Addiction, Celebrity, Public Shaming & Truth: The Performance Art of James Frey, Celebrated Writer of Ill-Repute | The Rich Roll Podcast

I think money is the most addictive, most destructive, most powerful drug of all.

More than anything, America is a classist country, right?

It's a fucking caste system. And the rich live a very different life than not.

There are no consequences. There are no repercussions.

There is no danger. It is a playground and people get real bored in that playground.

And when people get real bored and they have literally everything in existence at at their disposal, shit gets a little weird.

I'm not a journalist. I'm a guy who wrote a book about addiction I won't stop, I won't stop, I won't stop.

I wanna fuck it up. I wanna burn it down.

In 2003, there was this book that came out and it was a book that basically rocked my world.

A book that spoke to me, to the deepest, the darkest, and the most hidden parts of myself in so many ways that no other book that I'd ever read had.

And at the time I was a couple of years sober after hitting bottom, after having blown up my life into a million little pieces.

And I was in the early stages of reassembling those pieces into my newly arranged life.

And I just couldn't believe this book said what it said.

And reading it felt like someone was somehow reading my mind, the parts of it that I kept hidden.

And I couldn't imagine... even ever saying out loud, all of which left me fascinated with the mysterious wizard who had authored this sorcery.

And it turns out I wasn't alone. The book was a sensation, so much so that even Oprah took notice.

And this is where things went haywire for James Frye. his life exploding into this hell and back drama that in some ways kind of echoed This different kind of drama that he described in his salacious and controversial, is it an addiction memoir or is it fiction? mega bestseller entitled A Million Little Pieces.

James, the author of this book, had set out to become the bad boy of American literature.

His heroes are Baudelaire and Brad Easton Ellis, writers like Henry Miller and Hunter S. Thompson, He wanted to be bold like them and to write like them unapologetically, fearlessly.

And from the start, he was keenly aware of the ways in which image played a large part in how these literary giants were both received and perceived.

And so he took a page out of the playbooks established by artists like Warhol and Dali, and diligently set about crafting for himself a bad boy mythology and it worked.

He got what he wanted. He got what he asked for.

It just didn't look like he thought it would.

And he was left to contend with the million little pieces of the million little pieces media controversy that he had stepped into.

In the aftermath, he continued to crank out books.

He ran a successful business that ran into its own sort of controversy.

But after something like 13 or 15 years of shying away from the media and from the scrutiny of the public, he's kind of back, ready to talk about what happened and what it's like now. and still the same guy as always that wants to push your buttons and get right up in your face.

So today, we get into all of it. even way behind the scenes of his much ballyhooed, Oprah-induced upheaval, which he recounts in riveting detail, including never before until now aspects of it he has previously kept private.

But as much as this conversation is about James Fry's life, it's also somewhat of a manifesto on the importance of books, muscular books written by authors with courage.

It's about art, emotional truth, the intersection of creativity and the Tao, where inspiration comes from, how to capture its vitality and write it all down.

Something he calls his prowling with the panther philosophy.

And it's all coming up quick, but first.

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Okay, James Fry. James has always been a larger than life figure for me, someone I had always wanted to meet.

And I'm very glad that we did because this guy really delivered on everything I imagined him to be.

And kind of taking into account the fact that he is undoubtedly this extraordinarily gifted storyteller, including stories he tells about himself might leave you wondering which part is myth and which part is truth.

I have to say that I found him to be surprisingly transparent unguarded, earnest, endearing in many surprising ways, wise in others, And really without a doubt, especially for me, given that I'm in the midst of writing a book myself, someone who is really quite creatively inspiring.

His latest book, Next to Heaven, is a Paige Turner beach read portrayal of the top 1% of the 1%.

It's a very fun sort of punk rock, Danielle Steel-esque White Lotus characters before the vacation romp. narrative.

So check that out. And with that, this is me and the singular James Fry.

Well, it's great to have you here. I've wanted to meet you for a very long time.

Thank you for having me. Excited to have this conversation.

I just wanna say at the start that I read a million little pieces when it came out, 2003.

Yeah, I think I had like a year and a half of sobriety at that point.

And I don't think that I'd ever read anything that I identified with like as profoundly.

It was an extremely meaningful book to me to read like in my early sobriety and like hear a version of my story reflected back to me.

And so, you've done all these other things and we're gonna get into all of it, but for that alone, like you will always live in my heart as a very important figure.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for reading the book.

One of the reasons I wrote it, I had never seen what I thought was a realistic portrayal of what it felt like to be a drug addict.

There were lots of books about like being one, like here's how I buy my drugs.

Here's who I hang out with. Here's how cool it is.

But there had never been a book about what it felt like when you wake up every morning and you're a fucking drug addict.

When you're an alcoholic and you have to look in the mirror and you know that you're just destroying your soul.

You know that the one life you've been given you're lighting it on fucking fire.

And the self-hate and the shame the obsession, the obsession for the drugs more, more, more, right?

The endless obsession. And then what happens when you fucking wake up and you're that dude and you're basically told like you got a month or two or you can stop.

Right. The horror of that. And for whatever all the controversies around A Million Little Pieces were, the goal was at the beginning to create a work of art with words that would pierce the soul of any human being that read it.

And to take them into that place that you and I have lived right in a way that was visceral. and powerful and immediate, and overwhelming and horrifying and soul-destroying the way addiction is.

Right. That I wanted to try to figure out some way to make a reader feel what I felt as a drug addict to to feel All of it.

And have it overwhelm them the way it overwhelmed me while I lived it.

And so when people tell me that, like... again for all the controversies or whatever, I don't give a fuck.

What I care about is did I do that to you?

And if I did, like, thank you. Thank you for giving me the shot.

Yeah, I mean, it served that for me to be able to feel the depth of of pain and shame and loneliness and the darkness that sets in and the powerlessness to arrest this cycle.

The discomfort when you wake up in the morning is so profound and the shame is so overwhelming choice is removed and using again is inevitable because it's the only way to relieve yourself of all of those emotions.

And so you just, you entrench yourself in this cycle that only digs that hole deeper until, You're either gonna die or you're gonna raise your hand and do this radical thing called getting sober.

There's a lot to be said about about veracity in art and in society, fact versus fiction and this controversy that you had to weather.

I mean, the purpose of art is to elucidate truth, but not by dent of being, you know, of like fidelity, like photographic fidelity to something, but to elucidate something deeper. through the creative process.

And I think amidst this controversy and there'll be people watching and listening to this who aren't familiar with with what we're talking about.

So I want you to tell the story. There was something that got lost in the translation of what you were trying to achieve and what you were attempting to do and the public perception of what the final product was.

I mean, the larger story is when I was 21, I read a book called Tropic of Cancer, right?

And it was by Henry Miller. A friend of mine gave it to me. i opened it i read it in a single sitting and i couldn't believe it existed I couldn't believe somebody did it.

I couldn't believe somebody wrote that way and lived the way he lived and talked shit the way he talked.

And what I described is it like turned on a light bulb in my soul that had never existed before.

I had always been a big, big reader as a kid, but I had never imagined I could be a writer.

Writers were people who went to fancy schools.

Writers were people who grew up in places that I didn't.

And And when I ran Henry Miller, I was a 21-year-old alcoholic, drug dealer, drug addict, fuck-up punk.

But I was like, man, that motherfucker can do that.

I could do that. Right. I want to light some motherfucking kid up the way he just lit me up.

I wanna live the way he lived. I wanna live a life that revolves around art and love and sex and deep feeling.

And freedom, freedom of ideas and movement and of heart and of soul.

And for whatever reason, at that young age, I also was like, you know what?

I'm also going to go out and I'm going to be the best there is for whatever reason.

It's just that book lit something up in me and and from that point forward i started trying to teach myself how to write i didn't i don't have any education in writing And I moved to Paris. to be a famous writer.

And one of the things that I very deliberately did there was start reading immensely and looking at immense amounts of art and trying to find patterns in the people whose careers I wanted to or whose lives I wanted to to sort of not mirror, but the ones who had pulled off what I was wanting to pull off.

So I learned a lot about Baudelaire, Celine, Manet, Rambo, Jack Kerouac, certainly the famous ones like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and started finding patterns. and The patterns were when a lot of those people's first books came out, nobody had ever read anything like what they did. we think of hemingway now as hemingway but when hemingway's books first started coming out the idea that you could write short powerful declarative sentences without description and that it could be great was a radical fucking idea.

And any writer, Henry Miller, the use of profanity and the open, promotion of free sex, Kerouac with little grammar, long lyrical.

Mailer with just the fucking storming forward power.

So nobody had ever seen anything like how they wrote when they first appeared formally, sort of how they constructed sentences, how they did that.

And then also that when they wrote that whatever their first book was, was written about something that you know, was subversive to American society but was also very much a part of it.

It was shocking. It demanded attention and it absolutely polarized audiences, forced you to take a position on it.

So for years and years and years, I was seeking this thing.

How do I write in a way that is absolutely and utterly unique to me? to what I hear in my head, to the music that I hear in my mind and my soul?

And then what do I write about to fucking knock people off their feet?

And I had been through this sobriety thing, right?

I mean, you got sober really young I started using real young, right?

12 probably smoking cigarettes at like 10.

I was, you know, three, four days a week by 14 and daily by probably 17.

You don't see kids like that anymore. The world doesn't allow kids to exist like that, but we're more or less the same age.

There were kids like that when we grew up.

There was a whole generation fuck up punk crazy kids.

Well, it was free range latch key era. Yeah, I had no rules and my parents never knew what the fuck I was doing and so I raised hell, right?

And I was like, that's the best story I got.

I've never seen anything about addiction that rang true to my heart or certainly getting sober.

All the sober stuff was like, well, If you follow these things, everything will be delightful.

And it had no connection in any kind to the absolute fucking horror show I had experienced.

But also like the beautiful almost renaissance that I had lived through.

Like I somehow fucking survived. I still don't always know how I do or how I did, but I pulled it off.

And I was like, you know what? I can write a work of art that's unlike anything anybody's seen and will also help my people. will also, if I help one fucking drug addict stop, if I help one mother understand the horror of her son's life,

If I help one's father understand why his daughter ended up how she ended up, if I can do that and create some fucking great work of art, then that's it.

That's all I've ever wanted. My understanding is that you sold the book as a novel.

So we sold it as a novel. It was written, when I wrote it, I didn't think about novel, novel, I didn't think about that shit.

I thought about what's the next right word And what can I do to fucking tear whoever reads this heart apart?

But on some level, just to push back on you a little bit, you must have... been consciously aware of the extent to which you're gonna blend your own personal story and then bend it a little bit.

Absolutely. So there's more extreme versions of things that happen to you from time to time, but the point, the purpose of that was to kind of dig a little bit deeper to elucidate the emotive aspect of the feeling of being in that state.

I was also working in a tradition of literature that's old, right?

Baudelaire wrote books about his life where he called himself Charles Baudelaire, but there were clearly embellishments.

Go read Paris Spleen. It was published as fucking poetry, even though it's like a novel of short stories.

Go read fucking Henry Miller. Go read Jack Kerouac.

There's an interesting parallel with Kerouac where the original draft of on the road had all the characters real names in it and they debated whether to publish it as fiction or non-fiction kerouac thought of it as as a lyrical non-fiction book um the publisher said well novels sell better let's sell it let's publish it as a novel so he put in all the fake names and the publishes is the novel right and so there's always been this debate about certain writers about what we do And the publishers have always directed us towards the best commercial result.

And when a million little piece, when I wrote it, we sold it as a novel, but there was a thing in the contract where they had the right to publish it as a memoir.

Very specifically also in the contract, because of that, I had a separate clause where I did not indemnify the truthful veracity of the book.

I did not tell the publisher this is perfectly factual.

So there was always even the gray area in there.

So internally, there was complete awareness. of this fact, that this wasn't like an absolutely accurate rendition of your personal story.

Yeah, I mean, even I had said that in the media before the thing blew up.

I had said things like, every character in there was a real person and I have changed my their identities in ways so that I feel it is true to who they were, but you will never be able to identify who they actually were. that there was a world champion boxer in there with me, but I altered his identity in a way so that his family didn't have to deal with the fact that I wrote a fucking book with him in it.

So I had always been open about a lot of manipulations.

If you read the book, it's a simple manipulation.

The fucking problem and I own it is that when it came time to like really publish it and really go out and promote it, I was like, well, what do I say?

And they were like, Say it's true. That's what everybody does, right?

I was like, all right, I'll go do it. And it was a big, dumb fucking mistake.

And I did lie to the public. You can say I was told to do it or not, but ultimately at the end of the day, I have to own it because I was the one who sat in those fucking chairs and said those fucking words.

And I have owned it. I've never run from it.

I've never denied it. I've never said, I didn't do it.

I said immediately after. But the problem was it wasn't really a novel and it wasn't really nonfiction.

It exists somewhere in the middle and it's probably about 85% true.

I wasn't in jail for as long as I was there.

Honestly, that problems checking some of the veracity because juvenile criminal records are all sealed.

But I wasn't in jail for as long as I said I was.

And I got arrested for like three less things.

That was the real problem, right? It has long been acknowledged.

I was in there for what I was in there for, the people who know me, and the people who were in there with me were real and people who i know knew them knew my my friend leonard that was not his real name or knew my girlfriend.

The book comes out It's successful before Oprah cottons onto it and decides that she's gonna make you her pet project and position this book and celebrate this book as her pick.

So that all happens, right? And on some level, it's like, you know, Any writer would be delighted to have the promotional engine of Oprah behind their book.

But here comes this punk rock, iconoclastic writer with a lot of fuck you energy, who on some level I would imagine, especially at that time, you're like, is this really what I want?

This doesn't fit with like what my heroes would do, right?

Right. So there's probably some discomfort with that, even in the best case scenario, had nothing gone sideways.

But I wanna kind of like, understand the emotional experience of the book coming out, being received well, selling really well, and then suddenly this Oprah thing happens.

Yeah, so the book, it was interesting. The book was submitted to publishers on September 10th, 2001.

I was on my honeymoon, right? September 11th happens.

Nobody read it. When they did read it, everybody said no.

So we submitted it to 17 publishers and I got 16 no's.

The 17th was Nan Talese, who at the time, I thought was the best publisher.

Legend. Best publisher in America. So at the beginning of the process, I could have chosen someone.

It would have been her. And I ended up with her.

And I have nothing but love and respect for her.

And I will say she did stand behind me. Random House and the collective corporate that Nan worked for was horse shit and they were cowards.

But Nan wasn't. Nan was cool. And the book came out and it got a lot of hype before it came out.

And there were big articles. And I was, you know, there was a lot of As Joyce Carol Oates recently said, there was So much hyperbole, so much attention, right?

The book hit number two on the bestseller list.

I was a fucking punk from nowhere. A year later, I started, the publisher started calling and saying, hey, Oprah's interested in talking to you.

Will you talk to her? And I said no, and I said no like five times.

And the publisher finally said, James, just do us the favor and have the conversation.

They want you to come on to talk about addiction. just do us the favor and have the conversation you can say no i was like fine at the time i had a newborn child a six-month-old baby and I lived in Amagansett, New York.

And I remember the day the Oprah phone call, our fucking washer blew up.

And I had to drive to P.C. Richard in Southampton and buy a new washing machine and cost like twelve hundred bucks.

And I had done really well and I was doing really well, but I was still like, you know, this shit's, I got a kid.

My wife wants more of them. I have this call and it's first with Sherry Salata, who was the executive producer of Oprah at the time.

And she's like, we love the book. Would you ever be interested in coming on?

And I was like, yeah, you know. And then she was like, could you hold for a minute?

And I was like, yeah, sure. And I was on hold for maybe 10 seconds and then Oprah came on and she goes, hello, James, how are you?

And I said, is this Oprah? She's like, yes, it is.

And I was like, ah, I'm cool, Oprah. How are you, man?

She's like, great. She's like, do you know about my book club?

And I said, yeah, I know about your book club, but it shut down for like three, four years, right?

And it had been. And she was like, yes.

And I only ever said I would restart it again when I read a book worthy of it.

I'd like to restart it again with you. And I remember very vividly there was this moment and I thought, do you really wanna fucking do this?

And then I thought, You just had to buy a washing machine for $1,200.

If you sell 500,000 copies and get a bunch more readers, it's a good thing, man.

Say yes. And so I was like, yeah, I'd do that.

Or at least I'll talk about it. And then it happened.

First of all, did you feel like you had kind of betrayed your punk rock roots in agreeing to that?

Was there any kind of twinge of? No, there wasn't.

There wasn't. Because there was also a lot of ambition at that point in my life. i was i was a young angry man full of full of ambition and i was like if i sell 500 000 more books I'll get some dough in my pocket and it's part of the mission.

And the mission was and had always been And part of the controversies around me, I do think have always revolved around this.

I came out before a million little pieces came out and I said, listen, man, I'm here to be the best writer there is.

I'm here to be the most influential writer of my time.

I'm here to sell the most books. I'm here to cause the most problems.

And I'm here to make all of my peers irrelevant.

And that's it. Where did that ambition, that audacity come from?

I think a lot of it came from my childhood where I was a rowdy kid and I was a fighter. to fight and I love to get in trouble and I love to raise hell and my idols as a child We're iconic class, but often iconic class fighters.

Like my real childhood idol was marvelous Marvin Hagler, the greatest middleweight champ ever.

And I loved Marvin because he was – A guy who never got the respect he deserved, he came from nowhere and he fucking kicked everyone's ass, right?

Everyone always doubted him and all he ever did was walk motherfuckers down and render them unconscious.

And I just thought, I love that he called himself the best and the baddest.

And I thought as a child, when I grow up, I'm either gonna, I literally as a kid would be like, I'm either gonna die at 20 from drugs or I'm gonna be the best and the baddest.

It's something, right? Part of that is that alcoholic thing of thinking like I'm a piece of shit, but I'm also like a genius and I'm better than everyone else.

Yeah. Yeah. And part of it was I've talked always about my view of it has wildly evolved over the years, but I was born with some kind of furnace of fear. fury of rage inside of me.

And part of getting sober for me, that's what took me to the dark places I went to.

And part of getting sober was learning how to manage that fear. fury to manage this fucking furnace of rage that existed in me. and direct it towards something else.

But it's not just fury or rage, it's also this insistence that you have something to prove or something to say that deserves to be heard and seen.

Yeah, absolutely. I keep it all in there.

And I thought, you know what? Go out and be the Marvin Hagler of writers.

The best. and the fucking baddest and a guy who like outworks everyone doesn't give a fuck And it was very much in line with my literary heroes or my punk rock heroes.

I always liked people who, and I always admired people who made their own rules. who lived life according to their own code who did what they did And we're great at it, despite everybody trying to stop them, right?

I always loved those dudes. And so when I thought about, you know what, Henry Miller is a great writer and he lit people on fire. but I wanna be more than that, and I have more inside me.

And I believed absolutely, For some reason, I don't know why, absolutely from the day I decided to do it, from the day I finished reading Tropic of Cancer, I believed.

And I talk sometimes that there's almost two people in me.

There's a human being, there's a dude who like is a father and a friend. and feels insecurities and has anxieties and fears and And it has a lot of things he does to manage them.

And then there is the writer. And as a writer, I feel no fear.

I have no insecurity. I have absolute faith.

I believe beyond Anything anyone can tell me and the data that I have absolutely backs up. that i am the best of my time i'm the baddest of my time and i'm the most influential of my time and that was always the goal And I have always said as a writer, that's the goal.

It's the only thing I'm here to do. And I'm coming for you.

As a human being, like, yeah. I get scared to death of tons of things, but not as a writer.

As a writer, I believe it and nothing can shake it.

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That's R-O-K-A dot com. Ultimately, the role of the writer is to be this fearless voice that holds up a mirror to society and speaks truth. and is willing to be provocative and make people uncomfortable and is not out to win a popularity contest.

There's a whole, sort of self-mythologizing that goes into this that I wanna put a pin in for now and revisit.

That's what your heroes were doing. Here you are now in this position where you've written a book that you feel on some level is accomplishing that, is, you know, honest in that way.

Oprah comes along and it's this opportunity to like, here's a, this is a moment.

It was a huge moment. Oprah was the most powerful, most influential woman in the world at the time and probably at the time the most powerful and influential woman to ever exist.

And I said, yes. And I went in with my eyes open.

I went in thinking it would sell a bunch of books and it would be...

It would be another thing towards achieving that end goal.

I went on the show. I was a little surprised it was so focused on self-help things because I always have said, and I said it to her on the show, a million little pieces isn't a self-help book.

It's a work of literature. It's a work of art.

But that doesn't mean that I didn't hope that it would help people and that I didn't write it in some way with the intention of helping people.

But I think art can help people. I think we hear songs all the time.

The whole problem though was that had it been positioned as a fictional work of art from the outset.

Correct. of this would have gone down in this way.

I was a little surprised when I got on the show, how much they were focusing on the sort of, the truth and veracity and the inspiration, because a lot of the other book clubs had never been that. it had been let's talk about the book let's talk about how you write let's talk about these you know if you ever watched it was always that I came on and it was all about self-help.

Even the other things we shot were related to the self-help.

What happened afterwards was the book sold five million copies in three months.

And I went from being kind of a famous young writer to being a famous person.

And those are very, very different things, right?

A famous young writer, nobody knows what you look like.

Maybe they know your name. You've been on bestseller lists.

You have a certain cachet within a certain part of the world.

After I was on Oprah, I couldn't walk down a street.

I couldn't go into a restaurant. I couldn't walk through an airport.

Everywhere, I got hundreds of emails a day.

Can you help me? And it was overwhelming and it wasn't anything I wanted or was comfortable with.

I have talked recently as I've started doing interviews again about my therapist.

It was when I first started seeing this therapist that I've now seen for 20 some years.

And I originally went to him because he had written a paper called the mastery of rage. which was about how certain types of people are born with these furnaces of rage in their souls. and that we either end up dead or in prison or huge successes, and that he believed there were ways to master that rage.

And the example that he had given in talking about it was Jordan, right?

Michael Jordan has a furnace of rage in his heart, and it could have killed him or it could have done what it did, which turned him into the greatest basketball player and one of the greatest athletes. leads to ever live.

And Jordan somehow figured out a way to deal with that rage.

And so did I in some way, but I started seeing this therapist and a lot of what it was I was seeing him about was like, How did I end up here?

How did I end up? I wanted to be fucking... the most notorious writer on earth and i'm suddenly oprah's self-help wonder boy i'm in some kind of surreal hell And I can't walk down the street.

I can't push my baby daughter in a stroller.

I can't go to a fucking restaurant. And so we were trying to figure out how to manage my way out of it, right?

And how to deal with this sudden overwhelming fame that lots of people dream about.

And in a lot of ways I dreamed about. And when it comes at you, like I will say I was not prepared in any way to handle it. or to handle what would happen when that page got turned.

I actually think I was vastly more prepared to handle it when the page got turned.

I was ready to rock when the page got Oh, that's interesting.

How much time in between that first interview with Oprah and the kind of intervention that took place?

Early September to early January, right?

Oh, so it wasn't that long. Yeah. Yeah. And then how did that come about?

I had met one of the guys at an art opening and he was a friend of a friend.

I was very friendly with him. We shared a cab.

They started looking up all my mug shots and they called me one day, the guy who I had met. started asking me questions and I answered them and I answered them truthfully.

I was like, yeah, there's all kinds of shit in the fucking book.

I changed. So they publish this sort of Gawker expose of how you had taken liberties and this sets in motion. and it ends up it was literally on the nightly news right that was the lead story on all three network news shows that night when the the night the smoking gun came out They arranged for me to go on Larry King like two days later.

And I went on Larry King, which was the biggest nighttime show on TV at the time.

And on Larry King, you can watch it. I was like, yeah, Larry, I changed all kinds of shit.

I don't think that I should be held to the standard of journalism. i'm not a journalist i've never worked for it i'm a guy who wrote a book about addiction and I took all kinds of liberties.

I said, I think of the book the way a painter thinks of a self portrait.

I'm not held to strict standards and rules.

But your failure to demonstrate like being repentant about this only exacerbated like the media frenzy around it.

Only because at the end of Larry King, Oprah called in.

Oprah called in at the end of that Larry King show and said, Larry, I didn't want to make a statement on a million little pieces until I had heard what James had to say.

I've just listened to this show for the last hour and I 100%

I do believe there is a difference between real truth and emotional truth.

I didn't realize that she had done that.

Yes. So she had your back in that moment.

She had my back in that moment. And then what happened was the backlash came to her.

How dare George Bush is lying about Iraq? and now Oprah's lying about James Fry?

Oprah, we loved you. You've betrayed us.

They were literally, that's what it was.

And it kept getting worse for her. And I'll probably say things I haven't ever said publicly now, but I guess I don't give a fuck, but...

That's what this was really all about. When they came for her, she couldn't have them look into her life story the way they looked into mine.

No. And so they invited me back and they invited me back and they said, we want you to come on a show called Truth in America.

And the show will be, we are going to examine different types of truth.

We're gonna talk to reality TV producers and compare reality TV to the news.

We're going to talk to memoir writers and compare them to journalists. and we're going to talk to documentarians and compare them to Hollywood biographies I said cool I'll come do that Flew to Chicago with Ann Talese, staying at the hotel.

I remember... We go down to get in the car to go to the studio for the show.

I forget the dude's name. He was some fucking...

He was a theater critic and then he was a op-ed writer for the New York Times, but he was standing down there waiting for a car to go to the studio.

And Nan was like, oh, nice to see you. What are you doing here?

And he was like, I'm here for him. And then we went to the studio and everything was fine.

Truth in America and about. 30 seconds before the show starts, they say, hey, we were originally gonna tape this, now it's gonna be live.

It's not truth in America anymore. It's the James Fry controversy.

And I was like, wow, that's kind of fucked up.

And the producer, Sherry Salata, said it's going to get a little rough out there.

Just hang in. And I walked out onto the stage and again, for all of Oprah's horseshit about truth, You know, there was no truth in that situation on her side, right?

She was absolutely full of shit. They absolutely lied to me and deceived me and brought me there under false pretenses.

Basically what you're saying is that that had been the plan all along.

And in order to induce you to agree to do the show, they draped it in this... fabricated idea that it was gonna be this panel where you were gonna talk about all these other things.

Yes. I will say if they had just said, you need to come here to do a show called the James Fry Controversy, I would have said, cool.

They didn't need all that fucking bullshit, right?

So I go out on the stage and I don't really remember it.

I've never watched it. One of the things I believe I remember, but... was at the end of the first commercial break, all the ladies in the audience started booing me.

And I remember in the moment sitting there thinking, you know what, there's a couple ways you can go here, man.

Like you can start swinging, but that's not gonna work.

All you can do is take this beating and get out of here.

Just there's nothing. You are surrounded in deep enemy ground.

Just get the fuck out. So I just let it ride.

I just sat there and I have really no memory of it.

After the show, I go into the dressing room.

Oprah follows me in. She's like, you okay?

And I was like, yeah, I'm fine. She's like, you sure?

And I've been like, I said, if you think I haven't had worse fucking days than this, you're wrong.

I've had hundreds worse than whatever just happened here.

And she goes, well, I'm very sorry, it was all business.

And I was like, yeah. And she turned around and walked out, right?

I got in the car, went to O'Hare. I remember walking through fucking O'Hare as I am on every new CNN thing in the airport.

So it aired like that day. It was live show.

It was live. Went to New York, same thing at fucking LaGuardia.

I remember going across the bridge to So where I lived at the time, it was a long day.

The sun was dropping. I was in a cab and I just started laughing.

And I went home and my wife gave me a hug and she was like, I'm really sorry.

And she told me she loved me. And I went in and I kissed my baby daughter and I went to bed. and I woke up the next day and I was like, fuck.

We can go a couple different ways here. I can tell you what happened with the therapist or the mechanics of it.

Mechanics of it also were I had sensed that this was coming already.

So weeks before I had started taping phone calls.

I've never told this story in public. So I tape phone calls with my publishers, my agents, Oprah's producers, all of them.

I had all of what I just told you on tape.

Oh, anticipating legal action. No, anticipating that they were gonna fucking betray me in some way.

Or to say, we didn't know and all of that.

And you had conversations recorded in which everybody's acknowledging that this was, everybody was well aware of Correct.

What kind of book this was at the very beginning.

The day after the show, the Orpers producers called me.

And they said, we wanna talk to you about something.

And I was like, what? And they said, we're tracking our comments on our website.

And 90% of them are supporting you, not what happened here.

And I was like, yeah, what happened there was a fucking load of shit.

And they were very, very surprised by it.

And they also wanted to make sure I wasn't gonna kill myself.

And I was like, you gotta fucking stop. Like, I don't give a fuck.

Leave me alone. The next day, Oprah called me.

And again, there was a fucking tape recorder running.

And she wanted to know if I was gonna kill myself.

And I said, no. And then she started telling me her own stories about the things in her life that didn't necessarily match up with her biography.

And we had a long hour long conversation and I hung up and I had it on tape.

And she's since apologized publicly, didn't she?

The story ends there for now. I also went to see my therapist, right?

She did later publicly apologize to me and she later said she was wrong.

Yeah. And I never have. Take from that what you will.

But the real part of the story that I think is the important part is...

You asked how I reacted to that, right? I remember I saw the therapist like two days later and I walked in, he was like, how you doing?

I was like, yeah, man, it's been a fucking wild ride.

He was like, you got what you wanted. This guy who wants to be, you know, the most transgressive, in your face, controversial, provocative writer, the defining voice of his generation.

Here it is delivered on a platter. Like this is what it looks like.

Like you got what you asked for. Like you manifested the very thing that you had been focused career yeah he was like you got what you asked for how does it feel And I was like, man, it's been a lot.

It's been terrifying and it's been hard and it has hurt.

And it still is all of those things. But yeah, let's fucking rock.

Back to your point about like there's two James, the writer James and the human being.

The writer James is like, oh, well, all publicity is good publicity.

This is going to fuel the self mythologizing writer. but there's the human being there that, I mean, it had to be completely devastating on a human level to like have the entire world turn on you and have this, the most powerful media figure point a finger at you and essentially shame you in front of the world.

Yeah, that fucked the human being up, right?

And in some ways, and there are very real scars from it. there are reasons like we talked about that I haven't talked to the media in decades, right?

And the writer was like, let's rock. The writer was like, this is the dream.

So now you have to do it. And there's always been this balance.

We were talking a little bit about Taoism, I got sober using Taoism and Taoist meditation.

I taught myself to meditate and I have been a Taoist since the day I read the Tao the first day.

And even in the DAO, the DAOs, One of its fundamental principles is there has to be a balance.

We have the yin and the yang. We have the black and the white.

We have the dark and the light. And for me, I have this writer and this human and they somehow balance each other out the human was crushed the human was humiliated and embarrassed and and scared for the future.

Will I be able to write another book? Will I have a career?

Will I still be able to do it? And the writer was like, yup.

You know, one of the things that I don't think is accurate about what happened is that the public somehow turned on me because they didn't.

The media did for sure, but the media had hated me before.

It just gave them shit to hate me for more.

But A Million Little Pieces was number one on the bestseller list for like 40 weeks before the controversy and for 50 more after.

I still got thousands of letters a day. And even more when I walked out on the street, instead of people saying, James Fry, Can you help me?

They said, James Fry, go fucking get him.

We love you. Fuck her. Fuck Oprah. I've gotten...

50,000 emails in my life that say fuck Oprah from people, right?

And that's how I felt, right? I was like, great.

I wanna be the best writer there is. I wanna be the best and the baddest.

I now have the biggest enemies that exist.

I have the New York Times that hates me.

I have the most powerful woman to ever live who fucking hates me.

And I have most of the American media who hates me.

Let's fucking go, right? Time to show them.

And I did have people who publicly and privately supported me in ways that were deeply meaningful.

And I've never talked about this, but like Chris Rock called me and was incredibly privately supportive.

You're a great writer. Keep doing what you do, man.

That's it. Bruce Willis and Demi Moore who were still married at the time called me.

And Demi's still a friend. And Bruce was a friend until he couldn't be.

Yeah. Tony Scott was a guy who I had worked for a bunch of times and Tony was like, dude, You just got given the motherfucking crown.

Sonny Barger, who was a close friend of mine.

Who is that? I don't know who that is. The founder and leader of the Hells Angels.

Oh, wow. That's how you met Tony Scott, right?

I met Sonny. Were they doing like a project together?

Yeah. Yeah. There is a funny Sonny Barger story.

But, you know, I had people who were supporting me both publicly and privately.

They were just They weren't as loud as all the rest of the motherfuckers who were calling for my head.

But to me, I thought of it as a great challenge.

Like the writer in me was like, this is it, man, go get them.

Norman Mailer, after all of that. And there were witnesses to this conversation.

Norman Mailer, who I had already met and known, sort of laughed.

The first time after I saw him, he was like, all right, man, it's yours now.

And I was like, what do you mean Norman?

He was like, you know, people don't think about it this way.

But Hemingway was hated his whole life. Everybody fucking hated him forever.

And they hated him until I showed up. And the reason, and then as soon as I showed up, everybody loved him.

Everybody loved him. He became Ernest fucking Hemingway because they had somebody else to fucking hate.

Yeah. He was like, they've hated me for 50 years, but now they're gonna love me got you to fucking hate and and and he said it's yours meaning it's your turn yes and he said It'll stay yours if you can hold up.

They're going to hate you forever. They're going to come for you time after time after time after time.

If the books that you write are good enough and you're strong enough, it's yours.

If the books aren't any good and you can't take it, Don't bother.

Right. And so I took that. Right. And I was just like, you know what, I'm not going to go out this way.

I'm not going to let this be the end of this.

I'm gonna fucking, I'm coming. I won't stop.

I won't stop. I won't stop. When you think of like the great writers who stand out, at least in my memory, you know, Mailer, Hemingway, these people like big, charismatic characters.

Like we grew up in a time where It was Tom Wolfe and Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.

And there was a sexiness to all of this.

It was very romantic. moved to New York right after college and just was like, I wonder what it's like at Cafe Odeon where those guys go and like they talk Just a... a glamor to these types of writers who had created effective mythologies about who they were and seemed to be living very interesting lives.

And on some level, like you're the legacy of that.

Like you're a guy who kind of picked up the slack and said, well, I'll carry the ball now.

And when I look around, Maybe it's just the way the world is or people's relationship to books in general, but I don't see – that tradition kind of being carried on.

Yeah, there was always the tradition of sort of, who's the best writer?

Who's the loudest? Who writes the boldest books?

Like it's some kind of kingship, right? It's some kind of crown you wear.

And that's because books always held a very important cultural place.

So it was like, who's the best writer? It was always a competition and writers were always The job of a writer was what you mentioned earlier.

Hold a mirror up to society and reflect it back.

Show us the ugliness. change the world.

The pen is the mightier than the sword, right?

Writers used to believe we could change the world.

We could change people's lives. We could make great art that also did great things.

But there's also a performance art. There is.

To capturing people's attention and imagination.

Tom Wolfe puts on the white suit and there's a certain lifestyle with, Jay and Brett.

There's a Warholian kind of aspect of trying to be culturally relevant.

There's always the performance of it, right?

There's the person who, who spends hundreds of hours alone writing a book.

And then there's the person who goes out to sell it, right?

And self-mythology has always been part of not just Writers but artists, musicians do it, painters do it, podcasts.

Hosts do it, right? And for a writer, yes, it has always been a part of it.

And my own self mythology, has very much been yeah i'm a punk i don't give a about your rules i don't give a about what you think of me, I'm gonna write books that make you angry, and I'm gonna write books that are the best books of my time, word by word, sentence by sentence, you know, paragraph by paragraph, there's nobody better.

And I have picked up that mantle both in the work and effort I put in to write the books that I write, but also in the self mythology part of it.

And when we talk again about the sort of human and the writer, the writer does believe that what I believe.

And I also believe that the creation of the mythology is part of carrying that crown. that writers should go out and promote themselves to be cool.

I know a lot of rock stars and they're not the same person the stage as they are on the stage.

And in some way it's the same for a writer.

Yeah, I go perform. But part of that is also to try to get people to love books and think books are cool and read books and for young readers to be like, yeah, i want to be like that just like i did and you did with great writers of our time And at this point I think I am the only one.

I think society and publishing has beaten this out of us, right?

Publishing, We used to think of this glamorous, cool business that pushed boundaries, but now it's almost fascist in its conservatism. and not political conservatism, but just political correctness.

You cannot be offensive in publishing. You cannot hurt somebody's feelings in publishing.

You cannot say the wrong thing. There's huge controversies about like, Can a white man write a female character?

Can a white woman write a And it's all just horseshit.

Let's stop people from writing what they want, expressing how they want, it's cultural fascism.

And so that certainly makes books more fucking boring.

Nobody wants to read the same homogenous, politically correct horseshit because it sucks.

Do you know Bruce Wagner? I do, I love Bruce Wagner's books.

He's the best, right? Yeah. He had a run in with that, right?

Like he had a character that was called Fat Tony or something like that in one of his books and he had his... publishing contract revoked and he ended up publishing it for free.

There's some story like that around that.

Yeah, it's published online. I have it. I have a link of it saved in my bookmarks because I read it literally on a fucking computer because it was the only way to read it. also a guy who blends fact and fiction.

Like he'll weave like real name celebrities into these fictional narratives with his characters in this super interesting way. the most underrated like great Los Angeles writer of all time.

He's the goat. He's like an icon. Like he is the voice of this city.

Yeah, I love his work. I've never met him.

I don't know him, but I love the work. But yeah, like you can't be offensive.

And I'm lucky to be in a position where I sell so many books that they can't tell me what to do.

And I still believe in being offensive. I still believe in pushing boundaries and pushing boundaries in terms of what books can do.

And I want to inspire young kids to want to be readers and to want to be writers and to think that books are cool and bookstores are cool.

Like, Books open your soul in ways that nothing else can.

Books open your soul in the way that other art can do. and the way that a song can open your soul or a painting can open your soul. or a movie can open your soul right and and books are dying because of technology right because of technology and also because Publishers in their cultural fascism aren't doing anything to make kids think books are cool.

When was the last time a publisher said, you know what, we're going to publish a book for teenage boys? that teenage boys will actually think is cool.

Instead of publishing a book that has been vetted by our lawyers and our cultural committees and our safety committees before we're publishing it, right?

People wonder why boys won't read books because they don't want to read that shit.

Boys want to read books that are fucking cool and fun and rowdy and punk, right?

They want to read books about people they aspire to be. or who they think are cool.

And that's the problem is that Writers are scared of social media, they're scared of bad press, they're scared of losing their publishing contracts, they're scared of having their neighbors think down on them for saying the wrong thing.

And I'm not scared of any of that, right?

None of it, I've had it all happen. It's all been done.

It's all been said. I've had agents walk away, managers walk away, book contracts canceled.

I have books banned in the United States and countries all over the world.

I've had protests. I've had 40 lawsuits filed against me for different horseshit.

And to me, that means I'm doing the right thing, that I am writing books that are pushing the boundaries of what books can be about what writers can be about how we can write.

About how we can sell, about how we can talk about what we do, right?

Is that one of the reasons why the newest book is with Artists' Equity, like which is an independent, you know, imprint, James Clear is a co-founder, was that, a conscious decision to do that?

Or was that a consequence of the big publishing houses shining you on and saying, no thanks?

I can publish books with big publishing houses whenever I want to.

I could have published. So that door is still open to you.

That door is still open. I could have published this book with a big publishing house.

Um, I mean, the reason I published with Authors' Equity is...

So for certain things with my books, since a million little pieces, a million little pieces and Oprah granted me a bunch of things.

And what they really granted me was freedom. freedom to do and be and write and say whatever I wanted.

So since A Million Little Pieces with my books, I have total control of them.

I control what they look like. I control the covers.

I control all of the text on them. I control the font.

I have total creative control of the book.

I went with author's equity because I think they harken back to an age that I have more respect for than the old age. after i wrote the book i met with a few different publishers both big commercial ones and authors equity the people who run authors equity come from big commercial publishing I've actually worked with them in various places, but one of them was the CEO.

The woman was like Fia, she was head of rent Random House, right?

Yeah. And when I met with them, it was okay.

I haven't, written a book in the United States in a long time.

I haven't been willing to promote a book in the United States in decades, but I am now.

What is your tolerance for what me and my agent jokingly call the circus, which is when I release a book, that's what it is.

We open the circus for a while and it's always a circus. in a circus this time.

And they were like, you know what? The book is great.

We love it line by line. It's fucking spectacular.

And we want you. We don't want a tame version of you.

We're not gonna try to control you. We're not gonna try to reign you in and we're not scared.

And that's all I really wanted to hear. And I was like, let's rock.

The economics are whatever the economics are.

One of the things I like about Authors' Equity is their economic model is very different.

With a normal publisher, they pay you a advance upfront and if you sell enough books, you pay it back and you get a little bit of extra money. they will, the publishers like Hollywood will always do things to make sure it's really hard for you to get out of the advance.

Author's equity, there was no advance. I get a 65% royalty rate.

Oh, wow. That's wild. Day one. That's very high.

I bet on myself. Yeah, if you don't need the advance, that's a preferable arrangement.

Right. So it's great business with people who understand what I do, how I do it, and are willing to let me go out into the world and be myself.

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Rich Roll. I want you to pause for a moment because I want to tell you about my friend RJ.

Now, you might know this guy as the founder and CEO of Rivian.

He's certainly that, but he's really so much more.

He's one of those rare people who actually walks the walk.

I've watched him. over many years, and I know him to be this incredibly deeply committed person, committed to preserving wild space. while also inspiring people to explore responsibly.

And that's basically Rivian in a nutshell.

Their mission, keep the world adventurous forever, comes from this understanding that adventure and a healthy planet, these are not separate things.

They're the same thing. Here's what gets me.

Every generation deserves wild places to roam, to climb higher, to run farther, to be changed by the journey.

But obviously, that's only possible if we're not destroying those places in the process of getting there.

So yeah, Rivian builds electric vehicles.

But really? they're building something bigger, momentum toward a future where exploration does not come at the expense of nature, but actually inspires us to protect it.

It's like Why create the ultimate adventure vehicle if we're not protecting the adventures themselves?

And that's why I'm so proud to align forces in partnership. transportation it's about building a world worth exploring for our kids for their kids and for generations to come There's a courage and a fearlessness to walking towards the eye of the storm.

Is there also perhaps some twinge of like self-sabotage?

Like do you feel like you're inclined? Like there's something, that is alluring about like immersing yourself in a potential disaster.

Like you talk about that with your therapist.

Is that part of your... constitution, you think, or motivation, like an unconscious motivation?

Nobody's ever asked me that. So I think it's cool you did.

Yeah, my therapist and I do talk about it, right?

Like what if it just went smoothly? Like what if you just wrote a book, you were honest, you feel good about it, you said what you wanted to say and it came out and it did well. there wasn't a big controversy or the way, like, I just know, you know, fellow addict speaking here, like,

We want the drama, man. Where's the chaos?

I don't want the drama. What I want is...

The drama that comes along with greatness, the drama that comes along with defiance.

But also avoiding – being confused about the difference between greatness and getting a lot of attention, right? not conflating those things.

Yeah, I don't seek attention generally, right?

Like people will say, well, I didn't do an interview in the United States for 17 years.

Right. That's not a person seeking attention.

I do it now because I want my book to read and I want books to be continued.

I mean, I self-sabotage, honestly the human being self-sabotages himself vastly more than the writer does.

But that's something I struggle with. But no, I don't think that's part of the writer's constitution.

When I write a book, I believe it. And I believe that Part of it is also the way literature works globally, right?

People in America only think about my career here.

I don't only think of it here. And in many ways, the focus of it is not here.

America is the place where I sell the most books, but it's not the place that matters the most to me.

I always say I write books for the French and I sell them in America.

And I think a lot about how the books are perceived globally The self-sabotage, no, I don't think that comes into play with the work.

It comes into play in my life and it probably came into play in the work when I was younger.

But I've done like, I don't know, I do immense amounts of work to try to control my life and specifically to control self sabotage and I think there were times earlier in my life when I struggled with it, but not anymore.

What is your recovery experience? process?

Like, how do you take care of yourself? And then maybe that's a lead into talking about your creative process.

So in a million little pieces, I wrote about the Dow and that is what I have always done.

You know, I got out of treatment and I moved to Chicago.

And I started teaching myself to meditate and I couldn't meditate or sit like I can now or like I am now.

So at the very beginning, I started doing long walking meditation.

And at least in Taoism, meditation focuses around listening to the sound of your own breath.

So when I meditate, I sit like this. My hands are like this.

And I listened to myself breathe and that's it.

And when I first started doing it, I could only do it while I walked and I would walk in silence. as much in nature as I could just listening to myself breathe.

But my sort of life routine now is I wake up in the morning, I take a piss, I brush my teeth, I take three sips of cold coffee and I immediately meditate like this very traditional old-fashioned Taoist meditation for 20 to 30 minutes As soon as I finish with that, regardless of the weather, I go for a walk, which is the second meditation, right?

Silence, breathing in nature. I live out in the woods in Connecticut now.

And those are things that are just I've talked about my therapist.

My therapist and I both know we have to control sort of myself as a human, but also as a writer, like a lot of the things I do, We say that I'm a professional athlete of the mind and the soul.

And so a lot of the things, the routines I have designed to keep my mind and my soul as right as they can be.

So the day always starts with a lot of meditation. both formal and walking.

I come home, I get busy work, emails, phone calls, whatever, out of the way.

If I'm actively working on something, I write or work.

If not, I just go about my day. But every day, I haven't missed a day of meditation and walking in years and years and years and years.

And it's not even people talk about having to learn the discipline of these things.

It's not an issue of discipline at this point.

It's like, eating or going to the bathroom or something else.

It's a fundamental, it is the fundamental sort of action of my life is that start of the day.

And that meditation builds up, right? When you do it for a long time, it's almost like a reservoir of water that you can fill always.

And it's the most important thing I do. When I write, there's a different routine.

But my life is generally governed by principles of Taoism.

And those are? Patience in yourself and others. compassion for yourself and others, and simplicity in thought and action, right?

Try to be simple, Patient and compassionate.

Try to be a good, decent, kind person. I mean, those are the simple fundamentals of it. the easy way to explain it which i sort of jokingly always do is in george lucas And in Star Wars, George Lucas based the Force on what Daoists called the Dao.

And he based Jedi Knights on practicing Taoists who are always sort of solitary people.

It's the only solitary religion that exists.

Well, the force is unavailable unless you can inhabit a state of... present awareness to essentially be in a flow state of sorts, I suppose, where you are composing yourself equanimously, like in neutrality, right?

You have to create the internal conditions the force to arrive, or it's just not going to pay a visit, then you're vulnerable to the wiles of the evil empire.

Kind of, yeah. I mean, Taoism is interesting, man.

It's the oldest religion we know of, the Tao, the Tao Te Ching, which is the fundamental text of it. which translated means the art of the way um precedes the old testament of the bible by 1500 years it's ancient And I do believe you can tap into it.

I do believe you can exist in it. I do believe One of the fundamental ideas of it is Taoists believe in what is called in Taoism Wu Wei Wu, which means thinking, not thinking, or action, not action. and that you can enter into, Americans call it flow state, a state where you exist without without stress, without overthinking anything.

You just very simply react to whatever is happening around you.

You set goals. a goal for yourself and you very methodically and deliberately proceed to it and you can live in some kind of happiness.

Happiness is a weird word. It's one of those words like truth or love or God, right?

We all have our own kind of definition of happiness.

Happiness to me is like, being able to exist peacefully.

It doesn't mean joy. Joy and happiness are different things.

I can have a broken heart and I can be exceedingly happy.

But Taoists seek to live in this state where we accept whatever comes at us, where Yes, it's a permanent flow state.

And you can live in almost exist in sort of different definitions of it.

I very much believe in it. I write books in a very, very weird way.

And I very much believe I drop into the Dow and somehow a book shows up.

Well, let's talk about how you write books.

And maybe let's start with how you reconcile these Taoist principles. with the internal fury that you have, the anger.

Is that something that you feel like you need in order to do your best work and rely upon?

And how does that square with this kind of Daoist commitment to inhabiting a state of peace.

So if you think about again, Taoism is how it was represented in Star Wars.

There's the good side of the force and there's the bad side of the force.

And Taoists believe that the best way to live is ...to walk a sharp razor's edge right between them.

But also believe that you can sort of exist in one or the other... ...and that they both have to exist... for either of them to exist right the ying and the yang the dark has to balance out the light the good side of the force has to balance out the bad side of the force I generally try to live in the bad side of the – on the good side of the force.

The Freudian – slip there certainly have lived in the in the bad side when i go when i write a book I write books in a real weird way, except for A Million Little Pieces, which was edited.

Every book since is a first draft. It's unread.

And the only editing that happens to it is copy editing, which is fixing typos and mistakes.

That's so hard for me to believe. You can call the publisher, the New York Times.

When you say first draft though, it can't be like brain dump.

Like you're going over it as you're writing it and refining it.

And come on, like you're just it's literally it's not a flow right from the mind onto the page.

No, never, never to go back and No, I never read it.

I never look back on it. I will look at the work that I'm doing on the day that I am doing it.

And the next day, I usually read about a paragraph before to get it.

But when I talk about flow state, it doesn't mean that I'm like, sitting at a desk and everything's coming out in a perfect flow.

Flow state is more about existence than it is like performance within the state.

It is more about existing in the state and allowing things to happen while you're there, as opposed to forcefully putting yourself into it with a defined goal and metrics.

Does that make sense? Yeah. Getting out of the way so that you can be this open, aware channel for it depends on what you wanna call it, but call it your higher self or whatever it is your imagination is trying to express or whatever, your antenna to the ineffable is picking up.

So yes, except for a million little pieces.

I've never read them. their first drafts it's been like that's crazy media check today and you see this is like Is this the human James Fry or is this the writer?

Where's the self-mythologizing? Because I know you said you wrote the new book in 57 days.

I only write first drafts. Like, is this part of the myth?

No, this is part of the real. This is real.

The truth. Both. the human and the... The way I wrote the book I just wrote, it'll be an easy example, is...

I think when I want to write a book, I sort of unlock something in my head and say, okay, I'm ready to go.

I start talking to the therapist and we start getting me ready for it.

Initially, sort of a few stages. The first stage is more meditation than normal to really fill the reservoir as much as I can.

As I start thinking about a book and knowing that I want to write one, I always have a couple dancing around in my head.

Something will come forward. Usually a couple small things start showing up and then there will be a day where the whole book just shows up. a book shows up in my head and I know it's there.

Once that happens, I stop meditating. And I stopped taking a pill that I take every morning.

I stopped going for my walks. You talked about self-care.

And antidepressant, you mean? Yes. So that there are no gates on what I feel.

There are no gates on that fury. There is nothing... in the way of it so it's almost this conscious flip of the switch, like I'm gonna release the Kraken and I'm gonna let him come out and wreak a little havoc for a while,

That's what I got to do. And then I got to put him back in the cage.

I don't think of it like that because I don't think of it.

You know, we think of the crack. is this force of destruction.

I don't think of it as that. I think of it as something that's really strong and that I don't understand always. just being able to be connected to your emotions and try to translate those emotions into words through characters and behavior.

Yeah, the book shows up. And then when I say the book shows up, the book shows up I don't even know how to describe it.

It happened a week ago. A book showed up.

And when you say that, all the characters, the plot, the subplots, because a novel and, you know, Certainly the case in Next to Heaven, like there's a lot of people doing a lot of things.

There's a lot of jockeying and going back and forth and puzzle pieces that have to be arranged in a certain way in order for this plot to you know, reveal itself.

It's like, how does that happen in a first draft?

I'll tell you, I'll tell you a story about that at, And so I go off, and there will just be a day where I'm like, okay.

It's usually a day where I'm like, okay, it's time to go. and then I start writing the next day.

From the moment I start a book to the moment I finish a book, I take no breaks.

I take no days off. It's a full, flat run.

In the case of this book and in most I sit in a chair as I sit now, Lotus in a chair with a computer on my lap.

There's music playing constantly. And as I write, it's not I don't just sit there.

It's a physical process. I get up, I move, I dance.

I listen to music to manipulate my emotions.

So when I was writing about anger, I listen to angry music, sadness, sadness.

I tried to move myself into these extreme emotional states and then I write and in that beautiful Eames chair that's in the photograph in the New York Times piece.

Yeah. That's a nice chair. It's a custom made double side so that I can sit in it like that.

But I'm not just in that chair. I'm moving.

I'm doing things. But I'm not thinking. I'm not thinking in a way that I'm thinking now.

I'm in some, I call it a fever dream. I'm in some state where And when I work, I type with two fingers, right?

And I just think the next word, the next word, what's the next right word?

And it's almost like the book is in my head and I'm just trying to find what the next word of it is, how to translate whatever is in here onto there.

And I don't know how to describe it other than it's some kind of fucking magic.

It's what I call God or the Tao. And I don't believe that I can harness or control it.

I can just step into it and let it give me things, let it give me things that I want.

You have to ask, this is all sounds crazy, but you have to ask for it.

The way Lucas described it in Star Wars was Luke had to embrace his destiny, that you can only become what you are supposed to become if you are willing to fully embrace your destiny.

That's what Taoists believe. We have to fully inhabit who who God wants us, who we believe God has made us to be.

And I fully believe that God has made me or the Tao or whatever it is, I'm not arrogant enough to believe I have a name for it.

And that as part of that, it gives me these gifts.

Taoists also believe, though, that we can somehow architect our reality, You know, Americans now talk about it as manifestation, flow state and manifestation.

Those things are very connected to each other.

In Taoism, you can enter the flow state and architect your reality.

And so when I wrote this book and it's how I've written other books and how I do it one time, never reading.

As I drop into the flow and I trust it, absolutely.

I let myself exist in it, absolutely. I don't question it.

I don't doubt it. I don't resist it. I let myself into it.

And so a writing day on this book 14 to 18 hours in this chair, in this delirious state with music, with a computer, I'm moving, I'm thinking.

Sometimes I will sit and just do this for like a half an hour while something is working in my head.

In between doing these things, I'm just typing out words.

And I can't say I know really how it happens.

I somehow, my subconscious subconscious hyper focuses on something and builds it.

And when it's ready, it tells me. And then I drop into the Dow or I drop into this flow and I go.

And so when I'm in there, I don't talk to anybody.

I don't talk to friends. I don't email people.

I tell a few people I'm doing it. My therapist knows, my agent knows, my children know. a couple of friends now, but I disappear into it.

And I stay in there as almost 24 hours a day.

The only time I'm out of that state is when I'm making dinner for my kids or driving them somewhere.

And then as I near the end of that process, there are other things I have to do to survive it.

When I first started doing writing books, they've always happened the same way.

I've just gotten a lot better at refining and managing the process.

I always finish books in the middle of the night. the first couple books when i would finish them in the days and weeks and sometimes months after this exhaustion of soul there was a weird thing you as an athlete will appreciate this they did a study where they They tested caloric burn on novelists while we were in the process of writing books, and it's near what a marathon runner burns per day.

Well, the brain uses up an unreal amount of energy and calories, of course.

So when it's really locked in and you're in that 16-hour state of just hyper-focus, I would imagine, you know.

There's a lot of energy that that requires.

So when it ends, the first few times I did it, I would fall into... states of suicidal depression for long periods of time, I would just want to die.

I couldn't do anything. And it was the state that comes after this exertion.

So now we manage the end of it. right when I know I'm close to a book about a week before I start taking a pill again I start meditating again I start taking a walk in the morning just a little bit Wow So when you're doing the actual, when you're deep in, you excise even the meditation, like you're just, you're so locked in.

Two weeks before, everything everything stops the only thing that you're doing is this thing yep yeah i feel you To me, like, do you think that there's another way to do it?

Cause this is something I struggle with a lot.

And I think it also is, on some level, I think this is important shit, at least for somebody who struggles with, because we're kind of hardwired for extremes.

We want extreme experiences. We can't use drugs.

So how do we find these things? Well, I can go, you know, do some extreme sporting event, or you can create, your writing style is that of an extreme endurance athlete, right?

Like I'm gonna go in, hyper intense experience.

That's how I get my best work. This is the unlock.

And that's how I feel about these things.

Like, I don't know any other way to try to exude the best of what I have to offer other than inhabiting my version of what you just described.

But there is a narrative like setting aside, like, you know, live a balanced life, like this idea of of what if it were easy or what if you held onto it a little bit more loosely?

Like, couldn't you just work on it a couple hours a day?

Why question it? Why is... Why is any of it wrong?

And that's one thing you learn in Taoism is why question any of it?

Why is one way you're talking about Better than another way.

The right way is – the right way you find and and there's no reason to question it there's no reason to have anxiety over it if if You know, you talk about those extremities and I don't resist them.

I believe... in moderation in all things, including moderation, right?

That, yes, that's part of how I'm hardwired.

I don't deny it. I don't run from it. I occasionally indulge it, right?

One of the guys I wrote about in a million little pieces, this cat, in the book, here's an example of things things I did in the book his name is Miles Davis right he's a he's a judge in New Orleans and in real life his name was Al Green and he was a judge in New Orleans You know, that first year of sobriety for me wasn't really about sobriety.

It was just about survival. It was just about getting through everything. those moments where where i didn't think i could get through them um I think once you pass that stage of survival is when you start to become sober.

And what sober to me is not a, a program or a dogma or whatever.

It is learning how to live a content and productive life without the drugs and alcohol or without the chemicals that would kill you.

Right. As simple as that. And you can't really become sober until you can survive consistently in a stable way.

So my friend Al, I remember at one point during that year, I was like, Al, man, I called him.

I was like, Al, man, like I either think like. that I'm the king of the world or a piece of shit.

I have no middle ground, no stability. It's crazy.

And I remember he was like, James, you got to learn to prowl with your motherfucking panther.

And he was like, we all got a panther inside of us, right?

And that panther is what we feel any given moment.

We're all arrogant, so we think we can control that panther.

But nobody with any kind of brain thinks they can control a motherfucking panther.

So instead of trying to control it, just learn to prowl with it.

Whatever it feels is the right thing for you to feel, right?

And that translates sort of into what you're talking about, about processes and extremities and happiness and sobriety, right? whatever you define it as.

It is whatever brings peace to your soul.

It is whatever keeps you from picking up whatever it is you want to pick up that you know you shouldn't.

It's simply that. And so when I write like that, I don't ever question it.

I don't. I trust it absolutely. People talk all about God.

I feel a little corny sometimes talking about these things that I believe in.

But I trust the Dow absolutely. I don't question it.

I don't understand it. But I know I can go into it and I know I can do things.

With it and because of it. And so when I write the book, when I wrote this book, it was that was the process.

I unleashed the Kraken, as you said. I drop into this fever dream of a state where I don't really, I don't, And my memories of my books aren't ever of what I've written or of how they feel when I was writing them or the music or where I was.

One of the things that you were asking about this book, the complicated plot, that was something that concerned me at the beginning because I knew –

And if I pulled off the book right when you got to the reveal of it, you would be like, holy shit, I can't believe that's what happened.

And I can't believe he told me. all the way through the book, that's what happened.

That there are all these delicate little hints, right?

So when I was writing it, I always finished the books in the middle of the night.

I was on day 57. I was really fucking tired.

I had wanted to see at the beginning if I could do a book in under 60 days, which is why 57 was kind of stoked for me.

I told my agent at the beginning I was like I'm gonna try to do it in 60 days and he was like you're fucking crazy I was like no I think I can and so 57

But it was late at night, it was probably three in the morning, and I was to the second to last chapter.

I could have gone to bed and I was like, nope, I felt great.

And there's a sentence that starts that chapter and I remember it because of the visceral memory of what I'm about to say.

And the first word of that sentence, the sentence of that chapter is, ha, ha, ha, it worked.

That means a very specific thing within the context of the book.

It's part of a big reveal at the end, but you're also, it's a note to self.

Right. Like, like you pulled it off. Yeah.

That's what it meant. It's crazy because yeah, there's a lot of complexity here and there are Easter eggs and there's a map that's revealing itself.

And the idea that you were able to lay those Easter eggs throughout without having to go back and place them just so. is a magic trick if that's indeed what happened.

That's indeed what happened. This book is curious because on the one hand, you know, it's sort of this pulpy Collins-esque beach read about the 1% of the 1%.

And it's sexy and it's, fun and it's an easy read about, you know, intrigue and all these sorts of things that we're curious about. your friends and neighbors, it's billions, it's White Lotus before the vacation, right?

In many ways, like this is a populist, kind of book.

But it's almost as if you're not only channeling, you're like, if you were to write one of these kinds of books, what it would look like, a Danielle Steel book, But there's a nod to Brad Easton Ellison here with the run-ons and all the highly described kind of accoutrements of what it's like to live in this. you know, enclave of the ultra rich.

And it's saying something about America right now and what you think is actually happening.

So like how do you bring words to like the current moment? that we're experiencing right now?

I think it's hard. So I was actually I wrote this book because I was writing another book.

I was writing a book called 476, all spelled out as a long word.

This is the AI thing, right? No, that was a whole different one.

Oh, okay. 476 was a book, Rome fell for good in the year 476.

So I was writing a book about the ongoing collapse of America.

And my agent who I've been with for a long time, who's been through all the wars with me, all the poor shit with me. read like the first 250 pages of it.

And he was like, I won't participate. It'll get you killed.

Right. And the fundamental. Because why?

Because I attack America today in a very objective way.

I don't say one side is wrong and one side is right.

I say both sides are leading us to our doom.

And it can't be stopped. we're we're going get ready that's the fundamental message of that book and it attacked both sides pretty pretty partially both the left and the right and he was like somebody will get you this time for sure.

So I had another book I needed to write.

I make my living writing books, right? So I was like, all right, well, let's do something else.

I had read a Jackie Collins book for a Hollywood guy.

He's a buddy. He was thinking about adapting it.

I loved it. Hollywood Wives. Hollywood Wives.

It's fucking great if you've never read it.

It's fantastic. It's dirty and funny and ridiculous.

And then I read a couple of Danielle Steel books.

And then, you know, I have lived in this town, New Canaan, Connecticut, for 12 years.

It's one of the wealthiest towns in the country.

And it has been for 150 years. It is a bubble of wealth, unlike almost anything else that exists.

And as you're thinking about why America is falling apart, One of the fundamental reasons all revolutions occur and why all empires fall whether they are businesses or military or political or national empires is disparity of wealth between citizens or disparity of wealth between management of labor.

As I have lived in the wealthiest town in the United States for the past 12 years, we have seen the greatest... hoarding of wealth to ever occur.

I know the statistics because I've had to learn them.

But in 2015, the top one percent of the one percent held $1.5 trillion in wealth, right?

Today in 2025, the top 1% of the 1% holds $7.5 trillion in wealth. that hoarding and accumulation is just astonishing.

And it's unlike anything we've ever seen.

And certainly other people are playing around with it.

Mike White and Tropper with White Lotus and friends and neighbors both of which I love and both of which I have mad respect for their creators and But one of the differences I would say between me and both of those guys is I live in the bubble.

Right. I live in the most insulated bubble of wealth to ever exist.

The town of 17000 people. It's the safest town in America.

It's got the best school system in America.

It's got the wealthiest citizenry in America.

There's 50 or so billionaires in a little town of 17,000 people.

And I've watched them accumulate their wealth.

And We've been talking about drugs and recovery and such. i think money is the most addictive most destructive most powerful drug of all And the gates have been taken off on greed.

Right. And I wanted to hold a mirror up to the society in which I live and show.

The rest of the world, what it's like to live in one of these bubbles of extreme wealth and extreme privilege and how magnificent it is and how horrifying it is.

And I also wanted the book to be fun and delightful and ridiculous and dirty and dangerous.

But yeah, I am making a commentary about the United States and about America and about wealth.

It's dangerous. And it's the thing we don't pay attention to.

But there will come a day, right? There will come a day.

Yeah, at the center of it is a moral decay.

There's a rot at the base of this heavenly enclave of rich people who believe they can immunize themselves. from the rest of the world and believe they have permission to behave very badly. without repercussions.

Yeah, that's the one rule that we see. I say like, we talk about America as a racist country or all these things.

It's not really, it is. more than anything america is a classist country right it's a cast system and the rich live a very different life than not.

There are no consequences. There are no repercussions.

There is no danger. It is a playground and people get real bored in that playground.

And when people get real bored and they have literally everything they in existence at their disposal, shit gets a little weird.

The one thing about money too is we, The hoarding of it, right?

Like so many people have so much of it. And I know I have so many friends who are just immensely rich.

You must too. Like dudes who just have... billions and billions of dollars, or even dudes who have $50 million.

I always ask them the same question. And it's like, why are you still working, man?

They're like, well, what else am I gonna do?

It is a crazy thing, because a normal person would be like, you have this much money, like why, you know, like...

But the kind of person that has that much money got it because that's what's important to them.

And that's the kind of person who's never gonna stop.

Like they're gonna continue. Right. to pursue it.

Most finance guys are professional gamblers.

We don't think of them that way. But that's all the finance system is.

It's a fucking casino, man. And the best people are the best gamblers.

Right. And it's like I said, it's an addiction.

It's an addiction to money. It's an addiction to possession.

It's an addiction to status. It's addiction to all this horseshit that doesn't matter and it doesn't make you happier and it doesn't ever make you a better person.

Yeah, and I wanted to have some fucking fun with it.

There are messages in there if you want them.

And if you don't want them, you can just read it and laugh and be turned on.

But the added thing here is that it's a fictionalized version of the town that you live in about – versions of people that you know.

And so that's an interesting kind of media story in and of itself. and ironic in that the narrative around a million little pieces was all around like what's not true.

And here you have, a novel where everyone's like, what is true here?

And people are trying to identify themselves in it.

I'm sure there's a lot of gossip going on in your town right now about who's who in this thing. and who are you basing these characters on?

Like fancy luxury magazines are writing articles about this.

Yes. Yes. And earlier, earlier, way earlier in this conversation when I said like, I write books, I don't write fiction, nonfiction.

And you were like, drop the conceit. And I sort of didn't respond to it.

But part of what happens with my books is and why I say I just write a fucking book.

It's because if I write a book and they publish it as a novel, right, everybody tears it apart to find out what it is true.

Who's based on who? What part of my life is this based on?

They try to find out all the true shit in it, right? if i publish a book as non-fiction they do the opposite they tear it apart to try to find out what's not true where is he lying what's made up what's uh There's been a thing that has been very gratifying and satisfying to me.

But recently in France, after A Million Little Pieces, something called autofiction suddenly emerged, right?

The other thing they have started talking about – and when I say all sort of literary history usually emerges from –

French critics and theoreticians and something happened that, again, I always believed would.

But now a million little pieces and my entire body of work is now being looked at as almost something that's unique outside of literature where before me there was fiction, there was nonfiction and there was poetry, right?

Three very defined genres of literature.

Now I write books that could be considered all of them or could be considered none of them, right?

I just think that you think the whole thing is delicious.

I do, I do think it's delicious. It's a game.

Yeah, you're the puppet master here, like crafting scenarios in which you're gonna create intrigue around like truth versus fiction.

You're right. And purposely staying out of the conversation of whether this is fictionalized, it's a novel, it's not a novel.

It doesn't matter. It's a quote unquote book, leaving people to try to figure out This is obviously, this is art.

Art is, it's like the observer is, The artist isn't to comment on this or to tell you what you should think or how to contextualize it.

Correct. And you're doing the same in books, but there is a circus master aspect to this.

There is. I know the game. I know the game I play.

Think about the book that came after the whole a million little pieces controversy it was bright shiny morning a book about los angeles the very first sentence of the book says Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable, right?

I am being exceedingly fucking clear with you.

The whole book is then filled with lists of facts and statistics and demographics and history.

And I knew going into that, and I did it all very deliberately.

You're fucking with people when you do that.

But it's also part of – the greater goal of redefining what a fucking book is.

The games I play have a longer goal. And the longer goal is to say a book can be a work of art. without having to define it as fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

That we don't apply these rigorous and entirely fucking arbitrary classifications to any kind of art.

When a fucking rapper makes a song, Nobody reads the lyrics and fax checks them, right?

Why the fuck should they fact check me? Why do I not have the same privilege as a writer of words that that writer of words has?

Why do I not have the same fucking privilege a painter has when he paints a self-portrait to paint that self-portrait in any way possible?

So when we talk about those games, you giggle about them.

And you're right. I am playing games and I know I'm playing games and I'm deliberately playing games and I'm also playing games that I don't think will be understood for decades. until I'm gone, that people are starting to now look back and saying, holy fuck, he's been playing games with us very deliberate.

Games that clearly lead to a very deliberate conclusion now for decades, right?

And that's what art is. That's what an artist does.

You build a body of work to achieve an end goal.

And my end goal, which I stated was, has always been to be the best and the baddest, to be the most influential writer of my time. to make work That is so utterly defining that everything that comes after me has to adjust to it.

And we're starting to see that. And the examples of that are after a million little pieces, every single fucking memoir ever published has a big fat fucking disclaimer in front of it.

Because every writer that writes one does the same thing I did.

They're just not willing to take the fucking heat that I took, right?

But a million little pieces fundamentally changed publishing.

And that is the goal of art. And if you want to do that and if you want to play the game I play, which is to stand against the cancer of time. to be among the one or two writers of my age to survive for 100 years.

You're going to play fucking games. You're gonna make work that people don't understand.

You're gonna make work that defies classification and expectation.

When I do these things and when I think about these things and when I talked earlier about this decade of reading and looking at art, those are the things that I.

I found in patterns, right? One of the most influential people on me was the painter Manet, right?

Nobody would ever think of that. Yeah, I would not have.

I see you as like a bacon guy. No, Manet.

Manet was the king. Manet invented modern art.

Modern art does not exist without Manet.

Manet was the first painter to reject sort of formal painting style, which, you know, impressionism exists because Manet broke those boundaries.

More than that, Manet broke the boundaries of what could be used as content, right?

His two great famous paintings. Dejeuner de les herbes, right?

Naked people having... essentially a sex party by the side of the Seine in 1850.

And then Olympia a few years later, a prostitutes. staring directly at, right?

He shattered the idea of what a painting can be. who a painting can be made for, even how a painting can be displayed, because he was the first artist to utterly reject the salon and display his art on his own.

I did the same thing when I rejected publishing for the Final Testament of the Holy Bible. and was the first novelist to ever be published as a work of art by Gagosian.

Yeah, Gagosian put that out, right. And so again, as I talk about these things, Manet radically changed.

Painting and art weren't the same after Manet, almost more than anyone.

We always talk about Picasso as the great inventor of modern art because he was the first person to fully –

Brock to really with cubism embrace abstraction, pure total abstraction.

But that doesn't happen without an initial break with realism.

From Manet. Pure realism, pure academic painting, pure painting of approved subject matter.

Manet shattered it all. So when I think about what is my end goal, I spent 10 years trying to find out, figure out what my end goal was.

I spent 10 years studying, I spent 10 years teaching myself to write.

I remember when a million little pieces happened and everybody was like, what's it like to be famous overnight?

And I was like, there was tens of thousands of hours.

This was no accident. And this was not overnight. right this this this was happening there's such conviction in your voice like there it's devoid of doubt like do you ever like question yourself or battle with, insecurity or have talked about this a bunch.

Yeah. You know, I was talking about Marvin Hagler and I was talking about my therapist, we have and I was talking about all of these preparations that I go through when I write books. i go through a whole i went through a whole separate set to come publicize this book right i haven't done media in decades so we went through a whole separate process to get me ready for this But the way we truly think of – I've talked about I'm a professional athlete of the mind and the soul.

We treat me like a fighter and we very much think of me as a fighter, right?

I go through very specific preparations to do what I do.

A lot of fighters, when they approach fights, they can't doubt themselves.

You can't walk into a fight and think you're going to lose it.

You have to walk into a fight and know you're going to win with every fiber of your being.

If you have any chance of it, you have to believe with absolute certainty. impregnable conviction that you are going to win.

And again, decades of this have trained me as a writer To feel no doubt, to feel no insecurity, to feel no hesitation, to trust absolutely the process that I engage in when I drop into these states of hyperfascism. focus.

When I can write books in one draft without without ever looking at them.

Right. When you're able to do those things over time, you build confidence, you manifest. what you believed you could be.

I just always believed it. I've never doubted it.

Again, as a human being, again, away from the job, I have immense doubts about myself.

I have insecurities. I have great fears.

But when I come to do what I do, when I write a book, there is none of it.

And people, one of the things people are always sort of disturbed about with me is, the honesty of my ambition, right?

That writers aren't supposed to talk about this.

People say writing's not competitive. And I'm always like, you say writing is not competitive, but they publish a fucking list every week that tells me what place I'm in.

Right. So don't tell me it's not competitive.

And I'm competitive and I wanna be at the top of that fucking list and I have been for hundreds of weeks and that's not accidental.

That's because I prepare. It's because I train.

It's because I focus. It's because almost all of my life is built around putting me in a position to be the best and to be the baddest.

But you're in a very interesting moment right now.

You've written obviously written several other books after A Million Little Pieces, but your relationship with the public is very different now.

Like there was a conscious decision to really be outward facing. this book in a way that you haven't since the oprah days and it happens to coincide with a very interesting political and cultural moment where we're in this sort of post truth world where falsehoods, we have a very different relationship with falsity and truth than we ever have before.

We're very permissive about things we didn't used to be.

And yet there is a reticence there that just they just love taking shots at you.

And so how has that been emotionally? It's been great.

To step back in and be Marvin Hagler and you're in the ring and...

Here we go. It's been a joy, man. Honestly, it's been great.

I knew what I was getting in for, right?

I knew what I was in for. And I wanted it.

Part of what I did, which, Part of the reason I took so long off was because of my kids, right?

I have three children. I've always been very aware of the self-mythologizing part of what I do and I've also been very aware of of the impact it can have on your life and impact it can have on your children's lives.

I knew a lot of the old famous writers, right?

I knew Hunter Thompson a little bit. I knew Kurt Vonnegut very well.

I knew Norman Mailer very well. I knew Tom Wolfe.

I knew these guys. And I saw how each of the sort of the characters they played in the public affected both them and their children.

Their personal lives, yeah. And so when my children are coming of an age, when they started to be able to understand who their very notorious father was, I stepped away from what I did.

I wrote the Bible, right? 2012. My oldest kid was eight.

And then I basically... The final testament of the Holy Bible.

The final testament of the Holy Bible. I wrote that.

And God gave me that. But I took all those years off because I didn't want to burden kids in a lot of ways with who I am and what I do, right?

I didn't want to have to force them to have to deal with who I am, right?

And that is who I am. And there were a lot of struggles in those years not being who I am.

I did a bunch of other things. I was a CEO a couple times.

I did interesting, cool things, but it wasn't, To go back to Taoism, it wasn't my destiny.

This is what I do. This is who I am. And so when my children were old enough to understand it, and when I had gone through a divorce that in many ways freed me, I decided, all right.

It's time, right? And I think it is an interesting time in the world.

It's been interesting seeing how the book has come out.

I've actually loved the press. I actually thought the New York Times piece was really fair and in a way that I wasn't expecting.

Yeah. I mean, before that New York Times piece, there was a big conversation with the publisher and the publicist.

And I have a lot of respect for both of them, the publisher and the publicist.

But it was like, how are we going to play?

And a lot of it was, well, why not just go out and like show them the human, right?

Go be who you are when you're not a writer.

And I said, no, I was like, if we agreed at the beginning of this, you got me and you're getting me.

And so when we were dealing with the New York Times, the question was, how open would I be with them?

And how open would I be with anybody? And I decided at the beginning, I'm gonna be who I am.

I'm gonna say what I say. The way I always have and whatever happens, happens.

Whatever comes at me, comes at me. And so I did 12 hours of interviews with the New York Times.

That was four sessions, about three hours each.

And I was very open and vulnerable. And also not, right?

I said to him all the same things I said to you.

I said, listen man, maybe it won't be this time, but there will come a day when you acknowledge that I am the best and that I am the baddest.

And... I loved it. Even what they did was in some way a kind of coronation, right?

To say the way they did with that huge picture, Yeah, the moving, it's the motion, you know, the moving one that they do for the pieces that they really care about.

A lot of effort and time went into it. you know, making that special.

It was great. I got enough. Listen, I have not always had a good or respectful or decent relationship with the New York Times.

And this was the first time I would say they ever treated me fairly, decently or honestly in my life.

And then beyond that, lots of articles out there with photos of you standing in fields.

Well, like I said, meditation and walking in nature, right?

The New York Times one had your meditation hut, where you're sitting in there, but a lot of like you kind of standing in a field.

It's been fun, man. Like part of the reason I came back is because I see books dying, right?

I think it's cool to bring a little pizzazz to the business.

I wanna fuck it up. I wanna burn it down.

I still wanna write the best books of my time.

I still think I can. I still wanna do this.

It's been a ball. The media hasn't meant shit to me.

The New Yorker wrote some seven page thing and it made me laugh, right?

The New Yorker says I ain't shit, but they don't give other writers seven pages.

They don't use seven pages to try to fuck somebody up unless they think that motherfucker matters.

And it's been great. It's part of the game.

They're gonna hate me until I die or until somebody comes to replace me.

And I don't think anybody's coming to replace me.

I think I'm the last of this line of people.

The way I see books moving, the way I see culture moving, I think I'm the last in the line of American writers Willing to write books that cause problems and willing to go out in the world and defend them and willing to go out in the world and take whatever shit the world wants to give me.

I hope not. I hope that's not the case. I have to believe that it's not the case.

I just think that the incentive structure right now If you're somebody who is inclined in the way that you are, you know, maybe they go and write a limited series for, you know, for a streamer or something like you become Mike, Mike White on some level, like if you want to make An incisive statement about what you're seeing in culture.

Even the Mike Whites of the world are disappearing, right?

If you look at a lot of what streamers make, They employ the same cultural fascism that publishers do.

They employ the same rules of political correctness.

Yeah, because you need the corporate gatekeepers to create these projects because they cost money.

So you have to become... Tony Gilroy and weave your story into a star Wars story.

You know, you have to make Andor in order to like be, um, be disruptive.

You have to drape it in something that people can Except the problem is that younger generation is growing up in an environment where none of them are allowed to be a Tony Gilroy. where from the beginning of their careers, they're being forced into making things within very specific constraints, cultural and political constraints.

And so there won't be more Mike Bites because there won't be- Don't you think it's just a pendulum that's swinging though?

I think- I don't. There's always it's always the artist's job to, you know, basically speak true And the more dire the situation becomes, the more important the artist becomes.

And to me, it's inevitable that those voices find their way to the people in whatever medium.

What I was gonna say that one of the things I found really interesting is the generational reaction to my book, especially this one and the generational reaction to just me in general. which is our generation, Gen X, like, yeah, nobody gives a fuck what I do.

Like you read my books, I'm one of you. the millennials have always been very righteous with me oh that's the liar that's the oprah guy and very standoffish with me.

And now I think we see this younger generation, Gen Z, reacting to that and coming back with a more punk attitude.

And so for me, it's been really joyous one of the ways i started getting ready to do this is i had never i hadn't appeared in public in america in a long long time either so i did a couple practice readings right The first one was the New York Times wrote about a little bit.

Oh, the text message thing? Yeah, this reading that I did.

And it was the first reading I'd done in the States in at least a decade, I don't know.

But the crowd that showed up was like 400 people And probably 375 of them were under 30, right?

And it was fucking awesome that this younger generation, Gen Z is like, you know what?

Fuck this system. We understand we're getting fucked.

We understand we're getting fucked by everybody and we're gonna rebel a little bit and we're gonna try to find figures who have sort of been rebelling for a long time.

And so I've found like a new readership with younger readers.

And if there is somebody to come out of that, there might be.

Like there's a cool young poet in New York named Matt Starr, who's doing all kinds of cool, awesome shit. who's punk, he needs to write a novel, right?

He writes great poetry, but let's see what he does when he plays what I call the big game.

And the big game is who's the best novelist in the world.

Hopefully people emerge there. I do think there is something curdling in society. society right now where a lot of people are like, fuck this bullshit.

Fuck all these motherfuckers on the left and on the right.

And I hope we see a renaissance of if not literal punk, at least the attitude that punk carries, which is You don't get to tell me what to do.

You don't get to control my life. You don't get to decide what I say.

You don't get to decide what I do. Fuck off.

I'll fight you. And I hope that comes back.

I think it is coming back. I mean, we both have teenagers for kids and these are young people who are reared. in a very different media environment.

And they are exposed to all kinds of stuff. and most of what they're paying attention to isn't on ABC, CBS, or NBC, it's on YouTube.

And there is such a wide diversity of voices out there who are getting their voices out there without the intermediary gatekeeper. in the way.

So they don't even understand the idea of like somebody needing needing to give you permission to like say what's on your mind.

And I think that's really healthy. And there's something, indelible.

And, um, withstanding about books that is inescapable.

Like it is the one form of media that can withstand the test of time in our kind of disposable content landscape.

I hope. I think so. I don't know if I can.

And I think people are, there's a lot of hand wringing around like people aren't reading books anymore. maybe they're not buying hard copy books and maybe they're listening to them on audio books but i think the economy around books is quite strong.

The economy around books is quite strong.

What is not strong The analogy I'll use is the economy around the music business is real strong, too, but the economy around jazz isn't real strong.

Right. But my youngest daughter listens to a lot more jazz than I did when I was a kid.

We actually had this conversation yesterday.

We were driving home from Hollywood and I was telling her like, we were actually listening to the radio in the car, which is something I haven't done in a long time.

And she has never done And so I'm like, here's the stations in LA that are cool.

And here's what K-Rock was like when I was like, So good.

Here's what KCRW represents. And it was like all new to her.

And this is somebody who has the broadest appetite for music of any young person I know, listens to all kinds of stuff that that wasn't accessible when we were kids.

I was like, I just listened to the 10 songs that were constantly being repeated on the radio.

And what my friend's older brother told me was cool.

And that was like it, you know what I mean?

Cause she was saying, You'd go to the record store.

I'm getting to a point here that like she was like, oh, like I was telling her what it was like, like this is, you know, we had to like.

You had to find things. And then when you went to a new city, the radio stations were different.

Right. And you had to know, and like somebody would tell you, oh, when you go there, here's the one you listen to.

Right. that's the one with the cool music and you would discover a new song and the DJs mattered because they were curating like what you were hearing and she was like, that sounds so amazing.

Like, it's just terrible now. We don't have that.

And I said, Yeah, there's an argument to be made.

There's something romantic about that. But at the same time, you literally have access to every piece of music that was ever written in your pocket and you take advantage of that.

And you know a lot more about music and the history of music. and a wide variety of genres than I did.

Like your vocabulary around music is very advanced versus the kind of... what it would be if you had grown up when I grew up.

So these things are not all black and white.

But my point being that there is a appetite and a yearning for tactile, authentic experiences and honesty in this generation because they look around and they see an environment that is vapid and lacking in that regard.

And I think that that is what will always make books relevant.

And I have to believe if it's not already happening, that there's going to be some amazing voices that percolate up from that generation who have things to say and a very interesting way of saying it.

I hope so. When I was talking about Henry Miller, when I first started this whole fucking thing.

I finished that book and I said, I want to do some motherfucking punk kid with that guy just did to me.

Right. And that's part of why I still do it, too.

You ask, why am I doing it? Part of it is that I want it to continue.

I hope there are some punk kids who see me or see some other writer or read some other book and fall in love. and get that light bulb in their souls fucking turned on and decide, you know what, I'm gonna live how I wanna live too.

I'm gonna write how I wanna write too. I look to people like Manet and Baudelaire and Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer.

I hope some kid looks to me and says, you know what, that motherfucker pulled it off.

How he did it, I don't really know, but I'm going to figure out how to do it myself.

I think it's also more possible to do that today.

Like when we were kids, the idea that you were going to stray off the reservation and do your own thing or create your own career out of whole cloth was like, that was insanity.

But now everywhere you look, like everybody is just inventing careers all over the place and deciding the way they want to live and figuring out how to monetize it later.

Yeah. Yeah, it certainly makes for a more sort of chaotic system.

I miss that that that. delirious process of discovery that we had.

I think the difference between today and now is it's a lot easier, right? we had to work for it.

And when you have to work for something that almost is more meaningful to you, if that makes sense.

One of the things about today's culture that I hope sort of switches is the sort of disposability of it, right?

How easily people just get rid of things or get rid of people.

The speed at which information moves now I think works against books.

The focus required. Phones and technology have changed how our brains work in ways that literally large sections of the population don't have the attention span. anymore to read a book.

Let alone write one. Time and attention and focus.

And when you look at it and you're like, all right, I mean, I'll just use myself as an example.

I could take 18 months, two years to write this book It's gonna be extremely difficult.

It's gonna take an unbelievable amount of time. the number of people that are going to read it is gonna be far less than the number of people that tune in to listen to you and I today.

That's just a given. Right? Right. And I'm getting paid less than I would to do other things.

But there is a reason to do it, which is that It clarifies your thinking. and it provides you with an opportunity to express yourself in a way that no other form of media allows you to.

And it does mean something because it isn't disposable in the way that everything else seemingly is.

Books come and go, whatever, that's fine.

But if anything has an opportunity to stick around longer than most things, it's still books.

I hope we revert to some analog world, some more analog world.

I think when social media came along, we were also thrilled with the idea of this delightful fun cool harmless thing right And I think in the sort of really 10 years that it is, dominated the culture, we've started to really understand how vapid it is.

The word you used is the perfect word, right?

How vapid it is, how soul destroying it One of the things I did while I was sort of not writing was I worked for the world's largest influencer network.

Global Chief Content Officer for the world's largest influencer network, which at the time was a French company called Webedia.

And so I've seen very clearly, I know very clearly how social media works, the tricks that that are used literally to addict people.

Right. The whole purpose of social media is to addict its users to it so that the companies who manage the platforms can turn the users into products.

And it's an unbelievably soul-destroying endeavor that lines the pockets of a few people and destroys the souls of most of the others.

And I think we are coming around to the idea that it's fucked and that we've got to get rid of it, that we have to get back to some kind of life where There is truth as difficult as that word is to manage.

And that there is meaning, right? One of the content, one of the consequences of this content explosion that we've seen is like, things have less meaning again because they're so disposable because there's just another one you can get to fucking replace it and another one to replace that and another one to replace that. and i think what we're coming around to in some way is is that many, many people in contemporary society are living lives without meaning.

That when we get back to some of the things I write about in this book, money, right?

The cover of the book. The reason the cover is I am making that statement I made very directly.

Money is a drug, the most destructive, most addictive drug that exists.

I'm not a fortune teller, but I would like to think we're coming around to the ideas that the hoarding of money is not good. that social media does not make us happier, that does not make us better, it makes us worse in every way.

That information, the way it is currently – distributed is dangerous and that that we can live simpler lives, that our lives don't have to be about accumulation and and materialism that you can live a meaningful life with much less um we're either gonna come around to those ideas or we're gonna drive off a fucking cliff.

So I'm certainly hopeful that we come around to them.

And if we do dive off a cliff, I'll be off in the woods.

And if anybody wants to come hang out, try to come find us.

Is it true that you said no great book has ever been written by anyone over 50?

I said something like that. I probably said 60.

But again, I do believe in the idea of writers like professional athletes.

We have shelf lives. There are very, very few books.

What I more specifically said was I said, Very, very few great books have been written by men over 50. that I think there have been a number of very, very great books written by women over 50.

And that I think the processes in the sort of world of high level, highly ambitious women novelists are a little bit different than male novelists.

But you can look at somebody like Margaret Atwood who has very, very clearly written masterpieces after the age. but very few, if any, men have.

And again, that belief came out of, I've talked a number of times about how I look for patterns in things.

I look to seek patterns. And if you think about a writer as a professional athlete of the mind and the soul, Just like any other professional athlete, you only have so much.

You can only do it for so long at that level.

And at a certain point, you run out. Part of that huge break I took, I believe, has given me a much longer reservoir But even as I get older, I think about having to alter how I write books because I don't have the endurance I couldn't write a million little pieces now.

I couldn't write Bright Shiny Morning now.

I couldn't write the Bible now, but I can write other things.

So I think about writing shorter books. where I can drop into that state that I talk about for shorter periods of time.

So this book's like 300 pages. And it was the shortest book I've ever written by about 150.

And that wasn't accidental. That was, again, very pre-thought out.

And so as we talk about a circus master or these games I'm playing, as I'm thinking about how to train myself and how to write and how to prepare and how I'm going to engage in that fugue state.

And that fugue state, that fever dream, it wrecks you.

It's the most glorious, most delirious experience I've ever had.

It's not like anything I've ever known in life.

Literally, I feel like I'm swimming in a pool of God. right or the dow or the force or whatever you want to say But it's debilitating.

And so you can't do it too much. And so those years I now think about moving forward like, OK, shorter books.

Right. You don't have the endurance. Refine that process.

Fifty seven days. OK, the next one I'm going to try to do forty five. right?

Can I refine it more? Can I prepare better going in?

Can I come out of it better? One of the things I really learned with this book, and it's interesting thing about Taoism and ancient texts. is after the experience of how I wrote this, it also fundamentally changed how I believe I can live with the Tao and how I can exist in it.

And so whereas before, The idea of being in an almost permanent state of woo-way-woo or thinking not thinking was some delirious dream. that I now believe I can get to that and live in the Tao much more.

I told you on my way out here, I meditated for 30 minutes before I left the hotel and then for the entire hour I drove out here.

And the meditation out here was a different kind than the morning one, right?

The morning one was this absolute silence.

The one coming out here, I talked about how the music I use to manipulate.

I now believe I can use manipulate music to take me straight into the DAO, right?

There's certain musics that reacts to me emotionally that puts me into that state.

And so as I was riding out here, I had headphones on and the Uber driver must have thought I was crazy because I'm essentially like...

I'm meditating. Trans dancing in the backseat.

And I'm moving. But what I'm really doing is just allowing all the gates to open.

Just to be as free and as non-thinking and to let my body and my mind and my soul go to wherever they want to go, to some place where I... all that exists is the moment of hearing music and know that i'm moving and knowing that the world is alive.

I suppose the next level of this as it applies to how you write books is to inhabit that state and be able to create without it without the exhaustion part, you know what I mean?

Like, can it be a joyous, you know, state of freedom in which it's flowing naturally, but not paying this toll.

Yeah, I don't think that's possible. I don't.

Yeah, I don't think it is either. I think I always.

I think if you want to undertake the act of creation, there will always be a price that you pay, that your soul pays, that your heart pays.

Your consciousness pays. Your bank account with the DAO pays, right?

But I think there are ways... And as I've said, I've spent a lot of my life trying to figure out ways to do it differently or live in it differently or manage it differently.

You know, earlier you asked, like, what is my day-to-day life like in terms of managing my mental and physical health?

And it's been a long process. process of trying to find my way into this permanent state of Being, not being, right?

A focused, disciplined happiness, if that makes any sense, of utter acceptance of everything.

One of the reasons I can deal with the press And I don't care.

It's because I just accept it. Why should I care what some guy says about me?

Why does that matter in any way? It's his right and his job to say mean things about me.

Why should I expect anything else and why should it bother me?

Also, your job is to create things for people to talk about.

And there are other people who have their job is to, comment on it.

And usually that's going to include some negative stuff like that.

That just goes with the job. One of the things that's been fun about this one, and this will get kind of weird, is the inside baseball fights of it, right?

And so when the New Yorker wrote that article about me, it was the seven-page take down.

Yeah, I read it. Yeah. And it had a picture of me at a country club wearing a big platinum rope standing in front of a Ferrari.

Fancy car, yeah. The Times of London, which published an article two days later about my event in New York. which had an entirely different polar opposite position to it, used a picture from the same event. except it was pictures of me going like this, right?

And in a way that was also a statement from the Times of London to the New Yorker, those places, And so when you know you're doing that, when you know you're getting them to fight with each other over you without doing anything like. then I'm doing my job, right?

One of the Taoist things, and this all will kind of make sense, is there's sort of a fundamental text of Taoism that everybody knows called the Tao Te Ching.

There's a second one called the Cheng Tzu Wei, right? sort of Old Testament, New Testament.

In the they talk about man's ideal state of being, right?

And there's a Taoist ideal. And 30 some years ago, I had the tattoos of it.

I had the symbols of it tattooed on my arm.

But the ideal is to be as... Soft as iron, hard as rain, as quiet as thunder, and as still as the hurricane.

And throughout this conversation, we talked a lot about balance, about black and white, about sort of paradoxes how can you do this and this when these things sort of fundamentally are in opposition to each other but that's where i think magic exists And what the meaning of that statement is, is soft as iron.

We think of iron is iron. It's fucking build buildings and shit out of it.

But it's also malleable, the most malleable thing, one of the most malleable things we have, which is why we can build buildings and whatever else we want out of it that's impregnable.

You think about water, the softest, right?

But it also fucking carves a Grand Canyon.

You think about thunder. the loudest natural experience that exists.

But they know, science knows, in the moment before a thunder strike, there is perfect silence.

And you think about a hurricane as the most violent natural force there is.

But we know at the center of it sits absolute stillness, perfect calmness, right?

And so a lot of my what I do is to try to find that that state of existence to be.

As soft as iron, as hard as rain, as quiet as thunder, and as still as a fucking hurricane.

And I try to do that with my books. I try to do that in my life.

A lot of what I what both how I write and how I live are designed to try to bring me into that state.

And as I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot better at it.

I've gotten much happier, much calmer. I'm a much better person than I ever was before.

The books are better. I can write them better.

I can write them more efficiently. There's a liberation in embracing paradox rather than trying to figure out the binary of everything.

And that's really the human disposition, right?

Like we're pattern seeking creatures. We wanna know how things work and how they fit together.

And truth is just murky and it doesn't work that way.

And by accepting that rather than trying to crack the code, I think there's There's peace and a way, like the Tao of being that is a huge kind of unlock.

Yeah, I think people are trying to get back to it.

Like we were talking like we've all been through these decades, this decade now of mad wealth accumulation, of political insanity, of technological like madness and we've lost meaning and somehow doing these things at least brings it back.

I don't know. To jump back, you were talking about the binary of it, right?

Part of the problem today is we want explanations for everything and we think we can understand everything.

I talk all about the Tao and how I try to live in it.

And I try to feel it. inhabit every aspect of my life.

But on some level, I don't have any understanding of it and I don't try to.

And I think what, at least for me, and I guess maybe this will be, That's just it.

I don't have to understand everything, man.

I don't have to know how things work. Part of being a Taoist is also allowing mystery to exist, allowing yourself to say, I don't know the answer to that.

It just happens. It's just magic. It just is whatever it is, right?

And I think we need more of that in life.

If I have any message to leave anybody with, It would be like, Live wild, live free, be who you are.

You don't have to follow rules. You don't have to be who somebody else wants you to be or thinks.

You should be that the world is this crazy, horrible. terrifying, magnificent, delirious place Go do everything.

Go feel everything. Take every risk. Take every chance.

And you hear this kind of horseshit from motherfuckers all the time.

But I will say, I think one of the fundamental differences between me and those people is I have actually done that.

I have lived an insane life. All over the world.

The highest highs. The lowest lows. And it has been nothing but fucking great. whatever pain I have felt, whatever humiliation or embarrassment I have felt, has been well worth the price of just being wild and just being free and just being able to look in the mirror and say,

You ain't fucking perfect, but you're doing it your way and you're doing it the best you can.

Fucking keep going. That's it. Keep going.

Keep going. Keep going. I love it, man. I think that's a pretty good...

That's a pretty good place to land this.

I mean, I can't top that. Beautiful, man.

I love it. I will say this might be the best interview I've ever had in my whole life.

I was gonna say, how do you feel? Like, are we all right?

We're great. I mean – Do we do it? Like what did we – did we talk about everything?

I had no – Anything you want to say that –

No, man, I told you before we turned the fucking cameras on and your producer asked me, you're the only person I have ever solicited an interview for.

You're the only person I've ever said, hey man, would you be willing to interview me?

And I told you before we started, the reason I did that is because I think you're really smart.

I think you're really interesting and curious, but I also think you're really non-judgmental and you have an open mind and you're open to like, I told you I've never talked about a lot of this crazy shit.

I've sort of hinted at how I write. I talk about being able to manipulate myself into these fugue states, but never gone into the real sort of whatever and i did that because on some fundamental level i trust you and this has been awesome good man it's been a delirious delightful I dropped into the Dow before I got here and I feel like I'm still in it.

Awesome, man. We need courage right now.

We need moral conviction and courage. And I think that that is something that you like kind of represent in the spirit of why it is you do what you do.

Thank you. Even amidst all the controversy and all the PT Barnum of the whole thing.

I try to stay true to it, man, right? The goal is to write great books.

The goal is to provide people with an experience that lights up their soul.

The goal is to keep it all going. And the goal is to occasionally get to meet super cool people and hang out with them.

Cool. Thanks for doing this, dude. Thank you so much.

It's an honor. Godspeed. Yeah, much respect and honor to be here and honor to meet you.

Like I said, I'm a fan. I think you're a great man and a great example.

And in this world of madness. like a little island of honesty and decency that I have an immense respect for.

So thank you for having me. Thank you very much, man.

I'm trying. Appreciate it. Keep going. Alright.

Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. including links and resources related to everything discussed today. at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way.

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[The Art of Provocation: James Frey on Addiction, Truth, and the Writer’s Craft]-[Addiction, Celebrity, Public Shaming & Truth: The Performance Art of James Frey, Celebrated Writer of Ill-Repute]

📋 Summary

The Art of Provocation: James Frey on Addiction, Truth, and the Writer’s Craft

The Anatomy of Addiction and Art

The Myth of the Bad Boy

Taoism and the Creative Process

A Manifesto on Wealth and Society

Conclusion: The Last Punk

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript