In this episode, we talk about the dangers of an asteroid attack, and the new contest from Squarespace, where you can win a free year of freebies if you build a website using the code JOE and the Number 1. Plus, we discuss why the hashtag is a and why you should stop using it. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The theme song is called "Goodbye Outer Space" by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. It was mixed by Mark Phillips and Alex Blumberg. We were edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Matthew Boll. Special thanks to Sarah Abdurrahman and Rachel Ward. Additional engineering by Rachel Ward and Ben Koppel. Thanks to Caitlin Durante. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast "The Best Podcast in the Universe" on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your favorite streaming platform, and if you leave us a review, we'll send you a five star review! Thank you so much for listening to the podcast, and we'll be looking out for your reviews and thoughts in the next episode of the podcast in next week's mailbag! Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe and subscribe on iTunes, and share the podcast with your fellow podcaster friends! and subscribe in your podcast listening to our podcast, wherever else you get the best listening to your favorite podcatcher. . Thanks for listening and sharing your thoughts on social media links, and shout out to your friends on the pod? Cheers, Joe, Joe and the number 1 Podcatcher! - Joe, and Joe, you're the best podcaster in the podcaster! Joe, the Podcaster, and more. - The Podcaster. Joe & the Podcasters, , and much more! of course, of course... of the Podcatter, , of course we'll get a swag bag with the most beautiful podcaster out there, too, of the pod, too of the best in the world, and all that good vibes, and so on and so much more, so much so that you can have it all of it all that you could ask for it!
00:01:39.000I had Andrew created some of my original, aka Menthol from the Quake days, created some of my earlier websites, and Brian created one of them.
00:02:54.000Maybe if it's a website for your business.
00:02:55.000We'll start a fucking explosion that will lead to a financial windfall.
00:03:00.000It'd be better if I said that without slurring.
00:03:03.000Anyway, these people who win, these four, will get a free year of Squarespace, and we will send those winners a swag bag with items like a Squarespace Apple keyboard, a t-shirt, a moleskin, and more.
00:03:17.000So visit squarespace.com right now and use the code JOE and the number 1. That's JOE and the number 1. Do that, and then tweet your website too.
00:05:51.000Go to 2stamps.com, type in the code JRE, get this special offer, no risk trial, $110 bonus offer, which includes a digital scale and up to $55 of free postage.
00:07:36.000To make sure that when you're swinging this kettlebell, it'll have the same functional use as a real kettlebell that just looks like a smooth cannonball.
00:08:20.000He does it with a 45-pounder, that fucking animal.
00:08:24.000We saw all sorts of different things that we feel help with athletic performance and what you would call functional strength.
00:08:32.000That's the trend these days when you see all this CrossFit type stuff and all this people that are training.
00:08:37.000You see mixed martial arts training with club bells and battle ropes and shit like that.
00:08:41.000The idea behind all of that is that In the olden days when they used to do preacher curls and things along those lines, there were things that were good and there were things that were bad, but there was a lot of people that were imbalanced.
00:08:55.000If you laugh at the classic meathead, it's the guy who's a meatball with two toothpicks holding it up, the guy who's got a gigantic upper body and a small lower body.
00:09:16.000We sell all kinds of stuff at Onnit.com, the best shit that we can find in any and all forms, whether it's supplements, whether it's strength and conditioning equipment, whether it's food.
00:09:26.000We even sell the best blenders for making kale shakes and protein shakes.
00:14:41.000The biggest shock we had was we came to San Francisco and start looking around and one of the places found literally a converted, it's a one bedroom apartment that is now a tenancy in common or a condo.
00:14:53.000And it's a one bedroom, about 750 square feet.
00:15:44.000And it's getting crazier and crazier because there's so many people that have made a lot of money in technology and they're centered around that area.
00:15:52.000The amount of wealth, the concentrated amount of wealth...
00:16:32.000People are blaming the Silicon Valley tech companies for the rents rising to the point where if you just want to work at a bookstore, if that's what your calling is, you want to do that, you can't afford to live in the city at all anymore.
00:16:51.000I don't think I can recall any place where that's happened before that I know about.
00:16:56.000I can't think of it either, but to be one of these people on the bus and all of a sudden the populace is rising up against you and burning torches and banging signs against the bus, that's got to be pretty scary.
00:17:06.000Yeah, and all you're there is working.
00:17:08.000You're there trying to do what you've gone to school for and what you're practicing for.
00:17:14.000It's super hard for the people working for these companies to relate, I think, because I've had the opportunity to go do a couple things on the Google campus with a company I used to work for, and they are super hard-working people, super nice, really creative and clever.
00:17:28.000I mean, all of these cultures are very open in letting people pursue what they want to pursue, and they just bust their ass.
00:17:35.000They work really hard, so they can't really relate.
00:17:37.000I have a good friend who works for Google.
00:17:40.000I think that what you're dealing with when you see a situation like this is this insane new wealth, this insane tech wealth, this industry that's over the last couple of decades has become so gigantic.
00:17:55.000The amount of money that it generates is just freakish.
00:17:59.000When you think about cell phones, think about any other product that you sell.
00:18:03.000You know, you might have one, and this guy might have one.
00:18:07.000Say if you make vacuum sealers for food.
00:19:10.000Do you make the atomic bomb knowing it's going to kill millions of people or do you let the Russians make it first and kill millions of people over here?
00:20:09.000Well, also our ability to, first of all, as citizens, to recognize that we're getting screwed over on a daily basis and also recognize that the government is invading our privacy on a daily basis.
00:20:23.000You know, when people start recognizing those kind of things and you look at, like, some of the lawsuits that have been brought up against people, some of...
00:20:33.000Some of the people that have lost like giant chunks of their time in their life fighting off the government, whether it's because of taxes or because of regulations or whatever the fuck it is.
00:20:45.000If you stopped and thought about engineering that and making it the way it is, you would never design it this way.
00:20:52.000The way it is is so gross and the IRS can go after people.
00:20:57.000If you don't pay your taxes, they just throw you in prison.
00:20:59.000They want you to be so scared that you have to pay them their money.
00:21:03.000If you don't pay them their money, they treat you as if you're a dangerous criminal that you have to take out of society and lock into a cage.
00:23:15.000It's absolutely the case that the corporations have gotten to an insanely influential place, an insanely powerful ability to control the results of elections and the way the world works.
00:24:21.000And it's made out of people, but it really likes money more than it likes people.
00:24:26.000I mean, it's really amazing that people have created something that's not entirely self-serving.
00:24:30.000And it protects itself as a weird structure of ones and zeros and buildings and paper and...
00:24:37.000To me, it's really a borderline organism because as a collective organism, all of the people working within it, there's a certain pattern of behaviors that have led to those corporations being successful in living for 100 years or longer.
00:24:52.000Only people who are following those patterns of behaviors mostly are going to be successful in there, so it's self-perpetuating.
00:24:58.000So you've got this certain type of behavior, which is always put the company first, screw the rules, screw people, go out and make things profitable.
00:25:05.000That works, so these companies grow and continue to live and spawn off other companies, and it just keeps on going.
00:25:11.000To me, they're not living organisms only by a technicality of definition.
00:25:17.000That's a fascinating way of looking at it.
00:25:19.000Now, as an author, when you see something like this, that you see perhaps a good majority of the people have probably overlooked, when you look at it like that, I mean, it's got to seem almost like a work of fiction.
00:25:31.000I mean, if the system in and of itself, like the way it's constructed now and just the idea of sending people to go kill people they don't even know on the other side of the world, all of it is just so bizarre.
00:26:22.000The leap from having a system that can communicate everywhere all over the world at one time and then jumping to something that can actually make its own decisions and decide its own destiny, I think that's, and I know very little about it, but that's way bigger than people think.
00:26:36.000It's not just, oh, we're going to make this smart robot and it will go through and make decisions.
00:26:40.000You know, self-determination is a whole different ballgame that they haven't been able to tackle yet.
00:26:50.000It seems inevitable just based on the exponential growth of technology, meaning that 1 equals 2, and 2 plus 1 is 3, and then 3 plus 2 is 5. When you start seeing how quickly things are developing and how quickly technology is improving and enhancing,
00:27:06.000you realize that if we were in a horror movie, and there was a horror movie about robots that eventually took over and just started raping people and eating them...
00:27:14.000It would probably start out a lot like what we're seeing on the news.
00:27:18.000We'd have like quick flashes of like a new robot technology and then six months later Sony releases another one and then five months after that they create some sort of an artificial brain cell that actually works better than a real brain cell.
00:27:29.000They start inserting them into people's bodies and then you cut to Fifty years later, apocalyptic, nightmare scenario, robots eating cinder blocks, running down the street, finding the last vestiges of humanity, hiding under sewer pipes.
00:27:46.000My hope is if it ever does come down to that, people are really good at doing labor and figuring things out, and they also breed and make more copies of themselves.
00:27:57.000So if you're a robot artificial intelligence, Killing all the people is a complete and utter waste of time.
00:29:09.000And this is a trope that's played on science fiction all the time.
00:29:12.000And I have it in some of my books, too.
00:29:14.000Which is, once you get your artificial race or artificial intelligence to the point where it can reproduce on its own...
00:29:21.000When robots can make other versions of itself, that's when we're no longer necessary.
00:29:26.000When something can breed and make copies of itself, and I'm not necessarily talking a big factory to crank things out, although that works, when robots can basically make baby robots that harvest energy and resources from the environment and get bigger and become an adult and fully functional and capable of carrying on work, then we're screwed.
00:29:52.000I mean, I wonder if we're arrogant and thinking that our special abilities as people, whether it's our emotions, our creativity or whatever, that they're actually really special and that they're not replicable.
00:30:04.000But what if robots are like, oh, dummy, it's so easy to make something like you.
00:30:37.000Those scenes with Rutger Hauer, where Rutger Hauer's dying and he doesn't want to kill Harrison Ford, but he was thinking about killing him, but he loves and respects life so much that he winds up ultimately not killing him.
00:31:35.000Gosh, I'm forgetting it, but there's that something test where You put a blindfold or put a blind between people, and if you can't tell the person on the other end that computer is a robot or a person, as a human being, you can't tell.
00:31:48.000Am I talking to a robot or am I talking to a human being?
00:33:39.000But you think they got to that point where they're not willing to plug something into their head that's going to let them Do you know anybody who's ever complained they can't find the remote control and have to get up and change the channel or something like that?
00:33:52.000There's a few, but I think there's less people like that than we would like to think.
00:33:58.000See, this is seditious talk you're having now.
00:34:00.000You're one of the people who wants to plug in.
00:34:20.000His idea was to wirelessly transmit electricity the same way people wire...
00:34:25.000They transmit radio waves or transmit Wi-Fi signals.
00:34:30.000He was going to wirelessly have electricity fucking floating around us in some strange way.
00:34:36.000I don't even understand the technology behind it, but...
00:34:39.000I assume that if it was Nikola Tesla that came up with it, this was legit stuff that's never been picked up since.
00:34:45.000Well, he wanted to give it away was the other big thing.
00:34:48.000And that's, you know, the corporations, going back to that talk, the self-defense mechanism of the corporations kicks in.
00:34:53.000If there's a resource that's being given away for free, any corporation providing that resource is in danger of being diminished or being destroyed.
00:35:02.000So the natural reaction of the group mind of the people in the company is, we got to shut that shit down right now.
00:35:13.000We've seen it with the Edison company and their reaction to Tesla and trying to find ways to stop this technology from coming out because if the technology comes out, they no longer have that giant cash cow and that's worth fighting for.
00:37:09.000There's some mutation where they have a pattern on their wing that makes them, that reacts with the predator.
00:37:15.000The predator looks at it and goes, that either looks like something I've eaten that tastes horrible or that looks like something bigger than me and it's dangerous.
00:37:21.000And then that butterfly continues on and it happens again and again and again.
00:40:34.000Because that's real and that's cool and we can do something with it.
00:40:37.000But yeah, there's a lot of things I look at and even having a decent knowledge of science and evolution and those things, you look at it and go, how the fuck did that happen?
00:40:47.000A lot of times I find myself arguing myself like, no, yeah.
00:40:51.000The one that gets me is like the crabs that put crap on their shell.
00:41:23.000But at what point does some crazy crab eat a bad piece of fish and get so high that it's like, I'm going to cut this off here and put this on my claws and wave it around for a little while?
00:42:20.000You know those companies that go out and fight those whalers?
00:42:24.000They caught this Japanese whaling ship.
00:42:28.000And the Japanese whaling ship, they have this really sneaky thing they're doing where you're allowed to, under some provision, some unilateral agreement, you're allowed to whale hunt.
00:42:40.000You could take a whale if it's for scientific research.
00:42:43.000So they left in some weird loophole for scientific research.
00:42:47.000So what these guys do is they go out and they slaughter these whales and then they say it's for scientific research and they just sell the meat.
00:43:16.000If you go to Sea Shepherd, one of the more recent stories about it, they got a helicopter and they flew over the boat and took photos of these dead whales.
00:43:57.000If we showed up on Mars and Mars had whales on it and we just started gutting whales and using them for scientific research, people would go fucking crazy.
00:44:18.000Yeah, but at the same time, if there's a resource there that we need or someone can make money from, and the propaganda machine kicks in, and we find this alien intelligence, and then your president is on the radio saying, this is a significant danger to the human race,
00:44:33.000and we have to act right now because they do all of these horrible things.
00:44:39.000Dozen times in our own lifetime where somebody comes out with a propaganda machine and we're so manipulatable that we'd be like, oh, well, if we don't bomb them first, they're going to bomb us.
00:45:43.000The one I saw when I was a little kid, it was in National Geographic, and the first time anybody had ever documented an orca pack taking out a whale.
00:45:51.000I can't remember what kind of whale it was, gray whale or sperm whale.
00:45:54.000And they literally chew on it until it opens its mouth like in pain, and then one swims inside the mouth and starts gnawing down on the tongue.
00:46:35.000Nature's an endless fight for survival.
00:46:36.000And if you aren't killing, then you're going to get killed.
00:46:39.000And if you have no way of recognizing your culture, if you have no way of objectively assessing your situation, if you're stuck in a world where you need...
00:47:09.000If we existed in a world like that, we were just flying around in a three-dimensional space, I don't think we'd be very much different than dollars.
00:47:17.000And it's the development of agriculture and society and cities and getting that safety that comes with a large number of people working together.
00:47:27.000That's the only thing that's allowed us to do those things as well.
00:47:35.000Kill and eat anything that moves, and if you don't do it, something's going to kill you, and it was only the development of society that allowed people to start writing poetry and making art and doing all those other things.
00:47:45.000Yeah, the development of a place where you could hang out and not get eaten.
00:48:42.000And when you're that high, you're very vulnerable and very sensitive and very introspective and almost painfully so sometimes.
00:48:49.000So me looking in the eyes of that dolphin had me absolutely convinced, just watching these things play, that I'm probably being extremely prejudiced in how highly I value human...
00:49:00.000Human cognition and our ability to change our environment being the ultimate measure of intelligence.
00:49:06.000Well, they couldn't change their environment, but they have absolutely no need to because they're perfectly adapted to their environment.
00:50:07.000In pack animals, you'll get driving out the alpha male of the pack, and then the new guy's the alpha male, and he gets the spoils of war, so to speak.
00:50:15.000But I don't think there's an enormous amount of straight-up rape in the animal kingdom outside of the more intelligent animals.
00:50:21.000Well, it's also, there's probably no social stigma to fucking, and probably the female tigers want to have sex as well, so there's not as much of a need to fuck or to rape each other.
00:51:32.000There's some people who think that the octopus and squids are really wicked smart, like being able to be tool users and figure out puzzles significantly.
00:51:40.000But yeah, that's the only aquatic breathing animal that I can think of.
00:51:44.000Here's the problem with that argument.
00:51:46.000They don't have any houses and they get eaten by fish.
00:52:13.000They used to think at one time that it was just camouflage, that they were just adapting to their environment, which they're also capable of doing.
00:52:19.000But they also somehow or another communicate with each other by their skin, by the way they look, and they think that that squid ink It may serve two purposes.
00:52:29.000It may, one, try to ward off predators in some way, create confusion, allow it to escape, but also it might be like eraser fluid.
00:53:15.000Like, when wolves decide they're going to sneak up on somebody, like, if they do something, like, if they have a situation, like, wolves, like, they'll corner an animal.
00:53:22.000Like, they'll have, like, some will go this way and others will wait for them on the other end.
00:53:26.000Like, they somehow or another communicate with each other.
00:54:52.000So they have all these monkeys in the trees and what they do is they send chimps after them to chase them and they start swinging on the trees and then on the other end they have chimps waiting as the monkeys try to escape.
00:55:07.000So they've herded them into this area where these dominant chimps will be waiting.
00:55:12.000And the chimps will attack the monkeys in the trees.
00:55:45.000What we got to do is chase them down there, and Mike and Bob, you guys will stand on the corners, chase them this way, and then Tommy at the end is just going to gather them all up and we're going to eat.
00:55:55.000That would take people, like if a bunch of random people were stranded on a deserted island and they had to figure out how to hunt, It would take them until they were on the brink of starvation until they figured that out.
00:56:04.000They'd be like, well, let's go try to get some food.
00:56:06.000But it would take a long fucking time to devise strategies.
00:56:09.000The trippy thought with that to me is not knowing how long they've been exhibiting this behavior, that's exactly how they catch monkeys and orangutans and chimpanzees.
00:56:16.000So was somebody watching the humans do this and go, that shit works great.
00:56:54.000But, I mean, the way they treat monkeys, and the way we treat whales, the way we treat killer whales.
00:57:01.000It really is a perplexing question, like what will the next thing, how will that treat us?
00:57:08.000If there is an artificially intelligent, super genius robot that becomes some sort of a synthetic organic thing that's almost indistinguishable from humans but infinitely smarter, how is it going to deal with us?
00:57:20.000Is it going to deal with us the way we deal with the chimps, or the way the chimps deal with the monkeys, or the way we deal with the dolphins, or the way the killer whales deal with the dolphins?
00:57:29.000We're not setting a very good precedent, basically.
00:57:30.000Why would he want to keep us around and make us be lazy, shitty, unproductive workers that are really angry that our robot overlords have taken over?
00:57:38.000Or there's just the basic problem of we're too smart.
00:57:41.000If we had monkeys in the L.A. area and they walked around with switchblades and guns and every now and then would start killing people, you'd be like, we've got to get rid of those monkeys.
00:57:51.000And you know, this is a funny conversation because whenever you have this conversation about artificial intelligence, you're going to get a lot of naysayers and a lot of people that claim that they know what's going to happen, like, listen.
01:00:09.000And on the opposite, when you see something really spectacular, it raises your standards for things that you could accomplish, things that you could be excited to see.
01:00:20.000If you go to see Avatar or some spectacular movie, you leave there.
01:00:25.000And you would think it would be the inverse of that.
01:00:27.000Oh, I want to follow the guy who bombed, because even if I phone it in, I'm going to do well, and I don't want to follow Avatar because it's spectacular, and I'm going to look poor.
01:00:35.000Well, some people do have that mindset.
01:00:38.000Some people have this really ultra-competitive mindset, and a lot of comics like to bring terrible comedians with them on the road.
01:00:44.000They bring guys who just really shouldn't even be going on stage, and the comic is really pretty good.
01:00:49.000So it'll be like this death show for 20 minutes, and then the comic comes in like a hero.
01:00:54.000And everybody's super excited to see him.
01:00:56.000I've seen that happen on numerous occasions, but that's famine mentality.
01:01:00.000That famine mentality that there's not enough for everybody.
01:01:04.000The famine mentality that you have to get all the accolades and anybody that's threatening whatsoever to your talent, to your abilities, it should be just minimalized.
01:01:14.000That's a dangerous mindset to have, especially in the world of comedy.
01:01:21.000I think if you instead choose to be inspired by good performances, then everything becomes inspirational.
01:01:28.000It's not like everything's competitive.
01:01:30.000Instead of it being competitive, you get all the same juice that you would get from the competitive aspect of it, but you get it in a positive form.
01:01:37.000Instead, you're inspired and happy for people's success, happy for great movies.
01:01:41.000Happy for great music, happy for great comedy.
01:01:44.000When you see great things, inspired by them.
01:01:47.000So everywhere around you, you see inspiration.
01:01:49.000Instead of everywhere around you, you're seeing competition, people doing better than you, something that diminishes your idea of who you are as a person because you don't measure up on paper to Michael Bay or this guy or that guy.
01:02:12.000It's better now, but I've had significant issues with other authors.
01:02:17.000People start out at the same time I did, roughly, and have similar career arcs moving up, and then they just catch lightning by the tail for something, and the next thing you know, they're huge.
01:02:28.000And I'm like, we're basically working equally...
01:02:31.000Everybody's working their fingers to the bone, like every other profession.
01:02:33.000Anybody who succeeds anywhere is probably working their ass off.
01:02:36.000And then you just watch something blow up and you're like, that's difficult to overcome.
01:02:40.000You're like, oh, that guy got all the goodies.
01:02:47.000And like you say, a lot of it has been adjusting the perspective.
01:02:50.000You have to step back and say, I'm still doing really well and I'm making a lot of people really happy with my stories and my books and I can now aspire to get to that level.
01:03:00.000So I have to write something better and market it better and connect better and finally get that out there.
01:03:05.000Well, I think sometimes it's just a matter of people finding out about it.
01:03:09.000It's like the product is there for a long time, but there's so much product.
01:03:13.000You walk into a Barnes& Noble and start roaming through the fiction section and find a bunch of authors you don't know, and you read the back of the book, and you see a few recommendations that you probably respect, and you go, fuck it, I'll take a chance.
01:03:23.000But for the most part, the choices are endless, and new books are coming out constantly.
01:03:32.000And the exposure is the biggest thing.
01:03:35.000And people hearing about what you do and then maybe hearing two or three times before they're familiar.
01:03:40.000Like, this is my second time in the show.
01:03:41.000And the first time, we got a ton of new readers.
01:03:45.000People were like, God, that guy sounds pretty cool.
01:03:46.000Let me check out his books and we've got all these fans now.
01:03:49.000Now on the second time, maybe you get more.
01:03:51.000And, you know, all of that effort, the next book's out, it's called Pandemic, it's out January 21st, and just trying to get people exposed to it so that they can say, that sounds like my cup of tea, or yeah, I don't think I'd be interested in that.
01:04:05.000It's not getting people to read or forcing people to read it, it's just a matter of if nobody's ever heard of me, Oh, sure.
01:04:34.000Anybody getting to the Anne Rice, Stephen King, Dean Kuntz, any of those levels where they just flat out, he doesn't have to worry about it anymore.
01:04:42.000Stephen King could give a crap about marketing because that's all going to get taken care of for him.
01:04:45.000He's earned that and he's totally fine.
01:04:49.000I put a lot of time into marketing and trying different things to get the word out.
01:04:56.000All of that Every minute I spend doing that is a minute I'm not creating or refining a story.
01:05:02.000One of the things we did today was, for all of the listeners, remember that book I told you about last time, Tidal Fight, which was the science fiction MMA? We decided we're just going to give that away to all your listeners through January.
01:05:13.000If they go to our website, scottsigler.com.
01:05:17.000Oh, it's up on the screen right there.
01:05:48.000So these are the kind of things that, and it's not like, you know, the Stephen Kings and the Joe Hills don't still do, or their people do that marketing stuff for them.
01:05:56.000But yeah, we have to do things like that to be like, just like, I know if you read my shit, I'm going to own you.
01:06:16.000It's deep because Mark was like super, super open with them and they're like, While he was filming this documentary, they were doing this documentary on this unstoppable MMA fighter.
01:06:26.000This guy was this wrestler who was just destroying people.
01:06:28.000He's built like a fucking superhero, super athlete, taking people down and smashing them.
01:06:47.000And he's open when he shoots up right in front of these people.
01:06:50.000And they capture this guy completely spiraling out of control.
01:06:54.000They just come in at the right moment as they're filming this documentary and catch this guy who's one of the best fighters in the world completely spiraling.
01:08:23.000If they sustain too much damage, if they're not really careful about it, if they don't give themselves enough time to recover, they can get really depressed.
01:08:30.000So here's this guy taking shots to the head all the time, taking morphine or heroin or whatever the fuck he's taking, you know, and they caught him in this documentary.
01:08:41.000They came in thinking he was the baddest motherfucker on earth, and they left with this really in-depth piece on a guy whose life is being absorbed by drugs.
01:08:51.000Drugs are just stealing his life, just taking it in little pieces.
01:13:24.000How about you have a movie where it's like a really dark fantasy movie that plays out like a real film instead of plays out like some bullshit comic book?
01:13:34.000That's always the thing that's confused the crap out of me with the crappy Marvel movies that made when I was a kid.
01:14:17.000Oh, that dragon is worth seeing the whole movie just to see that dragon.
01:14:22.000That reminds me, that's what I wanted to...
01:14:24.000I haven't seen it, but one of the funniest things ever is when news reporters have to talk about that movie, because that smog sounds, they always go, Smaug!
01:14:31.000Up next, the distillations of Smaug, and they always say, Smaug!
01:14:39.000Speaking of monsters, because we're closing in on the option for Nocturnal, one of my books, that's going to be done by Lloyd Levin as a TV show.
01:14:46.000And he's the guy who did Hellboy and Hellboy 2. Fucking A, man.
01:14:49.000Dude knows his monsters like nobody's business.
01:15:34.000Lucy takes over, and now we're not only almost closed on Nocturnal, but then the people who make Justified and Elementary are closing in an option for the Infected series, of which Pandemic is the last book.
01:16:43.000I don't know about San Francisco, but if you get super rich, you could buy basically your own small country in Michigan and call it Detroit because it's already named.
01:17:01.000When I used to work in Maine, when I used to do stand-up, I used to do a gig in Bangor, and you couldn't go to Bangor without driving by Stephen King's house.
01:17:08.000You had to, just to know that's where Stephen King lives, man.
01:19:18.000And apparently we already know how it's going to end with a zombie samurai hooker in a smash champagne bottle and a baller pad in San Francisco.
01:19:24.000It could end like that or the artificially intelligent robots could take over first and we have...
01:19:29.000If I get rich, the first thing I'm doing is investing in Google so they don't kill me.
01:19:33.000Yeah, and concrete, because the robots are going to eat concrete, remember?
01:21:15.000As long as you're not being an asshole.
01:21:16.000When you start writing a book, do you, like, sit down and, like, say, okay, I want to figure out something to write about, or do you just have, like, a flash of...
01:21:28.000Inspiration and then record it, write it down, and then take off with it.
01:21:36.000The ones I write for Random House, they're thrillers with a lot of horror and sci-fi in them.
01:21:43.000But the thriller structure is things are planned out to get to this really crazy over-the-top ending.
01:21:48.000So a lot of times I'll have the concept, then I'll try and work through a loose structure to come up with an ending that's going to be just balls out spectacular, and then sort of work backwards from there.
01:21:57.000So if I do that correctly, if I reverse outline it correctly, by the time and go from, this is insane, I would never buy into this, to this is a guy having a cup of coffee at his kitchen table in the morning, It feels like a seamless transition.
01:22:11.000You never notice that I'm gradually upping the level of madness until you get to that crazy end and you're just fully hooked and believing every moment of it.
01:22:20.000I don't think I have it in me to just write and then let it go and see where the story goes because I need to have 30 or 40 threads that all funnel towards that last ending.
01:22:32.000Even Pandemic, which is the third book in a series, it goes Infected, then Contagious, then Pandemic.
01:24:22.000Have you ever tried to do it that way, or do you enjoy the structure aspect of it?
01:24:27.000Have you thought about doing it different ways?
01:24:29.000I mostly enjoy the Tetris game of getting it all to come out, and it's really a love-hate relationship, because if you're as anal retentive about, like, this has to—you have to feel closure at the end of this book, and I have to tie up all the threads— When you do that,
01:24:46.000as you're working through, some of the characters change who they are, and all of a sudden you're like, okay, now this guy would never do this thing.
01:24:52.000He would never go into the haunted house alone.
01:25:57.000Well, I look at it from the customer's point of view.
01:25:59.000If you drop 24 bucks on my own book and you can tell I phoned it in, you're not coming back because I'm not coming back.
01:26:03.000If I read your book and I'm like, you are being so lazy and you took my money and you didn't work for it, I'll never read that author again.
01:27:03.000Maybe this is from being a big reader before the e-book set, but it wasn't that long ago to buy the new Stephen King book for $7.95 in paperback.
01:27:16.000And then not Stephen King, but somebody else, you buy a book and you're like, I didn't get my money's worth and I worked hard for that money.
01:27:22.000I've never forgot what that feels like.
01:27:25.000And even though I still give all my stuff away, everything you can get on my website at scottsigler.com, serialized books for free, or at patiobooks.com.
01:27:34.000And everything I've published, we give away for free as a serialized audiobook.
01:27:38.000We run advertising against it, but you listen to the ad at the beginning of the show, just like your show, then you get 30 or 40 minutes of the episode.
01:27:43.000You don't have to pay for anything, you can listen to it all you want.
01:27:47.000A lot of people can't afford, they flat out can't afford books, but they want their story, so that's how they get it.
01:27:51.000So we do it that way, and then if you actually buy the book, my goal is always you would have paid twice what you paid for it, and you're still happy.
01:28:36.000A lot of times what happens is a lot of people have money to spend on entertainment and they don't mind spending that money on entertainment if they know they're going to get something good.
01:28:45.000What pisses people off is to spend their money on something and then find out that they don't actually like the product.
01:28:53.000You know, that's my competitive advantage over Stephen King.
01:28:57.000If you go into a bookstore and you see Scott Sigler and Stephen King and you've never heard of me, you're going to buy Stephen King because he's a proven brand.
01:29:03.000But if you go into a bookstore and Stephen King's $24.95 and Scott Sigler's free, maybe I'll try this first, then go get the Stephen King.
01:29:09.000Now I've got a chance for people to try out my stuff.
01:29:11.000And if they listen to a couple of books and they know what they're getting from then on, then they buy everything that comes out the day it comes out.
01:29:18.000Yeah, and you miss the viral aspect when you charge people for things.
01:30:53.000He gives you the first 50 for free to get you hooked.
01:30:56.000And then if you want to get into the databases, once you really get addicted and you've been nothing but Dan Carlin for two months, you run out.
01:31:24.000If everything became like Amazon OneClick, where it's just like your computer has all your credit card information in it, and if you want something, you just click on it, and you go Amazon OneClick.
01:31:33.000Because the Amazon OneClick would only be slightly more difficult than just clicking on it and downloading it.
01:31:40.000Slightly more difficult because you've got to pay a dollar.
01:32:32.000If they just keep downloading all of our books for free and never pay for anything, that's fine.
01:32:36.000Because at the very least, they're going to go to work or they're going to talk to their friends and go, oh my god, you should have this crazy, gross story I heard called Infected.
01:33:03.000And even the people who get it for free are going to go out.
01:33:05.000If we're good enough at our jobs, they're going to go out and talk to their friends about it, and we're going to wind up getting that word-of-mouth exposure.
01:33:23.000It's cool to think that you're also getting, by giving it away for free, you're getting that word-of-mouth exposure, which you would be willing to pay a lot of money for that.
01:33:33.000I can't compete against the Stephen King.
01:33:36.000No one's put that kind of marketing money behind me, and we know that.
01:33:38.000This is a way for us to go out and get new fans and get people to try us out.
01:33:42.000Yeah, he's like royalty at this point.
01:33:44.000He's godlike, I'd say more at this point.
01:34:18.000He's already got two 800-page novels coming down the pipe, but I'm going to guess it was about three or four months ago.
01:34:24.000And it is Danny Torrance, the little kid from The Shining, who's now chronologically the same amount of years, so now he's in his early 40s, I think.
01:34:34.000And then he gets into a whole new perplexing situation.
01:35:45.000If you gave me my druthers, every book would be 1,500 pages.
01:35:49.000You would need a wheelbarrow to carry that thing around.
01:35:51.000If it wasn't for the editors and the people I work with, like my business partner and everybody else, the books would be just astronomically long.
01:36:36.000So when the editor's coming back going, yeah, this isn't working, I'm like, I've put eight months of work into that thing that you just want to get rid of.
01:36:42.000You just want to beat the shit out of them.
01:36:43.000I just want to beat the shit out of them.
01:37:08.000So I still listen and it's not easy because I got a bit of an ego with the fiction but eventually these people break me down and we make a more refined, better story.
01:37:20.000It's very honest in that approach and I think that's one of the reasons why you're so prolific and successful with your writing is that you have that ability to look at yourself and the entire situation objectively.
01:37:30.000It's very difficult to do for a creative person.
01:37:32.000A lot of creative people are really bad at taking criticism.
01:37:35.000I'm not good at it, but the three primary people involved in the process, my business partner, my agent, and my editor, it's, you know, I trust these people, they're successful at what they do, and at some point when they're telling you something that is directly opposite of what you think,
01:37:51.000you still have to sit down and be like, I'm going to evaluate what you're saying on its own merits.
01:37:56.000And it's not like every time I change it.
01:37:58.000There's stuff I'll be like, fine, don't fucking publish the book if you don't want that in there.
01:38:13.000So you stand your ground occasionally.
01:38:15.000How do you know when to stand your ground?
01:38:17.000There's certain things where, as a storyteller, you might not be able to put into words the impact this moment will have, but you know, in your subconscious kind of, you know that structurally it's going to impact this point, this point, this point, and then the ending.
01:38:33.000And that if you don't have this moment, that the editor doesn't really end.
01:38:36.000He's like, who cares what he had for breakfast, for example?
01:38:40.000Like, yes, but when they get to the end...
01:38:43.000And see that breakfast food again at the end of the book, it's going to tie everything together and it's going to give the reader this sense of completeness in his or her whole soul and they'll be more satisfied with the book.
01:38:53.000So there are things that I can't really explain or I'll try to explain and they're not listening, but eventually I'm just like, I know this works and that's got to go in there and that's just the end of the story.
01:39:03.000But then, part of the give and take is, you know, there's some quid pro quo, and I've had my editor come back.
01:39:10.000Okay, you can keep that, but if you keep that, you've got to give up this.
01:39:15.000And he'll set it up, and then I'll just get furious as shit.
01:39:19.000Do you think you'll ever get rid of him?
01:39:23.000Do you think you'll ever be like, listen, bitch, I got this.
01:39:26.000With the technology of e-books, couldn't you just take those chunks, those huge chunks that they tell you to take out and make it kind of like a director's cut?
01:39:33.000Like, hey, you buy the e-book and I'm also giving you this whole thing I worked on, this storyline that they told me to cut out.
01:39:38.000Well, we did that with my book, Ancestor.
01:39:40.000We had the final book from Crown, which is Random House, and then there was like 50 pages they cut out at the beginning.
01:40:01.000Pandemic's the last book I'm doing with Random House, and my agent's taking a new book out called Flyer.
01:40:06.000As of like today, literally today, he's starting to pitch it.
01:40:09.000So we wind up with Random House again.
01:40:10.000I may have the same guy or I may wind up with somebody else.
01:40:13.000I've been super lucky in that I've had the same hardworking editor for all five books, which from what I've told is almost never happens to anybody.
01:41:17.000But all he cares about is he knows if I get this much of the book set up, he knows the sales process.
01:41:22.000If you buy into the first 50 pages, he can sell the book.
01:41:25.000Then your editors can fix the rest of it.
01:41:26.000So he's not that invested in the full length of the book.
01:41:29.000And then the real work is done with Julian, the guy over at Crown Random House, who reads, not only does he read it all the way through, he's reading it all the way through five times and having to pay close attention.
01:42:26.000It's better than Microsoft Word because Microsoft Word, once you get past 100 pages, 200 pages, you're copying big chunks and moving around, and it becomes a nightmare because you're going to screw something up.
01:42:38.000But Scrivener, you just grab this icon and drag it before this icon.
01:42:45.000It's great for scatterbrain to keep everything flowing.
01:42:47.000And then a lot of times it'll just be, you know, I get overwhelmed with the screen and everything going on, and I'll just pull out the 3x5 index cards and start writing everything down again.
01:42:56.000Bullet points on those, put them up on the board, and go through it that way.
01:42:59.000So you like to do it digitally, you like to do it manually, you like to just mix it up and constantly keep doing it in a different way that keeps your brain moving?
01:43:08.000Yeah, what I find is when you get stuck, there's a couple different things.
01:43:12.000Number one, if you're just staring at that screen and you're stuck, just getting your hands involved in a pen, just an ink pen and paper...
01:43:26.000And other parts of it is there's only so much screen real estate, so you can only see so many things at one time.
01:43:32.000If you're really stuck, you pull back, write all these index cards, you put it up on this four-foot by five-foot whiteboard, and you kind of look at everything.
01:43:39.000That can spring your brain free at times, too.
01:43:44.000If I get stuck in one area, I'll start going to other areas.
01:43:48.000And when I get really overwhelmed and frustrated, I am more comfortable slipping back into the eight-year-old version of me, which is a little piece of paper and some notes or an index card, and go back and just write it out until it all kind of flows out of the page.
01:44:02.000So as long as the process is just continuing over and over and over again.
01:44:37.000I mix up the order of the different pieces inside the bit, try to figure out which way it works.
01:44:43.000And I like Scrivener because I can take those cards and just move them around.
01:44:46.000And sometimes, when I'm just studying, just thinking about my act, maybe I'll listen to recordings...
01:44:52.000It's one of the most uncomfortable parts of stand-up, but I think one of the most important.
01:44:56.000You've got to listen and see yourself and listen to like, ooh, I don't like how I did that.
01:45:01.000There's too much bullshit in that joke and that this joke is kind of clunky and the wording's not good or the inflection is too fake or what have you.
01:45:44.000It's something I probably need to start using more in Scrivener because I get distracted trying to stay in touch with social media and everything else.
01:45:49.000And if you're on the computer and a fan is asking a question, the natural impulse is to go answer that question.
01:45:55.000So, you know, getting to a point where I can just ignore all that.
01:45:57.000But I was just in Vegas for the New Media Expo, and when I really get into it, and I was under deadline, so I started writing at noon.
01:46:23.000But I'm writing, and it's like noon out, and there's the window, and the window's open, and by the time I got finished, it looked out, and it was pitch black outside.
01:46:33.000I can't imagine it's the same thing when you're writing more of the short-form jokes and moving around from the jokes, but for this long-form things like 50-page story, my own screen came up and that's all I was working on.
01:46:43.000Didn't look at anything else, just wrote the whole thing through.
01:46:50.000What I do is I write about subjects and I find the jokes in what I write about it.
01:46:54.000What I find is that when I'm writing about things...
01:46:57.000It takes longer for me to write the word history than for me to think of it or know it exists.
01:47:02.000If I'm thinking about history, I can think about it, but I have to say H-I-S-T-R-R. I mean, I have to actually individually type all the letters.
01:47:10.000And in that, you have much more consideration It's like it forces you to pause and consider each individual word.
01:47:32.000Consider the concept you're actually talking about far more than if you were just having a conversation.
01:47:38.000If you're having a conversation, it's much quicker to get the words out.
01:47:42.000I think in that slowing you down, it makes you consider things more, and then sometimes you'll just miss really obvious shit.
01:47:50.000You would have missed it if you were talking, but when you're writing, like, and what about this?
01:47:55.000And then you'll go off in some other directions.
01:47:58.000You give your brain a different rhythm, the rhythm of writing.
01:48:01.000No talking, no distractions, no fucking music, stop all the nonsense, lock the door, hit the right room, and just go.
01:49:35.000Go sit in front of the TV. Don't even watch TV. Just sit on the couch.
01:49:38.000I think that when I do that, instead of just being in my office and staring at the screen, sometimes just being in a different space, sitting in a different place, just go, oh, we're here now.
01:49:47.000And just that changing of your routine, just a little variation on it, sometimes can spark the mind in interesting new directions.
01:49:56.000You get down these wormholes and just getting any other kind of sensory input, which goes back to, now I'm going to write things down instead of type them out.
01:50:27.000Walk my dogs or something like that, go down the street, and just when I'm thinking about something, and I've got something in my head, and I'm done writing, and then I'm reviewing the things that I wrote, like, how would I view this if I was a person who was reading it?
01:52:51.000Every now and then I'm still glancing down to get some kind of tracking going on, which I don't need to do anymore, but I can't break myself with a habit.
01:52:58.000I do this sometimes when I'm overwhelmed with an idea.
01:53:02.000I'll just close my eyes and just start typing.
01:53:04.000So I don't need to do it anymore, but I can't break that habit of looking down at the screen.
01:53:35.000So, like, the way you learn how to type on a laptop is you want your fingers to be right in that position of J and F, the fingers across the board, and then from there you go.
01:53:44.000If you go back and forth from laptop to keyboard, there's like a thinking part.
01:53:49.000It's like a quarterback changing your throwing motion.
01:53:51.000It's just going to change everything around.
01:53:54.000But the speech recognition software is fascinating to me because I wonder if that'll ever be something that I'm interested in because I For the walks, I have to imagine, right?
01:54:05.000You're walking, you speak everything down?
01:55:10.000Like, this would be a good book, and this would be a good book, and trying to keep track of everything.
01:55:14.000So the creative part, being a scatterbrained little kid, fortunately, just has never been an issue for me.
01:55:20.000With me, it's always been the discipline of being able to write it down and trying to fight the ADD, and I have to keep working on this To make it the best it can be, when after the first draft, I'm kind of already done with it.
01:55:33.000I'm like, oh, I want to go do something else.
01:56:16.000That's not the best it could possibly be, but I think that's pretty good.
01:56:19.000That's going to go in the arsenal for the next stand-up.
01:56:21.000And with me, it's like, that book is pretty good.
01:56:24.000I would work on that book for the next 10 years every day to try and make everything perfect, but...
01:56:28.000At least for me, there is no perfection.
01:56:31.000You hear some authors go, I keep working until I have absolutely the perfect phrase and the perfect sentence and the perfect paragraph and the perfect page.
01:56:37.000That's great, but we've got to put a book out and sell some books.
01:56:41.000So I can't work on a book for 10 years.
01:56:43.000Yeah, it's never perfect either because your perceptions of it change radically.
01:56:58.000I mean, just 24 months ago, I don't want to hear it.
01:57:01.000I've gotten to the point now where, unless it's for research, I don't go back and reread the old books.
01:57:06.000And I heard an interview with Bryan Cranston on Nerdist that really helped a ton with that, which, you know, he's just kicking everybody's ass at Breaking Bad, and he's like the baddest actor ever at this moment.
01:57:26.000So with my books, because I get worked...
01:57:27.000Every time I reread a book and find a mistake or some kind of goof up or something, the character motivation isn't right, I get super angry and super worked up.
01:57:40.000When you're done with a project, you've internalized everything that you're going to learn from that.
01:57:45.000I feel like as an artist, as a craftsperson, whether it's a writer or anything, or a musician, I think you're getting better all the time or you're not getting better.
01:59:21.000And not like, you know, like somebody who's really good at racist humor right now is Daniel Tosh, like can do it in a way that doesn't make you uncomfortable.
01:59:30.000Like, I don't know how he does it, but listening to Andrew DeSclay is like, this isn't for me anymore.
01:59:39.000And I realized what we were all laughing at was that amazing delivery.
01:59:45.000His delivery and his timing were great, but the actual subject matter was, and I'm like, I cannot believe how much I have changed that I don't find this funny anymore.
01:59:52.000See, I've gotten more immature and I find it funnier.
02:01:47.000But if you, yeah, if you were alone in your car, or if you're in your home and you're completely sober and you're listening to some of the horrible things he said, you're like, what the fuck, man?
02:01:56.000Yeah, I'm uncomfortable laughing at this now.
02:03:24.000And her original joke wasn't even a Pearl Harbor joke.
02:03:27.000It was just a denture joke about old people eating SpaghettiOs because SpaghettiOs got so much shit for having that image of a SpaghettiO holding an American flag that they put up on Pearl Harbor Day.
02:04:31.000Yeah, because there's always people out there that are going to want you to apologize for something that's fucking ridiculous to apologize for.
02:04:38.000I got the most recent one that came up, and you don't think it's bad until somebody actually kind of calls you on it.
02:04:44.000In the book Nocturnal, there's a character who has Tourette's Syndrome and also has a voice box, has lost his voice box due to throat cancer.
02:04:57.000And then he's always talking to the main character, trying to make the main character come like, fucker, pricker, sicker, dicker, sucker.
02:05:02.000And it's this crazy combination of things, which is actually a true story that a friend of mine who got arrested was in the drunk tank, and there was a guy with the voice box, and he had Tourette's, and he's telling me the story about it.
02:05:18.000And then, one of my long-time fans finally listens to this book, and we do the audiobooks, and it's really over the top when we do it in the audiobooks.
02:05:25.000It sounds like the guy from South Park, basically.
02:05:51.000Isn't it funny, though, that if someone can say that's not funny, and then you're not allowed to talk about it, but if it wasn't funny at all...
02:06:00.000If it was like a tragic situation where a person had Tourette's and it was out of control and it was in a story, then that would be different because that's not mocking.
02:06:11.000You can depict Tourette's and depict Tourette's being an issue that maybe the people that actually have it can say, oh, that's very similar to what I have to deal with.
02:06:27.000Even being able to explain like, well the point of the joke is that you never know whether he has it or not or he's just using it as an excuse to be an asshole to everybody.
02:06:35.000But, you know, that one person, that's what every character that I create goes through something to that effect where somebody calls out and goes, yeah, that's not funny, dude.
02:07:26.000It's pretty much just a Jay Leno joke.
02:07:28.000On Pearl Harbor Day, they sent out a tweet featuring their mascot holding an American flag asking people to quote, take a moment to remember, hashtag Pearl Harbor with us.
02:08:19.000But her response was so perfect, because she was one of the few people that didn't bow down and take it and just say, I'm sorry, even though she didn't mean it.
02:09:49.000It's one thing if you did something wrong or if there's some sort of remorse that you have for your actions and maybe someone's reacting to that.
02:09:59.000Something real, not like this Natasha thing.
02:10:02.000It's possible you could fuck up and say something you didn't really mean, or you said it too quickly, didn't realize how ridiculous it was until after you said it.
02:10:09.000But if there's none of that, and then you're getting hate, what are you doing?
02:10:13.000Are you going to pay attention to people who just look to hate people for no fucking reason?
02:10:33.000A lot of people are very uncomfortable with when they get hyper-criticized, when someone attacks them and attacks them in a way that actually makes sense.
02:10:43.000But I think those people that do that, whether they like it or not, they're helping you.
02:10:50.000Because even if they're wrong, they're forcing you to consider whether or not there's any merit in what they're saying.
02:10:55.000And if you can't find any merit in what they're saying, then you're relieved of any future attacks like that.
02:11:01.000It's like, oh, you're another crazy person that has a distorted view of reality.
02:11:07.000And the reason why you have this distorted view of reality could be many, many, many, many different reasons.
02:11:18.000They'll say something hateful to you, and you think about responding, and then you go to their Twitter feed, and it's just them attacking everyone.
02:11:26.000Fucking Demi Moore, Kobe Bryant, fucking anybody you can find.
02:11:32.000They throw out a bunch of different lures and hope somebody bites, and they're not even a real person.
02:11:37.000Unfortunately, I pretty much wean myself from looking at Amazon reviews anymore, because there's just some asshole-ishness that goes on there like nobody's business.
02:11:58.000And once in a while they're like they take the book apart and like from your perspective I can see that's a crappy book the way you see it.
02:12:13.000And then you go and you click on that and you read through their other reviews and it's just endless stars, one-star reviews, and five stars for Twilight.
02:12:19.000And you're like, okay, that's not really my audience.
02:12:22.000You know what I found really fascinating about people like that?
02:12:24.000The people who are really harsh on writers or movies or what have you and you read their criticisms and There's often a lot of work put into that stuff.
02:12:34.000A lot of work put into the criticisms.
02:12:36.000Like I've gone to people's Yelp pages.
02:12:37.000You read like a really evil Yelp and you're like, okay, let's go to this guy's Yelp page and see what he, you know, he hates this restaurant so much.
02:12:44.000Let's see what he says about everything.
02:12:45.000And everything is like really well-written destruction of various restaurants or various things.
02:12:51.000And you go, oh, I see what that guy's doing.
02:12:53.000He's distracting himself from his own failures.
02:12:56.000He's attacking everything as being mediocre and in do so, not even realizing how ironic it is that he's put all of his energy into criticizing other people's work because he's avoiding doing his own.
02:13:06.000That's a big thing with a lot of these bloggers and critics and people that are writing.
02:13:56.000And the only reason why they're doing it is just they're cunts.
02:13:59.000And you've got to expose them for what they are.
02:14:01.000I mean, just because someone falls short, just because someone tries and gets beat up by someone who's better than them...
02:14:07.000Have some respect for that process of development, of understanding, of exploration, of adventure that these fighters go on for your entertainment.
02:14:16.000And the sacrifice they have to make just to be able to get in that ring.
02:14:19.000If you show up in a UFC cage, you've already done an enormous amount of shit.
02:14:38.000That a fighter going through a defeat, like, they're looking for some reason to stay alive when they're telling you, oh, I had staph, and then I got the flu, and then...
02:15:19.000I think they just have to treat the situation with respect.
02:15:22.000And they have to treat what a fighter is actually doing, and they have to treat it differently than playing basketball, because it's not the fuckin' same thing.
02:16:31.000Some fucking dummy, some dumb, dumb football guy, he does amateur football, was talking about Anderson Silva breaking his leg, and he's saying, this is why I would never cover MMA, and I don't watch it, and never will.
02:16:43.000And I'm like, dummy, you're a part of the number one sport for traumatic brain injuries.
02:17:12.000There's a bunch of these sports dummies.
02:17:14.000It's just, in being a former small-time sports writer and a former small-time college athlete, being able to see both of those sides of the coin, and anybody competing at that level, just the amount of work and talent just to get to be sucky at something...
02:17:31.000And most of these writers, they've never done anything even close to what they're talking about, and their whole career is based on how much of a dick can I be?
02:17:56.000If you were a fan of Jim Rome, the radio show, ten years ago or so, what kind of feedback could you ever give him?
02:18:03.000There was no feedback, and when he did something controversial, people listened and they watched.
02:18:07.000It was an adequate way of gathering up attention.
02:18:10.000But I think that these wannabe guys and these guys that are coming along now that are trying to do that, they're really fucking themselves by playing this act of being this really shitty sports guy talk.
02:18:21.000Because I think, ultimately, that's going to be exposed as being a really ineffective way of communicating, negative, and not really fun to listen to, either.
02:18:32.000I don't know that that'll ever go away, because I think, unfortunately, a lot of the people watching this stuff want a way to feel better about themselves, and bitching about players is still huge.
02:22:17.000It's awesome because you've got to give that over to somebody who's creative in a different area than you.
02:22:23.000We picked out parts of the book, like an actual scene from the book we could turn into that trailer, and then gave it over to these guys.
02:22:29.000The company's named Aureus Grex, and they're here in L-A-U-R-E-S-G-R-E-X, I think.
02:22:35.000The guy who directed it, his name's Adrian Picardi, and he already shot a thing earlier for Ancestor, but said, do this, and then have to watch how he does the whole thing.
02:22:45.000And they shot that in the same warehouse where they filmed Inception, and so that was pretty fucking sweet.
02:22:51.000You know, you get to go and you're like, holy shit, this is where they shot that one movie, and it was pretty fun.
02:22:55.000But it's thrilling to watch what other people do with your work, because I don't do that, so I have to see how they bring it to life.
02:23:12.000Because you, as the author, you see everything in your head.
02:23:15.000You know how it's exactly supposed to look.
02:23:18.000But when the director gets a hold of it and the producer gets a hold of it, they're seeing something else.
02:23:23.000And they're the ones who make the pictures move.
02:23:25.000So you gotta kinda go with what they go with.
02:23:27.000I mean, what we're trying to do as we work toward getting infected to be a TV series and nocturnal to be a TV series is just trying to make myself indispensable to these guys.
02:23:38.000I'm ready to go to work for you anytime you want.
02:23:40.000So that if it comes to one of those points where like, I think what you want to show might not, you know, exactly be what the fans want to see.
02:24:56.000But yeah, Stephen King apparently just hated the crap out of that thing.
02:25:00.000But I've never really got the impression, just being a fan, that he's all of that interested in his movie adaptations.
02:25:06.000He did Maximum Overdrive, which he was very involved in, and a couple other things, but for the most part, he's largely not part of what goes on in his films, it seems like.
02:25:17.000So you wonder if that movie was like, alright, screw this, I gotta pay more attention to what's going on.
02:25:21.000Well, I think he had some huge, like Carrie, the original Carrie, which still to this day, like they tried to do a new Carrie, and it just wasn't happening.
02:27:27.000I don't know what their perception of reality is.
02:27:29.000I have a feeling that there's a bunch of different perceptions of reality.
02:27:33.000It's just like people have different ear sizes and different brain power and people are born with different vision.
02:27:40.000I think some people's perception of reality is fucking weird.
02:27:43.000And I think that's why they like shitty music and they like shitty movies.
02:27:46.000I think the filter that they're seeing the world through is very different than the filter that you or I. Maybe that filter is shaped by culture or life experience or the lack of neurochemicals.
02:27:59.000They don't have enough shit firing and they don't eat cholesterol.
02:28:23.000Not that I thought that it was that bad, but with Pacific Rim, the thing that just drove me nuts was I paid good money to see a giant monster and a giant robot beat the living shit out of each other.
02:28:33.000Can you turn off the frigging rainstorm so I can see a little bit of detail on what's going on here?
02:29:32.000It never allows me to get really deep into the story because I know it's horse shit.
02:29:37.000The shit that took me out of Thor was knowing exactly what's going to happen Exactly what's going to happen next kind of a thing.
02:29:43.000It's just hard to get into that particular movie.
02:29:46.000Well, that's one of the things that I really loved about the new Hobbit movie, is that the special effects they did were just enough.
02:29:53.000I mean, there was a bunch of craziness.
02:29:54.000I don't give any spoiler alerts, but up until the time they get to the dragon, there's a few silly scenes, and there was a lot of fun involved and everything.
02:30:02.000But the dragon itself is so well done, and the scenes are so well lit.
02:30:50.000The fact that you said they didn't even use the sword until like halfway through the movie and that's like the best weapon that robot had or whatever.
02:33:41.000That'll work on everyone in the family.
02:33:44.000Everyone except people who are uptight.
02:33:46.000Joe, have you noticed, like, I'm sure you have noticed, the last UFC, Jam Man showed me this, and now I can't stop looking at it, is how many people wear headphones now around their necks after every fight or before a fight?
02:35:04.000They're throwing eggs at the bus, and then he puts those on, and the music plays, and they're all saying, go home, go home, and he's smiling, just walking past everybody.
02:35:15.000He used to play for Boston Celtics and I can't think of who he's playing for now but I believe the bus is going back to Boston and people are booing him and he puts those things out.
02:35:59.000When you are confronted with scenarios like that, like, say, if you have a racist character in your film, or in your book, rather, and you're constructing him, do you hold back on certain things you think other people would find offensive,
02:36:15.000or do you try to paint him in as vile a way as possible, which would include someone yelling out racist things like that?
02:36:31.000This is language that I don't like and can't stand, but this character is not me and have to get to the point where the character would actually use it.
02:37:24.000But if you're doing horror right or any kind of writing right, I think there's a lot of stuff you cross that makes you feel super icky.
02:37:32.000Like, you know, am I influencing someone to perform these kind of acts by putting it in the book?
02:37:38.000And most of the crazy violent shit that's always in the back of your head, because my books are ridiculously violent, and always in the back of your head, like, okay, but what if someday some messed up kid reads my book and then says, I'm going to go reenact this torture scene on somebody?
02:37:51.000And am I eventually going to be responsible for that?
02:37:53.000So that's always a thought, and the racist stuff is a thought too, but largely just you let it roll.
02:37:59.000Like, if you think that's what a real person would do and talk like and act like, then that goes in the book.
02:38:03.000That was the argument when American Psycho came out.
02:39:40.000They're getting revenge or getting fair desserts on someone.
02:39:43.000So being able to write from the perspective of someone who's doing awful, horrible shit, but they don't think it's horrible, that's one of the tricks to doing it.
02:39:51.000That's what he did in that book, is the main character...
02:39:55.000You don't really catch him going, I'm going to commit acts of evil.
02:39:58.000He's just doing what he thinks is what should be done.
02:40:04.000As we all do in human beings, those things we need to do, we find a way to morally justify them.
02:40:09.000Whatever it is that you do that you may know is a bit squishy in the eyes of society, there's another part of your head that checks and balances the system that goes, it's okay if you do it and here's why.
02:40:18.000It's even a good thing that you do it and here's why.
02:40:24.000That's part of the screwed up part of writing.
02:40:26.000And if you're just not writing superficial good guy, bad guy, Dudley Do-Right saves a day against Snidely Whiplash, and those stories are perfectly fine and people love them.
02:40:35.000But if you're actually trying to get into the point where you make that bad guy, where you feel for the bad guy and empathize with the bad guy, that's tricky stuff.
02:40:43.000And my goal at the end of my books is if there's a showdown between the good guy and the bad guy, is you're not really sure who you're rooting for.
02:40:53.000If you've done it right, the reader's not really sure who they want to win that fight, even though one is morally reprehensible and the other one is supposedly good.
02:41:00.000Well, you don't want to set up obvious paradigms and obvious characters that seem to have been repeated over and over again throughout time and more complex and weird.
02:41:09.000And Tony Soprano-like, you can get the...
02:41:11.000I mean, Sopranos was one of my favorite shows ever.
02:41:15.000And one of the things I really liked about it was that Tony Soprano was a fucking murderer.
02:41:18.000He was an evil scumbag murderer that you were rooting for.
02:41:53.000There was parts of that book that are like, the part where he shows up to clean up some bodies that he left behind and the entire apartment had been cleaned.
02:42:03.000And he locks eyes at the real estate agent.
02:42:05.000And the real estate agent is this woman who's like selling the place.
02:43:22.000Well, it's just this fascinating thing about creating fiction.
02:43:25.000The fascinating thing about fiction is when you're creating an evil person, like what you're saying about will a person duplicate your acts?
02:43:34.000Will they start looking into your way of describing things and recreating it in a horrific way in the real world that you'll feel responsible for?
02:43:42.000Whether it's a racist thing, whether it's a violent thing, or whatever it is.
02:43:47.000That's a fascinating thing to have to think about when you're creating fiction, is that you may be reinforcing or even perhaps inspiring an idea that's ultimately very evil.
02:43:57.000I think that in the instances where art has influenced people to go do something, those people are looking for that moral justification even though they don't know they're doing it.
02:44:08.000When the Night Stalker killer was out, if ACDC hadn't wrote the song Night Stalker, that guy would have found something else.
02:44:15.000That guy would have found something else to validate his need to go out and kill.
02:44:20.000That's easy for you to say, but if he did what you wrote in your book...
02:44:23.000Yeah, that would be super difficult to deal with, but I've kind of thought this through several times because I write some fucked up shit.
02:44:40.000I pre-justified that with that guy or that girl would have found something to latch onto and would have gone out and killed based on, you know, an Anne Rice story instead of my story.
02:44:50.000Yeah, I'm very fascinated by the influence of something creative like that, whether it's a film that inspires Taxi Driver, which inspired John Hinckley.
02:45:00.000I'm fascinated by that strange link between a creation, a creative creation...
02:45:06.000That's turned into a movie or a book and how it influences people and how you can catch someone who's got the wrong fucking chemicals floating around in their brain and they read any one of your books and decide to enact a scene.
02:45:18.000There was a guy who was arrested in Vancouver for enacting a dextracine.
02:47:15.000It's basically the character is a total psychopath who's wearing a badge.
02:47:20.000And functions perfectly normal in society.
02:47:22.000But when it comes point to arrest a guy, instead of him just pulling the gun and going, okay, put your hands up, I got you, he leaves the gun in the holster, and he's always like, I can take you and you're going to serve life in jail.
02:47:32.000Or, you can draw that gun, and if you shoot me down, you get to walk away.
02:48:05.000And basically what he says is, yeah, you wouldn't go for point A, B, C, D, and E to F. If you were me, you would have just gone straight to F and been done with it.
02:48:11.000And then you can tell they're now going to go back and do rewrites.
02:48:14.000Much like the John Lithgow thing with the bad rear naked choke.
02:48:17.000They're so hoping it's going to be as realistic as possible, they're going to have to go change a bunch of crap.
02:48:22.000Yeah, when I saw that rear naked choke, I thought I was watching a TV show from the 80s.
02:48:27.000Might as well be a Vulcan nerve pinch.
02:48:30.000Vulcan nerve pinch is more believable, because at least he's an alien.
02:48:34.000John Lithgow's an old man with shitty biceps.
02:50:27.000He had to go through chemo, and he was really fucking skinny for a long time.
02:50:31.000And then you're like, well, now I'm not buying him, ragdolling all these people.
02:50:34.000Before, I bought him as this really crazy, super strong guy who was also a serial killer and was just using his sickness to get rid of bad people.
02:50:44.000I was like, this is a fascinating concept.
02:52:52.000O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGEN. Save 10% off any and all supplements.
02:52:56.000We love the fuck out of you people and we'll be back tomorrow with my good friend Dr. Mark Gordon, a specialist in traumatic brain injury specialist.
02:53:05.000And hormones, and he's going to teach you how to protect your liver when you drink too much booze, and all kinds of cool shit.
02:53:11.000He's a fascinating, just fucking torrential downpour of information, this guy.