In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with comedian Scott Sigler to discuss his new book, "Blood is Red" and talk about his new comedy show this Thursday at the American Comedy Company in San Diego, CA with Brian Redbanner and Tony Hinchcliffe. I also talk about my upcoming show at The Ice House with Ari Shafir and Ian Edwards on Wednesday, July 25th. We're sponsored by Onnit. Onnit is a company that makes fitness equipment that helps you improve your physical, mental, and emotional health through the use of a few simple tools and equipment you can buy to improve your overall well-being, productivity, and overall happiness. You can get 10% off your domain name registration with the code: JOGAN10 at checkout. And as always, thank you for checking out the show and supporting the show! I really appreciate it. -Joe Rogan Logo by Courtney DeKorte. This episode was produced by Riley Bray. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The opinions stated on the show are our own and not those of our record labels. We do not own the rights to either of these songs or any music used in the show. All credit given to any artists credited to any other artists or artists credited is their work. If you have a song you'd like us to use, we'd like to use their music, we're working with us in the next episode of our new album "Sonic" we'll be working with them on the next week. Thank you for all of the music we mentioned in the song "I Don't Know It All" we are working on the album "I'm Too Effing Good" by our new song "Goodbye" by Soothe & Good Morning Joe" by my good friend, we'll get a shoutout on this episode. -- we'll see you next week! -- Thank you! -- I'll be seeing you next Tuesday! -- I'm working on a song written and produced by my band "The Good Morning Podcast" -- Thank You, I'll See You" -- I hope you're listening to this one! -- we're going to see you soon! -- -- -- and we'll hear you next Monday! -- and I'll send you back next Tuesday, July 31st, July 5th, July 4th, 6/19, 8/6, 7/7, 8th, 9/8th, and 6/9th, etc.
00:00:05.000This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is brought to you by audible.com.
00:00:11.000If you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you can save yourself some money by getting a free audio book.
00:00:20.000And you can also, on top of that, as if that wasn't cool enough, you also get 30 days free Audible service.
00:00:29.000Audible is really a fantastic service, a fantastic thing to have if you're a commuter, if you're stuck on a plane, if you're on the bicycle just staring at a fucking stupid life cycle thing telling you you're not going fast enough.
00:00:45.000Books on tape are an amazing way to pass time.
00:00:52.000We're going to get into that a little bit later because my man has made a big mark doing exactly that, releasing his own books on tape, you motherfuckers.
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00:03:35.000So that's this Thursday night at the American Comedy Company.
00:03:38.000There's still a few tickets left, so jump on that shit, bitch.
00:03:42.000Tomorrow night, Wednesday night, I'm at the Ice House with Ari Shafir and Ian Edwards.
00:03:47.000I was going to do one of those crazy shows where I bring a lot of people on, but I'm trying to work out all this new shit, so we're all three of us going to do longer sets.
00:03:55.000Ian Edwards, if you've never seen him, really, really funny guy, and Ari, of course, is awesome.
00:03:59.000So that's Wednesday night at the Ice House.
00:04:02.000We're also brought to you by Onnit.com, which is...
00:04:26.000What it's for, you fucks, is functional strength.
00:04:29.000What we concentrate on on it is things that improve your performance, whether it's your mental performance with nootropics or your mood through new mood or your ability to perform at high levels of energy for longer periods of time with shroom tech.
00:04:45.000What we're just trying to do is improve the way your body functions, improve your fitness, your health and your fitness.
00:04:51.000And that's what these mace bells are about.
00:04:54.000They're these gigantic What a maze ball looks like, it looks like something that you would see in a gladiator movie.
00:05:03.000Yeah, it's a cannonball on the end of a long steel pipe and you swing it around and do all these different exercises with it.
00:05:13.000And in controlling something like that, it's surprisingly hard, especially when you grip it really low on the end of the pole because you have all this leverage working against you.
00:05:22.000And what it does is it gives you real functional strength.
00:05:25.000We have 10-pound ones, and that seems like, oh my god, what 10 pounds?
00:06:46.000Normally you have very little or no control at all.
00:06:49.000A couple points in my career, I've been very lucky to work with people who are like, let's get this as close to the vision you want as possible.
00:06:55.000And this is the guy who produced Hellboy and Hellboy 2 and The Watchmen.
00:07:21.000So we're going to look at the 12-episode arc of the first season and make sure everything fits in so we don't have any crazy ending that doesn't make any sense.
00:10:02.000And you go watch Hellboy, which is a little bit more supernatural, but the creature effects and the way everything was shot, and it was just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen to look up on the screen.
00:10:10.000And now that guy's interested in turning this.
00:10:12.000It's like I could not wish for anything more closely matched.
00:10:34.000That was a whirlwind because I started out giving all my books away as free audiobooks, recording myself, chopping up his podcast, giving away his podcast for free to build up an audience because I couldn't get anybody in New York to pay attention.
00:11:57.000Pace this out for a one-hour television show and can kind of visualize the 12-episode arc and then get someone to pay for it and get it shot correctly and get it up on a screen.
00:12:07.000That's a skill set I don't have at all.
00:12:08.000So it's really, I'm giving up a little bit, but largely it's exciting.
00:12:12.000Like, I want to see the shit in this book on TV. I want to see it on the screen.
00:12:16.000So it's really not that nerve-wracking at all.
00:12:19.000You have no idea how it's going to turn out.
00:12:21.000But at this point in my career, I concede that.
00:12:24.000I realize that the end product, I'm going to have a tiny amount of control on it, and you're just kind of hoping for the best.
00:12:29.000You hope they've got the right vibe, and they're going to want to put something as kick-ass on the screen as is in the book.
00:12:36.000Wow, that's got to be a very, very interesting process.
00:13:03.000So this starts out as sort of a buddy cop procedural where there are Brian Clouser and Pookie Chang, two San Francisco homicide inspectors.
00:13:12.000And Brian's having these really nasty, nasty dreams about killing people.
00:13:17.000And early on in the book they go to a site and the murder scene matches his dream exactly.
00:13:22.000And suspicion falls on him immediately that he's doing these borderline superhuman things to go shred people and body parts all over the place.
00:13:30.000And then it turns into the procedural from there.
00:13:34.000They kind of have to follow the rabbit trail.
00:13:38.000It's hard to summarize it without spoiling it, but it gets kind of paranormal, not really the supernatural.
00:13:47.000There's a rational explanation for everything, but they uncover this massive conspiracy within the police department.
00:13:51.000There's been a cover-up that's been going on for 200 years.
00:13:55.000To stop this, to let this particular group of people who are sacrificing innocence, let them continue to sacrifice.
00:14:01.000Brian Pooh, you gotta figure out how to shut that down and stay alive.
00:14:11.000Well, it plays off of the police department.
00:14:14.000And as I was researching this, one of the phrases that came up, like, the biggest gang in New York is the cops.
00:14:19.000And that goes back to when they first put in the police department and they started to get a lot of power.
00:14:24.000The organized crime and the gangs were – you could get away with a lot of stuff.
00:14:28.000But at some point, if you crossed the cops, whether they be good cops or corrupt cops, you were screwed because you just – they had a level of power you couldn't match.
00:14:37.000So yeah, they're the ones who've been keeping this thing quiet because there are a pattern of serial killers in San Francisco.
00:14:45.000And this other organization has a way of getting rid of the serial killers when the cops can't even find them.
00:14:50.000So the cops are actually trying to keep this quiet and protect it because the end result is more people live and less people die, but it's completely illegal as hell.
00:14:58.000When you write a book like this, how much when you're looking at human corruption and cop corruption, how much did you investigate?
00:15:06.000Did you go and look at actual cases to find out what's plausible or did you just go completely on your instincts and What you know just by general information?
00:15:14.000There's a significant amount of research, but it's broad.
00:15:21.000Let's look into what kind of corruption there has been and how was organized crime set up in San Francisco and learning a lot of things that way because fortunately at this point in the writing career I've learned to try and stay away from diving down the rabbit hole because you can learn all this incredible amazing stuff and then 1% of it actually makes it into the book.
00:15:40.000And all the time you've invested in researching that for these kind of thriller-style books is time that you get nothing out of that.
00:15:46.000So a lot of the superficial stuff, learning how the mafia was run out of San Francisco and replaced by the Tongs and the Russians and a lot of other groups, all that stuff is super cool and a ton of that goes in there.
00:16:00.000And the police department was pretty helpful in research for this.
00:16:07.000It's not your typical, these are dirty cops and they're going to shake you down.
00:16:10.000They actually are trying to do something that benefits the greater good, but they have to totally ignore the law they're sworn to protect in order to get the end result.
00:16:18.000So it's a bit of more fun corruption if you can imagine that.
00:16:21.000Wow, that's a fascinating subject and I've always been fascinated by the idea of secret societies that have been around for 200 years doing horrible things.
00:17:17.000And this guy, Billy Corbin, who directed it, one of the things he pulled out was that there was one year where the Miami Police Department's graduating class from the police academy Half of them, all of them, either wound up in jail or murdered.
00:19:07.000They're probably pretty good at, like you said, it's the biggest gang around.
00:19:10.000Why would you want to piss off the gang?
00:19:12.000You know, there's probably plenty of little subtle corruption, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
00:19:18.000The guys who can shoot you and it's legal, I think everybody knows at the end of the day you've really got to be careful around those guys because they can kill you and it's okay.
00:19:28.000And they can just say you attacked them.
00:19:30.000I mean, how many times have we seen a cell phone camera?
00:19:33.000Someone videotaping a cop and the cop beats the shit out of the kid and then you hear from the arrest papers that the police officer lied that the kid attacked him or lied that the kid spit on him or said something.
00:19:46.000There was a guy on Alex Jones recently.
00:21:02.000So a lot of those things go into, a lot of them are invisible in the book.
00:21:06.000I tend both with the science and with culture is to put in a lot of things you're already familiar with so that you you're like okay yeah okay yeah and if you say yeah 20 or 30 times like I know that I know that then when it starts to go up to the next level where the crazy shit starts to happen we've already got this rapport I've already got a rapport with you and you're you've allowed yourself to buy in completely so having those elements like you know realistic police things actually using the real history of the mafia in San Francisco Anything like that allows you to fall further
00:22:28.000So you get to write a story without the actual grunt work of getting down and writing.
00:22:32.000You come up with a big idea and then you turn it over to somebody who does this on a regular basis.
00:22:36.000It's exactly like taking lessons for something.
00:22:38.000Like, here's what I want to do and I want to have this and then this guy and then this chick should get naked because obviously that's very important to a story.
00:22:44.000And then this sort of thing should happen in the end.
00:22:45.000I'd be like, alright, let's go see what we can do.
00:22:48.000There's so many fascinating occupations out there.
00:22:52.000There's just not enough time in the world.
00:22:53.000But writing has always been a particularly romantic one.
00:22:56.000You know, it's the idea of putting together something that, you know, crafting a story entirely in your head, slapping it down on paper, and then it exists entirely in the heads of the people that are reading it.
00:23:15.000And it's similar to MMA when you see the guys come in the ring and you're like, oh, look at all this pageantry and all this wonderful stuff and the spotlight's on them.
00:23:24.000And, you know, except for the Ultimate Fighter show, you don't see the years that go in of just getting crushed and working all the time and all the sacrifice and all the things you got to do.
00:23:33.000And then you get that moment, oh, the book's in the store and I'm on tour.
00:24:00.000Who were your favorite writers when you were coming up?
00:24:02.000Definitely, Stephen King is the single biggest influence on me, watching his ability to tell a story and characterize.
00:24:10.000The thing that always mesmerized me about him is he could take a secondary character, give you one paragraph of description, like here's a vocal twitch, here's a physical twitch, and here's this thing they believe, and then you know that guy's name 20 years later.
00:24:25.000And then Anne McCaffrey was a huge sci-fi reader, the Dragon Riders of Pern, that series.
00:24:30.000So that was kind of more of the science fiction area of things.
00:24:34.000And Tom Clancy was another big one, too.
00:24:37.000Tom Clancy's ability to take thousands of different things, research them in detail, and kind of put them all together where they come together at the end for a super over-the-top ending.
00:25:49.000Unless you get your book dusted off somewhere.
00:25:51.000So the guys who are actually making stuff that resonates with people, that makes millions of people extremely happy to read it again and again, And then go see the movies.
00:26:02.000And Stephen King now is getting an enormous amount of, he's getting his props now from the industry, I think.
00:26:07.000But yeah, 25, 30 years ago, everybody was all pissed that this dirty butt kid from Maine came out of nowhere and has eaten all their lunches because he writes great stories that people love.
00:26:48.000Paul, the main character, has to write this story for Annie.
00:26:51.000And then they switch font, bring in the margin so it looks like a regular typewriter page.
00:26:55.000And then as the story's progressing, letters start to fall off of the typewriter.
00:27:00.000And the farther it goes, first it's the N, then the E, then the L. And as you get towards the end of the book, where not only is Paul's real-life story happening, but the fictional story is coming to a conclusion too, there's all these scrawled pencil marks in there.
00:27:12.000And just looking at the page starts to stress you the fuck out.
00:27:15.000And it was It wasn't until the third time I read it, I'm like, because I read it once, I'm like, okay, that was killer.
00:27:52.000First of all, he did a lot of cocaine and smoked a lot.
00:27:56.000It was fascinating that he said that cigarettes were one of the things that he really missed when it came to the creative process.
00:28:04.000You were talking about that with David Lee Roth the other day, that nicotine is such a huge part of the process.
00:28:08.000Well, I don't smoke, I don't partake in it, but there seems to be undeniable proof that it's some sort of a mental stimulant and it does something to accelerate thinking or does something to the mind.
00:28:20.000Because too many people, like, intelligent people, like Bertrand Russell, like, wouldn't get on a plane if he couldn't smoke.
00:28:27.000Like, if they didn't have a room in the smoking section, he wouldn't get on a plane.
00:28:30.000This fucking poor guy was just attached to this tit, this tobacco tit.
00:28:36.000Try some nicotine, Joe, see if it goes anywhere.
00:30:04.000Now, I'm coming to my fifth and final book with Random House, and I write these hard science techno thrillers with a fuckton of monsters in them and science fiction stuff.
00:30:18.000Then things go absolutely haywire and you're in for the ride.
00:30:21.000But I've been kind of jonesing to get back to the Stephen King that inspired me when I was a kid, which is you can spend so much more time on character and plot and developing things.
00:30:33.000If you don't have these large structural organizations like the cops, we're trying to get, like, the one I'm writing now is Pandemic.
00:30:39.000It's the final book in the Infected trilogy, and I'm trying to get help on what it's actually like in the Situation Room.
00:30:45.000And the series has taken itself to that level, but I don't follow politics, for sure.
00:30:49.000I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about in the Situation Room.
00:30:51.000You mean the Situation Room, the president?
00:30:57.000The first book Infected is, anybody who reads it as read Stephen King will see the influence as plain as day.
00:31:02.000It's largely, it's one University of Michigan linebacker who blew out his knee in the Rose Bowl, so never got to go pro.
00:31:10.000Would have been a number one draft pick, hands down.
00:31:12.000But now he works in computer support, because he didn't finish his degree, and he can't play ball anymore.
00:31:17.000So there's this giant, super dangerous guy with a lot of rage issues who works really hard to control his rage.
00:31:22.000And then he gets infected by this alien vector, this other thing going on, and he spends a large part of the book trying to not kill people.
00:31:30.000But most of that takes place in his apartment and in the town of Ann Arbor.
00:31:34.000And that's the Stephen King angle, which is we're going to take a small town, we can develop this out, I can do whatever I want, and I don't have to justify why isn't the SWAT team kicking in the door and all these other things.
00:31:43.000So now that I'm running this complicated crap with Situation Room, I'm like, I think that's kind of run its course.
00:31:48.000I want to get back to the smaller cast and the smaller towns.
00:32:32.000Yeah, I've read Horns and have read the first couple collections of the Lock and Key comic book, which is what he's becoming most well-known for, I think.
00:35:06.000A lot of people get into it specifically because you read those books or you read Peter Straub or any of the other – the heavyweights back in King's day.
00:35:16.000And you read those, and those call to you, and you want to make shit like that.
00:35:20.000And then when you start making your own shit, well, of course, it's going to have a little bit of that in there.
00:35:25.000And King readily admits he's influenced by a ton of people, and he's like, if you read my stuff closely enough, you see their stuff in the book.
00:36:38.000I can't do stand-up, but I can do that thing.
00:36:41.000Because you get used to that after a while.
00:36:43.000When people get very successful at something and then they start to believe their own bullshit, and that's when you start to get that crazy self-importance coming on.
00:36:51.000And the sad thing about that is when you start to see people like that, The majority of their fans are like, oh, God, he was so awesome back in the day, but now look at him.
00:37:36.000I feel like there's a lot of getting your ass kicked early in life and just failure after failure.
00:37:41.000There's an enormous amount to be said for trying things and failing, as opposed to people who like the first thing they try, out of the gate.
00:38:25.000Music, musicians, it happens to, you know, you know the guys that are the lead singers of these big bands, and they go fucking Looney Tunes, and the band falls apart, and what was it?
00:38:51.000Anytime you've got a story where you've got someone in a position of power, it's almost impossible to write them from, here's a normal, humble person in this position of power.
00:39:00.000If you're writing about the mayor of San Francisco is in the story, the police chief of San Francisco.
00:39:05.000It's almost impossible for them to get to that position if they're a nice, regular, humble person.
00:39:09.000Because at some point in any political construct, you have to become cutthroat.
00:39:13.000And you have to look at other people as an obstacle to be removed.
00:40:28.000And then at some point, I'll just be working on something else and four or five things will come together.
00:40:32.000And then that's the center point of the idea.
00:40:35.000I'm like, well, what if we had creatures that did this and then this happened and then they took over the world kind of a thing.
00:40:40.000From there, you have to go and hammer out an outline.
00:40:43.000I try and hammer out an outline with the tiny bit of science knowledge that I have.
00:40:47.000And then I'm really fortunate, again, because of the podcast, I started getting people, scientists, emailing me going, wow, I love what you're doing.
00:40:54.000You're really trying to get the science right.
00:44:05.000And yet, if we suddenly lost our atmosphere for whatever reason, or the environment changed significantly and all the humans died, this thing could still be around.
00:44:16.000And then this thing could start evolving and...
00:44:18.000Maybe the universe really doesn't have a sense of time and just sets up these little extra seeds laying around, genetic material like tardigrades, just in case you assholes hit that button and nuke the whole planet sideways.
00:44:32.000These little motherfuckers can grow into something that can survive in a vacuum.
00:45:33.000But there wasn't a large need for it in a greatly temperate environment like Savannah, Africa.
00:45:38.000So in the human body, all evolution, if there's something that you just don't need anymore and you're burning calories to keep that thing going and taking energy to support that, if you have...
00:45:49.000Successive mutations where that thing gets smaller and smaller, there's no penalty.
00:46:43.000So it could easily start out with some kind of primate or some kind of small mammal right off the bat.
00:46:47.000But there's also some pretty kick-ass reptiles out there and birds.
00:46:51.000You hear about the Ukrainian army has been training dolphins to use like knives and they've been attaching knives and pistols to their head and they've trained them to use them so they can now use these knives to do things.
00:47:51.000I'm sure the Ukrainian controllers, this is inherited from the Russian program, and they would have specific parameters to train them to go out and kill a certain shape or a certain color.
00:48:35.000Other than humans, they've got no predator.
00:48:39.000There's nothing that hunts a killer whale.
00:48:40.000I thought Happy Feet was kind of a fascinating monster movie in sort of a way, a monster alien movie, because it dealt with the whole idea of living in this semi-aquatic world, and all of a sudden these aliens...
00:48:54.000From the other part of the world, from the surface, come and fuck everything up and kidnap people and take photographs and shit.
00:49:01.000It's really kind of interesting when you think about how much life must suck if you live in the ocean.
00:49:06.000And these crazy assholes that live out above the ocean with these giant metal machines that they've created to literally scoop life in nets.
00:49:20.000Sometimes they get dolphins on purpose.
00:49:21.000Imagine what it was like for whales, which are pretty effing intelligent and have language and communication.
00:49:26.000And for, what, I think 100 million years, something like that, nobody screws with whales because you can't because they're gigantic and they just ignore you.
00:49:33.000Then all of a sudden, here come these ships and here come these harpoons and they're screwed.
00:49:53.000What I've heard about that's probably, you know, it's kind of an ice age thing or a place where there's ice, so the whales have to break the ice to come up to breathe, and a whale breaking through the ice so a blowhole can get out there.
00:50:04.000You just stab that son of a bitch, and I don't know how they did it, but somebody figured out that's a lot of good eating.
00:50:31.000And then we have the Galactic Football League, which is a young adult series, but it's an American pro football league, 800 years in the future, with aliens playing the different positions based on their physiology.
00:50:40.000So you've got 1,500-pound linemen, you've got receivers and D-backs that can jump 20 feet in the air, and it's this crazy hodgepodge of stuff.
00:50:47.000But intelligent dolphins are part of that whole thing, too.
00:50:51.000So it's that with the Galactic Football League series.
00:50:55.000Which is the rookie, the starter, the all-pro, and the MVP. And then the title fight, I think I'm one of the few guys who's merging sports and science fiction, because a lot of times the jock is anathemic to science fiction guys.
00:51:12.000A title fight is kind of a classic Rocky-esque type story, but there is a heavyweight champ of the galaxy named Korak the Cutter, and this is full-on octagon.
00:51:46.000And the warriors are these giant badass things with an extra set of arms.
00:51:51.000They're very mean and very tough, and they are perennially the champions.
00:51:56.000And then along comes this nasty-ass human fighter named Kyle North.
00:52:00.000Who comes out of a place called the Purist Nation, which is, in my universe, this is the backwater, human-only world where they hate all the alien races and won't get along with anybody.
00:52:07.000But they're mean and they're nasty, and this guy's name is Kyle North, and he was created by an author named Matt Wallace, who co-wrote this with me.
00:52:14.000And Matt's an ex-pro wrestler, so he's a bad MF. And it's following their arcs.
00:52:20.000The human who will do anything to be the champion, sacrifice his own body, kill whoever he's got to kill, make any deal, and the highly, you know, almost Ronan-like The honorable existing champion and the two different mentalities clashed for that final championship ring.
00:52:36.000The second half of the book is nothing but the fight.
00:52:42.000I'm trying to track out The growth of humans in just the last 50 years.
00:52:47.000In the NFL in particular, 50 years ago, the average NFL lineman weighed 253 pounds.
00:52:52.000At 253 pounds, you can't even play college ball.
00:52:54.000The starting offensive line for the Dallas Cowboys 50 years ago could not get a job anywhere in football, probably couldn't even get a scholarship.
00:53:10.000That's just better nutrition and these guys getting the opportunity and cultivating the bigger guys because 50 years isn't enough time for evolution to kick in.
00:53:17.000But eight centuries from now, you can kind of see that progressing out.
00:53:21.000So the main character in the Galactic Football League's name is Quentin Barnes.
00:53:23.000He's a quarterback and he's seven feet tall, 380 pounds.
00:53:28.000And they're like, well, he's kind of small.
00:55:01.000But occasionally you'll see a guy who's like really thickly muscled at 185 and you want to tell him, man, listen, you need to just get rid of all that muscle.
00:55:08.000Just do aerobic exercises only from now on.
00:55:30.000It's like having too much horsepower in a car where your wheels can't get any traction because you're just spinning your wheels, and then you run out of gas quick.
00:55:41.000That's what happens if you have too much horsepower in a car.
00:55:43.000And that's how it happens in a person, too.
00:55:46.000An overly muscular body, the resources that it requires are substantial.
00:55:50.000You've got to pump blood through all these extra tissues.
00:56:03.000If you can compete against the larger guys who cut weight...
00:56:10.000Well, it's been really cool to watch with WEC and the MMA actually getting more weight classes.
00:56:15.000I wrestled at 126 in college, and when you're watching the MMA, there's nowhere to see guys of that size, at least until WEC came along and they started to get more of the flyweight in there.
00:56:27.000And is the UFC going to continue to expand to all the weight classes?
00:56:30.000Yeah, they're thinking about going to 115 as well.
00:56:52.000I feel like the people who are saying that are the same people like back in UFC 1, 2, and 3 when they're like, you know, Gracie would be all tied up with something like, well, this isn't exciting.
00:57:01.000I'm like, it's because you have no idea what you're looking at.
00:57:54.000Yeah, but for fighters, the correct weight class and going in and fighting at your optimum weight class can be the difference between being a successful fighter with a championship career and being a guy who never quite rises to the top.
00:58:12.000You see in MMA, there's a few guys that are what they call tweeners.
00:58:17.000They're really too big for that, but they're really too small for 170. There's a few guys like that that are just somewhere in the middle there.
00:58:24.000They should be maybe a 165. Like BJ Penn fighting crazy...
00:59:13.000And he's got these old school sort of moves and just knows how to cover up, knows where the punches are going before you even think about throwing them, knows what you're going to do, finds your patterns, and then knows how to step around you, knows how to keep you moving.
00:59:30.000Well, in MMA there's not a whole lot of those guys That are like these old school, like, perfect fighters.
00:59:39.000Anderson, you know, Anderson's one of them.
00:59:41.000And then you've got John Jones, who's just this phenom, who's, although he has all this great success, really, he's got so much to learn still, too, which is the most scary thing about him.
00:59:51.000He hasn't even tapped into his potential.
00:59:53.000And then the really good guys in the 170-pound division, there's like six or seven of them.
01:00:01.000Like this weekend, there's six different killers that are fighting in Montreal.
01:00:05.000You've got Diaz is fighting George St. Pierre.
01:00:08.000You've got Carlos Condit is fighting Johnny Hendricks.
01:00:10.000And Jake Ellenberger is fighting Jake Shields.
01:00:45.000Was a big MMA fan, and it was this crazy spectacle, because that's the thing, like, wow, would a ninja beat up a karate master?
01:00:51.000And then somebody said, well, let's find out, and put everybody together.
01:00:54.000And I remember watching the early ones, and, you know, this guy's a fifth-degree ninjutsu black belt, and comes out and just gets his ass handed to him.
01:01:27.000And so really got into it then, and then when Dan Severin came out, he's a Michigan boy, and watching his fights with it, and he was just, you know, awesome, awesome to watch.
01:01:37.000Watching him fight a kickboxer and do full-on suplexes on guys who had no idea what a suplex was.
01:02:46.000Because I think, you know, since it's only like four months later or whatever it is, he's got time to recover, time to rest up a little bit, and then boom, get right back into it.
01:02:55.000So he'll be more used to the experience, probably put on a better performance, won't feel the ring rust as much.
01:04:36.000These guys are both in amazing, amazing shape.
01:04:40.000I'm so excited about it, not just because it's a championship fight, but I think it represents these guys who are two all-time greats, in my opinion, and it represents them in their perfect primes.
01:04:52.000They're both in the best situation they could possibly be.
01:04:55.000Nick Diaz comes off the BJ Penn fight with a fantastic performance.
01:05:00.000The Carlos Condit fight where Questionable decision.
01:06:11.000Going back, I guess, geez, I guess 15, 16 years.
01:06:14.000I was trying to get published for about 11 or 12 years, writing a book every two years, working a full-time job, all the regular stuff.
01:06:23.000And then back in the day, actually writing the submission letter and sending it to publishers, sending it to agents, going to conventions, trying to make the right connections, just to get somebody to look at the book.
01:06:32.000Then I got an agent, and I wound up with a deal with AOL Time Warner.
01:06:36.000My book, EarthCore, was supposed to be in every store in May of 2002. And then the 9-11 recession hit before it went to press.
01:06:47.000And the economy dropped and Time Warner scrapped everything that wasn't profitable.
01:06:49.000So I'd gotten to that point where I had a book deal.
01:07:18.000So I went to look for audiobooks to listen to.
01:07:20.000Because the first thing that happened in my head, being a writer, was somebody's putting out serialized books just like the radio dramas of the 40s and 50s.
01:07:27.000I start Googling it, and after two days of trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong to Google it, and I can't find any, I then realized nobody has done this yet.
01:07:36.000And at that point, I'm like, I've got a professionally edited book, and it was ready for mass market production.
01:07:43.000Here's this new technology that if somebody hears an episode, they can immediately instant message it to a friend, email it to a friend, chat room it, and anybody who clicks on that is going to start hearing the story right away.
01:07:52.000I've got speed of light marketing with this, and speed of light, word of mouth.
01:07:58.000And I figured out how to record, how to make an RSS feed, how to make a website, and got it all done just so I could get it out there and then put some marketing to work like that.
01:08:05.000The first guy to ever do a podcast-only novel.
01:08:08.000And hope it would get picked up by some blogs and different sites.
01:08:10.000And it did, and I started to get a followership.
01:08:13.000And when I got to the end of EarthCore, I had three other books done, and I just started podcasting them.
01:08:35.000I was like, if I can get to the end user, if I can go to the end listener and show them how kick-ass my stuff really is, I'm betting money that my shit is so good I can give it to you for free and then they'll still pay for it anyways.
01:09:04.000They didn't know what the internet was?
01:09:05.000I swear to God, they didn't know what the internet was.
01:09:08.000I thought I had this awesome plan and everything's going to work out great and I get to the point where I'm supposed to get the contract and get the book deal and they didn't care about the podcast at all.
01:09:17.000So then I just kept on doing it and eventually things kind of caught up.
01:09:20.000Finally, the end of the story is we put out that novel Ancestor as a print book.
01:09:25.000The one you've got is the one that's been rewritten for Random House, but this was just a little trade paperback put out by a small Canadian imprint, one lady working out of her garage.
01:09:33.000We put that out on April 1st, 2007, and it was the number one horror, number one sci-fi book at Amazon.
01:09:39.000And it was the number two fiction book on Amazon behind one of the Harry Potter novels.
01:10:34.000The model we have now is if you just want it for free or you can't afford it and you like the story because everybody gets into pickles here and there, you can listen to every episode every week and you can get the whole thing for free.
01:10:45.000If you download a book I've done before...
01:10:47.000You're going to hear 30 episodes with an ad inserted before every episode, just like what you do.
01:10:51.000So it's going to be ad-supported free content, and you can listen to it.
01:10:54.000If you don't want to hear me talk before the episode and you don't want to hear the ads, then you can go spend money and buy the audiobook.
01:11:00.000So I totally leave it up to the audience.
01:11:01.000If you want to buy the print or buy the e-book, you can do that.
01:11:04.000If you want to buy the audiobook, absolutely, that's why we're in business.
01:11:06.000If you don't want to do that or you can't afford it, you can go get all my books, every word of it for free, everything unabridged.
01:11:52.000I'm like, I'm going to give it to you and you're going to listen to it.
01:11:54.000And when you get to the end, you are going to miss work and you are going to go all night long and not be able to sleep because I'm in your skull taking over.
01:12:02.000And then when they get done like that, I like that book.
01:12:36.000And that's sort of the same thing we do with this podcast.
01:12:39.000We know there's – some people have, like – They have where you sign up and you can pay X amount of money and access the old podcasts.
01:12:47.000And some of them have it set up where if you want to watch on Ustream, you got to pay for a monthly thing.
01:12:52.000But I've always felt like what this thing does is so amazing is the word of mouth.
01:12:57.000And the best way to do that is to make it as accessible as possible.
01:13:02.000To put it out there as quickly and as easy and to make it as downloadable as possible.
01:13:08.000I mean, going back to Stephen King, if Stephen King was to start doing a weekly podcast of his fiction and actually read his fiction, he could charge for that and would make a significant amount of money for that.
01:14:19.000I think it would be awesome if everybody thought that way.
01:14:21.000But the biggest thing is the free because now there's so many entertainment options.
01:14:25.000You know, when Stephen King was coming up in the 70s, there was movies, books, and TV, and that was all there was.
01:14:31.000And now I've got to compete against fucking Xbox and PlayStation and downloaded content and podcasts and vidcasts and YouTube.
01:14:37.000I've got to compete against all that just to try and get somebody to get, like, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and ask for 10 hours of your time to read this book that doesn't really mean anything.
01:15:45.000So they try and come up with a chimera.
01:15:47.000It's an animal with genes from multiple species.
01:15:50.000So basically something along the lines of a sheep or a cow, but with transplantable lungs, liver, kidneys, everything a growing body could need.
01:15:58.000If they can pull this off and put this thing out to pasture, it's just like raising cows.
01:16:03.000You just harvest them when you need them and you make trillions of dollars.
01:16:06.000This is old-school horror movie sci-fi, so something goes horribly wrong.
01:16:11.000And instead of winding up with a 200-pound herd animal with perfectly transplantable organs and goes out and eats grass, they wind up with a 650-pound pack predator.
01:16:21.000And this, of course, happens on a remote island in Lake Superior.
01:16:25.000So we wind up with all of our characters stuck on an island with 100 of these 650-pound pack predators that just go through you like a knife through butter.
01:16:55.000So they've got a variation on the Dimetronon sail fin.
01:16:58.000Because the genome is based on the ancestor of all mammals.
01:17:02.000The thought is if they dial back the genetic clock, let's get back to the base set of code, then we will have exactly what we want and there won't be any endogenous retroviruses, there won't be any crazy stuff.
01:17:13.000We can then from there customize the animal we want, right?
01:17:17.000But they don't get it all the way right.
01:18:11.000Again, trying to compete against YouTube, you gotta be on YouTube.
01:18:15.000The thing with a book trailer is, if you make a really kick-ass book trailer, and it's the kind of thing that people will share, the money you spend on that is money that will continue to work for you.
01:18:25.000People will keep watching that for years.
01:20:26.000Aaron Proctor shot the thing, but we went out and found a guy to do it, and he got all his actor friends and put it together in the CGI, and we got permission from Century Media to use In This Moment's music for it.
01:20:37.000We shot it like we were shooting a five-minute movie.
01:20:39.000We went out in the mountains in the snow and had an effin' blast doing it.
01:20:42.000But that kind of thing, people still watch that whenever from 30, 40, 50 times a day.
01:20:47.000My trailer for Infected's at a quarter of a million views, and it just keeps getting views.
01:20:53.000Somebody's gonna watch that, and that's exactly the kind of book they want, then they go buy the book.
01:20:57.000It's the only form of marketing in the publishing industry that will continue to sell books for you year after year.
01:21:01.000So we go out and spend, I spend a ton of money on my trailers.
01:22:12.000Well, God, a million people have read this, so it's not that bad.
01:22:15.000And then the other factor that I think everybody just ignores is I haven't read it, but it's probably a great book.
01:22:23.000It does not sell that many copies unless that writing specifically appeals to the people who are buying it and they love the reading experience.
01:22:29.000I think one of the reasons why women don't trust porn stars or strippers or prostitutes or other women that will do things along those lines for money is because secretly I think there's a fear in the female community that All would have to happen would be just a few hundred girls start doing terrible things and they would all start doing it as sort of a mass movement.
01:22:57.000And when a book like Fifty Shades of Grey comes along and it's ball gags and all the crazy shit that they're doing in that book.
01:24:01.000Somewhere along the line, they realized their marriage is a big charade.
01:24:05.000I think we're seeing more, especially a lot of the porn stars being more open about what they do and going on their own podcast and talking about, like, yeah, this is my job to do.
01:25:12.000The only difference is, like, you could make it a little worse by leaving, like, pornography around, like gay porn or kiddie porn or something like that.
01:25:18.000If you cross me, I'm going to leave kiddie porn all around you.
01:25:21.000You're going to die of auto-asphyxiation.
01:25:23.000Yeah, you can see the mafia threatening that.
01:26:09.000Yeah, his friend was always like, hey, you gotta go skydiving with me, you gotta go skydiving with me, and then one day, uh, she, her, her, her, uh, Parachute got tangled up with her emergency parachute and she died.
01:26:23.000And this was like a week before he was going to go skydiving with her.
01:27:03.000There's like a technique to it, too, apparently.
01:27:06.000Because if you do it a certain way, you can fall.
01:27:08.000Does that give you the same drastic fight or flight response, though, as looking out, you know, jumping out of a plane and you're like, if anything goes wrong, I'm going to die.
01:29:00.000And they could have a fairly successful career at 8, but they would never be 10 again.
01:29:04.000Now that's something the NFL is facing because they've got, you know, a hundred years of results to look at.
01:29:10.000But for something like the UFC, which is new, you wonder at what point does it come in where they start to go, do we need to increase size of the gloves or outlaw some of the various moves?
01:30:51.000They spar, like, they'll get good sparring partners and they'll, you know, box at like a 50-60% ratio.
01:30:59.000You know, they don't try to murder each other.
01:31:02.000Whereas there's a lot of MMA gyms where guys are trying to murder each other.
01:31:05.000And not to say that doesn't take place in boxing, because there's some camps where it certainly does.
01:31:10.000For the most part, if you're watching a high-end boxing camp where there's a lot of money on the line, they're having good hard sparring, but they're also working.
01:31:19.000They're working on a guy imitating a certain guy's style or putting a certain amount of pressure on a fighter or whatever.
01:31:26.000In the high-end camp, if you're dealing with Floyd Mayweather camp or somewhere along, anywhere in that range, you're dealing with it.
01:31:35.000In MMA, you have a bunch of gyms like that, but then you also have a massive amount of gyms where people are just sort of making it up as they go along.
01:31:43.000And they think the harder you go, the better it is.
01:31:50.000Like we had Bas Rutten on yesterday, and he was talking about Holland-style sparring.
01:31:55.000They would go full blast to the body and to the legs, but to the head they would pull punches because they realize, you know, you're damaging each other.
01:32:01.000In a lot of the less experienced MMA gyms or the less well-structured MMA gyms, they don't realize that.
01:32:08.000And so they're punching each other full blast in the face in training, and they're fucking each other up.
01:33:36.000Well, I'm just going to get back into some, like, MMA boot camp and stuff, and I did a little Krav Maga San Francisco, had an MMA course, and I was having a ball doing that, but I was not going to get hit in the head.
01:34:39.000I think that was one of the biggest problems in MMA. In the early days of mixed martial arts camps, those guys getting beat up too much in the gym before they ever even got into the cage.
01:34:53.000It makes you wonder, and that's one of those things that I get into a lot in that Galactic Football League series I told you about, is size, speed, and strength continue to increase.
01:35:05.000Now we're seeing things in the NFL Where it's just basic physics.
01:35:10.000And you can put all the padding you want around a guy unless they do something drastic to improve that helmet.
01:35:15.000The more force that is on, bigger, faster, stronger bodies are going to produce more force.
01:35:20.000That brain bounces around inside the head.
01:35:22.000And when you project football players out to the 400- and 500-pound size and fighters up to the 400-pound size, It's something you try and get into that in the fiction itself, too.
01:35:32.000It's like, what is the average career like when you're getting hit on a regular basis by something that can bench press 1500 pounds and can run 30 miles an hour?
01:35:41.000Your career is like two, three seasons tops, and then you're just a vegetable.
01:35:44.000Unless you can get in the head and create some kind of additional structure between the brain and the skull, there's only so much that they can do other than change the rules to stop so much damage.
01:35:53.000Did you, in your fiction, ever create some other sort of protective wear that people would wear?
01:36:00.000Or did you eschew it altogether, which is what a lot of people think would be the solution, to stop a lot of the head-butting each other and smashing heads?
01:36:24.000But it's very rough and very physical, and yet they don't take the impact that American football players do.
01:36:30.000I do some of the magic hand waving with that.
01:36:32.000I'm like, well, this new helmet technology protects against this much, and then you just don't explain it, because if we could explain it, we would be doing it right now.
01:36:38.000So it is taken into account, but the main character, Quentin Barnes, is a seven-book series.
01:36:44.000And by book five, he's already starting to feel the effects of, you know, I stand in the pocket and if I do my job right, sometimes I'm getting rid of the ball and standing there when something that weighs 800 pounds is hitting me as hard as it can.
01:37:17.000So follow him all the way from a 19-year-old rookie through this league to the point where he's like, at some point he's going to have to make a decision.
01:37:23.000Do I continue to play and do what I love and die doing what I love, which is admirable and going to die anyway, so why not?
01:37:29.000Or do you look to the future and be like, what are the next 40 years of my life going to be like?
01:37:34.000It's a huge influence in the book as to what's going to happen.
01:37:37.000When you just stop and think about what an actual football player today, a 310-pound man who can run literally like a track star of the 1930s, when you stop and think about the kind of damage they can do and you sort of look towards the future and extrapolate,
01:37:56.0001,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now.
01:37:58.000Especially when this drastic change has happened in just the last 50, 60 years.
01:38:02.000The guys are a third larger than they used to be in just 50 years.
01:38:09.000And of course there's genetic and physical limitations.
01:38:12.000But as nutrition improves and science improves and genetic engineering improves, you're going to wind up in the future, pro sports, a couple centuries from now, pro sports, they're not even going to look human.
01:38:22.000They're going to look like a different species.
01:38:23.000That's how I came up with the idea for the book.
01:38:26.000I used to do a little stuff for ESPN when I was in college, like manage the teams coming off the field or hold the dish and that kind of a thing.
01:38:33.000I was 126 pounds and Michigan, Michigan State's a giant football game every year.
01:38:40.000ESPN is there, and my producer, Al Killian, I'm on the headset with him, and he's got me bringing the teams out of their dressing room, and then he starts screwing with me, because I'm 19, I don't know any better.
01:38:49.000And he's in my ears going, listen, if they don't come out at the right time, ESPN is going to lose $5 million of advertising, and that's going to be on you.
01:38:55.000And I'm like, he was fucking with me because he could, because I didn't know any better.
01:39:33.000And so I remember, he's giant, he's 6'8", I'm 5'8", I'm 125 pounds, and he goes to step out, and I just put my hand right on his sternum, I just stiff-armed him, and went, stop right there, you guys can't come out of that locker room yet!
01:39:51.000He was like, who is this little person?
01:39:54.000And he managed to wait, and all the guys were behind him, and he managed to wait just long enough for Michigan State to come out, then I got out of the way, and they came out.
01:40:01.000But I had, I wrote the whole concept of the book in that one moment, the whole GFL series.
01:40:05.000I had my hand on this guy's ear, my nose came up to his sternum, and I remember thinking, it's like he's a completely different species than me.
01:40:12.000And that was, and after that, I went home and started writing that book.
01:40:14.000Like, what if we have different species playing football, and the whole thing blew up from there.
01:40:50.000I wonder how many of these up-and-coming players are more aware of the risks now because of the past few years, all the different stories that have been coming out about players' depression.
01:41:04.000I think the veterans probably are, but when you are 22 years old and someone's paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars to play football, and that's been your dream your whole life, you're still 22 and you're bulletproof.
01:41:13.000I think the rules have to come in to adjust behavior.
01:43:08.000And then again, as you said, some don't have it in them.
01:43:11.000But for a lot of men, yeah, it's a real issue because you have a whole reward system set up in your DNA that you have no control over and you have all these things that you enjoy.
01:43:22.000There's very little outlet for it when you're working in a cubicle and it's hard to make your body free of the influence of all these instincts.
01:43:30.000There's things that can't be rationalized.
01:43:32.000There's just things you cannot explain away.
01:43:35.000When I used to wrestle and finally got to compete against people my own size, because I played football too, and played as hard as I could and did everything I could, but I got my ass kicked.
01:44:20.000Does that help you when you're writing, when you're writing something like Ancestor, when you're writing about this crazy, gigantic pack predator?
01:44:27.000I get into it a ton, especially in the new book Pandemic.
01:44:31.000The thought process is we are modified by society.
01:44:35.000We have a set of rules that we live by, a certain camaraderie, helping out our fellow man, helping our fellow women.
01:44:41.000You know, in our growing culture, the growing equality of women, and there's no need to be a douchebag.
01:44:48.000By and large, you don't need to be a douchebag.
01:44:49.000You can get along just fine being a good guy.
01:44:51.000And then, take these people who are aspiring to become these better people, who are genuinely good people, and then put them in the pressure cooker.
01:44:59.000When you start to get into it, and it's like, We're good to go.
01:45:32.000But it's largely when the strangers are brought together, get a small amount of time to gel, to get to know each other so it's not completely alien itself.
01:45:55.000I love the way you became sort of self-actualized by going out and putting it online yourself and reading your own books and putting it out in an audiobook form and making it free.
01:46:25.000And for folks who are interested in checking out more of Scott's book, the last name is Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R. I've got Nocturnal in front of me and Ancestor, and your website is...
01:47:10.000If you go to Audible.com forward slash Joe, you can get one free audio book and you will also get 30 days of free service at Audible.com, an awesome audio book.