Hunter Thompson, the legendary journalist, writer, and presidential candidate, joins Jemele to discuss his life and career, and the parallels between his writing and Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. Plus, Hunter shares some of his favorite quotes from Hunter's life and how they can be applied to the current political climate. Also, Hunter talks about his new book, "Freak Kingdom," which is out now, which is a memoir about his time in the early 20th century, and why he thinks Trump should have been the first president to plagiarize a speech by Richard Nixon in order to get his message out there and get people to remember him and his impact on the culture at large. We also discuss the similarities between Hunter s life and that of Donald Trump s presidential campaign and the Nixon White House, and how the two have a lot in common, especially when it comes to the way they were both written about in the media and the way that they were written about each other. Enjoy the episode, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! and a review of the book, Freak Kingdom! Subscribe to our new podcast, Freak Kingdom, wherever you get your stuff! Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast! It helps us spread the word about this podcast. Thank you so much to everyone who listened to this episode. We really appreciate it. -Jon Sorrentino and all the support we've gotten from you, the podcasting community. Jon Sorrenta Jon's bio: Jon's new book: Freak Kingdom: The Real Talk About Hunter Thompson's Life and the Great Gatsby's Life in the 21st Century. Jonathan Sorrenti's New York Times: The Man Who Wasn't Scared of It All by Hunter's Book About It All, the Real Thing by Hunter s Life, The Great Gadsby's New Book about It's Not Good Anymore by Hunter S. Thompson, Jr. and His Life and His New Book About His Life & His Dad's New Life by Bill Murray, Jr.'s New Book, Freak Kingdom, The Real Life by Hunter Thompson Jr. is out Now in the Real Talk: The Other Side of It's a Book About Hunter's Life, the Bigger than It's Real Talk, The Bigger Than It's Good, Not Really? by Mr. Jekyll and the Other Thing by Jay Meyers.
00:00:42.000When I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure my sentences never sounded like Thompson's sentences.
00:00:46.000So I didn't write out a lot of his sentences, but this morning before coming on, I went and got some of my favorite quotes and just wrote them out longhand to get a sense of what his perspective was and rhythm was again.
00:00:57.000Didn't he do that with The Great Gatsby?
00:01:23.000And they'll do it to their friends and they'll get a sense of the rhythm and the timing and get those laughs from doing a Richard Pryor bit to their friends.
00:02:11.000So the lines about crime and barbarians at the gates, crime, law and order, those were all from Nixon's shitty but successful 1968 Miami Convention speech.
00:02:20.000And Thompson knew how effective that that was.
00:02:23.000Yeah, I wonder if he did that on purpose.
00:02:28.000And one thing that Trump is so good at, he's so good at getting the media to talk about him.
00:02:32.000And one of the best ways to get the media to talk about him was give them something to be angry about that no one else is going to give a fuck about.
00:02:39.000He was like, oh, Melania plagiarized, but I plagiarized much better from Nixon.
00:02:49.000Well, if you plagiarize Nixon, that's okay.
00:02:51.000I mean, so, Freak Kingdom, the book about Hunter S. Thompson, I mean, it's really about taking the fucking emotion of living in this present, looking back at Thompson's career, and then trying to write it like a novel to dramatize all of the experiences he went through that are today so applicable to us,
00:03:08.000and just show his perspective that's so applicable to us today.
00:03:25.000When Hunter got together with Bill Murray and Bill's brother, and they did that thing where they were trying to get people to, Nixon got a bad deal, we gotta bring him back.
00:03:42.000There's a lot of parallels with Trump in that regard.
00:03:45.000I mean, one of my favorite quotes by Thompson is like, Richard Nixon is – with his Barbie doll family and his Barbie doll wife is like America's answer to – is America's Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.
00:04:12.000That's what I'm going to use to try to get elected.
00:04:14.000And like George Wallace did, like other politicians did, it had resonance and it happened with Trump because of our media environment, because of the place we live in now, to amplify him all the way to the most powerful position in the world, which is insane.
00:04:26.000It would be really fascinating to see, if Hunter was alive and in his prime now, how he would...
00:04:30.000I think his take on it would be very similar to Matt Taibbi's.
00:04:34.000Matt Taibbi is, in my opinion, our more reasonable, more put-together version of Hunter Thompson, because he's more disciplined.
00:04:44.000Sustained, more long-career version of Hunter Thompson.
00:04:46.000He's rational and he's there all the time.
00:04:49.000I'm sure you've heard the recently uncovered recording of Hunter calling in to some company that installed a DVD player and he's fucking screaming and yelling.
00:06:14.000He didn't want the press around him because he had committed very serious crimes.
00:06:18.000I think that's similar to what we see now.
00:06:20.000I mean, as people said on the show, no president wants a journalist digging into their lives specifically because you don't want chumminess with journalists.
00:06:29.000But I think Trump and Nixon both knew they had so much to hide that to actually have a journalist like Hunter Thompson, who was a good investigative journalist, to have a journalist like Matt Taibbi around, that's dangerous for them.
00:06:39.000They'll go to jail, which Nixon should have and Trump perhaps should.
00:06:53.000You know, I was 17 years old in Catholic high school at Bellarmine College Preparatory up in San Jose, and we had a counterculture writing class.
00:07:04.000And so I read some of it in there, and then a friend had an audiobook of Fear and Loathing.
00:07:07.000And so I just remember the first time hearing that old audiobook of Fear and Loathing.
00:07:10.000We're somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert.
00:07:12.000And then in my 20s, I really got into Strange Rumblings in Ozatlan, which is about a conspiracy within the Los Angeles Police Department regarding the death of Ruben Salazar, a prominent journalist.
00:07:24.000I read that and I'm like, oh my god, dude.
00:07:25.000This isn't somebody that's just dancing on stage or performing a road narrative.
00:07:29.000This is an investigative journalist who's going to the most powerful people.
00:07:34.000Exposing things they don't want us to see, and in a sense, risking his life to do so, because he says in Strange Romalings in Aslan, which is in Rolling Stone in 1970, he says that they're willing to kill Ruben Salazar, who was the most prominent journalist in Los Angeles, you could argue at the time.
00:07:47.000What the fuck is to stop them from killing me, Hunter Thompson, for asking these questions?
00:07:51.000Well, I think that's what a lot of people are saying today with Jamil Khashoggi.
00:07:55.000You know, Jamal Khashoggi's death has got a lot of journalists really freaking out.
00:08:01.000Like, what am I doing if I'm criticizing world leaders and talking about international politics if this could happen to me?
00:08:08.000Political violence is effective because it's used to silence either opposition or journalists.
00:08:15.000For me, writing this book, and I tried to dramatize it like a novel, it's quick, it's like only 220-210 pages, and then it's like 100 pages of notes, so I cited every sight, smell, or sound, so that somebody that knows Thompson really well can be like, where the fuck did you get this information?
00:08:28.000And somebody else can, if they have questions, just go back and look, but Long story short, for me, the crux of the book was in Chicago in 1968, where Hunter Thompson had a press pass.
00:08:38.000He went to the Democratic National Convention.
00:08:41.000On Wednesday night, Mayor Daley gave this order to clear the intersection of Balboa and Michigan because there was a protest going on, five, ten thousand people.
00:08:49.000Thompson was standing next to the Haymarket Inn, which was on the ground floor level.
00:08:59.000They did like a double pincher formation like Hannibal and like Kumai and like fucking 100 BC and they split the protesters in half, beat everybody, hit Thompson over the head.
00:09:09.000He got his motorcycle helmet on just in time so he's not concussed.
00:09:13.000He can see everything that's going on and the entire plate glass window behind him.
00:09:44.000And if that's where we're at right now with journalists, you know, if political opponents and journalists are being clubbed to keep silent and to not respond, then this is not the democracy we know.
00:09:54.000Yeah, his ex-wife talked about that as being like one of the only moments where she saw him cry.
00:10:37.000They've taken my bank accounts, my plant forms.
00:10:39.000But when he talks about violence, he's like, who the fuck are you, Antifa?
00:10:43.000Like I'm, you know, you're 120 pounds and wet.
00:10:45.000Like if we have civil war, you're going to lose.
00:10:47.000And I was sitting next to him during the podcast.
00:10:49.000And basically what I said was, if we have a civil war, you're going to be hit by sniper fire from the fucking roof.
00:10:53.000You're not going to be in a fistfight with Antifa across the way.
00:10:56.000And I think there's this idea on the right that we can push towards violence and we can get very close to it with our rhetoric or with our actions, but that it won't spread, like the conflagration won't keep going.
00:11:07.000Yeah, I don't know if that's isolated to the right.
00:11:11.000And that's why I love Thompson was as hard on the left as he was on the right when he wrote.
00:11:14.000And that was so important for his intelligence as a writer.
00:11:16.000Well, I think just even the left and the right in general for a lot of these people is just an identity and a gang that they belong to.
00:11:22.000And I don't think they really understand violence.
00:11:25.000You know, you want to talk about violence, talk to a military guy.
00:11:28.000You know, talk to someone who really understands what violence actually is.
00:11:31.000And they don't We don't have this empty rhetoric like these fools do.
00:11:36.000There's a lot of these people that are calling for violence.
00:11:38.000You should be calling for camaraderie.
00:11:41.000You should be calling for communication.
00:11:42.000We should be calling for some way we could all work this out, where the civilians, the civilization that we live in, that we all can get along together, and most people don't want to impede you from living your life and doing what you want to do.
00:12:25.000And that changes your ability to articulate something back in that moment.
00:12:28.000It means if that's political, if it's a police officer or a political opponent that uses violence instead of an argument to respond to you, we've left the realm that we recognize and we're not going to be able to communicate even in the limited way that we're communicating right now.
00:12:43.000So that's why after Chicago, I love that he went back to Aspen.
00:12:46.000And he's like, I'm going to run for fucking sheriff.
00:12:49.000I'm going to do a mayoral campaign in Aspen.
00:12:51.000And that was brilliant because it was his way to control his environment knowing that Mayor Daley is not listening to his nonviolent protest.
00:12:56.000Richard Nixon is not listening to his nonviolent protest.
00:13:00.000Thompson needed to find another avenue.
00:13:01.000To try to work within the American system to make things happen.
00:13:04.000A great contrast is his good friend Oscar Zeta Acosta.
00:13:08.000There's a wonderful PBS documentary, Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, by Philip Guadarrigas, a great director, and it's Acosta's life.
00:13:38.000And they were trying to use those provocateurs to incite violence against the plainclothes police so that – or the normalclothes police so that lethal violence could be used to silence the civil rights movement in Brown Beret.
00:13:50.000So they used agent provocateurs to make it look like they were part of the protest?
00:13:57.000That's how you destroy a civil rights movement because the most effective weapon in silencing civil rights is the lethal force.
00:14:02.000And you can do that in another country as the U.S. has done, but the U.S. can't use tactics like My Lie, like Thompson writes about this, in the U.S. unless you have a provocative reason, unless somebody that's undercover attacks a cop.
00:14:14.000And so the cops then, like what happened on August 29, 1970, during the moratorium riots, can just flood East L.A. and kill whoever they want.
00:14:21.000They blew Ruben Salazar's head off with a tear gas gun.
00:14:25.000Yeah, those are darker days when you couldn't communicate as well, and I think that's one of the reasons why Hunter decided to run for sheriff in Aspen, is that he felt like he could control that area, like it would have a direct impact on his life.
00:14:40.000The local politics have a real impact on your day-to-day existence, whereas what's going on in Washington, for the most part, it's not affecting you if you're living in Woody Creek.
00:14:49.000I mean, there were people that had Nixon's point of view in Aspen who were like, let's develop this valley beyond what it can hold in terms of its environment.
00:14:56.000Let's imprison hippies because they are going to take away from our tourist economy.
00:15:02.000Let's not adhere to normal civil rights laws.
00:15:07.000And so Thompson, in a participatory democracy, almost a Jeffersonian democracy, We're good to go.
00:15:33.000It got really bad, and he talks about this in Fear and Living on the campaign trail later, is that a few nights before, both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, freaked out.
00:15:41.000And so the Democrats said, all right, we'll kind of throw our weight behind you, the Republican sheriff, and then you Republicans will throw your weight for county manager behind our candidate.
00:15:49.000And so Thompson ended up losing by like 200 or 300 votes.
00:15:52.000And so in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on the campaign trail in 1972, he's at the Nixon campaign.
00:15:57.000Nixon's giving his acceptance speech at the convention.
00:16:00.000Thompson's with the Nixon youth who are about to do a demonstration.
00:16:03.000And he says, like, you know, I'm not a journalist.
00:16:51.000You know, it's a really interesting, the documentary that follows the campaign and when you get to see him, you know, heart fallen when he loses.
00:17:02.000You got a sense of what, there was real hope back then, like that if these guys could do that.
00:17:08.000And what's interesting now is, you know, back in the 70s, they really did have a freak community in Aspen.
00:17:22.000You go to Aspen, you see these, like, $20 million houses, and people, like, it's one of the rare places where people still wear fur coats, you know?
00:17:31.000Not ironically, or fake, but real fur coats.
00:17:33.000Well, if you wear a fur coat in LA, first of all, it's never cold enough for a fur coat.
00:17:38.000But if you did, you might get fucked up.
00:17:43.000You know, like, most likely nothing's going to happen, but there's a possible chance, which is really weird, because if you wear a leather jacket, you have no problem.
00:17:53.000I mean, Aspen's weird because a lot of Thompson's friends, like Lauren Jenkins, a great journalist, they've moved down to Basalt, let's say Down Valley.
00:20:16.000And I think when he went to Woody Creek, he learned that, all right, I can take a plane to Chicago, get my ass kicked, but I can come back.
00:20:22.000And if I want to have a drink, I can go to that tavern or I can go to the Jerome Hotel.
00:20:26.000And I think that was a good space for him.
00:20:28.000Well, I think that's probably a very intelligent move on his behalf.
00:20:32.000And a lot of us, I think, that are involved in day-to-day chaos would probably benefit from something similar.
00:20:39.000I mean, I just don't think he gets enough credit for his effort.
00:20:41.000You know, one thing I found when writing the book, I interviewed Bob Geiger, who Fear and Loathing is dedicated to, and who was a doctor that was a friend of his in Sonoma.
00:20:50.000And Geiger initially was the one who prescribed him dexedrine.
00:20:53.000And so people think Thompson was just doing acid in writing or Whatever.
00:20:57.000And maybe later as a caricature or whoever he became, that might have been part of his persona.
00:21:02.000But when he was writing from – the book is from Kennedy's assassination to Nixon's resignation.
00:21:09.000Like he was working harder than we can ever imagine.
00:21:11.000Douglas Wrinkley is the presidential historian who does his – Literary Estate talks about Thompson wasn't as fun as he seemed during that time.
00:21:18.000He took dexectrine to write and he had a drinking problem.
00:21:22.000Dexectrine is some sort of an amphetamine?
00:21:24.000It's Adderall that's cut differently with salt.
00:21:27.000So it's a little bit like you go a little higher and when it comes down, it's a little harder.
00:21:30.000Well, Adderall was Obitrol, which was an old diet drug that was repurposed in like 96. That is a little bit smoother in that sense, but it's very similar to what...
00:22:09.000Yeah, that Gibney documentary is really fantastic.
00:22:14.000It's probably one of the best introductions that anybody could have to try to get a grip on why, after all these years, Hunter resonates with so many people.
00:22:26.000I mean, I think that the Gibney documentary is brilliantly and perfectly done.
00:22:31.000I think that Thompson means something different with Donald Trump as president of the United States.
00:22:35.000To me, people could see it before Gibney saw it before.
00:22:38.000Other brilliant writers saw it before Taibbi did.
00:22:41.000But when Donald Trump became president of the United States, it was a lens.
00:22:51.000And so one of the ways I dealt with it was to just remove myself to 1968, 1967, 1969. And I took the emotion I had in the present.
00:22:59.000And I realized that Thompson is such a voice right now for people that maybe don't know him, only know him through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam's film.
00:23:06.000I would like freaking to be a lens that now, if they read that, They could then read his work and perhaps, you know, what his timelessness will come through more.
00:23:15.000It was an attempt to focus that timelessness.
00:23:17.000And what helped was the fucking terror of our present.
00:23:20.000Yeah, you can see, you definitely see the parallels in his work.
00:23:24.000You know, who also rings true like that is a lot of Bill Hicks stuff on the first Gulf War, you know, and Bush as a president and, you know, which obviously people today would probably be dying to have Bush as president.
00:23:50.000Well, that's our discourse today, too, where there couldn't be anything said reasonably about him when he passed away or even about his wife.
00:23:56.000I mean, I think he's not very favorable right now, but one of Hunter Thompson's main influences was Norman Mailer.
00:24:01.000And I don't think Norman Mailer writes well about women.
00:24:04.000I think Thompson wrote better about women.
00:24:06.000Thompson didn't just often write about women.
00:24:09.000Well, Mailer, whenever he writes about a woman, it's like he's watching the Nixonettes get off the Nixon airplane, and he's like, there were 33 redheads, like five head long legs like this.
00:24:17.000It's like, Mailer, you didn't need to write that fucking passage.
00:24:19.000You're writing about power and people...
00:24:22.000I think Miller writes beautifully about men that have more power than him.
00:24:26.000And so he writes about 1968 in Chicago where Thompson didn't because Thompson was beat up.
00:24:30.000And he writes about that moment of where Thompson's being beat up.
00:25:01.000We can dialogue on gender politics later.
00:25:03.000But I would say that Thompson wrote well, better about women because he understood that writing about people with more power than you is really important.
00:25:10.000And when Mailer writes about people with more power than him, when he writes about Mayor Daley beating the shit out of everybody, he writes really beautifully.
00:25:16.000And that's somebody that's resonating right now.
00:25:46.000I knew that Nixon was going to be president of the United States because if fucking Hubert Humphrey, that gutless old ward healer, can't control his own convention and his own party, how is he going to be able to run the country?
00:25:58.000And so as soon as Chicago's violence erupted, the Nixon campaign knew they'd won the election.
00:26:04.000Pappy Cannon, it's really interesting because even though Hunter would shit on him, Pappy Cannon was actually a fan.
00:27:26.000I think that we see him more as like a Doonesbury character.
00:27:28.000People who know him really well don't, but I think that most people, through whatever cultural forces that we've had, don't see his voice.
00:27:36.000Because a lot of people don't know the comparison, the Doonesbury character.
00:27:39.000So I think in the 80s or 70s, 80s, 90s, the cartoon Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau, it became – there was a character on it called Uncle Duke, and Uncle Duke was based on Hunter Thompson.
00:27:49.000And he was kind of an exaggerated version of Hunter Thompson.
00:27:52.000He was a cartoonish version of Hunter S. Thompson.
00:27:55.000And I think Terry Gilliam did a wonderful and kind of auteurish job on – We're good to go.
00:28:22.000And so it kills me that we identify him more as a clown or more as a cartoonish figure as opposed to a very serious political thinker, political activist, and serious writer who can give us insight into the fucking shit show we experience every moment today.
00:28:38.000Well, I think the perception of him is fairly nuanced.
00:28:41.000I don't think that everybody thinks of him as a cartoon character, although particularly later on in his life, He was relegated to that because he really didn't speak well.
00:28:51.000You know, later on in his life when he was, just the drugs had taken over.
00:29:46.000And he didn't end up writing the eight page spread that he needed to.
00:29:49.000Instead, it became Annie Leibovitz's photography, which was a famous and in retrospect, like huge move for her career.
00:29:56.000But I think that that pain right there of thinking that he'd spent 10 years, I mean, he hated Nixon since the checker speech, you know, when Nixon was VP for Eisenhower.
00:30:04.000He'd hated Nixon since 1962 when Nixon lost the I think?
00:30:33.000You know, ravenous monster who was anti-communist who would go to any extent to win and Thompson saw that and Thompson knew that other people saw it.
00:30:41.000In 1964 at the Barry Goldwater Convention in San Francisco, my favoritly named arena of all time, the Cow Palace.
00:30:49.000Barry Goldwater was going to speak to accept the nomination and what happened was Nixon was introducing him.
00:30:54.000It was Nixon's way back from the wilderness.
00:32:18.000He was a cultural figure that represented the resistance to the Vietnam War and represented it with the biggest loss that any public figure had ever shown and willingly gave up three years of his career in his prime from age 27 to 30. From 1967,
00:32:36.000from the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight, he didn't fight again for three years.
00:35:08.000Ali used his celebrity to speak for his virtue and his value and his beliefs.
00:35:12.000Thompson was really good at understanding what people sacrifice, what people have to give up, the wager, you know, between what that act will be, what the results will be.
00:36:24.000And so he was beginning to break down then.
00:36:27.000He was also, I think, on the tail end of his decade of being a journalist who had met every deadline so that he could fucking feed his family.
00:37:05.000Like, unfurled once alcoholism, I think, took its toll.
00:37:08.000And once he couldn't walk around anymore at a political convention without people just, like, grabbing his shoulder and saying, you're Hunter Thompson.
00:37:15.000Once that happened, I think things began to change.
00:37:18.000Yeah, that's one of the things that he talked about that I thought was really interesting, that he became a part of the story.
00:37:24.000It wasn't just that he was covering stories.
00:37:32.000You know, like when he would go to meet Nixon, all of Nixon's Secret Service agents wanted to meet him and they wanted to get an autograph from him and shake his hand.
00:38:19.000I mean, we got to remember that the dedication to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
00:38:25.000And I think the world was painful for Hunter Thompson.
00:38:28.000I think it was painful to see powerful people abuse the weak and take what they wanted brazenly without being held accountable.
00:38:34.000I think it was hard to deal with shitty editors who cut half your fucking essay on Nixon or half your story and made it into something that had nothing to do with the effort that you put out.
00:38:42.000I think it was hard to pay your bills.
00:38:44.000And, you know, live the way that you wanted to live.
00:38:46.000And I think a lot of that gets undermined.
00:38:49.000I just want people to realize how much effort he put out, especially during those years where he was like, all right, I want to be a great journalist.
00:38:56.000I want to have a voice in our society.
00:38:58.000I want to participate in our national conversation.
00:39:00.000My only path towards that is to work harder than everybody else, to be at places when things happen and when they matter.
00:39:05.000And he sacrificed a lot for that, but he was there and he's a voice and a light that we can have in this moment, which is another troubling moment in American history.
00:39:13.000Yeah, his voice was very unique, too, in that he decided to combine fiction with nonfiction in a very weird, blurry way.
00:39:47.000And I think Matt Taibbi on this show talked about it well, where one thing is that Muskie was already out of the campaign when that came out.
00:41:04.000But what I think people don't remember is, before that, and this affected the election, in February of 1972, Thompson was in Florida.
00:41:13.000He was on something called the Sunshine Special.
00:41:14.000It was a whistle-stop tour that Muskie, the frontrunner, had a good chance to beat Nixon, poll numbers-wise, was going all the way down the Florida Peninsula on to try to win the Florida primary.
00:42:11.000And he walks in and he says he's looking for the Muskie campaign, all these different things, and he ends up going out with Hunter Thompson for a drink.
00:42:18.000And Hunter Thompson finds out that Peter Sheridan had been a good friend of Jerry Garcia, had hung out with the Hells Angels in California, had been to La Honda, where Ken Kesey was, and was actually a pretty smart guy who was out of his mind in his mid-20s.
00:42:45.000And so there's a really good journalist, Outlaw.
00:42:48.000It's called Outlaw Journalist by Bill McKean, another Thompson biography.
00:42:52.000It talks about how Thompson took his press pass, put it into the elevator, pressed the button, sent the press pass down to the ground floor.
00:43:28.000He got in this weird fight with his wife at a...
00:43:31.000A campaign event where they like put cake in each other's face.
00:43:34.000It's been really weird and people aren't reporting on it.
00:43:36.000Like other reporters aren't saying Muskie's unstable.
00:43:39.000And so Muskie at the end of this whistle stop, he spent all his campaign money to go up and down and try to do this whistle stop like tour.
00:44:08.000Reaching up from the bottom of the caboose, Peter Sheridan is holding a gin bottle and grabbing at Muskie's leg as Muskie tries to give this speech.
00:44:17.000And then Muskie falls back and the whole thing ends.
00:44:20.000Like the whole press conference is over.
00:44:23.000And it came out that Hunter Thompson had had 13 martinis and run up and down the train and had interfered with it.
00:44:30.000And Muskie's campaign really believed that Thompson was working with Donald Segretti and Nixon's creep, Watergate crew, to fuck up Muskie's campaign.
00:44:44.000Thompson helped expose how fucked up Muskie was as a candidate at that time.
00:44:49.000And Thompson had never forgiven Muskie for being on the pro-Vietnam War platform at the 1968 convention.
00:44:54.000And so we talk about the obligate aspect of changing the campaign, but That report and the way that disseminated through media, the way it was picked up by other newspapers, really did help change the people's perception of Ed Muskie, Big Ed Muskie, as Thompson called him at the time.
00:45:09.000Now, when he wrote Hell's Angels, he hadn't really totally formulated that sort of gonzo style of journalism, but he did...
00:45:30.000I think that when it What Thompson did really well is what Joan Didion did really well.
00:45:39.000He took the way the media was portraying somebody and he stripped that off and said, this is who they actually are.
00:45:55.000And then in the scene in the White Album, Joan Didion writes about how they sit at a recording studio for two hours and nobody says anything and they eat eggs out of a paper bag and it's a fucking nightmare.
00:46:04.000Thompson knew that the media was sensationalizing the Hells Angels.
00:46:07.000He went to them on a cold night in San Francisco down by the waterfront and he said, hey, here's a Newsweek article.
00:46:55.000You know, and the famous story at the end of it is that – I mean, really, like when they go through it, he said that – He said that Thompson was doing a subjective version of us, but it was at least closer than the shitty Newsweek and Time versions.
00:48:41.000And Tiny was this, like, enormous Hells Angel who had been, you know, Thompson was very good at empathetically understanding their flaws and their perspectives.
00:48:51.000He'd never, I think, made excuses for them.
00:48:53.000He said that their inherent perspective is fascistic.
00:49:24.000If you came back from the war in 1950, you had a chance in Oakland to have a middle class life and a beautiful house and work the rest of your days and have a family that will then go on.
00:49:32.000But by 1965, that was no longer an option.
00:49:35.000And the angels were a violent response to that, very similar to what we're seeing now.
00:49:38.000So the way he wrote about the Hell's Angels is very similar to the way that we see violence within groups that are supporting Trump, you know, and groups on the left and the right.
00:49:46.000Did he ever wind up resolving his differences with the Hells Angels?
00:50:13.000Yeah, no more like, again, it gets to Thompson's effort.
00:50:15.000If you ride for six months with somebody and you're an honest, like putting up your hands, you're not trying to fit what you see into a thesis.
00:54:19.000Talk about throwing a football with Thompson.
00:54:21.000You know, talk about taking the dog to the beach, like all these other things.
00:54:23.000The football thing is an interesting thing because he was obsessed with football and that's one thing that he shared in common with Nixon.
00:54:30.000And so when they went, one time they were going to the airport and he hitched a ride with Nixon and Nixon wanted to talk to him about football.
00:54:39.000And he said, let's just not talk about politics when we talk about football.
00:54:56.000And so later Thompson said, later it was like, they told me not to talk about anything about football.
00:55:00.000But earlier Thompson said, like, I was just really awkward.
00:55:03.000Like this fucking guy, they're both in the backbench of a Mercury.
00:55:06.000And so it's before Secret Service, so it's just a cop driving, and it's like Pappy Cannon in the front, and it's Thompson and Nixon, and they're right here next to each other.
00:55:14.000And Thompson's like, well, you know, earlier in the night you'd said that, you know, the Oakland Raiders had a good shot to beat the Packers in Super Bowl II. Can you talk about that?
00:55:22.000And he was like, Nixon's like, my good friend Vince Lombardi had told me to watch out for the AFL because they pass.
00:56:27.000I mean, you have to listen to the other side.
00:56:29.000If you politically want to beat somebody like Pat Buchanan, if you want to defeat his tactics, if you want to defeat him, you need to know how he's thinking and what he's doing.
00:56:38.000Thompson knew that Buchanan was listening to the left to defeat them.
00:56:54.000In the early 60s, Thompson had a chance to drive, I don't know, some sort of cargo, like a friend's car out to Colorado on his way to San Francisco in 1960. He ended up doing a road trip up and down San Francisco after he passed through Colorado, but he stopped in Colorado because he had to drop off a friend's car and there was a woman there Peggy Clifford,
00:57:15.000who was a journalist and was his good friend at the Aspen Daily Times.
00:57:27.000And she lived right in Aspen and Woody Creek.
00:57:28.000And so then in 1963, after Sandy was pregnant, Tomson came back from South America where he was a reporter and did a wonderful job reporting on how democracies were falling apart down there.
00:57:41.000Him and Sandy wanted to move West because the National Observer was the newspaper Tomson worked for.
00:57:46.000They wanted to give Tomson a position to be a Western reporter.
00:57:49.000He was thinking of going to San Francisco, but instead he chose to stop first.
00:57:54.000Where Peggy Clifford was to stop in Aspen and Woody Creek.
00:57:58.000And so he was living in Aspen and Woody Creek from August of 1963 to February of 1963. And he was there.
00:59:44.000And that's why this book almost killed me because I did a note for every sound, smell, or sight, or comment.
00:59:51.000Like if I wrote, and then at that moment Thompson felt, what the fuck am I doing here?
00:59:55.000I had the quote where he said, I looked around then and I felt, what the fuck am I doing here?
00:59:59.000And I had that in the notes so people could see it.
01:00:01.000And it was because I wanted those people that knew him well and respected him and trusted him to not think that I was in any way Trying anything but to make good art off of his life and who he was.
01:00:10.000Trying to respond to my fucking view of Trump right now and my love of his work in this moment.
01:01:37.000And so, you know, and I had a family, and I had a, I'm a professor, like, I just – I never, when it came to writing, had to do both those things, which was to try to write it in a novelistic way, but then to also make sure that any question the reader would have.
01:01:54.000But like, why did you think that the dinner was at 5 p.m.?
01:01:57.000Or like, why did you think the sun was coming up in this way at this moment?
01:02:49.000But he's rolling a joint on the grass somewhere with that Las Vegas visor on, and he's talking about how He's really become this caricature and it would actually be better if he wasn't alive anymore.
01:03:04.000He was breaking up with his wife during that.
01:03:07.000There's a scene in that where he hides where he's at like a parking lot and he doesn't want people to see him and he's standing against the wall and people are like, come on, we got to go.
01:03:13.000He's like, I just don't want anybody to see me right now.
01:03:21.000He was a great friend to people afterwards.
01:03:22.000Ron Whitehead, this wonderful poet from Louisville, was a dear friend of his all through his life.
01:03:28.000But the tragedy of how much effort he put out.
01:03:30.000If we want to write about Trump, if you want to go after like Taibbi did about the financial institution, The way Thompson did it was to kind of wager time later for time now.
01:05:09.000And I take it to go into a library, and this is what David Wallace-Wells was talking about, I think, like, two days ago on the show, was how do you read really shitty academic articles where you need the information from them?
01:06:06.000You know, he did other things, but he took Dexatrine, so he gave it to Thompson.
01:06:11.000And for that small period of time, it helped.
01:06:13.000I mean, for me, it's like, I'm not a good researcher.
01:06:18.000And maybe I would be now, but the only way I can write about something like Hunter S. Thompson where I didn't know him, I have no experience with him, is to read everything that he's ever written or been written about him.
01:06:38.000It shifts it around to other aspects and other parts of life.
01:06:41.000And I think Thompson, when he wrote, he who makes a beast of himself escapes the pain or gets rid of the pain of being a man, We don't listen to that.
01:06:51.000He's like, I'm struggling with this effort.
01:06:53.000I'm trying to make these beautiful things.
01:06:54.000I always think of James Salter, a fiction writer, Aspen resident, wrote beautiful novels.
01:07:01.000He wrote his whole life until he was 90. His last novel was at 87. He wrote a memoir at 76 about being a fighter pilot, among other things, in the Korean War.
01:07:31.000I think that whenever we have something like chemical speed, whenever we have something like alcohol, whenever we have something that's not like marijuana, or at least marijuana cuts your mania, you know, like whenever we have something else like alcohol or alcohol, Adderall,
01:07:48.000we need to ask the question, is taking the pain away and being productive through those actually hastening your own doom?
01:07:57.000I think with alcohol, it's very clear it is.
01:08:00.000I think with Adderall, it's more complex.
01:08:01.000I think if you do an amount of time release, you can make it work.
01:08:05.000How many Americans do that out of the percent that are prescribed?
01:08:31.000So the only way you produce is on speed.
01:08:33.000The only way I produce the way I want to right now is on speed.
01:08:35.000I didn't start taking it until 2010. Dude, it's crazy that we're talking about this because there's so many people like you.
01:08:43.000It's so – I mean, how much of the work that we enjoy today, especially literary work, is written by people – journalistic work is written by people that are on speed.
01:08:53.000I mean, that's what Thompson and Burroughs and Southern – like, this has been – I believe that our American society, the situation I'm in, I have created a situation where I have too much work, and it's my fault.
01:09:03.000I should not be trying to be a professor and also go report at Congress and also at George Mason in the creative writing program.
01:09:10.000You know, and also then be hosting, like, people coming out, and also then, like...
01:09:14.000Be trying to research something that might be my next thing.
01:09:43.000One of the things about Hunter that's really intoxicating is that his sort of self-destructive path becomes romantic when you read it and you get involved in his work and you kind of mimic it.
01:11:48.000David McCumber employed Hunter for a while when David was...
01:11:53.000I forget what publication he was working for, but there's some footage of them communicating together and, you know, just trying to get Hunter.
01:12:15.000You escape the pain of saying, this is what's wrong in American society.
01:12:18.000For him to say the way he did, one of his great essays is from 1964. It's about going to Hemingway's Ketchum, Idaho grave in Hemingway's house.
01:12:27.000And it's gorgeous because it talks about Hemingway was a good writer, one of the best writers, when he was writing about a period he understood in the 1940s, 1930s, when there was a firmness to the reality that he could articulate.
01:12:41.000One of the writer's goals is to give a pattern to chaos, is to give an articulation to chaos.
01:12:45.000But what happens in the 1960s when the chaos is multiplying repeatedly, somebody like Hemingway becomes a literal relic, like his narrative no longer fits into the present that he's in.
01:12:56.000And Thompson saw Hemingway's decline, and he wrote about Hemingway's...
01:13:01.000What do you mean by his narrative doesn't fit?
01:13:04.000Hemingway's idea of what America was and what a man should be fit perfectly with what I think the 20s to the 40s, what we experienced.
01:13:11.000But I think in the early 1960s with our social upheaval of civil rights, You know, political upheaval.
01:13:20.000Like, his way of operating no longer articulated the present.
01:13:23.000And so Hemingway's last act was to take away his ability to say anything at all.
01:13:27.000That was his only—the last thing Hemingway ever said was to say, I'm not going to say anything anymore, was the suicide that Hemingway committed.
01:13:34.000And Thompson wrote about that gorgeously.
01:14:13.000It looked like pain, you know what I mean?
01:14:16.000But I think that it's not my place to even deal with that because Juan Thompson's book writes about that moment where Juan Thompson was in the house.
01:14:23.000And Juan writes beautifully about the stakes of it, how painful it was to the people that loved him.
01:14:58.000His entire, because of his alcoholism, his ability to control his bladder was gone.
01:15:02.000And so Juan gave this wonderful speech at George Mason when he came out.
01:15:06.000He's like, how do you write honestly about your father?
01:15:08.000And he asked the question of like, should I include this detail?
01:15:10.000And he's like, if my father was alive, I couldn't include that.
01:15:13.000But that's why I chose, in a sense, to write my book where my father was dead, because I think my father would want me to write honestly.
01:15:19.000But also not want me to include that if he was still alive.
01:15:22.000And so he included that detail and he talked about that, the struggle to include that detail, which I think brilliantly articulates what you're saying, which is the deterioration and the sadness of it.
01:15:33.000And I mean, we have finite amounts of energy or effort.
01:15:42.000We're all headed to the same place, whether we want to or not.
01:15:46.000And so I think Hunter is a really terrifying and beautiful example of one wager of chips that were made for the 1960s and 1970s.
01:15:55.000And I think the best way to honor that is to apply the brilliance that he forged and carved to the situation we have right now with corruption, Donald Trump.
01:17:55.000He'd come down to Stanford to write for what is now the Stegner Fellowship, but back then was the graduate program at Stanford.
01:18:00.000He had moved up to La Honda on the success of his first book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and had just written another beautiful book.
01:18:07.000And so Thompson was like, yeah, I'm writing about the Hell's Angels.
01:18:10.000And Kese was like, yo, I'd like to meet them.
01:19:17.000And everybody's watching on a giant trampoline screen, like the five-hour stream of consciousness footage from the Merry Pranksters trip across the US, which is what Tom Wolfe wrote about.
01:19:27.000And Tom was like, all right, they're not eating each other's skulls.
01:20:33.000Neil Cassidy, who's blackout drunk, who is Dean Moriarty in On the Road by Jack Kerrack, that's the character on whom it was based, his two or three girlfriends, one of them is having an orgy with the Hells Angels at this cabin off to the side and Tomson sees it.
01:22:47.000If someone sees something like that, I think it's important that you accurately relay the emotions of the experience when they're watching a horrific event.
01:22:54.000I mean, he did describe it as horrific.
01:24:04.000I mean, they're terrifying, but it's about like...
01:24:06.000Violence and shadow and light and horror.
01:24:10.000You know, it's a horrific scene that says Thompson's brilliance at that age.
01:24:14.000He could, in an audio note, get the fucking images and details that he needs to express the nature of that incident.
01:24:21.000And so Tom Wolfe used those to create it himself, but then Thompson recreated it too, or wrote about it in Hell's Angels, but in a more distant way than Wolfe did.
01:24:42.000He had friends that had told him that he's a personality where if he did acid to go to the bottom of the well for him, you know, this would be a really horrific thing.
01:24:50.000And so he's like, I don't care anymore.
01:24:52.000And instead he just walked around and like was at peace.
01:24:55.000It's always funny when someone tells you how you're going to react to a drug.
01:25:01.000Because you're going to react to it how you're going to react to it.
01:25:03.000What was it like for you when you finally finished this?
01:25:06.000When you put the last page down and you knew you were done?
01:25:10.000I know that you, like me, share, we have an adoration for this guy.
01:25:17.000He's one of my, for sure, personal heroes.
01:25:21.000I mean, the last image I wrote was one of the most beautiful things Thompson writes is something he didn't actually see was when Nixon's helicopter he saw on TV left the White House lawn.
01:25:34.000What happens is that giant helicopter with the white top and the blue… It's wheels lose their pressure.
01:25:39.000So the wheels are, you know, flattened at the bottom.
01:25:42.000But as the rotors begin to bring it up, they become elongated wheels that still touch the ground.
01:25:46.000Thompson wrote that image, and I've always loved that image.
01:25:49.000So I was writing that, in a sense, when I was at CPAC in 2018, last year.
01:25:56.000And I was walking out just after I wrote that in Pence's helicopter.
01:26:26.000I threw for as long as I can, you know, and I hope that everybody knows it's my version of Thompson and that it's a version of Thompson written through the lens of Donald Trump, but hopefully that it's through the effort and through the detail, a version that might bring more people to Thompson while also at the same time for Thompson fans,
01:26:44.000you know, being something that they can respect and engage.
01:27:44.000He's another guy who's got a bunch of great...
01:27:46.000And Anita Thompson does a great job on Facebook.
01:27:48.000And, you know, if you are interested in Thompson and you don't know him, I hope you read Free Kingdom, and that's a lens on his work, you know, to organize it.
01:27:54.000And if you love Thompson, I hope you read Free Kingdom, too, because that's a way to engage him again.