← The Rich Roll Podcast
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- [00:03]
Bruce Wagner
As a writer, I attack and destroy bullshit.
- [00:09]
Rich Roll
Bruce Wagner has had a prolific and eccentric career. Wagner just takes you straight to the contradiction, apocalyptic, yet ultimately spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of Hollywood. You are a fascinating character to me. I want to enter the Wagner extended universe here.
- [00:26]
Bruce Wagner
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 book sales?
- [00:50]
Rich 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 sort of palette, as this mirror for human behavior. Everybody has their longing and they are seeking. And what you're interested in is that kind of spiritual journey towards transcendence. And it's the transcendent piece, it's the spirituality that has baked into all of this that interests me the most.
- [01:34]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, you know, my nature is fiery and it's operatic, theatrical, and 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 of extremity, of extreme wealth and houselessness or poverty that one is brutalized almost to death by. I was possessed by celebrity and renown and invisibility and the tension between those poles. You know, I often think of a Buddhist story, a beautiful, magnificent book called Liberation in the Palm of youf Hand, or One's Hand, I might have the title wrong. And in that 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 lived in a Cave for 35 years. And his mantra, his essence 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 Hobby Stories, which are these ultimately quite poignant and dark stories, mirroring Fitzgerald's experience of an alcoholic screenwriter. 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 hobby. You know, I'm losing. My first book was Force Majeure, followed by I'm Losing youg. And those books were kind of cataloged 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 me. But the. The importance for me was there was an element missing ultimately from Nathaniel west and Fitzgerald, 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, 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 the idea of escaping that was always something that appealed to me in literature, particularly in books of parables, either Buddhist parables or Sufi parables, to me. So I began to read many books and superimpose this desire and to make them redolent of this scent, this perfume that I adored. 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 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. The one who lacerates had no desire to do that, no interest. I would have hung my guns up a long time ago if that was what I had to offer.
- [07:29]
Rich Roll
It's not a laceration. There is a skewering, but it's not satire. There is an affection for these characters, these human beings in extremis. And what I see in that or what I feel in that, and tell me if this tracks with how you see it, is that we are all these people. These are all mirrors of ourselves. And I'm sure people ask you, like, oh, is Bud you? Or these characters that you create, they're all you and they're all us, the reader, Right? They're all different. We can identify our peccadillos and all the bad behavior of all of these characters who are all stuck in these doomed cycles, and as are we. We in our own perception and our own kind of three stages of this Buddhist state of suffering.
- [08:27]
Bruce Wagner
That is a complete distillation of what my work is. And I was thinking of this on the way over. I was thinking about my father. I had a bad father, a father that was a sadistic alcoholic who did things to me that no boy should. Should experience, but many, many have. And 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 right.
- [09:11]
Rich Roll
As John Cusack says in Maps to the Stars.
- [09:14]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then what is. He could have done nothing else, you know, so there is a kind of certainty to all our behaviors, a fatalism. Well, it's that we behave in ways that I feel are predetermined, in a sense. You know, I had visited Ramesh Bolsekar in Mumbai with my friend Gavin. And 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 Nisargadatta Maharaj. 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, sagaradatta 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 who gave talks in Mumbai. And I remember I had written a novel called still holding, 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 that is not so active anymore. And I was at a monastery here in Los Angeles and saw Leonard. It's where his teacher was. And I told Leonard that I was thinking of going to India. And he said, if you liked 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. 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 my spirit is to dispose of everything that is told to me, 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 and everything is predetermined, you know, 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, one still corresponds by the laws and dictates of one's nature. So for me, I. 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. You know, I became, you know, all my life I've been raised and heard as a young man and an 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.
- [13:57]
Rich Roll
Yeah. Well, the pastiche of your childhood and your upbringing is this kind of collision of forces that obviously creates the artist that you are today. There's your father. There's the sort of Norman Rockwell esque experience of growing up in Beverly Hills at a very unique time. And you shared on Brett Easton Ellis's podcast, like that experience, which was fascinating. But all of this leaves you with this kind of unique lens on Hollywood as a young person, but also traumatized by being raised by your father, or not raised. And this search that you go on to replace him with all manner of father figures who become influential mentors and critical in the gestation of. However your brain was forming to 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.
- [15:13]
Bruce Wagner
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. You know, it's almost become impossible for me to read a book. And I can't listen to books either on. On audiotape. And it's a kind of agony for me. And I can't quite explain it, but 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 sense of smell, was impeccable. So I had genet at 11, 12 years old. Turgenev. I was possessed by books. And I would say that I absorbed the books. I don't believe that. I had read maybe 20% 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 reading Dead Souls by Gogol. So I would read that and adored it. 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, 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, when put into a kind of stew that contains 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. Everything 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 sure what it is, but my ability to be so deeply and kinetically involved with words and for them, to be almost religious for me, is not diminishing at all. Everything else is falling away.
- [18:32]
Rich Roll
What do you make of that? I mean, it feels on some level like an artist, fully formed. Like the books that you turned to and relied upon and required in order to enter that 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, that you're not continuing to read as voraciously as you once did is an interesting turn of events or evolution.
- [19:04]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, I don't know. I've talked about this. My father's father was someone that worked in a men's clothing store and would burst into tears over something that someone said that he thought that was mawkish or sentimental. And his mother, my father's mother, who was a tough bitch, would berate him, almost physically assault him. You know, I feel that I have elements. I see that grandfather, this simpering fool, this idiot, and then other parts of me are in shock that, that 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. 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, 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 wrapped in words as if wrapped by a boa constrictor. Do you know what I mean? 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, 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. I'm going to 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. 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. And for me, it will be whilst in the embrace of. Of that magnificent verbiage, you know, that mothered and fathered me.
- [23:39]
Rich 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 designed to do here on Earth during your time here. I want to get to the Castaneda stuff, but I'm imagining young Bruce riding his banana seat bike around Beverly Hills. What was the impetus to turn to books at that time? Was it a 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?
- [24:23]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, again, unknown. And those were the best years of my life, Rich. Those were the best years of life.
- [24:30]
Rich Roll
Paint a little picture. You know what that was like back then?
- [24:32]
Bruce Wagner
Back then, because you said Norman Rockwellian Beverly Hills, and people might think, what's Norman Rockwell about it? Back then, it was a small town. It was like a town. And it's a wonderful life. I had my first job. You know, I was like, maybe 9 years old. And on Halloween, the magic store would pay some of the boys to put monster masks on and have placards advertising the magic shop. And we'd walk up and down the boulevard. There was a huge pond on Santa Monica Boulevard that had live koi in it. Now, that would be impossible. There was a J.J. newberry's, a real soda shop counter that you'd see in movies in the 40s. 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 kids that were 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. And when they divorced wound up in an apartment on Doheny and overdosed and died. Which at the time they said it was she'd mixed the wrong flu medications. That used to be the euphemism. But all in all riding my banana seated Schwinn through the gusty Santa Ana nights and dusks 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 onto the home lives of other friends. And then I had a whole slew of friends that lived. I lived in the so called slums of Beverly Hills. On the corner was the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. There was a 24 hour drugstore and restaurant 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 Gene Wilder holding a sheep. It was Woody Allen was shooting everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask. 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. I mean 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 presentiment, some vision that I could do what these men and women had done in the books. That had a strong scent it was that simple, I think, you know, yeah.
- [29:18]
Rich Roll
Transgression is a huge theme in your work. And, you know, why is that so important?
- [29:26]
Bruce Wagner
It is very important for me and it's perhaps at the core of. Of what I do. And what could be more transgressive than the sacred, really? Do you know what I mean? But I want to overturn anything that comes my way and I want to crack the code that way. I mean, incest is very prominent in my work and one might say it's become a kind of trope now in these easy, pornographic times that we live in, you know. But for me, I was, you know, a child of incest. And I think didn't find that at the time. 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 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, I'll paraphrase it, where he had a. A gold plated detector, bullshit detector, you know what I mean? I pursued that line, you know, because anything that is accepted, the. 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, 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 each individual part is negligible. Do you know, then you had Henry James taking a shit on Dickens. I mean, it's just. To each their own.
- [32:48]
Rich Roll
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- [36:42]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, you know, I think it was a kind of inoculation, my work, which turned out to be false. But I think I wanted to explore every forbidden place in myself. What you said earlier about all of us being interchangeable, I really wanted to embrace that. And in my work, I am as close to the saintly characters that appear as I am to the malevolent, homicidal, perverse characters who appear. The child killers, the pedophiles. I wanted to inhabit the places that if there was a hesitation in a normal person, for me there was almost a kind of rapture in locating a place that was so infernal that why hadn't I visited there before? 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?
- [38:24]
Rich Roll
Right. But the transcendent peace is a function of shining a light on the infernal, 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.
- [38:47]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah. You know, I had migraines for years, and I told myself that I had them because of my mother. She had migraines. 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'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 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 Adhderal and Vicodin, extra strength and how many refills. You know, all that.
- [39:48]
Rich Roll
I was texting you from the hospital after my surgery, telling you, like, you were, like, asking me what you're. I was like, I think I'm Dilaudid.
- [39:54]
Bruce Wagner
And you were like, 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? Well, I like my coffee black. What? You know, it's just. It's the. The scent of addiction and 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 have to be given an injection, right? But you'd fall into this state, which I've heard epileptics talk about, which is called a postictal state. Right. And it's a metaphor for me after you. You descend to the lower depths, let's say, in my creative work, a numbness overtakes me because what I have seen or what I have experienced is so ungodly, so to speak, that I am empty. So it's an approximation, kind of synthetic, of inner silence or a kind of emptiness that has a spiritual aspect to it. So 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 look at the capabilities that involve transcendence and a deep silence.
- [41:49]
Rich 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, miniseries.
- [42:04]
Bruce Wagner
There seems to have always been this obsession, you know, with that kind of thing, but because of technology, it is mushroomed, you know, But I remember I was 14, and serial killers were the rage. Ed Kemper was up in Santa Cruz, you know, 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 American Psycho. American Psycho. And Kemper was like six, nine, 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 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.
- [43:28]
Rich 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 fortune. Like a decade. Right. I mean, you were inner circle in this insular world.
- [44:03]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah.
- [44:04]
Rich Roll
What drew you to him, and what was that all about?
- [44:09]
Bruce Wagner
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.
- [44:28]
Rich Roll
18 and you'd already dropped out of high school.
- [44:31]
Bruce Wagner
We 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 equivalent to the e. D, something like that, and then you could continue. So we literally went to night school, and I didn't last long at all. And he went all the way through. He went to medical school. His parents bribed a medical school to get him in. It was like $60,000, which was never repaid, right. And he wound up at S.C. county General, and he was a surgical resident, but he was also a junkie, right? So he was doing speed during the day, and then he would shoot fentanyl at night. And he was my close, close friend. And of course, I got a call that he had died, and. 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 a mother, you know? And I had my own agony, you know, I howled. You know, 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 private phone installed. He paid for me to have a second line, and he would do the little box that had noises that you could call places for free in Europe, you know. And later, the phone number, I got a copy of his autopsy report because I put it in a section of my first novel, horse majeure, called the weight of the human heart. The phone number, if you took the zeros out of the phone number, it was his Autopsy report number.
- [46:59]
Rich Roll
Wow, right.
- [47:02]
Bruce Wagner
So I. To comfort myself, I don't know. I had. I started to read Castaneda, but there is a book that touched me so deeply, and it was Journey to Ixtlan. I went looking for him. And at that point, I was in my 30s, 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 Luck, like probably hundreds of other people would say, come in. We never know. We don't know, et cetera. 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. 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 Wiggins 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 a script. And Oliver's film company was called Ixlan, right? And Janet Yang, I think, who's 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 Juan. And I said, boy, I'd love to go to that. And she said, at a certain point, well, it's invitation only, but I'm having a brunch at my house and. And he's going to be there. So I was sort of in shock about that. And I went there, sort of a.
- [48:59]
Rich Roll
Reclusive character, like after. What was it, like, 1968 or whenever. When that book came out, he was always. But he was living in Los Angeles.
- [49:06]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, he was always not reclusive, but he, you know, he occasionally would meet. Hollywood amused him, right? And so he would take meetings, which, of course, nothing ever came up. Fellini wanted to make a movie about. 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 were Florinda, Donna Grau and Tyche Abelard, two women that also had gone to UCLA and were also students of Don Juan Matis, Right. And had written books, Sorcerer's Crossing for Tysha, Being and Dreaming for Florinda. Then I didn't hear from anyone. You know, I had an interaction with Castaneda, who was hilarious to me in a contemporary way. You know, the person I compared him to was Orson Welles, who I met when I was driving a limousine. And Orson Welles was so fucking funny 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.
- [50:29]
Rich 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.
- [50:38]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah. The whole thing was a shock to my system. Then I didn't hear from anyone. And I had a dream 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.
- [51:03]
Rich Roll
I mean, that's almost out of one of your books.
- [51:05]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah.
- [51:07]
Rich Roll
I mean, for people that don't know, that's where CAA is now.
- [51:11]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, actually, this was pre caa, so these were these.
- [51:16]
Rich Roll
I mean, this is back then, before that.
- [51:18]
Bruce Wagner
But yes, you know, hopefully everything is out of my books.
- [51:22]
Rich Roll
The first AA meeting that I went to was in the basement of one of those towers.
- [51:28]
Bruce Wagner
Wow. Yeah, the basement.
- [51:30]
Rich Roll
Yeah. There was a windowless conference room on the ground because, you know, there's that subterranean wall there, like down there.
- [51:38]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah.
- [51:38]
Rich Roll
Anyway, go on. I don't want to interrupt it.
- [51:40]
Bruce Wagner
It's just like a church basement. Showbiz church basement. So I was failing at selling myself to the movies, Right. I'd had some.
- [51:52]
Rich Roll
This is Pre Wild Palms.
- [51:54]
Bruce Wagner
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 television arm, Right? So there they said, you should speak with Tracy Kramer. Now, Tracy Kramer was familiar to me because I went to 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, 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, and Castaneda was on time. And they sat next to each other. And Tracy was so. He knew the word 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 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. And then Tracy told me that he goes to these tensegrity classes. And at that point, I was married to Rebecca De Mornay, and we were invited 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 promulgate all kinds of gossipy, trolling terrors about Castaneda, which were manifestly untrue. It was something that was. The scent was so strong for me of his lineage, the Yaqui Indian lineage of sorcery, that I held on. You know, I held on. And I spoke with Leonard Cohen about this at a later date of the. You know, the slander and the insults that were hurled his way. And Leonard had this phrase that encapsulated it all. He called it the revenge of the practitioners. Right. You know, when Castaneda died, Florinda and Tysha 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? You know, so there's this conflated, this mystery about what happened was Salon.
- [55:56]
Rich Roll
There was some long article that sort of cast.
- [55:59]
Bruce Wagner
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. 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.
- [57:05]
Rich Roll
Enough, you know, to put a reductive, inelegant spin on Castaneda's core idea 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. What was the wisdom that you gleaned from this decade long tutelage?
- [57:36]
Bruce Wagner
Well, the acknowledgement of the effect of conditioning or the social order was. Was extravagantly clear and simple. But as it was presented, 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 nahual, which was the second attention, non ordinary reality, which is also the word.
- [58:11]
Rich Roll
You use to describe him. It's sort of a stand in for guru or sensei.
- [58:17]
Bruce Wagner
Well, yeah, I mean, we called him the nahual. And there were no rules in that world. There were no altars, or if there were, I would glance them in a closet that one of the women had. And they were rocks, they looked like solar systems, but there were no flowers, there were no guruisms. We talked about scent earlier. 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 his only desire was to be an agent of liberation. 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 sorcerer sees about here. And the assemblage point would move. It moved during drug use, it moved during madness, and it moved during sleep. So this idea of lucid dreaming became all the rage. And Carlos Castaneda had been told by Don Juan Matus, his teacher, to find your hands. This is the first, 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. 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. 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 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 Castaneda called the recapitulation, where you had in great detail, fastidious detail, re experienced all of those moments of your life from birth. Ultimately, you worked backwards, you know.
- [62:15]
Rich Roll
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- [65:31]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah, you would start with the sexual encounters, because those had the most kick, and 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, I like something with pepper in it. In terms of a cologne or perfume. It's meaningless. Castaneda's most misquoted sentences regarding the path of the heart. Right, you should always take the path 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.
- [66:39]
Rich Roll
But yet the warrior path is you still have to choose. And it's the warrior path because you choose knowing that it leads nowhere.
- [66:48]
Bruce Wagner
It was impeccable. You know, he would say that he talked about the figures. They're called chacmuls in South America. You'll have a figure in Mexico with a disk 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 echemedicians would say that these were discs involved in a sporting event. 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 the double. You know, we spend our entire lives trying to reunite with infinity and our double. And it was so poignant to me. So if you look at Castaneda and I think you look at my work, there's something 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, can be more complex than the non ordinary reality. So, like my experiences with the mushroom, and I did know 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.
- [68:53]
Rich Roll
And yet very popular with the psychonaut community.
- [68:56]
Bruce Wagner
Oh, yeah. I mean, for good reason. He was the person that opened the door, the doors of perception in that way for a generation. But for me, it was the poignance of that world that what he often referred to as ontological sadness of man, of man, the amoeba. And this is kind of what the Buddhists are talking about in that third realm of suffering where one experiences an almost existential or ontological sadness. These are all things that were described in the Yaqui Indian lineage of sorcery. And it felt familial to me, do you know? And not dysfunctionally familial, but magnificently familial.
- [69:58]
Rich Roll
You know, 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 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, plot lines, et cetera.
- [70:31]
Bruce Wagner
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, 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 kind of leapfrog that. But it's easier for me to come to a kind of silence now, and it's easier for me to feel nothing, in other words, no shame or guilt when I cannot. When I'm not writing, you know, I'm relatively happy until I'm not, which means I then have the flu of being called to do something else, you know, and it literally is a flu for me. It's just disgusting, really disgusting.
- [71:50]
Rich Roll
How does it come to you?
- [71:52]
Bruce Wagner
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 pre opic 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? I mean, I went from someone that was inordinately reviewed, you know, Michikakatani 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.
- [73:03]
Rich Roll
I should say, and I'm going to interrupt you just so the audience is acclimated. I just pulled up some of the blurbs that you've gotten. You know, I mean, it's pretty insane. The people that. That have incredible things to say about your writing, from Salman Rushdie to John Updike. I mean, Brett 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 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.
- [73:47]
Bruce Wagner
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. And to my 12 year old ears, Daddy. You know what I mean?
- [74:36]
Rich Roll
I found my new dad.
- [74:37]
Bruce Wagner
Why isn't Daddy. Why doesn't Daddy talk like that instead of drunkenly making sexual innuendos to me? You know what I mean?
- [74:45]
Rich Roll
Oh my God.
- [74:45]
Bruce Wagner
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 working as a consigliere editor at Arcade Books. And the I know close hand that the state of publishing and book reading is dismal. Is dismal. You know, there are of course always anomalies and always will be, but many writers who are reviewed in these really antique things like the New York Times or even the New Yorker sell 100 copies. 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 Entrekin saying that back in the day, if he got a writer on PBS or the COVID of the New York Times Book Review, those would move six to 7,000 copies. Yeah, de rigueur now three to four copies.
- [76:09]
Rich Roll
That's crazy.
- [76:11]
Bruce Wagner
It is crazy. So these things have an ebb and flow to it, but, you know, and.
- [76:17]
Rich Roll
Ebb is pretty insane, right? I mean, for decades now it has been in decline. You know, I think because, you know, kind of what I do, I'm more. I'm steeped in the nonfiction world. That seemed relatively healthy. It's fiction, it's novels. What is our cultural relationship to this art form? And has it been lost? Is it retrievable? I mean, this is something I talked about when I had James Fry here. I'm not old enough to remember some of those earlier memories that you have about the rock star status of people like Capote. But I am old enough to remember how sexy it was when Brett and McEnery, you know, were hanging out at Odeon. 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, had to do long form work in these publications that were voraciously read. Like this is 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 makes us feel connected to being human. But I don't know where we stand right now. With respect, like, when was the last Huge novel that came out. I mean, the closest thing I can remember is perhaps something Jonathan Fransen has done. But has there been anything in recent memory that has had the monoculture impact that. That not too long ago a great novel that would come along almost quarterly would do.
- [77:59]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah. You know, I would have to look. George Saunders did a book called Lincoln and the Bardo. But 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 you investigate and it's 3,500 copies.
- [78:22]
Rich Roll
Yeah, because we don't have a monoculture anymore because 20 million people aren't watching an episode of Gilligan's island anymore. We don't live in that world.
- [78:30]
Bruce Wagner
Tina Louise was at my bar mitzvah, by the way. I'm dead serious. At the Friars Club in Beverly Hills, five hours.
- [78:37]
Rich Roll
I just want you to drop every name and every person you've ever met, because you've literally met everyone. It's insane.
- [78:43]
Bruce Wagner
One quick thing before I start. I can drop names. We can just do a three minute, no questions, just names. 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 hacked screenwriter, I did that for movies, but books were inviolable for me. Never wrote for anyone but myself. Right, right. So you get to this idea of identity and is it a sad or terrible thing that books will disappear? You look at the transgressive, you ask the transgressive question. One thing that I've amused myself by is all the talk about AI Because I'm someone that believes that AI, in some iteration, whether it's near or distant future, will be able to write a book by Bruce Wagner that if I would read it now and some senility was around the corner, or even not that I would say, this 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 and 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, the destructivity of the self. Do you know what I mean? So here it is, 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 identity. I am a writer, you know, Castaneda said early on, he said, don't be Mr. Hollywood and be careful. And he would joke about himself wandering the quad at UCLA with, this is the teachings of Don Juan. You know, as an older man and an occasional student interested or acknowledgeable of his legendary status, he would make those kind of jokes. So. 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 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. 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. You know, the fires were a great lesson in that, you know, that decimated our city in the Palisades in Altadena after the initial shock of it. 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.
- [82:39]
Rich 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 we consider to be high art literature these days, there's your role as a participant in that ecosystem. Where do I stand in the pecking order and 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. Of is humanity better off with this art form or not, right? 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?
- [83:35]
Bruce Wagner
There's so much room to disparage, Rich.
- [83:37]
Rich Roll
Yeah, well, speaking of, I mean, 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. Yeah, you know, I mean, Amputation is the book we're talking about. It's your latest book.
- [84:05]
Bruce Wagner
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. I'm an Aries, so fire is where I live. I live in the furnace. And my desire was to write, to create a work of art about what had happened. Not a polemic, because I don't do that. I feel that when the moment an artist has politics, it's the death of his art or her art. That's me, how I approach things. Because this notion that you can change the course of human nature by a book, there's the fame. Leonardo da Vinci famously wanted to change the route of the Arno river, and it was an abysmal failure. So this idea that you can change the course of human nature or that your book will make a difference is a vanity, that is the architect of which is the self, you know, the fifth columnist, you know, the saboteur. So for me, the most transgressive thing is to stay absorbed and riveted by, and impassioned by the follies and the sanctities of. Of human nature, you know. So that book surprised me that I wrote it at all, because I was disgusted to use that word again with writing, you know, leave me alone, you know. But then I had the idea that I tricked my brain by saying that this will be a short book 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. And that was helpful to me, Rich, because I knew that I wasn't going to spend the next 18 months in a literal hell, you know, and then the book to me is very comic in many ways and ghoulish and 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. And the book was wonderful. 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 de Becker is a very close friend of mine. This was maybe 30 years ago. He was good friends with 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. Outside of London.
- [88:36]
Rich Roll
Outside of London.
- [88:36]
Bruce Wagner
And he had passed away by then and I spent just a lovely day there and I came across something, 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. 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 Shah, who had written maybe 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 felt that with amputation, I myself, the transgressive part of me after it went to the fire in that post ignal state that I called about earlier, had to find not meaning, but acceptance or acquiescence, not acquiescence in the pejorative sense that we might think of it. Castaneda used that word a lot. Acquiescence. For me, it has always been, and particularly in those experiences with psilocybin, when you're in position on the floor, not in submission, but in acquiescence to the divine, to infinity, to the unknown. The troika that Castanier talked about, which was another thing that I was possessed by to this moment, 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 the ultimate mysteries that we, we must abide. By whether we acknowledge them or not, you know?
- [91:27]
Rich Roll
Well, it's an assault on the ego that demands of us humility.
- [91:31]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah.
- [91:32]
Rich Roll
More than acquiescence, a deeper surrender and acceptance. And in thinking about amputation and trying to find acceptance and 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.
- [91:51]
Bruce Wagner
My.
- [91:54]
Rich Roll
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 all of these comedic aspects to it, but it's deeply despairing to me also, because the fire was a second chance 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 out of our own cycles and our egoic tendencies to serve each other in the way that we are actually capable of that fire.
- [92:43]
Bruce Wagner
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. 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. You know, for me, again, whether that what happened was criminal or, you know, why were the local fire trucks on the beach and the firemen were having enchiladas and said they had been told to stand down.
- [94:25]
Rich Roll
All of those things were the empty reservoir.
- [94:27]
Bruce Wagner
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.
- [95:00]
Rich Roll
In your books, including Amputation, you're always weaving real people into these narratives with your imagined characters. And Amputation, there's Stephen Colbert, there's Karen Bass, there's Timothee Chalamet's body double, Elizabeth Finch. Yeah, it makes it very fun to read 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 gonna pin Stephen Colbert under a tree and, you know, I'm just gonna go on and on and on about his Catholicism and obsession with Tolkien and, you know, and then to have him emerge and we see his interactions with his wife and all of this. Obviously this is a fictionalized, 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 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?
- [96:16]
Bruce Wagner
There is no chance of me going on.
- [96:18]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I don't think so.
- [96:19]
Bruce Wagner
No. I have encountered people that had issues, but nothing major. I've also mostly encountered people that were thrilled that they were mentioned.
- [96:37]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I'm sure people are campaigning to.
- [96:39]
Bruce Wagner
Be a character in your. The key thing is that I didn't go after Colbert. And in fact, Michael Douglas, during his cancer treatment, was a major character in Dead Stars. Right. I really came to have great sympathy and respect for Colbert in writing this book. So 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 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, the importance of love, etc. And. And yet his show had turned political, 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 for being the good Catholic or Christian with this entertainer Stephen Colbert, who 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, 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. So 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 addiction issues. Colbert has spoken very forthrightly about, not anywhere on the level of RFK junior 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, 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 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?
- [100:27]
Rich Roll
Yeah, there's an empathy as you're hoisting people on their petards. You are empathizing with their situation because there is the fatalism piece in that they are only who they only can be. 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. Yeah, there's a piece in that, I suppose.
- [101:00]
Bruce Wagner
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 a handful of people who have fallen, tripped over something or fainted and fallen and are quadriplegics now. Some, I would say most have accepted what has happened to them, at least outwardly, with incredible grace, which is a movement from one dream into the next dream. So these are people that have achieved a kind of enlightenment. Because I've heard enlightenment defined as when a glorious or wonderful thing happens or a tragic and terrible thing happens, one remains indifferent. That doesn't mean one doesn't feel a sense of joy or a sense of rage or depression. But ultimately, one sees that it is all we're living in, a story. So you've gone from one dream to the next, from one story to the other. The most poignant thing was Hanif Qureshi is a writer who did My Beautiful Laundrette. And the Buddha of the Suburbs was a novel he wrote. A wonderful writer. I never met him, but he was in Italy some years ago on vacation with his girlfriend, and he fainted and fell and suddenly was in hospital in Italy for months, quadriplegic. Finally, with great difficulty, logistical difficulty, moved back to London, where he lives now. And I joined the website that he had created, where you could give a little bit of money or whatever you could afford. 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, 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 reveled in. The piano, the typewriter, the computer. Everything is going to go away, you know, And I don't say that grimly, 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, 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. 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 being can die. One is like a child, one is like a beggar, and the other is like a lion, right? 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 are. They sustain me, you know, these moments of poetry and beauty. That's why Castaneda's work meant so much to me. There was such poetry to it, such agonizing tenderness to it. It. You know, and people think of Castaneda and it's. It's, you know, the drugs, the preparation of the drugs, you know. But of course, he's. 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 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 neck 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 from language and fiction is truly.
- [107:24]
Rich Roll
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 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 kind of consciousness beyond our brains, insistence on individuating it is available. And that is the transcendence that you're talking about. That's the journey home, that we're all.
- [108:34]
Bruce Wagner
On the journey to. Ixlan, 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.
- [109:04]
Rich Roll
Oh, yeah, we talked about that.
- [109:05]
Bruce Wagner
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. Commercial aircraft, private aircraft, and some. Half of them die. Some three die, you know, 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. 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, 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 Ixlan, that title was so evocative for me. For that reason. Castaneda was told by one of the Nawals in the book that Hollywood is your Ixlan because Castaneda went to Hollywood High and grew up around there. Hollywood is your Ixlan. You will always be returning, but you will never arrive, you know? 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 once we came, which was. Is infinity, you know, that reunion with the, the double that we were talking about, you know.
- [111:06]
Rich 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 the kind of more tactile connection that that creates with your own mortality.
- [111:19]
Bruce Wagner
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 book sales? No, I, you know, it's an interesting time for me. 71, you know, you find that group of people that was, oh, you're young, you know, 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 dominoes 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, 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. Father. It's all of fantasy construction that keeps us upright in many ways, depending upon our disposition and our mood. So my mood is labile. It's like that second mode of suffering the Buddhists talk about where I can be ecstatic 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. It's a kind of madness. It's kind of mad that we've lasted as long as we've lasted without being straight jacketed and sedated.
- [113:48]
Rich Roll
When you were talking to Brett, the subject of David lynch came up and Brett asked you something like, what do you make of the outpouring of love and support? Like you said, you were talking about legacy a few minutes ago. Like, legacy, who care, Whatever. But we did see such an incredible cultural moment of reverence for this man and this artist. And I think he asked you, what do you make of that? And I was reflecting on that. And I think a big part of it is that his refusal to compromise and his incredible fidelity to, like, what moved him and his insistence upon ensuring that everything he did was a perfect reflection of his intention is inspiring. And I think it's rare. And 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 when I think of your work, I see the same in you, Bruce. Like, you are insistent upon your art being your way and 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, you know, you are an example of an artist fully expressed to me.
- [115:38]
Bruce Wagner
Well, I appreciate that and 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 a event for Phil Stutz.
- [116:03]
Rich Roll
Right. And was it that long ago? A relationship with Time? I don't think it was.
- [116:08]
Bruce Wagner
No. I don't know.
- [116:09]
Rich Roll
Maybe nine months ago.
- [116:11]
Bruce Wagner
Was it nine?
- [116:11]
Rich Roll
I don't know. Yeah.
- [116:13]
Bruce Wagner
I don't know. We could find out anyway.
- [116:15]
Rich Roll
Jamie would know.
- [116:16]
Bruce Wagner
Yeah. But when I learned in a thumbnail about your journey, right, that is what Castanedo 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? So that I say that in terms of any artistic endeavor, it's not just fiction, because it's any. Any endeavor of deep and uncompromising transformation becomes an artistic act. Do you know? So that, to me, was something 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, 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 trying to say is, is I don't have this high opinion of art anymore. It's simply the way I express myself. And I like the scent or expression of other artists, but there's art in everything. I remember. There's. In one of Castaneda's books, one of the late books, at one point, he talks about Don Juan Matus, his teacher, telling him 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 says, 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 Hollywood Boulevard 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 will be what you hear when you leave this world. So I experienced one of those events. I was with my goddaughter, who was about 4, 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 la, 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. 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. She comes out and we go to the old section of the farmer's market, and it was Christmas time, 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 neighborhoody and folksy and some ancient Beverly Hills. Part of me was saying, I wish she could be seen 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. 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 poignance and sadness of walking this tough planet, you know, this tough, fierce, beautiful planet, you know?
- [121:18]
Rich Roll
Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, it's good to talk to you.
- [121:24]
Bruce Wagner
I'm really happy to talk to you. And I wish I had your. Your. Your intent and your. Your looks.
- [121:35]
Rich Roll
I wish I had your way with words. Will you be my mentor?
- [121:40]
Bruce Wagner
We'll do the. That swa. I'll be Lindsay Lohan. You'll be Lindsay Lohan. We'll both be Lindsay Lohan.
- [121:46]
Rich Roll
We already are. Right?
- [121:49]
Bruce Wagner
There you go.
- [121:50]
Rich Roll
Until next time. Thanks, Bruce.
- [121:52]
Bruce Wagner
Thank you, Rich.
- [121:53]
Rich Roll
Peace. 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 richroll.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 got to 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 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 richroll.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@rich roll.com today's show is produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo 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 Prior and of course, our theme music, as always, was created, created all the way back in 2012 by my stepsons Tyler and Trapper Pyatt, along with their cousin Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, and I'll see you back here soon. Peace Plants Namaste.
- [123:48]
Bruce Wagner
It.