#2508 - Joe Eszterhas

Joe Eszterhas is an author, former journalist for “Rolling Stone,” and screenwriter known for films such as “Basic Instinct,” “Sliver,” “Showgirls,” and “Flashdance.”www.imdb.com/name/nm0000390/ Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Use code ROGAN at https://BlueChew.com to get 10% OFF + Free Overnight Shipping on your first order. Open an account in minutes at https://Chime.com/Rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Okay, let's rock.

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  You need the headphones?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Never.

• 0:16Joe Rogan?

  No? Okay.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  If it's okay with you, I know I've seen it both ways.

• 0:21Joe Rogan?

  No, you don't have to wear them. You were telling me about your cane. That cane is amazing.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  It's amazing. It's carved by the Dogon people, who were in Mali. And it's a family that's been doing it for 100 years. And many of them were killed in the Rwandan wars. It's heavy, it's beautifully done, I think. And it's been a close companion of mine for many years. It seems to be indestructible.

• 0:52Joe Rogan?

  It's pretty awesome looking. It looks heavy. The Dogon people have a very strange origin story. It's a fascinating origin story that involves, is it a... It involves like, here it is. I didn't want to misspeak. So here it is. Centers on the Supreme Creator, Amma, and the cosmic journey of the amphibious water spirits known as the Noma. So they have this crazy cosmic origin story that's a part of their mythology. Amma then attempted to procreate with the earth, but the pairing was flawed.

• 1:35Joe Rogan?

  It's like a very strange descendant of the ark. According to the Dogon traditions, the Noma descended to earth from the Sirius star system in a giant ark-like vessel. The vessel contained the eight original human ancestors, along with the seeds and animals needed to populate the world. Those are the Dogon people.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  It's amazing. I didn't know that. It's amazing.

• 1:56Joe Rogan?

  Crazy story.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I have a daughter who's a nature photographer. She does a lot of work in Africa. And she knows all about that stuff.

• 2:07Joe Rogan?

  So you were telling me, before we got rolling, I said, "Save this for the air," that Vladimir Zelensky and his wife have seen Basic Instinct how many times?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  15, at least 15. There's a recent biography that said that, that began when they were recording.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  And that they had known each other before and one day she saw him with this tape in his hand, she said, what is it? And he said, basic instinct. And then they saw it together and it had such an effect on them that they played it together many times, at least fifteen times during on their anniversaries. Now, I'm not sure what that says. And I know that some people think the movies had a kind of amatory effect on them. But the other thing that's interesting to me is if you see it fifteen times, does it really fuck you up to the point where you go to war with Putin? I mean, is that the real key to why it happened?

• 3:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, in his defense, Putin attacked first.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I like Zelensky very much as a figure. And I'm very sympathetic to the Ukrainians because I've got Hungarian background. And in 1956, the Russians devastated Hungary in a similar freedom fight. So maybe it gave him the balls and the wisdom to go after Putin.

• 3:30Joe Rogan?

  Maybe it just made him horny. Who knows? Might have nothing to do with the war.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Might not.

• 3:35Joe Rogan?

  You made some crazy fucking movies, man. You really did.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  It will be there are eighteen of them that have been made. And there have been like thirty-four scripts that had been, so there are sixteen that haven't been made. And I don't know, you know, I kid around and I say there's a twisted little man inside and he lives in some spot that I'm not sure where it exactly is. But he's twenty-nine, born twenty-nine, he will die twenty-nine. And with anything that has a relatively strong sexual content, he wrote the fucking thing. I'm just an old guy giving him the space. You know, so when the recent deal was made for a record amount of money for Basic Instinct Three, because there was a sequel to it. That was a total piece of shit and I had nothing to do with it.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  But this would be Three, and my title for it is Basic Instinct: Jezebel. The Twisted Little Man put together this story that I think people will have fun with, but it continues in that same vein, and it seems to be his specialty. So, let's see what happens.

• 4:42Joe Rogan?

  I like how you refer to yourself as like another person.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:46Joe Rogan?

  The Twisted Man.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  There is, you know, there's a thing with little kids where they have a companion, an invisible companion. Right, and the Twisted Little Man is my main one. I have others. Mark Dwayne is one, and interestingly, Jesus of Nazareth is another. And then these people are very, very close to me. Twisted Little Man is a darker presence than the others, although Dwayne is a cross between the two of them, and I absolutely love him.

• 5:14Joe Rogan?

  So, when you were writing things like Basic Instinct, do you really feel like you were channeling like another person? Is that what it felt like?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  It felt, well, let me give you the backdrop. I wrote it in thirteen days. And then I felt like it just poured out of me. There is a background to it, and that is the Catherine Trammell character and then the Nick Curran character. Many, many years before, in college, I had an affair with a, I was an eighteen-year-old kid, and I had an affair with a faculty member's wife.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  It was a serious affair, and the, we, she was sophisticated, smart, beautiful, sassy, exactly the kind of woman I've always fallen for. And she had a profound effect on me. Now, at the end of the, at the end of the year, she moved on, and I discovered that there was a different student that she was with each year, and that her husband looked the other way.

• 6:26Joe Rogan?

  How old was she?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Thirty-nine. And I was eighteen. I was a very green eighteen because I grew up an ethnic immigrant kid. The, uh, the, uh...

• 6:40Speaker 01

  I, I, I fell in love easily. But falling in love easily also meant a lot in terms of learning things. Cause I, I was an immigrant and I really didn't know this country and I was shy. And, and I learned a lot sometimes, I think, more from the, from the women that I was together with the beginning in college and through the rest of my life. Then, then I preferred the company of women always because they weren't armored off in, in nail macho. Right. But, but anyway, she was stuck there in my memory. And then when I was a police reporter, um, almost a decade and a half later, um, a decade

• 7:23Speaker 01

  later, at the plane dealer, I had a buddy who was a cop that I liked very much, who had been involved in three or four shootings. And when we got to know each other and we spent time drinking together and we did a lot of that, I started wondering how, if he really liked the shootings. Was it an itchy trigger finger or did he just get off on it? So somehow these two characters were in my head and, and, and I thought about them a lot, but they didn't come together. And then I think thanks to the twist of Little Man, one day the two came together in, in, in a love story. And that was the, that was the genesis of Basic Incident.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  And by the time I, I wrote it, I had thought about it subconsciously and directly for a long time. I would wake up in the middle of the night and jot notes down, which happens to me sometimes when I'm, when I'm very involved in a script. And I wrote it in Hawaii. I went off to Hawaii by myself. I let the sun beat me up. I snorted some coke, um, which was, which was an habit in those days. And after thirteen days of, of all of that, and the other thing I did was listen to the Stones all the time. I loved the Stones. I loved, I loved the blues from the time I was an immigrant kid. And the Stones just blew everything else out during that period of time for me. So I listened to that at the end of thirteen days.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  I had this script and I went back home to Marin, typed it up, sent it, almost sent it to my agent with the title Love Hurts. And I was going out the door. The twist, the little man had another thought and I raced back inside and wrote the word Basic Instinct. Sent it to my agents, they auctioned it. Ten days later, my main agent Guy McElwain, who became my big brother and one of the people I really loved in life. Everybody bid on it. It wound up selling for a record $3 million. And then it became a towering hit. To this day, it trend.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  The critics in the beginning were critical, mildly critical. No, actually, the critics were really after the movie. And then through the years, the critics have had a change of mind.

• 9:43Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that funny?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. A woman named Camille Bagley, who was a main feminist critic, who went up against the movie very strongly recently, not recently, but in the past five or 10 years, has come around and said that the movie is the example of, it's a post feminist classic, she says. And it's about women who don't have to hide their sexuality.

• 10:07Joe Rogan?

  That's wild that she made such a turnaround. This episode is brought to you by The Mosquito Bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part, it's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat, where the stakes were life and death. Directed by Peter Berg, the guy behind Friday Night Lights, and starring Nicholas Galatzin, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis. The Mosquito Bowl, in theaters October 30.

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• 11:51Joe Rogan?

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• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:10Joe Rogan?

  I wonder, did you ever have a conversation with her?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  No, I've never met her. She teaches, um, somewhere on the east coast and then she has a towering reputation, but I've never met her. I usually don't listen to critics through the eighteen films and, you know, I don't, I don't listen to critics. I worked for the director, Richard Markwand, who directed Jack at Edge and Hearts, excuse me, and Hearts of Fire, and we worked on another, another one together. And Richard had said to me that critics should be taken out into the backyard and shot, okay? I worked with another director, Mike Figg, on One Night Stand, who said that critics should be taken out of the backyard and headbutted to death.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I was sympathetic to both, to both things.

• 13:56Joe Rogan?

  It's so wild that your views were formed by this relationship that you have when you're eighteen with an older horny, smart lady who's like, you know, kind of wild.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:08Joe Rogan?

  And then a cop.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:10Joe Rogan?

  Who might have been a shady cop.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yes. And how the two came together and in this, in this twisted thing called creativity, you know, and they come out of this maelstrom. Now, the other thing I'm sure was an influence is by the time I did that, I'd been through four years of police beat experience covering cops, um, two in Dayton, Ohio, and two in Cleveland. And, excuse me, and that consisted of, at that point, you're driving around in a company car, you got the police radio, um, and responding to whatever was going on. On occasion, you got there before the cops

• 14:51Speaker 01

  got there. Um, and then the one that really stuck in my head and got inside me was, was there was one with the report of a, the shooting on a suburb in Dayton, and I got there. Um, there were no cops there, the, the, the front door was wide open. I walked in, um, I, I, I passed the body of a guy who, who had shot himself and there was blood all over the wall. And then a woman, um, was his wife that he'd shot. And I heard someone in the back of the house screaming and crying. And then I walked, went back there and the thing that was really got to me is she was

• 15:35Speaker 01

  screaming and crying in Hungarian. Um, the, and it was an old lady who was the, the mother's mom. Um, and then of course I spoke fluent Hungarian and grew up Hungarian. Um, and, uh, and there was something about the scene that, that's with me to this day. The other police beat experience I had, Joe, there was, that was very moving was I covered the, the Glendale urban uprising in Cleveland. It was a big one and there were, I think, six or seven policemen, um, shot and killed. Um, the, I was crouched behind a, um, a, a car on the street, dugging down with, with

• 16:16Speaker 01

  about 10 feet in front of me was a, was a cop bleeding, badly bleeding, moaning. Um, and who the, the, um, and at the same time, there were gunshots coming from the, from this apartment house. And I heard that the, that the gunshots were coming from a group of so-called black nationalists led by a man named Fred Ahmed Evans. I knew both men. I, I knew from the police beat, um, the, the, uh, the, the cop, um, was Hungarian. Um, his name was Elmer Joseph. Um, and he would come around to the little office in the police beat all the time and I knew him. And, and the black man was named Fred Ahmed Evans.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Um, and he would come by in his dashiki sometimes at two in the morning because I worked the overnight shift sometimes. And we had the greatest talks, you know, drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of dope, um, and got to be pals. And he was leading the group of black nationalists and who had been who were shooting these policemen and I was behind this car's wheels a few feet away from the whole shit.

• 17:25Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  And I found the whole thing so frightening and so disturbing that I pissed my pants.

• 17:32Joe Rogan?

  Jesus Christ.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  So the four years of police, there were other incidents I covered. The urban uprisings in Detroit, two in Cleveland and one in Newark. I was very involved in the civil rights movement. And that's what I did. I covered whatever was breaking and much of it was dark stuff. So by the time that hookup happened between Catherine Trammell and Nick Curran, there was a lot that went into it.

• 18:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I could imagine. Like what the insane life experience to be able to see all those different crime scenes and witness all that and...

• 18:15Speaker 01

  You know, what happened was that I happened to pick a field. Journalism, I thought, and so did Hunter. One of the things, we became friends. We were both poor kids and we both dreamed of being novelists. Novelist.

• 18:34Joe Rogan?

  You mean Hunter Thompson?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hunter Thompson. And the way that we chose to begin that was by doing journalism because no one made a living writing novels and we both had to make a living. So Hunter wrote stuff for the National Enquirer and then moved down to Rolling Stone and all of that. And I did it on a local level. And that put us into a culture that was exploding. The American society was exploding. The black situation vis a vis white racism was horrendous. So there was a dynamic in the country that we were on top of because of what we did.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  So I saw a lot. I saw a lot in the refugee camps because I was in, I began my seven years in refugee camps in Austria and then grew up dirt poor in an urban city. And I saw a lot of stuff there as well that was, that was dark and moving and profoundly effective.

• 19:44Joe Rogan?

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• 20:29Joe Rogan?

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• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:51Joe Rogan?

  Which is so much more effective and makes sense why your stuff was so dark and wild.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does make sense. The, the, and the, you know, I mean, when I was a kid in Cleveland growing up, we lived in a very poor part of town, near West Side. There was a boy next door. And I used to say, I slept on a couch in the living room that overlooked the bar. And one night, I was looking out the window, because I always was. Neon lights and Puerto Rican hookers and all of that stuff. They're really interested, a little kid, who spent most of his time playing with, as Mark Twain said, with his pecker.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  And so this was all very exciting stuff. And I was watching one one day, and I saw this man on this stab another one to death and fall down and bleed to death.

• 21:50Joe Rogan?

  Oh gee, how old were you?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Twelve.

• 21:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there are reasons why. The other thing with my scripts is almost everything in my scripts is somehow comes from some kind of personal tie. You know, Big Shots, which was a little movie that was very popular with kids, came from my son Steve's experience in Marin County with a black friend and how they tried to make that friendship work. And that's what the movie is. It's a little movie about two kids, a white kid and a black kid, trying to become friends. There was a movie I did called Checking Out with Jeff Daniels, and that was about midlife crisis.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  And suddenly, now, in my early to mid thirties, I was scared shitless that I was going to die. Here I am at fucking eighty-one, talking about dying at thirty-something. But so there was a comedic thing that came out of that. It basically came out of where it did. But there was almost with every one, and there was some kind of Betrayed came out of the notion that, at that particular point, if you remember, there was all this right-wing craziness where there were militias that were shooting people and there were jamborees where the right-wingers got together.

• 23:20Joe Rogan?

  When was this?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Betrayed, which came out in the mid-eighties. There were several incidents in Oregon and in northwest parts of the country, which got a lot of publicity. It was before Timothy McVeigh. But roughly in that same period. So I decided, under a false name, to go to one of these jamborees and see what the hell is going on. Essentially, my journalism experience, I went into it. And then out of it, I concocted this romance between Deborah Winger and Tom Berenger. But they all had some kind of a tie. Telling Lies in America, which is one of my favorite little movies, with Kevin Bacon and Brad Renfro. Semi-autobiographical, in terms of the issues I had as a high school kid.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  With bullying and all of those kinds of things. And becoming an American citizen. And they were shot, incidentally, right where I grew up, in front of the apartment house where we lived. And I remember hearing a TV reporter in Cleveland interview. An old man was watching the shooting and saying, "Did you know Joe when he grew up here?" And he said, "Yeah, I was a bartender there." And then he said, "Shit, Joe is just a fucking refugee trying to make his way in the world." He nailed it. I mean, that's really what...

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Not a complicated thing, but that's really what happened. The only other thing, and nice things have been said about me through the years, but the only other thing that I really treasure and absolutely love is I interviewed O. S. Redding the night before he was killed in the plane crash in Cleveland. And we started, we began speaking around midnight after a show at a place called Leo's Casino. And we began talking around midnight and talked till 3:30 in the morning.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  We did a lot of beer, we did a lot of Jim Beam. We smoked a lot of really powerful Thai stuff. Um, and had a great time. And at the end of it, when he had to, he had to go. Go and he, he, he said, give me a fucking hug. And I gave him a hug and he said, you know what you are? He said, you're a fucking white nigger, that's what you are. And I, I love that. Stayed with me all this time. The New York Times said he's a force of nature. People said, if Shakespeare were alive today. Was maybe Joe S. around? Fuck all that, it's bullshit. What Otis said and what the old man said, I thought was really great, you know?

• 26:01Joe Rogan?

  Well, here and there, Otis Redding was such a legend.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Oh, he was, he was great.

• 26:05Joe Rogan?

  He died so young, too. How old was he?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  He died, he was really, I was at his thirties someplace. But listen to this, the, the, I interviewed him and I went home. The next day at the plane dealer, it was Sunday and I was working. I'm literally the day after the interview. And, uh, so I'm sitting there in this hall-like city room. And the, the, I see a city editor, the, the, the Associated Press wire machine start dinging. And in those days, if it had more than like four or five dings, there was some bad thing that happened. So I sit and I saw a city editor come from the city desk to this dinging machine. Right, and he's staring at it, the fucking thing is still dinging. Staring at it and then he looks at me like that in the city room. And then he looks away.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  So I, I, I saw that and then I got up and went to, to, to the dinging machine. And Otis and his plane had, had crashed. Um, the, uh, the wait's another gig. Um, and I, I was probably the last man who really spoke to him at, at length.

• 27:09Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Um, the, um, I left the office right then. I said, fuck it for the rest of the day. There was a bar across the street. Um, drank myself silly and went home with the waitress. I mean, I just.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  You know, it's just horrible, but, but I saw a lot, to get back to your point, so I did it in different ways. Incidentally, I tried to write a movie about Otis called Blaze of Glory. And the, the, we put it together. A man named John Apted was going to direct it and it was announced that Cuba Gooding was going to play Otis. And the, the whole thing fell apart at the last minute for financing reasons and to this day it's never gotten there. But I'm a writer. What else can I do with someone that I loved in a meeting except write about them in that way, right?

• 28:02Joe Rogan?

  So anybody who writes interesting things the way you do has to have had some interesting life experiences. You, you don't get those kind of scripts that you wrote from a, a sterile environment.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  No, I, I agree with that, yeah. Sometimes, um, after my, my conversion to Christian, to Christianity late in, late in my life, I wrote three, um, Christian scripts and none of them were made. Um, and one of the, one of them wasn't made, it wasn't made because, um, the, one of the priests involved with potentially getting Christian financing had said, "We need more incense." And my response to, to somebody who interviewed me about it was, "I don't write fucking incense, I write flesh and blood," you know, so, so no wonder it wasn't made.

• 28:59Joe Rogan?

  What did he mean by "you need more incense"?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Well, the, to make it more him-like, to make, make, and to give it a sense of piety. Um, to, to take, to make it inspire the people so that they become...

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Catholic in this specific case and that it was too secular. And I think what happened to me with all three is that I fell between views and between so-called Christian films and secular films. And so that's why we never got to finance for all three of them.

• 29:37Joe Rogan?

  When you say you fell between Christian films and secular films, you mean in the way you were writing it, that you weren't writing it specifically as a Christian film or specifically as a secular film?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  The way I was writing it naturally.

• 29:49Joe Rogan?

  Right, like you wrote everything else?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, without political considerations or clerical considerations. I was just writing it from my heart and that was too gritty to get Christian kind of financing and on the other hand, too religious to get the secular financing.

• 30:08Joe Rogan?

  That's too bad because that bridge is probably what would bring more people to Christianity where they could relate to it.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  I agree with you absolutely and my argument was, you know, these could be hit movies because my movies in a lot of cases have been, these could be hit movies and that's more important than spiking people with incense.

• 30:31Joe Rogan?

  It's interesting how Hollywood has always rejected those kind of religion films, religious films, like The Passion of the Christ, for instance. That was a huge movie.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Well, it's not just a huge movie, but in my mind, it was like a prayer, you know, I watched it each Good Friday and it was a huge movie, beautifully done. And it wasn't officially endorsed by the Catholic Church, although I saw in Cleveland a meeting where a priest organized a preview screening of the movie and they had like 700 people, the full hall, watching it. There was such an interest in it. But part of the reason, I think, you raise a good point because I think part of the reason... Um, it was such a towering yet, was that it was real.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  It wasn't, it wasn't incense filled. It was real. There was, you gotta figure who bled and you really show what happened up on that cross and how awful.

• 31:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  That kind of pain is, and the movie really reflected that.

• 31:42Joe Rogan?

  No, it was horrific. And then there was also that Willem Dafoe film. What was that one called?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  The, The Last Temptation of Christ.

• 31:48Joe Rogan?

  That's right.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  It's Marty Scorsese. Yeah.

• 31:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, I agree with that. The, I love, I love Dafoe. I mean, he's one of my favorite actors. Um, the, and, and I liked it. It's also very real, historically real.

• 32:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  You know, the, the, the notion that, that Jesus of Nazareth, um, you know, was this Fred Rogers figure, um, who wasn't really a real man, whereas the Bible says he was a true man and true God. Um, the, that shows, really showed is, that film really showed is the human side.

• 32:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And, and my conception of Jesus, who I revere and who was one of my, one of my close friends that I speak, speak to on most days, um, the, is that he was true man and true God. He was a Jewish zealot, a freedom fighter against the Roman Empire. He was crucified by the Romans. Um, the, then as a freedom fighter, he hung around blue collar guys and, and fishermen and hookers and tax collectors who were the lowest of the low back then, as they should be now, but they were the lowest of the low back then. And those were the people that he'd be primarily buddied around with. That's, that's Jesus of Nazareth.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And, and that, that side is, is completely ignored by most films, except the two that you mentioned specifically that are like that.

• 33:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, The Last Temptation of the Christ, I don't remember. I remember there was some controversy around it, but I don't, I was too young to really be paying attention to like how.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  It was the very fact that Jesus had a relationship that was clearly indicated as being sexual with Mary Magdalene, who was depicted as a prostitute. Now, the truth, historical truth, is that Mary Magdalene was a few years older than Jesus, and a woman of means, who had advised Roman builders in a city called Seraphin. And then was one of the people who financed Jesus as he swept through Galilee and the rest of Judea.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  There's another scene in the Bible where an unnamed woman goes to Jesus and washes his feet, and then washes his feet with his hair. This unnamed woman, by a pope in the 6th century, Gregory the Great, was depicted in Mary Magdalene. No connection to Mary Magdalene, there's nothing that says that Mary Magdalene was a hooker of any kind, and there's no proof for that in any way. So the fact that the last temptation of Christ did that, and brought the two of them together

• 34:46Speaker 01

  in a sort of semi-love story, without of course any real sexuality to it on film, is why it was so criticized. Scorsese's house was picketed, and I think the studio at that point was run by Lew Wasserman, whom I knew from Cleveland because he was a...

• 35:13Joe Rogan?

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• 37:15Speaker 01

  I say why in Cleveland before he went, but he was a legendary man. His house was picketed as well.

• 37:23Joe Rogan?

  So was it just Catholic people and Christian people that were upset about this?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Mostly, yeah.

• 37:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. But it was, it was very unusual for a Martin Scorsese film to be a religious film, too.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 37:35Joe Rogan?

  Like a depiction of Jesus. People were much more averse back then. I feel like sometimes like religion goes in like peaks and waves. And I think there was a wave of atheism back then and Hollywood was very non-Christian, to put it mildly.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:52Joe Rogan?

  It wasn't, the Christian themes in films were never promoted.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, he's absolutely right. It's not as bad now in that sense as it was, it was in those days. And I think that, that part of it, what frustrates me is that. Is that there would be an openness to that and to Christian films if they were real, if they didn't, if they weren't full of incense and piety.

• 38:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  You know, what we've done to Jesus over the years is make him a kind of Fred Rogers figure, you know, he wasn't that, you know, the, I'm not even sure that Jesus really said, "Do not resist violence." You know, Jesus also said, "If you have a cloak but not a sword, sell the cloak and buy a sword." He also said, "I come not to make peace, I come not to make peace, but with a sword." So, the, there's been a lot of church stuff, and then especially I think Catholics are more guilty of this, to romanticize and sort of cosmeticize the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

• 39:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's always a problem when human beings add their own interpretation to an ancient story.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 39:14Joe Rogan?

  And do it for, to fit their own narrative.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely, it's a great problem, but in this case, there is historical evidence on the other side, and they simply ignore that and pretend it doesn't happen. The Gospels are full of so-called revolutionary things, and the truth is that the Gospels were written forty years, thirty, forty years after the death of Jesus, whereas the Zenith Gospels, the ones that the churches have accepted, were written eighty, ninety years after the death of Jesus. So, they had to have been taken secondhand from people who said they saw things.

• 39:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Where with the previous, there's a shot that people directly saw them. The people in the church Gospels, who are named like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were not the people who were in the Gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then nobody knows who wrote them, they took with those names, but they were, they were not those people.

• 40:15Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:18Joe Rogan?

  I had no idea.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely, no doubt, even the, even the churches admit that at this point.

• 40:25Joe Rogan?

  Two thousand years is such a hard time for us to conceptualize, to put into our head as to how much time has passed.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:34Joe Rogan?

  Such a, you know, to try to get an accurate understanding of what was going on back then is insanely difficult.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  I have become a, since, since my, my sort of conversion to Christianity, and I would style myself a devout Christian, but not a devout Catholic, even though I go to Mass. And I love the Mass and believe in it. But since, since two thousand and one, when this process really began, I've become a real student of the historical Jesus. And I learn more and more, and I'm more and more astounded at what's been done to cosmeticize this man who was Jesus of Nazareth.

• 41:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also, he had some of the most profound and insanely resonating teachings, like even today. The words that he spoke two thousand years ago, there's still today, people, I mean, they resonate with people, and if you live your life by the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will be a better person.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yes, you will.

• 41:47Joe Rogan?

  It is a great framework to live your life.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:51Joe Rogan?

  Which is incredible, when you think about a person that lived so long ago.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  He is a much better person to pick as your imagined companion than Mark Twain.

• 42:03Joe Rogan?

  Your imagined companion. Let me ask you this, because I had a long conversation with Mel Gibson about this. What do you think about the Shroud of Turin?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Well, there was a study done, a major study that was done by, by the Catholic Church that led by John Paul II, whom I really admired, and read a lot about through the years. That, and this is a scientific study, that discovered that the Shroud of Turin came from thirteen thirteen or thirteen twenty. Now, there's this huge controversy about it. And there are those people who feel that that absolutely is Christ. And I must say that when I look at it, when I look at that figure, and I've done that a lot.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  And in my house, we have several blowups of Terence Christ. It's very, very moving. But the evidence, what there is, seems to indicate that it comes from the 1300s.

• 43:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've seen that as well. But then I've also seen people that say that that evidence, there's some controversy about that evidence.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is.

• 43:22Joe Rogan?

  And that some of the cloth, they believe dates to far earlier. And it's the type of cloth and the way it's made.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:29Joe Rogan?

  Seems to indicate that it's far older. I don't know how much of the cloth they've carbon tested. You know, that is also an issue. And whether or not it had been repaired, or whether or not there'd been additional pieces.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  I don't either. But you know what, ultimately, when I look at that, and when I look at that Jesus, and I've done that quite a bit, that face really moves me. So in a sense, I don't give a shit.

• 43:57Joe Rogan?

  At the very least, it's an insanely compelling piece of art.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:01Joe Rogan?

  At the very least.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 44:02Joe Rogan?

  But there's also a lot of very strange mysteries as to how that was created in the first place. Because it's not a dye, and they're not exactly sure what caused that image to appear. Or how, if that is a piece of art, they don't know how that art was created. And the fact that they really only could see the accurate representation of it once they saw it as a negative is also very interesting. Because who's going to make a piece of art where you can only really appreciate what it looks like when you see it as a negative? Especially when you're talking about something that you're doing, you're making something in the 1300s?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:40Joe Rogan?

  Hundreds of years before photography is ever created, so what are you, what are you making? And why is it so compelling when you look at it in the negative? And if you're talking about something that was created by an insane burst of energy, which is what the proponents of the Shroud of Turin being legitimate think. They think it was created by this insane burst of energy on Jesus's resurrection. You know, I'm not, I'm agnostic on it. I don't, no idea whether it's real or not real, but I, I find it fascinating that they have no real explanation as to how it was created.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  The, I'm pretty much of a complete ignoramus on anything that has to do with science. Um, you know, I've liked algebra and geometry and even biology, although I caught up with biology from personal experience. But, but I just don't know. It doesn't matter to me ultimately because I'm moved when I look at that, when I pray before that image and I look at it. Um, I'm moved. And so as far as I'm concerned, for me, it's real. It may not be for other people.

• 45:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, and like I said, it's, at the very least, it's an insanely compelling piece of artwork.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 45:53Joe Rogan?

  But the thing that, I don't want to dismiss the possibility that it's real. Because I'm fascinated by just the mystery of how it was, can you pull up an image of the, the, the negative version of it?

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was trying to look up a bunch of stuff you guys are talking about though, and there's no answers for any of the stuff you're saying.

• 46:11Joe Rogan?

  There's no answers in terms of why?

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Like I was just like, I was looking for an accurate recreation someone's made, you know, in the last 200 years and doesn't seem to be one.

• 46:19Joe Rogan?

  No, no one has.

• 46:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, when you look at the image and you realize that this is an actual negative of the original shroud.

• 46:32Joe Rogan?

  You you just you stop and think like, well, what would someone do if you if this is the negative? Like, how would you create that as a positive? Because it can you show me also the positive image of it? What it actually looks like? Okay, so here's. This is one image. So this is what it actually looks like. This is the actual shroud. And when you look at that, you go, okay, I see like shadows. It's very interesting. And then switch over to the negative. And it all comes to life. And there's marks from the lashes, from the whip marks. There's there's blood stains from where the rods went through his wrists. It's very fascinating.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sure is.

• 47:18Joe Rogan?

  And again, this is not dye. It's not ink. And they don't really know how it was made. And again, no one has been able to recreate this.

• 47:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the the cloth was made most likely from a loom that wasn't invented until like the thirteen hundreds.

• 47:36Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  That doesn't necessarily mean. That's where for sure came from, though, but.

• 47:42Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, but um.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Here's about the image. It's just like, how how was the image changed for the cloth, I ask. Just, you know, does anybody have any idea? I've seen a video where someone gave some sort of scientific explanation, but. I don't know if I could remember how to find it right now.

• 47:57Joe Rogan?

  Says it behaves like a photographic negative negative and shows some 3D information, which is unusual for normal artwork. Uh, the chemical theories that body heat, sweat or vapors reacting with the cloth. I example ammonia or lactic acid from sweat may have been proposed, but don't reproduce the shroud's sharp, non-blurry details. Simple heat or scorch theories likewise fail to match the very shallow, non-burned discoloration of the fibers.

• 48:27Joe Rogan?

  Human or man-made image, uh, human-made image theories. Painting or rubbing from bass relief has been tested, but studies have not found pigments in the amounts or patterns that would explain the image, and there's no clear brushstrokes. Primitive photography, some suggest that a medieval camera using light-sensitive silver salts and lenses could have projected a body or statue onto the cloth, and experimental replicas show that it's at least physically possible, though historically speculative. And now here's the weird one, radiation bursts of energy theories. Some researchers argue that a brief intense burst of ultraviolet or similar radiation

• 49:06Joe Rogan?

  from the body could have discovered, discolored, only the top five rolls, producing a non-contact image even where cloth and body didn't touch. Proponents sometimes link this to Jesus's resurrection, but the need, the needed radiation, billions of watts without burning the cloth, is far beyond anything observed in nature, and this remains a speculative, face-based idea rather than an established physical mechanism. In short, there's no consensus mechanism, the image transfer process is still unexplained, and every proposed method has serious problems when tested against the cloth's measured properties. Wild.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing.

• 49:47Joe Rogan?

  I mean, there's no other piece of artwork that's that fascinating. Because every other art, Michelangelo's work, you know, and all this incredible art, it's art. You see what they did, there's brushstrokes, there's chisel marks, they, you know, they made incredible sculptures, but it's clearly man-made art.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:08Joe Rogan?

  This is a different thing, it's a very strange thing. If you can't recreate it today, if they could recreate it today, people would be doing it. They'd be making their versions of the Shroud of Turin.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I don't know if that has been done historically, but you know, whether some, you know, some nutbag has decided to do business over recreating this round of turn.

• 50:29Joe Rogan?

  Is there, did they carbon test it? And what are the, what are the arguments that it's older? Because I, I do know that there have been some very recent arguments that the testing was incorrect and that it's older. See if you can find out what that is. Whether or not AI, whether perplexity, our sponsor, has some sort of a bias.

• 50:54Joe Rogan?

  The thing is, it's like pulling from all these, when you get an AI response to something, it's pulling from all these articles in the web. And most of the articles seem to indicate that people think it's at least either a hoax or an elaborate piece of artwork.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  The only carbon dating seems like it happened in 1988, so I don't know that they've done it again.

• 51:11Joe Rogan?

  Supporters of an earlier date argue that the 1988 radiocarbon results, 1988 is a long time ago, sampled an anomalous or contaminated area and that other historical and scientific clues point to a much older cloth. Okay, what is the scientific arguments? Contaminated repaired sample. Some research claimed the 1988 test piece came from a rewoven or heavily handled corner, so its carbon date reflects medieval repairs, not the original cloth. Alternative dating methods. X-ray or crystallog- crystallographic aging of linen fibers has produced dates compatible with the first century, though these methods are newer and not widely widely accepted as definitive. Pollen and dust.

• 51:56Joe Rogan?

  Analysis reports pollen grains and mineral dust consistent with the first century Middle East rather than only medieval Europe, which proponents say supports a much older origin. Image property. Some argue that the image's microscopic features and bursts of energy type characteristics require technology or phenomena unlikely in the Middle Ages implying an earlier extraordinary event. Well, why don't they do a retesting?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Uh...

• 52:25Joe Rogan?

  They probably don't want to know that it actually is from the 1300s.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just don't think they want to.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  John Paul II really believed in it.

• 52:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  He went to see it in Turin several times. He said he was moved by it, and that's when they launched this big Vatican investigation. And he never said in any way that he agreed with the investigation, it just seemed to drop the whole issue. And then, from what I know, it never went any further, you know? But he visited it twice, went out of his way.

• 52:56Joe Rogan?

  Where is it? It's in Turin still.

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was looking up that too. It's currently in the chapel of the Holy Shroud. But so here's interesting was who found it and when and why or whatever.

• 53:07Joe Rogan?

  The earliest undisputed record appears in the 19, the 1350s, rather, in Leary, a village in France, where the knight Geoffrey de Charnay displayed a cloth claimed to be Jesus's burial shroud. How he obtained it and where it was between the first century and the 14th century are unknown. Later theories trace it speculatively through Odessa and Constantin, Constantinople.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Constantinople.

• 53:34Joe Rogan?

  I can't, never say that. Constantinople. But these links are debated. Interesting. What does it look like? How's it displayed? That's how it's displayed?

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Constantinople was named after Constantine, who was the first Roman emperor who made Roman Catholicism the national religion.

• 53:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 53:58Joe Rogan?

  Wow. So you can go check it out. And how big is it? Boy, they got that sucker walled off, huh?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  I, from my impression, Joe, it, it, this was these, this was over the length of Jesus's body.

• 54:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  So it's longer than, than certainly I expected.

• 54:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, you can see it's both sides. So it apparently folded over. I wonder what all those markings are, those small triangle markings? What is all that?

• 54:26Speaker 04

  Like these things?

• 54:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  One other picture was pointing those out. It might be the burn marks that it was saying that there's burn marks on it. Again, it's, it's 2,000 years old in theory.

• 54:41Joe Rogan?

  Just imagine if it's real. That's the thing. It's like, I never want to dismiss the possibility that it's real because imagine if it is real. That is.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  I, I absolutely, I agree with you and I, in, in my mind, it's real and I pray to it. And you know, the, and I don't, I try not to worry about whether it's real and I know that I'm moved. And that's, that's, you know, that's good enough for me.

• 55:01Joe Rogan?

  What led to your conversion to Christianity? I mean, from a guy making these wild, insane movies?

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Jamie, could I ask you for some water?

• 55:10Joe Rogan?

  There's water right here.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Oh, great, thank you.

• 55:18Joe Rogan?

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• 56:02Joe Rogan?

  Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's Bank Partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. How long ago did you convert to Christianity?

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Well, I grew up Catholic. I was an altar boy when I was a kid. I knew one really great priest in my life who helped me with my life. I became a lapsed Catholic. And then, when, at the tail end of living in L.A., in Malibu, actually, I was usually successful as a screenwriter, of course. And I was being interviewed all over the place, and people were stealing mail from my mailbox and all that shit. And I should have been overwhelmingly happy with that, but something was missing, I felt.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  And I couldn't really put my finger on what that was, but something was missing in my life. And then I got throat cancer. Stage IV throat cancer. Um, the, uh, shortly after we moved back to Cleveland, you know, the, uh, from, from Malibu and then the, the Cleveland Clinic and then a surgeon named Marshall Strom did a surgery that they had never done in this country, that done in Switzerland, um, where they took some, they took the, a muscle from the left side of your neck and attach it to your larynx. Stage four was very dicey and then he was very honest with me about how dicey it would be and he did it spectacularly and, and here I am, um, at eighty-one.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Um, the, but in the course of all of that, when I was, when I was terrified and, and, uh, and, uh, and really frightened from one day to the other, um, I ran across Jesus, um, reading and, and partly Naomi's influence. Because Naomi also grew up Catholic and she had a, a, uh, very, this strong, um, the, the, can, and then the, very strong faith. And then I went to church a couple of times, um, and I, and I loved the Mass, um, the, the Mass itself. Um, and in the, in the course of recovery, and it was about a three-year recovery for, for a little,

• 58:39Speaker 01

  for some time I couldn't speak. And then I spoke like Brando, um, and then I squeaked, um, the, um, in the course of my recovery, I did everything I could physically to help. I, I jogged and walked and did all of those things. Um, and I, I recovered. Um, and I felt afterwards that, wasn't that the reason I was able to beat a stage four cancer had to do with my prayer life? Um, and then I started reading, um, voraciously about Jesus of Nazareth and the apostles and all, all of that ancient Jewish history, um, Catholic history. Um, and some of that really moved me as well.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Um, the, the, um, so I started going regularly to church with Naomi and then as the boys were bored even with, with the boys as well. And as time went by, excuse me.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  As time went by, the, I also started having issues with the Catholic Church. I continued going to the Mass because that was a very special thing to me. But I had issues with, with the history of antisemitism in the Church. The issues with sexism in terms of not allowing women to be priests. The, the, the issue was with, with the Pope making so-called infallible decisions. And I just shut most of that off, although in the process of it, my Christianity didn't suffer at all.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  But, but sometimes I felt like I was becoming a kind of an agnostic Catholic. The, and my, and my faith in Christ, and, and even as all of that happened, is unflagged. I still pray to Jesus, very specifically to Jesus. And he is, continues to be a major, important figure in my life.

• 1:00:47Joe Rogan?

  So your issues were with the organization of the Catholic Church?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yes. I respected Martin Luther's Revolution because he revolted against those same kind of issues. But the, the, the, as I said, the, the Mass continued to hold me. Worship is terrific and I really believe in it. I actually, the kind of worship that really moves me is, is black spiritual worship, full-scale, emotional, I give myself to you, Jesus, kind of worship. The, and, and I felt, I didn't want to, I didn't want to really switch, switch religions because I had my basic Christianity, you know, and that's, it continues to be important to me.

• 1:01:36Joe Rogan?

  So you you felt moved by like Baptist?

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Baptist, they they the whole emotional.

• 1:01:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Throw up your arms and say, OK, here I am. Take me, Lord.

• 1:01:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, definitely seems a lot more fun.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  It's fun.

• 1:01:49Joe Rogan?

  They they look like they're having way more fun.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  It's fun. I the I also have been very fortunate through the course of my life to have black friends and and to share the black culture. I was involved in in the civil rights movement. I had a shotgun stuck in my belly by a deputy who'd been indicted for killings and told to get the fuck out of the Shoba County. I I had the good fortune to have lunch with the Reverend Martin Luther King.

• 1:02:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Um, the I knew Stokely Carmichael.

• 1:02:17Joe Rogan?

  What was that like?

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Well, it was the most amazing thing. He was in town because of a of a the depth of a of a minister in a protest and and the the he was an unheralded appearance and I think it was partly before um, he became the towering international figure. And the the um, the he was heading back to the airport and he could find he couldn't find his ride. And I happened to be right there and I said, I can I can drive you Reverend drive you Reverend King. I was watching. He said, OK. So again, we we on the way to the airport, he said, are you hungry? I'm hungry. Can we stop someplace? I said, sure.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  So we did. And the what would amaze me about the man is that he was more interested almost in hearing about my refugee camp experiences and what that was like and how that worked and all of that. He said he didn't know much about it than he really than he was about than he was about talking about the the civil rights movement.

• 1:03:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Um, he was very, very moving and a powerful figure. Um, the and then I just drove him to the airport, but the the there was something about the man that was absolutely magnetic. You know, that I felt.

• 1:03:36Joe Rogan?

  Clearly.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then, but then, I also, when I was in college, I had a relationship with a young black woman. Um, the, um, and that brought me much closer to the black culture. I mean, I was an ethnic fucking kid, you know, and a refugee. And I certainly needed lessons in that whole cultural area, and I got them. Um, and then I sought them out. Um, and, uh, when, when, when I was at, uh, Rolling Stone, um, Huey Newton was over in Oakland, and he would come over sometimes. Um, the, uh, I think partly, I partly suspect because the, at Rolling Stone, we had some of the most beautiful women in the world working there.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  We didn't have air conditioning, and when it got real hot, they, they didn't wear a top at all. So what about that spread? So it was sort of fun.

• 1:04:26Joe Rogan?

  They were topless?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  They were topless when it got real hot.

• 1:04:29Joe Rogan?

  What year was this? Was this in the sixties?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  I was at Rolling Stone from seventy-one to seventy-six.

• 1:04:34Joe Rogan?

  Wild times.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  I was right, right in there. Um, in the, in the, in the years where, where the cultural revolution was exploding.

• 1:04:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  The women's revolution was, was exploding. Um, and to be at Rolling Stone at that time was like being in the vortex of all of that. You know, the, uh, and, and, uh, it was just a craze time, you know, the, the, uh, the sexual revolution was at its absolute height. Um, and the, the, uh, I've always, as I said to you, I've always really loved smart, sassy, sexy women. Um, and the whole office was filled with them, you know.

• 1:05:15Joe Rogan?

  I'm sure. What year was the birth control pill invented?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 1:05:20Joe Rogan?

  Let me guess. Sixty-five.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:05:23Joe Rogan?

  Sixty-four, let me guess. I'm just taking a wild swing. I have no idea.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  Approved by the FDA and introduced to the market in 1960.

• 1:05:34Joe Rogan?

  Sixty-eight?

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  Sixty, six zero.

• 1:05:36Joe Rogan?

  Nineteen sixty? Interesting. Yeah, well, that had a big factor, right?

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:05:42Joe Rogan?

  Because before, you know, women were in a situation where every time they had sex, they could get pregnant.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:48Joe Rogan?

  And then all of a sudden... But then you've got this pill that's fucking with their hormones that we found out now that women that have been on it for a long periods of time, they make poor choices in terms of mates and... It does a lot of weird stuff. I mean, when you're tricking your body.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  We're learning a lot of weird stuff.

• 1:06:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and also it's very dangerous for them. A friend of mine, his daughter died. She was seventeen years old. She was on the birth control pill and she was smoking cigarettes. And she, I guess, smoking cigarettes and birth control pills for some people can cause blood clots. I don't understand why or what, but... That is an issue, right? You're not supposed to smoke if you're on birth control? See if that's still the recommenda... Well, obviously, they tell you not to smoke, period. But I think there's some potential complication. Smoking while taking oral contraceptives that contain estrogen significantly increases the risk of severe cardiovascular events like heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots. The risk is... This episode is brought to you by ShipStation.

• 1:06:47Joe Rogan?

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• 1:08:13Joe Rogan?

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• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Joanne more fun at Rolling Stone than any other time in my life.

• 1:08:55Joe Rogan?

  I bet you did. I had Jan Wenner in here once.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw him.

• 1:09:00Joe Rogan?

  It was an interesting conversation.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  He kept looking at his watch.

• 1:09:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, he was, you know, he was Jan Wenner of 2024 or 2025, not Jan Wenner of 1975.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:09:10Joe Rogan?

  You know, not the Jan Wenner that was the editor when Hunter Thompson was writing crazy stories. You know, it's different times. People change.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  You are a big Hunter fan.

• 1:09:21Joe Rogan?

  Huge.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  And I know, and so am I. And I wanted to talk about him because I really haven't had a chance to talk about him specifically. Hunter really was the cause of my whole huge success, even as a screenwriter. Let me tell you how. The, I was a reporter at The Plain Dealer and I had read Hunter, of course, when he was the National Observer, doing those kinds of pieces from Latin America. Before, he discovered Gonzo.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  The, and I covered at The Plain Dealer, I covered at a Hell's Angels shootout of a bar called Barto's Cafe in Cleveland. And I wrote a story about it that the Associated Press picked up and put on their national wire. Um, the, and I get a note, um, shortly afterwards from Hunter Thompson, who had read this story on the AP Wire and wrote me a note that said, and I'm barely paraphrasing, "Big fucker. Now there are two of us who know how to write about L's Angels. That really pisses me off. All the best, Hunter Thompson."

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:10:41Joe Rogan?

  That must have been a fun thing to get.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I was, I was as excited about that as my two sons were to meet Joe Rogan. They really, they really, it was really, really something. So, okay, time goes by, um, and I get a call from Rolling Stone. I know, and at first I do a couple of freelance pieces for Rolling Stone. One on Kent State, um, one year afterwards, and the other, I forgot what the other one was. But, um, then, then I get a call from the managing editor, Paul Scanlon, who, incidentally, was the, was, was the backbone of the editorial content.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  He'd come from the, from the Wall Street Journal, and he wanted to take on the New York Times for Rolling Stone. So, and, and they wanted me to do a freelance piece on narcotics agents, um, corrupt narcotics agents. So, I go out there and, and I discover that, that Hunter had been after them to hire me because of that piece, and he kept saying he was a good guy and all of that. Then, when I'm at Rolling Stone, I write a, a book called Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, um, that Hunter loves. By now, we know each other, and, and, and we're friends, and, and we enjoy each other's company.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  And the, and I write this book, and Hunter, um, gets me as agent, who was the top literary agent in the country, and then gets me as publisher, which is Random House, to, to publish it, and then to boot blurbs it when, when the book comes out.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  And somebody, a United Artists, sees it, oh, and then the book becomes a finalist for the National Book Award, one of four finalists. Wow. Okay, so somebody, a United Artists, reads the book, reads because she reads all the finalists, reads the book, calls me out of the blue and says, you've got really cinematic talent, you thought about writing a script, and I said, no, I haven't, and I go to meet them, and they hire me, and I write Fist, all of that, which led to my success in screenplay and in the cinema, was thanks to Hunter. Wow. And the friendship we had was, was, I never, our friendship was in San Francisco.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  He lived in, in Woody Creek, and he would come to town, our friendship was in town. But we ran a lot together, we enjoyed each other, we drank together, we both like drinking. On occasion, we would, good story, we would go down, San Francisco was famed for its stripper bar area, I think around O'Farrell Street and stuff, and he and I went down there together. There was a very famous stripper show in one of those clubs, and one of the times we'd get down there, he, of course, would take acid before every trip down there, and I wouldn't do acid, but I'd, but I'd, I did acid once, and Hunter wound up holding me for an hour.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  But I was the guy from Cleveland, right, which he always, you know, we'd say, oh, you're from fucking Cleveland, you know. Anyway, the, I would snort some lines, and we'd go down there, and we were waiting for about an hour, and, you know, the place is filled, but the girls haven't come out, and Hunter suddenly gets up, hurls his arms up in the air, and says, where's the pussy? We want pussy, right?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  I don't know, great memories in my life, you know. Of course, I'd settle him down and all of that. And then when he started coming very loudly, he'd go, "Finally, finally, pussy." He was a, you know, larger-than-life, no doubt, colorful figure, but also what he was. And then I discovered this. And he didn't really share this with that many people. He was very, very well-read, well-read. He had a whole other side. There was a very sensitive and un-hippie-like side. I saw it most clearly once.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  I was married at the time to a former reporter at The Plain Dealer, who was very, very straight and really rejected the whole hippie thing and worked in California for a small suburban paper. And Hunter, I'd never met her, but had heard of her. And he said, "I'd really like to meet her." So we asked him to dinner. And Hunter came to dinner at our small, tiny apartment in Nevada. And my wife at the time cooked a Hungarian chicken paprikage dinner. Okay, it's Hungary's most famous meal. And he sat there with us.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  And what I discovered was that the boy from Kentucky was there underneath all of that firepower and all of that larger-than-life behavior. He was sensitive and quiet, and they got along like gangbusters. You know, and actually, interestingly, when I drove him, after dinner, I drove him back to town. For the ride back, he berated me because I was having an affair with what he called this hippie chick. He said, "You have this wonderful wife here, and you're fucking around with this hippie chick." I mean, it took her to berate him and anger and all of that.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  He had that side as well. Yes, he did. If we had breakfast, it was at four in the afternoon. And what he ordered were four margaritas, six beers, and maybe, maybe toast with scrambled eggs.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  And in that sense, he had more tolerance than anyone that I'd ever seen. And my tolerance in those days, for booze especially, was also very high. But I'd never seen anybody quite like him. He had a great sense of humor. The, as, many, many years later, he wanted me to write the screenplay for Rum Diner. And I hadn't seen him in a long time, and I had just met Naomi. Of course, of whom I've now been married thirty-two years. And, and the, and he wanted me to go to Aspen so that we could talk about it.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  And I called Jan and I said, listen, I had over heels in love with this woman. You know, and Hunter wants me to go out there. Tell me the truth, what kind of shape is he in? And Jan sort of pauses, and he says, well, he's good. And then he's another pause, and he says, but you know, the Stones were in Denver, and Mick and Keith had decided to come visit him. So, between gigs, so they hire a driver and they drive up here. And they have, they have a terrific time. But they're about, they're there about three or four hours, and they've got a gig that night.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  So they say, let's say, we gotta go, we got a gig, blah, blah. And Hunter gets all upset and says, well, you just got here. And they said, no, no, we've been here three or four hours and stuff. Well, he continues to be upset, and he leaves the house. And they're sitting there, and suddenly they hear gunshots. He had gone out and shot the tires out on the Stones' car.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  So I never took Naomi there. I was frightened, too frightened to do it.

• 1:18:49Joe Rogan?

  What year was this?

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Well, let's see, it was in ninety, ninety something, four maybe, maybe he said somewhere around five, four, five, and then three, three, four, five, somewhere in there.

• 1:19:01Joe Rogan?

  He had been going hard for thirty years by that point.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Yes, he had.

• 1:19:05Joe Rogan?

  Or at least twenty.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  And also, the end for him, I've read and heard, it was very sad because, and then the sadness wasn't caused by the drugs, it was caused by booze. And he was, in the aunt's opinion, and then he, the aunt saw him often in Woody Creek, and in his former wife's opinion, Sandy's opinion, it was the booze that did it. The, you know, his body began being old and he needed a wheelchair. He could hardly walk, and she drove him in the wheelchair at one time, I think in New Orleans, when they were visiting Sean, Sean Penn, on a film. He actually fell out of the wheelchair in the middle of traffic and she couldn't, Anita

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  couldn't really pick him up, and so they had to get help and cars are going by and all that shit. And then he also broke a leg when they were visiting Hawaii at the Kahala, so it was, as he said in his suicide note, which I thought was the most gut-wrenching, but also terrific suicide note, it was no fun anymore, the fun was gone, nothing was fun, no football, no this, no that, no fun.

• 1:20:21Joe Rogan?

  Well, when the body goes, it's hard to have fun.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Joe Rogan?

  And that's the problem with booze.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:27Joe Rogan?

  Well, the problem with many drugs, but particularly the problem with booze, you know, you're breaking down your body over and over and over again, and with a guy like Hunter, he was doing it every day.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Joe Rogan?

  There's a famous piece that this reporter wrote when he went to visit Hunter, and he documented Hunter's drug and alcohol use throughout the day, you know, like six in the morning, in the hot tub with champagne, like that's the end of the day. And then him sleeping, and then him waking up and doing all the drugs and then getting ready to write. And what was the guy's name? Who wrote the...

• 1:21:06Joe Rogan?

  There's a guy who took me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons reading it out and turned it into an EDM song.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:21:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  E. Jean Carroll, I think?

• 1:21:18Joe Rogan?

  No, no, no.

• 1:21:19Speaker 04

  That says a memoir of Hunter Thompson. Yeah, this is where it says from?

• 1:21:24Joe Rogan?

  Right, but the, um, but the singer, the song.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  You said who wrote?

• 1:21:29Joe Rogan?

  Yes, the guy, I'm sorry, the guy who wrote the...

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  The song?

• 1:21:34Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:37Joe Rogan?

  It's like a electronic dance music song. We played it before, many times. God, I can't believe it's like...

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  Bearded Man.

• 1:21:44Joe Rogan?

  Bearded Man, thank you. This guy Bearded Man put it to music and it's hilarious.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  I gotta check it out.

• 1:21:51Joe Rogan?

  It's amazing. I mean, it's a tragic story.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Joe Rogan?

  In a lot of ways, but... But in his prime, the writing that he did was, uh, in many ways, it was the narration of an era.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Yes. It was, and it was genius. You know, the heat, you know, there was this thing called the New Journalism and I practiced that and so did people like A. Thales and David Elversum and Larry Alkin. But then undertook that and created an entire new genre, the gonzo journalism thing was his. And it was, it was a kind of humor that, that just knocked you down. Um, and it was totally revolutionary. Um, and the, um, the, um, Tom Wolfe, um, said, who of course was one of the people, the founders of the New Journalism, said that he was today's version of Mark Twain.

• 1:22:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  In terms of what he was able to accomplish. Two books especially, I thought, the Fear and Loathing in Vegas, of course, and the campaign book, the seventy-two campaign book, which in my mind is the best political commentary, including all of Teddy White's books.

• 1:22:56Joe Rogan?

  No, it's fantastic.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Joe Rogan?

  Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, Fear and Loathing, yeah.

• 1:23:00Joe Rogan?

  And he also had this freedom that was very different from all these other reporters because he was a one-time guy. He was gonna go in there and follow the campaign for the entire time and then wrote this book about it.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  But so these roles stayed. Um, the, the shoe tie wearing reporters. And you turn this, this big creature loose on them and on the campaign trail. And of course, they all fell in love with him and they did. Because he was such a free spirit compared to what their lives were.

• 1:23:31Joe Rogan?

  Of course. Well, imagine you're doing this boring thing, which is following a bunch of fakers. As they're telling you how they're gonna change the country, which you know they're not really gonna do. Cause you've been doing this for 20 years.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:42Joe Rogan?

  And then along comes a guy's like, let's do acid. Come on pussies. And all of a sudden, you've got this fucking maniac who's drinking and, and saying wild shit and writing wild shit. And he doesn't have to be held to the same standards as everyone else, because he knows it doesn't matter. If they never have him back again, it's fine.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry that Hunter wasn't here with Trump's time.

• 1:24:09Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Because that could have been fucking wild and hilarious. But there's also a part of me that says he would have liked Trump. I know this is heresy to liberals, you know, who do think that he's a, you know, and they, they, they, he would have, that he would absolutely hated him and all of that. But I'm not certain of that. And I, and I, and I think that certainly in terms of his style, um, he would have liked things about him.

• 1:24:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think he would have liked the fact that he's this wild character.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:39Joe Rogan?

  Completely wild character that has never existed in all of presidential politics before. There's never been anything like him, for good or for bad. There's never been a guy like him.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Look what he did today. I mean, he, he had a shit fit with Netanyahu.

• 1:24:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, the, uh, you're fucking crazy.

• 1:24:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  You would have been in jail except for me.

• 1:24:59Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Um, I saved your ass. What other president, for God's sakes, has ever spoken like that, not only publicly, but to us?

• 1:25:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  And in that sense, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm proud of being a deplorable. I'm from Cleveland, you know, the, the, the, I grew up among, among poor people and blue collar people. And he's the first president, um, that, that didn't talk down, but talk directly to us.

• 1:25:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for good or for bad.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:25:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, he's, he is who he is.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Joe Rogan?

  Which is very odd, you know, it's a very, it's a very odd person to be running.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  I have, I have a lot of questions in, in certain areas, you know, the ICE area. And the bothers may be, uh. The uh, the whole shit with the ballroom and all of that stuff.

• 1:25:49Joe Rogan?

  Well, the ballroom doesn't bother me that much. Um, that's to me trivial construction. Like, whatever. The, the ICE stuff, what bothers me is we're opening the door for militarized police on our city streets. As many people say, like, look, we gotta get these immigrants out of here that are illegal, there's a lot of criminals in this country, there's a lot of people that are committing crimes. I understand that. I understand that perspective. My perspective is not that you need to get the criminals out. It's that it is a very slippery slope when you give people, and they're trained for seven weeks. They're not trained for very long. They're, they're trained for much less time than police officers, much less time than military. And then you have this militarized, militarized police force

• 1:26:33Joe Rogan?

  that has no identification and they're on the streets. That's a precedent. That you might like it when it's for a cause that you support, but that could easily be for a cause that you do not support. That militarized police force could be going door to door and confiscating guns. That militarized police force, that you could, you could find other ways where a different ruler could use this precedent in a very damaging way for our free society. That's my perspective on it.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with that. The, the, when they start calling people like, like that, the woman who was killed in Minnesota and the, the guy, domestic terrorists, um, you know, the uh, it's an abomination.

• 1:27:22Joe Rogan?

  Which, which woman is uh?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  That, that woman who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis.

• 1:27:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  And then the guy afterwards, the, the, the week afterwards is also shot by ICE.

• 1:27:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  And to call them domestic terrorists. But to give credit to Trump, he got rid of Kristi Noem. And he got rid of that guy who was, who was there that Tom Homan replaced.

• 1:27:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, Tom Homan was already in charge. That guy was in a different position. Um, but they did get rid of that guy. Also, that guy had a very odd way of dressing. That was very, like, he, he wore outfits that were, like, reminiscent of, like, Nazi Germany. Like, he had this very weird coat that he would wear all the time. And a lot of people were saying, this is a very odd choice for someone to be wearing who's being accused of fascism. See if you can find some photos of that dude. The the coats that he was wearing were a lot of like I had to make sure that this wasn't AI. I was like, is this is real coat that he's wearing? It's a very strange, I mean, not accusing him of anything, it's just a fucking coat. But it was, a lot of people online were pointing out, like, this is a very odd wardrobe choice.

• 1:28:25Joe Rogan?

  For someone who's in charge of, uh, in many ways, othering human beings. The other thing that's a problem with this whole ICE thing is, and it's not the fault of the ICE people or even this administration, is that many of these people were encouraged to come here. That's what's so fucked. Imagine if you're living in Guatemala, and you're encouraged to come to America. You live in a terrible third world situation, you have a, wherever you're living, it's like, deep poverty. You're told that they'll help you get across the border. They'll, they'll literally transport you into America. They'll put you in these cities. And you can get on public assistance if you have a bad back, they'll put you on social security.

• 1:29:08Joe Rogan?

  There's all these different programs that are incentivizing people to come to America. The Red Cross is giving you maps. People are showing you how to do it. They're letting you across the border, they're letting you into the country. And then, two years later, you're being chased down. Two years later, you've got masked ICE workers that are pulling, I mean, it's like, it's very inconsistent. Obviously, this is a completely different administration, but I feel for those poor fucking people that were told that they can come here and that there was gonna be a pathway to citizenship. So they upend their life, they come to America, and the only way they know how. And when people say, oh, they should do it legitimately, sure, a lot of people do it legitimately, and I understand their perspective, that it's a very difficult path,

• 1:29:53Joe Rogan?

  and no one should be able to cut that line, and they went through it the right way. However, these people, that's not an option for them. If you don't have any money, and you're living in a third world country, and people encourage you to come to America, I most certainly would have come to America, just like they did.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Joe, I did, my parents did. You know, I, I personify the American dream in terms of what happened to me. You know, the, the, what they said in the camps was, "The streets of America are paved with gold." When we lived on Lorraine Avenue in Cleveland, there was a Hungarian poet, a mad poet, his name was Achim Reh, who would go up and down Lorraine Avenue screaming in Hungarian, "Old one, old one", which means "where is it", "where is the gold", Right, right, right. But, look, I came in here as a kid, I couldn't speak the language, we knew no one. I got into serious juvenile trouble, I got out of that, I studied, I was a total autodidact.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  I wasn't a good student, but I did reading. I went to college. I wanted to be a disc jockey for a while, named Joe Anthony. He has a song to do the sad serpent secretary, right, this kind of shit. I went to college, I did well in college. I won a big award, I was a senior. I kept working. And I also, through the years, got a terrific amount of help from Americans. Couldn't have done it without them. Beginning with a bus driver named Henry Jackson,

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  a black man who had been adopted by Hungarian parents and spoke Hungarian. But, you know, moving on to people in college who helped, who I found a great deal of help. I couldn't have done what I achieved without the help of other people and other Americans. And then to top everything off, you know, the Hollywood and 18 films and all of that. Yes, I think that is the personification of the American dream. And many of the immigrants who come here are looking for the same dream.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  And many of them are saying what mad Achim Reh said on Lorraine Avenue, "Old one, old one, where is it", Right. Partly the reason that the stuff in Minneapolis breaks my heart is that. These Latino people are my cousins and brothers in terms of not the killers and not the gang members, but people who are gardeners.

• 1:32:50Joe Rogan?

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• 1:33:35Joe Rogan?

  Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card, provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. This episode is brought to you by Noco. You're miles from home, you turn the key, nothing. Dead battery. Normally, that means finding another car, someone willing to give you a jump, and dealing with old jumper cables. But what if you didn't need any of that? Keep a Noco portable jump starter in your glove box and jump-start your car yourself. No cables, no second vehicle, no waiting for help. It also works as a power bank and has a built-in LED flashlight.

• 1:34:18Joe Rogan?

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• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Because they're new work in the stores and trying to make a buck and have kids that they're trying to survive.

• 1:34:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also part of the ICE story too.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:38Joe Rogan?

  Part of the ICE story is that a lot of these officers are Latino. Including the two guys that shot Alex Preddy. Those two guys were Latino. And they took these jobs because these jobs give you, first of all, you get a $50,000 signing bonus to join ICE. I mean, that's a significant amount of money for someone who's in debt or who's struggling. So this is how this guy dressed. Look at how this guy dressed. That's kinda crazy. See that image?

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  That's a coat.

• 1:35:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, look at that coat.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Joe Rogan?

  I mean, come on. That's a cr- it's kind of a crazy WWII military coat.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 1:35:17Joe Rogan?

  A little odd when everybody else is, you know. The other thing is the masks. I understand. I understand the need for them, that they get doxxed, their families get doxxed, and it's very organized. This is not organic, these protests are not organic, I understand all these arguments.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm bothered by the masks too. They're too Giselle-like to me, that's...

• 1:35:37Joe Rogan?

  It's also, it sets a very bad precedent.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Joe Rogan?

  This is the problem with it all. But, you know, the real thing is, you shouldn't be able to have organized, paid-for protests where you're paying people to protest, and you're paying people to cause violence. And then you're also using people as political pawns and moving them into the country so that you could change, like, when you have congressional seats, it's all based on the census, the more people that are in the town, regardless of whether or not they're legal or illegal, you get more congressional seats. So you, they use them for political purposes.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Yes, they do, absolutely, same old political game.

• 1:36:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's the same old game, and that game should be illegal. That shouldn't be legal. The idea of the American dream is a beautiful dream. And they've corrupted it, and they've, they've taken this and used it for their own gain. And, you know, and they've weaponized empathy. And it's, it's a real problem. It's a real problem for those poor people that came over here looking for a better life.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Listen, I have an idea. Run for president or write your speeches.

• 1:36:38Joe Rogan?

  Listen.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  No, that attitude is really terrific attitude and I think you're right to be concerned. You see it.

• 1:36:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  Um, listen, I'm eighty-one years old, but I really see it too. You know, and, and there's great dangers there that I hope my sons don't have.

• 1:36:53Joe Rogan?

  Militarized police on the streets for that reason is a very, it's a very dangerous precedent. But then there's the other question is like, how do you get all the criminals out? I don't know. I'm not the guy, you know, I'm not the one, but I'm, I am very concerned with this, this dangerous precedent. That's my feeling on it. So I just worry that people accept it because they want this result now and they don't realize that this could set up this being a common occurrence. I mean, we saw some of it during COVID. There were some militarized police on the streets keeping people in lockdown in certain cities. They utilized the National Guard and they, they did things like that. That scares the shit out of me. Scares the shit out of me when you, you have a justification for militarized police with

• 1:37:38Joe Rogan?

  masks on that are just grabbing people. And some of these people are American citizens. It turned out a lot of them were American citizens, hundreds of them were.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  You know, we had the same syndrome. I, I covered the Kent State massacres.

• 1:37:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  I covered that. And the, one of the things that I saw is the rhetoric that was coming from James Rhodes, the governor at the time and from Sylvester Del Corso, who was the head of the National Guard, was absolutely the, the main thing that, that created that atmosphere that, that caused that shooting.

• 1:38:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  The, and today sadly we see many examples of that. And, you know, they're great dangers.

• 1:38:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you would think that we would learn, but we go through cycles where we learn, we get better, and then we repeat the same things again. You see that with racial tensions, you see that with political unrest, you see that with a lot of different things in this country. It's like we, we learn for a little while and then we forget.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Mark Twain's wisdom once again comes through. Mark Twain said, politicians are like diapers and they should be changed often and for the same reason.

• 1:38:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. He also said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it also, it often rhymes.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 1:38:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  He also said, a little bit off the subject, but I love it. He said, the, he said, when the mind and the pecker argue, the pecker always wins.

• 1:39:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, he was essentially the original stand-up comedian.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Oh, you're absolutely right. I meant, you're so right, I've actually been thinking about doing some piece on it. The, I mean, and stop me if you know the history, the, but, but in the beginning, he was a stand-up with his so-called lectures that he did all over the West. And then, then he did this, then he wrote some books, the books that he's famous for. But he went bankrupt nearly at the end of his life because of bad investments. And then he did a round-the-world tour of stand-up all over again. And usually, they said he was a, a, a poet of the profane, because he's usually for male audiences. He published a little book called On Masturbation, which is about the glories of masturbation.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  The only thing I've heard that's, that's close is a, is a, is a stand-up by one Joe Rogan, which there's a great line that says, "If you're married and have kids, the only, the only place to find peace," Twain would say with the Becker, "is if you rent a motel room and lock the door." You know, but he had the same kind of, of, of, of verve and love, in terms of being a stand-up, being outrageous, pushing the envelope. And that, that's the whole side of Twain, has been sort of hidden under the notion that he is

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  the great, there's Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and all of that. Nobody talks of, he wrote a book called Letters from the Earth from the Voice of the Devil. He wrote another one, he called The Mysterious Stranger, which is about Jesus coming back in a very dark way. And then he wrote one that was published in the 30s, that hasn't been republished, called Twain Erupts. You know, so, yes, you're so right when you say he was stand-up. He was a very straight stand-up.

• 1:41:07Joe Rogan?

  He was the originator, because he was essentially a very witty

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:11Joe Rogan?

  author, who wrote very provocative things, very hilarious things,

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:17Joe Rogan?

  and then would read them publicly.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:19Joe Rogan?

  And when he was doing these speeches, where he would go and, you know, whatever you'd call it, poetry, whatever it was, there was no stand-up comedy back then. There was no name for it.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:27Joe Rogan?

  But he was just riotously funny. People loved them.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:41:31Joe Rogan?

  And they would go to see them because they were funny.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  And the initial audiences were mostly male audiences.

• 1:41:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  The, uh, and then they, yeah, I mean, I think he's a great, it's never been really done. The, the, the, uh, to do a piece, a fictional piece about Twain, um, as a, as a stand-up with pushing the envelope with all these things, I think would be a lot of fun.

• 1:41:59Joe Rogan?

  It would be a lot of fun. The only problem would be like the cultural context is so different back then. It's almost like, um, did you see Lenny, the Dustin Hoffman film?

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:42:08Joe Rogan?

  Great film. I mean, I think Dustin Hoffman fucking nailed it. It was as close to Lenny Bruce as you're, you're ever gonna see someone portray Lenny Bruce. The problem is the world has changed so much since 1960.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:21Joe Rogan?

  That a lot of the outrageousness is gone and it seems very pedestrian. Like the things that he is saying, because he was such a groundbreaker and society was so locked down and, and, and so conservative and so, you know, just that there was just the way people communicated was much different back then. The understanding of culture and of, uh, race relations and sexual relations was very different back then. And so the outrageousness of what he was saying back then, it just doesn't really translate. Cause in many ways, I think stand-up comedy in particular is a window in time. It's a window into the, the, the way people behave. Films are that way as well.

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:03Joe Rogan?

  Especially like if you go and watch a lot of old films. It's a window into how people perceived reality back then.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  The, there's, there's some stuff that, that's rarely been published from Twain that, that hasn't really been seen very much. That was left in places like the University of California archives that they go, go a step past what we know from Twain. And, uh, and I think there's so much of it. There's something called Twain's notebooks that, that hasn't been published, um, in their full form certainly, um, that, that may still be shocking. Um, the, um, I'm, I'm, I'm still playing with it because I'm reading and reading and all of that, but even if I never do, it's so much fun reading about him and his life because he was such an interesting character.

• 1:43:55Joe Rogan?

  I hope you do write something about it because it would be great for people to see and to get an understanding of him because I think a lot of young people, particularly today, just think of him as an author.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Joe Rogan?

  Just think of him as the guy who wrote Tom Sawyer.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Tom Sawyer, yeah.

• 1:44:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  He's been pushed into being almost a kids' writer.

• 1:44:11Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  Speaking of stand-up, and I, I want you to know, and I don't think, you know, did you know that Sam Kinison dedicated a CD to me?

• 1:44:19Joe Rogan?

  Did he really?

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Sam Kinison, one of his, one of his, um, last CD was called Leader of the Band, B-A-N-N-E-D.

• 1:44:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  And at the flip side of the CD, he thanks a bunch of people, Ringo E. Zoff and record people and all of that, and then also Sly and Sean Penn. And then after all of that, in larger letters than the others, he says, "And very special thanks to Joe Esterhauser writing his letter to Michael Ovitz."

• 1:44:50Joe Rogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:44:53Joe Rogan?

  What letter did you write to Michael Ovitz?

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Oh, Michael Ovitz was the, was the top, top dog, um, agent in town, running CAA. And the, and, uh, I was leaving CAA because my best friend and rabbi in the business, it was an agent named Guy McElwain, who had been running Columbia, became an agent again. So I, I was leaving CAA simply because of my love for Guy. And I went in to see Ovitz and said, "I'm leaving the agency." And Ovitz said, "Um, if you leave the agency, then my foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard will put you under the ground."

• 1:45:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  What the fuck? You know, so the, I thought about it for a couple of weeks and I-

• 1:45:40Joe Rogan?

  Jesus.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  And I, and I wrote him a letter, which essentially said, "Fuck you." You know, "I'm leaving. I'm going back to the prison." He started me in the business and the prison I love. And it turned into a major controversy with headlines all over the place and all of that.

• 1:45:55Joe Rogan?

  Put you under the ground, a strong words.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  Oh, man. There's a, there was a producer named Bernie Brillstein.

• 1:46:01Joe Rogan?

  I know Bernie.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  He did, he wrote a memoir, um, late, years later, who said those exact words had been used to him as well. Yeah, so the, and you know what, and as time went on, it became obvious that that the whole controversy with Ovitz really hurt him. Because other people had been threatened that way, and he had a reputation for that. And he would, and he actually was out of the business, not, not, not much past that. But, but the notion of Kinison, I love Kinison's work. The notion of Kinison, when I saw that thing, I was overwhelmed.

• 1:46:41Joe Rogan?

  He was one of the greats.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  He was one of the greats, absolutely.

• 1:46:44Joe Rogan?

  He was one of the greats, and I, I still maintain that for like a period of two years, two or three years, he was the most profound and revolutionary stand-up comic ever.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  I agree, I agree.

• 1:46:53Joe Rogan?

  He came out of nowhere, he was so different than anybody else. You know, I was introduced to Kinison by a girl that I worked with. I was working at a, a gym called the Boston Athletic Club in South Boston. And it was a girl that worked at the front counter who was hilarious, she was a volleyball player, really hilarious girl. And she told me about Kinison and reenacted one of his bits in the parking lot of the club. Told me what she saw on TV about, he had that bit about homosexual necrophiliacs paying money. She's on her stomach, laying on the, she was so funny. She was on her stomach in the parking lot going, "Oh, oh, life keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead.

• 1:47:37Joe Rogan?

  It never ends, it never ends." And I was laughing so hard that I couldn't wait to go out and get that videotape. And I got that videotape, and I was only nineteen at the time, I'd never even thought about doing stand-up yet. But that was like one of the first times that I was like, "Oh, this is stand-up?" Like, I didn't know that this was stand-up. I thought stand-up was like, "Did you ever notice?" Like, that kind of stuff, like you'd see on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I had no thought ever that this wild shit was stand-up. And, you know, credit to HBO, because before then, you would never be able to see that kind of comedy. The only way you'd be able to see it is in the movie theater. It'd have to be like Richard Pryor, Live on the Sunset Strip, which predated that by a few years.

• 1:48:20Joe Rogan?

  And no one had any understanding that there was this kind of stand-up comedy out there. That this wild motherfucker who used to be a priest, he used to be a preacher.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, yeah.

• 1:48:34Joe Rogan?

  He he comes to LA and is this wild coke snorting fucking demon comedian. Who's just different than anybody else before him. And just changed comedy. There's a few people, there's a few characters along the way that have just completely changed comedy. And I think Kennedy, Kennison is one of the big ones.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  He was absolutely amazing. Um, I I I adored him and I thought he was a groundbreaker. And when I saw the CD, the CD, I'm holy shit.

• 1:49:03Joe Rogan?

  I have uh, two of his albums. Two different people have gifted me um, his uh, first album. God, what is it called? It's not, is it called Louder Than Hell? I think it's called Louder Than Hell. And uh, they're signed, both albums are signed. Both signatures are totally different. So I don't know which one's real or if either one of them are real. And that's the problem, like people buy stuff off eBay, they wanna give you a nice gift. They buy an autographed album and it might not even be real.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  He was a bridge and that last conversation when he died with Jesus, when he's conversing, it's mind boggling.

• 1:49:41Joe Rogan?

  Mind boggling, yeah, he's having, literally having a conversation with someone.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Yes, he is.

• 1:49:45Joe Rogan?

  As he's dying, yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  It's obviously Jesus, it's a Jesus figure, I mean, it's a, is it my time, I mean, all that. I'm amazing, because especially amazing considering where he came from. What what he went through, what he did with comedy and then then that ending. There was a movie made, wasn't there? But it wasn't very good.

• 1:50:04Joe Rogan?

  About Kennison?

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Joe Rogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  I think that, yeah, that guy, it was a while, very while I was thinking about that too.

• 1:50:11Joe Rogan?

  I have a problem with reenactments of a guy who is that profound.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:16Joe Rogan?

  Someone's playing him, you know, it's like it's.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:50:20Joe Rogan?

  I try not to watch, cuz it's just the the actual work of the guy, like going back and watching his HBO special and watching his stand up appearances on Letterman and listening to his his first album. The first album I listened to, I was like, Jesus Christ, this guy's incredible. It was just so different, so crazy. And, you know, and he was the first guy that was like, open about doing cocaine. Like, open about partying. You know, I mean, he was a, he was a wild boy.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  It reminds me, I'm sorry, Hunter, in terms of being wild about coke. My first story when I was at Rolling Stone was it was a piece about narcotics, corrupt narcotics agents. And as a result of the stories, the guy who was the head of the narcotics agency in the state of California had to resign. And as a result of that, I started getting plastic baggies full of coke at Rolling Stone from the various dealers who appreciated my work.

• 1:51:19Joe Rogan?

  (laughing).

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Now, whenever Hunter was there, I would present him with the bag. And he would go, "Holy fucking Christ, you're getting these from people?" One of the things that solidified our friendship.

• 1:51:34Joe Rogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  That I would have handed over.

• 1:51:36Joe Rogan?

  And that was back when cocaine was actually cocaine?

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it wasn't stepped on, you didn't get fentanyl, you didn't have to worry about dying of an overdose?

• 1:51:45Speaker 01

  It was the only drug besides smoking dope that I really, really enjoyed. I said I tried acid once and not her at to hold on to me because I was so freaked out.

• 1:51:56Joe Rogan?

  (laughing). I can only imagine. When I watched Showgirls, I was like, whoever wrote this was doing coke. That was literally one of the first things I've said. I've always said that's like one of the heightens of cocaine movies.

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  Not anymore, but certainly the memory of it was.

• 1:52:13Joe Rogan?

  Influenced.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:52:15Joe Rogan?

  Influenced by cocaine?

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Tarantino also really loved, loved Showgirls.

• 1:52:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, it was a wild movie. And I remember, you know, because it was that girl, was her name Elizabeth?

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  Berkeley.

• 1:52:30Joe Rogan?

  Berkeley. Elizabeth Berkeley, who was from Saved by the Bell, right? So she was like this America sweetheart from this really nice sitcom. And then all of a sudden, you know, she's half naked and she's a showgirl and it's like, whoa.

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  And she's having an affair with Paul Verhoeven.

• 1:52:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  Who's moved out with his wife and is living with Elizabeth Berkeley, right?

• 1:52:50Joe Rogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:52:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Jeez Louise. Wild times, right?

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely fun, really fun.

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  Jimi Hendrix story because he's the Jimi Hendrix experience and I wondered whether he had any kind of a godfather impact on the Joe Rogan experience.

• 1:53:09Joe Rogan?

  Oh, a hundred percent. I stole the name from Jimi Hendrix.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  Jimi Hendrix story.

• 1:53:12Joe Rogan?

  A hundred percent. I mean, when we first started doing the podcast, that was, I would always listen to Voodoo Child on the way to the Comedy Store. I'd listen, Coming Over Laurel Canyon, that was one of my favorite, that and Whole Lot of Love. Those are my two favorite songs to listen to on the way to the Comedy Store. I had like a soundtrack that I listened to to get myself psyched up for shows.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  You'll love this story, Ian. Okay, I'm a reporter at The Plain Dealer and the, all of our editors barely know about rock and roll. And as I said, I've loved it all my life and when Hendrix came around, I loved his work. And he's in Cleveland for an appearance and the fucking Cleveland cops have gone crazy and they're saying that this caused a riot and it's obscene and all of that stuff. And I asked, well, to my city editor and asked, I told him I'd like to interview Hendrix and cover his concert. So I do cover his concert and it's jammed in Cleveland Arena and people are loving it. And I've set up a date to interview them the next morning at the Cleveland Hotel.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so the, I show up the next morning and I am the Plain Dealer reporter. I've got a tie on and a sport coat, you know, and they go in, I think it's nine thirty. And he's up, but he's barely up and he's, he's wearing shorts and a t-shirt and his hair is, you remember his hair, but on this occasion, there were a lot of beads and things in his hair as well. And he's totally scruffed up. The, and we talk about rock and roll mostly and his background and the fact that he had been, I think, as a backup and as a, as a kind of guitarist in the Ricky Nelson Band that had been in Cleveland a couple of years before then. He'd done this pre-stuff before he went out on his own. And we get

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  along. And we begin smoking dope, of course, at nine thirty and by fucking eleven thirty, we both got the munchies. And he said, man, I'm hungry, you know, and you got any, you want to go in any place? I've got a car waiting for me downstairs. So I said, sure. And we go down and Mitch Mitchell and Chaz Chandler join us, the other members of the experience. Who are equally isn't looking like CD characters, you know, but it's that time of morning. It's after concert, all of that. So we pile into this limo and I direct them to go to, Buckeye Road is the center of the Hungarian community in Cleveland.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  And the center of the Hungarian community on Buckeye Road is a restaurant called The Bolaton. Okay. And I direct them to go to The Bolaton. Now, they know me at The Bolaton because I used to live on Buckeye Road. Big stretch limo pulls up, play glass window front, filled with old ladies with babushkas and guys very formally dressed. We get out in front of this place and these Martians, three Martians get out of the car. And I lead them in. And now Hungarian, I'm like, what the fuck, what is this? You know, they made me the, um, they're just following me in and I see Jimmy looking around and shit. So they seat us.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  The Major D knows me, so he calls me aside and he says, who are these people? Who are these people? And I say, Jimi Hendrix, big rock and roll star, you know, he's in town. And he said, oh, Hendrix, yeah, Jimi Hendrix. So we sit down and Jimmy says, you order for me. Great. So I order a chicken paprikash for him, which is a big Hungarian meal. And Chaz and Mitchell order something else, but very Hungarian stuff on my advice. And the, interestingly, as we're sitting there, the Major D has obviously spoken to people because old ladies are coming around asking him for an autograph. Mi tere Hendrix, ser, vil du autogramm, please.

• 1:57:08Speaker 01

  Wow. And he's gracious. He says, sure. But he loves his paprikash and went to order another.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  At this point, we've knocked out two bottles of wine, I think, and we're still rolling from all the dope. So they bring that at the end of this. He had three orders of chicken paprikos. He signed, we had like four bottles of wine. We staggered out of there. He signed, I would guess, ten autographs for people who come around bowing. And then as we walk out of the restaurant, he takes his fist high up in there and says, hungry, hungry.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  That's my Jimi Hendrix story.

• 1:57:55Joe Rogan?

  That's awesome. Ron White was telling us a story the other night in the mothership green room, the comedy club green room. And he was saying that when he was, I think he said he was 13 years old, he went to see The Monkees. And Jimi Hendrix opened for The Monkees. He said it was the worst booking of all time.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  They opened, oh my god.

• 1:58:12Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. So this is when Jimi Hendrix was emerging. He really hadn't become Jimi Hendrix yet. And so he's the opening act for The Monkees. And so you have a bunch of kids that are there to see this really cute band that was, you know, pieced together by corporate executives, essentially. You know, The Monkees, fun band, but you know, they had a TV show and it was a very clean, sweet TV show. Hey, hey, we're The Monkees. You know, and then you've got this guy opening up for them. This just jamming on the guitar, wow. And they were freaked out. They're like, what is this? Like, what is going on? And he said, nobody liked it. It was terrifying to people. Like, who is this guy with his guitar? Like, what the hell is he doing?

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  Great story. Many years later, I thought about writing a Hendrix movie. And working with a producer friend named Ben Myron, and Ben rounded up his brother. And we actually brought him to Malibu. And unfortunately, we discovered that the rights were so screwed up in between relatives that there's never been a Jimi Hendrix movie, babe, because people couldn't agree on the deal of any kind. But it still would be a terrific movie, I think, you know?

• 1:59:29Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it'd be a phenomenal movie. I believe there was at least one Jimi Hendrix docudrama. Wasn't there, Jimmy? I believe, do you remember it?

• 1:59:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was Andre 3000 from OutKast.

• 1:59:43Joe Rogan?

  That's right.

• 1:59:45Speaker 04

  But they'd like, couldn't really use all the music and stuff, I think.

• 1:59:48Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I didn't hear Jamie.

• 1:59:51Joe Rogan?

  He said it was Andre 3000 from OutKast?

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:59:54Joe Rogan?

  And that they couldn't use all the music.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:59:57Speaker 04

  I think, I, it came out ten, even like ten years ago.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  That was an issue back then, too. I remember that.

• 2:00:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:03Speaker 04

  Here's a picture of him as.

• 2:00:05Joe Rogan?

  That's right.

• 2:00:07Speaker 04

  Jamie.

• 2:00:07Joe Rogan?

  That's right. Wow.

• 2:00:09Speaker 04

  Also, that the day after you're talking about in Cleveland, there's a recording of the concert.

• 2:00:14Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:00:16Speaker 04

  Shit, that's my Facebook.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  Is that right, the Cleveland concert?

• 2:00:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:00:19Speaker 04

  There's a, I've got a few different links. They kept taking me to Facebook, but there's a bunch of pictures.

• 2:00:23Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:00:25Speaker 04

  March 26, 1968.

• 2:00:27Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:00:28Speaker 04

  And then there's a recording of the concert, too.

• 2:00:31Joe Rogan?

  So you can listen to the recording from the concert?

• 2:00:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was trying to get in here. There's like, there's an article from his legendary trip to Cleveland.

• 2:00:39Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:00:40Speaker 04

  But I, this was like paid while I decided I couldn't get all the stuff behind it.

• 2:00:43Joe Rogan?

  Wow, man.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  He was the nicest guy.

• 2:00:47Joe Rogan?

  I can imagine.

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, very nice, nice guy. Just laid back.

• 2:00:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow, he was just insane. One of a, not, not even one of a generation. One, one of one talent. I mean, to this day, if you ask most guitarists, who's the greatest guitarist of all time, it's Jim Hendrix.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. That one guy who died at 27 years old, and would he die in 1969 or 1970?

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, somewhere there, yeah.

• 2:01:15Joe Rogan?

  That that guy, to this day, is universally regarded as the greatest guitarist of all time.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  You know, I interviewed him. He was known as the Grim Reaper at the Plain Dealer because I interviewed Hendrix.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Um, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Otis. And they all died, they all died young, you know. I did a, I did a feature on Jose Feliciano. And people would come up to me at the Plain Dealer and say, what do you have against Jose? Why do you want him to die?

• 2:01:46Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy. It's just unfortunate that they all die. And they all died at twenty seven years old, which is really.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  Was that right?

• 2:01:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison all died at twenty seven. And, um, who else? Kurt Cobain, um, Amy Winehouse.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  At twenty seven?

• 2:02:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's all twenty seven. Twenty seven's the magic number for insanely talented people to die young. Yeah, very weird.

• 2:02:16Joe Rogan?

  You've had an incredible life, man.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  I've, I've, you know, I've been blessed. The, I've been really blessed. First of all, the fact that I'm still here at eighty one, considering some of my excesses in the past is miraculous. Truly is. I started smoking when I was thirteen.

• 2:02:32Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  Stopped when I was sixty.

• 2:02:34Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  Right, um, then I had just stage four cancer and, and, and Marshall Storm surgery saved me. Um, the, you know, the, I drank, uh, two hard most of my life until I was seventy. Um, and I finally stopped then. Um, the, um, only because I have a hard-headed Italian-Bolish wife who said, enough, you're falling down. You're taking twelve pills and you're falling down. No fucking more. Okay, ended it. Now, shortly after we were married, after, literally after we exchanged vows, she turned to me and she says,

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  she whispered, she says, if you cheat on me, I'm going to fucking hunt you down and kill you, okay? I listened to her. I, I, I listened to her. I listened to this woman. You know, so.

• 2:03:27Joe Rogan?

  Sounds like a fun lady.

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  She is. She is, and she's, um, I'm very proud of her because at, at sixty seven.

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  Um, the mother of four and truly the, the true head of our family. She's writing her first, she's written her first novel.

• 2:03:47Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Which is called, um, Dark Church. And it's set in, in, uh, Dracula's, Transylvania.

• 2:03:54Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  And it's a, a kind of, um, of, uh, Gothic, um, thriller. Um, the, um, and, um, the, I, I bring it up because I promised her that I would make this plug. And I fear that if I don't, I'm gonna be in a lot of talking troubles. Thank you very much, Joe.

• 2:04:20Joe Rogan?

  I love that when someone does something like that, when they're in their sixties, just say, fuck it, something I've always wanted to do, let's do it. I think it's fantastic.

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:04:28Joe Rogan?

  I ju- I just love when people do, like, fuck your age, who cares? Just pu- put it out, write it.

• 2:04:34Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 2:04:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  But I have lived, it, it was an amazing life and I, and I, I'm very thankful. Um, the, uh, um, I've seen a lot, um, the, and I've come out on the other side. I've seen a lot of darkness too. Um, but when it's all over, Graham Greene, who was in, in, was a writer that I admired, died, I think, in his late seventies. Um, and he said, um, we get to a point where we see the fence. The fence is there, but we can't see over the fence. But the closer we get to the fence, the more curious we are about what's on the other side of the fence. And there are some people who decide that they're too curious, people like Hunter, and jump over the fence, right?

• 2:05:19Speaker 01

  I'm not doing that, but, but I'm approaching the fence. But I've lived a terrific life and only, once again, only, only in America, you know, really, in America.

• 2:05:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, only in America. Well, I'm, I'm glad you're not jumping over the fence, cause I'm glad we got a chance to talk to you.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  Although I really did admire his note. The no more fun note, it should be, uh, it should be classic.

• 2:05:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, that's how he lived and at the end of his life, obviously it was not fun.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 2:05:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  But Twain, why, I keep going back to Twain. This is a, this is a good one, I think. He, he said, um, "The orgasm is God's own payback for all the suffering that he overlooks in the world."

• 2:06:03Joe Rogan?

  That's funny.

• 2:06:06Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's like writers in particular are, they're so important to culture because they can put down thoughts in a way that reshapes the way people view things. And we talked about Hunter in the 60s and the 70s. He was the voice of that generation. Like he was the guy that was this intelligent guy that wasn't a part of the elite establishment, that wasn't a part of the rich fat cats, but was also famous and well-known, but stuck true to his thoughts and his beliefs. And was able to articulate things in a way that gave you this understanding of what was going on with the people back then. That to this day, if you read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, or if you read Fear

• 2:06:50Joe Rogan?

  and Loathing in Las Vegas, or any of his work, you know, the Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, like it's just a phenomenal encapsulation of that.

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  The Curse of Loneliness, even something.

• 2:07:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's so important. It's, and we don't have a lot of that today, unfortunately. You know, you got a lot of podcasters and a lot of, you know, people making YouTube videos and TikToks, and just not a lot of like great writing that encapsulates things where there's like one figure that we turn to to read their stuff on things. And Hunter was that guy.

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  Yes, he was. As Hemingway was for a previous generation. You know, and Hunter and I talked a lot about Hemingway. Because of our backgrounds and earning a living and all of that. And I think that the fact that Hunter ended it, as he did, was sort of taught out many, many years before, in part, he threw Hemingway's example.

• 2:07:50Joe Rogan?

  Inspired by Hemingway, yeah. Unfortunately, that's how he did it too. And they both shared in common that they drank to excess.

• 2:07:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But you know, when I was a boy. Um, wanting to be a, and I wanted to be a novelist and not a screenwriter. Boy, the whole eternity were Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. They all died of alcoholism. Um, Hemingway shot himself. Fitzgerald had a, had a heart attack at a very young age while working as a hack Hollywood screenwriter, incidentally. And Faulkner fell off a horse, I think, in his early seventies, ripped, totally drunk. Um, and these were the idols of young people coming up and, you know.

• 2:08:31Joe Rogan?

  What do you think it is about alcohol and writing that go hand in glove?

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  The, the, um, I, I, for a while, I drank all day black coffee and cognac. Um, the, um, and then, then later on in life, um, the, I didn't have my first drink until noon, and what Hemingway was 11 o'clock. Um, and, uh, and I measured it until at night. And, and then it was gin, um, before it was white wine. Um, and part of it is that if you're lost, you know, in this imaginary world that's in your head all day, you can't get rid of it. You can't make it stop.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  And, and the booze makes it stop so that you could continue your normal familial daily obligations and schedules without having this, this stuff in your head all the time trying to crowd it out. The fact that sometimes, excuse me, the fact that sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and take notes of, of something that a character says or something indicates that I can't get rid of it. What the booze, when I was drinking, if I drank enough, I could get rid of it and begin it again the next day. It's partly freeing yourself, it's an interesting point, it's partly freeing yourself from something that you've created yourself.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  So that in that sense, you create something that, that, that can hurt you, even if you created it. My greatest enjoyment was, was, was writing a screenplay. And, I mean, it gives me a terrific amount of pleasures knowing that. It's going to take, when people see this, it's going to make their own lives more pleasant for at least two hours. They will enjoy it, they may, they may laugh at it, but it will take them out of their own existences in a pleasant way.

• 2:10:33Speaker 05

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• 2:11:03Speaker 06

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• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  That ain't bad, to be able to do that with people.

• 2:11:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's huge.

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  And that's very important to me.

• 2:11:39Joe Rogan?

  People think of it as trivial, that entertainment is trivial. I don't think it is at all. It shapes our perceptions of the world.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. You do the exact same thing. You make people's lives better by enjoying what they're watching. And that's, that is not as important or as dramatic as my daughter-in-law, for example, who just got her medical degree, who literally, literally saves people's lives. The, incidentally, the classic Hollywood story, I think, Alyssa. Alyssa Eszterhas works in, in Texas in a hospital. And she just got her medical degree.

• 2:12:18Speaker 01

  But to show the influence that Hollywood has on our culture. The other day, she walks into a room and there's a gigantic big guy there who's yelling and screaming. You know, this is the sweetest person in the world and has this wonderful smile. And really, he's great with people and she's trying to calm him down and she says, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" And she describes him as a really big man and is screaming and saying, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" And he yells, "I want Brad Pitt." Fucking in Texas, you know, at some hospital and he says, "You want Brad Pitt?" "I want fucking Brad Pitt." "But why?

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  Why do you want Brad Pitt?" "Because I wanna fuck him."

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  Now, this sweet woman.

• 2:13:12Joe Rogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  Doctor confronted him with this, "That man wants to fuck Brad Pitt." "One more example, do you need of the powerful effect of the culture on us?" "So, when I write something, I don't want some guy to see it and say, 'Is this the result? I want Brad Pitt,' nor do I want Philomena Zelensky to start a fucking war."

• 2:13:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  "But I do want people to enjoy it."

• 2:13:38Joe Rogan?

  Right. That's hilarious. When you see like, when you say that the alcohol silences the voices. I always thought of it as the other. I thought of it as like alcohol releases people from their inhibitions and allows them to tap into this voice sometimes.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  I think that happens with some writers, but that's never been my problem. There's something about going into a little room wherever you are and you don't have to be in Hollywood. You can be anywhere, as long as there's a little room in the house you can escape to and sit there quietly and make shit up that you think will, that people will enjoy. As long as that's there, that's all I really need. You know, now occasionally, maybe I will play music without stop on certain scripts. It's the same way with Leonard Cohen, I listen to him a lot, and Dylan, of course. I did a movie with Dylan, you know, which was also a funny experience.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  But sometimes it's music. It's not coke anymore. It's not cognac anymore with coffee. I drank so much coffee that finally, one day, we had to call an ambulance because I thought I was having a heart attack. Become allergic to it.

• 2:14:56Joe Rogan?

  It was just caffeine?

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  Ambulance caffeine. Ambulance is driving me down to Marine General and there's a traffic jam, there's construction, right? And they think I'm having a heart attack and I jump out of the ambulance and I run up to the guy with the heart hat. And I'll never forget, it says, "Bring her off." I don't think it was "Bring her off." And I'm yelling at him, "I'm having a heart attack, you motherfucker. Get these guys out of the way. I'm dying." Of course, "Oh, my God. It's worse than the guy who wants to fuck Brad Pitt."

• 2:15:24Speaker 01

  Gets out of the way.

• 2:15:25Joe Rogan?

  Well, the crazy thing is just coffee, after all the coke and all the other craziness?

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, even that, so I had to stop. I stopped the coffee as well.

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  Years after I stopped it, I was in New York and I ordered a decaf espresso. There wasn't decaf and I was out for two and a half days without being able to sleep, so obviously my system got totally screwed up.

• 2:15:50Joe Rogan?

  It got reset. Yeah, you lost your tolerance for it.

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  But I never felt it inspired me. Now, with basic instinct, writing it in the sun, in the Hawaiian sun. And of course, through all of this, I was nonstop smoking. Two pack a day smoking. Beginning with Lucky's and Marlboros and moving on to Gold Wasps and occasionally cigars and pipe and all this shit.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  So I did do that. But I never felt that the coke was inspirational. It was enjoyable and it was fucking dynamite sexually. That also comes in handy.

• 2:16:39Joe Rogan?

  But it wasn't what fueled your writing?

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  No, I never felt that it did.

• 2:16:43Joe Rogan?

  It was just recreational?

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was recreational.

• 2:16:44Joe Rogan?

  But nicotine did?

• 2:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:16:47Joe Rogan?

  That's also, Stephen King said that, that when he stopped smoking, it was one of the most difficult things that he ever quit. Like quitting the booze and quitting coke and all that stuff was one thing, but quitting cigarettes, he said he really noticed the difference in his writing.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went through that. I was warned after my cancer surgery by this army surgeon that I like so much that if you smoke or drink, you're dead. You're dead. Understand that. And so I took it seriously. The drinking, my idea of not drinking at that point was switching from Tangerine to white wine. And of course, that got out of hand after a while, too, until Naomi jumped into the whole prayer, you know, so.

• 2:17:36Joe Rogan?

  And now you're completely clean?

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  Totally. I've been first, or completely clean.

• 2:17:40Joe Rogan?

  Does this all line up with your conversion to Christianity?

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I needed Jesus of Nazareth's help, seriously, to be able to do all that. And I did a lot of praying. But I still believe in prayer and I believe in worship with a group of people. There's a special kind of inspirational thing that I feel.

• 2:18:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. No, I agree with you. I think there's something about all those people collected together.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:10Joe Rogan?

  It's just like when you go to a concert and you feel the music with all the people that are enjoying the music. There's a similar thing that happens at a church.

• 2:18:16Speaker 01

  Very similar, absolutely.

• 2:18:17Joe Rogan?

  We're meant to be together. You know, we are tribal people and we're meant to be together. And there's something about groups of people together, especially in a positive way, that unite us and connect us in a way that it's very profound. It's different than anything else. It's different than watching it on a screen. There's something about being in the presence of other people that are doing the same thing.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. You can feel a vibe.

• 2:18:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  And the vibe goes deep and it's really inspirational. And when it's really working, I feel almost transported. I'm on a different level, you know, and I feel myself being on that level and it's wonderful.

• 2:18:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. And you can see all these other people experiencing the same thing. It's very transformational, really. And, you know, I always talk about the parking lot of church is like the best place on earth because everybody lets you go. Everybody lets everybody go in front of them. Everyone's kind. You know, it's, it, it works. That's what's crazy. Like, the teachings of Jesus do work.

• 2:19:19Speaker 01

  Yes, they do.

• 2:19:20Joe Rogan?

  Like, if you follow them, you will be a better person.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  Yes, you will.

• 2:19:23Joe Rogan?

  But people are very cynical, and rightly so. They're very afraid of, uh, people manipulating them. They're very afraid of, of cults. There you go. You got your cross right on you.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:34Joe Rogan?

  That's a nice one, too. I like that.

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:19:36Joe Rogan?

  Because people are very afraid of people telling them that they know things, that they have the answers.

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, the, the, um, I'm, um, I'm, I'm not afraid of that. Sometimes I'm skeptical of it, but it depends on where it's coming from. And sometimes, I, I don't know how you are, but sometimes I could feel something very special with someone who is talking about those kinds of things, you know?

• 2:20:03Joe Rogan?

  You can feel the difference, and the difference between that and someone who's not genuine is very apparent.

• 2:20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:09Joe Rogan?

  You, you feel that as well. Like, it's, it bothers you. You know, like, I don't want to hear this guy talk about this.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  But you know what? If you have a shit detector, and you do, and so do I, if you have a shit detector, you can really feel that and pick it up.

• 2:20:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  And block it out.

• 2:20:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I think you, your shit detector works with virtually everything. I think the audience gets it, too. You know?

• 2:20:30Speaker 01

  I agree. I, the, the, in terms of, of, um, if my, if my shit detector advises me to do something, I must always do it.

• 2:20:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, this is Joe. It's been an honor having you in here. You're a real legend.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  It's been such a pleasure. Um, you are truly, what you do is you have redefined in the interview, and you, you made it into a very special conversation, conversation, chat between two guys, um, who think they'll like each other. And they, they talk for hours, and they, they're inspired, and they, they come out, and they like each other. And, and you do that to people, and I think that's a great gift. Thank you. I thank you for the Joe Rogan experience.

• 2:21:22Joe Rogan?

  Thank you for being here. It's an honor. It's an honor to meet you, and an honor to have you on here, and I, I really enjoyed the conversation. It was awesome.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  Thank you. I did, too.

• 2:21:29Joe Rogan?

  All right.

• 2:21:38Speaker 06

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