Joe Rogan | The Events That Shaped Hunter S. Thompson w/Timothy Denevi

Good to see you though man. What's up? Good to be here and talk Hunter Thompson. My pleasure. So your book, Free Kingdom. You know, we live in interesting times right now. It's kind of a kind of a shit show at every... Keep this about a fist from your face. Pull that sucker. There you go. What should I do with my hands? Should I put them up? You can do whatever you want with your hands. I shoot with this one. What is all this... you got a lot of writing. Well when I wrote the book I wanted to make sure my sentences never sounded like Thompson's sentences. So I didn't write out a lot of his sentences but this morning before coming on I went and got some of my favorite quotes and just wrote them out long-handed to get a sense of what his perspective was and rhythm was again. Didn't he do that with the Great Gatsby? He did it like a few times. He did it by hand. He like typed it out. Yeah. I love that idea that he was trying to find like the rhythm of the words. That's such a fascinating notion because comedians do that in the early days of comedy like a lot of guys in like before they ever start going on stage themselves they'll imitate their favorite comedians bits like they'll do a Richard Pryor bit and they'll do it to their friends and they'll get get a sense of the rhythm and the timing and get those laughs from doing a Richard Pryor bit to their friends and then they get that bug. It's like part of what infects them. I mean that's the hardest thing to steal. We're not plagiarizing but we're trying to understand what decisions they made. Beautiful work. Yeah I'm sure he wasn't plagiarizing but it's it's so unfortunate when when someone does. Yes. You know when when you have someone whether it's Hunter or Richard Pryor or anyone who's just got a truly exceptional and unique mind. Or someone who doesn't like our president and decided when he ran in 2016 to plagiarize Richard Nixon's 1968 convention speech directly. Really? Yeah that was the headline in the fucking times it said Nixon's inspiration. I'm sorry Trump's inspiration Nixon is the one. So the lines about crime and like barbarians at the gates crime law and order those were all from Nixon's shitty but successful 1968 Miami Convention speech and Thompson you know Thompson knew how effective that that was. Yeah I wonder if he did that on purpose because he was so good and one thing that Trump is so good at he's so good at getting the media to talk about him. Exactly. And like one of the best ways to get the media to talk about him was give them something to be angry about that no one else is gonna give a fuck about. He was like oh Melania plagiarized but I plagiarized much better from Nixon. That's right. So what loved it. Melania took some lines from Michelle Obama's speech right? Yeah. Oh if you plagiarize Nixon that's okay. I mean so we're freaking them the book about Hunter S. Thompson I mean it's really about taking the fucking emotion of living in this present looking back at Thompson's career and then trying to write it like a novel to dramatize all of the experiences he went through that are today so applicable to us and just show his perspective that's so applicable to us today. What do you got here Jamie? From New York Times. It's Donald Trump's convention but the inspiration Nixon. I was like are you you're running on Nixon? That's what you're running on? There are some parallels you know I mean do you remember when when Hunter got together with Bill Murray and Bill's brother and they did that thing where they were trying to get people to Nixon got a bad deal we got to bring them back and people were going along with it. Yeah that's a good yeah. Yeah do you remember that? Yeah. Like that there's a lot of parallels with Trump in that regard. I mean one of my favorite quotes by Thompson is like you know Richard Nixon is with his Barbie doll family and his Barbie doll wife is like America's answer to you know it's America's Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde like you know he is the werewolf he speaks to the werewolf in us and Nixon chose to hide that werewolf his whole career until it finally came out because he was insane with power. Trump ran on the werewolf he's like no I'm not gonna hide it that's who I am that's what I'm gonna use to try to get elected and like George Wallace did like other politicians did it had resonance and it happened with Trump because of our media environment because of the place we live in now to amplify him all the way to the most powerful position in the world which is insane. It would be really fascinating to see if Hunter was alive in his prime now how he would I think his take on it would be very similar to Matt Taibbi's you know like Matt Taibbi in is in my opinion our more reasonable more put together version of Hunter Thompson because he's more sustained or disciplined long career version of Hunter Thompson. He's like rational and he's there all the time like I'm sure you've heard the recently uncovered recording of Hunter calling in to some company that installed a DVD player and he's fucking screaming and yelling it's like 15 minutes and then he like gets lost and he goes what the fuck and the DVD player doesn't work. My fucking chords. I mean that was in the 1980s were not the best you know I think what Taibbi does is what Thompson did very well Hunter Thompson was really good at looking at Nixon saying how are you manipulating the way we see you to get a version of you out and Taibbi looks at the way the media gets played he looks at the way that an administration manipulates the media and he dramatizes that while everybody else just gives us the information the administration is giving us and that goes back to Thompson with Nixon. Thompson had space when he worked for Rolling Stone he could write about how Nixon made everybody watch his speeches the press on a closed circuit television and they made the press just like Trump off in the corner when the plane arrived you know being berated by everybody it's very similar to what is going on now and again we see people giving hot takes or we see people doing op-eds we don't see people dramatizing how manipulative these corrupt administrations are and were and Thompson did that beautifully. Taibbi does that beautifully. Was Nixon being berated by the press is that why he chose to have the- I thought he was I mean he was a crook so he doesn't want the press to investigate him like he you know he was a crook with sin Clemente like his loans with BB Roboso and all of that he was a crook the way he used the IRS to investigate his and I mean he was a crook when he tried to break into the Brookings Institution to destroy and bomb evidence like he didn't want the press around him because he had committed very serious crimes that I think that's similar to what we see now I mean as people said on the show no no president wants that a journalist you know digging into their lives specifically because it's you don't want chumminess with journalists but I think Trump and Nixon both knew they had so much to hide that to actually have a journalist like Hunter Thompson who was a good investigative journalist to have a journalist like Matt Taibbi around that's dangerous for them they'll go to jail which Nixon should have yeah Trump perhaps should well who knows what's going to happen how did you how'd you get involved with writing this book well I mean I've always loved honorist Thompson and I was reading exposed to him you know in in in a I was 17 years old in a Catholic high school at Bellarmine College preparatory up in San Jose and we had a counterculture writing class and so I read some of it there and then a friend had an audiobook of fear and loathing and so I just remember the first time hearing that old audiobook of fear and loathing and we're somewhere around Barstow at the edge of the desert and then in my 20s I really got into strange rumblings in Aztlan which is about a conspiracy within the Los Angeles Police Department regarding the death of Ruben Salazar I'm a prominent journalist and I read that I'm like oh my god dude this isn't somebody that's just dancing on stage or like performing a road narrative this is an investigative journalist who's going to the most powerful people but exposing things they don't want us to see and in a sense risking his life to do so because he says in strange rumblings in Aztlan which is in Rolling Stone in 1970 he says that they're willing to kill Ruben Salazar who was the most prominent journalist in Los Angeles you could argue at the time what the fuck is to stop them from killing me Hunter Thompson for asking these questions. Well I think that's what a lot of people are saying today with Jamal Khashoggi you know Jamal Khashoggi's death has got a lot of journalists really freaking out like what you know what am I doing if I'm criticizing world leaders and talking about international politics if this could happen to me. Political violence is effective because it's used to silence you either opposition or journalists and so for me running this book and I tried to dramatize it like a novel it's quick it's like only 220 210 pages and then it's like 100 pages of notes so I like cited every sight smell or sound so that somebody that knows Thompson really well can be like where the fuck did you get this information and somebody else can if they have questions just go back and look but long story short for me the crux of the book was in Chicago in 1968 where Hunter Thompson had a press pass he went to the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night Mayor Daley gave this order to clear the intersection of Balboa in Michigan because there is a protest going on five ten thousand people. Thompson was standing next to the hay market in which was on the ground floor level it was a plate glass window he was standing with delegates from the Democratic National Convention standing with their wives and the cops charged they did like a double pinch of formation like Hannibal and like um Kuwai and like fucking 100 BC and they split the protesters in half beat everybody hit Thompson over the head he got his motorcycle helmet on just in time so he's not concussed he can see everything that's going on and the entire plate glass window behind him shatters everybody falls in cops jump in are beating everybody and he's looking around and he's sure that snipers on the roof are going to open fire at any moment so he runs to the blackstone where he's staying across the way shows his room key gets beat up by the cops as he's trying to get in he goes I live here god damn it I'm paying 100 a day let me in my fucking room and he barely gets in and he just sits on his bed afterwards and he says they knew I was pressed they saw my press pass they hit me because I was pressed and if that's where we're at right now with journalists you know if political opponents and journalists are being clubbed to keep silent and to not respond then this is not the democracy we know yeah his ex-wife talked about that as being like one of the only moments where she saw him cry for two weeks he just cried afterwards for two weeks he couldn't stop it's crazy wow there was a it was a crazy time right I mean that that time is very similar in a lot of ways to what's going on today it's just today there's just so much more information and so much more people have so much more of an ability to communicate yeah and I think it's almost easier to coordinate violence I was just talking to the head of the proud boys you know Gavin McGinnis is a group um Enrique Tarrio and he's like you know he's he's saying he's using the language on the left he's like I'm a victim I can't buy groceries they've taken my bank accounts my plant forms but when he talks about violence he's like who the fuck are you Antifa like I'm you know you're 120 pounds and wet like if we have civil war you're gonna lose and I was sitting next to him during the podcast and basically what I said was if we have a civil war you're gonna be hit by sniper fire from the fucking roof you're not gonna be in a fist fight with Antifa across the way and I think there's this idea on the right that we can push towards violence and we can get very close to it with our rhetoric or with our um actions but that it won't spread like the conflagration won't keep going yeah I don't know if that's isolated to the right I mean with Antifa on the left too and that's why I left Thompson was as hard on the left as he was on the right when he wrote and that was so important for his intelligence as a writer but I think just even the left and the right in general for a lot of these people is just an identity and a gang that they belong to and I don't think they really understand violence you know you want to talk about violence talk to a military guy you know talk to someone who really understands what violence actually is and they don't have this empty rhetoric like these fools do exactly there's a lot of these people that are calling for violence like no you should be calling for camaraderie you should be calling for communication we should be calling for some way we could all work this out where the civilians this the civilization that we live in that we all we all can get along together and most people don't want to impede you from living your life and doing what you want to do most people the vast majority hunter dawson believed in working within the system you know he believed like it might be a fucked up system but you can still run for sheriff and aspen and he believed once you resort to violence that means the conversation is stopped and it disfigures you so he cried for two weeks that was the most surprising thing for me researching this book and writing it was to see how much the violence affected him that he experienced at chicago you can speak to someone who's done mma fighting who's been punched in the face as hard as somebody can punch you most americans haven't had that and that changes your ability to articulate something back in that moment it means you if that's political if it's a police officer or a political opponent that uses violence instead of an argument to respond to you we've left the realm that we recognize and we're not going to be able to communicate even in the limited way that we're communicating right now and thompson knew that so that's why after chicago i love that he went back to aspen and he's like i'm gonna run fucking sheriff i'm gonna run i'm gonna do a mayoral campaign in aspen and that was brilliant because it was his way to control his environment knowing that mary daley's not listening to his nonviolent protest richard nixon is not listening to his nonviolent protest thompson needed to find another avenue to try to work within the american system to make things happen and a great contrast is his good friend um oscar zeta acosta there's a wonderful pbs documentary rise and fall the brown buffalo by um philip waterriga is a great director and it's acosta's life that's who dr gonzo is based on yeah sure in fear and loathing and you know thompson had more advantages than acosta and acosta was being pursued by the la pd was eventually set up by them and for him working within the system he ran for sheriff wasn't an option the cops set him up for a high speed bust you know like the cops had the cops had undercover agents from something called the special operations for conspiracy which is a fucking department in the la pd at the time and they were trying to use those provocateurs to incite violence against the plainclothes police so that or the normal close police so that lethal violence could be used to silence a civil rights movement in the brown barrett so they used agent provocateurs to make it look like they're a part of the protest yeah there's an age-old tactic right that's how you destroy a civil rights movement because the most effective weapon in silencing civil rights is the lethal force and you can do that in another country as the u.s has done but the u.s can't use tactics like my lie like thompson writes about this in the u.s unless you have a provocative reason unless somebody that's undercover attacks a cop and so the cops then like what happened on august 29th 1978 during the moratorium riots can just flood east l.a and kill whoever they want they can the blue ribbon solids are head off with a tear gas gun