Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #089 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Joe Eszterhas

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#089 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with Joe Eszterhas · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
• 0:08
  by night. All day.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's rock and roll.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: You need the headphones?
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Never.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: No?
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: Okay. If it's okay with you. I know I've seen
• 0:20
  it both ways.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: No, you don't have to wear them.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: You were telling me about your cane. That cane is amazing.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: It's amazing. It's carved by the Dogon people who were
• 0:31
  in Mali. And it's a family that's been doing it
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  for 100 years. And many of them were killed in
• 0:41
  the Rwandan wars. It's heavy. It's beautifully done, I think.
• 0:47
  And it's been a close companion of mine for many years.
• 0:51
  It seems to be indestructible.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: It's pretty awesome looking. It looks heavy. The Dogon people
• 0:56
  have a very strange origin story. It's a fascinating origin
• 1:01
  story that involves... Is it– it evolves like– here it is.
• 1:10
  I didn't want to misspeak. So here it is. It
• 1:15
  centers on the supreme creator Ama and the cosmic journey
• 1:19
  of the amphibious water spirits known as the Noma. So
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  they have this crazy cosmic origin story that's a part
• 1:29
  of their mythology.
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  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Ama then attempted to procreate with the Earth, but the
• 1:34
  pairing was flawed. It's like a very strange descendant of
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  the Ark. According to the Dogon traditions, the Noma descended
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  to Earth from the Sirius star system in a giant
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  Ark-like vessel. The vessel contained the eight original human ancestors,
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  along with the seeds and animals needed to populate the world.
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  Those are the dogmas.
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  Speaker 2: It's amazing. I didn't know that. It's a crazy story.
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  I have a daughter who's a nature photographer. I mean,
• 2:01
  does a lot of work in Africa. And she knows
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  all about that stuff.
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  Speaker 1: So you were telling me before we got rolling, I said,
• 2:09
  save this for the air, that Vladimir Zelensky and his
• 2:13
  wife have seen Basic Instinct how many times?
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  Speaker 2: Fifteen, at least fifteen. There's a recent biography. That said that,
• 2:21
  that began when they were courting and that they had
• 2:24
  known each other before. And one day she saw him
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  with this tape in his hand. She said, what is it?
• 2:30
  And he said, basic instinct. And then they saw it
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  together and it had such an effect on them that
• 2:36
  they played it together many times, at least 15 times
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  on their anniversaries. Now, I'm not sure what that says.
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  And I know that some people think the movies had
• 2:52
  a kind of amatory effect on them. But the other
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  thing that's interesting to me is if you see it
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  15 times, does it really fuck you up to the
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  point where you go to war with Putin? I mean,
• 3:05
  is that the real key to why it happened?
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  Speaker 1: Well, in his defense, Putin attacked first.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I like Zelensky very much as a figure.
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  And I'm very sympathetic to the Ukrainians because I'm, I've
• 3:18
  got a Hungarian background. In 1956, the Russians devastated Hungary
• 3:23
  in a similar freedom fight. So maybe it gave him
• 3:27
  the balls and the wisdom to go after Putin.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Maybe it just made him horny. Who knows? Might have
• 3:33
  nothing to do with the war.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: Might not.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: You made some crazy fucking movies, man. You really did.
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  Speaker 2: There are 18 of them that have been made, and
• 3:42
  there have been like 34 scripts. There are 16 that
• 3:44
  haven't been made yet. And I don't know, you know,
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  I kid around and I say there's a twisted little
• 3:52
  man inside me who lives in some spot that I'm
• 3:54
  not sure where it exactly is. But he's 29, born 29,
• 3:59
  he will die 29. And with anything that has a
• 4:03
  relatively strong sexual content, he wrote the fucking thing. I'm
• 4:07
  just an old guy giving him the space. So when
• 4:11
  the recent deal was made for a record amount of
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  money for Basic Instinct 3, because there was a sequel
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  to it. That was a total piece of shit, and
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  I had nothing to do with it. But this would
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  be 3, and my title for it is Basic Instinct Jezebel.
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  The Twisted Little Men put together this story that I
• 4:33
  think people will have fun with, but it continues in
• 4:37
  that same vein, and it seems to be his specialty.
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  So let's see what happens.
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  Speaker 1: I like how you refer to yourself as like another person. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: The twisted man. There is, you know, there's this thing
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  with little kids where they have a companion, an invisible companion.
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  The twisted little man is my main one. I have others.
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  Mark Twain is one. And interestingly, Jesus of Nazareth is another.
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  You know, and these people are very, very close to me.
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  Twisted little man is a darker presidency. Then the others,
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  although Twain is a cross between the two of them,
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  and I absolutely love him.
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  Speaker 1: So when you were writing things like Basic Instinct, do
• 5:17
  you really feel like you were channeling like another person?
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  Is that what it felt like?
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: It felt, well, let me get a backdrop. I wrote
• 5:25
  it in 13 days, and I felt like it just
• 5:35
  poured out of me. There is a background to it,
• 5:38
  and that is that The Catherine Tramiel character and then
• 5:42
  the Nick Curran character. Many, many years before, in college,
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  I had an affair with a... I was an 18-year-old kid,
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  and I had an affair with a faculty member's wife.
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  It was a serious affair, and the... We... She was sophisticated, smart, beautiful, sassy... Um,
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  exactly the kind of woman I've always fallen for. And the, the, um,
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  and she had a profound effect on me. Now at
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  the end of the, at the end of the year,
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  she moved on and I discovered that there was a
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  different student that she was with each, each year and
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  that her husband looked the other way. Um, the, uh,
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  How old was she? 39. And I, I was 18.
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  I was a very green 18 because I grew up
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  an ethnic immigrant kid. Um, the, uh, I fell in
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  love easily. But falling in love easily also meant a
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  lot in terms of learning things because I was an
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  immigrant and I really didn't know this country and I
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  was shy. And I learned a lot sometimes, I think,
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  more from the women that I was together with beginning
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  in college. And through the rest of my life, then
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  I preferred the company of women always because they weren't
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  armored off and male macho. But anyway, she was stuck
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  there in my memory. And then when I was a
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  police reporter, almost a decade and a half later, a
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  decade later, at the plane dealer, I had a buddy
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  who was a cop that I liked very much who
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  had been involved in three or four shootings. And when
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  we got to know each other and we spent time
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  drinking together, and we did a lot of that. I
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  started wondering how, if he really liked the shootings. Was
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  it an itchy trigger finger, or did he just get
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  off on it? So somehow these two characters were in
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  my head, and I thought about them a lot, but
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  they didn't come together. And then, I think, thanks to
• 7:55
  the twist of Little Man, one day the two came
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  together in a love story. And that was the genesis
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  of Basic Instinct. And by the time I wrote it,
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  I had thought about it subconsciously and directly for a
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  long time. I would wake up in the middle of
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  the night and jot notes down, which happens to me
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  sometimes when I'm very involved in a script. And I
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  wrote it in Hawaii. I went off to Hawaii by myself.
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  I let the sun beat me up. I snorted some Coke,
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  which was an habit in those days. And after 13 days.
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  Of all of that. And the other thing I did
• 8:34
  was listen to the Stones all the time. I loved
• 8:36
  the Stones. I loved the blues from the time I
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  was an immigrant kid. And the Stones just blew everything
• 8:41
  else out during that period of time for me. So
• 8:44
  I listened to that at the end of 13 days
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  that I had this script. And then I went back
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  home to Marin, typed it up, sent it, almost sent
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  it to my agent with the title Love Hurts. And
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  I was going out the door The twist, the little
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  man had another thought, and I raced back inside and
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  wrote the word basic instinct, sent it to my agents.
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  They auctioned it. Ten days later, my main agent, Guy McElwain,
• 9:09
  who became my big brother and one of the people
• 9:14
  I really loved in life, everybody bid on it. It
• 9:19
  wound up selling for a record $ 3 million, and then
• 9:23
  it became a towering hit. To this day, it trends.
• 9:29
  The critics at the beginning were critical, mildly critical. No, actually,
• 9:36
  the critics were really after the movie. And then through
• 9:39
  the years, the critics have had a change of mind.
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  Speaker 1: Isn't that funny?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. A woman named Camille Baglia, who was a main
• 9:47
  feminist critic, who went up against the movie very strongly recently,
• 9:52
  not recently, but in the past five or ten years,
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  has come around and said that the movie is the example.
• 9:59
  It's a post-feminist classic, she says, and it's about women
• 10:03
  who don't have to hide their sexuality.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: That's wild that she made such a turnaround.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I wonder, did you ever have a conversation with her?
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: No, I've never met her. She teaches I'm somewhere on
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  the East Coast, and she has a towering reputation, but
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  I've never met her. I usually don't listen to critics.
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  It's through the 18 films, you know, I don't listen
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  to critics. I worked with a director, Richard Marquand, who
• 10:30
  directed Jagged Edge and Hearts of Fire, and we worked
• 10:35
  on another one together. And Richard said to me that
• 10:40
  critics should be taken out into the backyard and shot.
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  I worked with another director, Mike Figgis, On the one
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  night stand, we said the critic should be taken out
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  of the backyard and headbutted to death. I was sympathetic
• 10:54
  to both things.
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  Speaker 1: It's so wild that your views were formed by this
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  relationship that you had when you were 18 with an older, horny,
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  smart lady who's kind of wild and then a cop
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  who might have been a shady cop. Yes.
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  Speaker 2: And how the two came together in this twisted thing
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  called creativity. And they come out of this maelstrom. Now,
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  the other thing I'm sure was an influence is by
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  the time I did that, I'd been through four years
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  of police beat experience covering cops. Two in Dayton, Ohio,
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  and two in Cleveland. And that consisted of, at that point,
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  driving around in a company car, got the police radio, um,
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  and responding to whatever was going on. On occasion, you
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  got there before the cops got there. Um, and, and
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  then the one that really stuck in my head and, and, uh,
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  got inside me was, was, there was one when the
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  report of a, the shooting of Suburban Dayton and I
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  got there, um, there were no cops there. The, the,
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  the front door was wide open. I walked in, um, I, I,
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  I passed the body of a guy who had shot
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  himself and there was blood all over the wall. And
• 12:21
  then a woman was his wife that he'd shot. And
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  I heard someone in the back of the house screaming
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  and crying. And I went back there. And the thing
• 12:34
  that really got to me is she was screaming and
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  crying in Hungary. And it was an old lady who
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  was the the mother's mom. And, of course, I spoke
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  fluent Hungarian and grew up Hungarian. And there was something
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  about the scene that's with me to this day. The
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  other police beat experience I had, Joe, that was very
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  moving was that I covered the Glenville urban uprising in Cleveland.
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  It was a big one, and there were, I think,
• 13:05
  six or seven policemen shot and killed. I was crouched
• 13:10
  behind a a car on the street ducking down with
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  about 10 feet in front of me was a cop bleeding,
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  badly bleeding, moaning. And at the same time, there were
• 13:29
  gunshots coming from this apartment house. And I heard that
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  the gunshots were coming from a group of so-called black
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  nationalists led by a man, Fred Ahmed Evans. I knew
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  both men from the police beat. The cop was Hungarian.
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  His name was Elmer Joseph. And he would come around
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  to the little office in the police beat all the time,
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  and I knew him. And the black man was named
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  Fred Ahmed Evans. And he would come by in his
• 14:03
  dashiki sometimes at 2 in the morning because I worked
• 14:05
  the overnight shift sometimes. And we had the greatest talks.
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  You know, drank a lot of beer and smoked a
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  lot of dope. and got to be pals. And he
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  was leading the group of black nationalists who were shooting
• 14:20
  these policemen. And I was behind this car's wheels a
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  few feet away from the whole shit. And I found
• 14:28
  the whole thing so frightening and so disturbing that I
• 14:31
  pissed my pants. So the four years of police, there
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  were other incidents I covered. The urban uprisings in Detroit,
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  two in Cleveland, and one in Newark. I was very
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  involved in the civil rights movement. And, you know, that's
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  what I did. I covered whatever was breaking, and much
• 14:54
  of it was dark stuff. So by the time that
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  hookup happened between Catherine Trammell and Nick Curran, there was
• 15:04
  a lot that went into it.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I could imagine. Yeah. The insane life experience to
• 15:11
  be able to see all those different crime scenes and
• 15:15
  witness all that.
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  Speaker 2: You know, what happened was that I happened to pick
• 15:19
  a field. Journalism, I thought, and so did Hunter. One
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  of the things, we became friends. We were both poor kids,
• 15:32
  and we both dreamed of being novelists. Novelists.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: You mean Hunter Thompson?
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Hunter Thompson. And the way that we chose to
• 15:41
  begin that was by doing journalism because no one made
• 15:45
  a living writing novels and we both had to make
• 15:48
  a living. So I wrote stuff for the National Enquirer
• 15:54
  and then moved on to Rolling Stone and all of that.
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  And I did it on a local level. And that
• 16:01
  put us into a culture that was exploding. The American
• 16:06
  society was exploding. the black situation vis-à-vis white racism was horrendous.
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  So there was a dynamic in the country that we
• 16:18
  were on top of because of what we did. So
• 16:21
  I saw a lot. I saw a lot in the
• 16:23
  refugee camps because I began my seven years in refugee
• 16:27
  camps in Austria and then grew up dirt poor in
• 16:31
  an urban city. The.
• 16:35
  And I saw a lot of stuff there as well
• 16:40
  that was dark and moving and profoundly effective.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: Well, also, so when you're writing, you're writing from real-world experience.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Which is so much more effective and makes sense why
• 16:53
  your stuff was so dark and wild.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. It does make sense. And, you know, I mean,
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  when I was a kid in Cleveland growing up, We
• 17:06
  lived in a very poor part of town near West Side.
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  And there was a bar next door. And I slept
• 17:16
  on a couch in the living room that overlooked the bar.
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  And one night, I was looking out the window, because
• 17:25
  I always was, neon lights and Puerto Rican hookers and
• 17:30
  all of that stuff that really interested a little kid
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  who spent most of his time playing with, as Mark
• 17:36
  Twain said, with this pecker. So this was all very
• 17:41
  exciting stuff. And I was watching one day, and I
• 17:46
  saw this man stab another one to death and fall
• 17:48
  down and bleed to death.
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  Speaker 1: How old were you?
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: Twelve.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: Oh, Jesus.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: There are reasons here. Why? The other thing with my
• 18:03
  scripts is almost everything in my scripts somehow comes from
• 18:06
  some kind of personal tie. You know, Big Shots, which
• 18:10
  was a little movie that was very popular with kids,
• 18:13
  came from my son Steve's experience in Marin County with
• 18:19
  a black friend and how they tried to make that
• 18:22
  friendship work. And that's what the movie is. It's a
• 18:25
  little movie about two kids, a white kid and a
• 18:28
  black kid, trying to become friends. There was a movie
• 18:34
  I did called Checking Out with Jeff Daniels, and that
• 18:38
  was about a mid-life crisis. And suddenly now in my
• 18:43
  early to mid-30s, I was scared shitless that I was
• 18:45
  going to die. And here I am at fucking 81
• 18:49
  talking about dying at 30-something. So there was a comedic
• 18:54
  thing that came out of that. The basic came out
• 18:58
  of where it did. But there was almost with every one,
• 19:02
  there was some kind of betrayed came out of the
• 19:05
  notion that at that particular point, if you remember, there
• 19:09
  was all this right-wing craziness where there were militias that
• 19:13
  were shooting people and there were jamborees where the right-wingers
• 19:18
  got together.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: When was this?
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Betrayed, which came out in the 80s. There were several
• 19:25
  incidents in Oregon and in the northwest parts of the
• 19:28
  country which got a lot of publicity. It was before
• 19:31
  Timothy McVeigh, but roughly in that same period. So I
• 19:37
  decided under a false name to go to one of
• 19:40
  these jamborees and see what the hell was going on. Essentially,
• 19:44
  my journalism experience, I went into it. And then out
• 19:47
  of it, I concocted this romance between Deborah Winkler. and
• 19:50
  Tom Berenshire. But they all had some kind of a tie.
• 19:53
  Telling Lies in America, which is one of my favorite
• 19:55
  little movies, with Kevin Bacon and Brad Renfro, is semi-autobiographical
• 20:02
  in terms of the issues I had as a high
• 20:05
  school kid with bullying and all of those kinds of things,
• 20:10
  and becoming an American citizen. They were shot, incidentally, right
• 20:18
  where I grew up, in front of the apartment house
• 20:20
  where we lived. And I remember hearing a TV reporter
• 20:26
  in Cleveland interview an old man who was watching the
• 20:32
  shooting and saying, did you know Joe when he grew
• 20:37
  up here? And he said, yeah, I was a bartender there.
• 20:41
  And then he said, shit, Joe is just a fucking
• 20:44
  refugee trying to make his way in the world. He
• 20:48
  nailed it. I mean, that's really what, not a complicated thing,
• 20:51
  but that's really what happened. The only other thing, nice
• 20:55
  things have been said about me through the years, but
• 20:57
  the only other thing that I really treasure and absolutely
• 21:03
  love is I interviewed Otis Redding. the night before he
• 21:06
  was killed in a plane crash in Cleveland. And we
• 21:11
  began speaking around midnight after a show at a place
• 21:14
  called Leo's Casino. And we began talking around midnight and
• 21:20
  talked until 3.30 in the morning. And we did a
• 21:26
  lot of beer. We did a lot of Jim Beam.
• 21:28
  We smoked a lot of really powerful Thai stuff and
• 21:32
  had a great time. And at the end of it,
• 21:36
  he had to go, he said, give me a fucking hug,
• 21:41
  and I gave him a hug. And he said, you
• 21:42
  know what you are? He said, you're a fucking white nigger,
• 21:46
  that's what you are. I love that. It stayed with
• 21:49
  me all this time. The only time that he's a
• 21:51
  force of nature, people said, if Shakespeare were alive today,
• 21:54
  what's his name, B. Joe Esser, I'd fuck all that,
• 21:56
  it's bullshit. What Otis said, and what the old man said,
• 21:59
  I thought was really great, you know.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Well, Otis Redding was such a legend.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: Oh, he was great.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: He died so young, too.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: How old was he? He died. He was really, I
• 22:08
  was in his 30s someplace. But listen to this. I
• 22:11
  interviewed him. I went home. The next day at the
• 22:13
  plane dealer, it was Sunday, and I was working. Literally
• 22:17
  the day after the interview. And so I'm sitting there
• 22:21
  in this hall-like city room, and I see a city editor.
• 22:27
  The associated press wire machines start dinging. And in those days,
• 22:31
  if it had more than like four or five dings,
• 22:33
  there was some bad thing that happened. So I saw
• 22:37
  a city editor come from the city desk to this
• 22:40
  dinging machine. And he's staring at it. The fucking thing
• 22:44
  is still dinging. He's staring at it, and then he
• 22:46
  looks at me like that in the city room, and
• 22:49
  then he looks away. So I saw that, and then
• 22:54
  I got up and went to the dinging machine and
• 22:58
  noticed his plane had crashed the way it's another gig.
• 23:04
  And I was probably the last man who really spoke
• 23:07
  to him at length. I left the office right then
• 23:14
  and said, fuck it, for the rest of the day.
• 23:16
  There was a bar across the street. I drank myself
• 23:20
  silly and went home with the waitress. I mean, it
• 23:22
  was just horrible. But I saw a lot. To get
• 23:28
  back to your point, Joe, I did it in different ways.
• 23:31
  And so then I tried to write a movie about
• 23:33
  Otis called Blaze of Glory. And we put it together.
• 23:39
  A man named John Aptett was going to direct it,
• 23:42
  and it was announced that Cuba Gooding was going to
• 23:45
  play Otis. And the whole thing fell apart at the
• 23:49
  last minute for financing reasons, and to this day it's
• 23:52
  never gotten made. But I'm a writer. I'm a writer.
• 23:57
  What else can I do with someone that I love
• 23:59
  that I'm meeting except write about them in that way, right?
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: So anybody who writes interesting things the way you do
• 24:06
  has to have had some interesting life experiences. You don't
• 24:10
  get those kind of scripts that you wrote from a
• 24:13
  sterile environment.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Sometimes, I'll tell you the...
• 24:22
  After my conversion to Christianity later in my life, I
• 24:28
  wrote three Christian scripts and none of them were made.
• 24:34
  And one of them wasn't made because one of the
• 24:40
  priests involved with potentially getting Christian financing said we need
• 24:46
  more incense. And my response to And somebody who interviewed
• 24:51
  me about it was, I don't write fucking incense. I
• 24:54
  write flesh and blood. So no wonder it wasn't made.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: What did he mean by you need more incense?
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: Well, to make it more hymn-like, to give it a
• 25:07
  sense of piety, to make it inspire the people so
• 25:15
  that they become Catholic in this specific case. And that
• 25:20
  it was too secular. And I think what happened to
• 25:23
  me with all three is that I fell between views,
• 25:27
  between so-called Christian films and secular films. And so that's
• 25:35
  why we never got to finance for all three of them.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: When you say you fell between Christian films and secular films,
• 25:41
  you mean in the way you were writing it? That
• 25:42
  you weren't writing it specifically as a Christian film or
• 25:45
  specifically as a secular film?
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: The way I was writing it naturally.
• 25:48
  Speaker 4: Like you wrote everything else?
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but that political considerations are clerical considerations. I was
• 25:58
  just writing it for my heart. And that was too
• 26:01
  gritty to get Christian kind of financing. And on the
• 26:05
  other hand, too religious. to get the secular financing.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: That's too bad because that bridge is probably what would
• 26:11
  bring more people to Christianity, where they could relate to it.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: I agree with you absolutely, and my argument was these
• 26:20
  could be hit movies because my movies in a lot
• 26:23
  of cases have been these could be hit movies, and
• 26:26
  that's more important than spiking people with incense.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: It's interesting how Hollywood has always rejected those kind of
• 26:35
  religious films, like The Passion of the Christ, for instance.
• 26:40
  That was a huge movie.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: Well, it was not just a huge movie, but in
• 26:44
  my mind, it was like a prayer. I watch it
• 26:48
  each Good Friday, and it was a huge movie, beautifully done.
• 26:56
  It wasn't officially endorsed by the Catholic Church, although... I
• 27:03
  saw in Cleveland a meeting where a priest organized a
• 27:08
  preview screening of the movie, and they had like 700 people,
• 27:13
  the full hall, watching it. There was such an interest
• 27:16
  in it. But part of the reason, I think, you
• 27:20
  raise a good point, because I think part of the
• 27:21
  reason it was such a towering hit was that it
• 27:26
  was real. It wasn't It wasn't incense filled. It was real.
• 27:31
  You had a figure who bled, and you really show
• 27:34
  what happened up on that cross and how awful that
• 27:38
  kind of pain is. The movie really reflected that.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: No, it was horrific. And then there was also that
• 27:43
  Willem Dafoe film. What was that one called?
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: The Last Temptation of Christ. That's right. Marty Scorsese. Yeah. Yeah.
• 27:52
  I agree with that. I love Willem Dafoe. I mean,
• 27:55
  he's one of my favorite actors. And it's also very real,
• 28:02
  historically real. You know, the notion that Jesus of Nazareth
• 28:11
  was this Fred Rogers figure who wasn't really a real man,
• 28:16
  whereas the Bible says he was a true man and
• 28:18
  true God. That film really showed his human side. And
• 28:27
  my conception of Jesus, who I revere and who was
• 28:31
  one of my close friends that I speak to on
• 28:35
  most days, is that he was a true man and
• 28:39
  a true God. He was a Jewish zealot, a freedom
• 28:41
  fighter against the Roman Empire. He was crucified by the Romans.
• 28:49
  As a freedom fighter, he hung around blue-collar guys and
• 28:55
  fishermen And hookers and tax collectors who were the lowest
• 28:58
  of the low back then, as they should be now,
• 29:01
  but they were the lowest of the low back then.
• 29:04
  And those were the people that he primarily buddied around with.
• 29:08
  That's Jesus of Nazareth. And that side is completely ignored
• 29:16
  by most films except the two that you mentioned specifically
• 29:19
  that are like.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the last temptation of the Christ, I don't remember.
• 29:22
  I remember there was some controversy around it, but I don't.
• 29:25
  I was too young to really be paying attention to
• 29:28
  like how.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: It was the very fact that Jesus had a relationship
• 29:35
  that was clearly indicated as being sexual with Mary Magdalene.
• 29:39
  who was depicted as a prostitute. Now, the truth, historical truth,
• 29:45
  is that Mary Magdalene was a few years older than
• 29:48
  Jesus and a woman of means who had advised Roman
• 29:55
  builders in a city called Seraphim. and then was one
• 29:59
  of the people who financed Jesus as he swept through
• 30:02
  Galilee and the rest of Judea. There's another scene in
• 30:08
  the Bible where an unnamed woman goes to Jesus and
• 30:16
  washes his feet, and then washes his feet with his hair.
• 30:21
  This unnamed woman, by a pope in the 6th century,
• 30:25
  Gregory the Great, was picked to have been Mary Magdalene.
• 30:29
  No connection to Mary Magdalene. There's nothing that says that
• 30:33
  Mary Magdalene was a hooker of any kind. There's no
• 30:36
  proof for that in any way. So the fact that
• 30:38
  The Last Temptation of Christ did that and brought the
• 30:45
  two of them together in a sort of semi-love story without,
• 30:51
  of course, any real sexuality to it on film, His
• 30:56
  wife was so criticized. Scorsese's house was picketed. And I
• 31:01
  think the studio at that point was run by Lou Wasserman,
• 31:06
  whom I knew from Cleveland because he was a– he
• 31:12
  ran a racing wire in Cleveland before he went. But
• 31:14
  he was a legendary man. His house was picketed as well.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: So was it just Catholic people and Christian people that
• 31:23
  were upset about this?
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: Mostly, yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: But it was very unusual for a Martin Scorsese film
• 31:30
  to be a religious film too.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: Like a depiction of Jesus. People were much more averse
• 31:36
  back then. I feel like sometimes like religion goes in
• 31:39
  like peaks and waves. And I think there was a
• 31:42
  wave of atheism back then and Hollywood was very non-Christian
• 31:47
  to put it mildly. It wasn't– the Christian themes in
• 31:51
  films were never promoted.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's not as bad now
• 31:58
  in that sense as it was in those days. And
• 32:01
  I think that part of it that frustrates me is
• 32:07
  that there would be an openness to that in Christian
• 32:12
  films if they were real, if they weren't full of
• 32:16
  incense and piety. What we've done to Jesus over the
• 32:19
  years is make him a kind of Fred Rogers figure. No,
• 32:22
  he wasn't that. You know, I'm not even sure that
• 32:26
  Jesus really said, do not resist violence. You know, Jesus
• 32:30
  also said, if you have a cloak but not a sword,
• 32:34
  sell the cloak and buy a sword. He also said,
• 32:37
  I come not to make peace. I come not to
• 32:44
  make peace but with a sword. So there's been a
• 32:48
  lot of church stuff. And then especially I think Catholics
• 32:56
  are more guilty of this, that it's a romanticized and
• 32:59
  sort of cosmeticized figure of Jesus of Nazareth.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Well, there's always a problem when human beings add their
• 33:06
  own interpretation to an ancient story.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: And do it to fit their own narrative.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. It's a great problem. But in this case, there
• 33:17
  is historical evidence on the other side. And they simply
• 33:21
  ignore that. and pretend it doesn't happen. The Gnostic Gospels
• 33:25
  are full of so-called revolutionary things, and the truth is
• 33:32
  that the Gnostic Gospels were written 40 years, 30, 40
• 33:36
  years after the death of Jesus, whereas the Gnostic Gospels,
• 33:41
  the ones that the churches have accepted, were written 80,
• 33:44
  90 years after the death of Jesus. So they had
• 33:47
  to have been taken secondhand from people who said they
• 33:51
  saw things Where with the previous, there's a shot that
• 33:54
  people directly saw them. The people in the church gospels
• 34:01
  who are named like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were
• 34:03
  not the people who were in the gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke,
• 34:06
  and John. Nobody knows who wrote them. They took with
• 34:08
  those names. But they were not those people.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: I had no idea.
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. No doubt. Even the churches admit that at this point.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: 2,000 years is such a hard time for us to conceptualize,
• 34:26
  to put into our head as to how much time
• 34:29
  has passed.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: To try to get an accurate understanding of what was
• 34:35
  going on back then is insanely difficult.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: I have become a, since my sort of conversion to Christianity,
• 34:46
  and I would sound myself a devout Christian, but not
• 34:48
  a devout Catholic, even though I go to Mass regularly.
• 34:52
  And I love the Mass and believe in it. But
• 34:54
  since 2001, when this process really began, I've become a
• 35:01
  real student of the historical Jesus. And I learn more
• 35:07
  and more, and I'm more and more astounded at what's
• 35:11
  been done to cosmeticize this man who is Jesus of Nazareth.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: Well, it's also he had some of the most profound
• 35:21
  and insanely resonating teachings, like even today. The words that
• 35:30
  he spoke 2,000 years ago, they're still today. People, I mean,
• 35:37
  they resonate with people. And if you live your life
• 35:40
  by the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will be a
• 35:42
  better person.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: Yes, you will.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: It is a great framework to live your life.
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: Which is incredible when you think about a person that
• 35:49
  lived so long ago.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: He is a much better person to pick as your
• 35:57
  imagined companion than Mark Twain.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: Your imagined companion. Let me ask you this, because I
• 36:04
  had a long conversation with Mel Gibson about this. What
• 36:07
  do you think about the Shroud of Turin?
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: Well, there was a study done, a major study that
• 36:13
  was done by by the Catholic Church, led by John
• 36:18
  Paul II, whom I really admired and read a lot
• 36:26
  about through the years. And this is a scientific study
• 36:31
  that discovered that the Shroud of Turin came from 1313
• 36:34
  or 1320. Now, there's a huge controversy about it, and
• 36:42
  there are those people who who feel that that absolutely
• 36:46
  is Christ. And I must say that when I look
• 36:48
  at it, when I look at that figure, and I've
• 36:51
  done that a lot, and in my house we have
• 36:54
  several blow-ups of Turin's Christ, it's very, very moving. But
• 37:02
  the evidence, what there is, seems to indicate that it
• 37:08
  comes from the 1300s.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen that as well. But then I've also
• 37:12
  seen people that say that that evidence– there's some controversy
• 37:17
  about that evidence.
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there is.
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: And that some of the cloth they believe dates to
• 37:21
  far earlier and it's the type of cloth and the
• 37:24
  way it's made seems to indicate that it's far older.
• 37:27
  I don't know how much of the cloth they've carbon tested.
• 37:33
  That is also an issue and whether or not it
• 37:36
  had been repaired or whether or not there had been
• 37:38
  additional pieces.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: I don't either. But you know what? Ultimately, when I
• 37:44
  look at that, when I look at that Jesus, and
• 37:48
  I've done that quite a bit, that face really moves me.
• 37:52
  So in a sense, I don't give a shit.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: At the very least, it's an insanely compelling piece of artwork.
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: At the very least.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: But there's also a lot of very strange mysteries as
• 38:03
  to how that was created in the first place because
• 38:06
  it's not a die. And they're not exactly sure what
• 38:11
  caused that image to appear or how– if that is
• 38:15
  a piece of art, they don't know how that art
• 38:17
  was created. And the fact that they really only could
• 38:20
  see the accurate representation of it once they saw it
• 38:23
  as a negative is also very interesting because who's going
• 38:26
  to make a piece of art where you can only
• 38:28
  really appreciate what it looks like when you see it
• 38:30
  as a negative? Especially when you're talking about something you're
• 38:34
  doing– you're making something in the 1300s. All right. Hundreds
• 38:37
  of years before photography is ever created. So what are
• 38:41
  you making? And why is it so compelling when you
• 38:44
  look at it in the negative? And if you're talking
• 38:47
  about something that was created by an insane burst of energy,
• 38:50
  which is what the proponents of the Shroud of Turin
• 38:53
  being legitimate think. They think it was created by this
• 38:55
  insane burst of energy on Jesus' resurrection. I'm agnostic on it.
• 39:01
  I have no idea whether it's real or not real.
• 39:03
  But I find it fascinating that they have no real–
• 39:06
  explanation as to how it was created.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty much of a complete ignoramus on anything that
• 39:16
  has to do with science. I've liked algebra and geometry
• 39:22
  and even biology, although I caught up with biology from
• 39:24
  personal experience, but I just don't know. It doesn't matter
• 39:29
  to me ultimately because I'm moved when I look at that,
• 39:32
  when I pray before that image and I look at it.
• 39:35
  I'm moved. So as far as I'm concerned, for me,
• 39:42
  it's real. It may not be for other people.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: Well, like I said, at the very least, it's an
• 39:47
  insanely compelling piece of artwork.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: The thing that I don't want to dismiss the possibility
• 39:54
  that it's real because I'm fascinated by just the mystery
• 39:57
  of how it was. Can you pull up an image
• 39:58
  of the negative version of it?
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I was trying to look up a bunch of
• 40:04
  stuff you guys are talking about, though, and there's no
• 40:06
  answers for any of the stuff you're saying.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: There's no answers in terms of why?
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: I was looking for an accurate recreation someone's made in
• 40:13
  the last 200 years and it doesn't seem to be one.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: No, no one has. Yeah, when you look at the
• 40:21
  image and you realize that this is an actual negative
• 40:26
  of the original Shroud, you just– you stop and think like, well,
• 40:32
  what would someone– if this is the negative, like how
• 40:36
  would you create that as a positive? Because it– can
• 40:38
  you show me also the positive image of it? What
• 40:41
  it actually looks like?
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: OK.
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: So here's– this is one image. So this is what
• 40:46
  it actually looks like. This is the actual Shroud. And
• 40:50
  when you look at that, you go, okay, I see
• 40:53
  like shadows. It's very interesting. And then switch over to
• 40:56
  the negative and it all comes to life. And there's
• 41:01
  marks from the lashes, from the whip marks. There's blood
• 41:07
  stains from where the rods went through his wrists. It's
• 41:11
  very fascinating.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it sure is.
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: And again, this is not dye. It's not ink. And
• 41:18
  they don't really know how it was made. And, again,
• 41:21
  no one has been able to recreate this.
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: The cloth was made most likely from a loom that
• 41:30
  wasn't invented until, like, the 1300s.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: That doesn't necessarily mean that's where it for sure came.
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: From, though.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: Right, right. Here's about the cloth.
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: Image it's just like how how is the image transferred
• 41:44
  to the cloth i asked just you know does anybody
• 41:46
  have any idea i've seen a video where someone gave
• 41:48
  some sort of scientific explanation but i don't know if
• 41:51
  i can remember how to find it.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: Right now says it behaves like a photographic negative negative
• 41:56
  and shows some 3d information which is unusual for normal
• 41:59
  artwork the chemical theories that body heat sweat or vapors
• 42:04
  reacting with the cloth I example ammonia or lactic acid
• 42:09
  from sweat may have been proposed, but don't reproduce the
• 42:12
  shroud sharp non blurry details simple heat or scorch theories
• 42:17
  likewise fail to match the very shallow non burn discoloration
• 42:22
  of the fibers. Human or man made image human made
• 42:27
  image theories painting or rubbing from bass relief has been tested,
• 42:31
  but studies have not found pigments in the amounts or
• 42:33
  patterns that would explain the image. and there's no clear brushstrokes.
• 42:38
  Primitive photography. Some suggest that a medieval camera using light-sensitive
• 42:42
  silver salts and lenses could have projected a body or
• 42:46
  statue onto the cloth, and experimental replicas show that it's
• 42:48
  at least physically possible, though historically speculative. And now here's
• 42:53
  the weird one. Radiation bursts of energy theories. Some researchers
• 42:58
  argue that a brief, intense burst of ultraviolet or similar
• 43:02
  radiation from the body could have discovered Only the top
• 43:07
  fibrils producing a non-contact image, even where cloth and body
• 43:12
  didn't touch. Proponents sometimes link this to Jesus's resurrection, but
• 43:16
  the need, the needed radiation billions of Watts without burning
• 43:20
  the cloth is far beyond anything observed in nature. And
• 43:24
  this remains a speculative face-based idea rather than an established
• 43:28
  physical mechanism. In short, there's no consensus mechanism. The image
• 43:32
  transfer process is still unexplained. And every proposed method has
• 43:36
  serious problems when tested against the cloth's measured properties. Wild.
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: Amazing.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: I mean there's no other piece of artwork that's that fascinating.
• 43:48
  Because every other art, Michelangelo's work, all this incredible art,
• 43:54
  it's art. You see what they did. There's brush strokes.
• 43:57
  There's chisel marks. They made incredible sculptures. But it's clearly
• 44:02
  man-made art. This is a different thing. It's a very
• 44:05
  strange thing. If you can't recreate it today– if they
• 44:09
  could recreate it today, people would be doing it. They'd
• 44:11
  be making their versions of the Shroud of Turin.
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. I don't know if that's been done historically. But
• 44:18
  whether some nutbag has decided to do business over recreating
• 44:24
  the Shroud of Turin.
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: Is there– did they carbon test it? And what are
• 44:27
  the arguments that it's older? because i i do know
• 44:32
  that there have been some very recent arguments that the
• 44:36
  testing was incorrect and that it's older see if you
• 44:39
  can find out what that is whether or not ai
• 44:45
  whether perplexity our sponsor has some sort of a bias
• 44:49
  like the thing is it's like pulling from all these
• 44:53
  when when you get an ai response to something it's
• 44:55
  pulling from all these articles on the web and Most
• 44:58
  of the articles seem to indicate that people think it's
• 45:01
  at least either a hoax or an elaborate piece of
• 45:03
  hard work.
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: The only carbon dating seems like it happened in 1988,
• 45:05
  so I don't know that they've done it again.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Supporters of an earlier date argue that the 1988 radiocarbon results,
• 45:11
  1988 is a long time ago, sampled an anomalous or
• 45:15
  contaminated area and that other historical and scientific clues point
• 45:19
  to a much older cloth. Okay, what is the scientific argument?
• 45:23
  Contaminated repair samples. Some research claim the 1988 test piece
• 45:27
  came from a rewoven or heavily handled corner, so its
• 45:31
  carbon date reflects medieval repairs, not the original cloth. Alternative
• 45:35
  dating methods. X-ray or crystallographic aging of linen fibers has
• 45:42
  produced dates compatible with the first century. Though these methods
• 45:46
  are newer and not widely accepted as definitive. Pollen and dust.
• 45:52
  Analysis reports pollen grains and mineral dust consistent with the
• 45:56
  first century Middle East rather than only medieval Europe, which
• 46:00
  proponents say supports a much older origin. Image property. Some
• 46:04
  argue that the image's microscopic features and burst of energy
• 46:08
  type characteristics require technology or phenomena unlikely in the Middle Ages,
• 46:13
  implying an earlier extraordinary event. Well, why don't they do
• 46:18
  a retesting? They probably don't want to know that it
• 46:24
  actually is from the 1300s.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: John Paul II really believed in it. He went to
• 46:31
  see it in Turin several times. He said he was
• 46:34
  moved by it, and that's when they launched this big
• 46:37
  Vatican investigation. And he never said in any way that
• 46:41
  he agreed with the investigation. He just seemed to drop
• 46:43
  the whole issue. And from what I know, it never
• 46:47
  went any further. But he visited it twice, went out
• 46:51
  of his way, Where is it?
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: It's in Turin still.
• 46:55
  Speaker 3: I was looking up that too. It's currently in the
• 46:57
  chapel of the Holy Shroud. Interesting was who found it
• 47:02
  and when and why or whatever.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: The earliest undisputed record appears in the 1350s in Liry,
• 47:08
  a village in France where the knight Geoffrey de Charnay
• 47:14
  displayed a cloth claimed to be Jesus' burial shroud. How
• 47:18
  he obtained it and where it was between the 1st
• 47:20
  century and the 14th century are unknown Later theories trace
• 47:24
  it speculatively through Edessa and Constantinople. I can't never say that. Constantinople.
• 47:34
  But these links are debated. Interesting. What does it look like?
• 47:38
  How is it displayed? That's how it's displayed?
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: Constantinople was named after Constantine, who was the first Roman
• 47:47
  emperor who made Roman Catholicism the national religion.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: So you can go check it out. And how big
• 47:58
  is it? Boy, they got that sucker walled off, huh?
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: From my impression, Joe, this was over the length of
• 48:08
  Jesus' body.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: So it's longer than certainly I expected.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: Well, you can see it's both sides. So apparently it's
• 48:15
  folded over. I wonder what all those markings are, those
• 48:19
  small triangle markings. What is all that?
• 48:23
  Speaker 5: These things?
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 48:26
  Speaker 5: One other picture was pointing those out.
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: It might be the burn marks that it was saying,
• 48:30
  that there's burn marks on it.
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: Huh.
• 48:33
  Speaker 5: Again, it's 2,000 years old in theory.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: Just imagine if it's real. That's the thing. It's like
• 48:40
  I never want to dismiss the possibility that it's real
• 48:42
  because imagine if it is real. That is crazy.
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: I absolutely agree with you. In my mind, it's real
• 48:49
  and I pray to it. I try not to worry
• 48:52
  about whether it's real. I know that I'm moved. And
• 48:55
  that's good enough for me.
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: What led to your conversion to Christianity? I mean, from
• 49:00
  a guy making these wild, insane movies?
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: Jamie, can I ask you for some water?
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: There's water right here.
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, great. Thank you.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Chime. Chime is
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  a bank. Banking services and Chime card now. Provided by
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  Chimes Bank Partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to Chime.com
• 50:12
  slash disclosures for more details. How long ago did you
• 50:18
  convert to Christianity?
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: Well, I grew up Catholic. I was an altar boy
• 50:22
  when I was a kid. I knew one really great
• 50:27
  priest in my life who helped me with my life.
• 50:31
  I became a lapsed Catholic. And then when, um, at
• 50:38
  the tail end of living in, in, um, in L.A.,
• 50:41
  in Malibu, actually, I was, I was hugely successful as
• 50:46
  a screenwriter, of course, and, and, um, the, um, and
• 50:52
  I was, big interviewed all over the place, and people
• 50:55
  were stealing mail from my mailbox and all that shit, and, and, um,
• 51:00
  I should have been overwhelmingly happy with that, but something
• 51:03
  was missing, I felt. And I couldn't really put my
• 51:06
  finger on what that was, but something was missing in
• 51:08
  my life. And then I got throat cancer, stage four
• 51:14
  throat cancer. Shortly after we moved back to Cleveland, you know,
• 51:22
  from Malibu, and then the Cleveland Clinic and then a
• 51:26
  surgeon named Marshall Strom did a surgery that, they had
• 51:29
  never done in this country, that done in Switzerland, um,
• 51:33
  where they took some, they took the, a muscle from
• 51:36
  the left side of your neck and attach it to
• 51:38
  your larynx. Stage four was very dicey and, and he
• 51:41
  was very honest with me about how dicey it would be.
• 51:45
  And he did it spectacularly and, and here I am, um,
• 51:49
  at 81. Um, the, but in the course of all
• 51:53
  of that, when I was, when I was terrified and, and, and, um,
• 52:00
  and really frightened from one day to the other. I
• 52:05
  ran across Jesus reading, and partly Naomi's influence, because Naomi
• 52:12
  also grew up Catholic, and she had a very strong faith.
• 52:23
  And then I went to church a couple of times,
• 52:26
  and I loved the Mass. the mass itself. And in
• 52:32
  the course of recovery, and it was about a three-year recovery,
• 52:35
  for some time I couldn't speak. And then I spoke
• 52:39
  like Brando. And then I squeaked. In the course of
• 52:45
  my recovery, I did everything I could physically to help.
• 52:49
  I jogged and walked and did all of those things.
• 52:52
  And I recovered. And I felt afterwards that the reason
• 52:57
  I was able to beat a stage four cancer, had
• 53:01
  to do with my prayer life. And then I started
• 53:04
  reading voraciously about Jesus of Nazareth and the apostles, all
• 53:11
  of that ancient Jewish history, Catholic history. And some of
• 53:16
  that really moved me as well. So I started going
• 53:22
  regularly to church with Naomi, and then as the boys
• 53:26
  were growing, Bordy with the boys as well. And as
• 53:31
  time went by, as time went by, I also started
• 53:40
  having issues with the Catholic Church. I continued going to
• 53:45
  the Mass because that was a very special thing to me.
• 53:50
  But I had issues with the history of anti-Semitism in
• 53:54
  the Church. The issue was with sexism in terms of
• 53:58
  not allowing women to be priests. The issue was with
• 54:05
  the Pope making so-called infallible decisions. And I just shut
• 54:10
  most of that off. Although in the process of it,
• 54:15
  my Christianity didn't suffer at all. But sometimes I felt
• 54:19
  like I was becoming a kind of an agnostic Catholic. The...
• 54:26
  And my faith in Christ, even as all of that happened,
• 54:30
  is unflagged. I still pray to Jesus, pray specifically to Jesus.
• 54:38
  And he continues to be a major important figure in
• 54:42
  my life.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: So your issues were with the organization as the Catholic Church.
• 54:47
  Speaker 2: Yes. I respected Martin Luther's revolution because he was revolted
• 54:55
  against those same kind of issues. But the, as I said,
• 55:03
  the mass continued to hold me. Worship is terrific, and
• 55:07
  I really believe in it. I actually, the kind of
• 55:10
  worship that really moves me is black spiritual worship, full-scale emotional,
• 55:17
  I give myself to you, Jesus, kind of worship. And
• 55:22
  I felt, I didn't want to, I didn't want to
• 55:25
  really switch religions because I had my basic Christianity. And
• 55:30
  that continues to be important to me.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: So you felt moved by, like, Baptist, Black Baptist teachers?
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Black Baptist. The old emotional, throw up your arms
• 55:41
  and say, okay, here I am. Take me, Lord.
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: It definitely seems a lot more fun.
• 55:45
  Speaker 2: It's fun.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: They look like they're having way more fun.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: It's fun. I also have been very fortunate through the
• 55:50
  course of my life. to have black friends and to
• 55:54
  share the black culture. I was involved in the civil
• 55:57
  rights movement. I had a shotgun stuck in my belly
• 56:01
  by a deputy who'd been indicted for killings and told
• 56:03
  to get the fuck out of Neshoba County. I had
• 56:07
  the good fortune to have lunch with the Reverend Martin
• 56:09
  Luther King. Oh, wow. I knew Stokely Carmichael.
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: What was that like?
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: Well, it was the most amazing thing. He was in town.
• 56:18
  because of the death of a minister in a protest.
• 56:25
  And it was an unheralded appearance, and I think it
• 56:29
  was partly before he became the towering international figure. And
• 56:38
  he was heading back to the airport, and he couldn't
• 56:40
  find his ride. And I happened to be right there,
• 56:44
  and I said, I can drive you, Reverend King. I said, okay.
• 56:49
  So again, on the way to the airport, he said,
• 56:53
  are you hungry? I'm hungry. Can we stop someplace? I said, sure.
• 56:56
  So we did. And what amazed me about the man
• 57:02
  is that he was more interested almost in hearing about
• 57:05
  my refugee camp experiences and what that was like and
• 57:08
  how that worked and all of that. He said he
• 57:11
  didn't know much about it. Then he was talking about
• 57:17
  the Civil Rights Movement.
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: He was very, very moving and a powerful figure. And
• 57:22
  then I just drove him to the airport. But there
• 57:27
  was something about the man that was absolutely magnetic, you know,
• 57:31
  that I felt.
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: Clearly.
• 57:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But then when I was in college, I had
• 57:37
  a relationship with a young black woman. And that brought
• 57:41
  me much closer to the black culture. I mean, I
• 57:45
  was an ethnic fucking kid, you know, a refugee. And
• 57:49
  I certainly needed lessons in that whole cultural area, and
• 57:52
  I got them. And then I sought them out. And
• 57:57
  when I was at Rolling Stone, Huey Newton was over
• 58:02
  in Oakland, and he would come over sometimes. I think partly,
• 58:06
  I partly suspected, because at Rolling Stone, we had some
• 58:11
  of the most beautiful women in the world working there.
• 58:14
  We didn't have air conditioning, and when it got real hot,
• 58:17
  they didn't wear a top at all. So what about
• 58:20
  that spread? So it was sort of fun.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: They were topless?
• 58:23
  Speaker 2: They were topless when it got real hot.
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: What year was this? This was in the 60s?
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: I was at Rolling Stone from 71 to 76. Wild times.
• 58:29
  I was right in there. In the.
• 58:36
  In the years where the cultural revolution was exploding, the
• 58:40
  women's revolution was exploding, and to be at Rolling Stone
• 58:46
  at that time was like being in the vortex of
• 58:49
  all of that. It was just a crazy time. The
• 58:58
  sexual revolution was at its absolute height. As I said
• 59:04
  to you, I've always... Really loved smart sassy sexy women
• 59:08
  um and the whole office was filled with them you
• 59:11
  know i'm.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: Sure what year was the birth control pill invented.
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: I have no idea and let me guess 65 right
• 59:21
  64 let me guess.
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: I'm just taking a wild swing i have no idea
• 59:27
  Proved by the FDA and introduced to the market in 1960.
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: 68? 60. 1960.
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah, well, that had a big factor, right?
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely.
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: Because before, you know, women were in a situation where
• 59:42
  every time they had sex, they could get pregnant.
• 59:44
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, but then you've got
• 59:47
  this pill that's fucking with their hormones that we found
• 59:49
  out now that women that have been on it for
• 59:51
  long periods of time, they make poor choices in terms
• 59:54
  of mates. It does a lot of weird stuff.
• 59:58
  Speaker 2: We're learning a lot of weird stuff.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and also it's very dangerous for them. A friend
• 1:00:03
  of mine, his daughter died. She was 17 years old.
• 1:00:06
  She was on the birth control pill, and she was
• 1:00:08
  smoking cigarettes. And I guess smoking cigarettes and birth control
• 1:00:13
  pills for some people can cause blood clots. I don't
• 1:00:18
  understand why or what, but that is an issue, right?
• 1:00:21
  You're not supposed to smoke if you're on birth control?
• 1:00:23
  See if that's still the recommendation. Well, obviously they tell
• 1:00:26
  you not to smoke, period. but I think there's some
• 1:00:30
  potential complication. Smoking while taking oral contraceptive that contain estrogen
• 1:00:35
  significantly increases the risk of severe cardiovascular events like heart attacks, strokes,
• 1:00:39
  and blood clots. The risk is particularly high for women
• 1:00:42
  over 35. Quitting smoking or using alternative birth control is
• 1:00:46
  highly recommended. Yeah.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: So I had more fun at Rolling Stone than any
• 1:00:53
  other time in my life.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: I bet you did. I had Jan Wenner in here once.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw him.
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: It was an interesting conversation.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 2: He kept looking at us watching.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: Well, he was, you know, he was Jan Wenner of
• 1:01:05
  2024 or 2025, not Jan Wenner of 1975. Yes, absolutely.
• 1:01:09
  You know, not the Jan Wenner that was the editor
• 1:01:11
  when Hunter Thompson was writing crazy stories. You know, it's
• 1:01:14
  different times. People change.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: You are a big Hunter fan. Huge. I know. And
• 1:01:22
  so am I. And I wanted to talk about him
• 1:01:24
  because I really haven't had a chance to talk about
• 1:01:27
  him specifically. Hunter really was the cause of my whole
• 1:01:33
  huge success, even as a screenwriter, let me tell you how.
• 1:01:37
  I was a reporter at the Plain Dealer, and I
• 1:01:42
  had read Hunter, of course, when he was the National Observer,
• 1:01:45
  doing those kinds of pieces from Latin America, before he
• 1:01:50
  discovered Gonzo. And I covered at the Plain Dealer, I
• 1:01:56
  covered at an Hell's Angels shootout of a bar called
• 1:02:01
  Bartos Cafe in Cleveland. And I wrote a story about
• 1:02:05
  it that the Associated Press picked up and put on
• 1:02:09
  their national wire. And I get a note shortly afterwards
• 1:02:18
  from Hunter Thompson, who had read the story on the
• 1:02:21
  AP wire and wrote me a note that said, and
• 1:02:26
  I'm barely paraphrasing, big fucker. Now there are two of
• 1:02:30
  us who know how to write about Hell's Angels. That
• 1:02:33
  really pisses me off. All the best, Andreas Haugen. Well.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: That must have been a fun thing to get.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: Oh, man. I was excited about that as my two
• 1:02:46
  sons were to meet Joe Rogan. They really, they really,
• 1:02:50
  it was really, really something. So, Okay, time goes by,
• 1:02:57
  and I get a call from Rolling Stone. First, I
• 1:03:01
  do a couple of freelance pieces for Rolling Stone, one
• 1:03:03
  on Kent State one year afterwards, and the other, I
• 1:03:08
  forgot what the other one was, but then I get
• 1:03:12
  a call from the managing editor, Paul Scanlon, who incidentally
• 1:03:16
  was the backbone of the editorial content. He's come from
• 1:03:22
  the Wall Street Journal And he wanted to take on
• 1:03:25
  the New York Times for Rolling Stone. And they wanted
• 1:03:30
  me to do a freelance piece on narcotics agents, corrupt
• 1:03:35
  narcotics agents. So I go out there and I discover
• 1:03:40
  that Hunter had been after them to hire me because
• 1:03:45
  of that piece. And he kept saying he was a
• 1:03:47
  good guy and all of that. Then when I'm at
• 1:03:50
  Rolling Stone, I write a book called called Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse,
• 1:03:57
  that Hunter loves. By now we know each other, and
• 1:04:01
  we're friends, and we enjoy each other's company. And I
• 1:04:06
  write this book, and Hunter gets me as agent, who
• 1:04:10
  is the top literary agent in the country, and then
• 1:04:13
  gets me as publisher, which is Random House, to publish it,
• 1:04:18
  and then to boot, blurbs it, when the book comes out.
• 1:04:23
  And somebody at United Artists sees it. Oh, and then
• 1:04:26
  the book becomes a finalist for the National Book Award,
• 1:04:29
  one of four finalists. Okay. So somebody at United Artists
• 1:04:34
  reads the book, because she reads all the finalists, reads
• 1:04:38
  the book, calls me out of the blue, and says,
• 1:04:41
  you know, you've got really cinematic talent. Have you thought
• 1:04:45
  about writing a script? And I said, no, I haven't.
• 1:04:47
  And I go to meet them, and they hire me,
• 1:04:49
  and I write Fist. All of that. which led to
• 1:04:53
  my success in screenplays and in the cinema, was Nice Daughter. Wow.
• 1:04:58
  And the friendship we had was, I never, our friendship
• 1:05:03
  was in San Francisco. He lived in Moody Creek, and
• 1:05:08
  he would come to town. Our friendship was in town.
• 1:05:12
  But we ran a lot together. We enjoyed each other.
• 1:05:15
  We drank together. We both liked drinking. On occasion, we would...
• 1:05:22
  Good story. We would go down. San Francisco is famed
• 1:05:25
  for its stripper bar area. I think around O'Farrell Street
• 1:05:29
  and stuff. And he and I went down there together.
• 1:05:32
  There was a very famous stripper show in one of
• 1:05:36
  those clubs. And one of the times we'd get down there, he,
• 1:05:39
  of course, would take acid before every trip down there.
• 1:05:42
  I wouldn't do acid, but I did acid once, and
• 1:05:45
  Hunter wound up holding me for an hour.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 2: But I was the guy from Cleveland, right? Which he
• 1:05:51
  always would, you know. He'd say, well, you're from fucking Cleveland. Anyway,
• 1:05:56
  I would snort some lines and we'd go down there.
• 1:06:01
  And we were waiting for about an hour. And, you know,
• 1:06:04
  the place is filled, but the girls haven't come out.
• 1:06:07
  And Hunter suddenly gets up, hurls his arms up in
• 1:06:10
  the air, and says, where's the pussy? We want pussy, right?
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: I don't know, great memories of my life. Of course,
• 1:06:22
  I'd settle him down and all of that. And then
• 1:06:25
  when they finally started coming very loudly, he called me
• 1:06:27
  and said, finally, finally, pussy. He was a, you know,
• 1:06:35
  larger than life, no doubt, colorful figure, but also what
• 1:06:39
  he was. And then I discovered this. And he didn't
• 1:06:44
  really share this with that many people. He was very,
• 1:06:46
  very well-readed. well read he had a whole other side
• 1:06:52
  that was a very sensitive and un-hippie like side I
• 1:06:59
  saw it most clearly once I was married at the
• 1:07:04
  time to a former reporter at the plane dealer who
• 1:07:08
  was very very straight and really rejected the whole hippie
• 1:07:12
  thing and worked in California for a small suburban paper
• 1:07:17
  and Hunter had never met her, but had heard of her,
• 1:07:22
  and he said, I'd really like to meet her. So
• 1:07:23
  we asked him to dinner, and Hunter came to dinner
• 1:07:26
  at our small, tiny apartment in Novato, and my wife
• 1:07:33
  at the time cooked a Hungarian chicken paprikash dinner. It's
• 1:07:41
  Hungary's most famous meal. And he sat there with us,
• 1:07:46
  and What I discovered was that the boy from Kentucky
• 1:07:50
  was there underneath all of that firepower and all of
• 1:07:55
  that larger-than-life behavior. He was sensitive and quiet, and they
• 1:08:03
  got along like gangbusters. And actually, interestingly, when I drove
• 1:08:09
  him— after dinner, I drove him back to town— For the
• 1:08:14
  ride back, he berated me because I was having an
• 1:08:18
  affair with what he called this hippie chick. He said,
• 1:08:21
  you have this wonderful wife here, and you're fucking around
• 1:08:24
  with this hippie chick. I mean, true beration and anger
• 1:08:29
  and all of that. He had that side as well. Yes,
• 1:08:32
  he did. If we had breakfast, it was at 4
• 1:08:35
  in the afternoon. And what he ordered were four margaritas,
• 1:08:41
  six beers. And maybe, maybe toast with scrambled eggs. And
• 1:08:48
  in that sense, he had more tolerance than anyone that
• 1:08:52
  I'd ever seen. And my tolerance in those days, for
• 1:08:56
  booze especially, was also very high. But I'd never seen
• 1:09:00
  anybody quite like him. He had a great sense of humor.
• 1:09:02
  As many, many years later, he wanted me to write
• 1:09:08
  the screenplay for Rum Diary. And I hadn't seen him
• 1:09:18
  in a long time. And I had just met Naomi.
• 1:09:22
  I've now been married 32 years. And he wanted me
• 1:09:29
  to go to Aspen so that we could talk about it.
• 1:09:32
  And I called Jan and I said, listen, it overheals
• 1:09:36
  in love with this woman. And Hunter wants me to
• 1:09:40
  go out there and tell me the truth. What kind
• 1:09:43
  of shape is he in? And Jan sort of pauses
• 1:09:46
  and he says, well, He's good. And then he's in
• 1:09:50
  another pause and he says, you know, the Stones were
• 1:09:53
  in Denver. And Nick and Keith decided to come visit him.
• 1:10:00
  So between gigs. So they hire a driver and they
• 1:10:04
  drive up here. And they have a terrific time. But
• 1:10:10
  they're there about three or four hours and they've got
• 1:10:14
  a gig that night. So they say, listen, we got
• 1:10:17
  to go, we got a gig, blah, blah, blah. And
• 1:10:19
  Andre gets all upset and says, well, you just got here.
• 1:10:22
  And they said, no, no, we've been here two or
• 1:10:24
  four hours and stuff. Well, he continues to be upset
• 1:10:27
  and he leaves the house. They're sitting there and suddenly
• 1:10:30
  they hear gunshots. He had gone out and shot the
• 1:10:33
  tires out on the Stones car. So I never took
• 1:10:45
  Naomi there. I was too frightened to do it.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: What year was this?
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: Well, let's see. It was in the 90s, something, four, maybe.
• 1:10:54
  He said somewhere around five, four, five. Yeah. Three, four, five,
• 1:10:59
  somewhere in there.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: He had been going hard for 30 years by that point.
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 2: Yes, he had.
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: Or at least 20.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 2: And also, the end for him, I've read and heard,
• 1:11:09
  it was very sad because the sadness wasn't caused by
• 1:11:14
  the drugs. It was caused by booze. And he was,
• 1:11:17
  in Dion's opinion, and Dion saw him often in Woody Creek,
• 1:11:22
  and in his former wife's opinion, Sandy's opinion, he was
• 1:11:25
  the booch that did it. You know, his body began
• 1:11:30
  being old, and he needed a wheelchair. He could hardly walk.
• 1:11:35
  She drove him in the wheelchair at one time, I
• 1:11:39
  think in New Orleans when they were visiting Sean Penn
• 1:11:44
  on a film. He actually fell out of the wheelchair
• 1:11:46
  in the middle of traffic, and Anita couldn't really pick
• 1:11:51
  him up, and so they had to get help, and
• 1:11:53
  cars were going by and all that shit. And then
• 1:11:57
  he also broke a leg when they were visiting Hawaii
• 1:12:02
  at the Kahala. So as he said in his suicide note,
• 1:12:06
  which I thought was the most gut-wrenching but also terrific
• 1:12:13
  suicide note, There was no fun anymore. The fun was gone.
• 1:12:16
  Nothing was fun. No football, no this, no that, no fun. Well,
• 1:12:20
  when the body.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: Goes, it's hard to have fun. And that's the problem
• 1:12:24
  with booze.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: Well, the problem with many drugs, but particularly the problem
• 1:12:28
  with booze. You're breaking down your body over and over
• 1:12:32
  and over again. And with a guy like Hunter, he
• 1:12:33
  was doing it every day. There's a famous piece that
• 1:12:40
  this reporter wrote when he went to visit Hunter. And
• 1:12:44
  he documented Hunter's drug and alcohol use throughout the day,
• 1:12:48
  you know, like 6 in the morning in the hot
• 1:12:51
  tub with champagne. Like that's the end of the day.
• 1:12:54
  And then him sleeping and then him waking up and
• 1:12:57
  doing all the drugs and then getting ready to write.
• 1:13:00
  And what was the guy's name who wrote the– there's
• 1:13:04
  a guy who took me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons
• 1:13:09
  reading it out. and turned it into an EDM song.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 5: Eugene Carroll, I think?
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: No, no, no. Right, but the singer, the song. Yes,
• 1:13:28
  the guy, I'm sorry, the guy who wrote the.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: The song?
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like an electronic dance music song.
• 1:13:39
  We played it before, many times. God, I can't believe
• 1:13:42
  it's like Beardy Man. Thank you. This guy, Beardy Man,
• 1:13:46
  put it to music, and it's hilarious.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 2: I've got to check it out.
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: It's amazing. I mean, it's a tragic story in a
• 1:13:52
  lot of ways. But in his prime, the writing that
• 1:13:56
  he did was, in many ways, it was the narration
• 1:14:01
  of an era.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 2: Yes, it was. And it was genius. You know, there
• 1:14:06
  was this thing called the New Journalism, and I practiced
• 1:14:09
  that and so did people like A.J. Lees and David
• 1:14:12
  Elverson and Larry L. King. But then Hunter took that
• 1:14:16
  and created an entire new genre. The Gonzo journalism thing
• 1:14:20
  was his, and it was the kind of humor that
• 1:14:23
  just knocked you down. And it was totally revolutionary. Tom
• 1:14:32
  Wolfe said, who of course was one of the founders
• 1:14:35
  of new journalism, said that he was today's version of
• 1:14:39
  Mark Twain. in terms of what he was able to accomplish.
• 1:14:42
  Two books especially I taught, the Fear and Loathing in Vegas,
• 1:14:46
  of course, and the campaign book, the 72 campaign book,
• 1:14:49
  which in my mind is the best political commentary, including
• 1:14:53
  all of Teddy White's books.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: No, it's fantastic. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Fear and Loathing in 72, yeah.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: And he also had this freedom that was very different
• 1:15:01
  from all his other reporters because he was a one-time guy.
• 1:15:04
  He was going to go in there and follow the
• 1:15:07
  campaign for the entire time And then wrote this book
• 1:15:11
  about it.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: But Joe, these were all staid, the shoe-tie-wearing reporters. And
• 1:15:18
  you turn this big creature loose on them on the
• 1:15:21
  campaign trail. And, of course, they all fell in love
• 1:15:24
  with him. And they did because he was such a
• 1:15:27
  free spirit compared to what their lives were.
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: Going to be like. Well, imagine you're doing this boring thing,
• 1:15:33
  which is following a bunch of fakers around. As they're
• 1:15:36
  telling you how they're going to change the country, which
• 1:15:37
  you know they're not really going to do because you've
• 1:15:39
  been doing this for 20 years.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: And then along comes a guy who's like, let's do acid.
• 1:15:44
  Come on, pussies. And all of a sudden you've got
• 1:15:47
  this fucking maniac who's drinking and saying wild shit and
• 1:15:52
  writing wild shit. And he doesn't have to be held
• 1:15:55
  to the same standards as everyone else because he knows
• 1:15:59
  it doesn't matter. If they never have him back again,
• 1:16:01
  it's fine.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 2: I'm so sorry, Ed. that Hunter wasn't here with Trump's time. Oh,
• 1:16:07
  my God. Because that could have been fucking wild and hilarious.
• 1:16:12
  But there's also a part of me that says he
• 1:16:14
  would have liked Trump. I know this is heresy to liberals,
• 1:16:17
  you know, who think that he's a, you know, that
• 1:16:21
  he would absolutely hate him and all of that. But
• 1:16:25
  I'm not certain of that. And I think that certainly
• 1:16:29
  in terms of his style, he would have liked things
• 1:16:32
  about him.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: Well, I think he would have liked the fact that
• 1:16:35
  he's this wild character.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: A completely wild character that has never existed in all
• 1:16:41
  of presidential politics before. There's never been anything like him,
• 1:16:44
  for good or for bad. There's never been a guy
• 1:16:46
  like him.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 2: Look what he did today. I mean, he had a
• 1:16:49
  shit fit with Netanyahu.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 2: And he said, you know, you're fucking crazy.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 2: You would have been in jail except for me. I
• 1:16:59
  saved your ass. What other president, for God's sakes, has
• 1:17:03
  ever spoken like that, not only publicly, but to us? Right.
• 1:17:07
  And in that sense, you know, I'm proud of being
• 1:17:10
  a deplorable. I'm from Cleveland. You know, I grew up
• 1:17:15
  among poor people and blue-collar people, and he's the first
• 1:17:19
  president that didn't talk down but talked directly to us. Yeah.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: For good or for bad.
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean— He is who he is, which is
• 1:17:32
  very odd. You know, it's a very odd person to.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 2: Be running a country. I have a lot of questions
• 1:17:37
  in certain areas. You know, the ice area bothers me.
• 1:17:41
  The whole shit with the ballroom and all of that stuff.
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: Well, the ballroom doesn't bother me that much. That's, to me,
• 1:17:52
  trivial construction. Like, whatever. The ice stuff... What bothers me is...
• 1:17:58
  We're opening the door for militarized police on our city streets.
• 1:18:03
  As many people say, look, we've got to get these
• 1:18:05
  immigrants out of here that are illegal. There's a lot
• 1:18:08
  of criminals in this country. There's a lot of people
• 1:18:09
  that are committing crimes. I understand that. I understand that perspective.
• 1:18:13
  My perspective is not that you need to get the
• 1:18:16
  criminals out. It's that it is a very slippery slope
• 1:18:19
  when you give people– and they're trained for seven weeks.
• 1:18:22
  They're not trained for very long. They're trained for much
• 1:18:25
  less time than police officers, much less time than military.
• 1:18:28
  And then you have this militarized police force that has
• 1:18:32
  no identification on the streets. That's a precedent that you
• 1:18:38
  might like it when it's for a cause that you support.
• 1:18:42
  But that could easily be for a cause that you
• 1:18:44
  do not support. That militarized police force could be going
• 1:18:48
  door to door and confiscating guns. That militarized police force
• 1:18:52
  that you could find other ways where a different ruler
• 1:18:56
  could use this precedent in a very damaging way for
• 1:19:00
  our free society. That's my perspective on it.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: I agree with that. When they start calling people like
• 1:19:10
  Like the woman who was killed in Minnesota and the guy,
• 1:19:15
  domestic terrorist. You know, it's an abomination.
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: Which woman is that?
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 2: That woman who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 2: And then the guy afterwards, the week afterwards, was also
• 1:19:29
  shot by ICE.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 2: And they called him domestic terrorist. But to give credit
• 1:19:35
  to Trump, he got rid of Kristi Noem. Yeah. And
• 1:19:37
  he got rid of that guy who was there that
• 1:19:39
  Tom Holman replaced. Yeah.
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: Well, Tom Holman was already in charge. That guy was
• 1:19:43
  in a different position. But they did get rid of
• 1:19:45
  that guy. Also, that guy had a very odd way
• 1:19:48
  of dressing. That was very– like he wore outfits that
• 1:19:52
  were like reminiscent of like Nazi Germany. Like he had
• 1:19:56
  this very weird coat that he would wear all the time.
• 1:19:59
  And a lot of people were saying this is a
• 1:20:00
  very odd choice for someone to be wearing who's being
• 1:20:04
  accused of fascism. See if you can find some photos
• 1:20:06
  of that dude. the coats that he was wearing, where
• 1:20:09
  a lot of people, like, I had to make sure
• 1:20:10
  that this was an AI. I was like, is this
• 1:20:12
  a real coat that he's wearing? This is very strange.
• 1:20:15
  I mean, I'm not accusing him of anything. It's just
• 1:20:17
  a fucking coat. But it was, a lot of people
• 1:20:20
  online were pointing out, this is a very odd wardrobe
• 1:20:23
  choice for someone who's in charge of, in many ways,
• 1:20:28
  othering human beings. The other thing that's a problem with
• 1:20:32
  this whole ICE thing is, and it's not the fault
• 1:20:34
  of the ICE people or even this administration, is that
• 1:20:37
  Many of these people were encouraged to come here. That's
• 1:20:41
  what's so fucked. Imagine if you're living in Guatemala and
• 1:20:45
  you're encouraged to come to America. You live in a
• 1:20:47
  terrible third world situation. You have a– wherever you're living,
• 1:20:51
  it's like deep poverty. You're told that they'll help you
• 1:20:55
  get across the border. They'll literally transport you into America.
• 1:20:59
  They'll put you in these cities. And you can get
• 1:21:03
  on public assistance. If you have a bad back, they'll
• 1:21:06
  put you on Social Security. There's all these different programs
• 1:21:09
  that are incentivizing people to come to America. The Red
• 1:21:12
  Cross is giving you maps. People are showing you how
• 1:21:14
  to do it. They're letting you across the border. They're
• 1:21:17
  letting you into the country. And then two years later,
• 1:21:20
  you're being chased down. Two years later, you've got masked
• 1:21:24
  ICE workers that are pulling. I mean, it's like it's
• 1:21:27
  very inconsistent. Obviously, this is a completely different administration, but.
• 1:21:31
  I feel for those poor fucking people that were told
• 1:21:34
  that they can come here and that there was going
• 1:21:37
  to be a pathway to citizenship. So they upend their life.
• 1:21:40
  They come to America in the only way they know how.
• 1:21:43
  And when people say, oh, they should do it legitimately. Sure.
• 1:21:46
  A lot of people do it legitimately. And I understand
• 1:21:49
  their perspective that it's a very difficult path and no
• 1:21:52
  one should be able to cut that line. And they
• 1:21:54
  went through it the right way. However, these people, that's
• 1:21:56
  not an option for them. If you don't have any money.
• 1:21:59
  and you're living in a third-world country, and people encourage
• 1:22:02
  you to come to America, I most certainly would have
• 1:22:06
  come to America just like they did.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 2: Joe, I did. My parents did. You know, I personify
• 1:22:12
  the American dream in terms of what happened to me.
• 1:22:15
  You know, what they said in the camps was the
• 1:22:19
  streets of America are paved with gold. When we lived
• 1:22:22
  on Lorraine Avenue in Cleveland, there was a Hungarian poet,
• 1:22:26
  a mad poet. His name was Achim Rett. who would
• 1:22:30
  go up and down Lorraine Avenue screaming in Hungarian, old one,
• 1:22:34
  old one, which means where is it? Where is the gold?
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: Right, right, right.
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: But look, I came in here as a kid. I
• 1:22:42
  couldn't speak the language. We knew no one. I got
• 1:22:46
  into serious juvenile trouble. I got out of that. I studied.
• 1:22:52
  I was a total autodidact. I wasn't a good student,
• 1:22:55
  but I did reading. I went to college. I wanted
• 1:23:04
  to be a disc jockey for a while, and it
• 1:23:06
  was named Joe Anthony. Because the song is through the
• 1:23:09
  sad serpent secretary, right? This kind of shit. I went
• 1:23:14
  to college. I did well in college. I won a
• 1:23:18
  big award as a senior. I kept working. And I also,
• 1:23:28
  through the years, got a terrific amount of help from Americans.
• 1:23:32
  Couldn't have done it without them, beginning with a bus
• 1:23:35
  driver named Henry Jackson, a black man who had been
• 1:23:40
  adopted by Hungarian parents and spoke Hungarian. Moving on to
• 1:23:48
  people in college who helped, I found a great deal
• 1:23:54
  of help. I couldn't have done what I achieved without
• 1:23:57
  the help of other people and other Americans. And then
• 1:24:03
  to top everything off, you know, the Hollywood and 18
• 1:24:07
  films and all of that, yes, I think that is
• 1:24:12
  the personification of the American dream. And many of the
• 1:24:17
  immigrants who come here are looking for the same dream,
• 1:24:21
  and many of them are saying what Matt Achimera said,
• 1:24:24
  on Lorain Avenue, old one, old one, where is it?
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: Right, yeah.
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 2: Part of the reason that the stuff in Minneapolis breaks
• 1:24:34
  my heart is that. These Latino people are my cousins
• 1:24:41
  and brothers in terms of not the killers and not
• 1:24:45
  the gang members, but people who are gardeners and who
• 1:24:48
  work in stores and trying to make a buck and
• 1:24:51
  have kids and they're trying to survive.
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: Well, it's also part of the ICE story too.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: Part of the ICE story is that a lot of
• 1:25:00
  these officers are Latino, including the two guys that shot
• 1:25:04
  Alex Preddy. Those two guys were Latino. And they took
• 1:25:08
  these jobs because these jobs give you– first of all,
• 1:25:11
  you get a $ 50, 000 signing bonus to join ICE. I
• 1:25:15
  mean that's a significant amount of money for someone who's
• 1:25:18
  in debt or who's struggling. So this is how this
• 1:25:21
  guy dressed. Look at how this guy dressed. That's kind
• 1:25:25
  of crazy. See that image?
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: That's a coat?
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 2: Look at that coat. Yeah.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, come on. That's kind of a crazy World
• 1:25:34
  War II military coat.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 2: That's amazing.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: A little odd when everybody else is, you know. The
• 1:25:40
  other thing is the masks. I understand. I understand the
• 1:25:44
  need for them, that they get doxxed, their families get doxxed,
• 1:25:46
  and it's very organized. This is not organic. These protests
• 1:25:50
  are not organic. I understand all these arguments.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm bothered by the mask too. It's a trouble
• 1:25:56
  like to me.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: It's also– it sets a very bad precedent.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: This is the problem with it all. The real thing
• 1:26:02
  is you shouldn't be able to have organized, paid for
• 1:26:06
  protests where you're paying people to protest and you're paying
• 1:26:09
  people to cause violence. And then you're also using people
• 1:26:12
  as political pawns and moving them into the country so
• 1:26:15
  that you could change– like when you have congressional seats,
• 1:26:20
  it's all based on the census. The more people that
• 1:26:22
  are in the town– Regardless of whether or not they're
• 1:26:24
  legal or illegal, you get more congressional seats. So they
• 1:26:27
  use them for political.
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 2: Yes, they do. Absolutely. Same old political game.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: Yes, the same old game. And that game should be illegal.
• 1:26:33
  That shouldn't be legal. The idea of the American dream
• 1:26:36
  is a beautiful dream. And they've corrupted it and they've
• 1:26:40
  they've taken this and used it for their own gain. And,
• 1:26:43
  you know, and they've weaponized empathy. And it's a real problem.
• 1:26:47
  It's a real problem for those poor people that came
• 1:26:50
  over here looking for a better life.
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 2: Listen, I have an idea. Run for president or write
• 1:26:55
  your speeches.
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: Bah! Listen.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: No, that attitude is really terrific. I think you're right
• 1:27:02
  to be concerned. You see it. Listen, I'm 81 years old,
• 1:27:06
  but I really see it too. And there's great dangers
• 1:27:10
  there that I hope my sons don't have.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: Militarized police on the streets for that reason is a
• 1:27:16
  very dangerous precedent. But then there's the other question. It's
• 1:27:18
  like how do you get all the criminals out? I
• 1:27:20
  don't know. I'm not the guy. I'm not the one,
• 1:27:23
  but I am very concerned with this dangerous precedent. That's
• 1:27:29
  my feeling on it. So I just worry that people
• 1:27:32
  accept it because they want this result now and they
• 1:27:36
  don't realize that this could set up this being a
• 1:27:40
  common occurrence. I mean we saw some of it during COVID.
• 1:27:43
  There were some militarized police on the streets keeping people
• 1:27:46
  in lockdown in certain cities. They utilized the National Guard
• 1:27:49
  and they did things like that. That scares the shit
• 1:27:52
  out of me. It scares the shit out of me
• 1:27:53
  when you have a justification for militarized police with masks
• 1:27:59
  on that are just grabbing people. And some of these
• 1:28:02
  people are American citizens. It turned out a lot of
• 1:28:04
  them were American citizens. Hundreds of them were.
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: You know, we had the same syndrome. I covered the
• 1:28:09
  Kent State massacres. Yeah. I covered that. And one of
• 1:28:13
  the things that I saw is the rhetoric that was
• 1:28:15
  coming from James Rhodes, the governor at the time, and
• 1:28:18
  from Sylvester Del Corso, who was the head of the
• 1:28:21
  National Guard. was absolutely the main thing that created that
• 1:28:26
  atmosphere that caused that shooting. Yeah, absolutely. And today, sadly,
• 1:28:34
  we see many examples of that. Yeah. And they're great dangers.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you would think... that we would learn. But we
• 1:28:41
  go through cycles where we learn, we get better, and
• 1:28:44
  then we repeat the same things again. You see that
• 1:28:46
  with racial tensions. You see that with political unrest. You
• 1:28:49
  see that with a lot of different things in this country.
• 1:28:51
  It's like we learn for a little while, and then
• 1:28:54
  we forget.
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 2: Mark Twain's wisdom once again comes through, Mark Twain said.
• 1:29:00
  Politicians are like diapers and they should be changed often
• 1:29:03
  and for the same reason. Yeah.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: He also said history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 2: He also said a little bit off the subject but
• 1:29:16
  I love it. He said when the mind and the
• 1:29:20
  pecker argue, the pecker always wins. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, he was essentially the original stand-up comedian.
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 2: Oh, you're absolutely right. You're so right. I've actually been
• 1:29:34
  thinking about doing some piece on him. And stop me
• 1:29:38
  if you know the history. But in the beginning, he
• 1:29:41
  was a stand-up with his so-called lectures that he did
• 1:29:45
  all over the West. And then he wrote some books,
• 1:29:49
  the books that he's famous for. But he went bankrupt
• 1:29:52
  nearly at the end of his life because of bad investments.
• 1:29:56
  And then he did a round-the-world tour of stand-up all
• 1:30:00
  over again. And usually, they said he was a poet
• 1:30:05
  of the profane because these are usually for male audiences.
• 1:30:09
  He published a little book called On Masturbation, which is
• 1:30:13
  about the glories of masturbation. The only thing I've heard
• 1:30:17
  that's close is in a stand-up by one Joe Rogan,
• 1:30:23
  which there's a great line that says, if you're married
• 1:30:26
  and have kids, the only place to find peace, Tway
• 1:30:33
  would say, with the pecker, is if you rent a
• 1:30:36
  motel room and lock the door. But he had the
• 1:30:39
  same kind of verve and love in terms of being
• 1:30:48
  a stand-up, being outrageous, pushing the envelope. And that whole
• 1:30:53
  side of Twayne, has been sort of hidden under the
• 1:30:57
  notion that he is the great Huck Finn and Tom
• 1:31:00
  Sawyer and all of that. Nobody talks, and he wrote
• 1:31:03
  a book called Letters from the Earth from the Voice
• 1:31:06
  of the Devil. He wrote another one called The Mysterious Stranger,
• 1:31:10
  which is about Jesus coming back in a very dark way.
• 1:31:14
  And then he wrote one that was published in the
• 1:31:17
  30s that hasn't been republished called Twain Erupts. So yes,
• 1:31:23
  he was so right when you say he would stand up.
• 1:31:25
  First trade stand-up.
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: He was the originator because he was essentially a very
• 1:31:30
  witty author who wrote very provocative things, very hilarious things,
• 1:31:36
  and then would read them publicly. And when he was
• 1:31:39
  doing these speeches where he would go and whatever you
• 1:31:42
  call it, poetry or whatever it was, there was no
• 1:31:44
  stand-up comedy back then. There was no name for it.
• 1:31:46
  But he was just riotously funny. People loved him. And
• 1:31:50
  they would go to see them because they were funny.
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 2: And the initial audiences were mostly male audiences. Right. I
• 1:32:01
  think he's a great— he' s never been really done. To do
• 1:32:06
  a piece, a fictional piece, about Dwayne as a stand-up
• 1:32:14
  with pushing the envelope with all these things I think
• 1:32:17
  would be a lot of fun.
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: It would be a lot of fun. The only problem
• 1:32:20
  would be like the cultural context was so different back then.
• 1:32:23
  It's almost like– did you see Lenny, the Dustin Hoffman film?
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, of course.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: Great film. I mean I think Dustin Hoffman fucking nailed it.
• 1:32:30
  It was as close to Lenny Bruce as you're ever
• 1:32:33
  going to see someone portray Lenny Bruce. The problem is
• 1:32:37
  the world has changed so much since 1960 that a
• 1:32:41
  lot of the outrageousness is gone and it seems very pedestrian.
• 1:32:45
  Like the things that he is saying– Because he was
• 1:32:47
  such a groundbreaker and society was so locked down and
• 1:32:51
  so conservative and so– just the way people communicated was
• 1:32:58
  much different back then. The understanding of culture and of
• 1:33:02
  race relations and sexual relations was very different back then.
• 1:33:06
  And so the outrageousness of what he was saying back then,
• 1:33:10
  it just doesn't really translate because in many ways I
• 1:33:13
  think stand-up comedy in particular is a window in time.
• 1:33:17
  It's a window into the way people behave. Films are
• 1:33:21
  that way as well, especially if you go and watch
• 1:33:23
  a lot of old films. It's a window into how
• 1:33:26
  people perceived reality back.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: Then. There's some stuff that's rarely been published from Twain
• 1:33:37
  that hasn't really been seen very much that was left
• 1:33:42
  in places like the University of California archives. They go
• 1:33:47
  a step past what we know from Twain. And I
• 1:33:51
  think there's so much of it. There's something called Twain's
• 1:33:53
  Notebooks that hasn't been published in their full form, certainly.
• 1:33:59
  That may still be shocking. I'm still playing with it
• 1:34:06
  because I'm reading and reading and all of that. But
• 1:34:08
  even if I never do, it's so much fun reading
• 1:34:12
  about him and his life because he was such an
• 1:34:14
  interesting character.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: I hope you do write something about it because it
• 1:34:17
  would be great for people to see and to get
• 1:34:19
  an understanding of him because I think a lot of
• 1:34:21
  young people, particularly today, just think of him as an author.
• 1:34:24
  Just think of him as the guy who wrote Tom Sawyer.
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 2: Tom Sawyer. He's been pushed into being almost a kid's writer.
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 2: Speaking of stand-up, I want you to know, and I
• 1:34:34
  don't think you know, did you know that Sam Kinison
• 1:34:37
  dedicated a CD to me?
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: Did he really?
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 2: Sam Kinison, one of his last CDs, was called leader
• 1:34:47
  of the band, B-A-N-N-E-D. Right. And at the flip side
• 1:34:51
  of the CD, he thanks a bunch of people, reggae's
• 1:34:55
  often record people and all of that, and then also
• 1:34:57
  Sly and Sean Penn. And then after all of that,
• 1:35:01
  in larger letters than the others, he says, in very
• 1:35:05
  special thanks to Joe Esterhauser writing his letter to Michael Ovitz. Ha, ha, ha, ha.
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 2: Amazing.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: What letter did you write to Michael Ovitz?
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 2: Michael Ovitz was the top dog agent in town running CAA.
• 1:35:24
  And I was leaving CAA because my best friend and
• 1:35:30
  the rabbi in the business was an agent named Guy
• 1:35:33
  McElwain who had been running Columbia, became an agent again.
• 1:35:36
  So I was leaving CAA simply because of my love
• 1:35:39
  for Guy. And I went in to see Ovitz and said,
• 1:35:42
  I'm leaving the agency. And Ovitz said, if you leave
• 1:35:47
  the agency, then my foot soldiers who go up and
• 1:35:50
  down Wilshire Boulevard will put you under the ground.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: Oh, Jesus.
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 2: What the fuck? You know, so I thought about it
• 1:35:59
  for a couple weeks. Jesus. And I wrote him a letter,
• 1:36:03
  which essentially said, fuck you. You know, I'm leaving. I'm
• 1:36:06
  going back to the prison. He started me in the
• 1:36:08
  business in the prison I love. And it turned into
• 1:36:10
  a major controversy with headlines all over the place.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: Put you under the ground with strong words.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, man. There was a producer named Bernie Brillstein.
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: I know Bernie.
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 2: He wrote a memoir years later who said those exact
• 1:36:27
  words had been used to him as well. Wow. Yeah.
• 1:36:31
  And you know what? As time went on, it became
• 1:36:34
  obvious that the whole controversy with Ovitz really hurt him.
• 1:36:39
  because other people had been threatened that way. And he
• 1:36:43
  had a reputation for that. And he actually was out
• 1:36:48
  of the business, not much past that. But the notion
• 1:36:53
  of Kinison, I love Kinison's work. The notion of Kinison,
• 1:36:56
  when I saw that thing, I was overwhelmed.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: He was one of the greats.
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: He was one of the greats.
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: One of the greats, and I still maintain that for
• 1:37:06
  like a period of two years, two or three years,
• 1:37:08
  he was the most profound and revolutionary stand-up comic ever.
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 2: I agree.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: He came out of nowhere. He was so different than
• 1:37:15
  anybody else. I was introduced to Kinison by a girl
• 1:37:19
  that I worked with. I was working at a gym
• 1:37:23
  called the Boston Athletic Club in South Boston. And it
• 1:37:27
  was a girl that worked at the front counter who
• 1:37:28
  was hilarious. She was a volleyball player. Really hilarious girl.
• 1:37:32
  And she told me about Kinison and reenacted one of
• 1:37:35
  his bits in the parking lot of the club. Told
• 1:37:39
  me what she saw on TV about. He had that
• 1:37:41
  bit about homosexual necrophiliacs paying money. She's on her stomach.
• 1:37:48
  laying on the she was so funny she was on
• 1:37:50
  her stomach in the parking lot going oh oh life
• 1:37:54
  keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead it
• 1:37:56
  never ends it never ends and I was laughing so
• 1:38:00
  hard that I couldn't wait to go out and get
• 1:38:02
  that videotape and I got that videotape and I was
• 1:38:06
  only 19 at the time I had never even thought
• 1:38:07
  about doing stand-up yet but that was like one of
• 1:38:10
  the first times that I was like oh this is
• 1:38:11
  stand-up I didn't know that this was stand-up I thought
• 1:38:15
  stand-up was like did you ever notice Like that kind
• 1:38:17
  of stuff that you'd see on The Tonight Show with
• 1:38:19
  Johnny Carson. I had no thought ever that this wild
• 1:38:23
  shit was stand up. And, you know, credit to HBO,
• 1:38:27
  because before then you would never be able to see
• 1:38:31
  that kind of comedy. The only way you'd be able
• 1:38:33
  to see it is in the movie theater. It'd have
• 1:38:35
  to be like Richard Pryor live on the Sunset Strip,
• 1:38:37
  which predated that by a few years. And no one
• 1:38:41
  had any understanding that there was this kind of stand
• 1:38:45
  up comedy out there. that this wild motherfucker who used
• 1:38:48
  to be a priest, he used to be a preacher,
• 1:38:51
  and he comes to L.A. and is this wild, coke-snorting,
• 1:38:59
  fucking demon comedian who's just different than anybody else before
• 1:39:03
  him and just changed comedy. There's a few people, there's
• 1:39:07
  a few characters along the way that have just completely
• 1:39:10
  changed comedy, and I think Kennison is one of the
• 1:39:12
  big ones.
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 2: He was absolutely amazing. I adored him. I thought he
• 1:39:17
  was a groundbreaker. And when I saw the CD, I said,
• 1:39:21
  holy shit.
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: I have two of his albums. Two different people have
• 1:39:27
  gifted me his first album. God, what is it called?
• 1:39:33
  Is it called Louder Than Hell? I think it's called
• 1:39:35
  Louder Than Hell. And they're signed. Both albums are signed.
• 1:39:40
  Both signatures are totally different. So I don't know which
• 1:39:43
  one's real or if Either one of them are real,
• 1:39:46
  and that's the problem. Like people buy stuff off eBay.
• 1:39:48
  They want to give you a nice gift. They buy
• 1:39:50
  an autographed album, and it might not even be real.
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 2: He was a preacher, and that last conversation when he
• 1:39:57
  died with Jesus, when he's conversing, it's a mind-boggling conversation. Mind-boggling, yeah.
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: He's literally having a conversation with.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 2: Someone as he's dying. It's obviously Jesus. It's a Jesus figure.
• 1:40:09
  I mean, is it my time?
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 3: Right, right.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 2: Amazing. Especially amazing considering where he came from, what he
• 1:40:17
  went through, what he did with comedy, and then that ending. Yeah.
• 1:40:20
  There was a movie made, wasn't there? But it wasn't
• 1:40:22
  very good.
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: About Kenneson?
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 2: I was thinking about that, too.
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: I have a problem with reenactments of a guy who
• 1:40:34
  is that profound.
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: Someone's playing him.
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: It's like it's... I try not to watch because it's
• 1:40:41
  just the actual work of the guy, like going back
• 1:40:44
  and watching his HBO special and watching his stand-up appearances
• 1:40:48
  on Letterman and listening to his first album. The first
• 1:40:52
  album I listened to, I was like, Jesus Christ, this
• 1:40:54
  guy is incredible. It was just so different, so crazy.
• 1:40:58
  And he was the first guy that was like open
• 1:41:03
  about doing cocaine, like open about partying. You know, I mean,
• 1:41:08
  he was a wild boy.
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 2: It reminds me, I'm sorry, Hunter, in terms of being
• 1:41:15
  wild about coke. My first story when I was at
• 1:41:18
  Rolling Stone was a piece about narcotics, corrupt narcotics agents.
• 1:41:23
  And as a result of the stories, the guy who
• 1:41:26
  was the head of the narcotics agency in the state
• 1:41:29
  of California had to resign. And as a result of that,
• 1:41:32
  I started getting... plastic baggies full of coke at Rolling
• 1:41:36
  Stone from the various dealers who appreciated my work. Now,
• 1:41:42
  whenever Hunter was there, I would present him with the bag.
• 1:41:45
  And he would go, holy fucking Christ, you're getting these
• 1:41:49
  from people? One of the things that solidified our friendship.
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: That's hilarious.
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: I would hand it over.
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: And that was back when cocaine was actually cocaine.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It wasn't stepped on. You didn't get fentanyl. You
• 1:42:03
  didn't have to worry about dying of an overdose.
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 2: It was the only drug besides smoking dope that I really,
• 1:42:09
  really enjoyed. Like I said, I tried acid once and
• 1:42:12
  another had to hold on to me because I was
• 1:42:14
  so freaked out.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: I can only imagine. When I watched Showgirls, I was like,
• 1:42:20
  whoever wrote this was doing coke. That was literally one
• 1:42:24
  of the first things I've said. I've always said that's
• 1:42:26
  like one of the heightens of cocaine movies.
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 2: Not anymore, but certainly the memory of it was there.
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: Influenced.
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: Influenced by cocaine.
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 2: The Tarantino was a really loved showgirl. It was a
• 1:42:45
  wild movie.
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: And I remember because it was that girl. What was
• 1:42:48
  her name? Elizabeth.
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 2: Berkley.
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: Berkley. Elizabeth Berkley, who was from Saved by the Bell.
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 1: So she was like this America's sweetheart from this really
• 1:42:56
  nice sitcom. And then all of a sudden, you know,
• 1:42:58
  she's half naked and she's a showgirl. And it's like, whoa.
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 2: And she's having an affair with Paul Verhoeven. Right. Who
• 1:43:05
  has moved out with his wife and is living with
• 1:43:08
  Elizabeth Berkley right now.
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: Crazy.
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 2: I know. Yeah.
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: Geez Louise. Wild times, right?
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 2: Absolutely fun. Really fun. Yeah. Jimi Hendrix story because he's
• 1:43:21
  the Jimi Hendrix experience and I wondered whether he had
• 1:43:24
  any kind of a godfather impact on the Joe Rogan experience.
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, 100%. I stole the name from Jimi Hendrix.
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 2: Jimi Hendrix story.
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: 100%. I mean, when we first started doing the podcast,
• 1:43:35
  I would always listen to Voodoo Child on the way
• 1:43:39
  to the comedy store. Coming over Laurel Canyon, that was
• 1:43:42
  one of my favorites. That and Whole Lotta Love. Those
• 1:43:44
  were my two favorite songs to listen to on the
• 1:43:46
  way to the comedy store. I had like a soundtrack
• 1:43:48
  that I listened to to get myself psyched up for shows.
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 2: You'll love this story then. Okay, I'm a reporter at
• 1:43:53
  the Plain Dealer, and all of our editors barely know
• 1:43:57
  about rock and roll. And as I said, I've loved
• 1:44:00
  it all my life, and when Vandrick's came around, I
• 1:44:03
  loved his work. And he's in Cleveland for an appearance,
• 1:44:08
  and the fucking Cleveland cops have gone crazy, and they're
• 1:44:11
  saying that this caused a riot, and it's obscene, and
• 1:44:14
  all of that stuff. And I asked to go up
• 1:44:18
  to my city editor and I asked him, I'd like
• 1:44:20
  to interview Hendrix and cover his concert. So I do
• 1:44:24
  cover his concert and it's jammed in Cleveland Arena and
• 1:44:27
  people are loving it. And I've set up a date
• 1:44:30
  to interview him the next morning at the Cleveland Hotel. Okay,
• 1:44:34
  so they show up the next morning and I'm the
• 1:44:38
  plane dealer reporter. I've got a tie-on and a sport coat,
• 1:44:41
  you know, and they go in, I think it's 9.30.
• 1:44:45
  The And he's up, but he's barely up, and he's
• 1:44:49
  wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and his hair is, you
• 1:44:53
  remember his hair, but on this occasion there were a
• 1:44:54
  lot of beads and things in his hair as well.
• 1:44:57
  And it's totally scruffed up. And we talk about rock
• 1:45:02
  and roll mostly in his background, and the fact that
• 1:45:05
  he had been, I think, as a backup, as a
• 1:45:09
  kind of guitarist in a Ricky Nelson band that had
• 1:45:11
  been in Cleveland a couple of years before then. He'd
• 1:45:14
  done this pre-stop before he, went out on his own,
• 1:45:18
  and we get along. And we begin smoking dope, of course,
• 1:45:24
  at 9.30, and by fucking 11.30, we both got the munchies.
• 1:45:27
  And he said, man, I'm hungry, you know, and you
• 1:45:29
  got anyone going to any place? I've got a car
• 1:45:32
  waiting for me downstairs. So I said, sure, and we
• 1:45:36
  go down, and then Mitch Mitchell and Chaz Chandler join us,
• 1:45:40
  the other members of the experience, who are equally... It's
• 1:45:46
  looking like seedy characters, you know, but it's that time
• 1:45:49
  of morning. It's after a concert, all of that. So
• 1:45:51
  we pile into this limo, and I direct them to
• 1:45:54
  go to Buckeye Road is the center of the Hungarian
• 1:45:59
  community in Cleveland. And the center of the Hungarian community
• 1:46:02
  on Buckeye Road is a restaurant called the Bolaton. Okay,
• 1:46:06
  and I direct them to go to the Bolaton. Now,
• 1:46:09
  they know me at the Bolaton because I used to
• 1:46:11
  live on Buckeye Road. The big stretch limo pulls up.
• 1:46:15
  plate glass window front filled with old ladies with babushkas
• 1:46:19
  and guys very formally dressed. We get out in front
• 1:46:22
  of this place and these Martians, three Martians get out
• 1:46:26
  of the car. And I lead them in. And I'm like,
• 1:46:31
  what the fuck? What is this? They're just following me
• 1:46:38
  at the end. And I see Jimmy looking around and shit.
• 1:46:42
  So they see this The Major D knows me, so
• 1:46:45
  he calls me aside and he says, who are these people?
• 1:46:49
  I say, Jimi Hendrix, big rock and roll star, you know,
• 1:46:51
  he's in town. And he said, oh, Hendrix, yeah, Jimi Hendrix.
• 1:46:57
  So we sit down and Jimi says, you order for me. Great.
• 1:47:02
  So I order a chicken paprikash for him, which is
• 1:47:04
  a big Hungarian meal. And Chaz and Mitchell order something else,
• 1:47:10
  but very Hungarian stuff, on my advice. And interestingly, as
• 1:47:17
  we're sitting there, the maitre d' has obviously spoken to
• 1:47:21
  people because old ladies are coming around asking him for
• 1:47:23
  an autograph. Wow. And he's gracious. But he loves his
• 1:47:35
  paprikash and wants to order another. At this point, we've
• 1:47:39
  knocked out two bottles of wine, I think, and we're
• 1:47:41
  still rolling from all the dope. So they bring that.
• 1:47:44
  At the end of this, he had three orders of
• 1:47:49
  chicken paprikas. He signed. We had like four bottles of wine.
• 1:47:54
  We staggered out of there. He signed, I would guess,
• 1:47:59
  10 autographs for people who come around. And as we
• 1:48:04
  walk out of the restaurant, he takes his fist high
• 1:48:07
  up in there and says, Hungary, Hungary. Yeah. That's my
• 1:48:13
  Jimmy Hendrix story.
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: That's awesome. Ron White was telling us a story the
• 1:48:17
  other night in the Mothership Green Room, the comedy club.
• 1:48:20
  Green Room. And he was saying that when he was,
• 1:48:21
  I think he said he was 13 years old, he
• 1:48:23
  went to see the monkeys. And Jimi Hendrix opened for
• 1:48:27
  the monkeys. He said it was the worst booking of
• 1:48:29
  all time. It opened?
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: Exactly. So this is when Jimi Hendrix was emerging. He
• 1:48:35
  really hadn't become Jimi Hendrix yet. And so he's the
• 1:48:39
  opening act for the Monkees. And so you have a
• 1:48:42
  bunch of kids that are there to see this really
• 1:48:45
  cute band that was pieced together by corporate executives essentially.
• 1:48:50
  The Monkees, fun band, but they had a TV show
• 1:48:53
  and it was a very clean, sweet TV show.
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 2: Hey, we're the Monkees.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: And then you've got this guy. opening up for them,
• 1:49:03
  just jamming on the guitar. And they were freaked out.
• 1:49:07
  They're like, what is this? Like, what is going on?
• 1:49:10
  And he said nobody liked it. It was terrifying to people. Like,
• 1:49:13
  who is this guy with his guitar? Like, what the
• 1:49:15
  hell is he doing?
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 2: Great story. Many years later, I thought about writing a
• 1:49:22
  Hendrix movie and working with a producer friend named Ben Myron,
• 1:49:27
  and Ben rounded up his brother, and we actually brought
• 1:49:32
  him to Malibu. And unfortunately, we discovered that the rights
• 1:49:38
  were so screwed up in between relatives that there's never
• 1:49:41
  been a Jimi Hendrix movie made because people couldn't agree
• 1:49:44
  on the deal of any kind. But it still would
• 1:49:47
  be a terrific movie, I think.
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: Oh, it would be a phenomenal movie. I believe there
• 1:49:51
  was at least one Jimi Hendrix docudrama. Wasn't there, Jimi?
• 1:49:58
  I believe. Do you remember it?
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it was Andre 3000 from OutKast.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 5: But they couldn't really use all the music and stuff,
• 1:50:07
  I think.
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't hear Jamie.
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: He said it was Andre 3000 from OutKast.
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 2: I see.
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: And that they couldn't use all the music.
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 2: I see.
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: I think.
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 5: It came out even like 10 years ago.
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 2: That was an issue back then, too. I remember that. Yeah.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: That's right. That's right. Wow. Wow.
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 3: Also, the day after you're talking about in Cleveland, there's
• 1:50:32
  a recording of the concert.
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 2: Oh, shit. That's my Facebook. Is that right? The Cleveland concert? Yeah. Wow.
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 3: I've got a few different links. They kept taking me
• 1:50:41
  to Facebook, but there's a bunch of pictures.
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: Whoa. March 26, 1968.
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 3: Then there's a recording of the concert, too.
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: So you can listen to the recording from the concert?
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I was trying to get in here.
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 3: There's an article from his legendary trip to Cleveland.
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 2: Wow. Wow.
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 5: But this was like paid Walt, so I couldn't get
• 1:51:01
  all the stuff behind it.
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: Wow, man.
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 2: He was the nicest guy.
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: I can imagine.
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, very nice. Nice guy. I just laid back.
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: Wow, he was just insane. One of a, not even
• 1:51:16
  one of a generation, one of one talent. I mean,
• 1:51:20
  to this day, if you ask most guitarists who's the
• 1:51:23
  greatest guitarist of all time, it's Jim Hendrix.
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: That's crazy that one guy who died at 27 years old,
• 1:51:30
  and what did he die in, 1969 or 1970?
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, somewhere there, yeah.
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: That that guy to this day is universally regarded as
• 1:51:38
  the greatest guitarist of all time.
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 2: You know, I interviewed him. I was known as the
• 1:51:43
  Grim Reaper at the Plain Dealer because I interviewed Hendrix,
• 1:51:48
  Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Odison. And they all died.
• 1:51:54
  They all died young, you know. I did a feature
• 1:51:57
  on Jose Feliciano, and people would come up to me
• 1:52:00
  at the plane deal and say, what do you have
• 1:52:02
  against Jose? Why do you want him to die?
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: That's crazy. It's just unfortunate that they all died. And
• 1:52:09
  they all died at 27 years old, which is really good.
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 2: Was that right?
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Hendricks, Joplin, and Morrison all died at 27.
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: And who else? Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse.
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 2: At 27? Yeah.
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: It's all 27. 27 is the magic number for insanely
• 1:52:28
  talented people to die young.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: Very weird. You've had an incredible life, man.
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 2: You know, I've been blessed. I've been really blessed. First
• 1:52:41
  of all, the fact that I'm still here at 81,
• 1:52:45
  considering some of my excesses in the past, is miraculous.
• 1:52:48
  It truly is. I started smoking when I was 13.
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 3: Whoa.
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 2: Stopped when I was 60. Whoa. Then I had stage
• 1:52:56
  four cancer, and Marshall's storm surgery saved me. You know,
• 1:53:03
  I drank too hard most of my life until I
• 1:53:06
  was 70, and I finally stopped then. Only because I
• 1:53:12
  have a hard-headed Italian-Polish wife who said, enough, you're falling down.
• 1:53:19
  You're taking 12 pills and you're falling down. No fucking more. Now,
• 1:53:27
  shortly after we were married, literally after we exchanged the vows,
• 1:53:32
  she turned to me and she says, she whispers, she says,
• 1:53:36
  if you cheat on me, I'm going to fucking hunt
• 1:53:40
  you down and kill you. I listened to her. I
• 1:53:44
  listened to her. I listened to this woman.
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: Sounds like a fun lady.
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 2: She is. She is, and she's... I'm very proud of
• 1:53:53
  her because at 67, the mother of four and truly
• 1:54:00
  the true head of our family, she's writing her first,
• 1:54:04
  she's written her first novel, which is called Dark Church.
• 1:54:10
  And it's set in Dracula's Transylvania.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 3: Whoa.
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: And it's a kind of gothic thriller novel. And I
• 1:54:26
  bring it up because I promised her that I would
• 1:54:30
  make this plug. And I fear that if I don't,
• 1:54:33
  I'm going to be in a lot of trucking trouble.
• 1:54:35
  Thank you very much, Joe.
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: I love that when someone does something like that, when
• 1:54:42
  they're in their 60s, just say, fuck it, something I've
• 1:54:44
  always wanted to do, let's do it. I think it's fantastic.
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: I just love when people do, like, fuck your age.
• 1:54:51
  Who cares? Just put it out. Write it.
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 2: I agree. Yeah. But I have lived an amazing life,
• 1:54:57
  and I'm very thankful. I've seen a lot. I've come
• 1:55:05
  out on the other side. I've seen a lot of darkness, too.
• 1:55:09
  But when it's all over, Graham Greene, who's a writer
• 1:55:14
  that I admire, died, I think, in the late 70s.
• 1:55:18
  and he said we get to a point where we
• 1:55:21
  see the fence. The fence is there, but we can't
• 1:55:24
  see over the fence. But the closer we get to
• 1:55:27
  the fence, the more curious we are about what's on
• 1:55:30
  the other side of the fence. And there are some
• 1:55:33
  people who do decide that they're too curious, people like Hunter,
• 1:55:37
  and jump over the fence, right? I'm not doing that,
• 1:55:41
  but I'm approaching the fence. But I've lived a terrific life,
• 1:55:44
  and only once again, Only in America.
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, only in America. Well, I'm glad you're not jumping
• 1:55:52
  over the fence. I'm glad we got a chance to
• 1:55:55
  talk to you.
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 2: Although I really did admire his note. The no more
• 1:55:58
  fun note. It should be classic.
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean, that's how he lived. And at
• 1:56:04
  the end of his life, obviously it was not fun.
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 2: No, no. But Twain, when I keep going back to Twain,
• 1:56:10
  this is a good one, I think. He said the orgasm,
• 1:56:15
  He has God's own payback for all the suffering that
• 1:56:19
  he overlooks in the world.
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: That's funny. Well, it's like writers in particular, they're so
• 1:56:30
  important to culture because they can put down thoughts in
• 1:56:35
  a way that reshapes the way people view things. We
• 1:56:39
  talked about Hunter in the 60s and the 70s. He
• 1:56:42
  was the voice of that generation. Like he was the
• 1:56:45
  guy that was this intelligent guy that wasn't a part
• 1:56:48
  of the elite establishment, that wasn't a part of the
• 1:56:51
  rich fat cats, but was also famous and well-known, but
• 1:56:56
  stuck true to his thoughts and his beliefs. It was
• 1:56:59
  able to articulate things in a way that gave you
• 1:57:02
  this understanding of what was going on with the people
• 1:57:04
  back then, that to this day, if you read Fear
• 1:57:07
  and Loathing on the campaign trail, or if you read
• 1:57:10
  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Any of his work,
• 1:57:13
  you know, the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved. It's
• 1:57:18
  just a phenomenal encapsulation of that time.
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 2: It carries a low note, even something that carries a
• 1:57:23
  low note. Yeah.
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: It's so important. And we don't have a lot of
• 1:57:28
  that today, unfortunately. You know, you've got a lot of
• 1:57:31
  podcasters and a lot of, you know, people making YouTube
• 1:57:35
  videos and TikToks. There's not a lot of, like, great
• 1:57:38
  writing that encapsulates things where there's, like, one figure. that
• 1:57:42
  we turn to to read their stuff on things. And
• 1:57:45
  Hunter was that guy.
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, he was. As Hemingway was for a previous generation.
• 1:57:51
  You know, Hunter and I talked a lot about Hemingway
• 1:57:53
  because of our backgrounds and earning a living and all
• 1:57:57
  of that. And I think that the fact that Hunter
• 1:58:01
  ended it as he did was sort of thought out many,
• 1:58:07
  many years before in Bumpy through Hemingway's example.
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: Inspired by Hemingway, yeah. Unfortunately, that's how he did it too.
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 1: And they both shared in common that they drank to excess.
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. But, you know, when I was a boy wanting
• 1:58:21
  to be a, and I wanted to be a novelist
• 1:58:23
  and not a screenwriter, I was a boy, the Holy
• 1:58:25
  Trinity were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The old diet of alcoholism. Anyway,
• 1:58:32
  shot himself. Fitzgerald had a heart attack at a very
• 1:58:36
  young age while working as a Hollywood screenwriter, incidentally. And
• 1:58:41
  Faulkner fell off a horse, I think, in his early 70s, ripped, ripped,
• 1:58:45
  totally drunk. And these were the idols of young people
• 1:58:48
  coming up then.
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: What do you think it is about alcohol and writing
• 1:58:54
  that go hand in glove?
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 2: The... I, I, for a while, I drank all day
• 1:59:03
  black coffee and a cognac. Um, the, uh, and then,
• 1:59:09
  then later on in life, um, the, I didn't have
• 1:59:13
  my first drink until noon. And what they make way
• 1:59:16
  was 11 o'clock. Um, and, uh, and I measured it
• 1:59:20
  until at night. And, and then it was gin, um,
• 1:59:26
  before it was white wine. Um, And part of it
• 1:59:30
  is that if you're lost in this imaginary world that's
• 1:59:35
  in your head all day, you can't get rid of it.
• 1:59:38
  You can't make it stop. And the booze makes it
• 1:59:42
  stop so that you can continue your normal familial daily
• 1:59:50
  obligations and schedules without having this stuff in your head
• 1:59:54
  all the time trying to crowd it out. The fact
• 1:59:56
  that sometimes... excuse me the fact that sometimes I wake
• 2:00:01
  up in the middle of the night and take notes
• 2:00:04
  of something that the character says or something indicates that
• 2:00:08
  I can't get rid of it with the booze when
• 2:00:10
  I was drinking if I drank enough I could get
• 2:00:13
  rid of it and begin it again the next day
• 2:00:15
  it's partly freeing yourself it's an interesting point it's partly
• 2:00:18
  freeing yourself from something that you've created yourself so in
• 2:00:24
  that sense you create something that That can hurt you,
• 2:00:30
  even if you create it. My greatest enjoyment with writing screenplays,
• 2:00:35
  I mean, it gives me a terrific amount of pleasure
• 2:00:38
  knowing that it's going to take, when people see this,
• 2:00:42
  it's going to make their own lives more pleasant for
• 2:00:44
  at least two hours. They will enjoy it. They may
• 2:00:48
  laugh at it, but it will take them out of
• 2:00:50
  their own existences in a pleasant way. That ain't bad,
• 2:00:53
  to be able to do that with people.
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's huge.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 2: And that's very important to me.
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: People think of it as trivial, that entertainment is trivial.
• 2:01:01
  I don't think it is at all.
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 3: No, no.
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: It shapes our perceptions of the world.
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 2: Exactly. You do the exact same thing. You make people's
• 2:01:07
  lives better by enjoying what they're watching. And that is
• 2:01:11
  not as important or as dramatic as my daughter-in-law, for example,
• 2:01:17
  who just got her medical degree, who literally, literally saves
• 2:01:22
  people's lives. Incidentally... It's a classic Hollywood story. I think Alyssa,
• 2:01:29
  Alyssa Esterház works in Texas in a hospital, and she
• 2:01:35
  just got her medical degree. But to show the influence
• 2:01:41
  that Hollywood has on our culture, the other day she
• 2:01:44
  walks into a room and there's a gigantic big guy
• 2:01:47
  there who's yelling and screaming. You know, this is the
• 2:01:50
  sweetest person in the world and has this wonderful smile.
• 2:01:55
  and really is great with people, and she's trying to
• 2:01:57
  calm him down, and she says, what's wrong, what's wrong?
• 2:02:00
  And she describes him as a really big man, and
• 2:02:04
  he's screaming, and he says, what's wrong, what's wrong? And
• 2:02:06
  he yells, I want Brad Pitt. He's fucking in Texas,
• 2:02:11
  you know, in some hospital, and he says, you want
• 2:02:15
  Brad Pitt? And he says, I want fucking Brad Pitt.
• 2:02:19
  He says, but why, why do you want Brad Pitt?
• 2:02:22
  And he goes, because I want to fuck him. Now
• 2:02:30
  this sweet woman.
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: That's hilarious.
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 2: Doctor confronted her with this madman who wants to fuck
• 2:02:37
  Brad Pitt. One more example of the powerful effect of
• 2:02:42
  the culture on us. So when I write something, I
• 2:02:45
  don't want some guy to say, Teresa. To see it
• 2:02:49
  and say, yeah, this is the result I want, Brad Pitt.
• 2:02:52
  Nor do I want Vladimir Zelensky to start a fucking war. Right.
• 2:02:55
  But I do want people to enjoy it. Right.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: That's hilarious. When you say that the alcohol silences the voices,
• 2:03:06
  I always thought of it as the other. I thought
• 2:03:08
  of it as like alcohol releases people from their inhibitions
• 2:03:11
  and allows them to tap into this voice sometimes.
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 2: I think that happens with some writers, but that's never
• 2:03:17
  been my problem, the– There's something about going into a
• 2:03:21
  little room wherever you are, and you don't have to
• 2:03:23
  be in Hollywood. You can be anywhere. As long as
• 2:03:25
  there's a little room in the house you can escape
• 2:03:27
  to and sit there quietly and make shit up that
• 2:03:33
  you think people will enjoy. As long as that's there,
• 2:03:39
  that's all I really need. Now, occasionally I will play
• 2:03:44
  music without stop on certain scripts. It's the same way
• 2:03:47
  with Leonard Cohen. I listen to him a lot. And Dylan,
• 2:03:50
  of course. I did a movie with Dylan, which was
• 2:03:54
  also a funny experience. But sometimes it's music. It's not
• 2:04:00
  Coke anymore. It's not cognac anymore with coffee. I drank
• 2:04:07
  so much coffee that finally one day we had to
• 2:04:10
  call an ambulance because I thought I was having a
• 2:04:12
  heart attack. I had become allergic to it.
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: It was just caffeine?
• 2:04:16
  Speaker 2: Ambulance caffeine. An ambulance is driving me down to Marine General,
• 2:04:20
  and there's a traffic jam. There's construction, right? And they
• 2:04:23
  think I'm having a heart attack, and I jump out
• 2:04:25
  of the ambulance, and I run up to the guy
• 2:04:27
  with the hard hat. And I'll never forget it. It says, Brinkerhoff.
• 2:04:32
  His name was Brinkerhoff. And I'm yelling at him, I'm
• 2:04:34
  having a heart attack, you motherfucker. Get these guys out
• 2:04:37
  of the way. I'm dying, of course. Oh, my God.
• 2:04:40
  It's worse than the guy who wants to fuck Brad Pitt.
• 2:04:42
  He gets out of the way.
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: The crazy thing is just coffee after all the Coke
• 2:04:47
  and all the other craziness.
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, even that got me so I had to stop.
• 2:04:51
  I stopped the coffee as well. The years after I
• 2:04:56
  stopped it, I was in New York and I ordered
• 2:05:00
  a decaf espresso that wasn't decaf and I was up
• 2:05:04
  for two and a half days without being able to sleep.
• 2:05:06
  So obviously my system got totally screwed up.
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: It got reset. Yeah, you lost your tolerance for it.
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 2: But the... I never felt it inspired me now with
• 2:05:21
  basic instinct writing it in the sun in the Hawaiian
• 2:05:27
  sun and of course through all of this it was
• 2:05:30
  non-stop smoking two pack a day smoking beginning with Lucky's
• 2:05:36
  and Marlboro's and moving on to Galois and occasionally cigars
• 2:05:40
  and pipe and all this shit so I did do
• 2:05:44
  that But I never felt that the Coke was inspirational.
• 2:05:51
  It was enjoyable, and it was fucking dynamite sexually. That
• 2:05:57
  also comes in handy.
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't what fueled your writing.
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 2: No, I never felt that it did.
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: It was just recreational.
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was recreational.
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: But nicotine did.
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: Stephen King said that. that when he stopped smoking was
• 2:06:10
  one of the most difficult things that he ever quit.
• 2:06:12
  Like quitting the booze and quitting coke and all that
• 2:06:14
  stuff was one thing, but quitting cigarettes, he said he
• 2:06:16
  really noticed the difference in his writing.
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I went through that. I was warned after
• 2:06:25
  my cancer surgery by this Army surgeon that I like
• 2:06:28
  so much that if you smoke or drink, you're dead.
• 2:06:33
  You're dead. Understand that. And so I took it seriously.
• 2:06:40
  The drinking, my idea of not drinking at that point,
• 2:06:45
  was switching from Tangeray to white wine. And, of course,
• 2:06:49
  that got out of hand after a while, too, until
• 2:06:53
  Naomi jumped into the whole parade.
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: And now you're completely clean.
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 2: Totally. I've been completely clean.
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: Did this all line up with your conversion to Christianity?
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I needed it. Jesus of Nazareth helped
• 2:07:08
  seriously to be able to do all that. And I
• 2:07:14
  did a lot of praying. But I still believe in
• 2:07:16
  prayer and I believe in worship. With a group of people,
• 2:07:20
  there's a special kind of inspirational thing that I feel. Yeah.
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: No, I agree with you. I think there's something about
• 2:07:26
  all those people collected together.
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: It's just like when you go to a concert and
• 2:07:31
  you feel the music with all the people that are
• 2:07:33
  enjoying the music. There's a similar thing that happens at
• 2:07:35
  a church.
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 2: Very similar.
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: Well, we're meant to be together. You know, we are
• 2:07:39
  tribal people and we're meant to be together. And there's
• 2:07:41
  something about groups of people together, especially in a positive way,
• 2:07:45
  that unite us and connect us in a way that
• 2:07:49
  it's very profound. It's different than anything else. It's different
• 2:07:52
  than watching it on a screen. There's something about being
• 2:07:55
  in the presence of other people that are doing the
• 2:07:57
  same thing.
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You can feel a vibe.
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 2: And the vibe goes deep and it's really inspirational. And
• 2:08:07
  when it's really working, I feel almost transported. I'm on
• 2:08:12
  a different level. I feel myself being on that level
• 2:08:15
  and it's wonderful.
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can see all these other people experiencing
• 2:08:19
  the same thing. It's very transformational.
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: And, you know, I always talk about the park in
• 2:08:25
  a lot of church is like the best place on
• 2:08:27
  earth because everybody lets you go. Everybody lets everybody go
• 2:08:31
  in front of them. Everyone's kind. You know, it works.
• 2:08:35
  That's what's crazy. Like the teachings of Jesus do work.
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 2: Yes, they do.
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 1: Like if you follow them, you will be a better person.
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, you will.
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 1: But people are very cynical and rightly so. They're very
• 2:08:46
  afraid of people manipulating them. They're very afraid of cults.
• 2:08:51
  There you go. You've got your cross right on you.
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: That's a nice one, too. I like that.
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 1: People are very afraid of people telling them that they
• 2:08:59
  know things, that they have the answers.
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm not afraid of that. Sometimes I'm skeptical of it,
• 2:09:11
  but it depends on where it's coming from. And sometimes,
• 2:09:15
  I don't know why you are, but sometimes I could
• 2:09:17
  feel something very special with someone who was talking about
• 2:09:21
  those kinds of things.
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: You can feel the difference. And the difference between that
• 2:09:25
  and someone who's not genuine is very apparent. You feel
• 2:09:29
  that as well. It bothers you. You're like, I don't
• 2:09:33
  want to hear this guy talk about this.
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 2: But you know what? If you have a shit detector,
• 2:09:37
  and you do, and so do I, if you have
• 2:09:40
  a shit detector, you can really feel that and pick
• 2:09:42
  it up.
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 2: Then block it out.
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: I think your shit detector works with virtually everything. I
• 2:09:47
  think the audience gets it too.
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 2: I agree. In terms of if my shit detector advises
• 2:09:56
  me to do something, I must always do it. Yeah.
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 1: Well, this is Joe.
• 2:10:01
  Speaker 4: It's been an honor having you in here. You're a
• 2:10:03
  real legend. It's been such a pleasure. You are truly,
• 2:10:09
  what you do is you have redefined the interview and
• 2:10:13
  you made it in into a very special conversation chat
• 2:10:20
  between two guys who think they'll like each other, and
• 2:10:26
  they talk for hours, and they're inspired, and they come
• 2:10:32
  out liking each other, and you do that to people,
• 2:10:36
  and I think that's a great gift.
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 2: Thank you. I thank you. For the Joe Rogan experience.
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 1: Thank you for being here. It's an honor. It's an
• 2:10:43
  honor to meet you and an honor to have you
• 2:10:45
  on here. And I really enjoyed the conversation. It was awesome.
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you. I did too. All right.
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: Bye, everybody.