The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2508 - Joe Eszterhas

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:08.000 Let's rock and roll.

00:00:09.000 Okay, let's rock and roll.

00:00:14.000 You need the headphones?

00:00:16.000 Never.

00:00:16.000 No?

00:00:17.000 Okay.

00:00:18.000 If it's okay with you, I know I've seen it both ways.

00:00:21.000 No, you don't have to wear them.

00:00:22.000 Okay.

00:00:23.000 You were telling me about your cane.

00:00:24.000 That cane is amazing.

00:00:26.000 It's amazing. 0.99

00:00:27.000 It's carved by the Dogon people who were in Mali. 1.00

00:00:33.000 And the. 0.91

00:00:35.000 It's a family that's been doing it for 100 years, and many of them were killed in the Rwandan Wars.

00:00:44.000 It's beautifully done, I think.

00:00:44.000 It's heavy.

00:00:47.000 And it's been a close companion of mine for many years.

00:00:51.000 It seems to be indestructible.

00:00:52.000 It's pretty awesome looking.

00:00:54.000 It looks heavy.

00:00:55.000 The Dogon people have a very strange origin story.

00:00:59.000 It's a fascinating origin story that involves.

00:01:03.000 Is it.

00:01:07.000 It involves, like, here it is.

00:01:11.000 I didn't want to misspeak.

00:01:12.000 So, here it is.

00:01:15.000 Centers on the supreme creator Ama and the cosmic journey of the amphibious water spirits known as the Noma.

00:01:23.000 So, they have this crazy cosmic origin story that's a part of their mythology.

00:01:31.000 Ama then attempted to procreate with the earth, but the pairing was flawed.

00:01:35.000 It's like a very strange descendant of the Ark, according to the Dogon traditions. 0.92

00:01:40.000 The Noma descended to Earth from the Sirius star system in a giant arc like vessel. 0.93

00:01:45.000 The vessel contained the eight original human ancestors along with the seeds and animals needed to populate the world. 1.00

00:01:52.000 Those are the dope animals.

00:01:54.000 Amazing.

00:01:54.000 It's amazing.

00:01:55.000 I didn't know that.

00:01:56.000 It's a crazy story.

00:01:58.000 I have a daughter who's a nature photographer.

00:02:01.000 She does a lot of work in Africa.

00:02:04.000 And she knows all about that stuff.

00:02:07.000 So you were telling me before we got rolling, I said, save this for the air.

00:02:11.000 That Vladimir Zelensky and his wife have seen Basic Instinct how many times?

00:02:16.000 15, at least 15.

00:02:17.000 There's a recent biography that said that, that it began when they were courting and that they had known each other before.

00:02:26.000 And one day she saw him with this tape in his hand.

00:02:29.000 She said, What is it?

00:02:30.000 And he said, Basic Instinct.

00:02:32.000 And then they saw it together and it had such an effect on them that they played it together many times, at least 15 times.

00:02:42.000 On their anniversaries.

00:02:43.000 Now, I'm not sure what that says.

00:02:49.000 I know that some people think the movies had a kind of amatory effect on them.

00:02:54.000 But the other thing that's interesting to me is if you see it 15 times, does it really fuck you up to the point where you go to war with Putin?

00:03:05.000 I mean, is that the real key to why it happened?

00:03:08.000 Well, in his defense, Putin attacked first.

00:03:11.000 Absolutely.

00:03:12.000 And I like Zelensky very much as a figure.

00:03:14.000 And I'm very sympathetic to the Ukrainians because I've got a Hungarian background.

00:03:20.000 And in 1956, the Russians devastated Hungary in a similar freedom fight. 0.63

00:03:24.000 So maybe it gave him the balls and the wisdom to go after Putin. 0.98

00:03:30.000 Maybe it just made it horny. 0.99

00:03:32.000 Who knows?

00:03:33.000 Might have nothing to do with the war.

00:03:34.000 Might not. 1.00

00:03:35.000 You made some crazy fucking movies, man. 1.00

00:03:37.000 You really did. 0.99

00:03:39.000 Well, there are 18 of them that have been made, and there have been like 34 scripts that hadn't been made.

00:03:45.000 So there are 16 that have been made.

00:03:48.000 And I don't know.

00:03:49.000 You know, I kid around and I say there's a twisted little man inside me who lives in some spot that I'm not sure where it exactly is. 0.99

00:03:56.000 But he's 29, born 29, he will die 29, and with anything that has a relatively strong sexual content, he wrote the fucking thing. 0.99

00:04:06.000 I'm just an old guy giving him the space. 0.99

00:04:09.000 So when the recent deal was made for a record amount of money for Basic Instinct 3, because there was a sequel to it, that was a total piece of shit and I had nothing to do with it. 0.59

00:04:21.000 But this would be 3, and my title for it is Basic Instinct Jezebel.

00:04:27.000 The Twisted Little Man put together this story that I think people will have fun with, but it continues in that same vein, and it seems to be his specialty.

00:04:40.000 So let's see what happens. 0.86

00:04:42.000 I like how you refer to yourself as like another person.

00:04:45.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:04:46.000 The Twisted Man.

00:04:47.000 There is, you know, there's a thing with little kids where they have a companion, an invisible companion.

00:04:54.000 The Twisted Little Man is my main one.

00:04:56.000 I have others, Mark Twain is one.

00:04:59.000 And interestingly, Jesus of Nazareth is another.

00:05:02.000 And these people are very, very close to me.

00:05:05.000 Twist the Little Man is a darker presence than the others, although Twain is a cross between the two of them, and I absolutely love him.

00:05:14.000 So, when you were writing things like Basic Instinct, do you really feel like you were channeling like another person?

00:05:20.000 Is that what it felt like?

00:05:22.000 Well, let me tell you the backdrop.

00:05:22.000 It felt.

00:05:25.000 I wrote it in 13 days, and I felt like.

00:05:33.000 It just poured out of me.

00:05:36.000 There is a background to it, and that is that the Catherine Trammell character and then the Nick Current character.

00:05:44.000 Many, many years before in college, I had an affair with a, I was an 18 year old kid, and I had an affair with a faculty member's wife.

00:05:54.000 It was a serious affair, and the, we, she was sophisticated, smart, beautiful.

00:06:07.000 Sassy, exactly the kind of woman I've always fallen for.

00:06:12.000 And she had a profound effect on me.

00:06:17.000 Now, at the end of the year, she moved on, and I discovered that there was a different student that she was with each year, and that her husband looked the other way.

00:06:27.000 How old was she?

00:06:29.000 39.

00:06:31.000 I was a very green 18 because I grew up an ethnic immigrant kid.

00:06:31.000 I was 18.

00:06:41.000 I fell in love easily, but falling in love easily also meant a lot in terms of learning things because I was an immigrant and I really didn't know this country and I was shy. 0.93

00:06:54.000 And I learned a lot sometimes, I think, more from the women that I was together with beginning in college and through the rest of my life than I preferred the company of women always because they weren't.

00:07:09.000 armored off in male macho. 0.75

00:07:13.000 But anyway, she was stuck there in my memory.

00:07:16.000 And then when I was a police reporter, almost a decade and a half later, a decade later, at the plane dealer, I had a buddy who was a cop that I liked very much who had been involved in three or four shootings.

00:07:31.000 And when we got to know each other and we spent time drinking together and we did a lot of that, I started wondering how, if he really liked the shootings.

00:07:41.000 Was it an itchy trigger finger, or did he just get off on it?

00:07:45.000 So somehow these two characters were in my head, and I thought about them a lot, but they didn't come together.

00:07:53.000 And then, I think, thanks to the twisted little man, one day the two came together in a love story.

00:08:00.000 And that was the genesis of Basic Instinct.

00:08:03.000 And by the time I wrote it, I had thought about it subconsciously and directly for a long time.

00:08:11.000 I would wake up in the middle of the night and jot notes down, which happens to me sometimes when I'm very involved in a script.

00:08:19.000 And I wrote it in Hawaii.

00:08:21.000 I went off to Hawaii by myself.

00:08:23.000 I let the sun beat me up.

00:08:24.000 I snorted some coke.

00:08:27.000 which was an habit in those days.

00:08:30.000 And after 13 days of all of that, the other thing I did was listen to the Stones all the time.

00:08:36.000 I loved the Stones.

00:08:37.000 I loved the Blues from the time I was an immigrant kid. 1.00

00:08:40.000 And the Stones just blew everything else out during that period of time for me. 0.99

00:08:43.000 So I listened to that at the end of 13 days that I had this script.

00:08:48.000 Then I went back home to Marin, typed it up, sent it, almost sent it to my agent with the title Love Hurts.

00:08:56.000 And I was going out the door.

00:08:58.000 The twisted little man had another thought, and I raced back inside and wrote the word Basic Instinct, sent it to my agents.

00:09:04.000 They auctioned it.

00:09:06.000 Ten days later, my main agent, Guy McElween, who became my big brother and one of the people I really loved in life, everybody bid on it.

00:09:18.000 It wound up selling for a record $3 million, and then it became a towering hit.

00:09:25.000 To this day, it trends.

00:09:26.000 It's now gotten.

00:09:29.000 The critics in the beginning were critical, mildly critical.

00:09:36.000 No, actually, the critics were really after the movie.

00:09:38.000 And then through the years, the critics have had a change of mind.

00:09:43.000 Isn't that funny?

00:09:43.000 Yeah.

00:09:44.000 The woman named Camille Bakabia, who is the main feminist critic who went up against the movie very strongly recently, not recently, but in the past five or ten years, has come around and said that the movie is the example of – it's a post-feminist classic, she says.

00:10:02.000 And it's about women who don't have to hide their sexuality.

00:10:06.000 That's wild that she made such a turnaround. 1.00

00:10:09.000 Yeah.

00:10:10.000 I wonder did you ever have a conversation with her?

00:10:14.000 No, I've never met her.

00:10:15.000 She teaches somewhere on the East Coast and she has a towering reputation, but I've never met her.

00:10:21.000 I usually don't listen to critics.

00:10:23.000 It's through the 18 films.

00:10:24.000 I don't listen to critics.

00:10:27.000 I worked with a director, Richard Marquand, who directed Jack at Edge and The Hearts.

00:10:33.000 Excuse me, in Hearts of Fire, and we worked on another one together.

00:10:36.000 And Richard said to me that critics should be taken out into the backyard and shot. 0.75

00:10:42.000 I worked with another director, Mike Figgis, on the One Night Stand, who said that critics should be taken out of the backyard and headbutted to death. 0.83

00:10:51.000 I was sympathetic to both things.

00:10:55.000 It's so wild that your views were formed by this relationship that you have when you're 18 with an. 0.96

00:11:04.000 Older, horny, smart lady who's like, you know, kind of wild. 0.99

00:11:08.000 Yes. 1.00

00:11:09.000 And then a cop who might have been a shady cop.

00:11:12.000 Yes.

00:11:13.000 And how the two came together in this twisted thing called creativity, you know, and they come out of this maelstrom.

00:11:21.000 Now, the other thing I'm sure was an influence is by the time I did that, I'd been through four years of police beat experience covering cops two in Dayton, Ohio, and two in Cleveland.

00:11:34.000 And that consisted of, at that point, driving around in a company car that got the police radio and responding to whatever was going on.

00:11:47.000 Going on.

00:11:49.000 On occasion, you got there before the cops got there.

00:11:54.000 And then the one that really stuck in my head and got inside me was there was one with the report of a shooting in a suburb in Dayton, and I got there.

00:12:07.000 There were no cops there.

00:12:08.000 The front door was wide open.

00:12:11.000 I walked in.

00:12:13.000 I passed the body of a guy who.

00:12:18.000 who had shot himself and there was blood all over the wall.

00:12:21.000 And then a woman was his wife that he'd shot.

00:12:24.000 And I heard someone in the back of the house screaming and crying.

00:12:31.000 And I went back there.

00:12:33.000 And the thing that really got to me is she was screaming and crying in Hungarian.

00:12:40.000 And it was an old lady who was the mother's mom.

00:12:44.000 And of course, I spoke fluent Hungarian.

00:12:46.000 I grew up Hungarian.

00:12:49.000 And there was something about the scene that's with me to this day.

00:12:54.000 The other police beat experience I had, Joe, that was very moving was I covered the Glenville urban uprising in Cleveland.

00:13:03.000 It was a big one, and there were, I think, six or seven policemen shot and killed.

00:13:09.000 I was crouched behind a car on the street ducking down.

00:13:17.000 About 10 feet in front of me was a cop bleeding.

00:13:21.000 Badly bleeding, moaning, and at the same time there were gunshots coming from this apartment house.

00:13:32.000 I heard that the gunshots were coming from a group of so called black nationalists led by a man named Fred Ahmed Evans.

00:13:43.000 I knew both men from the police beat.

00:13:47.000 The cop was Hungarian.

00:13:51.000 His name was Elmer Joseph, and he would come around to the little office in the police bed all the time, and I knew him.

00:13:57.000 And the black man was named Fred Ahmed Evans, and he would come by in his dashiki sometimes at 2 in the morning because I worked the overnight shift sometimes, and we had the greatest talks, you know, drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of dope, and got to be pals.

00:14:15.000 And he was leading the group of black nationalists who had been shooting these policemen, and I was behind this. 0.99

00:14:22.000 This car's wheels a few feet away from the whole shit. 0.99

00:14:27.000 And I found the whole thing so frightening and so disturbing that I pissed my pants. 0.99

00:14:35.000 So, the four years of police, there were other incidents I covered.

00:14:39.000 The urban uprisings in Detroit, two in Cleveland, and one in Newark.

00:14:46.000 I was very involved in the civil rights movement.

00:14:50.000 And that's what I did.

00:14:52.000 I covered whatever was breaking, and much of it was dark stuff.

00:14:57.000 So, by the time that hookup happened between Catherine, Catherine Trammell, and Nick Curran, there was a lot that went into it.

00:15:06.000 Yeah, I could imagine.

00:15:08.000 Like what?

00:15:09.000 Insane life experience to be able to see all those different crime scenes and witness all that.

00:15:17.000 You know, what happened was that I happened to pick a field.

00:15:23.000 Journalism, I thought, and so did Hunter.

00:15:27.000 One of the things we became friends.

00:15:30.000 We were both poor kids, and we both dreamed of being novelists.

00:15:35.000 Novelists.

00:15:35.000 You mean Hunter Thompson?

00:15:37.000 Yeah, Hunter Thompson.

00:15:39.000 And the way that we chose to begin that was by doing journalism because no one made a living writing novels and we both had to make a living.

00:15:50.000 So the under wrote stuff for the National Enquirer and then moved on to Rolling Stone and all of that.

00:15:57.000 And I did it on a local level.

00:15:59.000 And that put us into a culture that was exploding.

00:16:05.000 The American society was exploding. 0.96

00:16:08.000 The black situation vis-a-vis white racism was horrendous.

00:16:14.000 So there was a dynamic in the country that we were on top of because of what we did.

00:16:20.000 So I saw a lot.

00:16:23.000 I saw a lot in the refugee camps because I began my seven years in refugee camps in Austria and then grew up dirt poor in an urban city.

00:16:35.000 And I saw a lot of stuff there as well that was dark and moving and profoundly effective.

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00:17:40.000 Well, also, so when you're writing, you're writing from real world experience, which is so much more effective and makes sense why your stuff was so dark and wild.

00:17:50.000 Yeah, it does make sense.

00:17:53.000 The, the, um, When I was a kid in Cleveland growing up, we lived in a very poor part of town near Westside.

00:18:04.000 There was a bar next door.

00:18:10.000 I slept on a couch in the living room that overlooked the bar.

00:18:17.000 One night, I was looking out the window, because I always was, the neon lights and Puerto Rican hookers and all of that stuff that really interested a little kid. 0.65

00:18:28.000 Who spent most of his time playing with Mark Twain, as Mark Twain said, with his pecker. 0.98

00:18:34.000 So this was all very exciting stuff.

00:18:38.000 And I was watching one day and I saw this man stab another one to death and fall down and bleed to death.

00:18:45.000 How old were you?

00:18:47.000 Twelve.

00:18:48.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:18:51.000 Yeah.

00:18:52.000 So there are reasons why.

00:18:57.000 The other thing with my scripts is almost everything in my scripts somehow comes from.

00:19:01.000 Some kind of personal tie.

00:19:03.000 You know, Big Shots, which was a little movie that was very popular with kids, came from my son Steve's experience in Marin County with a black friend and how they tried to make that friendship work.

00:19:19.000 And that's what the movie is.

00:19:20.000 It's a little movie about two kids, a white kid and a black kid, trying to become friends.

00:19:26.000 There was a movie I did called Checking Out with Jeff Daniels, and that was about the midlife crisis.

00:19:35.000 And suddenly, now in my early to mid-30s, I was scared shitless that I was going to die. 0.96

00:19:42.000 And here I am at fucking 81 talking about dying at mid-30 something. 0.96

00:19:48.000 So there was a comedic thing that came out of that. 0.97

00:19:52.000 Basic came out of where it did.

00:19:55.000 But there was almost with everyone, there was some kind of betrayed.

00:19:59.000 Came out of the notion that at that particular point, if you remember, there was all this right-wing craziness where there were militias that were shooting people and there were jamborees where the right-wingers got together.

00:20:14.000 When was this?

00:20:16.000 Betrayed, which came out in the mid-80s.

00:20:19.000 There were several incidents in Oregon and in the northwest parts of the country which got a lot of publicity.

00:20:25.000 It was before Timothy McVeigh, but all roughly in that same period.

00:20:31.000 So I decided under a false name to go to one of these jamborees and see what the hell is going on.

00:20:38.000 Essentially my journalism experience, I went into it, and then out of it I concocted this romance between Deborah Winger and Tom Berenscher.

00:20:46.000 But they all had some kind of a tie.

00:20:48.000 Telling Lies in America, which is one of my favorite little movies with Kevin Bacon and Brad Renfro, is semi-autobiographical in terms of the issues I had as a high school kid with bullying.

00:21:03.000 and all of those kinds of things, and becoming an American citizen.

00:21:09.000 They were shot, incidentally, right where I grew up, in front of the apartment house where we lived.

00:21:18.000 And I remember hearing a TV reporter in Cleveland interview, an old man was watching the shooting and saying, did you know Joe when he grew up here?

00:21:33.000 And he said, yeah, I was a bartender there. 1.00

00:21:36.000 And then he said, shit. 1.00

00:21:38.000 Joe is just a fucking refugee trying to make his way in the world. 1.00

00:21:43.000 I mean, that's really what, not a complicated thing, but that's really what happened. 1.00

00:21:43.000 He nailed it. 1.00

00:21:48.000 The only other things, nice things have been said about me through the years, but the only other thing that I really treasure and absolutely love is I interviewed Otis Redding the night before he was killed in a plane crash in Cleveland.

00:22:06.000 And we began speaking around midnight after a show at a place called Leo's Casino.

00:22:13.000 And we began talking around midnight and talked till 3 30 in the morning.

00:22:18.000 And we did a lot of beer, we did a lot of Jim Beam, we smoked a lot of really powerful Thai stuff, and had a great time. 0.98

00:22:29.000 And at the end of it, when he had to go, he said, Give me a fucking hug, and I gave him a hug, and he said, You know what you are? 1.00

00:22:39.000 He said, You're a fucking white nigger, that's what you are. 1.00

00:22:42.000 I love that. 1.00

00:22:43.000 Stayed with me all the time.

00:22:45.000 New York Times said he's a force of nature.

00:22:47.000 People said if Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Esperance? 1.00

00:22:51.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

00:22:51.000 Fuck all that. 1.00

00:22:52.000 What Otis said and what the old man said, I thought was really great. 1.00

00:22:56.000 Well, here and there, Otis Redding was such a legend.

00:22:58.000 Oh, he was great.

00:22:59.000 He died so young, too.

00:23:01.000 He died.

00:23:02.000 He was really, I was in his 30s someplace.

00:23:05.000 Listen to this.

00:23:06.000 I interviewed him and went home the next day at the plane dealer.

00:23:09.000 It was Sunday and I was working.

00:23:11.000 Literally the day after the interview.

00:23:13.000 I'm sitting there in this hall-like city room, and I see a city editor, the Associated Press wire machine start dinging.

00:23:26.000 In those days, if it had more than four or five dings, there was some bad thing that happened.

00:23:31.000 I saw a city editor come from the city desk to this dinging machine. 0.95

00:23:37.000 He's staring at it, the fucking thing is still dinging, staring at it, and then he looks at me like that in the city room, and then he looks away.

00:23:46.000 So I saw that and I got up and went to the digging machine and Otis, his plane had crashed the way to another gig and I was probably the last man who really spoke to him at night. 1.00

00:24:07.000 I left the office right then and said, fuck it for the rest of the day. 0.99

00:24:11.000 There was a bar across the street. 1.00

00:24:14.000 I drank myself silly and went home with the waitress. 0.85

00:24:21.000 Horrible.

00:24:22.000 But I saw a lot to get back to your point, Joe.

00:24:24.000 I did in different ways.

00:24:26.000 Incidentally, I tried to write a movie about Otis called Blaze of Glory.

00:24:31.000 And we put it together.

00:24:34.000 A man named John Apted was going to direct it.

00:24:37.000 And it was announced that Cuba Gooding was going to play Otis.

00:24:42.000 And the whole thing fell apart at the last minute for financing reasons.

00:24:47.000 And to this day, it's never gotten made.

00:24:49.000 But I'm a writer.

00:24:52.000 What else can I do with someone that I love that I meet except write about them in that way?

00:24:56.000 So anybody who writes interesting things the way you do has to have had some interesting life experiences.

00:25:03.000 You don't get those kind of scripts that you wrote from a sterile environment.

00:25:09.000 I agree with that.

00:25:11.000 Sometimes, not that I, after my conversion to Christianity late in my life, I wrote three Christian scripts.

00:25:25.000 And none of them were made.

00:25:28.000 And one of them wasn't made because one of the priests involved with potentially getting Christian financing said we need more incense. 0.98

00:25:41.000 And my response to somebody who interviewed me about it was I don't write fucking incense. 0.97

00:25:48.000 I write flesh and blood. 0.98

00:25:50.000 So no wonder it wasn't made.

00:25:52.000 What did he mean by you need more incense?

00:25:54.000 Well, to make it more.

00:25:57.000 him like to make and give it a sense of piety, to make it inspire the people so that they become Catholic in this specific case, and that it was too secular.

00:26:15.000 And I think what happened to me with all three is that I fell between pews, between so called Christian films and secular films.

00:26:25.000 And so that's why we never got the finance for all three of them.

00:26:31.000 When you say you fell between Christian films and secular films, you mean in the way you were writing it, that you weren't writing it specifically as a Christian film or specifically as a secular film?

00:26:41.000 The way I was writing it naturally.

00:26:42.000 It's like you wrote everything else.

00:26:44.000 Yeah, without political considerations or clerical considerations.

00:26:46.000 I was just writing it from my heart.

00:26:53.000 And that was too gritty to get Christian kind of financing, and on the other hand, too religious to get the secular financing.

00:27:00.000 That's too bad because that bridge is probably what would bring more people to Christianity where they could relate to it.

00:27:08.000 Where they can relate to it.

00:27:10.000 I agree with you absolutely.

00:27:11.000 And my argument was these could be hit movies.

00:27:17.000 Because my movies in a lot of cases have been these could be hit movies.

00:27:21.000 And that's more important than spiking people with incense.

00:27:26.000 It's interesting how Hollywood has always rejected those kind of religious films like The Passion of the Christ, for instance.

00:27:35.000 That was a huge movie.

00:27:36.000 Well, it's not just a huge movie, but in my mind, It was like a prayer.

00:27:41.000 I watch it each Good Friday.

00:27:44.000 And it was a huge movie, beautifully done.

00:27:47.000 It wasn't officially endorsed by the Catholic Church, although I saw in Cleveland a meeting where a priest organized a preview screening of the movie.

00:28:05.000 And they had like 700 people, the full hall, watching it.

00:28:09.000 There was such an interest in it.

00:28:12.000 But part of the reason I think you raise a good point because I think part of the reason it was such a towering hit was that it was real.

00:28:21.000 It wasn't incense filled.

00:28:25.000 You had a figure who bled, and you really show what happened up on that cross and how awful that kind of pain is.

00:28:25.000 It was real.

00:28:34.000 The movie really reflected that.

00:28:35.000 No, it was horrific.

00:28:37.000 There was also that Willem Dafoe film.

00:28:39.000 What was that one called?

00:28:40.000 The Last Temptation of Christ.

00:28:42.000 That's right.

00:28:44.000 It was Marty Scorsese.

00:28:45.000 I agree with that.

00:28:47.000 I love Wim Defoe.

00:28:49.000 I mean, he's one of my favorite actors.

00:28:51.000 And I liked it.

00:28:54.000 And it's also very real, historically real.

00:28:57.000 You know, the notion that Jesus of Nazareth was this Fred Rogers figure who wasn't really a real man, whereas the Bible says he was a true man and true God.

00:29:14.000 That film really showed his human side.

00:29:20.000 And my conception of Jesus, who I revere and who was one of my close friends that I speak to on most days, is that he was true man and true God.

00:29:34.000 He was a Jewish zealot, a freedom fighter against the Roman Empire.

00:29:38.000 He was crucified by the Romans.

00:29:41.000 As a freedom fighter, he hung around blue-collar guys and fishermen and hookers and tax collectors who were the lowest of the low.

00:29:53.000 Back then, as they should be now, but they were low and low back then.

00:29:58.000 And those were the people that he primarily buddied around with.

00:30:02.000 That's Jesus of Nazareth.

00:30:05.000 And that side is completely ignored by most films, except the two that you mentioned specifically that are like that.

00:30:14.000 Yeah, the last Temptation of the Christ, I don't remember.

00:30:17.000 I remember there was some controversy around it, but I was too young to really be paying attention to how.

00:30:23.000 It was the very fact that Jesus had a relationship that was clearly indicated as being sexual with Mary Magdalene, who was depicted as a prostitute.

00:30:35.000 Now, the truth, historical truth, is that Mary Magdalene was a few years older than Jesus and a woman of means who had advised Roman builders in a city called Seraphim, and then was one of the people who financed Jesus as he swept through.

00:30:57.000 Galilee and the rest of Judea.

00:30:59.000 Judea.

00:31:02.000 There's another scene in the Bible where an unnamed woman goes to Jesus and he washes his feet and then washes his feet with his hair.

00:31:16.000 This unnamed woman, by a pope in the 6th century, Gregory the Great, was picked to have been Mary Magdalene.

00:31:24.000 No connection to Mary Magdalene.

00:31:26.000 There's nothing that says that Mary Magdalene was a hooker of any kind.

00:31:30.000 And then there's no proof for that in any way.

00:31:33.000 So the fact that The Last Temptation of Christ did that and brought the two of them together in a sort of semi-love story without, of course, any real sexuality to it on film is why it was so criticized.

00:31:53.000 Scorsese's house was picketed, and I think the studio at that point was run by Lou Wasserman, whom I knew from Cleveland because he was there.

00:32:04.000 He was a.

00:32:06.000 He ran a race haywire in Cleveland before he went, but he was a legendary man.

00:32:11.000 His house was picketed as well.

00:32:13.000 So was it just Catholic people and Christian people that were upset about this? 0.97

00:32:19.000 Mostly, yeah.

00:32:19.000 But it was very unusual for a Martin Scorsese film to be a religious film, too.

00:32:25.000 Absolutely.

00:32:26.000 Like a depiction of Jesus.

00:32:27.000 People were much more averse back then.

00:32:30.000 I feel like sometimes religion goes in peaks and waves, and I think.

00:32:34.000 There was a wave of atheism back then, and Hollywood was very non Christian, to put it mildly.

00:32:42.000 Yes.

00:32:42.000 It wasn't the Christian themes and films were never promoted.

00:32:46.000 Yeah, it was absolutely right. 1.00

00:32:49.000 It's not as bad now in that sense as it was in those days.

00:32:54.000 And I think that part of it, what frustrates me is that there would be an openness to that and to Christian films.

00:33:05.000 If they were real, if they weren't full of incense and piety.

00:33:11.000 What we've done to Jesus over the years is make him a kind of Fred Rogers figure.

00:33:15.000 He wasn't that.

00:33:16.000 I'm not even sure that Jesus really said, do not resist violence.

00:33:22.000 Jesus also said, if you have a cloak but not a sword, sell the cloak and buy a sword.

00:33:30.000 He also said, I come not to make peace.

00:33:34.000 I come not to make peace but with a sword. 0.83

00:33:39.000 There's been a lot of church stuff, and especially I think Catholics are more guilty of this, to romanticize and sort of cosmeticize the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. 0.92

00:33:56.000 Well, there's always a problem when human beings add their own interpretation to an ancient story. 0.96

00:34:03.000 And do it to fit their own narrative.

00:34:03.000 Absolutely.

00:34:07.000 Absolutely, it's a great problem, but in this case, there is historical evidence on the other side.

00:34:14.000 And they simply ignore that and pretend it doesn't happen.

00:34:17.000 The Gnostic Gospels are full of so called revolutionary things.

00:34:24.000 And the truth is that the Gnostic Gospels were written 40 years, 30, 40 years after the death of Jesus, whereas the Synoptic Gospels, the ones that the churches have accepted, were written 80, 90 years after the death of Jesus.

00:34:40.000 So they had to have been taken secondhand from people who said they saw things.

00:34:45.000 Where with the previous, there's a shot that people directly saw them.

00:34:49.000 People directly saw them.

00:34:52.000 The people in the church gospels who were named like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not the people who were in the gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

00:35:02.000 Then nobody knows who wrote them.

00:35:03.000 They took with those names.

00:35:05.000 But they were not those people.

00:35:07.000 Yeah.

00:35:07.000 Really?

00:35:09.000 I had no idea.

00:35:10.000 Absolutely.

00:35:11.000 No doubt.

00:35:12.000 Even the churches admit that at this point.

00:35:18.000 Two thousand years is such a hard time.

00:35:20.000 Time for us to conceptualize, to put into our head as to how much time has passed.

00:35:25.000 Yes.

00:35:27.000 To try to get an accurate understanding of what was going on back then is insanely difficult.

00:35:33.000 I have become a, since my sort of conversion to Christianity, and I would style myself a devout Christian, but not a devout Catholic, even though I go to Mass, and I love the Mass and believe in it.

00:35:49.000 But since 2001, When this process really began, I became a real student of the historical Jesus.

00:36:01.000 And I learned more and more, and I'm more and more astounded at what's been done to cosmeticize this man who was Jesus of Nazareth.

00:36:14.000 Well, it's also, he had some of the most profound and insanely resonating teachings, like even today.

00:36:24.000 The words that he spoke 2,000 years ago, there's still today people, I mean, they resonate with people.

00:36:33.000 And if you live your life by the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will be a better person.

00:36:38.000 Yes, you will.

00:36:39.000 It is a great framework to live your life.

00:36:41.000 Yes.

00:36:42.000 Which is incredible when you think about a person that lived so long ago.

00:36:47.000 He is a much better person to pick as your imagined companion than Mark Twain.

00:36:56.000 Your imagined companion.

00:36:58.000 Let me ask you this because I had a long conversation with Mel Gibson about this.

00:37:02.000 What do you think about the Shroud of Turin?

00:37:05.000 Well, there was a study done, a major study that was done by the Catholic Church led by John Paul II, whom I really admired and read a lot about through the years.

00:37:23.000 This is a scientific study.

00:37:27.000 Discovered that the Shroud of Turin came from 1313 or 1320.

00:37:34.000 Now, this is a huge controversy about it, and there are those people who feel that that absolutely is Christ.

00:37:41.000 I must say that when I look at it, when I look at that figure, and I've done that a lot, and in my house we have several blow ups of Turin's Christ, it's very, very moving.

00:37:57.000 But the evidence, what there is, seems to indicate that it comes from the 1300s.

00:38:05.000 Yeah, I've seen that as well.

00:38:06.000 But then I've also seen people that say that that evidence, there's some controversy about that evidence.

00:38:13.000 And that some of the cloth they believe dates to far earlier, and it's the type of cloth and the way it's made seems to indicate that it's far older.

00:38:13.000 Yeah, there is.

00:38:23.000 I don't know how much of the cloth they've carbon tested.

00:38:28.000 You know, that is also an issue.

00:38:30.000 And whether or not it had been repaired, whether or not there had been additional pieces.

00:38:35.000 I don't either.

00:38:37.000 Ultimately, when I look at that, when I look at that Jesus, and I've done that quite a bit, that face really moves me.

00:38:37.000 But you know what?

00:38:47.000 So, in a sense, I don't give a shit. 0.98

00:38:48.000 At the very least, it's an insanely compelling piece of artwork. 0.99

00:38:52.000 Absolutely.

00:38:52.000 At the very least.

00:38:54.000 But there's also a lot of very strange mysteries as to how that was created in the first place because it's not a die and they're not exactly sure what caused that image to appear or how, if that is a piece of art, they don't know how that art was created.

00:39:13.000 And the fact that they really only could see the accurate representation of it once they saw it as a negative.

00:39:19.000 Is also very interesting because who's going to make a piece of art where you can only really appreciate what it looks like when you see it as a negative?

00:39:27.000 Especially when you're talking about something that you're doing, you're making something in the 1300s, hundreds of years before photography is ever created.

00:39:35.000 So, what are you making and why is it so compelling when you look at it in the negative?

00:39:41.000 And if you're talking about something that was created by an insane burst of energy, which is what the proponents of the Shroud of Turin being legitimate think, they think it was created by this insane burst of energy on Jesus' resurrection.

00:39:55.000 I'm agnostic on it.

00:39:56.000 I have no idea whether it's real or not real, but I find it fascinating that they have no real explanation as to how it was created.

00:40:08.000 I'm pretty much of a complete ignoramus on anything that has to do with science.

00:40:14.000 I've launched algebra and geometry and even biology, although I caught up with biology from personal experience, but I just don't know.

00:40:23.000 It doesn't matter to me ultimately because I'm moved when I look at that.

00:40:27.000 When I pray before that image and I look at it, I moved.

00:40:32.000 So, as far as I'm concerned, for me, it's real.

00:40:37.000 It may not be for other people.

00:40:39.000 Well, like I said, at the very least, it's an insanely compelling piece of art.

00:40:44.000 But the thing that I don't want to dismiss the possibility that it's real because I'm fascinated by just the mystery of how it was.

00:40:44.000 Absolutely.

00:40:52.000 Can you pull up an image of the negative version of it?

00:40:58.000 I was trying to look up a bunch of stuff you guys are talking about, though, and there's no.

00:41:01.000 Answers for any of the stuff you're saying.

00:41:02.000 There's no answers in terms of why.

00:41:04.000 I was looking for an accurate recreation someone's made in the last 200 years and doesn't seem to be one.

00:41:11.000 No, no one has.

00:41:15.000 Yeah, when you look at the image and you realize that this is an actual negative of the original shroud, you stop and think, well, what would someone do?

00:41:29.000 If this is the negative, how would you create that as a positive?

00:41:33.000 Can you show me also the positive image of it?

00:41:36.000 What it actually looks like.

00:41:37.000 Okay, so here's this is one image.

00:41:41.000 So this is what it actually looks like.

00:41:42.000 This is the actual shroud.

00:41:45.000 And when you look at that, you go, okay, I see like shadows.

00:41:49.000 It's very interesting.

00:41:50.000 And then switch over to the negative, and it all comes to life.

00:41:54.000 And there's marks from the lashes, from the whip marks.

00:42:01.000 There's blood stains from where the rods went through his wrists.

00:42:06.000 It's very fascinating.

00:42:07.000 Yeah, it sure is.

00:42:09.000 And again, this is not dye.

00:42:12.000 It's not ink.

00:42:13.000 And they don't really know how it was made.

00:42:16.000 And again, no one has been able to recreate this.

00:42:21.000 The cloth was made most likely from a loom that wasn't invented until like the 1300s.

00:42:28.000 That doesn't necessarily mean that's where it for sure came from, though.

00:42:28.000 Okay.

00:42:33.000 Right, right.

00:42:35.000 But here's the image.

00:42:38.000 This is like, how was the image transferred to the cloth?

00:42:40.000 You know, does anybody have any idea?

00:42:40.000 I asked.

00:42:42.000 I've seen a video where someone gave some sort of scientific explanation, but I don't know if I could remember how to find it right now.

00:42:48.000 Says it behaves like a photographic negative and shows some 3D information, which is unusual for normal artwork.

00:42:55.000 The chemical theories that body heat, sweat, or vapors reacting with the cloth, for example, ammonia or lactic acid from sweat, may have been proposed, but don't reproduce the shroud's sharp, non blurry details.

00:43:10.000 Simple heat or scorch theories likewise fail to match.

00:43:14.000 The very shallow, non burned discoloration of the fibers.

00:43:18.000 Human or man made image theories.

00:43:23.000 Painting or rubbing from bas relief has been tested, but studies have not found pigments in the amounts or patterns that would explain the image, and there's no clear brush strokes.

00:43:33.000 Primitive photography.

00:43:34.000 Some suggest that a medieval camera using light sensitive silver salts and lenses could have projected a body or statue onto the cloth, and experimental replicas show that it's at least physically possible, though historically speculative.

00:43:47.000 And now here's the weird one.

00:43:49.000 Radiation bursts of energy theories.

00:43:51.000 Some researchers argue that a brief, intense burst of ultraviolet or similar radiation from the body could have discolored only the top fibrils, producing a non contact image even where cloth and body didn't touch.

00:44:08.000 Proponents sometimes link this to Jesus' resurrection, but the needed radiation, billions of watts, without burning the cloth, is far beyond anything observed in nature.

00:44:19.000 And this remains a speculative, face based idea rather than an established physical mechanism.

00:44:25.000 In short, there's no consensus mechanism, the image transfer process is still unexplained, and every proposed method has serious problems when tested against the cloth's measured properties.

00:44:36.000 Wild.

00:44:37.000 Amazing.

00:44:38.000 I mean, there's no other piece of artwork that's that fascinating.

00:44:43.000 Because every other art, Michelangelo's work, you know, and all this incredible art, it's art.

00:44:49.000 You see what they did, there's brush strokes, there's.

00:44:52.000 Chisel marks, they made incredible sculptures, but it's clearly man made art.

00:44:59.000 This is a different thing.

00:45:00.000 It's a very strange thing.

00:45:02.000 If you can't recreate it today, if they could recreate it today, people would be doing it.

00:45:06.000 They'd be making their versions of the Shroud of Tyrone.

00:45:08.000 Absolutely.

00:45:09.000 I don't know if that's been done historically, but whether some nutbag has decided to do business over recreating the Shroud of Tyrone.

00:45:20.000 Did they carbon test it?

00:45:22.000 What are the arguments that it's older?

00:45:25.000 Because I do know that there have been some very recent arguments that the testing was incorrect and that it's older.

00:45:32.000 See if you can find out what that is.

00:45:35.000 Whether or not AI, whether Perplexity, our sponsor, has some sort of a bias.

00:45:42.000 The thing is, it's like pulling from all these, when you get an AI response to something, it's pulling from all these articles on the web.

00:45:51.000 Either a hoax or an elaborate version.

00:45:57.000 The only carbon dating seems like it happened in 1988, so I don't know that they've done it.

00:46:02.000 Supporters of an earlier date argue that the 1988 radiocarbon results, 1988 is a long time ago, sampled an anomalous or contaminated area and that other historical and scientific clues point to a much older cloth.

00:46:15.000 Okay, what are the scientific arguments?

00:46:17.000 Contaminated repair samples.

00:46:19.000 Some research claim the 1988 test piece came from a rewoven or heavily handled corner, so its carbon date reflects medieval repairs.

00:46:27.000 Repairs, not the original cloth.

00:46:30.000 Alternative dating methods X ray or crystallographic aging of linen fibers has produced dates compatible with the first century, though these methods are newer and not widely accepted as definitive.

00:46:46.000 Pollen and dust analysis reports pollen grains and mineral dust consistent with the first century Middle East rather than only medieval Europe, which proponents say supports a much older origin.

00:46:58.000 Some argue that the image's microscopic features and burst of energy type characteristics require technology or phenomena unlikely in the Middle Ages, implying an earlier extraordinary event.

00:46:58.000 Image properties.

00:47:12.000 Well, why don't they do a retesting?

00:47:17.000 They probably don't want to know that it actually is from the 1300s.

00:47:21.000 John Paul, too, really believed in it.

00:47:26.000 He went to see it in Turin several times.

00:47:29.000 He said he was moved by it.

00:47:30.000 That's when they launched this.

00:47:32.000 Big Vatican investigation.

00:47:34.000 He never said in any way that he agreed with the investigation.

00:47:38.000 It just seemed to drop the whole issue.

00:47:41.000 From what I know, it never went any further.

00:47:44.000 But he visited it twice, went out of his way.

00:47:47.000 Where is it?

00:47:48.000 It's in Tarentia.

00:47:49.000 I was looking up that too.

00:47:51.000 It's currently in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud.

00:47:55.000 So here's interesting who found it and when and why or whatever.

00:48:02.000 The 1350s, rather, in Leary, a village in France, where the knight Geoffrey de Charnay displayed a cloth claimed to be Jesus' burial shroud.

00:48:13.000 How he obtained it and where it was between the first century and the 14th century are unknown.

00:48:18.000 Later theories trace it speculatively through Edessa and Constantinople.

00:48:26.000 I can't never say that.

00:48:27.000 Constantinople.

00:48:29.000 But these links are debated.

00:48:31.000 Interesting.

00:48:32.000 What does it look like?

00:48:33.000 How is it displayed?

00:48:36.000 That's how it's displayed?

00:48:37.000 Constantinople was named after Constantine, who was the first Roman emperor who made Roman Catholicism the national religion.

00:48:47.000 Right.

00:48:49.000 Wow.

00:48:50.000 So you can go check it out.

00:48:53.000 And how big is it? 0.80

00:48:55.000 Boy, they got that sucker walled off, huh? 0.94

00:48:58.000 From my impression, Joe, this was over the length of Jesus' body. 0.98

00:49:04.000 Right.

00:49:04.000 So it's longer than certainly I expected.

00:49:07.000 Well, you can see it's both sides.

00:49:09.000 So apparently.

00:49:10.000 Folded over.

00:49:13.000 I wonder what all those markings are, those small triangle markings.

00:49:17.000 Like, what is all that?

00:49:18.000 Like these things?

00:49:19.000 Yeah.

00:49:21.000 One other picture was pointing those out.

00:49:23.000 It might be the burn marks that it was saying, that there's burn marks on it.

00:49:28.000 And again, it's 2,000 years old in theory.

00:49:32.000 Just imagine if it's real.

00:49:34.000 It's like I never want to dismiss the possibility that it's real because imagine if it is real.

00:49:34.000 That's the thing.

00:49:39.000 That is crazy.

00:49:40.000 I absolutely agree with you.

00:49:42.000 And in my mind, it's real and I pray to.

00:49:46.000 And I try not to worry about whether it's real or not.

00:49:48.000 I know that I'm moved.

00:49:50.000 And that's good enough for me.

00:49:52.000 What led to your conversion to Christianity? 0.85

00:49:55.000 I mean, from a guy making these wild, insane movies? 0.86

00:50:00.000 Jamie, could I ask you for some water?

00:50:01.000 There's water right here.

00:50:02.000 Oh, great.

00:50:03.000 Thanks.

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00:51:12.000 How long ago did you convert to Christianity?

00:51:15.000 Well, I grew up Catholic.

00:51:17.000 I was an altar boy when I was a kid.

00:51:21.000 I knew one really great priest in my life who helped me with my life.

00:51:26.000 I became a lapsed Catholic.

00:51:29.000 And then when, at the tail end of living in L.A., in Malibu actually, I was hugely successful as a screenwriter, of course. 0.99

00:51:48.000 Be interviewed all over the place, and people were stealing mail from my mailbox and all that shit.

00:51:53.000 And I should have been overwhelmingly happy with that, but something was missing, I felt. 0.83

00:51:59.000 And I couldn't really put my finger on what that was, but something was missing in my life.

00:52:05.000 And then I got throat cancer, stage four throat cancer.

00:52:13.000 Shortly after we moved back to Cleveland, from Malibu, and the The Cleveland Clinic and a surgeon named Marshall Strom did a surgery that they had never done in this country, that was done in Switzerland, where they took a muscle from the left side of your neck and attached it to your larynx.

00:52:34.000 Stage four was very dicey and he was very honest with me about how dicey it would be.

00:52:40.000 He did it spectacularly and here I am at 81.

00:52:47.000 But in the course of all of that, when I was When I was terrified and really frightened from one day to the other, I ran across Jesus reading, and partly Naomi's influence, because Naomi also grew up Catholic and she had a very strong faith.

00:53:18.000 And then I went to church a couple of times, and I loved the Mass.

00:53:24.000 the mass itself.

00:53:26.000 In the course of recovery, and it was about a three-year recovery, for some time I couldn't speak, and then I spoke like Brando, and then I squeaked.

00:53:38.000 In the course of my recovery, I did everything I could physically to help.

00:53:43.000 I jogged and walked and did all of those things, and I recovered.

00:53:49.000 And I felt afterwards that the reason I was able to be to stage four cancer had to do with my prayer life.

00:53:58.000 And then I started reading voraciously about Jesus of Nazareth, the apostles, all of that ancient Jewish history, Catholic history, and some of that really moved me as well.

00:54:16.000 So I started going regularly to church with Naomi, and then as the boys were boarding with the boys as well.

00:54:26.000 And as time went by, excuse me.

00:54:30.000 As time went by, I also started having issues with the Catholic Church.

00:54:39.000 I continued going to the Mass because that was a very special thing to me, but I had issues with the history of anti-Semitism in the Church, the issues with sexism in terms of not allowing women to be priests, the issues with the Pope making so-called infallible decisions.

00:55:04.000 And I just shut most of that off.

00:55:07.000 Although in the process of it, my Christianity didn't suffer at all.

00:55:13.000 But sometimes I felt like I was becoming a kind of an agnostic Catholic.

00:55:21.000 And my faith in Christ, even as all of that happened, is unflagged.

00:55:27.000 I still pray to Jesus, very specifically to Jesus.

00:55:32.000 And he continues to be. major important figure in my life.

00:55:38.000 So your issues were with the organization as the Catholic Church.

00:55:42.000 Yes.

00:55:44.000 I respected Martin Luther's revolution because he revolted against those same kind of issues.

00:55:53.000 But the, as I said, the mass continued to hold me.

00:56:00.000 Worship is terrific and I really believe in it.

00:56:03.000 I actually, the kind of worship that really moves me is black spiritual worship.

00:56:10.000 Full scale emotional, I give myself to you, Jesus, kind of worship.

00:56:17.000 And I felt I didn't want to really switch religions because I had my basic Christianity, and that continues to be important to me.

00:56:27.000 So you felt moved by like Baptist, Black Baptist?

00:56:32.000 Black Baptist, the old emotional throw up your arms and say, okay, here I am, take me, Lord. 1.00

00:56:38.000 It definitely seems a lot more fun. 0.74

00:56:40.000 It's fun.

00:56:40.000 They look like they're having way more fun.

00:56:42.000 It's fun.

00:56:43.000 I also have been very fortunate through the course of my life to have black friends and to share the black culture.

00:56:50.000 I was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. 0.99

00:56:53.000 I had a shotgun stuck in my belly by a deputy who'd been indicted for killings and told to get the fuck out of Neshoba County. 0.98

00:57:02.000 I had the good fortune to have lunch with the Reverend Martin Luther King. 0.99

00:57:05.000 Oh, wow.

00:57:07.000 I knew Stokely Carmichael.

00:57:08.000 What was that like?

00:57:10.000 Well, it was the most amazing thing.

00:57:12.000 He was in town.

00:57:13.000 because of the depth of a minister in a protest.

00:57:20.000 And it was an unheralded appearance, and I think it was partly before he became the towering international figure.

00:57:30.000 And he was heading back to the airport, and he couldn't find his ride.

00:57:37.000 And I happened to be right there, and I said, I can drive you, Reverend King.

00:57:41.000 I looked at the watch, and he said, okay.

00:57:44.000 So we get in the, on the way to the airport, he said, are you hungry?

00:57:48.000 I'm hungry.

00:57:49.000 Can we stop someplace?

00:57:50.000 I said, sure.

00:57:51.000 So we did, and what amazed me about the man is that he was more interested almost in hearing about my refugee camp experiences and what that was like and how that worked and all of that.

00:58:06.000 He said he didn't know much about it than he was talking about the Civil Rights Movement.

00:58:14.000 He was very, very moving and a powerful figure.

00:58:17.000 Then I just drove him to the airport, but there was something about the man that was absolutely magnetic.

00:58:25.000 you know, that I felt.

00:58:27.000 Clearly.

00:58:28.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:58:29.000 But then I also, when I was in college, I had a relationship with a young black woman.

00:58:35.000 And that brought me much closer to the black culture. 0.99

00:58:39.000 I mean, as I was an ethnic fucking kid, you know, a refugee. 0.99

00:58:44.000 And I certainly needed lessons in that whole cultural area, and I got them. 0.98

00:58:48.000 And then I sought them out.

00:58:50.000 And when I was at Rolling Stone, Huey Newton was over in Oakland and he would come over sometimes. 0.98

00:59:01.000 I think partly, I'd partly suspect, because at Rolling Stone, we had some of the most beautiful women in the world working there. 1.00

00:59:09.000 We did have air conditioning and when it got real hot, they didn't wear a top at all. 1.00

00:59:14.000 So what about that spread?

00:59:16.000 So it was sort of funny.

00:59:17.000 They were topless?

00:59:18.000 They were topless when it got real hot.

00:59:20.000 What year was this?

00:59:21.000 Was it in the 60s?

00:59:22.000 I was at Rolling Stone from 71 to 76.

00:59:26.000 I was right in there.

00:59:26.000 Wild times.

00:59:29.000 In the years where the Cultural Revolution was exploding, the Women's Revolution was exploding, and to be at Rolling Stone at that time was like being in the vortex of all of that.

00:59:47.000 It was just a crazy time. 0.57

00:59:53.000 The Sexual Revolution was at its absolute height. 0.77

00:59:58.000 I've always said to you, I've always Really love smart, sassy, sexy women.

01:00:04.000 And the whole office was filled with them. 0.99

01:00:06.000 Oh, I'm sure.

01:00:07.000 What year was the birth control pill invented?

01:00:09.000 I have no idea.

01:00:10.000 Let me guess.

01:00:12.000 65.

01:00:14.000 Right?

01:00:15.000 64.

01:00:16.000 Let me guess.

01:00:18.000 I'm just taking a wild swing.

01:00:20.000 I have no idea.

01:00:22.000 Approved by the FDA and introduced to the market in 1960.

01:00:25.000 68?

01:00:26.000 60.

01:00:27.000 1960.

01:00:29.000 Interesting.

01:00:31.000 Yeah, well, that had a big factor.

01:00:32.000 Right? 0.99

01:00:33.000 Because before, you know, women were in a situation where every time they had sex, they could get pregnant. 0.50

01:00:33.000 Yes, absolutely. 0.50

01:00:39.000 Absolutely.

01:00:40.000 And then all of a sudden. 0.72

01:00:41.000 But then you've got this pill that's fucking with their hormones that we found out now that women that have been on it for long periods of time, they make poor choices in terms of mates and it does a lot of weird stuff. 0.74

01:00:52.000 I mean, we're learning a lot of weird stuff. 0.86

01:00:55.000 Yeah, and also it's very dangerous for them.

01:00:57.000 A friend of mine, his daughter died.

01:01:00.000 She was 17 years old.

01:01:01.000 She was on the birth control pill and she was smoking cigarettes.

01:01:04.000 And she. 1.00

01:01:06.000 I guess smoking cigarettes and birth control pills for some people can cause blood clots.

01:01:12.000 I don't understand why or what, but that is an issue, right?

01:01:16.000 You're not supposed to smoke if you're on birth control.

01:01:18.000 See if that's still the recommendation.

01:01:20.000 Well, obviously, they tell you not to smoke, period.

01:01:23.000 But I think there's some potential complication.

01:01:27.000 Smoking while taking oral contraceptives that contain estrogen significantly increases the risk of severe cardiovascular events like heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots.

01:01:36.000 The risk is particularly high for women over 35.

01:01:38.000 Quitting smoking or using alternative birth control is highly recommended.

01:01:43.000 Yeah.

01:01:44.000 Joe, I had more fun at Rolling Stone than any other time in my life.

01:01:49.000 I bet you did.

01:01:50.000 I had Jan Wenner in here once.

01:01:52.000 Yeah, I saw him.

01:01:53.000 It was an interesting conversation.

01:01:55.000 He kept looking at us watching.

01:01:56.000 Well, he was, you know, he was Jan Wenner of 2024 or 2025, not Jan Wenner of 1975.

01:02:03.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:02:04.000 You know, not the Jan Wenner that was the editor when Hunter Thompson was writing crazy stories.

01:02:09.000 You know, it's different times.

01:02:11.000 People change.

01:02:12.000 You are a big Hunter fan.

01:02:14.000 Huge.

01:02:15.000 And I know.

01:02:16.000 And so am I.

01:02:18.000 And I wanted to talk about him because.

01:02:20.000 I really haven't had a chance to talk about him specifically.

01:02:24.000 Hunter really was the cause of my whole huge success, even as a screenwriter, let me tell you how.

01:02:32.000 I was a reporter at the Plane Dealer, and I had read Hunter, of course, when he was the National Observer, those kinds of pieces from Latin America, before he discovered Gonzo.

01:02:49.000 And I covered at the Plane Dealer, I covered at A Hells Angels shootout of a bar called Bartos Cafe in Cleveland.

01:02:59.000 And I wrote a story about it that the Associated Press picked up and put on their national wire. 0.99

01:03:08.000 And I get a note shortly afterwards from Hunter Thompson, who had read this story on the AP Wire and wrote me a note that said, and I'm barely paraphrasing, big fucker. 0.98

01:03:24.000 Now there are two of us who know how to write about Hells Angels. 0.98

01:03:28.000 That really pisses me off.

01:03:29.000 All the best on Threat Thousand.

01:03:34.000 That must have been a fun thing to get.

01:03:36.000 Oh, man.

01:03:38.000 I was as excited about that as my two sons were to meet Joe Rogan.

01:03:46.000 It was really, really something.

01:03:48.000 So, okay, time goes by.

01:03:52.000 And I got a call from Rolling Stone.

01:03:55.000 First, I do a couple of freelance pieces for Rolling Stone.

01:03:58.000 One on Kent State one year afterwards, and the other, I forgot what the other one was.

01:04:05.000 But then I get a call from the managing editor, Paul Scanlon, who incidentally was the backbone of the editorial content.

01:04:15.000 He'd come from the Wall Street Journal, and he wanted to take on the New York Times for Rolling Stone.

01:04:24.000 So then they wanted me to do a freelance piece on narcotics agents.

01:04:30.000 Corrupt narcotics agents.

01:04:32.000 So I go out there and I discover that Hunter had been after them to hire me because of that piece.

01:04:40.000 And they kept saying he was a good guy and all of that.

01:04:44.000 Then when I met Rolling Stone, I write a book called Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse that Hunter loves.

01:04:53.000 By now we know each other and we're friends and we enjoy each other's company.

01:05:00.000 And I write this book and Hunter.

01:05:04.000 Gets me as agent, who is the top literary agent in the country, and then gets me as publisher, which is Random House, to publish it.

01:05:13.000 And then to boot, blurbs it when the book comes out.

01:05:19.000 And somebody, a United Artist, sees it.

01:05:21.000 Oh, and then the book becomes a finalist for the National Book Award, one of four finalists.

01:05:25.000 Wow.

01:05:26.000 Okay.

01:05:27.000 So somebody, a United Artist, reads the book, reads because she reads all the finalists, reads the book, calls me out of the blue.

01:05:35.000 And says, You've got really cinematic talent.

01:05:39.000 Have you thought about writing a script?

01:05:41.000 And I said, No, I haven't.

01:05:42.000 And I go to meet them, and they hire me, and I write Fist.

01:05:45.000 All of that, which led to my success in the screenplays and in the cinema, was thanks to Hunter.

01:05:53.000 Wow.

01:05:53.000 And the friendship we had was, I never, our friendship was in San Francisco.

01:05:59.000 He lived in Woody Creek, and he would come to town.

01:06:04.000 Our friendship was in town.

01:06:07.000 But we ran a lot together.

01:06:09.000 We enjoyed each other.

01:06:10.000 We drank together.

01:06:12.000 We both liked drinking.

01:06:15.000 On occasion, we would.

01:06:17.000 Good story.

01:06:18.000 We would go down. 1.00

01:06:19.000 San Francisco is famed for its stripper barred area, I think around O'Farrell Street and stuff.

01:06:25.000 And he and I went down there together.

01:06:27.000 There was a famous stripper show in one of those clubs.

01:06:32.000 And one of the times we'd get down there, he, of course, would take acid before every trip down there.

01:06:37.000 I wouldn't do acid, but I did acid once, and Hunter wound up holding me for an hour.

01:06:44.000 But I was the guy from Cleveland, right?

01:06:46.000 Which he always would, you know. 1.00

01:06:48.000 We'd say, oh, you're from fucking Cleveland. 0.99

01:06:51.000 Anyway, I would snort some lines and we'd go down there. 0.99

01:06:56.000 And we were waiting for about an hour. 0.90

01:06:59.000 And, you know, the place is filled, but the girls haven't come out. 1.00

01:07:02.000 And Hunter suddenly gets up, hurls his arms up in the air, and says, where's the pussy? 1.00

01:07:08.000 We want pussy, right? 0.99

01:07:14.000 I don't like great memories in my life, you know. 1.00

01:07:17.000 Settle him down and all of that. 1.00

01:07:20.000 And then when they finally started coming, a very loud echo, finally, finally, pussy. 0.99

01:07:27.000 He was a larger than life, no doubt, colorful figure, but also what he was. 0.99

01:07:35.000 And then I discovered this.

01:07:38.000 And he didn't really share this with that many people.

01:07:41.000 He was very, very well read.

01:07:45.000 He had a whole other side that was very sensitive and Unhippie like side.

01:07:54.000 I saw it most clearly once.

01:07:57.000 I was married at the time to a former reporter at the plane dealer who was very, very straight and really rejected the whole hippie thing and worked in California for a small suburban paper.

01:08:12.000 And Hunter had never met her but had heard of her.

01:08:17.000 He said, I'd really like to meet her.

01:08:18.000 So we asked him to dinner.

01:08:20.000 And Hunter came to dinner at our small.

01:08:23.000 tiny apartment in Novato and my wife at the time cooked a Hungarian chicken paprikash dinner.

01:08:35.000 Okay, it's Hungary's most famous meal.

01:08:38.000 And he sat there with us and what I discovered was that the boy from Kentucky was there underneath all of that firepower and all of that larger than life behavior.

01:08:53.000 He was sensitive and quiet.

01:08:56.000 And they got along like gangbusters.

01:09:00.000 And actually, interestingly, when I drove him, after dinner I drove him back to town, for the ride back he berated me because I was having an affair with what he called this hippie chick. 0.99

01:09:16.000 He said, you have this wonderful wife here and you're fucking around with this hippie chick. 0.99

01:09:21.000 I mean, true beration and anger and all of that. 1.00

01:09:25.000 He had that side as well.

01:09:27.000 Yes, he did.

01:09:29.000 If we had breakfast, it was at four in the afternoon.

01:09:33.000 And what he ordered were four margaritas, six beers, and maybe, maybe toast with scrambled eggs.

01:09:42.000 And in that sense, he had more tolerance than anyone that I'd ever seen.

01:09:48.000 And my tolerance in those days, for boots especially, was also very high.

01:09:54.000 But I'd never seen anybody quite like him.

01:09:56.000 He had a great sense of humor.

01:10:01.000 As many, many years later, he wanted me to write the screenplay for Rum Diary.

01:10:12.000 And I hadn't seen him in a long time, and I had just met Naomi, of course, to whom I've now been married 32 years.

01:10:20.000 And he wanted me to go to Aspen so that we could talk about it.

01:10:28.000 And I called Ian, and I said, listen, I'm head over heels in love with this woman, you know, and Hunter wants me to go out there, tell me the truth, what kind of shape is he in?

01:10:40.000 And Ian sort of pauses, and he says, well, He's good.

01:10:44.000 And then he's in another pause and he says, but you know, the Stones were in Denver and Mick and Keith decided to come visit him.

01:10:55.000 So between gigs.

01:10:56.000 So they hire a driver and they drive up here.

01:11:01.000 And they have a terrific time.

01:11:05.000 But they're about there.

01:11:06.000 They are about three or four hours and they've got a gig that night.

01:11:10.000 So they say, let's say we've got to go.

01:11:12.000 We've got a gig.

01:11:14.000 And Hunter gets all upset.

01:11:16.000 And says, Well, you just got here.

01:11:17.000 And they said, We've been here three or four hours and stuff.

01:11:20.000 Well, he continues to be upset and he leaves the house.

01:11:24.000 They're sitting there and suddenly they hear gunshots.

01:11:27.000 He had gone out and shot the tires out on the Stones car.

01:11:39.000 So I never took Naomi there.

01:11:41.000 I was too frightened to hear.

01:11:42.000 What year was this?

01:11:44.000 Well, let's see.

01:11:45.000 It was in 90, something, four maybe.

01:11:49.000 He said somewhere around.

01:11:51.000 Five, four, five, and then three, four, five, somewhere.

01:11:55.000 He had been going hard for 30 years by that point.

01:11:57.000 Yes, he had.

01:11:58.000 Or at least 20.

01:11:58.000 And also, the end for him, I've read and heard it was very sad because the sadness wasn't caused by the drugs, it was caused by Booth.

01:12:09.000 And he was, in Dionne's opinion, and then he saw him often in Woody Creek, and in his former wife's opinion, Sandy's opinion, it was the Booths that did it.

01:12:20.000 His body began being old and he needed a wheelchair.

01:12:26.000 He could hardly walk.

01:12:29.000 She drove him in the wheelchair.

01:12:32.000 At one time, I think in New Orleans, when they were visiting Sean Penn on a film, he actually fell out of the wheelchair in the middle of traffic.

01:12:41.000 Anita couldn't really pick him up. 0.96

01:12:46.000 So they had to get help and cars were going by and all that shit. 0.85

01:12:49.000 And then he also broke a leg when they were visiting Hawaii. 0.97

01:12:55.000 So, as he said in his suicide note, which I thought was the most gut wrenching but also terrific suicide note, it was no fun anymore.

01:12:55.000 At the Kahala.

01:13:09.000 The fun was gone.

01:13:10.000 No football, no this, no that, no fun.

01:13:10.000 Nothing was fun.

01:13:13.000 Well, when the body goes, it's hard to have fun.

01:13:17.000 And that's the problem with booze.

01:13:18.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:13:19.000 Well, the problem with many drugs, but particularly the problem with booze.

01:13:23.000 You're breaking down your body over and over and over again.

01:13:26.000 And with a guy like Hunter, he was doing it every day.

01:13:28.000 Yeah.

01:13:29.000 Every day.

01:13:30.000 Yeah.

01:13:32.000 There's a famous piece that this reporter wrote when he went to visit Hunter, and he documented Hunter's drug and alcohol use throughout the day.

01:13:43.000 You know, like six in the morning in the hot tub with champagne.

01:13:47.000 Like that's the end of the day.

01:13:48.000 Yeah.

01:13:49.000 And then him sleeping, and then him waking up and doing all the drugs and then getting ready to write.

01:13:55.000 And what was the guy's name?

01:13:57.000 Who wrote the.

01:13:59.000 There's a guy who.

01:14:01.000 Took me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons reading it out and turned it into an EDM song.

01:14:08.000 Really?

01:14:09.000 Yeah.

01:14:11.000 No, no, no.

01:14:17.000 Right, but the singer, the song.

01:14:23.000 You said the guy who wrote the song.

01:14:27.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:14:30.000 It's like an electronic dance music song.

01:14:34.000 We played it before many times.

01:14:36.000 God, I can't believe it's like Beardy Man.

01:14:39.000 This guy, Beardy Man, put it to music and it's hilarious.

01:14:39.000 Thank you.

01:14:43.000 I've got to check it out.

01:14:44.000 It's amazing.

01:14:45.000 I mean, it's a tragic story in a lot of ways, but in his prime, the writing that he did was, in many ways, it was the narration of an era.

01:14:57.000 Yes, it was.

01:14:58.000 And it was genius.

01:15:00.000 You know, there was this thing called the New Journalism, and I practiced that and so did.

01:15:05.000 People like Aja Lees and David Elverson and Larry L. King.

01:15:09.000 But then Hunter took that and created an entire new genre.

01:15:13.000 The gonzo journalism thing was his, and it was a kind of humor that just knocked you down.

01:15:20.000 And it was totally revolutionary.

01:15:23.000 And Tom Wolf said, who of course was one of the people, the founders of the new journalism, said that he was today's version of Mark Twain in terms of what he was able to accomplish.

01:15:37.000 Two books, especially, I taught the.

01:15:39.000 The Fear and Loathing in Vegas, of course, and the campaign book, the 72 campaign book, which in my mind is the best political commentary, including all of Teddy White's books.

01:15:49.000 No, it's fantastic.

01:15:50.000 Yeah.

01:15:51.000 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

01:15:52.000 Yeah, it is.

01:15:54.000 And he also had this freedom that was very different from all his other reporters because he was a one time guy.

01:15:59.000 He was going to go in there and follow the campaign for the entire time and then wrote this book about it.

01:16:06.000 But Joe, these were all staid, the shoe tie wearing reporters.

01:16:12.000 And you turn this creature loose on them on the campaign trail, and of course they all fell in love with him, and they did, because he was such a free spirit compared to what their lives were going to be like. 0.92

01:16:25.000 Well, imagine you're doing this boring thing, which is following a bunch of fakers as they're telling you how they're going to change the country, which you know they're not really going to do because you've been doing this for 20 years. 0.97

01:16:25.000 Of course. 0.97

01:16:35.000 Absolutely.

01:16:36.000 And then along comes a guy who's like, let's do acid. 1.00

01:16:39.000 Come on, pussies. 1.00

01:16:40.000 All of a sudden, you've got this fucking maniac who's. 1.00

01:16:44.000 Drinking and saying wild shit and writing wild shit, and he doesn't have to be held to the same standards as everyone else because he knows it doesn't matter. 1.00

01:16:54.000 If they never have him back again, it's fine. 0.99

01:16:57.000 I'm so sorry that Hunter wasn't here with Trump's time.

01:17:02.000 Oh, my God. 0.93

01:17:03.000 Because that could have been fucking wild and hilarious. 0.98

01:17:07.000 But there's also a part of me that says he would have liked Trump. 0.97

01:17:10.000 I know this is heresy to liberals who think that he's a.

01:17:15.000 You know, that he would have absolutely aired him and all of that.

01:17:19.000 But I'm not certain of that.

01:17:21.000 And I think that certainly in terms of his style, he would have liked things about him.

01:17:28.000 Well, I think he would have liked the fact that he's this wild character.

01:17:31.000 Absolutely.

01:17:32.000 A completely wild character that has never existed in all of presidential politics before.

01:17:37.000 There's never been anything like him.

01:17:39.000 No.

01:17:39.000 For good or for bad, there's never been a guy like him.

01:17:42.000 Look what he did today. 0.99

01:17:43.000 I mean, he had a shit fit with Netanyahu. 0.99

01:17:46.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:17:47.000 And he said, you know, you're fucking crazy. 1.00

01:17:50.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:17:51.000 You would have been in jail except for me. 1.00

01:17:54.000 I saved your ass. 0.99

01:17:56.000 What other president, for God's sakes, has ever spoken like that, not only publicly, but to us? 1.00

01:18:02.000 And in that sense, I'm proud of being a deplorable.

01:18:06.000 I'm from Cleveland. 0.57

01:18:09.000 I grew up among poor people and blue collar people, and he's the first president that didn't talk down, but talked directly to us.

01:18:20.000 Yeah.

01:18:20.000 For good or for bad.

01:18:21.000 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

01:18:23.000 I mean, He is who he is, which is very odd.

01:18:23.000 Yeah.

01:18:29.000 It's a very odd person to be talking about.

01:18:30.000 I have a lot of questions in certain areas.

01:18:33.000 The ice area bothers me. 0.99

01:18:36.000 The whole shit with the ballroom and all of that stuff. 0.99

01:18:41.000 The ballroom doesn't bother me that much. 0.99

01:18:45.000 That's, to me, trivial construction, like whatever.

01:18:48.000 The ice stuff, what bothers me is we're opening the door for militarized.

01:18:55.000 Police on our city streets.

01:18:57.000 As many people say, like, look, we got to get these immigrants out of here that are illegal.

01:19:02.000 There's a lot of criminals in this country.

01:19:03.000 There's a lot of people that are committing crimes.

01:19:04.000 I understand that.

01:19:06.000 I understand that perspective.

01:19:07.000 My perspective is not that you need to get the criminals out, it's that it is a very slippery slope when you give people, and they're trained for seven weeks.

01:19:17.000 They're not trained for very long.

01:19:18.000 They're trained for much less time than police officers, much less time than military.

01:19:22.000 And then you have this militarized police force that has no identification in there on the streets.

01:19:29.000 That's a precedent that you might like it when it's for a cause that you support, but that could easily be for a cause that you do not support.

01:19:39.000 That militarized police force could be going door to door and confiscating guns.

01:19:44.000 That militarized police force, you could find other ways where a different ruler could use this precedent in a very damaging way for our free society.

01:19:55.000 That's my perspective on it.

01:19:58.000 Yeah, I agree with that.

01:19:59.000 When they start calling people like Like the woman who was killed in Minnesota and the guy, domestic terrorist, you know, it's an abomination.

01:20:14.000 Which woman is – That woman who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis.

01:20:19.000 Oh, yeah.

01:20:20.000 And then the guy afterwards, the week afterwards, was also shot by ICE.

01:20:25.000 To call them domestic terrorists.

01:20:25.000 Yeah.

01:20:27.000 But to give credit to Trump, he got rid of Christine Holm and he got rid of that guy who was there that Tom Holman replaced.

01:20:34.000 Yeah.

01:20:34.000 Well, Tom Holman was already in charge.

01:20:37.000 That guy was in a different position.

01:20:38.000 But they did get rid of that guy.

01:20:40.000 Also, that guy had a very odd way of dressing.

01:20:43.000 That was very, like, he wore outfits that were, like, reminiscent of, like, Nazi Germany.

01:20:49.000 Like, he had this very weird coat that he would wear all the time.

01:20:53.000 And a lot of people were saying, this is a very odd choice for someone to be wearing who's being accused of fascism.

01:20:59.000 See if you can find some photos of that dude, the coats that he was wearing.

01:21:03.000 Where a lot of people, like, I had to make sure that this wasn't AI.

01:21:06.000 I was like, is this.

01:21:07.000 His real coat that he's wearing is a very strange. 0.99

01:21:09.000 I mean, not accusing him of anything, it's just a fucking coat. 0.99

01:21:12.000 Fucking coat, but it was a lot of people online were pointing out like this is a very odd wardrobe choice for someone who's in charge of, in many ways, othering human beings. 0.99

01:21:25.000 The other thing that's a problem with this whole ice thing is, and it's not the fault of the ice people or even this administration, is that many of these people were encouraged to come here. 1.00

01:21:36.000 That's what's so fucked. 0.97

01:21:37.000 Imagine if you're living in Guatemala and you're encouraged to come to America, you live in a terrible third world country. 0.99

01:21:43.000 Situation, you have a wherever you're living, it's like deep poverty.

01:21:48.000 You're told that they'll help you get across the border, they'll literally transport you into America, they'll put you in these cities, and you can get on public assistance if you have a bad back, they'll put you on Social Security.

01:22:02.000 There's all these different programs that are incentivizing people to come to America.

01:22:07.000 The Red Cross is giving you maps, people are showing you how to do it.

01:22:10.000 They're letting you across the border, they're letting you into the country.

01:22:14.000 Two years later, you're being chased down.

01:22:16.000 Two years later, you've got masked ice workers that are pulling.

01:22:20.000 I mean, it's like it's very inconsistent. 0.98

01:22:23.000 Obviously, this is a completely different administration, but I feel for those poor fucking people that were told that they can come here and that there was going to be a pathway to citizenship. 0.98

01:22:34.000 So they upend their life, they come to America in the only way they know how. 0.97

01:22:38.000 And when people say, oh, they should do it legitimately, sure, a lot of people do it legitimately, and I understand their perspective that it's a very difficult path. 0.96

01:22:47.000 And no one should be able to cut that line, and they went through it the right way.

01:22:50.000 However, these people, that's not an option for them. 0.57

01:22:53.000 If you don't have any money and you're living in a third world country and people encourage you to come to America, I most certainly would have come to America just like they did. 0.89

01:23:04.000 Joe, I did. 0.99

01:23:04.000 My parents did. 0.99

01:23:06.000 I personify the American dream in terms of what happened to me.

01:23:11.000 What they said in the camps was, the streets of America are paved with gold.

01:23:17.000 When we lived on Lorraine Avenue in Cleveland, there was a Hungarian poet.

01:23:22.000 A mad poet, his name was Hajim Reb, would go up and down Lorraine Avenue screaming in Hungarian, Old Von, Old Von, which means where is it?

01:23:32.000 Where is the gold?

01:23:34.000 Right, right, right.

01:23:35.000 But look, I came in here as a kid.

01:23:37.000 I couldn't speak the language.

01:23:38.000 We knew no one.

01:23:40.000 I got into serious juvenile trouble.

01:23:45.000 I got out of that.

01:23:46.000 I studied.

01:23:47.000 I was a total autodidact.

01:23:48.000 I wasn't a good student, but I did reading.

01:23:54.000 I went to college.

01:23:59.000 I wanted to be a disc jockey for a while, named Joe Anthony.

01:24:02.000 Because the song is through the Sad Supper and Secretary, right? 1.00

01:24:06.000 This kind of shit. 1.00

01:24:09.000 I went to college. 1.00

01:24:10.000 I did well in college.

01:24:12.000 I won a big award as a senior.

01:24:20.000 I kept working.

01:24:21.000 And then I also, through the years, got a terrific amount of help from.

01:24:26.000 Americans.

01:24:27.000 I couldn't have done it without them, beginning with a bus driver named Henry Jackson, a black man who had been adopted by Hungarian parents and spoke Hungarian.

01:24:40.000 Moving on to people in college who helped, I found a great deal of help.

01:24:49.000 I couldn't have done what I achieved without the help of other people and other Americans.

01:24:57.000 And then to top everything off, You know, the Hollywood and 18 films and all of that.

01:25:06.000 Yes, I think that is the personification of the American dream.

01:25:09.000 And many of the immigrants who come here are looking for the same dream.

01:25:16.000 And many of them are saying what Matt Achimura said on Lorraine Avenue, old one, old one, where is it?

01:25:22.000 Right.

01:25:23.000 Yeah.

01:25:24.000 Part of the reason that the stuff in Minneapolis breaks my heart is that these Latino people are my cousins and brothers in terms of not the killers and not the gang members.

01:25:41.000 The people who are gardeners and who work in stores and trying to make a buck and have kids that they're trying to survive.

01:25:48.000 Well, it's also part of the ICE story, too.

01:25:52.000 Absolutely.

01:25:52.000 Part of the ICE story is that a lot of these officers are Latino, including the two guys that shot Alex Pretty.

01:25:59.000 Those two guys were Latino.

01:26:01.000 And they took these jobs because these jobs give you, first of all, you get a $50,000 signing bonus to join ICE. 0.61

01:26:08.000 I mean, that's a significant amount of money for someone who's in debt or who's struggling.

01:26:14.000 So, this is how this guy dressed.

01:26:16.000 Look how this guy dressed.

01:26:18.000 That's kind of crazy.

01:26:20.000 See that image?

01:26:21.000 That's a coat.

01:26:22.000 Yeah, look at that coat.

01:26:23.000 I mean, come on.

01:26:25.000 That's a, it's kind of a crazy World War II military coat.

01:26:29.000 That's amazing.

01:26:30.000 A little odd when everybody else is, you know.

01:26:34.000 The other thing is the masks.

01:26:36.000 I understand.

01:26:37.000 I understand the need for them, that they get doxxed, their families get doxxed, and it's very organized.

01:26:42.000 This is not organic.

01:26:43.000 These protests are not organic.

01:26:45.000 I understand all these arguments.

01:26:46.000 Yeah, I bought it by the master.

01:26:49.000 It's too good.

01:26:50.000 It's also, it sets a very bad precedent.

01:26:53.000 This is the problem with it all.

01:26:53.000 Yeah.

01:26:56.000 You know, the real thing is you shouldn't be able to have organized, paid for protests where you're paying people to protest and you're paying people to cause violence.

01:27:04.000 And then you're also using people as political pawns and moving them into the country so that you could change, like when you have congressional seats, it's all based on the census.

01:27:15.000 The more people that are in the town, regardless of whether or not they're legal or illegal, You get more congressional seats.

01:27:21.000 So they use them for political points.

01:27:23.000 Yes, they do.

01:27:24.000 Same old political game.

01:27:24.000 Absolutely.

01:27:25.000 Yes.

01:27:25.000 It's the same old game.

01:27:26.000 And that game should be illegal.

01:27:27.000 That shouldn't be legal.

01:27:29.000 The idea of the American dream is a beautiful dream.

01:27:31.000 And they've corrupted it.

01:27:33.000 And they've taken this and used it for their own gain.

01:27:37.000 And they've weaponized empathy.

01:27:39.000 And it's a real problem.

01:27:42.000 It's a real problem for those poor people that came over here looking for a better life.

01:27:46.000 Listen, I have an idea.

01:27:48.000 Run for president or write your speeches.

01:27:50.000 No, that attitude is really terrific, Adam.

01:27:50.000 Listen.

01:27:55.000 I think you're right to be concerned.

01:27:57.000 You see it.

01:27:58.000 Listen, I'm 81 years old, but I really see it too.

01:27:58.000 Yeah.

01:28:02.000 You know, and there's great dangers there that I hope my sons don't have to face.

01:28:08.000 Militarized police on the streets for that reason is a very dangerous precedent.

01:28:12.000 But then there's the other question how do you get all the criminals out?

01:28:15.000 I'm not the guy.

01:28:15.000 I don't know.

01:28:16.000 You know, I'm not the one.

01:28:18.000 But I am very concerned with this dangerous precedent.

01:28:23.000 That's my feeling on it.

01:28:25.000 So I just worry that people accept it because they want this result now and they don't realize that this could set up this being a common occurrence.

01:28:35.000 I mean, we saw some of it during COVID.

01:28:37.000 There were some militarized police on the streets keeping people in lockdown in certain cities.

01:28:42.000 They utilized the National Guard and they did things like that. 0.95

01:28:45.000 That scares the shit out of me. 0.87

01:28:47.000 It scares the shit out of me when you have a justification for militarized police with masks on that are. 0.98

01:28:54.000 Just grabbing people. 0.58

01:28:56.000 And some of these people are American citizens.

01:28:58.000 It turned out a lot of them were American citizens, hundreds of them were.

01:29:01.000 You know, we had the same syndrome.

01:29:02.000 I covered the Kent State massacres.

01:29:04.000 Yeah.

01:29:05.000 I covered that.

01:29:06.000 Covered that.

01:29:08.000 And one of the things that I saw is the rhetoric that was coming from James Rhodes, the governor at the time, and from Silvestre del Corso, who was the head of the National Guard, was absolutely the main thing that created that atmosphere that caused that shooting.

01:29:24.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:29:26.000 And today, sadly, we see many examples of that.

01:29:31.000 And they're great dangers.

01:29:34.000 Yeah, you would think that we would learn.

01:29:36.000 But we go through cycles where we learn, we get better, and then we repeat the same things again.

01:29:40.000 You see that with racial tensions.

01:29:42.000 You see that with political unrest.

01:29:44.000 You see that with a lot of different things in this country.

01:29:46.000 It's like we learn for a little while and then we forget.

01:29:50.000 Mark Twain's wisdom once again comes through.

01:29:53.000 Mark Twain said, Politicians are like diapers and they should be changed often and for the same reason.

01:30:00.000 Yeah.

01:30:01.000 He also said, History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

01:30:06.000 Yeah.

01:30:08.000 He also said, a little bit off the subject, but I love it, and he said, when the mind and the pecker argue, the pecker always wins.

01:30:22.000 Yeah, I mean, he was essentially the original stand-up comedian.

01:30:25.000 Oh, you're absolutely right.

01:30:27.000 You're so right.

01:30:28.000 I've actually been thinking about doing some piece on him.

01:30:32.000 And stop me if you know the history.

01:30:34.000 But in the beginning, he was a stand-up with his so-called lectures.

01:30:39.000 That he did all over the West.

01:30:41.000 And then he did this.

01:30:43.000 Then he wrote some books, the books that he's famous for.

01:30:46.000 But he went bankrupt nearly at the end of his life because of bad investments.

01:30:51.000 And then he did a round the world tour of stand up all over again.

01:30:55.000 And usually they said he was a poet of the profane because these are usually for male audiences. 0.85

01:31:04.000 He published a little book called On Masturbation, which is about the glories of masturbation. 0.68

01:31:10.000 The only thing I've heard that's That's close.

01:31:13.000 It's a stand-up by one Joe Rogan.

01:31:18.000 There's a great line that says, if you're married and have kids, the only place to find peace, Twain would say, with the pecker, is if you rent a motel room and lock the door.

01:31:34.000 But he had the same kind of verve and love in terms of being a stand-up.

01:31:44.000 Being outrageous, pushing the envelope.

01:31:47.000 And that whole side of Twain has been sort of hidden under the notion that he is the great Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and all of that.

01:31:57.000 He wrote a book called Letters from the Earth from the Voice of the Devil.

01:31:57.000 Nobody talks of it.

01:32:02.000 He wrote another one called The Mysterious Stranger, which is about Jesus coming back in a very dark way.

01:32:09.000 And then he wrote one that was published in the 30s that hasn't been republished called Twain Erupts.

01:32:16.000 So, yes, you're so right when you say he was stand up.

01:32:19.000 He was a first-rate stand-up.

01:32:22.000 He was the originator because he was essentially a very witty author who wrote very provocative things, very hilarious things, and then would read them publicly.

01:32:33.000 And when he was doing these speeches where he would go and, whether you call it poetry or whatever it was, there was no stand-up comedy back then.

01:32:40.000 There was no name for it.

01:32:41.000 But he was just riotously funny.

01:32:44.000 People loved him.

01:32:45.000 Absolutely.

01:32:45.000 And they would go to see them because they were funny.

01:32:48.000 And the initial audiences were mostly male audiences.

01:32:51.000 Right.

01:32:56.000 I think he's a great, it's never been really done.

01:33:01.000 To do a piece, a fictional piece about Twain as a stand up with pushing the envelope with all these things, I think would be a lot of fun.

01:33:13.000 It would be a lot of fun.

01:33:14.000 The only problem would be the cultural contexts are so different back then.

01:33:18.000 It's almost like did you see Lenny, the Dustin Hoffman film?

01:33:22.000 Yeah, of course.

01:33:22.000 Great film.

01:33:23.000 I mean, I think Dustin Hoffman. 0.99

01:33:24.000 Fucking nailed it. 0.97

01:33:26.000 It was as close to Lenny Bruce as you're ever going to see someone portray Lenny Bruce. 0.98

01:33:31.000 The problem is, the world has changed so much since 1960 that a lot of the outrageousness is gone and it seems very pedestrian.

01:33:40.000 Like the things that he is saying, because he was such a groundbreaker and society was so locked down and so conservative and so, you know, just the way people communicated was much different back then.

01:33:54.000 The understanding of culture and of race relations and sexual relations.

01:33:59.000 Was very different back then.

01:34:01.000 And so the outrageousness of what he was saying back then, it just doesn't really translate.

01:34:07.000 Because in many ways, I think stand up comedy in particular is a window in time.

01:34:12.000 It's a window into the way people behave.

01:34:15.000 Films are that way as well.

01:34:17.000 Especially if you go and watch a lot of old films, it's a window into how people perceived reality back then.

01:34:25.000 There's some stuff that's rarely been published.

01:34:29.000 From Twain, that hasn't really been seen very much, that was left in places like the University of California archives, that go a step past what we know from Twain.

01:34:43.000 And I think there's so much of it.

01:34:47.000 There's something called Twain's Notebooks that hasn't been published in their full form, certainly, that may still be shocking.

01:34:56.000 I'm still playing with it because I'm reading and reading and all of that.

01:35:02.000 Even if I never do, it's so much fun reading about him and his life because he was such an interesting character.

01:35:09.000 Well, I hope you do write something about it because it would be great for people to see and to get an understanding of him because I think a lot of young people, particularly today, just think of him as an author.

01:35:19.000 Just think of him as the guy who wrote Tom Sawyer.

01:35:21.000 Tom Sawyer, yeah.

01:35:22.000 He's been pushed into being almost a kid's writer.

01:35:25.000 Right, yeah.

01:35:26.000 Speaking of stand up, I want you to know, and I don't think, you know, did you know that Sam Kennison dedicated a CD to me?

01:35:33.000 Did he really?

01:35:34.000 Sam Kinnison, one of his last CDs was called Leader of the Band, B-A-N-N-E-D. 0.99

01:35:43.000 Right.

01:35:44.000 And at the flip side of the CD, he thanks a bunch of people, Ring Azov and record people and all of that, and then also Sly and Sean Penn.

01:35:53.000 And then after all of that, in larger letters than the others, he says, and a very special thanks to Joe Esterhauser writing his letter to Michael Ovitz.

01:36:04.000 That's amazing.

01:36:06.000 What letter did you write to Michael Ovitz?

01:36:09.000 Michael Ovitz was the top dog agent in town running CAA.

01:36:17.000 I was leaving CAA because my best friend and the rabbi in the business was an agent named Guy McEwen who had been running Columbia became an agent again.

01:36:30.000 So I was leaving CAA simply because of my love for Guy.

01:36:35.000 And I went in to see Ovitz and said, I'm leaving the agency.

01:36:38.000 And Ovitz said, If you leave the agency, then my foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard will put you under the ground.

01:36:48.000 Oh, Jesus. 1.00

01:36:49.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:36:51.000 You know, so I thought about it for a couple weeks and I wrote him a letter which essentially said, fuck you. 1.00

01:37:00.000 You know, I'm leaving. 1.00

01:37:01.000 I'm going back to the person who started me in the business and the person I love.

01:37:05.000 And it turned into a major controversy with headlines all over the place.

01:37:09.000 Put you under the ground of strong words.

01:37:11.000 Oh, man.

01:37:13.000 There was a producer named Bernie Brillstein.

01:37:16.000 I knew Bernie.

01:37:17.000 He wrote a memoir years later who said those exact words had been used to him as well.

01:37:25.000 Wow.

01:37:25.000 Yeah, so the, and you know what, as time went on, it became obvious that the whole controversy with Ovis really hurt him because other people had been threatened that way, and he had a reputation for that.

01:37:40.000 And he actually was out of the business, not much past that.

01:37:47.000 But the notion of Kennison, I love Kennison's work, the notion of Kennison, when I saw that thing, I was overwhelmed.

01:37:56.000 He was one of the greats.

01:37:57.000 He was one of the greats.

01:37:58.000 Absolutely.

01:37:58.000 He's one of the greats, and I still maintain that for like a period of two years, two or three years, he was the most profound and revolutionary stand up comic ever.

01:38:07.000 I agree.

01:38:08.000 He came out of nowhere.

01:38:09.000 He was so different than anybody else.

01:38:12.000 You know, I was introduced to Kinnison by a girl that I worked with.

01:38:15.000 I was working at a gym called the Boston Athletic Club in South Boston, and it was a girl that worked at the front counter who was hilarious. 0.99

01:38:24.000 She was a volleyball player. 1.00

01:38:25.000 She was a really hilarious girl.

01:38:27.000 And she told me about Kinnison and reenacted one of his bits in the parking lot of the club. 0.79

01:38:34.000 Told me what she saw on TV about, he had that bit about homosexual necrophiliacs paying money. 0.73

01:38:41.000 She's on her stomach laying on the. 0.89

01:38:44.000 She was so funny. 1.00

01:38:45.000 She was on her stomach in the parking lot going, oh, oh, life keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead. 1.00

01:38:51.000 It never ends. 1.00

01:38:52.000 It never ends.

01:38:54.000 And I was laughing so hard that I couldn't wait to go out and get that videotape.

01:38:59.000 And I got that videotape, and I was only 19 at the time.

01:39:02.000 I had never even thought about doing stand up yet.

01:39:04.000 But that was like one of the first times that I was like, oh, this is stand up?

01:39:07.000 Like, I didn't know that this was stand up.

01:39:09.000 I thought stand up was like, did you ever notice?

01:39:12.000 Like, that kind of stuff.

01:39:13.000 Like, you'd see on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. 0.99

01:39:15.000 I had no thought ever that this wild shit was stand up. 0.97

01:39:20.000 And, you know, credit to HBO because before then, you would never be able to see that kind of comedy. 0.99

01:39:27.000 The only way you'd be able to see it is in the movie theater.

01:39:30.000 It'd have to be like Richard Pryor.

01:39:31.000 Live on the Sunset Strip, which predated that by a few years.

01:39:35.000 And no one had any understanding that there was this kind of stand up comedy out there. 0.98

01:39:42.000 That this wild motherfucker who used to be a priest, he used to be a preacher. 0.99

01:39:47.000 Yeah, I know. 1.00

01:39:48.000 And he comes to LA and is this wild, coke snorting fucking demon comedian who's just different than anybody else before him and just changed comedy. 0.94

01:40:01.000 There's a few people, there's a few characters along the way that have just. 0.97

01:40:04.000 Completely changed comedy, and I think Kennison is one of the big ones.

01:40:08.000 He was absolutely amazing.

01:40:10.000 I adored him.

01:40:11.000 I thought he was a groundbreaker. 0.99

01:40:14.000 And when I saw the CD, I'm like, holy shit. 0.98

01:40:18.000 I have two of his albums. 0.92

01:40:21.000 Two different people have gifted me his first album.

01:40:26.000 God, what is it called?

01:40:27.000 Is it called Louder Than Hell?

01:40:30.000 I think it's called Louder Than Hell.

01:40:31.000 And they're signed.

01:40:34.000 Both albums are signed.

01:40:35.000 Both signatures are totally different.

01:40:37.000 So I don't know which one's real or if either one of them are real.

01:40:41.000 And that's a problem.

01:40:42.000 Like people buy stuff off eBay, they want to give you a nice gift.

01:40:45.000 They buy an autographed album and it might not even be real.

01:40:48.000 He was a preacher, and that last conversation when he died with Jesus, when he's conversing, it's mind boggling.

01:40:55.000 Mind boggling.

01:40:56.000 Yeah, he's literally having a conversation with someone as he's dying.

01:41:02.000 It's obviously Jesus.

01:41:03.000 It's a Jesus figure.

01:41:04.000 I mean, is it my time?

01:41:06.000 Right, right.

01:41:07.000 Amazing, especially amazing considering where he came from, what he went through, what he did with comedy, and then that ending.

01:41:15.000 There was a movie made, wasn't there?

01:41:17.000 But it wasn't very good.

01:41:19.000 About Kennison?

01:41:20.000 I don't know.

01:41:20.000 Yeah.

01:41:21.000 I think that, man.

01:41:23.000 I was thinking about that too.

01:41:26.000 I have a problem with reenactments of a guy who is that profound.

01:41:31.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:31.000 Someone's playing him.

01:41:33.000 Yeah.

01:41:33.000 I agree.

01:41:35.000 I try not to watch because it's just the actual work of the guy, like going back and watching his HBO special and watching his stand up appearances on Letterman and listening to his first album.

01:41:46.000 The first album I listened to, I was like, Jesus Christ, this guy's incredible.

01:41:50.000 It was just so different, so crazy.

01:41:53.000 And, you know.

01:41:54.000 And he was the first guy that was like open about doing cocaine, like open about partying.

01:42:02.000 You know, I mean, he was a wild boy.

01:42:07.000 It reminds me, I'm sorry, Hunter, in terms of being wild about Coke.

01:42:12.000 My first story when I was at Rolling Stone was a piece about narcotics, corrupt narcotics agents.

01:42:18.000 And as a result of the stories, the guy who was the head of the narcotics agency in the state of California had to resign.

01:42:26.000 And as a result of that, I started getting plastic baggies full of coke at Rolling Stone from the various dealers who appreciated my work. 0.98

01:42:36.000 Now, whenever Hunter was there, I would present him with the bag, and he would go, Holy fucking Christ, you're getting these from people. 0.94

01:42:45.000 It's one of the things that solidified our friendship. 0.97

01:42:48.000 That's hilarious.

01:42:51.000 And that was back when cocaine was actually cocaine.

01:42:53.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:42:55.000 Yeah.

01:42:56.000 It wasn't stepped on.

01:42:57.000 You didn't get fentanyl.

01:42:58.000 You didn't have to worry about dying of an overdose.

01:43:00.000 It was the only drug besides smoking dope that I really, really enjoyed.

01:43:06.000 I said I tried acid once and not a rat to hold out to me because I was so freaked out.

01:43:10.000 I can only imagine.

01:43:13.000 When I watched Showgirls, I was like, whoever wrote this was doing coke.

01:43:17.000 That was literally one of the first things I've said.

01:43:20.000 I've always said that's like one of the heightens of cocaine movies.

01:43:24.000 Not anymore, but certainly the memory of it was influenced.

01:43:29.000 Absolutely.

01:43:30.000 Influenced by cocaine.

01:43:31.000 Yeah.

01:43:34.000 Tarantino also really loved Showgirl.

01:43:37.000 Well, it was a wild movie.

01:43:41.000 And I remember, you know, because it was that girl, was her name Elizabeth?

01:43:44.000 Berkeley.

01:43:45.000 Berkeley.

01:43:45.000 Elizabeth Berkeley, who was from Saved by the Bell.

01:43:48.000 Right.

01:43:48.000 So she was like this America sweetheart from this really nice sitcom.

01:43:52.000 And then all of a sudden, you know, she's half naked and she's a showgirl.

01:43:55.000 And it's like, whoa.

01:43:58.000 And she's having an affair with Paul Verhoeven.

01:44:00.000 He's moved out with his wife and is living with Elizabeth Berkeley, right?

01:44:00.000 Right.

01:44:04.000 So.

01:44:05.000 No, crazy.

01:44:05.000 Crazy.

01:44:06.000 Yeah.

01:44:07.000 Jeez, Louise.

01:44:09.000 Wild times, right?

01:44:10.000 Absolutely fun.

01:44:11.000 Really fun.

01:44:14.000 Jimi Hendrix's story because he's the Jimi Hendrix experience, and I wondered whether he had any kind of a godfather impact on the Joe Rogan experience.

01:44:24.000 I stole the name from Jimi Hendrix.

01:44:24.000 Oh, 100%.

01:44:26.000 Jimi Hendrix's story.

01:44:27.000 100%.

01:44:28.000 I mean, when we first started doing the podcast, I would always listen to Voodoo Child on the way to the comedy store.

01:44:35.000 Coming over Laurel Canyon, that was one of my favorites.

01:44:37.000 That and a whole lot of love.

01:44:38.000 Those are my two favorite songs to listen to on the way to the comedy store.

01:44:42.000 I have like a soundtrack that I listen to to get myself psyched up for shows.

01:44:46.000 You'll love this story then.

01:44:47.000 Okay, I'm a reporter at the plane dealer, and all of our editors barely know about rock and roll.

01:44:54.000 And as I said, I've loved it all my life, and when Hendrix came around, I loved his work. 0.95

01:45:00.000 And he's in Cleveland for an appearance, and the fucking Cleveland cops have gone crazy, and they're saying that this caused a riot, and it's obscene, and all of that stuff.

01:45:11.000 And I go up to my city editor and tell him I'd like to interview Hendrix and cover his concert. 0.98

01:45:18.000 So I do cover his concert and it's jammed in Cleveland Arena and people are loving it.

01:45:23.000 And I've set up a date to interview him the next morning at the Cleveland Hotel.

01:45:29.000 Okay, so they show up the next morning and I am the plane dealer reporter.

01:45:34.000 I've got a tie on and a sport coat, you know, and they go in, I think it's 9.30.

01:45:42.000 And he's up, but he's barely up and he's wearing shorts and a t-shirt and his hair is, you remember his hair, but on this occasion there were a lot of beads and things in his hair as well.

01:45:52.000 It was totally scruffed up.

01:45:56.000 We talk about rock and roll mostly and his background and the fact that he had been, I think, as a backup, as a kind of guitarist in the Ricky Nelson band that had been in Cleveland a couple years before then.

01:46:08.000 He'd done this pre-stuff before he went out on his own.

01:46:13.000 And we get along. 0.97

01:46:16.000 And we begin smoking dope, of course, at 9.30, and by fucking 11.30, we both got the munchies. 0.97

01:46:22.000 And he said, man, I'm hungry. 0.77

01:46:24.000 You want to go to any place?

01:46:26.000 I've got a car waiting for me downstairs.

01:46:29.000 So I said, sure.

01:46:30.000 And we go down, and then Mitch Mitchell and Chas Chandler join us, the other members of the experience, who are equally looking like CD characters, you know, but it's that time of morning.

01:46:44.000 It's after a concert, all of that.

01:46:45.000 So we pile into this limbo.

01:46:48.000 And I direct them to go to Buckeye Road is the center of the Hungarian community in Cleveland.

01:46:55.000 And the center of the Hungarian community on Buckeye Road is a restaurant called the Bolaton.

01:47:01.000 Okay, and I direct them to go to the Bolaton.

01:47:04.000 Now, they know me at the Bolaton because I used to live on Buckeye Road.

01:47:07.000 The big stretch limo pulls up, plate glass window front, filled with old ladies with babushkas and guys very formally dressed. 0.99

01:47:16.000 We get out in front of this place, and these Martians, three Martians, get out of the car. 1.00

01:47:22.000 And I lead them in. 0.99

01:47:24.000 And the Hungarians are looking, I'm like, what the? 1.00

01:47:26.000 Fuck, what is this? 1.00

01:47:29.000 You know, it made me the, they're just following me at the end and I see Jimmy looking around and shit. 1.00

01:47:37.000 So they see us. 0.87

01:47:38.000 The Major D knows me so he calls me aside and he says, who are these people?

01:47:42.000 Who are these people?

01:47:44.000 I say, Jimi Hendrix, big rock and roll star, you know, he's in town and he said, oh, and Hendrix, and I say, yeah, Jimi Hendrix.

01:47:52.000 So we sit down and Jimmy says, you order for me.

01:47:56.000 Great.

01:47:57.000 So I order a chicken paprikash for him, which is the big Hungarian meal.

01:48:02.000 And Chaz and Mitchell order something else, but very Hungarian stuff on my advice.

01:48:09.000 And interestingly, as we're sitting there, the maitre d has obviously spoken to people because old ladies are coming around asking him for an autograph.

01:48:20.000 Mr. Hendrik Söld, will you autograph please?

01:48:23.000 Wow.

01:48:24.000 And he's gracious.

01:48:25.000 Sure. 0.94

01:48:29.000 But he loves his paprikash and wants to order another.

01:48:33.000 At this point, we've knocked off two bottles of wine, I think, and we're still rolling from all the dope.

01:48:39.000 At the end of this, he had three orders of chicken paprika.

01:48:39.000 So they bring that.

01:48:46.000 He signed, we had like four bottles of wine.

01:48:49.000 We staggered out of there.

01:48:52.000 He signed, I would guess, ten autographs for people who come around bowing.

01:48:57.000 And then as we walk out of the restaurant, he sticks his fist high up in there and says, Hongary, Hongary.

01:49:05.000 That's my Jimi Hendrix story.

01:49:09.000 That's awesome.

01:49:11.000 Ron White was telling us a story the other night in the mothership green room, the comedy club green room, and he was saying that when he was, I think he said he was 13 years old, he went to see the monkeys.

01:49:20.000 And Jimi Hendrix opened for the monkeys.

01:49:23.000 He said it was the worst booking of all time.

01:49:25.000 You've got.

01:49:26.000 It opened.

01:49:26.000 Oh my God.

01:49:27.000 Exactly.

01:49:27.000 So this is when Jimi Hendrix was emerging.

01:49:30.000 He really hadn't become Jimi Hendrix yet.

01:49:33.000 And so he's the opening act for the monkeys.

01:49:36.000 And so you have a bunch of kids that are there to see this really cute band that was, you know, pieced together by corporate executives essentially.

01:49:45.000 You know, the Monkeys, fun band, but, you know, they had a TV show and it was a very clean, sweet TV show.

01:49:52.000 The Monkeys.

01:49:52.000 Hey, yeah, of course.

01:49:54.000 You know, and then you've got this guy opening up for them, just jamming on the guitar.

01:50:00.000 Wow.

01:50:01.000 And they were freaked out.

01:50:02.000 They're like, what is this?

01:50:03.000 Like, what is going on?

01:50:05.000 And he said, nobody liked it.

01:50:06.000 It was terrifying to people.

01:50:08.000 Like, who is this guy with his guitar?

01:50:10.000 Like, what the hell is he doing?

01:50:12.000 Great story.

01:50:14.000 Many years later, I thought about writing a Hendrix movie.

01:50:19.000 And I was working with a producer friend named Ben Myron, and Ben rounded up his brother.

01:50:26.000 And we actually brought him to Malibu.

01:50:30.000 And unfortunately, we discovered that the rights were so screwed up in between relatives that there's never been a Jimi Hendrix movie, babe, because people couldn't agree on the deal of any kind.

01:50:40.000 But it still would be a terrific movie, I think.

01:50:43.000 Oh, it would be a phenomenal movie.

01:50:45.000 I believe there was at least one Jimi Hendrix docudrama.

01:50:51.000 Wasn't there, Jimi?

01:50:53.000 I believe.

01:50:54.000 Do you remember it?

01:50:55.000 Yeah, it was Andre3000 from Outkast.

01:50:58.000 It was on what?

01:50:59.000 But they couldn't really use all the music and stuff, I think.

01:51:03.000 Oh.

01:51:04.000 I'm sorry, I didn't hear Jamie.

01:51:05.000 He said it was Andre3000 from Outkast.

01:51:08.000 I see.

01:51:09.000 And that they couldn't use all the music.

01:51:11.000 I see.

01:51:12.000 I think.

01:51:12.000 Yeah, it came out like 10 years ago.

01:51:14.000 That was an issue back then, too.

01:51:16.000 Yeah.

01:51:16.000 I remember that.

01:51:17.000 There's a picture of him as.

01:51:20.000 That's right.

01:51:22.000 That's right.

01:51:23.000 Wow.

01:51:24.000 Also, the day after you're talking about in Cleveland, there's a recording of the concert.

01:51:29.000 Oh, wow. 0.99

01:51:30.000 Oh, shit. 0.99

01:51:31.000 That's my Facebook. 1.00

01:51:31.000 Is that right? 1.00

01:51:32.000 The Cleveland concert?

01:51:33.000 Yeah.

01:51:33.000 Wow.

01:51:34.000 I've got a few different links.

01:51:35.000 It kept taking me to Facebook, but there's a bunch of pictures.

01:51:38.000 Whoa.

01:51:40.000 March 26, 1968.

01:51:41.000 Wow.

01:51:43.000 And then there's a recording of the concert, too.

01:51:45.000 So you can listen to the recording from the concert?

01:51:47.000 Yeah, I was trying to get in here.

01:51:49.000 There's an article from his legendary trip to Cleveland.

01:51:53.000 Wow.

01:51:54.000 But this was like paywalled, so I couldn't get all the stuff behind it.

01:51:58.000 Wow, man.

01:51:59.000 He was the nicest guy.

01:52:01.000 I can imagine.

01:52:02.000 Yeah, very nice.

01:52:03.000 Nice guy.

01:52:03.000 Just laid back.

01:52:06.000 Wow, he was just insane. 0.98

01:52:09.000 One of a. 0.98

01:52:11.000 Not even one of a generation.

01:52:13.000 One of one talent.

01:52:15.000 I mean, to this day, if you ask most guitarists who's the greatest guitarist of all time, it's Jimi Hendrix.

01:52:21.000 That's crazy.

01:52:22.000 The one guy who died at 27 years old.

01:52:25.000 And would he die in 1969 or 1970?

01:52:28.000 Yeah, somewhere there.

01:52:29.000 Yeah.

01:52:30.000 That guy to this day is universally regarded as the greatest guitarist of all time.

01:52:36.000 You know, I interviewed him.

01:52:38.000 I was known as the Grim Reaper at the plane dealer because I interviewed Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Otis.

01:52:48.000 And they all died.

01:52:49.000 They all died young.

01:52:51.000 I did a feature on Jose Feliciano, and people would come up to me at the plane dealer and say, What do you have against Jose?

01:52:57.000 Why do you want him to die?

01:53:01.000 That's crazy.

01:53:02.000 It's just unfortunate that they all died.

01:53:04.000 And they all died at 27 years old, which is really weird.

01:53:07.000 Was that right?

01:53:07.000 Yeah.

01:53:08.000 Hendricks, Joplin, and Morrison all died at 27.

01:53:11.000 Wow.

01:53:12.000 And who else?

01:53:15.000 Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse.

01:53:18.000 At 27?

01:53:18.000 Yeah.

01:53:19.000 It's all 27.

01:53:21.000 27 is the magic number for insanely talented people to die young.

01:53:25.000 Yeah.

01:53:27.000 Very weird.

01:53:30.000 You've had an incredible life, man.

01:53:33.000 You know, I've been blessed.

01:53:35.000 I've been really blessed.

01:53:36.000 First of all, The fact that I'm still here at 81, considering some of my excesses in the past, is miraculous.

01:53:43.000 It truly is.

01:53:45.000 I started smoking when I was 13, stopped when I was 60, and I had stage 4 cancer, and Marshall Storm surgery saved me.

01:53:58.000 I drank too hard most of my life until I was 70, and I finally stopped then.

01:54:07.000 Only because I have a hard-headed Italian-Polish wife.

01:54:11.000 who said, enough, you're falling down. 0.99

01:54:14.000 You're taking 12 pills and you're falling down. 1.00

01:54:17.000 No fucking more. 1.00

01:54:19.000 Okay? 1.00

01:54:19.000 Ended it. 1.00

01:54:20.000 Now, shortly after we were married, literally after we exchanged the vows, she turned to me and she says, she whispers, she says, if you cheat on me, I'm going to fucking hunt you down and kill you. 1.00

01:54:36.000 Okay? 1.00

01:54:38.000 I listened to her.

01:54:39.000 I listened to her.

01:54:40.000 I listened to this woman. 1.00

01:54:42.000 Sounds like a fun lady. 1.00

01:54:43.000 She is. 1.00

01:54:44.000 She is, and she's.

01:54:47.000 I'm very proud of her because at 67, the mother of four, and truly the true head of our family, she's written her first novel, which is called Dark Church, and it's set in Dracula's Transylvania.

01:55:09.000 And it's a kind of Gothic novel.

01:55:09.000 Whoa.

01:55:15.000 Thriller. 0.97

01:55:21.000 I bring it up because I promised her that I would make this plug, and I fear that if I don't, I'm going to be in a lot of fucking trouble. 0.92

01:55:30.000 Thank you very much, Joe. 0.98

01:55:34.000 I love that when someone does something like that when they're in their 60s, just say, fuck it, something I've always wanted to do. 0.99

01:55:40.000 Let's do it. 0.99

01:55:41.000 I think it's fantastic.

01:55:42.000 Thank you. 1.00

01:55:43.000 I just love when people do, like, fuck your age. 1.00

01:55:46.000 Who cares? 1.00

01:55:47.000 Just.

01:55:48.000 Put it out.

01:55:48.000 Write it.

01:55:49.000 I agree.

01:55:50.000 But I have lived an amazing life, and I'm very thankful.

01:55:50.000 Yeah.

01:55:58.000 I've seen a lot.

01:56:00.000 I've come out on the other side.

01:56:01.000 I've seen a lot of darkness, too.

01:56:04.000 But when it's all over, Graham Greene, who's a writer that I admire, died, I think, in the late 70s.

01:56:13.000 And he said, We get to a point where we see the fence.

01:56:18.000 The fence is there, but we can't see over the fence.

01:56:21.000 But the closer we get to the fence, the more curious we are about what's on the other side of the fence.

01:56:27.000 And there are some people who decide that they're too curious, people like Hunter, and jump over the fence, right?

01:56:34.000 I'm not doing that.

01:56:35.000 But I'm approaching the fence.

01:56:38.000 But I've lived a terrific life.

01:56:39.000 And only, once again, only in America.

01:56:45.000 Yeah, only in America.

01:56:46.000 Well, I'm glad you're not jumping over the fence.

01:56:48.000 No.

01:56:48.000 I'm glad we got a chance to talk.

01:56:50.000 No, I really did admire his note, the No More Fun note.

01:56:54.000 It should be classic.

01:56:56.000 Yeah, well, I mean, that's how he lived.

01:56:59.000 At the end of his life, obviously it was not fun.

01:57:01.000 No, no.

01:57:02.000 But Twain, I keep going back to Twain.

01:57:05.000 This is a good one, I think.

01:57:07.000 He said, The orgasm is God's own payback for all the suffering that he overlooks in the world.

01:57:18.000 That's funny.

01:57:20.000 Well, it's like writers in particular are so important to culture because they can put down thoughts in a way that reshapes the way people view things.

01:57:34.000 We talked about Hunter in the 60s and the 70s.

01:57:37.000 He was the voice of that generation.

01:57:40.000 He was the guy that was this intelligent guy that wasn't a part of the elite establishment, that wasn't a part of the rich fat cats, but was also famous and well known, but stuck true to his thoughts and his beliefs.

01:57:54.000 It was able to articulate things in a way that gave you this understanding of what was going on with the people back then.

01:58:00.000 That to this day, if you read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, or if you read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Any of his work.

01:58:09.000 The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved.

01:58:12.000 It's just a phenomenal encapsulation of that.

01:58:15.000 Guys are lonely, even something else.

01:58:17.000 Guys are lonely.

01:58:18.000 Yeah.

01:58:20.000 It's so important.

01:58:22.000 And we don't have a lot of that today, unfortunately.

01:58:25.000 You've got a lot of podcasters and a lot of people making YouTube videos and TikToks.

01:58:31.000 Just not a lot of great writing that encapsulates things where there's one figure that we turn to to read their stuff on things.

01:58:39.000 And Hunter was that guy.

01:58:41.000 Yes, he was.

01:58:43.000 As Hemingway was for a previous generation.

01:58:46.000 Hunter and I talked a lot about Hemingway because of our backgrounds and earning a living and all of that.

01:58:54.000 I think that the fact that Hunter ended it as he did was sort of thought out many, many years before, probably through Hemingway's example.

01:59:04.000 Inspired by Hemingway.

01:59:07.000 Unfortunately, that's how he did it too.

01:59:10.000 They both shared in common that they drank to excess.

01:59:12.000 Absolutely.

01:59:13.000 When I was a boy, Wanting to be a novelist and not a screenwriter.

01:59:19.000 Boy, the Holy Trinity were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.

01:59:24.000 They all died of alcoholism.

01:59:26.000 Hemingway shot himself.

01:59:28.000 Fitzgerald had a heart attack at a very young age while working as a hack Hollywood screenwriter, incidentally.

01:59:36.000 And Faulkner fell off a horse, I think, in his early 70s, ripped, totally drunk.

01:59:41.000 Jesus.

01:59:42.000 And these were the idols of young people coming up then.

01:59:46.000 What do you think it is about alcohol and writing?

01:59:49.000 That go hand in glove?

01:59:55.000 I, for a while, I drank all day black coffee and cognac.

02:00:03.000 And then later on in life, I didn't have my first drink until noon, which I make way was 11 o'clock.

02:00:13.000 And I measured it until at night.

02:00:18.000 And then it was gin.

02:00:21.000 Before it was white wine.

02:00:24.000 And part of it is that if you're lost in this imaginary world that's in your head all day, you can't get rid of it, you can't make it stop.

02:00:35.000 And the booze makes it stop so that you could continue your normal familial daily obligations and schedules without having this stuff in your head all the time trying to crowd it out.

02:00:51.000 The fact that sometimes, excuse me, The fact that sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and take notes of something that the character says or something indicates that I can't get rid of it.

02:01:04.000 With the booze when I was drinking, if I drank enough I could get rid of it and begin it again the next day.

02:01:10.000 It's partly freeing yourself.

02:01:12.000 It's an interesting point.

02:01:13.000 It's partly freeing yourself from something that you've created yourself.

02:01:18.000 So in that sense, you create something that can hurt you even if you created it.

02:01:26.000 My greatest enjoyment is with writing screenplays, then it gives me a terrific amount of pleasure knowing that it's going to take – when people see this, it's going to make their own lives more pleasant for at least two hours.

02:01:40.000 They will enjoy it.

02:01:43.000 They may laugh at it, but it will take them out of their own existences in a pleasant way.

02:01:47.000 That ain't bad to be able to do that with people.

02:01:51.000 Oh, it's huge.

02:01:52.000 And that's very important to me.

02:01:54.000 People think of it as trivial, that entertainment is trivial.

02:01:56.000 I don't think it is at all.

02:01:57.000 It shapes our perceptions of the world.

02:01:59.000 Exactly.

02:02:00.000 You do the exact same thing.

02:02:02.000 You make people's lives better by enjoying what they're watching.

02:02:05.000 And that is not as important or as dramatic as my daughter-in-law, for example, who just got her medical degree, who literally, literally saves people's lives.

02:02:20.000 Incidentally, the classic Hollywood story, I think Alyssa, Alyssa Esterhaas works in Texas in a hospital, and she just got her medical degree.

02:02:33.000 But to show the influence that Hollywood has on our culture, the other day she walks into a room and there's a gigantic big guy there who's yelling and screaming.

02:02:44.000 You know, this is the sweetest person in the world and has this wonderful smile and really is great with people.

02:02:51.000 And she's trying to calm him down and says, What's wrong?

02:02:54.000 What's wrong?

02:02:55.000 And she describes him as a really big man and is screaming and what's wrong?

02:03:00.000 What's wrong?

02:03:01.000 And he yells, I want Brad Pitt. 0.99

02:03:05.000 It was fucking in Texas, you know, and some hospital went and he says, you want Brad Pitt? 1.00

02:03:11.000 He says, I want fucking Brad Pitt. 0.99

02:03:13.000 He says, but why? 1.00

02:03:15.000 Why do you want Brad Pitt? 1.00

02:03:17.000 He goes, because I want to fuck him. 1.00

02:03:20.000 Now this sweet woman. 1.00

02:03:27.000 That's hilarious. 1.00

02:03:28.000 The doctor confronted her with this madman who wants to fuck Brad Pitt. 1.00

02:03:34.000 One more example, D.N. 8, of the powerful effect of the culture. 1.00

02:03:39.000 So, when I write something, I don't want some guy to see it and say, as a result, I want Brad Pitt. 0.82

02:03:47.000 Nor do I want Volodymyr Zelensky to start a fucking war. 0.98

02:03:50.000 Right. 0.98

02:03:51.000 But I do want people to enjoy it.

02:03:52.000 Right.

02:03:54.000 That's hilarious.

02:03:55.000 When you say that the alcohol silences the voices, I always thought of it as the other.

02:04:03.000 I thought of it as like alcohol releases people from their inhibitions and allows them to tap into this voice sometimes.

02:04:09.000 I think that happens with some writers, but it That's never been my problem.

02:04:15.000 There's something about going into a little room wherever you are, and you don't have to be in Hollywood.

02:04:18.000 It could be anywhere. 0.97

02:04:20.000 As long as there's a little room in the house you can escape to and sit there quietly and make shit up that you think people will enjoy. 0.96

02:04:31.000 As long as that's there, that's all I really need. 0.93

02:04:36.000 Now, occasionally I will play music without stop on certain scripts.

02:04:41.000 It was the same way with Leonard Cohen.

02:04:43.000 I listened to him a lot.

02:04:44.000 And Dylan, of course.

02:04:45.000 I did a movie with Dylan, which was also a funny experience.

02:04:53.000 But sometimes it's music.

02:04:54.000 It's not Coke anymore.

02:04:56.000 It's not cognac anymore with coffee.

02:05:01.000 I drank so much coffee that finally one day we had to call an ambulance because I thought I was having a heart attack and become allergic to it.

02:05:10.000 Is it just caffeine?

02:05:11.000 Ambulance caffeine.

02:05:13.000 Ambulances are driving me down to Marine General and there's a traffic jam.

02:05:16.000 There's construction, right?

02:05:18.000 And they think I'm having a heart attack and I jump out of the ambulance and I run up to the guy with the heart attack.

02:05:24.000 And I'd never forget, it says Brinkerhoff.

02:05:27.000 His name was Brinkerhoff. 1.00

02:05:28.000 And I'm yelling at him, I'm having a heart attack, you motherfucker. 1.00

02:05:31.000 Get these guys out of the way. 1.00

02:05:32.000 I'm dying, of course.

02:05:33.000 Oh, my God. 1.00

02:05:35.000 It's worse than the guy who wants to fuck Brad Pitt. 1.00

02:05:38.000 If it gets out of the way. 1.00

02:05:39.000 Well, the crazy thing is just coffee after all the coke and all the other craziness.

02:05:43.000 Yeah, well, even that got, so I had to stop.

02:05:46.000 I stopped the coffee as well.

02:05:48.000 The years after I stopped it, I was in New York and I ordered a Decaf espresso.

02:05:57.000 There wasn't decaf, and I was up for two and a half days without being able to sleep, so obviously my system got totally screwed up.

02:06:05.000 It got reset.

02:06:06.000 Yeah, you lost your tolerance for it.

02:06:11.000 But I never felt it inspired me.

02:06:14.000 Now, with basic instincts, riding it in the sun, in the Hawaiian sun, and of course, through all of this, it was nonstop smoking.

02:06:28.000 Two pack a day smoking. 0.97

02:06:30.000 beginning with Lucky's and Marlboro's and moving out to Galois and occasionally cigars and pipe and all this shit. 0.99

02:06:38.000 So I did do that.

02:06:40.000 But I never felt that the Coke was inspirational. 0.99

02:06:46.000 It was enjoyable and it was fucking dynamite sexually. 0.99

02:06:52.000 That also comes in handy. 0.98

02:06:53.000 But it wasn't what fueled your writing.

02:06:56.000 No, it was just recreational.

02:06:59.000 But nicotine did.

02:07:00.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:07:02.000 Stephen King said that, that when he stopped smoking, it was one of the most difficult things that he ever quit.

02:07:07.000 Quitting the booze and quitting coke and all that stuff was one thing, but quitting cigarettes, he said he really noticed the difference in his writing.

02:07:14.000 Well, yeah, I went through that.

02:07:18.000 I was warned after my cancer surgery by this army surgeon that I liked so much that if you smoke or drink, you're dead.

02:07:28.000 You're dead.

02:07:29.000 Understand that.

02:07:33.000 So I took it seriously.

02:07:35.000 The drinking, my idea of not drinking at that point was switching from tangerine to white wine.

02:07:42.000 And of course, that got out of hand after a while, too, until Naomi jumped into the whole prey.

02:07:49.000 And now you're completely clean?

02:07:52.000 Totally.

02:07:52.000 I've been completely clean.

02:07:53.000 Did this all line up with your conversion to Christianity? 0.75

02:07:56.000 Well, I needed Jesus of Nazareth's help seriously to be able to do all that. 0.92

02:07:56.000 Yeah. 0.92

02:08:04.000 And I did a lot of praying.

02:08:09.000 But I still believe in prayer and I believe in worship with a group of people.

02:08:14.000 Group of people, there's a special kind of inspirational thing that I feel.

02:08:19.000 Yeah, no, I agree with you.

02:08:20.000 I think there's something about all those people collected together.

02:08:23.000 Yeah.

02:08:24.000 It's just like when you go to a concert and you feel the music with all the people that are enjoying the music.

02:08:29.000 There's a similar thing that happens at a church.

02:08:30.000 Very similar, absolutely.

02:08:32.000 We're meant to be together.

02:08:33.000 You know, we are tribal people and we're meant to be together, and there's something about groups of people together, especially in a positive way, that unite us and connect us in a way that it's very profound.

02:08:46.000 It's different than anything else.

02:08:47.000 It's different than watching it on a screen.

02:08:49.000 There's something about being in the presence of other people that are doing the same thing.

02:08:53.000 Yeah.

02:08:54.000 You can feel a vibe.

02:08:56.000 Yeah.

02:08:57.000 And the vibe goes deep and it's really inspirational.

02:09:01.000 And when it's really working, I feel almost transported.

02:09:07.000 I'm on a different level.

02:09:08.000 I feel myself being on that level.

02:09:10.000 It's wonderful.

02:09:11.000 Yeah.

02:09:12.000 And you can see all these other people experiencing the same thing.

02:09:15.000 It's very transformational.

02:09:17.000 Really.

02:09:18.000 And I always talk about the parking lot of church is like the.

02:09:21.000 Best place on earth because nobody lets you go, everybody lets everybody go in front of them, everyone's kind.

02:09:29.000 You know, it's it, it works.

02:09:30.000 That's what's crazy.

02:09:31.000 Like, the teachings of Jesus do work, yes, like if you follow them, you will be a better person.

02:09:36.000 Yes, you will.

02:09:37.000 But people are very cynical, and rightly so, they're very afraid of people manipulating them, they're very afraid of cults.

02:09:46.000 There you go, you got your cross right on you.

02:09:48.000 Yeah, that's a nice one, too.

02:09:49.000 I like that.

02:09:50.000 Is people are very afraid of people telling them that they know things.

02:09:50.000 Thank you.

02:09:55.000 That they have the answers.

02:09:58.000 Yeah.

02:10:02.000 I'm not afraid of that.

02:10:04.000 Sometimes I'm skeptical of it, but it depends on where it's coming from.

02:10:09.000 And sometimes, I don't know how you are, but sometimes I could feel something very special with someone who is talking about those kinds of things.

02:10:17.000 You can feel the difference, and the difference between that and someone who's not genuine is very apparent.

02:10:24.000 You feel that as well.

02:10:26.000 It bothers you.

02:10:27.000 You're like, I don't want to hear this guy talk about this.

02:10:29.000 But you know what? 1.00

02:10:31.000 If you have a shit detector and you do, and so do I, if you have a shit detector, you can really feel that and pick it up. 1.00

02:10:37.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:10:38.000 And block it out.

02:10:39.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:10:39.000 Well, I think your shit detector works with virtually everything. 1.00

02:10:42.000 And I think the audience gets it too. 1.00

02:10:44.000 Yeah.

02:10:45.000 I agree. 0.99

02:10:47.000 In terms of if my shit detector advises me to do something, I must always do it. 0.99

02:10:53.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:10:54.000 Well, listen, Joe, it's been an honor having you in here.

02:10:58.000 You're a real legend.

02:10:59.000 It's been such a pleasure.

02:11:02.000 You are truly.

02:11:03.000 What you do is you have redefined the interview and you've made it into a very special conversation chat between two guys who think they'll like each other, and they talk for hours and they're inspired and they come out liking each other and you do that to people and I think that's a great character.

02:11:32.000 I thank you for the Joe Rogan experience.

02:11:32.000 Thank you.

02:11:35.000 Thank you for being here.

02:11:37.000 It's an honor.

02:11:37.000 It's an honor to meet you and an honor to have you on here.

02:11:40.000 And I really enjoyed the conversation.

02:11:41.000 It was awesome.

02:11:42.000 Thank you.

02:11:43.000 Bye, everybody.

02:11:43.000 All right.

02:11:43.000 I did too.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 03, 2026

Joe Rogan Experience #2508 - Joe Eszterhas

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