Chuck Palahniuk’s ADVICE for Life and CRAZY Stories Will Leave You In Awe | Impact Theory

You have this idea of what it's going to be to attain this thing, but when you actually attain the thing, it's never what you anticipated, which is the glorious part. Because why strive for something [music] if you kind of already know what that thing is. But when you strive for it and it surprises [music] you, that's the glorious part. It's like, "Wow, where did that come from? That was so beyond what I thought my potential was." And that feels like a connection to something nuts. Chuck Palahniuk, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Tom. Welcome. I I've never met you in person, but this is great. Very true. I'm very excited that we're able to do this in person. I was saying just before we started rolling that um I have I guess a big question to ask to kick things off. Uh you have a new It's not a full book. It's an essay. Yeah. essay. Perfect. Wonderful essay, People, Places, Things, and really liked it. And as I was saying, you look at the world in a way that is very different than the way that I look at the world. And so, you massage my brain and touch my creativity in a way that maybe a lot of people don't. If I already see the world the same way they do, it isn't surprising. It doesn't sort of jar me in that way that I find deeply pleasurable. And so, I want to ask you a question. It's kind of lofty. I'm not trying to you know, get to necessarily lofty answers. I'm just super curious to see how you think about it. So, in reading the essay, it was such a fascinating glimpse to say, "Okay, if if I were going to write a similar one and pick, you know, seven or eight moments that really stuck with me, became a part of me, helped shape me, whatever, or are the um the analogies that I used to understand something else in my life, what would I pick? And so thinking about that got me thinking about what is the essence of who we become, which is very much how I think about it. So what to you is the essence of the human experience like how why people places things like to what extent are we shaped from the outside in versus inside out? Ah. Wow, suddenly I feel like Mitch Albom. You know, the seven people you meet in heaven. Um but uh I would say if I had to weigh it, I would say inside out first. But that inside out shapes what we react to in the world. And personally I've always loved to do stonework. I I just Like actual rocks? crazy about stonework. Yeah, when the gyms were all closed last year Uh-huh. I ordered six dump trucks full of stone. I had a promontory looking over this canyon. I'd always wanted to build a ruined church there. And so I spent my summer building and I also collected concrete skulls from different artists for years and years. And they were all always sat out in the woods and got mossy. So I wanted to mortar it all together with big arched windows and then leave it so that decades from now people would find it and they'd say what used to be here. But Did you build it ruined so that it's not a complete structure? Right. I I built it ruined. I put all the skulls in it so it kind of looks like an ossuary. Is there any trolling in this? No. No, not at all. Not at all. It It is kind of a picturesque the thing that draws you to this promontory and then frames the view from the promontory. But my grandfather was also very much into stonework and and as was my father. And it seems to be a very Ukrainian thing, I'm told. That when I went to have work done on my house, the the the top stoneworkers, the top tile setters, were all Ukrainian. And so, am I drawn to stonework because I'm Ukrainian? Or, you know, I think that's I think that's a lot of it. That we're drawn to these things, they resonate with us. But, I would bet that's because of something that's innate within us. It's really fascinating to me. I want to understand better the stonework element. So, COVID hits, you know you're going to be alone. Is if let's say that we just could not get stone, would it be working with your hands? Is that sort of primarily it? Or is there something to the solidity of the rock that speaks to you? Mhm. It is the is the way that working with the three-dimensional rock like like Tetris, like these 60 to 80 lb Tetris things, frees up my sort of chattering monkey mind. Mhm. And my mind is able to do or be receptive to whatever ideas might occur. And also there's a kind of mania that happens when you're doing that kind of really heavy work. You reach a point of exhaustion, and you keep going. And breakthroughs happen. Um the way that breakthroughs happen when you're taking a shower, or when you're washing the dishes. You're doing something kind of mindless and cogni- well, sort of physically, spatially cognitive that frees up your mind for ideas to just sort of occur. And you get the wildest thoughts and the and the wildest misphrasings of things. What do you think is happening in that moment? So, I think a lot about um meditation and Go ahead. You had talked about the sleep sleep expert the last time. Yes. The guy who had said that when you sleep, you are re-enacting memories without the emotional attachment. Correct. Unless you have PTSD, in which case was it MDA? Well, that ends up being MDMA ends up being one of the potential therapies. Um the his punchline is that if you have norepinephrine, which I think is exactly the same as adrenaline. If you have that heightened when you're sleeping, then the memory never loses its emotional edge. And he was hypothesizing that one of the reasons that we dream, cuz of course that's a much asked question in the literature, um he believes is specifically to pull the emotion out of the equation, but still learn the lesson. And he said what happens with people that end up developing PTSD is for whatever reason the adrenaline levels do not come back down when they sleep, and so they're re-living it and just really baking in the heightened emotion and the stress. You know, I would really for my own experience have to agree with that. But I'd also put forward that the turning it into a craft exercise, and I see a lot of people talking about this uh teaching writing or workshops as as a form of talk therapy, where you you're telling the story through a metaphor, and you're sort of controlling and re-crafting the story along these very intellectual lines to achieve an an effect in someone else. So, when the emotion is landing out there, that's when you've really mastered the experience, and you're no longer reactive to it. My mind obsesses over things, and when I look at my life, I am sometimes grateful and sometimes deeply distressed by how much my mind is looping on something. Now, when it loops on something and I get a fruitful answer, then it's like, "Oh my god, okay, this is worth it, you know, fantastic." Uh when I'm just looping on something negative that's giving me the wrong sort of neurochemical standpoint of my, "Oh my god, this really sucks." And what I have realized is one of the reasons that I like um teaching, for lack of a better word. So, I I have this thing called Impact Theory University and I'm basically walking people through um what I have done to sort of get control of my mind, which is probably the right way to think about it, to emotionally center myself. And every time I start answering a question for somebody else, I'm really reinforcing it in myself and it's incredible how often that's therapeutic, where whatever I'm going through right then at that moment, somebody will ask me a question and I will get to like my subconscious giving me the answer in the form of a, you know, advice for them. And it's really really helpful. And something very similar happens if I'm journaling. Where the act of like slowing down to write it, I don't know, there's something where the there seems to be some sort of ability for the subconscious mind to connect to the conscious mind and so I feel like somebody's giving me a helping hand if that makes sense. So, when you're journaling, are you keyboarding or are you longhand writing? I keyboard. I Yeah, so one, for years I had problems with joint pain and that probably started it and then also I'm really afraid, we talked about this last time. I'm really afraid of losing the things that I write. I know you throw most of it away. Uh I do not. So, having it in a digital format, like, I can relax. If I ever need to find that insight again, which of course I never go back and look, but should I need to, you know, I know that it's there and that does give me a great deal of comfort. You know, the uh somebody once said to me that the reason why she did not take notes was because the really great ideas won't leave you. Or the really great concerns won't leave you until they're resolved. And years ago I've been working with a trainer and I said I was working on this this short story about these kids in high school that were so worried about the future. And these were really the most promising kids, the talented and gifted kids. They just felt so much of the future was always on them. That one kid finally went into the health room took the defibrillator, took the pads off, stuck them on either side of his temples, pressed the button and gave himself a peel-and-stick lobotomy. And after that, he was such a wonderful 3-year-old. It literally damaged him forever? I made it up. Oh, Jesus. invention. And so I was thinking about this this story idea and I told it to the trainer at the time. And then I forgot about it. Two years later, Chris, my trainer, said, "Did you ever do anything with that defibrillator story? I cannot forget that. I can't get it out of my head." And I knew at that moment, two years later, Mhm. I had more or less forgotten about it, but the fact that Chris had not forgotten about it meant that that was a story worth writing. See, but that's what scares me is you had forgotten about it, but he hadn't. Had he not said something, we would all have lost it. Like literally, when you were telling me it was like a Memoirs of a Geisha moment. Okay. Uh where I read that book thinking it was real and as you were telling the story, I thought it was real. So when you got to the the zapping part, I was like, "Holy shit." Like it yeah. But you know, my rationale was also if I think it's real, it's either already happened and we're not hearing about it or it's going to happen. Because when I was writing Fight Club, the little bit about splicing single frames of pornography into movies, a friend of mine said, "Do not put that in your book because then people will do it." And since then, so many people have come up to me and said, "You know, I love that you did that because when I was a teenage projectionist, I was always slicing pornography into family films." So weird. And so there's really, you know, we're not such snowflakes that we're going to come up with something that is completely unique and and a kind of nuclear bomb. Yeah, that's uh it it is an interesting question of for sure you can plant ideas in people's minds and you can make something that otherwise wouldn't have been there, but how much do you try to sterilize um it's interesting. But going back to the idea of if a if an idea is good, it is not my experience and this may be a limitation of my own mind, it is not my experience that I will remember it. In fact, there are often times an idea will just get stuck in my head for some like it speaks to me for some reason, but I'll try to present it to other people and it's just dead every time. Dead dead dead and I can't get that same spark out of them that I feel. Um and then there are other times where I feel like if I don't write things down, I'm not going to remember it no matter what. Like there are just the way that my mind works, things tend to dissipate over time. And so note-taking is one of the ways that I reinforce that and increase the odds of it sticking. And then if I may, uh there's also with story ideas, I will go back and reread them. So I'll write down a quick idea and I'll be reading the idea and it will spark new ideas that then deepen that potential idea. Uh and that has been extremely fruitful for me. Okay. Um but do you find ever that having that kind of burden of inventory precludes new ideas or or acts as acts as a a negative burden? It does not for me, but I'm curious. So in what way does the the ideation process feels like a wait for you? Um just that every once in a while I will pursue an idea for 250 or 300 pages and then I will realize, you know, this is architecture and dialogue. There is no through line action. There is no grand gesture that is escalating in this. It is just people talking in compelling spaces. And then I have to realize that I'm never going to finish it because it doesn't contain that physical visceral element. No matter how interesting the idea is if it is My Dinner with Andre I'm not going to sit through it. Yeah. There's got to be a physical visceral task and I think that's why so much of my creative work gets done while I'm doing physical labor. Interesting. You think there needs to be like that connection or is it just that that puts you your brain into a different state? It I realize that I can only think for so many minutes at a time and that those thoughts are probably going to occur and I need to be doing some overall task for those ideas to occur so I don't feel like I'm kind of rushing the idea. The baby's not going to come out a new baby every 30 seconds. The the baby takes a long time to come out and I might as well fill up my time with something else while the baby's doing its job. Um I did my best I wrote Fight Club while I was working full time. I wrote most of it at work. Because when you're doing this kind of thoughtless work then your mind has to stay occupied with something. And that's when the ideas start to sort of come around and and you know at a reasonable rate. I'm not rushing things. That's interesting. The I would be very curious to know what the brain science is behind this. This is one of reasons that I really like to meditate. If I get stuck on a creative problem, um stopping, meditating, and I'm not Ooh, this is interesting. This is only partly true. Bear with me for thinking just sort of out loud here, but for the most part, I'm not intentionally sitting down trying to force getting to the idea, but I have found that very rapidly, if I start breathing from my diaphragm, I close my eyes, ideally I have like nature sounds playing in headphones, the what I think of as the connection between my subconscious and my conscious mind happens very quickly. And so, I'll sometimes sit down for like 3 minutes, and oh, boom, got it. I know exactly where to go now. Um I get that most from meditating or being in the shower. So, it's like my body is taking care of, if you will. So, in meditation, it feels like I'm as close to hanging my body up in a closet as you can get, right? I've I've removed all of its stimulus. I've trapped my ears by giving one sort of um rhythmic sound is maybe roughly right. I close my eyes, so I don't see anything. I'm sitting in the most comfortable position I can conceive of. I'm breathing in a way that feels so good. So, my body just feels like, okay, cool. We've got everything we need, and it goes away, more or less. And then, at that moment, I don't know, something very interesting happens. Like, I would find it far harder to do with my eyes open, because I I now have stimulus that's competing with that connection. You know, I have Boy, for for me, so often, it's also my ideas are kind of externally either validated or generated. Someone will say something, will tell me something that I can't forget. And I'll in order to process it, I'll have to repeat it to other people. And then, that's why I feel like I have to go too far in my work because then I force my audience to go to other people and say, "You know, I read this thing or I saw this thing and I'd like to have your take on it." They need to sort of form a community in order to process it them- themselves. And uh and so so much of my work starts with me in community with other people, hearing some aspect of their life that I find it very hard to process. So, I have to take that to other people to to start to understand this is part of a bigger uh pattern of people's lives. Yeah, this is one of the reasons I find you so interesting is I don't think I would react in the same way to the things that you react. And it feels to me when I encounter your work that you're bringing me a way of understanding something that I would have let slide, that I would have been a a party and heard the same thing that you heard and thought, "Oh my god, that's a crazy story. Oh, wow, that's really funny." But that it wouldn't have I and it feels like a deficit in my personality that I would have somehow missed what it could be, what it hints at, where where it goes, what it implies. And when you're able to grab it and like give it meaning, for instance, um going back to the essay and I'm really curious to hear about like where this came from. So, you talk about the dream that you have about walking across the bridge, uh or your mom taking you across the bridge to the middle point and then makes a comment and you're like thinking that you dreamed this and then later your brother has a moment with her many, many decades later, I assume, uh where she reveals that that was potentially as ominous as it appears in your dreams. And the Did anybody else in the family like pull that together or were you the only one sort of grappling with that? My brother and I are the only two who've talked about it. Because he she made the confession to him. And how far are you willing to presume what she was intimating? Cuz you're very you if you read the essay, it's very clear what you're saying. But I don't know if it without you being sort of blunt if it will come across in the podcast, so I don't know how. And I really wanted to give a lot of wiggle room because I don't want to demonize her. But she was a bright person with a lot of potential in a very limited circumstance. And she was having some very wild desperate thoughts of how to resolve things. Um and in a way I I want to sort of acknowledge that I want to I want to know and love her for all of her, not just the the best aspects of her. Interesting. She also when it was our birthday, she would make cupcakes for everyone in school. And you'd have to bring a list of how many boys and how many girls. So she could make this many pink cupcakes and this many uh blue cupcakes. So she was a great mother. But what happened with her making these dire plans was just a desperate moment and she didn't go through with it. And it kind of illustrates that people have these moments. And if they're aware that everyone has these moments, they're not as likely to feel so alone that they do take those actions. Blah blah blah. I want to pull on that thread a little bit. There's a It's interesting you use very very physical verbs. I took a great course for used car salesman. And they say that people either they're very uh uh auditory or visual or physical. And you can tell by how they speak. They'll say, "Oh, I see what you're talking about." or "I hear what you're saying." or "I get you." And you're a very physical. You use very very physical introductory transitions. So, I get that What does that reveal? Nothing in particular. It's just a smallest group. Cuz most people tend to use visual metaphors. Mhm. And uh slightly smaller group uses auditory. Um and the smallest group uses physical. Interesting. transitions. That's interesting. Now, I'm curious. I'm also curious, you took a class for car salesman? Yeah, it was a great class. It was so manipulative. It was all about identifying emotional tells and then using them to leverage people into buying things that they couldn't afford. Oof. in front of their spouse. say that? Oh, yeah. Always. Wow. They would they had great techniques. Can you give us some? There was one that was so evil. If you've got the husband and you've got the wife and you're trying to sell them on a really expensive car that the wife kind of likes, kind of wants. Mhm. And the husband is thinking more seriously about not getting it. You take him kind of you focus on him in her presence and you say, "You know, Tom Tom Do you remember when you first met Lisa? And you would move the moon and the stars for her. And you loved Lisa so much that you wanted to give her everything in the world. Lisa Tom what happened? Why did you change? And he will buy that car. Yeah. That's That is evil. You're right. but that's that's good writing. That is very good writing. That's interesting. What made you take that course? Was it something for a book or you just thought, "Ooh, I need to understand how to how these people work or I want to know the skills of persuasion?" I I was writing a book about um called rant about people who run these kind of consensual demolition derbies in the street where uh you badge your car in a very sort of what looks like a standardized way. You know, you might put a Christmas tree on top of it. Because sometimes of the year a lot of cars have Christmas trees, but you do it in the middle of summer. Mhm. And so you know that everybody else with a tree on their car or with some other kind of standard badging like uh just married kind of you know, cans and banners and shaving cream you know that they're in the game. And if it's a certain window of time in a certain section of the city everyone with their car is badged in that way is actually involved in this conceptual demolition derby. And so I wanted to know tons of stuff about cars and how you get cars out of impound lots and how you buy cars at auction. And that got me into the the used car industry. And that got me into the the three-day seminar. And so it was just that kind of immersion in and wanting to learn all the tricks about how to get used cars. Mhm. That to me, that would be a lot of fun in terms of exploring things that deep so that you can create something out of it. Is that part of the joy of writing for you is knowing that you there is meaning behind doing things like that? Yeah. You know, what I hated in school was when they were teaching us something without teaching us how to apply it. Mhm. When it was just a skill I could never retain it unless I had some way of using the skill in the moment. Um and so that's what I love about writing. Yeah, there's a That's one of the things and I always feel bad cuz look, teaching is brutally difficult, but if you're using that skill in your day-to-day life, then it becomes very easy to present it as, "Hey, let me tell you exactly how you're going to use this." And so I teach a business course and my thing is I wouldn't teach that course if I wasn't running a business the rest of my day. And because I am, then it's like I'm just telling you what I'm doing right now today. I'll tell you what works, I'll tell you what didn't work. And that has made it very easy to make what I'm talking about compelling to the other business owners that are trying to use this stuff because I'm like, "Look, this is how it comes up. This is how you deal with it. The These are going to be the consequences." And so it becomes something that's immediately usable. Like even when you were describing it, I get a really different energy when it's something I'm just learning versus something that I'm like, "I need to use this to get this outcome that I'm really excited about." And now, oh my god, like this is a missing piece in that puzzle and if I can get this, then I can get a new outcome. And sometimes it takes it gives you an outcome that you didn't anticipate that is even better than what you were kind of banking on. In what you're talking about, the exploration or just skill acquisition in general? Well, skill kind of both because you have this idea of what it's going to be to attain this thing. But when you actually attain the thing, it's never what you anticipated, which is the glorious part because why strive for something if you kind of already know what that thing is. But when you strive for it and it surprises you, that's the glorious part. It's like, "Wow, where did that come from? That was so beyond what I thought my my was." And that feels like a connection to something nuts. How much does surprise as a value, maybe is the right way to ask it. How much is surprise as a value in your life, something that you covet, that you really appreciate? It is everything. You know, and as you grow older, you get it less and less often. Um so that when you do get it, it is so glorious because it makes you young again. It's something that you associated with when you're a child and everything is a surprise. Um and then you're an adolescent and Rosebud is a sled. There are still some surprises. But those surprises are fewer and farther between as you grow older. But when you do find them, somebody does bring you something amazing, uh you just treasure it. Yeah, it is very fun. And I do like it. So I definitely don't want to discount that I do enjoy that, but if I had been asked, I would say, "Nah, surprise ranks relatively low for me. What I like is usability." And this is the um the thing that you surprised me and that is why I find you so interesting. So my own conundrum is if asked, I would have said, "Yeah, I don't care if I'm surprised. I just want like there's something that I want to build and create in this world and I want to be able to go and do it." And yet I found your work and constantly find myself like, "Yeah, there's something about like I can't I never know where this is going." And I love that and that is fun. So I'm I'm not sure what to do with that realization of I don't think it hits me the way that it hits you, but I do enjoy it. So how do you like now I'm thinking about the rock wall that you're building, how much of that is wanting to leave something surprising for somebody else? You know, that's a big part of it. Because when I was really small, my father did a lot of carpet carpentry work. And when my brother and I helped him, we would always leave things inside the walls of remodel jobs we would do. Because we knew the kind of joy of finding those things. So, we'd write our names, we'd leave a a newspaper, sometimes we'd leave money, or we'd leave a a bottle of liquor. Because you we knew the joy that would be generated when that stuff was discovered. And so so so so often it is doing that. And I've done that in every house I've ever lived in. Because someday something somebody's going to find it. And it's not about my joy. It's about providing that that moment for somebody else. Yeah, we talked about that in the last conversation where you were saying that you'll let people correct you intentionally. You know the real answer. You're at a party, you let them correct you, they feel smart, you look dumb, you never correct them. And I asked you if that was about being Santa Claus and just giving them a gift, or if there was, you know, something else uh going on there where it was a little bit of trolling, and you said, "Well, to be honest, it's a little bit of both." But it is it is interesting as I try to predict you and try to think about how you see the world, there is um there is a very interesting thing about the community reaching across space and time to find connection. I don't know Does that resonate with how you think about the world? Yeah, very much so. Because the man who taught me writing always referred to what he called elephant mind. And the way he defined elephant mind as opposed to monkey mind was that elephant mind was this this huge mutual consciousness across you know, more or less maybe all human beings living and dead. And that when you could connect to that and get in that zone then you could create something that would resonate with the lives of or the experience of huge numbers of people. What is that zone? The awareness of what the collective mind is like and will react to? Typically in the in the terms of one phenomenon. One thing. And recently I wrote about how when Were you raised Catholic? No, but my friends were, so I have a passing familiarity. The the ceremony to become an adult in the Catholic Church is called confirmation. Yep. And we were, you know, after Vatican II, the the bishop comes and he he pats your cheeks. And that is the replacement of traditionally what was a giant wallop across your face. The bishop would just hit you so hard. And it was meant as a gesture to wake you up into adulthood. Into the reality of being a Catholic adult. And we had a really old-school bishop. Here we go. And when he hit us you found yourself looking sideways and tasting blood. Woah. And every mother in the parish was like, "Oh, my kid has just gotten hit by the bishop." And even dads were looking away. And I remember getting slapped so hard and looking sideways at Carrie Fisher. And Carrie Fisher is got he's trying to fight back cuz he's just been slapped. A friend of mine worked for the Dalai Lama. When she first met him, guess what he did? He slapped her across the face. Woah. And he said, "That's to wake you up into your mortality, into what it is to be a living human being." There is so much cultural stuff and also mind science about that kind of impact as a gesture and as a kind of awakening um that that is the kind of archetypal thing that I'm always looking for and trying to connect across a lot of different cultures and the experience of a lot of different people because there's something to it and just by accident I had the character in Fight Club punch the other character in the ear and I thought I was making it up but no it is a giant cross-culturally thing to punch specifically in the ear specifically in the ear and I thought it was funny but it resonates with the the the mythology of uh of uh um uh Thomas Edison uh supposedly being Thomas Edison because when he was young he worked on a train he did something wrong and a conductor boxed his ears so badly that from the age of 12 he was almost completely deaf Woah. but it was just he he always said that after the age of 12 he could never hear birds sing and that that deafness like the deafness of Howard Hughes the deafness of so many people who were bright allowed them a kind of deeper concentration I didn't know Howard Hughes was deaf Yeah he was an almost he was very very deaf Huh. but uh anyway this being boxed in the ears seemed to resonate with the Christian Orthodox idea that the Virgin Mary was uh um more or less impregnated through her ears by by the Holy Spirit whispering her destiny in her ear and that's why in so many Christian sects uh young women have to cover their ears because their ears are considered uh very vaginal in that way uh so there's just I'm always looking for these cross-cultural ideas and gestures and images that can be tied together in a new fresh way. And do you look for them as a storyteller or you looking for them as as a person who wants to understand this whole thing? Well, you know, I I might be closer to you with this because I think I'm looking for them in a way to try to make order out of what looks like chaos. Mhm. That I I I still want there to be a universal field theory that maybe I'm cherry-picking to try to dream one up. But I think there's enough other people who want a universal field field theory that you know, they'll go along with it. There's also something I I I think you will agree with this. There's also something really intoxicating about feeling that you understand something about humans that just it's an insight into yourself, it's an insight into other people. It may sometimes it's realizing that oh, this thing that I thought was so weird about me is actually shared and there's you know, some reason for it. That to me is um cathartic maybe just knowing that okay, there is a connection here. There's there's something in the human experience going back to that initial question. I'm obsessed with what is the human experience? Like how much of this is avoidable? How much of this is just this is the nature of being a human and you know, that we get to go on this ride. I think it helps me make sense of it helps me make sense of pain for sure, but also can elevate joy when for me when I understand it. Elevate joy, but also I like the idea of taking things that we have a negative connotation like shame. And if there's some way to harness shame and spin shame so that you get a you shame becomes productive. I want to discover that. Yeah, I'd like you to discover that. It have you thought about that one in particular? Like is there any gosh, this last week I run a workshop and the workshop kind of ran away and it was just a lot of cross talk, a lot of people battling over one particular piece of writing that was presented. And I called the workshop to order in a kind of blunt way. And later through discord, one of my students came on and said "You were really out of bounds and you made one of the members cry after the fact and you need to apologize and blah blah blah." And I felt so enormously shamed, but then I thought I kind of like this because after you've had your period in the shower and all the girls throw tampons at you you got nowhere to go but up. I could get used to this because we spent so much of our time resisting being shamed that when we actually do get slammed down you know, I I've told people this before, I wish I could call room service and say, "Would you send a waiter up? Send up the biggest waiter you got because I just want him to slam me across the face to just knock my idol down so I don't feel like I'm the center of the universe and just put me back in that zero place because there's such freedom in that zero place where you're not trying to look good and you're try not trying to dominate. You're just kind of it's it's like a fresh wake up. But won't you just rebuild back to that same state? Not if you get to zero zero. I think it gives you you have a freedom in that moment that you can either Søren Kierkegaard, have you ever seen Have you ever seen um A Chorus Line? No. The Broadway musical A Chorus Line? Is it the one with um Michael Douglas? No, then I definitely haven't seen it. That That's the movie. I've seen I've seen it in Cabaret. So, no, I have not seen A Chorus Line. Were you raised in Tacoma? I was raised in Tacoma. In a cave in Tacoma? Like basically, yes. In A Chorus Line, you know, it's It was a Michael Bennett musical on Broadway for a million years. And then it became a a movie in the '80s. But it it starts with hundreds and hundreds of dancers all auditioning and try to dance identical. And then out of those, maybe 20 are chosen. And then out of those 20, it becomes very kind of Gestalt therapy where they're each asked about their their personhood, their childhood, why they chose to be a dancer. And they each kind of tell a self-explanatory story through a song. And so, you have these the songs that are a ballad song or a rising spirit song or a comedy pattern song. And so, each of them emerges as an individual. But then in the third act, they all fall back into this complete synchronicity. And they completely kind of submerge their individuality again in the desperate hope of getting a job in this synchronized chorus line. And so, getting back to your point is when you get to that zero, you can choose to be the same. But you know from that point forward that you've chosen inauthenticity. Or you can choose to do things differently. Um and at because at that zero, you have the awareness that what you're doing is a choice. If you do build back, then you haven't If you do build back the same, without knowing you're doing so, then you never reach zero. What should people build towards? What calls to you? Or what frightens you? What are you the most afraid of failing at? That is the thing you should be doing. Why? Why the thing you were most afraid? The amount of misery that's going to put you through. Why that? Because when you reach the end of your life, and you go, "Wow, I'm really glad I did all the easy things." That's not going to be any kind of comfort. But really, like so, I'm going to I'm going to think through this without, by the way, I'm not sure that what you're saying is the wrong idea. It might be exactly right. But now let's think through neurochemistry matters, and if you haven't done the sort of monastic work to make sure that you're detached from the outcome, pursuing that kind of thing for somebody who needs a self-narrative that makes them feel good about themselves, if they really are afraid of failing at that thing, their identity is completely tied up in it, they think their self-worth is tied up in it, that's the very thing that makes them afraid to fail at that, in pursuing that thing without learning the sort of mental model of not being attached to the outcome, that this is, in using my language, this is about skill acquisition, and you know, the attempting to get better, I could see how that would be a terrifying journey for people. Your point being? It's not supposed to be a terrifying journey? No, that's interesting. So, for you, the whole point is is get scared, or the whole point is that fear will open something up, the coping mechanism you will use will be something profound, useful? The fear is the thing that validates that you're doing the thing that means something to you. Because if it didn't mean anything to you, you wouldn't feel the fear. You'd be like, "Huh, I didn't win Miss America." But what if you're just trying to impress people? Oh, you're kidding. I I don't even see that as a as a a goal. What do you mean? I mean, the man who taught me writing, You Tom Spanbauer. Yeah, Tom. He always said, "If you're writing for any reason other than you want to write and you love writing and you'd love to put together a terrific book, you should not be here. If you're writing to impress your dad, if you're writing to get enough money to buy a house, if you're writing to redeem yourself to all those kids who made fun of you in school, you shouldn't be here. You should be here because there is nothing more fun and more frightening to you than this thing." There's just you v you. Right, and it's never an in order to. Yeah. Yeah, Doug Coupland, who wrote Generation X, he said, "If you're still doing your passion after the age of 31, then you're only competing against yourself. You're no longer competing against that other writer or that other stand-up guy or that other whatever performer artist." Why would that be true? Uh well, Doug's scientific rationale and Doug is knows a lot more about this than I do. Doug is hugely uh left brain well, intellectual guy. He says that brain science shows that the last significant changes in the human brain happen between the ages of 31 and 33. Hm. And that tends to be the small window when people produce their masterpiece, when they can synthesize their experience and their education and they can create something larger than the sum of the two. And so, 33 to 34 is generally when people kind of buy their freedom with one big success. And so if you're still doing your passion at that age, that's when you tend to break out. Um yeah, and I guess the science supports it, but I can't cite it. Doug Copeland can cite it. That's intriguing to me. So, I am I am very unnerved might be the right word by how aging matters, how there's demographics to take into consideration that the context of any one of us as a I don't know, as a creator, as a performer, and I don't mean performer on a stage. I mean like building a business is a performance of a kind. It begins to get recontextualized. Like you are perceived by the outside world as different. Like when you see a really old guy hit on a young girl and the response is, "Oh my god, you're so cute." And it's harmless. Like I can only imagine the sort of devastation that that is. But there's a quote that haunts me deeply, and it's that genius is a young man's game. And they may be talking about that 31 to 33 window where people tend to have their, you know, massive breakthroughs. I think that quote is even, "You get rewarded in your 60s for the work you did in your 30s." And I find that distressing. Partly because I am a late bloomer, and partly because I really have a problem with the idea of my best days being behind me. Well, there's also, you know, take this to heart. And I always get the name of the book wrong. Um the creative kind, the creative mind. It was a huge book a couple years ago, multi very colorful cover with a circle with a a lot of colorful things in the circle. And it cited studies that showed that people who come up with a brilliant idea, say in their 20s, like Einstein, spend the rest of their lives defending that brilliant idea, and they never have another one. But the people who are in love with that constant exploration process are the people who are creative throughout their entire lives, well into their 60s, 70s, 80s, because they're in love with the process rather than just this single outcome. So, people who succeed early tend to just become kind of entrenched in whatever that idea was, even though that idea becomes outdated. Um that's all they've got. But but people who bloom later have allowed themselves to fall in love with the discovery process. So, they're more often going to bloom over and over until they die. Going back to the essay, how did you choose those moments, the ones that you talk about? You've got the peanut on the cover. It's almost a throwaway line, but it is a setup for an entire person from your youth. How did you pick, and were they meant to sort of encapsulate um the forces that shaped you? I wanted to write an essay about this enigmatic man uh from my childhood. Uh my childhood was in Burbank, Washington, which is across the state from Tacoma. And it's in the desert, and then at the time 300 people lived there. Wow. It was very small. And uh but there was this retired railroad laborer who was a Japanese-American. And he walked the back roads, and he gave candy to children. And we all adored him. And then we subsequently found out that he he planted these enormous gardens in these very ruined industrial sites. And those gardens were such kind of romantic gorgeous things that were dead the moment that he could no longer tend them. They weren't about impressing anybody. They weren't about creating a a legacy because they were gone the moment he didn't water them. But they were so amazing in the moment that we discovered them. We saw them as children. And even the adults who lived these very blue-collar railroad lives when these redneck guys with a union saw these gardens they went home and they kind of built a Japanese garden in their backyards. It it shaped everyone's aesthetic. It gave everyone this kind of glimpse of how beautiful things could be. And and went home they went home they did it wrong. They fed the koi the wrong things. They bonsai'd the wrong trees. But at least they were kind of shown an aesthetic, a way of being they never would have discovered for themselves. And this man was such a a huge impact that I started to kind of look for other figures like that uh from other people's lives as well as you know, my own. Um years ago I met a guy who grew up in uh Milwaukee. And he took me aside and he said when he was in high school in the '90s he worked at a tool rental company. And one day there was this piece in the newspaper a guy about a guy who lived in the Oxford Apartments and how he was killing and eating young men. And the picture of this guy who'd been arrested was so familiar. The this guy who's telling me the story he went back through their rental records and he found that they'd had this customer. He'd come in and he'd rented an electric drill and at one point he'd rent rented a a reciprocating saw, a saber saw. And And so he went to his boss and he said, "You know what, there's this guy named Jeffrey Dahmer, and he's rented a couple of the tools that we have in stock right now. Do you think we should give those to the police?" And his boss said, "Let me think about it." And the next day he came back into work and those pages in the rental history were gone and the tools were gone because his boss did not want all of Milwaukee to know that they had rented tools to the cannibal killer. And so it's that kind of a those strange local human landmark stories I wanted to sort of pull all of those together and sort of demonstrate that that they're they're part of everyone's lives. Um yeah. The idea of landmarks in our lives, is that um in what way do you think that's important? If we can identify the influences then we know we didn't just invent it. We have a choice. We have a choice to either be that good or bad way because it's not entirely us. We were introduced to this idea by somebody else. And so we can either embrace it or we can at that point don't choose to no longer live that way. Yeah, the malleability of the human mind, human spirit, it was one of the notes that I took after reading your story is you know, I was thinking trying to sort of get inside your mind and understand like what is it that you find so compelling about these moments and how they shape us and um I'm curious, do you are you more interested by the you said it starts inside, but are you more interested by the things that shape us from the outside or are you more interested in the fact that we can change ourselves? If I could just backpedal for a moment. Sure. You talked about your teaching. And I think once you recognize the people who have influenced you, you want to I hate to use the cliche, but you want to pay it forward. You want to create that same kind of joy in other people's lives. An access to something that has provided you joy. And so I think it's just an automatic uh wanting to perpetuate this knowledge or this skill or this way of being that you have found so beneficial. And in terms of innate or inherited or whatever, I think only a select group of people are going to really hear it. And that might be the innate part. Is it only certain people it's only going to resonate with certain people. But that's fine, because they'll pick it up. They'll benefit from it, and they will pass it forward. When I think about you and the people that you meet in the stories that you collect, um do you think that that you're just a one in, you know, 8 billion roll of the dice that has led you to encounter all of these fascinating stories, or is it that you go way out of your way to collect them? Uh you know, it uh Hm. I don't think I go way out of my way. In fact, I think I just kind of spin it. I think I get out of my way. That it used to be I would go to parties, and I wouldn't say more than two or three words. And then afterwards, people would say to each other, "You know, Chuck is a really good talker." And it's because I was just really good at paying attention. And paraphrasing and asking questions based on what people had said. I wasn't just waiting for my turn to to to say my thing. Um Yeah, and also, you know, [snorts] uh one of my best friends in college, Franz, used to live here in LA. He was an architect. And he said, "When you grow up gay, you have to learn everything. You have to watch everything because you don't have any kind of innate every innate way that you would do something is wrong. So, you have to monitor your behavior 24/7. And you have to watch, okay, how should I be carrying my books? And how should I walk? And am I on my walking on my toes too much? Um you have got to monitor every aspect of your presentation. And so you have to be hyper aware of everyone's presentation. And you're cuz you're sort of on a survival level studying all human behavior and really listening. Um and you can't talk in gay voice. So, yeah, so you keep a little burr in your throat. And you make sure your glottis isn't open. Um yeah, it's just everything you from an early age you're really aware that you are a performance and that everyone is a performance. And I think that's why, according to Franz, gay people become such kind of creative people is that they kind of recognize the qualities of things and they're able to replicate them uh because they themselves are replicating other people's behaviors. So, I I say that that's that's a probably a big part of it. But then you could say that about [snorts] kind of any outside group. You know, Jews. You could say that about any group that has felt outside of the mainstream. That they've had to kind of Zelig and look for ways of fitting in. So they've had to sort of tailor their behavior to fit into the larger culture. That's fascinating. The idea of the amount that you discover about yourself by looking at other people and yeah, I'd never thought about if you're on the outside of you're constantly trying to hide the amount of sort of mirror neurons that you're going to be spinning up and firing and trying to theory of mind, how are they acting? How should I act? How are they perceiving my sense of acting? Um it's one of those where hardships in childhood, whatever, it usually does a lot of damage, but the people for whom it does not break, they end up you know, overshooting things. I think about that a lot in the context of the inner cities. If the inner city just gives people the world's worst frame of reference in terms of how to be successful. But for people that figure out how the game works, it is really extraordinary. There's there is at least anecdotally from people that I've seen, there's a real over performance and over compensation that is really pretty extraordinary. It's one of those things I wouldn't wish on people, but when you start looking at like oh god, I think it's presidents. The number of presidents that their parents died young or their father died young. It's like you can sort of pick a a tragedy that could befall people, then look at the demographic and see if certain things end up being true down the line. Now, I don't know how many of these things hold up statistically, but I know the the the orphan one shows up pretty often in in hyper successful successful people. Um dyslexia shows up a lot in entrepreneurship and I don't know if it's a wiring of the brain thing and they're just more, you know, like wired for problem-solving or if it is that they had to struggle so much and like [ __ ] you I'm going to show you I'm going to overcome and do better. I'm not sure but it really is an interesting idea to me that that just a certain amount of struggle is going to be critical to developing well. Struggle and dealing with the struggle as opposed to evading the struggle. If you have the struggle and you start taking drugs at an early age that's not a great recipe. That is definitely not a great recipe. Yeah. And thank you for letting silence happen. Thank you for pointing out the last time that I didn't. So, I literally went to speak and I thought, you know what? Let's see. The I I noticed that a lot with uh the media is that there is this kind of rush to to fill dead air. And uh and it it just forces a level of enthusiasm that's so artificial that doesn't lend itself to kind of insight or listening. And uh Do you remember Paul Harvey? Yeah, we you brought him up last time as the example of Silence. Mhm. And weird breaks. And I just noticed that the people who succeed in radio are those people. That do the weird breaks? That do the weird breaks. Um Yeah. Do you think it's just breaking convention and that's what grabs people's attention? Going back to surprise. I spent all morning listening to Suddenly Last Summer, uh the Tennessee Williams play. There is a really gorgeous uh BBC version that's on YouTube with Maggie Smith and Rob Lowe and Natasha Richardson. Oh. And it's it's not the entire play. It's been edited a tiny bit, but it beats the pants off the Elizabeth Taylor Katherine Hepburn version. And almost everything is said twice. Um almost every line is said and then re-said as a kind of couplet. Um in that kind of Robert Frost way. And I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. And in The Great Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan says almost everything twice. Nick, you remind me of a rose, of an absolute rose. Doesn't Nick remind you of a rose? The Daisy says everything twice. And Tennessee Williams says everything twice. And you don't mind it. It's kind of gorgeous because I think it's like song lyrics. It makes it more like a a couplet in poetry. And it gives you a chance to you don't have to pay such close attention because you know it'll happen twice. I don't I don't know. It's just a a pattern I look for. You look for a lot of patterns. Um part of just the fascination with life, usability, why, or do you just have a mind for patterns? I I we all have a mind for patterns. We're all sort of trained in patterns, but until we recognize that, then we're kind of used by patterns. We're used by them. Do you ever notice how the diamond industry has a different junky diamond thing that comes out every Christmas? It's the three-stone ring. This year is the anniversary ring. The anniversary ring must be at least three times the size of the diamond that you bought her for her engagement ring. Because it will prove that you love her and you would marry her three times. You know, and every every year it's a different slogan. It's a chocolate diamond. It's a champagne diamond. And I think chocolate diamonds were basically industrial diamonds that they used to use in grinding. But they decided to market them one year as the must-have gift. Or it's the the infinity ring or the three-stone ring. Or one year it was the the right-hand cocktail ring. Why should the left hand have all the fun when the right hand should have a diamond ring? And a million guys who really don't know jack [ __ ] about their wives anymore rush out and think, "Okay, she wants a cocktail ring for her right hand in a in a stuffed bear." Because they don't recognize the pattern. Stetson cologne. A million wives who have quit paying attention are going to run out and buy Stetson cologne. Because it's most it's supposed to smell like Tom Brady. So, until you recognize these patterns, you're just going to be used by them. Mhm. Um with Fight Club, boom, Chuck made a noise. Um I got to buy the first tombstone in generations in my family. It was for my grandparents. And I I we hadn't had a tombstone in generations. Why? Because we didn't have any money. You don't have money, you you can't buy these big, you know, gauche tombstones. And they had died, and I wanted the biggest tombstone the cemetery would allow. And the the woman who sells tombstones brought out these catalogs, and she said, uh, "Your grandfather, he was a farmer, was he an International Harvester guy or a John Deere guy?" Because they had all these logos that they would sandblast on the tombstone. Whoa. And she took me walking through the cemetery. And there were teenage girls who played volleyball, so they had a Voit volleyball on their tombstone, as opposed to a Spalding volleyball. Whoa. As opposed to Nike. They had all these, uh, badging, all these emblems. Was he Pepsi or Coke? Because we can do that. We have the licensing agreement. And we can put all these brands. Uh, was he an International Harvester trucker guy or was he a Navistar guy or was he a Freightliner guy? Because we could put all this imagery on the tombstone. And people actually pay for that because they don't really know anything about the person who died because they haven't been paying attention. So, they go with the default. She liked Pepsi. Let's go with that. And going through that cemetery was so heartbreaking. Dude, that is exactly what I'm feeling right now. That is heartbreaking. But it's kind of incredibly funny and absurd. It takes a lot of the pressure off. What do you mean, takes the pressure off to I just have to do better than Pepsi on the tombstone? No, it it it it kind of it flops over the difference between uh, pathos, true true tragedy, Mhm. and bathos, which is where pathos makes one step too far and becomes comic. That's the difference is your daughter died at the age of 14 and you put a void volleyball on her tombstone. That's bathos where it becomes comic in a deeply sad but comic way. And with so many of my uh beginning writers and this goes back to the essay is that when they come into workshop as beginning writers the one story that they want to tell is their most traumatic story. And I always say do not tell that story. That should not be the story you cut your teeth on because you're so close to it and you're going to write it so badly that it will be the funniest thing people in workshop have ever heard. And for your a long time I had this uh a woman my age but as a child she had been repeatedly sexually abused. And so she had to constantly prove as she was writing that she was beyond that abuse. So every sentence had this kind of forced smiley face on it and she would just fob off these phrases like around the summer of my 16th rape. Right. And that's the difference between pathos and bathos. And so once it reaches bathos it's some the something comically absurd to it and that's where the freedom comes in. Think life is a tragedy or a comedy? You know there was a great study Scientific American that I can't cite uh chapter and verse on but a historian had gone back and he said that the ancient Greeks the vast majority of their literature was comedy because they operated out of out of the idea that when the gods were up there observing us, they thought we were endlessly funny in all of our stupid iterations and rushing around. So, the gods were constantly laughing their butts off. And so, the Greeks wrote almost entirely comedies. But when Christianity came into the picture, they had the opposite worldview that everything is tragic. And so, most of Greek literature was destroyed by the Christian church. And so, when we think of Greek literature, we think of Medea, we think of all of this suffering, Sturm und Drang. Only because the Christians threw away the good stuff. And so, I always try to go back to what I think is probably the older point of view, this comic absurdity. Yeah, there's in your work, there's definitely you allow your audience to look at something that would otherwise be too difficult to look at because I can feel the absurdity. You allow me to enjoy it. Like, that was I remember seeing Fight Club for the first time and just being like, when he's in the um the cancer um groups and I mean, just you know, what would otherwise be these gut-wrenching stories, but just the way that it's written, it's I don't know, it it allows a different door into that moment, which is really I get that feeling is you when your eyes sparkle when you're about to tell some like insane story or uh that that's true, by the way. Um it's really interesting and I find that you and I take a different I don't want to call it coping mechanism, but you and I take a different approach to the the comedy tragedy that is life. I mean, there are moments that are just unbelievably painful to live through, to look at, to know have befallen somebody else. Um but it is I think you you almost have to take a stance for sanity's sake. You have to be able to find a a a glance at it that doesn't just yank your heart out of your chest. Yeah, touching on the the COVID thing. When I was writing those support group scenes, I was a young person and everybody I knew was dying of AIDS. All my friends were dying. Jesus. Nobody knew when they were going to start dying. And so I started working in the hospice so I could kind of kind of be part of this whole effort to see how do people die of this? How can I help? And I would have to take them to the support groups because, you know, I was 24, 25, 28. I didn't know anything but how to drive a car. So I would take people to see the ocean for the last time. Or I would take them to their support group and I would sit there. And as people were in these support groups and they were saying what their latest uh opportunistic infection was and how they were going blind and how they were developing organic brain dementia and how their bodies were just dying around them. It was like people were playing playing this kind of medical draw poker. It was like, "Oh, you think that's bad? I've got fungus halfway down my throat, you know? Oh, God." People having these scalp yeast infections once your immune system goes, your head is just nothing but dandruff. And your bowels are just nothing but yeast. And these people are rotting from the inside out. But there's a certain point again, it's pathos moving to bathos whereas people put all this suffering on the table, suddenly somebody starts to laugh. It tips to that absurdest point and then everyone is laughing. And then all these dying people that you would not trade places with in a million years are all laughing their asses off and they start falling out of their chairs. And they're laughing so hard. And that's kind of the blessing of pain is that pain can only go on for so long before it shifts to something else. And all that tension comes out. Um and so often what I do is I'm not getting a laugh. I'm creating an enormous amount of tension in a story and then I'm breaking it really fast with a socially inappropriate response. Like there's a long lead-up in the Fight Club chapter where the narrator gets his face beat into the concrete floor over and over and over until there's this this mask, this print of blood that is his face staring up from the floor. And at that point, people are so silent listening to it. And then Tyler says, "Cool." And it breaks the tension so beautifully and the whole room roars with laughter. And it's not a funny, funny thing. It's just a break of tension. And that's what happens when the pathos spills over, it becomes too much and becomes bathos. Um I love those moments. Yeah, that that to me is a very fascinating thing about the human condition is the when you're bringing people together in community like that, that whole moment, the description, the building of the tension, the release of the tension, it requires the audience or even in the support group, it requires them all to be going through something together. There's something utterly fascinating about that dance, whether it's you as a writer knowing that you are speaking across space and time to a reader at some point and that, you know, even though Thomas saying you better be writing for the sake of just the joy of writing, inherent in writing is that there is, you know, somebody participating in that. And the way that our minds reach out to to feel the existence of other minds and that we don't exist in isolation, we exist in context. That to me is really a trip, and I think that's one of the things that people really battle with is that shout and echo, right? You are both the shout and the echo. And so, it's like in in what way like going back to your earlier story about, okay, you had this moment in the writing group, you said something. In the moment you were fine. You probably didn't notice or realize that you made the person cry. And then in an instant, the context of that shifts as you get new information about how one of the other humans uh was feeling. And so, suddenly your brain re-maps, re-contextualizes the whole thing. It's really It can be very startling and jarring at times, but it's a certainly a fascinating part of the being a human. I I Have you ever been tested for autism? I have not. You have not. I I think I'm on the spectrum because when things like that happen, I'm always kind of a step away from them, and I always think, "Oh, isn't this interesting, this dynamic? Because this person is claiming the hurt of this other person." And so, when I went to the other person who supposedly cried, and I said, "I really deeply apologize. I I was blunt, and maybe I shouldn't have been so blunt." The other person said, "I didn't cry." Interesting. And so, the kind of white knight person Mhm. seems to have kind of invented the reaction to some extent. And and then the person who was supposed to have cried said, "Don't put me in the middle. Uh you know, I was okay with that. I thought you said really good things." So, there's this sort of autistic part of me that's stepping back and kind of looking at uh the sort of patterns in behavior behind between people. That's really interesting. So, given that moment, which may speak to exactly what I want to ask. So, I would say there's a sort of changing cultural landscape right now in terms of what the Overton window is, what we can talk about, what we can't talk about, what's beyond the pale. Um you Fight Club, I think was the first book of yours that was labeled as transgressive fiction. Meaning violating social norms. Now that violating social norms can have such egregious consequences, do you think about that at all? Do you try to play a different game slightly? Um what are your thoughts on that? I'm 100% sincere. All the time. And really. I'm not going to give away any trade secrets. You know, no, seriously, people Ken Kesey said it. Ken Kesey had lots of flaws. But he said, for offense to occur, there has to be somebody to give offense and somebody to take offense. And it doesn't matter what you say. If somebody wants to take offense, they will take offense. You can say the sky is blue and they say, "What do you mean by that?" So, I'm not even kind of part of the equation. You know, you're just there and lightning strikes. So, I don't worry about giving offense. I don't want to hurt people. I don't want to take cheap shots because I've taken cheap shots. Christ. And they always make me feel like a jerk afterwards. Um and just to to prove what a [ __ ] I am. In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote has the observation that Americans hate natural, true, classical beauty. What they want to see is a plain person who exaggerates their defects to the point and his he says that if a woman is tall, she'll wear super high heels. If she's flat-chested, she'll she'll strap down what little breasts she does have. That if she's got a speech impediment, she'll exaggerate that stammer. They want to see someone who is so groomed and so stylized they can pass as a whatever this this exaggerated thing is, they can be passed off as pretty. Mhm. Because it's proof that you don't have to be born naturally pretty. That as Americans we can work at it and we can achieve a kind of what passes for fashionable. And I told this story at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. That was a Red Bull flavored belch. And I buttoned the story by saying and that's why we have Sarah Jessica Parker. And 900 people booed me. And I deserved to be booed. That was a [ __ ] cheap shot. And I could have said Tori Spelling and it would have been a [ __ ] cheap shot and I could have said Ann Coulter and it would have been a [ __ ] cheap shot. And I would have deserved to get booed. So I know a cheap shot and I try not to do them because they're just not worth it. Um if you do it, you're an [ __ ] So and beyond that, it is what it is. It is what it is and if I do give offense without intending to yeah, sometimes it's not my fault and I can't worry about that. It's interesting. I look at your work differently and obviously I believe you certainly over me, but my perspective on it is you're telling interesting stories that force me to think interesting thoughts and I would be very sad if you were to stop trying to flaunt the whatever becomes sort of that moment's unquestioned thing. Like I probably have told you this before, but I lived in the building that in Fight Club they blow up. And there was something really interesting about seeing my actual apartment in the movie. Like cuz they're making fun of that way of life A place to be someone. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so it was really um it's fascinating. And so it you suddenly cut through a veil that for other people might not otherwise have been cut through. Going back to if you don't recognize the patterns they use you. Like there's I don't know, it creates a visibility, but you have to risk cuz I could have been very like offended that you were making fun of my way of life or you know, whatever. And uh yeah, so I don't know. That transgressive fiction speaks to me because of its ability to look at the same thing that everybody else is going for, but from a completely different angle and showing you something new. I find that uh very useful. Years ago I was on tour in Dallas Texas. And part of tours they take you around and you sign huge amounts of stock different bookstores. One afternoon I'm signing at some Barnes & Noble. There's a a young woman who's helping me. She she I remember her very vividly. She had longish sort of mousy blonde hair and she had this kind of very unnerving way of sort of just staring at me and not looking away. And then finally she said "What sign of the zodiac are you?" And I said, "I'm Pisces." And she said, uh "Ah, the only water sign without a shell." And she said it in such a superior, sanctimonious way. I just wanted to pop her. I just I just wanted to backhand her so bad. But really, I wanted to hit her because she was right. She was entirely right. I always have to have a narrative going in my head as this kind of armor so that the slings and arrows don't get to me. Tell me about that narrative. That's interesting. It's always got to be some some big in the works short story or sometimes it's a scene or sometimes it's a whole book. But it's always got to sort of occupy my monkey mind so that when somebody honks or cuts me off in traffic or um whatever, I don't get all bent out of shape. Because you can return to the story. Well, because I've got more important things on my mind. I'm trying to figure out how to get this guy off this roof. Mhm. You know, in my mind. Uh all of my sort of fight and flight stuff is occupied by a thing that I've chosen, this false narrative. So that when something minor goes wrong, yeah, it's a blip. But when she nailed it, that that Pisces, that thing without a shell, uh a lot of times people are offended not because you've somehow hurt their feelings, but because you've said a truth that they don't want to hear. That is almost always why people are upset, which is really interesting. So, when I think about from a business perspective, it's when people decide they want to hurt you, they're going to hurt you with something real because Cuz know that it will get a reaction. And so the good or bad news is you have the psychological immune system. It will come to your aid. So you'll be able to slip and dodge and not let that thing hit you. And you will minimize or avoid a lot of the pain. But you also don't have that piece of information now to work with. And so No. That piece of information. Yeah, the thing that they're throwing at you to hurt you. Okay. To avoid the pain, you say that's [ __ ] It's not true. It probably was true. And so by saying it's [ __ ] and that it's not true, you're not going to learn from it. You're not going to process through it. Back to your point about have you actually learned anything? In fact, Foucault would say you've given it more power. You've been oppositional to it. So you've reinforced it. Um Cuz you're doubling down on it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, I that makes a lot of sense to me. And my thing is the analogy I use is look, there somebody's going to throw something at your head. It hits you. It hurts. There's no doubt. Uh you're bleeding from your head. But now if you look down at your feet, it's actually a chunk of gold. And so now you can pick that gold up and do something with it. You had to suffer in order to get it because most people are doing what you're talking about there, dodging it. They're giving it energy. They're pushing it away. They're rejecting it aggressively with anger, with offense, with whatever. And I get it, man. Trust me, I get it. Because it is not fun to take a wallop to the head and have to really look at that and and say, "Okay, I'm going to stare nakedly at my inadequacies. What am I doing wrong? How am I going to make this better?" Um but if you do it, it becomes usable. Well, even just to be in the presence of that nakedness of your absurdities, time itself is going to turn you around and and put you into "Oh yeah, I'm an [ __ ] Oh my god. That's right. Yeah. It's right. It kind of gives you the opportunity to embrace that." Do you think that stacks up on people? Or when you say that, do you see a way out of being an [ __ ] Cuz when I think about somebody saying to themselves, I am an [ __ ] I think, "Oof, you're going to be in a dark place in a few years." Cuz those are going to stack. You're going to see evidence like that. I'm an [ __ ] I'm also stupid. I can be cruel. Like it will it will stack if those become like the things that you carry. Or is that just a reminder to like don't keep acting like that. Well, if you if you use it as a pass and you sort of embrace and say, "Yeah, I'm a douche. Okay, I can be a douche to everyone." That's one thing. But, I think most people would say, "Oh, jeez, I'm a douche. Can you forgive me? I Yeah, I own that. I Because if you're saying, "Yeah, I'm a douche. So, why are you surprised?" Then you're not really owning it. You're not really being there in the naked awkwardness of it. That's just another form of doubling down on it. Um But, if you do say, "Yeah, boy, jeez, sometimes I'm such a jerk." You give everybody else the opportunity to say, "Me, too." When you when you think that about yourself, is there a sense of just like [ __ ] I need to do something or how do you come back out of that, deal with it, use it, whatever the case is for you? A lot of times I'll try to find a I'll throw it out and I'll I'll gather other people's similar experiences and I'll try to find a way to quilt them together to make a story. Because that way that story has a greater chance of resonating with huge numbers of people. And that story Zombies where the kids put the defibrillators on their heads? There's one moment where he's got the defibrillator on his head and he's about to press the button. He's looking in the mirror and he's realizing, "You know, if I erase my memory, I'll lose all those Christmases, and I won't know that my mom that my nose is my mom's nose. And I won't know that my my mouth is my dad's mouth. And I'll when I look in the mirror, I'll think it's just me. And I phrase it better in the story, but when I come to the end of that passage, I'll look out, and there'll be 25-year-old guys crying. Because if you can turn that personal thing into a relatable metaphor, then it's not just about you. You give other people a way to sort of see themselves in the same metaphor. And it's just wonderful to kind of have that cathartic effect where everyone's limbic system is so hooked in in that moment, and you've got 800 people crying, or 800 people laughing, or even 800 people hating you. On that level, the Sarah Jessica Parker thing worked. Because for 1 minute, I got to be Donald Trump. And there's a lot of power in being the person who can be hated by 800 people. There's kind of kind of some kind of glorious about that. There's power in being able to be hated. Oh, yeah. Meaning I'm not uncomfortable here. Hate away. It Because that seems powerful. But just to be hated Once you're used to it, and you're like, yeah, I'm hated. I can own it. The world's not going to come to an end. There is a huge power in that that I think Americans never Power or freedom? Both. Because you're not stopped by being hated. And you're no longer slave to having to be liked. Uh Americans there's so much about the popularity contest. And once you give up that desperate need to be liked by everybody, then you don't have to be that 12-year-old boy anymore. So, hate away. And you you have a way of explaining things that brings ideas together in a fresh way. So, you don't have to be that 12-year-old boy anymore. That's [ __ ] fascinating. Uh but going back to um the kid with the defibrillator and he says, "I won't realize this is my dad's nose or my mom's mouth or vice versa." Uh I don't know why that made me emotional, but it did. And so, there's something really fascinating that circles circles an issue for me about what I think is ever present in your work, which is that I am connected to something bigger than myself or I am something bigger than myself, which is really intriguing. I would argue both. And there's an enormous uh joy in that feeling. And when I ache for it. Yeah. It's what kind of what church used to be. Um Interesting. Probably not within my lifetime. And I felt it in those support groups where everyone was so present in to the immediacy of their mortality. Uh yeah. If we were going to write something on your tombstone, I know it's not going to be a volleyball or a can of soda. Um I have a guess at what might be meaningful to you, but I don't know if this would would actually be meaningful to you. And your face is interesting. Um Is it uncomfortable to talk about what would go on your tombstone? No, no, no. I I I think we all have thought that and it changes all the time. So, I would think that something would be meaningful, whether you'd want it on your team set or not is a whole another question, but that you made as little effort as possible to look good or to make yourself look good. Oh, I'm going to toss to something that might be controversial. Please. Um when I was 28 years old, uh I was working a [ __ ] job and I had this vague recollection that I wanted to be a writer someday, but I was never going to act on it. I was going to wait till I turned 65 in my [ __ ] job. Why not? And then, once I had once I could write full-time, then I'd be a writer. And a friend invited me to do the Landmark Forum, which I understood to be a kind of re-languaging and reinventing of the est training from the '70s. And the first thing that they said in this training was human beings have three thrownnesses. And I think the term thrown is kind of comes from Heidegger, kind of the way that they're wired to be. And one is that you are wired to always be right. Even when you're saying, "Oh my gosh, I'm a douche." It's just a different form of being right. I'm wrong. I'm so sorry, I'm wrong. But you're right that you're wrong. About being wrong, yeah. You're always right. You're always driven to look good. So, even when you're looking bad, it's a form of looking good. And you're always driven to dominate and avoid being dominated. And you will always be used by those three wired thrownnesses until you recognize them. And once you recognize them, the metaphor was until you know that stepping on the crack in the sidewalk does not break your mother's back, you will avoid stepping on that crack. Once you recognize it's a superstition, it's just an automatic way of being. You're free to either step on it or not step on it. And so once you recognize that you're always about looking good, you're always about being right, you're always about dominating and avoiding being dominated, then you can back off on any one of those three. Um blah, blah, blah. Why blah, blah, blah? Uh because uh sometimes I need a trailing off. Yeah, and sometimes it's a way of negating something that sounds really pompous. It needs to be negated with a kind of yeah, I hear I'm sounding like a big brain donkey right now. I hear that, too. Funny. Um yeah, those three. I've never heard it put like that, but that makes a lot of sense. Now, are you given that you learned about that so early, is that something that stuck with you that you consciously think about backing off on all three of those, or it's not really a day-to-day thing in your life? It takes some getting used to. But if you make it part of your awareness, it does give you more options. So when things happen, you'll think, "Okay, this is just me looking good. Uh I don't have to be this way. It's just the way I'm wired. It's the way human beings are." And so once you can kind of use it a few times to de- defuse your reactiveness, it becomes more of a a habit. Makes sense. Chuck, as always, I so enjoy my time with you. Where can people connect with you, find you, follow you? Tom. Yes. Um I never trust people who say my name. Really? Yeah, I think it comes from that used car salesman That's so interesting. So I once heard something, and this really resonated with me, which is that the sweetest word in any language is the person's name. And uh clearly you don't subscribe to that. But there there does seem to be something. Now, if somebody's using it as like a pat thing and it feels slick, then yeah, not so much. But Um but I have a a Substack now where I purport to teach writing and publish a lot of short stories because Oh, [ __ ] there's just not a lot not a lot of market for short fiction right now. The glossy magazines are gone. Uh I used to love having stories in Playboy. But even Playboy's disappeared. And believe it or not, I've actually written stories too offensive for any magazine to ever buy. Um so I've got a Substack. It's like chuckpalahniuk.substack.com. I've got the new essay on Scribd, people, places, and things. Um yeah, that's that's everything so far. a perfect way to end it. I'm excited about the Substack. That is amazing. Um and speaking of things that are amazing, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.