Transcript of #2508 - Joe Eszterhas New

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. Rock and roll. Okay, let's rock and roll.

You need the headphones?

Never. No?

Okay.

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

No, you don't have to wear them.

Okay.

You, you were telling me about your cane. That cane is amazing.

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

It's pretty awesome looking. It looks heavy. The Dogon people have a very strange origin story. It's a fascinating origin story that involves— is it, uh, the— it involves like— here it is. That's— I don't want— I didn't want to misspeak, so here it is. Um, centers on the supreme creator Amma and the cosmic journey of the amphibious water spirits known as the Noma. So they have this crazy cosmic origin story that's a part of their mythology. Amma then attempted to procreate with the Earth, but the pairing was flawed. It's like a very strange descendant of the Ark. According to the Dogon traditions, the Noma descended to Earth from the Sirius star system in a giant ark-like vessel. The vessel contained the 8 original human ancestors along with the seeds and animals needed to populate the world.

Those are the Dogon people. Amazing. That's amazing. Amazing. I didn't know that. That's amazing. Crazy story. I have a daughter who's a nature photographer. I mean, does a lot of work in Africa. And she knows all about that stuff.

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

15, at least 15. There's a recent biography that said that, that began when they were courting and that they had known each other before. And one day she saw him with this tape in his hand. She said, "What is it?" And he said, "Basic Instinct." And then they saw it together and it had such an effect on them that they played it together many times, at least 15 times, during— on their anniversaries. Now, I'm not sure what that says. And, you know, I know that some people I think the movies had a kind of amatory effect on them. But the other thing that's interesting to me is if you see it 15 times, does it really fuck you up to the point where you go to war with Putin? I mean, is that the real key to why it happened?

Well, in his defense, Putin attacked first. Absolutely.

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

Maybe it just meant warning. Who knows? Might have nothing to do with the war.

Might not.

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

Well, there are 18 of them that have been made, and there have been like 34 scripts that hadn't been made. So there's 16 that haven't been made. And I don't know, you know, I kid around and I say there's a twisted little man inside me who lives in some spot I'm not sure where it exactly is, but he's 29, born '29, he will die '29, and with anything that has a relatively strong sexual content, he wrote the fucking thing. I'm just an old guy giving him the space, you know. So when the recent deal was made for a record amount of money for Basic Instinct 3, 'cause there was a sequel to it that was a total piece of shit and I had nothing to do with it, but this would be 3, and my title for it is Basic Instinct Jet Set. Isabel. Um, the, uh, Twisted Little Man put together the story, um, that I, that I think people will have fun with. But it's, but it's, it continues in that same vein, and it seems to be his specialty, you know. So let's see what happens.

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

Yeah, the Twisted Man. There is, you know, there's a thing with, with little kids where they haven't have a companion, an invisible companion, right? And the Twisted Little Man is my main one. I have others. Mark Twain is one, and interestingly, Jesus of Nazareth is another, you know. And then these, these people are very, very close to me. Twisted Little Man is a darker presence than the others, although Twain is a cross between the two of them, and I absolutely love him.

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

It felt— well, let me do the backdrop. The, the, uh, I wrote it in 13 days. The, um, and then, and then I did, and I felt like, like it just poured out of me. Now there is a background to it, and that is that the Catherine Tramell character and then the Nick Curran character, um, many, many years before in college, um, I had an affair with a— I was an 18-year-old kid and I had an affair with a a faculty member's wife. It was a serious affair and the— we— she was sophisticated, smart, beautiful, sassy, exactly the kind of woman I've always fallen for. And she had a profound effect on me. Now at the end of the year she moved on and I discovered that there was a different student that she was with each ear and that her husband looked the other way. How old was she? 39. And I was 18. I was a very green 18 because I grew up an ethnic immigrant kid. I fell in love easily, but falling in love easily also meant a lot in terms of learning things because I I was an immigrant and I really didn't know this country and I was shy.

And I learned a lot sometimes, I think, more from the women that I was together with beginning in college and through the rest of my life than I preferred the company of women always because they weren't armored off in male macho. But anyway, she was stuck there in my memory. And then when I was a police reporter, almost a decade and a half later, a decade later, at The Plain Dealer. I had a buddy who was a cop that I liked very much who had been involved in 3 or 4 shootings. And when we got to know each other and we spent time drinking together, and we did a lot of that, I started wondering how, if he really liked the shootings. Was it an itchy trigger finger, or did he just get off on it? So somehow these two characters were in my head, and I thought about them a lot, but they didn't come together. And then I think, thanks to the Twisted Little Man, one day the two came together in a love story. And that was the genesis of Basic Instinct. And by the time I wrote it, I had thought about it subconsciously and directly for a long time.

I would wake up in the middle of the night and jot notes down. Which happens to me sometimes when I'm very involved in a script. And I wrote it in Hawaii. I went off to Hawaii by myself. I let the sun beat me up. I snorted some coke, which was an habit in those days. And after 13 days of all of that— and the other thing I did was listen to the Stones all the time. I love the Stones. I love the blues from the time I was an immigrant kid. And the Stones just blew everything else out during that period of time for me. So I listened to that. At the end of 13 days, that I had this script. Then I went back home to Marin, typed it up, sent it— almost sent it to my agent with the title "Love Hurts." And I was going out the door, the twist, the little man had another thought, and I raced back inside and wrote the words "Basic Instinct," sent it to my agents, they auctioned it. 10 days later, my main agent, Guy McElwain, who became my big brother and one of the people I really loved in life, Everybody bid on it.

It wound up selling for a record $3 million. And then it became a towering hit. To this day, it trends. The critics in the beginning were critical, mildly critical. No, actually, the critics were really after the movie. And then through the years, the critics have had a change of mind.

Isn't that funny?

Yeah. There's a woman named Camille Paglia who was the main feminist feminist critic who went up against the movie very strongly recently— not recently, but in the past 5 or 10 years— has come around and said that the movie is the example of— it's a post-feminist classic, she says, and it's about women who don't have to hide their sexuality.

So that's so wild that she made such a turnaround.

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Critics. I worked with the director Richard Marquand, who directed Jagged Edge and Hearts of Fire, and we worked on another one together, and Richard said to me that critics should be taken out into the backyard and shot. Okay? I worked with another director, Mike Figgis, on One Night Stand, who said that critics should be taken out into the backyard and headbutted to death. I was sympathetic to both things.

It's so wild that your views were formed by this relationship that you have when you're 18 with an older, horny, smart lady who's like, you know, kind of wild.

Yes.

And then a cop who might have been a shady cop.

Yes. And how the two came together and then, yeah, in this twisted thing called creativity, you know, and you may come out of this maelstrom. Now, the other thing I'm sure was an influence is by the time I did that, I'd been through 4 years of police beat experience covering cops. 2 in Dayton, Ohio, and 2 in Cleveland. Excuse me. And that consisted of, at that point, driving around in a company car that got the police radio and responding to whatever was going on. On occasion, you got there before the cops got there. And the one that really stuck in my head and got inside me was, there was one with the report of a shooting in a suburb in Dayton, and I got there. There were no cops there. The front door was wide open. I walked in. I passed the body of a guy who who had shot himself, and there was blood all over the wall. And then a woman, it was his wife, that he'd shot. And I heard someone in the back of the house screaming and crying. And then I went back there. And the thing that really got to me is she was screaming and crying in Hungarian.

And it was an old lady who was the mother's mom. And of course, I spoke fluent Hungarian. I grew up Hungarian. And there was something about the scene that's with me to this day. The other police beat experience I had, Joe, that was very moving was I covered the Glenville urban uprising in Cleveland. It was a big one, and there were, I think, 6 or 7 policemen shot and killed. I was crouched behind a car in the street, ducking down. With about 10 feet in front of me was a cop bleeding, badly bleeding, moaning. And the— and at the same time, there were gunshots coming from this apartment house. And I heard that the gunshots were coming from a group of so-called black nationalists, led by a man named Fred Ahmed Evans. I knew both men from the police beat. The cop was Hungarian. His name was Elmer Joseph. And he would come around to the little office in the police beat all the time, and I knew him. And the Black man was named Fred Ahmed Evans. And he would come by in his dashiki sometimes at 2:00 in the morning because I worked the overnight shift sometimes.

And we had the greatest talks. You know, drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of dope, and got to be pals. And he was leading the group of black nationalists, and who had been shooting these policemen. And I was behind this car's wheels, a few feet away from the whole shit.

Whoa.

And I found the whole thing so frightening and so disturbing that I pissed my pants. Jesus Christ. So the 4 years of police, there were other incidents I covered, the urban uprisings in in Detroit, 2 in Cleveland, and 1 in Newark. I was very involved in the civil rights movement. And I, you know, that's what I did. I covered whatever was breaking, and much of it was dark stuff. So by the time that hookup happened between Katherine, Katherine Trammell and Nick Curran, there was a lot that went into it.

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

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

You mean Hunter Thompson?

Yeah, Hunter Thompson. And the way that we chose to begin that was by doing journalism, because no one made a living writing novels, and we both had to make a living. So Hunter wrote stuff for the National Enquirer and then moved on to Rolling Stone and all of that. And I did it on a local level. And that put us into a culture that was exploding. The American society was exploding. The Black situation vis-à-vis white racism was horrendous. So there was a dynamic in the country that we were on top of because of what we did. So I saw a lot. I saw a lot in the refugee camps because I was in— I began my 7 years in refugee camps in Austria and then grew up Dirt poor in an urban city. The— and I saw a lot of stuff there as well that was dark and moving and profoundly effective.

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Yeah, it does make sense. The, the, um, and the, you know, I mean, when I was a kid in Cleveland growing We lived in a very poor part of town, near West Side. And there was a bar next door. And I slept on a couch in the living room that overlooked the bar. And one night, I was looking out the window, because I always was. Neon lights and Puerto Rican hookers and all of that stuff that really interested a little kid who spent most of his time playing with Mario as Mark Twain said, with his pecker, you know. So this was all very exciting stuff. And the— and one night I was watching one day and I saw this man stab another one to death and fall down and bleed to death.

Oh, gee. How old were you?

12. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. So there are reasons why. The other thing with my scripts is almost everything in my scripts somehow comes from some kind of personal tie. You know, Big Shots, which was a little movie that was very popular with kids, came from my son Steve's experience in Marin County with a Black friend and how they tried to make that friendship work. And that's what the movie is. It's a little movie about two kids, a white kid and a Black kid, trying to become friends. The— there was a movie I did called Checking Out. With Jeff Daniels, and that was about midlife crisis. And suddenly, now, in my early to mid-30s, I was scared shitless that I was going to die. And here I am at fucking 81 talking about dying at 30-something. But so there was a comedic thing that came out of that. It basically came out of where it did. But there was almost with every one, there was some kind of betrayed came out of the notion that at that particular point If you remember, there was all this right-wing craziness where there were militias that were shooting people and there were jamborees where the right-wingers got together.

When was this? Betrayed, which came out in the mid-'80s. There were several incidents in Oregon and in the northwest parts of the country which got a lot of publicity. It was before Timothy McVeigh, but all roughly in that same period. So I decided under a false name to go to one of these jamborees and see what the hell is going on. And essentially my journalism experience, I went into it, and then out of it I concocted this romance between Deborah Winger and Tom Berenger. So, but they all had some kind of a tie. Telling Lies in America, which is one of my favorite little movies with Kevin Bacon and Brad Renfro, is semi-autobiographical in terms of the issues I had as a high school kid. Bullying and all of those kinds of things, and becoming an American citizen. They were shot, incidentally, right where I grew up, in front of the apartment house where we lived. And I remember hearing a TV reporter in Cleveland interview an old man who was watching the shooting and saying, Did you know Joe when he grew up here? And he said, yeah, I was a bartender there. And then he said, shit, Joe is just a fucking refugee trying to make his way in the world.

That's— he nailed it. I mean, that's really what— not a complicated thing, but that's really what happened. The only other things— and nice things have been said about me through the years, but the only other thing that I really treasure and I absolutely love is I covered, I interviewed Otis Redding the night before he was killed in the plane crash in Cleveland. And we began speaking around midnight after a show at a place called Leo's Casino. And we began talking around midnight and talked till 3:30 in the morning. And we did a lot of beer, we did a lot of Jim Beam. We smoked a lot of really powerful Thai stuff and had a great time. And at the end of it, when he had to go, he said, "Give me a fucking hug." And I gave him a hug. And he said, "You know what you are?" He said, "You're a fucking white nigger. That's what you are." I love that. It stayed with me all this time. The New York Times said he's a force of nature. People said, "If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Esrahi?" Fuck all that.

It's bullshit. What Oda said and what the old man said, I thought, That was really great, you know.

Well, hearing that, Otis Redding was such a legend.

Oh, he was great.

He died so young too.

How old was he? He died, he was really, he was in his 30s someplace. But listen to this, the interview, then I went home the next day at the Plain Dealer, right? It was Sunday and I was working. I'm literally the day after the interview. And so I'm sitting there in this hall-like city room and I see a city editor, the Associated Press wire machines start dinging Dinging. And in those days, if it had more than like 4 or 5 dings, there was some bad thing that happened. So I sit and I saw the city editor come from the city desk to this dinging machine. Right? And he's staring at it. The fucking thing is still dinging. Staring at it. And then he looks at me like that in the city room. And then he looks away. So I saw that and then I got up and went to the dinging machine. And Otis, his plane had crashed. The wait to another gig. And I was probably the last man who really spoke to him at length. Wow. I left the office right then and said, fuck it for the rest of the day. There was a bar across the street.

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

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

No, I agree with that, yeah. Sometimes, not that they— after my conversion to Christianity late in my life, I wrote 3 Christian scripts and none of them were made. And one of them wasn't made because one of the priests involved with potentially getting Christian financing said that we need more incense. And my response to somebody who interviewed me about it was, I don't write fucking incense. I write flesh and blood. So no wonder it wasn't made.

What did he mean by you need more incense?

Well, to make it more hymn-like, to make, make, give it a sense of piety, to take, to make it inspire the people so that they become Catholic in this specific case, and that it was too secular. And I think what happened to me with all three is that I fell between views and between so-called Christian films and secular films. And so that's why we never got the finance for all three of them.

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

The way I was writing it naturally. Right.

Like you wrote everything else.

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

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

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

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

Well, it's not just a huge movie, but in my mind, it was like a prayer, you know. I watch it each Good Friday, and it was a huge movie, beautifully It wasn't officially endorsed by the Catholic Church, although I saw in Cleveland a meeting where a priest organized a preview screening of the movie, and they had like 700 people, the full hall, watching it. There was such an interest in it. But part of the reason, I think, And you raise a good point because I think part of the reason, um, it was such a towering hit was that it was real. It wasn't, it wasn't incense-filled. It was real. There was— you had a figure who bled, and you really show what happened up on that cross and how awful, yeah, that kind of pain is. And how did the movie really reflect that?

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

The Last Temptation of Christ.

That's right.

That's Marty Scorsese.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. I love Willem Dafoe. I mean, he's one of my favorite actors. And I liked it. And it's also very real, historically real. Yeah. You know, the notion that Jesus of Nazareth was this Fred Rogers figure who wasn't really a real man, whereas the Bible says he was a true man and true God, that film really showed his human side. And my conception of Jesus, who I revere and who is one of my close friends that I speak to on most days, is that he was a true man and true God. He was a Jewish zealot, a freedom fighter against the Roman Empire. He was crucified by the Romans. As a freedom fighter, he hung around blue-collar guys and fishermen and hookers and tax collectors who were the lowest of the low back then, as they should be now, but they were the lowest of the low back then. And those were the people that he primarily buddied around with. That's Jesus of Nazareth, and that side is completely ignored by most films except the two that you mentioned specifically that are like that.

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

It was the very fact that Jesus had a relationship group that was clearly indicated as being sexual, with Mary Magdalene who was depicted as a prostitute. Now, the truth, historical truth, is that Mary Magdalene was a few years older than Jesus and a woman of means who had advised Roman builders in a city called Seraphim, and then was one of the people who financed Jesus and as he swept through Galilee and the rest of Judea. There's another scene in the Bible where an unnamed woman goes to Jesus and washes his feet, and then washes his feet with his hair. This unnamed woman, by a Pope in the 6th century, Gregory the Great, was picked to have been Mary Magdalene. No connection to Mary Magdalene. There's nothing that says that Mary Magdalene was a hooker of any kind. There's no proof for that in any way. So the fact that The Last Temptation of Christ did that and brought the two of them together in a sort of semi-love story without, of course, any any real sexuality to it on film is why it was so criticized. Scorsese's house was picketed, and I think the studio at that point was run by Lew Wasserman, whom I knew from Cleveland because he was a— he ran a racing wire in Cleveland before he went, but he was a legendary man.

His house was picketed as well.

—so was it just Catholic people and Christian people that were upset about this? Mostly, yeah.

Yeah, but it was—

it was very unusual for a Martin Scorsese film to be a religious film. Absolutely. Like a depiction of Jesus. People were much more averse back then. I feel like sometimes, like, religion goes in, like, peaks and waves, right? And I think there was a wave of atheism back then, and Hollywood was very non-Christian, to put it mildly. The Christian themes in films were never promoted.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's not as bad now in that sense as it was in those days. And I think that part of it, what frustrates me is that there would be an openness to that, into Christian films, if they were real, if they weren't full of incense and piety. Right. You know, what we've done to Jesus over the years is make him a kind of Fred Rogers figure. You know, he wasn't that. You know, I'm not even sure that Jesus really said, "Do not resist violence." You know, Jesus also said, "If you have a cloak but not a sword, sell the cloak and buy a sword." He also said, "I come not to make peace, I come not to make peace, but with a sword. So there's been a lot of church stuff, and especially I think Catholics are more guilty of this, that they romanticize and sort of cosmeticize the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

Well, there's always a problem when human beings add their own interpretation to an ancient story. Absolutely. And do it to fit their own narrative.

Absolutely, it's a great problem, but in this case, there is historical evidence on the other side, and they simply ignore that and pretend it doesn't happen. The Gnostic Gospels are full of so-called revolutionary things, and the truth is that the Gnostic Gospels were written 40 years, 30, 40 years after the death of Jesus, whereas the synoptic gospels, the ones that the church has accepted, were written 80, 90 years after the death of Jesus. So they had to have been taken secondhand from people who said they saw things, where with the previous, there's a shot that people directly saw them. The people in the church gospels were named like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not the people who were in the Gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then nobody knows who write them. They took those names, but they were, they were not those people. Really? Yeah. I had no idea. Absolutely no doubt. Even the, even the churches admit that at this point.

Whoo. 2,000 years is such a hard time for us to conceptualize, to put into our head. Yeah. How much time time has passed. Yes. Such a, you know, to try to get an accurate understanding of what was going on back then is insanely difficult.

I have become a, since my sort of conversion to Christianity, and I would style myself a devout Christian but not a devout Catholic even though I go to Mass and I love the Mass and believe in it, but since since 2001, when this process really began, I've become a real student of the historical Jesus. And I learn more and more, and I'm more and more astounded at what's been done to cosmeticize this man who was Jesus of Nazareth.

Well, it's also, he had some of the most profound and and insanely resonating teachings. Like, even today, the words that he spoke 2,000 years ago, there's still today people— I mean, they resonate with people. And if you live your life by the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will be a better person. Yes, you will. It is a great framework to live your life. Yes. Which is incredible when you think about a person that lived so long ago.

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

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

Well, there was a study done, a major study that was done by by the Catholic Church, led by John Paul II, whom I really admired, and read a lot about through the years, that— and this is a scientific study— that discovered that the Shroud of Turin came from 1313 or 1320. Now, there's this huge controversy about And there are those people who feel that that absolutely is Christ, and I must say that when I look at it, when I look at that figure, and I've done that a lot, and in my house we have several blowups of Turin's Christ, it's very, very moving. But the evidence, what there is, seems to indicate that it comes from the 13th century. 1900s.

Yeah, I've seen that as well, but then I've also seen people that say that that evidence— there's some, some controversy about that evidence. Yeah, there is. And that some of the cloth they, they believe dates to far earlier, and it's the type of cloth and the way it's made, right, seems to indicate that it's far older. Um, I don't know how much of the cloth they've carbon tested, you know, that, that is also an issue, and whether or not it had been repaired whether or not there'd been additional pieces.

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

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

Absolutely.

But there's also a lot of very strange mysteries as to how that was created in the first place. Because it's not a die, and they're not exactly sure what caused that image to appear. Or how— if that is a piece of art, they don't know how that art was created. And the fact that they really only could see the accurate representation of it once they saw it as a negative is also very interesting. Because who's gonna make a piece of art where you can only really appreciate what it looks like when you see it as a negative? Especially when you're talking about something that you're doing— you're making something in the 1300s, right? Hundreds of years before photography's ever created. So what are you— what are you making, and why is it so compelling when you look at it in the negative? And if you're talking about something that was created by an insane burst of energy, which is what the proponents of the Shroud of Turin being legitimate think— they think it was created by this insane burst of energy on Jesus' resurrection. You know, I'm agnostic on it. I have no idea whether it's real or not real, but I find it fascinating that they have no real explanation as to how it was created.

The—

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

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

Absolutely, absolutely.

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

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

There's no answers in terms of why?

I was looking for an accurate recreation someone's made, you know, in the last 200 years and doesn't seem to be one. No, no one has.

Yeah, when you look at the image and you realize that this is an actual negative of the original Shroud, you, you just, you stop and think like, well, what would someone do if you— if this is the negative, like, how would you create that as a positive? Because it— can you show me also the positive image of it? What it actually looks like. Okay, so here's— this is one image. So this is what it actually looks like. This is the actual Shroud. And when you look at that, you go, okay, I see like shadows. It's very interesting. And then switch over to the negative and it all comes to life. And there's marks from the lashes, from the, the whip marks. There's, there's blood stains from where the rods went through his wrists. It's very fascinating. Yeah, it sure is. And again, this is not dye, it's not ink, and they don't really know how it was made. And again, no one has been able to recreate this.

It said the cloth was made most likely from a loom that wasn't invented until like the 1300s. Okay, that doesn't necessarily mean That's where for sure came from though, but right, right, but um, here's about the image. It's just like, how, how was the image transferred to the cloth? I asked, just, you know, does anybody have any idea? I've seen a video where someone gave some sort of scientific explanation, but I don't know if I can remember how to find it right now.

Says it behaves like a photographic negative and shows some 3D information, which is unusual for normal artwork. Uh, the chemical theories that body heat, sweat, or vapors reacting with the cloth I, uh, example, ammonia or lactic acid from sweat may have been proposed but don't reproduce the shroud's sharp, non-blurry details. Simple heat or scorch theories likewise fail to match the very shallow, non-burn discoloration of the fibers. Human or man-made image, uh, human-made image theories. Painting or rubbing from bas-relief has been tested, but studies have not found pigments in the amounts or patterns that would explain the image, and there's no clear brushstrokes. Primitive photography— some suggest that a medieval camera using light-sensitive silver salts and lenses could have projected a body or statue onto the cloth, and experimental replicas show that it's at least physically possible, though historically speculative. And now here's the weird one— radiation bursts of energy theories. Some researchers argue that a brief, intense burst of ultraviolet or similar radiation from the body could have discovered— discolored only the top fibrils, producing a non-contact image even where cloth and body didn't touch. Proponents sometimes link this to Jesus's resurrection, but the need— the needed radiation, billions of watts without burning the cloth, is far beyond anything observed in nature, and this remains a speculative, faith-based idea rather than an established physical mechanism.

In short, there's no consensus mechanism. The image transfer process is still unexplained, and every proposed method has serious problems when tested against the cloth's measured properties. Wild. Amazing. I mean, there's no other piece of artwork that's that fascinating because every other art, Michelangelo's work, you know, and all this incredible art, it's art. You see what they did. There's brush strokes, there's chisel marks. They, you know, they made incredible sculptures, but it's clearly man-made art, right? This is a different thing. It's a very strange thing. If you can't recreate it today— if they could recreate it today, people would be doing it. They'd be making their versions of the Shroud of Turin.

Absolutely. I don't know if that's been done historically, but when, you know, where there's some, you know, some nutbag has decided to do business over recreating this rounded terrain. Is there—

did they carbon test it? And what are the arguments that it's older? Because I do know that there have been some very recent arguments that the testing was incorrect and that it's older. See if you can find out what that is, whether or not AI, whether Perplexity, our sponsor, has some sort of a bias. Like, the thing is, it's like pulling from all these— when, when you get an AI response to something, it's pulling from all these articles on the web, and most of the articles seem to indicate that people think it's at least either a hoax or an elaborate—

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

Supporters of an earlier date argue that the 1988 radiocarbon results— 1988 is a long time ago— sampled an anomalous or contaminated area. And that other historical and scientific clues point to a much older cloth. Okay, what is the scientific arguments? Contaminated repair sample. Some research claimed the 1988 test piece came from a rewoven or heavily handled corner, so its carbon date reflects medieval repairs, not the original cloth. Alternative dating methods. X-ray or crystallographic aging of linen fibers has produced dates compatible with the 1st century, though these methods are newer and not widely, widely accepted as definitive. Pollen and dust analysis reports pollen grains and mineral dust consistent with the 1st century Middle East rather than only medieval Europe, which proponents say supports a much older origin. Image properties— some argue that the image's microscopic features and burst-of-energy-type characteristics require technology or phenomena unlikely in the Middle Ages, implying an earlier extraordinary event. Well, why don't they do a retesting? They probably don't want to know that it actually is from the 1300s.

John Paul II really believed in it. Yeah, he went to see it in Turin several times. He said he was moved by it, and that's when they launched this this big Vatican investigation. And he never said in any way that he agreed with the investigation. He just seemed to drop the whole issue. And from what I know, it never went any further. But he visited it twice, went out of his way— Where is it? It's in Turin still.

It's in Turin. I was looking up that, too. It's currently in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. But so here's what's interesting, was who found it.

And when and why or whatever. The earliest undisputed record appears in the 19— the 1350s rather, in Lirey, a village in France, where the knight Geoffrey de Charnay displayed a cloth claimed to be Jesus's burial shroud. How he obtained it and where it was between the 1st century and the 14th century are unknown. Later theories trace it speculatively through Edessa and Constantinople I can't never say that. Constantinople. But these links are debated. Interesting. What does it look like? How is it displayed?

That's how it's displayed. Constantinople was named after Constantine, who was the first Roman Emperor who made Roman Catholicism the national religion.

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

I, from my impression, Joe, it, it, this was, this was over the length of Jesus's body, right? So it's longer than, than certainly I expected.

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

Like these things? Yeah. One other picture was pointing those out. They might be the burn marks that it was saying, that there's burn marks on it. Huh. Again, it's, it's 2,000 years old in theory.

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

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

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

Jamie, can I ask you for some water? There's water right here. Oh, great. Thank you.

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Well, I grew up Catholic. I was an altar boy when I was a kid. I knew one really great priest in my life who helped me with my life. I became a lapsed Catholic, and then when, at the tail end of living in in LA, in Malibu actually. I was usually successful as a screenwriter, of course, and I was being interviewed all over the place and people were stealing mail from my mailbox and all that shit. And I should have been overwhelmingly happy with that, but something was missing, I felt. And I couldn't really put my finger on what that was, but something was missing. In my life. And then I got throat cancer, stage 4 throat cancer, shortly after we moved back to Cleveland from Malibu. And then the Cleveland Clinic and then a surgeon named Marshall Strom did a surgery that they had never done in this country, they had done in Switzerland, where they took some— they took a muscle from the left side of your neck and attached it to your larynx. Stage 4 was very dicey, and he was very honest with me about how dicey it would be. And he did it spectacularly, and here I am at 81.

But in the course of all of that, when I was terrified and and really frightened from one day to the other, I ran across Jesus, reading, and partly Naomi's influence, because Naomi also grew up Catholic and she had a very strong, very strong faith. And then I went to church a couple of times, and I loved the Mass. The Mass itself. In the course of recovery, and it was about a 3-year recovery, for some time I couldn't speak, and then I spoke like Brando, and then I squeaked. In the course of my recovery, I did everything I could physically to help. I jogged and walked and did all of those things, and I recovered. And I felt afterwards that the reason I was able to beat a stage 4 cancer had to do with my prayer life. And then I started reading voraciously about Jesus of Nazareth, the apostles, all of that ancient Jewish history, Catholic history, and some of that really moved me as well. So I started going regularly to church with Naomi, and then as the boys were born, with the boys as well. And as time went by, excuse me, as time went by, I also started having issues with the Catholic Church.

I continued going to the Mass, because that was a very special natural thing to me. But I had issues with the history of anti-Semitism in the church, the issues with sexism in terms of not allowing women to be priests, the issues with the pope making so-called infallible decisions. And I just shut most of that off, although in the process of it, My Christianity didn't suffer at all, but sometimes I felt like I was becoming a kind of an agnostic Catholic. And my faith in Christ, even as all of that happened, is unflagged. I still pray to Jesus, pray specifically to Jesus, and he continues to be a major important figure in my life.

So your issues were with the organization that is the Catholic Church.

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

To me. So you felt moved by Baptist, Black Baptist churches?

Yeah, Black Baptist churches, they're all emotional, throw up your arms and say, "Okay, here I am, take me, Lord." Which definitely seems a lot more fun.

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

It's fun. I also have been very fortunate through the course of my life to have Black friends and to share the Black culture. I was involved in the civil rights movement. I had a shotgun stuck in my belly by a deputy who'd been indicted for killings and told to get the fuck out of Neshoba County. I had the good fortune to have lunch with the Reverend Martin Luther King. Oh, wow. I knew Stokely Carmichael. What was that like? Well, the most amazing thing, he was in town because of the death of a minister in a protest. And it was an unheralded appearance, and I think it was partly before he became the towering international figure. And he was heading back to the airport, and he couldn't find his ride. And I happened to be right there, and I said, "I can drive you, Reverend King." He said, "Okay." So again, on the way to the airport, he said, "Are you hungry?" I'm hungry. He said, "Can we stop someplace?" I said, "Sure." So we did. And the— what amazed me about the man is that he was more interested almost in hearing about my refugee camp experiences and what that was like and how that worked and all of that.

He said he didn't know much about it than he really— than he was about— than he was about talking about the civil rights movement. Wow. He was very, very moving and a powerful figure. The end, then I just drove him to the airport. But there was something about the man that was absolutely magnetic, you know, that I felt. Clearly. Yeah. And then, but then I also, when I was in college, I had a relationship with a young black woman. And that brought me much closer to the black culture. I mean, I was an ethnic fucking kid, you know, a refugee. And I certainly needed lessons in that whole cultural area, and I got them. And then I sought them out. And when I was at Rolling Stone, Huey Newton was over in Oakland, and he would come over sometimes. I think partly, I partly suspect, because at Rolling Stone we had some of the most beautiful women in the world working there. We did have air conditioning, but when it got real hot, they didn't wear a top at all. So what about that spread? So it was sort of funny. They were topless? They were topless when it got real hot.

What year was this? Was it in the '60s?

I was at Rolling Stone from '71 to '76. Wild times. I was right in there. In the years where the Cultural Revolution was exploding. The women's revolution was exploding. And to be at Rolling Stone at that time was like being in the vortex of all of that. You know, the— and it was just a crazy time. You know, the sexual revolution was at its absolute height. And the— I've always, as I said to you, I've always always really loved smart, sassy, sexy women, um, and the whole office was filled with them, you know.

I'm sure. What year was the birth control pill invented? I have no idea. Let me guess, '65, right? '64. Let me guess, I'm just taking a wild swing, I have no idea.

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

'68. 1960. Interesting. Yeah, well, that had a big factor, right? Yes, absolutely. Because before, you know, women were in a situation where every time they had sex, they could get pregnant. Absolutely. And then all of a sudden— but then you've got this pill that's fucking with their hormones that we found out now that women that have been on it for long periods of time, they make poor choices in terms of mates, and it does a lot of weird stuff.

We're learning a lot of weird stuff.

Yeah, and also it's very dangerous for them. A friend of mine, his daughter died. She was 17 years old. She was on the birth control pill and she was smoking cigarettes. And she— I guess smoking cigarettes and birth control pills for some people can cause blood clots. I don't understand why or what, but that is an issue, right? You're not supposed to smoke if you're on birth control? See if that's still the recommenda— well, obviously they tell you not to smoke, period. But I think there's some potential complication. Smoking while taking oral contraceptives that contain estrogen significantly increases the risk of severe cardiovascular events like heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots. The risk is particularly high for women over 35. Quitting smoking or using alternative birth control is highly recommended. Yeah.

So I had more fun at Rolling Stone than any other time in my life.

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

Yeah, I saw him.

It was an interesting conversation.

He kept looking at his watch.

Well, he was, you know, he was Jan Wenner of 2024 or 2025, not Jan Wenner of 1975. Yes, absolutely. You know, not the Jan Wenner that was the editor when Hunter Thompson was writing crazy stories. You know, it's different times. People change.

You are a big Hunter fan. Huge. And I know, and so am I, and I wanted to talk about him because I really haven't had a chance to talk about him specifically. Hunter really was the cause of my whole huge success, even as a screenwriter. Let me tell you how. I was a reporter at the Plain Dealer And I had read Hunter, of course, when he was a National Observer, doing those kinds of pieces from Latin America before he discovered Gonzo. And I covered at the Plain Dealer, I covered a Hells Angels shootout of a bar called Barto's Café in Cleveland. And I wrote a story about it that the Associated Press picked up and put on their national wire. The— and I get a note shortly afterwards from Hunter Thompson, who had read this story on the AP wire and wrote me a note that said, I'm barely paraphrasing, "Big fucker, now there are two of us who know how to write about Hells Angels. That really pisses me off. All the best, Hunter Thompson." Well, that must have been a fun thing to get. Oh man, I was as excited about that as my two sons were to meet Joe Rogan.

They really— it was really, really something. So okay, so that time goes by, um, and I get a call from Rolling Stone. I know when I first— I do a couple of freelance pieces for Rolling Stone Rolling Stone, one on Kent State one year afterwards and the other, I forgot what the other one was, but then I get a call from the managing editor, Paul Scanlan, who incidentally was the backbone of the editorial content. He'd come from the Wall Street Journal and he wanted to take on the New York Times for Rolling Stone. So, and they wanted me to do a freelance piece on narcotics agents, corrupt narcotics agents. So I go out there, and I discover that Hunter had been after them to hire me because of that piece. And he kept saying, "He's a good guy," and all of that. Then, when I'm at Rolling Stone, I write a book called Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse that Hunter loves. By now, we know each other. And we're friends and we enjoy each other's company. And I write this book and Hunter gets me his agent, who was the top literary agent in the country, and then gets me his publisher, which is Random House, to publish it.

And then to boot, blurbs it when the book comes out. And somebody at United Artists sees it— oh, and then the book becomes a finalist finalist for the National Book Award, one of 4 finalists. Wow. OK. So somebody at United Artists reads the book, reads because she reads all the finalists, reads the book, calls me out of the blue and says, you've got really cinematic talent. Have you thought about writing a script? And I said, no, I haven't. And I go to meet them, and they hire me, and I write Fist. All of that, which led to my success in screenplays and in the cinema was thanks to Hunter. Wow. And the friendship we had was— was— I never— our friendship was in San Francisco. He lived in, in Woody Creek, um, the— and he would come to town. Our friendship was in town, um, but we ran a lot together. We enjoyed each other. We drank, um, together. We both liked drinking, um, and on occasion we would Good story. We would go down— San Francisco is famed for its stripper part area, I think around O'Farrell Street and stuff. And he and I went down there together.

There was a very famous stripper show in one of those clubs. And one of the times we get down there, he of course would take acid before every trip down there. I wouldn't do acid, but I did acid once and Hunter wound up holding me for an hour. But I was the guy from Cleveland, right? Which he always let me know. He'd say, "Oh, you're from fucking Cleveland." Anyway, I would snort some lines and we'd go down there. And we were waiting for about an hour. And, you know, the place is filled, but the girls haven't come out. And Hunter suddenly gets up, hurls his arms up in the air, and says, "Where's the pussy?" We want pussy, right? Great memories in my life. Of course, I'd settle him down and all of that, and then when they finally started coming very loudly, he'd call me back and say, finally, finally pussy. He was a larger than life, no doubt, colorful figure, but also what he was, and then I discovered this And he didn't really share this with that many people. He was very, very well-read. He had a whole other side that was a very sensitive and unhippie-like side.

I saw it most clearly once. I was married at the time to a former reporter at the Plain Dealer who was very, very straight and really rejected the whole hippie thing and worked in California for a small suburban paper. And Hunter had never met her but had heard of her. He said, "I'd really like to meet her." So we asked him to dinner. And Hunter came to dinner at our small, tiny apartment in Novato, and my wife at the time, the Cooked a Hungarian chicken paprikash dinner. Okay? It's Hungary's most famous meal. And he sat there with us, and what I discovered was that the boy from Kentucky was there underneath all of that firepower and all of that larger-than-life behavior. He was sensitive and quiet. And they got along like gangbusters, you know. And actually, interestingly, when I drove him after dinner, I drove him back to town, for the ride back he berated me because I was having an affair with what he called this hippie chick. He said, you have this wonderful wife here and you're fucking around with this hippie chick. I mean, it's true, beration and anger and all of that.

He had that side as well. Yes, he did. If we had breakfast, it was at 4 in the afternoon, and what he ordered were 4 margaritas, 6 beers, and maybe, maybe toast with scrambled eggs. And in that sense, he had more tolerance than anyone in the that I'd ever seen. And my tolerance in those days, for booze especially, was also very high. But I'd never seen anybody quite like him. He had a great sense of humor. The— as many, many years later, he wanted me to write the screenplay for Rum Diary. And I hadn't seen him in a long time and I had just met Naomi, to whom I've now been married 32 years. And he wanted me to go to Aspen so that we could talk about it. And I called Ian and I said, "Listen, I'm head over heels in love with this woman, you know, and Hunter wants me to go out there. Tell me the truth, what kind of shape is he in?" And Jan sort of pauses and he says, "Well, he's good." And then he's another pause and he says, "But you know, the Stones were in Denver and Mick and Keith decided to come visit him between gigs.

So they hire a driver and they drive up here and they have a terrific time." But they're there about 3 or 4 hours and they've got a gig that night. So they say, listen, we gotta go, we gotta gig, blah blah blah. And Hunter gets all upset and says, well, you just got here. And they said, no, no, we've been here 3 or 4 hours and stuff. Well, he continues to be upset and he leaves the house and they're sitting there and suddenly they hear gunshots. He had gone out and shot the tires out on the Stones' car. So I never took Naomi there. I was frightened, too frightened. What year was this? Well, let's see, it was in '90 and '90-something, '94 maybe, maybe somewhere around '5, '4, '5, '3, '3, '4, '5, somewhere.

He had been going hard for 30 years by that point. Yes, he had.

Or at least 20. And also, the end for him, I've read and heard, it was very sad because the sadness wasn't caused by the drugs, it was caused by booze. And he was, in Jan's opinion, and Jan saw him often in Woody Creek, and in his former wife's opinion, Sandy's opinion, it was the booze that did it. You know, his body began being old and he needed a wheelchair. He could hardly walk. She drove him in the wheelchair. And at one time, I think in New Orleans, when they were visiting Sean Penn on a film, he actually fell out of the wheelchair in the middle of traffic. And Anita couldn't really pick him up. And so they had to get help. And cars are going by and all that shit. And then he also broke a leg when they were visiting Hawaii at the Kahala. So as he said in his suicide note, which I thought was the most gut-wrenching and, but also terrific suicide note, it was no fun anymore. The fun was gone. Nothing was fun. No football, no this, no that, no fun.

Well, when the body goes, yeah, it's hard to have fun. Yeah. And that's the problem with booze. Yeah, exactly. Well, the problem with many drugs, but particularly the problem with booze, you know, you're breaking down your body over and over and over again. And with a guy like Hunter, he was doing it every day.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a famous piece that this reporter wrote when he went to visit Hunter, and he documented Hunter's drug and alcohol use throughout the day, you know, like 6 in the morning in the hot tub with champagne, like that's the end of the day. And then him sleeping and then him waking up and doing all the drugs and then getting ready to write. And what's the guy's name who wrote the— there's a guy who took me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons reading it out and turned it into an EDM song. Really? Yeah. Eugene Carroll? No, no, no. Right, but the, um, but the, the singer, the song. Yes, the guy. I'm sorry, the guy who wrote the song. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like an electronic dance music song. We played it before many times. God, I can't believe it's like Beardyman. Thank you. This guy Beardyman put it to music, and it's hilarious.

I gotta check it out. It's amazing.

I mean, it's a tragic story. Yeah, in a lot of ways, but, but in his prime, the writing that he did was, uh, in many ways it was the narration of an era.

Yes, it was, and it was genius. You know, the— he— there would— you know, there was this thing called the New Journalism, and I practiced And so did people like Gay Talese and David Halberstam and Larry L. King. But then Hunter took that and created an entire new genre. The gonzo journalism thing was his. And it was a kind of humor that just knocked you down. And totally revolutionary. And the— Tom Wolfe said, who, of course, was one of the people, the founders of the New Journalism, Winston Churchill said that he was today's version of Mark Twain in terms of what he was able to accomplish. Two books especially I thought, the Fear and Loathing in Vegas, of course, and the campaign book, the '72 campaign book, which in my mind is the best political commentary, including all of Teddy White's books.

No, it's fantastic. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Yeah, in '72, yeah. And he also had this freedom that was very different from all these other reporters because he was a one-time guy. He was going to go in there and follow the campaign for the entire time and then wrote this book about it.

But Joe, these were all staid, the shoe-tie-wearing reporters, and you turn this creature loose on them on the campaign trail, and of course they all fell in love with him, and they did, because he was such a free spirit compared to what their lives were going to be. Of course.

Well, imagine you're doing this boring thing, which is following a bunch of fakers as they're telling you how they're gonna change the country, which you know they're not really gonna do because you've been doing this for 20 years. Absolutely. And then along comes the guys like, let's do acid, come on, pussies! All of a sudden you've got this fucking maniac who's drinking and saying wild shit and writing wild shit, and he doesn't have to be held to the same standards words as everyone else because he knows it doesn't matter if they never have him back again. It's fine.

I'm so sorry that Hunter wasn't here with Trump's time. Oh my God, because that could have been fucking wild and hilarious. But there's also a part of me that says he would have liked Trump. I know this is heresy to liberals, you know, who think that he's a, you know, that he would have he would absolutely hate him and all of that. But I'm not certain of that. And I, and I, and I think that, that certainly in terms of his style, um, he would have liked things about him.

Well, I think he would have liked the fact that he's this wild character. Absolutely. Completely wild character that has never existed in all of presidential politics before. There's never been anything like him, for good or for bad. There's never been a guy like him.

Look what he did today. I mean, I mean, he had a shit fit with Netanyahu. And he said, you know, you're fucking crazy. You would have been in jail except for me. I saved your ass. What other president, for God's sakes, has ever spoken like that, not only publicly, but to us? And in that sense, you know, I'm proud of being a deplorable. I'm from Cleveland. You know, I grew up in among poor people and blue-collar people, and he's the first president that didn't talk down but talk directly to us.

Yeah, for good or for bad.

Oh yeah, absolutely for good or for bad.

Yeah, I mean, he is who he is, which is very odd. It's a very odd person to be president.

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

Well, the ballroom doesn't bother me that much. That's, to me, trivial construction. Like, whatever. The ICE stuff, what bothers me is we're opening the door for militarized police on our city streets. As many people say, like, look, we got to get these immigrants out of here that are illegal. There's a lot of criminal criminals in this country. There's a lot of people that are committing crimes. I understand that. I understand that perspective. My perspective is not that you need to get the criminals out. It's that it is a very slippery slope when you give people— and they're trained for 7 weeks, they're not trained for very long, they're trained for much less time than police officers, much less time than military— and then you have this military— militarized police force that has no identification and on the streets. That's a precedent that you might like it when it's for a cause that you support, but that could easily be for a cause that you do not support. That militarized police force could be going door-to-door and confiscating guns. That militarized police force that you could— you could find other ways where a different ruler could use this precedent in a very damaging way for our free society.— that's my perspective on it.

Yeah, I agree with that. When they start calling people like that, the woman who was killed in Minnesota and the guy, domestic terrorists, you know, it's an abomination. Which woman is—? That woman who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis, and then the guy afterwards. Afterwards, the week afterwards, was also shot by ICE. Yeah. And to call them domestic terrorists. But to give credit to Trump, he got rid of Christie Noem. He got rid of that guy who was there that Tom Holman replaced.

Yeah, well, Tom Holman was already in charge. That guy was in a different position. But they did get rid of that guy. Also, that guy had a very odd way of dressing. That was very— like, he wore outfits that were reminiscent reminiscent of like Nazi Germany. Like he had this very weird coat that he would wear all the time. And a lot of people were saying, this is a very odd choice for someone to be wearing who's being accused of fascism. See if you can find some photos of that dude, the coats that he was wearing, where a lot of people, like I had to make sure that this wasn't AI. I was like, is this his real coat that he's wearing? This is very strange. I mean, not accusing him of anything. It's just a fucking coat. But it was, a lot of people online were pointing out, like, this is a very odd wardrobe choice for someone who's in charge of, in many ways, othering human beings. The other thing that's a problem with this whole ICE thing is, and it's not the fault of the ICE people or even this administration, is that many of these people were encouraged to come here.

That's what's so fucked. Imagine if you're living in Guatemala and you're encouraged to come to America. You live in a terrible third-world world situation, you have a— wherever you're living, it's like deep poverty. You're told that they'll help you get across the border. They'll literally transport you into America. They'll put you in these cities, and you can get on public assistance. If you have a bad back, they'll put you on Social Security. There's all these different programs that are incentivizing people to come to America. The Red Cross is giving you maps. People showing you how to do it, they're letting you across the border, they're letting you into the country, and then 2 years later you're being chased down. 2 years later you've got masked ICE workers that are pulling— I mean, it's like, it's very inconsistent. Obviously this is a completely different administration, but I feel for those poor fucking people that were told that they can come here and that there was gonna be a pathway to citizenship. So they upend their lives life, they come to America in the only way they know how. And when people say, oh, they should do it legitimately, sure, a lot of people do it legitimately, and I understand their perspective that it's a very difficult path and no one should be able to cut that line and they went through it the right way.

However, these people, that's not an option for them. If you don't have any money and you're living in a third world country and people encourage you to come to America, I most certainly would have come to America just like they did.

Joe, I did. My parents did. You know, I personify the American dream in terms of what happened to me. You know, what they said in the camps was, "The streets of America are paved with gold." Right. When we lived on Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, there was a Hungarian poet, a mad poet. His name was Átsimra, who would go up and down Lorain Avenue screaming in Hungarian Olván, olván, which means where is it? Where is the gold? Right, right, right. But look, I came in here as a kid. I couldn't speak the language. We knew no one. I got into serious juvenile trouble, like maybe— I got out of that. I studied. I was a total autodidact. I wasn't a good student, but I did reading. I went to college. College. I wanted to be a disk jockey for a while and the name Joe Anthony. Here's a song to Sue the Sad Suffering Secretary, right, and this kind of shit. I went to college and I did well in college. I won a big award as a senior. I kept working And I also, through the years, got a terrific amount of help from Americans.

I couldn't have done it without them, beginning with a bus driver named Henry Jackson, a Black man who had been adopted by Hungarian parents and spoke Hungarian. You know, moving on to people in college who helped, who I found a great deal of help. I couldn't have done what I achieved achieved without the help of other people and other Americans. And then to top everything off, you know, the Hollywood and 18 films and all of that. Yes, I think that is the personification of the American dream. And many of the immigrants who come here are looking for the same dream. And many of them are saying, Mad Hachimura said on Lorraine Avenue, "Old one, old one, where is it?" Right. Yeah. Part of the reason that the stuff in Minneapolis breaks my heart is that. These Latino people are my cousins and brothers in terms of not the killers and not the gang members, the people who are gardeners and who work in stores and trying to make a buck and have kids and that they're trying to survive. Well, it's also part of the ICE story too. Absolutely.

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

Yeah.

I mean, come on. That's a— it's kind of a crazy World War II military coat.

That's amazing.

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

Yeah, but it's bothered by the mask too. It's terrible. Like, to me, that's—

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

yes, they do. Absolutely. Same old political game.

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

Listen, I have an idea. Run for president. I'll write your speeches. Bah! Listen, no, that attitude is really terrific. I think you're right to be concerned. You see it. Yeah. Listen, I'm 81 years old, but I really see it too, you know, and and great dangers there that I hope my sons don't have to face.

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

Hundreds of them were. You know, we had the same syndrome. I covered the Kent State massacres. Yeah. I covered that. And one of the things that I saw is the rhetoric that was coming from James Rhodes, the governor at the time, and from Sylvester Del Corso, who was the head of the National Guard, was absolutely the main thing that created that atmosphere. Atmosphere that, that caused that shooting. Yeah, absolutely. And today, just sadly, we see many examples of that, and yeah, they're great dangers.

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

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

He also said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." Ah, ah, ah.

Yeah. He also said, a little bit off topic, but I love it, he said, He said, "When the mind and the pecker argue, the pecker always wins." Yeah, I mean, he was essentially the original stand-up comedian. Oh, you're absolutely right. You're so right. I've actually been thinking about doing some piece on him. I mean, stop me if you know the history. But in the beginning, he was a stand-up with his so-called lectures. Theaters that he did all over the West. And then, then he did this, then he wrote some books, the books that he's famous for. But he went bankrupt nearly at the end of his life because of bad investments. And then he did a round-the-world tour of stand-up all over again. And usually they said he was a, a, um, a poet of the profane, because these are usually for male audiences. He published a little book called On Masturbation, which is about the glories of masturbation. The only thing I've heard that's close is a stand-up by one Joe Rogan, which there's a great line that says, if you're married and have kids, the only place to find peace, um, toi would say, with the pecker, that is if you rent a motel and locked the door, you know.

But he had the same kind of verve and love in terms of being a stand-up, being outrageous, pushing the envelope. And that whole side of Twain has been sort of hidden under the notion that he is the great— it's Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and all of that. Nobody talks— he wrote a book called called Letters from the Earth from the Voice of the Devil. He wrote another one called The Mysterious Stranger, which is about Jesus coming back in a very dark way. And then he wrote one that was published in the '30s that hasn't been republished called Twain Erupts. Um, you know, so yes, you're so right when you say he was stand-up. He was the first straight stand-up.

He was the originator because he was essentially a very witty Yes. Author who wrote very provocative things, very hilarious things, and then would read them publicly. Right. And when he was doing these speeches where he'd go and, you know, whether you call it poetry or whatever it was, there was no stand-up comedy back then. There was no name for it. Yes. But he was just riotously funny. People loved them.

Absolutely.

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

And the initial audiences were mostly male audiences. Right. Yeah, I think he's a great— it's never been really done, to do a piece, a fictional piece about Twain as a stand-up with pushing the envelope with all these things, I think would be a lot of fun. It would be a lot of fun.

The only problem would be like the cultural context is so different back then. It's almost like Like, um, did you see Lenny, the Dustin Hoffman film? Great film. I mean, I think Dustin Hoffman fucking nailed it. It was as close to Lenny Bruce as you're ever going to see someone portray Lenny Bruce. The problem is the world has changed so much since 1960, right, that a lot of the outrageousness is gone and it seems very pedestrian. Like, the things that he is saying, because he was such a groundbreaker and society was so locked down and so conservative and so, you know, just that there was just the way people communicated was much different back then. The understanding of culture and of race relations and sexual relations was very different back then. And so the outrageousness of what he was saying back then, it just doesn't really translate. Because in many ways, I think stand-up comedy in particular is a window in time. Time. It's a window into the way people behave. Films are that way as well, especially if you go and watch a lot of old films. It's a window into how people perceived reality back then.

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

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

I'm sorry, he's been pushed into being almost a kid's writer, right? Yeah. Speaking of stand-up, I want you to know, and I don't think you know, did you know that Sam Kennison dedicated a CD to me. Did he really? Sam Kennison, one of his, one of his last CDs was called Leader of the Band, B-A-N-N-E-D, right? And at the flip side of the CD, he thanks a bunch of people, Ring A-Soft and record people and all of that, and then also Sly and Sean Penn. And then after all of that, in larger letters than the and he says, and a very special thanks to Joe Esterhouser writing his letter to Michael Ovitz. Ah, that's amazing.

What letter did you write to Michael Ovitz?

Oh, Michael Ovitz was the, was the top, top dog, um, the agent in town running CAA. And the, and I was leaving CAA because my best friend and the rabbi in the business, who was an agent named Guy McEwen, who had been running Columbia, became an agent again. So I was leaving the CIA simply because of my love for Guy. And I went in to see Ovitz and said, I'm leaving the agency. And Ovitz said, if you leave the agency, then my foot soldiers who go up and down Wilshire Boulevard will put you under the ground. Oh, geez. What the fuck? You know, so I thought about it for a couple weeks. Jesus. And I wrote him a letter, which essentially said, fuck you. You know, I'm leaving. I'm going back to the person who started me in the business and the person I love. And it turned into a major controversy with headlines all over the place.

Put you under the ground is strong words. Oh, man.

There was a producer named Bernie Brillstein Bernie. I know Bernie. Did you? He wrote a memoir years later who said those exact words had been used to him as well. Wow. Yeah. And you know what? As time went on, it became obvious that the whole controversy with Ovitz really hurt him, because other people had been threatened that way, and he had a reputation for that, and he actually He was out of the business not much past that. But the notion of Kinison, I love Kinison's work. The notion of Kinison, when I saw that thing, I was overwhelmed. He was one of the greats. He was one of the greats, absolutely.

One of the greats, and I still maintain that for like a period of 2 years, 2 or 3 years, he was the most profound and revolutionary stand-up comic I I've agree.

I agree.

He came out of nowhere. He was so different than anybody else. You know, I was introduced to Kinison by a girl that I work with. I was working at a gym called the Boston Athletic Club in South Boston. There was a girl that worked at the front counter who was hilarious. She was a volleyball player. Really hilarious girl. And she told me about Kinison and reenacted one of his bits in the parking lot. Of the club told me what she saw on TV about— he had that bit about homosexual necrophiliacs. Oh yeah, money. She's on her stomach laying on the— she was so funny. She was on her stomach in the parking lot going, oh, oh, life keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead. It never ends. It never ends. And I was laughing so hard that I couldn't wait to go out and get that videotape. Tape. And I got that videotape, and I was only 19 at the time. I'd never even thought about doing stand-up yet, but that was like one of the first times that I was like, oh, this is stand-up. Yeah, like, I didn't know that this was stand-up.

I thought stand-up was like, did you ever notice, like that kind of stuff that you'd see on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I had no thought ever that this wild shit was stand-up. And, you know, credit to HBO, because before then you would never be able to see that kind of comedy. The only way you'd be able to see it is in the movie theater. It'd have to be like Richard Pryor, Live on the Sunset Strip, which predated that by a few years. And no one had any understanding that there was this kind of stand-up comedy out there. That this wild motherfucker who used to be a priest— He used to be a preacher.

Yeah, I know. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Mind-boggling. Yeah, he's having, literally having a conversation with someone as he's dying.

Yeah, it's obviously Jesus. It's a Jesus figure. I mean, it's a— is it my time? I mean, all right, right. I'm amazing because— especially amazing considering where he came from what, what he went through, what he did with comedy, and then, then that ending. Yeah, there was a movie made, wasn't there? But it wasn't very good. I don't know about Kennison. Yeah, I don't know. I think that, man, that guy was a wild— for a while I was thinking about that too.

I have a problem with reenactments of a guy who is that profound. Oh yeah, someone's playing them.

Yeah, it's like, it's—

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

It reminds me— I'm sorry— in terms of being wild to buy coke, my first story when I was at Rolling Stone was a piece about narcotics, corrupt narcotics agents, and as a result of the stories, the guy who was the head of the narcotics agency in the state of California had to resign, and as a result of that, After that, I started getting plastic baggies full of coke at Rolling Stone from the various dealers who appreciated my work. Now, whenever Hunter was there, I would present him with the bag, and he would go, holy fucking Christ, you're getting these from people? One of the things that solidified our friendship— That's hilarious. —is that I would hand it over.

And that was back when cocaine was actually cocaine. Pain. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it wasn't stepped on. You didn't get fentanyl. You didn't have to worry about dying of an overdose.

It was the only drug besides it— besides smoking dope that, that I really, really enjoyed. I said I tried acid once and another had to hold on to me because I was so freaked out.

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

Not anymore, but, but certainly the memory of it was— it was influenced, absolutely influenced by cocaine. The, uh, Tarantino also really loved, loved, uh, loved Showgirls.

Well, it was a wild movie, and I remember, you know, because it was that girl— was her name Elizabeth Berkley? Elizabeth Berkley, who was from Saved by the Bell, right? So she was like this America's sweetheart from this really nice sitcom. And then all of a sudden, you know, she's half naked and she's a showgirl and it's like, whoa.

And she's having an affair with Paul Verhoeven. Right. He's moved out with his wife and is living with Elizabeth Berkley right now. So crazy. No. Yeah. Geez Louise. Wild times, right? Absolutely. Fun, really fun. Um, Jimi Hendrix story, because he's the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and I wondered whether he had any kind of a godfather impact on, on the Joe Rogan Experience. Oh, 100%. I stole the name from Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix story, 100%.

I mean, when we first started doing the podcast, I was— I would always listen to Voodoo Child on the way to the Comedy Store. I'd listen coming over Laurel Canyon. That was one of my favorite. That and Whole Lotta —those were my two favorite songs to listen to on the way to the Comedy Store. I had like a soundtrack that I listened to to get myself psyched up for shows.

You'll love this story then. Okay, I'm a reporter at the Plain Dealer, and all of our editors barely know about rock and roll. And as I said, I've loved it all my life, and when Van Dyke came around, I loved his work. And he's in Cleveland for an appearance, and The fucking Cleveland cops have gone crazy and they're saying that this caused a riot and it's obscene and all of that stuff. And I ask, go up to my city editor and ask, and tell him I'd like to interview Hendrix and cover his concert. So I do cover his concert and it's jammed in Cleveland Arena and people are loving it. And I set up a date to interview him the next morning at the Cleveland Hotel. Okay, so the They show up the next morning and I am the Plain Dealer reporter. I've got a tie on and a sport coat, you know, and they go in. I think it's 9:30. And he's up, but he's barely up, and he's wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and his hair is— you remember his hair, but on this occasion there were a lot of beads and things in his hair as well.

And he's totally scruffed up. And we talk about rock and roll mostly in his background and the fact that he had been, I think, as a backup, as a kind of guitarist in the Ricky Nelson band that had been in Cleveland a couple of years before then. He'd done this Priest stuff before he went out on his own. And we get along. And we begin smoking dope, of course, at 9:30, and by fucking 11:30 we both got the munchies. And he said, man, I'm hungry, you know. You got any— you want to go to any place? I've got a car waiting for me downstairs. So I said, sure. And we go down, and Mitch Mitchell and Chaz Chandler join us, the other members of The Experience, who are equally looking like seedy characters, you know? But it's that time of morning, it's after a concert, all of that. So we pile into this limo, and I direct them to go to Buckeye Road is the center of the Hungarian community in Cleveland. And the center of the Hungarian community on Buckeye Road is a restaurant called the Balaton. Okay? And I direct them to go to the Balaton.

Now, they know me at the Balaton, because I used to live on Buckeye Road. Big stretch limo pulls up, plate glass window front, filled with old ladies with babuschkas and guys, very formal, normally dressed. We get out in front of this place, these Martians, 3 Martians get out of the car, and I lead them in. And now I'm getting there looking, I'm like, what the fuck, what is this? You know, they made me the, um, they're just following me again. And I see Jimmy looking around and shit. So they see us, the maître d' knows me, so he calls me aside and He says, "What are these people? Who are these people?" I say, "Jimmy Hendrix, big rock and roll star, you know, he's in town." And he said, "Oh, Hendrix." I said, "Yeah, Jimi Hendrix." So we sit down and Jimi says, "You order for me." Great. So I order a chicken paprikash for him, which is the big Hungarian meal. And Chaz and Mitchell order something else, but very Hungarian stuff on my advice. And interestingly, as we're sitting there, the maître d' has obviously spoken to people because old ladies are coming around asking him for an autograph.

"Mister Hendricks, will you autograph please?" Wow. Wow. And he's gracious. He says, "Sure." But he loves his paprikash in one sort or another. At this point we've knocked out 2 bottles of wine, I think, and we're still rolling from all the dope. So they bring that at the end of this. He had 3 orders of chicken paprikash. He signed, we had like 4 bottles of wine. We staggered out of there. He signed, I would guess, 10 autographs for people who come around, bowing, "Ron Garant." And then as we walk out of the restaurant, He sticks his fist high up in the air and says, "Hungry, hungry." That's my Jimi Hendrix story.

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

You've got Oh my God, exactly.

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

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

There— I believe there was at least one docudrama, wasn't there, Jimmy? I believe— do you remember it?

Yeah, it was, uh, Andre 3000 from OutKast. It was on— but they'd like couldn't really use all the music and stuff, I think.

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't hear Jimmy.

He said it was Andre 3000 from OutKast. I see. And, uh, that they couldn't use all the music. I see.

I think I— yeah, it came out even like 10.

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

Yeah, yeah, there's a picture of him as— that's right, Jimmy. That's right. Wow.

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

Oh wow. Uh, shit, that's my face.

Is that right? Cleveland concert? Yeah. Wow. There's a—

I've got a few different links. It kept taking me to Facebook, but there's a bunch of pictures. Whoa. March 26, 1968. Wow. And then there's a recording of the concert too.

So you can listen to the recording from the concert?

Yeah, I was trying to get in here. There's like, there's an article from his legendary trip to Cleveland. Wow. But this was like paywall inside. I couldn't get all the stuff behind it.

Wow, man. He was the nicest guy.

I can imagine. Yeah, very nice, nice guy, just laid back.

Well, he was just insane. One of a— not even one of a generation, one of one talent. I mean, to this day, if you ask most guitarists who's the greatest guitarist of all time, it's Jimi Hendrix. Yeah, that's crazy that one guy who died at 27 years old, and would he die in 1969 or 1970? Yeah, somewhere there. Yeah, that, that guy to this day is universally regarded as the greatest guitarist of all time.

You know, I interviewed him. I was known as the Grim Reaper at the Plain Dealer because I interviewed Hendrix, um, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and, uh, Otis. And they all died. They all died young, you know. I did a feature on Jose Lisiano, and people would come up to me at the Plain Dealer and say, what do you have against José? Why do you want him to die?

That's crazy. It's just unfortunate that they all died, and they all died at 27 years old, which is really—

was that right?

I didn't know Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison all died at 27. And, um, who else? Kurt Cobain, um, Amy Winehouse at 27. Yeah, it's all 27. 27 is the magic number for insanely talented people to die young. Yeah, very weird. You've had an incredible life, man.

I've, you know, I've been blessed. I've been really blessed. First of all, the fact that I'm still here at 81, considering some of my excesses in the past, is miraculous. Truly is. I started smoking when I was 13. I stopped when I was 60. Whoa. Right? And I had stage 4 cancer, and Marshall Storm surgery saved me. You know, I drank too hard most of my life until I was 70, and I finally stopped then, only because I have a hard-headed Italian-Polish wife who said, Enough. You're falling down. You're taking 12 pills and you're falling down. No fucking more. Okay? Ended it. Now, shortly after we were married, after— literally after we exchanged the vows, she turned to me and she says— she whispers, she says, if you cheat on me, I'm going to fucking hunt you down and kill you. Okay? I listened to her. I did. I listened to her. I listened to this woman. You know, so sounds like a fun lady. She is, she is. And she's, um, I'm very proud of her because at, at 67, um, the mother of 4 and truly the, the true head of our family, she's writing her first— she's written her first novel.

Wow. Which is called, um, Dark Church, and it's set in, in, uh, Dracula's Transylvania Whoa. And it's a kind of gothic thriller. The— and the— I bring it up because I promised her that I would make this plug, and I fear that if I don't, I'm gonna be in a lot of fucking trouble. Thank you very much.

I love that when someone does something like that when they're in their 60s, just say fuck it. Something I've always wanted to do, let's do it. I think it's fantastic. Thank you. I just love when people do— like, fuck your age, who cares? Just put it out, write it.

I agree. Yeah, but I have lived an amazing life, and I'm very thankful. I've seen a lot, and I've come out on the other side. I've seen a lot of darkness too, but Graham Greene, who was a writer that I admired, died, I think, in his late 70s, and he said, "We get to a point where we see the fence. The fence is there, but we can't see over the fence. But the closer we get to the fence, the more curious we are about what's on the other side of the fence." And there are some people who decide that they're too curious people like Hunter, and jump over the fence, right? I'm not doing that, but I'm approaching the fence. But I've lived a terrific life, and only, once again, only in America, really, that I'm like that.

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

Although I really did admire his note, the no more fun note. It should be, yeah, it should be classic.

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

No, no. But Twain, why I keep going back to Twain, this is a good one I think, he said, "The orgasm is God's own payback for all the suffering that he overlooks in the world." That's funny. Good.

Writers in particular are— they're so important to culture because they can put down thoughts in a way that reshapes the way people view things. We talked about Hunter in the '60s and the '70s. He was the voice of that generation. He was the guy that was this intelligent guy that wasn't a part of the elite establishment, that wasn't a part of the rich fat cats, but was also famous and well-known, but stuck true to his thoughts and his beliefs, and was able to articulate things in a way that gave you this understanding of what was going on with the people back then. To this day, if you read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, or if you read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or any of his work, you know, the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved. It's just a phenomenal encapsulation of that time.

The guys are lono. Even something as crazy as Lone Ranger. Yeah.

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

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

Yeah. Unfortunately, that's how he did it Yeah, too. and they both shared in common that they drank to excess.

Absolutely. But you know, when I, when I was a boy wanting to be a— and I wanted to be a novelist and not a screenwriter— as a boy, the Holy Trinity were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. They all died of alcoholism. Hemingway shot himself. Fitzgerald had a heart attack at a very young age while working as a hack calling He was a screenwriter, incidentally. And Faulkner fell off a horse, I think, in his early 70s, ripped, ripped, totally drunk. And these were the idols of young people coming up then.

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

I, for a while, I drank all day black coffee and a cognac. The— and then later on in life, the— I didn't have my first drink until noon, which anyway was 11 o'clock, and I measured it until at night. And then it was gin before it was white wine, and part of it is That if you're lost in this imaginary world that's in your head all day, you can't get rid of it, you can't make it stop. And the booze makes it stop so that you can continue your normal familial daily obligations and schedules without having this stuff in your head all the time trying to crowd it out. The fact that sometimes Sometimes— excuse me— the fact that sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and take notes of something that a character says or something indicates that I can't get rid of it. With Taboo, it was when I was drinking. If I drank enough, I could get rid of it and begin it again the next day. It's partly freeing yourself— it's an interesting point— it's partly freeing yourself from something that you've created yourself. So in that sense, you create something that can hurt you, even if you created it.

My greatest enjoyment was writing screenplays. I mean, it gives me a terrific amount of pleasure knowing that it's going to take— when people see this, it's going to make their own lives more pleasant for at least 2 hours. They will enjoy it. They may laugh at it, but it will take them out of their own existences in a pleasant way. That ain't bad, to be able to do that with people. Oh, it's huge.

And that's very important to me. People think of it as trivial, that entertainment is trivial. I don't think it is at all. No, it shapes our perceptions of the world.

Exactly. You do the exact same thing. You make people's lives better by enjoying what they're watching. And that's— that is not as important or as dramatic as my My daughter-in-law, for example, who just got her medical degree, who literally, literally saves people's lives. Incidentally, it's a classic Hollywood story, I think. Alyssa, Alyssa Esterhaz works in Texas in a hospital, and she just got her medical degree. But to show the influence that Hollywood has on our culture, The other day she walks into a room and there's a gigantic big guy there who's yelling and screaming. You know, this is the sweetest person in the world and has this wonderful smile and really is great with people. And she's trying to calm him down and says, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" And she describes him as a really big man and screaming and, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" And he yells, "I want Brad Pitt!" Fucking in Texas, you know, some hospital. And she says, you want Brad Pitt? He says, I want fucking Brad Pitt. But why? Why do you want Brad Pitt? He goes, because I want to fuck him. Now this sweet woman, that's hilarious, doctor confronted with this, that What the fuck, Brad Pitt?

What more examples do you need of the powerful effect of the culture on us? So when I write something, I don't want some guy to see it and say, "This is the result I want, Brad Pitt." Nor do I want Volodymyr Zelensky to start a fucking war. But I do want people to enjoy it.

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

I think that happens with some writers, but it's never been my problem. There's something about going into a little room wherever you are, and you don't have to be in Hollywood. You can be anywhere, as long as there's a little room in the house you can escape to and, and sit there quietly and make shit up, um, that, that, that you, that you think will— that people will enjoy. As long as that's there, that's, that's all I, that's all I really need, you know. The, uh, now occasionally I will play music without stop on certain scripts. There's the same way with, with Leonard Cohen. I listen to him a lot. And Dylan, of course. I did a movie with Dylan, you know, um, the which was also a funny experience. But sometimes it's music. It's not Coke anymore. It's not cognac anymore with coffee. I drank so much coffee that finally one day we had to call an ambulance because I thought I was having a heart attack. I'd become allergic to it. It was just caffeine? Ambulance caffeine. Ambulance is driving me down to Marin Center and there's a traffic jam, there's construction, right?

And they think I'm having a heart attack, and I jump out of the ambulance and I run up to the guy with the hard hat. And I never forget, it says Brinkerhoff, and his name was Brinkerhoff. And I'm yelling at him, I'm having a heart attack, you motherfucker! Get these guys out of the way, I'm dying! Of course, you know, oh my God, it's worse than the guy who wants to fuck Brad Pitt. It gets out of the way.

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

Yeah, well, even that got— so I had to stop. I stopped the coffee as well. Um, the, the years after I stopped it, um, I was in New York and I ordered a decaf espresso. There wasn't decaf, and I was up for 2 and a half days without being able to sleep. So obviously my system got totally, totally screwed up.

Got reset.

Yeah, you lost your tolerance for it. But the, um I never felt it inspired me. Now, with Basic Instinct, writing it in the sun, in the Hawaiian sun, and of course, through all of this, it was nonstop smoking. You know what I mean? Two-pack-a-day smoking, beginning with Luckies and Marlboros and moving on to Gauloises and occasionally cigars cosmic pipe and all this shit. So I did do that, but I never felt that the coke was inspirational. It was enjoyable, and it was fucking dynamite sexually. You know, so that also comes in handy.

But it wasn't what fueled your writing. No, I never felt that it did. It was just recreational. Yeah, it was recreational. But nicotine did. Absolutely. That's also— Stephen King said that, that when he stopped smoking, it was one of the most difficult things that he ever quit. Like quitting the booze and quitting coke and all that stuff was one thing, but quitting cigarettes, he said he really noticed the difference in his writing.

Well, yeah, I went through that. I was warned after my cancer surgery by this army surgeon that I liked so much that if you smoke or drink He's like, "You're dead. You know, you're dead. Understand that." And so I took it seriously. The drinking, my idea of not drinking at that point was switching from Tanqueray to white wine. And of course, that got out of hand after a while, too, until Naomi jumped into the whole fray, you know, so. And now you're completely clean. Yeah, totally. I've been first or completely clean.

Did this all line up with your conversion to Christianity?

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

Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think there's something about all those people collectively connected together. It's just like when you go to a concert and you feel the music with all the people that are enjoying the music. There's a similar thing that happens at a church.

SPOON] Exactly, very similar, absolutely.

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

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

Yeah, and you can see all these other people experiencing the same thing. It's, it's very transformational, really. It— and, you know, I was talking about the parking lot of church is like the best place on earth because no— everybody lets you go. Everybody lets everybody go in front of them. Everyone's kind, you know. It's— it works. That's what's crazy. Like, the teachings of Jesus do work. Yes, if you follow them, you will be a better person. Yes, you will. But people are very cynical, and rightly so. They're very afraid of people manipulating them. They're very afraid of cults. There you go, you got your cross right on you. Yeah, that's a nice one too. I like that. Thank you. People are very afraid of people telling them that they know things, that they have the answers.

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

You can feel the difference. And the difference between that and someone who's not genuine is very apparent. You feel that as well. Like it bothers you. You know, like, I don't want to hear this guy talk about this.

But you know what, if you have a shit detector and you detect it, and so do I. If you have a shit detector, you can really feel that and pick it up. Yeah. Then block it out.

Yeah, well, I think your shit detector works with virtually everything.

I think the audience gets it too. I agree. In terms of if my shit detector advises me to do something, I almost always do it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, listen, Joe, it's been an honor having you in here.

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

It's an honor. It's an honor to meet you and an honor to have you on here. And I really enjoyed the conversation.

It was awesome. Thank you. I did too. All right. Bye, everybody.