Matt Taibbi and Joe Rogan on the Brilliance of Hunter S. Thompson

One of my favorite books ever about politics is Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail. Oh yeah, and I wrote the introduction to that a lot. Did you? Yeah, the last edition of that book. Oh, that's... Greatest book, yeah. It's a fantastic book. And it's a great example of someone who knew that they weren't a part of that system so they could talk about it as an outsider. He knew he was only going to be covering it for a year, so he just went in guns blazing, got everybody fucked up, drinking on the bus, making everybody do an asset. Burned all of them? Yeah, and he says that in the book. He's like, look, this isn't my beat. I don't have any friends I have to keep, you know? So I'm going to tell you everything that I see and fuck it. And that's a real problem in reporting. When you're in a beat for too long, you end up developing unhealthy relationships with sources and you end up in a position where you're not going to burn the people who you're dependent on to get your information. And when that happens to reporters, I think that's one of the reasons it's good to kind of cycle through different topics over the course of your career. If you get stuck in the same beat too long, eventually you fall into that trap. And Thompson, of course, never did that. Every story that he covered was he let it all hang out and just said whatever the hell he thought and he let the chips fall where they may. And that's kind of the way... I mean, you can't do that all the time probably, but I think that's the thing. That was great. It was amazing. There's no other examples of it. No, no. It's not like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that book was so great on so many levels. I always thought of it as being also kind of like a novel because it's this story about this person who's obsessed with finding meaning and truth, but he goes to the most fake place on earth, which is the campaign trail, to look for it. And so all these depictions of all these terrible lying people, they're just so hilarious. And so it's kind of... It's almost like a Franz Kafka novel. It's amazing. And then it's great journalism at the same time. He's telling you how the system works and how elections work and it's really valuable for that. So yeah, that was brilliant. He also changed a lot. He actually affected politicians. Like the shit that he did with Ed Muskie. Oh my God, Ed Boudin. That was fantastic. When he was on the Dick Cavett show and Dick Cavett asked him about it, he goes, well, there was a rumor that he was on Ibogaine and I started that rumor. I mean, it's just he literally got in that guy's head. Oh yeah. And I remember he put that picture of Muskie and he just found a picture of Muskie and it's... He's basically wearing... Like that. Yes. And the caption is Muskie in the throes of an Ibogaine frenzy, right? And you couldn't really get away with that now. Well, it's a crazy drug to choose too because it's a drug that gets you off addictions. Right, yeah, exactly. It's one of the more hilarious aspects of his choice. But it sounded great. Yeah. And with the witch doctor and all that stuff. Brazilian witch doctor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was fantastic. Oh, so good. Yeah, but that kind of stuff probably wouldn't go over all that well right now. No, he'd get sued. Yeah. Also, he had this very, very sort of aggressively characterizing way of looking at politics and politicians and that wouldn't go over that well now either. Like people don't want you to rip on the process as much as he did in that book. So it was great. It was just a fantastic book. Yeah, I mean, he had a bunch of them that were great, but that one particularly, it's... You can sort of redo it. You could reread it every time we get to an election cycle. And he sort of goes, oh, it lets you know these are repeating cycles. This is just like the same shit that he was dealing with in various different forms. But you can see it all today. And it's funny, the reporters, everybody's read that book. Everybody who covers campaigns. I'm on my fifth right now for Rolling Stone. Like I have his old job. And everybody has read that book. And so they unconsciously try to make the same characters in each election cycle. So there's always like a Christ-like McGovern figure. There's a turncoat, quisling, spineless, musky figure. There's the villain Nixon. Trump kind of fills that role for a lot of reporters now. And then a lot of them try to behave in the same way that their characters behave in the same book. So you remember Frank Mankiewicz was McGovern's sort of handler. And he was having beers with Thompson after the events and kind of strategizing with them. Reporters try to do that. They all try to do that with the candidates and their handlers. Now they try to develop those same relationships. It's just interesting. It's like they're reliving the book. That's a problem with someone that's really good. They take on so many imitators. So many imitators take on their demeanor and their thought process. And Hunter was just such an iconic version of a writer that it's so difficult, if you're a fan of his, to not want to be like that guy. Oh, totally. I mean, I know that. Especially because I'm writing for the same magazine and covering a lot of the same topics, you have to immediately realize that you can't do what he did. Thompson's writing was incredibly ambitious and unique. He was using a lot of the same techniques that the great fiction writers use. He was creating almost like this four-dimensional story, but at the same time it was also journalism. Most people couldn't get away with that. You have to be a great, great writer. I mean, I'm talking like a rare Mark Twain-level talent to really do what he did, which is to kind of mix the ambition of great fiction with journalism. So if you try to do that stuff, it's going to be terrible. And I've done, I've certainly, if you go back and look at my writing, you'll find a lot of shitty Thompson imitations. And so I learned to not do that pretty early. But yeah, it's one of those don't try this at home things for young writers, if you can avoid that for sure.