The Joe Rogan Experience - March 12, 2013


Joe Rogan Experience #336 - Scott Sigler

Topics
corruption in miami police department Galactic Football League series overly muscled MMA fighters BJ Penn fighting podcast accessibility & performance Sigler ancestor horrors Sigler Ancestor trailer Fifty Shades of Grey fight-or-flight responses
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Scott Sigler
Mentioned
Stephen King Scott Ziegler Nick Diaz Brian Redband George St. Pierre Jesus Christ Hilarious Tony Hinchcliffe Jake Ellenberger Anderson Silva Paul Whitcover Billy Bonnell Carlos Condit Ian Edwards James Irvin Kyle North Nick Denis Dan Severin John Sullivan Floyd Mayweather Quentin Barnes and 72 more
Joe Rogan Experience #335 - Bas Rutten Joe Rogan Experience #338 - Shane Smith

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 48 minutes

Words per minute

196.37

Word count

21,287

Sentence count

1,964

Harmful content

Misogyny

29

sentences flagged

Toxicity

303

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with comedian Scott Sigler to discuss his new book, "Blood is Red" and talk about his new comedy show this Thursday at the American Comedy Company in San Diego, CA with Brian Redbanner and Tony Hinchcliffe. I also talk about my upcoming show at The Ice House with Ari Shafir and Ian Edwards on Wednesday, July 25th. We're sponsored by Onnit. Onnit is a company that makes fitness equipment that helps you improve your physical, mental, and emotional health through the use of a few simple tools and equipment you can buy to improve your overall well-being, productivity, and overall happiness. You can get 10% off your domain name registration with the code: JOGAN10 at checkout. And as always, thank you for checking out the show and supporting the show! I really appreciate it. -Joe Rogan Logo by Courtney DeKorte. This episode was produced by Riley Bray. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The opinions stated on the show are our own and not those of our record labels. We do not own the rights to either of these songs or any music used in the show. All credit given to any artists credited to any other artists or artists credited is their work. If you have a song you'd like us to use, we'd like to use their music, we're working with us in the next episode of our new album "Sonic" we'll be working with them on the next week. Thank you for all of the music we mentioned in the song "I Don't Know It All" we are working on the album "I'm Too Effing Good" by our new song "Goodbye" by Soothe & Good Morning Joe" by my good friend, we'll get a shoutout on this episode. -- we'll see you next week! -- Thank you! -- I'll be seeing you next Tuesday! -- I'm working on a song written and produced by my band "The Good Morning Podcast" -- Thank You, I'll See You" -- I hope you're listening to this one! -- we're going to see you soon! -- -- -- and we'll hear you next Monday! -- and I'll send you back next Tuesday, July 31st, July 5th, July 4th, 6/19, 8/6, 7/7, 8th, 9/8th, and 6/9th, etc.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:02.000 Hello, my friends.
00:00:04.000 We're off and running again.
00:00:05.000 This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is brought to you by audible.com.
00:00:11.000 If you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you can save yourself some money by getting a free audio book.
00:00:20.000 And you can also, on top of that, as if that wasn't cool enough, you also get 30 days free Audible service. 0.97
00:00:29.000 Audible is really a fantastic service, a fantastic thing to have if you're a commuter, if you're stuck on a plane, if you're on the bicycle just staring at a fucking stupid life cycle thing telling you you're not going fast enough. 0.88
00:00:45.000 Books on tape are an amazing way to pass time. 0.97
00:00:50.000 Scott Sigler is with us today. 0.99
00:00:52.000 We're going to get into that a little bit later because my man has made a big mark doing exactly that, releasing his own books on tape, you motherfuckers. 0.98
00:01:00.000 Audible.com forward slash go. 0.99
00:01:03.000 Joe?
00:01:03.000 What?
00:01:03.000 What's my name?
00:01:05.000 My name is Go.
00:01:06.000 His book's on here.
00:01:07.000 Awesome.
00:01:08.000 Yeah.
00:01:09.000 Nocturnal's on there.
00:01:10.000 Yeah.
00:01:11.000 Right there.
00:01:11.000 Bam.
00:01:12.000 Are all your books on there?
00:01:14.000 No, they're not all on there.
00:01:16.000 Just Nocturnal?
00:01:18.000 Infected is on there.
00:01:18.000 Contagious is on there.
00:01:20.000 I sense a trend.
00:01:22.000 Blood is red.
00:01:23.000 Infectious, contagious.
00:01:26.000 Audible.com forward slash Joe.
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00:02:06.000 Audible.com forward slash Joe.
00:02:09.000 We're also brought to you by Hover.
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00:02:49.000 And they're a sponsor of the show.
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00:03:01.000 This Thursday night, there is a show at the American Comedy Company in San Diego, California.
00:03:07.000 If you're in that area, it's going to be fun.
00:03:09.000 It's going to be Brian Redbanner, little buddy Brian.
00:03:12.000 Tony Hinchcliffe is there, of course.
00:03:14.000 Hilarious Tony Hinchcliffe.
00:03:15.000 One of the best up-and-coming guys today. 0.98
00:03:17.000 Really fucking good writer. 0.89
00:03:19.000 Very funny kid. 0.95
00:03:20.000 Jason Teab, who's awesome, of course.
00:03:22.000 You've heard him on our podcast.
00:03:24.000 He's been on many of the Ice House Chronicles.
00:03:26.000 Very funny guy.
00:03:26.000 Real veteran of comedy.
00:03:28.000 Billy Bonnell, another very funny guy.
00:03:30.000 Billy's so funny, man.
00:03:31.000 That dude's going to blow up.
00:03:32.000 That guy in five years, huge.
00:03:33.000 And Yoshi, who's awesome as well.
00:03:35.000 So that's this Thursday night at the American Comedy Company. 1.00
00:03:38.000 There's still a few tickets left, so jump on that shit, bitch. 1.00
00:03:42.000 Tomorrow night, Wednesday night, I'm at the Ice House with Ari Shafir and Ian Edwards. 1.00
00:03:47.000 I was going to do one of those crazy shows where I bring a lot of people on, but I'm trying to work out all this new shit, so we're all three of us going to do longer sets.
00:03:55.000 Ian Edwards, if you've never seen him, really, really funny guy, and Ari, of course, is awesome.
00:03:59.000 So that's Wednesday night at the Ice House.
00:04:02.000 We're also brought to you by Onnit.com, which is... 0.99
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00:05:01.000 Or a video game as your first weapon.
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00:05:13.000 And in controlling something like that, it's surprisingly hard, especially when you grip it really low on the end of the pole because you have all this leverage working against you.
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00:05:25.000 We have 10-pound ones, and that seems like, oh my god, what 10 pounds?
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00:05:30.000 It's such a weird workout.
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00:05:53.000 Alright, freaks. 0.98
00:05:55.000 We got Scott Sigler in the house.
00:05:57.000 We're going to get jiggy with it. 0.99
00:05:58.000 We got a lot of shit to talk about. 1.00
00:06:01.000 We're gonna talk about some scary shit too. 1.00
00:06:14.000 Powerful author, Scott Sigler. 0.99
00:06:16.000 You know you're a bad motherfucker when you look at the back of your book and it says, a worthy successor to Michael Crichton. 0.99
00:06:23.000 That's pretty sweet. 1.00
00:06:24.000 That's some powerful praise right there.
00:06:26.000 I didn't even say that myself.
00:06:27.000 I know.
00:06:28.000 Isn't it awesome when someone else says something super cool about you?
00:06:30.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:06:31.000 You're like, ooh, look at that.
00:06:33.000 Yeah, that's pretty badass, dude.
00:06:35.000 And you said Nocturnal's being turned into a TV show right now?
00:06:38.000 You're in the process of creating something?
00:06:39.000 They're working on it right now, yeah.
00:06:41.000 How much control do you have as a writer when that happens?
00:06:44.000 I've been shocked by it.
00:06:46.000 Normally you have very little or no control at all.
00:06:49.000 A couple points in my career, I've been very lucky to work with people who are like, let's get this as close to the vision you want as possible.
00:06:55.000 And this is the guy who produced Hellboy and Hellboy 2 and The Watchmen.
00:06:59.000 His name is Lloyd Levin.
00:07:01.000 And Lloyd has been...
00:07:03.000 They've kept me involved at all phases of this.
00:07:06.000 Right now they're finishing up the pilot script for it.
00:07:08.000 So I don't write the pilot script, but the guys who are writing it...
00:07:14.000 Kind of send me the plot steps.
00:07:16.000 Here's what we want the episode to be like.
00:07:17.000 Does that sort of match what you're looking at?
00:07:19.000 Because I'm writing the Bible for it.
00:07:21.000 So we're going to look at the 12-episode arc of the first season and make sure everything fits in so we don't have any crazy ending that doesn't make any sense.
00:07:28.000 And then I get to give them feedback.
00:07:30.000 Well, you could try these things.
00:07:31.000 And it's very collaborative.
00:07:33.000 That's amazing.
00:07:34.000 That's a beautiful thing to hear.
00:07:35.000 I love when you hear that.
00:07:36.000 It's one of the most frustrating things to listen to when you hear someone who had a vision...
00:07:41.000 And they tried to express this vision to these other people that had the money.
00:07:45.000 And the people with the money are like, no, no, no, we got this.
00:07:48.000 We need a girl. 1.00
00:07:49.000 You need this. 0.99
00:07:51.000 Add a black guy. 0.99
00:07:52.000 That's the way it usually works, though.
00:07:54.000 I mean, the guys who can raise $20 million get to kind of call the shots for the most part.
00:07:58.000 Yeah, I've seen it.
00:07:58.000 It's a weird thing to see.
00:08:00.000 I've told this story before.
00:08:02.000 There was a guy named Dave.
00:08:04.000 I don't remember his last name.
00:08:05.000 I apologize.
00:08:06.000 But he was a really funny guy.
00:08:08.000 And he's a really funny actor.
00:08:10.000 He's been in a bunch of movies.
00:08:12.000 Like, a real over-the-top, hilarious guy.
00:08:14.000 Well, he got his first starring role in a movie.
00:08:17.000 And I had a very small part in this movie.
00:08:19.000 And I watched all these people in suits.
00:08:21.000 This man had cufflinks on.
00:08:23.000 Like, beautiful, expensive cufflinks. 0.99
00:08:26.000 A perfectly tailored, expensive fucking suit, pinstriped a fat Rolex with diamonds on it. 0.99
00:08:34.000 I mean, this guy was fucking loaded, right? 0.99
00:08:37.000 And he's giving this guy line reads, telling him how he should do it like, I want you to come in like, whoa, whoa! 0.98
00:08:48.000 The guy thinks he's funny.
00:08:51.000 He's got so much power and so much money that he literally is telling the comedian how to be funny.
00:08:58.000 It was a horrific thing to watch.
00:09:01.000 The movie was called Frank McCluskey C.I. or something like that.
00:09:05.000 Terrible!
00:09:06.000 Terrible!
00:09:07.000 They gutted it.
00:09:08.000 They had two ideas.
00:09:37.000 Brilliant.
00:09:38.000 I mean, it's been great.
00:09:39.000 That was such a good movie.
00:09:41.000 It was an excellent movie and great source material to start with.
00:09:44.000 But, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Hellboy.
00:09:46.000 When this popped up, I mean, I watch Hellboy and I'm like...
00:09:49.000 Because my stuff's super hard science-based.
00:09:51.000 We try to make all the bad things plausible.
00:09:54.000 So when you get to the nasty bits and the blood's flying, you're fully bought in.
00:09:58.000 You're like, I know how...
00:09:59.000 I know how this works.
00:10:00.000 I learned about this in science class.
00:10:02.000 Like that.
00:10:02.000 And you go watch Hellboy, which is a little bit more supernatural, but the creature effects and the way everything was shot, and it was just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen to look up on the screen.
00:10:10.000 And now that guy's interested in turning this.
00:10:12.000 It's like I could not wish for anything more closely matched.
00:10:16.000 That's got to be an amazing feeling.
00:10:17.000 What a perfect combination.
00:10:19.000 Yeah.
00:10:19.000 The universe is probably about to send an asteroid our way.
00:10:23.000 Things are going too well.
00:10:24.000 It's my fault.
00:10:25.000 Things are going too well. 0.99
00:10:26.000 You're all going to die and it's my fault. 0.97
00:10:27.000 Sorry. 0.90
00:10:28.000 That must be very comforting to know that you've got a guy that's willing to listen to you.
00:10:33.000 Well, I had the first book infected.
00:10:34.000 That was a whirlwind because I started out giving all my books away as free audiobooks, recording myself, chopping up his podcast, giving away his podcast for free to build up an audience because I couldn't get anybody in New York to pay attention.
00:10:46.000 Well, we don't know if you're horror.
00:10:47.000 We don't know if you're sci-fi.
00:10:48.000 We don't know if you're thriller.
00:10:49.000 We don't know if you're military. 0.93
00:10:50.000 All these different ass-kicking genres coming together.
00:10:53.000 So I couldn't get a book deal.
00:10:54.000 Start giving the books away for free.
00:10:56.000 Build up an audience.
00:10:57.000 Landed a print deal with Random House for Infected.
00:11:00.000 And part of that deal was immediately optioned by Rogue Pictures for a movie.
00:11:04.000 And that's the last I heard of it for like two years.
00:11:07.000 I got to go down and have a couple meetings with some people.
00:11:10.000 But...
00:11:11.000 Script writer, never got to meet him, never got to see the script.
00:11:14.000 It immediately just kind of went off into the weeds and nothing ever came out of it.
00:11:17.000 So this is pretty exciting so far to see things progressing.
00:11:21.000 Wow, that's amazing, man.
00:11:23.000 Like I said, that's an awesome thing to hear when things are just falling into place in the proper order.
00:11:28.000 Now, when you write a book and then you're going to have your book turned into a television series...
00:11:36.000 And you're sort of giving up your ideas to other people.
00:11:40.000 How does that feel?
00:11:41.000 Is that a strange feeling?
00:11:42.000 What is that like?
00:11:44.000 Well, this is the second time around for me for doing this.
00:11:47.000 And it's a little bit strange, but largely it's very exciting.
00:11:51.000 Because what they do, I can't do.
00:11:53.000 I'm not the guy with the Rolex who's trying to control things.
00:11:55.000 The people who can...
00:11:57.000 Pace this out for a one-hour television show and can kind of visualize the 12-episode arc and then get someone to pay for it and get it shot correctly and get it up on a screen.
00:12:07.000 That's a skill set I don't have at all.
00:12:08.000 So it's really, I'm giving up a little bit, but largely it's exciting. 0.99
00:12:12.000 Like, I want to see the shit in this book on TV. I want to see it on the screen. 0.99
00:12:16.000 So it's really not that nerve-wracking at all.
00:12:19.000 You have no idea how it's going to turn out.
00:12:21.000 But at this point in my career, I concede that.
00:12:24.000 I realize that the end product, I'm going to have a tiny amount of control on it, and you're just kind of hoping for the best.
00:12:29.000 You hope they've got the right vibe, and they're going to want to put something as kick-ass on the screen as is in the book.
00:12:36.000 Wow, that's got to be a very, very interesting process.
00:12:40.000 I wish you luck with that.
00:12:41.000 Thanks!
00:12:41.000 It's going to be a fascinating journey.
00:12:44.000 And tell us, what's the plot of the book in a summary?
00:12:48.000 Nocturnal is kind of a throwback to 80s buddy cop movies.
00:12:54.000 And I grew up on the whole Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, all that.
00:12:59.000 Turner and Hooch.
00:13:00.000 Yeah, Turner and Hooch.
00:13:01.000 And just love that genre.
00:13:03.000 So this starts out as sort of a buddy cop procedural where there are Brian Clouser and Pookie Chang, two San Francisco homicide inspectors.
00:13:12.000 And Brian's having these really nasty, nasty dreams about killing people.
00:13:17.000 And early on in the book they go to a site and the murder scene matches his dream exactly.
00:13:22.000 And suspicion falls on him immediately that he's doing these borderline superhuman things to go shred people and body parts all over the place.
00:13:30.000 And then it turns into the procedural from there.
00:13:34.000 They kind of have to follow the rabbit trail.
00:13:38.000 It's hard to summarize it without spoiling it, but it gets kind of paranormal, not really the supernatural.
00:13:47.000 There's a rational explanation for everything, but they uncover this massive conspiracy within the police department.
00:13:51.000 There's been a cover-up that's been going on for 200 years.
00:13:55.000 To stop this, to let this particular group of people who are sacrificing innocence, let them continue to sacrifice.
00:14:01.000 Brian Pooh, you gotta figure out how to shut that down and stay alive.
00:14:05.000 Wow.
00:14:05.000 Yeah.
00:14:06.000 That's some deep conspiratorial shit, man. 1.00
00:14:08.000 200 years of people keeping their mouths shut? 1.00
00:14:10.000 Yeah.
00:14:11.000 Well, it plays off of the police department.
00:14:14.000 And as I was researching this, one of the phrases that came up, like, the biggest gang in New York is the cops.
00:14:19.000 And that goes back to when they first put in the police department and they started to get a lot of power.
00:14:24.000 The organized crime and the gangs were – you could get away with a lot of stuff.
00:14:28.000 But at some point, if you crossed the cops, whether they be good cops or corrupt cops, you were screwed because you just – they had a level of power you couldn't match.
00:14:36.000 Right.
00:14:37.000 So yeah, they're the ones who've been keeping this thing quiet because there are a pattern of serial killers in San Francisco.
00:14:45.000 And this other organization has a way of getting rid of the serial killers when the cops can't even find them.
00:14:50.000 So the cops are actually trying to keep this quiet and protect it because the end result is more people live and less people die, but it's completely illegal as hell.
00:14:58.000 When you write a book like this, how much when you're looking at human corruption and cop corruption, how much did you investigate?
00:15:06.000 Did you go and look at actual cases to find out what's plausible or did you just go completely on your instincts and What you know just by general information?
00:15:14.000 There's a significant amount of research, but it's broad.
00:15:19.000 It's not deep.
00:15:20.000 It's broad research.
00:15:21.000 Let's look into what kind of corruption there has been and how was organized crime set up in San Francisco and learning a lot of things that way because fortunately at this point in the writing career I've learned to try and stay away from diving down the rabbit hole because you can learn all this incredible amazing stuff and then 1% of it actually makes it into the book.
00:15:40.000 And all the time you've invested in researching that for these kind of thriller-style books is time that you get nothing out of that.
00:15:46.000 So a lot of the superficial stuff, learning how the mafia was run out of San Francisco and replaced by the Tongs and the Russians and a lot of other groups, all that stuff is super cool and a ton of that goes in there.
00:16:00.000 And the police department was pretty helpful in research for this.
00:16:07.000 It's not your typical, these are dirty cops and they're going to shake you down.
00:16:10.000 They actually are trying to do something that benefits the greater good, but they have to totally ignore the law they're sworn to protect in order to get the end result.
00:16:18.000 So it's a bit of more fun corruption if you can imagine that.
00:16:21.000 Wow, that's a fascinating subject and I've always been fascinated by the idea of secret societies that have been around for 200 years doing horrible things.
00:16:36.000 Right, right.
00:16:47.000 But the idea of it is it's a constantly fascinating source for people because every now and then you find one that's real.
00:16:54.000 Every now and then you find like a Jerry Sandusky case where no one really did tell the cops for 20 years of child molesting.
00:17:02.000 It really did happen.
00:17:03.000 And you're like, whoa, like these things can happen.
00:17:05.000 Or the Miami – did you ever see Billy Corbin's documentary Cocaine Cowboys?
00:17:10.000 Mm-hmm.
00:17:11.000 Cocaine Cowboys 1 and Cocaine Cowboys 2 are two of my favorite documentaries ever.
00:17:16.000 They're amazing.
00:17:17.000 And this guy, Billy Corbin, who directed it, one of the things he pulled out was that there was one year where the Miami Police Department's graduating class from the police academy Half of them, all of them, either wound up in jail or murdered.
00:17:35.000 Whoa.
00:17:36.000 Yeah.
00:17:37.000 Half of them were murdered and half of them went to jail.
00:17:40.000 The whole thing was like a crazy criminal organization.
00:17:45.000 The entire police force was massively corrupt in the cocaine era.
00:17:50.000 If you go to Miami, have you ever been?
00:17:53.000 No, never been to Miami.
00:17:54.000 It's avoidable.
00:17:55.000 It's not totally necessary.
00:17:57.000 The amount of money involved back then was just astronomical and somebody is going to bite on that sooner or later.
00:18:03.000 The amount of banks there is insane.
00:18:05.000 The banks per capita there are much higher than anywhere else.
00:18:08.000 It's because they were all laundering cocaine money.
00:18:10.000 I mean for real.
00:18:11.000 I mean that's really the root of it all.
00:18:13.000 I mean the actual impact that cocaine had on the economy of Miami is undeniable.
00:18:20.000 But this guy wrote about how crazy the police corruption was back then, or rather did this documentary where he showed it.
00:18:27.000 I mean, it's possible.
00:18:28.000 People can go off the rails.
00:18:30.000 That was just a couple of decades ago.
00:18:32.000 You've got the money and you've got the power, and they're isolated from a lot of the self-examination. 0.99
00:18:40.000 Corruption at the upper or top levels of the police department can make a lot of shit go away. 0.97
00:18:45.000 That's the place it seems most likely That's realistic. 0.98
00:18:49.000 They have their hands on the drugs, their hands on the criminals, their hands on the money.
00:18:52.000 If somebody's going to go bad, that's a good place to do it.
00:18:55.000 Yeah, it's fascinating when you find out that it's true, though.
00:18:58.000 It's like, wow, a corrupt cop. 0.97
00:18:59.000 A bunch of corrupt cops. 0.98
00:19:01.000 They tried it.
00:19:03.000 You almost wonder why it doesn't happen more often.
00:19:05.000 It probably does.
00:19:07.000 They're probably pretty good at, like you said, it's the biggest gang around.
00:19:10.000 Why would you want to piss off the gang?
00:19:12.000 You know, there's probably plenty of little subtle corruption, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
00:19:18.000 The guys who can shoot you and it's legal, I think everybody knows at the end of the day you've really got to be careful around those guys because they can kill you and it's okay. 0.61
00:19:27.000 They're licensed to kill. 0.54
00:19:28.000 And they can just say you attacked them.
00:19:30.000 I mean, how many times have we seen a cell phone camera? 0.96
00:19:33.000 Someone videotaping a cop and the cop beats the shit out of the kid and then you hear from the arrest papers that the police officer lied that the kid attacked him or lied that the kid spit on him or said something.
00:19:46.000 There was a guy on Alex Jones recently. 0.98
00:19:48.000 Same thing.
00:19:49.000 These cops just have ultimate power.
00:19:51.000 That's a bad thing.
00:19:52.000 Whenever any human being's got ultimate power over other people.
00:19:56.000 The thing people I think tend to forget is there's millions of cops across the country.
00:20:02.000 And with that many...
00:20:04.000 A sample set that big...
00:20:06.000 And those opportunities, some of those individuals, a very small percentage of those individuals are going to take that opportunity. 0.96
00:20:12.000 Some of them are going to be nuts. 0.86
00:20:13.000 You only hear about those guys. 0.95
00:20:15.000 You don't hear about the 999,000 that are just doing their job and willing to take a bullet for you every day.
00:20:21.000 But yeah, it happens.
00:20:22.000 Yeah, and when a Christopher Dormer case happens, then people go, Jesus Christ.
00:20:29.000 This could be a cop too?
00:20:30.000 That guy?
00:20:31.000 How'd that guy get through?
00:20:32.000 Or what happened to him overseas that turned him into that guy?
00:20:36.000 Who knows?
00:20:37.000 But how much of that plays a part of your writing?
00:20:40.000 Just sort of in a broad educational sense?
00:20:43.000 Like you just pay attention to all that stuff?
00:20:45.000 It's largely to weave the tapestry of reality.
00:20:48.000 I mean, there's a certain amount of things people are expecting from a fictional novel, things that feel familiar.
00:20:54.000 Well, there's got to be some level of corruption.
00:20:57.000 One cop's got to be a total badass.
00:20:59.000 Somebody's going to rough some guys up just because you're familiar with it.
00:21:01.000 You've seen that.
00:21:02.000 So a lot of those things go into, a lot of them are invisible in the book.
00:21:06.000 I tend both with the science and with culture is to put in a lot of things you're already familiar with so that you you're like okay yeah okay yeah and if you say yeah 20 or 30 times like I know that I know that then when it starts to go up to the next level where the crazy shit starts to happen we've already got this rapport I've already got a rapport with you and you're you've allowed yourself to buy in completely so having those elements like you know realistic police things actually using the real history of the mafia in San Francisco Anything like that allows you to fall further
00:21:36.000 into the story.
00:21:37.000 So it's very important to use real stuff and kind of create that illusion.
00:21:41.000 That's awesome, man.
00:21:42.000 I've always wanted to be a writer in some sense.
00:21:46.000 I've never had the time, but I've always thought it would be an awesome thing.
00:21:48.000 I wrote a terrible script once.
00:21:50.000 You know what we can do?
00:21:51.000 I was on the way up here.
00:21:52.000 We were talking about starting a new show called Get In My Shorts, where I talk to people who say exactly what you said.
00:21:59.000 We sit down for 10 minutes.
00:22:01.000 I interview you about the fiction stuff you like, the movie stuff you like, etc. 0.99
00:22:04.000 Tell me you think it's a stupid idea. 0.99
00:22:06.000 We were talking about this. 0.99
00:22:07.000 And then at the end, like, okay, well, let's throw out some ideas for a story, and I'll help bounce stories together.
00:22:11.000 And then when we get done, you get up and walk away.
00:22:14.000 And then like a week later, I've got like a 5-10 page short story.
00:22:18.000 And then that's the kind of thing that...
00:22:20.000 When you take off your clothes.
00:22:21.000 Yeah. 0.63
00:22:22.000 That Joe got naked. 0.97
00:22:24.000 That sounds like it would be a fun idea. 0.93
00:22:26.000 That doesn't sound bad at all.
00:22:28.000 So you get to write a story without the actual grunt work of getting down and writing.
00:22:32.000 You come up with a big idea and then you turn it over to somebody who does this on a regular basis.
00:22:36.000 It's exactly like taking lessons for something.
00:22:38.000 Like, here's what I want to do and I want to have this and then this guy and then this chick should get naked because obviously that's very important to a story. 0.83
00:22:44.000 And then this sort of thing should happen in the end.
00:22:45.000 I'd be like, alright, let's go see what we can do.
00:22:47.000 We'll go back and push that up.
00:22:48.000 There's so many fascinating occupations out there.
00:22:52.000 There's just not enough time in the world.
00:22:53.000 But writing has always been a particularly romantic one.
00:22:56.000 You know, it's the idea of putting together something that, you know, crafting a story entirely in your head, slapping it down on paper, and then it exists entirely in the heads of the people that are reading it.
00:23:07.000 It's a...
00:23:07.000 The romance of it is so utterly overblown.
00:23:10.000 I've been lucky enough to do this full-time for five years now.
00:23:13.000 This is all I do.
00:23:14.000 It's my job.
00:23:15.000 And it's similar to MMA when you see the guys come in the ring and you're like, oh, look at all this pageantry and all this wonderful stuff and the spotlight's on them.
00:23:24.000 And, you know, except for the Ultimate Fighter show, you don't see the years that go in of just getting crushed and working all the time and all the sacrifice and all the things you got to do.
00:23:33.000 And then you get that moment, oh, the book's in the store and I'm on tour.
00:23:36.000 And that lasts two weeks.
00:23:37.000 And then you go right back into the dungeon and do it some more.
00:23:39.000 It's a great effing job.
00:23:41.000 I don't want to do anything else.
00:23:42.000 I'm so happy to be doing it.
00:23:43.000 But yeah, those moments of romance are like little tiny things that pop up every now and then.
00:23:48.000 Yeah, well, to everybody outside of it that doesn't have to do the work, that's where it's romantic.
00:23:53.000 Yeah, the work can be grueling.
00:23:55.000 Sitting there smoking a cigarette in front of your typewriter like you're Hunter Thompson. 1.00
00:23:59.000 Crap. 0.98
00:24:00.000 Who were your favorite writers when you were coming up? 0.97
00:24:02.000 Definitely, Stephen King is the single biggest influence on me, watching his ability to tell a story and characterize.
00:24:10.000 The thing that always mesmerized me about him is he could take a secondary character, give you one paragraph of description, like here's a vocal twitch, here's a physical twitch, and here's this thing they believe, and then you know that guy's name 20 years later.
00:24:23.000 He's the master of that.
00:24:25.000 And then Anne McCaffrey was a huge sci-fi reader, the Dragon Riders of Pern, that series.
00:24:30.000 So that was kind of more of the science fiction area of things.
00:24:34.000 And Tom Clancy was another big one, too.
00:24:37.000 Tom Clancy's ability to take thousands of different things, research them in detail, and kind of put them all together where they come together at the end for a super over-the-top ending.
00:24:46.000 Those are probably the biggest three.
00:24:48.000 And Jack London's another gigantic one, too.
00:24:50.000 When I was a kid, I read something somewhere where they were criticizing Stephen King's books.
00:24:59.000 I grew up in Boston, in Newton, one of the suburbs of Boston.
00:25:04.000 There was a lot of snobby people.
00:25:05.000 There was a lot of people that were like, Stephen King, what base writing.
00:25:09.000 I remember thinking that. 0.96
00:25:12.000 Why would you ever criticize a guy who was, first of all, so fucking prolific? 0.90
00:25:17.000 And it's really fun stuff. 0.94
00:25:20.000 How stuffy do you have to be to not appreciate a good Stephen King book?
00:25:25.000 He's on a completely different level than, say, the Twilight writer.
00:25:29.000 But you still run into that today.
00:25:31.000 Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight and these books come out and they blow up because it resonates with the end reader. 0.89
00:25:39.000 And all of this pompous, arrogant bullshit about I'm writing art, and you know what?
00:25:43.000 Unless your book has sold 200, 300,000 copies, no one's going to remember your name in 50 years. 0.98
00:25:49.000 You're going to be gone.
00:25:49.000 Unless you get your book dusted off somewhere.
00:25:51.000 So the guys who are actually making stuff that resonates with people, that makes millions of people extremely happy to read it again and again, And then go see the movies.
00:25:59.000 They get shed on all the time.
00:26:02.000 All the time.
00:26:02.000 And Stephen King now is getting an enormous amount of, he's getting his props now from the industry, I think.
00:26:07.000 But yeah, 25, 30 years ago, everybody was all pissed that this dirty butt kid from Maine came out of nowhere and has eaten all their lunches because he writes great stories that people love. 0.96
00:26:18.000 They were pissed. 0.98
00:26:19.000 They wanted those books sold, not him. 0.98
00:26:21.000 Yeah, they're crazy.
00:26:22.000 You read The Shining and tell me it's not an amazing book.
00:26:24.000 The movie's great, but the TV show I didn't really dig that much.
00:26:30.000 But the movie, the Jack Nicholson movie, although very different from the book, but the book's sensational.
00:26:36.000 My favorite book of his is Misery.
00:26:38.000 Yes!
00:26:39.000 You go through Misery, and he didn't just play with a story there.
00:26:44.000 He actually played with the typography on the page.
00:26:46.000 So if you actually read the page...
00:26:48.000 Paul, the main character, has to write this story for Annie.
00:26:51.000 And then they switch font, bring in the margin so it looks like a regular typewriter page.
00:26:55.000 And then as the story's progressing, letters start to fall off of the typewriter.
00:27:00.000 And the farther it goes, first it's the N, then the E, then the L. And as you get towards the end of the book, where not only is Paul's real-life story happening, but the fictional story is coming to a conclusion too, there's all these scrawled pencil marks in there.
00:27:12.000 And just looking at the page starts to stress you the fuck out. 0.52
00:27:15.000 And it was It wasn't until the third time I read it, I'm like, because I read it once, I'm like, okay, that was killer.
00:27:20.000 That was killer.
00:27:20.000 I read it again, and then I'm like, I'm reading it the third time, I'm like, why am I so angry?
00:27:24.000 What is going on?
00:27:25.000 And I stop and look, and I'm like, it's just, so he even understands the art form of how visually things look on a page.
00:27:32.000 You know why?
00:27:33.000 Why's that? 1.00
00:27:33.000 He was on all sorts of drugs when he wrote that shit. 1.00
00:27:36.000 He was back in the day. 1.00
00:27:37.000 He was on some heavy-duty shit. 0.99
00:27:40.000 He said that, I think it was Christine, he didn't even remember writing it. 0.99
00:27:44.000 It was one of them, yeah.
00:27:46.000 Didn't remember writing it.
00:27:47.000 The car's alive, man. 1.00
00:27:49.000 I think he was just fucked up, man. 1.00
00:27:52.000 First of all, he did a lot of cocaine and smoked a lot. 0.99
00:27:56.000 It was fascinating that he said that cigarettes were one of the things that he really missed when it came to the creative process.
00:28:04.000 You were talking about that with David Lee Roth the other day, that nicotine is such a huge part of the process.
00:28:08.000 Well, I don't smoke, I don't partake in it, but there seems to be undeniable proof that it's some sort of a mental stimulant and it does something to accelerate thinking or does something to the mind.
00:28:20.000 Because too many people, like, intelligent people, like Bertrand Russell, like, wouldn't get on a plane if he couldn't smoke.
00:28:27.000 Like, if they didn't have a room in the smoking section, he wouldn't get on a plane. 0.99
00:28:30.000 This fucking poor guy was just attached to this tit, this tobacco tit. 0.99
00:28:36.000 Try some nicotine, Joe, see if it goes anywhere. 1.00
00:28:37.000 No, thanks, fella.
00:28:38.000 It's just nicotine.
00:28:39.000 I don't want it.
00:28:39.000 Get out of here.
00:28:40.000 Go fuck yourself. 1.00
00:28:41.000 You're not going to get me on that crazy horse. 1.00
00:28:44.000 But, yeah, so many writers have been smokers, you know.
00:28:48.000 But the thing about Stephen King, he quit.
00:28:51.000 And so he still puts out great stuff.
00:28:53.000 But I think he struggles more.
00:28:56.000 Do you hear what he does, though?
00:28:57.000 Supposedly, because this is a bit of Thieb's, that he allows himself to have one cigarette every time he finishes a novel.
00:29:04.000 No wonder he writes so many novels.
00:29:05.000 Yeah, and that's why the Thieb's joke is like, I wrote 32 novels today.
00:29:10.000 Yeah, that's funny.
00:29:12.000 That's interesting that he allows himself one cigarette a year or so.
00:29:15.000 Is that what he's doing?
00:29:16.000 I guess he's probably kicking out about a novel a year, if not more.
00:29:20.000 He's got a different...
00:29:22.000 Different style of writing, too.
00:29:24.000 When you can effortlessly bring in the supernatural the way he does, there's not an enormous amount of research that's necessary.
00:29:31.000 I know when he wrote The Green Mile, he researched a lot of things about the prison system and actual history.
00:29:36.000 But if it's a modern-day ghost story, you don't have to research anything.
00:29:40.000 You just sit down and do your thing.
00:29:41.000 And that allows him to write a little bit faster than a lot of people.
00:29:44.000 Did you ever read The Tommyknockers?
00:29:46.000 Oh, yeah.
00:29:46.000 Oh, I love that one, man.
00:29:48.000 Yeah.
00:29:48.000 He's got the best...
00:29:51.000 In my opinion, the best supernatural scenarios.
00:29:55.000 He comes up with so many different...
00:29:57.000 Maximum Overdrive.
00:29:59.000 Did you guys like that?
00:30:00.000 I love that movie.
00:30:03.000 And it's interesting.
00:30:04.000 Now, I'm coming to my fifth and final book with Random House, and I write these hard science techno thrillers with a fuckton of monsters in them and science fiction stuff.
00:30:14.000 So they always start out normal.
00:30:15.000 You're like, oh, I've seen this before.
00:30:16.000 This is a CSI episode.
00:30:18.000 Then things go absolutely haywire and you're in for the ride.
00:30:21.000 But I've been kind of jonesing to get back to the Stephen King that inspired me when I was a kid, which is you can spend so much more time on character and plot and developing things.
00:30:33.000 If you don't have these large structural organizations like the cops, we're trying to get, like, the one I'm writing now is Pandemic.
00:30:39.000 It's the final book in the Infected trilogy, and I'm trying to get help on what it's actually like in the Situation Room.
00:30:45.000 And the series has taken itself to that level, but I don't follow politics, for sure. 0.75
00:30:49.000 I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about in the Situation Room. 0.92
00:30:51.000 You mean the Situation Room, the president? 0.99
00:30:53.000 Yeah, the White House.
00:30:54.000 Not like the CNN show with Wolf Blitz.
00:30:56.000 Right, yeah.
00:30:57.000 The first book Infected is, anybody who reads it as read Stephen King will see the influence as plain as day.
00:31:02.000 It's largely, it's one University of Michigan linebacker who blew out his knee in the Rose Bowl, so never got to go pro.
00:31:10.000 Would have been a number one draft pick, hands down.
00:31:12.000 But now he works in computer support, because he didn't finish his degree, and he can't play ball anymore.
00:31:17.000 So there's this giant, super dangerous guy with a lot of rage issues who works really hard to control his rage.
00:31:22.000 And then he gets infected by this alien vector, this other thing going on, and he spends a large part of the book trying to not kill people.
00:31:30.000 But most of that takes place in his apartment and in the town of Ann Arbor.
00:31:34.000 And that's the Stephen King angle, which is we're going to take a small town, we can develop this out, I can do whatever I want, and I don't have to justify why isn't the SWAT team kicking in the door and all these other things.
00:31:43.000 So now that I'm running this complicated crap with Situation Room, I'm like, I think that's kind of run its course.
00:31:48.000 I want to get back to the smaller cast and the smaller towns. 0.68
00:31:51.000 I grew up in small town Michigan.
00:31:53.000 I think that's why a lot of stuff resonated with me.
00:31:55.000 It's the same thing, just a different accent.
00:31:56.000 And I want to, for the future, I'm going to probably try and get back more into that kind of thing.
00:32:00.000 I thought it was amazing that Stephen King wrote so many books about a writer from Maine.
00:32:04.000 Yeah.
00:32:05.000 It's like, after a while, you're like, come on, man, really? 0.99
00:32:07.000 What the fuck are you doing? 0.99
00:32:08.000 You got another book about a writer from Maine? 1.00
00:32:11.000 Like, Jesus!
00:32:13.000 We're rolling on it. 1.00
00:32:14.000 I know you want to write a book a year, but fucking come on. 1.00
00:32:16.000 You can't be a baseball player or a fireman or some shit? 1.00
00:32:19.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:32:20.000 It's got to be a goddamn writer for me. 0.99
00:32:22.000 That's why he got into The Green Mile, which is about as different than anything else he's written. 0.99
00:32:25.000 That day was amazing.
00:32:27.000 Christine is another one of my favorites.
00:32:28.000 Have you read any of his son's work?
00:32:31.000 Joe Hill.
00:32:32.000 Yeah, I've read Horns and have read the first couple collections of the Lock and Key comic book, which is what he's becoming most well-known for, I think.
00:32:42.000 Oh, really?
00:32:43.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:32:44.000 What is the Lock and Key comic book?
00:32:45.000 Lock and Key is...
00:32:47.000 I forget where the family originates, but they wind up moving to a mansion they inherit in Rhode Island, so it's very similar to...
00:32:56.000 Forgive me, Lock and Key fans, if I have this wrong.
00:32:58.000 It's very similar to old school Stephen King.
00:33:00.000 Small town.
00:33:01.000 Family moves into this haunted house.
00:33:03.000 It's kind of shining-esque.
00:33:04.000 And there's a lot of different keys that will open up different rooms in the house.
00:33:08.000 And the rooms in the house are all these crazy paranormal portal type things.
00:33:12.000 But the artist, I believe, is Gabriel Rodriguez.
00:33:15.000 And they both won Eisner Awards, which is the Academy Award of comic books for this.
00:33:18.000 So he's really...
00:33:20.000 Although, obviously, he's had an enormous amount of...
00:33:44.000 It's...
00:33:47.000 What is that?
00:33:48.000 The Dark Tower series?
00:33:50.000 Is that King?
00:33:51.000 The Dark Tower.
00:33:52.000 I read the first one when it first came out, but all my friends are so addicted to that series.
00:33:57.000 Have you followed that?
00:33:58.000 I followed it up, I think, through book six.
00:34:00.000 And then, I don't think it's a spoiler at this point.
00:34:04.000 It's 20 years old.
00:34:04.000 There's a point in the series where Stephen King actually writes himself into the series.
00:34:08.000 So the characters are actually talking to Stephen King, who's going like, wait a minute, I wrote you guys.
00:34:13.000 And I was like, okay, that's just too meta for me.
00:34:16.000 I'm out.
00:34:17.000 I'm out.
00:34:17.000 But I think the first three Dark Tower books are the single best trilogy of any kind anywhere.
00:34:25.000 Those three books are just effing meta.
00:34:28.000 There's still a masterpiece.
00:34:30.000 The series went on.
00:34:30.000 I think the first three books are...
00:34:32.000 There's never been anything better written, in my opinion.
00:34:34.000 It's perfect. 1.00
00:34:35.000 Yeah, he was a bad motherfucker and still is. 1.00
00:34:37.000 Heart-shaped box is his son's book. 1.00
00:34:39.000 That's it, heart-shaped box.
00:34:40.000 I read that one.
00:34:41.000 It's about a haunted suit.
00:34:43.000 Yeah, really good stuff, man.
00:34:46.000 He looks a lot like his dad, too.
00:34:47.000 It's kind of creepy.
00:34:49.000 Shades of his dad.
00:34:52.000 But his style is unique.
00:34:54.000 It's very much his.
00:34:55.000 It's sort of influenced, you can tell, but very much is.
00:34:58.000 Well, it's – everybody who writes horror is influenced by Stephen King.
00:35:01.000 That's like – I don't know how to – Can't not be.
00:35:05.000 There's no way to not be.
00:35:06.000 A lot of people get into it specifically because you read those books or you read Peter Straub or any of the other – the heavyweights back in King's day.
00:35:15.000 John, Saul, etc. 0.99
00:35:16.000 And you read those, and those call to you, and you want to make shit like that. 0.99
00:35:20.000 And then when you start making your own shit, well, of course, it's going to have a little bit of that in there. 0.98
00:35:25.000 And King readily admits he's influenced by a ton of people, and he's like, if you read my stuff closely enough, you see their stuff in the book. 0.98
00:35:31.000 It's just the way it goes.
00:35:32.000 Yeah, he was actually a big proponent of reading other guys' stuff to help your writing.
00:35:37.000 Have you read Stephen King on writing?
00:35:39.000 Oh, yeah.
00:35:40.000 Great book. 1.00
00:36:01.000 Stop sucking your own dick. 1.00
00:36:02.000 Pardon the phrase. 1.00
00:36:03.000 You're not that important.
00:36:04.000 You're not that great.
00:36:05.000 Just tell the story.
00:36:06.000 Stop putting in words that are going to make everybody realize how important you are and just tell your story.
00:36:10.000 And that's like the main gist of it, is how to streamline everything.
00:36:25.000 I play up the pompous windbag.
00:36:30.000 That's like the joke within a joke.
00:36:32.000 Talk about awesome the story is going to be and all this other stuff.
00:36:35.000 And the fans, they eat it up.
00:36:36.000 It's funny.
00:36:37.000 That's my shtick.
00:36:38.000 I can't do stand-up, but I can do that thing.
00:36:41.000 Because you get used to that after a while. 0.98
00:36:43.000 When people get very successful at something and then they start to believe their own bullshit, and that's when you start to get that crazy self-importance coming on. 0.94
00:36:51.000 And the sad thing about that is when you start to see people like that, The majority of their fans are like, oh, God, he was so awesome back in the day, but now look at him. 0.96
00:36:59.000 It happens to a lot of people.
00:37:00.000 The pressure or something.
00:37:02.000 The pressure of success.
00:37:05.000 I think, yeah, the success, though.
00:37:06.000 I mean, if you're surrounded by yes-men all the time, and nobody's there criticizing your ideas, then...
00:37:12.000 And you're not objective, and you don't sort of self-analyze.
00:37:16.000 A lot of people don't like to self-analyze.
00:37:18.000 You get some...
00:37:19.000 Confused.
00:37:20.000 But we've all seen the real-life pompous windbag, and it's a shocking thing. 0.96
00:37:24.000 It's so gross, too.
00:37:25.000 One of the reasons why it's so gross is because you hope and pray that you could never be that guy.
00:37:29.000 You hope and pray that if the situation was reversed and you were in his shoes, it wouldn't be possible.
00:37:35.000 It couldn't be possible. 0.99
00:37:36.000 I feel like there's a lot of getting your ass kicked early in life and just failure after failure. 0.98
00:37:41.000 There's an enormous amount to be said for trying things and failing, as opposed to people who like the first thing they try, out of the gate. 0.99
00:37:48.000 Huge success.
00:37:49.000 And then you haven't developed that...
00:37:52.000 That humble nature of, I tried 28 things and 27 of them failed miserably.
00:37:56.000 So this one thing, I'm not going to get too crazy with this.
00:37:58.000 We're having success.
00:38:00.000 You tend to see that in Hollywood and in writing.
00:38:02.000 Some people come out of the gate, get that big novel.
00:38:04.000 It blows up.
00:38:06.000 Then after that, they don't have much success and they can't figure out what's going on because they think they're very important.
00:38:11.000 Isn't that amazing?
00:38:12.000 They change their own frequency that they're putting out because of their success and that sabotages them.
00:38:18.000 And that's the sad thing.
00:38:19.000 That's what hamstrings them. 0.96
00:38:21.000 It happens to so many, though.
00:38:22.000 Yeah.
00:38:23.000 To so many different art forms, too.
00:38:25.000 Music, musicians, it happens to, you know, you know the guys that are the lead singers of these big bands, and they go fucking Looney Tunes, and the band falls apart, and what was it?
00:38:33.000 Was it partying, drugs, adulation?
00:38:36.000 Adulation's a serious possibility.
00:38:38.000 Adulation's a big drug.
00:38:39.000 It's a scary one. 1.00
00:38:41.000 You can get delusional in that shit. 1.00
00:38:44.000 It's a fascinating one for character development though, isn't it? 1.00
00:38:48.000 It is.
00:38:49.000 You can play off them.
00:38:51.000 Anytime you've got a story where you've got someone in a position of power, it's almost impossible to write them from, here's a normal, humble person in this position of power.
00:39:00.000 If you're writing about the mayor of San Francisco is in the story, the police chief of San Francisco.
00:39:05.000 It's almost impossible for them to get to that position if they're a nice, regular, humble person.
00:39:09.000 Because at some point in any political construct, you have to become cutthroat.
00:39:13.000 And you have to look at other people as an obstacle to be removed.
00:39:17.000 And there can't be humanity involved.
00:39:18.000 Like everybody at the top politics right now, those are some cutthroat people.
00:39:22.000 Even Barack Obama didn't get where he was by playing nice, you know?
00:39:25.000 And so when you're writing a character about someone in that higher position of power, you have to channel some of that in there.
00:39:31.000 There has to be that level of Self-assuredness all the way up to arrogance and that dismissive nature as well.
00:39:38.000 If you're in my way, I'm going to tell you, you probably shouldn't be in my way because it's not going to go well for you.
00:39:43.000 And then that full-on confidence and then you just get rid of them.
00:39:45.000 If you crush them, then too bad, I told you.
00:39:47.000 When you start to write a story, do you have a full idea in your head before you sit down in front of a computer?
00:39:54.000 Or do you have, like, I want to write a vampire cop drama?
00:39:58.000 What is it?
00:39:59.000 Do you have a bunch of different ways that it gives birth in your mind?
00:40:03.000 It tends to come from several different places.
00:40:06.000 I watch as much science TV as I can and I read up as much as I can.
00:40:11.000 And in the natural world, there's always something like, oh my, look at that.
00:40:14.000 Look, this creature can do that thing. 1.00
00:40:16.000 The water bear can survive in space. 0.99
00:40:18.000 You know, holy crap. 0.99
00:40:18.000 And that'll stick. 0.99
00:40:20.000 And then at some other point, you will watch something about, you know, here's asexual reproduction.
00:40:24.000 If they're in this particular chemical environment, then that'll stick.
00:40:27.000 And then a couple things stick.
00:40:28.000 And then at some point, I'll just be working on something else and four or five things will come together.
00:40:32.000 And then that's the center point of the idea.
00:40:35.000 I'm like, well, what if we had creatures that did this and then this happened and then they took over the world kind of a thing.
00:40:40.000 From there, you have to go and hammer out an outline.
00:40:43.000 I try and hammer out an outline with the tiny bit of science knowledge that I have.
00:40:47.000 And then I'm really fortunate, again, because of the podcast, I started getting people, scientists, emailing me going, wow, I love what you're doing.
00:40:54.000 You're really trying to get the science right. 0.98
00:40:56.000 You fucked this up. 0.97
00:40:57.000 So if you get into neurochemistry again, I'm a PhD, give me a call. 1.00
00:41:01.000 And I started getting all this shit in. 0.98
00:41:03.000 Oh, that's amazing. 0.99
00:41:04.000 Now I've got this battery of people.
00:41:06.000 I'll do the outline.
00:41:07.000 And then I will send them all the outline and say, all right, tear it up.
00:41:11.000 And then they shred it.
00:41:12.000 They shred it and they'll come back.
00:41:13.000 Well, you can't do that, but here's some other.
00:41:15.000 We just found out about this.
00:41:16.000 You can do this.
00:41:16.000 Oh, that is so cool.
00:41:18.000 What an awesome resource.
00:41:19.000 It's amazing.
00:41:20.000 And they have a blast with it.
00:41:22.000 And then I restructure my outline, do a detailed first draft, and then we repeat.
00:41:27.000 For people that are listening right now that are going, well, what's his podcast?
00:41:30.000 What's the name of your podcast?
00:41:31.000 The podcast is Scott Sigler's Audiobooks.
00:41:33.000 And if you go to iTunes and search for Scott Sigler, S-C-O-T-T-S-I-G-L-E-R, you'll find that.
00:41:39.000 Or scottsigler.com.
00:41:41.000 We have them there.
00:41:41.000 We've been going on seven years now.
00:41:43.000 Is that right?
00:41:44.000 That's awesome.
00:41:45.000 Every Sunday for seven years we put on an episode.
00:41:46.000 I want you to pull a picture up of those water bears.
00:41:49.000 I think they're also called tardigrades.
00:41:51.000 Tardigrades, that's it, yeah. 1.00
00:41:52.000 They can survive in space.
00:41:54.000 It's so weird when nature is as crazy as anything you could ever think of in fiction.
00:42:00.000 Yeah.
00:42:00.000 And it's just undeniable.
00:42:01.000 There it is.
00:42:02.000 Here's a photograph of it.
00:42:03.000 This is a real thing.
00:42:05.000 That's why the science is... 1.00
00:42:07.000 Look at these fucking things. 1.00
00:42:09.000 And they're super tiny. 1.00
00:42:11.000 But, of course, my brain immediately looks at this and goes, okay, what if that was eight feet long?
00:42:14.000 Let's make that thing eight feet long. 1.00
00:42:16.000 Jesus.
00:42:16.000 And let's make that hide pretty much bulletproof.
00:42:19.000 Let's do those two things to it.
00:42:20.000 For the folks listening and not watching, this thing looks like...
00:42:24.000 It looks like a giant rhino with a circular diamond drill for a mouth.
00:42:30.000 Fleshlight.
00:42:32.000 Yeah, like a super diamond alien fleshlight.
00:42:36.000 It looks like a Star Wars creature.
00:42:38.000 It also looks like it has a cotton cape on or something like that.
00:42:42.000 It doesn't look like it's skin.
00:42:43.000 Dude, that thing survives in space. 0.93
00:42:47.000 It can survive in space.
00:42:49.000 The membranes get a little different when you get down that small.
00:42:52.000 That's the kind of thing...
00:42:53.000 Where maybe a graphic artist who does a lot of acid could come up with that.
00:42:58.000 Maybe.
00:42:58.000 And then it shows up and you're like, that's the picture right there.
00:43:01.000 Oh my god, look at its fucking mouth. 1.00
00:43:04.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00
00:43:06.000 For the folks at home, it's literally got a giant shark mouth. 0.99
00:43:11.000 Wow, that's ridiculous. 0.93
00:43:13.000 See, this is it. 0.97
00:43:14.000 Listen to this.
00:43:14.000 I just realized this.
00:43:16.000 I'm finishing up a book called Pandemic, which it goes infected, then contagious, then pandemic.
00:43:20.000 And there's a creature in Pandemic, and the mouth is similar to that, and I just realized that that's where I got it from.
00:43:28.000 That thing has been floating in the back of my head forever, and it's actually popped out in this book.
00:43:33.000 Oh.
00:43:33.000 Look at that photo.
00:43:34.000 That is insane.
00:43:36.000 That is insane.
00:43:38.000 Folks, you can find them.
00:43:39.000 They're called either water bears, people call them that, or tardigrades, I think is the scientific name for it. 1.00
00:43:44.000 And they are the creepiest looking motherfuckers. 0.99
00:43:47.000 How small are those things? 1.00
00:43:49.000 They're microscopic?
00:43:50.000 They're microscopic, yeah.
00:43:52.000 They're incredibly, a couple of microns, I think.
00:43:54.000 Jesus.
00:43:56.000 It's spooky little creatures.
00:43:59.000 But then you get, and that gives you so many storytelling possibilities.
00:44:02.000 You've got a creature that seems insignificant.
00:44:04.000 You can't even see it.
00:44:05.000 And yet, if we suddenly lost our atmosphere for whatever reason, or the environment changed significantly and all the humans died, this thing could still be around.
00:44:16.000 And then this thing could start evolving and... 0.97
00:44:18.000 Maybe the universe really doesn't have a sense of time and just sets up these little extra seeds laying around, genetic material like tardigrades, just in case you assholes hit that button and nuke the whole planet sideways. 0.99
00:44:32.000 These little motherfuckers can grow into something that can survive in a vacuum. 1.00
00:44:36.000 It would start over real quick. 1.00
00:44:37.000 If we got wiped out, it would start over again pretty fast.
00:44:40.000 I wonder.
00:44:40.000 I wonder what it would be next.
00:44:42.000 Would it be dolphins?
00:44:43.000 Would it be some sort of sea creature? 1.00
00:44:46.000 This is the shit I think about all the time for the books. 0.99
00:44:49.000 And odds are you're not going to get any sea creature for a couple reasons. 0.99
00:44:53.000 Number one, no hands.
00:44:54.000 There's no tool use.
00:44:55.000 And number two, no fire.
00:44:56.000 The two biggest factors that go in are tool use and fire.
00:45:19.000 And having to invent some way to stay warm and you start to use tools to make clothes and tools to hunt.
00:45:23.000 And as soon as something has to use a tool and figures that out, that's the flashpoint.
00:45:27.000 From there it goes crazy.
00:45:29.000 Why did we lose the hair?
00:45:30.000 I'm not entirely sure.
00:45:32.000 I don't know.
00:45:33.000 But there wasn't a large need for it in a greatly temperate environment like Savannah, Africa.
00:45:38.000 So in the human body, all evolution, if there's something that you just don't need anymore and you're burning calories to keep that thing going and taking energy to support that, if you have...
00:45:49.000 Successive mutations where that thing gets smaller and smaller, there's no penalty.
00:45:52.000 There's no penalty.
00:45:53.000 Oh, well, his hands are this big and he can't use a spear.
00:45:56.000 You're not going to survive that long.
00:45:58.000 But if your earlobes shrink and you can hear just fine, there's no penalty.
00:46:01.000 So evolution kind of gets rid of the stuff that you don't need.
00:46:05.000 It is fascinating what you say, though, about the intelligent sea creatures never be able to get their physical environment to change.
00:46:13.000 Right, right.
00:46:14.000 Yeah, that's an interesting point.
00:46:16.000 I never really thought about the no fire thing.
00:46:18.000 But yeah, how could they create something?
00:46:20.000 If you can't make fire and refine metal, then you are cut off at the knees as far as what you can do from there.
00:46:26.000 And James Cameron played with that in The Abyss, with having his intelligent water-based species.
00:46:32.000 But it's very difficult to conceive any way you could get that to going.
00:46:36.000 So it's land-based.
00:46:38.000 It's got to have hands or appendages that are ready to become hands.
00:46:41.000 A couple of basic things.
00:46:43.000 So it could easily start out with some kind of primate or some kind of small mammal right off the bat.
00:46:47.000 But there's also some pretty kick-ass reptiles out there and birds.
00:46:51.000 You hear about the Ukrainian army has been training dolphins to use like knives and they've been attaching knives and pistols to their head and they've trained them to use them so they can now use these knives to do things. 0.61
00:47:02.000 Pistols?
00:47:03.000 Yeah, so right now this was on the news today that they lost the dolphins that had the pistols or the guns on them.
00:47:09.000 And they're on the loose right now.
00:47:10.000 So there's these rogue dolphins that have guns on them that are just terrorizing the sea.
00:47:16.000 Come on.
00:47:16.000 I swear to God, it's true.
00:47:17.000 Dolphins apparently swam away to get laid.
00:47:19.000 They were out looking for some.
00:47:21.000 And they haven't come back.
00:47:22.000 Why would they come back?
00:47:23.000 They got guns, man. 1.00
00:47:24.000 Guns and bitches. 1.00
00:47:25.000 Yeah, they got guns and they're trying to get someone. 1.00
00:47:27.000 Dolphins are one of the few creatures that they murder.
00:47:29.000 Yeah.
00:47:29.000 They'd kill for no other reason than just a kill.
00:47:31.000 And also dolphins rape, which is messed up.
00:47:33.000 So now you've got these things swimming around.
00:47:35.000 And they're trained to kill divers is the problem. 0.86
00:47:37.000 They're specifically trained to kill divers. 0.99
00:47:38.000 So... 0.99
00:47:39.000 I'm going to rape a dolphin Saturday at Sea Road in San Diego. 0.99
00:47:41.000 These dolphins are trained to kill divers? 0.99
00:47:43.000 Yeah.
00:47:43.000 They're military.
00:47:44.000 They're trained to kill. 1.00
00:47:45.000 That's the program.
00:47:46.000 It's the aquatic mammal program.
00:47:48.000 Specific divers or any divers?
00:47:49.000 Enemy divers.
00:47:50.000 Enemy divers.
00:47:51.000 I'm sure the Ukrainian controllers, this is inherited from the Russian program, and they would have specific parameters to train them to go out and kill a certain shape or a certain color. 0.99
00:47:59.000 How fucked up is that? 0.98
00:48:01.000 They train dolphins to go out and be assassins. 1.00
00:48:04.000 Yeah.
00:48:05.000 What a douchey move. 0.93
00:48:07.000 Dolphins rule.
00:48:08.000 Dolphins are very creepy, though. 1.00
00:48:10.000 They kill babies. 0.89
00:48:11.000 They kill the baby when a female gives birth. 0.99
00:48:14.000 I think she won't mate with a male for several years. 0.98
00:48:18.000 So if a male comes along and it's not his babies, he just kills them.
00:48:21.000 Get her to mate again. 0.99
00:48:23.000 Dolphins are the gangsters of the sea.
00:48:25.000 They are not messing around.
00:48:27.000 Except for killer whales.
00:48:28.000 Killer whales eat them.
00:48:30.000 Nobody screws with a killer whale.
00:48:31.000 The apex?
00:48:32.000 Of the apex?
00:48:33.000 Next to humans?
00:48:35.000 Other than humans, they've got no predator.
00:48:39.000 There's nothing that hunts a killer whale.
00:48:40.000 I thought Happy Feet was kind of a fascinating monster movie in sort of a way, a monster alien movie, because it dealt with the whole idea of living in this semi-aquatic world, and all of a sudden these aliens... 0.99
00:48:54.000 From the other part of the world, from the surface, come and fuck everything up and kidnap people and take photographs and shit. 0.95
00:49:01.000 It's really kind of interesting when you think about how much life must suck if you live in the ocean. 1.00
00:49:06.000 And these crazy assholes that live out above the ocean with these giant metal machines that they've created to literally scoop life in nets. 0.99
00:49:16.000 Take you right off. 1.00
00:49:17.000 They don't give a fuck what they get. 1.00
00:49:18.000 Dolphins, whoops. 0.99
00:49:20.000 Sometimes they get dolphins on purpose.
00:49:21.000 Imagine what it was like for whales, which are pretty effing intelligent and have language and communication.
00:49:26.000 And for, what, I think 100 million years, something like that, nobody screws with whales because you can't because they're gigantic and they just ignore you.
00:49:33.000 Then all of a sudden, here come these ships and here come these harpoons and they're screwed.
00:49:38.000 There's nothing they can do.
00:49:39.000 There's nothing they can do.
00:49:40.000 Who was the first guy to try to harpoon a whale? 1.00
00:49:42.000 That guy was a bad motherfucker. 1.00
00:49:44.000 You got to think about that. 1.00
00:49:46.000 That's a gangster move.
00:49:47.000 I'm going to eat a whale.
00:49:49.000 You know?
00:49:49.000 I mean, that guy's not playing games.
00:49:51.000 I don't know.
00:49:53.000 What I've heard about that's probably, you know, it's kind of an ice age thing or a place where there's ice, so the whales have to break the ice to come up to breathe, and a whale breaking through the ice so a blowhole can get out there. 0.98
00:50:04.000 You just stab that son of a bitch, and I don't know how they did it, but somebody figured out that's a lot of good eating. 0.99
00:50:09.000 Wow. 1.00
00:50:10.000 That's harsh life.
00:50:12.000 Yeah.
00:50:31.000 And then we have the Galactic Football League, which is a young adult series, but it's an American pro football league, 800 years in the future, with aliens playing the different positions based on their physiology.
00:50:40.000 So you've got 1,500-pound linemen, you've got receivers and D-backs that can jump 20 feet in the air, and it's this crazy hodgepodge of stuff.
00:50:47.000 But intelligent dolphins are part of that whole thing, too.
00:50:51.000 So it's that with the Galactic Football League series.
00:50:55.000 Which is the rookie, the starter, the all-pro, and the MVP. And then the title fight, I think I'm one of the few guys who's merging sports and science fiction, because a lot of times the jock is anathemic to science fiction guys.
00:51:08.000 They don't like the jocks very much.
00:51:10.000 Yeah, what is that story about?
00:51:12.000 A title fight is kind of a classic Rocky-esque type story, but there is a heavyweight champ of the galaxy named Korak the Cutter, and this is full-on octagon.
00:51:23.000 It's straight out.
00:51:24.000 I'm a huge MMA champ.
00:51:25.000 Heavyweight champion of the galaxy.
00:51:26.000 Heavyweight champion of the galaxy.
00:51:27.000 So in this universe I've created, in the Siglerverse, if you're going to be a combat fighter, you can't have any body modifications.
00:51:34.000 It has to be all natural.
00:51:35.000 So there's no hydraulics or no cybernetics or anything like that.
00:51:39.000 And he is of a race called the Quith. 1.00
00:51:42.000 Which have three casts.
00:51:43.000 There's a leader, there's a warrior, and there's a worker.
00:51:45.000 Kind of an insectile type approach.
00:51:46.000 And the warriors are these giant badass things with an extra set of arms.
00:51:51.000 They're very mean and very tough, and they are perennially the champions. 0.92
00:51:56.000 And then along comes this nasty-ass human fighter named Kyle North. 0.97
00:52:00.000 Who comes out of a place called the Purist Nation, which is, in my universe, this is the backwater, human-only world where they hate all the alien races and won't get along with anybody. 0.99
00:52:07.000 But they're mean and they're nasty, and this guy's name is Kyle North, and he was created by an author named Matt Wallace, who co-wrote this with me.
00:52:14.000 And Matt's an ex-pro wrestler, so he's a bad MF. And it's following their arcs.
00:52:20.000 The human who will do anything to be the champion, sacrifice his own body, kill whoever he's got to kill, make any deal, and the highly, you know, almost Ronan-like The honorable existing champion and the two different mentalities clashed for that final championship ring.
00:52:36.000 The second half of the book is nothing but the fight.
00:52:38.000 It's just a brutal fight.
00:52:39.000 How big is the human?
00:52:42.000 I'm trying to track out The growth of humans in just the last 50 years.
00:52:47.000 In the NFL in particular, 50 years ago, the average NFL lineman weighed 253 pounds.
00:52:52.000 At 253 pounds, you can't even play college ball.
00:52:54.000 The starting offensive line for the Dallas Cowboys 50 years ago could not get a job anywhere in football, probably couldn't even get a scholarship.
00:53:01.000 They're just not big enough.
00:53:03.000 So we've seen the average weight go from 253 to somewhere like 310, 315, somewhere in that ballpark.
00:53:09.000 And that's not evolution.
00:53:10.000 That's just better nutrition and these guys getting the opportunity and cultivating the bigger guys because 50 years isn't enough time for evolution to kick in.
00:53:17.000 But eight centuries from now, you can kind of see that progressing out.
00:53:21.000 So the main character in the Galactic Football League's name is Quentin Barnes.
00:53:23.000 He's a quarterback and he's seven feet tall, 380 pounds.
00:53:28.000 And they're like, well, he's kind of small.
00:53:29.000 He could play tight end.
00:53:30.000 He'd be a small tight end.
00:53:31.000 And then everybody's exponentially larger based on quarterback to lineman.
00:53:35.000 So Kyle North, I think, in the book, he's 6'8", 380. And that's the heavyweight champ of the world.
00:53:41.000 Jesus Christ.
00:53:42.000 And just cut, too, because this is our cover with him.
00:53:47.000 Wow. 1.00
00:53:48.000 That looks like gay porn, son. 1.00
00:53:50.000 It does. 1.00
00:53:51.000 You might want to switch that up.
00:53:52.000 Why is he flexing so hard?
00:53:53.000 That's where we got that.
00:53:54.000 Why is he flexing so hard? 0.99
00:53:56.000 Well, we grabbed an image and we searched for MMA fighter and all the image sites and we had a lot of gay porn. 0.99
00:54:00.000 That's all we got. 0.99
00:54:02.000 That's all we got.
00:54:04.000 Unfortunately.
00:54:04.000 And fortunately, depending on your sexual preference.
00:54:07.000 I was hoping to find just some gigantic Dan Severin type dude and none of that was available for us.
00:54:12.000 Well, Fedor Emelianenko, one of the greatest fighters of all time, he didn't have a body anything like that.
00:54:17.000 That looks like James Irvin.
00:54:20.000 But even bigger than James Irvin.
00:54:22.000 Maybe James Irvin when he was a heavyweight.
00:54:23.000 He was a very muscular MMA fighter.
00:54:25.000 But most guys aren't built like that.
00:54:27.000 Either you have to have extreme genetics to be built like that, or you've got to spend too much time lifting weights.
00:54:34.000 You get some really cut physiques at the middleweights and light heavyweights.
00:54:38.000 Not as much.
00:54:41.000 The best guys are longer and leaner.
00:54:44.000 You know, the really heavily muscled guys, it's just too much fuel those bodies require.
00:54:52.000 You see like a guy...
00:54:54.000 Like spiders, spiders, he's not that cut.
00:54:57.000 Yeah, Anderson Silva is a perfect example of what I think is like the...
00:55:00.000 Ultimate fighter body.
00:55:01.000 But occasionally you'll see a guy who's like really thickly muscled at 185 and you want to tell him, man, listen, you need to just get rid of all that muscle.
00:55:08.000 Just do aerobic exercises only from now on.
00:55:11.000 You've got plenty of muscle.
00:55:13.000 Just wrestle and kickbox and run like a lot.
00:55:16.000 And drop some weight, man.
00:55:18.000 You're hindering yourself by having this crazy beach body, you know?
00:55:22.000 Do you think that affects their fighting performance to be overly muscled?
00:55:26.000 Certainly.
00:55:27.000 Absolutely.
00:55:28.000 It's just not effective.
00:55:30.000 It's like having too much horsepower in a car where your wheels can't get any traction because you're just spinning your wheels, and then you run out of gas quick.
00:55:41.000 That's what happens if you have too much horsepower in a car.
00:55:43.000 And that's how it happens in a person, too.
00:55:46.000 An overly muscular body, the resources that it requires are substantial.
00:55:50.000 You've got to pump blood through all these extra tissues. 1.00
00:55:53.000 That's serious shit. 0.99
00:55:54.000 It's a lot of work for your heart. 1.00
00:55:56.000 So you should be strong but as lean as you can be.
00:56:00.000 Close to natural weight.
00:56:02.000 Close to natural weight is great.
00:56:03.000 If you can compete against the larger guys who cut weight...
00:56:10.000 Well, it's been really cool to watch with WEC and the MMA actually getting more weight classes.
00:56:15.000 I wrestled at 126 in college, and when you're watching the MMA, there's nowhere to see guys of that size, at least until WEC came along and they started to get more of the flyweight in there.
00:56:27.000 And is the UFC going to continue to expand to all the weight classes?
00:56:30.000 Yeah, they're thinking about going to 115 as well.
00:56:33.000 We went to 125. You're like, yes!
00:56:35.000 Those guys are like Tasmanian devils.
00:56:40.000 Some people don't like it because they say those fights aren't as exciting, but I think they're the most technical fights.
00:56:46.000 Like Mighty Mouse Johnson is one of my favorite fighters.
00:56:48.000 Demetrius Johnson, he's the flyweight champion.
00:56:51.000 Okay.
00:56:52.000 I feel like the people who are saying that are the same people like back in UFC 1, 2, and 3 when they're like, you know, Gracie would be all tied up with something like, well, this isn't exciting.
00:57:01.000 I'm like, it's because you have no idea what you're looking at.
00:57:03.000 This is mesmerizing.
00:57:04.000 Dan Severn fighting Gracie is mesmerizing to watch.
00:57:08.000 I think for some people, bigger is better, especially Americans.
00:57:11.000 We're such knuckleheads.
00:57:12.000 We want to see the biggest guy, and we'll see the biggest guy in the house.
00:57:16.000 It's like John L. Sullivan. 0.99
00:57:17.000 You can lick any man in this room. 1.00
00:57:20.000 They used to say it back then, lick. 0.99
00:57:22.000 I don't know why.
00:57:23.000 I don't know why it was lick.
00:57:24.000 You can't really say that now. 0.97
00:57:27.000 I can lick any man in this room. 1.00
00:57:28.000 Everybody's like, hey, what the fuck are you trying to say, man? 1.00
00:57:31.000 I think I was six and I got in trouble at my grandma's house. 0.99
00:57:33.000 And my grandma's is a German immigrant.
00:57:35.000 And she's like, I'll give you such a lick. 1.00
00:57:37.000 And I'm like, I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.
00:57:39.000 I'm like, I don't know what's going on, grandma, but I'm just going to behave from now on because I don't want to crush it.
00:57:44.000 That's a terrifying threat.
00:57:46.000 I was like, what are you talking about, old woman? 1.00
00:57:50.000 I don't know what you mean by that. 0.99
00:57:51.000 Just hold me down and lick me. 1.00
00:57:52.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99
00:57:54.000 Yeah, but for fighters, the correct weight class and going in and fighting at your optimum weight class can be the difference between being a successful fighter with a championship career and being a guy who never quite rises to the top. 0.98
00:58:12.000 You see in MMA, there's a few guys that are what they call tweeners.
00:58:16.000 They're not really a 155-er.
00:58:17.000 They're really too big for that, but they're really too small for 170. There's a few guys like that that are just somewhere in the middle there.
00:58:24.000 They should be maybe a 165. Like BJ Penn fighting crazy...
00:58:29.000 Yeah, BJ Penn, that's his choice.
00:58:32.000 He just chooses to fight the bigger guys.
00:58:34.000 He's not afraid to fight bigger guys.
00:58:36.000 And when he was younger, he was able to pull it off pretty well.
00:58:38.000 But the game is moving in a forward and progressing direction constantly.
00:58:45.000 You're never going to slow down.
00:58:47.000 The progress of these young guys that are up and coming.
00:58:50.000 They're better.
00:58:50.000 They're going to be better.
00:58:51.000 They're going to be more technical.
00:58:53.000 It doesn't mean that the older guys can't still win occasionally, but those guys have to evolve as well.
00:58:59.000 You see in boxing, Bernard Hopkins this week won a world title.
00:59:03.000 It's crazy.
00:59:05.000 I watched it and it's a beautiful performance because he just did everything correctly.
00:59:11.000 He's like such a craftsman in there.
00:59:13.000 And he's got these old school sort of moves and just knows how to cover up, knows where the punches are going before you even think about throwing them, knows what you're going to do, finds your patterns, and then knows how to step around you, knows how to keep you moving.
00:59:28.000 It was beautiful to watch.
00:59:30.000 Well, in MMA there's not a whole lot of those guys That are like these old school, like, perfect fighters.
00:59:39.000 Anderson, you know, Anderson's one of them.
00:59:41.000 And then you've got John Jones, who's just this phenom, who's, although he has all this great success, really, he's got so much to learn still, too, which is the most scary thing about him.
00:59:51.000 He hasn't even tapped into his potential.
00:59:53.000 And then the really good guys in the 170-pound division, there's like six or seven of them.
01:00:01.000 Like this weekend, there's six different killers that are fighting in Montreal.
01:00:05.000 You've got Diaz is fighting George St. Pierre.
01:00:08.000 You've got Carlos Condit is fighting Johnny Hendricks.
01:00:10.000 And Jake Ellenberger is fighting Jake Shields.
01:00:13.000 No, no, no.
01:00:14.000 Jake Ellenberger is fighting... 0.99
01:00:16.000 God damn it. 0.99
01:00:20.000 Nate Marquardt. 1.00
01:00:24.000 Jake Ellenberger and Nate Marquardt is a sick fight.
01:00:33.000 Is that all on the same card?
01:00:35.000 Yeah, that's all on the same card.
01:00:36.000 Yeah, that's live from Montreal.
01:00:38.000 That's exciting.
01:00:39.000 How long have you been an MMA fan?
01:00:41.000 Oh, like UFC 1. Really?
01:00:43.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:00:45.000 Was a big MMA fan, and it was this crazy spectacle, because that's the thing, like, wow, would a ninja beat up a karate master?
01:00:51.000 And then somebody said, well, let's find out, and put everybody together. 0.99
01:00:54.000 And I remember watching the early ones, and, you know, this guy's a fifth-degree ninjutsu black belt, and comes out and just gets his ass handed to him. 0.98
01:01:01.000 And a lot of the guys... 0.96
01:01:02.000 And I was excited, because I was a wrestler.
01:01:04.000 Yeah.
01:01:27.000 And so really got into it then, and then when Dan Severin came out, he's a Michigan boy, and watching his fights with it, and he was just, you know, awesome, awesome to watch.
01:01:37.000 Watching him fight a kickboxer and do full-on suplexes on guys who had no idea what a suplex was.
01:01:42.000 It was beautiful.
01:01:44.000 So me and all my wrestling buddies would get together and watch those and just go apeshit.
01:01:48.000 We couldn't even get through one of those without beating the crap out of each other.
01:01:52.000 It was awesome.
01:01:53.000 And then to watch it come up and what's happened since Dana has taken over, it's just been one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
01:02:00.000 It's very strange, as you were talking about, the size of football players changing over a period of 50 years.
01:02:08.000 Look at how much better the MMA fighters has gotten in the 20 years it has existed.
01:02:12.000 It's really shocking.
01:02:14.000 It's shocking to see now.
01:02:15.000 Like Diaz and George St. Pierre, both of these guys.
01:02:19.000 There was nobody like them 10 years ago.
01:02:22.000 They didn't exist.
01:02:22.000 Nobody was that good.
01:02:24.000 These guys are on a complete...
01:02:25.000 This is the highest level we've ever experienced.
01:02:28.000 And every time St. Pierre improves, like he just beat Carlos Condit, had a long time off in the recouping from his knee surgery.
01:02:36.000 He recovers from that and has the Condit fight.
01:02:39.000 A good, solid, long, tough fight.
01:02:41.000 Now, just a couple months later, he's going in there against Diaz.
01:02:45.000 I love that.
01:02:46.000 Because I think, you know, since it's only like four months later or whatever it is, he's got time to recover, time to rest up a little bit, and then boom, get right back into it.
01:02:55.000 So he'll be more used to the experience, probably put on a better performance, won't feel the ring rust as much.
01:03:02.000 Just experienced it recently.
01:03:04.000 Is that enough time for him to analyze the other fighters' style though and work it in?
01:03:09.000 Because an enormous amount of training has got to be, he's going to do this.
01:03:12.000 Here's his tendencies.
01:03:13.000 When he puts his right foot forward, this is what's going to happen.
01:03:15.000 Do you think four months is enough time for him to... 0.99
01:03:17.000 Because that guy's an effing killer, man. 1.00
01:03:18.000 Both guys are killers. 0.99
01:03:19.000 But I think, first of all, St. Pierre has been eyeing Diaz for a long time because they were supposed to fight before. 0.86
01:03:26.000 Diaz tested positive in a marijuana thing and it took him all this time before he was able to get a fight again after the Condit fight.
01:03:39.000 He's had a bunch of weird issues outside of the cage. 0.97
01:03:46.000 And that one being a big one, that they suspended him for a long time for marijuana, which is just really fucking ridiculous. 0.98
01:03:53.000 That really drives me bananas. 0.87
01:03:56.000 But he's been wanting this fight forever.
01:03:59.000 Diaz has been calling out for this fight forever.
01:04:02.000 And George St. Pierre has been cage-side for his fights and talking about fighting him.
01:04:06.000 So these guys have been sizing each other up for a long time.
01:04:10.000 It's not just four months to get ready.
01:04:12.000 This is a long time coming.
01:04:15.000 We played this yesterday.
01:04:16.000 There's a video of Nick Diaz hitting a speed bag for 23 minutes in a row.
01:04:21.000 It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen.
01:04:23.000 He just...
01:04:26.000 23 minutes!
01:04:27.000 That is so long!
01:04:29.000 Most folks have no idea how difficult it is.
01:04:31.000 I don't think I can keep my arms up for 23 minutes, let alone hit the bag.
01:04:34.000 And he's hammering at it.
01:04:36.000 These guys are both in amazing, amazing shape.
01:04:40.000 I'm so excited about it, not just because it's a championship fight, but I think it represents these guys who are two all-time greats, in my opinion, and it represents them in their perfect primes.
01:04:52.000 They're both in the best situation they could possibly be.
01:04:55.000 Nick Diaz comes off the BJ Penn fight with a fantastic performance.
01:05:00.000 The Carlos Condit fight where Questionable decision.
01:05:04.000 A close fight.
01:05:06.000 But Carlos Condit used a very good strategy of moving and keeping away from Nick.
01:05:11.000 Nick has that aggressive, in-your-face style.
01:05:15.000 He wants to commit to a fight.
01:05:17.000 George does not dance around.
01:05:19.000 He doesn't dance around.
01:05:20.000 And with his wrestling style as well, this is going to be a really interesting fight.
01:05:24.000 First of all, Nick Diaz has a nasty guard.
01:05:26.000 He's got very good sweeps, he's got very good submissions off of his back, and he gets real comfortable there.
01:05:31.000 He knows how to tie you up.
01:05:32.000 You know, it's not an amateur that you have on his back, and he's dangerous off his back.
01:05:37.000 You have to mind your P's and Q's.
01:05:38.000 And then, you know, is he going to be able to stop the takedown?
01:05:42.000 If he does stop the takedown, you know, what does the stand-up look like?
01:05:45.000 Does George kick him from the outside?
01:05:47.000 Does Nick pressure him into a stand-up slugfest?
01:05:50.000 You know, what does it become?
01:05:51.000 It's going to be fascinating.
01:05:52.000 I can't wait.
01:05:53.000 I'm excited for that fight.
01:05:54.000 Yeah, I'm very excited for it as well.
01:05:57.000 You were like one of the first guys that I ever heard of That took his books and put it on the internet as an audio podcast.
01:06:05.000 What led you to decide to do that?
01:06:08.000 I couldn't get a book deal, frankly.
01:06:11.000 Going back, I guess, geez, I guess 15, 16 years.
01:06:14.000 I was trying to get published for about 11 or 12 years, writing a book every two years, working a full-time job, all the regular stuff.
01:06:23.000 And then back in the day, actually writing the submission letter and sending it to publishers, sending it to agents, going to conventions, trying to make the right connections, just to get somebody to look at the book.
01:06:32.000 Then I got an agent, and I wound up with a deal with AOL Time Warner.
01:06:36.000 My book, EarthCore, was supposed to be in every store in May of 2002. And then the 9-11 recession hit before it went to press.
01:06:47.000 And the economy dropped and Time Warner scrapped everything that wasn't profitable.
01:06:49.000 So I'd gotten to that point where I had a book deal.
01:06:52.000 Then the publisher folded.
01:06:54.000 It happens.
01:06:55.000 And it took me three years to get the rights back to my book.
01:06:58.000 So now when I get the rights back in 2005, I have this professionally edited book.
01:07:02.000 The editor's name was Paul Whitcover.
01:07:04.000 He was a great guy.
01:07:05.000 I thought it was a really solid piece of work.
01:07:08.000 And we can't get another book deal for it.
01:07:11.000 Then I learn about podcasting.
01:07:12.000 See what Dave Weiner and Adam Curry are doing with podcasting.
01:07:15.000 And I'm like, oh, that's really cool.
01:07:17.000 Serialized stuff.
01:07:18.000 So I went to look for audiobooks to listen to.
01:07:20.000 Because the first thing that happened in my head, being a writer, was somebody's putting out serialized books just like the radio dramas of the 40s and 50s.
01:07:27.000 I start Googling it, and after two days of trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong to Google it, and I can't find any, I then realized nobody has done this yet.
01:07:36.000 And at that point, I'm like, I've got a professionally edited book, and it was ready for mass market production.
01:07:43.000 Here's this new technology that if somebody hears an episode, they can immediately instant message it to a friend, email it to a friend, chat room it, and anybody who clicks on that is going to start hearing the story right away.
01:07:52.000 I've got speed of light marketing with this, and speed of light, word of mouth. 0.99
01:07:56.000 And then I'm like, shit. 0.94
01:07:58.000 And I figured out how to record, how to make an RSS feed, how to make a website, and got it all done just so I could get it out there and then put some marketing to work like that. 0.98
01:08:05.000 The first guy to ever do a podcast-only novel.
01:08:08.000 And hope it would get picked up by some blogs and different sites.
01:08:10.000 And it did, and I started to get a followership.
01:08:13.000 And when I got to the end of EarthCore, I had three other books done, and I just started podcasting them.
01:08:18.000 And I've been going at it ever since.
01:08:20.000 So I was of the mind that if...
01:08:23.000 The publishers are the gatekeepers and they won't let me in because it's not a western.
01:08:27.000 It's not a horror story.
01:08:29.000 It's not a vampire story.
01:08:30.000 They want very specific things they can sell.
01:08:32.000 You've got a lot of different genres.
01:08:34.000 They don't like you very much.
01:08:35.000 I was like, if I can get to the end user, if I can go to the end listener and show them how kick-ass my stuff really is, I'm betting money that my shit is so good I can give it to you for free and then they'll still pay for it anyways. 0.86
01:08:46.000 That was the thought process. 0.67
01:08:47.000 And I thought I would get a lot of followers and a lot of followers would turn into a book deal.
01:08:51.000 Initially that didn't happen because I was going to publish.
01:08:53.000 I have 10,000 people listening to me every Sunday.
01:08:55.000 How can you not put this out?
01:08:57.000 And their question is, well, what's a podcast?
01:08:59.000 They had no idea what it was.
01:09:01.000 Here's verifiable stats.
01:09:02.000 They didn't know what the internet was.
01:09:03.000 They had no idea.
01:09:04.000 They didn't know what the internet was?
01:09:05.000 I swear to God, they didn't know what the internet was.
01:09:08.000 I thought I had this awesome plan and everything's going to work out great and I get to the point where I'm supposed to get the contract and get the book deal and they didn't care about the podcast at all.
01:09:17.000 So then I just kept on doing it and eventually things kind of caught up.
01:09:20.000 Finally, the end of the story is we put out that novel Ancestor as a print book.
01:09:25.000 The one you've got is the one that's been rewritten for Random House, but this was just a little trade paperback put out by a small Canadian imprint, one lady working out of her garage.
01:09:33.000 We put that out on April 1st, 2007, and it was the number one horror, number one sci-fi book at Amazon.
01:09:39.000 And it was the number two fiction book on Amazon behind one of the Harry Potter novels.
01:09:43.000 Wow.
01:09:44.000 And New York crapped an egg roll.
01:09:46.000 I mean, it was awesome.
01:09:47.000 Because I had a new agent at that point who had the book Infected on their desk.
01:09:50.000 And people were like, oh, this is it.
01:09:51.000 We like this.
01:09:52.000 This is good.
01:09:52.000 Then all of a sudden, this guy that they've never heard of anywhere is number one in horror, number one in sci-fi.
01:09:58.000 And then that got us into auction for Infected.
01:10:01.000 And then I've been rolling ever since.
01:10:03.000 Wow.
01:10:04.000 That's amazing.
01:10:04.000 What an awesome story.
01:10:06.000 Yeah.
01:10:06.000 So you're sort of self-created.
01:10:08.000 Very much self-created.
01:10:10.000 I love stories like that.
01:10:12.000 A lot of it is my audience.
01:10:16.000 We're going to go sell this book on this day, spread the word, and they went out and spread the word.
01:10:20.000 And this is the audience that you created with this blog, this podcast of your novels.
01:10:25.000 Did you profit off of it?
01:10:26.000 How did you have it set up?
01:10:27.000 Did you have to pay for it to download it?
01:10:30.000 No, it's always been free from square one.
01:10:32.000 The whole book is free.
01:10:33.000 The whole book is free.
01:10:34.000 The model we have now is if you just want it for free or you can't afford it and you like the story because everybody gets into pickles here and there, you can listen to every episode every week and you can get the whole thing for free.
01:10:45.000 If you download a book I've done before...
01:10:47.000 You're going to hear 30 episodes with an ad inserted before every episode, just like what you do.
01:10:51.000 So it's going to be ad-supported free content, and you can listen to it.
01:10:54.000 If you don't want to hear me talk before the episode and you don't want to hear the ads, then you can go spend money and buy the audiobook.
01:11:00.000 So I totally leave it up to the audience.
01:11:01.000 If you want to buy the print or buy the e-book, you can do that.
01:11:04.000 If you want to buy the audiobook, absolutely, that's why we're in business.
01:11:06.000 If you don't want to do that or you can't afford it, you can go get all my books, every word of it for free, everything unabridged.
01:11:11.000 The way it's been from Square One.
01:11:12.000 That's a beautiful way to do it, man.
01:11:14.000 Yeah.
01:11:36.000 The problem is when you buy that record or you buy that audiobook and you heard the sample and you're like, well, that was great.
01:11:41.000 Then you get to the end of it and you're like, this guy got lazy.
01:11:44.000 This story ends crappy.
01:11:46.000 I have wasted my time.
01:11:46.000 I have wasted my money.
01:11:48.000 You're pissed off.
01:11:49.000 You're angry that you spent money on something that you didn't like.
01:11:51.000 So I flip that.
01:11:52.000 I'm like, I'm going to give it to you and you're going to listen to it.
01:11:54.000 And when you get to the end, you are going to miss work and you are going to go all night long and not be able to sleep because I'm in your skull taking over.
01:12:02.000 And then when they get done like that, I like that book.
01:12:04.000 I like the way that ended.
01:12:06.000 This is my author.
01:12:06.000 Then they go buy everything that I've ever made.
01:12:09.000 And if people get to the end and they didn't like it, it's no sweat off anybody's balls.
01:12:13.000 It's like, well, I didn't spend anything on it.
01:12:14.000 It's not really for me.
01:12:15.000 And it creates this crazy sense of goodwill that even people who don't really like your stuff...
01:12:21.000 As soon as they hear somebody else going, oh, you know, I really like a hard science monster story.
01:12:25.000 It's like, oh, you've got to check out the Sigler guy.
01:12:27.000 And, like, everybody loves the fact that you give – leave it up to the customer.
01:12:30.000 Just leave it up to – it's up to them.
01:12:32.000 It's their money.
01:12:32.000 You decide if you want to spend it or not.
01:12:33.000 It's not up to me to trick you.
01:12:34.000 That's an awesome ethic.
01:12:35.000 I love that.
01:12:36.000 And that's sort of the same thing we do with this podcast.
01:12:39.000 We know there's – some people have, like – They have where you sign up and you can pay X amount of money and access the old podcasts.
01:12:47.000 And some of them have it set up where if you want to watch on Ustream, you got to pay for a monthly thing.
01:12:52.000 But I've always felt like what this thing does is so amazing is the word of mouth.
01:12:57.000 And the best way to do that is to make it as accessible as possible.
01:13:02.000 To put it out there as quickly and as easy and to make it as downloadable as possible.
01:13:08.000 I mean, going back to Stephen King, if Stephen King was to start doing a weekly podcast of his fiction and actually read his fiction, he could charge for that and would make a significant amount of money for that.
01:13:19.000 Here's the problem.
01:13:20.000 Stephen King's the worst guy ever to read his books. 1.00
01:13:24.000 His books are awesome, but when he's reading them, I'm like, oh, this motherfucker can't read books! 1.00
01:13:29.000 Not his thing. 0.99
01:13:30.000 He doesn't command it enough.
01:13:33.000 I don't know.
01:13:33.000 Maybe you have a strong voice.
01:13:35.000 Stephen King has sort of almost like a mumbly voice while he's reading his amazing book.
01:13:42.000 Ari's more mumbly. 0.50
01:13:43.000 Ari would never be able to pull it off.
01:13:45.000 Well, the performance of the book, I've had seven years to polish that up.
01:13:48.000 When I started out the first on Earth course, I just used all the voices I used to use to make my buddies laugh in high school.
01:13:53.000 I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing.
01:13:55.000 Just throw it in there and we'll make it as entertaining as possible.
01:13:57.000 And I've always tried to make every book as over the top as it can be.
01:14:00.000 So there's a loud rock intro, loud rock outros.
01:14:04.000 I'm, you know, peeking the meters when I'm talking and just trying to make it exciting and energetic and fun.
01:14:08.000 It's not just money, it's people's time. 0.97
01:14:10.000 If you're going to take an hour of somebody's time, you better have some good shit because they can't get that hour back ever. 0.99
01:14:14.000 Dude, you're saying all the right shit. 0.99
01:14:16.000 I love you. 1.00
01:14:18.000 That's how you should think, man.
01:14:19.000 I think it would be awesome if everybody thought that way.
01:14:21.000 But the biggest thing is the free because now there's so many entertainment options.
01:14:25.000 You know, when Stephen King was coming up in the 70s, there was movies, books, and TV, and that was all there was.
01:14:31.000 And now I've got to compete against fucking Xbox and PlayStation and downloaded content and podcasts and vidcasts and YouTube.
01:14:37.000 I've got to compete against all that just to try and get somebody to get, like, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and ask for 10 hours of your time to read this book that doesn't really mean anything. 0.98
01:14:45.000 That's a tough sell today.
01:14:46.000 That's a super tough sell, especially with younger kids because video games are amazing entertainment experiences.
01:14:52.000 For you to get them to put that down and pick this book up for a while, you've really got to bring good stuff.
01:14:57.000 How many hours do you think it would take to read one of these books?
01:14:59.000 Do you think you can read one of these in 10 hours?
01:15:01.000 I think somebody can read it 10 to 20 hours.
01:15:03.000 Yeah.
01:15:04.000 10 to 20 depending on...
01:15:05.000 My stuff reads a little faster.
01:15:06.000 It looks thicker than it is because there's an enormous amount of dialogue.
01:15:10.000 There's a lot of regular guy dialogue and that means like two, three words line, two, three words line, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
01:15:15.000 Stuff goes real fast.
01:15:16.000 So people are surprised at how fast they read it.
01:15:19.000 Like this giant honking thing, they're like, I can't believe I finished it so fast.
01:15:23.000 I'm like, well, there's an enormous amount of just dialogue in there.
01:15:25.000 And this other book that I have here is Ancestor.
01:15:28.000 What's this one about?
01:15:30.000 Ancestor is an effort by a biotech company to create a herd animal with transplantable human organs.
01:15:37.000 Every year, hundreds of thousands of people die because there's just not enough organs to go around.
01:15:41.000 And if you've got a bad liver for you to live, somebody else has to die.
01:15:44.000 It's a zero-sum game.
01:15:45.000 So they try and come up with a chimera.
01:15:47.000 It's an animal with genes from multiple species.
01:15:50.000 So basically something along the lines of a sheep or a cow, but with transplantable lungs, liver, kidneys, everything a growing body could need.
01:15:58.000 If they can pull this off and put this thing out to pasture, it's just like raising cows.
01:16:03.000 You just harvest them when you need them and you make trillions of dollars.
01:16:06.000 This is old-school horror movie sci-fi, so something goes horribly wrong.
01:16:11.000 And instead of winding up with a 200-pound herd animal with perfectly transplantable organs and goes out and eats grass, they wind up with a 650-pound pack predator.
01:16:21.000 And this, of course, happens on a remote island in Lake Superior.
01:16:25.000 So we wind up with all of our characters stuck on an island with 100 of these 650-pound pack predators that just go through you like a knife through butter.
01:16:34.000 And what do these things look like?
01:16:35.000 They're not all that dissimilar from the American Werewolf in London you got out there.
01:16:41.000 But the biggest thing I did with them, I kind of combined them.
01:16:44.000 A little bit of a bear and a gorilla.
01:16:47.000 But the defining thing they have, and fans draw tons of pictures of this.
01:16:50.000 If you Google Sigler ancestor, you'll probably see this.
01:16:54.000 They have this giant sail fin.
01:16:55.000 So they've got a variation on the Dimetronon sail fin.
01:16:58.000 Because the genome is based on the ancestor of all mammals.
01:17:02.000 The thought is if they dial back the genetic clock, let's get back to the base set of code, then we will have exactly what we want and there won't be any endogenous retroviruses, there won't be any crazy stuff.
01:17:13.000 We can then from there customize the animal we want, right?
01:17:17.000 But they don't get it all the way right.
01:17:20.000 Yeah, that's one of the things.
01:17:22.000 That's from Predator.
01:17:24.000 Scroll back over to the left.
01:17:26.000 One of my fans did a full four-foot-tall maquette of the thing.
01:17:29.000 That's the monster right there.
01:17:31.000 And they had this sail fin that they keep back, and you start to find out they start to use it for communication.
01:17:36.000 So they signal each other when they're closing in on you. 0.93
01:17:38.000 So if you see that fin pop up somewhere, kind of like a land shark, you're effing screwed. 0.97
01:17:43.000 Whoa.
01:17:43.000 They're fully CGI'd in the trailer.
01:17:46.000 If you want to get the trailer on there, that's...
01:17:47.000 Yeah, someone CGI'd this?
01:17:49.000 Yeah, my buddy Kevin Capizzi, who's amazingly talented.
01:17:52.000 Go to YouTube and search for Sigler Nocturnal Trailer.
01:17:56.000 And so you're doing a movie of Nocturnal, but Ancestor...
01:18:01.000 Oh, Sigler Ancestor trailer, excuse me, yeah.
01:18:02.000 Ancestor, or this is going to be a TV series.
01:18:04.000 What is going on with Ancestor?
01:18:06.000 Nothing right now.
01:18:07.000 There have been a couple people who have been like, we'd like to...
01:18:08.000 But there's a trailer?
01:18:09.000 Yeah, I do trailers for the books.
01:18:11.000 Again, trying to compete against YouTube, you gotta be on YouTube.
01:18:15.000 The thing with a book trailer is, if you make a really kick-ass book trailer, and it's the kind of thing that people will share, the money you spend on that is money that will continue to work for you.
01:18:25.000 People will keep watching that for years.
01:18:26.000 Every four minutes.
01:18:29.000 Someone dies while waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney.
01:18:34.000 Imagine a technology that could provide those organs for a fee, and imagine what a company would do to monopolize that technology.
01:18:43.000 The biotech firm Genata tried to solve this problem by creating the ancestor.
01:18:48.000 A creature with transplantable human organs.
01:18:52.000 But they didn't get the docile herd animal they envisioned.
01:18:56.000 Instead, their work awakens something big.
01:19:00.000 Something evil.
01:19:02.000 Something very, very hungry.
01:19:12.000 You want a monopoly.
01:19:14.000 A monopoly on human life.
01:19:17.000 Nothing sells like life itself.
01:19:21.000 When we succeed, we will be the only vendor and be able to charge whatever the market will bear.
01:19:31.000 And for the millions of people not quite ready for death, the market will bear quite a lot.
01:19:57.000 That's my favorite part. 0.99
01:20:13.000 I don't know what that is, but that sure as fuck ain't no cow! 1.00
01:20:23.000 So you created that yourself? 0.99
01:20:25.000 No, we had people do it.
01:20:26.000 Aaron Proctor shot the thing, but we went out and found a guy to do it, and he got all his actor friends and put it together in the CGI, and we got permission from Century Media to use In This Moment's music for it.
01:20:37.000 We shot it like we were shooting a five-minute movie.
01:20:39.000 We went out in the mountains in the snow and had an effin' blast doing it.
01:20:42.000 But that kind of thing, people still watch that whenever from 30, 40, 50 times a day.
01:20:47.000 My trailer for Infected's at a quarter of a million views, and it just keeps getting views.
01:20:53.000 Somebody's gonna watch that, and that's exactly the kind of book they want, then they go buy the book.
01:20:57.000 It's the only form of marketing in the publishing industry that will continue to sell books for you year after year.
01:21:01.000 So we go out and spend, I spend a ton of money on my trailers.
01:21:03.000 Well, that's really interesting.
01:21:05.000 Is this a common thing?
01:21:07.000 Am I just out of the loop?
01:21:07.000 It's getting more common, yeah.
01:21:09.000 And a lot of book trailers, they're awful.
01:21:12.000 It's a floating book cover with music and words floating in.
01:21:15.000 But there's people who go out and just shoot, I mean, they do full-on three, four-minute movies to try and sell the book.
01:21:21.000 Have you seen one of these, Brian?
01:21:23.000 Have you ever seen one, Jamie?
01:21:24.000 Not this style, but I've seen something like it before.
01:21:27.000 Yeah.
01:21:28.000 Wow.
01:21:28.000 I've never heard of it.
01:21:29.000 That's fascinating.
01:21:30.000 We did the first one in 2008, and it was relatively unheard of now, but it's more common now.
01:21:34.000 Now, as a professional writer and a man, I need you to explain to me Fifty Shades of Grey. 0.95
01:21:40.000 What the fuck is going on? 0.99
01:21:41.000 What the fuck is going on? 1.00
01:21:43.000 It's the naughty factor, I think. 1.00
01:21:46.000 And I'm guessing here.
01:21:47.000 I'm trying to figure out, primarily, that's a female readership.
01:21:50.000 Trying to figure out the female mind, which is not something I'm that gifted at. 0.99
01:21:53.000 Or gay dudes pretending to be straight, they might read that. 0.83
01:21:56.000 I don't know, but I think, number one, it's... 0.97
01:22:00.000 It's not your usual sex scene.
01:22:02.000 This is some stuff where you read and you're like, oh my goodness, can you put that in a book?
01:22:05.000 And then at some point it tipped and enough people had read it that it became okay.
01:22:10.000 You've got the hive mentality.
01:22:12.000 Well, God, a million people have read this, so it's not that bad.
01:22:15.000 And then the other factor that I think everybody just ignores is I haven't read it, but it's probably a great book.
01:22:23.000 It does not sell that many copies unless that writing specifically appeals to the people who are buying it and they love the reading experience.
01:22:29.000 I think one of the reasons why women don't trust porn stars or strippers or prostitutes or other women that will do things along those lines for money is because secretly I think there's a fear in the female community that All would have to happen would be just a few hundred girls start doing terrible things and they would all start doing it as sort of a mass movement. 0.98
01:22:57.000 And when a book like Fifty Shades of Grey comes along and it's ball gags and all the crazy shit that they're doing in that book. 0.96
01:23:06.000 Go back to the terrible part. 0.97
01:23:07.000 What's terrible about 200 girls going out and having a grand old time? 1.00
01:23:11.000 Nothing terrible.
01:23:12.000 I mean, terrible from their point of view.
01:23:14.000 From the established, yeah. 0.99
01:23:15.000 Yeah, their own social norms of not wanting to be a slut and not wanting to be promiscuous. 0.93
01:23:21.000 I think a book like Fifty Shades of Grey can literally change culture. 0.96
01:23:26.000 Oh, yeah.
01:23:26.000 I'm sure you got it.
01:23:27.000 So did Sex and the City.
01:23:28.000 Sex and the City.
01:23:28.000 Same thing.
01:23:29.000 Yeah.
01:23:29.000 I bet the sales of bondage instruments have gone up significantly since that book has come out.
01:23:35.000 Well, you think about women in the 90s, before Sex and the City came along, it was sort of like there was no MILF world. 0.98
01:23:44.000 People weren't really turned on by really hot 50-year-olds.
01:23:48.000 That didn't exist.
01:23:49.000 There was none of that.
01:23:51.000 And then all of a sudden, it became okay. 0.99
01:23:52.000 And then all these women that were over 40 were like, fuck it, I'm getting divorced. 1.00
01:23:56.000 I'm going to go out and get some dick. 1.00
01:23:58.000 Hang out with my friends. 0.99
01:23:59.000 I don't like hanging out with men either.
01:24:00.000 Jesus Christ.
01:24:01.000 Somewhere along the line, they realized their marriage is a big charade.
01:24:05.000 I think we're seeing more, especially a lot of the porn stars being more open about what they do and going on their own podcast and talking about, like, yeah, this is my job to do.
01:24:14.000 This is super fun.
01:24:15.000 People are accepting it more and more.
01:24:17.000 In a book like Fifty Shades of Grey, hopefully the norms of our parents are going away.
01:24:22.000 And if somebody wants to go get laid and the other person's into it, what's the problem?
01:24:26.000 Nobody's getting hurt.
01:24:27.000 Yeah, unless your ball gags on real tight, you get hurt.
01:24:30.000 You get like a lip strain.
01:24:32.000 Sooner or later, the autoerotic asphyxiation is going to kick in.
01:24:35.000 Somebody's going to strangle, get choked to death, and that's sad.
01:24:38.000 Whenever anybody dies from autoerotic asphyxiation, I always smell foul play.
01:24:42.000 If you were going to figure out a way to discredit a guy, like there was a preacher that died.
01:24:48.000 And he died.
01:24:48.000 He had a wetsuit on.
01:24:49.000 He had a black dildo up his ass. 1.00
01:24:51.000 And he was doing auto-erotic asphyxiation. 1.00
01:24:54.000 And he died.
01:24:56.000 And that guy, I was thinking, well, you know what?
01:24:58.000 That guy's a priest. 1.00
01:25:00.000 Who knows what kind of creepy shit he did. 1.00
01:25:02.000 He's probably not a stupid priest. 1.00
01:25:04.000 You know, I mean, come on. 1.00
01:25:05.000 He could be very well stupid. 1.00
01:25:06.000 That's a good way to whack someone, absolutely. 1.00
01:25:08.000 Yeah, but it's a good way.
01:25:09.000 I mean, it's like as embarrassing as possible.
01:25:11.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:25:12.000 The only difference is, like, you could make it a little worse by leaving, like, pornography around, like gay porn or kiddie porn or something like that. 0.99
01:25:18.000 If you cross me, I'm going to leave kiddie porn all around you. 1.00
01:25:21.000 You're going to die of auto-asphyxiation. 1.00
01:25:23.000 Yeah, you can see the mafia threatening that.
01:25:24.000 It'll make somebody straighten out.
01:25:25.000 Well, they said that's what happened with David Carradine.
01:25:27.000 I know.
01:25:28.000 I heard the same thought. 0.98
01:25:30.000 When that happened, I'm like, I don't give a shit what anybody does in their own private time, but I'm not buying that. 0.98
01:25:36.000 He crossed someone. 0.99
01:25:37.000 He had to have crossed someone or owed somebody money or something because that was just nuts.
01:25:41.000 Well, the rumor was that there was some organized crime involvement in his death.
01:25:45.000 That was the rumor.
01:25:46.000 That's the rumor.
01:25:47.000 Somebody easily could have just made that up. 1.00
01:25:49.000 I mean, there's so many goddamn rumors. 0.98
01:25:51.000 It just seems so implausible that you do that. 0.98
01:25:55.000 But I've never tried.
01:25:57.000 Maybe it's the greatest thing ever.
01:25:57.000 I'm never going to find out.
01:25:58.000 It's supposed to be awesome, but it's not my cup of tea.
01:26:00.000 Yeah, so skydiving is supposed to be great, too.
01:26:02.000 I'm not going to do that either.
01:26:04.000 Brian's dad was trying to get talked into skydiving.
01:26:07.000 Tell that story.
01:26:09.000 Yeah, his friend was always like, hey, you gotta go skydiving with me, you gotta go skydiving with me, and then one day, uh, she, her, her, her, uh, Parachute got tangled up with her emergency parachute and she died.
01:26:23.000 And this was like a week before he was going to go skydiving with her.
01:26:27.000 Not for me.
01:26:30.000 Did he find out by just going to work and she wasn't there?
01:26:35.000 Not for me.
01:26:36.000 More power to the people who want to do it, but not for me.
01:26:38.000 I avoid the crazy life-threatening stuff.
01:26:40.000 Yeah, that's a funny one.
01:26:43.000 The skydiving one's a really funny one.
01:26:45.000 You want that big adrenaline rush?
01:26:47.000 Wait until they come up with virtual skydiving.
01:26:49.000 That sounds like it's going to be pretty badass.
01:26:51.000 Well, those little fan things sound pretty fun.
01:26:53.000 Have you ever done one of those where you're over that big fan and you're just kind of floating in the sky?
01:26:57.000 Eddie Bravo did that.
01:26:58.000 He said it's amazing.
01:26:59.000 Yeah, it seems amazing.
01:27:00.000 They have one in Universal.
01:27:01.000 We should do it one day.
01:27:01.000 Yeah, that'd be great.
01:27:02.000 Yeah, you fly.
01:27:03.000 Yeah.
01:27:03.000 There's like a technique to it, too, apparently.
01:27:06.000 Because if you do it a certain way, you can fall.
01:27:08.000 Does that give you the same drastic fight or flight response, though, as looking out, you know, jumping out of a plane and you're like, if anything goes wrong, I'm going to die.
01:27:15.000 Like, that's the thrill.
01:27:16.000 I've got to thank for these people.
01:27:17.000 Yeah, absolutely.
01:27:18.000 That's a big part of it.
01:27:20.000 It's the part that people don't want to, they don't want to sort of admit it.
01:27:25.000 It's a thrill.
01:27:26.000 What's the thrill part?
01:27:27.000 Well, the thrill is that you're almost dying.
01:27:29.000 Yeah.
01:27:30.000 A bungee jump is the same thing.
01:27:31.000 Your body is reacting like it's going to die, and you're tricking that.
01:27:36.000 Yeah.
01:27:36.000 But not really.
01:27:37.000 Like, you're pretty sure it's not going to, so it's not a full-on I'm-going-to-die moment.
01:27:42.000 Well, you only make that mistake once.
01:27:43.000 Then you're all set. 0.63
01:27:44.000 Yeah, we're weird with our manipulation of our fight-or-flight responses, the things we do, like wing suits and shit like that. 0.98
01:27:53.000 Well, fucking, you know, organized fighting is the same thing. 0.98
01:27:57.000 You are channeling that base primitive instinct to establish dominance over another member of your species. 0.99
01:28:04.000 It's just all of the things that used to go with that in primitive times are gone, and it's just down to that one instinct.
01:28:09.000 You are going in there to test your mettle against another person and see if you can beat them, if you can establish dominance on them.
01:28:16.000 That's all that stuff is, and the guys who are the best at establishing dominance are the guys who rise to the prominence in their sport.
01:28:22.000 We're starting to see younger and younger guys retire as well.
01:28:25.000 That's good.
01:28:26.000 That's being an issue now.
01:28:27.000 Well, is it they're retiring because they've already got damage or they're retiring ahead of damage?
01:28:31.000 Well, everybody's got a certain amount of damage.
01:28:33.000 That's the reality.
01:28:34.000 The reality is if you've done some hard sparring, you've got damage.
01:28:39.000 It doesn't seem like there's any getting around that.
01:28:41.000 How much of it recovers after a couple months?
01:28:45.000 How much is a couple weeks?
01:28:46.000 How much is never?
01:28:48.000 Depends.
01:28:48.000 I've seen fights where guys got beat up and they were never the same guy again.
01:28:52.000 They just weren't.
01:28:54.000 They were missing something.
01:28:55.000 If they were at 10 before, they were at 8 now.
01:28:58.000 And that was where they were now.
01:29:00.000 And they could have a fairly successful career at 8, but they would never be 10 again.
01:29:04.000 Now that's something the NFL is facing because they've got, you know, a hundred years of results to look at.
01:29:10.000 But for something like the UFC, which is new, you wonder at what point does it come in where they start to go, do we need to increase size of the gloves or outlaw some of the various moves?
01:29:19.000 That actually is less safe.
01:29:22.000 The bigger gloves is because they hit harder?
01:29:24.000 No.
01:29:24.000 The bigger gloves, there's two issues with them.
01:29:26.000 One is that you don't break your hands as much, so you can pretty much punch a guy anywhere.
01:29:31.000 Not always.
01:29:32.000 Some guys have fragile hands.
01:29:34.000 Even with the big gloves, like Floyd Mayweather, he's had several operations on his hands because he kept breaking them.
01:29:40.000 Whereas the MMA gloves are smaller and you can't take as many shots with them.
01:29:46.000 The bigger gloves, you can take more punches.
01:29:49.000 And in fact, it's not really necessarily the concussive blows that do a lot of brain damage.
01:29:54.000 It's just the constant sub-concussive trauma that is the real issue.
01:29:59.000 So there's a guy named Nick Denis who was a MMA fighter who just retired.
01:30:03.000 I believe he was a pre-med student, I think.
01:30:06.000 But a very, very smart guy nonetheless, whatever his educational background was.
01:30:10.000 But that was his concern, was the sub-concussive traumas. 0.99
01:30:14.000 You start thinking, like, why can't I remember where I put my fucking car keys? 0.99
01:30:17.000 Like, is that normal... 0.99
01:30:19.000 Or am I missing a gear now?
01:30:22.000 And that's a real concern.
01:30:24.000 It's still safer than boxing.
01:30:26.000 I mean, by far, right?
01:30:28.000 Supposedly, yes.
01:30:29.000 Because boxing has less options.
01:30:32.000 For one, you can't clinch in a boxing match.
01:30:36.000 You're not supposed to.
01:30:36.000 You can't take a guy to the ground if you're stuck in a situation.
01:30:40.000 As far as repetitive head trauma goes, though...
01:30:42.000 Depends.
01:30:43.000 I mean, how you're training.
01:30:44.000 How you're training is what's really important.
01:30:46.000 Because a lot of boxers who are very smart, they don't train that hard as far as sparring.
01:30:50.000 They don't spar hard.
01:30:51.000 They spar, like, they'll get good sparring partners and they'll, you know, box at like a 50-60% ratio.
01:30:59.000 You know, they don't try to murder each other.
01:31:02.000 Whereas there's a lot of MMA gyms where guys are trying to murder each other.
01:31:05.000 And not to say that doesn't take place in boxing, because there's some camps where it certainly does.
01:31:10.000 For the most part, if you're watching a high-end boxing camp where there's a lot of money on the line, they're having good hard sparring, but they're also working.
01:31:19.000 They're working on a guy imitating a certain guy's style or putting a certain amount of pressure on a fighter or whatever.
01:31:26.000 In the high-end camp, if you're dealing with Floyd Mayweather camp or somewhere along, anywhere in that range, you're dealing with it.
01:31:33.000 They have a strategy to it.
01:31:35.000 In MMA, you have a bunch of gyms like that, but then you also have a massive amount of gyms where people are just sort of making it up as they go along.
01:31:43.000 And they think the harder you go, the better it is.
01:31:45.000 So let's go hard.
01:31:46.000 We're badasses.
01:31:47.000 We're going hard every day.
01:31:48.000 And they'll go hard even to the head.
01:31:50.000 Like we had Bas Rutten on yesterday, and he was talking about Holland-style sparring.
01:31:55.000 They would go full blast to the body and to the legs, but to the head they would pull punches because they realize, you know, you're damaging each other.
01:32:01.000 In a lot of the less experienced MMA gyms or the less well-structured MMA gyms, they don't realize that. 0.96
01:32:08.000 And so they're punching each other full blast in the face in training, and they're fucking each other up. 0.97
01:32:12.000 Wow, yeah. 0.99
01:32:14.000 It's going to add up.
01:32:14.000 It adds up.
01:32:15.000 There's no way it doesn't add up.
01:32:18.000 You look at a guy like Alistair Overeem, he's been stopped something like nine times, maybe even ten.
01:32:23.000 I think this might be the tenth time he's been stopped.
01:32:26.000 In his career, in that Bigfoot fight, that's a lot of times, man.
01:32:30.000 That's a lot of times of the fight being stopped from you getting punched too many times, where you're just gones.
01:32:39.000 You're not supposed to get nine of those in your life, right?
01:32:41.000 I don't think you're supposed to get one, actually.
01:32:44.000 You get up to nine, that's an awful lot.
01:32:47.000 Yeah.
01:32:47.000 And you watch it affect, after a few of those, you watch it start to affect their ability to fight.
01:32:51.000 They're not the same guy out there.
01:32:53.000 It certainly does, especially if they're not involved in any testosterone replacement therapy.
01:33:01.000 Because one of the things about all that trauma is there's been a lot of studies that show that it starts to shut down your testosterone.
01:33:09.000 Like multiple concussions that it shuts down.
01:33:13.000 It does a lot of damage to your pituitary.
01:33:16.000 Apparently the pituitary is quite sensitive to concussive blows.
01:33:20.000 And when you get blasted a bunch of times, they've shown that it starts to lower your testosterone and it starts to make guys depressed.
01:33:27.000 It's one of the things that makes you depressed.
01:33:30.000 Scary thing, especially for a guy like you, I'm sure, who you make your living with your mind.
01:33:36.000 Yeah.
01:33:36.000 Well, I'm just going to get back into some, like, MMA boot camp and stuff, and I did a little Krav Maga San Francisco, had an MMA course, and I was having a ball doing that, but I was not going to get hit in the head.
01:33:49.000 Like, this is my business.
01:33:51.000 And then when I actually did spar, I got hit about three times and never saw a punch.
01:33:55.000 I'm like, yeah, I don't process that.
01:33:56.000 Yeah.
01:33:57.000 Whatever you just did, I didn't see anything.
01:33:59.000 Let's go back to grappling. 0.80
01:34:00.000 Grappling I can do all goddamn day long, but I don't see punches, so I'm out. 0.93
01:34:04.000 Yeah. 0.85
01:34:04.000 Well, the key is you got to do only with people who you really totally trust. 0.85
01:34:08.000 Yeah.
01:34:09.000 You got to do it.
01:34:09.000 It's hard if you do it with strangers or if you do it with a guy who's got a chip on his shoulder.
01:34:16.000 Some guys, you just tag them lightly and all of a sudden you're in a war.
01:34:19.000 Oh, right.
01:34:20.000 Okay.
01:34:20.000 That can happen.
01:34:21.000 And what do you do?
01:34:22.000 Do you stop the sparring partner and stuff?
01:34:25.000 Most of the time, guys don't.
01:34:26.000 Most of the time, they just engage in the war with a sparring partner.
01:34:29.000 You don't stop them and say, hey, what are we doing here?
01:34:32.000 You don't trust them now, because now he's swinging at you full blast.
01:34:35.000 It happens all the time.
01:34:39.000 I think that was one of the biggest problems in MMA. In the early days of mixed martial arts camps, those guys getting beat up too much in the gym before they ever even got into the cage.
01:34:53.000 It makes you wonder, and that's one of those things that I get into a lot in that Galactic Football League series I told you about, is size, speed, and strength continue to increase.
01:35:05.000 Now we're seeing things in the NFL Where it's just basic physics.
01:35:10.000 And you can put all the padding you want around a guy unless they do something drastic to improve that helmet.
01:35:15.000 The more force that is on, bigger, faster, stronger bodies are going to produce more force.
01:35:20.000 That brain bounces around inside the head.
01:35:22.000 And when you project football players out to the 400- and 500-pound size and fighters up to the 400-pound size, It's something you try and get into that in the fiction itself, too.
01:35:32.000 It's like, what is the average career like when you're getting hit on a regular basis by something that can bench press 1500 pounds and can run 30 miles an hour?
01:35:41.000 Your career is like two, three seasons tops, and then you're just a vegetable.
01:35:44.000 Unless you can get in the head and create some kind of additional structure between the brain and the skull, there's only so much that they can do other than change the rules to stop so much damage.
01:35:53.000 Did you, in your fiction, ever create some other sort of protective wear that people would wear?
01:36:00.000 Or did you eschew it altogether, which is what a lot of people think would be the solution, to stop a lot of the head-butting each other and smashing heads?
01:36:08.000 Get rid of the helmets. 0.97
01:36:10.000 The first time I heard that, I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard of.
01:36:14.000 And then I started to think about it a little bit, like, you know, rugby does not have the same, it's not the same kind of contact. 0.85
01:36:20.000 Rugby, you do not get a 15-yard head start and take someone out of the picture.
01:36:23.000 Right.
01:36:24.000 But it's very rough and very physical, and yet they don't take the impact that American football players do.
01:36:30.000 I do some of the magic hand waving with that.
01:36:32.000 I'm like, well, this new helmet technology protects against this much, and then you just don't explain it, because if we could explain it, we would be doing it right now.
01:36:38.000 So it is taken into account, but the main character, Quentin Barnes, is a seven-book series.
01:36:43.000 We've got four books done.
01:36:44.000 And by book five, he's already starting to feel the effects of, you know, I stand in the pocket and if I do my job right, sometimes I'm getting rid of the ball and standing there when something that weighs 800 pounds is hitting me as hard as it can.
01:36:57.000 That's what you get paid to do.
01:36:59.000 And it's going to start impacting him.
01:37:01.000 So I'm excited about that.
01:37:02.000 The last three books start to get into character analysis.
01:37:04.000 What happens when the ultimate professional athlete, the top of his game, things aren't processing as fast anymore.
01:37:12.000 And he can't make the decisions as quick as he could.
01:37:14.000 And his reads aren't quite as good as they were before.
01:37:16.000 And his body's starting to hurt.
01:37:17.000 So follow him all the way from a 19-year-old rookie through this league to the point where he's like, at some point he's going to have to make a decision.
01:37:23.000 Do I continue to play and do what I love and die doing what I love, which is admirable and going to die anyway, so why not?
01:37:29.000 Or do you look to the future and be like, what are the next 40 years of my life going to be like?
01:37:34.000 It's a huge influence in the book as to what's going to happen.
01:37:37.000 When you just stop and think about what an actual football player today, a 310-pound man who can run literally like a track star of the 1930s, when you stop and think about the kind of damage they can do and you sort of look towards the future and extrapolate,
01:37:56.000 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now.
01:37:58.000 Especially when this drastic change has happened in just the last 50, 60 years.
01:38:02.000 The guys are a third larger than they used to be in just 50 years.
01:38:07.000 Yeah.
01:38:08.000 So you extrapolate that out.
01:38:09.000 And of course there's genetic and physical limitations.
01:38:12.000 But as nutrition improves and science improves and genetic engineering improves, you're going to wind up in the future, pro sports, a couple centuries from now, pro sports, they're not even going to look human.
01:38:22.000 They're going to look like a different species. 0.94
01:38:23.000 That's how I came up with the idea for the book.
01:38:26.000 I used to do a little stuff for ESPN when I was in college, like manage the teams coming off the field or hold the dish and that kind of a thing.
01:38:33.000 I was 126 pounds and Michigan, Michigan State's a giant football game every year.
01:38:39.000 It's huge.
01:38:40.000 ESPN is there, and my producer, Al Killian, I'm on the headset with him, and he's got me bringing the teams out of their dressing room, and then he starts screwing with me, because I'm 19, I don't know any better.
01:38:49.000 And he's in my ears going, listen, if they don't come out at the right time, ESPN is going to lose $5 million of advertising, and that's going to be on you. 0.95
01:38:55.000 And I'm like, he was fucking with me because he could, because I didn't know any better. 0.85
01:38:59.000 And I'm like, so stressed out. 0.98
01:39:00.000 And then, let Michigan State out of the locker room at the appointed time, and all these giant human beings are coming out.
01:39:06.000 And then as they're coming out, They're walking by the door to the Michigan locker room.
01:39:11.000 The Michigan locker room door opens up, and standing in the door is Greg Skrepnack.
01:39:15.000 You ever heard of him?
01:39:16.000 No.
01:39:16.000 He was 6'8", 360. He was a giant, giant man.
01:39:22.000 Plus, he's got all the gear on.
01:39:23.000 And I'm like, little tiny thing, I'm freaking out.
01:39:27.000 I'm like, Al, Al, Michigan's going to come out.
01:39:28.000 He's like, you don't let them come out of that locker room.
01:39:31.000 I don't care what you have to do.
01:39:33.000 And so I remember, he's giant, he's 6'8", I'm 5'8", I'm 125 pounds, and he goes to step out, and I just put my hand right on his sternum, I just stiff-armed him, and went, stop right there, you guys can't come out of that locker room yet!
01:39:48.000 And he just, he looked confused.
01:39:51.000 He was like, who is this little person?
01:39:54.000 And he managed to wait, and all the guys were behind him, and he managed to wait just long enough for Michigan State to come out, then I got out of the way, and they came out.
01:40:01.000 But I had, I wrote the whole concept of the book in that one moment, the whole GFL series.
01:40:05.000 I had my hand on this guy's ear, my nose came up to his sternum, and I remember thinking, it's like he's a completely different species than me.
01:40:12.000 And that was, and after that, I went home and started writing that book.
01:40:14.000 Like, what if we have different species playing football, and the whole thing blew up from there.
01:40:18.000 Wow, that's awesome.
01:40:20.000 Yeah, I'm lucky I'm alive.
01:40:22.000 They really are a completely different species.
01:40:24.000 If you're dealing with those super athlete, pro football players, we're getting some really enormous human beings now.
01:40:32.000 In the combine, I may have read this incorrectly, they had three guys, three offensive linemen, 310 pounds, who ran four 640s.
01:40:41.000 Those are gazelles. 0.69
01:40:42.000 If I stand still and they run at me and hit me like that, I am dead on impact.
01:40:47.000 That's how much force is involved.
01:40:48.000 I'm just dead.
01:40:49.000 There's nothing you can do.
01:40:50.000 It's crazy.
01:40:50.000 I wonder how many of these up-and-coming players are more aware of the risks now because of the past few years, all the different stories that have been coming out about players' depression.
01:41:01.000 Yeah.
01:41:04.000 I think the veterans probably are, but when you are 22 years old and someone's paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars to play football, and that's been your dream your whole life, you're still 22 and you're bulletproof.
01:41:13.000 I think the rules have to come in to adjust behavior.
01:41:17.000 It has to be run from the top down.
01:41:19.000 You were 22, and if I was playing in the NFL, nobody could tell me anything. 1.00
01:41:24.000 I'm going to go hit that motherfucker as hard as I possibly can. 1.00
01:41:27.000 That's how I make my money. 1.00
01:41:29.000 That's how people know me because I'm the guy who brings the heat.
01:41:32.000 It's never going to stop from the players themselves.
01:41:35.000 Yeah, and you start to think, if I get hurt, I'll get out.
01:41:37.000 But I won't get hurt too bad.
01:41:39.000 I'll be smart.
01:41:41.000 They also, you know, try and remember back to that age, there is this rationalization of, maybe I'll get hurt and won't be quite as smart.
01:41:47.000 I'm willing to pay that price in order to have this moment right now.
01:41:51.000 I'm willing to give up years down the road.
01:41:53.000 And at 22, 23, 24, that is a perfectly rational, logical decision.
01:41:57.000 You're like, this makes sense to me.
01:41:59.000 It's not until you get 20 years down the road, like, boy, I'm glad I didn't get any brain damage.
01:42:03.000 That would suck right now.
01:42:04.000 Yeah, it's also a thing when you're 22 and you love playing football.
01:42:08.000 That's another thing. 0.77
01:42:09.000 It's a very fucking exciting thing to do, as is MMA fighting, as is a lot of motocross riding. 0.89
01:42:16.000 There's a lot of crazy, dangerous things that people really enjoy doing, and ultimately that's really our choice. 0.90
01:42:23.000 We should have that across the board.
01:42:25.000 We're hardwired to go out and seek that kind of danger.
01:42:28.000 Evolutionarily speaking, we're hardwired to go out.
01:42:29.000 We have to go get into life and death situations to hunt, to defend, to fight off other tribes. 0.91
01:42:34.000 And the people who have those instincts are the people who wound up living and reproducing and passing that on.
01:42:40.000 So as an 18 to 27-year-old male, you are hardwired for war.
01:42:45.000 And a lot of guys aren't.
01:42:46.000 That's cool.
01:42:47.000 But a lot of guys have that. 1.00
01:42:49.000 That's what they inherited is like, let's go out and kill some shit. 1.00
01:42:52.000 That's in you. 1.00
01:42:53.000 I had that in me.
01:42:54.000 I wasn't very good at it because I was so small.
01:42:55.000 Wrestling was a good outlet.
01:42:57.000 But you know what that feeling is like.
01:42:59.000 And these kind of activities provide a safe, rational outlet for those things.
01:43:04.000 But it's in there and it's going to come out one way or another.
01:43:06.000 Yeah, for a lot of men.
01:43:08.000 And then again, as you said, some don't have it in them.
01:43:11.000 But for a lot of men, yeah, it's a real issue because you have a whole reward system set up in your DNA that you have no control over and you have all these things that you enjoy.
01:43:22.000 There's very little outlet for it when you're working in a cubicle and it's hard to make your body free of the influence of all these instincts.
01:43:30.000 There's things that can't be rationalized.
01:43:32.000 There's just things you cannot explain away.
01:43:34.000 Like... 0.99
01:43:35.000 When I used to wrestle and finally got to compete against people my own size, because I played football too, and played as hard as I could and did everything I could, but I got my ass kicked. 0.98
01:43:43.000 I weighed 120, 125 pounds. 0.91
01:43:44.000 When I wrestled, going up against guys my own weight, I was able to dominate people and just things like a crossface.
01:43:55.000 It's kind of mean to say, I guess, one of the greatest feelings of my whole life is I suplexed the kid and broke his collarbone.
01:44:01.000 When I brought him up and put him back, he landed his collarbone and broke and he just stuck there.
01:44:05.000 And it was utterly primitive.
01:44:07.000 It was just, you know, why would you be happy if you just hurt another human being?
01:44:11.000 He was a good guy.
01:44:11.000 I knew him.
01:44:12.000 He's a nice guy.
01:44:13.000 But for that brief moment, all the chemistry inside and everything else was like...
01:44:19.000 That's how you do it.
01:44:20.000 Does that help you when you're writing, when you're writing something like Ancestor, when you're writing about this crazy, gigantic pack predator?
01:44:27.000 I get into it a ton, especially in the new book Pandemic.
01:44:31.000 The thought process is we are modified by society.
01:44:35.000 We have a set of rules that we live by, a certain camaraderie, helping out our fellow man, helping our fellow women. 0.72
01:44:41.000 You know, in our growing culture, the growing equality of women, and there's no need to be a douchebag. 0.97
01:44:48.000 By and large, you don't need to be a douchebag. 0.95
01:44:49.000 You can get along just fine being a good guy.
01:44:51.000 And then, take these people who are aspiring to become these better people, who are genuinely good people, and then put them in the pressure cooker.
01:44:59.000 When you start to get into it, and it's like, We're good to go.
01:45:20.000 Do we regress to that lizard brain?
01:45:22.000 Do we start looking out for number one?
01:45:24.000 And I don't get into it too much.
01:45:27.000 You protect your kids.
01:45:28.000 You protect your family.
01:45:29.000 There's a guy you've known for 20 years.
01:45:31.000 You two are going down together.
01:45:32.000 But it's largely when the strangers are brought together, get a small amount of time to gel, to get to know each other so it's not completely alien itself.
01:45:40.000 It's one of my group.
01:45:42.000 Then bring in the 650 pound pack predators.
01:45:45.000 What happens?
01:45:46.000 What do these characters do?
01:45:47.000 That sounds awesome, man.
01:45:48.000 I'm going to read this.
01:45:49.000 I can't wait to read it.
01:45:50.000 It sounds like a great idea.
01:45:51.000 I love your whole philosophy.
01:45:53.000 I love what you did.
01:45:55.000 I love the way you became sort of self-actualized by going out and putting it online yourself and reading your own books and putting it out in an audiobook form and making it free.
01:46:05.000 I think it's brilliant.
01:46:06.000 It's beautiful.
01:46:07.000 I love the fact that it worked.
01:46:08.000 I love your whole philosophy on giving it to people that can't afford it and you just put a little ad in there.
01:46:13.000 It's great.
01:46:14.000 It's beautiful.
01:46:14.000 It's all perfect.
01:46:15.000 It's great.
01:46:15.000 Thank you very much for coming on, man.
01:46:17.000 I really, really appreciate it.
01:46:18.000 Thank you for having me on the show.
01:46:19.000 I've been a fan since the broadcast news days.
01:46:23.000 It's a big thrill.
01:46:24.000 Thanks, man.
01:46:25.000 I really appreciate it.
01:46:25.000 And for folks who are interested in checking out more of Scott's book, the last name is Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R. I've got Nocturnal in front of me and Ancestor, and your website is...
01:46:38.000 ScottSigler.com.
01:46:39.000 And it's just Scott Sigler on Twitter, right?
01:46:41.000 Yeah, Scott Sigler on Twitter.
01:46:43.000 Facebook.com slash Scott Sigler.
01:46:45.000 We get to all the interwebs everywhere we can get to them.
01:46:48.000 Well, dude, thank you very much.
01:46:49.000 And folks, go support.
01:46:51.000 Go get one of these books.
01:46:52.000 I'm reading.
01:46:52.000 I'm going to start this one tonight.
01:46:53.000 Sweet! 0.95
01:46:54.000 That's awesome.
01:46:54.000 Thank you very much, brother.
01:46:55.000 I really, really appreciate it.
01:46:56.000 Really fun time, man.
01:46:57.000 Thank you very much.
01:46:58.000 Thank you.
01:46:58.000 Thank you, too.
01:46:59.000 Thank you to Hover, one of our sponsors for this episode.
01:47:03.000 If you go to Hover.com forward slash Rogan, you will get 10% off your domain name registrations.
01:47:08.000 Thanks also to Audible.com.
01:47:10.000 If you go to Audible.com forward slash Joe, you can get one free audio book and you will also get 30 days of free service at Audible.com, an awesome audio book.
01:47:23.000 We're good to go.
01:47:45.000 Brian Redband, Tony Hinchcliffe, Yoshi, Billy Bonnell, Jason Tebow.
01:47:50.000 It's going to be a hell of a show, ladies and gentlemen.
01:47:53.000 Go down there and check it out.
01:47:54.000 And if you're around Pasadena on Wednesday night at the Ice House Comedy Club, it's me, Ari Shafir, and Ian Edwards.
01:48:01.000 All right, folks, that's the end of this episode.
01:48:03.000 We'll be back in about 10 minutes with Justin Wren.
01:48:06.000 We're doing a double podcast day.
01:48:07.000 My man's out there saving pygmies. 1.00
01:48:09.000 This shit's going to be crazy. 0.99
01:48:11.000 Thank you, Scott Sigler. 1.00
01:48:11.000 I really enjoyed that. 1.00
01:48:12.000 Thank you very much.
01:48:23.000 Bye!