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Podcast Episode Notes: Unmasking Shadows with Chuck Palahniuk
Podcast Information
- Podcast Title: The James Altucher Show
- Episode Title: Unmasking Shadows with Chuck Palahniuk | Fight Clubs, Killer Families, and Deep Reflections
- Description: James Altucher interviews Chuck Palahniuk about his new book, "Not Forever, But for Now," exploring themes of darkness, humor, and the intersection of writing and life.
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Key Themes and Discussions
- The Nature of Book Tours
- Chuck Palahniuk discusses his extensive book tour.
- The effectiveness of book tours in the modern age.
- Personal anecdotes of loyal fans, showcasing the connection between author and audience.
- Transgressive Fiction
- Definition: Stories that challenge societal norms and explore taboo subjects.
- Palahniuk's new book is described as transgressive, focusing on uncomfortable themes that mainstream outlets often avoid.
- Importance of books in delivering complex and dark stories that are often omitted from other media formats.
- The Role of Humor and Absurdity
- Discussion of how humor can emerge from dark themes, likening it to cozy mystery novels juxtaposing horror with a lack of emotional response.
- The absurdity of characters responding to violence and horror in a detached manner, similar to reactions in movies and thrillers.
- Writing as a Reflection of Life
- Writing as a means to safely explore personal and societal issues, emotions, and experiences.
- Palahniuk shares his personal struggles with feelings of inadequacy and how they influence his writing, drawing parallels to the characters he creates.
- Personal Development and Reflection
- Exploration of life stages marked by feelings of inadequacy and the impact of family dynamics.
- Conversations delve into how personal experiences shape one's artistic voice.
- Cultural Commentary
- Examination of societal issues, including the impact of violence in media and its normalization.
- The conversation touches on themes of empire, legacy, and family businesses, drawing connections between personal stories and broader societal narratives.
- Metaphor as a Literary Tool
- The use of metaphor in literature to address painful truths without direct confrontation.
- Discussion of authors like Shirley Jackson and Ira Levin who employed metaphor to tackle complex social issues.
- Writing Style and Influences
- Palahniuk reflects on his writing style, contrasting maximalism with minimalism.
- He mentions influences from authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, emphasizing their use of science fiction as a vehicle for deeper themes.
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Key Takeaways
- Connection between Author and Reader: Palahniuk's loyal fanbase signifies the enduring impact of authentic storytelling.
- The Necessity of Transgressive Literature: There is a vital need for literature that challenges norms and speaks to human experiences often left unexamined.
- Coping Through Writing: Writing provides both the author and the reader a space to process complex emotions and societal issues.
- The Power of Metaphor: Metaphor allows writers to safely explore real-life fears and anxieties, often leading to stronger emotional resonances with readers.
- Cultural Reflection: The discussion serves as a reminder of the responsibility writers have to portray life’s complexities while engaging their audience.
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Conclusion This episode of "The James Altucher Show" delves deep into the mind of Chuck Palahniuk, bringing forth rich discussions around writing, life, and the societal implications of storytelling. The interplay between humor, darkness, and transgressive themes creates a thought-provoking narrative that resonates with listeners long after the conversation ends.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Look, as a manager of people, as an employer, as an entrepreneur, and as even an investor in startups, I can tell you the most important thing for your business is the quality of the quality of people. you hire. The best part is that great candidates are already on LinkedIn. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. And I will tell you that the great thing about LinkedIn is that you're not just looking at random people. You're able to see the people who your friends and trusted peers and colleagues who they trust and who they've hired in the past and who they recommend.
0:42And hiring doesn't have to be complicated. Realistically, when you have a business to run, you don't want to spend hours on hiring. You want to hire the right person as quickly as possible. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests immediately 25 great big candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find the top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Altachirk. Post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
1:24It's always great having Chuck Palahniuk. We always go much deeper than I always expect to go, and it's always great. I always think about it for many months or years afterwards. And such a pleasure. He's the author of Fight Club. He's the author of a new book, not forever, but for now, a great new novel. And we talk about writing and life and the relationship between the two. And then the specifics of it. We talk about everything. So here it is.
1:57This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. this is the james altucher show
2:14well chuck where are you right now are you in organ i am in portland oregon are you doing a book tour for this book oh i'm doing the mother of all book tours do book tours work you know they they used to do the purpose of book tours was that they got you local promotion and even if you only got like six people in the store, you got to do the daytime television show locally. You got to do all the radio shows. The newspaper would cover you. You got all the local market. You got dumped with free publicity. And nowadays there is no coverage for books. So book tours are kind of useless, except for mine, because mine draw like a thousand people.
2:53That's good. Well, I think you, more than many authors, you have a very loyal audience. They stick with, they follow you. Well, you know, the shocking part is I first met them when they were in high school. And then I met them when they were in college. And then I met them, they brought their baby. And now they're bringing their teenager, which is really fucking depressing. And the teenagers, do they have a clue? No, the teenagers love the books. It's the one thing that they share in common with their parents. Oh, that's good. This is what I'm wondering. Just in general, books, and not airport books, like let's say thrillers that you could read on a flight from New York to California, books other than that, are they in trouble, do you think, because of TikTok and YouTube?
3:48I mean, people can scroll forever on TikTok and be just as happy. it seems. Yeah, but you know, books give a depth of experience and they give a kind of, they continue to give stories that Netflix is never going to touch and that studios are never going to touch. So I think that especially transgressive stories can only be delivered through books. And describe transgressive. Anything in which nice people who read The New Yorker do not want to hear about. So we're talking about not forever, but for now, and I'll I'll mention it more in the intro, but this book is definitely transgressive. It's not going to be in the New Yorker, any sections from this book.
4:27And it's not going to be on NPR. You know, NPR is not a place for transgressive. So in this book in particular, it's about two little boys who kind of have an obsessive, incestuous relationship. and they watch nature films, which is a thinly veiled metaphor for online pornography. Their entire life is nature films. And they eat nothing but sweets, which is a metaphor for drugs. And somehow they have managed to squander about 30 years living in their nursery, which is a lovely reference to the woman in the Hauntingham Hill House, who ages 30 or 40 years from a child to an old woman and eventually dies in Hill House.
5:16So, like, this is, I don't want to say this is completely different from other books you've written, but of course it is. But how did you come up with this? Like, in the Welsh setting and the idea of a family of professional killers, like, what was kind of made you wake up one day and say, this is the book I have to write? have you ever lived any place where it snowed and snowed and snowed and you were stuck in the house for three weeks uh yeah kind of like you know i've lived i lived most of my life in new york and the area around there i lived in ithaca new york for a while and and that was very snowy i uh i got a stack of cozy mysteries from barnes and noble these mysteries where somebody has their throat cut at a bake sale in an english village and a dog solves a mystery or the Vicar Solves a Mystery or the Little Miss Marple.
6:11And so I read all of these thinking, what is the appeal? And I was kind of disgusted because they were all the same. But I was kind of charmed because there was a kind of autistic disconnect between the horror that was depicted, somebody getting their throat cut or their head bashed in during church rumble sale and nobody reacting to it emotionally. Everyone reacting to it as if it was just a new board game, something that they all had to rush to solve the mystery. So this complete flattened emotional affect sort of made it very funny for me. So I thought I would sort of take that lack of reaction to death and horror and write kind of the mother of all cozy mysteries.
6:58I feel like that lack of emotion to murder and horror happens a lot in movies and TV. So every superhero movie, like the big bad villain comes in and there's buildings that are crashing and planes going down. A lot of people die and you never hear about all the funerals and the sadness and the pain that's been caused. And this happens in every single movie. And like kids are just waiting for like, you know, Spider-Man to like wrap up the guy in a web and Iron Man to say something witty. But like there's a lot of death and sadness that must be happening in the real world. And you're right. Like it happens even in like these thrillers or mystery novels.
7:46Like everybody will be dying in some town and people will be focused on, well, what's the clue to solve this as opposed to going to funerals and being really upset that their best friends died? Well, and also so much of it is what I think of as tableau horror, like in Da Vinci Code. We don't actually see the people slaughtered. We come across these elaborate tableaus in which the body has been arranged in this overdramatic way. And the archbishop is sort of strung up by his entrails. So it's a suggestion of violence and pain without us actually having to witness it. Yeah. So it's almost like, you know, on the one hand, I think fiction in general provides a safe way to experience the horrors and pains of life.
8:33You could read about someone's marriage and divorce. You could read about someone's death. You could read about someone's search for meaning and you don't have to actually experience it yourself. You could live it through somebody else. And then to take it one step further in these very graphic thriller stories, like let's say the Da Vinci Code, it's almost like a safe way to experience that extreme violence. Like we have that craving for the extreme, the transgressive, but we don't want to admit it. So it gives us this safe path to have those emotions. Do you think in your book, you're kind of making fun of that or in this book, what are you doing related to that?
9:09In a way, I am making fun of it, just making fun of that form where, you know, horror happens and it happens off screen. And then it's immediately turned into a kind of game that has to be solved. I'm also thinking of books like, do you remember The Alienist? Yeah, Caleb Carr. I've had Caleb Carr on the podcast, actually. Yeah. You know, I just forgot about that until now. I had him on in like 2016. So it is male child sex workers who are slaughtered. And we never see them slaughtered. We always find them on top of the Brooklyn Bridge with their entrails and their organs arranged in some cryptic pattern.
9:48And so in a way, it's a huge cheat because we are seeing the suggestion of incredible violence done to children. But we are always seeing it after the fact. So even though it purports to be more gruesome or a gruesome transgressive thing, it is not because we're only seeing the after effects. It's like a reaction shot. We don't see the violence. We see people's reaction to the violence. Now, you know, with Kalab Kar, I wonder for him if he's also finding a safe way to experience these emotions personally. So for instance, and I apologize to Cal Bacar if I'm not recommending, remembering exactly everything we discussed seven years ago, but I think he had suffered abuse as a child.
10:38And so he didn't want to have children because he felt like that sort of passes from generation to generation. And I wonder if he was himself finding kind of a safe way to deal with these emotions inside of himself. And so, and then the question is for you, to what extent in books ranging from Fight Club to this book, and to what extent are you playing out emotions that you feel you can't experience in real life? For me, it's really super easy. And that the two little boys feel enormously inadequate. They feel enormously kind of rejected by their parents and by society because they are kind of, they call themselves pre-males.
11:23that their father has disappeared very early in their childhood, and they've had kind of no access to becoming adults. The metaphor that they have attached to is the kind of fetal joy that comes out of the kangaroo's vagina and has to climb up the outside of the kangaroo's fur and ideally get into the pouch, the marsupial pouch, where it can complete its development. But there's always the danger that the joey is going to fall off and just fall into the Australian outback and die in the dust. And that the mother can't help it and that the father's not there and this poor little just mass of cells has to do this impossible task.
12:12And so these little boys find themselves isolated and forced to do this impossible task of trying to become adults. So they are, yeah, it's a huge book about inadequacy. And at what times in your life have you felt inadequate? Oh, my God. You know, I think about the age of three or four. However, when you're same-sex attracted and your dad realizes, oh, my God, it's going to be a fag. And the dad distances himself from the infant fag because the dad has no idea how to deal with this thing. And so the dad has just got to get out of the picture. It's like, I can't deal with this. I have no idea what this thing is going to be.
13:06And so the dad disappears. And so that is kind of very much the case of Cecil and Otto, is that they sort of have internalized the sense that they are despised and that they have no way of sort of completing their adulthood. And in what sense did you have a hard time completing your adulthood? I'm not trying to be all, you know, Sigmund Freud here, but, you know, clearly there's a connection that you brought up that you're exploring here. You know, a lot of it is just floundering around. You have no idea what to do and you kind of distract yourself. You're just trying to get from day to day without dealing with any of the issues until things kind of come to a head, perhaps usually late in life.
13:55And then you take all the wrong steps. Do you think of, oh, was it Sebastian, the character in Suddenly Last Summer? At the very end of the play, when he's confronted by this enormous sort of mess that he's made of his life, he's finally going to try to resolve the situation. That leads to his destruction. Now, you had success fairly early on with Fight Club. And, you know, since then, do you feel like, oh, a better sense of belonging? Like maybe the father wasn't there, but now you have this community of writers and readers that love you and kind of give you more of a feeling of, oh, I've made it.
14:36I've succeeded despite the missing father, despite the disaffected mother or whatever it was. You know, that's the only reason why I could have written this book. This is the kind of book that you only write from a place of eventual safety, whether it's nothing left to lose or whether it's a kind of a stable place where I have some resources. But I could never have written this book at the beginning. In a way, this book is a kind of a completion and a continuance of Fight Club, because the two little boys, the older boy is very much like Tyler Durden, and the younger boy is very much like the witnessing character of the narrator in fight club right it's very much parallel to that except to more of an extreme like like people won't emulate these two characters i don't think but fight club somehow people emulated it like fight clubs actually started because fight club uh presented a kind of activity that could be replicated the fight clubs themselves and they kind of replic they They presented an activity in Project Mayhem that people could replicate as a means of kind of being with each other and exploring these issues, whether they fought each other or whether they just did these huge outdoor public pranks.
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17:59Have you ever thought about writing a kind of, let's call it typical coming of age type novel that's really about where you came from and who you are and why you are who you are? I can't imagine wasting my time on writing such a novel. I would read it. That would be great to see your style in your world. I think Tobias Wolfe has already written that novel. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people, I guess, have, but everybody's got their own take on it. You know what this book reminds me of? Have you ever read this author, Anderson Prunty? Mm-mm. He has a book called Fuckness. and uh the auto character sort of reminds me of a character in this book who just really can't fit in at all and has this life of despair and what he calls fuckness and uh and stranger and stranger things happen uh in in the novel i think i think you would like it it's like a a strange kind of style but when you say like this couldn't have been written before do you think if you were unknown would a publisher publish this book uh right now in at this point in history probably not but maybe 20 years ago maybe 25 years ago yeah i feel like 25 years ago so like mid 90s i feel like from the mid 80s to the mid 90s there was this kind of acceptable indie book scene within the major publishers so when you had things like the vintage books and american psycho and and jay mcinerney stuff and i don't know there were a lot of there were a lot of novelists who i feel random house and others were taking a chance on and train train spotting marabou stork nightmares all of irving oh yeah yeah yeah how how much of a influence was was welsh uh you know he was a huge influence because Because I think for a lot of people, American Psycho was too, too much.
20:05But Trainspotting was just enough. So it kind of hit that sort of happy medium that made transgressive, you know, bearable. Yeah, it's interesting because American Psycho, I would say part of the appeal of reading that was, and not only American Psycho, but also Less Than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis, there's like no emotion in the main characters. So you don't get this feeling that, you know, like we do with a superhero movie, that there's all this pain and nobody feels anything. It's like the main character himself doesn't really feel anything. And we, the reader, are aware that's a problem. But in Trainspotting, it's interesting because the dialogue is so realistic and you really feel that not only these people do feel things, but it's like a different sort of feelings than quote unquote regular people have.
20:59And the point of view jumps around so that you have, it's kind of diluted between several characters and you're not always inside Patrick Bateman's head. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like the first three books by Breddy Sinalis I really enjoyed, which was Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, American Psycho. And then after that, I just sort of lost – I kind of lost the thread of his books. But what other influences from that period do you think you have? You know, very much the minimalists because a lot of the minimalists kind of do that trick, but they do it in a kinder, gentler way. people like Mark Richard and Amy Hempel, where they will present the story without sort of dictating emotion.
21:44The characters won't have an emotional reaction, even though they're being abused by their father or they're watching their best friend die. And their lack of expressing emotion within the story forces the reader to carry the entire building accumulation of emotion and pain. And so by the end of a story like in the garden where Al Jolson, in the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried, you find yourself weeping and you're not really sure why you're weeping so hard. And it's because you've been forced to carry all of the pain that the narrator hasn't expressed. Yeah, that's so interesting. I never thought of minimalism in that way, but it's not only minimalism of language, it's minimalism of emotion.
22:29And we've of course spoken about dennis johnson before and his collection of stories jesus son but uh even in the very first story in that collection car crash while hitchhiking all these horrific horrible things happen and the main character's reaction or and the main character is called fuckhead same i'm saying the word fuck a lot in this podcast but uh uh the main character has almost no emotional reaction he's even surprised that he addresses the reader directly in the in the last sentence even surprised anybody expects emotion from him it's as if he doesn't really know how to do it yeah and that's very much a kind of a combination suggestion of being on drugs but also being a kind of callow young person so it's a perfect combination to to to do that kind of story yeah and it's interesting how that you know that's a collection of connected short stories and by the end the main character is more sober he's like in a rehab beverly home right but and and the stories are less disjointed.
23:30They have a more of a narrative, but he still has kind of this emotionless reaction to many things. Like he's a voyeur without necessarily pondering the ethics of it. He just wants to see something happen. But he's also learning in those scenes where he's the voyeur through the bathroom window. He's not just witnessing the naked woman in the shower. He's also witnessing the act of forgiveness between the husband and wife as the wife, Like as the husband washes the wife's feet, he is kind of learning what it is to be a human being. And that's where it becomes so redemptive in a gorgeous, understated way.
24:07But I wouldn't say you're a minimalist in that way though. I mean, in many ways, particularly in language, you're almost a maximalist. And here the stories are just dripping with every angle and every possible scenario that these characters could get involved in. Like it's, you're pushing the limit of the reader and the characters. And so you're inspired by The Minimalist, but how does it show up, let's say, in this book? Well, to me, minimalism isn't necessarily about language itself. For me, minimalism is like when you think about a play. A play has to keep its setting limited. It has to keep its time limited.
24:48People are only going to sit on their butts for two hours, which is why I haven't seen Oppenheimer yet. And it has to keep its characters limited. It has to keep its objects limited. So a play escalates very quickly because it has so few things to work with. And that's how I see minimalism. I see it as a Skipper's seafood commercial where you've got to show Skipper's seafood in as many different ways as possible in 30 seconds. So you're not going to throw in a picture of a horse. You're going to throw in just everything that says skippers in as many different forms as possible. So in minimalism, I see the themes, the characters, the settings, the objects as all being very limited, like in a play, so that the story itself escalates very quickly.
25:40Right. And then I guess also there's an extent of mystery. Like you're going to always have, there's a lot of things that you know that you keep hidden from the reader and the reader is maybe guessing, but, but, but gradually figuring out this world that, that you're putting them in. Right. And also introducing them in a kind of wrinkled chronology. So we get a glimpse of something and then much, for example, the nanny that fell down the stairs and wrung her neck. And then later we find out that how she fell down the stairs and rung her neck. And then we find out more or less why she fell down the stairs and someone rung her neck.
26:22So the story is hinted at, but then over the course of the entire book, this very small subplot is fleshed out. And so I've never done this before, but it was a blast to do it this time. and to force the reader to assemble all of those out-of-order details and to suffer the pain without me having to dictate it. It's interesting. You say you've never done it before. I feel like Fight Club was a little bit disjointed in that way. Fight Club feels like a walk in the park compared to this one. This one is really a Gordian knot. Yeah, because Fight Club still exists in what I'll call our world. Yeah.
27:04Whereas this one, it does exist in our world technically, but somehow it's not. These are characters we really wouldn't have a chance of encountering in the real world, in my world, for instance. Yeah. Boy, even the language, just the language of this one is so different for me. Just to sit down and just kind of put on this entire wardrobe of somebody else's language was a blast for me. I've never had so much fun adopting all of these Brit phrases and studying language to figure out what the phrases actually meant and the purposes they served. I felt like I was writing Clockwork Orange. Yeah, it felt like you were at this one more than just about any other book I've read from you.
27:52This one felt like it was a party for you. Like every time you sat down, you were like, how can I make this as fun as possible, this chapter? And also heartbreaking. This book had the most heartbreaking things I've ever put into a book. Chapter 43, where they go out and they're going to pick up some low-class street guy, some guy with absolutely no future, but who just happens to be like 19 years old. They're going to pick him up. They're going to abuse him. They're going to dump him. And that scene where they're preying on this kid's loneliness, it was just heartbreaking for me. And is that because, like, what did you picture when you were writing that?
28:33Were you the 19-year-old? Like, what was the heartbreaking part for you? I was both the characters. And it really put me in touch with when you're same-sex attracted and you are that age and you're not out and you're living in a place where you don't have the freedom to be anything. and you will do absolutely anything for any predator if it means not being lonely for a moment. And you will do anything that kind of deadens the fantastic loneliness and isolation that you feel. And you will tell yourself that it's love or that it's emotional connection when in fact it's not. It's just a kind of respite from pain and loneliness.
29:15And so that is so present in that scene. And in a way, I kind of saw that very much in the Dahmer series that Netflix brought out. They really kind of brought to the fore the enormous pain of loneliness and what it will drive people to do. Where did you grow up again? I don't know. I grew up in a little town called Burbank, Washington, which was about 300 people on the Snake River in eastern Washington state. and do you think when when you started writing it was almost like you're sending this uh message in a bottle out to the world to try to find others who can connect with your writing i.e connect with you do you feel that was a an instinct that got you started writing you know it's never been a kind of attempt to connect it's been an attempt to kind of analyze my feelings and to choose the ones that still seem valid.
30:09Like in Fight Club, you know, I really had to make fun of the fact that I thought that furniture would make me an adult, that I thought having a good condominium or having a good car would make me an adult. So I really had to kind of look at all the fallacies of my life. It's never been about connecting. It's been about kind of dissecting my life and making fun of the broken parts, the fake parts. It's funny. I wonder if a lot of people go through that. For me, I thought when I could afford my own VCR, if people don't know what a VCR is, it's a video cassette recorder. I won't explain. But when I could afford my own VCR, that's when I felt like I made it to adulthood.
30:56And I think if you're really honest about expressing those fallacies and making fun of yourself, then you do inadvertently connect because you provide other people with the opportunity to do that, to express whether it's a feeling that they never feel like they grew up or that they maybe spend a lot too much time watching nature films on Pornhub. You provide that opportunity for other people to say, oh my gosh, me too. And to not feel bad about it, but to laugh about it. If you were to rank someone's prospects in writing, It seems like not necessarily an ability with language, although that's extremely important, but that ability you just mentioned to be able to find where your pain was, where you went wrong, and to be able to almost laugh about it without arrogance.
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31:46I feel that's a strong part of every good writer. Well, I think it's a little more difficult when I don't have children. So I'm not going to see their developmental stages. And so I'm not going to be sort of automatically reminded of decisions I made at those stages. So for me, it's a little bit more haphazard. And things like watching Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom and revisiting the enormous terror that I felt as a child when I wasn't sure whether the baby fawn was going to be destroyed by the tribe of baboons. getting in touch with those and then putting them on the page and seeing that those scenes also trigger other people who are also as children terrified of seeing that baby animal destroyed that is what i do because i don't have kids i can watch do you ever regret the not having kids Oh, geez, no.
32:50I would have been – this is a generalization that might not be the case, but I am such an obsessive writer that I think I would have made a lousy parent. I mean, I'm a really good dog parent. My dog has a great life. My long series of dogs have all had great lives, but dogs are not kids. and I would have been one of those writer parents whose kids suffer. Yeah. When I was younger, I never wanted to have kids, but of course, one thing happens after another and I have two biological kids, three stepkids. And so now I have a whole coven of kids. Do you recognize when they go through a developmental stage and they sort of are thwarted or stopped by something?
33:45Do you recognize the moment that you were in that stage? Oh, absolutely. And it's so painful because you can't give them really any advice. Because if you remember when you were at those stages, you're so filled with those young emotions that words are just meaningless. Like they cannot combat all the hormones and emotions that are happening inside your brain and body. and when they were born, I was really sad, not because I didn't want to have kids, but because I knew eventually they would go through some of the things that I've been through. And it's just, I was horrible imagining these little babies would one day experience those things.
34:27What about in seeing them go through this, those stages, has it allowed you to kind of recalibrate your life from decisions that you made at those stages? I don't know. I don't think so. Because I think I would have made mistakes no matter what. And I think I would have regretted them no matter what, even though I see that they're common things through them. But like, imagine the things you went through. Like, do you have any regrets in life? Do you wish any part of your life were different? You know, I really wish that I had made the time as a child to sit down and spend more time just talking with my older relatives.
35:07even back then our lives were so full of distraction and we would sit with the television and the television would hold everyone's attention that I never really engaged with my older relatives in a task. I could have sat down and helped them do something and that would have given us the opportunity for me to learn what their lives had been. So in a way, I have no idea who they were or where they came from. It's funny how now that won't be the case as much for our great, great, great grandkids because of social media. They'll see all the dumb, stupid things we were doing all the time. It's all documented.
35:47Like, I wish I could see my great, great, great grandfather's TikTok videos, but they don't, they didn't exist. I really hope that's the case.
36:12This is a weird question, but do you ever wish that you hadn't been born same-sex attracted? No, never. it just seems like something that was just so much a part of me from such a young age that I cannot imagine my life you know for a long time I tried to be attracted to women and I dated and I had sexual responses and I tried to pursue that but ultimately it was just so tortuous it was unpleasant for me it was unpleasant for the women and so it just would have been a disaster for everyone. At what age did you sort of like own it that this is who I am? Probably at 12 or 13. But even after that though, you still try to have relations with women and so on?
37:09Oh, at least through the age of 18 or 19, yeah. And so when I say own it, when did you finally say, look, I'm not going to do that anymore. This is who I am. Forget it. When I realized that I was just screwing up everybody's lives, you know, I was screwing up the lives of these beautiful young women I was with. I was screwing up my life. I was misleading everybody. Yeah. So it was just, I was causing nothing but suffering for people. That's an interesting way to put it. See, that's why I think a novel about your, you know, kind of a somewhere between novel and narrative nonfiction about your experience would be so fascinating.
37:55I would read that novel. You know, I am so much an advocate for metaphor. You read Valley of the Dolls, right? Yeah. Yeah, I love Valley of the Dolls, actually. I adore Valley of the Dolls. And when it came out, people really crucified Jackie Suzanne. And they said, what you write about that Tony Polar going into the institution and having this progressive brain disease and becoming a vegetable catatonic. And what you write about breast cancer, that's all exploitive. It's crude and exploitive. And Jackie Suzanne, you're a monster. but the truth is that Jackie Suzanne had a severely developmentally damaged child that she visited on a weekly basis in in a care home and that she struggled with breast cancer most of her adult life and it eventually killed her and so in the movie when we see in the day room of the asylum, where we see Patty Duke's character sort of stagger across the day room and embrace Tony Polar's character.
39:10What we're seeing is Jackie Suzanne embracing her severely damaged child at Willowbrook. And yeah, it looks like schlock, but it is so based on her life. It is still really powerful. It's what she was trying to express about her own life. And she just maybe wasn't the greatest writer to do so. But I still think that that kind of personal pain is better expressed in fiction, where other people can attach to it in a non-threatening way. They can pretend that it's just a made-up story. And it's not just exclusively the experience of Jackie Suzanne or Chuck Palahniuk. I guess it's what we were referring to earlier.
40:03Like, what is the safe way to experience some of these painful emotions? And not because you're trying to make it as soft as possible, but because you want people to experience those emotions and not leave the writing because it's too hard for them. Right. You want to charm them because first and foremost, these are people who are spending their spare money and their spare time to consume this thing. And if they know that they're going to be spending their money and their time consuming a painful story, you know, why? Nobody wants to spend their downtime reading about pain. But if you can give them Rosemary's Baby and not say you're going to be reading a story about thalidomide, about deformed children, because mothers are being given these cakes and these drinks and nobody's explaining anything until the baby is born with these claw-like hands and feet.
41:03No, nobody's going to sit down and say, oh yeah, I want to spend all my off time reading about deformed babies and chemicals approved by German drug manufacturers. No, no, it's got to be rosemary's baby is that what rosemary's baby was really about yeah i i would i love rosemary's baby for the religious aspect i would bet everything because all throughout it it is thalidomide and it is about how the the booties are being uh crocheted in such a way that they they look like they're being made for claws and the claws very much sort of the trademark of a child suffering from thalidomide sickness. So I really think that that's what Ira Levin got away with and that he could never overtly state because nobody was going to say, oh great, a thalidomide novel.
42:00Nobody was going to read that. Nobody was going to publish that. But that's the horror that we were reacting to that we were not aware of. Wow. I have never thought of it that way. And I've read and reread and also seen the movie a bunch of times i never thought of it that way but you're probably right and it was around that that time also like the late 60s when he when he wrote that and another thing is people had such a strong anger reaction to shirley jackson's the lottery when it came out in the new yorker and subscriptions canceled and people railing saying this woman is the devil how dare she published this horrible story that seems so Norman Rockwell on the front end, but ends up with such fantastic violence of this woman being stoned to death by her own children.
42:53And how dare the New Yorker publish this thing. But when you consider the time it came out in, I would bet, I would bet, and for a short period of time, I was in possession of Shirley Jackson's ashes. Her cremains were sent to me by her daughter. But I would bet that that story was Shirley Jackson's incredibly smart way of saying, hey, let's look at the draft lottery during the Korean War. And if you just happen to get the right number and your number gets called, you are going to be destroyed in a fantastically brutal painful way and nobody's going to give a shit. And that's what we have to do to keep our society up and running.
43:40And nobody is going to sort of in the moment stop and protest this. They're going to let you just have your number called and tough luck. Sucks to be you. You're going to go step on a mortar and die and be blown to bits. And people do not want to think about that. They do not want to, in their comfortable lives here at home, they do not want to think that these nice kids are just going to go and be slaughtered because of a stupid number that got pulled out of a stupid thing on television, I believe. Wow. You're totally right. You're blowing my mind here. I never thought about the lottery that way.
44:24But if you think about it, it's a topic that was on everyone's mind. And because she used the power of metaphor, she's able to take it to such an extreme and yet touch this emotion we're all feeling probably right then when she wrote it in during that time and make it extreme again. And so much of the rage that people felt was a fantastic shame. They did not want to be confronted with the fact that their comfortable lives are dependent upon a bunch of sweet, innocent people being destroyed in this arbitrary way. and they didn't want that thrown in their faces. And they never would have understood that.
45:07But by putting it in a metaphor, in a fiction story, Shirley Jackson was brilliant because she triggered them and they didn't know why they were so triggered. It's interesting because I've asked this question to a lot of people and used the word triggered. A lot of people get triggered by this. Do you think there was ever a war? Let's even just look at American history. do you think there was ever a war that was really justified? It's a sensitive topic for a lot of reasons. You know, I don't know enough about war. I just do not know enough about war to answer that. I feel like that's a cop-out a little bit.
45:46No, I'm sorry. I just want to be, I think I'd be flailing and I'd be making up a lot of stuff to try to come up with an example. Yeah. Yeah. I just do not know enough. But every war has this element of somehow other people are making a decision to send off our children to get destroyed, like you say. And in that context, nothing seems worth it. And they're doing so, and they're immediately forgetting the fact that they did so. recently I've been reading a ton of mid-century science fiction because my next thing I want I want to do science fiction I want to do one big science fiction book and so much of what I'm reading from the 40s and the 50s are these stories that are very thinly veiled war stories from from guys who came back from world world war ii and they're writing about guys coming back from these expeditions to the moon where they've seen all of their peers destroyed, killed in these brutal ways.
46:54And they're having to deliver the details to the parents of these men who've died. Or the stories are about these robots that have to go through their lives with no emotion whatsoever, despite these kind of horrible things that are happening to them. So all of this mid-century science fiction seems to be war stories that nobody wanted to read and nobody wanted to buy and nobody wanted to publish. So they had to be tarted up as science fiction stories about missions to Mars and robots. And so I think that the war stories are all over out there. The stories about pain, stories like the lottery. But they have to be dressed up in order to be sold.
47:40What about something like The Things They Carried by Tim O 'Brien, which, you know, specifically is a giant metaphor, but it's an easy metaphor. Like, obviously, they carried weapons in Vietnam, but they also carried, you know, emotions about the girl back home and fears and loneliness and so on. So what about something like that where it is directly in a war and it is a very sad book? You know, and it's funny you mentioned that because I was just teaching with a friend four days ago and we were teaching that story. And my friend really loves that story. But I have never been a fan of that story because the story seems to constantly vacillate about depicting really horrific things and then saying that didn't happen.
48:25And so there seems to be kind of no true core to the story. And that's always frustrated me. That's interesting. Maybe no true core because everybody's different. Everybody in this troop is different, and they're carrying different things. But the threat is Vietnam. There's this foundation of Vietnam, but it's really about the fact that they're kids and they're bringing a lot of sad things with them as well as these weapons that they're using to kill people. and and when uh the character is depicted stepping on the landmine and and dying on this beautiful sudden burst of sunshine and when the other character is depicted taking the water buffalo baby and then shooting away different parts of it trying to kill it as slowly as possible and then the reader is kind of subjected to these these moments that are so beautifully unpacked.
49:23But then all of that is instantly negated when the narrator says that didn't happen. That's not true. It just, it leaves me really frustrated not knowing what is true and what is made up. And so that's why I can never find the kind of core in that story. But wouldn't people say that about a lot of your novels? And again, I'll just take, because most people know it. Fight Club is an example. We don't know what's true and what's not when we're reading the book initially. You know, things that happen in my novels, what happens happens, but you don't understand the full context of what they are. We don't understand that until later.
50:08It doesn't negate what actually happened. What happened happened, but it sort of changes the circumstances. It provides a fuller understanding of the circumstances, which is what I think we get throughout life. As a child, we experience something and we think, okay, that's what happened. But then much later in life, we find out all the surrounding circumstances for why it happened and what it really fully involved. it's so it's so it's so interesting because i guess and since you're reading mid-century science fiction you look at an author like kurt bonnegut who was sort of born out of mid-century science fiction and then you lead to the slaughterhouse five which is his war story but completely in this like weird science fiction context you know time travel happens space travel happens but it's all basically about his experience in dresden well And I think that's the other thing is that the war experience from World War II, it could be depicted either in science fiction with this kind of space cowboy thing, or it could be depicted in kind of ludicrous, over -the-top, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, absurd comedy.
51:21Yeah, really, for most, for the two or three decades following World War II, it could only be one or the other. Or it could be, in a small way, depicted in Catcher in the Rye, because that came out of Salinger's fantastically brutal experience. Or it could be depicted in the absurd comedy of Dennis, Patrick Dennis. And he was one of the top-selling writers in the mid-century, beginning with Auntie Mame. He wrote maybe a dozen books that were huge sellers, but there were all these very comedic books that were him processing his World War II trauma in this comic way like Joseph Heller. Yeah, it's interesting.
52:08You've shed a whole new light for me on how metaphor has been used in this past century's worth of novels and stories. So like what science fiction novels are you reading right now? I'm reading Dune. I'm reading Ursula Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness. And I'm reading mostly short stories because I want to cover a lot of territory. I've reread Martian Chronicles a thousand times, but I'm rereading a lot of short stories that I loved as a child in the 60s. I always liked Asimov's and Ray Bradbury short stories. And Bradbury is so much about that lost innocence, that sort of lost American Midwest innocence.
52:50And so is Earl Hamner. I love Earl Hamner's science fiction. You know, if you know the Waltons? Yeah. The Waltons was created by Earl Hamner. And he is basically, it's his sort of bio. he is John Boy Walton, this kid in West Virginia who is sitting in his upstairs bedroom during the Depression wanting to be a writer. And then I love the fact that Earl Hamner, John Boy Walton, goes on to write the most fucked up episodes of The Twilight Zone. So this sweet kid is writing the darkest, most twisted stuff that was ever on Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, all of those anthology television series. Do you remember any particular episode of The Twilight Zone that he might have written?
53:43I'd have to look it up. I'm sorry. But I was shocked how many that he had done. Yeah, that's funny. I had no idea. Do you ever read Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling? No, but tell me about it. And it's about a kid who his parents were just losers and died young and had him in a night of passion. And he ends up growing up in foster homes and he becomes a violent kid in Portland, Oregon. And he's just trying to figure out, like, why is he so violent? Why is he such a loser in his own words? and he hangs out in bars, pool halls. He tries to rob people, but he knows it's all meaningless. And he's desperately trying to find meaning in his life.
54:36And it's very realist. It's hard to find the metaphor. But what intrigued me was Don Carpenter had a bunch of friends that he would hang out with. Richard Brodigan, other writers who I had read separately, but they had one thing in common. They all hung out with each other. that all wrote this real hardcore stuff and they all committed suicide. So I was just curious if you had any, like here's people who were writing really realist stuff. Like I didn't even realize, I read a bunch of novels. I didn't realize all these people knew each other and that not only that, they all killed themselves at different times in their lives.
55:13Why do you think that happened? That's a big question. Maybe it's another benefit of writing through a metaphor, kind of writing, instead of writing my story, writing the lottery writing it as a kind of a non-threatening metaphoric way into the story that makes it entertaining make it makes sets it at a distance a little bit and makes it a little over top over the top so there's wiggle room and you can still express and deal with your issue and exhaust it but you're not dealing with it so directly and that maybe it's also that kind of Foucault concept, that when you deal with something directly, you're giving it more power.
55:55If you go in direct opposition to your story and you try to figure it out by figuring it out, then you're actually giving it more power, and it maybe ultimately destroys you. But if you come at it from an angle, as a comedy, by writing Slaughterhouse-Five, and you deal with it in this kind of indirect way, you can avoid giving it more power and you can actually resolve it for yourself and actually make room, make access for other people to have the same experience at the same time. So you're not reinforcing it in your head. You're dealing with it without making it stronger. Yeah, it's interesting because you think the lottery, i mean that's introduced into middle school like kids kids read that because it's it's quote-unquote safe if it was just about the korean war nobody would they wouldn't assign it to the sixth graders and you know and if all those young mothers in the 60s watching rosemary's baby and just being so troubled by it if they had known that it was probably about thalidomide and the fact that that was the giant thing that could not be dealt with in the culture They would not have gone to it.
57:16They would have been destroyed by it. Do you think Ira Levin, who wrote Rosemary's Baby or Shirley Jackson, do you think they were 100 % aware of the metaphor that they were using? Or do you think it's sort of like they were driven by the anxiety of those situations while they were writing those stories? Just from my own experience, I think that they were attracted. that I knew Ira Levin wanted to write a story about a pregnancy that wasn't what it seemed. And he was really compelled by the Midwich Cuckoos, which is the story that inspired Village of the Damned, where a bunch of women in an English village suddenly became pregnant the same night and more or less gave birth to exactly the same child.
58:05And it's revealed that these children were all the offspring of some alien force. But the Midwich Cuckoos had already been written. So Ira wanted to find his own metaphor, his own way to write that story. And I think at the beginning, he wasn't fully aware that he was writing about thalidomide. But as he got into it and he was writing about these mysterious cakes and these mysterious drinks that were being given to this woman. And he was writing about her neighbors crocheting booties that were basically for claws. That he finally realized what he was writing about, but he also knew he could never get caught.
58:53If he got caught, he would be like Gilbert Godfrey when he made that crack about missing his connection at the Empire State Building. And everyone said too soon, too soon that he would have got crucified. And so at that moment, he was probably terrified of getting caught. So he could never, ever, you know, let anybody realize it. And in fact, if people had come to him and said, is it really about thalidomide? He would have said, don't be crazy. Don't be crazy. Of course not. It's interesting because it reminds me of like, let's say, let's just a basic example, 1984, which particularly during COVID times, that book, and also the recent elections, That book was quoted by 100 % of people, but everybody thought it applied to the other people.
59:51So like if Orwell had said exactly who this is, he's writing 1984 about or what society or whatever, then maybe only half the people would like it or nobody would like it. But because he makes it a sort of science fiction type book, everybody could relate to it and accuse the other side of being orwellian and i love that i like i love the fact that both sides use fight club to beat on the other side um yeah and it's kind of to some extent it's a big rorschach test and everybody sees their own thing uh and that's another thing about if i were to write my story it wouldn't be that kind of a rorschach test it would be either people agree with it or they don't agree with it there would be no kind of ambiguity.
1:00:40Yeah, that's really interesting. I never really thought of, again, it sounds simplistic, but I never really thought of metaphor in this way. So what do you think? Is that your next project is to do science fiction? Oh, hell yeah. You know, I love science fiction. I don't see why I shouldn't take a shot at it. I want to do it my way. And yeah, I'm so excited about this. And, you know, I could totally see you doing great science fiction because, again, I'll bring up Fight Club. I know you must be sick of answering questions about Fight Club. But that's like a little bit of escapist fiction. We want to be Tyler Durden.
1:01:18And science fiction has elements of escapism. I want to be a prince of a galactic empire or a Jedi knight or whatever. I mean, part of science fiction, I think, is half metaphor, but half escapism. And there's another aspect of writing it that I really thoroughly enjoy, and that's apostolic fiction, where the narrator so admires Tyler Durden. and it is so much, it's so fun, such ongoing ecstasy to write about someone you love, someone you admire, even though what they're doing is very questionable and even despicable. And in Not Forever But For Now, it is Cecil writing about how much he adores his older brother.
1:02:05And despite what his older brother is doing, he is just so in love with his older brother, the way that we tend to be really in love with older brothers. And in the way that America is kind of in love with Great Britain, that's why it's kind of set in England, and it's written with all this Brit language. Because America just hero worships England, despite all of its sort of flaws. Yeah, that's interesting. And also there's, I don't want to say nostalgia, but you brought up nostalgia earlier in reference to science fiction and Ray Bradbury. There's a certain nostalgia to a family business. Like that's like almost old fashioned now.
1:02:53People don't have family businesses because that means you make tires or some snack or whatever, or cereal. Like family businesses are, But there's still a nostalgia to them. And there's kind of a family legacy that happens in this book. And when you think about it on a kind of national level, empire is a family business. Is the next generation going to sign on to run the empire that we have worked so hard to build? And if they don't, then all of our wealth is going to be destroyed. So Otto and Cecil are being signed on to run this giant killing machine as a kind of metaphor for, is the next generation going to sign on to run the giant empire that we have worked so damn hard to make our lives great?
1:03:48Yeah, and it's funny how a lot of that is encoded in language. Like if you tell somebody, let's say next election, you tell a friend of yours, I'm not going to vote. One thing that is commonly said is people died for your right to vote. How could you not vote? people died for your right to vote. And in reality, nobody really died for Chuck's right to vote. Nobody was thinking, oh, Chuck Palahniuk could vote now when they were dying. But it's these words that have been encoded with all this meaning that is foisted upon us so that we continue these empires or this family business or whatever nostalgia is trying to be forced on us.
1:04:33language plays an important role. And voting would maybe be the least part of engaging with empire. And depending on who you voted for, you would be engaging with empire or maybe engaging with empire on a lesser level, maybe helping to resolve empire and saying, maybe we don't need to live in this giant house in the English countryside if it means going out and killing Judy Garland. yeah so well look chuck i hope everyone reads your book not forever but for now and what does the title mean or should we figure it out you know it's just a it's a title about intransience is that the word it's a title about uh things that are here in the moment but will not be around forever.
1:05:29So it's really a title about loss because everything in the book is more or less lost except for the main character, that everything falls by the wayside, everything is resolved, everything is left behind, including Empire. It is this character who moves from being kind of a follower who is just a cipher. It's the classic witness novel where Big Chief in Cuckoo's Nest, you know, he can't resolve the machine. He can't resolve the death of Randall Patrick McMurphy or Billy Bibbett, but he can escape and he can go out into the world and be his own, have agency and be his own small fix in the world.
1:06:16And so by the end of the novel, the narrator, Cecil, does escape the world and get out and have his own life. in the way that Ann Wells kind of goes back to Lawrenceville in Valley of the Dolls. So again, it is the witnessing character. It is Nick Carraway going back to the Midwest, heartbroken, but at least he's not still involved with all of those nasty people. So yeah, it's about leaving everything behind. Someone should write what happens to Nick Carraway after, like for the rest of his life. You know, or in all of these witness novels, Someone should just take over, like the little boy in the Road Warrior, Mad Max movie.
1:07:02What happened? He grows up. What happened to him? You know, that's a good point because would it be that interesting? Because so many people, they make their whole lives about what happened to them at that early age, like Jack London or Charles Darwin. You know, they had their adventure and that adventure kind of shaped who they were and they wrote about it for the rest of their lives. I get worried about that. I feel like I'm in a constant fight to not let that happen. And I feel that is a good way to keep one young as well, to always have the next quest that you're going for instead of always thinking about how to reinterpret, you know, something from the past.
1:07:43And I think part of it is now I'm teaching and now I'm working with a lot of much younger writers. and it's kind of reshaping how I work, but it's also really fulfilling to kind of walk them through getting their stories out. Maybe it's not the same thing as my experience, but there's a joy in it. Well, Chuck, thanks once again. I always enjoy our conversation so much about your books, about writing, about life in general. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and, and I always enjoy your books. I hope everyone reads this one and I'm sure you're going to have a lot of work in the next few weeks doing the book tour and the podcast tour and that whole thing.
1:08:30So, so good luck with this and, and hopefully we'll, we'll, you'll come on again when the science fiction book comes out. I'm missing you in person. Do you do anything in person? Not as much anymore. I've become more even reclusive. Like I barely ever leave. But every now and then I travel a little bit. So if I'm, it's conceivable I could be in the Portland, Oregon area at some point. So I'd love to do a podcast if I'm ever there. Or if you're ever in Atlanta. You know, after the Second World War, there was La Bomba in Italy, where the culture and everything exploded. It was this giant cultural explosion.
1:09:09And after Franco died in Spain, I believe they also called it La Bomba. And so much in Spain, in Madrid particularly, is very 80s comic book stores and record stores and 80 neon colors because they're still so enjoying the freedom that they got after Franco died. And I'm really hoping that American culture has that same explosion after COVID. Yeah, I wonder. I wonder if we built a habit of not leaving during this. and habits are hard to break now. Well, in the same way that by the end of the book, Cecil gets out and does his small part in the world to be in the world instead of being in that house with nature films.
1:09:54I really want to get my ass out there and do my part to try to explode things in the wake of COVID. Yeah, maybe that's how I should view it is kind of getting out there more. I feel like I've moved more inward, but it's not COVID at first. I was fine with it, but then as it dragged on and as all the people's opinions sort of melded with the culture of it, I kind of became more. I'm just staying in my house. I haven't left my house in about six or seven days right now. So it's become a habit. Oh, James. Come on. Come on. I'm not going to guilt you. I'm not going to guilt you. I'm just saying it's going to be a lot more fun if you get out.
1:10:43I agree with you. So between now and the next time we speak, I will get out more. I'm going to try to break this habit. Yes, please. Get out of the giant nursery. Get out of the nursery. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. That's the metaphor. Happy to beat you up anytime. Well, thanks very much, Chuck. Thank you. As usual, I appreciate it. Thank you. Excellent.
1:11:10Thank you.
From the publisher
In this candid episode, James Altucher welcomes back Chuck Palahniuk, a guest who never ceases to inspire introspection long after the conversation has wrapped. As they unpack the twisted humor and darkness of Palahniuk's new book, "Not Forever, But for Now", listeners are invited into a world of professional killer families and the burdens shouldered by young successors. But it doesn't end there. In an episode filled with profound insights and electric dialogues, James and Chuck paint a vivid tapestry of how writing mirrors life, its joys, and its abysses.------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book Skip the Line is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsStitcheriHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on Social Media:YouTubeTwitterFacebook
------------What do YOU think of the show? Head to JamesAltucherShow.com/listeners and fill out a short survey that will help us better tailor the podcast to our audience!Are you interested in getting direct answers from James about your question on a podcast? Go to JamesAltucherShow.com/AskAltucher and send in your questions to be answered on the air!------------Visit Notepd.com to read our idea lists & sign up to create your own!My new book, Skip the Line, is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever books are sold!Join the You Should Run for President 2.0 Facebook Group, where we discuss why you should run for President.I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltuchershow.com------------Thank you so much for listening! If you like this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe to "The James Altucher Show" wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsiHeart RadioSpotifyFollow me on social media:YouTubeTwitterFacebookLinkedIn
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