Joe Rogan Experience #1264 - Timothy Denevi

Joe Rogan 0:01 ... five. You get less enthusiastic with-

Narrator 0:03 I don't know, maybe.

Joe Rogan 0:04 ... after it's been a few times.

Timothy Denevi 0:05 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:05 You're like, you're not really... We're live? Alright, we're live. What's up, man? How are you?

Timothy Denevi 0:09 (laughs) Good.

Joe Rogan 0:10 Thanks for doing this.

Timothy Denevi 0:10 Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan 0:11 My pleasure. Uh, sorry for the false starts. We've been having issues with our equipment. Good to see you though, man. What's up?

Timothy Denevi 0:19 Good to be here and talk Hunter Thompson.

Joe Rogan 0:20 My, my pleasure. Um, so your book, Freak Kingdom.

Timothy Denevi 0:25 You know, we live in, uh, interesting times right now. It's kind of a, kind of a shit show at every single moment.

Joe Rogan 0:31 Keep this about a fist from your face. Pull that sucker-

Timothy Denevi 0:33 Do I-

Joe Rogan 0:33 There you go. Perfect.

Timothy Denevi 0:34 What should I do with my hands? Should I put 'em up just like that?

Joe Rogan 0:35 You can do whatever you want with your hands, man.

Timothy Denevi 0:37 But I shoot with this one. (laughs) Um-

Joe Rogan 0:38 What is, what is all this, uh, you got a lot of writing.

Timothy Denevi 0:41 Well, when I... When I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure my sentences never sounded like Thompson's sentences.

Joe Rogan 0:46 Oh, right, right.

Timothy Denevi 0:47 But when... So I didn't write out a lot of his sentences, but this morning before coming on, I went and got some of my favorite quotes and just wrote 'em out longhand to get a sense of what his, uh, what his perspective was and rhythm was again.

Joe Rogan 0:57 Didn't he do that with The Great Gatsby? He-

Timothy Denevi 0:59 He did it like a few times.

Joe Rogan 1:00 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 1:01 He did it by hand, he like typed it out.

Joe Rogan 1:02 Yeah. I love that idea that he was trying to find like the rhythm of the words. That's such a fascinating notion because comedians do that. In the early days of comedy, like a lot of guys, um, in, like before they ever start going on stage themselves, they'll imitate their favorite comedian's bits. Like they'll do a Richard Pryor bit, and they'll do it to their friends and they'll get, get a sense of the rhythm and the timing and get those laughs from doing a Richard Pryor bit to their friends, and then they get that bug. It's like part of what infects them.

Timothy Denevi 1:34 I mean, that's the hardest thing to steal. We're not plagiarizing, but we're trying to understand what decisions they made-

Joe Rogan 1:39 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 1:39 ... to create beautiful work.

Joe Rogan 1:40 Yeah, I'm sure he wasn't plagiarizing, but it is, it's so unfortunate when, when someone does.

Timothy Denevi 1:47 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:47 You know, when, when you have someone, whether it's Hunter or Richard Pryor or anyone who's just got a truly exceptional and unique mind.

Timothy Denevi 1:55 Or someone who doesn't, like our president, and decided-

Joe Rogan 1:58 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 1:58 ... when he ran in 2016 to plagiarize Richard Nixon's 1968 convention speech in Miami-

Joe Rogan 2:03 Did he do that?

Timothy Denevi 2:03 ... directly.

Joe Rogan 2:04 Really?

Timothy Denevi 2:04 Yeah, that was the headline in the fucking Times. It said, "Nixon's Inspiration." I'm sorry, uh, "Trump's Inspiration, Nixon is the One." So the lines about crime and, um, like barbarians at the gates, crime, law and order, those were all from Nixon's shitty but successful 1968, uh, Miami convention speech. And Thompson, you know, Thompson knew how effective that that was.

Joe Rogan 2:24 Yeah, I wonder if he did that on purpose. Because he was so good... And one thing that Trump is so good at, he's so good at getting the media to talk about him.

Timothy Denevi 2:32 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 2:33 And like one of the best ways to get the media to talk about him was give them something to be angry about that no one else is gonna give a fuck about.

Timothy Denevi 2:39 He was like, "Oh, Melania plagiarized, but I plagiarized-

Joe Rogan 2:41 Right, right. (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 2:41 ... much better from Nixon."

Joe Rogan 2:43 That's right.

Timothy Denevi 2:44 So, so Trumpse would've loved it.

Joe Rogan 2:45 Melania took some lines from Michelle Obama's speech, right?

Timothy Denevi 2:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:49 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 2:49 Well, if you plagiarize Nixon, that's okay.

Joe Rogan 2:51 All right.

Timothy Denevi 2:51 I mean, so, well Freak Kingdom, the book about Hunter S. Thompson, I mean it's really about taking the fucking emotion of living in this present-

Joe Rogan 2:57 What he-

Timothy Denevi 2:57 ... looking back at Thompson's career, and then trying to write, um, it like a novel to dramatize all of the, uh, experiences he went through that are today so applicable to us. And, and just show his perspective that's so applicable to us today.

Joe Rogan 3:10 What do you got here, Jamie?

Timothy Denevi 3:12 From New York Times.

Joe Rogan 3:13 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 3:13 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 3:13 It's "Donald Trump's Convention but the Inspiration, Nixon."

Timothy Denevi 3:17 I was like, are you f... You're running on Nixon? That's what you're running on?

Joe Rogan 3:20 Well, there's some parallels, you know. I mean, do you remember when, um, when Hunter got together with, uh, Bill Murray and Bill's brother and they did that thing where they were trying to get people to, uh, "Nixon got a bad deal. We gotta bring him back."

Timothy Denevi 3:36 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 3:36 And, and people were going along with it.

Timothy Denevi 3:38 Oh, yeah. That's a good... Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 3:39 Yeah. I mean-

Timothy Denevi 3:39 Yeah, I do remember. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:40 Remember that?

Timothy Denevi 3:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:41 Like that... There's a lot of parallels with Trump in that regard.

Timothy Denevi 3:45 I mean, it... One of my favorite quotes by, um, Thompson is like, um, you know, Richard Nixon is, um, with his Barbie doll family and his Barbie doll wife, is like America's answer to, um, you know, it's, it's America's Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.

Joe Rogan 3:59 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 3:59 Like, you know, he is the werewolf. He speaks to the werewolf in us.

Joe Rogan 4:02 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 4:03 And Nixon chose to hide that werewolf his whole career until it finally came out, 'cause he was insane with power. Trump ran on the werewolf. He's like, "No, I'm not gonna hide it. That's who I am. That's what I'm gonna use to try to get elected." And like George Wallace did, like other politicians did, it had resonance. And it happened with Trump because of our media environment, because of the place we live in now, to amplify him all the way to the most powerful position in the world. Which is insane.

Joe Rogan 4:26 It would be really fascinating to see if Hunter was alive and in his prime now how he would... I think h- his take on it would be very similar to Matt Taibbi's. You know, like Matt Taibbi in, i- is, in my opinion, our more reasonable, more put together version of Hunter Thompson.

Timothy Denevi 4:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:42 Because he's more-

Timothy Denevi 4:43 Sustained.

Joe Rogan 4:44 ... disciplined.

Timothy Denevi 4:44 More disciplined, long career version of Hunter Thompson.

Joe Rogan 4:46 (laughs) He's like rational and he's there all the time. Like, the... I'm sure you've heard the recently uncovered recording of Hunter calling in to some company that installed a DVD player and he's fucking screaming and yelling. It's like 15 minutes long. (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 5:00 I know. And then he like gets lost and he goes, "What the fuck? And the f- and DVD player doesn't work."

Joe Rogan 5:03 "Yeah, yeah, yeah. My fucking cords."

Timothy Denevi 5:05 I mean that was... The 19- the 1980s were not the best. You know, I think what Taibbi does is what Thompson did very well. Hunter Thompson was really good at looking at Nixon and saying, "How are you manipulating the way we see you-

Joe Rogan 5:15 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 5:15 ... to get a version of you out?" And Taibbi looks at the way the media gets played. He looks at the way that an administration manipulates the media. And he dramatizes that-

Joe Rogan 5:22 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 5:22 ... while everybody else just gives us the information the administration's giving us. And that goes back to Thompson with Nixon. Thompson had space when he worked for Rolling Stone, and he could write about how Nixon made everybody watch his speeches, the press, on a closed circuit television. And they made the press just like Trump, off in the corner when the plane arrived, you know, being berated by everybody.

Joe Rogan 5:39 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 5:39 It's very similar to what, uh, is going on now. And again, we see people giving hot takes or we see people doing op-eds. We don't see people dramatizing how manipulative these corrupt administrations are and were. And Thompson did that beautifully. Ni- um, Taibbi does that beautifully.

Joe Rogan 5:56 Was, uh, Nixon being berated by the press? Is that why he chose to have the-

Timothy Denevi 5:59 Well, he thought he was. I mean, he was a crook, so-

Joe Rogan 6:01 Right.

Timothy Denevi 6:01 ... he doesn't want the press to investigate him. Like he, you know, he was a crook with San Clemente, like his loans with Bebe Rebozo and all of that. He was a crook the way he used the IRS to investigate his...And it means he was a crook when he tried to break into the Brookings Institution (laughs) to destroy-

Joe Rogan 6:13 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 6:13 ... and bomb evidence. Like, he didn't want the press around him because he had committed very serious crimes that I think that's similar to what we see now. I mean, as people have said on this show, no, no president wants the, a journalist, you know, digging into their lives specifically-

Joe Rogan 6:27 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 6:27 ... because it's, you don't want chumminess with journalists. But I think Trump and Nixon both knew they had so much to hide that to actually have a journalist like Hunter Thompson, who was a good investigative journalist-

Joe Rogan 6:36 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 6:36 ... to have journalists like Matt Taibbi around, that's dangerous (laughs) for them. They'll go to jail, which Nixon should have.

Joe Rogan 6:42 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 6:42 And Trump perhaps should.

Joe Rogan 6:44 Well, who knows what's going to happen? How did you, uh, how'd you get involved with, uh, writing this book?

Timothy Denevi 6:49 Well, I mean, I've always loved Hunter S. Thompson, and I was reading-

Joe Rogan 6:52 How'd you get exposed to him?

Timothy Denevi 6:53 You know, in, in, in, uh, I was 17 years old in a Catholic high school at, uh, Bellarmine College Preparatory up in San Jose, and, um, we had a counterculture, uh, writing class. And so I read some of it in there, and then a friend had an audiobook of Fear and Loathing. And so I just remember the first time hearing that old audiobook of Fear and Loathing, um, or somewhere around Barstow on the Edge of the Desert. And then in my, um, 20s, I really got into, um, Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, which is about a conspiracy within the Los Angeles Police Department, um, regarding the death of Ruben Salazar, um, a prominent journalist. And I read that and I'm like, "Oh my God, dude. This isn't somebody that's just dancing on stage or, like, performing a rogue narrative. This is an investigative journalist who's going to the most powerful people, exposing things they don't want us to see, and in a sense, risking his life to do so." Because he says in Strange Rumblings in Aztlan, which is in Rolling Stone in 1970, he says, "If they were willing to kill Ruben Salazar," who was the most prominent journalist in Los Angeles, you could argue, at the time, "what the fuck is to stop them from killing me, Hunter Thompson-"

Joe Rogan 7:49 Right.

Timothy Denevi 7:50 "... for asking these questions?"

Joe Rogan 7:51 Well, I think that's what a lot of people are saying today with Jamal Khashoggi. You know, Jamal Khashoggi's death has got a lot of journalists really freaking out. Like, "What, you know, what am I doing if I'm criticizing world leaders and talking about international politics, if this could happen to me?"

Timothy Denevi 8:08 Political violence is effective because it's used to silence-

Joe Rogan 8:12 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 8:12 ... either opposition or journalists. And so for me, writing this book, and I tried to dramatize it like a novel. It's quick. It's, like, only 220, 210 pages, and then there's, like, 100 pages of notes. So I, like, cited every sight, smell, or sound so that somebody that knows Thompson really well can be like, "Where the fuck did you get this information?"

Joe Rogan 8:28 Right.

Timothy Denevi 8:28 And somebody else can, if they have questions, just go back and look. But long story short, for me, the crux of the book, um, was in Chicago in 1968, where Hunter Thompson had a press pass. He went to the, uh, Democratic National Convention. On Wednesday night, Mayor Daley gave this order to clear the intersection of Balboa and Michigan because there was a, um, protest going on, five, 10,000 people. Thompson was standing next to the Haymarket Inn, which was on the ground floor level. It was a plate glass window. He was standing with delegates from the, um, Democratic National Convention, standing with their wives, and the cops charged. They did, like, a double pincher formation, like Hannibal and like, um, Kuma in, like, fucking 100 BC. And they split the protesters in half, beat everybody, hit Thompson over the head. He got his motorcycle helmet on just in time, so he's not concussed. He can see everything that's going on. And the entire plate glass window behind him shatters. Everybody falls in. Cops jump in, are beating everybody. And he's looking around, and he's sure that snipers on the roof are gonna open fire at any moment. So he runs to the Blackstone where he's staying across the way, shows his room key, gets beat up by the cops as he's trying to get in. He goes, "I live here, goddamn it. I'm paying $100 a day. Let me in my fucking room." And he barely gets in. And he just sits on his bed afterwards and he says, "They knew I was press. They saw my press pass. They hit me because I was press." And if that's where we're at right now with journalists, you know, if political opponents and journalists are being clubbed to keep silent and to not respond, then this is not the democracy we know.

Joe Rogan 9:54 Yeah, his ex-wife talked about that as being, like, one of the only moments where she saw him cry.

Timothy Denevi 10:02 For two weeks.

Joe Rogan 10:02 When he talked about-

Timothy Denevi 10:02 He just cried afterwards for two weeks.

Joe Rogan 10:04 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 10:04 He couldn't stop. It's crazy.

Joe Rogan 10:06 Wow, uh, it was a, it was a crazy time, right? I mean, that, that time is very similar in a lot of ways to what's going on today. It's just today, there's just so much more information and so much more s- so people have so much more of an ability to communicate.

Timothy Denevi 10:23 Yeah, and I think it's almost easier to coordinate violence. I was just talking to the, um, head of the Proud Boys, you know, Gavin McInnes's, uh, group-

Joe Rogan 10:29 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 10:30 ... um, Enrique Tarrio. And he's like, you know, he's ad- he's saying, he's using the language of the left. He's like, "I'm a victim. I can't buy groceries. They've taken my bank accounts, my platforms." When he talks about violence, he's like, "Who the fuck are you, ANTIFA? Like, I'm, you know, you're 120 pounds and wet. Like, if we have civil war, you're gonna lose." And I was sitting next to him during the podcast and basically what I said was, "If we have a civil war, you're going to be hit by sniper fire from the fucking roof. You're not gonna be in a fistfight-"

Joe Rogan 10:55 No.

Timothy Denevi 10:55 "... with ANTIFA across the way." And I think there's this idea on the right that we can push towards violence and we can get very close to it with our rhetoric or with our, um, actions, but that it won't spread, like the conflagration won't keep going.

Joe Rogan 11:08 Yeah, I don't know if that's isolated to the right.

Timothy Denevi 11:09 I mean, uh, with ANTIFA on the left, too. And that's what I love. Thompson was as hard on the left as he was on the right when he wrote.

Joe Rogan 11:14 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 11:14 And that was so important for his intelligence as a writer.

Joe Rogan 11:16 Well, I think just even the left and the right in general for a lot of these people is just an identity and a gang that they belong to. And I don't think they really understand violence. You know, you wanna talk about violence, talk to a military guy.

Timothy Denevi 11:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:28 You know, talk to someone who really understands what violence actually is. And they don't have this empty rhetoric like these fools do.

Timothy Denevi 11:36 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 11:36 There's a lot of these people that are calling for violence. Like, no, you should be calling for camaraderie.

Timothy Denevi 11:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:41 You should be calling for communication. We should be calling for some way we could all work this out where the civilians, the c- the civilization that we live in, that we all, we all can get along together. And most people don't wanna impede you from living your life and doing what you wanna do. Most people-

Timothy Denevi 11:59 I mean-

Joe Rogan 11:59 ... the vast majority.

Timothy Denevi 12:00 ... Hunter Thompson believed in working within the system. You know, he believed, like, it might be a fucked up system, but you can still run for sheriff in Aspen. And he believed once you resort to violence, that means the conversation has stopped.

Joe Rogan 12:09 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 12:09 And it disfigures you. So he cried for two weeks. That was the most surprising thing for me researching this book and writing it, was to see how much the violence affected him that he experienced at Chicago. And you can speak to someone who's done MMA fighting, who's been punched in the face as hard as somebody can punch you. Most Americans haven't had that, and that changes your ability to articulate something back in that moment. It means you, if, if that's political, if it's a police officer or a political opponent that uses violence instead of an argument to respond to you-We, we've left the realm that we recognize, and we're not going to be able to communicate even in a limited way that we're communicating right now. And Thompson knew that. So that's why after Chicago, I love that he went back to Aspen.

Joe Rogan 12:47 Hm.

Timothy Denevi 12:47 And he's like, "I'm gonna run for fucking sheriff."

Joe Rogan 12:48 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 12:48 "I'm gonna run. I'm gonna do a mayoral campaign in Aspen." And that was brilliant because it was his way to control his environment, knowing that Mayor Daley's not listening to his nonviolent protest. Richard Nixon's not listening to his nonviolent protest. Thompson needed to find another avenue to try to work within the American system to make things happen. And a great contrast is his good friend, um, Oscar Zeta Acosta. There's a wonderful PBS documentary, Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, by, um, Phillip Rodriguez, a great director, and it's Acosta's life. That's who Dr. Gonzo is based on. And, um-

Joe Rogan 13:15 Mm-hmm. Sure.

Timothy Denevi 13:16 ... in Fear and Loathing, you know, Thompson had more advantages than Acosta. And Acosta was being pursued by the LAPD, was eventually set up by them. And for him, working within the system, he ran for sheriff, wasn't an option.

Joe Rogan 13:26 Hm.

Timothy Denevi 13:27 The cops set him up for a high-speed bust. You know?

Joe Rogan 13:30 Hm.

Timothy Denevi 13:30 Like the cops had, the cops had undercover agents from something called the Special Operations for Conspiracy, which was a fucking department in the LAPD at the time. And they were trying to use those provocateurs to incite violence against the, um, plainclothes police, so that... Or the normal clothes police, so that lethal violence could be used to silence the, uh, civil rights movement and the, um, Brown Berets.

Joe Rogan 13:50 So they used agent provocateurs to make it look like they're a part of the protest?

Timothy Denevi 13:55 Yes. Yeah, there was a-

Joe Rogan 13:55 Yeah. That is an age-old tactic.

Timothy Denevi 13:56 Right? That's how you destroy a civil rights movement. 'Cause the most effective weapon in silencing civil rights is the lethal force.

Joe Rogan 14:02 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 14:02 And you can do that in another country, as the US has done, but the US can't use tactics like My Lai, like Thompson writes about this, in the US unless you have a pro- provocative reason.

Joe Rogan 14:11 Right.

Timothy Denevi 14:11 Unless somebody that's undercover attacks a cop. And so the cops then, like what happened on August 29th, 1970, during the moratorium riots, can just flood East LA-

Joe Rogan 14:20 Right.

Timothy Denevi 14:20 ... and kill whoever they want.

Joe Rogan 14:21 Right.

Timothy Denevi 14:21 They killed... They blew Ruben Salazar's head off with a tear gas gun.

Joe Rogan 14:24 Wow. Yeah. Those were darker days when you couldn't communicate as well. And I think that's one of the reasons why Hunter decided to run for sheriff in Aspen, is that he felt like he could control that area. Like, e- it would have a direct impact on his life. The local politics have a real impact on your day-to-day existence. Whereas what's going on in Washington, for the most part, it's not affecting you if you're living in Woody Creek.

Timothy Denevi 14:49 Yeah. I mean, there were people that had Nixon's point of view in Aspen, who were like, "Let's develop this valley beyond what it can hold in terms of its environment."

Joe Rogan 14:56 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 14:56 "Let's, um, imprison hippies because they are going to take away from our tourist, um, you know, economy." You know, "Let's, um, you know, not have or not adhere to normal, like, civil rights laws." And so Thompson, you know, in a participatory democracy, almost a Jeffersonian democracy, um, way, ran for sheriff by emphasizing personal agency and, most of all, trying to get out the youth vote, like people who had left the political system but were living in Aspen, a lot of people wh- like hippies, who had fled the cities in the late 1960s and were living, you know, in the, in the West. And he got them involved, and they should have won the mayor- mayoral campaign with, uh, Joe Edwards then.

Joe Rogan 15:29 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 15:29 Thompson was the director of that. And they lost by like six votes. Then when he ran for sheriff, it got really bad. And he talks about this in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail later, is that a few nights before, both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans freaked out. And so the Democrats said, "All right, we'll kind of throw our weight behind you, the Republican sheriff, and then you Republicans will throw your weight for county manager behind our candidate." And so Thompson ended up losing by like 200 or 300 votes. And so in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: On the Campaign Trail in 1972, he's, um, at the Nixon campaign. Um, Nixon's giving his acceptance speech at the convention. Thompson's with the Nixon youth, who are about to do a demonstration. And he says like, you know, "I'm not a journalist. You can't kick me out. Like, I'm a political observer." He's like, "Have you ever run for office?" And the Nixon guy is like, "No, have you?" And Thompson's like, "Sheriff, and I would have won, but the liberals stuck it to me."

Joe Rogan 16:15 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 16:15 And he was right. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 16:17 I love how he shaved his head, too-

Timothy Denevi 16:19 It's great.

Joe Rogan 16:19 ... so he could refer to his long-haired opponent. (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 16:21 My long... I mean, that was a great... That debate... Like, so in the book, I at- I recreate that debate a lot, like, 'cause-

Joe Rogan 16:25 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 16:25 ... there's transcripts of it. That debate is brilliant.

Joe Rogan 16:27 It is brilliant.

Timothy Denevi 16:27 To- Thompson is amazing at that.

Joe Rogan 16:28 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 16:29 The guy's like, "I've only used my gun once in 10 years, but I'd like to have it." And Thompson's like, "Well, if you've used it once in 10 years, maybe you don't need it. We could try not having it." You know, and his-

Joe Rogan 16:37 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 16:37 ... his gun rights, um, views were very complex and changed after Bobby Kennedy's death. But he was so intelligent on stage-

Joe Rogan 16:44 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 16:44 ... with this sheriff who's like, "I just want this job real bad," and like gulping, like, you know, it couldn't-

Joe Rogan 16:48 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 16:48 ... he just was eviscerated by Thompson.

Joe Rogan 16:50 Yeah. You know, i- it's, uh, it's a really interesting... The, the documentary, uh, that follows the campaign and when you get to see him, you know, heartfelt and... when he loses. And you got a sense of what... that there was real hope back then-

Timothy Denevi 17:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:06 ... like, that if these guys could do that... And what's interesting now is, um, you know, back in the '70s, they really did have a freak community in Aspen. That shit's gone now. I don't know what happened.

Timothy Denevi 17:18 The billionaires have replaced the millionaires, is what I was told-

Joe Rogan 17:21 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 17:21 ... when I went out to do research.

Joe Rogan 17:21 It's a weird place, man. You go to Aspen, you see these, like, $20 million houses, and people, like... It's one of the rare places where people still wear fur coats, you know? (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 17:31 (laughs) Not ironically or fake, but real fur coats.

Joe Rogan 17:34 Well, if you wear a fur coat in LA, first of all, it's never cold enough for a fur coat.

Timothy Denevi 17:38 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:38 But if you did, you might get fucked up. Like-

Timothy Denevi 17:40 You're getting blood thrown on you. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:41 ... could... some shit could go down. You know, like you, you... Most likely nothing's gonna happen, but there's a possible chance, which is really weird 'cause if you wear a leather jacket, you have no problem.

Timothy Denevi 17:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:52 It's weird, you know?

Timothy Denevi 17:53 It is weird. I mean, Aspen's weird because a lot of the Thompsons' friends, like Loren Jenkins, a great journalist, um, they've moved down to Basalt. They'd say Down Valley.

Joe Rogan 18:00 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 18:01 So I was out there with his, um, his son. Juan Thompson is a fantastic writer. He wrote a book called, um, um, Stories I Tell Myself about his relationship with his father. And so-

Joe Rogan 18:08 Yeah, I've been in contact with Juan through email.

Timothy Denevi 18:10 He's a really good writer, and he's a really honest and brilliant writer.

Joe Rogan 18:13 He seems like a good dude, and he seemed like a really good dude in the Gonzo documentary as well, you know?

Timothy Denevi 18:19 Gibney's, that was a great documentary.

Joe Rogan 18:20 Yes. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Gibney. He, he always kills it. I, um, I went to the, uh, the tavern in Woody Creek when I was in t- Uh, felt like, "If I'm here-"

Timothy Denevi 18:31 We gotta go.

Joe Rogan 18:32 "... I gotta go there." You know, it's weird. It's weird being there, man, you know?

Timothy Denevi 18:36 When did you go? How long ago was that?

Joe Rogan 18:37 I guess it was a year ago, year and a half ago.

Timothy Denevi 18:39 Did, were people on bicycles just dr- w- uh, riding their bikes by the whole time? It's on this huge bike route now.

Joe Rogan 18:44 No, it was cold as fuck.

Timothy Denevi 18:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:45 It was the winter.

Timothy Denevi 18:46 Okay.

Joe Rogan 18:46 We were there for a ski trip, so-

Timothy Denevi 18:48 What did you think of it?

Joe Rogan 18:49 Well, it was just cool. You know, it's like there's places you go to where you just, uh, you just kinda... You know, I was with my family, they didn't give a fuck. My kids have no idea who he is.

Timothy Denevi 19:01 (laughs) The children listening here need to know who he is.

Joe Rogan 19:04 There's, there's, yeah. (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 19:04 The children out there-

Joe Rogan 19:05 Well, they'll, my kids'll learn eventually-

Timothy Denevi 19:06 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 19:07 ... but they're just eating enchiladas, you know? But it's just, um, it's, uh, to me, it, you know, represented a big part of who he, you know, this is like-

Timothy Denevi 19:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:18 ... this was his home base.

Timothy Denevi 19:20 Dude, he came out, so he was in San Francisco in '65, '66.

Joe Rogan 19:22 There it is. There's a picture of me there. I think there's a picture of me there on my Instagram.

Timothy Denevi 19:27 It was a special place for him. When he was in San Francisco, it was like being on the central nerve. He was there from '64 to '67 and-

Joe Rogan 19:34 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 19:34 ... uh, or '66. And he saw the first Jefferson Airplane concert.

Joe Rogan 19:38 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 19:38 He lived right next to the Matrix. He went out every night till like 5:00 AM.

Joe Rogan 19:41 That-

Timothy Denevi 19:41 He was with the Hells Angels. That's awesome. He was with everybody.

Joe Rogan 19:43 Yeah, I got hammered there too, outta respect. (laughing)

Timothy Denevi 19:46 (laughing)

Joe Rogan 19:47 I had quite a few margaritas.

Timothy Denevi 19:48 But here, he could divide his life up. Look, the freak power.

Joe Rogan 19:51 Yeah, yep.

Timothy Denevi 19:51 If you can see in the background, that freak power, um, the, the, yeah, the sheriff's, uh, campaign, um, symbol.

Joe Rogan 19:56 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 19:56 But he moved to Woody Creek and he suddenly had, you see it in his, um, you see it when you interview people that know him, you see it in his letters, he had space again. And being in the city was hard for him-

Joe Rogan 20:05 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 20:05 ... because he could write beautifully about the Hells Angels, about the counter-cultural scene. He was at war protests and the free, um, speech movement with Mario Savio. He was there, but it was burning him up, you know? It was using him up. And I think when he went to Woody Creek, he learned that, "All right, I can take a plane to Chicago, get my ass kicked, but I can come back and if I wanna have a drink-"

Joe Rogan 20:23 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 20:23 "... I can go to that tavern or I can go to the Jerome Hotel."

Joe Rogan 20:26 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 20:26 And that's a good space. And I think that was a good space for him.

Joe Rogan 20:28 Yeah. Well, I think that's a, a probably, uh, a very intelligent move on his behalf. And a lot of us, I think, that are involved in day-to-day chaos would probably benefit from something similar.

Timothy Denevi 20:39 I mean, I just don't think he gets enough credit for his effort. You know, one thing I found when writing the book, I interviewed, um, I interviewed Bob Geiger, um, who Fear and Loathing is dedicated to, and who was a doctor that was a friend of his in Sonoma. And Geiger initially, um, was the one who prescribed him Dexedrine. And so people think Thomson was just doing acid and writing or, um, whatever. And maybe later as a caricature of whoever he became, that might've been part of his persona, but when he was writing from, the book is from Kennedy's assassination to Nixon's resignation, he was working so fucking hard. Like, he was working harder than we can ever imagine. Douglas Brinkley is, um, the presidential historian who does his, um, literary estate, talks about Thompson wasn't as fun as he seemed during that time. He took Dexedrine to write and he had a, a drinking problem, you know, that I was trying to measure in-

Joe Rogan 21:23 Is dex- Dexedrine some sort of an amphetamine?

Timothy Denevi 21:24 It's Adderall.

Joe Rogan 21:25 Is it Adderall?

Timothy Denevi 21:25 It's Adderall that's cut differently with salt.

Joe Rogan 21:26 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 21:27 So it's a little bit like you go a little higher and when it comes down it's a little harder. While Adderall was Obetrol, which was an old diet drug-

Joe Rogan 21:33 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 21:33 ... that was repurposed in like '96, that is a little bit smoother in that sense. But it's very similar to what, uh, to what Thomson took. He had a great editor named Margret Harrell, who was his editor on Hells Angels. And he didn't know she was 27 when he was 29. He thought she was like 55 'cause they would talk on the phone every day to edit the book. And, um, he sent her, she still has the letter, I've done some events with her, she still has the actual letter. He sent her a five milligram Dexedrine. He's like, "Hey, it's gonna be hard the last 10 pages to edit. Take this and focus." (laughing)

Joe Rogan 22:02 (laughing)

Timothy Denevi 22:02 So she still has it, this orange, little five milligram Dexedrine.

Joe Rogan 22:06 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 22:06 For 40, 50 years she's had it.

Joe Rogan 22:07 Wow. That's crazy. Yeah, um, the, that Gibney documentary is, uh, really fantastic. It's probably one of the best introductions that anybody could have to try to get a grip on why, after all these years, Hunter resonates with so many people.

Timothy Denevi 22:26 I mean, I think that the Gibney documentary is brilliantly and perfectly done. I think that Thompson means something different with Donald Trump as president of the United States.

Joe Rogan 22:34 Mm.

Timothy Denevi 22:35 To me. Uh, you, people could see it before Gibney saw it, before other like, um, brilliant writers saw it before Taibbi did. But when Donald Trump became president of the United States, it was a lens onto the past, I felt like. And-

Joe Rogan 22:47 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 22:47 ... I was a, I mean, I'm a bitch ass liberal. Like, I was fucking upset. And so one of the ways I dealt with it was to just remove myself to 1968, 1967, 1969. And I took the emotion I had in the present, and I realized that Thompson is, is such a voice right now for people that maybe don't know him, only know him through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam's film.

Joe Rogan 23:05 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 23:06 I would like for it to kind of be a lens that now if they read that, they could then read his work and perhaps, you know, w- what his timelessness will come through. It was, uh, more, it was an attempt to focus that timelessness. And that, what helped was the fucking terror of our present.

Joe Rogan 23:20 Yeah. You can see th- you definitely see the parallels in, in his work. You know, who also, uh, rings true like that is a lot of Bill Hicks stuff on the first Gulf War, you know, and, and Bush as a president and, you know, which obviously people today would probably be dying to have Bush as president.

Timothy Denevi 23:38 (laughs) That's-

Joe Rogan 23:39 You know, the original Bush.

Timothy Denevi 23:39 ... he's so smart. He carried his book around for two weeks, at least he carried a book.

Joe Rogan 23:42 Well, Herbert Walker, the main, the older Bush-

Timothy Denevi 23:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:45 ... who was, uh, you know, much more of a, a reasonable gentleman, you know?

Timothy Denevi 23:50 Yeah. Well, that's our discourse today too where there couldn't be anything said reasonably about him when he passed away.

Joe Rogan 23:55 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 23:55 Or even about his wife. I mean, I think, uh, it's not, he's not very favorable right now, but one of Hunter Thompson's main influences was Norman Mailer.

Joe Rogan 24:02 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 24:02 And I don't think Norman Mailer writes well about women. And, you know, I think that's, I think Thompson wrote better about women. Thompson didn't just often write about w-

Joe Rogan 24:08 What's the criticism that I'm not familiar with

Narrator 24:10 ... the criticism by Mailer?

Timothy Denevi 24:10 Well, Mailer, whenever he writes about a woman, it's like he's watching the Nixonettes get off the Nixon airplane and he's like, "There were 33 redheads, like, five had long legs like this." Like, it's like, Mailer, you didn't need to write that fucking passage. You're writing about power and people more extreme than you. So I think Mailer writes beautifully about men that have more power than him.

Joe Rogan 24:25 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 24:25 And so he writes about 1968 in Chicago, where Thompson didn't, because Thompson was beat up. And he writes about that moment of, um, where Thompson's being beat up.

Joe Rogan 24:34 I'm confu- but what is the criticism of the way he's writing about women? Just, he's describing them physically?

Timothy Denevi 24:38 Uh, the male gaze is that he, well, he stabbed his wife in the-

Joe Rogan 24:41 The male gaze?

Timothy Denevi 24:41 He, he, he stabbed his wife in the heart.

Joe Rogan 24:42 Did he really?

Timothy Denevi 24:43 Yeah, with a penknife.

Joe Rogan 24:44 What? With a knife?

Timothy Denevi 24:44 Yeah, he went to Bellevue, he went to Bellevue for 14 days. It was in 1960.

Joe Rogan 24:48 That's it?

Timothy Denevi 24:48 He missed it. Yeah, no he went to, he did a psychiat- psychiatric evaluation instead of going to jail.

Joe Rogan 24:53 What?

Timothy Denevi 24:53 I think they stayed married.

Joe Rogan 24:54 What?

Timothy Denevi 24:54 They, yeah. (laughing)

Joe Rogan 24:55 Boy, what a reasonable lady.

Timothy Denevi 24:56 Yeah. (laughing) . Um-

Joe Rogan 24:59 Um, so listen, shit happens.

Timothy Denevi 25:01 We'll, we can dialogue on gender politics later. But I, I would say that Thompson wrote well, better about women because he understood that writing about people with more power than you is really important.

Joe Rogan 25:10 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 25:10 And when Mailer writes about people with more power than him, when he writes about Mayor Daley, beating the shit out of everybody, he writes really beautifully. And that's somebody that's resonating right now with, um, what Trump's doing and with the violence that we're seeing on the right and on the left. Where Mailer was sitting with, uh, Pat Buchanan, who was Nixon's, um, main aide, um, in, uh, during that moment in Chicago when the, um, Haymarket Inn shattered and everybody was beat up. And they were looking down from the 17th floor, and Mailer's thinking like, "Well, this is what happens if police take over society." And he writes beautifully about how the police came and split the protestors 'cause he's so high up writing it-

Joe Rogan 25:43 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 25:44 ... and it's gorgeous. And Buchanan would write later like, "I knew then Nixon was going to be President of the United States." Because if fucking Hubert Humphrey, that gutless old war keeler can't control his own convention and his own, um, party, how is he going to be able to run the country?

Joe Rogan 25:58 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 25:59 And so as soon as Chicago's violence erupted, the Nixon campaign knew they'd won the election.

Joe Rogan 26:04 Pat Buchanan, it, it's really interesting because even though Hunter would shit on him, Pat Buchanan-

Timothy Denevi 26:09 They were friends.

Joe Rogan 26:10 ... was actually a fan. Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 26:11 No, they drank. They drank-

Joe Rogan 26:12 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 26:12 ... at the Watergate. Like, they sat there and went deep, like all night.

Joe Rogan 26:15 But he definitely, Hunter definitely shit on him.

Timothy Denevi 26:17 Oh, he shit on him hard.

Joe Rogan 26:18 (laughing)

Timothy Denevi 26:18 But Buchanan shit back on him hard. The first night they met was at the Nixon, um, at the w- at the, um, Holiday Inn in, um, 1968 in New Hampshire during Nixon's comeback campaign. And Thompson walks in and Pat bu- Buchanan goes, "Who's this damn guy with a damn ski jacket walking through our goddamn lobby?" And Thomas is like, "I have a press pass. Like, I'm here to do this." And so they, like, have this big moment and then later on that night, Thompson goes to a party with, um, campaign people and with, um, uh, Buchanan, and he brings a big bottle of Wild Turkey. And so Buchanan's a young journalist at the time, he worked at the St. Louis, um, Post-Dispatch I think, he'd gone to the Columbia Journalism School. He's working for Nixon as his main policy guy. And he looks at Thomas, he's like, "That's the fucking the ski... Oh, you got a bottle of wi- Oh, if you got a bottle of Old Crow, like, no, we'll drink that." And so they stayed up all night and they talked about the Vietnam War. And Thompson, you know, talked about how it disfigures us to be in a foreign war that's unjust and it destroys our democratic ideals to be doing that. And Buchanan was like, "Containment, nuclear war, we're trying to get out of it." And they listened to each other till dawn, like that first night that they met.

Joe Rogan 27:19 Now, what was your idea behind writing this book? Like, what, what compelled you?

Timothy Denevi 27:24 I think we've mistaken Thompson. I think that we see him more as like a Doonesbury character. I-

Joe Rogan 27:28 Hm.

Timothy Denevi 27:28 People who know him really well don't, but I think that most people through whatever cultural forces that we've had-

Joe Rogan 27:34 Well can you explain that?

Timothy Denevi 27:35 ... don't, don't realize he's a voice.

Joe Rogan 27:36 'Cause a lot of people don't know the comparison, what the Doonesbury character-

Timothy Denevi 27:39 So I think in the '80s or, um, '70s, '80s, and '90s, um, the cartoon Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, it became, um, there was a character on it called Uncle Duke, and Uncle Duke was based on Hunter Thompson. And he was kind of an exaggerated version of Hunter Thompson. He was a cartoonish version of Hunter S. Thompson. And I think Terry Gilliam did a wonderful and kind of auteur-ish job on, um, a, like, a brilliant job on Fear and Loathing in, in Las Vegas but that's also an exaggerated version-

Joe Rogan 28:04 Right.

Timothy Denevi 28:05 ... of Hunter Thompson. And we forget today the amount of work Hunter Thompson did, the effort he put out. We forget that he was a straight journalist, where he did the freelance assignments, he wrote the straight articles for years to make money for his family. And it wasn't until he had his breakthrough with Hells Angels that he could develop the style that, um, we identify with today. And so it kills me that we identify him more as a clown or like a, you know, more as a, a cartoonish figure as opposed to a very serious political thinker and political activist and serious writer who can give us insight into the fucking shit show we experience every moment today.

Joe Rogan 28:38 Well, I think the, the perception of him is fairly nuanced. I don't think that everybody thinks of him as a cartoon character. Although particularly later on in his life, he was relegated to that because he really didn't speak well. You know, later on in his life when he was, just the drugs had taken over.

Timothy Denevi 28:55 Alcohol, and the alco-

Joe Rogan 28:56 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 28:57 His, his son writes about the alcohol. Juan-

Joe Rogan 28:58 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 28:58 ... writes so beautifully about the toll alcoholism took on Hunter S. Thompson.

Joe Rogan 29:02 Well, he couldn't talk anymore.

Timothy Denevi 29:04 That's true.

Joe Rogan 29:04 I mean, when he was deep into-

Timothy Denevi 29:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:05 ... his 60s, his heart and voice was ƒ%$#&. It was so hard to even understand him.

Timothy Denevi 29:11 It was awful.

Joe Rogan 29:11 There's a awful piece that he did with Conan O'Brien where Conan went to, uh, Woody Creek and shot guns-

Timothy Denevi 29:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:18 ... uh, off the back porch with him, and y- you could barely understand a fucking word Hunter's saying.

Timothy Denevi 29:23 That's why I tried to end it with Nixon leaving, because it was really sad when Nixon resigned, Hunter Thompson was at the Connecticut Hilton, which is a hotel right by the White House. Annie Leibovitz, um, the photographer with Rolling Stone, was calling him and saying, "We need to get to the White House. Nixon is leaving, like he's gonna get on the helicopter." And Thompson just laid in the grass, and he didn't go. You know? And that was heartbreaking. And he didn't end up writing the eight page spread that he needed to. Instead, it became Annie Leibovitz's photography, which was a famous and, um, in retrospect, like, huge move for her career. But I think at that point right there, of thinking that he'd spent 10 years... I mean, he'd hated Nixon since the Checkers speech, you know, when, um, Nixon was VP for Eisenhower. He'd hated Nixon since 1962 when Nixon lost the, um, California, um, uh, uh, governor, um, ship and said, "You and the press, you've been giving me the shaft for so long, like, you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore."

Joe Rogan 30:18 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 30:19 Like, Thompson had seen that Nixon was somebody who said, "I'm just the poor son of a butcher. I'm just this, like, very hardworking, you know, d- American that represents all of us." Where behind that, like, he was a politically, um, you know, ravenous monster who was anti-communist, who would go to any extent to win. And Thompson saw that, and Thompson knew that other people saw it. And in 1964 at the Barry Goldwater Convention in San Francisco, my favoritely named arena of all time-... the Cow Palace. Um, Barry Goldwater was gonna speak to accept the nomination and what happened was Nixon was introducing him. It was Nixon's way back from the wilderness. Thompson was a few rows back. It was the first time Thompson, I think, was that close to see him live. And Nixon's like, "You know, I'm a poor son of a butcher. Don't think about me. Just think about Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, who will become Mr. President." And Thompson was like, "Fuck. Everybody here knows he's lying, but they think that that act of lying is a skill." In the way a used car salesman who lies-

Joe Rogan 31:16 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 31:16 ... but can make a lot of money off it-

Joe Rogan 31:17 Right.

Timothy Denevi 31:17 ... is skillful. The way that Trump, by selling steaks to people and then they go bankrupt and he gets rich. That's an American skill. And Thompson sensed that from the start with Nixon. And so I think he battled against Nixon for a decade, for a lot of years. And when Nixon left, I think he felt spent. And so I tried not to focus on the later... You know, I ended then, in '74, 'cause I think it- it's- it... He wrote some beautiful things afterwards. He was still a great-

Joe Rogan 31:41 He definitely, he definitely had some moments where he decided to not do the assignment that he was supposed to do, and it was kinda sad. Like, um, the Ali-Foreman fight, I think.

Timothy Denevi 31:50 He fucking floated in the pool.

Joe Rogan 31:52 Yeah, he floated in the pool with a Nixon mask on, flew all the way to Africa.

Timothy Denevi 31:55 And it's one of the greatest sports moments.

Joe Rogan 31:57 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 31:57 It was like game six of, um, you know, um, you know, the Boston Red Sox versus the Reds.

Joe Rogan 32:02 Well, I think Ali was something different to people than I think it's... Uh, I don't think we have someone like that today, so it's very difficult for, for us to understand. People today look at Ali and they go, "Oh, he was a heavyweight boxing champion." He was way more than that. He was a, a cultural figure that represented the resistance to the Vietnam War, and re- represented it with the biggest loss that any public figure had ever shown, and willingly.

Timothy Denevi 32:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:31 Gave up three years of his career-

Timothy Denevi 32:32 Yes.

Joe Rogan 32:32 ... in his prime from age 27 to 30, from 1967 from the Cleveland Big Cat Williams fight. He didn't fight again for, uh, three years. He didn't train. He didn't do anything. They kept him from his career, while... when he was in his prime, when he was the best heavyweight of all time. And he spoke publicly and often, and, and he was fucking hated all over the country, but he represented something different. Like, uh, my parents were hippies and when I was a little kid, he lost to Leon Spinks and the rematch was on television. My parents never watched TV-

Timothy Denevi 33:09 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:09 ... and they definitely never watched boxing, and they- they- they sat in front of that TV to watch that. I'm ne- I remember thinking, "I can't believe my parents wanna watch a boxing match." Like, "This is crazy." And I was probably, like, I don't know, maybe eight or nine years old or something at the time. And I just remember thinking, "I d- I can't believe my parents wanna watch a boxing match." And that's really when it sunk into me at a really early age that this guy was not just this heavyweight boxer. He was, he was a, a cultural icon. He was a historical figure. He meant, he meant a lot. And to Hunter, he meant a lot. He meant something, something much bigger than just, just a boxer. And so Hunter thought he was going to a death sentence. George Foreman had crushed Joe Frazier. He crushed everybody. I mean, he was so powerful. George Foreman, to this day, is one of the all-time scariest heavyweights of all time, with- without a doubt. He, he could hit so fucking hard and literally pick guys off their feet. He hit Joe Frazier and lifted him off his feet with a punch.

Timothy Denevi 34:14 I remember.

Joe Rogan 34:14 And, uh, e- everybody was convinced that that was gonna happen to Ali, that Ali had been past his prime. And look, just look at what George Foreman had done to Joe Frazier. What is he gonna do to Muhammad Ali? And Ali just rope-a-doped him until he got tired and then fucked him up in front of the whole world.

Timothy Denevi 34:30 That's one of the greatest athletic moments. I mean, we forget that athletes, athletes like Curt Flood, you know, they, they risked in a way-

Joe Rogan 34:39 Who was that?

Timothy Denevi 34:39 Curt Flood was the, um, American baseball player who challenged the reserve clause, 'cause in baseball, you weren't allowed to, um, get free agency for another team, and Curt Flood was this great player, and he was like, "I'm gonna sit out and I'm gonna wait." Athletes like Colin Kaepernick, they've sacrificed their career. It's not the same with Muhammad Ali, who was like Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds-

Joe Rogan 34:56 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 34:57 ... and, like, everybody combined at that one moment.

Joe Rogan 34:59 Right.

Timothy Denevi 34:59 And, but he was risking... It's the opposite of Trump. Trump used his celebrity to become this even more mangled version of himself and get more power.

Joe Rogan 35:08 But he-

Timothy Denevi 35:08 Ali used his celebrity to speak for his virtue and his value and his beliefs, and Sa-... Like, Thompson was really good at understanding what people sacrifice-

Joe Rogan 35:15 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 35:15 ... what people have to give up, the wager, you know, between what that act will be, what the results will be. They may be later, but he knew that. And so his respect for Ali, for giving up those years of his prime, you know, was, was enduring. He came, Thompson came back from that fight and he gave his son, um, Juan, uh, boxing gloves, um, that, um, were, were, um, Ali's boxing gloves.

Joe Rogan 35:36 Wow. Yeah, it's a very, very unfortunate that he missed that fight because it would've been fascinating to hear his take on it. I mean, I'm sure he would've been so moved when he saw Ali win.

Timothy Denevi 35:46 But it was in-... I mean, that's a good point. It was indicative of, I think, the stress and the pressure that the last decade of covering Nixon had taken out on him.

Joe Rogan 35:54 Well, there's a little bit of that, but let's be honest, he was also kind of a fuck up. I mean, when he was writing for Rolling Stone and they gave him that w- that early fax machine-

Timothy Denevi 36:03 The Mojo.

Joe Rogan 36:03 Yeah, and he would fuck that thing up. He would unplug it-

Timothy Denevi 36:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:05 ... and plug it back in. He would do it just so he could go to the bar and say, "This thing doesn't work."

Timothy Denevi 36:09 But that was the end, I think, of his arc where he was still on point. He was still playing the role of a serious journalist, and he would use that persona as a fuck up. And there's letters by Jann Wenner being like, "You cannot turn in your articles three hours before we go to press. I know you made it. This doesn't fucking work." And so he was beginning to break down then.

Joe Rogan 36:27 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 36:27 He was also, I think, on the tail end of his decade of being a journalist who had met every deadline so that he could fucking feed his family and he could afford Owl Farm. Like, there were, there's moments where, wh- before he got the, um, contract for Hells Angels in 196, uh, 5, he was ready to be, like, a longshoreman. He was going and looking for work in the mornings in San Francisco, you know-

Joe Rogan 36:46 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 36:46 ... to try to support his family. He was willing to give up writing. And instead, that article blew up, and he arr- all these beautiful letters began to arrive at 319 Parnassus where he lived at, um, at the h- top of the Haight-Ashbury in, um, San Francisco.

Joe Rogan 36:58 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 36:58 And, you know, that opened up his chance to continue being a writer, but money was the main motivating factor. And so I think once money bec- like, unfurled, once alcoholism, I think, took its toll-

Joe Rogan 37:08 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 37:08 ... and once he couldn't walk around anymore at a political cam- convention without people just, like, grabbing his shoulder and saying, "You're Hunter Thompson-"

Joe Rogan 37:15 Right.

Timothy Denevi 37:15 ... once that happened, I think things began to change.

Joe Rogan 37:18 Yeah, that's one of the things that he talked about that I thought was really interesting, that he became a part of the story. It wasn't just that he was covering stories. He couldn't be anonymous anymore. He was, in many cases, more famous than the people that he was covering.

Timothy Denevi 37:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:32 You know, like when he would go to meet Nixon, all of Nick- Nixon's Secret Service agents wanted to meet him and they wanted to get an autograph from him and shake his hand. And it was just too weird.

Timothy Denevi 37:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:42 Everything had got... And then there's the alcoholism. That alcoholism, look, it- it's a depressant. It- it wrecks you.

Timothy Denevi 37:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:49 And if you read, you know, we (clears throat) me and Greg Fitzsimmons on a podcast once, read off, uh, that one journalist who had, uh, detailed Hunter's daily routine.

Timothy Denevi 38:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:00 And so we, we read the daily routine and they put a techno beat to it. It's fucking hilarious. (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 38:05 That was a bad... That's a sad... Those are... So it's so funny because those seem funny, you know, now, but they're, they were kind of a, a death knell. Like, I mean, that, that daily routine, um, that was, um, the, the biography Hunter, it was in that.

Joe Rogan 38:17 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 38:17 And it's just... It's heartbreaking. I mean, we gotta remember that the dedication to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain-"

Joe Rogan 38:24 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 38:25 "... of being a man." And I think the world was painful for Hunter Thompson. It was painful to see powerful people abuse the weak-

Joe Rogan 38:30 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 38:31 ... you know, and like take what they wanted brazenly without being held accountable. I think it was hard to deal with shitty editors who cut half your fucking essay on Nixon, or half your story, and made it into something that had nothing to do with the effort that you put out.

Joe Rogan 38:42 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 38:42 You know, I think it was hard to pay your bills and, you know, live the way that you wanted to live. And I, I think a lot of that gets undermined. And I, I just want people to realize how much effort he put out, especially during those years where he was like, "All right, I wanna be a great journalist. I wanna have a voice in our society. I wanna participate in our national conversation. My only path towards that is to work harder than everybody else-"

Joe Rogan 39:03 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 39:03 "... to be at places when things happen and when they matter." And he sacrificed a lot for that. But he was there and he's a voice and a light that we can have in this moment, um, which is another troubling moment in American history.

Joe Rogan 39:13 Yeah. His voice was very unique too, in that he decided to combine fiction with non-fiction-

Timothy Denevi 39:18 He did a great job.

Joe Rogan 39:18 ... in a very weird, blurry way.

Timothy Denevi 39:21 I think it was... So one thing I think of is, he usually gives you a cue, where what he did was-

Joe Rogan 39:25 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 39:25 ... he dramatized. People didn't dramatize. And so like the-

Joe Rogan 39:28 Well, wait a minute.

Timothy Denevi 39:28 ... the Ibogaine-

Joe Rogan 39:28 He made shit up. He didn't just dramatize-

Timothy Denevi 39:30 Well, there's been talk about, there was a rumor-

Joe Rogan 39:32 ... about the, the witch doctor.

Timothy Denevi 39:33 Yeah. Hey, I didn't say that there, he did Ibogaine. I said there was a... This is about Ed Muskie's campaign. Um, I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he did Ibogaine. I started that rumor.

Joe Rogan 39:43 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 39:43 I mean, that's what he says, but what if he-

Joe Rogan 39:44 Well, he said that on The Dick Cavett Show, remember?

Timothy Denevi 39:46 Yeah, later. And I think Matt Taibbi on this show talked about it well, where one thing is that, um, Muskie was already out of the campaign when that came out. Muskie had already lost. And so Muskie had been a fucking monster and a terrible person on that campaign. And so Thomson used that version of Muskie and wrote, as Taibbi said, in a very straight way, the Ibogaine story.

Joe Rogan 40:07 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 40:07 And so if you had a sense of irony, you kind of knew, like you're not really thinking that this is a guy who did Ibogaine. So I think there's cues in there for a listening audience. But what I think is even more, uh, you know... But I, I think he dramatized the way other people didn't. He would say, "I look left, I look up, I see." He came down to me and then he said, "People didn't write like that in journalism." They didn't go step by step. And he did.

Joe Rogan 40:29 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 40:29 And that was really important. What I think is more important than the Ibogaine story... So the Ibogaine story in the background is Ed Muskie was the front runner for the, um, Democratic primary in, uh, 1972. He fucked up his campaign. Afterwards, Thomson, um, talked about how he had heard that there, or there was a rumor that this candidate was doing Ibogaine, which is like ayahuasca, or-

Joe Rogan 40:47 Well, there, the... He said that they brought... No, it's not like ayahuasca.

Timothy Denevi 40:50 It's not?

Joe Rogan 40:51 No, it's very different. It's not hallucinatory, it's a self-examinatory drug.

Timothy Denevi 40:55 Oh, it's the one you get off-

Joe Rogan 40:55 It's very good.

Timothy Denevi 40:56 Yeah, it's, yeah, it's to get off. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:57 Um, but he said they brought in a Brazilian witch doctor.

Timothy Denevi 41:00 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:01 (laughs) Which it's... Ibogaine is not even a Brazilian drug.

Timothy Denevi 41:03 It's-

Joe Rogan 41:03 It's from Africa.

Timothy Denevi 41:04 And so some people got it, but what I think people don't remember is, before that, and this affected the election... In, um, February of 1972, Thomson was in Florida. He was on something called the Sunshine Special. It was a whistle-stop tour that Muskie, the front runner, had a good chance to beat Nixon poll numbers wise, um, was, um, going all the way down the Florida, um, peninsula on to try to win the Florida primary. And Thomson was like, "This is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen." Like at every stop, Muskie gave the same shit speech. It's like, "Somebody should be a president, namely me." And it was repeated. The reporters were like, "Fucking... This is terrible." Muskie was secluded in the back of the car. He didn't interact with anybody. They had his, um, political, um, operatives come out and make everybody, like sing the song like, um, about like Muskie, like sunshine in his hands, the whole world's in his hands. It was terrible. And so that night, Thomson pulled into a Florida town. It was the second to last stop. And he and this young political reporter named Monte Chidi were, um, going to get a drink at 2:00 AM. And this guy walks into the lobby. He's like 6'6", 250, Peter Sheridan. And he, um, he walks in and he, um, he says he's looking for the Muskie campaign, all these different things. And he ends up going out with, um, Hunter Thomson for a drink. And Hunter Thomson finds out that Peter Sheridan had been a good friend of Jerry Garcia, had, um, hung out with the Hell's Angels in, um, California, had, um, been to La Honda where Ken Kesey was, and was actually a pretty smart guy who was out of his mind in his mid-20s. They stayed out and drank all night. At the end of the night, Thomson's like, "So what are you doing tomorrow? Where you going?" And, um, Peter Sheridan was like, "Well, I'm going to Miami." And Thomson's like, "We are too. You don't have to hitchhike. Fuck that." And so there's a really good journalist, um, Outlaw, um, it's called Outlaw, um, Journalist by, um, Bill McKeen, the, um, another Thomson biography. Talks about how Thomson took his, Thomson took his press pass, put it into the, um, elevator, pressed the button, sent the press pass down to the ground floor. Peter Sheridan got it. So Peter Sheridan could ride for free on the Sunshine Express down to Miami the next day. So Thomson oversleeps because the fucking Muskie campaign doesn't like him anyways. Instead, Peter Sheridan gets on the Sunshine Express with a Hunter Thomson press badge. And Peter Sheridan goes on to order 12 martinis. And he goes, "Gimme like a triple gin bucks and hold the buck." And he runs up and down the car. And, you know, Muskie has been-... a really shitty candidate at this point. He's not been engaging people. He got in this weird fight, um, with his wife at a, um, a campaign event where they, like, put cake in each other's face.

Joe Rogan 43:34 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 43:34 It, it's been really weird and people aren't reporting on it. Like other reporters aren't saying Muskie's unstable. And so Muskie, at the end of this whistle-stop, he spent all his campaign money to go up and down and try to do this whistle-stop, like, tour. He gives this speech at the caboose and Jerry Rubin, the anti-war activist who was one of the Chicago Seven, um, and was, um, i- i- has come to heckle him, is in the crowd. And he's saying to Muskie, "So why did you support the Vietnam War in 1968? Like, who do you think you are?" And so Muskie's yelling at Jerry Rubin. He's saying, "Young man, keep your mouth shut." Beneath Muskie, reaching up from the bottom of the caboose, Peter Sheridan is holding a, a gin bottle and grabbing at Muskie's leg as Muskie tries to give this speech. And then Muskie falls back and the whole thing ends, like the whole press conference is over. Like Women's Wear Daily reported this, and it came out that Hunter Thompson had had 13 martinis and run up and down the, um, train and had interfered with it. And Muskie's campaign really believed that Thompson was working with Donald Segretti and Nixon's, um, creep, um, Watergate crew, to fuck up Muskie's campaign. And that actually changed the course. Y- like, Thompson helped expose how fucked up Muskie was as a candidate at that time. And Thompson had never forgiven Muskie for being on the pro-Vietnam War platform at the 1968 convention. And so we talk about it, the implicating aspect of changing the campaign, but that report and the way that disseminated through media, the way it was picked up by other newspapers, really did help change the people's perception of Ed Muskie, E- Big Ed Muskie-

Joe Rogan 45:07 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 45:07 ... as, uh, Thompson called him at the time.

Joe Rogan 45:09 Now, he, when he wrote Hell's Angels, he hadn't really totally formulated that sort of gonzo style of journalism, but he did have a little bit of fiction mixed in with that, and that sort of ran him afoul of the Hel- Hells Angels. They were very upset by that, right? Like he, he did write some things in there that they claim were not accurate.

Timothy Denevi 45:32 I think that when it came to Hells Angels, um, what Thompson did really well is what Joan Didion did really well. He took the way the media was portraying somebody and he stripped that off and said, "This is who they actually are. This is what they're actually doing." Joan Didion, when she writes about Jim Morrison in The White Album, she's like, "Jim Morrison was like sex and death in his leather pants. It was the best thing ever. Everybody loves Jim Morrison." And then in the scene in The White Album, Joan Didion writes about how they sit at a recording studio for two hours and nobody says anything and they eat eggs out of a paper bag and it's a fucking nightmare. Thompson knew that the media was sensationalizing the Hells Angels. He went to them, um, on a cold night in San Francisco, um, down by the, um, waterfront, and he said, "Hey, here's a Newsweek article, here's a Time article. Here's how everybody's writing about you. All I wanna do is write the truth about who you are." And he did, and he ended up writing with them, um, and he ended up spending time with them. I don't think they got as mad at him about the way he portrayed them. I think they got mad that he began to make money or that he became famous. Hells Angels sold 500,000 paperback copies. That is almost impossible to imagine today. 500,000 paperback copies of a literary book, and the Angels were pissed off about that. They felt Thompson owed him more money or owed him something for that. When it came to the truth of it all-

Joe Rogan 46:49 Did he pay them at all? Did he give them any money?

Timothy Denevi 46:50 Well, Sonny Barger, Sonny Barger's so ridiculous. Sonny Barger said he owed us a keg and he didn't give us a keg.

Joe Rogan 46:55 That's it?

Timothy Denevi 46:55 You know, and the, the famous story at the end of it is that, that i- I mean, really, like when they go through it, it w- He said that, he said that Thompson was doing a subjective version of us-

Joe Rogan 47:05 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 47:05 ... but it was at least closer than the shitty Newsweek and Time versions.

Joe Rogan 47:08 Right.

Timothy Denevi 47:09 And so Thompson, at the end of, he'd finished the book, barely made the deadline. Had to go down to a hotel in Monterey, lock himself in, stay up for 100, um, hours straight and write it in March of, uh, '67 to finish it. So he turns it in, makes his, um, advance deadline. In September, they're like, "Here's our author photo." And it's shitty. And he's like, "Fuck this." So he goes to a Hells Angels rally. He doesn't know anybody 'cause he hasn't been with them for six or seven months. He's taking pictures. That's when he got beat up-

Joe Rogan 47:34 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 47:34 ... for writing about the Hells Angels. And he, Tiny, his friend, who later committed suicide after Altamont, after being involved in the Altamont security situation, Ti-

Joe Rogan 47:43 That's the Rolling Stone one where the guy got stabbed?

Timothy Denevi 47:45 Yes, yes. Where Meredith Hunter was stabbed. But Tiny-

Joe Rogan 47:47 Ma- It was a woman that got stabbed?

Timothy Denevi 47:48 Man. Meredith Hunter.

Joe Rogan 47:49 Oh.

Timothy Denevi 47:50 Um (laughs) , it was a man named Meredith. Um-

Joe Rogan 47:52 That was back in the day when you can name your kids Meredith, right? Like-

Timothy Denevi 47:57 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 47:57 ... Marian. Marian's another one.

Timothy Denevi 47:59 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 48:00 Right?

Timothy Denevi 48:00 Um-

Joe Rogan 48:01 Lindsey.

Timothy Denevi 48:02 Lindsey?

Joe Rogan 48:03 Some guys are Lindsey. I got no one to speak. Give me one. Jamie. Oh, yeah. (laughs) But Jamie's normal.

Timothy Denevi 48:09 Well-

Joe Rogan 48:09 Like there's a lot of Jamies (overlapping)

Timothy Denevi 48:09 ... that, that future man scene where it's like, uh, what's his name is like, "My name's Susan." In the future, men are named Susan. I know it's a girl's name in your time. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 48:17 Hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, right.

Timothy Denevi 48:19 Um, but-

Joe Rogan 48:20 Meredith is a weird one though. You must hate your fucking son to make-

Timothy Denevi 48:23 But-

Joe Rogan 48:23 ... you lose a argument with your wife.

Timothy Denevi 48:24 Uh, but that, th- but I've lost a lot of arguments with my... But that poor guy (clears throat) was, um, but Thompson was there and Tiny grabbed him after he was beat up. There was a guy holding a rock to drop it on Thompson with the Hells Angels.

Joe Rogan 48:36 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 48:37 And Tiny was like, "All right, I know him. I know the rest of you don't." And he grabbed him out. And Tiny was, um, this, like, enormous Hells Angel who had been, you know, Thompson was very good at empathetically understanding their flaws and their perspectives. He'd never, I think, made excuses for them. He said that their inherent perspective is fascistic. He writes that, you know. He says, "They use violence to respond where they were in society." Their idea of total retaliation, the Hells Angels, where any offense, like looking at you funny or being like, "Dude, you drink?" could be met with everybody beating you up 'cause they got to determine the, they got, the Hells Angels got to determine the offense. Like that was fascism to Tom...

Joe Rogan 49:14 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 49:14 ... say. And he wrote beautifully about their reliance on violence 'cause he, they felt, the Hells Angels, they'd been left behind by our moderated society. Like there's technology, there's all these new jobs. If you came back from the war in 1950, you had a chance in Oakland to have a middle-class life and a beautiful house, and work the rest of your days and have a family that will then go on. But by 1965, that was no longer an option. And the Angels were a violent response to that, very similar to what we're seeing now. So the way he wrote about the Hells Angels is very similar to the way that w- we see violence within groups that are supporting Trump, you know.

Joe Rogan 49:44 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 49:45 In groups on the left and the right.

Joe Rogan 49:46 Did he ever wind up, um, resolving his differences with the Hells Angels?

Timothy Denevi 49:50 I think so. Sonny Barger, the Hells Angels got fucked. Like, rightly so. The Hells Angels were, you know, pursued like a mob, um, like a, like a mafia group. People went to jail. Sonny Barger went to jail. Um, I think they, at the end, appreciated his representation of them because it was better than any other one.

Joe Rogan 50:07 Right, right.

Timothy Denevi 50:07 There is no better representation of the Hells Angels.

Joe Rogan 50:09 No more sympathetic, for sure.

Timothy Denevi 50:11 Yeah, or just no more accurate. No more on point.

Joe Rogan 50:13 No more understanding, yeah.

Timothy Denevi 50:13 Yeah, no more like... Again, I guess it's Thompson's effort. If you ride for six months with somebody-

Joe Rogan 50:17 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 50:17 ... and you're an honest, like putting up your hands, you're not trying to fit what you see into a thesis, you're doing the opposite, trying to look at the reality you have in front of you and then form an argument out of that-

Joe Rogan 50:27 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 50:27 ... and c- and coherent. That's what Thompson's gift was.

Joe Rogan 50:29 And very dangerous too to do that. I mean, I mean he did-

Timothy Denevi 50:31 Dude.

Joe Rogan 50:32 ... get beat up taking those photographs, but-

Timothy Denevi 50:33 He also had a really bad motorcycle accident with his friend on the back and his friend broke his leg. Like, it was sorta tough. That's why he left. Like, "Get the fuck out of San Francisco."

Joe Rogan 50:41 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 50:41 Race looks amazing. Like, San Francisco's amazing. It's a, it's a fire that you're putting your hand onto. It's gonna burn you.

Joe Rogan 50:46 How did he crash?

Timothy Denevi 50:47 He was coming down, um... It was with the Mayor of Richmond. He was coming down a slick road and they had, um, hit a, an... like something was wet or an oil thing and it went out the back tire.

Joe Rogan 50:57 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 50:57 So Thompson rolled and was fine, but his friend's knee hit, um, railroad tracks, so his friend's knee broke-

Joe Rogan 51:03 Oh, Jesus.

Timothy Denevi 51:03 ... really badly. Um, it was the mayor, yeah, it was the Mayor of Richmond and that's-

Joe Rogan 51:07 He continued riding motorcycles though.

Timothy Denevi 51:09 Uh, yeah, he did. He would get in accidents at Woody Creek, but he was pretty careful. Like, so I love that scene in Hells Angels. I don't know if readers or listeners know this, but the edge.

Joe Rogan 51:19 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 51:19 You know?

Joe Rogan 51:19 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 51:19 And that's a major part of the book, where Thompson's fighting with his wife. Thompson's finished his book, but he's breaking down because he'd worked so hard to do it. And so, he takes his, um, BSA out and he goes... If you know San Francisco, he goes out to the park. He hits the, um, coast highway, and he comes down it and he's like, "I'm so overwhelmed. Everything is so fucking terrible." He's going as fast as he can and he talks about how his eyes begin to lose moisture. You, you know the scene?

Joe Rogan 51:45 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 51:45 Like, it's this beautiful scene. He's looking for sand pits-

Joe Rogan 51:48 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 51:48 ... because if you hit a sand pit near the zoo you're fucking done.

Joe Rogan 51:51 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 51:51 And he gets all the way to Rockaway Beach, which is in, um, like halfway down to Santa Cruz, and he turns around and what he talks about is when he's at 100 miles per hour, and I think he was near death, I think he was really overwhelmed. He says, um, "You know, the edge, the only people that know it are the people that have gone over. The rest, the living don't have any understanding of it." And all we can do is approach it in this way and it's this beautiful end. It's called Midnight on the Coast Highway. It was, uh, anthologized in Tom Wolfe, you know?

Joe Rogan 52:17 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 52:17 And it was just beautiful. So he comes back and he sits at his, um, desk. And so he, he had a view of the Bay Bridge. He could see its two flashing lights, um, the whole time, and he had broken the window in a terrible fight with his wife like three weeks earlier. Um, and so he sits at the broken window and he writes out that scene right away with his eyes still scoured of what-

Joe Rogan 52:37 Wasn't the broken window when she wouldn't give him a gun because he was on acid and he threw a shoe through the window?

Timothy Denevi 52:41 So there's three, there's three versions.

Joe Rogan 52:43 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 52:43 So I do it, and then I give the three versions in the notes. So I go with the three versions that I've heard. Like I heard it from, um-

Joe Rogan 52:48 Did you ask her?

Timothy Denevi 52:49 You know, she wrote... I- I really respect Sandy, like deeply. She wrote at the, um... A- a few years ago she said, "I'm done giving interviews with, about R.S. Thompson. That was my life, that it was then."

Joe Rogan 52:59 Right.

Timothy Denevi 52:59 She's given so many interviews up to this point.

Joe Rogan 53:01 Yeah, good for her.

Timothy Denevi 53:01 She says that that exists, and so I wanted to respect that-

Joe Rogan 53:04 Good for you.

Timothy Denevi 53:05 ... more, more than anything and-

Joe Rogan 53:06 You know.

Timothy Denevi 53:06 ... just use the information that I had already.

Joe Rogan 53:07 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 53:08 And let the reader know, "Yo, here are three other versions. Here's the best version I could make. Dramatized, look left, throw, do this."

Joe Rogan 53:15 Did you talk to Anita?

Timothy Denevi 53:16 Um, Anita's been great. I had talked to Anita later, but the book ended so early that I, um... There's a beautiful arch-

Joe Rogan 53:22 Anita's the second wife of Hope Thompson.

Timothy Denevi 53:23 Yeah, and Anita Thompson is, um, she runs Owl Farm. She runs kind of his legacy. She does the Facebook page. She does a wonderful job. Um-

Joe Rogan 53:30 What is Owl Farm today? Does she still live up there?

Timothy Denevi 53:33 Yeah, she's gonna make it into a, like a writer's retreat.

Joe Rogan 53:35 Oh, nice.

Timothy Denevi 53:35 And a, and a, um... She's doing a wonderful job. Make it into a writer's retreat and also a, um, like a museum.

Joe Rogan 53:41 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 53:41 And it's taken a while but to- to honor his legacy as-

Joe Rogan 53:44 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 53:44 ... a great political, like thinker and writer, like a great literary light. But since she didn't meet him until the '90s, I wanted to focus on the time that I was in. Um, and so I- I- I think talking to Bob Geiger, you know, his friend then was, was, I was really lucky. Bob Geiger's in his late 80s.

Joe Rogan 54:01 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 54:01 And he was able to go through like... Because I had... I believe if you interview somebody, you need to read everything that exists already.

Joe Rogan 54:07 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 54:08 You need to read everything they've already said. You don't want to ask them questions that, when- when I do interview for research, that they've already supplied answers to.

Joe Rogan 54:14 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 54:15 So with Bob Geiger, I could see the holes or things I didn't know, and I was able to sit with him, talk about throwing a football with Thompson.

Joe Rogan 54:21 Hmm.

Timothy Denevi 54:21 You know, talk about taking the dog to the beach, like all these other things.

Joe Rogan 54:23 That's... The football thing is an interesting thing because he was, he was obsessed with football and that's one thing that he shared in common with Nixon, and so when they went... One time they were going to the airport and he hitched a ride with Nixon and Nixon wanted to talk to him about football. And he said, "Let's just not talk about politics, we'll only talk about football." And so he talked-

Timothy Denevi 54:43 One of my favorite scenes.

Joe Rogan 54:44 ... for the whole ride.

Timothy Denevi 54:45 It was, it was in 1968. Pat Buchanan had helped set it up.

Joe Rogan 54:48 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 54:48 They'd worked it out that week, they'd become friends. And so they come to Thompson and they're like, "All right, the boss is gonna take a plane to Florida. You can come and talk to him."

Joe Rogan 54:55 That is so crazy.

Timothy Denevi 54:55 And Thompson's a freelancer. And so later Thomson said... Later it was like, "They told me not to talk about anything but football." But earlier Thomson said like, "I was just really awkward." Like this fucking guy, they're both in the back bench of a Mercury and so it's before Secret Service so it's just a cop driving and it's like Pat Buchanan in the front and it's Thomson and Nixon and they're right here next to each other. And Thompson's like, "Well, you know, earlier in the night you said that, you know, the Oakland Raiders had a good shot to beat the Packers in Super Bowl II. Can you talk about that?" And he was like, Nixon's like, "My good friend Vince Lombardi had told me to watch out for the AFL because they pass and they can be very effective." And so Thompson then, like remembers, that guy, um, um, Bob Geiger had been a professional quarterback. He had taken Thompson to his first football game and Thompson said, "NFL is better than the AFL." And Geiger's like, "Shut the fuck up. Let's go to a Raiders game." And they went in '65 and the Raiders won on this beautiful pass, Tom, uh, Tom Flores. Like beautiful goal line pass. And Nixon was saying the same thing. And so then at that moment, at that moment, Thompson's like, "Oh yeah, it was the Miami guy, uh, Mueller, Miller, who'd caught the pass." And Nixon goes, taps him on the knee and goes, "You're right." And he goes, "Oh, what a beautiful moment." And Thompson's just like, "What the fuck is going on?"

Joe Rogan 56:06 So Nixon, apparently, they, they, they were talking about, like, college draft picks and all kinds of crazy shit. Like, Nixon was deep into it.

Timothy Denevi 56:12 It was the only moment Thompson said that he knew Nixon wasn't lying.

Joe Rogan 56:16 (laughs)

Timothy Denevi 56:16 It was when they could talk about football in that, in that instant.

Joe Rogan 56:19 It's fascinating when people, uh, they're so diametrically opposed to each other, but, but they find common ground.

Timothy Denevi 56:25 Thompson did a great job of that.

Joe Rogan 56:26 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 56:26 And I think we've lost it today. I mean, you have to listen to the other side to... If you, if you politically want to beat somebody like Pa- Pat Buchanan, if you want to defeat his tactics, if you want to defeat him, you need to know how he's thinking and what he's doing.

Joe Rogan 56:38 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 56:38 Thompson knew that Buchanan was listening to the left to defeat them, and so Thompson listened to Buchanan.

Joe Rogan 56:43 What led him to move to Colorado?

Timothy Denevi 56:46 Oh, he was losing his shit in San Francisco. It was that night on the fucking water cycle-

Joe Rogan 56:49 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 56:50 ... where, I mean, how-

Joe Rogan 56:50 But how did he choose Colorado?

Timothy Denevi 56:52 So this is a great story. In, like, the early 60s, Thompson had, had a chance to drive, um, I don't know, some sort of cargo, like, a friend's car out to Colorado on his way to San Francisco in 1960. He ended up doing a road trip up and down San Francisco after he passed through Colorado, but he stopped in Colorado because, um, he had to drop off a friend's car. And there was a woman there, Peggy Clifford, who was a journalist, um, and was his good friend at the, um, at the Aspen, um, um, Daily Times, and she was older. She saw him, like, after driving 20 hours. She's like, "Hey, come in my house. Hang out." And she lived right in Aspen in Woody Creek. And so then in 1960, um, three, after, um, Sandy was pregnant, Thompson came back from South America where he was a reporter and did a wonderful job, like, reporting on how democracies were falling apart down there. Him and Sandy wanted to move West because the National Observer was the newspaper Thompson worked for. They wanted to give Thompson, um, a position to be a Western reporter. He was thinking of going to San Francisco, but instead he chose to stop first where Peggy, um, Clifford was, w- stop in Aspen and Woody Creek. And so he was living in Aspen and Woody Creek from August of 1963 to February of 1963. And he was there... This is where Freak Kingdom begins. He was there when, um, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and he's sitting in his, like, living room. It's, you know, 10:00 AM, 11:00 AM Pacific Time, and he gets a knock on the door, and it's this rancher named Wayne Wagner, which is an old, um, Aspen family. And the rancher's like, "The president's been shot." Like, "What's more, he's, he's been murdered. He's dead." And Thompson just, like, lets out a sob, then he begins to fucking swear, and then he fucking calms down, and he goes downtown, um, Woody Creek. He goes to Aspen, and he just gets notes from people what their responses are. And so when he then went to San Francisco to become the correspondent for, um, for, for the magazine that he was working for, he was having a tough time. He was already wanting to flee. Because he got Hells Angels, he was able to stay in San Francisco longer-

Joe Rogan 58:53 Right.

Timothy Denevi 58:53 ... and write, report on them. Uh, by 1966, '67, he was like, "This city is not a good place for me." He has a great quote about, like, what would have happened if he stayed in San Francisco from '67 on. He's like, "I would have burned up." (laughs) Like, "I would have been immolated right there."

Joe Rogan 59:05 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 59:05 And so when it was time to leave, he thought again of, um, Woody Creek and of Aspen, which was so different than, than it is now. And, um, that was the place that he decided to, um, move and rent for a little while at first, but then because of the success of Hells Angels, he was able to buy Owl Farm.

Joe Rogan 59:20 Mm. Um, Aspen's very different, but Woody Creek is not that much different. Woody Creek is still pretty-

Timothy Denevi 59:26 It's great. But Salt and Woody Creek are great, dude.

Joe Rogan 59:29 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 59:29 There's a great, there's a place called The Temporary. They did an event with, um, Juan Thompson, and I, like, did a reading at it. And, like, a lot of Thompson's friends were there. So I'm like, "I'm some fucking young..." Like, I, I didn't know Thompson. Like, I, I'm an interloper, you know? Like, I'm out there, and it was really great to talk to everybody that knew him and to go through it. And that's why I, that's why this book almost killed me because I did a note for every sound, smell, or sight, or comment. Like, if I wrote, "And then at that moment, Thompson felt, 'What the fuck am I doing here?'" I had the quote where he said, "I looked around then, and I felt, 'What the fuck am I doing here?'" And I had that in the notes, so people could see it. And it was because I wanted those people that knew him well and respected him and trusted him to not think that I was in any way trying anything but to make good art off-

Joe Rogan 1:00:09 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 1:00:09 ... of his life and who he was, trying to respond to my fucking view of Trump right now and my love of his work in this moment.

Joe Rogan 1:00:15 Um, why, why do you say it almost killed you?

Timothy Denevi 1:00:18 Uh, it's not possible to write a narrative and then also cite every detail of the narrative. So each day, I would spend nine hours researching and outlining with citations. Every... I wanted to write it like a novel.

Joe Rogan 1:00:31 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 1:00:31 I wanted to be like, you know... "And at that moment, I felt like I, and I s-... The machine oil from the bay was coming off." I wanted to write it vividly.

Joe Rogan 1:00:38 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 1:00:39 I knew that I had to support all of that. And so I would spend eight or nine hours every day just on the pure, um, arrangement and research. And then for the next six or seven hours or eight hours, I would write the narrative, and then I'd sleep for five or six hours, you know, and get up, and I would do it again. And I did this for four or five months, you know, after I was deeply into it. And I, I don't think that's sustainable. I think it's better (laughs) in retrospect to go and report somewhere-

Joe Rogan 1:01:03 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 1:01:03 ... you know, to, like, go and be at the middle of Congress and take notes. But to try to write something with a dramatized nature that I think Thompson wrote well and having my prose sound nothing like his... You know, I wanted my prose to sound nothing like the way he wrote. But then to also have almost as many pages of notes showing my work, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:01:21 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 1:01:21 Like, showing the math that went behind it.

Joe Rogan 1:01:23 Right.

Timothy Denevi 1:01:23 So if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but at least you can see it. I think that was morally correct, but I think that was too much effort (laughs) when it comes to taking a book-

Joe Rogan 1:01:31 Was it just because you were trying to do it in a short period of time? Did you have a crazy deadline or something?

Timothy Denevi 1:01:35 Yes, but I also, I had a year. And so... You know, and I had a family, and I had a, uh, I'm a professor. Like, I, I just, I'd never, when it came to writing, had to do both those things, which was to try to write it in a, in a, um, novelistic way, but then to also make sure that any question the reader would have... "But, like, why did you think that the dinner was at 5:00 PM?"

Joe Rogan 1:01:57 Mm-hmm.

Timothy Denevi 1:01:58 You know? Or, like, you know, "Why, why did you think the sun was coming up in this way at this moment?"

Joe Rogan 1:02:02 Right.

Timothy Denevi 1:02:03 ... to make sure, 'cause out of respect, 'cause what Thomson talked about was people making money off him, like Doonesbury.

Joe Rogan 1:02:08 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 1:02:08 You know? Like, that's what he talked about, was people trying to make money off him. And if I was gonna write this book, it couldn't have, it couldn't be in that space.

Joe Rogan 1:02:15 Didn't he have a lawsuit against Gary Trudeau?

Timothy Denevi 1:02:17 He thought about it, I think.

Joe Rogan 1:02:18 He thought about it?

Timothy Denevi 1:02:18 I don't think he ever did it. He talked about it publicly.

Joe Rogan 1:02:20 Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 1:02:21 I, I think it was just-

Joe Rogan 1:02:22 Well, th- he became that guy, unfortunately. That's what's really weird. It's almost like-

Timothy Denevi 1:02:26 What happens when we become a caricature of ourselves? It's really scary.

Joe Rogan 1:02:29 Do you know, um... Well, it- it's... What's weird about it is that he kind of knew that it was happening. Like, there's that famous interview where he's, uh, talking to that British guy who, uh, did a documentary about him.

Timothy Denevi 1:02:46 Breakfast with Hunter maybe or no, but yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:48 One of them.

Timothy Denevi 1:02:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:49 One of them, but he's s- he's rolling a joint, uh, on the grass somewhere with that Las Vegas visor on and he's, you know, talking about how he's really become this caricature and it would be, actually be better if he wasn't alive anymore-

Timothy Denevi 1:03:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:04 ... you know? And then his-

Timothy Denevi 1:03:04 He was breaking up with his wife during that.

Joe Rogan 1:03:06 Was he? Yeah.

Timothy Denevi 1:03:06 It was really sad. There's a scene in that where he hides, where he's at, like, a parking lot and he doesn't want people to see him and he's standing against the wall and people are like, "Come on, we gotta go." He's like, "I just don't want anybody to see me right now." It was really sad.

Joe Rogan 1:03:17 Hm.

Timothy Denevi 1:03:17 And I, I tried to take that tragedy too, and he wrote great things afterwards. He was a great friend to people afterwards, like Ron Whitehead, this wonderful poet from Louisville was a dear friend of his, like, um, all through his life. But the tragedy of how much effort he put out to... If we wanna write about Trump, if you wanna go after it like Taibbi did about the financial institution, the way Thomson did it was to kind of wager time later for time now. And he talks about that. He says-

Joe Rogan 1:03:41 What do you mean by that?

Timothy Denevi 1:03:42 Chemical speed, he says, doing Dexedrine, being an alcoholic, instead of changing his life and his rhythms, he said, "I'm wagering time later for time now.

Joe Rogan 1:03:49 Hm.

Timothy Denevi 1:03:49 "I'm using up energy or things that I might have by burning the candle so brightly at this instant, 'cause I believe I need to go after these moments and I, later, I'm not gonna have it, but I'm making that gamble. I'm putting the card down right now." And I think that's terrifying. And I also think that he gave us brilliant writing over one of the most remarkable spans in American history because of it.

Joe Rogan 1:04:08 That's a weird tradition in journalism, right? To destroy your body while creating your art. And, um, I think there's a, a- according to my friends who are journalists, there's a big problem with Adderall today.

Timothy Denevi 1:04:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:20 And there's a lot of people that are using it to write and, um, it's fucking speed and y- you know, you get addicted.

Timothy Denevi 1:04:28 I mean, Adderall makes everything in front of you closer.

Joe Rogan 1:04:31 Have you done it?

Timothy Denevi 1:04:31 Yeah. So my first book was called Hyper: Um, A Personal History of ADHD.

Joe Rogan 1:04:35 Mm.

Timothy Denevi 1:04:35 So it was about being medicated as a child.

Joe Rogan 1:04:37 You were medicated as a child?

Timothy Denevi 1:04:37 Yeah, like having pills forced down my throat, like also-

Joe Rogan 1:04:40 How old were