The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1264 - Timothy Denevi

00:00:01.000 Five.

00:00:02.000 You get less enthusiastic after it's been a few times.

00:00:05.000 You're like, you're not really...

00:00:06.000 We're live?

00:00:07.000 All right, we're live.

00:00:08.000 What's up, man?

00:00:09.000 How are you?

00:00:09.000 Thanks for doing this.

00:00:10.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:11.000 My pleasure.

00:00:12.000 Sorry for the false starts.

00:00:13.000 We've been having issues with our equipment.

00:00:17.000 Good to see you, though, man.

00:00:18.000 What's up?

00:00:19.000 Good to be here and talk Hunter Thompson.

00:00:20.000 My pleasure.

00:00:22.000 So your book, Freak Kingdom...

00:00:25.000 You know, we live in interesting times right now. 0.99

00:00:28.000 It's kind of a shit show at every single moment. 1.00

00:00:31.000 Keep this about a fist from your face. 1.00

00:00:33.000 Pull that sucker. 1.00

00:00:33.000 There you go. 1.00

00:00:34.000 What should I do with my hands?

00:00:35.000 Should I put them up?

00:00:35.000 You can do whatever you want with your hands, man.

00:00:37.000 But I shoot with this one.

00:00:38.000 What is all this...

00:00:39.000 You've got a lot of writing.

00:00:41.000 Well...

00:00:42.000 When I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure my sentences never sounded like Thompson's sentences.

00:00:46.000 So I didn't write out a lot of his sentences, but this morning before coming on, I went and got some of my favorite quotes and just wrote them out longhand to get a sense of what his perspective was and rhythm was again.

00:00:57.000 Didn't he do that with The Great Gatsby?

00:00:59.000 He did it a few times.

00:01:00.000 He did it by hand.

00:01:01.000 He typed it out.

00:01:02.000 I love that idea that he was trying to find the rhythm of the words.

00:01:07.000 That's such a fascinating notion.

00:01:09.000 Because comedians do that in the early days of comedy, like a lot of guys...

00:01:15.000 Before they ever start going on stage themselves, they'll imitate their favorite comedian's bits.

00:01:21.000 Like they'll do a Richard Pryor bit.

00:01:23.000 And they'll do it to their friends and they'll get a sense of the rhythm and the timing and get those laughs from doing a Richard Pryor bit to their friends.

00:01:31.000 And then they get that bug.

00:01:32.000 It's like part of what infects them.

00:01:34.000 I mean, that's the hardest thing to steal.

00:01:36.000 We're not plagiarizing, but we're trying to understand what decisions they made.

00:01:39.000 Beautiful work.

00:01:40.000 Yeah, I'm sure he wasn't plagiarizing.

00:01:42.000 But it's...

00:01:43.000 It's so unfortunate when someone does.

00:01:46.000 Yes.

00:01:47.000 You know, when you have someone, whether it's Hunter or Richard Pryor, anyone who's just got a truly exceptional and unique mind.

00:01:55.000 Or someone who doesn't like our president and decided when he ran in 2016 to plagiarize Richard Nixon's 1968 convention speech in Miami.

00:02:03.000 Did he do that?

00:02:03.000 Directly.

00:02:04.000 Really? 0.99

00:02:04.000 Yeah, that was the headline in the fucking Times that said, Nixon's inspiration. 0.99

00:02:08.000 I'm sorry, Trump's inspiration. 0.99

00:02:10.000 Nixon is the one.

00:02:11.000 So the lines about crime and barbarians at the gates, crime, law and order, those were all from Nixon's shitty but successful 1968 Miami Convention speech. 0.70

00:02:20.000 And Thompson knew how effective that that was.

00:02:23.000 Yeah, I wonder if he did that on purpose.

00:02:27.000 Because he was so good.

00:02:28.000 And one thing that Trump is so good at, he's so good at getting the media to talk about him. 0.98

00:02:32.000 And one of the best ways to get the media to talk about him was give them something to be angry about that no one else is going to give a fuck about. 0.97

00:02:39.000 He was like, oh, Melania plagiarized, but I plagiarized much better from Nixon. 0.98

00:02:43.000 Oh, that's right.

00:02:43.000 Trump would have loved it.

00:02:45.000 Melania took some lines from Michelle Obama's speech, right? 1.00

00:02:49.000 Yeah.

00:02:49.000 Well, if you plagiarize Nixon, that's okay.

00:02:51.000 I mean, so, Freak Kingdom, the book about Hunter S. Thompson, I mean, it's really about taking the fucking emotion of living in this present, looking back at Thompson's career, and then trying to write it like a novel to dramatize all of the experiences he went through that are today so applicable to us,

00:03:08.000 and just show his perspective that's so applicable to us today.

00:03:10.000 What do you got here, Jamie?

00:03:12.000 From New York Times.

00:03:13.000 It's Donald Trump's convention, but the inspiration, Nixon.

00:03:17.000 I was like, you're running on Nixon?

00:03:19.000 That's what you're running on?

00:03:20.000 There are some parallels, you know?

00:03:22.000 I mean, do you remember when...

00:03:25.000 When Hunter got together with Bill Murray and Bill's brother, and they did that thing where they were trying to get people to, Nixon got a bad deal, we gotta bring him back.

00:03:36.000 And people were going along with it.

00:03:38.000 Yeah, that's a good, yeah.

00:03:39.000 Remember that?

00:03:42.000 There's a lot of parallels with Trump in that regard.

00:03:45.000 I mean, one of my favorite quotes by Thompson is like, Richard Nixon is – with his Barbie doll family and his Barbie doll wife is like America's answer to – is America's Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

00:03:59.000 He is the werewolf.

00:04:01.000 He speaks to the werewolf in us. 0.96

00:04:02.000 And Nixon chose to hide that werewolf his whole career until it finally came out because he was insane with power. 0.91

00:04:08.000 Trump ran on the werewolf.

00:04:09.000 He's like, no, I'm not going to hide it.

00:04:11.000 That's who I am.

00:04:12.000 That's what I'm going to use to try to get elected.

00:04:14.000 And like George Wallace did, like other politicians did, it had resonance and it happened with Trump because of our media environment, because of the place we live in now, to amplify him all the way to the most powerful position in the world, which is insane.

00:04:26.000 It would be really fascinating to see, if Hunter was alive and in his prime now, how he would...

00:04:30.000 I think his take on it would be very similar to Matt Taibbi's.

00:04:34.000 Matt Taibbi is, in my opinion, our more reasonable, more put-together version of Hunter Thompson, because he's more disciplined.

00:04:44.000 Sustained, more long-career version of Hunter Thompson.

00:04:46.000 He's rational and he's there all the time. 0.99

00:04:49.000 I'm sure you've heard the recently uncovered recording of Hunter calling in to some company that installed a DVD player and he's fucking screaming and yelling. 0.98

00:04:58.000 It's like 15 minutes long. 0.99

00:05:00.000 And then he gets lost and he goes, what the fuck? 0.99

00:05:02.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:05:03.000 Yeah.

00:05:27.000 Thompson had space when he worked for Rolling Stone.

00:05:29.000 He could write about how Nixon made everybody watch his speeches, the press, on a closed circuit television.

00:05:34.000 And they made the press, just like Trump, off in the corner when the plane arrived, you know, being berated by everybody.

00:05:39.000 It's very similar to what is going on now.

00:05:42.000 And again, we see people giving hot takes or we see people doing op-eds.

00:05:46.000 We don't see people dramatizing how manipulative these corrupt administrations are and were.

00:05:52.000 And Thompson did that beautifully.

00:05:54.000 Taibbi does that beautifully.

00:05:55.000 Trevor Burrus Was Nixon being berated by the press?

00:05:58.000 Is that why he chose to have him?

00:06:14.000 He didn't want the press around him because he had committed very serious crimes.

00:06:18.000 I think that's similar to what we see now.

00:06:20.000 I mean, as people said on the show, no president wants a journalist digging into their lives specifically because you don't want chumminess with journalists.

00:06:29.000 But I think Trump and Nixon both knew they had so much to hide that to actually have a journalist like Hunter Thompson, who was a good investigative journalist, to have a journalist like Matt Taibbi around, that's dangerous for them.

00:06:39.000 They'll go to jail, which Nixon should have and Trump perhaps should.

00:06:43.000 Yeah.

00:06:44.000 Well, who knows what's going to happen.

00:06:45.000 How did you get involved with writing this book?

00:06:49.000 Well, I mean, I've always loved Honor S. Thompson.

00:06:52.000 How did you get exposed to him?

00:06:53.000 You know, I was 17 years old in Catholic high school at Bellarmine College Preparatory up in San Jose, and we had a counterculture writing class.

00:07:04.000 And so I read some of it in there, and then a friend had an audiobook of Fear and Loathing.

00:07:07.000 And so I just remember the first time hearing that old audiobook of Fear and Loathing.

00:07:10.000 We're somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert.

00:07:12.000 And then in my 20s, I really got into Strange Rumblings in Ozatlan, which is about a conspiracy within the Los Angeles Police Department regarding the death of Ruben Salazar, a prominent journalist.

00:07:24.000 I read that and I'm like, oh my god, dude.

00:07:25.000 This isn't somebody that's just dancing on stage or performing a road narrative.

00:07:29.000 This is an investigative journalist who's going to the most powerful people.

00:07:34.000 Exposing things they don't want us to see, and in a sense, risking his life to do so, because he says in Strange Romalings in Aslan, which is in Rolling Stone in 1970, he says that they're willing to kill Ruben Salazar, who was the most prominent journalist in Los Angeles, you could argue at the time. 0.97

00:07:47.000 What the fuck is to stop them from killing me, Hunter Thompson, for asking these questions?

00:07:51.000 Well, I think that's what a lot of people are saying today with Jamil Khashoggi. 0.99

00:07:55.000 You know, Jamal Khashoggi's death has got a lot of journalists really freaking out.

00:08:01.000 Like, what am I doing if I'm criticizing world leaders and talking about international politics if this could happen to me?

00:08:08.000 Political violence is effective because it's used to silence either opposition or journalists. 0.96

00:08:15.000 For me, writing this book, and I tried to dramatize it like a novel, it's quick, it's like only 220-210 pages, and then it's like 100 pages of notes, so I cited every sight, smell, or sound, so that somebody that knows Thompson really well can be like, where the fuck did you get this information?

00:08:28.000 And somebody else can, if they have questions, just go back and look, but Long story short, for me, the crux of the book was in Chicago in 1968, where Hunter Thompson had a press pass.

00:08:38.000 He went to the Democratic National Convention.

00:08:41.000 On Wednesday night, Mayor Daley gave this order to clear the intersection of Balboa and Michigan because there was a protest going on, five, ten thousand people.

00:08:49.000 Thompson was standing next to the Haymarket Inn, which was on the ground floor level.

00:08:52.000 It was a plate glass window.

00:08:53.000 He was standing with delegates from the Democratic National Convention, standing with their wives.

00:08:58.000 And the cops charged. 0.97

00:08:59.000 They did like a double pincher formation like Hannibal and like Kumai and like fucking 100 BC and they split the protesters in half, beat everybody, hit Thompson over the head. 0.94

00:09:09.000 He got his motorcycle helmet on just in time so he's not concussed. 0.56

00:09:13.000 He can see everything that's going on and the entire plate glass window behind him.

00:09:16.000 It shatters.

00:09:18.000 Everybody falls in.

00:09:19.000 Cops jump in, are beating everybody.

00:09:21.000 And he's looking around and he's sure that snipers on the roof are going to open fire at any moment.

00:09:25.000 So he runs to the Blackstone where he's staying across the way, shows his room key, gets beat up by the cops as he's trying to get in. 0.97

00:09:31.000 He goes, I live here, goddammit. 0.58

00:09:32.000 I'm paying $100 a day. 1.00

00:09:33.000 Let me in my fucking room. 1.00

00:09:34.000 And he barely gets in. 1.00

00:09:36.000 And he just sits on his bed afterwards and he says, They knew I was pressed.

00:09:40.000 They saw my press pass.

00:09:41.000 They hit me because I was pressed.

00:09:44.000 And if that's where we're at right now with journalists, you know, if political opponents and journalists are being clubbed to keep silent and to not respond, then this is not the democracy we know.

00:09:54.000 Yeah, his ex-wife talked about that as being like one of the only moments where she saw him cry.

00:10:01.000 For two weeks.

00:10:02.000 He just cried afterwards for two weeks.

00:10:03.000 He couldn't stop.

00:10:05.000 It's crazy.

00:10:06.000 It was a crazy time, right?

00:10:09.000 I mean, that time is very similar in a lot of ways to what's going on today.

00:10:15.000 It's just today there's just so much more information and so much more – people have so much more of an ability to communicate.

00:10:22.000 Yeah, and I think it's almost easier to coordinate violence.

00:10:25.000 I was just talking to the head of the Proud Boys, Gavin McGinnis' group.

00:10:29.000 Mm-hmm.

00:10:33.000 I'm a victim.

00:10:36.000 I can't buy groceries.

00:10:37.000 They've taken my bank accounts, my plant forms. 1.00

00:10:39.000 But when he talks about violence, he's like, who the fuck are you, Antifa? 0.99

00:10:43.000 Like I'm, you know, you're 120 pounds and wet. 1.00

00:10:45.000 Like if we have civil war, you're going to lose.

00:10:47.000 And I was sitting next to him during the podcast. 1.00

00:10:49.000 And basically what I said was, if we have a civil war, you're going to be hit by sniper fire from the fucking roof. 0.99

00:10:53.000 You're not going to be in a fistfight with Antifa across the way. 0.97

00:10:56.000 And I think there's this idea on the right that we can push towards violence and we can get very close to it with our rhetoric or with our actions, but that it won't spread, like the conflagration won't keep going.

00:11:07.000 Yeah, I don't know if that's isolated to the right.

00:11:09.000 I mean, with Antifa on the left, too.

00:11:11.000 And that's why I love Thompson was as hard on the left as he was on the right when he wrote.

00:11:14.000 And that was so important for his intelligence as a writer.

00:11:16.000 Well, I think just even the left and the right in general for a lot of these people is just an identity and a gang that they belong to.

00:11:22.000 And I don't think they really understand violence.

00:11:25.000 You know, you want to talk about violence, talk to a military guy.

00:11:28.000 You know, talk to someone who really understands what violence actually is. 0.99

00:11:31.000 And they don't We don't have this empty rhetoric like these fools do. 0.99

00:11:36.000 There's a lot of these people that are calling for violence. 0.98

00:11:38.000 You should be calling for camaraderie.

00:11:41.000 You should be calling for communication.

00:11:42.000 We should be calling for some way we could all work this out, where the civilians, the civilization that we live in, that we all can get along together, and most people don't want to impede you from living your life and doing what you want to do.

00:11:58.000 Most people.

00:11:59.000 The vast majority.

00:12:00.000 Hunter Thompson believed in working within the system. 0.97

00:12:02.000 He believed it might be a fucked up system, but you can still run for sheriff in Aspen. 0.95

00:12:06.000 And he believed once you resort to violence, that means the conversation is stopped. 0.99

00:12:09.000 And it disfigures you.

00:12:10.000 So he cried for two weeks.

00:12:12.000 That was the most surprising thing for me, researching this book and writing it.

00:12:14.000 Was to see how much the violence affected him that he experienced at Chicago.

00:12:18.000 And you can speak to someone who's done MMA fighting, who's been punched in the face as hard as somebody can punch you.

00:12:23.000 Most Americans haven't had that.

00:12:25.000 And that changes your ability to articulate something back in that moment.

00:12:28.000 It means if that's political, if it's a police officer or a political opponent that uses violence instead of an argument to respond to you, we've left the realm that we recognize and we're not going to be able to communicate even in the limited way that we're communicating right now.

00:12:42.000 And Thompson knew that.

00:12:43.000 So that's why after Chicago, I love that he went back to Aspen. 0.99

00:12:46.000 And he's like, I'm going to run for fucking sheriff. 0.98

00:12:49.000 I'm going to do a mayoral campaign in Aspen. 0.99

00:12:51.000 And that was brilliant because it was his way to control his environment knowing that Mayor Daley is not listening to his nonviolent protest.

00:12:56.000 Richard Nixon is not listening to his nonviolent protest.

00:13:00.000 Thompson needed to find another avenue.

00:13:01.000 To try to work within the American system to make things happen.

00:13:04.000 A great contrast is his good friend Oscar Zeta Acosta.

00:13:08.000 There's a wonderful PBS documentary, Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, by Philip Guadarrigas, a great director, and it's Acosta's life.

00:13:14.000 That's who Dr. Gonzo is based on.

00:13:29.000 I think?

00:13:38.000 And they were trying to use those provocateurs to incite violence against the plainclothes police so that – or the normalclothes police so that lethal violence could be used to silence the civil rights movement in Brown Beret.

00:13:50.000 So they used agent provocateurs to make it look like they were part of the protest?

00:13:55.000 Yeah.

00:13:55.000 That is an age-old tactic.

00:13:56.000 Right?

00:13:57.000 That's how you destroy a civil rights movement because the most effective weapon in silencing civil rights is the lethal force.

00:14:02.000 And you can do that in another country as the U.S. has done, but the U.S. can't use tactics like My Lie, like Thompson writes about this, in the U.S. unless you have a provocative reason, unless somebody that's undercover attacks a cop.

00:14:14.000 And so the cops then, like what happened on August 29, 1970, during the moratorium riots, can just flood East L.A. and kill whoever they want.

00:14:21.000 They blew Ruben Salazar's head off with a tear gas gun.

00:14:24.000 Wow.

00:14:25.000 Yeah, those are darker days when you couldn't communicate as well, and I think that's one of the reasons why Hunter decided to run for sheriff in Aspen, is that he felt like he could control that area, like it would have a direct impact on his life.

00:14:40.000 The local politics have a real impact on your day-to-day existence, whereas what's going on in Washington, for the most part, it's not affecting you if you're living in Woody Creek.

00:14:49.000 I mean, there were people that had Nixon's point of view in Aspen who were like, let's develop this valley beyond what it can hold in terms of its environment.

00:14:56.000 Let's imprison hippies because they are going to take away from our tourist economy. 1.00

00:15:02.000 Let's not adhere to normal civil rights laws. 0.84

00:15:07.000 And so Thompson, in a participatory democracy, almost a Jeffersonian democracy, We're good to go.

00:15:33.000 It got really bad, and he talks about this in Fear and Living on the campaign trail later, is that a few nights before, both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, freaked out.

00:15:41.000 And so the Democrats said, all right, we'll kind of throw our weight behind you, the Republican sheriff, and then you Republicans will throw your weight for county manager behind our candidate.

00:15:49.000 And so Thompson ended up losing by like 200 or 300 votes.

00:15:52.000 And so in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on the campaign trail in 1972, he's at the Nixon campaign.

00:15:57.000 Nixon's giving his acceptance speech at the convention.

00:16:00.000 Thompson's with the Nixon youth who are about to do a demonstration.

00:16:03.000 And he says, like, you know, I'm not a journalist.

00:16:05.000 You can't kick me out.

00:16:06.000 Like, I'm a political observer.

00:16:07.000 He's like, have you ever run for office?

00:16:08.000 And the Nixon guy is like...

00:16:10.000 No, have you?

00:16:11.000 And Thompson's like, Sheriff.

00:16:12.000 And I would have won.

00:16:13.000 But the liberals stuck it to me.

00:16:15.000 And he was right.

00:16:17.000 I love how he shaved his head, too, so he could refer to his long-haired opponent.

00:16:21.000 My long...

00:16:21.000 I mean, that was a great...

00:16:22.000 That debate...

00:16:22.000 So in the book, I recreate that debate a lot, because there's transcripts of it.

00:16:26.000 That debate is brilliant.

00:16:27.000 It is brilliant.

00:16:27.000 Thompson is amazing at that.

00:16:29.000 The guy's like, I've only used my gun once in 10 years, but I like to have it.

00:16:32.000 And Thompson's like...

00:16:32.000 Well, if you've used it once in 10 years, maybe you don't need it.

00:16:35.000 We could try not having it.

00:16:36.000 You know, and his gun rights views were very complex and changed after Bobby Kennedy's death.

00:16:41.000 But he was so intelligent on stage with this sheriff who's like, I just want this job real bad, like gulping, like, you know, it couldn't.

00:16:48.000 This was eviscerated by Thompson.

00:16:50.000 Yeah.

00:16:51.000 You know, it's a really interesting, the documentary that follows the campaign and when you get to see him, you know, heart fallen when he loses.

00:17:02.000 You got a sense of what, there was real hope back then, like that if these guys could do that.

00:17:08.000 And what's interesting now is, you know, back in the 70s, they really did have a freak community in Aspen. 0.99

00:17:16.000 That shit's gone now. 0.99

00:17:17.000 I don't know what happened. 1.00

00:17:18.000 The millionaires have replaced the millionaires, is what I was told when I went out to do research.

00:17:21.000 That's a weird place, man.

00:17:22.000 You go to Aspen, you see these, like, $20 million houses, and people, like, it's one of the rare places where people still wear fur coats, you know?

00:17:31.000 Not ironically, or fake, but real fur coats.

00:17:33.000 Well, if you wear a fur coat in LA, first of all, it's never cold enough for a fur coat. 0.99

00:17:38.000 But if you did, you might get fucked up. 0.99

00:17:40.000 You're gonna get blood thrown on you. 1.00

00:17:41.000 Some shit could go down. 0.99

00:17:43.000 You know, like, most likely nothing's going to happen, but there's a possible chance, which is really weird, because if you wear a leather jacket, you have no problem. 0.99

00:17:52.000 It's weird, you know?

00:17:53.000 It is weird.

00:17:53.000 I mean, Aspen's weird because a lot of Thompson's friends, like Lauren Jenkins, a great journalist, they've moved down to Basalt, let's say Down Valley.

00:18:00.000 So I was out there with his son.

00:18:02.000 Juan Thompson is a fantastic writer.

00:18:04.000 He wrote a book called Stories I Tell Myself about his relationship with his father.

00:18:08.000 Yeah, I've been in contact with Juan through email.

00:18:10.000 He's a really good writer.

00:18:11.000 And he's a really honest and brilliant writer.

00:18:13.000 He seems like a good dude, and he seemed like a really good dude in the Gonzo documentary as well.

00:18:18.000 That was a great documentary.

00:18:20.000 Yes.

00:18:21.000 Yeah, I'm a big fan of Gibney.

00:18:22.000 He always kills it.

00:18:24.000 I went to the tavern in Woody Creek when I was in town.

00:18:28.000 I felt like, if I'm here...

00:18:31.000 You gotta go.

00:18:32.000 I gotta go there.

00:18:33.000 It's weird.

00:18:34.000 It's weird being there, man.

00:18:35.000 When did you go?

00:18:36.000 How long ago was that?

00:18:37.000 I guess it was a year ago, a year and a half ago.

00:18:39.000 Were people on bicycles just riding their bikes by the whole time?

00:18:43.000 It's on this huge bike route now. 0.99

00:18:44.000 Oh, it was cold as fuck. 0.98

00:18:45.000 It was the winter. 0.99

00:18:46.000 We were there for a ski trip.

00:18:48.000 What did you think of it?

00:18:49.000 Well, it was just cool.

00:18:51.000 You know, it's like there's places you go to where you just...

00:18:57.000 I was with my family. 0.99

00:18:59.000 They didn't give a fuck. 0.99

00:18:59.000 My kids have no idea who he is. 0.99

00:19:02.000 The children listening here need to know who he is.

00:19:05.000 My kids will learn eventually, but they're just eating enchiladas.

00:19:09.000 To me, it represented a big part of who he is.

00:19:17.000 This is his home base.

00:19:20.000 Dude, he came out.

00:19:21.000 So he's in San Francisco.

00:19:22.000 There's a picture of me there.

00:19:24.000 I think there's a picture of me there on my Instagram.

00:19:27.000 That was a special place for him.

00:19:28.000 When he was in San Francisco, it was like being on the central nerve.

00:19:31.000 He was there from 64 to 67 or 66. And he saw the first Jefferson Airplane concert.

00:19:37.000 He was right next to the Matrix.

00:19:39.000 He went out every night until like 5 a.m.

00:19:41.000 He was with the Hells Angels.

00:19:42.000 That's awesome.

00:19:42.000 Yeah, I got hammered there too.

00:19:44.000 Out of respect.

00:19:45.000 Yeah.

00:19:47.000 Quite a few margaritas.

00:19:48.000 But here he could divide his life up.

00:19:50.000 Look, the freak power.

00:19:51.000 If you haven't seen the background, that freak power.

00:19:53.000 Yeah, the sheriff's campaign symbol.

00:19:56.000 But he moved to Woody Creek and he suddenly had – you see it in his – you see it when you interview people that know him.

00:20:01.000 You see it in his letters.

00:20:02.000 He had space again.

00:20:04.000 And being in the city was hard for him because he could write beautifully about the Hells Angels, about the countercultural scene.

00:20:09.000 He was at war protests and the free speech movement with Mario Savio.

00:20:13.000 He was there, but it was burning him up.

00:20:15.000 You know, it was using him up. 0.98

00:20:16.000 And I think when he went to Woody Creek, he learned that, all right, I can take a plane to Chicago, get my ass kicked, but I can come back. 0.97

00:20:22.000 And if I want to have a drink, I can go to that tavern or I can go to the Jerome Hotel. 0.97

00:20:25.000 And that's a good space.

00:20:26.000 And I think that was a good space for him.

00:20:28.000 Well, I think that's probably a very intelligent move on his behalf.

00:20:32.000 And a lot of us, I think, that are involved in day-to-day chaos would probably benefit from something similar.

00:20:39.000 I mean, I just don't think he gets enough credit for his effort.

00:20:41.000 You know, one thing I found when writing the book, I interviewed Bob Geiger, who Fear and Loathing is dedicated to, and who was a doctor that was a friend of his in Sonoma.

00:20:50.000 And Geiger initially was the one who prescribed him dexedrine.

00:20:53.000 And so people think Thompson was just doing acid in writing or Whatever.

00:20:57.000 And maybe later as a caricature or whoever he became, that might have been part of his persona.

00:21:02.000 But when he was writing from – the book is from Kennedy's assassination to Nixon's resignation. 0.97

00:21:06.000 He was working so fucking hard. 0.69

00:21:09.000 Like he was working harder than we can ever imagine. 0.93

00:21:11.000 Douglas Wrinkley is the presidential historian who does his – Literary Estate talks about Thompson wasn't as fun as he seemed during that time.

00:21:18.000 He took dexectrine to write and he had a drinking problem.

00:21:22.000 Dexectrine is some sort of an amphetamine?

00:21:24.000 It's Adderall.

00:21:24.000 It's Adderall that's cut differently with salt.

00:21:27.000 So it's a little bit like you go a little higher and when it comes down, it's a little harder.

00:21:30.000 Well, Adderall was Obitrol, which was an old diet drug that was repurposed in like 96. That is a little bit smoother in that sense, but it's very similar to what...

00:21:39.000 To what Thompson took.

00:21:40.000 He had a great editor named Margaret Harrell, who was his editor on Hell's Angels.

00:21:44.000 And he didn't know she was 27 when he was 29. He thought she was like 55 because they would talk on the phone every day to edit the book.

00:21:50.000 And he sent her, she still has the letter.

00:21:53.000 I've done some events with her.

00:21:54.000 She still has the actual letter.

00:21:55.000 He sent her a five milligram dexedrine.

00:21:57.000 He's like, hey, it's going to be hard the last 10 pages to edit.

00:22:00.000 Take this and focus.

00:22:02.000 So she still has it, this orange little five milligram dexedrine for 40, 50 years.

00:22:07.000 She's had it.

00:22:08.000 That's crazy.

00:22:09.000 Yeah, that Gibney documentary is really fantastic.

00:22:14.000 It's probably one of the best introductions that anybody could have to try to get a grip on why, after all these years, Hunter resonates with so many people.

00:22:26.000 I mean, I think that the Gibney documentary is brilliantly and perfectly done.

00:22:31.000 I think that Thompson means something different with Donald Trump as president of the United States.

00:22:35.000 To me, people could see it before Gibney saw it before.

00:22:38.000 Other brilliant writers saw it before Taibbi did.

00:22:41.000 But when Donald Trump became president of the United States, it was a lens.

00:22:45.000 On to the past, I felt like. 1.00

00:22:47.000 I mean, I'm a bitch-ass liberal. 1.00

00:22:50.000 I was fucking upset. 0.99

00:22:51.000 And so one of the ways I dealt with it was to just remove myself to 1968, 1967, 1969. And I took the emotion I had in the present. 0.98

00:22:59.000 And I realized that Thompson is such a voice right now for people that maybe don't know him, only know him through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam's film.

00:23:06.000 I would like freaking to be a lens that now, if they read that, They could then read his work and perhaps, you know, what his timelessness will come through more.

00:23:15.000 It was an attempt to focus that timelessness. 0.96

00:23:17.000 And what helped was the fucking terror of our present. 0.97

00:23:20.000 Yeah, you can see, you definitely see the parallels in his work. 0.97

00:23:24.000 You know, who also rings true like that is a lot of Bill Hicks stuff on the first Gulf War, you know, and Bush as a president and, you know, which obviously people today would probably be dying to have Bush as president.

00:23:39.000 He seemed so smart.

00:23:40.000 He carried his book around for two weeks.

00:23:41.000 At least he carried a book.

00:23:42.000 Well, Herbert Walker, the older bush, was much more of a reasonable gentleman. 0.99

00:23:50.000 Yeah.

00:23:50.000 Well, that's our discourse today, too, where there couldn't be anything said reasonably about him when he passed away or even about his wife.

00:23:56.000 I mean, I think he's not very favorable right now, but one of Hunter Thompson's main influences was Norman Mailer.

00:24:01.000 And I don't think Norman Mailer writes well about women.

00:24:04.000 I think Thompson wrote better about women.

00:24:06.000 Thompson didn't just often write about women.

00:24:07.000 What's the criticism?

00:24:08.000 I'm not familiar with...

00:24:09.000 Well, Mailer, whenever he writes about a woman, it's like he's watching the Nixonettes get off the Nixon airplane, and he's like, there were 33 redheads, like five head long legs like this. 0.98

00:24:17.000 It's like, Mailer, you didn't need to write that fucking passage. 0.97

00:24:19.000 You're writing about power and people... 0.99

00:24:22.000 I think Miller writes beautifully about men that have more power than him.

00:24:26.000 And so he writes about 1968 in Chicago where Thompson didn't because Thompson was beat up.

00:24:30.000 And he writes about that moment of where Thompson's being beat up.

00:24:34.000 I'm confused.

00:24:34.000 But what is the criticism of the way he's writing about women?

00:24:36.000 Just he's describing them physically?

00:24:38.000 The male gaze. 0.60

00:24:39.000 He stabbed his wife in the heart.

00:24:42.000 Did he really? 0.86

00:24:42.000 Yeah, with a penknife. 0.86

00:24:44.000 What?

00:24:44.000 Yeah, he went to Bellevue for 14 days.

00:24:47.000 It was in 1960. That's it?

00:24:48.000 He missed it.

00:24:49.000 Yeah, no, he did a psychiatric evaluation instead of going to jail.

00:24:52.000 What?

00:24:53.000 I think they stayed married.

00:24:54.000 What?

00:24:55.000 Boy, what a reasonable lady. 0.98

00:25:01.000 We can dialogue on gender politics later.

00:25:03.000 But I would say that Thompson wrote well, better about women because he understood that writing about people with more power than you is really important.

00:25:10.000 And when Mailer writes about people with more power than him, when he writes about Mayor Daley beating the shit out of everybody, he writes really beautifully.

00:25:16.000 And that's somebody that's resonating right now.

00:25:20.000 I think? 0.98

00:25:46.000 I knew that Nixon was going to be president of the United States because if fucking Hubert Humphrey, that gutless old ward healer, can't control his own convention and his own party, how is he going to be able to run the country? 0.97

00:25:58.000 And so as soon as Chicago's violence erupted, the Nixon campaign knew they'd won the election. 0.98

00:26:04.000 Pappy Cannon, it's really interesting because even though Hunter would shit on him, Pappy Cannon was actually a fan. 0.98

00:26:11.000 No, they drank. 0.97

00:26:12.000 They drank at the Watergate.

00:26:13.000 They sat there and went deep all night. 1.00

00:26:15.000 But Hunter definitely shit on him. 1.00

00:26:17.000 Oh, he shit on him hard. 1.00

00:26:18.000 Pappy Cannon shit back on him hard. 1.00

00:26:19.000 The first night they met was at the Holiday Inn in 1968 in New Hampshire during Nixon's comeback campaign. 1.00

00:26:28.000 And Thompson walks in and Pat McKenna goes, who's this damn guy with the damn ski jacket walking through our goddamn lobby? 0.99

00:26:35.000 And Thompson's like, I have a press pass. 1.00

00:26:37.000 I'm here to do this.

00:26:38.000 And so they have this big moment.

00:26:40.000 And then later on that night, Thompson goes to a party with campaign people and with...

00:26:46.000 And he brings a big bottle of wild turkey.

00:26:48.000 And so Buchanan's a young journalist at the time.

00:26:50.000 He'd worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I think.

00:26:52.000 He'd gone to the Columbia Journalism School.

00:26:54.000 He's working for Nixon as his main policy guy.

00:26:56.000 And he looks at Thompson. 1.00

00:26:57.000 He's like, that's the fucking scheme. 0.99

00:26:58.000 Oh, you got a bottle of what? 0.99

00:27:00.000 Oh, if you got a bottle of Old Crow, like, no, we'll drink that. 0.97

00:27:02.000 And so they stayed up all night and they talked about the Vietnam War.

00:27:04.000 And Thompson talked about how it disfigures us to be in a foreign war that's unjust and destroys our democratic ideals.

00:27:11.000 To be doing that.

00:27:12.000 And Buchanan was like containment, nuclear war.

00:27:14.000 We're trying to get out of it.

00:27:15.000 And they listened to each other till dawn, like that first night that they met.

00:27:19.000 Now, what was your idea behind writing this book?

00:27:22.000 Like what compelled you?

00:27:24.000 I think we've mistaken Thompson.

00:27:26.000 I think that we see him more as like a Doonesbury character.

00:27:28.000 People who know him really well don't, but I think that most people, through whatever cultural forces that we've had, don't see his voice.

00:27:36.000 Because a lot of people don't know the comparison, the Doonesbury character.

00:27:39.000 So I think in the 80s or 70s, 80s, 90s, the cartoon Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau, it became – there was a character on it called Uncle Duke, and Uncle Duke was based on Hunter Thompson.

00:27:49.000 And he was kind of an exaggerated version of Hunter Thompson.

00:27:52.000 He was a cartoonish version of Hunter S. Thompson.

00:27:55.000 And I think Terry Gilliam did a wonderful and kind of auteurish job on – We're good to go. 0.99

00:28:22.000 And so it kills me that we identify him more as a clown or more as a cartoonish figure as opposed to a very serious political thinker, political activist, and serious writer who can give us insight into the fucking shit show we experience every moment today. 0.94

00:28:38.000 Well, I think the perception of him is fairly nuanced. 0.96

00:28:41.000 I don't think that everybody thinks of him as a cartoon character, although particularly later on in his life, He was relegated to that because he really didn't speak well.

00:28:51.000 You know, later on in his life when he was, just the drugs had taken over.

00:28:56.000 Alcohol.

00:28:56.000 His son writes about the alcohol.

00:28:58.000 Juan writes so beautifully about the toll alcoholism took on Hunter S. Thompson.

00:29:02.000 Well, he couldn't talk anymore.

00:29:03.000 I mean, when he was deep into his 60s, it was so hard to even understand him.

00:29:11.000 There's an awful piece that he did with Conan O'Brien.

00:29:15.000 Where Conan went to Woody Creek and shot guns off the back porch with him. 0.99

00:29:19.000 And you could barely understand a fucking word Hunter saying. 0.98

00:29:23.000 That's why I tried to end it with Nixon leaving because it was really sad. 0.99

00:29:26.000 When Nixon resigned, Hunter Thompson was at the Connecticut Hilton, which is a hotel right by the White House.

00:29:32.000 Annie Leibovitz, the photographer with Rolling Stone, was calling him and saying, we need to get to the White House.

00:29:38.000 Nixon is leaving.

00:29:39.000 Like he's going to get on the helicopter.

00:29:41.000 And Thompson just laid in the grass and he didn't go.

00:29:45.000 You know, and that was heartbreaking.

00:29:46.000 And he didn't end up writing the eight page spread that he needed to.

00:29:49.000 Instead, it became Annie Leibovitz's photography, which was a famous and in retrospect, like huge move for her career.

00:29:56.000 But I think that that pain right there of thinking that he'd spent 10 years, I mean, he hated Nixon since the checker speech, you know, when Nixon was VP for Eisenhower.

00:30:04.000 He'd hated Nixon since 1962 when Nixon lost the I think?

00:30:33.000 You know, ravenous monster who was anti-communist who would go to any extent to win and Thompson saw that and Thompson knew that other people saw it.

00:30:41.000 In 1964 at the Barry Goldwater Convention in San Francisco, my favoritly named arena of all time, the Cow Palace.

00:30:49.000 Barry Goldwater was going to speak to accept the nomination and what happened was Nixon was introducing him.

00:30:54.000 It was Nixon's way back from the wilderness.

00:30:56.000 Thompson was a few rows back.

00:30:57.000 The first time Thompson, I think, was that close to see him live.

00:31:00.000 And Nixon's like, you know, poor son of a butcher.

00:31:02.000 Don't think about me.

00:31:03.000 Just think about Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, who'll become Mr. President.

00:31:07.000 And Thompson was like... 1.00

00:31:09.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:31:10.000 Everybody here knows he's lying. 1.00

00:31:11.000 But they think that that act of lying is a skill.

00:31:14.000 And the way a used car salesman who lies but can make a lot of money off it is skillful.

00:31:18.000 The way that Trump buys selling steaks to people and then they go bankrupt and he gets rich.

00:31:22.000 That's an American skill.

00:31:23.000 And Thompson sensed that from the start with Nixon.

00:31:26.000 And so I think he battled against Nixon for a decade, for a lot of years.

00:31:30.000 And when Nixon left, I think he felt spent.

00:31:32.000 And so I tried not to focus on the later – I ended then in 74 – Because I think he wrote some beautiful things afterwards.

00:31:40.000 He definitely had some moments where he decided to not do the assignment that he was supposed to do.

00:31:46.000 And it was kind of sad.

00:31:47.000 Like the Ali Foreman fight. 0.99

00:31:50.000 He fucking floated in the pool. 0.99

00:31:51.000 Yeah, floated in the pool with a Nixon mask on. 1.00

00:31:54.000 Flew all the way to Africa. 0.55

00:31:55.000 I think it's one of the greatest sports moments.

00:31:57.000 It was like game six of the Boston Red Sox versus the Reds.

00:32:02.000 I think Ali was something different to people than...

00:32:05.000 I think it's...

00:32:06.000 I don't think we have someone like that today, so it's very difficult for us to understand.

00:32:12.000 People today look at Ali and they go, oh, he was a heavyweight boxing champion.

00:32:16.000 He was way more than that.

00:32:18.000 He was a cultural figure that represented the resistance to the Vietnam War and represented it with the biggest loss that any public figure had ever shown and willingly gave up three years of his career in his prime from age 27 to 30. From 1967,

00:32:36.000 from the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight, he didn't fight again for three years.

00:32:43.000 He didn't train.

00:32:44.000 He didn't do anything.

00:32:44.000 They kept him from his career.

00:32:46.000 When he was in his prime, when he was the best heavyweight of all time.

00:32:49.000 And he spoke publicly and often. 0.98

00:32:53.000 And he was fucking hated all over the country. 0.98

00:32:56.000 But he represented something different. 0.98

00:32:58.000 Like, my parents were hippies, and when I was a little kid, he lost to Leon Spinks, and the rematch was on television.

00:33:06.000 My parents never watched TV, and they definitely never watched boxing.

00:33:11.000 And they sat in front of that TV to watch that.

00:33:15.000 I remember thinking, I can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match.

00:33:18.000 Like, this is crazy!

00:33:19.000 And I was probably like, I don't know, maybe eight or nine years old or something at the time.

00:33:24.000 And I just remember thinking, I can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match.

00:33:28.000 And that's really when it sunk into me at a really early age that this guy was not just this heavyweight boxer.

00:33:36.000 He was a cultural icon.

00:33:39.000 He was a historical figure.

00:33:41.000 He meant a lot.

00:33:43.000 And to Hunter, he meant a lot.

00:33:45.000 He meant something much bigger than just a boxer.

00:33:50.000 And so Hunter thought he was going to a death sentence.

00:33:53.000 George Foreman had crushed Joe Frazier.

00:33:55.000 He crushed everybody.

00:33:57.000 I mean, he was so powerful.

00:33:59.000 George Foreman, to this day, is one of the all-time scariest heavyweights of all time.

00:34:03.000 Without a doubt. 0.99

00:34:04.000 He could hit so fucking hard. 0.99

00:34:07.000 And literally picked guys off their feet. 0.98

00:34:10.000 He hit Joe Frazier and lifted him off his feet with a punch.

00:34:14.000 And everybody was convinced that that was going to happen to Ali.

00:34:17.000 That Ali had been past his prime.

00:34:19.000 And just look at what George Foreman had done to Joe Frazier.

00:34:23.000 What is he going to do to Muhammad Ali? 0.98

00:34:25.000 And Ali just rope-a-doped him until he got tired and then fucked him up in front of the whole world. 0.94

00:34:29.000 That's one of the greatest athletic moments. 0.97

00:34:32.000 I mean, we forget that athletes like Kurt Flood...

00:34:36.000 You know, they risked...

00:34:38.000 Who's that?

00:34:38.000 Kurt Flood was the American baseball player who challenged the reserve clause because in baseball you weren't allowed to...

00:34:47.000 I think?

00:35:08.000 Ali used his celebrity to speak for his virtue and his value and his beliefs.

00:35:12.000 Thompson was really good at understanding what people sacrifice, what people have to give up, the wager, you know, between what that act will be, what the results will be.

00:35:20.000 They may be later, but he knew that.

00:35:22.000 And so his respect for Ali, for giving up those years of his prime, you know, was enduring.

00:35:28.000 Thompson came back from that fight and he gave his son, Juan, boxing gloves that were Ali's boxing gloves.

00:35:36.000 Wow.

00:35:37.000 Yeah, it's very, very unfortunate that he missed that fight because it would have been fascinating to hear his take on it.

00:35:43.000 I mean, I'm sure he would have been so moved when he saw Ali win.

00:35:46.000 But it wasn't, I mean, that's a good point.

00:35:48.000 It was indicative of, I think, the stress and the pressure that the last decade of covering Nixon had taken out on him.

00:36:18.000 Well, there's a Three hours before we go to press.

00:36:21.000 I know you made it. 0.99

00:36:22.000 This doesn't fucking work. 0.98

00:36:24.000 And so he was beginning to break down then. 0.99

00:36:27.000 He was also, I think, on the tail end of his decade of being a journalist who had met every deadline so that he could fucking feed his family. 0.97

00:36:33.000 And he could afford Al Farm. 0.97

00:36:35.000 Like, there's moments where...

00:36:37.000 Before he got the contract for Hell's Angels in 1965, he was ready to be like a longshoreman.

00:36:43.000 He was going and looking for work in the mornings in San Francisco to try to support his family.

00:36:47.000 He was willing to give up writing.

00:36:48.000 And instead, that article blew up.

00:36:50.000 And all these beautiful letters began to arrive at 319 Parnassus, where he lived at the top of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.

00:36:58.000 And that opened up his chance to continue being a writer.

00:37:01.000 But money was the main motivating factor.

00:37:03.000 And so I think once money...

00:37:05.000 Like, unfurled once alcoholism, I think, took its toll.

00:37:08.000 And once he couldn't walk around anymore at a political convention without people just, like, grabbing his shoulder and saying, you're Hunter Thompson.

00:37:15.000 Once that happened, I think things began to change.

00:37:18.000 Yeah, that's one of the things that he talked about that I thought was really interesting, that he became a part of the story.

00:37:24.000 It wasn't just that he was covering stories.

00:37:26.000 He couldn't be anonymous anymore.

00:37:27.000 He was, in many cases, more famous than the people that he was covering.

00:37:32.000 Yeah.

00:37:32.000 You know, like when he would go to meet Nixon, all of Nixon's Secret Service agents wanted to meet him and they wanted to get an autograph from him and shake his hand.

00:37:40.000 It was just too weird.

00:37:42.000 And then there's the alcoholism.

00:37:46.000 Alcoholism, look, it's a depressant.

00:37:48.000 It wrecks you.

00:37:49.000 And if you read, you know, we...

00:37:51.000 Me and Greg Fitzsimmons on a podcast once read off that one journalist who had detailed Hunter's daily routine.

00:38:00.000 And so we read the daily routine and they put a techno beat to it. 0.97

00:38:04.000 It's fucking hilarious. 0.98

00:38:05.000 That was a bad... 0.99

00:38:06.000 That's a sad...

00:38:07.000 So it's so funny because those seem funny now, but they're kind of a death knell.

00:38:12.000 I mean, that daily routine, that was the biography of Hunter.

00:38:16.000 It was in that.

00:38:17.000 And it's just...

00:38:18.000 It's heartbreaking.

00:38:19.000 I mean, we got to remember that the dedication to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

00:38:25.000 And I think the world was painful for Hunter Thompson.

00:38:28.000 I think it was painful to see powerful people abuse the weak and take what they wanted brazenly without being held accountable. 0.92

00:38:34.000 I think it was hard to deal with shitty editors who cut half your fucking essay on Nixon or half your story and made it into something that had nothing to do with the effort that you put out. 0.97

00:38:42.000 I think it was hard to pay your bills. 0.98

00:38:44.000 And, you know, live the way that you wanted to live.

00:38:46.000 And I think a lot of that gets undermined.

00:38:49.000 I just want people to realize how much effort he put out, especially during those years where he was like, all right, I want to be a great journalist.

00:38:56.000 I want to have a voice in our society.

00:38:58.000 I want to participate in our national conversation.

00:39:00.000 My only path towards that is to work harder than everybody else, to be at places when things happen and when they matter.

00:39:05.000 And he sacrificed a lot for that, but he was there and he's a voice and a light that we can have in this moment, which is another troubling moment in American history.

00:39:13.000 Yeah, his voice was very unique, too, in that he decided to combine fiction with nonfiction in a very weird, blurry way.

00:39:20.000 I think it was...

00:39:21.000 So, one thing I think of is he usually gives you a cue where what he did was he dramatized.

00:39:26.000 People didn't dramatize.

00:39:27.000 Well, wait a minute. 1.00

00:39:28.000 He made shit up. 1.00

00:39:29.000 He didn't just dramatize. 1.00

00:39:31.000 How about the witch doctor? 0.93

00:39:33.000 I didn't say that he did Ibogaine.

00:39:36.000 I said there was...

00:39:37.000 This is about Ed Muskie's campaign.

00:39:38.000 I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he did Ibogaine.

00:39:41.000 I started that rumor.

00:39:43.000 I mean, that's what he says.

00:39:44.000 But what he said on the Dick Cavett show, remember?

00:39:46.000 Yeah, later.

00:39:47.000 And I think Matt Taibbi on this show talked about it well, where one thing is that Muskie was already out of the campaign when that came out.

00:39:54.000 Muskie had already lost. 0.99

00:39:55.000 And so Muskie had been a fucking monster and a terrible person on that campaign. 0.98

00:40:00.000 And so Thompson used that version of Muskie and wrote, as Tayebi said, in a very straight way, the Ibogaine story. 0.98

00:40:07.000 And so if you had a sense of irony, you kind of knew, like, you're not really thinking that this is a guy who did Ibogaine.

00:40:13.000 So I think there's cues in there for a listening audience.

00:40:15.000 But what I think is even more...

00:40:18.000 I think he dramatized the way other people didn't.

00:40:21.000 He would say, I look left.

00:40:22.000 I look up.

00:40:23.000 I see.

00:40:23.000 He came down to me.

00:40:24.000 And then he said, people didn't write like that in journalism.

00:40:27.000 They didn't go step by step.

00:40:28.000 And he did.

00:40:29.000 And that was really important.

00:40:30.000 What I think is more important than the Ibogaine story.

00:40:32.000 So the Ibogaine story in the background is Ed Muskie was the front runner for the Democratic primary in 1972. He fucked up his campaign. 0.90

00:40:40.000 Afterwards, Thompson talked about how he had heard that There was a rumor that this candidate was doing ibogaine, which is like ayahuasca. 0.99

00:40:48.000 No, it's not like ayahuasca.

00:40:50.000 It's not.

00:40:51.000 No, it's very different.

00:40:52.000 It's not a hallucinatory.

00:40:53.000 It's a self-examinatory drug that's very good.

00:40:57.000 But he said they brought in a Brazilian witch doctor.

00:41:00.000 Yeah.

00:41:01.000 Ibogaine is not even a Brazilian drug.

00:41:03.000 It's from Africa.

00:41:04.000 But what I think people don't remember is, before that, and this affected the election, in February of 1972, Thompson was in Florida.

00:41:13.000 He was on something called the Sunshine Special.

00:41:14.000 It was a whistle-stop tour that Muskie, the frontrunner, had a good chance to beat Nixon, poll numbers-wise, was going all the way down the Florida Peninsula on to try to win the Florida primary.

00:41:28.000 And Thompson was like...

00:41:30.000 This is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. 1.00

00:41:32.000 At every stop, Muskie gave the same shit speech. 1.00

00:41:34.000 It's like, somebody should be your president, namely me. 1.00

00:41:37.000 And it was repeated. 1.00

00:41:38.000 The reporters were like, fucking, this is terrible. 1.00

00:41:41.000 Muskie was secluded in the back of the car. 1.00

00:41:43.000 He didn't interact with anybody.

00:41:44.000 They had his political operatives come out and make everybody sing the song like...

00:41:52.000 We're good to go.

00:42:10.000 Peter Sheridan.

00:42:11.000 And he walks in and he says he's looking for the Muskie campaign, all these different things, and he ends up going out with Hunter Thompson for a drink.

00:42:18.000 And Hunter Thompson finds out that Peter Sheridan had been a good friend of Jerry Garcia, had hung out with the Hells Angels in California, had been to La Honda, where Ken Kesey was, and was actually a pretty smart guy who was out of his mind in his mid-20s.

00:42:33.000 They stayed out and drank all night.

00:42:34.000 At the end of the night, Thompson's like, so, what are you doing tomorrow?

00:42:36.000 Where are you going?

00:42:38.000 And Peter Sheridan was like, well, I'm going to Miami.

00:42:42.000 And Thompson's like, we are too.

00:42:43.000 You don't have to hitchhike. 1.00

00:42:44.000 Fuck that. 1.00

00:42:45.000 And so there's a really good journalist, Outlaw. 1.00

00:42:48.000 It's called Outlaw Journalist by Bill McKean, another Thompson biography.

00:42:52.000 It talks about how Thompson took his press pass, put it into the elevator, pressed the button, sent the press pass down to the ground floor.

00:43:00.000 Peter Sheridan got it.

00:43:02.000 So Peter Sheridan could ride for free.

00:43:04.000 On the Sunshine Express down to Miami the next day. 0.99

00:43:07.000 So Thompson oversleeps because the fucking Muskie campaign doesn't like him anyways. 0.94

00:43:11.000 Instead, Peter Sheridan gets on the Sunshine Express with a Hunter Thompson press badge. 0.98

00:43:15.000 And Peter Sheridan goes on to order 12 martinis.

00:43:18.000 And he goes, give me like a triple gin bucks and hold the buck.

00:43:21.000 And he runs up and down the car. 0.96

00:43:23.000 And, you know, Muskie has been a really shitty candidate at this point. 0.95

00:43:27.000 He's not been engaging people. 0.96

00:43:28.000 He got in this weird fight with his wife at a...

00:43:31.000 A campaign event where they like put cake in each other's face.

00:43:34.000 It's been really weird and people aren't reporting on it.

00:43:36.000 Like other reporters aren't saying Muskie's unstable.

00:43:39.000 And so Muskie at the end of this whistle stop, he spent all his campaign money to go up and down and try to do this whistle stop like tour.

00:43:45.000 He gives the speech at the caboose.

00:43:47.000 And Jerry Rubin, the anti-war activist who was one of the Chicago 7 and has come to heckle him, is in the crowd.

00:43:55.000 And he's saying to Muskie, So why did you support the Vietnam War in 1968?

00:44:00.000 Like, who do you think you are?

00:44:02.000 And so Muskie's yelling at Jerry Rubin. 0.98

00:44:05.000 He's saying, young man, keep your mouth shut. 0.72

00:44:07.000 Beneath Muskie.

00:44:08.000 Reaching up from the bottom of the caboose, Peter Sheridan is holding a gin bottle and grabbing at Muskie's leg as Muskie tries to give this speech.

00:44:17.000 And then Muskie falls back and the whole thing ends.

00:44:20.000 Like the whole press conference is over.

00:44:22.000 Like Women's Wear Daily reported this.

00:44:23.000 And it came out that Hunter Thompson had had 13 martinis and run up and down the train and had interfered with it.

00:44:30.000 And Muskie's campaign really believed that Thompson was working with Donald Segretti and Nixon's creep, Watergate crew, to fuck up Muskie's campaign.

00:44:42.000 And that actually changed the course. 0.95

00:44:44.000 Thompson helped expose how fucked up Muskie was as a candidate at that time. 0.88

00:44:49.000 And Thompson had never forgiven Muskie for being on the pro-Vietnam War platform at the 1968 convention. 0.68

00:44:54.000 And so we talk about the obligate aspect of changing the campaign, but That report and the way that disseminated through media, the way it was picked up by other newspapers, really did help change the people's perception of Ed Muskie, Big Ed Muskie, as Thompson called him at the time.

00:45:09.000 Now, when he wrote Hell's Angels, he hadn't really totally formulated that sort of gonzo style of journalism, but he did...

00:45:30.000 I think that when it What Thompson did really well is what Joan Didion did really well.

00:45:39.000 He took the way the media was portraying somebody and he stripped that off and said, this is who they actually are.

00:45:46.000 This is what they're actually doing. 0.98

00:45:48.000 Joan Didion, when she writes about Jim Morrison in the White Album, she's like, Jim Morrison was like sex and death in his leather pants. 0.94

00:45:53.000 It was the best thing ever. 0.88

00:45:54.000 Everybody loves Jim Morrison. 0.97

00:45:55.000 And then in the scene in the White Album, Joan Didion writes about how they sit at a recording studio for two hours and nobody says anything and they eat eggs out of a paper bag and it's a fucking nightmare. 0.81

00:46:04.000 Thompson knew that the media was sensationalizing the Hells Angels.

00:46:07.000 He went to them on a cold night in San Francisco down by the waterfront and he said, hey, here's a Newsweek article.

00:46:15.000 Here's a Time article.

00:46:16.000 Here's how everybody's writing about you.

00:46:18.000 All I want to do is write the truth about who you are.

00:46:21.000 And he did and he ended up writing with them and he ended up spending time with them.

00:46:25.000 I don't think they got as mad at him about the way he portrayed them.

00:46:29.000 I think they got mad that he began to make money or that he became famous.

00:46:34.000 Hell's Angels sold 500,000 paperback copies.

00:46:38.000 That is almost impossible to imagine today.

00:46:41.000 500,000 paperback copies of a literary book.

00:46:43.000 And the angels were pissed off about that.

00:46:45.000 They felt Thompson owed him more money or owed him something for that.

00:46:48.000 Did he pay them at all?

00:46:49.000 Did he give them any money? 0.99

00:46:50.000 Well, Sonny Barger – Sonny Barger is so ridiculous. 0.73

00:46:52.000 Sonny Barger said he owed us a keg and he didn't give us a keg. 0.96

00:46:55.000 That's it?

00:46:55.000 You know, and the famous story at the end of it is that – I mean, really, like when they go through it, he said that – He said that Thompson was doing a subjective version of us, but it was at least closer than the shitty Newsweek and Time versions.

00:47:08.000 And so Thompson, at the end of...

00:47:10.000 He'd finished the book, barely made the deadline.

00:47:12.000 Had to go down to a hotel in Monterey, lock himself in, stay up for 100 hours straight, and write it in March of 67 to finish it.

00:47:19.000 So he turns it in, makes his advance deadline. 0.66

00:47:22.000 In September, they're like, here's our author photo, and it's shitty. 0.99

00:47:25.000 He's like, fuck this. 0.99

00:47:26.000 So he goes to a Hell's Angels rally. 1.00

00:47:28.000 He doesn't know anybody because he hasn't been with them for six or seven months.

00:47:32.000 He's taking pictures.

00:47:33.000 That's when he got beat up for writing about the Hells Angels.

00:47:36.000 And Tiny, his friend, who later committed suicide after Altamont, after being involved in the Altamont security situation...

00:47:42.000 That's the Rolling Stone one where the guy got stabbed?

00:47:45.000 Yes, where Meredith Hunter was stabbed.

00:47:46.000 But Tiny...

00:47:47.000 It was a woman that got stabbed? 0.69

00:47:48.000 Man, Meredith Hunter.

00:47:49.000 Oh.

00:47:51.000 It was a man named Meredith.

00:47:52.000 That was back in the day where you can name your kids Meredith, right?

00:47:56.000 Like Marion?

00:47:57.000 Marion's another one?

00:48:00.000 Right?

00:48:01.000 Lindsay?

00:48:02.000 Lindsay?

00:48:02.000 Some guys are Lindsay.

00:48:04.000 I got another one to speak.

00:48:05.000 Give me one.

00:48:06.000 Jamie.

00:48:07.000 Oh, yeah.

00:48:07.000 But Jamie's normal.

00:48:09.000 Like, there's a lot of Jamie's...

00:48:10.000 That future man scene where it's like...

00:48:12.000 What's his name?

00:48:12.000 It's like...

00:48:12.000 My name's Susan.

00:48:14.000 In the future, men are named Susan.

00:48:16.000 I know it's a girl's name in your time.

00:48:18.000 Oh, right.

00:48:20.000 Meredith is a weird one, though. 1.00

00:48:21.000 You must hate your fucking son. 1.00

00:48:23.000 You lose an argument with your wife. 1.00

00:48:24.000 But that...

00:48:27.000 I've lost a lot of arguments.

00:48:28.000 But that poor guy was, but Thompson was there and Tiny grabbed him after he was beat up.

00:48:33.000 There was a guy holding a rock to drop it on Thompson with the Hells Angels.

00:48:37.000 And Tiny was like, all right, I know him.

00:48:38.000 I know the rest of you don't.

00:48:39.000 And he grabbed him out.

00:48:41.000 And Tiny was this, like, enormous Hells Angel who had been, you know, Thompson was very good at empathetically understanding their flaws and their perspectives.

00:48:51.000 He'd never, I think, made excuses for them.

00:48:53.000 He said that their inherent perspective is fascistic.

00:48:55.000 He writes that.

00:48:56.000 You know, he says they use violence to respond to where they were in society.

00:49:00.000 I think?

00:49:24.000 If you came back from the war in 1950, you had a chance in Oakland to have a middle class life and a beautiful house and work the rest of your days and have a family that will then go on.

00:49:32.000 But by 1965, that was no longer an option.

00:49:35.000 And the angels were a violent response to that, very similar to what we're seeing now.

00:49:38.000 So the way he wrote about the Hell's Angels is very similar to the way that we see violence within groups that are supporting Trump, you know, and groups on the left and the right.

00:49:46.000 Did he ever wind up resolving his differences with the Hells Angels?

00:49:50.000 I think so. 0.99

00:49:51.000 The Hells Angels got fucked, rightly so. 1.00

00:49:53.000 The Hells Angels were pursued like a mob, like a mafia group. 0.99

00:49:58.000 People went to jail.

00:49:59.000 Sonny Barger went to jail.

00:50:01.000 I think they, at the end, appreciated his representation of them because it was better than any other one out there.

00:50:07.000 There's no better representation of the Hells Angels.

00:50:09.000 No more sympathetic for sure.

00:50:10.000 Yeah, or just no more accurate.

00:50:12.000 No more on point.

00:50:13.000 Yeah, no more like, again, it gets to Thompson's effort.

00:50:15.000 If you ride for six months with somebody and you're an honest, like putting up your hands, you're not trying to fit what you see into a thesis.

00:50:21.000 You're doing the opposite.

00:50:22.000 Trying to look at the reality you have in front of you and then form an argument out of that.

00:50:27.000 That's what Thompson's gift was.

00:50:29.000 And very dangerous, too, to do that.

00:50:31.000 I mean, he did get beat up taking those photographs.

00:50:34.000 He also had a really bad motorcycle accident with his friend on the back.

00:50:36.000 His friend broke his leg.

00:50:37.000 That's why he left. 1.00

00:50:40.000 Get the fuck out of San Francisco. 0.99

00:50:41.000 Grace looks amazing. 1.00

00:50:42.000 San Francisco's amazing.

00:50:43.000 It's a fire that you're putting your hand onto.

00:50:46.000 How did he crash?

00:50:47.000 He was coming down.

00:50:48.000 It was with the mayor of Richmond.

00:50:49.000 He was coming down a slick road.

00:50:51.000 And they had hit like something was wet or an oil thing and it went out the back tire.

00:50:57.000 So Thompson rolled and was fine but his friend's knee hit railroad tracks.

00:51:02.000 So his friend's knee broke really badly.

00:51:05.000 It was the mayor of Richmond.

00:51:07.000 He continued riding motorcycles though.

00:51:10.000 Yeah, he did.

00:51:11.000 He would get in accidents at Woody Creek, but he was pretty careful.

00:51:14.000 So I love that scene in Hells Angels.

00:51:15.000 I don't know if readers or listeners know this, but the edge.

00:51:19.000 And that's a major part of the book where Thompson's fighting with his wife.

00:51:23.000 Thompson's finished his book, but he's breaking down because he'd worked so hard to do it.

00:51:27.000 And so he takes his BSA out and he goes, if you know San Francisco, he goes out to the park.

00:51:33.000 He hits the Coast Highway.

00:51:34.000 And he comes down it.

00:51:36.000 And he's like, I'm so overwhelmed. 0.91

00:51:38.000 Everything is so fucking terrible. 0.83

00:51:40.000 He's going as fast as he can. 0.96

00:51:42.000 And he talks about how his eyes begin to lose moisture.

00:51:44.000 You know, the scene.

00:51:45.000 It's this beautiful scene.

00:51:46.000 He's looking for sand pits. 0.99

00:51:48.000 Because if you hit a sand pit near the zoo, you're fucking done. 0.97

00:51:51.000 And he gets all the way to Rockaway Beach, which is halfway down to Santa Cruz. 0.98

00:51:55.000 And he turns around.

00:51:56.000 And what he talks about is when he's at 100 miles per hour, I think he was near death.

00:52:00.000 I think he was really overwhelmed.

00:52:01.000 He says, you know, the edge, the only people that know it are the people that have gone over.

00:52:06.000 The rest, the living, don't have any understanding of it.

00:52:10.000 And all we can do is approach it in this way.

00:52:12.000 And it's this beautiful end.

00:52:13.000 It's called Midnight on the Coast Highway.

00:52:15.000 It was anthologized in Tom Wolfe.

00:52:17.000 And it was just beautiful.

00:52:19.000 So he comes back.

00:52:20.000 And he sits at his desk.

00:52:22.000 And so he had a view of the Bay Bridge.

00:52:24.000 He could see its two flashing lights the whole time.

00:52:27.000 And he had broken the window in a terrible fight with his wife like three weeks earlier.

00:52:30.000 And so he sits at the broken window and he writes out that scene right away with his eyes still scoured.

00:52:37.000 Wasn't the broken window when she wouldn't give him a gun because he was on acid and he threw a shoe through the window?

00:52:41.000 So there's three versions.

00:52:43.000 So I do it and then I give the three versions of the notes.

00:52:45.000 So I go with the three versions that I've heard.

00:52:47.000 Like I heard it from...

00:52:48.000 Did you ask her?

00:52:49.000 You know, she wrote – I really respect Sandy, like, deeply.

00:52:52.000 She wrote it a few years ago.

00:52:55.000 She said, I'm done giving interviews about Alice Thompson.

00:52:57.000 That was my life that it was then.

00:52:59.000 She's given so many interviews up to this point.

00:53:01.000 Yeah, good for her.

00:53:01.000 She says that that exists.

00:53:03.000 And so I wanted to respect that more than anything.

00:53:06.000 And just use the information that I had.

00:53:08.000 And let the reader know, yo, here are three other versions.

00:53:11.000 Here's the best version I could make.

00:53:13.000 Dramatize.

00:53:13.000 Look left.

00:53:14.000 Throw.

00:53:14.000 Do this.

00:53:15.000 Did you talk to Anita?

00:53:16.000 Anita's been great.

00:53:17.000 I had to talk to Anita later, but the book ended so early that I... There's a beautiful...

00:53:22.000 Anita's the second wife for folks. 1.00

00:53:23.000 Yeah, Anita Thompson is... 1.00

00:53:24.000 She runs Owl Farm.

00:53:26.000 She runs kind of his legacy.

00:53:27.000 She does the Facebook page.

00:53:28.000 She does a wonderful job.

00:53:30.000 What is Owl Farm today?

00:53:32.000 Does she still live up there? 0.68

00:53:33.000 Yeah, she's going to make it into like a writer's retreat. 1.00

00:53:47.000 Oh, nice.

00:53:55.000 I think talking to Bob Geiger, you know, his friend then was, I was really lucky.

00:53:59.000 Bob Geiger's in his late 80s.

00:54:01.000 And he was able to go through like, because I had, I believe if you interview somebody, you need to read everything that exists already.

00:54:07.000 You need to read everything they've already said.

00:54:09.000 You don't want to ask them questions that, when I do interview for research, that they've already supplied answers to.

00:54:14.000 So with Bob Geiger, I could see the holes or things I didn't know.

00:54:17.000 And I was able to sit with him.

00:54:19.000 Talk about throwing a football with Thompson.

00:54:21.000 You know, talk about taking the dog to the beach, like all these other things.

00:54:23.000 The football thing is an interesting thing because he was obsessed with football and that's one thing that he shared in common with Nixon.

00:54:30.000 And so when they went, one time they were going to the airport and he hitched a ride with Nixon and Nixon wanted to talk to him about football.

00:54:39.000 And he said, let's just not talk about politics when we talk about football.

00:54:42.000 And so he talked for the whole ride.

00:54:45.000 It was in 1968. Pat Buchanan had helped set it up.

00:54:48.000 They worked it out that week.

00:54:49.000 They'd become friends.

00:54:50.000 And so they come to Thompson.

00:54:51.000 They're like, all right, the boss is going to take a plane to Florida.

00:54:53.000 You can come and talk to him.

00:54:55.000 That is so crazy.

00:54:56.000 And so later Thompson said, later it was like, they told me not to talk about anything about football.

00:55:00.000 But earlier Thompson said, like, I was just really awkward. 0.98

00:55:03.000 Like this fucking guy, they're both in the backbench of a Mercury. 0.92

00:55:06.000 And so it's before Secret Service, so it's just a cop driving, and it's like Pappy Cannon in the front, and it's Thompson and Nixon, and they're right here next to each other. 0.99

00:55:14.000 And Thompson's like, well, you know, earlier in the night you'd said that, you know, the Oakland Raiders had a good shot to beat the Packers in Super Bowl II. Can you talk about that?

00:55:22.000 And he was like, Nixon's like, my good friend Vince Lombardi had told me to watch out for the AFL because they pass.

00:55:27.000 They can be very effective.

00:55:29.000 And so Thompson then, like, remembers that guy...

00:55:34.000 Bob Geiger had been a professional quarterback.

00:55:36.000 He had taken Thompson to his first football game.

00:55:37.000 And Thompson said, NFL is better than the AFL. And Geiger's like, shut the fuck up. 1.00

00:55:41.000 Let's go to a Raiders game. 0.99

00:55:42.000 And they went in 65, and the Raiders won on this beautiful pass, Tom Flores, a beautiful goal line pass.

00:55:48.000 And Nixon was saying the same thing.

00:55:50.000 And so then at that moment, at that moment, Thompson's like, oh yeah, it was the Miami guy, Miller, who'd caught the pass.

00:55:57.000 And Nixon goes, taps him on the knee and goes...

00:56:00.000 You're right.

00:56:00.000 And he goes, oh, what a beautiful moment.

00:56:03.000 And Thompson's just like, what the fuck is going on? 1.00

00:56:05.000 So Nixon, apparently, they were talking about college draft picks and all kinds of crazy shit. 1.00

00:56:11.000 Nixon was deep into it. 0.99

00:56:12.000 It was the only moment Thompson said that he knew Nixon wasn't lying.

00:56:16.000 There's one that can talk about football in that instant.

00:56:19.000 It's fascinating when people are so diametrically opposed to each other, but they find common ground.

00:56:25.000 Thompson did a great job of that.

00:56:26.000 And I think we've lost it today.

00:56:27.000 I mean, you have to listen to the other side.

00:56:29.000 If you politically want to beat somebody like Pat Buchanan, if you want to defeat his tactics, if you want to defeat him, you need to know how he's thinking and what he's doing.

00:56:38.000 Thompson knew that Buchanan was listening to the left to defeat them.

00:56:41.000 And so Thompson listened to Buchanan.

00:56:43.000 What led him to move to Colorado? 1.00

00:56:46.000 Oh, he was losing his shit in San Francisco. 1.00

00:56:47.000 It was that night on the fucking motorcycle. 1.00

00:56:50.000 But how did he choose Colorado? 1.00

00:56:52.000 So, this is a great story.

00:56:54.000 In the early 60s, Thompson had a chance to drive, I don't know, some sort of cargo, like a friend's car out to Colorado on his way to San Francisco in 1960. He ended up doing a road trip up and down San Francisco after he passed through Colorado, but he stopped in Colorado because he had to drop off a friend's car and there was a woman there Peggy Clifford,

00:57:15.000 who was a journalist and was his good friend at the Aspen Daily Times.

00:57:20.000 And she was older.

00:57:22.000 She saw him like after driving 20 hours.

00:57:24.000 She's like, hey, come in my house. 0.64

00:57:26.000 Hang out.

00:57:27.000 And she lived right in Aspen and Woody Creek.

00:57:28.000 And so then in 1963, after Sandy was pregnant, Tomson came back from South America where he was a reporter and did a wonderful job reporting on how democracies were falling apart down there.

00:57:41.000 Him and Sandy wanted to move West because the National Observer was the newspaper Tomson worked for.

00:57:46.000 They wanted to give Tomson a position to be a Western reporter.

00:57:49.000 He was thinking of going to San Francisco, but instead he chose to stop first.

00:57:54.000 Where Peggy Clifford was to stop in Aspen and Woody Creek.

00:57:58.000 And so he was living in Aspen and Woody Creek from August of 1963 to February of 1963. And he was there.

00:58:06.000 This is where Freak Kingdom begins.

00:58:07.000 He was there when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

00:58:11.000 And he's sitting in his living room.

00:58:13.000 It's 10 a.m., 11 a.m.

00:58:15.000 Pacific time, and he gets a knock on the door.

00:58:17.000 And it's this rancher named Wayne Wagner, which is an old Aspen family.

00:58:21.000 And the rancher's like, the president's been shot.

00:58:23.000 What's more?

00:58:24.000 He's been murdered.

00:58:25.000 He's dead.

00:58:25.000 And Thompson just lets out a sob.

00:58:27.000 Then he begins to fucking swear. 1.00

00:58:29.000 And then he fucking calms down. 1.00

00:58:30.000 And he goes downtown Woody Creek. 0.99

00:58:32.000 He goes to Aspen.

00:58:33.000 And he just gets notes from people what their responses are.

00:58:37.000 And so when he then went to San Francisco to become the correspondent for the magazine that he was working for, he...

00:58:50.000 We're good to go.

00:59:08.000 We're good to go.

00:59:25.000 Woody Creek is still pretty...

00:59:27.000 It's great.

00:59:27.000 But Salt and Woody Creek are great, dude.

00:59:29.000 There's a place called The Temporary.

00:59:30.000 They did an event with Juan Thompson and I did a reading at it.

00:59:34.000 And a lot of Thompson's friends were there. 0.98

00:59:35.000 So I'm like, I'm some fucking young... 0.97

00:59:37.000 I didn't know Thompson. 0.99

00:59:38.000 I'm an interloper.

00:59:40.000 I'm out there.

00:59:41.000 And it was really great to talk to everybody that knew him.

00:59:44.000 And to go through it.

00:59:44.000 And that's why this book almost killed me because I did a note for every sound, smell, or sight, or comment.

00:59:51.000 Like if I wrote, and then at that moment Thompson felt, what the fuck am I doing here? 0.91

00:59:55.000 I had the quote where he said, I looked around then and I felt, what the fuck am I doing here? 0.58

00:59:59.000 And I had that in the notes so people could see it.

01:00:01.000 And it was because I wanted those people that knew him well and respected him and trusted him to not think that I was in any way Trying anything but to make good art off of his life and who he was. 0.87

01:00:10.000 Trying to respond to my fucking view of Trump right now and my love of his work in this moment. 0.53

01:00:15.000 Why do you say it almost killed you? 0.99

01:00:18.000 It's not possible to write a narrative and then also cite every detail of the narrative.

01:00:24.000 So each day I would spend nine hours.

01:00:27.000 Researching and outlining with citations.

01:00:30.000 I wanted to write it like a novel.

01:00:31.000 I wanted to be like, you know.

01:00:33.000 And at that moment I felt like the machine oil from the bay was coming off.

01:00:36.000 I wanted to write it vividly.

01:00:39.000 I knew that I had to support all of that.

01:00:41.000 And so I would spend eight or nine hours every day just on the pure arrangement and research.

01:00:47.000 And then for the next six or seven hours or eight hours, I would write the narrative.

01:00:51.000 And then I'd sleep for five or six hours.

01:00:53.000 You know, I get up and I would do it again.

01:00:55.000 And I did this for four or five months, you know, after I was deeply into it.

01:00:58.000 And I don't think that's sustainable.

01:01:00.000 I think it's better in retrospect to go and report somewhere.

01:01:03.000 You know, to like go and be at the middle of Congress and take notes.

01:01:06.000 But to try to write something with the dramatized nature that I think Thompson wrote well and having my prose sound nothing like his.

01:01:13.000 You know, I wanted my prose to sound nothing like the way he wrote.

01:01:15.000 But then to also have almost as many pages of notes showing my work.

01:01:21.000 You know, like showing the math that went behind it.

01:01:23.000 So if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but at least you can see it.

01:01:26.000 I think that was morally correct, but I think that was too much effort.

01:01:30.000 Was it just because you were trying to do it in a short period of time?

01:01:33.000 Did you have a crazy deadline or something?

01:01:35.000 Yes, but I also, I had a year.

01:01:37.000 And so, you know, and I had a family, and I had a, I'm a professor, like, I just – I never, when it came to writing, had to do both those things, which was to try to write it in a novelistic way, but then to also make sure that any question the reader would have.

01:01:54.000 But like, why did you think that the dinner was at 5 p.m.?

01:01:57.000 Or like, why did you think the sun was coming up in this way at this moment?

01:02:02.000 Right.

01:02:02.000 To make sure, because out of respect, because what Thompson talked about was people making money off him like Doonesbury.

01:02:08.000 That's what he talked about, was people trying to make money off him.

01:02:11.000 And if I was going to write this book, it couldn't be in that space.

01:02:15.000 Didn't he have a lawsuit against Gary Trudeau?

01:02:17.000 He thought about it, I think.

01:02:18.000 I don't think he ever did it.

01:02:19.000 He talked about it publicly.

01:02:21.000 I think it was just...

01:02:22.000 Well, he became that guy, unfortunately.

01:02:24.000 That's what's really weird.

01:02:26.000 What happens when we become a caricature of ourselves?

01:02:27.000 It's really scary.

01:02:29.000 Do you know...

01:02:30.000 Well...

01:02:32.000 What's weird about it is that he kind of knew that it was happening.

01:02:37.000 There's that famous interview where he's talking to that British guy who did a documentary about him.

01:02:46.000 Breakfast with Hunter, maybe.

01:02:47.000 No, but yeah.

01:02:48.000 One of them.

01:02:49.000 But he's rolling a joint on the grass somewhere with that Las Vegas visor on, and he's talking about how He's really become this caricature and it would actually be better if he wasn't alive anymore.

01:03:04.000 He was breaking up with his wife during that.

01:03:06.000 It was really sad.

01:03:07.000 There's a scene in that where he hides where he's at like a parking lot and he doesn't want people to see him and he's standing against the wall and people are like, come on, we got to go.

01:03:13.000 He's like, I just don't want anybody to see me right now.

01:03:15.000 It was really sad.

01:03:17.000 And I tried to take that tragedy.

01:03:19.000 He wrote great things afterwards.

01:03:21.000 He was a great friend to people afterwards.

01:03:22.000 Ron Whitehead, this wonderful poet from Louisville, was a dear friend of his all through his life.

01:03:28.000 But the tragedy of how much effort he put out.

01:03:30.000 If we want to write about Trump, if you want to go after like Taibbi did about the financial institution, The way Thompson did it was to kind of wager time later for time now.

01:03:40.000 And he talks about that.

01:03:41.000 What do you mean by that?

01:03:52.000 By burning the candle so brightly at this instant, because I believe I need to go after these moments.

01:03:56.000 And later, I'm not going to have it.

01:03:58.000 But I'm making that gamble.

01:03:59.000 I'm putting the card down right now.

01:04:01.000 And I think that's terrifying.

01:04:02.000 And I also think that he gave us brilliant writing over one of the most remarkable spans in American history because of it.

01:04:08.000 That's a weird tradition in journalism, right?

01:04:11.000 To destroy your body while creating your art.

01:04:13.000 And I think there's a, according to my friends who are journalists, there's a big problem with Adderall today.

01:04:19.000 And there's a lot of people that are using it to write. 0.98

01:04:23.000 And it's fucking speed and, you know, you get addicted. 0.98

01:04:28.000 I mean, Adderall makes everything in front of you closer. 0.99

01:04:30.000 Have you done it?

01:04:31.000 Yeah, so my first book was called Hyper, A Personal History of ADHD. So it was about being medicated as a child.

01:04:36.000 You were medicated as a child?

01:04:38.000 Yeah, like having pills forced down my throat.

01:04:39.000 How old were you?

01:04:40.000 Six when I took Ritalin for the first time. 1.00

01:04:42.000 Fuck, man. 1.00

01:04:43.000 I had a suicidal moment at like six years old. 1.00

01:04:46.000 What?

01:04:46.000 The first time.

01:04:47.000 You were six?

01:04:48.000 You wanted to commit suicide?

01:04:49.000 I held like a butter knife to my wrist.

01:04:50.000 I don't remember it, but yeah.

01:04:52.000 I kind of remember it, but yeah.

01:04:53.000 And it was on Ritalin, which I've taken now as an adult, and I always feel startled when I'm on it.

01:04:57.000 If I ever take Ritalin now, I'm like, what?

01:05:00.000 I take it to write.

01:05:01.000 Like, this world is incredibly painful, so I take Adderall now.

01:05:04.000 And I take it to...

01:05:05.000 How often do you take it?

01:05:06.000 Every day.

01:05:07.000 I take, like, 30 milligrams a day.

01:05:08.000 Really?

01:05:09.000 And I take it to go into a library, and this is what David Wallace-Wells was talking about, I think, like, two days ago on the show, was how do you read really shitty academic articles where you need the information from them?

01:05:21.000 I'm not good at that.

01:05:22.000 I'm not good at even making, like, a car reservation, you know, like a car rental reservation.

01:05:26.000 Mm-hmm.

01:05:27.000 And so this world's going to be painful no matter what, but there's a functionality that Adderall allows.

01:05:32.000 And it's always a wager.

01:05:34.000 What Thompson writes about is whenever something is given, something else is lost.

01:05:38.000 You never get anything for free in this world.

01:05:40.000 Thompson understood that better than anybody.

01:05:42.000 So with him with Dexedrine, I'm not going to say Thompson was hyperactive.

01:05:45.000 I'm not going to go into that.

01:05:46.000 But Dexedrine, like, Geiger was like, yo.

01:05:49.000 You're breaking down.

01:05:50.000 Like, you're 26. You have a wife.

01:05:52.000 You have a very small child.

01:05:54.000 You're writing right now.

01:05:55.000 You want to have your career go forward.

01:05:58.000 You're not doing well.

01:05:59.000 And Geiger was like, I'm a doctor.

01:06:01.000 I had gone through med school.

01:06:02.000 You know, I'd been overwhelmed like you.

01:06:05.000 Geiger ran every morning.

01:06:06.000 You know, he did other things, but he took Dexatrine, so he gave it to Thompson.

01:06:11.000 And for that small period of time, it helped.

01:06:13.000 I mean, for me, it's like, I'm not a good researcher.

01:06:18.000 And maybe I would be now, but the only way I can write about something like Hunter S. Thompson where I didn't know him, I have no experience with him, is to read everything that he's ever written or been written about him.

01:06:29.000 And then go out and interview people.

01:06:31.000 And so effort is my only path forward.

01:06:34.000 And what Adderall helps for me is to take the pain away of that effort.

01:06:37.000 But it doesn't take it away.

01:06:38.000 It shifts it around to other aspects and other parts of life.

01:06:41.000 And I think Thompson, when he wrote, he who makes a beast of himself escapes the pain or gets rid of the pain of being a man, We don't listen to that.

01:06:49.000 He was like, this effort is hard.

01:06:51.000 He's like, I'm struggling with this effort.

01:06:53.000 I'm trying to make these beautiful things.

01:06:54.000 I always think of James Salter, a fiction writer, Aspen resident, wrote beautiful novels.

01:07:01.000 He wrote his whole life until he was 90. His last novel was at 87. He wrote a memoir at 76 about being a fighter pilot, among other things, in the Korean War.

01:07:10.000 Lyric, literary.

01:07:11.000 He did it his whole life.

01:07:12.000 He didn't burn out for a small period of time.

01:07:15.000 He's the antonym To Thompson, I think, when it comes to effort and literary work.

01:07:19.000 Right.

01:07:21.000 Do you just take it for work?

01:07:24.000 Yeah, I mean...

01:07:25.000 You don't have, like, an issue that you need to take it for?

01:07:28.000 Well, I mean, we were...

01:07:31.000 I think that whenever we have something like chemical speed, whenever we have something like alcohol, whenever we have something that's not like marijuana, or at least marijuana cuts your mania, you know, like whenever we have something else like alcohol or alcohol, Adderall,

01:07:48.000 we need to ask the question, is taking the pain away and being productive through those actually hastening your own doom?

01:07:57.000 I think with alcohol, it's very clear it is.

01:08:00.000 I think with Adderall, it's more complex.

01:08:01.000 I think if you do an amount of time release, you can make it work.

01:08:05.000 How many Americans do that out of the percent that are prescribed?

01:08:08.000 I don't know, 10%, 20%?

01:08:11.000 It's dangerous.

01:08:12.000 How often do you take time off?

01:08:15.000 I'd say maybe one or two weeks of every three or four months.

01:08:22.000 And when you do that, do you feel weird?

01:08:24.000 No, I just watch movies.

01:08:25.000 I just don't do anything.

01:08:27.000 I don't have any productivity.

01:08:29.000 I don't produce.

01:08:31.000 So the only way you produce is on speed.

01:08:33.000 The only way I produce the way I want to right now is on speed.

01:08:35.000 I didn't start taking it until 2010. Dude, it's crazy that we're talking about this because there's so many people like you.

01:08:43.000 It's so – I mean, how much of the work that we enjoy today, especially literary work, is written by people – journalistic work is written by people that are on speed.

01:08:52.000 But that's not new.

01:08:53.000 I mean, that's what Thompson and Burroughs and Southern – like, this has been – I believe that our American society, the situation I'm in, I have created a situation where I have too much work, and it's my fault.

01:09:03.000 I should not be trying to be a professor and also go report at Congress and also at George Mason in the creative writing program.

01:09:10.000 You know, and also then be hosting, like, people coming out, and also then, like...

01:09:14.000 Be trying to research something that might be my next thing.

01:09:16.000 That's too much.

01:09:18.000 And the way Thompson saw Dexedrine was that he could make reality match his effort.

01:09:22.000 So there was no longer the limit.

01:09:24.000 It was the American dream idea.

01:09:25.000 If you just put out enough effort, you'll get it.

01:09:27.000 And that's why I think he so brilliantly understood the toxicity of the American dream.

01:09:31.000 Is that the effort is what destroys you.

01:09:33.000 Just because you have a path with the effort to be rich or be successful, that doesn't mean that's a good thing.

01:09:38.000 That's what will actually dismantle you.

01:09:40.000 It's putting it out.

01:09:41.000 And I think we forget that.

01:09:42.000 Do you...

01:09:43.000 One of the things about Hunter that's really intoxicating is that his sort of self-destructive path becomes romantic when you read it and you get involved in his work and you kind of mimic it.

01:09:57.000 That's the greatest fallacy.

01:10:00.000 I think what he was trying to say with self-destruction was that this was an incredible threat to our American democracy.

01:10:06.000 I don't mean that.

01:10:08.000 There's no romanticism to it.

01:10:11.000 Well, the romantic aspect of it was that his work was fantastic.

01:10:17.000 But it was until it wasn't.

01:10:19.000 It was fantastic until it wasn't.

01:10:20.000 I mean, so he understood.

01:10:22.000 He lived within the failure.

01:10:23.000 But it was until it wasn't.

01:10:24.000 But he lived in with – he spent much more time within the consequences of that binging than he did within the success of the binging.

01:10:31.000 And that – I think he knew that.

01:10:34.000 In his letters, it's really beautiful and heartbreaking.

01:10:37.000 And in his writing, too.

01:10:38.000 I mean, I think that's what's been missed about him is there's no romanticism in self-destruction.

01:10:43.000 Right.

01:10:43.000 Towards the end, he definitely lost his productivity, and Jan Werner talked about that in the Alex Gibney documentary.

01:10:50.000 And Sticky Fingers was a great – the new book on Jan Werner has great moments of Thompson in the 70s just being kind of lost.

01:10:58.000 And I think we've got to remember that.

01:11:01.000 We have incredible times in American history.

01:11:04.000 We have times that are going to burn brightly, and it's up to each writer to decide how they'd like to burn next to it.

01:11:09.000 And if they're going to burn brightly, they may not have other times.

01:11:12.000 And that's, I think, an American thing where you can wager that bright flame, which means you may have nothing left afterwards.

01:11:17.000 But Thompson knew.

01:11:19.000 That he may have to live in, that kind of afterlife.

01:11:22.000 Juan Thompson writes about it so beautifully in stories I tell myself.

01:11:26.000 There's some footage of him when he was writing for, I forget what newspaper, was it somewhere in the Pacific Northwest?

01:11:35.000 What was he writing for?

01:11:36.000 Who's the author of Playing Off the Rail?

01:11:39.000 Google Playing Off the Rail.

01:11:42.000 There's a guy who was a journalist.

01:11:44.000 What year do you think it was?

01:11:46.000 David McCumber?

01:11:47.000 Yes.

01:11:48.000 David McCumber.

01:11:48.000 David McCumber employed Hunter for a while when David was...

01:11:53.000 I forget what publication he was working for, but there's some footage of them communicating together and, you know, just trying to get Hunter.

01:11:59.000 I was in San Francisco.

01:12:00.000 I was in San Francisco. 1.00

01:12:01.000 And Hunter's just out of his fucking mind. 1.00

01:12:03.000 I mean, he was younger. 1.00

01:12:05.000 I mean, he wasn't even that old, but he was just wrecked.

01:12:07.000 He just couldn't communicate.

01:12:09.000 He couldn't talk. 0.61

01:12:11.000 He makes a beast.

01:12:12.000 You escape the pain of articulation.

01:12:15.000 You escape the pain of saying, this is what's wrong in American society.

01:12:18.000 For him to say the way he did, one of his great essays is from 1964. It's about going to Hemingway's Ketchum, Idaho grave in Hemingway's house.

01:12:27.000 And it's gorgeous because it talks about Hemingway was a good writer, one of the best writers, when he was writing about a period he understood in the 1940s, 1930s, when there was a firmness to the reality that he could articulate.

01:12:41.000 One of the writer's goals is to give a pattern to chaos, is to give an articulation to chaos.

01:12:45.000 But what happens in the 1960s when the chaos is multiplying repeatedly, somebody like Hemingway becomes a literal relic, like his narrative no longer fits into the present that he's in.

01:12:56.000 And Thompson saw Hemingway's decline, and he wrote about Hemingway's...

01:13:01.000 What do you mean by his narrative doesn't fit?

01:13:04.000 Hemingway's idea of what America was and what a man should be fit perfectly with what I think the 20s to the 40s, what we experienced.

01:13:11.000 But I think in the early 1960s with our social upheaval of civil rights, You know, political upheaval.

01:13:16.000 Hemingway, it was confusing to him.

01:13:18.000 It didn't fit anymore.

01:13:20.000 Like, his way of operating no longer articulated the present.

01:13:23.000 And so Hemingway's last act was to take away his ability to say anything at all.

01:13:27.000 That was his only—the last thing Hemingway ever said was to say, I'm not going to say anything anymore, was the suicide that Hemingway committed.

01:13:34.000 And Thompson wrote about that gorgeously.

01:13:37.000 Yeah, when— When he was young.

01:13:40.000 When he wound up killing himself, it was almost— Unsurprising.

01:13:46.000 You know, when I read that he had died, I remember going, man.

01:13:52.000 Well, I guess, yeah.

01:13:55.000 You know what I mean?

01:13:56.000 I mean, it's like you knew that he was deteriorating rapidly.

01:13:59.000 You knew that he had really bad hips. 0.91

01:14:01.000 He had had hip replacement surgery.

01:14:04.000 The Ralph Steadman had drawn this very crazy image of him with the artificial hip.

01:14:13.000 Yeah.

01:14:13.000 It looked like pain, you know what I mean?

01:14:16.000 But I think that it's not my place to even deal with that because Juan Thompson's book writes about that moment where Juan Thompson was in the house.

01:14:23.000 And Juan writes beautifully about the stakes of it, how painful it was to the people that loved him.

01:14:30.000 Of course.

01:14:30.000 Everything about it.

01:14:32.000 Even if that's a logical outcome, that's not what needed it.

01:14:35.000 So it's interesting.

01:14:36.000 I would say read stories I tell myself.

01:14:38.000 That moment is so honestly and brilliantly written by Juan.

01:14:43.000 No, I'm sure.

01:14:43.000 But all I was getting at is that at the time of his death, he was deteriorating so badly.

01:14:56.000 He was wearing diapers.

01:14:58.000 His entire, because of his alcoholism, his ability to control his bladder was gone.

01:15:02.000 And so Juan gave this wonderful speech at George Mason when he came out.

01:15:06.000 He's like, how do you write honestly about your father?

01:15:08.000 And he asked the question of like, should I include this detail?

01:15:10.000 And he's like, if my father was alive, I couldn't include that.

01:15:13.000 But that's why I chose, in a sense, to write my book where my father was dead, because I think my father would want me to write honestly.

01:15:19.000 But also not want me to include that if he was still alive.

01:15:22.000 And so he included that detail and he talked about that, the struggle to include that detail, which I think brilliantly articulates what you're saying, which is the deterioration and the sadness of it.

01:15:33.000 And I mean, we have finite amounts of energy or effort.

01:15:35.000 We really do.

01:15:36.000 We have to take care of ourselves.

01:15:38.000 And if we don't, we will pay that price at some point.

01:15:41.000 We're going to pay it anyways.

01:15:42.000 We're all headed to the same place, whether we want to or not.

01:15:46.000 And so I think Hunter is a really terrifying and beautiful example of one wager of chips that were made for the 1960s and 1970s.

01:15:55.000 And I think the best way to honor that is to apply the brilliance that he forged and carved to the situation we have right now with corruption, Donald Trump.

01:16:06.000 An attack on American democracy.

01:16:08.000 Where American democracy is basically, it's like what Erdogan says, democracy is a train and we arrive at the station, we get off.

01:16:14.000 Like they basically use the ladder to get to the attic and now Trump's pulling up the ladder.

01:16:18.000 And I think Thompson would understand that really, really well.

01:16:21.000 And I think reading him now, whether you know him or not, helps you.

01:16:25.000 And that's why I wrote Free Kingdom was so that it can be a lens on his work going back or just on this present right now.

01:16:30.000 Regardless of Trump, I think what he really represents is a brilliant historical time capsule.

01:16:35.000 And he sort of captures that time period, that upheaval pre-internet where the world was in chaos like no one else.

01:16:46.000 He encapsulated this very strange moment in history, which I don't think is nearly as strange as the moment we're going through right now.

01:16:54.000 I think this is probably the most strange moment ever.

01:16:56.000 Yeah.

01:16:56.000 But he nailed it.

01:16:58.000 And he nailed it in a very, very unique way.

01:17:01.000 That's still today.

01:17:02.000 I mean...

01:17:03.000 Well, that was another thing I wanted to ask you about.

01:17:05.000 Why did him and Tom Wolfe...

01:17:07.000 Like, Tom Wolfe got some of his tapes from some of the...

01:17:12.000 Was it La Honda?

01:17:13.000 The Hells Angels Parties.

01:17:16.000 And some crazy orgy that was going on.

01:17:20.000 And he gave the tapes to this.

01:17:22.000 Like, what was all that about?

01:17:23.000 So, when Thompson was covering the Hells Angels...

01:17:27.000 They believed the counterculture at the left in the 1960s, 65, 66. We're talking about Ken Kesey.

01:17:33.000 We're talking about the anti-war movement, the free speech movement with Mario Savio.

01:17:36.000 They believed the Hells Angels were on their side.

01:17:38.000 They were fellow counterculturalists that are also outside of the ballgame.

01:17:43.000 And so...

01:17:44.000 Kese and Thompson were having a drink after being on KQED or some local TV show in San Francisco.

01:17:51.000 Ken Kese's background is he was a wrestler at Oregon.

01:17:53.000 He grew up on a dairy farm.

01:17:55.000 He'd come down to Stanford to write for what is now the Stegner Fellowship, but back then was the graduate program at Stanford.

01:18:00.000 He had moved up to La Honda on the success of his first book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and had just written another beautiful book.

01:18:07.000 And so Thompson was like, yeah, I'm writing about the Hell's Angels.

01:18:10.000 And Kese was like, yo, I'd like to meet them.

01:18:13.000 Thompson was like, okay.

01:18:15.000 And so Thompson knew how dangerous the Hells Angels were, where I think people either romanticized them or exaggerated their danger.

01:18:21.000 He's like, okay, I'll set them up.

01:18:22.000 And he contacted the chapter with Kesey.

01:18:25.000 So on August 7th, I think, of 1965, the Hells Angels came to LaHonda.

01:18:32.000 Allen Ginsberg was there with Kesey.

01:18:34.000 Alpert was there.

01:18:37.000 All the Stanford intellectuals were there, and they made a huge banner that says, The merry pranksters welcome the hell's angels.

01:18:44.000 And Thompson rolled up with – this isn't the Gibney documentary.

01:18:48.000 Thompson rolled up with his family.

01:18:51.000 Juan was a child, a baby in the back seat.

01:18:54.000 Sandy was in the front seat.

01:18:55.000 And he pulled up and what Thompson saw was Ken Kesey giving acid.

01:18:59.000 In red cups, like red cake cups, to the Hells Angels. 0.85

01:19:02.000 Thompson was like, well, we're getting the fuck out of here. 0.81

01:19:04.000 And so he grabs his wife and his son. 0.95

01:19:06.000 They go to San Clemente, which is on the other side.

01:19:08.000 They have like a big picnic.

01:19:09.000 And on the way back, they're like, well, let's just check it out.

01:19:11.000 Let's see what it's like.

01:19:13.000 And they kind of pull in.

01:19:14.000 He's driving this old, like, roadster.

01:19:16.000 They pull in.

01:19:17.000 And everybody's watching on a giant trampoline screen, like the five-hour stream of consciousness footage from the Merry Pranksters trip across the US, which is what Tom Wolfe wrote about.

01:19:27.000 And Tom was like, all right, they're not eating each other's skulls.

01:19:31.000 Like, we can hang out a little bit.

01:19:33.000 So they hung out, and it was interesting how acid pacified the angels instead of made them violent.

01:19:37.000 Of course that's what acid is.

01:19:41.000 We're good to go.

01:19:57.000 And Ginsburg and Thompson get pulled over by the cops.

01:20:01.000 Thompson's sober.

01:20:01.000 He's talking to the cops.

01:20:02.000 He gets a ticket because his red lens for his back taillight is cracked.

01:20:08.000 And he's like, come on, dude.

01:20:09.000 That's 300 bucks.

01:20:10.000 I can't.

01:20:11.000 I'm a journalist.

01:20:12.000 The cops are like, why are you writing about them?

01:20:14.000 And they're talking about people being taken away to jail.

01:20:17.000 And Ginsburg goes...

01:20:19.000 What's in Redwood City, man?

01:20:22.000 Thompson goes, it's called a jail, Alan.

01:20:25.000 And it goes back to talking to the cops and all of this.

01:20:27.000 And Thompson was friends with Ginsburg.

01:20:28.000 And so they go back into the party.

01:20:31.000 Tomson realizes that.

01:20:33.000 Neil Cassidy, who's blackout drunk, who is Dean Moriarty in On the Road by Jack Kerrack, that's the character on whom it was based, his two or three girlfriends, one of them is having an orgy with the Hells Angels at this cabin off to the side and Tomson sees it.

01:20:47.000 And he describes it in two ways.

01:20:49.000 When he writes about it, but he did audio notes.

01:20:52.000 So he did audio notes of step by step.

01:20:55.000 And he describes it as like just horrific where she's barely awake.

01:21:00.000 Like she's catatonic.

01:21:03.000 And they bring in Neil Cassidy to hook up with her too. 0.92

01:21:06.000 It's horrific.

01:21:06.000 And he articulates this horror.

01:21:08.000 I had a friend who's a good feminist writer who's dear to me. 1.00

01:21:11.000 She's like, You wrote about a fucking white guy, like whatever. 0.98

01:21:14.000 She's like, you did most of it right. 1.00

01:21:15.000 She's like, you excused Thompson in that moment.

01:21:17.000 You should have just let it stand and write about it in the book instead of trying to talk about how upset he was at saying it.

01:21:23.000 Thompson was really upset.

01:21:24.000 Why did she say that?

01:21:26.000 That doesn't make any sense.

01:21:27.000 Because I think she thought that I was making the experience less authentic by trying to qualify it for our current times.

01:21:34.000 But why would that be the case when you were just explaining how he felt in the moment?

01:21:39.000 No, I think I should have let him stand more instead of showing or amplifying his emotion too much.

01:21:47.000 But are you saying this based on her criticism or your own personal opinion?

01:21:52.000 No, I think that he was really upset, but I think him being really upset is secondary to whatever she was experiencing.

01:21:58.000 Right, but you're writing about him.

01:21:59.000 Yes.

01:22:00.000 So I stand by it.

01:22:00.000 I thought about that when I wrote it.

01:22:02.000 I stand by it.

01:22:03.000 What is her criticism again?

01:22:05.000 That by amplifying his upsetness, by showing how upset he was, that that's too much of an excuse for him.

01:22:11.000 Just write it where he experienced it.

01:22:13.000 What did she think?

01:22:15.000 No, no, no.

01:22:16.000 Nothing like that.

01:22:17.000 She was on point.

01:22:17.000 She felt the effort on my part to try to explain his upsetness instead of just having him be upset with one sentence and then go on.

01:22:26.000 She thought it was overriding.

01:22:28.000 I thought it was a fair criticism.

01:22:30.000 Where I overwrote it.

01:22:31.000 But long story short, Thompson goes back and he goes to Kesey and he goes, this is one of the worst things I've ever seen.

01:22:36.000 This is in the documentary.

01:22:37.000 Right, but if that's the case, then why would it be that you were overwriting it?

01:22:41.000 It doesn't seem like you overwrote it.

01:22:43.000 I always worry I'm overwriting.

01:22:44.000 It's one of my great fears.

01:22:47.000 If someone sees something like that, I think it's important that you accurately relay the emotions of the experience when they're watching a horrific event.

01:22:54.000 I mean, he did describe it as horrific.

01:22:56.000 But how much of it is my...

01:22:58.000 Cultural perception of this moment that I'm giving too much to Thompson and how much of it was what he accurately experienced.

01:23:04.000 But he talked about it.

01:23:05.000 So I think just giving his words instead of saying a little bit.

01:23:08.000 Okay, I don't know what he says.

01:23:10.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:11.000 But he goes back on his notes that night.

01:23:13.000 These are the notes he gave to Ken Kesey.

01:23:15.000 I'm sorry, these are the notes he gave to Tom Wolfe.

01:23:17.000 But he gave him the recordings.

01:23:19.000 No, I don't think there were actual recordings.

01:23:21.000 No, I don't.

01:23:22.000 I think that's what Tom Wolfe said.

01:23:23.000 No, that's what one of the documentaries said.

01:23:25.000 Tom Wolfe said he gave me the notes of it.

01:23:28.000 So he gave me the notes of what happened.

01:23:31.000 And Tom Wolfe, I know what those notes are.

01:23:32.000 Use those notes to recreate that scene in electric Kool-Aid acid test.

01:23:37.000 And so, this is why we talk about truth.

01:23:39.000 Later in life, Thompson, some biographies might have said that he actually recorded the event.

01:23:44.000 He didn't.

01:23:44.000 He went back and he took these long audio notes of like shadow and light and the horror that he saw.

01:23:49.000 No, that's what I'm saying.

01:23:50.000 He took the audio notes, the recordings.

01:23:53.000 He made the recordings.

01:23:53.000 Yes.

01:23:54.000 And then he gave those to Tom Wolfe.

01:23:55.000 And Tom Wolfe used those.

01:23:56.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:23:56.000 Exactly.

01:23:57.000 But some people have said that he put the tape recorder in the room.

01:23:59.000 No, no, no.

01:24:00.000 And that's not what he did.

01:24:00.000 That's not what I meant.

01:24:01.000 I meant he gave him the recordings.

01:24:03.000 And they're beautiful.

01:24:04.000 I mean, they're terrifying, but it's about like...

01:24:06.000 Violence and shadow and light and horror.

01:24:10.000 You know, it's a horrific scene that says Thompson's brilliance at that age. 0.65

01:24:14.000 He could, in an audio note, get the fucking images and details that he needs to express the nature of that incident. 0.59

01:24:21.000 And so Tom Wolfe used those to create it himself, but then Thompson recreated it too, or wrote about it in Hell's Angels, but in a more distant way than Wolfe did.

01:24:31.000 Yeah.

01:24:31.000 Which is crazy because he was actually there.

01:24:33.000 It's fucking crazy, dude. 0.96

01:24:34.000 That was the first time Thompson ever took acid because he was so upset. 1.00

01:24:37.000 He went to Kesey and he's like, fuck it. 0.99

01:24:38.000 I'm not a journalist anymore. 1.00

01:24:40.000 That's so horrific what I saw. 1.00

01:24:41.000 Fuck it. 1.00

01:24:42.000 He had friends that had told him that he's a personality where if he did acid to go to the bottom of the well for him, you know, this would be a really horrific thing. 1.00

01:24:50.000 And so he's like, I don't care anymore.

01:24:52.000 And instead he just walked around and like was at peace.

01:24:55.000 It's always funny when someone tells you how you're going to react to a drug.

01:24:59.000 Relax.

01:25:00.000 Right?

01:25:01.000 Because you're going to react to it how you're going to react to it.

01:25:03.000 What was it like for you when you finally finished this?

01:25:06.000 When you put the last page down and you knew you were done?

01:25:10.000 I know that you, like me, share, we have an adoration for this guy.

01:25:17.000 He's one of my, for sure, personal heroes.

01:25:21.000 I mean, the last image I wrote was one of the most beautiful things Thompson writes is something he didn't actually see was when Nixon's helicopter he saw on TV left the White House lawn.

01:25:34.000 What happens is that giant helicopter with the white top and the blue… It's wheels lose their pressure.

01:25:39.000 So the wheels are, you know, flattened at the bottom.

01:25:42.000 But as the rotors begin to bring it up, they become elongated wheels that still touch the ground.

01:25:46.000 Thompson wrote that image, and I've always loved that image.

01:25:49.000 So I was writing that, in a sense, when I was at CPAC in 2018, last year.

01:25:56.000 And I was walking out just after I wrote that in Pence's helicopter.

01:26:00.000 It was on the lawn right there.

01:26:02.000 It was lifting off.

01:26:03.000 And I saw the wheels elongate just like that.

01:26:05.000 And I just had so much respect for Thompson's ability as a...

01:26:08.000 We talk about fiction as a narrative writer to detail that instant, you know, and to detail the way that that elongated and went.

01:26:16.000 And to have that be the emotion of Nixon finally departing.

01:26:19.000 And so I felt, you know, I felt...

01:26:23.000 I gave it, you know, I threw as hard as I could.

01:26:24.000 I threw as many pitches as I could.

01:26:26.000 I threw for as long as I can, you know, and I hope that everybody knows it's my version of Thompson and that it's a version of Thompson written through the lens of Donald Trump, but hopefully that it's through the effort and through the detail, a version that might bring more people to Thompson while also at the same time for Thompson fans,

01:26:44.000 you know, being something that they can respect and engage.

01:26:48.000 Beautiful.

01:26:49.000 Well, thank you for writing it.

01:26:51.000 Thank you for just highlighting who this guy was, and thanks for all your work, man.

01:26:56.000 I appreciate it.

01:26:57.000 Thanks for being a good fan and for highlighting his work, too.

01:26:59.000 Your beautiful poster, we didn't even talk about it, the Aspen Wall poster that you have right in here is just so gorgeous.

01:27:05.000 Yeah, I got a hundred shit all over the place. 0.59

01:27:07.000 It's fantastic. 0.99

01:27:08.000 It's good.

01:27:09.000 Yeah.

01:27:10.000 No, I'm a diehard.

01:27:13.000 For sure.

01:27:14.000 Listen, man, thank you, brother.

01:27:15.000 I'm so happy to be here.

01:27:16.000 Thank you very much.

01:27:16.000 Thank you.

01:27:17.000 Thanks for doing this.

01:27:18.000 Tell everybody the book, where to get it, how to get it.

01:27:20.000 Freak Kingdom, Hunter Thompson's 10-year Manic Crusade Against American Fascism.

01:27:26.000 It's available everywhere on Amazon.

01:27:28.000 I'm at Tim Denevy on Twitter.

01:27:31.000 And you should check out the Gonzo Voice Twitter hashtag, which has Thompson quotes all the time, which is great.

01:27:37.000 And, you know...

01:27:37.000 There's a great guy on Instagram, too.

01:27:39.000 There's a couple of them.

01:27:40.000 Yeah, RxGonzo.

01:27:42.000 RxGonzo and the Jackalope.

01:27:44.000 He's another guy who's got a bunch of great...

01:27:46.000 And Anita Thompson does a great job on Facebook.

01:27:48.000 And, you know, if you are interested in Thompson and you don't know him, I hope you read Free Kingdom, and that's a lens on his work, you know, to organize it.

01:27:54.000 And if you love Thompson, I hope you read Free Kingdom, too, because that's a way to engage him again.

01:27:58.000 Beautiful.

01:27:59.000 Thank you everybody.

01:27:59.000 Bye.

01:28:00.000 Thank you Joe.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 13, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1264 - Timothy Denevi

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