This Writer Knows What You're Hiding From Yourself | Bruce Wagner

January 29, 2026 2h 1m

Rich Roll Podcast

Key Takeaway

Bruce Wagner, celebrated novelist of 15 books examining Hollywood's extremes, reveals how embracing life's darkest corners—from childhood trauma to society's taboos—became his path to transcendence. His most actionable insight: To achieve creative liberation and spiritual growth, you must explore every forbidden place within yourself without judgment, then emerge with the sacred understanding that all human experience, however dark, connects us.

Episode Overview

This conversation with novelist Bruce Wagner explores his unique approach to writing, spirituality, and the human condition. Wagner discusses how his traumatic Beverly Hills childhood, influenced by an abusive father and Hollywood's contradictions, shaped his transgressive literary style. He reveals his deep connections to spiritual teachers like Carlos Castaneda and Romesh Balsekar, his philosophy on predetermined behavior versus free will, and how exploring humanity's darkest impulses paradoxically leads to transcendence. Wagner's work examines extremes—wealth and homelessness, celebrity and invisibility, the sacred and profane—all filtered through Hollywood as a laboratory for human vanity and need.

Key Insights

Transcendence Requires Exploring the Forbidden

Wagner believes true artistic and spiritual growth comes from willingly exploring every forbidden place within yourself. By inhabiting characters from saints to serial killers with equal intimacy, he discovered that examining humanity's darkest impulses—without the spiritual component—leads to atrophy, but with it, creates the possibility of transcendence. The key is not avoiding what scares you, but moving directly toward it.

The Three Types of Buddhist Suffering

Wagner identifies three forms of suffering that inform his work: physical pain (birth, death, illness), fluctuation of moods (the impermanence underlying all experience, intensified in bipolar conditions), and conditional suffering (suffering imposed by social order). Understanding these categories helps explain why his characters seek escape through various means and why transcendence becomes so important.

Predetermined Actions Don't Excuse Behavior

Through teacher Romesh Balsekar, Wagner explored the concept that everything is predetermined—a notion that initially disturbed many, including celebrities who needed their sense of agency. However, Wagner clarifies this doesn't excuse harmful actions; rather, it suggests we all 'could have done nothing else' based on our conditioning, yet still must correspond to the laws and dictates of our nature.

The 'Scent' of Literature Guides Creative Choice

Wagner describes his relationship with books and language through the metaphor of scent—an almost olfactory attraction to certain writers and styles. He gravitates toward work containing extremity, pathos, and what he calls 'perfume': the fidious, obsessive, romantic, mathematical use of language found in Dickens. This scent-based selection explains why he absorbed books more than read them, seeking specific qualities rather than consuming everything.

Words as Religious Experience and Survival Mechanism

For Wagner, language became both mother and father—the thing that wrapped around him like a boa constrictor, killing off other capacities while simultaneously feeding him. His kinetic, almost religious involvement with words remains the one thing not diminishing as everything else falls away. This suggests language can serve as both prison and liberation, depending on how it's wielded.

Notable Quotes

"I explore every forbidden place in myself and there's only one thing I'm really worried about from the moment I put my head on the pillow and it's book sales."

— Bruce Wagner

"He could have done nothing else, you know. So there there is a kind of um certainty to um all our behaviors."

— Bruce Wagner

"If you liked acid, you'll love India."

— Leonard Cohen (quoted by Wagner)

"I attack and destroy um [bullshit] in a sense. I mean, Hemingway had that line, uh, I can't remember, I'll paraphrase it, where he had a a goldplated, [bullshit] detector."

— Bruce Wagner

"Without the spiritual aspect you atrophy and you become a kind of curiosity to others and to oneself and you become a fetishist."

— Bruce Wagner

Action Items

1
Explore Your Forbidden Territories
Identify the places within yourself that cause hesitation or shame. Instead of avoiding them, move toward them with curiosity. Write about them, discuss them with a therapist, or examine them through creative work. Wagner suggests that rapturously locating 'infernal' places you haven't visited creates the possibility for genuine growth and transcendence.
2
Develop Your Creative 'Scent' Detector
Pay attention to what genuinely attracts you in art, literature, or any creative field—not what you think should attract you or what's critically acclaimed. Wagner trusted his 'impeccable sense of smell' for language and themes. Cultivate awareness of what resonates authentically with you, then follow that scent relentlessly in your own work.
3
Balance Dark Exploration with Spiritual Grounding
If you're examining difficult subjects or working through trauma, ensure you have spiritual practices or frameworks that prevent you from becoming merely a 'curiosity' or 'fetishist.' Wagner combined transgressive artistic exploration with Buddhist and spiritual teachings. Find your own balance between confronting darkness and maintaining connection to transcendence.
4
Recognize the 'Postal State' After Intensity
After periods of creative intensity or emotional difficulty, acknowledge the numbness or emptiness that follows. Wagner compares this to the 'postal state' after migraines—a metaphorical descent to lower depths that creates a synthetic inner silence. Rather than fighting this state, recognize it as part of the creative cycle and a doorway to deeper understanding.