Bruce Wagner Writes Transgressive Novels About Tragedy & Transcendence

Bruce Wagner is a novelist, former student of Carlos Castaneda, and author of fifteen books, including his latest, "Amputation." This conversation explores his use of Hollywood as a laboratory for human behavior, crafting transgressive fiction that skewers the desperate while searching for transcendence. We discuss his decade with Castaneda, writing "Amputation" after the LA fires, the relationship between suffering and art, Buddhist and Sufi wisdom, and why fiction is our most potent vehicle to truth. He describes inhabiting his most malevolent characters with the same proximity as his saintly ones—because we're all interchangeable, all searching for transcendence. Bruce is infinitely fascinating, one of the most interesting people I've ever met. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Shokz: Use code RICHROLL for $10 off your purchase👉🏼http://www.shokz.com AG1: Get their best offer ever – Welcome Kit, Omega 3's, D3+K2, Flavor Sampler, plus AGZ sleep supplement FREE ($126 in gifts)👉🏼https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.com Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 10% off your first order of a website or domain👉🏼http://www.squarespace.com/RichRoll LMNT: Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase👉🏼https://www.drinklmnt.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  As a writer, I attack and destroy bullshit.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Bruce Wagner has had a prolific and eccentric career.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Wagner just takes you straight to the contradiction.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Apocalyptic, yet ultimately spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of Hollywood.

• 1:23Rich Roll?

  You are a fascinating character to me. I want to enter the Wagner Extended Universe here.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  I never wrote for a reader, ever. I explore every forbidden place in myself. And there's only one thing I'm really worried about from the moment I put my head on the pillow, and it's book sales. What are my books on?

• 1:53Rich Roll?

  Bruce, I'm delighted to have you here today. As I mentioned to you a moment ago, I just, I want to enter the Wagner Extended Universe here and just kind of marinate in your ethos and sensibility. I mean, you're somebody who has written many books, 15 now, 15 novels, something like that, and effectively used Hollywood, as you have mentioned, as this laboratory for need and vanity, as your, as your sort of palette, as this mirror for human behavior. Everybody has their longing and they are seeking, and what you're interested in is, is that kind of spiritual journey towards transcendence. And it's the transcendent piece, it's the spirituality that is baked into all of this that interests me the most.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I, um, my nature is fiery and it's operatic, theatrical, and it's, it's also laser-like for me in my observational powers. I've been thinking a lot about writer, the scent of writers, like the scent of a woman, the scent of a writer, and what attracts, what is my scent and what themes or notions attract me? Hollywood had a perfect scent for me because I was someone that was possessed by the notions

• 3:22Speaker 01

  of extremity, of extreme wealth and houselessness or, or poverty that one is brutalized almost to, to, to death by. I was possessed by celebrity and renown and invisibility. And the tension between those poles, you know, I'm, I'm often think of...

• 3:53Speaker 01

  A Buddhist story, a beautiful, magnificent book called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, or One's Hand, I might have the title wrong. And in that book, they talk of so many things. And one of the things that's said is that vanity, the need to seek attention and approbation, is one of the most difficult things to overcome. And the example they give is of a hermit who was, lived in a cave for 35 years. And his mantra, his essence

• 4:34Speaker 01

  was, he wanted to be the most well-known hermit, you know. So I'm possessed by that. And yet, you know, my, my work, early on, was compared to Nathaniel West, Day of the Locust. I didn't read that book until a few years ago, because I had been compared to him so often, that I was nervous about reading it. But the books that I did read, one had a tremendous influence on me, was Fitzgerald's Pat Hobbie Stories, which are these, ultimately, quite poignant and dark stories, mirroring Fitzgerald's experience of an alcoholic screenwriter.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  And they're high comedy, but they are also eviscerating in that they are, there's such a sadness to them, and such a fatalism to them. One aches for a Pat Hobbie. You know, I'm losing, my first book was Force Majeure, followed by I'm Losing You. And those books were kind of catalogued and characterized by their extremely dark view of Hollywood, which I'm not going to argue with. And I was called a satirist, which, which I rebelled against at first. Now I don't care what they, what they call me, or how they categorize

• 5:55Speaker 01

  me. But the, the importance for me was, there was an element missing, ultimately, from, from Nathaniel West and Fitzgerald.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Which is certainly not a flaw on their part. It didn't have a scent that attracted to them. I was attracted by the sacred and by transcendence. You know, this notion of conditional suffering, you know, the Buddhists speak of. The three sufferings that the Buddhists speak of are physical pain, you know, the pain of birth, death, illness. And then the fluctuation of moods is another kind of suffering that a day can contain great heights and great depths,

• 6:51Speaker 01

  which I think people who are bipolar experience in a more operatic way. And then the, which also that second mode of suffering is characterized by the notion of impermanence that underpins everything. The last suffering is the conditional suffering, which my interpretation is that the suffering imposed upon us by the social order. So I, the idea of escaping that was always something that appealed to me in literature, you know, particularly in books of parables,

• 7:33Speaker 01

  either Buddhist parables or Sufi parables to me. So I began to read many books and, and superimpose this, this desire and to make them redolent of this scent, this thing, this, this perfume that I adore. So I read Don Quixote because I'd read a quote from Dostoevsky saying that it was the saddest book ever written. So I was immediately signed on and it was.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Rapturously sorrowful, but transcendent at the end. So I felt that in the mosaic of my work, the mandala of my work, that it was essential, because I didn't want to be king of the hill of the one who lacerates, had no desire to do that, no interest. I would have, you know, hung my guns up a long time ago if that was what I had to offer.

• 8:33Rich Roll?

  It's not a laceration. There is a skewering, but it's not satire. Like, there is, there is an affection for these characters, these human beings in extremis. And I, and I, and, you know, what I see in that, or what I feel in that, and tell me if this, this tracks with, you know, how you see it, is that, you know, we are all these people. These are all mirrors of ourselves. And, you know, I'm sure people ask you, like, oh, is Bud you? Or like, these characters that you create, like, they're all, they're all you, and they're all us, the reader, right? They're all different. We can identify our peccadilloes and all the bad behavior of all of these characters,

• 9:18Rich Roll?

  who are all stuck in these doomed cycles. And as are we, in our own, you know, perception, and our own, you know, kind of three stages of this Buddhist, you know, state of suffering.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  That is a complete distillation of what my work is. And I was thinking of this on the way over. You know, I was thinking about my father. You know, I had a bad father, you know? A father that was a sadistic alcoholic, who did things to me that no boy should, should experience, but many, many have. And...

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I was thinking, if I were to be asked, well, did he do his best? Did your father do his best? Well, you can reach that point where, yes, he did his best. And that's kind of palliative or...

• 10:14Rich Roll?

  Right, as John Cusack says in Maps to the Stars.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then what follows that is he could have done nothing else, you know? So there is a kind of certainty to all our behaviors.

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  A fatalism.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's that we behave in ways that I feel are predetermined, in a sense. You know, I had visited Ramesh Balsekar in Mumbai with my friend Gavin. And he, this is someone that Leonard Cohen went to see and spent months with when he climbed down from Mount Baldy onto Boogie Street, right? As he referred to it. And I was interested after Carlos Castaneda died, who I had spent many years with. There was a book called I Am That by Nasargadada Maharaj.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  And I had really never looked at any of the spiritual disciplines, for want of a better word at the moment, until Castaneda died. And I was captivated by that book, I Am That, because it reminded me, it had the scent of Carlos Castaneda, you see? So I learned that, I knew nothing. I thought, Nasargadada Maharaj is still alive, I must go see him. Of course, I learned that he was dead. And the man who was his translator was a man named Ramesh Balsekar,

• 11:58Speaker 01

  who gave talks in Mumbai. And I remember I had written a novel called Still Holding.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  That had a character in it, a very famous Hollywood star, an A-lister who was also a Buddhist. Someone along the lines of Richard Gere. That paradigm is not so active anymore. And I was at a monastery here in Los Angeles and saw Leonard. You know, it's where his teacher was. And I told Leonard that I was thinking of going to India. And he said, if you like acid, you'll love India. You know, I'd never been, right? So I went and I saw Ramesh a number of times over the years.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  And his idea was that everything was predetermined. And people had a huge problem with that. You'd have celebrities that would come over to see him. And the moment he removed in their heads their agency, they were gone, right? So I, my spirit is to dispose of everything that is told to me, you know? Because then we enter, we're already in the cult of reality. Then we enter into the cult of spirituality, you know? Where you return from India, everything is predetermined, you know?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  So these are all things that my nature is to overturn, you know? But I understood what Ramesh was saying. And actually, it was very helpful for Leonard, who had gone through terrible depression in his 50s and 60s. And when he went to India and met Ramesh, it alleviated some of his suffering. Now, that doesn't excuse behavior. It doesn't excuse actions, this notion of that things are predetermined at all, you know? One still corresponds by the laws and dictates of one's nature, you know?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  So for me, I...

• 14:22Speaker 01

  I had to add an element of the sacred. So when I say my father was predetermined to act in this way, it's without meaning. I became, you know, all my life I'd been raised and heard as a young man and adolescent, oh, he has no father, you know? And I was conditioned to believe I had a father. Well, I did. I had a bad father, an absentee father. And in the end, it was just, that's what I drew. That was the card I drew.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, the pastiche of your childhood and your upbringing is this, you know, kind of collision of forces that, you know, obviously, you know, creates the artist that you are today. There's your father, there's the sort of Norman Rockwell-esque, you know, experience of growing up in Beverly Hills, you know, at a very unique time. And you shared on Bret Easton Ellis's podcast, like, that experience, which was fascinating. But all of this leaves you with this, you know, kind of unique lens on Hollywood as a young person, but also traumatized by being raised by your father, or not raised,

• 15:42Rich Roll?

  and this search that you go on to replace him with all manner of father figures who become influential mentors and, you know, critical in the gestation of however your brain was forming to, you know, create this incredibly unique style of writing with such precision and attention to not only the quality of your language, but also even the aesthetics of words and how they show up on the page that I've never seen, you know, in anyone else.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Well, my love affair with my operatic romance with the English language is what has sustained me. There are aspects of my personality and my being that are stunted.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  You know, I, I'm, it's almost become impossible for me to read a book. And I, I can't listen to books either on, on audio tape. And it's, it's a kind of agony for me. And I can't quite explain it, but the germ, the germ of that has always been there. When I was very young, I would steal books from bookstores. And I had my own sacred library, so to speak. And it was all about scent. And my scent, my, my sense of smell was impeccable.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  So I had Janey, you know, at 11, 12 years old, Turgenev, you know, I, I was possessed by books. And I would say that I absorbed the books. I don't believe that I, I had read maybe 20% of, of the books in this very large library. And that continued through my life. Occasionally, I would be forced to read because one of my characters in one of my books was, was reading Dead Souls by Gogol. So I would read that and, and adored it.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I don't know how I got to Dickens, but Dickens, for me, was an apotheosis of the most powerful perfume for me. Because it contained the fastidious, obsessive, romantic, almost mathematical use of language, which I, at a younger age, had not stumbled across. And yet it was, Dickens is often accused of being sentimental by, which is not a dirty word for me. You know, I am pathetic, I am pathos. Even on the most saccharine, primitive level, really nurtures me, you know?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  When put into a kind of stew that contains...

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Ingredients that are acrid, you know. So I'm becoming like a completely blind person. And the only thing that blind person has a keen and acute sense of smell for language. Do you know? Everything is is beginning to fade away for me in that regard. And I'm not speaking of a neurological problem. I'm speaking of perhaps something more complicated and more simple at the same time. I'm not I'm not sure what it is. But my ability to be so deeply and kinetically involved with words and for them to

• 19:27Speaker 01

  to be almost religious for me is not diminishing at all. Everything else is falling away.

• 19:35Rich Roll?

  What do you make of that? I mean, it feels on some level like an artist fully formed. Like the books that you turn to and relied upon and required in order to enter that, you know, dreamlike state of the imagination is now something that you're able to give birth to without having to turn to them. But the fact that you're not continuing to read as voraciously as you once did is is an interesting turn of events or evolution.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I'm, you know, talked about this. I'm I had a my father's father was someone that worked in a men's clothing store and would burst into tears over some something that someone said that he thought that was mawkish or sentimental. And his, his mother, my father's mother, who was a tough bitch, would berate him, almost physically assault him. You know, I, I feel that I have elements. I see that that grandfather, you know, this simpering fool, this idiot.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And then other parts of me are in shock that that I I've completed a book. It's like I have nothing to do with it. And I know it sounds pretentious, but. It's such a puzzle, all of it, Rich. I don't know how you feel about what you do, but that you have materialized doing the things that you do and are on the journey that you're on is... it's a puzzle. You know, it's... you know, we're so goal-oriented. We're socialized to believe that... not necessarily that there's reason to it,

• 21:34Speaker 01

  but there's meaning and that the meaning is in the journey, you know? Well, how... you know, I feel completely incapable of analyzing the journey or even recognizing it, you know? So, I don't know. It's all going to go away anyway, you know, by stroke or by sudden death. And yet, I was blessed, in a sense, to be able to recognize and acknowledge that I had been... I had been wrapped in words, as if wrapped by a boa constrictor. Do you know what I mean?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  And yet, the same thing that was killing me or killing off everything but the snake was the thing that fed me as well, you know? I had a psilocybin journey, you know? The goddess who oversaw the mushroom, you know, the mushroom's teacher, would speak during the journeys that I took. And I went for one of my birthdays and I wasn't disappointed, but, you know, it's this fantasy that we control all. You know, "I'm going to do this."

• 23:02Speaker 01

  It's this kind of big idea. "I'm going to do psilocybin with a guide on my ex-birthday, you know, and it's going to be astonishing." You know, it's like, it's such a farce, you know? So, she, the goddess that oversees the mushroom, said, spoke of me in the third person. "He thinks I'm going to wow him on his birthday," you know? I'm gonna wow him at death. But what she really said was that I did not need to do this anymore in terms of visitation by and with the mushroom. My stories would suffice until that moment I entered infinity.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  You know, the words will go away. You know, Castaneda speaks of these four important moments in one's life. The four states of man, which is fear, clarity, power, and old age. These are the four enemies, the four enemies of man. Fear, clarity, power, old age. And one cannot defeat old age. And yet, one can achieve an exit or liberation.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  And for me, it will be whilst in the embrace of of that magnificent verbiage, you know, that mothered and fathered me.

• 24:43Rich Roll?

  Well, you certainly are gifted with a unique talent, whether it comes through you or it's a function of willing these words onto the page. Like you are clearly doing what you are, you know, designed to do here on earth during your time here.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:00Rich Roll?

  I want to get to the Castaneda stuff, but I'm imagining young Bruce riding his, you know, banana seat bike around Beverly Hills. What was the impetus to turn to books at that time? Like, was it a like, trauma response to the chaos at home? Or was it a safe haven for you? Or what was it that drew you as a young person?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, unknown. And those were the best years of my life. Those were the best years of my life.

• 25:33Rich Roll?

  Paint a little picture, you know, what that was like back then.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Back then, because you said Norman Rockwell in Beverly Hills, and people might think, what's Norman Rockwell about it? Back then, it was a small town. It was like a town in It's a Wonderful Life. I had my first job, you know, I was like, um, maybe nine years old. And on Halloween, the magic store would pay some of the boys to put monster masks on and, and have placards advertising the magic shop. And we'd walk up and down the boulevard. Um, there was a huge pond on Santa Monica Boulevard that had live coy in it. You know, now that would be impossible. There was a J.J.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Newberry's, you know, a real, um, soda shop, uh, counter, um, that you'd see in movies in the forties. There was also celebrity, sometimes the hint of it, and sometimes overtly. We lived a few doors down from Broderick Crawford, from All the King's Men, which I think he won an Academy Award for. And then he was on Highway Patrol, this television show. And I went to school with, with kids that were, um, the sons and daughters of famous people. Broderick Crawford was married to a woman who was the mother of a girl that I went to school with, and the woman was a starlet.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And when they divorced, wound up in an apartment on Doheny and overdosed and died, which at the time, they said it was, um, she'd mixed the wrong flu medications. That used to be the, the euphemism. But all in all, riding my, um, banana seeded Schwinn.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Through the gusty Santa Ana nights and dusk and late afternoons of Beverly Hills, arriving at the playground at six in the morning sometimes and school wouldn't begin till late and staying till six at night, not really having a home life, but grifting and grafting on to the home lives of other friends, you know. And then I had a whole slew of friends that lived, I lived in the so-called slums of Beverly Hills. On the corner with Beverly Wilshire Hotel, there was a 24-hour drugstore and restaurant

• 28:06Speaker 01

  with a counter where you'd see Groucho Marx and Tony Curtis and, you know, they sold Dunhill hairbrushes that were like $2,000. What? I was in shock about so many things. One day I was, we were Christmas carolers at the Beverly Wilshire and it was just part of the neighborhood. And one day I cut through it on the way to high school and I looked up and they were shooting a film there. And there was Aunt Jean Wilder holding a sheep. It was Woody Allen was shooting Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  You know, it was a really kind of pure and innocent upbringing, which the backdrop was my parents' monstrous marriage, you know. So it wasn't so much reading that was my escape. It was getting, literally getting out of the house as early as I could and coming back as late as I could. I would be dragged from my bed by my mother in the middle of the night and brought to her bedroom because she and my father were in the midst of some epic, half-physical, half-sexual battle. And my father would leer and taunt me.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it was, it was dark, dark, dark. But writing, you know, I got my first typewriter and quickly learned how to type. I played piano as well, so I had some dexterity in that regard. And I think it was sent again, you know? It wasn't an escape. Reading wasn't an escape because even then I had difficulty reading. But the idea of books, and I think I had some pre-sentiment, some vision that I could do what these men and women had done

• 30:15Speaker 01

  in the books that had a strong scent. It was that simple, I think, you know?

• 30:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Transgression is a huge theme in your work. And, you know, why is that so important?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  It is very important for me. And it's perhaps at the core of what I do. And what could be more transgressive than the sacred? Really, do you know what I mean? But I, I, I don't, um, I want to overturn anything that comes my way. And I want to crack the code that way, you know? I mean incest is very prominent in my work. And one, one might say, um, it, it's become a kind of trope now

• 31:10Speaker 01

  in these easy pornographic times that we live in, you know? But for me, um, I was, um, you know, a child of incest. And, and I think didn't, um, find that at the time, uh, I'm, it was, I'm sure traumatizing. But as I get older, it becomes part of the template of what family is, you know? And so I, by exploring.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  The transgressive notion of incest, I was able to somehow knit together the idea of family and intimacy, you know. But I would say, in the end, this idea of my transgressive nature has been of tremendous value for me as an artist, because I attack and destroy bullshit, in a sense. I mean, Hemingway had that line, I can't remember it, I'll paraphrase it, where he had a gold-plated shit detector, bullshit detector, you know what I mean? I pursued that line, you know,

• 32:34Speaker 01

  because anything that is accepted, the kind of writing that I had, that I would come across, that was endorsed by the good housekeeping of The New Yorker, you know, I wanted to disembowel, do you know what I mean? The ones that really appealed to me were the ones that were doing the same. Now, that doesn't mean I was, you know, I was, Faulkner was a huge influence on me. But when one thinks of Faulkner, when I think of Faulkner, it's the unusual, transgressive things he did with language. You know, again, it comes down to scent,

• 33:19Speaker 01

  because you have, recently, I was watching Glenn Gould take a shit on Rachmaninoff. The worst, you know. And then I heard Bernstein and Gould talking about Beethoven. Beethoven, the sum of his parts is significant, but in each individual part is negligible, you know. Then you had Henry James taking a shit on Dickens. I mean, it's just to each their own.

• 33:53Rich Roll?

  ¿Qué te atrae a la siente es la verdad. Hay presentación y artífice y luego hay realidad. Y la realidad también está informada por la percepción. Así que hay las montañas de Beverly Hills de la afuera, hermosas mansiones y los grauchos Marxes y los Wilders. Pero todos están involucrados en la obra de crear percepción y artífice. Y detrás de las puertas cerradas de esas mansiones están, ya sabes, estrellas que se han desmayado y que están bromeando todo el día, ¿verdad? Así que como joven, ves la disidencia entre cómo aparecen las cosas y lo que realmente está pasando. Y la siente es realmente como lo que hay detrás de esa puerta cerrada,

• 34:35Rich Roll?

  qué está motivando ese comportamiento y cuál es la verdad de todo esto. Y ¿hay una oportunidad de trascendencia dentro de estos ciclos deseados, verdad? ¿Y cómo distingues entre artífice y realidad?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Sí, creo que fue un tipo de inoculación mi trabajo, que resultó ser falso. Pero creo que quería explorar cada lugar prohibido en mí mismo. Lo que dijiste anteriormente sobre que todos nosotros somos intercambiables, realmente quería aceptarlo. Y en mi trabajo estoy tan cerca de los personajes santos que aparecen

• 35:26Speaker 01

  como estoy a los personajes malevolentes, homicidales, pervertidos que aparecen. Los asesinos de niños, los pedófilos. Quería inhabitar los lugares que... Si había una duda en una persona normal, para mí había casi un tipo de desmayo en ubicar...

• 35:58Speaker 01

  A place that was so infernal that, um, why hadn't I visited there before? You know? So you can do that and you can do it forever. But what happens is, I think, ultimately, without the spiritual aspect, you atrophy and you become a kind of curiosity to others and to oneself. And you become a fetishist, you know?

• 36:31Rich Roll?

  Right, but the transcendent peace is a function of shining a light on the infernal, you know, shame inducing peace. Like, you can't have one without the other. If you're not willing to go towards the thing that scares you the most, that you are hiding from the world, then you are cutting yourself off from the possibility of that transcendent experience.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I had migraines for years. And I, I told myself that I had them because of my mother. She had migraines, you know? And then I was addicted to prescription painkillers. And I later found out, much later, that they were rebound headaches. And these headaches would, you know, you'd wind up in the emergency room. I wasn't doing much drinking, but if I drank very little, the hangover was emergency room. I found doctors that would hook me up to Demerol and morphine and Dilaudid

• 37:37Speaker 01

  in their office, you know, they would leave you, the nurse would come in and check on you. I found doctors that would come to my apartment house and, you know, it sounds like you have ADHD. Vusamaterol and Vicodin extra strength and how many refill? You know, that, all of that.

• 37:55Rich Roll?

  I think I was texting you from the hospital after my surgery, telling you, you were like, asking me what you're, I was like, I think I'm Dilaudid? And you were like.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dilaudid never did it for me. It's so weird. We're like, how do you like your coffee? You know, some people hate Dilaudid, others like, what? How could you hate Dilaudid? Yeah. Well, I like my coffee black. What? You know, it's just, it's the scent of addiction, the scent of opiates, you know? So, at the end of a migraine, because the kind of migraines I had, pills don't work against at a certain point. You, you have to be given an injection, right? But you'd, you'd fall into this state, which I've heard epileptics talk about, which is called a post-ictal state, right?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  And it's a metaphor for me, you, after you, you descend to the lower depths, let's say in my creative work, a numbness overtakes me, you know? Because what I have seen or what I have experienced is so ungodly, so to speak, that I am empty, you know? So it's an approximation, kind of synthetic, of inner silence or a kind of emptiness that, that has a spiritual aspect to it, you know?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  So I, it is a way, in other words, exploring the caverns of the worst of us, of our capabilities. There is, you come out on the other side and you're able again to, to look at the capabilities that involve transcendence, transcendence and, and a deep silence, you know?

• 39:57Rich Roll?

  Do you think that that explains the massive popularity of true crime narratives that we see right now? True crime podcasts, Netflix, true crime mini-docs, mini-series?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  There seems to be, have always been this obsession, you know, with, with that kind of thing. But because of technology, it is mushroomed, you know? But the, I remember I was 14 and...

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Serial killers were the rage. Ed Kemper was up in Santa Cruz, you know,

• 40:42Speaker 01

  in his van, picking up hitchhikers. He's the one that beheaded his mother that I think Brett used a line of Ed Kemper in

• 40:53Rich Roll?

  American Psycho.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  American Psycho. And Kemper was like 6'9", you know, and was in Manhunter. And I mean, these people became kind of emblematic and iconic. But that was a serial killer rage, you know, which is still going on with, you know, the Ed Gein thing recently, Ryan Murphy's obsession with it. So I don't know. I think it's a component of human nature, much like horror films, but much more accessible to us than a horror film. There's less distance between the fantasy of a horror film and the imagining of someone next door or on your block.

• 41:36Rich Roll?

  You drop out of high school, right? And you have this sort of journeyman phase, lots of different types of jobs, a lot of travel. You're up in Big Sur. You're on some level, searching for something, I suppose. You find your way back to Los Angeles and at some point, I mean, this is later, but you end up meeting Carlos Castaneda and you end up becoming a student of his for like a decade, right? I mean, you were inner circle in this insular world.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:12Rich Roll?

  What drew you to him? And what was that all about?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I had a friend from Beverly Hills and we both dropped out of school around the same time. We decided one day that let's just become medical doctors, right? So I think we were 17 or 18.

• 42:38Rich Roll?

  And you'd already dropped out of high school?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  We'd dropped out of high school. And we thought if we went to Santa Monica City College, there was a way you could get your whatever.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Equivalent to the The GED, something like that. And then you could continue. So we literally went to night school. And I, I didn't last long at all. And he went all the way through. He went to, to, to medical school. His parents bribed a medical school to get him in. And it was like $60,000, which was never repaid. Right? And he wound up at SC County General. And he was a surgical resident.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  But he was also a junkie. Right? So he was doing speed during the day. And then he would shoot amfet- uh, fentanyl at, at night. And he was my close, close friend. And of course, I got a call that he had died. And I went to his apartment with his mother. And it was just littered with Jack in the Box food and boxes. And it was horrendous to see the agony of, of a mother, you know? And I had my own agony, you know? I, I, I howled, you know?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  When someone is so close to you and you find yourself howling like an animal, you know? You really join the human race, you know? And he was also kind of a phone hacker. And he had a, a private phone installed. He paid for me to have a second line. And he would do the, um, the, the little box that had noises that you could call places for free in Europe, you know? And later, the phone number, um, I got a copy of his autopsy report because I, I put it in a section of my first novel, Force Majeure, called The Weight of the Human Heart.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  The phone number, if you took the zeros out of the phone number, it was his autopsy report number.

• 45:07Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  So I, to comfort myself, I don't know. I had started to read Castaneda. But there is a book that is, that touched me so deeply. And it was Journey to Ixlon. I went looking for him. And at that point, I was in my 30s, you know? And I had heard that Castaneda did occasional talks at bookstores in Santa Monica. One was called the Phoenix Bookstore. And I would go and like probably hundreds of other people would say, we never know, we don't know, et cetera.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  So it was a very convoluted series of experiences. I wrote an adaptation of that book, Force Majeure, for Oliver Stone. Right? Oliver Stone was given it. We sold a thousand copies of it out of book soup. Right? That myself and a guy named Cotty Chubb, desktop, published. And it was like a slim, it was four short stories called Force Majeure, The Bud Wigan Stories. Ed Pressman, the producer who died recently, gave copies of the book out for Christmas. Oliver got one, loved it, optioned it. And I wrote script. And Oliver's film company was called Ixlon.

• 46:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And Janet Yang, I think who is now the president of the Academy, worked for Oliver at that time. And I learned through her that Castaneda taught classes called Tensegrity of certain physical movements that had been taught him by Don Wong.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  And I said, boy, I'd love to go to that. And she said, at a certain point,

• 46:55Speaker 01

  well, it's invitation only, but I'm having a brunch at my house and he's going to be there. So I was sort of in shock about that. And I went there.

• 47:05Rich Roll?

  He was sort of a reclusive character, like after, what was it? Like 1968 or whenever, when that book came out.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  He was always.

• 47:12Rich Roll?

  But he was living in Los Angeles.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he was always, not reclusive, but he.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  You know, he occasionally would meet, um, Hollywood amused him, right? And so he would take meetings, which of course, nothing ever came up. Fellini wanted to make a movie about, um, from one of his books. So he was not accessible in any way, in short. So I went and I met him and at this brunch was, uh, were Florinda Donaghy and Taisha Abilar, two women that also had gone to UCLA and were also students of Don Juan Matas, right? And had written books, um, Sorcerers Crossing for Taisha, Being and Dreaming for Florinda.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Then I didn't hear from anyone, you know? I had an interaction with Castaneda, who was hilarious to me, um, in a contemporary way. You know, the, the person I, I compared him to was Orson Welles, who I met when I was driving a limousine. And Orson Welles was so fucking funny, um, and so contemporary in his references. And Castaneda was like that too, which was startling to me. Very sardonic, almost gave the appearance of being gregarious, right?

• 48:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you would expect someone of that, you know, kind of guru-like stature to hover above those things that us mortals think about and talk about.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole thing was a shock to my system. Then I didn't hear from anyone. And I had a dream, um, about the Twin Towers, not in New York, but in Century City, right? Those two office buildings, those silver towers. And that was where I was going to meet Carlos Castaneda, right?

• 49:10Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's almost out of one of your books.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  I mean, for people that don't know, like, that's where CAA is now.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, actually, this was pre-CAA, so these were these-

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  This is back then, before that, but-

• 49:25Speaker 01

  But yes, you know, hopefully, everything is out of my books.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  The first AA meeting that I went to was in the basement of one of those towers.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 49:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  The basement?

• 49:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there was a windowless conference room on the ground, because you know, there's that subterranean wall there, like, down there.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:46Rich Roll?

  Anyway, go on, I don't want to interrupt you.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  It's just like a church basement.

• 49:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Showbiz church basement. So, I was failing at selling myself to the movies, right? I had some-

• 50:00Rich Roll?

  This is pre-Wild Palms.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yes, this is pre-Wild Palms. And I had an agent, it was an agency called Triad, and they did what all good agents do, is when you have a loser client in film, you shuttle him to the television arm, right? So there, they said, "You should speak with Tracy Kramer." Now, Tracy Kramer was familiar to me because I went to a middle school with him, elementary school with him in Beverly Hills. And he represented people like Roseanne Barr and the Judds. I mean, a disparate group of clients. And I looked up at a certain point, we're having a friendly conversation, getting to know each other again,

• 50:48Speaker 01

  and I see all of the books of Castaneda on his top shelf. And I said, "What the fuck?" And he said that he was a huge fan of Carlos Castaneda, and as was someone at the agency. The agency had a director as a client that wanted to meet Castaneda, and set up a meeting. And Tracy came early.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  And Castaneda was on time and they sat and next to each other. And Tracy was so, he knew the work cold. And Castaneda thought he was the director that wanted to meet him, right? And because Castaneda is so unorthodox, at the end of the, the, um, the event, he said, "I want you to be my book agent." And Tracy was not a book agent. He was a television agent and Tracy became his book agent and still is for the estate. And so that was a strange opening.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  And then Tracy told me that he goes to these Tensegrity classes. And, um, at that point, I was married to Rebecca de Mornay. And we were invited to, um, through Tracy. So that was the dream. The person that was in the towers. And it was easy to get thrown off that particular carousel of Castaneda. Many of the men that came into his orbit were in competition with him. And it was challenging on many different levels. And then people would write books and, um, and promulgate all kinds of, um,

• 52:48Speaker 01

  gossipy, trolling, uh, um, terrors about Castaneda, uh, which were manifestly untrue. It was, um, something that, um, was, the scent was so strong for me of his lineage, the Yaki Indian lineage of sorcery, that, um, I held on, you know, I held on. And I spoke with Leonard Cohen about this at a later date. Of the slander and the insults that were hurled his way. And Leonard had this phrase that encapsulated it all.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  He called it "the revenge of the practitioners." You know, when Castaneda died, Florinda and Taisha and there were other women who I knew very well. Were they murdered? All this stuff. Well, when he died, I was there at the house and there were paparazzi, there were people going through the trash bins. Why would those women have wanted to stay? So there's this conflated, this mystery about what happened.

• 54:02Rich Roll?

  Was it Salon? There was some long article that sort of cast...

• 54:07Speaker 01

  There's a few people that are obsessed, but that is instructive because it is our nature, putting me as one of those people, to dissemble and annihilate beauty or transcendence. You know, from early on, he was accused of writing fiction. He's actually Margaret Mead. There were two professors that really came after him, almost with a vengeance, the revenge of the practitioners and the academics.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  And those two professors wound up suing each other for slander. I mean, you know, we are, as Castaneda used to say, "the naked ape is ill." And the permutations of that illness are endless, and the stuff of my own fiction. But again, to simply catalog it isn't enough.

• 55:13Rich Roll?

  To put a reductive, inelegant spin on Castaneda's core...

• 55:20Rich Roll?

  Idea or or philosophy or premise. It's essentially that we're all living in a description of the world and we're all a victim of our perception. Where we locate our perception and the sorcery, to use your word, is really breaking free of that. Yes, like is that like, what was the the wisdom that you gleaned from this decade-long tutelage?

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Well, the acknowledgement of the effect of conditioning or the social order was was extravagantly clear and simple. But as it was presented, the the two realities, the ordinary reality was called the tonal or the first attention. This is the ordinary reality, consensus reality, right? And then there existed something called the na wall, which was the second attention, non-ordinary reality.

• 56:17Rich Roll?

  So which is also the word you use to describe him.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:21Rich Roll?

  It's sort of a stand-in for guru or sensei.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, we called him the na wall. And there were no rules in in that world. There was no, there were no altars. Or if there were, I would glance them in a closet that one of the women had and and they were, they were rocks, they looked like solar systems, you know. But there were no flowers, there were no guruisms, you know. You know, we talked about scent earlier.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  It was a very dramatic and dense world of mythology that appealed to my being. He spoke of sentient beings, and that was the first time I'd heard that phrase. And was transgressive in the sense that

• 57:36Speaker 01

  He was, his only desire was to be an agent of liberation. You know, so the way he described what sorcerers saw, that they could see energy as it flowed in the universe, that everything came through an assemblage point, which was located outside the luminous egg of human beings, which is how sorcerers see them, about here. And the assemblage point would move. It moved during drug use, it moved during madness, and it moved during sleep.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  So this idea of lucid dreaming became all the rage, you know. And Carlos Castaneda had been told by Don Juan Matus, his teacher, to find your hands, this is the first step, while dreaming, right? And this would allow you to scale the heights of lucid dreaming, so eventually you'll be able to do wonders. And Castaneda then told me that that was something to distract the mind, which is the ultimate saboteur. It wasn't an exercise in discipline that, you know, that would allow one to lucid dream.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  It was, what would allow one to do lucid dreaming was the temporary eclipse of the mind, which wants to control everything. He really felt the mind was the fifth column, that it was the saboteur, you know. So this idea, these notions for me, were stunning, you know, when he spoke of the eagle, you know? And Don Juan Matus, his teacher, said that he hated that they called it the eagle, but... We are so bereft when it comes to description or expression

• 59:42Speaker 01

  that they call it the eagle because it resembled to someone at some time, an eagle. That there was this energetic creature that devoured the awareness of people as they died. That you could give that eagle a semblance of all of your experiences of awareness. A stand-in, so to speak, because you had done an act which Castina called the recapitulation, where you had, in great detail, fastidious detail, re-experienced all of those moments of your life from birth. Ultimately, you work backwards.

• 1:00:25Rich Roll?

  Basically, that is, on some level, sort of a meditation practice where you do this inventory of all these people. And then you sit with the memory of that person and you go down the list, recapitulating that narrative and that history to liberate yourself from your past.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would start with the sexual encounters because those had the most kick. And you work your way back to your parents. And this would mean everyone I met at the studio today, et cetera. And it was that detailed and it could take years for many people. But all of these things sound like embellishments of cultism, which is fine because it doesn't matter what they sound like because it would be like someone saying, "I don't like rose musk." You know, "I like something with pepper in it in terms of a cologne or perfume." It's meaningless.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  You know, Castina's most misquoted sentence is regarding the path of the heart, right?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  You should always take the path of of heart. And that became almost a greeting card decades ago. But what they would remove from that, because it sounded too nihilistic, was all paths lead nowhere.

• 1:01:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  So this-

• 1:01:50Rich Roll?

  But yet, you still, the warrior path is you still have to choose. And it's the warrior path because you choose knowing that it leads nowhere.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  It was impeccable. You know, he would say that, he talked about the the figures. They're called chakmules in South America. You'll have a figure in Mexico with with a disc on its abdomen looking this way. And the mirror figure will be one in the Yucatan looking back. And Castaneda would say that anthropologists, who are like, you know, ecchinists, right? Would say that these were discs involved in a sporting, you know, event.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  And he would say, no, these are discs that facilitated dreaming because a weight here would facilitate dreaming. And then he would describe the gaze, that it was the reunion with with with the double. You know, we spend our entire lives trying to reunite with with infinity and our double. And it was so poignant to me. So if you if you look at Castaneda, and I think you look at my work,

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  there's something that that one can see how I would be so deeply moved by that world, the world, the revelation of the second attention, right? And all of the mysteries of the first attention, which Don Juan Matus said is almost more complex. This consensus reality, this ordinary reality is-

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Can be more complex than the non-ordinary reality. So like my experiences with the mushroom, and I did no psychedelics at all while I was with him. He was completely opposed to that. Very strict with diet in terms of what he felt one should take into the body.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  And yet, very popular with the psycho not community.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I mean, for good reason. You know, he was the person that opened the door. The doors of perception in that way for a generation. But for me, it was the poignancy of that world that what he often referred to as ontological sadness of man, you know, of man, the amoeba. And this is kind of what the Buddhists are talking about in that that third realm of suffering where one experiences an almost existential or ontological sadness.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  These are all things that were described in the Yaki Indian lineage of sorcery. And it was, it felt familial to me, do you know? And not dysfunctionally familial, but magnificently familial, you know?

• 1:05:10Rich Roll?

  There's how that sensibility seeps into the words that end up on the pages of your books. But it also informs the process of bringing life to those words, right? Like, how do you transcend the Maya, you know, of the complications of our social construct in order to inhabit that more dreamlike state where you can become a cipher for the thoughts that congeal into ideas, characters, plotlines, et cetera?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I've spent a lifetime getting out of the way of Bruce Wagner, you know? And at this point, because the craft is not an issue.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  It's easier for me. It comes with a price tag. You know, I don't like writing books. You know, there's a certain aspect of them. You know, I like the perfume of the experience. But if you ask me to go into a lab and spend, you know, two years doing that, it's appalling to me, you know. So I can, I can kind of leapfrog that. But it's easier for me to come to a kind of silence now. And, and it's easier for me to feel nothing.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  In other words, no shame or guilt when I cannot, when I'm not writing. You know, I'm, I'm relatively happy until I'm not, you know, which means I then have the flu of, of being called to do something else, you know. And it literally is a flu for me. It's just disgusting. I really disgusting.

• 1:07:01Rich Roll?

  How does it come to you?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I'll start to dance around something, but I'm dancing around something almost by habit, which is repellent to me, you know, because back in the day, I had that overachieving aspect that men often have, you know. What's the next quarry, you know? What am I hunting next? And that carried over into my creative life, you know, where it's almost preopic, prolific ambition, you know. And that faded, even though I remained prolific, but not with vanity attached to it because, you know, no one was waiting for the next Bruce Wagner novel. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  I mean, I went from someone that was

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Inordinately reviewed, you know, Michiko Katani for one book on a Wednesday, and then Jay McInerney on the Sunday for the New York Times, to someone that has a degree of invisibility now, you know, I'm not saying this out of self pity, but whose books are ignored, in a sense, you know?

• 1:08:13Rich Roll?

  I should say, and I'm gonna interrupt you, just so the the audience is acclimated, I just I just pulled up some of the blurbs that you've gotten, you know, I mean, it's pretty insane, the people that have incredible things to say about your writing, from Salman Rushdie to John Updike, I mean, Bret Easton Ellis, I think he's the best prose writer working now, I really do, John Waters, Dead Stars is the cruelest book ever written, you know, it's just like, John Updike, Wagner writes like a wizard, you know, his prose write, uh, rise and coruscates, you know, like, just, it goes on and on and on, like, you are revered among the literary set, irrespective of what the New York Times bestseller list has to say about it.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no, it's actually, I think more what I mean, Rich, is that I come from a time as a writer, where writers were, they weren't deified as they were in Europe, but they were figures of great celebrity, and I remember as a boy, watching with astonishment, you know, Truman Capote, or Gore Vidal, or Norman Mailer, on these lively talk shows, insulting each other, and saying brilliant things, Norman Mailer, in an argument with someone, and saying, "You're sweeping the food off the table with logical niceties."

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  And to my 12-year-old ears, "Daddy," you know what I mean?

• 1:09:45Rich Roll?

  I found my new dad.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Why isn't daddy, why doesn't daddy talk like that, instead of drunkenly making sexual innuendos to me, you know what I mean?

• 1:09:55Rich Roll?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  But it was a different time, and it was a time where books were sold. So the caveat for my so-called invisibility is that, you know, I'm I'm working as a consigliere editor at Arcade Books, and the, I know, close hand.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  That the the state of publishing and book reading is dismal, is dismal. You know, you, you, there are of course always anomalies and always will be. But many writers who are reviewed in in these really antique things like the New York Times or even the New Yorker sell 100 copies. You know, Brett and I were talking about this the other day. There was an article recently that he read. There was an agent, maybe it was Morgan Entrickin, saying that back in the day, if if he got

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  a writer on PBS or the cover of the New York Times Book Review, those would move 6,000 to 7,000 copies.

• 1:11:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  De rigueur. Now, 3, 2, 4 copies.

• 1:11:20Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  It is crazy. So, these things have an ebb and flow to it, but, you know, I'm

• 1:11:27Rich Roll?

  But the ebb is pretty insane, right? I mean, for decades now, it has been in decline. I, you know, I think because, you know, kind of what I do, I'm more, I'm steeped in the nonfiction world. That seems relatively healthy. It's fiction. It's novels.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Rich Roll?

  What is our cultural relationship to this art form? You know, and has it been lost? Is it, is it retrievable? I mean, this is something I talked about when I had James Fry here. You know, I'm not old enough to remember, you know, some of those earlier memories that you have about the rock star status of, you know, people like Capote, but I am old enough to remember how sexy it was when Brett and McInerney, you know, were hanging out at Odion and like, you know, this was, I mean, it was aspirational what these people were doing and the lifestyles that they were living. And it was a time when Things like magazines mattered and the budgets that these great writers, you know,

• 1:12:26Rich Roll?

  had to do long form work in these publications that were voraciously read. Like this has gone the way of the dodo and I don't see it coming back. And yet, we can't let this art form die. It is the lifeblood of what, what makes us feel connected to being human. But I don't know where we stand right now with respect. Like, when was the last, you know, huge novel that came out? I mean, the closest thing I can remember is perhaps something, you know, Jonathan Franzen has done. But has there been anything in recent memory that has had the monoculture impact that not too long ago, a great novel that would come along almost quarterly would do?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I would have to look. George Saunders did a book called Lincoln in the Bardo. And, but I, I don't know that the numbers are deceptive. In other words, you think, you've heard so much about a certain book, that it must have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And then, then you investigate and it's 3,500 copies.

• 1:13:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because we don't have a monoculture anymore. 20 million people aren't watching an episode of Gilligan's Island anymore. Like, we don't live in that world.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Tina Louise was at my bar mitzvah, by the way. I'm dead serious. At the Friars Club in Beverly Hills.

• 1:13:46Rich Roll?

  I can talk to you for five hours. Just, just, I just want you to drop every name and every person you've ever met, because you've literally met everyone. It's insane.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  One quick thing before I start, I can drop names. We can just do a three minute, no questions, just names. The, what is one's identity? In other words, as a writer, I never wrote for a reader, ever. You know, I wrote for television and imagining what the audience would be. And sometimes, when I was a hack screenwriter, I did that for movies. But books were inviolable for me. Never wrote for anyone but myself, right? So you, you get to this idea of identity. And is it a sad or terrible thing that books will disappear?

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  You look at the transgressive, you ask the transgressive question, you know. One thing that, you know, that I've amused myself by is all the talk about AI, you know, because I'm someone that believes that AI, in some iteration, whether it's near or distant future, will be able to, to write a book by Bruce Wagner, that if I would read it now, and senility, some senility was around the corner, or even not, that I would say, this

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  is something that I must have written, or wish I had written. You know, it would be like that feeling I had when I read Lincoln in the Bardo by Saunders. You know, I'd never been a reader of Saunders, and maybe it was because Bardo was in the title, I don't know, I just decided to read it. And it was so stunning and lovely to me, that it's one of the few books I thought, oh, I should have written this book, do you know what I mean? And that's what's coming, I can see that is what's coming. And you know, all of the major spiritual disciplines speak of the erasure of self,

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  the destructivity of the self, do you know what I mean? So here it is. Yeah. You know, what's your fucking problem? Do you know what I mean? That's being a little flip about it, I get that. But, but identity, I am a writer. You know, Castaneda said early on, he said, "Don't be Mr. Hollywood, be careful." And he would joke about himself wandering the quad at UCLA with, "This is the teachings of Don," you know, as an older man, and an occasional student interested or knowledgeable of his legendary status, he would make those kind of jokes.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  So, how much of one's vanity, and one's reflexive habitual vanity from the past, when one was a young Turk, do you know what I mean, is involved in the toxicity?

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Of these kind of ideas, you know, if books will die, everything is going to die. Everything is going to vanish. This idea of legacy, it's an absurdity. Legacy for what? To whom? For anyone, it's an absurdity. And yet, you know, we're still possessed, you know.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  You know, the fires were a great lesson in that, you know.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  The decimated RC and the palisades in Altadena. After the initial shock of it.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  And it doesn't matter what the politics were, or who was told to stand down, or why they were told to stand down. The lesson of impermanence arrives at most inconvenient times.

• 1:17:49Rich Roll?

  There's the idea of impermanence, the reality of impermanence. There is the suffering that we experience by our clutch to our various identities. And you, as a writer, with respect to the sort of declining appetite of the novel, or whatever, you know, we consider to be high art literature these days. There's your, there's your role as a participant in that ecosystem. Where do I stand in the pecking order? And, you know, how am I perceived by the public and all of that? Which obviously is a vehicle for suffering ultimately. But then there's just the notion of, is humanity better off with this art form or not? Right?

• 1:18:33Rich Roll?

  Like acknowledging the impermanence of it. Is there not room to kind of despair for what humanity will be deprived of if this art form slides into obscurity?

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  There's so much room to despair, Rich.

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of which, I mean, you, I think that you, had you said that you weren't sure you were going to write another novel until the fires happened, and then you literally write this book in like, a month, out of, was it despair, was it anger, what motivated that, that like burst of creativity to, you know, get your ideas down on what was happening, almost in real time?

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know.

• 1:19:13Rich Roll?

  I mean, Amputation is the book we're talking about, it's your latest book.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  I saw that episode you did with James Fry, and one phrase stuck out to me, which was the furnace of rage, you know, you know, I'm a fire sign, right? So, it was perfect, you know, I'm an Aries, so, fire is, is where I live, I live in the furnace, you know? And, my desire was to, to write, to create a work of art, about what had happened, you know, not a polemic, because I don't do that, I feel that when, when the moment an artist has, um, politics, it's the death of his art, or her art, it's just, that's me, uh, how I approach things, because, this notion that you can change the course of human nature,

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  by a book, do you know, um, there's the fame, uh, Leonardo da Vinci famously wanted to change, the, um, the route of the Arno River, and it was an abysmal failure, you know? So this idea that, you can change the, the course of human nature, or that your book will make a difference, is a vanity that is, uh, the architect of which is the self, you know, the fifth columnist, you know, um, the saboteur. So, for me, the most transgressive thing, is to, um, to stay absorbed and, uh, riveted

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  by and impassioned by, the follies and the sanctities of, of, um, human nature, you know? So, that book surprised me, that I, I, uh, wrote it at all, because I was, um, disgusted, to use that word again, with writing, you know, leave me alone, you know? And, um, but then-

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  I had the idea that I tricked my brain by saying that this will be a short book, which I think it's about 200 pages. It's probably the shortest book I've written. And so there was a light at the end of the tunnel after a moment, which doesn't happen in many cases for a year or two, you know? And that was helpful to me, Rich, because I knew that I wasn't gonna spend the next 18 months in a literal hell, you know?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  And then the book to me is very comic in many ways and ghoulish in others. But for me, right now, I would say amputation is very close to me. And as close to me as a book, these two novellas, The Met Gala and Tales of Saints and Seekers. I had read many years ago a collection of short stories by Henry James. And it was called, I don't think it was his title, but it was the editor's title of this collection of short stories. It was called Tales of Writers and Artists, right?

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  And the book was wonderful, you know? I'm a qualified fan of Henry James. Just the sheer weight, the gravitas of his obsession with language and the Bach-like way that he engages in construction got me, you know? So I scribbled down on a piece of paper, and, oh, I can drop some really good names. All right. Okay. So Gavin DeBecker is a very close friend of mine.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  This was maybe 30 years ago. He was good friends with...

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  George and Olivia Harrison, right? And we were both in London at the same time. And he invited me to that house, that famous castle-like house. I'm forgetting the name of it, where George Harrison. In London. You know, outside of London. And he had passed away by then. And I spent just a lovely day there. And I came across, oh, uh, something I, I guess I stayed overnight. And I had written on a piece of paper that had the Dark Horse logo of his record company or whatever that was.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  And I'd written down Tales of Saints and Seekers, right? And that is the second novella of the Met Gala. It's the Tales of Saints and Seekers. And it came to me as a surprise, but nothing is forgotten in this strange entity of the sentient being and the sentient being who is, as an artistic bent. Somehow this was sunk into my cells that one day I would write something like that. And by then, I was a devoted and obsessive fan of Idris Shaw, who had written maybe

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  20 volumes of parables, Sufi parables, that were like novels in themselves. They would be two pages, four pages, six pages. And that was the birth of Saints and Seekers. So I, I felt that with amputation, I myself, the transgressive part of me, after it went to the fire in that post-Iqal state that I called about earlier, had to find not meaning, but acceptance or acquiescence. And not acquiescence in the pejorative sense that we might think of it. You know, Castaneda used that word a lot, acquiescence.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  For me, it has always been, and particularly in those experiences with psilocybin, when you're in position on the floor.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  Not in submission, but in acquiescence to the divine, to infinity, you know, to the unknown. The troika that Castaneda talked about, which was another thing that I was possessed by to this moment,

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  was the known, the unknown, and the unknowable, right? Being wired the way we are, we like to think, well, the unknown is not, you know, there is nothing unknowable. There's either the known or the unknown. The unknowable brings in the most important aspect of this, which is

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  the ultimate mysteries that we must abide by, whether we acknowledge them or not, you know.

• 1:26:37Rich Roll?

  Well, it's an assault on the ego that demands of us humility.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Rich Roll?

  More than acquiescence, a deeper surrender and acceptance.

• 1:26:49Rich Roll?

  And in thinking about amputation and trying to find acceptance in what you were seeing happening, you know, right before your very eyes, like, how do I make sense of this? How do I manage my, my unbalanced emotions that are arising around this? And investing that in characters who can't get out of their own way and behave badly is a way of making peace with it, I suppose. I mean, for me, yes, it's very funny. It has, it has all of these comedic aspects to it, but it's deeply despairing to me also because the fire was a second chance

• 1:27:33Rich Roll?

  for humanity to find a way to come together in the midst of a cataclysm to cooperate for the greater good. And yet, once again, we can't get, you know, out of our own cycles and our egoic tendencies to

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Rich Roll?

  to serve each other in the way that we are actually capable, capable of.

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  That fire, you know, I knew long-term residents of the Palisades, and you didn't have to be a long-term resident to turn on the television and see people sneaking back into the neighborhoods on bicycles. And you saw no fire trucks at all. And what they pushed was that the winds, the winds, untrue. And there was a press conference, it was almost like Out of Hunger Games, that you saw Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass in the street. Behind them, in the background, like a Hollywood movie, was the Chase Manhattan Building on fire, and that would later take the Methodist Church. What happened was criminal, and the information is coming out.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  But we are also in this time now where day is night and night is day. You have the people that believe day is night, and you have the people that insist that night is day. It's not really a function of AI. But Gavin has spoken about this before in our conversations, which is, the one thing he likes about the kind of topical sex buzz of AI is that it makes people rethink or think more about the nature of reality.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  For me, again, whether what happened was criminal, or why were the local fire trucks on the beach, and the firemen were having enchiladas and said they had been told to stand down. All of those things were-

• 1:29:37Rich Roll?

  The empty reservoir-

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of that lost its significance for me, because then otherwise you venture into some kind of impotent activism, or you become someone that rages against the machine, you know what I mean? And I don't want to rage against the machine. I want to show the workings of a sacred machine, which then dissolves into the ether, where we're all going.

• 1:30:10Rich Roll?

  In your, in your books, including Amputation, you're, you're always weaving real people into these narratives with your imagined characters. In Amputation, there's Stephen Colbert, there's Karen Bass, there's Timothy Chalamet's, you know, body double. Is this, I mean-

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Elizabeth Finch.

• 1:30:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it makes it, it makes it very fun to read.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Rich Roll?

  This, this mashing up of the world we recognize with the world of Bruce Wagner's imagination. And I know people ask you all the time, does this ever create drama in your life or legal consequences? I mean, when you decide like, I'm going to pin Stephen Colbert under a tree and, you know, I'm just going to go on and on and on about his Catholicism and obsession with Tolkien and, you know, and then to have him emerge and, you know, we see his interactions with his wife and all of this. Like, obviously, this is a fictionalized, you know, sort of extreme version of this person that we all have a relationship through a screen. But does any of that ever come back to revisit you or bite you? Do you, do

• 1:31:17Rich Roll?

  you end up running into these people in the real world? And if you were to go on Colbert's show, or you were to bump into him somewhere, like, what is he going to say to you and what are you going to say to him?

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  There is no chance of me going on-

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't think so.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  No, I'm, I have encountered people that, that had issues, but nothing, nothing major. I've also mostly encountered people that were thrilled that they were mentioned.

• 1:31:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm sure people are campaigning to be a character in your book.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  The, the key thing is that I, I didn't go after Colbert. And in fact, Michael Douglas, during his cancer treatment, was a, a, a major character in Dead Stars, right?

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  I really came to have great sympathy and respect for Colbert in writing this book. So I don't, I never have an idea in my mind that I'm going to roast X, Y, or Z. Not that you were implying that. And I inhabit Stephen Colbert. And, you know, one thing that initially drew me to him was he makes these appearances as kind of the lay Catholic saint where he talks all about love, you know, the importance of love, et cetera. And yet, his show had turned political.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Many felt to its detriment over the past few years. And he was saying the most vile things about people. So I was trying to, how can I square the Stephen Colbert, who's constantly being honored and for being the good Catholic or Christian, with this entertainer, Stephen Colbert, who is, seems to have crossed the line from being someone that is comedic into someone that is vitriolic, you know? And it was very interesting to me because I learned,

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  you know, one of the people that he really had it out for was Robert Kennedy Jr. And what was interesting to me is I read, I learned for the first time that Stephen Colbert had a terrible tragedy in his life. When he was, I think, 14, he had two older brothers and his father. The father was taking the two older brothers to look at colleges because they were of that age. And the plane went down, Eastern Airlines, killed all three of them. He also had an enormous family of siblings. And I think it turned out to be just the same amount that Bobby Kennedy Jr. had.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  So in the, in the book, these two men, they're like brothers in essence for me. They both had fathers and loved ones that died tragically and violently. They both had substance issue, addiction issues. Colbert has spoken very forthrightly about, not anywhere on the level of RFK Jr., but of having issues with, I think with benzos, Klonopin. And both have a religiosity about them, Catholic. So I wanted to explore that. And there was something very touching about him hallucinating that he was Frodo in essence,

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  you know, which is a book that saved him during, one of the things that saved him during that terrible tragedy. I could not imagine what it would be like to go through that. And so I grew very close to Colbert toward the end. And he doesn't return to his show, which is kind of what's happening now, but not due to injury, a different kind of injury, one would say, political injury. Really, my, my fantasy, when I have it, which is not often, is that he is stunned by what he reads at how real and respectful that it is, you know?

• 1:35:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. There's an empathy. As you're, as you're hoisting people on their petards, you are empathizing with their situation because there is, there is the fatalism piece in that. They are, they are only who they only can be, you know? We are all only the person that we could be. You are who you are because of your father and these series of events. And only you can do what you do, but you can't do otherwise.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Rich Roll?

  There's a piece in that, I suppose.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, knowing that we don't know what's coming. We just had that horror of Rob Reiner and his wife and their son, you know? I know.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Una puerta de gente que ha caído,

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  atrapado en algo, o ha despierto y caído, y ahora es cuadruplegico. Algunos, diría que la mayoría, han aceptado lo que les ha pasado, al menos a nivel exterior, con una gracia increíble, que es un movimiento de un sueño en el siguiente sueño. Estas son personas que

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  han logrado un tipo de iluminación, porque he oído que la iluminación se define como cuando una cosa gloriosa o maravillosa sucede, o una cosa trágica y terrible sucede, uno permanece indiferente. Eso no significa que uno no sienta un sentido de alegría o un sentido de rabia o depresión, pero en última instancia uno ve que estamos viviendo una historia. Así que has pasado de un sueño al siguiente, de un cuento al otro. Lo más importante fue que Hanif Qureshi es un escritor

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  que escribió "Mi hermosa lavadura" y "El Buda de las calles" fue un novel que escribió. Un escritor maravilloso. Nunca lo conocí, pero cuando... Él estaba en Italia hace unos años, en vacaciones con su novia, y despierto y caí, y de repente estaba en el hospital en Italia durante meses, cuadruplegico. Finalmente, con gran dificultad, dificultad logística, se mudó de nuevo a Londres, donde vive ahora. And I joined the website that he had created, where you could give a little bit of money, or whatever you could afford.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  And I was sent a book by him. And instead of signed, there was a thumbprint. You know, and that for me was so deeply moving. You know, this grand signature that we have, or this contempt for those that ask us to sign a book. Or I know a writer who won't sign galleys because they're going to resell those. He may be true. All of these ideas we have that the self promotes, endless self-promotion.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  These books we write, the ability of our hands. It seems like there's an epidemic of Parkinson's now. Everyone I know has Parkinson's. One has Lewy body dementia. It's like this tactile thing that we revel in, the piano, the typewriter, the computer. Everything is going to go away, you know? And I don't say that grimly, you know? And I hope it's not taken that way. Because I really am enthralled by this life and the beauty and mystery of it. But I'm forever cognizant, because it's my nature, I suppose,

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  of the darkness of it. And sometimes I can do that with more grace than other times, you know? But these things, something moved me so terribly. It's a, maybe this was from the liberation in the palm of one's hand. That there were three ways that a Buddhist can die, or an advanced, you know, being can die. One is like a child. One is like a beggar. And the other is like a lion, right?

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  To die like a child means to have no awareness that the end or even the beginning was near. To die like a beggar is to have an awareness, but not to care. To die as a lion, well, the lion dies in solitude. He exits and dies in solitude. So these things, just hearing simple things like that, parables like that,

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  are... They sustain me, you know? These moments of poetry and beauty. That's why Castaneda's work meant so much to me.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  There was such poetry to it, such agonizing tenderness to it, you know? And people think of Castaneda and it's, you know, the drugs, the preparation of the drugs, you know? But of course, he's fading in terms of people's knowledge or memory of him, you know, of his work. It'll be rediscovered, and which it's still, his books sell quite well all over the world now, and still have. But I don't think there's much consciousness about him

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  for younger people now, and perhaps that will change. But that, to me, is what sustains me. It is language, just the existence of it, you know, the necklace of language, you know, the chains of language, and what language is capable of. You know, language is capable, as we are, of all sentient beings are, of great trauma and terror and binding and control, but of transcendence. And when you get a whiff of transcendence

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  from language...

• 1:42:32Rich Roll?

  And fiction is truly the vehicle to truth. I mean, everything is fiction. But the novelist's eye is our way of glimpsing a greater truth that we can't find in nonfiction. And I think, when I think of your work, Bruce, I think the comedy and the tragedy of...

• 1:42:58Rich Roll?

  This dance that we're doing on the mortal plane, where we're striving to be noticed and we're trying to accomplish things. And we're so invested in our individuation. But fundamentally, what's motivating all of that is this pain. Because really, all we want to do is be accepted. We want to belong and we want to experience love. And all of that is available to us if we can get out of our way and realize that the greater consciousness beyond our brain's insistence on individuating it is available. And that is the transcendence that you're talking about.

• 1:43:42Rich Roll?

  That's the journey home that we're all on.

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  The journey to Exelon. If I may, I was researching a book once. It was the Buddhist book called Still Holding. And around that time, there was an Alaskan Airlines plane that went down. And if you look at, I know so many people, the writer Susan Orlean was just talking about it, The Black Box Book, which has been a couple of volumes.

• 1:44:15Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, we talked about that.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  And I just heard her talk about it a few days ago. And The Black Box Book is a transcript of plane crashes. And some of them, everyone dies. A commercial aircraft, private aircraft. And some, half of them die, some three die. And it's from wind shear, it's from mechanical failure, et cetera. So this Alaskan Airlines plane went down. What happened was there was a problem that could not be solved.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  So they spent two or three hours in the air. But they had an engineer on at the air tower at the place they were going to be landing. And he knew, he finally knew that there was nothing that could be done. And all he said was, "We'll see you on landing." And he knew it was a lie, and the pilots knew it was a lie. But everyone on that plane were fixated on Oakland or wherever it was that they were returning. And I imagined that to be a Flying Dutchman, you know? And the journey to Ixlon, that title was so evocative for me for that reason.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  Castaneda was told by one of the Nawals in the book that Hollywood is your Ixlon. Because Castaneda went to Hollywood High and grew up around there. Hollywood is your Ixlon. You will always be returning, but you will never arrive, you know?

• 1:45:56Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this Flying Dutchman, you know, where is it that we are returning, you know? Are we returning to the social order? Or are we returning whence we came, which was, is infinity? You know, that reunion with the double that we were talking about, you know?

• 1:46:16Rich Roll?

  And where are you at right now personally with all of this? As you, you know, as you are reflecting on getting older and a kind of more tactile connection that that creates with your own mortality?

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  There's only one thing I'm really worried about. From the moment I wake up and the moment I put my head on the pillow, and it's book sales. What are my books?

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  No, you know, it's an interesting time for me, 71, you know.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  You find that group of people that was, "Oh, you're young!" You know, a delusional group of people where you certainly don't feel old, so to speak. But the diagnoses are starting to drop like, you hear them like dominos of others, you know? And when will that domino or shoe drop for oneself? Well, irrelevant because you can have that fall, you know, as a 28-year-old. You can have that glioblastoma, you know, as a 14-year-old.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  You can have that murder in bed, you know, as a 50 or 60 or 80-year-old, you know? All of it's inconsequential and all of it just subscribes to this need for the self to believe that it has a measure of control. If I do this, this won't happen. Or that could not happen to me because it did not happen to my mother or father, you know? It's all of fantasy construction, you know, that keeps us upright in many ways, depending upon our disposition and our mood, you know? So my mood is labile, you know? It's like that second mode of suffering the Buddhists talk about where I can be ecstatic

• 1:48:24Speaker 01

  and morose within a 10-minute period, do you know what I mean? Hypomanic or hypo-depressed. And then I'll have a seizure of concern and worry that will evaporate the next day. You know, it's a kind of madness. It's kind of mad that we've lasted as long as we've lasted without being straitjacketed and sedated, you know?

• 1:48:58Rich Roll?

  When you were talking to Brett, the subject of David Lynch came up and Brett asked you something like, you know, what, you know, what do you make of the outpouring of love and support? Like you said, you know, like you were talking about legacy a few minutes ago, like legacy, who care, whatever. But we did see, you know, such a, such an incredible cultural moment of reverence for, for this man and this, and this artist. And I think he asked you, you know, what do you make of that? And I was reflecting on that. And I think a big part of it is that his, his refusal to compromise and his incredible

• 1:49:40Rich Roll?

  fidelity to like what moved him and his insistence upon ensuring that everything he did was a perfect reflection of, of his intention is inspiring. And I think it's rare. And I think when, I think part of what makes it so inspiring is because we're also familiar with the compromises that we make every single day. And when we see somebody, whether an artist or otherwise, refuse that, I mean, that is transgressive in its own right. And, and when I think of your work, like I see the same in you, Bruce, like you are insistent

• 1:50:24Rich Roll?

  upon your art being your way. And, you know, you had your own travails with compromises that you were confronted with and then refused to make. And I think that that is deeply inspiring and it definitely inspires me. You are a, you know, you are a, an example of an artist fully expressed to me.

• 1:50:49Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate that. And

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  I wanted to mention that something that has always been on my mind, this is not the segment where the guest blows smoke at Rich Roll. But when I, I was not very aware of you when I met you. I think it was a year and a half or two years ago, at an event for Phil Stutz.

• 1:51:14Rich Roll?

  Right. And... Was it that long ago? My relationship with time, I don't think it was that long.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  No, I don't know.

• 1:51:19Rich Roll?

  Maybe, maybe nine months ago.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Was it nine months?

• 1:51:22Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 1:51:24Speaker 01

  I don't know. We could find out.

• 1:51:26Rich Roll?

  Anyway, Jamie would know.

• 1:51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but when I learned in a thumbnail about your journey, right? That is what Castaneda would call intent, right? Because what we're talking about essentially is transformation, right? And if you get past fear, you know, that first enemy, you know, you have clarity, right? And for me, learning about what you had done and the kind of superhuman intent that it entailed, it meant a lot to me, you know? Because it was something that was impossible, you know?

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  So that, I say that in terms of any artistic endeavor. It's not just fiction, because it's any endeavor of deep and uncompromising transformation becomes an artistic act, you know? So that, to me, was something that, that made me go and get your book, because I wanted to see the documents, do you know what I mean? But by itself, even as an abstract...

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  That kind of transformation is unusual. It's anomalous. And it made me, it still makes me wonder about the mechanics of that, which of course, they're unknown, right? Unknowable. So that to me, you know, I suppose what I'm, what I'm trying to say is, I don't have this high opinion of art anymore. Do you know? It's simply the way I express myself. And I like the scent or expression of other artists. But there's art in, in everything, you know? I remember

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  there's in one of Castaneda's books, one of the late books. At one point, he talks about Don Juan Matos, his teacher telling him to make a book of memorable events, to keep a log, a journal of memorable events. And Castaneda says, what do you mean? Graduation or the death of a parent? He said, no, no, no, no, something that is far less dramatic, something that has a subtlety to it and does not pay homage to the social order. And he reminded Castaneda of a story he told him, which was Castaneda was on a Hollywood Boulevard

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  and heard a cheap trumpet being played. And the tune stuck in his head. And Don Juan said, "The haunting sound of that cheap trumpet is, will be what you hear when you leave this world." Do you know? So I experienced one of those events. I was with my goddaughter, who was about four. And I was very nervous because her mother, who I knew very well, said, "You take her to the farmer's market. You'll be fine in L.A., right?" And she had to pee. So of course I was like, what the fuck do I do now? So I hovered, I asked a woman to bring her in and, you know, all that.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  And all I could think was, you know, she's gonna, I'm gonna have to call my, her mother in about 20 minutes and say, "We can't find her. She can't have gone far." You know, all of this sort of thing.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  She comes out and we go to the old section of the farmer's market. And it was Christmas time.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  And there were tables of cheap ornaments, right? Cheap Christmas ornaments. I'm not even sure who set them up or why they allowed them to be set up. But then it was kind of neighborhood-y and folksy. And some ancient Beverly Hills part of me was saying, "I wish she could be seeing something that was more expensive, you know? I'd get something for her." And she was staring at these cheap ornaments. And she said, "How beautiful.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  It destroyed me. It destroyed me." So there's a memorable event, you know? So this idea of art is fading away from me. And what's left is the utter poignancy and sadness of walking this tough planet, you know? This tough, fierce, beautiful planet, you know?

• 1:56:29Rich Roll?

  Thank you for sharing that.

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:32Rich Roll?

  It's good to talk to you.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  I'm really happy to talk to you. And I wish I had your intent and your looks.

• 1:56:46Rich Roll?

  I wish I had your way with words. Will you be my mentor?

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  We'll do that swah. I'll be Lindsay Lohan, you'll be Lindsay Lohan. We'll both be Lindsay Lohan.

• 1:56:57Rich Roll?

  We already are, right?

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:57:01Rich Roll?

  Until next time. Thanks, Bruce.

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  Thank you, Rich.

• 1:57:08Rich Roll?

  All right, everybody. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I really do hope that you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit today's episode page at ritual.com, where you will find the entire podcast archive, as well as my books, Finding Ultra, The Voicing Change Series, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is free, actually. All you gotta do is subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review, or drop a comment. Sharing your show, or your favorite episode, with friends, or on social media is, of course, awesome as well, and extremely helpful. So

• 1:57:50Rich Roll?

  thank you in advance for that. In addition, I'd like to thank all of our amazing sponsors, without whom this show just would not be possible, or at least, you know, not free. To check out all their amazing product offerings and listener discounts, head to ritual.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at ritual.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, along with associate producer Desmond Lowe. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music, as always, was created all

• 1:58:34Rich Roll?

  the way back in 2012 by my stepsons Tyler and Trapper Pyatt, along with her cousin, Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, and I'll see you back here soon. Peace. Plants.