Kind: captions
Language: en
you have this idea of what it's going to
be
to attain this thing
but when you actually attain the thing
it's never what you anticipated which is
the glorious part because why strive for
something if you kind of already know
what that thing is
but when you strive for it and it
surprises you
that's the glorious part like wow where
did that come from
that was so beyond
what i thought my potential was
and that feels like a connection to
something
nuts
chuck paula nick welcome back to the
show
thank you tom welcome i i've never met
you in person but this is great it's
true very true i'm very excited that
we're able to do this in person i was
saying just before we started rolling
that um i have i guess a big question to
ask to kick things off uh you have a new
it's not a full book it's an essay yeah
it's an essay perfect wonderful essay
people places things
and really liked it and as i was saying
you look at the world in a way that is
very different than the way that i look
at the world and so
you massage my brain and touch my
creativity in a way that maybe a lot of
people don't if i already see the world
the same way they do it isn't surprising
it doesn't sort of
jar me in that way that i find deeply
pleasurable
and so i want to ask you a question it's
kind of lofty i'm not trying to you know
get to necessarily loft the answers i'm
just super curious to see how you think
about it so
in reading the essay
it was such a fascinating glimpse to say
okay if if i were going to write a
similar one and pick you know seven or
eight moments that really stuck with me
became a part of me helped shape me
whatever or are the
um the analogies that i use to
understand something else in my life
what would i pick and so thinking about
that got me thinking about what is the
essence of who we become which is very
much how i think about it
so what to you is the essence of the
human experience like
how why people places things like to
what extent are we shaped from the
outside in versus inside out
wow suddenly i feel like mitch album
you know those seven people you meet in
heaven
um but uh
i would say
if i had to weigh it i would say
inside out first
but that inside out
shapes what we react to in the world
and personally
i've always loved to do stonework i i
just like actual rocks crazy about
stonework yeah when the gyms were all
closed last year uh-huh i ordered six
dump trucks full of stone i had a
promontory looking over this canyon i'd
always wanted to build a ruined church
there
and so i spent my summer building and i
also collected concrete skulls from
different artists for years and years
and they were all always sat out in the
woods and got mossy
so i wanted to
mortar it all together with big arched
windows and then leave it so that
decades from now people would find it
and they'd say what used to be here
but at did you build it ruined so that
it's not a complete structure right
i i built it ruined i put all the skulls
in it so it kind of looks like an
ossuary
is there any trolling in this no no no
not at all it is kind of a picturesque
the thing that draws you to this
promontory and then
frames the view from the promotory
but
my grandfather was also
very much into stonework and and as was
my father
and it seems to be a very ukrainian
thing i'm told
that when i went to have work done in my
house
the the top stone workers the top tile
setters were all ukrainian
and so
am i drawn to stonework because i'm
ukrainian
or you know
i think that's i think that's a lot of
it that
we're drawn to these things they
resonate with us
but
i would bet that's because
of something that's innate within us
it's really
fascinating to me i want to understand
better the stone work element so
covet hits you know you're going to be
alone is
if let's say that we just could not get
stone
would it be working with your hands is
that sort of primarily it or is there
something to the solidity of the rock
that speaks to you
um
it is the
is the way that working with the
three-dimensional rock like like tetris
like these 60 to 80 pound tetris things
freeze up
my
sort of chattering monkey mind
and my mind is able to do
or be
receptive to whatever ideas might occur
and also there's a kind of mania that
happens when you're doing that kind of
really heavy work
you reach a point of exhaustion
and you keep going
and breakthroughs happen
the way that breakthroughs happen when
you're taking a shower
or when you're washing the dishes you're
doing something kind of mindless
and cognitive well it's sort of
physically spatially cognitive
that frees up
your mind for ideas to just sort of
occur
and you get the wildest thoughts and the
wildest missed phrasings of things
what do you think is happening in that
moment so i think a lot about um
meditation and
you had talked about the sleek sleep
expert the last time yes the guy who had
said that when you sleep
you are reenacting memories without the
emotional attachment right unless you
have ptsd in which case was it mda
well that ends up being mdma ends up
being one of the potential therapies um
his punchline is that if you have
noradrenaline which i think is exactly
the same as adrenaline if you have that
heightened when you're sleeping then the
memory never loses its emotional edge
and he was hypothesizing that
one of the reasons that we dream because
of course that's a much asked question
in the literature
he believes is specifically to pull the
emotion out of the equation but still
learn the lesson
and he said what happens with people
that end up developing ptsd is for
whatever reason the adrenaline levels do
not come back down when they sleep and
so they're reliving it and just really
baking in the heightened emotion and the
stress
you know i would really from my own
experience have to agree with that
but i'd also put forward that
that turning it into a craft exercise
and i see a lot of people talking about
this
teaching writing or workshops
as a form of talk therapy where you're
telling the story
through a metaphor and you're sort of
controlling and recrafting the story
along these very intellectual lines
to achieve an ex
an effect in someone else
so when the emotion is landing out there
that's when you've really mastered the
experience and you're no longer reactive
to it
my mind obsesses over things
and when i look at my life i am
sometimes grateful and sometimes deeply
distressed by how much my mind is
looping on something now when it loops
on something and i get a fruitful answer
then it's like oh my god okay this is
worth it you know fantastic
when i'm just looping on something
negative that's giving me the
wrong sort of neurochemical standpoint
i'm like oh god this really sucks and
what i have realized is one of the
reasons that i like um
teaching for lack of a better word so i
have this thing called impact theory
university and i'm basically walking
people through
um what i have done to sort of get
control of my mind which is probably the
right way to think about it to
emotionally
center myself
and
every time i start answering a question
for somebody else i'm really reinforcing
it in myself and it's incredible how
often that's therapeutic where whatever
i'm going through right then at that
moment somebody will ask me a question
and i will get to like my subconscious
giving me the answer in the form of it
you know advice for them and it's really
really helpful and something very
similar happens if i'm journaling
where the act of like slowing down to
write it i don't know there's something
where the there seems to be some sort of
ability for the subconscious mind to
connect to the conscious mind and so i
feel like somebody's giving me a helping
hand if that makes sense so when you're
journaling are you keyboarding or are
you long handwriting i keyboard
yeah so one for years i had problems
with joint pain and that probably
started it and then also i'm really
afraid we talked about this last time
i'm really afraid of losing the things
that i write i know you throw most of it
away uh i do not so having it in a
digital format like i can relax if i
ever need to find that insight again
which of course i never go back and look
but should i need to you know i know
that it's there and that does give me a
great deal of comfort
you know the uh
somebody once said to me that the reason
why she did not take notes was because
the really great ideas won't leave you
or the really great concerns won't leave
you until they're resolved and years ago
i've been working with a trainer and i
said i was working on this this short
story about these
kids in high school
that were so worried about the future
and these were really the most promising
kids the talented and gifted kids
they just felt so much of the future was
always on them
that one kid finally went into the
health room
took the defibrillator took the pads off
stuck them on either side of his temples
pressed the button
and gave himself a peel and stick
lobotomy
and after that he was
such a wonderful three-year-old
it literally damaged him forever
i made it up oh it was my invention
and so i was thinking about this
this story idea and i told it to the
trainer at the time
and then i forgot about it two years
later chris
my trainer
said did you ever do anything with that
defibrillator story i cannot forget that
i can't get it out of my head
and i knew at that moment two years
later
i had more or less forgotten about it
but the fact that chris had not
forgotten about it
meant that that was a story worth
writing see but that's what scares me is
you had forgotten about it but he hadn't
had he not said something we would all
have lost like literally when you were
telling me it was like a memoirs of a
geisha moment okay uh where i read that
book thinking it was real and as you
were telling the story i thought it was
real so when you got to the the zapping
part i was like holy [ __ ] like it yeah
but you know my rationale is also
if i think it's real it's either already
happening we're not hearing about it
or is going to happen because
when i was writing fight club the little
bit about splicing single frames of
pornography into movies
a friend of mine said do not put that in
your book because then people will do it
and since then so many people have come
up to me and said you know i love that
you did that because when i was a
teenage projectionist i was always
slicing pornography into family films so
weird and so there's really you know
we're not such snowflakes that we're
going to come up with something that
is completely unique and in a kind of
nuclear bomb
yeah that's uh
it it is an interesting question of for
sure you can plant ideas in people's
minds and you can make something that
otherwise wouldn't have been there but
how much do you try to sterilize
um it's interesting but going back to um
the idea of if a if an idea is good it
is not my experience and this may be a
limitation of my own mind it is not my
experience that i will remember it in
fact there are oftentimes an idea will
just get stuck in my head for some like
it speaks to me for some reason but i'll
try to present it to other people it's
just dead every time dad dead dead and i
can't get that same spark out of them
that i feel um and then there are other
times where i feel like if i don't write
things down i'm not going to remember it
no matter what like they're just the way
that my mind works things tend to
dissipate over time and so note taking
is one of the ways that i reinforce that
and increase the odds of it sticking and
then if i may uh there's also with story
ideas i will go back and reread them so
i'll write down a quick idea and i'll be
reading the idea and it will spark new
ideas that then deepen that potential
idea uh and that has been extremely
fruitful for me
okay
um but do you find ever
that having that kind of burden of
inventory
precludes new ideas or access or acts as
a negative burden it does not for me but
i'm curious so in what way does the the
ideation process feels like a weight for
you
um
just that every once in a while i will
pursue an idea for 250 or 300 pages
and then i will realize you know this is
architecture and dialogue
there is no through line action there is
no
grand gesture that is escalating in this
it is just people talking in compelling
spaces
and then i have to realize that i'm
never going to finish it because
it doesn't contain that physical
visceral
element no matter how interesting the
idea is
if it is
my dinner with andre
i'm not going to sit through it
yeah there's got to be a physical
visceral task and i think that's why
so much my creative work gets done
while i'm doing physical
more labor you think there needs to be
like that connection or is it just that
that puts your brain into a different
state
it
i realize that i can only
think for so many minutes at a time
and that those thoughts are probably
going to occur and i need to be doing
some overall
task for those ideas to occur
so i don't feel like i'm kind of rushing
the idea
the baby's not going to come out
a new baby every 30 seconds
that the baby takes a long time to come
out
and i might as well fill up my time with
something else while the baby's
doing its job
i did my best i wrote fight club while i
was working full-time
i wrote most of it at work
because when you're doing this kind of
thoughtless work
then your mind has to stay occupied with
something
and that's when the ideas start to sort
of come around and
you know
on a reasonable
rate i'm not rushing things
that's interesting the
i would be very curious to know what the
brain science is behind this this is one
of the reasons that i really like to
meditate if i get stuck on a creative
problem
stopping meditating and i'm not
oh this is interesting this is only
partly true bear with me for thinking
just sort of out loud here but for the
most part i'm not intentionally sitting
down trying to force getting to the idea
but i have found that very rapidly if i
start breathing from my diaphragm i
close my eyes ideally i have like nature
sounds playing in headphones
the what i think of as the connection
between my subconscious and my conscious
mind happens very quickly and so i'll
sometimes sit down for like three
minutes and oh boom got it i know
exactly where to go now um
i get that most from meditating or being
in the shower so it's like my body is
taken care of if you will so in
meditation it feels like i'm as close to
hanging my body up in a closet as you
can get right i've i've removed all of
its stimulus i've trapped my ears by
giving one sort of um
rhythmic sound is maybe
roughly right i close my eyes so i don't
see anything i'm sitting in the most
comfortable position i can conceive of
i'm breathing in a way that feels so
good so my body just feels like okay
cool we've got everything we need and it
goes away more or less and then at that
moment i don't know something very
interesting happens like i would find it
far harder to do with my eyes open
because i now have stimulus that's
competing with that connection
you know
boy for for me so often it's also
my ideas are kind of externally either
validated or generated someone will say
something will tell me something that i
can't forget and in order to process it
i'll have to repeat it to other people
and that's why i feel like
i had to go too far in my work
because then i force my audience
to go to other people and say you know i
read this thing or i saw this thing
and
i'd like to have your take on it they
need to sort of form a community in
order to process it them themselves
and uh
and so so much of my work starts
with me in community with other people
hearing some aspect of their life
that i find it very hard to process so i
have to take that to other people
to start to understand this is part of a
bigger
pattern of people's lives
yeah this is one of the reasons i find
you so interesting is i don't think i
would react
in the same way to the things that you
react
and
it feels to me when i encounter your
work that you're bringing me a way of
understanding something that i would
have let slide that i would have been at
a party and heard the same thing that
you heard and thought oh my god it's a
crazy story oh wow that's really funny
but
that it wouldn't have
i
and it feels like a deficit in my
personality that i would have somehow
missed what it could be what it hints at
where where it goes what it implies
and when you're able to grab it and like
give it meaning for instance
going back to the essay
and i'm really curious to hear about
like
where this came from so
you talk about the dream that you have
about walking across the bridge
or your mom taking you across the bridge
to the middle point and then makes a
comment and you're like thinking that
you dreamed this and then later your
brother has a moment with her many many
decades later i assume
uh where she
reveals that that was potentially as
ominous as it appears in your dreams
and
the
did anybody else in the family like pull
that together or
were you the only one sort of grappling
with that my brother and i
are the only two who've talked about it
because he
she made the confession to him and how
far are you willing to presume what she
was intimating because you're ver you if
you read the essay it's very clear what
you're saying but i don't know if it
without you being sort of blunt if it
will come across in the podcast so i
don't know how
and i really wanted to give a lot of
wiggle room
because i don't want to demonize her
that she was a bright person with a lot
of potential in a very limited
circumstance and she was
having some very wild desperate thoughts
of how to resolve things
um
and in a way i i want to sort of
acknowledge
that i want to i want to know and love
her for all of her
not just
the the best aspects of her interesting
she also when it was our birthday she
would make cupcakes for everyone in
school and you'd have to bring a list of
how many boys and how many girls so she
could make this many pink cupcakes and
this many blue cupcakes
so she was a great mother
but
what happened
with her making these dire plans
was just a
desperate moment
and she didn't go through with it
and
it kind of illustrates that people have
these moments
and if they're aware that everyone has
these moments they're not as likely to
feel so alone
that they do take those actions
blah blah blah
i want to pull on that thread a little
bit there's uh
it's interesting you use very very
physical
verbs i took a great course for used car
salesmen
and they say that people either
they're very uh
uh
auditory or visual or physical
and you can tell by how they speak
they'll say oh i see what you're talking
about or i hear what you're saying or i
get you
and you're a very physical you use very
very physical introductory
transitions
so i get what does that reveal
nothing in particular it's just a
smallest group because most people tend
to use visual
metaphors
and a slightly smaller group uses
auditory
and the smallest group uses physical
interesting transitions that's
interesting now i'm curious i'm also
curious you took a class for car
salesmen yeah it was a great class it
was so manipulative it was all about
identifying
emotional tells
and then using them to leverage people
into buying things that they couldn't
afford
[Music]
to actively say that oh yeah always
wow
they had great techniques can you give
us some there was
one that was so evil
if you've got the husband and you've got
the wife
and you're trying to sell them on a
really expensive car
that the wife
kind of likes kind of once
and the husband is thinking more
seriously about not getting it
you take him kind of
you focus on him in her presence
and you say you know tom
tom
do you remember when you first met lisa
and you would move the moon and the
stars for her and you loved lisa so much
that you wanted to give her everything
in the world
lisa
tom
what happened
why'd you change
and he will buy that car yeah
that's uh that is evil it's evil but
that's
that's good writing that is very good
writing that's interesting what made you
take that course was it something for a
book or you just thought oh i need to
understand
how to how these people work or i want
to know the skills of persuasion
i was writing a book about um called
rant about people who run these kind of
consensual demolition derbies in the
street
where
uh you badge your car in a very sort of
what looks like a standardized way
you know you might put a christmas tree
on top of it because sometimes of the
year a lot of cars have christmas trees
but you do it in the middle of summer
and so you know that everybody else with
the tree on their car
or with some other kind of standard
badging like uh just married kind of you
know cans and banners and shaving cream
you know that they're in the game and if
it's a certain window of time in a
certain section of the city
everyone with their cars badged in that
way
is actually involved in this conceptual
demolition derby
and so i wanted to know tons of stuff
about cars and how you get cars out of
impound lots and how you buy cars at
auction and that got me into the the
used car industry and that got me into
the uh the three-day seminar
and so it was just that kind of
immersion and and wanting to learn all
the tricks about uh how to get used cars
that to me that would be a lot of fun in
terms of exploring things that deep so
you can create something out of it is
that part of the joy of writing for you
is knowing that you there is meaning
behind doing things like that yeah you
know what i hated in school
was when they were teaching us something
without teaching us how to apply it
when it was just a skill
i could never retain it unless i had
some way of using the skill in the
moment
um
and so that's what i love about writing
yeah there's a that's one of the things
and i always feel bad because like
teaching is brutally difficult but
if you're using that skill in your
day-to-day life then it becomes very
easy to present it as hey let me tell
you exactly how you're going to use this
and so i teach a business course and my
thing is i wouldn't teach that course if
i wasn't running a business the rest of
my day and because i am then it's like
i'm just telling you what i'm doing
right now today i'll tell you what works
i'll tell you what didn't work and
that has made it
very easy to make what i'm talking about
compelling to the other business owners
that are trying to use this stuff
because i'm like look this is how it
comes up this is how you deal with it
these are going to be the consequences
and so it becomes something that's
immediately usable like even when you
were describing it i get a really
different energy when it's something i'm
just learning
versus something that i'm like i need to
use this to get this outcome that i'm
really excited about and now oh my god
like this is a missing piece in that
puzzle and if i can get this then i can
get a new outcome
and sometimes it takes it gives you an
outcome that you didn't anticipate that
is even better than what you were kind
of banking on
in what you're talking about the
exploration or just skill acquisition in
general well
kind of both because you have this idea
of what it's going to be
to attain this thing
but when you actually attain the thing
it's never what you anticipated which is
the glorious part because why strive for
something if you kind of already know
what that thing is
but when you strive for it and it
surprises you
that's the glorious part it's like wow
where did that come from
that was so beyond
what i thought my potential was
and that feels like a connection to
something
nuts
how much does surprise
as a value maybe is the right way to ask
it how much as surprise is a value in
your life something that you covet that
you really appreciate
it is everything you know
and as you grow older you get it less
and less often
so that when you do get it
it is so glorious because it makes you
young again
it's something that you associated with
when you're a child and everything is a
surprise
um
and then you're an adolescent and
rosebud is a sled there are still some
surprises
but those surprises are fewer and far
farther between as you grow older
but when you do find them somebody does
bring you something amazing
uh
you just treasure it
yeah it is very fun
and i do like it
so
i definitely don't want to discount that
i do enjoy that but if i had been asked
i would say no surprise rank's
relatively low for me what i like is
usability and this is the um
the thing that you surprise me and that
is why i find you so interesting so my
own conundrum is if asked i would have
said yeah
i don't care if i'm surprised i just
want like there's something that i want
to build and create in this world and i
want to be able to go and do it and yet
i found your work and constantly find
myself like yeah there's something about
like i can't i never know where this is
going
and i love that and that is fun so i'm
i'm not sure what to do with that
realization of
i don't think it hits me the way that it
hits you but i do
enjoy it so how do you like now i'm
thinking about the rock wall that you're
building how much of that is wanting to
leave something surprising for somebody
else
you know that's a big part of it because
when i was really small
my father uh did a lot of carpentry work
and when my brother and i helped him we
would always leave things inside the
walls of remodel jobs we would do
because we knew the kind of joy of
finding those things so we'd write our
names we'd leave a newspaper sometimes
we'd leave money or we'd leave a bottled
liquor
because
you we knew the joy that would be
generated when that stuff was discovered
and so
so so often it is doing that and i've
done that in every house i've ever lived
in
because someday something somebody's
gonna find it
and it's not about my joy
it's about providing that that moment
for somebody else
yeah we talked about that in the last
conversation where you were saying that
you'll let people
correct you intentionally you know the
real answer you're at a party you let
them correct you they feel smart you
look dumb you never correct them and i
asked you if that was about being santa
claus and just giving them a gift or if
there was you know something else
uh going on there where was a little bit
of trolling and you said yeah to be
honest it's a little bit of both but it
is
it is interesting as i try to predict
you
and try to think about how you see the
world
there is um
there is a very interesting thing about
the community
reaching across space and time to find
connection i don't know does that
resonate with how you think about the
world
yeah very much so because the man who
taught me writing always referred to
what he called elephant mind and the way
he defined elephant mind as opposed to
monkey mind was that elephant mind was
this this huge mutual consciousness
across
you know more or less maybe all human
beings
living and dead
and that when you could connect to that
and
get in that zone
then you could
create something that would resonate
with the lives of or the experience of
huge numbers of people what is that zone
the awareness of what the collective
mind is like and will react to
typically in the in the terms of one
phenomenon
one
thing
and recently i wrote about how
when were you raised catholic
no but my friends were so i have a
passing familiarity
the the ceremony to become an adult
in the catholic church is called
confirmation
and we were you know after vatican 2
the the bishop comes and he pats your
cheeks
and that is
the replacement of traditionally what
was a giant wallop across your face the
bishop would just hit you so hard and it
was meant as a gesture to wake you up
into adulthood
into the reality of being a catholic
adult
and we had a really old-school bishop
here we go and when he hit us
you found yourself looking sideways and
tasting blood whoa
and
every mother in the parish was like oh
my kid has just gotten hit by the bishop
and even dads were looking away
and i remember getting slapped so hard
and looking sideways at carrie fisher
and carrie fisher's got tears he's
trying to fight back because he's just
been slapped
a friend of mine worked for the dalai
lama
when she first met him guess what he did
he slapped her across the face
he said that's to wake you up into
your mortality into what it is to be a
living human being
there is so much
cultural stuff and also mind science
about
that kind of impact as a gesture and as
a kind of
awakening
um
that that is the kind of archetypal
thing
that i'm always looking for and trying
to connect across a lot of different
cultures
and the experience of a lot of different
people
because there's something to it
and just by accident i had
the character in fight club
punch the other character in the ear
and i thought i was making it up
but no it is a giant cross-culturally
thing
to punch specifically in the ear
specifically in the ear and i thought it
was
funny
but it resonates with the the the
mythology of uh um
thomas edison
uh supposedly
being thomas edison because when he
was young he worked on a train he did
something wrong
and a conductor boxed his ears so badly
that from the age of 12 he was almost
completely deaf whoa but it was just he
always said that after the age of 12 he
could never hear birds sing
and that that deafness like the deafness
of howard hughes the deafness of so many
people who were bright
allowed them a kind of deeper
concentration
that they howard hughes was deaf yeah he
was
almost he was very very deaf
but
anyway this
being boxed in the ears seemed to
resonate with
the christian orthodox idea that the
virgin mary was
uh
more or less impregnated through her
ears by by the holy spirit whispering
her destiny in her ear and that's why in
so many christian sex
young women have to cover their ears
because their ears are considered
very vaginal in that way
so there's just i'm always looking for
these cross-cultural
ideas and gestures and images that can
be tied together in a new fresh way
and do you look for them as a
storyteller are you looking for them as
as a
person who wants to understand this
whole thing
well you know i i might be closer to you
with this because i think i'm looking
for them in a way to try to make
order out of what looks like chaos
that i i was i still want there to be a
universal field theory
that
maybe i'm cherry-picking to try to dream
one up
but i think there's enough other people
who want a universal field field theory
that you know they'll go along with it
there's also something i
i think you will agree with this there's
also something really intoxicating about
feeling that you
understand something about humans that
just it's an insight into yourself it's
an insight into other people it may
sometimes it's realizing that oh this
thing that i thought was so weird about
me is actually shared and there's you
know some reason for it
that to me is um cathartic maybe just
knowing that okay there is a connection
here there's there's something in the
human experience going back to that
initial question i'm obsessed with what
is the human experience like how much of
this is
avoidable how much of this is just this
is the nature of being a human
and you know that we get to go on this
ride i think it helps me make sense of
it helps me make sense of pain for sure
but also can elevate joy when
for me when i understand it
elevate joy but also
i like the idea of taking things that we
have a negative connotation like shame
and if there's some way to harness shame
and spin shame so that you get a
shame becomes productive
i want to discover that yeah i'd like
you to discover that it have you thought
about that one in particular like is it
oh my gosh this last week i run a
workshop
and
the workshop kind of ran away and it was
just a lot of crosstalk a lot of people
battling
over one particular piece of writing
that was presented
and
i i called the workshop to order it in a
kind of blunt way
and
later through discord one of my students
came on and said
you were really out of bounds and you
made one of the members cry after the
fact
and you need to apologize
and blah blah blah
and
i felt so enormously shamed
but then i thought
i kind of like this
because
after you've had your period in the
shower
and all the girls throw tampons at you
you've got nowhere to go but up
i could get used to this
because we spent so much of our time
resisting being shamed
that when we actually do get slammed
down
you know i i've told people this before
i wish i could call room service
and say would you send a waiter up send
up the biggest waiter you got because i
just want him to slam me across the face
to just knock my idle down so i don't
feel like i'm the center of the universe
and just put me back in that zero place
because there's such freedom in that
zero place
where you're not trying to look good and
you're trying not trying to dominate
you're just kind of it's like a fresh
wake up but won't you just rebuild back
to that same state
not if you get to zero zero
i think it gives you you have a freedom
in that moment that you can either
store in kierkegaard have you ever seen
have you ever seen um a chorus line
no
the broadway musical chorus line is it
the one with um
michael douglas no then i definitely
haven't seen it that's the movie
i've seen i was singing a cabaret so no
i have not seen a chorus line what were
you raised in tacoma i was raised into
in a cave in tacoma like basically yes
in a chorus line
you know it's it was a michael bennett
musical on broadway for a million years
and then it became a movie in the 80s
but it starts with hundreds and hundreds
of dancers all auditioning to try to
dance identical
and then out of those maybe 20 are
chosen
and then out of those 20 it becomes very
kind of
gestalt therapy where they're each asked
about their
personhood their childhood why they
chose to be a dancer
and they each kind of tell a
self-explanatory story through a song
and so you have these
the songs that are a ballad song or a
rising spirit song or a comedy pattern
song
and
so each of them emerges as an individual
but then in the third act they all fall
back into this complete synchronicity
and they completely kind of submerge
their individuality again in the
desperate hope of getting a job in this
synchronized chorus line
and so getting back to your point
is when you get to that zero
you can choose to be the same
but you know from that point forward
that you've chosen inauthenticity
or you can choose
to do things differently
um
and
because at that zero you have the
awareness that what you're doing is a
choice
if you do build back then you haven't if
you do build back the same
without knowing you're doing so
then you never reach zero what should
people build towards
what calls to you
or what frightens you what are you the
most afraid of failing at
that is the thing that you should be
doing
why why the thing you were most afraid
the amount of misery that's going to put
you through
why that
because when you reach the end of your
life and you go
wow i'm really glad i did all the easy
things
that's not going to be any kind of
comfort but really like so i'm gonna i'm
gonna think through this without by the
way i'm not sure that what you're saying
is the wrong idea it might be exactly
right but now let's think through
[Music]
neurochemistry matters and
if you haven't done this sort of
monastic work to make sure that you're
detached from the outcome
pursuing that kind of thing
for somebody who needs a self-narrative
that makes them feel good about
themselves
if they really are afraid of failing at
that thing their identity is completely
tied up in it they think their
self-worth is tied up in that that's the
very thing that makes them afraid to
fail at that
in pursuing that thing without learning
the sort of mental
model of not being attached to the
outcome that this is in using my
language this is about skill acquisition
and you know the attempting to get
better i could see how that would be a
terrifying journey for people
your point being
it's not supposed to be a terrifying
journey that's interesting so for you
the whole point is
is get scared or the whole point is that
fear will open something up the coping
mechanism you will use will be something
profound useful
the fear is the thing that
validates that you're doing
the thing that means something to you
because if it didn't mean anything to
you you wouldn't feel the fear
you'd be like huh i didn't win miss
america
but what if you're just trying to
impress people
oh you're kidding
i i don't even see that as a as a goal
what do you mean i mean
the man who taught me writing
tom's van bauer yeah tom he always said
if you're writing
for any reason other than you want to
write and you love writing and you'd
love to put together a terrific book
you should not be here if you're writing
to impress your dad if you're writing to
get enough money to buy a house if
you're writing to redeem yourself
to all those kids who made fun of you in
school
you shouldn't be here you should be here
because
there is nothing more fun and more
frightening to you
than this thing
versus uvu
right and it's never in order to
uh yeah yeah doug copeland who wrote
generation x he said if you're still
doing your passion after the age of 31
then you're only competing against
yourself you're no longer competing
against that other writer or that other
stand-up guy or that other
whatever performer artist
why would that be true
uh well doug's scientific rationale and
doug is knows a lot more about this than
i do doug is
hugely uh
left brain well
intellectual guy
he says that brain science shows that
the last
significant changes in the human brain
happen between the ages of 31 and 33
and that tends to be
the small window when people produce
their masterpiece when they can
synthesize their experience and their
education and they can create something
larger than the sum of the two
and so
33 to 34 is generally when people kind
of buy their freedom with one big
success
and so if you're still doing your
passion
at that age that's when you tend to
break out
um
yeah and i guess the science supports it
but i can't cite it doug copeland can
cite it that's intriguing to me so i am
i am very unnerved might be the right
word
by how aging matters how
there's demographics to take into
consideration that the
context of any one of us as uh
i don't know as a creator as a performer
and i don't mean performer on the stage
i mean like building a business is a
performance of a kind
it begins to get re-contextualized like
you are perceived by the outside world
as different like when you see a really
old guy hit on a young girl and the
response is oh my god you're so cute and
it's harmless like i can only imagine
the sort of devastation that that is but
there's a quote that haunts me deeply
and it's that genius is a young man's
game
and they may be talking about that 31-33
window where people tend to have their
you know massive breakthroughs i think
that quote is even you get rewarded in
your 60s for the work you did in your
30s
and i find that distressing partly
because i am a late bloomer and partly
because i really have a problem with the
idea of my best days being behind me
well there's also you know take this to
heart
and i always get the name of the book
wrong
the creative kind the creative mind it
was a huge book a couple years ago
multi-very colorful cover with a circle
with a lot of colorful things in the
circle
and it cited studies that showed that
people who
come up with a brilliant idea say in
their 20s
like einstein
spend the rest of their lives defending
that brilliant idea and they never have
another one
but the people who are in love with that
constant exploration process
are the people who are creative
throughout their entire lives well into
their 60s 70s 80s because they're in
love with the process
rather than just this single outcome
so people who succeed early
tend to just become kind of entrenched
in whatever that idea was even though
that idea becomes outdated
um
that's all they've got
but but people who bloom later
have allowed themselves to fall in love
with the discovery process so they're
more often
going to bloom over and over
until they die
going back to
the essay how did you choose those
moments the ones that you talk about
you've got the peanut on the cover it's
almost a throwaway line but it is a
setup for an entire person
from your youth
how did you pick and were they meant to
sort of encapsulate
the forces that shaped you
i wanted to write an essay about this
enigmatic man
from my childhood
my childhood was in burbank washington
which is across the state from tacoma
and it's in the desert and at the time
300 people lived there wow it was very
small and
but there was this retired railroad
laborer who was a japanese-american and
he walked the back roads and he gave
candy to children and we all adored him
and then we subsequently found out that
he he planted these enormous gardens in
these very ruined
industrial sites
and those gardens was such
kind of romantic
gorgeous things
that were dead the moment that he could
no longer tend them
they weren't about impressing anybody
they weren't about
creating a a legacy
because they were gone the moment he
didn't water them
but they were
so amazing in the moment that we
discovered them we saw them as children
and even the adults
who lived these very blue-collar
railroad lives
when these
redneck guys with the union saw these
gardens
they went home and they kind of built a
japanese garden in their backyards
it shaped everyone's aesthetic it gave
everyone this kind of glimpse
of how beautiful things could be
and
and went home they went home they did it
wrong
they fed the koi the wrong things
they
bonsaied the wrong trees
but at least they were kind of shown an
aesthetic a way of being they never
would have discovered for themselves
and this man was such a
a huge impact that i started to kind of
look for other figures like that
uh from other people's lives as well as
you know my own
um
years ago i met a guy who grew up in
milwaukee
and he took me aside and he said
when he was in high school
in the 90s
he worked at a tool rental company
and
one day there was this piece in the
newspaper a guy about a guy who lived in
the oxford apartments
and how he was
killing and eating young men
and the picture of this guy who'd been
arrested was so familiar
that this guy who's telling me the story
he went back through their rental
records and he found that they'd had
this customer he'd come in and he'd
rented an electric drill and at one
point he'd rented a reciprocating saw a
saber saw
and so he went to his boss and he said
you know there's this guy named jeffrey
dahmer and he's rented a couple of the
tools that we have in stock right now do
you think we should give those to the
police
and his boss said let me think about it
and the next day he came back into work
and those pages in the
rental history were gone
and the tools were gone
because his boss
did not want all of milwaukee to know
that they had rented tools to the
cannibal killer
and so
is that kind of
those strange local
human landmark stories i wanted to sort
of pull all of those together
and sort of demonstrate that they're
part of everyone's lives um
yeah
the idea of landmarks in our lives is
that um
in what way do you think that's
important
if we can
identify the influences
then we know
we didn't just invent it
we have a choice
we have a choice to either be that good
or bad way
because it's not entirely
us
we were introduced to this idea
by somebody else and so we can either
embrace it or we can at that point
choose no longer
live that way
yeah the
malleability of the human mind human
spirit it was one of the notes that i
took after reading your story is you
know i was thinking trying to sort of
get inside your mind and understand like
what is it that you find so compelling
about these moments and how they shape
us and
um i'm curious do you are you more
interested by
the you said it starts inside but are
you more interested by the things that
shape us from the outside or are you
more interested in the fact that we can
change ourselves
if i can just back pedal for a moment
you talked about your teaching
and i think once you recognize the
people who have influenced you you want
to and i hate to use the cliche but you
want to pay it forward you want to
create that same kind of joy in other
people's lives
and access to something that
has provided you joy and so
i think it's just an automatic
uh
wanting to perpetuate
this knowledge or this skill or this way
of being that you have found so
beneficial
and in terms of
innate or
inherited or whatever
i think only a select group of people
are going to really hear it and that
might be the innate part is that only
certain people
it's only going to resonate with certain
people
but that's fine
because they'll pick it up
they'll benefit from it and they will
pass it forward
when i think about you and the people
that you meet and the stories that you
collect
do you think that
that you're just a
one in you know eight billion roll of
the dice that has led you to encounter
all of these fascinating stories or is
it that you go way out of your way to
collect them
you know it uh
hmm
i don't think i go way out of my way in
fact i think i
just kind of spin that i think i get out
of my way
that it used to be i would go to parties
and i wouldn't say more than two or
three words
and then afterwards
people would say to each other you know
chuck is a really good talker
and it's because i was just really good
at paying attention
and
paraphrasing and asking questions based
on what people had said
i wasn't just waiting for my
to say my thing
yeah and also you know
one of my best friends in college
franz used to live here in l.a he was an
architect
he said
when you grow up gay
you have to learn everything
you have to watch everything because you
don't have any kind of innate
every innate way that you would do
something is wrong
so you have to monitor your behavior 24
7. and you have to watch okay how should
i be carrying my books and how should i
walk and am i on my walking on my toes
too much
um
you have got to monitor every aspect of
your presentation
and
so you have to be hyper aware of
everyone's presentation
and you're sort of on a survival level
studying
all human behavior and really listening
um
and you can't talk in gay voice
so
so you keep a little burr in your throat
and you make sure your glottis isn't
open
um
yeah there's just
everything from an early age you're
really aware that you are a performance
and that everyone is a performance
and i think that's why according to
france
gay people become such kind of creative
people
is that they kind of recognize the
qualities of things and they're able to
replicate them
uh because they themselves are
replicating other people's behaviors
so i would say that that's that's a
probably a big part of it
but then you could say that about kind
of any outside group you know jews
you can say that about
any group that has felt outside of the
mainstream
that they've had to kind of
zelig and look for ways of fitting in so
they've had to sort of tailor their
behavior to fit into the larger culture
that's fascinating the idea of
the amount that you discover about
yourself by looking at other people and
yeah i'd never thought about
if you're on the outside if you're
constantly trying to hide the amount of
sort of mirror neurons that you're going
to be spinning up and firing and trying
to
theory of mind how are they acting how
should i act how are they perceiving my
sense of acting
it's one of those where hardships and
childhood whatever it usually does a lot
of damage but the people for whom it
does not break they end up
you know overshooting things i think
about that a lot in the context of the
inner cities of the inner city just
gives people the world's worst frame of
reference in terms of how to be
successful
but
for people that figure out how the game
works it is really extraordinary there's
there is at least anecdotally from
people that i've seen there's a real
over performance and over compensation
that is
really pretty extraordinary it's one of
those things i wouldn't wish on people
but when you start looking at like oh
god i think it's presidents the number
of presidents that their parents died
young or their father died young it's
like you can sort of pick a
tragedy that could befall people then
look at the demographic and see if
certain things end up being true down
the line now i don't know how many of
these things hold up statistically but i
know the
the orphan one shows up pretty often in
in hyper successful successful people
um dyslexia shows up a lot in
entrepreneurship and i don't know if
it's a wiring of the brain thing and
they're just more
you know
like wired for problem solving or if it
is that they had to struggle so much and
like [ __ ] you i'm gonna show you i'm
gonna overcome and do better i'm not
sure but it really is
an interesting idea to me that um that
just a certain amount of struggle is
going to be critical to developing well
struggle and dealing with the struggle
as opposed to evading the struggle
if you have the struggle and you start
taking drugs at an early age
that's not a great recipe
that's definitely not a great recipe
and thank you for letting silence happen
thank you for pointing out the last time
that i didn't
so
i literally went to speak and i thought
you know what
let's see
the uh
i've noticed that a lot with uh
the media is that there's this kind of
rush to to fill dead air
and uh
and it just it forces a level of
enthusiasm that's so artificial
that doesn't lend itself to kind of
insight or listening
and uh
do you remember paul harvey
yeah we you brought him up last time
yeah as the example of silen