The Final Days and Suicide of Hunter S. Thompson | Joe Rogan and Timothy Denevi

One of the things about Hunter that's really intoxicating is that his sort of self-destructive path becomes romantic when you read it and you get involved in his work and you kind of mimic it. That's the greatest fallacy. I think what he was trying to say with self-destruction was that this was an incredible threat to our American democracy. No, I don't mean that. I mean, his... There's no romanticism to it. Well, I mean, the romantic aspect of it was that his work was fantastic. I mean, when he... But it was till it wasn't. It was fantastic till it wasn't. Till it wasn't. I mean, so he understood. He lived within the failure. But it was, until it wasn't. But he lived in with... He spent much more time within the consequences of that binging than he did within the success of the binging. Right. And that, I think he knew that in his letters. It's really beautiful and heartbreaking. And in his writing too. I mean, I think that's what's been missed about him is there's no romanticism in self-destruction. Right. Towards the end, he definitely lost his productivity. And Jan Werner talked about that in the Alex Gibney documentary. Yeah. And Sticky Fingers was a great... The new book on Jan Werner has great moments of Thompson in the 70s just being kind of lost. Yeah. You know, and I think we got to remember that. We have incredible times in American history. We have times that are going to burn brightly and it's up to each writer to decide how they'd like to burn next to it. And if they're going to burn brightly, they may not have other times. And that's, I think, an American thing where you can wager that bright flame, which means you may have nothing left afterwards. But Thompson knew that he may have to live in that kind of afterlife. Juan Thompson writes about it so beautifully. Yeah. The stories I tell myself. There's some footage of him when he was writing for, I forget what newspaper. Was it somewhere in the Pacific Northwest? What was he writing for? Who's the author of Playing Off the Rail? Google Playing Off the Rail. There's a guy who was a journalist. What year do you think it was? David McCumber? Yes. David McCumber. David McCumber employed Hunter for a while when David was... I forget what publication he was working for, but there's some footage of them communicating together and was trying to get Hunter... Was it in San Francisco? Was it San Francisco? And Hunter's just out of his fucking mind. I mean, he was younger. I mean, he wasn't even that old, but he was just wrecked. He just couldn't communicate. He couldn't talk. And, you know... He makes a beast of... You escape the pain of articulation. You escape the pain of saying, this is what's wrong in American society. For him to say the way he did, one of his great essays is from 1964. It's about going to Hemingway's, Ketchum, Idaho, grave in Hemingway's house. And it's gorgeous because it talks about Hemingway was a good writer, one of the best writers, when he was writing about a period he understood in the 1940s, 1930s, when there was a firmness to the reality that he could articulate. One of the writers' goals is to give a pattern to chaos, is to give an articulation to chaos. But what happens in the 1960s? When the chaos is multiplying repeatedly, somebody like Hemingway becomes a literal relic. His narrative no longer fits into the present that he's in. And Thompson saw Hemingway's decline, and he wrote about Hemingway's suicide by... What do you mean by his narrative doesn't fit? Hemingway's idea of what America was and what a man should be fit perfectly with what I think the 20s to the 40s, what we experienced. But I think in the early 1960s with our social upheaval of civil rights, of political upheaval, Hemingway, it was confusing to him. It didn't fit anymore. His way of operating no longer articulated the present. And so Hemingway's last act was to take away his ability to say anything at all. That was his only... The last thing Hemingway ever said was to say, I'm not going to say anything anymore, was the suicide that Hemingway committed. And Thompson wrote about that gorgeously. Yeah, when... He was young. When he wound up killing himself, it was almost unsurprising. When I read that he had died, I remember going, man, well, I guess, yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, it's like you knew that he was deteriorating rapidly. You knew that he had really bad hips. He had had hip replacement surgery. The Ralphs... Broken leg. Yeah. Ralphs Tedman had drawn this very crazy image of him with the artificial hip and... Yeah. It looked like pain. You know what I mean? But I think that it's not my place to even deal with that because Juan Thompson's book writes about that moment where one Thompson was in the house. And that's his... And Juan writes beautifully about the stakes of it, how painful it was to the people that loved him. Of course. Everything about it and how that... Even if that's a logical outcome that that's not... No. So it's interesting. I would say read stories I tell myself where that moment is so honestly and brilliantly written by Juan. No, I'm sure. But all I was getting at is that at the time of his death, he was in just sort of... He was deteriorating so badly. He was wearing diapers. His entire... Because of his alcoholism, his ability to control his bladder was gone. And so Juan gave this wonderful speech at George Mason when he came out. He was like, how do you write honestly about your father? And he asked the question of like, should I include this detail? And he was like, if my father was alive, I couldn't include that. But that's why I chose in a sense to write my book when my father was dead because I think my father would want me to write honestly, but also not want me to include that if he was still alive. And so he included that detail. And he talked about that, the struggle to include that detail, which I think brilliantly articulates what you're saying, which is the deterioration and the sadness of it. And I mean, we have finite amounts of energy or effort. We really do. We have to take care of ourselves. And if we don't, we will pay that price at some point. We're going to pay it anyways. We're all headed to the same place, whether we want to or not. And so I think Hunter's a really terrifying and beautiful example of one wager of chips that were made for the 1960s and 1970s. And I think the best way to honor that is to apply the brilliance that he forged and carved to the situation we have right now with corruption, Donald Trump.