Transcript
Speaker: You are listening to The Mentally Oddcast, where we talk with creatives about neurodivergence, trauma, addiction, and all the other things that impact and inform our art. Our goal is to show everyone that no matter what you're going through, you are not alone and you can make art about it.
Speaker: Music
Speaker: You are listening to the Mentally Oddcast. My name is Wednesday, leave Friday, and we are brought to you by Sometimes Hilarious Horror Magazine. Do find us on Ko-fi. That's K-O-hyphen-F-I.
Speaker: Sometimes Hilarious Horror. Today's guest is Bronx-born author Stefan Petruccia, and his work has sold millions of copies worldwide. Can I stop you for a second?
Speaker: I guess. You already did. It's Stefan Petruca. Stefan Petruca. See, i I need to do phonetics when I send out these lists. everybody gets it wrong. so Well, nobody can spell my name. So, like, I get it. They can say it, but they they cannot spell it.
Speaker: Wendez Day? Wendez Day. Like, lots and lots of different things. All right. So, for the third and hopefully final time...
Speaker: ah Bronx-born author Stefan Petruka sold millions of copies worldwide, over 20 novels to his name, including original works like Ripper and Dead Man Walking, which I love, and licensed prose novels like ah Spider-Man Forever Young and Deadpool Paws from Marvel.
Speaker: He's also written hundreds of graphic novels spanning iconic franchises like X-Men, Beowulf, Mickey Mouse, and Nancy Drew. um His latest book, an effort which took seven years, is the original science fiction epic, the Stars Within, which just came out. I haven't even had a chance to read it yet, but I will.
Speaker: Thank you, Stephan. Welcome. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. I hate to Correct you again, but you said X-Men instead of X-Files. Did I? Oh, my God, I'm an idiot. No, at all.
Speaker: I mean, they're both like feasts of man candy, but yeah, that's an important distinction. Like a Star Trek, Star Wars thing. Yeah. And I can't even say I didn't read my own writing because it's typed.
Speaker: We'll be canceled, yeah. Right? So with apologies to Wolverine and David Duchovny, we always begin by asking guests to tell us the story of the first horror movie that they remember seeing. And I'm sure you've got a great story, so let's hear it.
Speaker: Well, actually, i remember this. I mean, i I think it was from an age where you're not supposed to remember anything. I was three years old. It was before before the birth of my sister. And I was watching an Astro Boy cartoon on TV on our black and white that had like an ancient. It actually had a remote, but it was sound operated remote.
Speaker: And I saw a commercial for Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. And it was the scene where the monster Glenn Strange, as I now know, hurled the nurse out of the window and crashed the glass.
Speaker: And this, this terrified me. And I wound up having dreams, I think probably for weeks and perhaps for the rest of my life of being chased by the monster in our, in our Bronx neighborhood. You know, you, one of those dreams where you run really like crazy and he's moving very slow, but somehow he's always.
Speaker: Right. right So I don't know when i actually saw the film, but that's my first memory of of a horror film. It was just the commercial. Yeah, well, no, my story is similar, actually, because I remember the Jaws trailer more than I remember anything else I would have seen at that age.
Speaker: And for people who have not seen the Jaws trailer, it is terrifying. I mean, it's even today compared to ah just a regular trailer. It's it's a scary trailer. It's it's like set up.
Speaker: But yeah, and and so is the film. I saw it by accident. A bunch of my friends went went to New York City. We were going to get Broadway show tickets for $15, but we didn't like any of the shows. And Jaws had just premiered.
Speaker: And nobody really knew. It was a shark movie. And we went to see that and we walked out like stunned. Yeah, I guess so. my I can't even imagine that. Just going in to see Jaws like cold.
Speaker: Just vaguely knowing that it's a shark movie and then you get that. Yeah, that's probably the best way to see something like that too. Because you expectations can ruin things. Yes, very much so. well Especially now. I mean trailers are just insane with giving away information.
Speaker: Oh God, I hate that. You know, you feel like you've seen the movie by the end of it and it gives away all the plot points. Yeah, well, there's... I mean, I think the most egregious example of that that I can think of is the movie Quarantine, which is the American remake of of Wreck, the zombie movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah Because the trailer has actually the last scene in the film, like the final jarring thing where ah Jennifer, what's its, you know, Deb from Dexter, and she gets, like, grabbed and dragged backwards and...
Speaker: It's in the trailer. and So by the time it shows up in the movie, you know it's coming in to the very end. Great shot. yeah Oddly enough, I recently had the opposite experience. i would you know Yesterday was my birthday and we went to a secret movie at Cinemark and you don't know what it's going to be.
Speaker: And it was The Companion. Yeah, I saw your post about that. So how was it? Because I love those trailers. i Other people liked it more than me. But um what I wanted to say about the trailer was that it doesn't reveal the twist.
Speaker: Oh, I thought seeing the trailer and maybe I was just being dense that it was about like two psychopaths or serial killers who are having a relationship and got involved in a bizarre sadomasochistic relationship. you know But that I don't want to give away what the twist was for those who might not know, but it's nothing like that.
Speaker: um It is, it has a really cool twist about 10 minutes in and while it handles the tropes, Really well. After that, you just know exactly what's happen for the rest the movie anyway, in terms of a mini review.
Speaker: But it was well enough that the audience gave it a bunch of applause. And for me, it may have been that I've seen too many movies for my own good to enjoy it as much as I might have.
Speaker: Well, and that is really the bane of being especially a horror fan, a hardcore horror fan, because movies that are made for mainstream audiences assume that you haven't spent the last couple of decades voraciously watching every horror movie.
Speaker: Our tastes are much more refined. Yeah, well, and and we can we can spot all the the tropes and all the techniques and all the, you know, like we'd spot all of it. I'm actually reviewing the new Dexter series, which is a prequel.
Speaker: yeah And I have tons of issues with it. But one of the things is that they show us something in episode three that I'm like, oh my God. So it's obviously that person. and And so then in episode seven, when they drop the big reveal, it's like, yeah, I know.
Speaker: we we are Everybody who watches this kind of content knows. It's like woman wakes up and throws up. Okay. She's pregnant. Right. Right. There's no secrets. I i haven't seen the whole thing. I just managed to see the beginning, but I really liked the opening sequence.
Speaker: where he's pulling the the t-shirt on, and for a second he looks like you know Anthony Hall. And then you then then you realize it's the younger actor playing him. So I thought that was really well There's a lot to like about the new series. i have big problems with a lot of the retconning in it, but the show as a whole, like the people that they've cast to play the younger versions of the characters, they're wonderful. Masuka and Deb are both just spot on.
Speaker: Well, they look good in the trailer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a lot to like about it, but if you are really invested in the original story, the retconning is going to bother you a lot. Like they've done some things with Laura Moser that are just like, no, that was a little hippie girl who got in over her head, not whatever the hell this is.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it depends on the kind of retconning for me. Some of the stuff I don't care about, but there was plenty to, you know, like and dislike about the original Dexter, too. Yeah, yeah. And I think it it asks a lot of its audience because sometimes the writing gets a little lazy and sloppy and you just have to kind of go with it for the ride.
Speaker: Well, even in the original series, I mean, the stars were really some of the serial killers he ran into. But the rest of the cast itself was very cartoony and kind of two note. And some of it was like a little too hard to swallow sometimes. Yeah, I would agree with that. He can't get caught, but they bring him to the edge of being caught. And it's like, how is he not going to get caught this time?
Speaker: And then nobody liked you know the final episode. so Right. it's it I mean, it it it does rise to the level of like Clark Kent's glasses sometimes. Yeah. Like, really? We're all supposed to just not notice that that just happened?
Speaker: yeah but Yeah. Anthony Hall's great. Yeah. Oh, he is. I actually just saw YouTube of him singing Bowie songs, and it was delightful. Yeah, he does audiobooks, too. He read he does a Pet Sematary on Audible. Cool.
Speaker: And for a while, I was getting just so many audiobooks. don't want to get ahead of myself, but the Dead Man Walking books are also on Audible. the for are there How many of those are there? There are two... two dead There's Dead Man Walking and and... What's the second one? Dead Man Running? I was just...
Speaker: And I would have done dead man running for the, well, what was I gonna do? Dead man sitting. and Dead man enjoying his day off with ah with a coffee.
Speaker: Dead man yielding at the intersection. Yeah. So I did, so speak it was one of the rare times when I did speak to the person who did the audio book beforehand. So I gave him a Farewell My Lovely, Robert Mitchum, as an example of the kind of voice Oh, nice. And he, he, he took that to heart and I think did a great job.
Speaker: Oh, that is so. War control over the stars within audio book because a friend of mine did that. So, but that'd be, we'll get there at some point with that. Definitely. Definitely. I don't want to get ahead of myself because there's so much stuff I want to ask you.
Speaker: Okay. So maybe I'm ADD so we can bounce around. You may have to. Girl, same. um So, I mean, we, we did talk a little bit about like horror in general,
Speaker: But I want to know you you mentioned Frankenstein as like one of your introductions to undead people. what What else? I mean, obviously you're influenced by zombie culture.
Speaker: How did that come about? i don't think Frankenstein is undead. I think of him as he's he's alive. you know he's He's got a beating heart as opposed to a zombie who is literally dead. because he I mean they'rere mean, they're more magical. You can kill them by shooting them in the head, but you know, they can crawl around with just their hands and stuff. So I only heard part of the question was it how I got introduced to like zombies. Well, how zombie culture, like how your interest in it began and how it came to influence you.
Speaker: and think the first time I saw zombies was probably when I was eight or nine. And it was like in an episode of my beloved soap opera, Dark Shadows. nice And they had some curse occurred and all the the the bodies in Collinwood Cemetery came to life.
Speaker: And they did the hands coming out of the you know graveyard thing. You're seeing like tales from the cliff. And they took over Collinwood. And Barnabas and Julia fled and used the Ching to go to the future to 1972 and know found the place in ruins.
Speaker: So those were kind of the first zombies I saw. And don't remember when I saw Night of the Living Dead, but my original encounters were probably Romero. And I saw um when it came out, I wanted to see Dawn of the Dead,
Speaker: but no one would go to the theater with me. So it was one of the first movies I went to by myself. Oh, wow. i thought it was I thought it was wonderful. I thought it was hysterical and scary and all kinds of all kinds of great things.
Speaker: And I wound up doing a video satire of it called Afternoon of the Airheads. yeah It requires a little bit of an explanation. I was taking a class called The Language of Social Control, and we studied an episode of Charlie's Angels in it And it was a very, you know, media, uh, we're being, you know, the massages, media, Marshall McLuhan, all that stuff, probably something for code at some point.
Speaker: Uh, and I wanted not to have to write the final paper. So to get out of that, I did a video satire of Charlie's angels, uh, called Chadwick's airheads. and It involved, uh, an attempt to assassinate our college president.
Speaker: And it was set on the campus and my the professor, richard Richard stack, dear friend, uh, Loved it, insisted I showed it in public. And we had like you know several hundred people showed up. So was kind of a thing on campus.
Speaker: So I did the sequel was Afternoon of the Airheads, in which the president of the college trying to stop people from protesting. Because we actually, we we were in the last colleges to take over administration building in the 70s.
Speaker: But to stop them from protesting, he he he's in cahoots with the Dr. Death. who's a professor faculty member in the Nat Sci building, um who comes up with a way to basically create Romero-esque zombies, but they're more insipid. They just wander around saying, I like to dance and paint.
Speaker: And an artist friend of mine, Bill Beerworth, did a beautiful satire of the Romero poster, which is, when they you know, when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And this was when there's no more room in the dorms, know, the dead will walk the campus. And it was, they say, I have it somewhere. was printed. We printed it in the school paper. And that one ran at about, that ran about an hour.
Speaker: And at the end of it, I got to blow up the campus's performing arts center, which was a series of like Broadway-sized stages. we, I got a guy to build a little a model out of it, had a little sugar cubes. And I had the one guy on campus who had a license to use explosives,
Speaker: because he'd been working in special effects as as an intern somewhere. And we it looked great anyway. But it was also you know black and white, reel-to-reel video. So nothing compared to what you could do with your phone today.
Speaker: That's my early relationship with zombies comes out of that, more as a ah satirical thing. And I think even when I yeah when i saw night of the Living Dead, which may have been after Dawn of the Dead, I was terrified by it.
Speaker: Dawn the Dead didn't scare me because you know, the zombies wandering around with the Muzak in the mall was just, you know, funny. But Night of the Living Dead, I watched it late at night with commercials on Channel 7 or something.
Speaker: And that i was I was up for the rest of the night. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's the only film that kept me up. Yeah, think it's in my late teens or even early But the only film that kept me up like that since was the Blair Witch Project.
Speaker: But that's my that's my general relationship to The to the Walking Dead. I see. It's another series. I see. Now, I feel compelled because i I gather that you're a little older than me.
Speaker: um But the 1979 Salem's Lot, you got any feelings about that? I... is That's the one with... What's his name?
Speaker: Yes, good old what's his name. No, it's David Soule and James Mason. James Mason. James Mason is the one i'm thinking of. I really like James Mason in it. Felt like he was slumming to an extent. And I love, you know, Stephen King is, you know, I was going to say he's the blah, blah, blah of the United States. And I can't, draw oh, Charles Dickens of our time.
Speaker: ah I will do that. I will forget a name, sometimes my own. Oh, no, I get it. And I think he's done some wonderful, amazing stuff. I tend to enjoy his non-horror stuff more.
Speaker: I loved different seasons. I loved several of his short stories. The Shining is great for me up until the end when the monster shows up because I thought it was such a wonderful portrait of a decaying alcoholic mind that it didn't need the ghosts.
Speaker: you And those are my favorite kinds of ghost stories where you don't really need the ghosts or the ghosts don't have to be, it doesn't matter whether the ghosts are real or not because it's, it's, it's all the the psychological, uh, uh,
Speaker: terror, the horror of being human. yeah The Innocence is a favorite of mine. Oh, yeah, definitely. you know, based on Turn of the Screw. but That movie scared the crap out of me. I saw that as an adult by myself in a movie theater because I was working at the theater and they played it and someone came in to bring me popcorn and I like jumped and yelled. It's so scary.
Speaker: No, me too. I think I saw that when I was like 12 or something. And that, that, that was before night of the living dead, but was it was an early one that kept me up and the kid dies at the end. Yeah.
Speaker: Spoiler alert for this 80 year old movie. don't even know who the kid is. So yeah, right. It's kind of a spoiler alert, but you don't need, they don't need to be ghosts. It could just be someone convinced that there are ghosts. Debra Kerr does I saw it recently in Debra Kerr's performance is so over the top.
Speaker: It's almost funny. But it still had the same kind of general impact that that did. Yeah, I think a lot of those older performances, especially when you take one of those like proper young ladies that like have all that weird societal training where you don't say what you think and you don't say when you're mad and.
Speaker: You know, yeah and then you put them into a situation where like, oh, there's ghosts and this is dangerous and a whole bunch of crazy shit's happening. And I am a lady, so I can't say anything about it. It was her her her own um sexual repression was so over, was kind of over the top the second time I saw it.
Speaker: Well, you have to get that across because that's part of what's driving her interest in the ghosts. you know fascination with these have dead lovers. Yeah. Well, and they really explore that like in the, the Mike Flanagan version of that.
Speaker: I don't know if you saw that. Oh, that's, that's the, um, is that the mini series? Yeah. Bly Manor. Yes. Yeah. I enjoyed lots of that. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly some nits to pick if, if, uh, that's yeah, but, but yeah, there's, there's, there's a lot. melting in my mind with the I'm sorry. It's melting in my mind with the Shirley Jackson one he did.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there, He's one of those people where I think a lot of his work, you know, it's like Rob Zombie's music. Like, yeah, it's good. I like it. But there's a there's a sameness to to the storytelling, certainly.
Speaker: Well, I hated what he did with the end of that one because he ruined one of the best written paragraphs in horror, which is Shirley Jackson's yeah know opening to the haunting of Hill House, where the last line is and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Speaker: And at the end of his version of that, he he he has the ghosts keeping each other company. he does yeah Whatever walked there, walked together. And and they were happy. And I was like, I wanted to punch the television. But that also, that I think it's that one that also has one of the best jump scares I've ever seen.
Speaker: Where the two family members are driving in the car and they're having this very tense, fraught fight and the tension's building. And then all of a sudden, the head of their dead mother or sister comes shooting between them, screaming.
Speaker: And I leapt across the room. That's probably still the best jump scare I've ever seen. Nice. Right on. All right. So we got to talk about dead man walking now, because one of the things that blew my mind when I read it was that there's a point where the zombies, which are not typical zombies, these, these folks are, are sentient and they have to barricade themselves in a building because of mob of living people.
Speaker: are coming at them like, I mean, they're, they're rage monsters, man. And you know, I'm an American, you're an American. So we're living with rage monsters right now. so oh yeah yeah yeah So not only was the scene itself just brilliant as a ah reversal of, of everything we know about zombie culture,
Speaker: Thank you. but Thank you. and then But there's also like some societal relevance to that, that the people that claim to be all about law and order and, and you know, bringing people together and whatnot are the violent monsters tearing everything up.
Speaker: um Yeah, I don't know where to go with it. had a question about that. that's okay. But no, like, why, how how did that how did that come to be? Like that that scene in particular?
Speaker: because i broke The plan from the beginning? Well, I got the idea for for for Dead Man Walking. I mean, I wasn't looking to do as a zombie thing because you know Walking Dead, it was done to death.
Speaker: It's impossible to do anything new with it. So you know you invariably you try to play with the tropes. So was driving along to go grocery shopping or something. And I'm listening to an NPR broadcast about the death penalty.
Speaker: And they're they're saying, well, you know, one of the big problems with the death penalty is you can't take it back. You can't, you know, with the person's dead. And I started thinking, well, what if you could?
Speaker: So that's where that whole thing came from. So the um the the way it works and in Dead Man Walking is they develop this method that brings people back. Some people use it on their family members, but their family members are, you know, wind up being depressed and tend to go feral.
Speaker: But they mostly started using it with people who were wrongly put to death. as a way of making up for the state's mistakes. Yeah. It seemed like that. And then like really, really rich people.
Speaker: Yes. Yeah. You know, but then grandma starts eating the family pet. So, you know, you can't keep her in the house. Hey, she's from a different generation, man. Give her a break. They had to do that.
Speaker: And, you know, going, I'm the children hungrily. um So it was, so from there, I mean, considering where it came from, it, it, The idea came full blown as sort of a class thing.
Speaker: And, you know, Romero has one of the rare proactive early main black characters in Night the Living Dead who winds up getting, you know,
Speaker: so spoil Can I spoil the end of that? You can spoil the end of a movie that came out two years before I was born, yes. Okay. Have you have you seen it? Have I seen it? I could recite it, sir. Okay, yeah no you already said you were terrified by it. so and It's horrifying. The ending of that is more horrifying than the rest of the movie.
Speaker: Yes. They think he's a zombie and they shoot him. And it's these white crackers wandering around. Well, and it's funny because... going to take care of those zombies next. When I watch that movie now, I generally stop it when the militia guys show up. I say, oh, good. They're there to save the day. Hooray! then I just turn it off so I don't have to look at it because, man.
Speaker: so yeah. So Romero's very aware of class and in in in in both of those movies. He kind of abandons it later, but I think he just never got the budget he wanted to do. Day of the Dead and things like that.
Speaker: And, you know, Dawn is more guess Somebody said once that Night of the Living Dead was a 1950s movie done in the 1960s and Dawn of the Dead was a 1960s movie done in the 1970s.
Speaker: So he was always kind of looking back and that kind of thing. But the know the the social satire is very different in Dawn of the Dead. My point is I didn't make up the idea of zombies and class issues, but I did turn them effectively into an underclass.
Speaker: And I'd be telling myself, you know, yeah, they're kind of an underclass, but they're also really zombies. They're dead. And if they go feral, they generally are dangerous. And then I'm thinking, you know, no, people do that too.
Speaker: Yeah, they do. You back them into a corner enough, they're going to, you know, they're going they're going to go for you. So that, that's, you know, was the formation of the idea.
Speaker: and Well, and in, in that scene in particular, the angry living people are much more terrifying than the zombies because they can't be reasoned with.
Speaker: And, yeah you know, I don't want to be all politics all the time, but that is a problem that we're having right now is that people think outlandish things and they cannot be reasoned with.
Speaker: I, you know, yes, but I think that that part has always been there and the internet has changed. I used to say when the internet started, you say, you know, the damnedest people are getting organized. And it's it's put a megaphone to that.
Speaker: But, you know, we're also in a situation now where, you know, Trump was elected by the majority of voters. ah No, actually. Okay, fine. Well, you know, the majority of, you know.
Speaker: More people voted for other candidates than for Trump. Trump was elected by 3 million votes. Well, but I mean, it is worth bre its worth repeating that more people voted for people who were not Trump than who voted for Trump.
Speaker: Yes, he he is the guy who got the most votes, whatever. If indeed he was... I mean, Trump did come out and say that, you know, he had the votes in Pennsylvania thanks to Elon or some ridiculous thing implying that... this all kinds of yeah yeah See, that's the thing. It's like, oh, wait, why would I believe anything he says?
Speaker: yeah Yeah. Well, you know, Kennedy's father bought him Chicago in 1960, whatever the hell that was. So that's, you know, it's not new. And it's it's that, you know that part of it's American.
Speaker: A lot of it's ah unfortunately American. But I guess part of my point is it's not just the lunatics who voted for him. And you've got people who voted for Obama twice and who voted for Trump.
Speaker: You got people who voted for you know Hillary the first time and then recently voted for Trump. Yeah, can't. You got people who voted for Biden. can't get my head around it. I mean, I know that there were protest votes about Gaza.
Speaker: Congratulations on all that, by the way, protest voters, now that he's saying he wants to clean out Gaza and let rich people just move in and do whatever. I mean... nothing he's doing is surprising. Yeah. But it's, it's all pretty awful. And yeah i think part of the, what makes it so infuriating now is how surprised his supporters seem to be at at the awful things that he's doing, you know, and we'll see. And, you know, some of them are probably just, Oh boy, maybe he shouldn't have released all the January 6th insurgents, but you know, we'll see what happens next.
Speaker: But I think,
Speaker: we're at a point where we need to, well, I mean, that's a, it's a, it's a whole complicated issue. I'm really looking forward to the midterms. I think there's a point in all this where the rubber hits the road and you bump up into reality.
Speaker: And i think the, I'm not even gonna say democratic institutions, but I think the institutions in the United States are robust enough that we're going to have, you know, we're going to have elections in two years.
Speaker: And I think the holds the Republicans have on Congress is teeny tiny and that could easily flip. So, and then, you know, Trump's not an ideologue.
Speaker: He doesn't believe in anything. So in some ways it wouldn't surprise me if he like discovered universal healthcare and thought it was his idea. It's Trumpcare. It's Trumpcare in the Gulf of Trump.
Speaker: yeah Well, maybe liberals should just start saying how much we would hate universal health care and how it's insurance is really woke. We we love it. ah Well, in terms of it in terms of the dialogue, though, I think we got to be more open to talking to the and I know it's painful and I know it's incredibly difficult, but we got to be more open to talking to those people who voted for but for Obama twice and then voted for Trump and and and just trying you know My main goal, despite shaking hands, has been trying to understand why they did that.
Speaker: Because they're hateful and cowardly. That is... If you believe that trans people go to libraries to read books because they want to molest children, you cannot be reasoned with.
Speaker: Not everyone who voted... My point is, yes, everyone who believes that voted for Trump, but not everyone who voted for Trump believes that. But they're fine with that.
Speaker: They're fine with, I mean. No, no, no. I understand. i understand. i understand. But at this point to take the country back, you can't do it without those people.
Speaker: Yeah. I don't think we're going to get the country back. I think that was our last chance to save democracy and people well i gave it to the Brolican. I hope you're right, man. I do. I mean, I think, you know, Facebook posts, America's dead.
Speaker: yeah The American ideal is gone. i don't think ideals die. I think there's going to be a midterm. I think people just don't act the way we want them to. And you know think um um historically, we've always been like that as a nation.
Speaker: You know, we're not, yeah what Churchill said, America will always do the right thing after we've run out of all the options. um And we still had an option with Trump. um So I remain hopeful. I mean, this isn't like,
Speaker: Vietnam, where, you know, people were coming back in body bags and had to either flee the country or sign up for the draft. We're in a different place now. Wait, wait, dude. Ice was at my door buzzer earlier. Like, get I mean don't even remember what day it was. Was it Monday?
Speaker: They were looking for the family upstairs. Good Lord. And they wanted me to let them in. And I was like, I don't think the buzzer works. I don't know my name. I don't think we have an upstairs. Like, I don't. put But, I mean, it's people. First of all, Trump's first term, he bungled COVID.
Speaker: Over a million Americans ended up dying of it. Sure. There are absolutely body bags being hauled around and people are leaving. Dude, I have a friend in Texas who had to send his kids out of the state because one of them is trans and he had no no he can't be with his kids. I'm not saying it's not horrible. well but Please don't misunderstand. To say that people are not in real danger right now is in incorrect. I mean, am I misunderstanding people are not in real danger.
Speaker: I'm saying that it's It's different. American fascism is not going to be you know Nazi Germany fascism. There are lots of differences in the where we are as a country and where the Weimar Republic was as a country.
Speaker: And again, you know i and i understand i understand the I don't want to say defeatism, but I understand the feeling that it's over. i just don't think it is. Man, I hope you're right.
Speaker: I think voter suppression is going to be an enormous problem in the midterms because Trump already didn't want to allow mail-in voting, i mean, years ago. And that's why he fucked up the post office so bad.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Which, can I just say... but then he turned around and everybody, you know... and yes Well, now Biden did not do much to fix the post office. And I think that was a big, big fumble. Louis DeJoy is still in charge.
Speaker: who to blame on Who to blame Trump on is another question. Biden's on my list. um It was Jack Smith's hire on my list because there's no reason it should have taken four years for him to bring charges about the actual crime.
Speaker: Yeah, I have to agree with that. A lot of balls dropped there. Merrick gotut merrickt Garland. I mean, the thing is, we we seem to, we got this idea in our heads that Merrick Garland was this great liberal, liberal and he really wasn't. He was the guy that was supposed to be so centrist that nobody would vote against him. And then they still, you know, that whole clusterfuck.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Well, that was that was ah what was the last couple of months of Obama's term. Yeah, well, I mean, it was Obama in some ways, too. I was he let the Democratic machine across the country kind of fall apart. He just wasn't into he just wasn't into it.
Speaker: And one of the reasons some of those people like in Michigan didn't vote for Hillary was because he went to. Oh, who had the lead pipes? Flint? The lead in the water. Flint, Michigan. Well, lots of cities, but Flint is the one people know about. well yeah, Flint. Well, he went Obama went to Flint when they knew there was still lead in the water, said to everybody it's fixed, and drank a glass of water and then disappeared.
Speaker: And that was it. Yeah, there's there's still plenty of families in Flint that can't drink their tap water. Yeah, yeah. i want yeah where do they where did this Where does the fire come out of the faucets?
Speaker: But now my mind brain... Well, that's a South thing. That's that's a fracking thing. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. realized that. I was thinking faucets and that's how my brain works. um But my point is but Obama let a lot of stuff fall apart and Hillary did not visit many of the states that she lost.
Speaker: So there's a lot going on that, you know, not even voter suppression, voters didn't come out. Well, voter apathy obviously is a huge American problem.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. but And yet we've had record turnouts at the same time. We've had the most turnouts in the last, I think, three or four elections than we have had, know, I think since World War II or something.
Speaker: ah And then, you know, there now I've lost my thread. So well help me. So my point, you know, I hope you're wrong you know, about the about what will happen next. I mean, there's already tons of lawsuits against what Trump is doing.
Speaker: Yeah, that well, there have been lawsuits against Trump since the 80s, and they haven't really slowed him down. Yeah, but these are lawsuits against the Trump administration, and they have slowed him down.
Speaker: I disagree with that. I think that there's several instances where he has been, you know, blocked in various ways. Well, he doesn't get to do absolutely everything he wants the second he wants to do it.
Speaker: But, yeah I mean, people don't even call him out on his lies. We aren't even calling Nazis what they are when they make Nazi salutes. Yeah, I think, I mean, okay, so part of the thing is, Musk's a Nazi.
Speaker: know he's easy but And to prove he's a Nazi, all you have to do is quote him. Yep. But that photo is a distraction. Because people can argue people can and do argue about it.
Speaker: Well, yeah, if you're only looking at the still photo, but there's there's video. I mean, it's yeah don not... Yeah, no, no. And I saw both. And you can still argue about it. um I'm not sure that there's a good faith argument against that. People do. I mean, there was like a two-page article in the New York Times. Well, people do, but that doesn't mean it's a good faith argument. There's talking. say was a good faith argument, but I'm saying it's an argument that's a distraction.
Speaker: I would agree with that, certainly. and And that all you have to do is just quote him. And then stop. But I understand how difficult... I mean, there are like posts up about how, you know, I'm never going to forgive you for voting for Trump.
Speaker: And as I said earlier, we're going to need some of those people to vote against him. So... Well, I mean, and there are... Somebody who voted against, you know...
Speaker: keeping marriages together. And I just, I can't get my head around it. I don't. and I understand. And I sympathized. It's just ultimately not a great strategy.
Speaker: Well, I'm not a strategist. I'm just a regular old voter. Fair enough. You know, I worked on, I was a Kamala ambassador and i don't know if you saw any of the posts about what ended up happening because one of the things that happened ah There was an error and there were postcards sent out with my face on it, but they had my full married name.
Speaker: and And I was okay with my face going out, but I don't use my married name publicly. Mostly because my husband's family is pretty religious and I'm a sex writer and they were just weird about it. So I didn't, you know, I just thought it was best to keep those things separate.
Speaker: Well, people from where I graduated from high school, which is a real redneck-y area, actually not where I graduated, but where I went before that, um Real redneck area. And I mean, I was getting like threatening phone calls from people.
Speaker: We were going to have ah a party for my husband at the place where my family used to go when I was a kid, like the, you know, the family pizza place. We were all going to take a drive down there for his birthday And we were threatened to keep my N-word husband out of their town and just like really vile shit.
Speaker: And so I think... I'm sorry to hear that Well, thank you. but I think that because so much of this has impacted us so personally, i'm just not as willing to say, oh let's let's break bread and talk about why you want us all dead.
Speaker: i don't think you have to... Okay. I mean, I just don't think everyone who voted for Trump wants you dead. No, no, but they didn't vote against the people that do.
Speaker: they They voted for the people who said, you know. There are different reasons to vote for them that they had or thought they had. And I think they can be convinced otherwise.
Speaker: And I think you're talking about, I mean, you're if you're talking about somebody who has a you know belief system of the type you're talking about, yeah, of course. But there are a lot of people who voted for Trump. And some of them can be convinced otherwise, obviously, because, you know, they they voted for Obama and they voted for Biden.
Speaker: So there are other reasons going around. And I'm not thinking, you know, you should have to do this. And I certainly understand the emotional difficulty in that.
Speaker: And I, you know, I just, I think it's the only option left. to in and Again, in terms of strategy, and if you don't want to be a strategist, and strategist I sure as fuck don't blame you.
Speaker: But there's got thiss there's going to be a way out. And and you know when it comes to when it comes to a lot of immigration, I'm a... Oh, I love the term YT. I hadn't heard that before.
Speaker: LAUGHTER and When you yeah first of yeah that was when you when will we use the the abbreviation YT, it's just a way of um avoiding the white people as a protected class on Facebook.
Speaker: So it's cool. yeah and And yeah, it's it's interesting because it's also hard for me. It harkened back to whitey, you know, and and I was like, oh, that's nice. it's It's making a comeback. um But, um'm you know, but, you know, that's me. And I'm living in the biggest bubble in the nation and in Amherst, Massachusetts, you know.
Speaker: So I'm not dealing with immigration issues. I don't have, you know, ICE people at the door. um And there are some states that are fighting that as well. Currently, there are tons of lawsuits about that. And we'll see what the courts say about it.
Speaker: I don't think all the courts are are corrupt. um So I think, i you know, I hope you're wrong. I hope I'm right. so Well, that that would be great.
Speaker: It would be great. It would surprise me with Harris. And I was horrified after Biden's debate performance. And I was really going to step aside. But, you know, if he hadn't run the fucking first place when he was going be a first term, you know, then someone would have gotten the nomination who had more yeah time and the legitimacy of the convention.
Speaker: But what surprised me was I had hoped she would win largely based on the the women and other people who came out in support of yeah abortion rights.
Speaker: During the previous elections, that stopped all the, or a number of them, that stopped all the, you know, abortion bans or some of the some of the abortion bans.
Speaker: And they didn't show up. Or they didn't, or they voted for Trump. Well, yeah, white women largely voted for Trump, and it's so upsetting and disappointing. Yeah, and I mean, that was that was my hope, you know, for how it could work.
Speaker: Basically, every black person I know was like, you can't possibly be surprised by that. And I'm like, I i don't know. i don't know if I'm surprised, but man, I am horrified and disappointed. Well, I was surprised because they did it last time, you know?
Speaker: It came out for the local races, but not for the you know the national races. Well, it's just that the whole pro-life argument in politics is so false. And I'll probably take some shit for saying this, but i the Republican platform is not a pro-life platform.
Speaker: You're pretending if you think that they care about the innocent babies. you know First of all, the phrase innocent babies pisses me off. as but As opposed to what, worldly criminal babies?
Speaker: you're You're trying to manipulate people when you use a term like that. No, you know completely sympathetic. I mean, on a purely intellectual basis, my feeling is that the federal government doesn't have the right to force anybody to keep themselves connected to anybody else to keep them alive.
Speaker: Agree. You know, period. I mean, if it was my, if I was connected just to to Jesus by a thing, and if I took that out, Jesus would die up to me, you my call.
Speaker: Well, yeah. And the, the oft used example is if someone needs one of your organs, you cannot be compelled to give someone your organs because you have body autonomy. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and and past that, if you have a religious objection to it, you that, that, that's on you, but in a,
Speaker: In a functioning society, you know it's just it's a basic right. Yeah, it's just what's hurting you over your own f freaking body. It seems very transparent to me. gone a field from zombies. I do want to say something about the the thing here.
Speaker: I'm watching the screen, and every time you talk, there's a little waveform that shows up. But I don't have that. Oh, I'm seeing yours. Okay, then we're cool. yeah Yeah, I'm seeing yours. I would have brought it up if if we weren't.
Speaker: um But yeah, like what I'm seeing in politics, like this is really only the second generation of men that had to find women to be in their lives like legitimately.
Speaker: Not that a woman needed a man so she could have a bank account or buy a house anything. you know, own property or, you know, anything like that. We don't, and society is now set up so that we don't necessarily need men, even though there's like a wage gap and there's, you know, a little bit of, of legal discrepancy between genders. Um,
Speaker: men are terrified. You hear all about this loneliness epidemic and these men can't find wives or girlfriends. Like, no, of course you can't. You're listening to Joe Rogan and the the other guy, the sex trafficker, what's his name? Andrew Tate, you know, and they're listening to these men that tell them to be like super selfish and dickish and that you're the prize and you don't have to treat women well. Oh, they love that shit. Or, you know, all this weird stuff.
Speaker: but treating women like they're a different species, you know, not like, Oh, it's a person. You want to have a relationship with a person? We'll go introduce yourself, you know? And it's not that like the whole pickup lines thing is just so weird to me Like, let me think of a clever lie to get your attention. Like that's old.
Speaker: you Yeah. Well, but you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sorry. Yeah. I was not on the dating scene for a long time. And I mean, I'm married and everything, but I do dating apps. I like meet new people and it's crazy.
Speaker: It is insane. The things that grown ass men will say say get you to like, you know, all that there. i know Yeah. it's It's a total puzzle. I mean, I've been married for over 33 years now, I think.
Speaker: And it's, and so I'm completely unaware of the dating scene and it just all strikes me as ah as a, as terrific puzzle. I mean, you'd think it'd be easier to find somebody that you were actually compatible with because of the way different ways you can talk to people and say to get the dick pics, you know, and, but, but, you know, that's, of course that kind of thing gets amplified more, but you probably have a better sense of how common it is than I do.
Speaker: I tend to not trust the megaphone of social media.
Speaker: Well, the loudest people aren't always the right ones, but, you know. No, but they're the ones you notice. Yep, definitely. They're the ones you wind up talking about, you know. And I think nice people are still meeting each other. Maybe I'm kidding myself.
Speaker: No, no. I mean, i'm I'm definitely making friends, but I'm also seeing things that are just horrifying, you know. Sure. So I want to get into um your diagnosis a little bit. Now, I'm aware that you live with, um is it ADD or do you have ADHD? Sure.
Speaker: I don't even know the difference. Well, one comes with hyperactivity and is likely, i mean, it's, it's kind of like the the hyperactive one, but yeah. Yeah. it It seems sort of like the difference between having depression and being bipolar that like sometimes there's a real high energy part of it and not everybody gets that. and I don't think I don't think I'm, I'm bipolar. I mean, I know bipolar, I know bipolar people and I don't have the same swings. Well, lucky you.
Speaker: Yeah, and well, I'm very lucky in a lot of ways. I mean, no doubt. um I can get hyper and have that kind of energy. And if you look at the 16 millimeter films of me when I was a kid, I'm always i'm in constant motion, running around like crazy.
Speaker: um But it wasn't a yeah the a, the ADD or ADHD wasn't a diagnosis for me until we moved here and I actually sought it out because it started dawning on me that know, something was wrong that could perhaps be treated.
Speaker: For me, one of the biggest manifestations of it, it doesn't mean you can't pay attention to something. um I can write novels. I can sit down for eight hours and do something. It means you cannot
Speaker: pay attention to things that that part of you doesn't want to. You can't choose what to pay attention to. And the busy biggest example for me is if you're sitting with me in a car, And I say, you know, when do I make my next turn? And you say, two blocks and make a right.
Speaker: I will five seconds later ask you the same question. Like, is it this one? Is this one? Is it this one? Right. And by then, you know, something dawned on me something was going on. And I started reading about the, you know, the symptoms from adult onset. So you went all through school without a diagnosis.
Speaker: Yes, yes. I wish I'd had Ritalin in high school. um know More so in college. I probably would have. I think my depression is related to my ADD because I also kind of tend to lock on to things.
Speaker: And like, you know, someone else might give it get over a a broken romantic relationship in three months. And for me, it would be like a year and a half. And I'd be depressed and and very, very hard for me to to get out there. Well, when you're smart and creative, it's easy to become frustrated and disappointed with yourself when your brain doesn't cooperate with all the things that you want to do.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, no that's that's certainly true. I tend to I tend to kind of follow it like a roller coaster. I mean, I had to stop. I just want to make this side reference since we talk about horror.
Speaker: There's there's a section in The Exorcist, the book, which I love. where they want to give Reagan Ritalin. And they say, you know, it's it seems like a contradiction because it's a stimulant, but it actually manages to calm people with similar conditions, not being possession, down.
Speaker: And for all my life, I had such sort of an internal dialogue, you know not schizophrenic voices in my head. We can talk about that later. I've never heard voices, but yeah, kind of like a call and response thing going on.
Speaker: And the first time I took methylene, which is the generic version of Ritalin, the conversation stopped. It was like one side caught up with the other. And i was in front of myself. I wasn't like stuck inside myself.
Speaker: And that was, that was a, that was a revelation. i had found my drug, you as it were. and that enabled me to focus. And I was on it for about, uh, 15 years until my high blood pressure, uh,
Speaker: I had to stop. So I haven't been on it for, I think, the last three or four years. And, you know, i i'm I'm older. I'm 66. And you get used to, i I think some people do anyway, get more used to who they are.
Speaker: So, you know, nowadays I handle it more by i will type for five minutes and then I'll walk around the house. and Okay. Come back and start typing again or working on something.
Speaker: So it's, so or, you know, I'll head one place and i'll I'll do the dishes on the way, you know. So that's more you know learning to live in my body. But Ritalin was vitalin was a godsend, and I wish i wish i'd had it in college.
Speaker: And I think the depression is more sort of related to the to the ADD, but I still get like, you know, I guess morning blues. And I was on Wellbutrin, which is chemically related to Ritalin. So supposedly they work together. Is it?
Speaker: Yeah. Wow. I took Wellbutrin years ago because my doctor didn't believe me when I said I was bipolar. He thought I just had depression and he gave me Wellbutrin, which sent me into crazy, crazy amounts of mania.
Speaker: Wow. Well, yeah, you're... weird Yes, so you' you're you're probably bipolar. you Isn't it great when doctors do that to you? You say, no, you know, well my daughter has OCD and she runs into the same problems. Well, being a woman and going to a male doctor, that is an ongoing... Oh, with female doctors too, with female psychiatrists. as I think you're anxious. I'm going to give you this. you know Well, and and a rush to medicate people is is often, I mean, yes, people can and are helped by medication. I certainly am. But someone who hardly knows you shouldn't be prescribing you a medication. Like that's yeah terrifying.
Speaker: Yeah. And there's a lot of abuse about it. And, you know, when, you know, when I first heard about Ritalin and all that stuff, i my initial impression was was that it was intensely overprescribed and, know, they were just kind of taking kids who were being kids and, so you know, stuffing drugs down their face. And then a friend of mine said, look, I understand where you're coming from. I felt the same way, but I know my son can now, you know, sit down and read a book or, you know, do his, do his homework. And he's not on, and he's happy about that.
Speaker: So it it worked for him. And he had some, some people have issues and some people, the drugs work for, So I think there's overprescribing. i think there's reason to distrust doctors, except in the case of vaccines.
Speaker: um Well, it's important to just advocate for your own health. Because absolutely doctors like to say that thing, well, they'll say, oh, well, you know, you Googling this isn't the same as going to medical school.
Speaker: and And that's true. That's a that's a valid stance that if you Google something, but at the same time, me living with something for 20 years is not the same as you taking a weekend seminar about it, doctor. No, no. And Maya has the same problems with her OCD. She's been trying to get a methylene prescription, they don't want to give it to her because she's taken it and it helps her.
Speaker: right
Speaker: So that, that could also possibly be related to that, but it depends on where you live and how you're being treated by your doctors and what you have, what you're forced to put it up with or what you in some instances choose to put up with. Well, and what your insurance will cover.
Speaker: I'm sorry. what And then there's what your insurance will cover. Oh yeah. God. Um, that's a whole other two hour conversation, right but, um, but to give you an example about how things are different here at Emerson, I went in for a tooth cleaning and it was kind of like, it wasn't like a public situation, but there was another chair, like beyond the stack of books and things where they were doing another cleaning.
Speaker: And the woman there was, uh, the cleaner said, you know, we'd like to give you a, like a fluoride treatment since you haven't been to the dentist in a long time, just, you know, basically spray some on your teeth. And she said, i I'm from an anti-fluoride home, but upbringing or background.
Speaker: ah So I don't, will will it hurt me? And rather than saying, you know, every goddamn state has fluoride in the water and the only one that doesn't, Hawaii has the worst tooth decay in the nation. Yeah, they do.
Speaker: Yeah. She said, well, what you may have read about, true or not, is ingesting it. And we're just painting it on the surface of your teeth.
Speaker: So even then it wouldn't get in. So even if there is something wrong with it which there isn't, and and she took the fluoride treatment. Oh, neat. So there's, there there's ah just the most respectful dentist I've ever been to.
Speaker: And so it worked. And it was, and it was someone who listened, you know, and had the right response for that person. Well, and yeah you're right. That does go back to your earlier point about,
Speaker: reaching out and like having the conversation with people. Yeah. God knows it's not easy. Well, I wish that I had that kind of patience because i I do, you know, I have that whole issue with Don Jr. So I spend a lot of time talking to MAGA people online and usually like, you know, when they're done telling me that they think I'm ugly and they don't want to sleep with me or whatever, they, we, we do end up talking about political things.
Speaker: yeah and And it often seems to come back to, well, we hate you because you're deviants and you're dangerous and you want to hurt children. it it's so often goes back to being suckered by this Nazi-esque propaganda.
Speaker: You know, people used to know that Rick Santorum and and all the things he thought were a frigging joke and they seem to have forgotten. And I don't know why that happens. Well, yeah I mean, you're putting yourself in a position for good or ill where you're talking to some of the worst aspects of our society.
Speaker: You know, it's like my mother, my mother, I love my mother. She had a terrific sense of humor. She was a wonderful human being. She's also a racist. She, you know, she thought that, you know, if it was a smart black person, it was because they had white blood.
Speaker: Oh, Jesus Christ. But, ah you know, and she was a um probation officer and Queens. So, all of the people of color she met and she met many because there weren't a lot of white people coming to her office were, were criminals.
Speaker: So, you know, surrounded by that kind of reinforcement, you know, it doesn't create a huge opportunity you know for change. And I don't know that I don't, I'm not saying your situation is like that, but if you're going out and talking to Macca people all the time, I'd go crazy. mean, I wouldn't last a week. and curl up and a fetal thing under the desk.
Speaker: well And i I curate my feed differently. So everybody says, my God, the Nazis are talking to me on Facebook. I'm not seeing them. I'm seeing pictures by Botticelli from the you know museum or whatever. And it's calming.
Speaker: Well, I'll tell you, I tried to be on Truth Social. And it's the only time in my life I ever made a fake account where I was like, not myself. I was a different person. And I went on Truth Social as a white man.
Speaker: And I just started misspelling everything and seeming angry. Yeah. because Well, my plan, because, you know, i my first book about Don G, my first President's Son book that is not about anyone we know came out in 2020.
Speaker: And so I went on Truth Social to market it. I was going to pretend to be outraged by it and see if I could get MAGA people. brilliant. Right? right you're you're you're You're a stronger person than I Dude, I couldn't do it.
Speaker: I was on Truth Social for about a week and a half. And every time I went on there, they were talking about killing people. Every time. It utterly drains you yeah on Facebook. When I, I, when, when Trump was running the first time, twenty so i those um i had a massive purge of anybody who remotely said anything kind about him. he's like You're gone. You're gone. You're gone.
Speaker: ah But you know, and since then he won again. So there's a new problem. And I would, if I did this every day, hour upon hour, i like I said, I'd be in a fetal ball under the desk.
Speaker: But, you know, I have occasional conversations where I think the other person is being remotely reasonable. I recently had a big back and forth with a fan of my work who does not believe in evolution.
Speaker: Oh, geez. How does that even work? Well, with great difficulty, because he said, there's no evidence of this. And I would say, well, yeah, there is evidence of this. There's no evidence of this. And I'd be like, well, yeah, there is the evidence of this. And, you know, ultimately it wound up. yeah I did not convince him to believe in evolution.
Speaker: but the conversation itself was not vitriolic. Is that a word? but Vitriolic? Vitriolic. It wasn't mean, you know, I mean, I had conversations with people on the left to call me a neo-Nazi, you know call me a Nazi supporter because I'm not telling, you know, the party line exactly the way they want. Oh yeah. I've been called a colonizer, which makes me laugh because I've never owned property in my life.
Speaker: We are incredibly famous for our circular firing squad, you know, and what ends up happening is there's only two of you left. Um, So, you know, i I try to find the middle ground, but I don't do this every day, you know?
Speaker: It was very hard for me not to say, what the fuck is wrong with you? How can you not believe in evolution? What kind of an idiot are you? And that kind of opening Stance does not lead to a good conversation. You know what though? What if you're genuinely curious to know what kind of idiot they are?
Speaker: Because I am fascinated that. Well, that's not the way to find out. but The way to find out what kind of idiot so any idiot someone is is not to say what kind of idiot are you. yeah But it's so straightforward. They like being straightforward. They like telling it like it is, But they're not going to answer that question. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker: I do. I do know what you're saying. um and mode moderation has become increasingly difficult over the years. Well, you know, I just get so carried away with it. like No, I, and I, so I understand. And you, you have my, my, you have my siblings.
Speaker: So, so you also, uh, we're saying that you live with depression and, um, like, it sounds like you're not medicated for that right now. Is that correct? I'm most, I'm only medicated for my, um,
Speaker: For my blood pressure. i say Well, a lot of times, though, with with ah high blood pressure, they'll give you beta blockers, which do have mental health benefits as well.
Speaker: Oh, for things like anxiety, which can, you know, exacerbate depression. So I'm on three different medications. I don't think any of them are beta blockers. And now I have. And now I can barely move.
Speaker: and My blood pressure is like, you know, 120 or something like that. I usually like to be in a room where people do their blood pressure because mine's usually the lowest. It's nice, but, um, uh, and I certainly, I, I feel healthier in my sixties than I did in my fifties, uh, physically. So that's great.
Speaker: But, uh, you know, I, I missed the Wellbutrin for my depression and I missed the, um, I certainly miss the Ritalin. But i've learned like I said, I've learned to live with both. I mean, for the depression, now I take CBD.
Speaker: I got like CBD gummies. Nice. They're the part of the the you know the marijuana plant that does not make you stoned. Yes, I am aware. as Well, in case our listeners out there.
Speaker: Any regular listener here i think will know a lot about weed. I don't need hallucinogenic drugs. I just have to be me. So... so and and that And that works. I mean, and it's it's down to like like occasional morning blues where I'll stare out the window, although you things have been going well lately.
Speaker: So I haven't, you know, some of my depression is situational. It's more like the extent i to which I react or overreact to things that makes it more like, and yeah I wouldn't even say chronic depression. but Well, if it's first thing in the morning, it could even be related to blood sugar.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't think it is. um Doesn't feel that way. It's a very, you know how it works. Sometimes you just, if your body's depressed, your brain's depressed, you look around for something to connect to it.
Speaker: And one of the hardest things was to not learn to connect it to something, to just think of it as free floating and then try to work my way through it. But it was like, you know, I went on Wellbutrin after my ah youngest daughter went to college because I would wake up and make her breakfast every morning.
Speaker: ah And then I didn't have anything to do, you know? And she was, know, she was gone, I missed her, but I also, this big structural thing in my life was gone. And that was depressing.
Speaker: And that's that's when I went on, you know but so that was in the morning too, possibly because that's when I made her breakfast. But that's when I went on the Wellbutrin in addition to the Ritalin.
Speaker: And it helped, it helped for a long time. it There's a certain artificial quality to the brain states it creates But I never felt like I wasn't me like some people do or that I'd been robbed of my highs or lows or anything of the sort.
Speaker: Interesting. It was literally like I could focus on things, whatever I wanted to, yeah rather than only things that I could wind up obsessing about.
Speaker: And I tend to be an obsessive worker with novels and my videos and things like that, or back in the old days with my videos. I mean, i'll so I'll grab it and then hold on to it until it's... until it's finished, which is well you're great in some ways for a novelist, but doesn't necessarily speak to your balanced emotion. Right, right.
Speaker: my brother My brother-in-law Chris says if he's ever in a rowboat, he'd want to be in the middle of the ocean, he'd want to be there with me because he'd know I would never give up. Wow. I would keep rowing no matter what. What an amazing compliment.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. I was pleased. But it's, you know, your superpower can also be your super weakness. Sometimes it's important to let go of things. Yes. Well, you know, on that note, yeah um you have, ah you describe yourself as having an acute schizophrenic reaction. When my father died. Yeah.
Speaker: That's, a um that's complicated. My father was an alcoholic. um He was emotionally abusive. physically abusive to our dog.
Speaker: oh And I was living with him. But when we would, while I was living with him, as his he would still get drunk, but he wouldn't scream or anything. He would just kind of fall asleep. And when I, and we were very close. He was, he was also brilliant and would crawl across fire and burnt glass to help me.
Speaker: But in the throes of his disease, he would, you know, I'd find a bottle somewhere and he'd say, I put that there to know, to, to prove that you were trying to test me and that you were betraying me.
Speaker: So it was gaslighting before it was a popular term. My mother would gaslight me too. She would buy, you know, she'd buy corned beef and then she insists, insists that I love corned beef and I hated corned beef, but she would tell me I loved, anyway, mom was funny and that's whole other story.
Speaker: So I was living with my father and went to college and left him alone. And within a year he was dead. Acute pancreatitis.
Speaker: And I didn't visit him as much as I thought perhaps I should because yeah whenever I called him, he was drunk and it was very uncomfortable for me. And I was free. I was in college. i was like out of there. And when he died, um but I'm not saying this particular sentence caused my nervous breakdown, but my mother basically said, you know, you kept him alive.
Speaker: And she meant it as sort of like I did a good thing. but I'm thinking all of 18 whatever the hell I was. Oh, I killed him. And I add that to the thing to live life.
Speaker: And you know, nobody's perfect. My dad was an alcoholic, but he was one of the most, he was the most important person in my life. And it was like having my soul hit by a Mack truck.
Speaker: And a I didn't sleep. I had delusions. Some of them were fun delusions, like the Beatles had reunited to save me by playing on the roof.
Speaker: Others were, you know, the the mafia bought me this coat to to keep an eye on me, you know, that kind of thing. And I was i wasn't kicked out of school. I was taken away from school and brought to my mother's house, which is probably the last place in the world I would have wanted to live. i was stuck there and put on Thorazine.
Speaker: And It was revelatory in a lot of different ways. I think the chief of which that plays into some of the themes of my writing and certainly my latest book, which is an odd place to insert a promotional statement, that the self, which we like to think of as impermeable and a beautiful soul that exists unto itself, can actually be broken.
Speaker: That it has pieces and it cannot work for a while. And that's literally what it felt like. I mean, people have asked me to describe it. The closest I could come up to come to is if you've ever been half awake and half asleep, half in dream and half waking, and you could not either wake up or fall asleep.
Speaker: And it was intensely uncomfortable. And that's what it felt like. Like I was I was you know trapped between these two things and couldn't couldn't go one way or the other.
Speaker: But you know and in yeah in time, I recovered. I think the reason I recovered was to get the hell out of my mother's house. So I decided to, you know I'll behave sane. Well, let's not gloss over that though. you You recovered. I mean, how did you do that? it it it was Was it just time? You know, a lot of it, well grief is a tricky thing and people you know deal with it in different ways.
Speaker: And I could say it was a conscious decision to behave sanely, and And to an extent it was, but it was really just, it was, you know, sleeping and waiting and and and time. Because i you get hit by a Mack truck and then your body starts to heal.
Speaker: And, you know, in my case, the self healed. But, you know, ah some of the sensations from it lasted for years.
Speaker: And that's, it wasn't until many years later when my best friend and woman I was seeing wound up engaged Like after two weeks, it was like this. What? It was bizarre. I know my life is like that. It was bizarre, hyper, sober thing.
Speaker: And I felt this intense depression and I bottomed out. And then I realized I wasn't going to go crazy. Because I hit bottom. Okay. was still sane, you know, or as close to it as one gets.
Speaker: So, but, you know, but but that that that was years later. um I wanted to get back to some of the things I started feeling at the time while I was still in school before they had taken me out, before it got too crazy.
Speaker: so In this numb state, I started listening to people and liked listening to people because I didn't want to feel what I was feeling or hear what was going on my own head. So I kind of developed this hyper-focus on people.
Speaker: And I didn't start hearing voices in the sets of schizophrenic voices that are disembodied. But I started when When you sit and listen to someone for long enough, they'll start self-narrating. hh They'll talk to themselves.
Speaker: And I started noticing that in this process, they would use different voices. Like, ah usually, you my roommate says this, my mother says this, my mother says that, but without the attributions.
Speaker: Like, should I do this? Should I do that? Am I feeling this? And they started striking me as literally different voices. Like, this is something they remembered their mother said. This is something they their father said.
Speaker: And then I started being good crazed intellectual creative that I was. I started wondering, you know I started hearing these things everywhere from different people when they spoke and I could kind of parse it out. In some cases, it's not like when somebody says, good morning, what time is it?
Speaker: You know, you're not going to say, oh that was Xenon from Greece or that kind of thing. But I started wondering, you know, how old some of those voices might be, you know, how long they've been around. Some of them probably lasted a long time and floated around the ether.
Speaker: and how they operated in the sense of archetypes. And some of them are probably ancient. And people probably in saying things like that to themselves about themselves for thousands of years. Or sometimes it'd be like a week ago.
Speaker: yeah Andy Warhol's 15 minute of fame, and except as it applies to archetypes. And that became the basis for both my first novel and The Stars Within, which is which is also a space opera.
Speaker: But that's very... directly connected to my experiences during my, you know, the doc, you know, the family doctor and the the first psychiatrist I visited called it an acute schizophrenic reaction in relation to, to, to grief, but they were making shit up, know?
Speaker: Well, they're all, they're all guessing. It's all about the best guess. More so 1977 than, you know, or 1978, 77, 78, that's around when it happened. um Then, then, then now I hope, you know, and they didn't have the same,
Speaker: collection of drugs. So I got, I got the horse tranquilizer.
Speaker: So god i went i couldn't wait to get off that stuff.
Speaker: So, and it was the right onset age for schizophrenia, but I didn't have those, the right symptoms for it. I didn't hear outside voices and my delusions were, you know, passing.
Speaker: It was kind of like being and like, again, it was kind of more like being half asleep. You know, you realize this isn't happening, but you're wondering if it's happening kind of a thing. Okay. So how does that ah lend itself to the premise of the stars within?
Speaker: so okay. The stars within is ah it's a space opera on the surface. And I can go into the plot on that. It's, it's a rollicking adventure-y space, you know, fight pew, pew, pew. It's also kind of a deconstruction of the chosen one, but the underlying argument,
Speaker: from some of the characters and some of the belief systems is that the the gods are real, but they're part of ourselves. They're these archetypes, these voices.
Speaker: And the part that I did not believe even when I was hearing the voices is that that they're they're conscious at times, kind of like occasional gods that control things or rather steer them, kind of like the murmuration of birds in particular directions.
Speaker: in the same way that narratives determine your choices. You know, if you're the hero, you have to do this, or you have these two choices, as opposed to just kind of, you know screwing it all and heading down south for the winter or whatever.
Speaker: And so they they they funnel sort of human events in certain ways. And in the Stars Within, I've got a little page prepared on the basic plot of it. But it's rather than a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It's a long, long time from now in this very galaxy.
Speaker: And there's a couple of space empires and there's ah these Arcosian. The Arcosian empires are aggressive atheists. theyre They're not like our atheists. They're more like based on the French Revolution.
Speaker: Okay. And they're hell bent hellbent on spreading their atheism and enlightenment. throughout the galaxy, whether various cultures want it or not. Rude. As a result, there are different worlds that have different beliefs and in different gods, and they fight with each other because gods hate each other, and people who have believed different beliefs you know fight each other like crazy.
Speaker: But they wind up having to band together in order to fight the expansionist Arcosians. So they form this very uneasy alliance called the Pantheon. And, you know, one of the story events that happens at the very beginning is that somebody finds this weapon on Earth that puts the Arcosian expansion on steroids. So it makes everything much more fraught.
Speaker: But there's also this guy on Arcosia, who's a great thinker, who's trying to find um ah middle path, as it were, that makes everybody hate him. And his his his argument is that, know, the gods are real, but date what we think of as ourself and our souls is, in fact, malleable, comes in pieces,
Speaker: And we we're only cognizant of a small bit of it. Whereas these archetypes, which can be conscious, are like those gods, except they're not necessarily external. They don't exist without us.
Speaker: Sort of a thing. So the the the most of the believer planets hate this guy because he's he's saying that the gods are not you know external. And the Arcosians consider an apologist.
Speaker: So he winds up, you know, ostracized. But that's just a very small part of the book. And that's how it relates to that specific issue. Jeez, that is huge. I mean, first of all, that's like mind bending because it's really high concept, but it also sounds like a really digestible, like a fun story that you're going to be into for the story. But yet that's just not even the story. you know I mean, the story follows this one kid who thinks he's the chosen one because his mother told him he was.
Speaker: I don't call him the chosen one. It's called the world soul. um And everybody's wrong. It's one of the themes of the book. I mean, yeah one of my feelings is in terms of basic principles and such, and you'd asked a question in the questionnaire about my atheism.
Speaker: and my My basic premise is that in reality, you know the map is never the terrain. And all we have are maps, whether it's the map that our senses provide or belief systems or our expectations.
Speaker: And, you know, you can never get to the reality. All you're stuck with maps. So along those lines, my personal belief is that, well, that's my first principle.
Speaker: I mean, that's everything else flows from that. But in terms of atheism, agnosticism, belief and things like that, and here's ah that horrible kind of compromise again. um I believe that I came out of something vastly bigger and more complicated than I am.
Speaker: and that um in some sense the distinction between myself and it is an illusion, and that eventually that illusion is going to disappear, and I'll be back as part of that.
Speaker: I do not think that thing plans its day around me, but I know that I have to plan my day around it, and if you want to call it God, I don't object to that. And if you don't, i don't object to that either.
Speaker: But I don't, I certainly don't believe in, you know, a God in the sense of some man, woman or anything or a principal on a chair telling you to do this, this, this, and this.
Speaker: So that's my complicated and answer about agnosticism, atheism. Well, but you've actually been in situations where you were like judged and ostracized for being an atheist. Yeah, when I was, when I was 15, you know, I'm 66 now. So, yeah,
Speaker: And they were they were kind of, that was kind of a comic thing. And and it was it wasn't funny because they were really go to beat me up. I was, hey, boys, we got an atheist here. you know My loving God wants me to kick your ass, sir. Yeah. the yeah So there's a there's a simplicity. We don't like no atheists around here. yeah So there's a kind of you know comic book simplicity to it. that so you know And I imagine there are to a lot of the MAGA people you run in, that they have that kind of similar
Speaker: unsubtle personalities, shall we say. But, you know, that that that's endemic. um I kind of lost my thread. Did I have a thread? Did I get somewhere? Well, we were talking about um the difference between like, I guess you were saying being like an apologist versus trying to understand everyone or or trying to compromise was was the theme there.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, that of the book. Yeah. And I guess, you know, that that's you know me trying to understand Trump voters as related to that. Yeah, very much so. Because I'm listening to it like, oh, I'm frustrated with this.
Speaker: but yeah, i can I could see that. Because, um yeah, that that's huge. Now I'm really excited to read it. Oh, cool. Good. Well, then my job here is done.
Speaker: Took me seven years. a Well, that's a lot. I've certainly, I mean, the current thing I'm working on feels like it's been that long, but seven years, damn. I have not spent seven years on a single project yet.
Speaker: not Not a book. Went through several iterations. you know It was originally a fantasy novel. Now it's kind of like a cross between Star Wars and the Game of Thrones. Neat. And I'm usually a very fast one, of needs be, a very fast writer. I think the fastest turnaround I did on a novel was three weeks.
Speaker: Damn. Yeah. It was the Wicked Dead series and they had rejected. That was a pain in ass. Anyway, they had rejected it because they did they wanted me to change the ending. And they said, look, you're either going to change the ending so that all the people don't die or the bad people don't win or you've got to write a new novel in three weeks. And I said, all right, I'll write new one.
Speaker: Oh, wow. so Well, spite is a great motivator. but You know, yeah, yeah. It was never published. but Oh, damn. Only the first five volumes of Wicked Dead were published.
Speaker: Oh. Wow. That... Damn. I'm trying to get my head around that now. I've had lots of works that were in that weren't published. I mean, I think that's just endemic with being a writer for, know, what, 40 years now, I think?
Speaker: Wow. Wow. Yeah, I have a friend who does, she's an illustrator, but she does her own, like does graphic novels now. And she just had a thing come out and it's just huge. She does. Oh, great.
Speaker: Yeah, Nothing Special, it's called, the comic. Great title. but Yeah, and it's it's marvelous. It's just so like, I mean, it's it's sort of a YA thing, but it's kind of for everyone.
Speaker: But yeah she she'll be on my show eventually, so you'll get to hear about it. ah much So if somebody is completely unfamiliar with your work, where is the best place for them to start? Well, with the stars within. Yeah, the this one?
Speaker: With the new one. Yeah. Okay. well um You know, it's the one that's most on my mind. It depends on your proclivities. I mean, if you're're you're more of a horror fan, then you have Dead Man Walking, I guess. Yeah. Well, I actually recommend Dead Man Walking to my noir thriller friends.
Speaker: thank All the people that'd be loving, ah you know, the Humphrey Bogart movies. I'm like, oh, you've got to read this. I'm imitating Dashiell Hammett for a lot of it. The Glass Key in particular. Nice.
Speaker: Nice. He tries to eliminate the use of adjectives in it. It's his most style based. I can't even imagine. Like I'm i don't tend to spend a lot of time with adjectives and and basically describing things in general. I get I get criticized for it a lot. Like I don't where are they? Where's the room? Like I don't give a fuck about the room. Listen to what they're saying because what they're saying is insane. ah yeah Yeah. Well, um dialogue's always been easier for me, which I guess is.
Speaker: some ways surprising because I've done so many comic books where I spend so much time describing pictures for the artist. But it it's a kind of a stripping down process where you want the character to be there. You want a sense of the place and you don't want this, you know, you you got, you wind up writing all this extra stuff that you can just get rid of. Right. And I think the glass keys, a perfect example of a sparse style.
Speaker: And, you know, I had that people say that about Hemingway, but I i never really cared for Hemingway much. So yeah, There's that. I've also written a lot, you know, some other the things I'm proud of is The Bandyman, which you probably can't find anywhere.
Speaker: It was right after the X-Files comic that I did with Charlie Adler and Meron Kim. And it's about, it's it's three different stories, but one of them is about the woman who wrote Genesis in ancient Judea.
Speaker: Wow. Being held by the current king of Judea. And it's a three-way story, one of which is her in the past, illustrated by Jill Thompson, who is really upset right now, given what's going on with her previous famous partner, who sucks.
Speaker: Yeah. let's Let's not go there at all. Yeah, let's not. Yeah. And Moran Kim did the center story, which was about the original version of Genesis, which was in which the first person God created, he was not finished with, but didn't like where he was headed, so he sort of abandoned him.
Speaker: But he survived as this unfinished man, and called the Bandy Man. Holy shit, that's fascinating. And the third one, illustrated by Charlie Adlard of X-Files and that other thing, The Walking Dead,
Speaker: um is about someone present day, a guy, kind of like some of the guys you're talking to ah who finds out that he's he has a brother who is descended from Bandias, or may be Bandias, and him dealing with being essentially unfinished.
Speaker: That's one of my favorite things I wrote. Wow. But it was a great opportunity because I was in a position to get, because of the i was famous for doing the X-Files. My last bout, unquote, with fame was the X-Files comic.
Speaker: And after i I was fired from that, Two weeks after my daughter was born. And after that, i was eight but I was able to get this pet project through that I absolutely adored.
Speaker: so Well, but I mean, you've written Deadpool and and like yeah Spider-Man tie-in stuff. I mean, how do you not just walk around feeling like the coolest guy ever, like all the time?
Speaker: You know what say Because I don't know where my mortgage is coming from. That's the simple answer. And and yeah I don't go to a lot of conventions anymore. Mostly you know mostly say I'm home.
Speaker: But what does make me feel really cool is sometimes I forget this. I wrote a what if. What if Blink lived ages ago. And as a consequence of that, I am listed as having created Marvel Earth.
Speaker: I think it's 256. So I created a whole... Earth in the Marvel Universe. Dope. So that's cool. Right? Wow.
Speaker: um I just am looking over my questions here. I want to make sure we haven't like missed anything because we jumped around a little bit, but I'm learning so much. Disease is our strength.
Speaker: so So wait, so your new book is on Audible, and I know the two Hescius Man books are also on Audible. What else is over there for people that like to read with their ears? Ripper. Ripper's on Audible. oh okay. they did that that was a nice They did a nice job with that because they did more like a radio show with sound effects and stuff.
Speaker: Oh, that's super cool. And let me turn around and look at my bookshelf. I think that might be it in terms of the in terms of the Audible books. Okay. All right.
Speaker: all right Yeah, I've only got a couple of things on Audible, but like one of them is a full ensemble cast. And then one of them is just, you know, a lady reading it. Yeah, I don't think they ever did audibles for the Marvel book.
Speaker: Oh, no, they did Deadpool. They did a fun job. I'm in the i'm in the audiobook for Deadpool. Oh, nice. there's there's There's one point where, you know, Deadpool talks to me and I do the two lines.
Speaker: That's so cool. So that's cool too. Yeah. Right on. Well, did, did, ah you know, I actually have a question here about AI if we want to cover it. Oh yeah. That's another R&F. Well, you know, I'm in a situation right now where like as a sex writer, which is my day job, I was writing for two different companies and And one of them was bought um by a foreign company.
Speaker: And they took like 15 years of great writing from all these people and just sort of made it a blog in their store. So it's all just a store now. And it's so yeah like there's so much good work there. And the other site was on hiatus, but they really want to use AI for both graphics and for prose. Yeah.
Speaker: And I need to decide whether or not there's a way for me to even work for this company anymore without being just a total hypocrite. Well, when you say use, what do you mean specifically? They want them, AI, to write the stories? Well, I think what they're using it now is, well, they use it for graphics, for some graphics, just as article headers. And I've never done my own graphics. So it's kind of none of my business.
Speaker: yeah But at the same time, I'm so vocally opposed to replacing the humanities with generative AI that, like, if, yeah for example, you know, an article will go up, but then a few months later, it'll get freshened up, you know, so it can stay kind of evergreen, facts change, whatever.
Speaker: So they want to use AI for those kinds of things, for for freshening things up, for rewriting things, for simplicity. and does the When they rerun it, does the person who did the original piece get any money?
Speaker: Typically, no. not for the the like I write a piece, I sell it, they own it. And that's how that works. And then they can do what they want with it. But I'm very serious about not wanting my own mind personal name on things that I did not write entirely myself. If there was an AI algorithm involved, I don't want my name on it.
Speaker: But at the same time, as as any writer knows, your byline's important. You don't want your byline to just be disappearing out there. Yeah. so Well, yeah yeah we've we've had several conversations about AI online that I recall of online.
Speaker: And they're, you know, I don't know if you want my blessing or my my warning. or my would like your honest opinion. I mean, not necessarily to heed or not heed, but I would like to know what other people think. I don't expect you to anything I said.
Speaker: Yeah. i First of all, we're all hypocrites. I mean, we're I have a cell phone that was probably built by child labor. yeah Yeah, well, i eat driving and I eat American chocolate, so I get it. I am still in the United States paying taxes to, you know, this racist, misogynist, you know, hellscape.
Speaker: um So, you know, everybody's a little bit hypocrite. know your be key You bring anything into the world, it's going to get dirt on it. ah Second thing is, I mean, there are three issues with at least three with AI, you know, one is the, is it art?
Speaker: Then my and short answer is, yeah, it can be. um And the second thing is the the legal issues, how it fits in with the copyright. And I think that was in some sense, largely solved when the Copyright Bureau said you can't copyright it based on, interestingly, ah previous decision about animal paintings.
Speaker: Right. it's it's If it's not human, you can't copyright it. That waters down the value of AI as a, you know you know, a screenplay written by AI can be used by anyone if it doesn't have a copyright. It's a waters down the value to some extent in the market.
Speaker: And the third one's a tricky one, which is the fact that, you know, none of these people were asked permission right to to train these large language and and artistic models.
Speaker: Right. Yeah, and in terms of quality, as I said before, AI writes better or as good as half of what's on television, which is more of an insult on what's on television.
Speaker: Burn on you, CBS. Yeah, well, any of it. and but I've gone to movies where I've sat down and I've seen entire movies where every line of dialogue was from another movie. you know yeah And there's three who paid $100,000 for woman. Yeah.
Speaker: but but three guys two guys in a win yeah Well, and it is very much the question of art versus product. You know, are we making valuable media that we are proud of and want to share with people?
Speaker: Or are we making something that's like a background for some ads that we want people to look at? Because I only want to be involved in one of those. Well, the big art question is something I kind of gave up personally a long time ago, specifically when I wrote ah an issue of something I wasn't particular, it was a licensed thing. The licensor wasn't giving me much leeway.
Speaker: So I didn't have my whole heart in it, but I did it and it was it was popular and I didn't ascribe much value to it. But then I got this letter from this couple who thanked me for it and the artist ah because their adult son was a huge fan of this property.
Speaker: And on his deathbed, they read, this comic book together. And that was the last moment they shared. And so they valued it tremendously.
Speaker: So my own sense of what I do that is valued or not, and I hew to an aesthetic, but it went out the window. It's like, I just don't know what's going to be, you know, what's going to change somebody's life or not.
Speaker: You know, it's not necessarily the things I think should change their life or the ways I think they should be changed. So all i all I do is I stick to myself. And that's related to that question of product versus, you know, quote unquote art.
Speaker: Art's in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker: It's not in the hand of the artist. that's That's my conclusion on on that particular issue. and Okay. But at the same time,
Speaker: You know, these these models were trained by people who didn't give their permission. So there's an ethical dilemma there. Well, and it also takes work from, i mean, it's kind of like the argument that the music industry makes. Well, we're losing sales because you're not, you know, you're copying it off the radio or whatever, or downloading it and not buying it, you know. And and I realized that not everybody would be buying the things.
Speaker: it it's ah It is a matter of getting more things to more people. but yeah Yeah, I used to be worried about bootlegs of my books, but then I realized that the numbers were kind of minor and the people who were bootlegging them wouldn't have paid for them anyway.
Speaker: Well, and I think a lot of writers would rather be widely read than widely sold. I mean, you know, beyond the fact that we need money live. Depends on how money I have for my mortgage. No, I get it. I don't make crap doing what I do. i You know, the magazine, I'm like selling collectibles to fund the magazine.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, no, no, and and I count myself one of the lucky ones. And yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, you know, it if you can live on what you create and not have to, you know, slave for the man, that that's amazing.
Speaker: but but and to And to back up a second, it's I don't think it's going to take work from, and I hesitate to use real, real artist, but I think there's a very basic level where things in like clip art,
Speaker: and royalty-free stock images have taken work from people for years. I think it's more along those lines. It's kind of like the low-level stuff.
Speaker: But I think the stuff that influences, that I like to think influences dialogues or you know culture in general, as ah as opposed to the the shared moment on the deathbed with my you know crappy story, I think that will remain in the hands of humans. I don't think that can be done by anyone.
Speaker: I think to to some extent that's true, but we also hear, I'm sure you're hearing what I'm hearing, that a lot of authors that are very against AI pros are fine with using AI art for their book covers.
Speaker: Well, that's lame, you know? Yeah, I mean, that's... and chuck that's That's just plain-ass hypocritism. Well, I mean, I'm a graphic designer, and I know not everyone does, so I try to not be too privileged in my opinions of that. But, like, when we started Sometimes Hilarious Horror, we used ah AI art.
Speaker: i I took a bunch of AI images that represented the stories and then I gave them to our graphics guy and said, please incorporate these into the cover. And that's what we did. And we took a lot hate for it because i I really didn't know. I thought at first that it was like Photoshop. This was like two years ago.
Speaker: and i And I don't personally hate you for it. Thank you. but But we don't do that anymore. Now that we understand that, a it takes work from artists that had already been created and and was utilized to train AI without their permission, but also... The whole training thing is is the is is the stickler there, you in some ways, because it's it's using their own work to create the model. But if you look at copyright law, I mean, it's not illegal to read something or to look at something. And that's essentially all it all it's doing.
Speaker: but But to back up for a second, I designed the cover of The Stars Within. And I made it using, not AI, I'm not that stupid, but, um you know, a clip art, an image from the Hubble, two pieces of clip art and an image from the Hubble telescope, which was public domain.
Speaker: Nice. It was free. And I think the two images i used cost $24.00. And we spent another $16 on the Adobe font that we used. I could have had the publisher give artist $1,000 to paint something. And that would have supported the arts.
Speaker: And when I originally was putting this together, I was thinking of it. And it went through various evolutions. I was thinking of it literally just as a sketch to show a real artist to put it together. But when it came out, we liked it.
Speaker: And so we kept it. And that's not the equivalent of using AI, but it's some of the same issues you're talking about. And if you go through a bookstore, most of the covers you're looking at aren't original art.
Speaker: They're licensed photos that some Photoshop guy ran through and put the right font on it and did design work. And there's an an art to that. oh yeah and or There's an n art to prompting ChatGPT the right way, you know.
Speaker: um yeah garbage in, garbage out. If you ask it really interesting questions, you get really interesting responses. I, in deference to the way people are upset about it, I don't use it.
Speaker: I mean, yes, I use it, but I don't use professionally. know, when I was playing with it, what I, when I write, I gave myself, and this is probably an ADD thing too. There's some artists who will, some writers will rewrite the first sentence over and over and over again until they get it perfect. And they know, you know,
Speaker: how it is, I gave myself permission to write whatever crap I wanted with the understanding that I would go back and change it. So a lot of my writing is rewriting, which is 90% of writing anyway.
Speaker: Oh yeah, I hear that. My first book actually was a NaNoWriMo, which is, you know, where you just get in there and you write and write and write and write until you got a whole bunch of it and then you decide what to do with it.
Speaker: yeah yeah and you make Yeah. I work with an outline too, and i i but I'm free to change the outline. So when I was playing with it, what I would do with it is I would let it do that first shitty draft. Okay. Because I would look at the pile of crap that I had put down and I said, that sucks.
Speaker: But the fact that I knew it sucked meant that I had an idea for something better. And then I would try to make it match that idea of something better. Okay. And so, insofar as I used ChatGP, I used it in that sense, you So, and it was very useful.
Speaker: But again, because of the because I'm part of that community and out of respect to the people who hate it, not gonna go there. And I wanna say until the issues are resolved, but to an extent, they're just not gonna be resolved because legally you'd have to change the copyright law.
Speaker: And I don't think anybody understands that. They're like, mean, there's a stupid thing Noam Chomsky says it's a cut and paste machine. And it's just not. I mean, if it was, we wouldn't have any problems.
Speaker: you know That would just be flat out copyright stealing. But it's generative. It makes stuff up. I remember asking it to give me a list of my books. And some of them were real.
Speaker: But it had made up a sequel to The Ripper called The Shadow of the Moth. Yeah, yeah. um ChatGPT had me writing for sites I'd never written for that seemed plausible but but not true.
Speaker: And The Shadow of the Moth is a great title. Right. Wow, I wish I had done a sequel to The Ripper. My sequel to The Ripper was called Ripper or New One? No, there was a sequel to The Ripper that never got published too.
Speaker: It was Ripper ripper and Son, but that's i have a lot of sad stories like that. Anyway, so it's it's a dilemma. And what are you leaning towards? You lean towards just quitting? um Well, you know, I have this thing um called money that I need.
Speaker: but Yes. But no, i'm what i'm what I'm trying to do, honestly, is is find a way to stay with the company and not be not not feel like a hypocrite every day.
Speaker: Because the thing is, I've never had to do my own graphics. So the graphics part of it is really none of my business. But i i can't if if they can agree that anything with my name on it or that I'm getting credit for is not AI produced in any sense, I think that would be enough for me.
Speaker: Would they you know would they let you spell that out in your credit or something? um Well, I mean, i don't i don't think I have a current contract. So we'd probably be negotiating a new contract anyway. Don't give it a shot. I mean, you know, so like I'm using my child labor produced phone.
Speaker: yeah I'm just, I'm using it Let me just eat one of these slave sneakers right quick. um yeah But I guess, I mean... I don't know.
Speaker: It's very grating because the guy in charge will say, oh, it's so much faster. It's so much easier. And the the voice in the back of my head says, well, you just don't want to pay people. And that's like a shitty thing to accuse someone of because, you know, money is finite. Nobody has as much of it as they really want.
Speaker: You know, even Elon is bitching about what he can't do. so That's the old story about any automation, though. you know Yeah, it is. It's deeper, it's faster, and it puts people out of work, except for the people who maintain the machines or the people who learn how to use the machines.
Speaker: I mean, in 20 years, there might be you know writers who do use JAT-BT are maybe ahead of the curve. And I read this about someone was saying early on, there'll be two kinds of lawyers in the future, you know lawyers who use JAT-GBT to do the drafts of their legal things.
Speaker: And those who go to business, you know, because the others would just be much more efficient and efficiency, ethical or not wins out.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, that's the whole like business via algorithm that insurance companies and, you know, litigation finance people are all arguing about. And it's, it's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, evolution is, you know, for, for my non-evolutionary friend on Facebook, evolution is about that which survives.
Speaker: Yeah, I want to give everybody just a minute to sit with that. Evolution is about that which survives. so
Speaker: Okay. Did we cover everything that you wanted talk to talk about? Did we leave anything out? i I think so. it seems like it. I mean, i I got through everything on my list. Do you ah do you have any questions for me?
Speaker: ah You wanted me to end with a question. I'm dying to know what you're going to do about your AI dilemma. um But in a more more perhaps genial sense, so what's ah your favorite thing that you've written? um And why?
Speaker: Well, my first book was a total Mary Sue about a girl who, ah you know, a crazy girl who kills her mom because her mom was abusive. Um, and that was basically, I mean, it's, it's a pretty good read and, and I find that sad teenagers like it a whole lot.
Speaker: Um, my next book I wrote just to make sure I could write a book that wasn't about me. And, uh, frankly, it's, it's not great. Um, I think the book I'm probably the most proud of is my third book, which is called Kiss Me Like You Love Me. And it's ah multiple first person. Like every other chapter is first person from the killer's perspective.
Speaker: And then the other chapters are various people in his life, his ex-wife, his stepdaughter, his boss. um Oh, that sounds cool. It is. and it in ah one of the things that I try to portray is that is like how much of a difference the perspective makes and how much we lie to ourselves because the the killer is not like a smooth, slick killer. He's a big dumbass who, you know, is fixated on young girls and he's really gross and he doesn't see that he's gross.
Speaker: And it's it's very much about men that that see women and girls as like a ah species to be conquered as opposed to like You know, just a ah human person you might want to interact with. if It's all these little mind games and self-deceptions.
Speaker: And also the idea of people not taking advantage of the power that they have. You know, like you could have done something in this situation, but you you didn't for reasons that seem reasonable to you at the time. But look at what happened.
Speaker: Yeah. You know, because i'm I'm always a proponent of like having the conversation, getting mad and then like yelling if you have to and just getting it all out there. You know, truth, truth, truth.
Speaker: But that's not, you know, it doesn't always end up that way. And then it turned out I had autism. So I like, oh, well, that explains a whole lot of why I hated retail.
Speaker: um sure i isn't There's a satisfaction to diagnoses. Yes, very much so. Very much so. And then, like after that, my last novel was The Finster Effect, which was my zombie thing.
Speaker: And that that's another first person perspective. But some of the perspectives are also animals, because there's a dog and a cat and a swarm of rats. Was it conscious or was the individual rats? Well, you know, it's interesting because it is a communal consciousness. It started out there was going to be a rat general.
Speaker: and And I love that idea because I i love the Ratman's Notebooks. That's one of my favorite books. was just going to mention Willard and Ben. And the love song by Michael Jackson. Yeah.
Speaker: ah Oh, Ben. but but it just doesn't get better But yeah, that's, um i'm I'm really fond of that one as well. And then I didn't write anything for like eight years. I didn't publish a damn thing.
Speaker: And um then I wrote the the first President's Son book because it was so important to me that people understand how I arrived at the conclusion that Don Jr. is secretly decent. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to explain this and everyone will understand it because it makes so much sense.
Speaker: And, um, whoops. Whoops. Yeah, I, uh... yeah ah that That is probably the single biggest fumble that I have ever made in terms. And I mean, there's lots and lots of people that I used to think were great that I now know are not great. You know, when I was a kid, I had a crush on Scott Mayo.
Speaker: Yeah. Whoops. You know, and like a lot of people, I like Chris Noth. I like Kevin Spacey and Neil Gaiman and, you know, all those people that's like, oh, whoops, they're monsters. ah Bill Cosby hurt a lot. but But yeah, well, and even now it's like, oh, I'm sorry. Snoop Dogg just went fascist. What the fuck?
Speaker: Yeah. And, you know, I'm a fat, funny brunette. So Roseanne also hit me pretty hard. She's had a number of issues. She has. She has. But, you know, mean, it's weird to me because I often find myself thinking about how, like, some people, once they say or do one fucked up thing that makes them seem like they're down with the fash, I don't want anything to do with them anymore.
Speaker: Like, The Rock declined to declare for a for a candidate, and I was just like, oh, fuck him. if If you're not going to say Kamala is the right thing, I don't like you anymore, The Rock. sure You can shut up. and But then, you know, this Don Jr. thing for like years and years. I'm like, no no, no, He's in a picture with that guy, but he probably doesn't know. and you know, I mean, I sounded like a regular Trump person just with a different Trump. Like I always had some excuse or some reason why it wasn't what it looked like.
Speaker: And yeah it turned out. You can honestly believe some of it was, you switching her meds yeah yeah well and but then that's the thing people try to say oh it's the weed it's all that weed like well if it's a one yeah if it's a one of you know and they're really sorry you know right right i'm sorry that's what the wall tell told me to say you know like okay all right but we're gonna keep it yeah but you know uh bill cosby was one of the you know my family life was fraught as a child
Speaker: mom and dad fighting dad being an alcoholic and we but we could always laugh at bill cosby albums it was like this moment of family togetherness that kind of meant a lot to me and then you know that was not a one of yeah oh yeah totally well yeah that's that's my husband's family he grew up constantly listening to bill cosby and like he's one of those guys that says lines why did I eat chocolate cake for breakfast? We asked for eggs and milk.
Speaker: He made us eat this. So, so yeah. And it sucks. And that's part of the, like the bad part of the internet is that you have to learn so much more about people that it's like persona was so dignified. Right.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge beetle fan. John Lennon hit women. He sure did, but he thought it was the wrong thing to do eventually. Yes.
Speaker: Yeah. But that's a thing, you know? Well, that's another thing I have a hard time with. Like when a cop, you know, does something that any idiot could see was inappropriate. Well, but and just in general, any adult that goes around hurting people, if you've ever been hit, then you know that hitting hurts.
Speaker: yeah This isn't something that you should need a sensitivity class because you can tell a three-year-old no hitting. And they might still hit, but they'll understand what you mean. Not all three-year-olds are told that.
Speaker: you know, so. um But by the time you can legally buy a beer, you've been told. Yeah, you know, I guess I believe in, I think redemption's possible, you know. Well, it can be, but I mean.
Speaker: and depends on the circumstance, you know, not if you're, if you're, you know, drugging and raping women for 10 years. Russell Brand, you know, Russell Brand is apparently a big Christian now and people are just buying it because the Lord told him to stop essaying teenagers or something.
Speaker: you know, ah eventually. So guess what, dude? It's time for the Mad Lib. Oh, okay. Are you ready for this? Sure. This one looks like it has a ton of, okay, wait, let's start. One, two, three.
Speaker: Looks like I'm going to need four adjectives.
Speaker: Good Lord. um Oh, you got this. Wait, what? Red. Salacious. Criminal. all It's so on my mind for some reason.
Speaker: um Hopefully. Is that an adverb? That's an adverb because it's a L-Y. So one more adjective. Hopeful. Hopeful.
Speaker: All right. I need two verbs. Two verbs. ah Encroaching.
Speaker: And validating. Okay. I'm going present tense these. Okay. Validate and encroach. Okay. And then I need... I need one, two, three singular nouns.
Speaker: Three singular nouns. Potato. um Pumpkin. um I'm doing all fruits. I mean, I'm doing all vegetables. And neophyte.
Speaker: All right. I need a plural noun, please. ah Tissues. A number? 42. Everybody does that.
Speaker: and a part of the body plural
Speaker: ah Pancreases. Pancrei? Pancreases. um Alright. So this is Truth or Dare. Because last ah recording we did part one of Truth or Dare. So this is part two and it's the dares. Okay?
Speaker: So the dare is pretend you are a red puppy. Encroach loudly and wag your potato. Okay. Dare, put on some salacious music and dance like a criminal pumpkin for one minute.
Speaker: that's it's a lot That's poetry. I'm going to need video of that, sir. Dare, hop on one neophyte while you validate and say the alphabet backward.
Speaker: i've actually done that. Dare. Dr. Seuss.
Speaker: One fish, two fish, red fish, neophyte. Take off your socks and tissues and step into the shower. Then turn on the hopeful water and yodel at the top of your pancreases for 42 seconds.
Speaker: and go Well, I have every confidence in you. um All right. I've just hit my microphone stand with my hand like three times because I am professional. Yeah.
Speaker: Dude. that's what we do when we're professionals. Right? Well, thank you so much for being here and for thank you for telling me how to pronounce your name finally. that was that's That's good info. um From Petruka's new book, The Stars Within.
Speaker: Chapter 2.
Speaker: Niemann-Oss' shower guard shifted about, uncertain where to stand. He was clearly uncomfortable, a fact which pleased Oss. If you'd like to watch, I don't mind.
Speaker: No. It was always a different guard, and always only one. Their schedules shifted randomly to prevent any possible collusion. Otherwise it was feared Oss would turn them against each other.
Speaker: This clumsy fellow seems new. I can't have gone through them all already, can i Well, why not? The only thing about this place that still surprises me is how so much white can be so filthy.
Speaker: All those smells hanging naked in the air. Ost smiled at him. Are you sure? it is a unique opportunity. I am the only sentient alien humanity knows about.
Speaker: No harm in looking. Toujours gay. The poor man frowned, highlighting the lines in his reddening face. Toujours gay. It's a phrase I came across in an ancient story databank.
Speaker: Poems written by a cockroach. Means something like always happy. More a request than a statement, really. and Always did have a fondness for pre-Kalitian earth culture.
Speaker: Even got the idea for creating my own non-human pronoun from a 1920 novel, back when they counted the years since they killed the child of their god. Os stretched. So, what do you say, have a look?
Speaker: No, the guard said. After a beat, he added, thank you. Definitely new. What sad turn brought you to this crappy job?
Speaker: Arkoja's new plasma swallow up your homeworld? Thanks to the elite naturalist panel tasked with studying Jure, As was required to shower alone. Having bedded everyone on that panel, As thought their report was rife with sour grapes.
Speaker: After all, the convicted con artist chose prison over remaining their laboratory plaything. But, of course, they were right to be careful. If they weren't, us would be long gone.
Speaker: Homo sapiens were constantly in heat, and your ability to generate targeted pheromones could easily exert a problematic influence on other inmates, or most anyone for that matter, with an accent on mate.
Speaker: More than problematic. An outsider able to excite and manipulate human mating and bonding urges could start their own army, control a nation or a world. Wish I'd thought of that before they caught me.
Speaker: But, toujours encore. As gave the newbie a wink before disappearing behind the privacy screen. Undressing, Gie considered accidentally pushing the screen aside just for fun.
Speaker: All thought of personal amusement vanished though when the incredibly unusual and incredibly contraband communicator hidden deep in your ear canal squawked to life. Small change in plans.
Speaker: Though Dr. Worland's device was the size of a Triticale Colonel, the audio was crisp and clear. It was Alec Frey, the soldier. Former soldier, since he assassinated somebody or other.
Speaker: Now he was a convict, just like us. Half-dressed, us started the shower and waited for the hissing steam to better cover your response. Do go on, soldier boy. We're escaping.
Speaker: Right now. A small change? Frey, what the fuck? My things are back in my cell. Running, Frey panted.
Speaker: Not my call. Charnell overheard that two new arrivals decided to make a run for it in the maze. He figures Admin will blame them for anything unusual, giving us cover.
Speaker: So he had Worland bring down their comms. Oz stared at the streaming water. A pity, but he's right. Most of the guards won't even notice until they check their wrists.
Speaker: Then they'll get terribly lost. This is our best shot. Yeah, well, I'm on my way, aren't I? Worland said her blocker will burn out in about five minutes, along with our chances.
Speaker: I'll need at least two to seduce the guard. I'll be there in one. And I'm not into three ways. Spoilsport!
Speaker: Frey was an easy read, Worland reliably insane, but Charnell had secrets, and the smells sociopaths gave off didn't always match their intent.
Speaker: Charnell also, wisely, insisted they meet with us only when they were all present, so there was never a moment to voice those doubts one-on-one. They did all need each other to escape, so there was that.
Speaker: No going back then. Free or dead. Toujours Soaked and steaming, she yanked away the privacy screen. The guard couldn't help but gape.
Speaker: Not that the black, far-set eyes, neatly divided by a strong, aquiline nose, were particularly attractive to humans. Neither was the zafra's skin, or the cloud-white, feathery tufts atop your narrow skull.
Speaker: What was appealing? was the accompanying symphony of pheromones Gherglans produced. Carried by the steam, the chemicals not only engendered desire, they promised a satisfactory release.
Speaker: A rare few did manage to defer acting on this desire, little puzzles Oz stored for future rumination. Ghe hoped the guard wasn't one. He wasn't. He was already lowering his weapon.
Speaker: W-what are you doing? Lacking time, stared a few barefoot steps forward. Exploring. iy can't. ah Of course you can.
Speaker: Everyone does. Every guard in the chamber. Ask around. As long as I never see you again, and I won't. Admin doesn't care. Consider it's compensation for the shitty pay.
Speaker: The latest hires were largely from fallen pantheon worlds. Their home economies in shambles. Displaced workers were forced to take any pay available. That included the low wages here, which had been further reduced under high warden's swope.
Speaker: That sort of resentment always helped loosen the chains on base desire. He worked hard. Why shouldn't he have some fun? Are you even a... Zhe caught a whiff of the man's expectations.
Speaker: Heteronormative. Zhe was a she, then. Yes, whatever you're thinking, whatever you want, it's me. Oz took the guard's hand and pressed it to Zhe's chest, so he could feel, as well as Zhe, the curves swelling along Zhe's slender form.
Speaker: There are limits to what I can change, but I've never had any complaints. Os ran an index finger through the man's hair, pressing hard. Careful not to scratch, but promising G would if he liked.
Speaker: If they catch us, it was the only opening Ost needed. Being from the Pantheon, he must believe in some deity or other. Some sects were wonderfully inventive, but those who maintained order tended to be prudish on principle, none worse than the followers of Lao.
Speaker: That, of course, made them easy, but boring. In this case, a lucky kind of boring. She cooed. Isn't it a waste to devote all that imagination to the punishment, and none to the crime?
Speaker: That did it. He pulled Jiren for an open-mouthed to kiss. As As roughly slid Jiren against his, she provided the promised scratch. Rather than a fingernail, it came from a tiny, needle-like protrusion, courtesy of Dr. Emma Worland.
Speaker: As expected, the guard didn't notice anything wrong until his eyes rolled up into his head. As was pleased to think it had been considerably less than a minute, but a second later Frey arrived.
Speaker: Soldier Boy didn't reek of fear. That much was tamed by his Arkojan training. But it was still there, a subtle background note. Seeing that the guard was out, he wasted no time spinning back to the exit, moving with a precision that made his monochrome prison outfit almost look like a military uniform.
Speaker: Good. Okay. Let's go. In a moment... After slipping back into the prison overalls, Oz gave the guard's crotch a good last squeeze and took his sidearm.
Speaker: Must you? i may not have scruples, Oz explained, but I do have an aesthetic. When his disapproving look remained, Oz worried about being mistaken for a liability.
Speaker: Frey wasn't the type for an outright betrayal. He was the only one of them who showed any form of kindness. But he was a soldier, used to making sacrifices. And while the Pantheon might believe in an afterlife, Oz did not.
Speaker: In any case, I'm told it's only for humans and their pets. I suppose I might get in as a pet, but then I may as well have stayed with the naturalists. Just outside the showers, two custodial staff lay on the white floor, rendered unconscious by Frey through less enjoyable means.
Speaker: And we want to remind listeners that ah we can be found on coffee ah under sometimes hilarious horror, the magazine that sponsors the mentally odd cast. ah We're going to see everybody next week.
Speaker: And again, thanks so much for being here. um We're going to have links in the district description for the, ah the Amazon link and the audible link and all the other information that y'all might need to catch up with Stefan's work. Okay.
Speaker: Cool. So we'll see everybody next time.
