Joe Rogan | Humanizing Hunter S. Thompson w/Timothy Denevi

Pappy Canyon was actually a fan. No, they drank. They drank at the Watergate. Like they sat there and went deep like all night. But he definitely hunted, definitely shit on him. Oh, he shit on him hard. Pappy Canyon shit back on him hard. The first night they met was at the Nixon, at the Holiday Inn in 1968 in New Hampshire during Nixon's comeback campaign. And Thompson walks in and Pappy Canyon goes, who's this damn guy with the damn ski jacket walking through our goddamn lobby? And Thompson's like, I have a press pass. Like I'm here to do this. So they like have this big moment. And then later on that night, Thompson goes to a party with campaign people and with Pappy Canyon. And he brings a big bottle of wild turkey. And so Pappy Canyon's a young journalist at the time. He worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I think he'd gone to the Columbia Journalism School. He's working for Nixon as his main policy guy. And he looks at Thompson. He's like, that's the fucking ski. Oh, you got a bottle of what? Oh, if you got a bottle of old crow, like no, we'll drink that. And so they stayed up all night and they talked about the Vietnam War. And Thompson talked about how it disfigures us to be in a foreign war that's unjust and destroys our democratic ideals to be doing that. And Pachin was like containment, nuclear war. We're trying to get out of it. And they listened to each other till dawn, like that first night that they met. Now, what was your idea behind writing this book? Like what compelled you? I think we've mistaken Thompson. I think that we see him more as like a Dunesbury character. People who know him really well don't, but I think that most people through whatever cultural forces that we've had, well, can you explain that? Well, he's a voice. Because a lot of people don't know the comparison, what the Dunesbury character is. I think in the 80s or 70s, 80s, 90s, the cartoon Dunesbury by Gary Trudeau, it became, there was a character on it called Uncle Duke. And Uncle Duke was based on Hunter Thompson. And he was kind of an exaggerated version of Hunter Thompson. He was a cartoonish version of Hunter S. Thompson. And I think Terry Gilliam did a wonderful and kind of auteurist job on, like a brilliant job on fear-loathing in Las Vegas, but that's also an exaggerated version of Hunter Thompson. The amount of work Hunter Thompson did, the effort he put out, we forget that he was a straight journalist, where he did the freelance assignments. He wrote the straight articles for years to make money for his family. And it wasn't until he had his breakthrough with Hell's Angels that he could develop the style that we identify with today. And so it kills me that we identify him more as a clown or like more as a cartoonish figure as opposed to a very serious political thinker, political activist and serious writer who can give us insight into the fucking shit show we experience every moment today. Well, I think the perception of him is fairly nuanced. I don't think that everybody thinks of him as a cartoon character, although particularly later on in his life, he was relegated to that because he really didn't speak well. You know, later on in his life when he was just the drugs had taken over. Alcohol and alcohol. His son writes about the alcohol. Juan writes so beautifully about the toll alcoholism took on Hunter S. Thompson. Well, he couldn't talk anymore. I mean, when he was deep into his sixties, his heart was like, it was so hard to even understand him. There's a awful piece that he did with Conan O'Brien where Conan went to Woody Creek and shot guns off the back porch with him. And you could barely understand a fucking word Hunter saying. That's why I tried to end it with Nixon leaving because it was really sad when Nixon resigned. Hunter Thompson was at the Connecticut Hilton, which is a hotel right by the White House. Annie Leibowitz, the photographer with Rolling Stone was calling him and saying, we need to get to the White House. Nixon is leaving. Like he's going to get on the helicopter and Thompson just laid in the grass and he didn't go. You know, and that was heartbreaking. And he didn't end up writing the eight page spread that he needed to. Instead it became Annie Leibowitz's photography, which was a famous and in retrospect, like huge move for her career. But I think that that pain right there of thinking that he'd spent 10 years, I mean, he hated Nixon since the checker speech, you know, when Nixon was a VP for Eisenhower. He'd hated Nixon since 1962 when Nixon lost the California governor ship and said, you and the press, you've been giving me the shaft for so long. You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. Thompson had seen that Nixon was somebody who said, I'm just the poor son of a butcher. I'm just this like very hardworking, you know, American that represents all of us. Where behind that, like he was a politically, you know, ravenous monster who was anti-communist who would go to any extent to win. And Thompson saw that and Thompson knew that other people saw it. And in 1964, at the Barry Goldwater Convention in San Francisco, my favorite lead named arena of all time, the Cow Palace. Barry Goldwater was gonna speak to accept the nomination and what happened was Nixon was introducing him. It was Nixon's way back from the wilderness. Thompson was a few rows back. That's the first time Thompson I think was that close to see him live. And Nixon's like, you know, poor son of a butcher. Don't think about me. Just think about Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, who'll become Mr. President. And Thompson was like, fuck. Everybody here knows he's lying. But they think that that act of lying is a skill in the way a used car salesman who lies but can make a lot of money off it is skillful. The way that Trump by selling steaks to people and then they go bankrupt and he gets rich. That's an American skill. And Thompson sends that from the start with Nixon. And so I think he battled against Nixon for a decade, for a lot of years. And when Nixon left, I think he felt spent. And so I tried not to focus on the later, you know, I ended then in 74. Cause I think it, he wrote some beautiful things afterwards. He was still a great- He definitely had some moments where he decided to not do the assignment that he was supposed to do. And it was kind of sad. Like the Ali Foreman fight. He fucking floated in the pool. Yeah, floated in the pool with a Nixon mask on, flew all the way to Africa. And it was one of the greatest sports moments. It was like game six of, you know, you know, the Boston Red Sox versus the Reds. I think Ali was something different to people than I think it's, I don't think we have someone like that today. So it's very difficult for us to understand. People today look at Ali and they go, Oh, he was a heavyweight boxing champion. He was way more than that. He was a cultural figure that represented the resistance to the Vietnam war. And represented it with the biggest loss that any public figure had ever shown. And willingly gave up three years of his career in his prime from age 27 to 30. From 1967, from the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight, he didn't fight again for three years. He didn't train. He didn't do anything. They kept him from his career. When he was in his prime, when he was the best heavyweight of all time. And he spoke publicly and often. And he was fucking hated all over the country, but he represented something different. Like my parents were hippies. And when I was a little kid, he lost to Leon Spinks and the rematch was on television. My parents never watched TV and they definitely never watched boxing. And they sat in front of that TV to watch that. I remember thinking, I can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match. Like this is crazy. And I was probably like, I don't know, maybe eight or nine years old or something at the time. And I just remember thinking, I can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match. And that's really when it sunk into me at a really early age that this guy was not just this heavyweight boxer. He was a cultural icon. He was a historical figure. He meant a lot. And to Hunter, he meant a lot. He meant something much bigger than just a boxer. And so Hunter thought he was going to a death sentence. George Foreman had crushed Joe Frazier. He crushed everybody. I mean, he was so powerful. George Foreman to this day is one of the all-time scariest heavyweights of all time. Without a doubt, he could hit so fucking hard and literally pick guys off their feet. He hit Joe Frazier and lifted him off his feet with a punch. And everybody was convinced that that was gonna happen to Ali, that Ali had been past his prime and just look at what George Foreman had done to Joe Frazier. What is he gonna do to Muhammad Ali? And Ali just rope-adoped him until he got tired and then fucked him up in front of the whole world. That's one of the greatest athletic moments. I mean, we forget that athletes, athletes like Kurt Flood, you know, they risked. Kurt Flood was the American baseball player who challenged the reserve clause. Because in baseball, you weren't allowed to get free agency for another team. And Kurt Flood was this great player. And he was like, I'm gonna sit out and I'm gonna wait. Athletes like Colin Kaepernick. They've sacrificed their career. It's not the same with Muhammad Ali, who was like Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds and like everybody combined at that one moment. But he was risking, it's the opposite of Trump. Trump used his celebrity to become this even more mangled version of himself and get more power. Ali used his celebrity to speak for his virtue and his value and his beliefs. And like, Thompson was really good at understanding what people sacrifice, what people have to give up, the wager, you know, between what that act will be, what the results will be. They may be later, but he knew that. And so his respect for Ali, for giving up those years of his prime, you know, was enduring. Thompson came back from that fight and he gave his son Juan boxing gloves, or Ali's boxing gloves. Wow. Yeah, it's very, very unfortunate that he missed that fight because it would have been fascinating to hear his take on it. I mean, I'm sure he would have been so moved when he saw Ali win. I mean, that's a good point. It was indicative of, I think, the stress and the pressure that the last decade of covering Nixon had taken out on him. Well, there's a little bit of that, but let's be honest, he was also kind of a fuckup. I mean, when he was writing for Rolling Stone and they gave him that early fax machine. Yeah, and he would fuck that thing up. He would unplug it, plug it back in. He would do it just so he could go to the bar and say, this thing doesn't work. But that was the end, I think, of his arc where he was still on point. He was still playing the role of a serious journalist and he would use that persona as a fuckup. And there's letters by Jan Wenner being like, you cannot turn in your articles three hours before we go to press. I know you made it. This doesn't fucking work. And so he was beginning to break down then. He was also, I think, on the tail end of his decade of being a journalist who had met every deadline so that he could fucking feed his family and he could afford Alf Arm. Like, there's moments where, before he got the contract for Hell's Angels in 1965, he was ready to be like a longshoreman. He was going and looking for work in the mornings in San Francisco to try to support his family. He was willing to give up writing. And instead that article blew up and all these beautiful letters began to arrive at 319 Parnassus where he lived at the top of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. And that opened up his chance to continue being a writer, but money was the main motivating factor. And so I think once money unfurled, once alcoholism, I think, took its toll, and once he couldn't walk around anymore at a political convention without people just grabbing his shoulder and saying, you're Hunter Thompson, once that happened, I think things began to change. Yeah, that's one of the things that he talked about that I thought was really interesting, that he became a part of the story. It wasn't just that he was covering stories. He couldn't be anonymous anymore. He was, in many cases, more famous than the people that he was covering. Like when he would go to meet Nixon, all Nixon's Secret Service agents wanted to meet him and they wanted to get an autograph from him and shake his hand and it was just too weird. And then there's the alcoholism. Alcoholism, look, it's a depressant. It wrecks you. And if you read, me and Greg Fitzsimmons on a podcast once read off that one journalist who had detailed Hunter's daily routine. And so we read the daily routine and they put a techno beat to it. It's fucking hilarious. That was a bad, that's a sad, so it's so funny because those seem funny now, but they're kind of a death knell. I mean, that daily routine, that was the biography Hunter, it was in that. And it's just, it's heartbreaking. I mean, we gotta remember that the dedication to fear and loathing in Las Vegas was he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. And I think the world was painful for Hunter Thompson. I think it was painful to see powerful people abuse the weak and take what they wanted brazenly without being held accountable. I think it was hard to deal with shitty editors who cut half your fucking essay on Nixon or half your story and made it into something that had nothing to do with the effort that you put out. I think it was hard to pay your bills and live the way that you wanted to live. And I think a lot of that gets undermined. I just want people to realize how much effort he put out, especially during those years, where he was like, all right, I wanna be a great journalist. I wanna have a voice in our society. I wanna participate in our national conversation. My only path towards that is to work harder than everybody else, to be at places when things happen and when they matter. And he sacrificed a lot for that, but he was there. And he's a voice in a light that we can have in this moment, which is another troubling moment in American history.