#457: Chuck Palahniuk, Author of Fight Club — A Masterclass in Creative Living and Dangerous Writing

“The goal is to make people laugh and then to really break their heart.” — Chuck Palahniuk Writer Chuck Palahniuk (@chuckpalahniuk https://twitter.com/chuckpalahniuk) has published twenty-three national and international best-selling books. These include fifteen prose novels, a collection of short stories, two graphic novels, two coloring books, a travel guide, a collection of essays, and a memoir about his life as a writer. He was raised in a desert town with a population of three hundred at the time of his birth in 1962. He received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Palahniuk is best known for his novels Fight Club https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Club-Novel-Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/0393355942/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and Choke https://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/0385720920/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, both of which were made into films. Publication of his short story Guts https://youtu.be/cYHLpEEz_8g in the Sunday Guardian prompted a sharp drop in circulation. He frequently contributed fiction to Playboy, where his stories Romance https://mitchlav.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/chuck-palahniuk-reads-his-short-story-romance/, Cannibal https://www.playboy.com/read/cannibal, and Zombie https://playboysfw.kinja.com/zombie-a-new-original-short-story-by-chuck-palahniuk-1465542446 had to be personally approved by Hugh Hefner. His new book, The Invention of Sound https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Sound-Chuck-Palahniuk/dp/1538718006/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, is coming out on September 8th. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/. Do you sell stuff online? Then you know what a pain the shipping process is. ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/ was created to make your life easier. Whether you’re selling on eBay, Amazon, Shopify, or over 100 other popular selling channels. ShipStation lets you access all of your orders from one simple dashboard, and it works with all of the major shipping carriers, locally and globally, including FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Tim Ferriss Show listeners get to try ShipStation https://www.shipstation.com/ free for 60 days by using promo code TIM. There’s no risk and you can start your free trial without even entering your credit card info. Just visit ShipStation.com https://www.shipstation.com/, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in TIM! *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor http://tim.blog/sponsor. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be the appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. ButcherBox makes it easy for you to get high-quality, humanely-raised meat that you can trust. They deliver delicious, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef, free-range, organic chicken, heritage-breed pork, and wild-caught seafood directly to your door. For me, in the past few weeks, I've cooked a ton of their salmon, as well as two delicious barbecue rib racks in the oven. Super simple. They were the most delicious pork ribs I've ever prepared, and my freezer is full of ButcherBox. When you become a member, you're joining a community focused on doing what's better for all. That means caring about the lives of animals, the livelihoods of farmers, treating our planet with respect, and enjoying better meals together. ButcherBox partners with

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  folks, small farmers included, who believe in going above and beyond when it comes to caring for animals, the environment, and sustainability. And none of their meat is ever given antibiotics or added hormones. So how does it work? It's pretty simple. You choose your box and your delivery frequency. They offer five boxes, four curated box options, as well as the popular custom box, so you get exactly what you and/or your family love. Box options and delivery frequencies can be customized to fit your needs. You can cancel at any time with no penalty. ButcherBox ships your order frozen for freshness and packed in an eco-friendly, 100% recyclable box. It's easy, it's fast, it's convenient. I really, really enjoy it. And best of all, looking at the average cost, it works out

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  to be less than $6 per meal. And for a limited time, new members can get two pounds of free ground beef in every ButcherBox order by signing up today at butcherbox.com/tim. That's up to $180 in savings per year. Check it out. All the details and goodies can be found at butcherbox.com/tim. Again, that's butcherbox.com/tim.

• 2:13Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out.

• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

  Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 3:12Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market saves me a ton of money and it's perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market is a membership-based site on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone. You can regularly save 25 to 50% off of normal retail prices with member-only prices for anything you can imagine, really. Whether it's keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegan, whatever, you can sort by that. You can find all types of food. You can find supplements. You can find non-toxic home products, clean wine, dog food, just about anything. And let me give you a personal example of just how much you can save. So my last order, I ordered Primal Kitchen Mayonnaise, which is made with avocado oil. It's delicious. Justin's Almond Butter.

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  And the first was 25% off. The Justin's Almond Butter was 30% off. Rao's Homemade Marinara Sauce, which is awesome, 26% off. All said and done, at the end of my shopping, I saved $39 on my order. So members, and I'm a member, can earn wholesale prices every day and save an average of $30 on each order. I'll come back to that. And through Thrive Market... Thrive Gives, their one-on-one membership matching program. Every paid Thrive Market membership is matched with a free one for a low-income family in need. So, go to thrivemarket.com/timtoday to give Thrive Market a try. You can select the membership model that best fits your lifestyle. They have one-month and 12-month membership options.

• 4:40Tim Ferriss?

  Choose a free gift, up to $22 in value, when you join today and purchase the one-year membership. And just remember, Thrive Market membership is risk-free. You can take the first 30 days to decide if Thrive Market is right for you. If it's not, just cancel within those 30 days and get a full refund. This is what I offered my mom. So, again, that's thrivemarket.com/tim. By the way, my mom kept using it. Thrivemarket.com/tim. Check it out.

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all different walks of life. My guest today is none other than writer Chuck Paulinick. Chuck has published 23 national and international bestselling books. Give me a second to pick my broken self-esteem off the floor. These include 15 prose novels, a collection of short stories, two graphic novels, two coloring books, a travel guide, a collection of essays, and a memoir about his life as a writer, which I highly, highly recommend. He was raised in a desert town with a population of 300 at the time of his birth in 1962. He received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Paulinick is best known for his novels Fight Club and Shook, both of which were made into films.

• 5:53Tim Ferriss?

  Publication of his short story Guts in the Sunday Guardian prompted a sharp drop in circulation. He frequently contributed fiction to Playboy, where his stories Romance, Cannibal, and Zombie had to be personally approved by Hugh Hefner. His new book, The Invention of Sound, comes out on September 8th. You can find him on the web, chuckpaulinick.net, on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram also, all under the handle of Chuck Paulinick. Chuck, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you very much, Tim. And I want to start with a few questions about the bio. Specifically, Guts in the Sunday Guardian, why did that prompt a sharp drop in circulation?

• 6:33Speaker 03

  You know, I'd always been fascinated by the fact that when Shirley Jackson published The Lottery in The New Yorker, The New Yorker lost something like 500 subscribers, people who were so offended by that story. And I always thought, what would it take these days for a story to offend people that much that they would actually cancel subscriptions? And I ended up becoming acquaintances with Shirley Jackson's daughter, who sent me a big chunk of Shirley's cremains, her burned up remains. And so, having Shirley's ashes in my house, I just had to write a story that would be as offensive as The Lottery

• 7:15Speaker 03

  was. And Playboy published it. Originally, had turned it down, but then the editor, Chris Napolitano, came to an event and saw people faint while I was reading Guts. So, he had to buy it. And then in England, The Guardian had to buy it. They ran it in their Sunday Literary Supplement. And they later reported to me that a huge number of their subscribers had canceled after that was published.

• 7:45Tim Ferriss?

  What was it about Guts? What was it in the narrative or the content that caused people to faint and to cause them to unsubscribe?

• 7:55Speaker 03

  A doctor in Cambridge witnessed a bunch of people faint. And he explained to me that watching the way that their heads fell to one side was a classic form of hyperventilation, that they laughed so much through the first part of the story, that their blood became what's it, it's alkali typically, and then it becomes acid once it's overoxygenated. But whatever, it made the shift. And in religious cults, where they make you sing or chant a lot, the purpose of that is to hyperventilate, so that...

• 8:31Speaker 03

  You're really susceptible to passing out. That's why you have people passing out in in very fundamentalist religious ceremonies. And so by having people laugh so much during the first part of the story, once the real, the, the true nature of the story is revealed, then people are physiologically set up to faint. And the doctor explains how their, their head falls to one side. And then in order to open their airway, their body has to fall to the floor. And so that's what was happening. People were laughing. They were shocked. They fell to the floor.

• 9:08Tim Ferriss?

  What was the motivation or the, the itch that needed to be scratched in this particular instance? It was it just the challenge of seeing if you could accomplish such a feat of sort of almost stage magic with, with the reading? Or was it a morbid curiosity? What was it?

• 9:30Speaker 03

  It really started with, I had two anecdotes and they were so similar. And I knew I couldn't do anything with two anecdotes. It was like writing a song with two verses. You really need a third verse and you need a bridge. And so I had an anecdote about a friend of mine in college who had been in the Marines and stationed in the Middle East. And he got very stoned in college and called me from the hospital and said that, that he had tried this princess wand trick that he had learned in the Middle East, or he'd witnessed these, these long brass rods that people would, that men would insert in their urethra while

• 10:10Speaker 03

  they masturbated. So he had tried to do it with a long drip of wax from a candle. And he ended up in the hospital and he ended up hugely in debt and dropping out of college. And then I tied that to an anecdote that I had heard about a friend who wanted to try pegging as an adolescent and had bought a carrot, but then was too embarrassed to buy a carrot and Vaseline. So he bought all the ingredients for a carrot cake and Vaseline.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  And I had these two great anecdotes that were funny and heartbreaking and visceral. And it wasn't until I was doing research for my book Choke that a sexaholic in a sexaholic support group was explaining to me that he has always been 135 pounds because he had to have a radical bowel resectioning. And I asked him why, and he explained this horrible swimming pool story. And I realized I had the third anecdote, that I had the third verse for what would be kind of a song that would ultimately make people faint. But that some people have come to me and, and they've told me that it is the saddest story they have

• 11:29Speaker 03

  ever written their lives. And that's always the, the goal is to make people laugh and then to really break their heart.

• 11:36Tim Ferriss?

  I've read from you a lesson, and this is a lesson from Consider This, your book, which I'm gonna read. This is something that was in Publishers Weekly. And you can feel free to, of course, correct this, but I think it perhaps connects to, to what you're saying, or at least I'll, I'll make that attempt. Here it is. Quote, "If you're going to work on something as long as a novel, it has to explore some unresolved aspect of you, so that even if it never sells, never makes any money, never gets any attention, you still have a therapeutic benefit of fully exploring and exhausting that unresolved part of you." So you talked about making people laugh and then breaking their hearts. When you write a shorter piece, is there some desired impact or process that you want

• 12:21Tim Ferriss?

  for yourself in writing that? Or is it dissimilar from novels?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  You know, a shorter piece is about exploring an idea. But a shorter piece is really a fantastic opportunity to mess with the language, to really do an experiment in restructuring information. And the original short story that became Fight Club, it became chapter six of Fight Club. Was was just because I wanted to do a story in which the transitions were rules. I wanted to use rules as a kind of chorus, a nonfiction transitional device that would allow me to cut together different aspects of the story like I was cutting film. I could jump around temporally, I could jump around whether I was in scene or in sort

• 13:08Speaker 03

  of observation, as long as I used the came back to the rules. So a short story is really an experiment in how to completely reinvent structuring a story. And what the story is about is always kind of a secondary thing.

• 13:25Tim Ferriss?

  So, speaking of rules, if I'm gonna try to span a bridge to someone I want to ask you about, could you speak to how you learned to write? And specifically, the name that pops to mind for me is, or maybe it's developed your style is a better, a better way to put it, but you could put it in context, Tom Spanbauer. Could you explain to people who Tom was?

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Tom was effectively my second writing teacher. My first writing teacher was a very nice workshop led by a writer named Andrea Carlisle, who eventually came to me and said that that my work was so upsetting to the other writers, who were all very nice, middle-aged people. And I was, I was this crazy 25-year-old, and they, the other students no longer really felt safe around me. And so she was asking me to leave the workshop. She said, a man named Tom Spanbauer had just moved to Portland from New York, where he had studied at Columbia with a famous editor named Gordon Lish.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  And Gordon Lish is famous for a lot of things, including being Raymond Carver's editor, being a famous Knopf editor, fiction editor at Esquire, running a magazine called The Quarterly, and really sort of developing a style called minimalism, and a school of writers who were very popular at the time, who were known as the minimalists. And so Tom had moved to Portland, and he was more or less teaching Gordon Lish's minimalism in a workshop. And that's where I got my, my real, real education.

• 15:09Tim Ferriss?

  Could you describe that education? What were some of the the the highlights or formative inputs in that education?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  You know, there are so many rules. And as a writer, you go into writing without rules. And you tend to just write in these default ways. You've always thought a story should be. But then Tom and Gordon come in and they say, you may not use thought verbs. You have to externalize everything the way an actor would. So that the thought, the realization, the the epiphany occurs within the reader. You can't dictate emotion like that.

• 15:55Tim Ferriss?

  And by that, you mean, for instance, you can't, you wouldn't use verbs like he wonder or think?

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Or realized or believed or yeah. You can't even use love. It's about staying away from abstractions. You can't use one inch. You can't use it was a hundred degree day. You can't say he was a six foot tall man. You have to stay away from all abstractions. Because a six foot tall man is somebody different to everyone who meets him. And so when your character says he was six feet tall, you're losing an incredible chance of describing, giving to the reader how the character perceives a six foot tall man.

• 16:40Tim Ferriss?

  Does practicing that type of writing with that specific constraint, change your everyday perception of reality at all? In the sense that having taken a fair number of different compounds in my life, when you dissociate from labels or you lose labels, perception can change. And I don't want to force this narrative on you. But did that affect how you walked about in the world experiencing things? When you disallowed yourself from using?

• 17:12Tim Ferriss?

  Those types of abstractions.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  It made me really listening for how other people describe things. Because typically, when people are talking, they don't use abstractions when they're telling a story. They are using a much more intuitive way of describing things that is really linked to their experience. And that's what you're listening for. The way that the people describe things in what Gordon Lish would call burnt tongue. This kind of inexact, awkward, inelegant way of saying something that says it in a new, fresh way, but also implies the emotion behind the story. A story that's told really beautifully and smoothly and elegantly

• 17:58Speaker 03

  does not carry a lot of honesty or emotion, doesn't imply the kind of stress that's behind the story. So you're looking for ways of kind of reinventing storytelling and reinventing reading so that readers have that fantastic excitement that you first had in first or second grade once you figured it out and you could follow these symbols. You want to not just tell a story, you want to completely reinvent the act of reading every single time.

• 18:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm looking at some notes in front of me, as I always do. And there's a term here, capital D, capital W, dangerous writing. And it's part of a line, or I should say a series of lines with methods for staying intact. Could you speak to, first and foremost, the definition of dangerous writing and go from there?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Well, here's an example. You know, my parents fought like animals. My parents fought like crazy. And so so much of my childhood and my siblings' childhood was about maintaining peace. We would play Henry Kissinger, where we would hide in the basement. And once mom and dad, once the fighting had reached this huge crescendo, one of us would be chosen to hurt themselves so that a bleeding child or a child with a broken bone suddenly had to be dealt with. And my parents couldn't fight anymore. So we played this game of being Henry Kissinger to calm the waters, to kind of redirect all of their anxiety.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  And so I really could not be with conflict. So I wrote the book Fight Club, which is all about this consensual, structured, controlled way of experiencing and exploring conflict and violence like you would dance, that could allow everybody who had problems with conflict to kind of put their toe in the water and kind of experience conflict and develop an ability to be with it, but be less reactive to it. And so Dangerous Writing is effectively about taking an idea, something that is unresolved and threatening to you,

• 20:19Speaker 03

  and blowing it up and exploring it and making it worse than you ever imagined it could be. And in doing so, really exhausting your emotional reaction to it. And typically, that makes the problem itself go away entirely.

• 20:35Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other examples of that that you could give? This seems like an incredibly powerful therapeutic tool, possibly, right? So speaking personally as someone who is hyperreactive to certain things, whether from your own experience or that of others you've described this to, could you illustrate any other examples of how this might apply to exhausting that emotional reactivity?

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Well, let's talk about somebody else. Let's talk about Ira Levin, who was always a hero of mine. He wrote Rosemary's Baby at a time when women were being given thalidomide and being told, "Take this. It will calm you down." And women were just controlled and kind of forced to do whatever the obstetrician said to do. And regardless of what they were worried about, their concerns were dismissed. Nobody could talk about abortion at the time. So Ira Levin.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Writes Rosemary's Baby, which is about a woman who is manipulated and then completely controlled by the medical services around her, and she's coerced into having this monster of a baby, after everyone has assured her that everything is going to be just fine. And in doing so, Ira Levin really kind of broke open how women were able to be with the whole medical industrial complex, and how they were able to discuss abortion. It was really one of the first, maybe the first mainstream movie in which abortion was openly discussed, and also in an indirect way, how thalidomide was dealt with culturally.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  All of these kind of horrors that people just could not talk about openly, because they were too controversial and too frightening. Ira Levin gave people a metaphor that allowed them to exhaust all their feelings around these things, so the things themselves could be dealt with directly.

• 22:34Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned a little bit earlier, or you described Fight Club and the consensual violence that it involves, and I'd love to explore a line that I've read of yours, which abbreviated would be "resolution is death," and I'd love to read just a short bit from an interview, I think it's an interview, yes it is, in The Guardian, and feel free to fact check, of course, but here goes, this is a portion of the quote. "If I write something that people can really argue about, that thing is going to be in the culture forever. For example, is Fight Club good or bad? It's consensual, but it's violence. I'm trying to create this dazzling spectacle that's not meant to perpetuate or generate

• 23:18Tim Ferriss?

  anything, but to be a sorbet that allows you to taste the next thing, to be a little more present in the next thing." And the interviewer asked if you wanted to see resolution, and you said, "No, especially in creative work, resolution is death." And what I would love to ask is, how do you think about crafting, if you do, a satisfying story arc while maintaining this surface tension of lack of resolution, if that's a way to put it? How do you think about combining those two things, or either piece?

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Do it the way your dog would do it. Do you got a dog?

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  I do.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  All right, so when your dog sees a squirrel... The dog falls into a trance.

• 23:59Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Because the squirrel is a moving thing. And the dog will follow the verb. The motion carries its own authority. And so as long as you keep a character in action, and the action is always towards a purpose, and it's not overthought, it's not overanalyzed, the story will occur as really good and engaging, because action is always taking place. And so as long as you stay in action, and you come back and you complete an unresolved thing, then there's that sense of satisfaction. You don't have to resolve the entire world. You just have to resolve one aspect of the world. And that's enough to give people a sense of reward.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  You know, I could segue here to short stories, because I adore short stories. There just are not enough of them. And I would argue it's because so many publications pay by the word. So they will pay less for a fantastic short story than they will for a really flabby 40, 100-page, long, long story.

• 25:09Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think there's a way to fix that? Is there a simple solution where someone could somehow create incentives for that to be different?

• 25:19Speaker 03

  You know what I'd like to see?

• 25:22Tim Ferriss?

  What would you like?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  I'd like to see more spoken word stories. If you had a program of stories, because stories weren't always written down. Stories were originally somebody that, somebody, something that was told by somebody to an audience. And those are the stories that you really crave, those stories you heard around the campfire when you were a kid. They really scared the pants off of you. Or they were the stories you heard in the barber shop that made you really laugh. And so if you adhere to that kind of oral storytelling model, you could never go long, long. And so in a way, I would like to see more stories told out loud because it automatically limits how long they can be.

• 26:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a inbuilt central governor, which is the vocal cords and memory and so on, right? Especially if it's truthful, especially if it's a true story, although it wouldn't have to be. Can you think of any other parameters if you were setting up this experiment? Any other restrictions or prerequisites that would go into people who would be getting up to tell these stories?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  The other kind of failsafe device that's built in is it as a teller of stories, you know when you're dying. You know when that story is just not landing. You can tell from the whether the room is engaged. You can tell from the silence in the room. You can tell from the emotional reactions from people. Right now, I'm still trying to conduct my writer's workshop and we're doing it on Zoom and it is death because as you read your work on Zoom, you're not getting the ongoing, the laughter, the groans, the inhales, the fantastic silence of terror. You're not getting any emotional feedback. So it feels like you are failing for 30 or 40 minutes.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  And if you were from an audience, you would know at what point you had gone way too long and that you were, your story had was failed.

• 27:21Tim Ferriss?

  Would there be an upper limit? Would you say 10 minute max, 15, 20, 30? Or would it be up to each presenter, each storyteller? Better put.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  You know, Andy Warhol would say art is whatever you can get away with. I have heard 40 minute, hour long stories that felt like 10 minutes. Same goes for movies. Anything, you know, the idea is to keep people engaged on such an intense level that they lose track of time. They are so completely. Involved in the story. And so time doesn't really matter as long as people's butts don't hurt. And as long as they stay really deeply immersed in the story.

• 28:03Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's talk about engaging the room. And I do agree that Zoom is death, right? You can't hear people shuffling papers out of boredom or distraction. It's the cues aren't there. The feedback isn't there. What are some of your methods for engaging the audience? And when is it important to you to engage the audience?

• 28:21Speaker 03

  You know, I would argue that right from the get go, from the first sentence, you've got to engage the audience. And that goes back to journalism, that your lead has to be really strong. Your lead has to raise a question, has to tease something. So, and if not your lead, then at least your first paragraph has to really hook the audience. It has to make them want to read the next sentence or the next paragraph. And beyond that, you know, really is about staying very visceral or on the body, as Tom would teach it, that you involve a constant sort of awareness of physicality. So that you're enrolling the reader on a physical level, not just an emotional

• 29:06Speaker 03

  or intellectual level, but you have the reader's entire body is in the story. And that's why so many of my stories really involve either sex or violence or illness or drugs, but something that heightens the physical awareness of the characters.

• 29:26Tim Ferriss?

  What other approaches, whether craft or trickery, or perhaps often the same thing, have you used or seen as being effective for engaging the audience?

• 29:36Speaker 03

  There's just so many little tricks. One is just to constantly be changing the texture, to find some way that you can shift from first person to third person to second person, the way that people tell a joke conversationally. And to deliver the story in broken down articulated bits that will assemble themselves in the reader's mind without a lot of connective tissue, without a lot of transitional phrasing. This is why I love the work of Amy Hempel so much is in stories like in the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried. She basically presents a list of fantastic details without any kind of transitional narrative linking them together.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  And the list of details piles up in your mind like an attorney presenting bits of evidence in court. And at the end, she doesn't dictate an emotional state, but she forces the reader to have the emotional reaction that her narrator is not having. And by the end of that story, you find yourself weeping so hard, and you don't know why you're weeping so hard, because you haven't been told, this is the sad part, this is where you should cry. But she has so burdened you with what seem like innocuous moments that you have no other reaction except for to have the emotional reaction that her character's not having.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  I could go on and on, there's so many little tricks.

• 31:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, please go on and on. That's why this isn't a five-minute morning TV show. We have the runway.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, another kind of core thing in minimalism is that you keep saying the same thing over and over. I finally got minimalism. One day, I left Spanbauer's workshop. I went home, I turned on television, there was a commercial for Skipper's seafood. And the commercial was just a montage of images. It was the signage, it was the paper cups, it was the napkins, it was people at a table smiling and happy with Skipper's badging all around them. It was people in uniforms with Skipper's badging. And every single one of these images, even though they were all different images, they all basically said the same thing.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  And at no point did they insert, say, a horse running in the surf. There were no unrelated aspects. It was all saying Skipper's seafood over and over. And so in minimalism, you look for as many different ways as possible to say the same thing over and over and over.

• 32:21Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going off notes here, but I'm gonna throw out a few prompts. What about making intentional mistakes?

• 32:27Speaker 03

  I love making intentional mistakes. Oh, my gosh. You know, what is the first thing that Scarlett O'Hara says in Gone with the Wind?

• 32:36Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna fail my my lit class here. I will have to defer to you.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  She says, war, war, war. All this talk of war is spoiling all the barbecues. There is not going to be a war. And as soon as she says there is not going to be a war, we are on board. We are thinking, you poor, privileged little thing, there is going to be a war and it is going to completely kick your ass and it is going to destroy your little world. But because she said the wrong thing, she makes the audience smarter and she makes the audience sympathetic with her. And Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary's Baby, we know that she's been knocked up by the devil, but she doesn't know.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  And the fact that she doesn't know makes us really root for her. So when you have a character who's making an ongoing mistake, you keep the audience really engaged because the audience feels superior, doesn't resent the character and wants to see the character come to enlightenment. But there is a kind of condescending sympathy and nurturing that the audience feels for a character who is making a constant mistake. Also, I love doing this. I love going to a literary party and saying, you know, Robert Benchley, what a fantastic career that man had. He founded The New Yorker

• 34:08Speaker 03

  and then so much later in life, he wrote the book Jaws. And wow, what a fantastic span of a career. And there'll be a long silence and all these smart people look at me.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  And then finally, someone will say, no, Peter Benchley wrote Jaws and that was Robert Benchley's son. And they'll all feel so superior and so smart. And they get such a rush. When you allow people to be smart like that, it's like they've won a game show. And they they might feel a little less respectful of you. But what's important is that you've made them feel really good. They've got those chemicals going at that point and you can really start to jerk them around.

• 35:00Tim Ferriss?

  So I naturally have to ask, what particular flavors of jerking such people around do you enjoy?

• 35:07Speaker 03

  I really love to tell people that Sylvia Plath was a racist. She really was. She was totally a racist because she wrote The Bell Curve. No, she wrote The Bell Jar. And everybody at the party will look at you puzzled for a moment and then go, "No, you're such an idiot. She wrote The Bell Jar." And I'm like, "What?" And so it's just terrific to troll people like that. It validates their education. The way that game shows, when you're sitting and you're yelling at Jeopardy,

• 35:45Speaker 03

  and you get it right and they get it wrong, you feel so pompous. And it's always about making the audience, giving the audience a win, giving the audience an ongoing series of wins. And that's a big thing in minimalism, is that you never want to tell them what is what until they figure it out first. And going back to the short story Guts, where the character is so sure that this some kind of a snake has come out of the bottom of their pool, and the snake has a hold of him. The audience realizes what the snake is before the narrator does.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  And that forces the audience to have this enormous cognitive reframing and to face the horror all alone, without being told what the horror is. In a way, we kind of figure out what's in the box at the end of Seven, before Brad Pitt, and that makes us smarter and more horrified. And we're forced to carry the horror before Brad Pitt is allowed the horror.

• 36:55Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. The holiday season is fast approaching and we know that people will be buying more stuff online than ever before. All of these trends to e-commerce have been accelerated due to COVID and much more. If you're an e-commerce seller, are you ready to meet the demands of a record-breaking online shopping season? Be ready with ShipStation. ShipStation.com is the fastest, easiest, and most affordable way to manage and ship your orders. In just a few clicks, you're managing orders, printing out discounted shipping labels, and getting your products out fast. Happier holidays for you and your customers. ShipStation takes the hassle out of holiday shipping.

• 37:37Tim Ferriss?

  No matter where you're selling, on Amazon, Etsy, your website via Shopify or other platforms, ShipStation brings all of your orders into one simple interface. And ShipStation works with all of the major carriers, USPS, FedEx, UPS, even international. You can compare and choose the best shipping solution every time, and you can access the same postage discounts that are usually reserved for large Fortune 500 companies. It's no wonder that ShipStation is the number one choice of online sellers. And right now, my listeners, that's you guys, can try ShipStation free for 60 days when you use offer code TIM. Just go to the homepage, shipstation.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in TIM, T-I-M. That's it. Go to shipstation.com, then enter offer code TIM.

• 38:22Tim Ferriss?

  Shipstation.com. Make ship happen.

• 38:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna make a hard left turn, since it is my nature to enjoy non-sequiturs. I'd like to discuss Lewis Hyde. I believe you have something to say or things to say about Lewis Hyde. And I'm also curious to know, is this the same Lewis Hyde who has written quite a few books, including one of my favorites, which is Trickster Makes This World, which is a book really about the disruptive side of human imagination as embodied in trickster mythology? Is this one and the same Lewis Hyde?

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that book. I think that was his first book.

• 39:03Tim Ferriss?

  It's spectacular. And it's fucking long, just so people know what they're signing up for if they get it on Kindle or something, but it's fantastic. What would you like to say about Lewis Hyde?

• 39:13Speaker 03

  You know, there's so much of Lewis Hyde that has been so useful for me because he approaches things from cross-culturally. And so you don't just hear about North American trickster culture with coyote or raven. You hear about Loki, North American trickster culture. You hear about Mediterranean trickster culture. You hear all these, how all these cultures have this kind of chaos character, which is what I was writing when I was writing Tyler Durden. And so seeing how your character falls into this ancient tradition of these art types is so important because it allows you to really, you know, write accurately and effectively exactly the character that you're writing and get the effect that you're

• 39:57Speaker 03

  going for. You realize you're not kind of inventing something entirely new. You're reinventing something really ancient. And there's a wonderful joy in that. I wrote a short story called Phoenix, which was about a woman on a business trip. And she kept on calling home and her small daughter would not speak to her. And she kept on trying to get her husband to coerce her daughter into saying hi, because she had started to fantasize that perhaps her daughter might be ill or in the hospital, or might have even been killed. And that the husband, the father, does not want to admit that to her

• 40:37Speaker 03

  over the phone. So she, it all escalates until she tells her husband, okay, you get a pin from my sewing basket and you stick it in our daughter. You stick it in Rachel and you make Rachel scream. If I don't hear Rachel scream, I'm calling the police and they're going to be at the house and I'm going to tell them that you sexually abused Rachel and you're going to prison. So either you stick a pin in Rachel, or I'll tell people that you stuck something else in Rachel. And the story works so well. It escalates this completely horrific no-win situation. And when I was done with it, I realized I

• 41:17Speaker 03

  was rewriting Isaac and Abraham. It's God saying, prove how much you love me by stabbing a knife in your kid. And with Lewis Hyde,

• 41:31Speaker 03

  He helps you identify the archetype that you're writing to, so that you can really fulfill that expectation. Because if you get that expectation a tiny bit wrong, then on some level, the reader is not going to be really satisfied with it. Stephen King has written about how, when you're writing, in a way, you're excavating some ancient, enormous buried thing. And you're trying to excavate it as intactly as possible, without breaking off any piece of it, and without leaving any of it sort of obscured with dirt. And the more you understand about this ancient thing, the better you are at reproducing it in its fullness. And so Lewis Hyde helps with that.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Boy, the other aspect of Lewis Hyde that I'm really fascinated with is, is in his book, The Gift. He writes a great deal about how, according to Greek and Roman tradition, each of us is born with, effectively, a guardian angel. But it's more along the lines of a guide that represents our fullest potential. And this guide wants to see us reach our fullest potential, our greatest form of power. And the ancient Greeks and the Romans, they would make a sacrifice on their birthday to this, whether they called it their genius, or their daemon, or their genie. Lewis Hyde's example is the elves and the shoemaker.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  That when the shoemaker is really at a low ebb, the elves arrive and begin to make these fantastic shoes for him. And when the shoemaker finally gives a gift to them, then they're freed from their bondage, and they leave his life, but they leave his life transformed. And according to this ancient Greek and Roman idea, is that if you fulfill your potential, if you sacrifice and you develop your skills...

• 43:31Speaker 03

  That are kind of your destiny according to this potential you're born with, then you free that guardian spirit so that that guardian spirit can move on to another level. In effect, you are freeing the genie from the bottle. And if you do it wrong, the genie has to go back into the bottle. And according to the Greeks and the Romans, if you did it wrong, then the genie, the daemon, the genius, becomes a malevolent household spirit that will destroy you and destroy your home. And how many of us kind of know a creative person who just didn't follow through with it and ended up drinking and doing drugs

• 44:14Speaker 03

  and kind of destroying their lives because they didn't have the whatever to really pursue the passion that should have been their destiny? But Lewis Hyde writes about that very effectively.

• 44:28Tim Ferriss?

  Have you in your own life ever experienced the consequences of not fulfilling your destiny to your daemon, so to speak? I mean, have you suffered the consequences of neglecting that directional impulse?

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Only every time I'm between a book. When I am emotional and reactionary and getting drunk and taking Ambien and calling my few friends in the middle of the night and saying, "What did you mean by that?" And I'm picking fights and I am just totally trashing my life. Somebody will say, "You're not writing right now, are you?" And that's exactly it. Because when I'm writing, all of that negative, all that anxiety goes into the work and my life is so peaceful and so productive. But when I'm not writing, and also when I'm writing, there's this sense. I've talked to other writers who write and musicians.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  And they say that when you're really deep in a project, there is a sense that you are so protected and so embraced by something that nothing bad can happen to you. You really feel like you're just completely protected when you're in the creative act. And when you're not, you're just completely anxious.

• 45:55Tim Ferriss?

  You seem to be a real student of mythology, and I'd like to ask you two, at least two things about that. The first is, do you find some solace in mythology? Is it reassuring in some way? And second, could you speak to Joseph Campbell's theory of the second father?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Boy, a million years ago, I did not have television all through college and then all through the 90s. And someone taped the Joseph Campbell PBS lecture series, Bill.

• 46:31Tim Ferriss?

  The Power of Meth with Bill Moyers?

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  Spectacular, yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  And up to that point, I had looked at black street gangs and thought, these guys are idiots. You know, they're so destructive, so negative, and so, you know, without purpose. And then Joseph Campbell mentioned the secondary father. And he said, what's going on in black street gangs is that they're getting the secondary father in terms of being given tasks, being given challenges, being given roles, and being given this opportunity to kind of distinguish themselves and to grow their skills in what are, you know, more or less illegal ways.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  But there's still ways of developing the individual so that the individual will eventually rise out of that gang. And live a productive life in some other way. But the problem is that more and more people who used to be the secondary fathers in our culture, and these are, say, military drill sergeants, or religious leaders, or teachers, or coaches, are becoming stigmatized. And they're no longer kind of revered figures in the culture. You know, blame it on a lot of things, on sexual abuse, on whatever. But all these secondary fathers are disappearing. And they're important for both men and women.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  So without them, what happens? Street gangs happen. And so I don't think we can complain about street gangs unless the secondary father is available in some other form.

• 48:14Tim Ferriss?

  Does anything outside of being immersed in a writing project make you feel protected or at ease if you share the same sentiment as your other writing friends that brought this to the surface in conversation?

• 48:31Speaker 03

  No, you know, I could lie. I would lie. I would lie. And I would say Vicodin.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, find me some Vicodin and I'll, and I'll be a happy camper. But no, that's, that's an artificial sense of safety and, and security. No, the only time is when I feel like I'm fulfilling some kind of destiny and I feel like I've kind of lost myself and I've become a conduit for something deeper and more important than myself. And so often it puts me into conversation with other people because I tell them what I'm working on. And I am so constantly looking for different ways of reinventing Skipper's seafood over and over in a book. And so I need to take the topic to every single person and I need to see if it resonates with them.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  That's what we do at parties, is that you go to a party and the story you tell, if it shuts the room down and everyone's quiet, that's not necessarily a great story. But if the room erupts with everyone having a different version of that same story, that all starts with, oh my gosh, the same thing happened to me, only bigger. Then that's a good story. And so if you take your topic to other people and it resonates with each of them enough that they can sort of tell their experience of it. And they can also tell you whether or not it's already been exploited in commercial culture. They can say, oh, I saw that in a movie.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  So you're testing whether people engage with it. You are expanding it using other people's experience. And you're also making sure that it wasn't already explored to some other sort of commercial narrative.

• 50:19Tim Ferriss?

  How old were you, if you recall, when you began writing and finished Fight Club?

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Just a little aside. Doug Copeland, the guy who wrote Generation X, is a friend of mine. And reading Generation X was kind of an epiphany for me. It was such a unique, fantastic book. And it was a book I read before I really started to write. But Doug Copeland had told me that he had just read a bunch of brain studies that showed that the last sort of physiological, physical changes in the human brain occur around the age of 31. So that it's at the age of 31 that people, for the very first time, can combine their experience with their education

• 51:08Speaker 03

  and create something that is greater than just the sum of the two. So it tends to be between the age of 31 and typically 33 that people who have studied in a field create their breakthrough or create their masterpiece, the proof of their competence. And so it really was at the age of 33 that I wrote Fight Club. But I very much, I started writing it more or less when I was 31 and finished it at 33. Another interesting aspect to that brain study is that this study showed that for the rest of people's lives, no matter how old they get, if you ask them, how old do you feel?

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Almost everyone will say, you know, I feel like I'm, I always feel like I'm 31.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  That that really is a formative period between 31 and 33.

• 52:07Tim Ferriss?

  When they were reborn in their full feature set at 31, that's wild. How can or how does narrative generate social change?

• 52:19Speaker 03

  You know, I've always hated narrative that tries to dictate social change. And I've always felt that the most effective way that it could generate social change is creating and presenting an alternative that is so attractive that it makes people just readily abandon what they were doing before. And my favorite examples are here in the Pacific Northwest. We had this huge problem with beavers. Beavers are choking all the waterways with chewed down trees. The beavers have become a fantastically dense pest. But 100 years ago, beavers were almost extinct

• 53:05Speaker 03

  because the Hudson Bay Company had come in and set up all these trapping forts and these ways of buying beaver pelts. Because beaver was the fur for hats. Everyone wanted a beaver hat. And so beaver was being driven to extinction for beaver skin hats.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  And it wasn't people protesting. It wasn't people chaining themselves to trees. It wasn't anything like that to save the beavers. It was the British creating the silk top hat. And silk hats suddenly became the fashion. And something as, that seems as silly as fashion, saved beavers, because suddenly, nobody wanted old fashioned beaver hats. They wanted silk top hats. And suddenly, beaver had no value whatsoever as a commodity. And so suddenly, beavers were left unmolested for a hundred years. And now, beavers are everywhere.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  And I love that story, because people think that the arts don't really create social change. But when they change the narrative, when they just change what people perceive as valuable or high status, then they naturally get people to change without having to browbeat people or legislate change. Another sort of odd example, my Italian editor Eduardo told me years ago, how the Italian fur industry back in the 90s was doing really well. Fur was very popular with wealthy and celebrity Italians. But they decided they really wanted to grow the fur market.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  So the fur industry decided that they would finance furs so that middle class and even lower class people could buy fur, minks, chinchillas, coats, whatever. They could buy them on installments, like you would buy a house or a car. And tons of lower class people bought tons of fur. And for a brief moment, the fur market exploded in Italy. But then the rich people saw all the poor people wearing fur. And the rich people thought, no, fur is no longer a status indicator. So they dropped fur. And the celebrities dropped fur. And suddenly, the poor people saw that the rich people didn't wear fur anymore.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  And the poor people dropped fur. And the Italian fur industry has never really recovered from that. And it's not because somebody said fur is evil and threw a bloody raccoon at the Devil Wears Prada at Anna Wintour. It wasn't because of any kind of political thing. It was because the narrative changed. And it changed in that kind of inadvertent, accidental way. And I think that's what really good writing or really good, any storytelling does.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  It makes me think, I've never heard that example before, that story. It makes me think about what some people, maybe in New York, would describe as flying rats, pigeons. Pigeons started off, in a sense, as display birds of the aristocracy. And they got out, turns out, they multiply very well. And now they're thought of as trash birds. They're actually very beautiful, beautiful, beautiful birds. But all it takes is releasing, whether it's birds or ideas, sometimes into the wild, to change the narrative. Are there any other examples that come to mind?

• 56:46Speaker 03

  You know, there's some speculative examples. They're not actual examples, but when you change the listening, how it really kind of skews how people perceive things. Nowadays, whenever I see like a middle-aged guy walking down the street with a really pretty little girl, I think, I wonder how they met. I go to that Jeffrey Epstein place, instead of seeing a father and a daughter. And Jeffrey Epstein thing has just totally tainted how I see an older man and a younger woman together. And so that's one example of how, when the listening changes.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  It sort of taints everything like pigeons. Another example is The Wizard of Oz. Somebody pointed out that Dorothy gets back home by clicking her heels together. And that's a movie that was released in 1939 when clicking your heels together was a really Nazi thing. So is The Wizard of Oz actually kind of a white supremacist movie? This all this heel clicking, all this, I don't know. Suddenly the optics are really bad on The Wizard of Oz. So it just takes these really small things to shift the perspective.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  Have you ever thought, now, I don't mean to imply doing it very on the nose in a direct way. If I'm remembering correctly, you said you dislike when art or narrative in the form of art tries to directly catalyze social change. Feel free to correct me, but have you ever used narrative to obliquely, indirectly, surreptitiously generate social change or in hopes of doing so?

• 58:30Speaker 03

  You know, if I've done it, it was just to kind of raise an awareness. You know, in my book Beautiful You, which is about sex toys that are so effective that they basically take over the world. The book was started because I was a little appalled seeing the Trojan Twister advertised so openly during primetime television. And I thought it was just fascinating that what used to be very interpersonal, interpersonal interactions were being so commodified. We don't know how to say we love each other. So there's aisles and aisles of cards that will say it for us.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  And there's all these recording artists that will express our love for us. And, you know, people are kind of losing all of these really intimate ways of connecting, expressing, because they can buy something that they feel is better than they could do themselves. And Beautiful You was very much about talking about this commodification of the personal and how ultimately that takes away our ability to express anything and we lose all control. So sometimes I am a little dogmatic.

• 59:47Tim Ferriss?

  This is going to be an ill-formed question, but I'll make an attempt anyway. And this is, of course, a leading question that is full of assumptions, but what is it that draws you to cults? And are we in the moment of cults?

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  I wouldn't even say cults as much as I would say social models. I'm always fascinated by different social models, the kind of games that people invent for, you know, how to conduct their lives. That somebody has created all these rules and everyone has agreed to play by these rules. I find that fascinating because it is an acceptance that that is a consensual sort of behavior, mutually agreed upon set of behaviors that are going to define our culture and make it work. One aspect is, I love the work of Victor Turner, who was a British sort of cultural anthropologist, because he identified, like Lewis Hyde, all

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  these liminal and limnoid rituals that people do. And one limnoid rituals are when people get together in a mutually sort of agreed upon situation, like whether it's Burning Man in the desert, or it's Occupy Wall Street. But they get together with a sense of communitas, where the social hierarchy is flattened. Everyone is equal. And they kind of experiment to see if they can come up with a different way of being together. They experiment with fashion, they experiment with food, with just how to conduct themselves with each other, and how to manage themselves. And they also experiment with their identities.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  And so people go to Burning Man, and they're not who they are in the rest of the world. They're a unique Burning Man person for that one week. And so ideally, if those experiments are successful, they get adopted into the culture and they become the new institutions. Years ago, before I started writing, I got wrapped up in the cacophony society, which was about nothing but creating these kind of experiential, social experiments, like Burning Man, like Santa Rampage, and most of which did not work. They just fell down, they were horrible failures, but some of which had become huge

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  celebrated things, like the naked bike ride and Santa Rampage and Burning Man.

• 1:02:16Tim Ferriss?

  You used a word just a moment ago that I did not recognize, which is liminal. Could you define that, please?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Now, let's start with the word liminal, which sort of comes from threshold or lintel. It's a line that you pass over from one state of being to the next.

• 1:02:35Tim Ferriss?

  As in subliminal, just etymologically, right? I mean, it would be...

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  Below awareness, yeah.

• 1:02:41Tim Ferriss?

  Below awareness or the threshold awareness.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  And liminal events happen throughout our lives. The honeymoon is held up as an archetypal liminal event, that it is what divides you from being a single person to being a married person. So you are wedded in front of your community, so your whole community is seeing you wedded. But then you have to leave the community for typically three days. That the classic honeymoon is a liminal event where you leave the culture for three days, and when you come back, you are fully recognized as being husband and wife. And you go to someplace that is outside of the culture, you know, a resort, someplace that is not part of your everyday life.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  There are liminal events, funerals are liminal events, weddings, Halloween is a great liminal event. Another distinction of liminal events is that they tend to have a power hierarchy reversal in them. That at Halloween, all the people who have no power dress up as outlaws. They dress up as cowboys, or they dress up as the dead, or they cross-dress, or they dress as animals. They dress as something outside of the normal. And then they go to people who do have power and property, and they demand tribute from them. So the hierarchy is reversed for one night. Halloween used to be just a major shitshow.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  People used to tear down fences, they used to slash tires, they used to really destroy a lot of property, until the 1920s, when the newspapers got together with the insurance companies and the candy companies, and decided to promote Halloween to change the listening, like pigeons, to change it so that if you went door to door and asked for candy, people would give you candy. And that was basically just a way of saving a huge amount of insurance claims. It started in Canada, in Toronto, but it really, you know, that's what we see as Halloween now. Christmas was kind of the same way, that Christmas carolers would go around,

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  and caroling was a really menacing thing. Caroling meant either you come out and you give us booze, or food, or gold, or we will break your windows.

• 1:05:05Tim Ferriss?

  They're paid to go away.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  And so was foshing, or Mardi Gras, that it was traditionally the one time when poor people could go into the church and eat their greasy food, and do all these kind of outrageous things, and the clergy did kind of profane things. And it was during foshing, it was during the period before Lent, that Martin Luther nailed up his protests. So that's why Protestant religions have never had power hierarchy reversal rituals, because that's how they kind of came into power. And they don't want to provide that opportunity for something to go wrong again. And extending that to Limnoide? Liminal events are things that happen at regular junctures in the culture.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Christmas, funerals, weddings, Halloween, before Lent, Easter. But limnoid events are events that have the characteristics of liminal events. They tend to have communetas, they're outside of the regular world. They have a social leveling of the of the power hierarchy. But they can occur at any time. They tend to be things that you purchase a way into like a concert, like Burning Man.

• 1:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to do a flash back and a flash forward, or a flash to present, perhaps. In the process of doing homework for this conversation, I came across a phrase I had never come across before, and that is kiss-off money. As it relates to Fight Club. Could you please explain what this means and how it relates to Fight Club?

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, I have such misgivings about ever having mentioned this because it really hurt my editors' feelings. Years ago, when Fight Club was being shopped around as a manuscript, there was this really brave guy, Jerry Howard, at WW Norton. And Jerry wanted to acquire the book for Norton so bad. And finally, he got Norton to offer $6,000 on it, which he brought to me, and I was thrilled. I had no idea that $6,000 was a really small advance. And then years later, I mentioned it to another Norton author, and she said, "Oh, you accepted

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  the fuck you money." And I said, you know, what's that? And she said, "If the house does not want to acquire a book, but they don't want to alienate the editor who wants to acquire the book, they offer an advance so low that the author is supposed to say fuck you and walk away." And I had no idea. I was young. I'd never done this before. I was working at Freightliner. So I just took the money. But then I made the mistake of repeating what this other author had told me. And became part of the public record and, you know, ultimately hurt the feelings of the editor

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  who had acquired, you know, the money for me. But, you know, that's kind of what it's known is politely, it's known as kiss off money.

• 1:08:27Tim Ferriss?

  I got the Disney version. Now, people, at least people of my generation, certainly think of Fight Club as this cultural mainstay. I mean, this real landmark piece of narrative in marquee lights. How many copies did it sell in the first year in hardcover, would you estimate?

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Boy, it was dismal. They sent me on a four-city tour and I never had more than one or two people at any cities. I ended up in Livermore, Livermore, California with no one. And I doubt if it sold 2,000 copies in its first year, hardcover. And even in 1999, when the movie was coming out, most of the hardcovers were still in the warehouse and they were about to be pulped, turned back into recycled paper, when someone mentioned that a movie was coming out. So they kept the hardcovers and subsequently sold them all. But it sold tiny numbers, just really nothing numbers. It sold a little better

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  as a paperback. But no, it was a big bomb at the beginning.

• 1:09:37Tim Ferriss?

  This is gonna be a lazy question, but I'll ask it anyway because I'm so curious. Having never had anything made into a movie, how would you summarize what your experience was like going from pre-movie to, say, a few years after the movie came out? How would you summarize or describe that experience? I really can't even imagine emotionally what it looked like or felt like.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  I can only talk about it. I always try to be as specific as possible and address maybe just one aspect of something, rather than try to sort of generalize about the entire thing. And one interesting aspect that I've grown to appreciate is that when you do 1,000 press junkets for a movie,

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  And you're asked the same questions over and over. It's kind of like the whole Buddhist concept of look again, look again, look again. And it's as if you're being psychoanalyzed by a million strangers who have no emotional attachment to your action, to your answer. So, but you are still looking a little deeper and trying to reinvent the thing every time you look at it. And so often it takes that kind of really thorough coaching before you realize what you actually wrote about. And suddenly you can realize in the middle of a, some room full of reporters,

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  the thing, the dark, secret, horrible thing that you were actually writing about. And you can be mortified. You put this thing on the page. And then you spend the whole rest of that meeting with a smile just pinned on your face, praying that no one will ever realize what you were actually writing about. And it's painful, but I would rather it happens eventually than never happen. It, because it's, it's extraordinary to see how your subconscious was working that whole time. And in a way, as you're writing, you are trying to trick yourself to go to a place that you would never consciously go to. And at the same time, you're trying to trick the reader

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  to go to a place that they would never consciously go to. And to have a reaction to something that they do not want to fully recognize. And that's kind of the glory of minimalism.

• 1:11:58Tim Ferriss?

  I don't expect an answer here, so feel free not to answer if you prefer. But what did you discover? What were you actually writing about?

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Oh, hell no, I'm not gonna go there. No. You know, number one, because it's always so fantastically dark and personal and suppressed. And number two, I'm afraid if I ever get that specific with my intention, it will preclude the readers. Sort of interpretation. And it won't have any power for the reader because suddenly there'll be this correct interpretation. And if it's the reader doesn't conform to that, then the reader is wrong. And again, it's never about making the reader wrong. It's about making the reader right and giving them a rush of being right over and over.

• 1:12:45Tim Ferriss?

  Couldn't have asked for a better answer. Thank you for that. Do you ever worry after writing something or at any point that you will write something? And at some point be sitting in a meeting and you have this flash of insight about what you were actually writing about? That is so dark that it plunges you headlong into some type of abyss that is difficult to climb out of.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  No, it is never really as if it's plunged into an abyss because any kind of revelation like that is such a relief. It's gaining access, being able to retrieve something that had been so completely lost to me. That I feel a fantastic joy when even those darkest things come to the surface. Yeah, because at least I know what I'm dealing with and I'm no longer used by it. I'm using it. And this, my advice to writers, dangerous writing is that so many of us are used by aspects of our history, our, our past, our experience without fully understanding them.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  And once we can unpack them in the seemingly innocuous world of fiction, then we can more fully look at them and be aware of them and not be used by them.

• 1:14:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you have no idea how helpful that is to where I am right now. But this conversation isn't about me, so I'll put a pin in that. I would love to ask you about the selection of subjects, how you decide. For instance, in the case of your new book, The Invention of Sound, you could write about anything and everything to the extent that you're comfortable describing it. What is this new book about and how did you choose to write this book?

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  I am always fascinated by the commodification of human things. We are so constantly finding ways of buying and selling things that had never been a commodity before. And I had started with the idea of someone who collected human screams, and in doing so, basically killed people in order to record their ultimate scream. And when I was doing a rough draft of the story, I mentioned it to a friend. And he said, have you heard of the Wilhelm scream? And the Wilhelm scream is a famous scream from the 1940s. It's been used in dozens of movies, hundreds of video games, cartoons, television, everything.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  The Wilhelm scream is everywhere. And at the same time I was writing it, a cover artist for Fight Club 3 drew a tattoo artist who was wearing a concert T-shirt for a band called The Wilhelm Scream. And suddenly, all these strange coincidences, the Wilhelm scream was coming to me from so many different directions, unrelated directions, that I thought, ah, this is, this is all confirmation. This is what I should be working on. And so I would mention it to other people, and they told me about the goofy holler. They told me about the Howie scream. They told me about Tape Lead.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  You know, I meet with so many recording engineers doing radio shows, or doing podcasts, or doing audiobooks. And they all have some fantastic story. And so, you know, it gave me a way to kind of fish for this information from people who really know it. And then it gave me a structure for assembling it all together. And on an emotional level, it's about a guy who is searching for his daughter, who might have been killed for one of these screams. And this is a character I kind of go back to. The father who has killed or lost his child. I find that people engage with it really intensely.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  And I think I engage with it, I just realized this is a fairly safe revelation. But I don't have kids and I won't have kids. And I think I've reached a point in my life where I'm beginning to really panic and mourn the loss of not having kids. And I can express that through writing a character whose big purpose is to find what became of his dead child, or if his child was killed. So without realizing I was expressing that aspect of myself. But I find that that character resonates with a lot of my peers who have chosen not to have kids.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  That that character really hits home for them.

• 1:17:22Tim Ferriss?

  Well Chuck, I gotta say, man, you are incredibly fun to interview.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  It sounds kind of downerish, doesn't it?

• 1:17:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's not said, I'm not saying that as a tale on what you just said. I legitimately mean that this has been a lot of fun for me. And I don't always say that, for what it's worth. And I've taken copious notes, as we've been talking, for myself. And I hope this is not our last conversation, although I have no expectations of future conversations. Is there anything else that you would like to share or discuss? I feel like this has been such a densely packed, rich masterclass from you on a multiple number of levels that I'm feeling very complete. And hopefully there'll be time for a second conversation sometime.

• 1:18:16Tim Ferriss?

  But is there anything else that you would like to say or add? Comment upon, complain about?

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  It's funny, because the more you have access to the entire sweep of your life, and in a way, every one of my books is a diary of what I was going through at that point in my life, and also kind of a diary of things that my friends were going through. So it's almost like a cross-peer group diary of a group of people during that time. Each book is sourced from so many different people. And recently, I was watching the news like everybody else, and I was watching the looting and just kind of appalled. You know, people stealing stuff, you know, from Saks Fifth Avenue, people stealing stuff from downtown Portland. I mean, downtown Portland is just a giant looting festival.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  And I remarked the same to some friends. And one of my friends who had read my book Invisible Monsters said, "You're one to talk. You grew up looting things." And I realized I did. My dad worked for the railroad and in the middle of the night, when he would get word that a train had derailed anywhere in the west, he would come home, you know, 1, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning, and he would have us kids all get in the pickup. And we would drive for hours across deserts and mountains to wherever this train was smashed up. And our job was to steal as much as we could from the train as possible.

• 1:19:47Speaker 03

  And so we would steal typing paper by the reams, or we would steal cases and cases of butterscotch pudding. And my mother did not approve of this, but she had read Daphne de Marier's book Jamaica Inn, which was a huge book in the mid-century. And it depicted the, what were called the wreckers on the west coast of Ireland, people who would walk up and down beaches with lanterns and give ships the impression that there was a harbor there, so that ships would crash on the rocks. And then the wreckers would loot the ships and kill any survivors. And so Daphne de Marier, very romanticized looting. Okay, white people do it too, looting.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  And so it was delightful that my friends who had read Invisible Monsters remembered that I had looted trains as a small child. And really, my whole peer group, my whole small town would be there. Everyone would be looting that train before, you know, somebody would show up to stop us. And so by writing the books, you're able to kind of make your deepest, darkest history into part of public record, so that when you do say something stupid, the whole world can call you on it. And that's, that's a nice kind of coaching.

• 1:21:10Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. Fantastic. Chuck, Chuck Paulinick. You can find chuckpaulinick.net, @chuckpaulinick on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. I will put all of this, as well as notes and links to everything that we discussed in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Chuck, what a pleasure. Hey, Tim, thank you very much. I really, really appreciate the time. And to everybody listening, till next time, thanks for tuning in. And don't forget, Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Curve.

• 1:21:44Tim Ferriss?

  Bell jar. I know, I'm kidding.

• 1:21:48Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 1:22:28Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email, and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market saves me a ton of money, and it's perfect for these crazy times. Thrive Market is a membership-based site on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone. You can regularly save 25% to 50% off of normal retail prices with member-only prices for anything you can imagine, really, whether it's keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegan, whatever. You can sort by that. You can find

• 1:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  all types of food. You can find supplements. You can find non-toxic home products, clean wine, dog food. Just about anything. And let me give you a personal example of just how much you can save. So my last order, I ordered Primal Kitchen Mayonnaise, which is made with avocado oil. It's delicious. Justin's Almond Butter. And the first was 25% off. The Justin's Almond Butter was 30% off. Rouse's Homemade Marinara Sauce, which is awesome, 26% off. All said and done, at the end of my shopping, I saved $39 on my order. So, members, and I'm a member, can earn wholesale prices every day and save an average of $30 on each order. I'll come

• 1:23:57Tim Ferriss?

  back to that. And through Thrive Gives, their one-on-one membership matching program, every paid Thrive Market membership is matched with a free one for a low-income family in need. So, go to ThriveMarket.com/Tim today to give Thrive Market a try. You can select the membership model that best fits your lifestyle. They have one-month and 12-month membership options. Choose a free gift, up to $22 in value when you join today, and purchase the one-year membership. And just remember, Thrive Market membership is risk-free. You can take the first 30 days to decide if Thrive Market is right for you. If it's not, just cancel within those 30 days and get a full refund. This is what I offered my mom. So, again, that's ThriveMarket.com/Tim. By the way, my mom kept using it. ThriveMarket.com/Tim. Check it out.

• 1:24:42Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox. ButcherBox makes it easy for you to get high-quality, humanely-raised meat that you can trust. They deliver delicious, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef, free-range organic chicken, heritage-breed pork, and wild-caught seafood directly to your door. For me, in the past few weeks, I've cooked a ton of their salmon, as well as two delicious barbecue rib racks in the oven. Super simple. They were the most delicious pork ribs I've ever prepared. My freezer is full of ButcherBox. When you become a member, you're joining a community focused on doing what's better for all. That means caring about the lives of animals, the livelihoods of farmers, treating our planet with respect, and enjoying better meals together. ButcherBox partners with folks, small farmers included,

• 1:25:26Tim Ferriss?

  who believe in going above and beyond when it comes to caring for animals. The environment and sustainability. And none of their meat is ever given antibiotics or added hormones. So how does it work? It's pretty simple. You choose your box and your delivery frequency. They offer five boxes, four curated box options, as well as the popular custom box. So you get exactly what you and/or your family love. Box options and delivery frequencies can be customized to fit your needs. You can cancel at any time with no penalty. ButcherBox ships your order frozen for freshness and packed in an eco-friendly 100% recyclable box. It's easy, it's fast, it's convenient. I really, really enjoy it. And best of all, looking at the average cost, it works out to be less than $6 per meal.

• 1:26:09Tim Ferriss?

  And for a limited time, new members can get two pounds of free ground beef in every ButcherBox order by signing up today at butcherbox.com/tim. That's up to $180 in savings per year. Check it out. All the details and goodies can be found at butcherbox.com/tim. Again, that's butcherbox.com/tim.