00:02:49.000I know that some people think the movies had a kind of amatory effect on them.
00:02:54.000But 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?
00:03:05.000I mean, is that the real key to why it happened?
00:03:08.000Well, in his defense, Putin attacked first.
00:03:49.000You 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
00:03:56.000But 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
00:04:06.000I'm just an old guy giving him the space.0.99
00:04:09.000So 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
00:04:21.000But this would be 3, and my title for it is Basic Instinct Jezebel.
00:04:27.000The 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.
00:06:17.000Now, 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.
00:06:41.000I 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
00:06:54.000And 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.
00:07:13.000But anyway, she was stuck there in my memory.
00:07:16.000And 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.
00:07:31.000And 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.
00:07:41.000Was it an itchy trigger finger, or did he just get off on it?
00:07:45.000So somehow these two characters were in my head, and I thought about them a lot, but they didn't come together.
00:07:53.000And then, I think, thanks to the twisted little man, one day the two came together in a love story.
00:08:00.000And that was the genesis of Basic Instinct.
00:08:03.000And by the time I wrote it, I had thought about it subconsciously and directly for a long time.
00:08:11.000I 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.
00:09:44.000The 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.
00:10:02.000And it's about women who don't have to hide their sexuality.
00:10:06.000That's wild that she made such a turnaround.1.00
00:10:27.000I worked with a director, Richard Marquand, who directed Jack at Edge and The Hearts.
00:10:33.000Excuse me, in Hearts of Fire, and we worked on another one together.
00:10:36.000And Richard said to me that critics should be taken out into the backyard and shot.0.75
00:10:42.000I 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
00:11:13.000And how the two came together in this twisted thing called creativity, you know, and they come out of this maelstrom.
00:11:21.000Now, 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.
00:11:34.000And that consisted of, at that point, driving around in a company car that got the police radio and responding to whatever was going on.
00:11:49.000On occasion, you got there before the cops got there.
00:11:54.000And 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.
00:13:51.000His name was Elmer Joseph, and he would come around to the little office in the police bed all the time, and I knew him.
00:13:57.000And 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.
00:14:15.000And he was leading the group of black nationalists who had been shooting these policemen, and I was behind this.0.99
00:14:22.000This car's wheels a few feet away from the whole shit.0.99
00:14:27.000And I found the whole thing so frightening and so disturbing that I pissed my pants.0.99
00:14:35.000So, the four years of police, there were other incidents I covered.
00:14:39.000The urban uprisings in Detroit, two in Cleveland, and one in Newark.
00:14:46.000I was very involved in the civil rights movement.
00:15:39.000And 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.
00:15:50.000So the under wrote stuff for the National Enquirer and then moved on to Rolling Stone and all of that.
00:17:14.000Sex is not just about being able to perform, it's about actually wanting to.
00:17:19.000And I've got a special deal for you listeners.
00:17:22.000Right now, when you buy two months of Blue Chew Gold, you get the third free with the promo code ROGAN.
00:17:29.000You'll also receive an additional 10% off plus free overnight shipping on your first order.
00:17:34.000Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information.
00:17:40.000Well, 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.
00:18:10.000I slept on a couch in the living room that overlooked the bar.
00:18:17.000One 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
00:18:28.000Who spent most of his time playing with Mark Twain, as Mark Twain said, with his pecker.0.98
00:19:03.000You 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.
00:19:55.000But there was almost with everyone, there was some kind of betrayed.
00:19:59.000Came 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.
00:20:16.000Betrayed, which came out in the mid-80s.
00:20:19.000There were several incidents in Oregon and in the northwest parts of the country which got a lot of publicity.
00:20:25.000It was before Timothy McVeigh, but all roughly in that same period.
00:20:31.000So I decided under a false name to go to one of these jamborees and see what the hell is going on.
00:20:38.000Essentially my journalism experience, I went into it, and then out of it I concocted this romance between Deborah Winger and Tom Berenscher.
00:20:48.000Telling 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.
00:21:03.000and all of those kinds of things, and becoming an American citizen.
00:21:09.000They were shot, incidentally, right where I grew up, in front of the apartment house where we lived.
00:21:18.000And 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?
00:21:33.000And he said, yeah, I was a bartender there.1.00
00:21:48.000The 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.
00:22:06.000And we began speaking around midnight after a show at a place called Leo's Casino.
00:22:13.000And we began talking around midnight and talked till 3 30 in the morning.
00:22:18.000And 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
00:22:29.000And 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
00:22:39.000He said, You're a fucking white nigger, that's what you are.1.00
00:23:11.000Literally the day after the interview.
00:23:13.000I'm sitting there in this hall-like city room, and I see a city editor, the Associated Press wire machine start dinging.
00:23:26.000In those days, if it had more than four or five dings, there was some bad thing that happened.
00:23:31.000I saw a city editor come from the city desk to this dinging machine.0.95
00:23:37.000He'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.
00:23:46.000So 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
00:24:07.000I left the office right then and said, fuck it for the rest of the day.0.99
00:24:11.000There was a bar across the street.1.00
00:24:14.000I drank myself silly and went home with the waitress.0.85
00:25:28.000And one of them wasn't made because one of the priests involved with potentially getting Christian financing said we need more incense.0.98
00:25:41.000And my response to somebody who interviewed me about it was I don't write fucking incense.0.97
00:25:57.000him 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.
00:26:15.000And I think what happened to me with all three is that I fell between pews, between so called Christian films and secular films.
00:26:25.000And so that's why we never got the finance for all three of them.
00:26:31.000When 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?
00:27:44.000And it was a huge movie, beautifully done.
00:27:47.000It 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.
00:28:05.000And they had like 700 people, the full hall, watching it.
00:28:54.000And it's also very real, historically real.
00:28:57.000You 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.
00:29:14.000That film really showed his human side.
00:29:20.000And 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.
00:29:34.000He was a Jewish zealot, a freedom fighter against the Roman Empire.
00:30:05.000And that side is completely ignored by most films, except the two that you mentioned specifically that are like that.
00:30:14.000Yeah, the last Temptation of the Christ, I don't remember.
00:30:17.000I remember there was some controversy around it, but I was too young to really be paying attention to how.
00:30:23.000It 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.
00:30:35.000Now, 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.
00:31:26.000There's nothing that says that Mary Magdalene was a hooker of any kind.
00:31:30.000And then there's no proof for that in any way.
00:31:33.000So 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.
00:31:53.000Scorsese'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.
00:33:16.000I'm not even sure that Jesus really said, do not resist violence.
00:33:22.000Jesus also said, if you have a cloak but not a sword, sell the cloak and buy a sword.
00:33:30.000He also said, I come not to make peace.
00:33:34.000I come not to make peace but with a sword.0.83
00:33:39.000There'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
00:33:56.000Well, there's always a problem when human beings add their own interpretation to an ancient story.0.96
00:34:07.000Absolutely, it's a great problem, but in this case, there is historical evidence on the other side.
00:34:14.000And they simply ignore that and pretend it doesn't happen.
00:34:17.000The Gnostic Gospels are full of so called revolutionary things.
00:34:24.000And 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.
00:34:40.000So they had to have been taken secondhand from people who said they saw things.
00:34:45.000Where with the previous, there's a shot that people directly saw them.
00:34:52.000The 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.
00:35:27.000To try to get an accurate understanding of what was going on back then is insanely difficult.
00:35:33.000I 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.
00:35:49.000But since 2001, When this process really began, I became a real student of the historical Jesus.
00:36:01.000And 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.
00:36:14.000Well, it's also, he had some of the most profound and insanely resonating teachings, like even today.
00:36:24.000The words that he spoke 2,000 years ago, there's still today people, I mean, they resonate with people.
00:36:33.000And if you live your life by the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will be a better person.
00:36:58.000Let me ask you this because I had a long conversation with Mel Gibson about this.
00:37:02.000What do you think about the Shroud of Turin?
00:37:05.000Well, 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.
00:37:27.000Discovered that the Shroud of Turin came from 1313 or 1320.
00:37:34.000Now, this is a huge controversy about it, and there are those people who feel that that absolutely is Christ.
00:37:41.000I 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.
00:37:57.000But the evidence, what there is, seems to indicate that it comes from the 1300s.
00:38:06.000But then I've also seen people that say that that evidence, there's some controversy about that evidence.
00:38:13.000And 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.
00:38:54.000But 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.
00:39:13.000And the fact that they really only could see the accurate representation of it once they saw it as a negative.
00:39:19.000Is 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?
00:39:27.000Especially 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.
00:39:35.000So, what are you making and why is it so compelling when you look at it in the negative?
00:39:41.000And 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.
00:41:15.000Yeah, 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?
00:41:29.000If this is the negative, how would you create that as a positive?
00:41:33.000Can you show me also the positive image of it?
00:42:42.000I'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.
00:42:48.000Says it behaves like a photographic negative and shows some 3D information, which is unusual for normal artwork.
00:42:55.000The 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.
00:43:10.000Simple heat or scorch theories likewise fail to match.
00:43:14.000The very shallow, non burned discoloration of the fibers.
00:43:23.000Painting 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.
00:43:34.000Some 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.
00:43:51.000Some 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.
00:44:08.000Proponents sometimes link this to Jesus' resurrection, but the needed radiation, billions of watts, without burning the cloth, is far beyond anything observed in nature.
00:44:19.000And this remains a speculative, face based idea rather than an established physical mechanism.
00:44:25.000In 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.
00:45:35.000Whether or not AI, whether Perplexity, our sponsor, has some sort of a bias.
00:45:42.000The 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.
00:45:51.000Either a hoax or an elaborate version.
00:45:57.000The only carbon dating seems like it happened in 1988, so I don't know that they've done it.
00:46:02.000Supporters 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.
00:46:15.000Okay, what are the scientific arguments?
00:46:30.000Alternative 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.
00:46:46.000Pollen 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.
00:46:58.000Some 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.
00:47:51.000It's currently in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud.
00:47:55.000So here's interesting who found it and when and why or whatever.
00:48:02.000The 1350s, rather, in Leary, a village in France, where the knight Geoffrey de Charnay displayed a cloth claimed to be Jesus' burial shroud.
00:48:13.000How he obtained it and where it was between the first century and the 14th century are unknown.
00:48:18.000Later theories trace it speculatively through Edessa and Constantinople.
00:51:29.000And 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
00:51:48.000Be interviewed all over the place, and people were stealing mail from my mailbox and all that shit.
00:51:53.000And I should have been overwhelmingly happy with that, but something was missing, I felt.0.83
00:51:59.000And I couldn't really put my finger on what that was, but something was missing in my life.
00:52:05.000And then I got throat cancer, stage four throat cancer.
00:52:13.000Shortly 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.
00:52:34.000Stage four was very dicey and he was very honest with me about how dicey it would be.
00:52:40.000He did it spectacularly and here I am at 81.
00:52:47.000But 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.
00:53:18.000And then I went to church a couple of times, and I loved the Mass.
00:53:26.000In 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.
00:53:38.000In the course of my recovery, I did everything I could physically to help.
00:53:43.000I jogged and walked and did all of those things, and I recovered.
00:53:49.000And I felt afterwards that the reason I was able to be to stage four cancer had to do with my prayer life.
00:53:58.000And 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.
00:54:16.000So I started going regularly to church with Naomi, and then as the boys were boarding with the boys as well.
00:54:30.000As time went by, I also started having issues with the Catholic Church.
00:54:39.000I 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.
00:57:51.000So 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.
00:58:06.000He said he didn't know much about it than he was talking about the Civil Rights Movement.
00:58:14.000He was very, very moving and a powerful figure.
00:58:17.000Then I just drove him to the airport, but there was something about the man that was absolutely magnetic.
00:59:29.000In 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.
01:00:41.000But 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
01:00:52.000I mean, we're learning a lot of weird stuff.0.86
01:00:55.000Yeah, and also it's very dangerous for them.
01:01:06.000I guess smoking cigarettes and birth control pills for some people can cause blood clots.
01:01:12.000I don't understand why or what, but that is an issue, right?
01:01:16.000You're not supposed to smoke if you're on birth control.
01:01:18.000See if that's still the recommendation.
01:01:20.000Well, obviously, they tell you not to smoke, period.
01:01:23.000But I think there's some potential complication.
01:01:27.000Smoking while taking oral contraceptives that contain estrogen significantly increases the risk of severe cardiovascular events like heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots.
01:01:36.000The risk is particularly high for women over 35.
01:01:38.000Quitting smoking or using alternative birth control is highly recommended.
01:02:18.000And I wanted to talk about him because.
01:02:20.000I really haven't had a chance to talk about him specifically.
01:02:24.000Hunter really was the cause of my whole huge success, even as a screenwriter, let me tell you how.
01:02:32.000I 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.
01:02:49.000And I covered at the Plane Dealer, I covered at A Hells Angels shootout of a bar called Bartos Cafe in Cleveland.
01:02:59.000And I wrote a story about it that the Associated Press picked up and put on their national wire.0.99
01:03:08.000And 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
01:03:24.000Now there are two of us who know how to write about Hells Angels.0.98
01:07:57.000I 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.
01:08:12.000And Hunter had never met her but had heard of her.
01:08:20.000And Hunter came to dinner at our small.
01:08:23.000tiny apartment in Novato and my wife at the time cooked a Hungarian chicken paprikash dinner.
01:08:35.000Okay, it's Hungary's most famous meal.
01:08:38.000And 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.
01:09:00.000And 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
01:09:16.000He said, you have this wonderful wife here and you're fucking around with this hippie chick.0.99
01:09:21.000I mean, true beration and anger and all of that.1.00
01:10:01.000As many, many years later, he wanted me to write the screenplay for Rum Diary.
01:10:12.000And 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.
01:10:20.000And he wanted me to go to Aspen so that we could talk about it.
01:10:28.000And 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?
01:10:40.000And Ian sort of pauses, and he says, well, He's good.
01:10:44.000And 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.
01:11:58.000And 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.
01:12:09.000And 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.
01:12:20.000His body began being old and he needed a wheelchair.
01:12:32.000At 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.
01:12:41.000Anita couldn't really pick him up.0.96
01:12:46.000So they had to get help and cars were going by and all that shit.0.85
01:12:49.000And then he also broke a leg when they were visiting Hawaii.0.97
01:12:55.000So, 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.
01:13:32.000There'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.
01:13:43.000You know, like six in the morning in the hot tub with champagne.
01:15:23.000And 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.
01:15:39.000The 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.
01:15:54.000And he also had this freedom that was very different from all his other reporters because he was a one time guy.
01:15:59.000He was going to go in there and follow the campaign for the entire time and then wrote this book about it.
01:16:06.000But Joe, these were all staid, the shoe tie wearing reporters.
01:16:12.000And 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
01:16:25.000Well, 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
01:16:40.000All of a sudden, you've got this fucking maniac who's.1.00
01:16:44.000Drinking 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
01:16:54.000If they never have him back again, it's fine.0.99
01:16:57.000I'm so sorry that Hunter wasn't here with Trump's time.
01:19:07.000My 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.
01:19:18.000They're trained for much less time than police officers, much less time than military.
01:19:22.000And then you have this militarized police force that has no identification in there on the streets.
01:19:29.000That'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.
01:19:39.000That militarized police force could be going door to door and confiscating guns.
01:19:44.000That 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.
01:19:59.000When they start calling people like Like the woman who was killed in Minnesota and the guy, domestic terrorist, you know, it's an abomination.
01:20:14.000Which woman is – That woman who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis.
01:21:07.000His real coat that he's wearing is a very strange.0.99
01:21:09.000I mean, not accusing him of anything, it's just a fucking coat.0.99
01:21:12.000Fucking 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
01:21:25.000The 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
01:21:37.000Imagine if you're living in Guatemala and you're encouraged to come to America, you live in a terrible third world country.0.99
01:21:43.000Situation, you have a wherever you're living, it's like deep poverty.
01:21:48.000You'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.
01:22:02.000There's all these different programs that are incentivizing people to come to America.
01:22:07.000The Red Cross is giving you maps, people are showing you how to do it.
01:22:10.000They're letting you across the border, they're letting you into the country.
01:22:14.000Two years later, you're being chased down.
01:22:16.000Two years later, you've got masked ice workers that are pulling.
01:22:20.000I mean, it's like it's very inconsistent.0.98
01:22:23.000Obviously, 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
01:22:34.000So they upend their life, they come to America in the only way they know how.0.97
01:22:38.000And 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
01:22:47.000And no one should be able to cut that line, and they went through it the right way.
01:22:50.000However, these people, that's not an option for them.0.57
01:22:53.000If 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
01:23:06.000I personify the American dream in terms of what happened to me.
01:23:11.000What they said in the camps was, the streets of America are paved with gold.
01:23:17.000When we lived on Lorraine Avenue in Cleveland, there was a Hungarian poet.
01:23:22.000A 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?
01:24:27.000I 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.
01:24:40.000Moving on to people in college who helped, I found a great deal of help.
01:24:49.000I couldn't have done what I achieved without the help of other people and other Americans.
01:24:57.000And then to top everything off, You know, the Hollywood and 18 films and all of that.
01:25:06.000Yes, I think that is the personification of the American dream.
01:25:09.000And many of the immigrants who come here are looking for the same dream.
01:25:16.000And many of them are saying what Matt Achimura said on Lorraine Avenue, old one, old one, where is it?
01:25:24.000Part 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.
01:25:41.000The people who are gardeners and who work in stores and trying to make a buck and have kids that they're trying to survive.
01:25:48.000Well, it's also part of the ICE story, too.
01:26:56.000You 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.
01:27:04.000And 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.
01:27:15.000The more people that are in the town, regardless of whether or not they're legal or illegal, You get more congressional seats.
01:27:21.000So they use them for political points.
01:28:25.000So 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.
01:28:35.000I mean, we saw some of it during COVID.
01:28:37.000There were some militarized police on the streets keeping people in lockdown in certain cities.
01:28:42.000They utilized the National Guard and they did things like that.0.95
01:29:08.000And 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.
01:31:18.000There'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.
01:31:34.000But he had the same kind of verve and love in terms of being a stand-up.
01:31:44.000Being outrageous, pushing the envelope.
01:31:47.000And 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.
01:31:57.000He wrote a book called Letters from the Earth from the Voice of the Devil.
01:32:22.000He 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.
01:32:33.000And 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.
01:33:26.000It was as close to Lenny Bruce as you're ever going to see someone portray Lenny Bruce.0.98
01:33:31.000The problem is, the world has changed so much since 1960 that a lot of the outrageousness is gone and it seems very pedestrian.
01:33:40.000Like 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.
01:33:54.000The understanding of culture and of race relations and sexual relations.
01:34:17.000Especially if you go and watch a lot of old films, it's a window into how people perceived reality back then.
01:34:25.000There's some stuff that's rarely been published.
01:34:29.000From 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.
01:34:47.000There's something called Twain's Notebooks that hasn't been published in their full form, certainly, that may still be shocking.
01:34:56.000I'm still playing with it because I'm reading and reading and all of that.
01:35:02.000Even if I never do, it's so much fun reading about him and his life because he was such an interesting character.
01:35:09.000Well, 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.
01:35:19.000Just think of him as the guy who wrote Tom Sawyer.
01:35:44.000And 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.
01:35:53.000And 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.
01:36:06.000What letter did you write to Michael Ovitz?
01:36:09.000Michael Ovitz was the top dog agent in town running CAA.
01:36:17.000I 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.
01:36:30.000So I was leaving CAA simply because of my love for Guy.
01:36:35.000And I went in to see Ovitz and said, I'm leaving the agency.
01:36:38.000And Ovitz said, If you leave the agency, then my foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard will put you under the ground.
01:37:25.000Yeah, 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.
01:37:40.000And he actually was out of the business, not much past that.
01:37:47.000But the notion of Kennison, I love Kennison's work, the notion of Kennison, when I saw that thing, I was overwhelmed.
01:37:58.000He'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.
01:38:09.000He was so different than anybody else.
01:38:12.000You know, I was introduced to Kinnison by a girl that I worked with.
01:38:15.000I 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
01:39:48.000And 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
01:40:01.000There's a few people, there's a few characters along the way that have just.0.97
01:40:04.000Completely changed comedy, and I think Kennison is one of the big ones.
01:41:35.000I 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.
01:41:46.000The first album I listened to, I was like, Jesus Christ, this guy's incredible.
01:42:07.000It reminds me, I'm sorry, Hunter, in terms of being wild about Coke.
01:42:12.000My first story when I was at Rolling Stone was a piece about narcotics, corrupt narcotics agents.
01:42:18.000And as a result of the stories, the guy who was the head of the narcotics agency in the state of California had to resign.
01:42:26.000And 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
01:42:36.000Now, 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
01:42:45.000It's one of the things that solidified our friendship.0.97
01:44:14.000Jimi 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.
01:44:47.000Okay, I'm a reporter at the plane dealer, and all of our editors barely know about rock and roll.
01:44:54.000And as I said, I've loved it all my life, and when Hendrix came around, I loved his work.0.95
01:45:00.000And 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.
01:45:11.000And I go up to my city editor and tell him I'd like to interview Hendrix and cover his concert.0.98
01:45:18.000So I do cover his concert and it's jammed in Cleveland Arena and people are loving it.
01:45:23.000And I've set up a date to interview him the next morning at the Cleveland Hotel.
01:45:29.000Okay, so they show up the next morning and I am the plane dealer reporter.
01:45:34.000I've got a tie on and a sport coat, you know, and they go in, I think it's 9.30.
01:45:42.000And 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.
01:45:56.000We 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.
01:46:08.000He'd done this pre-stuff before he went out on his own.
01:46:30.000And 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.
01:47:57.000So I order a chicken paprikash for him, which is the big Hungarian meal.
01:48:02.000And Chaz and Mitchell order something else, but very Hungarian stuff on my advice.
01:48:09.000And 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.
01:48:20.000Mr. Hendrik Söld, will you autograph please?
01:49:11.000Ron 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.
01:49:20.000And Jimi Hendrix opened for the monkeys.
01:49:23.000He said it was the worst booking of all time.
01:49:27.000So this is when Jimi Hendrix was emerging.
01:49:30.000He really hadn't become Jimi Hendrix yet.
01:49:33.000And so he's the opening act for the monkeys.
01:49:36.000And 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.
01:49:45.000You know, the Monkeys, fun band, but, you know, they had a TV show and it was a very clean, sweet TV show.
01:50:14.000Many years later, I thought about writing a Hendrix movie.
01:50:19.000And I was working with a producer friend named Ben Myron, and Ben rounded up his brother.
01:50:26.000And we actually brought him to Malibu.
01:50:30.000And 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.
01:50:40.000But it still would be a terrific movie, I think.
01:54:20.000Now, 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
01:54:47.000I'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.
01:55:21.000I 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
01:57:20.000Well, 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.
01:57:34.000We talked about Hunter in the 60s and the 70s.
01:57:40.000He 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.
01:57:54.000It was able to articulate things in a way that gave you this understanding of what was going on with the people back then.
01:58:00.000That 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.
01:58:09.000The Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved.
01:58:12.000It's just a phenomenal encapsulation of that.
01:58:43.000As Hemingway was for a previous generation.
01:58:46.000Hunter and I talked a lot about Hemingway because of our backgrounds and earning a living and all of that.
01:58:54.000I 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.
02:00:24.000And 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.
02:00:35.000And 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.
02:00:51.000The 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.
02:01:04.000With the booze when I was drinking, if I drank enough I could get rid of it and begin it again the next day.
02:01:13.000It's partly freeing yourself from something that you've created yourself.
02:01:18.000So in that sense, you create something that can hurt you even if you created it.
02:01:26.000My 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.
02:02:02.000You make people's lives better by enjoying what they're watching.
02:02:05.000And 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.
02:02:20.000Incidentally, the classic Hollywood story, I think Alyssa, Alyssa Esterhaas works in Texas in a hospital, and she just got her medical degree.
02:02:33.000But 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.
02:02:44.000You know, this is the sweetest person in the world and has this wonderful smile and really is great with people.
02:02:51.000And she's trying to calm him down and says, What's wrong?
02:04:20.000As 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
02:04:31.000As long as that's there, that's all I really need.0.93
02:04:36.000Now, occasionally I will play music without stop on certain scripts.
02:04:41.000It was the same way with Leonard Cohen.
02:05:01.000I 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.
02:07:02.000Stephen King said that, that when he stopped smoking, it was one of the most difficult things that he ever quit.
02:07:07.000Quitting 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.
02:08:33.000You 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.
02:10:04.000Sometimes I'm skeptical of it, but it depends on where it's coming from.
02:10:09.000And 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.
02:10:17.000You can feel the difference, and the difference between that and someone who's not genuine is very apparent.
02:11:03.000What 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.
02:11:32.000I thank you for the Joe Rogan experience.