Timothy Denevi

00:01five you get less enthusiastic with after it's been a few times you're like you're not really we're live all right we're live what's up man how are you thanks for doing this thanks for having me my pleasure uh sorry for the fall starts we've been having issues with our equipment good to see though man what's up good to be here and talk hunter thompson my my pleasure um so your book freak kingdom you know we live in uh interesting times right now it's kind of a kind of a show at every single moment about a fist from your face pull that sucker there you go what should i do with my hands should i put them on you do whatever you want with your hands i shoot with this one what is all this uh you got a lot of writing well when i wrote the book i wanted to make sure my sentences never sounded like thompson's sentences oh right so i didn't write out a lot of his

00:48sentences but this morning before coming on i went and got some of my favorite quotes and just brought him out longhand to get a sense of what his uh what his perspective was rhythm once again didn't he do that with the great gatsby he did like a few times yeah by hand he like typed it out yeah i loved that idea that he was trying to find like the rhythm of the words that's such a fascinating notion because comedians do that in the early days of comedy like a lot of guys um in like before they ever start going on stage themselves they'll imitate their favorite comedians bits like they'll do a richard pryor bit and they'll do it to their friends and they'll get get a sense of the rhythm and the timing and get those laughs from doing a richard pryor bit to their friends and then they get that bug it's like part of what infects them i mean that's the hardest

01:35thing to steal we're not plagiarizing but we're trying to understand what decisions they made yeah beautiful work yeah i'm sure he wasn't plagiarizing but it's it's so unfortunate when when someone does yes you know when when you have someone whether it's a hunter or richard pryor anyone who's just got a truly exceptional and unique mind or someone who doesn't like our president and decided when he ran in 2016 to plagiarize richard nixon's 1968 convention speech directly really yeah that was the headline in the times it said nixon's inspiration i'm sorry uh trump's inspiration nixon is the one so the lines about crimean um like barbarians at the gates crime law and order those were all from nixon's shitty but successful 1968 uh miami convention speech and thompson you know thompson knew how effective that that was yeah i wonder if he did that on purpose because he was so good the one

02:28thing that trump is so good at he's so good at getting the media to talk about him exactly and like one of the best ways to get the media to talk about them was give them something to be angry about that no one else is going to give a about he was like oh melania played your eyes but i played your eyes much better from nixon oh that's right somebody loved it melania took some lines from michelle obama's right yeah well if you played your eyes nixon that's okay i mean so freak kingdom the book about hunter s thompson i mean it's really about taking the emotion of living in this present looking back at thompson's career and then trying to write um it like a novel to dramatize all of the uh experiences he went through that are today so applicable to us and just show his perspective that's so applicable to us today what do you got here jamie from new york time it's donald trump's

03:14convention but the inspiration nixon i was like are you you're running on nixon that's what you're running on there are some parallels you know i mean do you remember when um when hunter got together with bill murray and bill's brother and they did that thing where they were trying to get people to uh nixon got a bad deal we got to bring them back and people were going along with that oh yeah that's a good yeah yeah remember that yeah like that there's a lot of parallels with trump in that regard i mean one of my favorite quotes by um thompson is like um you know richard nixon is uh with his barbie doll family and his barbie doll wife is like america's answer to um you know it's america's doctor jekyll to mr hyde like you know he is the werewolf he speaks to the werewolf in us and nixon chose to hide that werewolf his whole career until it finally came out because

04:06he was insane with power trump ran on the werewolf he's like no i'm not going to hide it that's who i am that's what i'm going to use to try to get elected and like george wallace did like other politicians did it had resonance and it happened with trump because of our media environment because of the place we live in now to amplify them all the way to the most powerful position in the world which is insane it would be really fascinating to see if hunter was alive and in his prime now how he would i think his take on it would be very similar to matt tybee's you know like mad taibi and is in my opinion our more reasonable more put together version of hunter thompson because he's more sustained disciplined long career version he's like rational and he's there all the time like i'm sure you've heard the recently uncovered recording of hunter calling in to some company that installed a dvd

04:56player and he's screaming and yelling it's like 15 minutes long and then he like gets lost and he goes like the and the dvd player doesn't work my chords i mean that was the 1980s were not the best you know i think what tybee does is what thompson did very well hunter thompson was really good at looking at nixon saying how are you manipulating the way we see you you get a version of you out and taiyubi looks at the way the media gets played he looks at the way that an administration manipulates the media and he dramatizes that well everybody else just gives us the information the administration's giving us and that goes back to thompson with nixon thompson had space when he worked for rolling stone he could write about how nixon made everybody watch his speeches the press on a closed circuit television and they made the press just like trump off in the corner when the plane arrived you

05:37know being berated by everybody is very similar to what uh is going on now and again we see people giving hot takes or we see people doing op-eds we don't see people dramatizing how manipulative these corrupt administrations are and were and thompson did that beautifully um tybee does that beautifully was uh nixon being berated by the press is that why he chose to i thought he was i mean he was a crook so he doesn't want the press to investigate him like he you know he was a crook with san clemente like his loans with bb rebozo and all of that he was a crook the way he used the irs to investigate his and it means he was a crook when he tried to break into the brookings institution to destroy and bomb evidence like he didn't want the press around him because he had committed very serious crimes that i think that's similar to what we see now i mean as people said on the show no no

06:22president wants the a journalist you know digging into their lives specifically because it's you don't want chumminess with journalists but i think trump and nixon both knew they had so much to hide that to actually have a journalist like hunter thompson who was a good investigative journalist to have you almost like matt tv around that's dangerous for them they'll go to jail which nixon should have yeah trump perhaps should well who knows what's going to happen how did you how did you get involved with uh writing this book well i mean i've always loved honor thompson and how did you get exposed to him you know in in uh i was 17 years old in a catholic high school at bellarmine college preparatory up in san jose and we had a counter culture writing class and so i read some of it there and then a friend had an audiobook of fear and loathing and so i just

07:07remember the first time hearing that old audiobook of fear and loathing were somewhere around barstow on the edge of the desert and then in my um 20s i really got into um strange rumblings in azatlan which is about a conspiracy within the los angeles police department um regarding the death of ruben salazar i'm a prominent journalist and i read that i'm like oh my god dude this isn't somebody that's just dancing on stage or like performing a road narrative this is an investigative journalist who's going to the most powerful people exposing things they don't want us to see and in a sense risking his life to do so because he says in strange rumblings in azeklang which is in rolling stone in 1970 he says that they're willing to kill ruben salazar who was the most prominent journalist in los angeles you could argue at the time what the is to stop them from

07:48killing me hunter thompson for asking these questions well i think that's what a lot of people are saying today with jamil khashoggi you know jamal khashoggi's death has got a lot of journalists really freaking out like what you know what am i doing if i'm criticizing world leaders and talking about international politics if this could happen to me political violence is effective because it's used to silence either opposition or journalists and so for me writing this book and i try to dramatize it like a novel it's quick it's like only 220 210 pages and then it's like 100 pages of notes so i like cited every site smell or sound so that somebody that knows thompson really well can be like where the did you get this information and somebody else can if they have questions just go back and look but long story short for me the crux of the book um was in chicago in

08:351968 where hunter thompson had a press pass he went to the democratic national convention on wednesday night mayor daley gave this order to clear the intersection of balboa and michigan because there is a protest going on five ten thousand people thompson was standing next to the haymarket inn which was on the ground floor level it was a plate glass window he was standing with delegates from the um democratic national convention stating what there was and the cops charged they did like a double pincher formation like hannibal in like um kumai and like 100 bc and they split the protesters in half beat everybody hit thompson over the head he got his motorcycle helmet on just in time so he's not concussed he can see everything that's going on and the entire playglass window behind him shatters everybody falls in cops jump in are beating everybody and he's looking

09:22around and he's sure that snipers on the roof are going to open fire at any moment so he runs to the blackstone where he's staying across the way shows his room key gets beat up by the cops as he's trying to get in he goes i live here goddammit i'm paying 100 a day let me in my room and he barely gets in and he just sits on his bed afterwards and he says they knew i was pressed they saw my press pass they hit me because i was pressed and if that's where we're at right now with journalists you know if political opponents and journalists are being clubbed to keep silent and to not respond then this is not the democracy we know yeah his ex-wife talked about that as being like one of the only moments where she saw him cry for two weeks just cried afterwards for two weeks he couldn't stop it's crazy wow there was a it was a crazy time right i mean that that time is very similar in a lot

10:13of ways to what's going on today just today there's just so much more information and so much more so people have so much more of an ability to communicate yeah and i think it's almost easier to coordinate violence i was just talking to the head of the proud boys you know gavin mcginnis's group enrique tario and he's like you know he's adv he's saying he's using the language on the left he's like i'm a victim i can't buy groceries they've taken my big accounts my platforms but when he talks about violence he's like who the are you antifa like i'm you know you're 120 pounds and wet like if we have civil war you're going to lose and i was sitting next to him during the podcast and basically what i said was if we have a civil war you're going to be hit by sniper fire from the roof you're not going to be in a fist fight with antifa across the way and i think

10:57there's this idea on the right that we can push towards violence and we can get very close to it with our rhetoric or with our um actions but that it won't spread like the conflagration won't keep going yeah i don't know if that's isolated to the right i mean with antifa on the left too and that's why i left thompson was as hard on the left as he was on the right when he wrote that was so important for his intelligence as a writer well i think just even the left and the right in general for a lot of these people is just an identity and a gang that they belong to and i don't think they really understand violence you know you want to talk about violence talk to a military guy you know talk to someone who really understands what violence actually is and they don't have this empty rhetoric like these fools do exactly there's a lot of these people that are calling for violence

11:38like no you should be calling for camaraderie you should be calling for communication we should be calling for some way we could all work this out where the civilians this the civilization that we live in that we are we all can get along together and most people don't want to impede you from living your life and doing what you want to do most people the vast majority 100 believed in working within the system you know he believed like it might be a up system but you can still run for sheriff and aspen and you believe once you resort to violence that means the conversation is stopped and it disfigures you so he cried for two weeks that was the most surprising thing for me researching this book and writing it was to see how much the violence affected him that he experienced at chicago and you can speak to someone who's done mma fighting who's been punched in the face as hard as somebody

12:23can punch you most americans haven't had that and that changes your ability to articulate something back in that moment it means you if that's political if it's a police officer or a political opponent that uses violence instead of an argument to respond to you we've left the realm that we recognize and we're not going to be able to communicate even in the limited way that we're communicating right now and thompson knew that so that's why after chicago i love that he went back to aspen and he's like i'm gonna run sheriff yeah i'm gonna run i'm gonna do a mayoral campaign in aspen and that was brilliant because it was his way to control his environment knowing that mayor daley is not listening to his non-violent protest richard nixon is not listening to his non-violent protest thompson needed to find another avenue to try to work within the american system to make

13:03things happen and a great contrast is his good friend um oscar zeta acosta there's a wonderful pbs documentary rise and fall the brown buffalo by i'm philip rodriguez a great director and it's acosta's life that's who dr gonzo is based on that's true in fair loading you know thompson had more advantages than acosta and acosta was being pursued by the lapd was eventually set up by them and for him working within the system he ran for sheriff wasn't an option the cops set him up for a high-speed bust you know like the cops had the cops had undercover agents from something called the special operations for conspiracy which is a department in the lapd at the time and they were trying to use those provocateurs to incite violence against the plainclothes police so that or the normal close police so that lethal violence could be used to silence a civil rights movement in um

13:50so they used agent provocateurs to make it look like they were part of the protest yeah there was an age-old tactic right that's how you destroy a civil rights movement because the most effective weapon in silencing civil rights is the lethal force and you can do that in another country as the u.s has done but the u.s can't use tactics like my lie like thompson writes about this in the u.s unless you have a provocative reason unless somebody that's undercover attacks a cop and so the cops then like what happened on august 29th 1978 during the moratorium riots can just flood east l.a and get whoever they want they can blue ribbon soldiers head off with a tear gas gun wow yeah those are darker days when you couldn't communicate as well and i think that's one of the reasons why hunter decided to run for sheriff in aspen is that he felt like he could control that area like

14:37it would have a direct impact on his life the local politics have a real impact on your day-to-day existence whereas what's going on in washington for the most part it's not affecting you if you're living in woody creek yeah i mean there were people that had nixon's point of view in aspen who were like let's develop this valley beyond what it can hold in terms of its environment let's um imprison hippies because they are going to take away from our tourist um you know economy you know let's um you know not have or not adhere to normal like civil rights laws and so thompson you know in a participatory democracy almost a jeffersonian democracy way ran for sheriff by emphasizing personal agency and most of all trying to get out the youth vote like people who had left the political system but were living in aspen a lot of people like hippies who had fled the cities in

15:22the late 1960s and were living you know in the west and he got them involved and they should have won the mayor mayoral campaign with uh joe edwards that thompson was the director of that and they lost by like six votes and when he ran for sheriff it got really bad and he talks about this in fairness on the campaign trail later is that a few nights before both parties the democrats and the republicans freaked out and so the democrats said all right we'll kind of throw our weight behind you the republican sheriff and then you republicans will throw your weight for county manager behind our candidate and so thompson losing by like two or three hundred votes and so in fear living in las vegas on the campaign trail in 1972 he's um at the nixon campaign um nixon's giving his acceptance speech at the convention thompson's with the nixon youth who are about to do a

16:02demonstration and he says like you know i'm not a journalist you can't kick me out like i'm a political observer he's like have you ever run for office and the nixon guy is like no have you and thompson's like sheriff and i would have won but the liberal stuck it to me and he was right i love how he shaved his head too so he could refer to his long-haired opponent i mean that is a great that debate like so in the book i i recreate that debate a lot like because there's transcripts of it that debate is brilliant thompson is amazing yeah the guy's like i've only used my gun once in 10 years but i like to have it thompson's like well if you've used it once in 10 years maybe you don't need it we could try not having it you know and his his gun rights um views were very complex and changed after bobby kennedy's death but he was so intelligent on stage with this

16:44sheriff who's like i just want this job real bad and like gulping like you know it couldn't this was eviscerated by thompson yeah you know it's a it's a really interesting the the documentary uh that follows the campaign and when you get to see him you know heart fallen when he loses and you got a sense of what there was real hope back then like that if these guys could do that and what's interesting now is um you know back in the 70s they really did have a free community in aspen that shit's gone now i don't know what happened billionaires have replaced the millionaires yeah i was told when i went to weird place man you go to aspen you see these like 20 million dollar houses and people like it's one of the rare places where people still wear fur coats you know not ironically or fake but real fur coats well if you wear a fur coat in la first of all it's never cold enough

17:37for a fur coat but if you did you might get up you can get blood thrown on you because some could go down you know like you you most likely nothing's gonna happen but there's a possible chance which is really weird because if you wear a leather jacket you have no problem yeah it's weird you know that's weird i mean aspen's weird because a lot of the thompson's friends like lauren jenkins a great journalist they've moved down to basalt they'd say down valley so i was out there with his um his son juan thompson is a fantastic writer he wrote a book called um stories i tell myself about his relationship with his father yeah i've been in contact with juan through email he's a really good writer and he's a really honest and brilliant writer he seems like a good dude and he seemed like a really good dude in the gonzo documentary as well that was a great documentary yes yeah

18:21i'm a big fan of gibney he he always kills it i um i went to the uh the tavern in woody creek when i wasn't i felt like if i'm here i gotta go i gotta go there that was weird it's weird being there man when did you go how long ago was that i guess it was a year ago year now were people on bicycles just dr uh riding their bikes by the whole time it's on this huge bike route now it was cold as it was the winter okay we were there for a ski trip so what did you think of it well it's just cool you know it's like there's places you go to where you just uh you just kind of you know i was with my family they didn't give a my kids have no idea who he is the children listening here need to know who he is you have children out there my kids will learn eventually but they're just eating enchiladas you know but it's just um it's uh to me it you know represented a big part of who he you know this is

19:18like this is his home base dude he came out he's in san francisco and there's a picture of me there i think there's a picture of me there on my instagram that was a special place from when he was in san francisco was like being on the central nerve he was there from 64 to 67 and um 66 and he saw the first jefferson airplane concert he lived right next to the matrix he went out every night till like 5 00 a.m he was with the hell's angels that's awesome yeah i got hammered there too out of respect quite a few margaritas but here he could divide his life up look at the freaking power if you don't see in the background that freak power um the the yeah the sheriff's uh campaign symbol but he moved to woody creek and he suddenly had you see it in his um you see when you interview people that know when you see it in his letters he had space again and being in the city

20:05was hard for him because he could write beautifully about the hell's angels about the countercultural scene he was at war protests and the free um speech movement with mario savio he was there but it was burning him up you know it was using him up and i think when he went to woody creek he learned that all right i can take a plane to chicago get my ass kicked but i can come back and if i want to have a drink i can go to that tavern or i can go to the jerome hotel and that's a good space and i think that was a good space for him yeah well i think that's a probably a very intelligent move on his behalf and a lot of us i think that are involved in day-to-day chaos would probably benefit from something similar i mean i just don't think he gets enough credit for his effort you know one thing i found when writing the book i interviewed um i interviewed bob geiger who fair

20:46loading is dedicated to and who was a doctor that was a friend of his in sonoma and geiger initially um was the one who prescribed him dexterity and so people think thompson was just doing acid and writing or whatever and maybe later as a caricature or whoever he became that might have been part of his persona but when he was writing from the book is from kennedy's assassination to nixon's resignation he was working so hard like he was working harder than we could ever imagine douglas wrinkly his um the presidential historian who does his um literary estate talks about thompson wasn't as fun as he seemed during that time he took dexedrine to right and he had a a drinking problem is some sort of an amphetamine it's adderall that's cut differently with salt so it's a little bit like you go a little higher when it comes down it's a little harder well adderall was

21:31obitrol which was an old diet drug that was repurposed in like 96 that is a little bit smoother in that sense but it's very similar to what uh to what thompson took he had a great editor named margaret harrell who was his editor on hell's angels and he didn't know she was 27 when he was 29 he thought she was like 55 because they would talk on the phone every day to edit the book and um he sent her she still has the letter i've done some events with her she still has the actual letter he sent her a five milligram dexa dream he's like hey it's going to be hard the last 10 pages to edit take this and focus so she still has it this orange little 5 milligram dexa dream for 40 50 years she's had wow that's crazy yeah um the that gibney documentary is uh really fantastic it's probably one of the best introductions that anybody could have to try to get a grip on why after all these years hunter

22:23resonates with so many people i mean i think that the given documentary is brilliantly and perfectly done i think that thompson means something different with donald trump as president of the united states to me you people could see it before gibney saw it before other like um brilliant writers saw it before taibi did but when donald trump became president of the united states it was a lens onto the past i felt like and i was i mean i'm a bitch-ass liberal like i was upset and so one of the ways i dealt with it was to just remove myself to 1968 1967 1969 and i took the emotion i had in the present and i realized that thompson is such a voice right now for people that maybe don't know him only know him through fear and loathing las vegas terry gilliam's film i would like freaking to be a lens that now if they read that they could then read his work and perhaps you know

23:12what his timelessness will come through it was more it was an attempt to focus that timelessness and that what helped was the terror of our present yeah you can see you definitely see the parallels and in his work you know who also uh rings true like that is a lot of bill hicks stuff on the first gulf war you know and and bush as a president and you know which obviously people today would probably be dying to have bush as president you know the original part he carried his book around for two weeks at least he carried a book well herbert walker the main the older bush was you know much more of a a reasonable gentleman you know yeah well that's our discourse today too where there couldn't be anything said reasonably about him when he passed away or even about his wife i mean i think it's not he's not very favorable right now but one of the hunter thompson's

24:00main influences was norman maylor and i don't think norman miller writes well about women and you know i think that's i think thompson wrote better about women thompson didn't just criticism but i'm not familiar with well mailer whenever he writes about a woman it's like he's watching the nixonettes get off the nixon airplane he's like there were 33 redheads like five had long legs like this like it's like mainly you didn't need to write that passage you're writing about power and people more extreme than you so i think miller writes beautifully about men that have more power than him and so he writes about 1968 in chicago where thompson didn't because thompson was beat up and he writes about that moment of um where thompson's being beat up i'm confused but what is the criticism of the way he's writing about women just he's describing them physically uh the

24:38male gays is that he well he stabbed his wife he stabbed his wife in the heart did he really yeah with a pen knife what yeah he went to bellevue he went to bellevue for 14 days it was in 1960 that's it he missed it yeah i know he went to he did a psychiatric evaluation instead of going to jail wow i think they stayed married yeah boy what a reasonable lady politics later but i would say that thompson wrote well better about women because he understood that writing about people with more power than you is really important and when mailer writes about people with more power than him when he writes about mayor daley beating the out of everybody he writes really beautifully and that's somebody that's resonating right now with what trump's doing and what the violence that we're seeing on the right and on the left where mailer was sitting with pat buchanan who was nixon's main aide aid in

25:28during that moment in chicago when the haymarket inn shattered and everybody was beat up and they were looking down from the 17th floor and mailer's thinking like well this is what happens if police take over society and he writes beautifully about how the police came and split the protesters because he's so high up running and it's gorgeous and buchanan would write later like i knew that nixon was going to be president of the united states because a hubert humphrey that gutless old ward healer can't control his own convention and his own um party how is he going to be able to run the country and so as soon as chicago's violence erupted the nixon campaign knew they'd won the election pappy cannon it's really interesting because even though hunter would on him happy campers they were actually a fan no they drank they jumped at the water gate like they sat there and went

26:14deep like all night but he definitely hunted definitely on him oh he on him hard but he can't back on him hard the first night they met was at the nixon um at the um holiday inn in 1968 in new hampshire during nixon's comeback campaign and thompson walks in and kenny goes who's this damn guy with the damn ski jacket walking through our goddamn lobby and thompson's like i have a press pass like i'm here to do this and so they like have this big moment and then later on that night thompson goes to a party with um campaign people and with um uh buchanan and he brings a big bottle of wild turkey and so buchanan's a young journalist at the time he worked at the st louis um post dispatch i think he'd gone to the columbia journalism school he's working for nixon as his main policy guy and he looks at thomas he's like that's the ski oh you got a bottle of what oh if you've got a old

27:01crow like no we'll drink that and so they stayed up all night and they talked about the vietnam war and thompson you know talked about how it disfigures us to be in a foreign war that's unjust and it destroys our democratic ideals to be doing that and bikini was like containment nuclear war we're trying to get out of it and they listen to each other till dawn like that first night that they met now what was your idea behind writing this book like what what compelled you i think we've mistaken thompson i think that we see him more as like a dunesbury character and people who know him really well don't but i think that most people through whatever cultural forces that we've had but he's a voice because a lot of people don't know the comparison what the dunesbury so i think in the 80s or 70s 80s 90s um the cartoon dunesbury by gary trudeau it became there was a character

27:46on it called uncle duke and uncle duke was based on hunter thompson and he was kind of an exaggerated version of hunter thompson he was a cartoonish version of hunter s thompson and i think terry gilliam did a wonderful and kind of auteurous job on um like a brilliant job on fair loading in las vegas but that's also an exaggerated version of hunter thompson and we forget today the amount of work hunter thompson did the effort he put out we forget that he was a straight journalist where he did the freelance assignments he wrote the straight articles for years to make money for his family and it wasn't until he had his breakthrough with hell's angels that he could develop the style that we identify with today and so it kills me that we identify him more as a clown or like a you know more as a cartoonish figure as opposed to a very serious political thinker political activist and serious

28:32writer who can give us insight into the show we experience every moment today well i think the the perception of him is fairly nuanced i don't think that everybody thinks of him as a cartoon character although particularly later on in his life he was relegated to that because he really didn't speak well you know later on in his life when he was just the drugs had taken over his son writes about the alcohol juan writes so beautifully about the whole alcoholism took on hunter s thompson well he couldn't talk anymore i mean when he was deep into his 60s his wife was i was like it was so hard to even understand him there's a awful piece that he did with conan o'brien where conan went to uh woody creek and shot guns uh off the back porch with him and you could barely understand a word hunter saying that's why i tried to end it with nixon leaving because it was

29:26really sad when nixon resigned hunter thompson was at the connecticut hilton which is a hotel right by the white house annie leibowitz the photographer with rolling stone was calling him and saying we need to get to the white house nixon is leaving like he's gonna get on the helicopter and thompson just laid in the grass and he didn't go you know and that was heartbreaking and he didn't end up writing the eight-page spread that he needed to instead it became annie leibowitz's photography which was a famous and um in retrospect like huge move for her career but i think that that pain right there of thinking that he'd spent 10 years i mean he hated nixon since the checkers speech you know when nixon was a vp for eisenhower he'd hated nixon since 1962 when nixon lost the california governor ship and said you and the press you've been giving me the shaft for so long like you won't

30:16have dick nixon to kick around anymore like thompson had seen that nixon was somebody who said i'm just the poor son of a butcher i'm just this like very hard working you know american that represents all of us where behind that like he was a politically um you know ravenous monster who was anti-communist who would go to any extent to win and thompson saw that and thompson knew that other people saw it in in 1964 at the berry goldwater convention in san francisco my favoritely named arena of all time the cow palace barry goldwater was going to speak to accept the nomination and what happened was nixon was introducing him it was nixon's way back from the wilderness thompson was a few rows back the first time thompson i think was that close to see him live and nixon's like you know i'm poor son of a butcher don't think about me just think about barry goldwater mr conservative he'll become

31:06mr president and thompson was like everybody here knows he's lying but they think that that act of lying is a skill and the way a used car salesman who lies but can make a lot of money off it and it's skillful the way that trump by selling stakes to people and then they go bankrupt and he gets rich that's an american skill and thompson sends that from the start with nixon and so i think he battled against nixon for a decade for a lot of years and when nixon left i think he felt spent and so i tried not to focus on the later you know i ended then in 74 because i think it it's he wrote some beautiful things afterwards he was still definitely he definitely had some moments where he decided to not do the assignment that he was supposed to do and it was kind of sad like um the ali foreman fight he floated in the pool yeah float in the pool with a nixon mask on flew

31:54all the way to africa i missed one of the greatest sports moments it was like game six of um you know um you know the boston red sox versus the reds i think ali was something different to people than i think it's i don't think we have someone like that today so it's very difficult for for us to understand if people today look at ali and they go oh he was a heavyweight boxing champion he was way more than that he was uh a cultural figure that represented the resistance to the vietnam war and represented it with the biggest loss that any public figure had ever shown and willingly he gave up three years of his career in his prime from age 27 to 30. from 1967 from the cleveland big cat williams fight he didn't fight again for three years he didn't train he didn't do anything they kept him from his career when he was in his prime when he was the best heavyweight of all time

32:50and he spoke publicly and often and he was hated all over the country but he represented something different like uh my parents were hippies and when i was a little kid he lost to leon spanx and the rematch was on television my parents never watched tv and they definitely never watched boxing and they they they sat in front of that tv to watch that i remember thinking i can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match like this is crazy and i was probably like i don't know maybe eight or nine years old or something at the time and i just remember thinking i can't believe my parents want to watch a boxing match and that's really when it sunk into me at a really early age that this guy was not just this heavyweight boxer he was he was a a cultural icon he was a historical figure he meant he meant a lot and to hunter he meant a lot he meant something

33:46something much bigger than just just a boxer and so hunter thought he was going to a death sentence george foreman had crushed joe frazier he crushed everybody i mean he was so powerful george foreman to this day is one of the all-time scariest heavyweights of all time with without a doubt he he could hit so hard and literally pick guys off their feet he hit joe frazier and lifted him off his feet with a punch and uh everybody was convinced that that was going to happen to ali that ali had been past his prime and look just look at what george foreman had done to joe frazier what is he going to do to muhammad ali and ali just rope-a-doped him until he got tired and then him up in front of the whole world that's one of the greatest athletic moments i mean we forget that athletes athletes like kurt flood you know they've they risked wait kurt floyd was the american

34:40baseball player who challenged the reserve clause because in baseball you weren't allowed to um get free agency for another team and kurt floyd was this great player and he was like i'm going to sit out and i'm going to wait athletes like colin kaepernick they've sacrificed their career it's not the same with muhammad ali who was like babe ruth and barry bonds and like everybody combined at that one moment right but he was risking it's the opposite of trump trump used his celebrity to become this even more mangled version of himself and get more power well he used his celebrity to speak for his virtue and his value and his beliefs and like thompson was really good at understanding what people sacrifice yeah people have to give up the wager you know between what that act will be what the results will be they may be later but he knew that and so his respect for ali for giving up those

35:25years of his prime you know was was enduring he came thompson came back from that fight and he gave his son um juan uh boxing gloves um that um or um all these boxing gloves wow yeah it's a very very unfortunate that he missed that fight because it would have been fascinating to hear his take on it i mean i'm sure he would have been so moved when he saw ollie win but it wasn't i mean that's a good point it was indicative of i think the stress and the pressure that the last decade of covering nixon had taken out on him well there's a little bit of that but let's be honest he was also kind of a fuck-up i mean when he was writing for rolling stone and they gave him that that early fax machine yeah and he would that thing up he would unplug it and plug it back in he would do it just so he could go to the bar and say this thing doesn't work but that was the end i think of his arc

36:10where he was still on point he was still playing the role of a serious journalist and he would use that persona as a up and there's letters by john weiner being like you cannot turn in your articles three hours before we go to press i know you made it this doesn't work and so he was beginning to break down then he was also i think on the tail end of his decade of being a journalist who had met every deadline so that he could feed his family and he could afford our farm like there were there's moments where before he got the um contract for hell's angels in 1965 he was ready to be like a longshoreman he was going and looking for work in the mornings in san francisco you know to try to support his family he was willing to give up writing and instead that article blew up and he all these beautiful letters began to arrive at 319 parnassus where he lived at um

36:55at the top of the haight ashbury in san francisco and you know that opened up his chance to continue being a writer but money was the main motivating factor and so i think once money like unfurled once alcoholism i think took its toll and once he couldn't walk around anymore at a political camp convention without people just like grabbing his shoulder and saying you're hunter thompson once that happened i think things began to change yeah that's one of the things that he talked about that i thought was really interesting that he became a part of the story it wasn't just that he was covering stories he couldn't be anonymous anymore he was in many cases more famous than the people that he was covering yeah you know like when he would go to meet nixon all nick nixon's secret service agents wanted to meet him and they wanted to get an autograph from him and shake his

37:39hand and it was just too weird everything he got and then there's the alcoholism that alcoholism look it it's a depressant it wrecks you and if you read you know we me and greg fitzsimmons on a podcast once read off uh that one journalist who had uh detailed hunter's daily routine yeah and so we we read the daily routine and they put a techno beat to it it's hilarious that was a bad that's a set those are so it's so funny because those seem funny you know now but they're they're kind of a death nail like i mean that that daily routine um that was um the biography hunter it was in that and it's just it's heartbreaking i mean we've got to remember that the dedication to fear and loving in las vegas was he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain yeah man and i think the world was painful for hunter thompson it was painful to see powerful people abuse the

38:30weak you know and like take what they wanted brazenly without being held accountable i think it was hard to deal with shitty editors who cut half your essay on nixon or half your story and made it into something that had nothing to do with the effort that you put out yeah you know i think it was hard to pay your bills and you know live the way that you wanted to live and i i think a lot of that gets undermined i just want people to realize how much effort he put out especially during those years where he was like all right i want to be a great journalist i want to have a voice in our society i want to participate in a national conversation my only path towards that is to work harder than everybody else to be at places when things happen when they matter and he sacrificed a lot for that but he was there and he's a voice and a light that we can have in this moment

39:10which is another troubling moment in american history yeah his voice was very unique too in that he decided to combine fiction with non-fiction in a very weird blurry way i think it was so one thing i think of is he usually gives you a cue where what he did was he dramatized people didn't dramatize well so later he made up he didn't just dramatically talk about there's a rumor rich doctor i didn't say that there he did it i said there was this is about ed musky's campaign um i said there was a rumor in milwaukee that he did it again i started that rumor yeah i mean that's what he says but he said that on the dick cavett show remember yeah later and i think matt tayyip on this show talked about it well where one thing is that um muskie was already out of the campaign when that came out muskie had already lost and so musky had been a monster and a terrible person on

39:59that campaign and so thompson used that version of muskie and wrote as tybee said in a very straight way the ibogaine story and so if you had a sense of irony you kind of knew like you're not really thinking that this is a guy who did it gain so i think there's cues in there for a listening audience but what i think is even more you know what i i think he dramatized the way other people didn't he would say i look left i look up i see he came down to me and then he said people didn't write like that in journalism they didn't go step by step and he did and that was really important what i think is more important than the ibogaine story so the abigain story in the background is ed muskey was the frontrunner for the democratic primary in 1972. he up his campaign afterwards thompson um talked about how he had heard that there or there was a rumor that this candidate was doing

40:45ibogaine which is like ayahuasca or well he said that no it's not like ayahuasca it's not no it's very different it's not a hallucinatory it's a self-examinatory oh it's the drug that's very good yeah yeah yeah yeah um but he said they brought in a brazilian witch doctor yeah which it's ibogaine is not even a brazilian drug it's from africa so some people got it but what i think people don't remember is before that and this affected the election in um february of 1972 thompson was in florida he was on something called the sunshine special it was a whistle-stop tour that muskie the front runner had a good chance to beat nixon poll numbers wise was going all the way down the florida peninsula on to try to win the florida primary and thompson was like this is the most disgusting thing i've ever seen like at every stop muskie gave the same speech it's like somebody should be

41:35a president namely me and it was repeated the reporters were like this is terrible muskie was secluded in the back of the car he didn't interact with anybody they had his um political operatives come out and make everybody like sing the song like um about like musky like sunshine in his hands the whole world in his dance it was terrible and so that night thompson pulled into a florida town it was the second last stop and he and this young political reporter named monty chitty were um going to get a drink at 2 a.m and this guy walks into the lobby he's like 6 6 2 50. peter sheridan and he um he walks in and he um he says he's looking for the musky campaign all these different things he ends up going out with um hunter thompson for a drink and hunter thompson finds out that peter sheridan had been a good friend of jerry garcia had um hung out with the hell's angels in

42:26california had been to la honda where ken casey was and was actually a pretty smart guy who was out of his mind in his mid-20s they stayed out and drank all night at the end of the night thompson's like so what are you doing tomorrow where are you going and um peter sheridan was like well i'm going to miami and thompson's like we are too you don't have to hitchhike that and so there's a really good journalist outlaw um it's called outlaw um journalists by bill mckean another thomas biography talks about how thompson took his thompson took his press pass put it into the elevator press the button sent the press pass down to the ground floor peter sheridan got it so peter sheridan could ride for free on the sunshine express down to miami the next day so thompson oversleeps because the muskie campaign doesn't like him anyways instead peter sheridan gets on the sunshine express

43:13with a hunter thompson press badge and peter sheridan goes on to order 12 martinis and he goes give me like a triple gin bucks and hold the buck and he runs up and down the car and you know muskie has been a really shitty candidate at this point he's not been engaging people he got in this weird fight um with his wife at a um a campaign event where they like put cake in each other's face it's been really weird and people aren't reporting on it like other reporters aren't saying musky's unstable and so musky at the end of this whistle stop he spent all his campaign money to go up and down and try to do this whistle-stop-like tour he gives the speech the caboose and jerry rubin the anti-war activist who was one of the chicago 7 and was it has come to heckle him is in the crowd and he's saying to muskie so why did you support the vietnam war in 1968 like who do you think you are

44:02and so musky's yelling at jerry rubin he's saying young man keep your mouth shut beneath muskie reaching up from the bottom of the caboose peter sheridan is holding a gin bottle and grabbing at musky's leg as musky tries to give this speech and then musky falls back and the whole thing ends like the whole press conference is over like women's wear daily reported this and it came out that hunter thompson had had 13 martinis and run up and down the um train and had interfered with it and muskie's campaign really believed that thompson was working with donald segeretti and nixon's um creep um watergate crew to up muskie's campaign and that actually changed the course like thompson helped expose how up muskie was as a candidate at that time and thompson had never forgiven muskie for being on the pro vietnam war platform at the 1968 convention and so we talk about the

44:55illigaine aspect of changing the campaign but that report and the way that disseminated through media the way it was picked up by other newspapers really did help change the people's perception of ed muskie at big ed muskie as thompson called him at the time now he when he wrote hell's angels he hadn't really totally formulated that sort of gonzo style of journalism but he did have a little bit of fiction mixed in with that and that sort of ran him a foul of the hell hell's angels they were very upset by that right like he he did write some things in there that they claim were not accurate i think that when it came to hell's angels what thompson did really well is what joan didion did really well he took the way the media was portraying somebody and he stripped that off and said this is who they actually are this is what they're actually doing joan didion when she writes about jim

45:49morrison in the white album she's like jim morrison was like sex and death in his leather pants was the best thing ever everybody loves jim morrison and then in the scene in the white album joan didion writes about how they sit at a recording studio for two hours and nobody says anything and they eat eggs out of a paper bag and it's a nightmare thompson knew that the media was sensationalizing the hell's angels he went to them on a cold night in san francisco down by the waterfront and he said hey here's a newsweek article here's a time article here's how everybody's writing about you all i want to do is write the truth about who you are and he did and he ended up writing with them and he ended up spending time with them i don't think they got as mad at him about the way he portrayed them i think they got mad that he began to make money or that he became famous angels

46:34sold 500 000 paperback copies that is almost impossible to imagine today hundred thousand paperback copies of a literary book and the angels were pissed off about that they felt thompson owed him more money or owed him something for that did he came to them at all did he give them any more sodium barger sunny barker's so ridiculous sonny barker said he owed us a keg and he didn't give us a cake that's it you know and the the famous story at the end of it is that that is i mean really like when they go through it he said that he said that thompson was doing a subjective version of us but it was at least closer than the shitty newsweek and time versions right and so thompson at the end of he'd finished the book barely made the deadline had to go down to a hotel in monterey lock himself in stay up for 100 hours straight and write it in march of 67 to finish it so he

47:19turns it in makes his advance deadline in september they're like here's our author photo and it's shitty he's like this so he goes to a hell's angels rally he doesn't know anybody because he hasn't been with him for six or seven months he's taking pictures that's when he got beat up from writing about the hell's angels and he tiny his friend who later committed suicide after altamonte after being involved in the altamonte security situation that's the rolling stone one where the guy got stabbed yes where meredith hunter was stabbed but tiny it was a woman that got stabbed man meredith hunter it was a oh named meredith it was back in the day where you can name your kids meredith right like marion marion's another one right um lindsey lindsey some guys are lindsay i got nothing to speak give me one jamie oh yeah but jamie's normal well like there's a lot of jazz is that future man

48:10scene where it's like what's his name is like my name's susan in the future men are named susan i know it's a girl's name in your time um but meredith is a weird one though you must hate your son but you lose an argument with your wife but that but i've lost a lot of arguments but that poor guy was um but thompson was there and tiny grabbed him after he was beat up there was a guy holding a rock to drop it on thompson with the hell's angels and tiny was like all right i know him i know the rest of you don't and he grabbed him out and tiny was um this like enormous hells angel who had been you know thompson was very good at empathetically understanding their flaws and their perspectives he'd never i think made excuses for him he said that their inherent perspective is fascistic he writes that you know he says they used violence to respond to where they were in society their idea of total

49:01retaliation the hell's angels where any offense like looking at you funny or being like dude you drink could be met with everybody beating you up because they got determined the they got the hell's angels got to determine the offense like that was fascism to thompson and he wrote beautifully about their reliance on violence because he they felt hell's angels they'd been left behind by our moderated society like there's technology there's all these new jobs if you came back from the war in 1950 you had a chance in oakland to have a middle class life and a beautiful house and work the rest of your days and have a family that will then go on but by 1965 that was no longer an option and the angels were a violent response to that very similar to what we're seeing now and so the way he wrote about the hell's angels very similar to the way that we see violence within groups that

49:43are supporting trump you know and from the left and the right did he ever wind up uh resolving his differences with the hell's angels i think so sonny barger the hell things got like rightly so the hell's angels were you know pursued like a mob um like a mafia group people went to jail sonny barger went to jail um i think they at the end appreciated his representation of them because it was better than any other one right there's no better representation of the house no more sympathetic for sure yeah or just no more accurate no more understand yeah no more like again it gets to thompson's effort if you ride for six months with somebody and you're an honest like putting up your hands you're not trying to fit what you see into a thesis you're doing the opposite trying to look at the reality you have in front of you and then form an argument out of that yeah coherent

50:27that's what thompson's gift was and very dangerous too to do that i mean i mean he did get beat up taking those photos really bad motorcycle accident with his friend on the back and his friend broke his leg like it was sort of that's why he left like get the out of san francisco yeah grace looks amazing like it's just amazing it's a it's a fire that you're putting your hand on to crash he was coming down um it was the mayor of richmond he was coming down a slick road and they had um hit uh like something was wet or an oil thing and it went out the back tire so thompson rolled and was fine but his friend's knee hit um railroad tracks so his friend's knee broke really badly um it was the mayor it was the mayor of richmond and that's continued riding motorcycles though i yeah he did he would get in accidents at woody creek but he was pretty careful like so i love that scene in hell's

51:15angels i don't know if readers or listeners know this but the edge you know and that's a major part of the book where thompson's fighting with his wife thompson's finished his book but he's breaking down because he's worked so hard to do it and so he takes his bsa out and he goes if you know san francisco he goes out to the park he hits the um coast highway and he comes down it and he's like i'm so overwhelmed everything is so terrible he's going as fast as he can and he talks about how his eyes begin to lose moisture you know the scene like it's this beautiful scene he's looking for sand pits because he hit a sandpit near the zoo you're done yeah and he gets all the way to rockaway beach which is in um like halfway down to santa cruz and he turns around and what he talks about is when he's at 100 miles per hour and i think he was near death i think he

52:00was really overwhelmed he says um you know the edge the only people that know it are the people that have gone over the rest the living don't have any understanding of it and all we can do is approach it in this way and it's this beautiful and it's called midnight on the coast highway it was anthologized in tom wolf you know and it's just beautiful so he comes back and he sits at his um desk and so he had a view of the bay bridge he could see its two flashing lights um the whole time and he had broken the window in a terrible fight with his wife like three weeks earlier and so he sits the broken window and he writes out that scene right away with his eyes still scoured wasn't the broken window when she wouldn't give him a gun because he was on acid and he threw a shoe through the window so there's three there's three versions so i do it and then i give the

52:44three versions of the notes so i go with the three versions that i've heard like i heard it from jazz kerr you know she wrote i i really respect sandy like deeply she wrote at the um a few years ago she said i'm done giving interviews with about honest thompson that was my life that it was then she's given so many interviews up to this point yeah good for you she says that that exists and so i wanted to respect that good for you more than anything and just use the information that i had yeah and let the reader know yo here are three other versions here's the best version i could make dramatized look left throw do this did you talk to anita um anita has been great i had to talk to you later but the book ended so early that i um did there's a beautiful art is his second wife yeah and anita thompson is um she runs al farm she runs kind of his legacy she does the facebook page

53:28she does a wonderful job what is owl farm today does she still live up there yeah she's going to make it into like a writer's retreat she's doing a wonderful job make it into a writer's retreat and also a um like a museum and it's taken a while but to honor his legacy as a great political like thinker and writer like a great literary light but since she didn't meet him till the 90s i wanted to focus on the time that i was in um and so i think talking to bob geiger you know his friend then was was i was really lucky bob geiger's in his late 80s and he was able to go through like because i had i believe if you interview somebody you need to read everything that exists already yeah you need to read everything they've already said you don't want to ask them questions that when i do interview for research that they've already supplied answers to yeah so with

54:15bob geiger i could see the holes or things i didn't know and i was able to sit with him talk about throwing a football with thompson you know talk about taking the dog to the beach like all these other things that's the football thing is an interesting thing because he was obsessed with football and that's one thing that he shared in common with nixon and so when they went one time they were going to the airport and he hitched a ride with nixon and nixon wanted to talk to him about football and he said let's just not talk about politics when we talk about football and so he taught me my favorite the whole ride it was it was in 1968 pat buchanan had helped set it up they worked it out that week they'd become friends and so they come to thompson they're like all right the boss is going to take a plane to florida you can come and talk to them and so later thompson said later it was

54:58like they told me not to talk about anything about football but earlier thompson said like i was just really awkward like this guy they're both in the back bench of a mercury and so it's before secret service so it's just a cop driving and it's like papi cannon in the front and it's thompson and nixon and they're right here next to each other and thompson's like well you know earlier in the night you'd said that you know the oakland raiders had a good shot to beat the packers in super bowl too can you talk about that and he was like nixon's like my good friend vince lombardi had told me to watch out for the afl because they pass they can be very effective and so thompson then like remembers that guy um um bob geiger had been a professional quarterback he had taken thompson to his first football game and thompson said nfl is better than the afl and geiger is like shut the up let's go to a

55:41raiders game and they went in 65 and the raiders won on this beautiful pass tom flores beautiful goal line pass and nixon was saying the same thing and so then at that moment at that moment thompson's like oh yeah it was the miami guy uh mueller miller who'd caught the pass and nixon goes taps him on the knee and goes you're right and goes oh what a beautiful moment and thompson's just like what the is going on so nixon apparently they they were talking about like college draft picks and all kinds of crazy like nixon was deep into it it was the only moment thompson said that he knew nixon wasn't lying they could talk about football in that in that instance it's fascinating when people they're so diametrically opposed to each other but they find common ground thompson did a great job of that and i think we've lost it today i mean you have to listen to the other side to if

56:29you if you politically want to beat somebody like papi cannon you want to defeat his tactics if you want to defeat him you need to know how he's thinking and what he's doing thompson knew that bikini was listening to the left to defeat them and so thompson listened to bikini what led him to move to colorado oh he was losing the in san francisco it was that night on the motorcycle i mean but how did he choose colorado so this is a great story in like the early 60s thompson had had a chance to drive um i don't know some sort of cargo like a friend's car out to colorado on his way to san francisco in 1960. he ended up doing a road trip up and down san francisco after he passed through colorado but he stopped in colorado because he had to drop off a friend's car and there was a woman there peggy clifford who was a journalist and was his good friend at the um at the aspen um daily times and

57:21she was older she saw him like after driving 20 hours she's like hey come in my house hang out and she lived right in aspen in woody creek and so then in 1960 um three after sandy was pregnant thompson came back from south america where he was a reporter and did a wonderful job like reporting on how democracies were falling apart down there him and sandy wanted to move west because the national observer was the newspaper thompson worked for they wanted to give thompson a position to be a western reporter he was thinking of going to san francisco but instead he chose to stop first where peggy um clifford was to stop in aspen and woody creek and so he was living in an aspen in woody creek from august of 1963 to february of 1963 and he was there this is where freak kingdom begins he was there when um john f kennedy was assassinated and he's sitting in his like living room

58:13it's you know 10 a.m 11 a.m pacific time he gets a knock on the door and it's this rancher named wayne wagner which is an old aspen family and the ranchers like the president's been shot like what's more he's he's been murdered he's dead thompson just like lets out a sob then he begins to swear and then he calms down and he goes downtown on woody creek he goes to aspen and he just gets notes from people what their responses are and so when he then went to san francisco to become the correspondent for um for the magazine that he was working for he was having a tough time he was already wanting to flee because he got hell's angels he was able to stay in san francisco longer right report on them but by 1966-67 he was like this city is not a good place for me he has a great quote about like what would have happened if he stayed in san francisco from 67 on he's like i would have burned

59:03up like i would have been immolated right there yeah and so when it was time to leave he thought again of um woody creek and of aspen which was so different then than it is now and um that was a place that he decided to move and rent for a little while at first but then because of the success of hell's angels he was able to buy owl farm um aspen is very different but woody creek is not that much different woody creek is still pretty that's great but salt and woody creek are great dude yeah there's a great there's a place called the temporary they did an event with um juan thompson and i like did a reading at it and like a lot of thompson's friends were there so i'm like i'm some young like i didn't know thompson like i'm an interloper you know like i'm out there and it was really great to talk to everybody that knew him and to go through it and that's why

59:45that's why this book almost killed me because i did a note for every sound smell or sight or comment like if i wrote and then at that moment thompson felt what the am i doing here i had the quote where he said i looked around then and i felt what the am i doing here and i had that in the notes so people could see it and it was because i wanted those people that knew him well and respected him and trusted him to not think that i was in any way trying anything but to make good art off of his life and who he was trying to respond to my view of trump right now and my love of his work in this moment um why do you say it almost killed you it's not possible to write a narrative and then also cite every detail of the narrative so each day i would spend nine hours researching and outlining with citations every i wanted to write it like a novel i wanted to be like you know and at that

60:33moment i felt like i s the machine oil from the bay was coming off i wanted to read it vividly i knew that i had to support all of that and so i would spend eight or nine hours every day just on the pure arrangement and research and then for the next six or seven hours or eight hours i would write the narrative and then i'd sleep for five or six hours you know i get up and i would do it again and i did this for four or five months you know after i was deeply into it and i i don't think that's sustainable i think it's better in retrospect to go and report somewhere you know to like go and be at the middle of congress and take notes but to try to write something with the dramatized nature that i think thompson wrote well and having my pros sound nothing like his you know i wanted my pros to sound nothing like the way he wrote but then to also have almost as many pages of notes

61:19showing my work you know like showing the math that went behind me so if i'm wrong i'm wrong but at least you can see it i think that was morally correct but i think that was too much effort when it comes was it just because you were trying to do it in a short period of time did you have a crazy deadline or something yes but i also i had a year and so you know and i had a family and i had a i'm a professor like i i just i'd never when it came to writing had to do both those things which was to try to write it in a novelistic way but then to also make sure that any question the reader would have but like why did you think that the dinner was at 5 pm you know or like you know why why did you think the sun was coming up in this way at this moment to make sure because out of respect because what thompson talked about was people making money off i'm like doonesbury yeah you know like that's

62:09what he talked about was people trying to make money off him and if i was gonna write this book it could have it couldn't be in that space didn't he have a lawsuit against gary trudeau he thought about it i think i don't think he ever did it he talked about it publicly yeah i i think it was just well that he became that guy unfortunately that's what's really weird what happens when we become a caricature of ourselves it's really scary do you know um well it's what's weird about it is that he kind of knew that it was happening like there's that famous interview where he's uh talking to that british guy who uh did a documentary about him breakfast with hunter maybe or no but yeah one of them one of them but he's he's rolling a joint uh on the grass somewhere with that las vegas visor on and he's you know talking about how he's really become this caricature and it would be actually

63:01be better if he wasn't alive anymore you know then he was breaking up with his wife during that it was really sad there's a scene in that where he hides where he's at like a parking lot and he doesn't want people to see him and he's standing against the wall and people like come on we gotta go he's like i just don't want anybody to see me right now it was really sad and i i tried to take that tragedy too and he wrote great things afterwards he was a great friend of people afterwards like ron whitehead this wonderful poet from louisville was a dear friend of his like all through his life but the tragedy of how much effort he put out to if we want to write about trump if you want to go after like tybee did about the financial institution the way thompson did it was to kind of wager time later for time now and he talks about that he says what do you mean by

63:41that chemical speed he says doing dexa dream being an alcoholic instead of changing his life and his rhythms he said i'm wagering time later for time now i'm using up energy or things that i might have by burning the candles so brightly at this instant because i believe i need to go after these moments and i later i'm not gonna have it but i'm making that gamble i'm putting the card down right now and i think that's terrifying and i also think that he gave us brilliant writing over one of the most remarkable spans in american history because of it that's a weird tradition in journalism right to destroy your body while creating your art and um i think there's a according to my friends who are journalists there's a big problem with adderall today and there's a lot of people that are using it to write and um it's speed and you know you get addicted i mean

64:28adderall makes everything in front of you closer have you done it yeah so my first book was called hyper um a personal history of adhd so it was about being medicated as a child you were medicated like having pills forced out my throat like also how old were you six when i took ritalin for the first time man i had i i had a suicidal moment and like six years old what the first time you were six you wanted to commit suicide i held like a butter knife to my wrist i don't remember it but yeah i kind of remember it but yeah and it was on ritalin which i've taken now as an adult and i always feel startled when i'm on it if i ever take ritalin now why do you do it i i take it to write like this world is incredibly painful so i take adderall now um and i take it to how often you take it every day i take like 30 milligrams a day really and i take it to i take it to go into a library and this

65:12is what uh david wallace wells was talking about i think like two days ago on the show was how do you read really shitty academic articles where you need the information from them i'm not good at that i'm not good at even making like a car reservation you know like a car rental reservation and so this world's going to be painful no matter what but there's a functionality that adderall allows and it's always a wager what thompson writes about is whenever something is given something else is lost you never get anything for free in this world thompson understood that better than anybody so with him with dexagrade i'm not going to say tom's almost hyperactive i'm not going to go into that but dexa dream like geiger was like yo you're breaking down like you're 26 you have a wife you have a very small child you you're writing right now you want to have your career go forward you're not

65:58doing well he and geiger was like i'm a doctor i had gone through med school you know i bid it i i'd been overwhelmed like you guy ran every morning you know he did he did other things but he he took dexterity so he gave it to thompson and for that small period of time it helped i mean for me it's like i i i'm not a good researcher and maybe i would be now but the only way i can write about something like hunters thompson where i didn't know him i have no experience with him is to read everything that he's ever written or been written about him and then go out and interview people and so effort is my only path forward and what adderall helps for me is to take the pain away of that effort but it doesn't take it away it shifts it around to other aspects in other parts of life and i think thompson when he wrote he who makes a beast of himself escapes the

66:45pain or gets rid of the pain of being a man we don't listen to that like he was like this effort is hard he's like i'm struggling with this effort i'm trying to make these beautiful things i always think of james salter a fiction writer aspen um um resident wrote beautiful novels he wrote his whole life till he was 90. his last novel was at 87. he wrote a memoir at 76 about being a fighter pilot among other things in the korean war lyric literary he did it his whole life he didn't he didn't burn out for a small period of time he's the antonym to thompson i think when it comes to effort and literary work right um do do you just take it for work yeah i mean you don't have like an issue that you need to take it forward i mean um i think that whenever we have something like chemical speed whenever we have something like alcohol um whenever we have something that's not

67:39like marijuana where at least marijuana cuts your mania you know like whenever we have something else like alcohol or at all we need to ask the question is it is taking the pain away and being productive through those actually hastening your own doom and i think with alcohol it's very clear it is i think with adderall it's more complex i think if you do an amount of time release you can make it work how many americans do that out of the percent that are prescribed you know i don't know 10 20 like it's dangerous how often do you take time off i'd say maybe one or two weeks of uh every three or four months and when you do that do you feel weird no i just watch movies like i just don't do anything it doesn't i don't have any productivity i don't i don't produce so the only way you produce is on speed the only way i produce the way i want to right now is on speed i didn't

68:36start taking it until um 2010. dude it's crazy that we're talking about this because there's so many people like you it's um it's so common how much of the work that we enjoy today especially literary work is written by people journalistic work is written by people that are on speed but that's not new i mean that's what thompson and bros and southern like this has been i believe that our american society the situation i'm in i have created a situation where i have too much work and it's my fault i should not be trying to be a professor and also go report at congress and also at george mason in the creative writing program you know and also then be hosting like people coming out and also then like be trying to research something that might be my next thing that's too much and the way thompson saw dexter dream was that he could make reality match his effort so there was no longer the limit

69:24it was the american dream idea if you just put out enough effort you'll get it and that's why i think he so brilliantly understood the toxicity of the american dream is that the effort is what destroys you just because you have a path with the effort to be rich or be successful that doesn't mean that's a good thing right that's what will actually dismantle you yeah is putting it out and i think we forget that do you one of the things about hunter that's really intoxicating is that his sort of self-destructive path becomes romantic when you read it and you get involved in his work and you kind of mimic it you know it's uh that's the greatest fallacy i think i think what he was trying to say with self-destruction was that this was an incredible threat to our american democracy no i don't mean that i mean i mean his there's no romanticism his well i mean the romantic

70:13aspect of it was that his work was fantastic i mean when it was till it wasn't it was fantastic until it was it wasn't i mean so he understood he lived within the field it wasn't but he lived in with he spent much more time within the consequences of that binging than he did within the success of the binging right and that i think he knew that in his letters it's really beautiful um and heartbreaking and in his writing too i mean i think that's what's been missed about him is there's no romanticism in self-destruction right towards the end he definitely lost his productivity and john warner talked about that in the alex gibney documentary and sticky fingers was a great the document of the new book on um the new book on yon winner has great moments of thompson in the 70s just being kind of lost yeah you know and i think i think we got to remember that we have incredible times in american

71:03history we have times that are going to burn brightly and it's up to each rider to decide how they'd like to burn next to it and if they're going to burn brightly they may not have other times and that's i think an american thing where you can wager that bright flame which means you may have nothing left afterwards but thompson knew that he may have to live in that kind of afterlife i want juan thompson writes about it so beautifully stories i tell myself there's some some footage of him when he was writing for i forget what newspaper somewhat was it somewhere in the pacific northwest what was he writing for who's the author of playing off the rail google uh playing off the rail there's a guy who was a journalist what year do you think it was david mccumber yes david mccumber david mccumber employed hunter for a while when david was i forget what publication he was working

71:54for but there's some footage of them community communicating together and you know just trying to get hunter i was in san francisco was it san francisco and hunter's just out of his mind i mean and he was younger i mean he wasn't even that old but he was just wrecked he just couldn't communicate he couldn't talk and uh you know he made a b he makes a beast of you escape the pain of articulation you escape the pain of saying this is what's wrong in american society for him to say the way he did one of his great essays is from 1964 it's about going to hemingway's um ketchum idaho on grave in hemingway's house and it it's gorgeous because it talks about hemingway was a good writer one of the best writers when he was writing about a period he understood the 1940s 1930s when there was a firmness to the reality that he could articulate one of the writers goals is to give a pattern to

72:43chaos is to give an articulation to cast but what happens in the 1960s when the chaos is multiplying repeatedly somebody like hemingway becomes a literal relic like his narrative no longer fits into the present that he's in and thompson saw hemingway's decline and he wrote about hemingway's um uh suicide what do you mean by his narrative doesn't fit hemingway's idea of what america was and what a man should be fit perfectly with what i think the 20s to the 40s when we experienced but i think in the early 1960s with our social upheaval of civil rights of um you know political upheaval hemingway it was confusing to him it didn't it didn't fit anymore like his way of operating no longer articulated the present right and so hemingway's last act was to take away his ability to say anything at all it was his only the last thing hemingway ever said was to say i'm not going to say anything

73:31anymore was the suicide that hemingway committed and thompson wrote about that gorgeously yeah when when he was young when he won up killing himself it was it was almost unsurprising you know when when i read that he had died i remember going man well i guess yeah you know man i mean it's like you knew that he was deteriorating rapidly you knew that he had really bad hips he had hip replacement surgery um the ralph's leg yeah ralph stedman had drawn this very crazy image of him with the artificial hip and yeah it looked like pain you know i mean but i think that it's not my place to even deal with that because juan thompson's book writes about that moment where one thompson was in the house and that's that's that's his and juan writes beautifully about the stakes of it how painful it was to the people that loved him of course everything about it um and how that even if that's a logical

74:33outcome that that's not no i needed it so it's interesting i would say read stories i tell myself that moment is so honestly and brilliantly written by juan no i'm sure but almo all i was getting at is that at the time of his death you know he was in just sort of a he was deteriorating so badly he was wearing diapers his his entire because of his alcoholism his ability to control his bladder was gone and so juan gave this wonderful speech at george mason when he came out he's like how do you write honestly about your father and he asked the question of like should i include this detail and he's like if my father was alive i couldn't include that but that's why i chose in a sense to write my book where my father was dead because i think my father would want me to write honestly but also not want me to include that if he was still alive and so he included that detail and

75:23he talked about that the struggle to include that detail which i think brilliantly articulates what you're saying which is the deterioration yeah and the sadness of it and i mean we have finite amounts of energy or effort we really do we have to take care of ourselves and if we don't we will pay that price um at some point we're going to pay it anyways we're all headed to the same place whether we want to or not you know and so i think hunter's a really terrifying and beautiful example of one wager of chips that were made for the 1960s and 1970s and i think the best way to honor that is to you know apply the brilliance that he forged and carved to the situation we have right now with corruption donald trump um an attack on american democracy where american democracy is basically it's like what erdogan says democracy is a train and we arrive at the station we get off like they

76:15basically use the ladder to get to the attic and now trump's pulling up the ladder and i think thompson would understand that really really well and i think reading him now whether you know him or not helps you and that's why i wrote free kingdom was so that it can be a lens on his his work going back or just on this present right now regardless of trump i think what he really represents is a brilliant historical time capsule and he he sort of captures that time period that upheaval pre-internet where the world was in chaos like no one else he he he encapsulated this very strange moment in history which i don't think is nearly as strange as the moment we're going through right now i think this is probably the most strange moment ever yeah but he he nailed it and he nailed it in a very very unique way that still today i mean well that was another thing i wanted to

77:04ask you about why why did him and tom wolf like tom wolf uh got some of his tapes from um some of the was it la honda the uh how's the angels probably los angeles parties and um some crazy orgy that was going on and he gave them the the tapes to this like what was all that about so when thompson was covering the hell's angels they believed the counter culture out the left in the 1960s 65-66 we're talking about ken keezy we're talking about the anti-war movement the free speech movement with mario savio they believe the hell's angels were on their side they were fellow counter-culturalists that are also outside of the ball game and so keysi and thompson were having a drink after being on like kqed or like some local tv show in san francisco and you know ken keys background is he was a wrestler at oregon he grew up on a dairy farm he come down to stanford to write

77:56for what is now the stagner fellowship but back then was the graduate program at stanford he had moved up to la honda on the success of his first book um one flew over the cuckoo's nest and had just written another beautiful book um and so thompson was like yeah i'm writing about the hell's angels and kezie was like yo i or i'd like to meet them thompson's like okay and so thompson knew how dangerous the hell's angels were where i think people either romanticized them or exaggerated their danger he's like okay i'll set them up and he you know he contacted the chapter with keys he saw on august 7th i think of 1965 like the hell's angels came to la honda allen ginsberg was there with keezy um albert was there you know who that like all the all the stanford intellectuals were there and they made a huge banner that says the merry pranksters welcomed the hell's angels

78:44and thompson rolled up with this isn't this isn't the gibney documentary thompson rolled up with his family um juan was a child a baby in the back seat sandy was in the front seat and he pulled up and what thompson saw was ken keezy giving acid in red cups like red cake cups to the hell's angels thompson was like well we're getting the out of here and so he grabs his wife and his son they go to san clemente which is on the other side they have like a big picnic and on the way back they're like well let's just check it out let's see what it's like and they kind of pull in he's driving this old like roadster they pull in and everybody's watching on a giant trampoline screen like the five-hour stream of consciousness footage from the mary prankster's trip across the um across the u.s which is what tunnel fought about and thompson's like all right they're not eating each other's

79:30skulls like we can hang out a little bit so they hung out and it was interesting how acid pacified the angels instead of made them violent and that's what acid you know of course that's what acid is but they spent the night hanging out there thompson was writing so he's like i'm not gonna do drugs he's like i'll have a few drinks he's taking notes for his his book and later on in the night him and allen ginsberg and this is something i cut out of the book are like let's go get some beer and so the cops are staking out the property and ginsburg and thompson get pulled over by the cops thompson's sober he's talking to the cops he gets a um ticket because his red um lens for his back um tail light is cracked and he's like come on dude that's 300 bucks like i can't i'm a journalist the cops are like why are you writing about them and they're talking about like people being taken

80:16away to jail and ginsburg goes what's in what's in uh what's in redwood city man thompson goes it's called a jail allen and like goes back to talking to the cops and all of this and thompson was friends with ginsburg and so they go back into the party realizes that neil cassidy who's blackout drunk who is dean moriarty and on the road by jack herreck that's the character on who it was based his two or three girlfriends one of them is having an orgy with the hell's angels at this cabin off to the side and thompson sees it and he describes it in two ways when he writes about it but he did audio notes so he did audio notes of step by step and he describes it as like just horrific where she's barely awake um like she's she's catatonic and they bring in neil cassidy to hook up with her too it's horrific and he articulates this horror i had a friend who's a good feminist writer like who's

81:10dear to me she's like you wrote about a white guy like whatever she's like you did most of it right she's like you excused thompson in that moment you should have just let it stand and write about it in the book instead of trying to talk about how upset he was seeing it thompson was really upset so why did she say that that doesn't make any sense because i think she thought that i was making the experience less authentic by trying to qualify it for our current times but why would that be the case when you were just explaining explain no i should have just left thompson no i think i should have let him stand more instead of showing or amplifying his emotion too much but are you saying this based on her criticism or her own personal opinion no i think that he was really upset but i think him being really upset is secondary to whatever she was experiencing right but you're

81:58writing about him yes so i stand by it like i thought about that when i wrote it yeah i stand by it but what was what is her criticism again that by amplifying his upsetness by showing how upset he was that that's too much of an excuse for him just just write it where he what did she think he should have done stepped in no no no no nothing like that she was on point she thought i shouldn't she felt the effort on my part to try to explain his upsetness instead of just having him be upset with one sentence and then go on she thought it was overriding i thought it was a fair criticism where i overwrote it but long story short thompson goes back and he goes to keyse and he goes this is one of the worst things i've ever seen this is in the documentary right but if that's the case then why would why would it be that you were overwriting it that doesn't seem like you overwrote it i

82:43always worry i'm overwriting it's one of my great it's one of my great fears if someone sees something like that i think it's important that you accurately relay the emotions that they experience when they're watching a horrific event i mean he did describe it as horrific but how much of it is my cultural perception of this moment that i'm giving too much to thompson and how much of it was what he accurately experienced what he talked about so i think just giving his words instead of a saying a little bit you know going okay i don't know what he said yeah yeah and so but he goes back and he on his notes that night and these are the notes he gave to ken keezy i'm sorry these are the notes tom wolfe he says he gave him the recordings no i don't think there were actual recordings no i don't i think that's what tom wolf said no that's what one of the documentaries

83:25said tomorrow said he gave me the the notes of it so he gave me the notes of what happened and tom wolf i know what those notes are use those notes okay to recreate that scene in electric kool-aid acid test um and so this is why we talk about truth later in life thompson some biographies might have said that he actually recorded the event he didn't he went back and he took these long audio notes right of like shadow and light and the horror that he saw that's what i'm saying yeah he took the audio notes the recordings he made the recording yes yes and then he gave those to tomorrow and tomorrow exactly yeah but some people have said that he put the tape recorder in the room no no that's not that's not what i meant i mean he gave him the recordings and that was really they're beautiful i mean like they're terrifying but it's about like violence and shadow and light

84:08and horror you know it's a horrific it's a horrific scene that this is thompson's brilliance at that age he could in an audio note get the images and details that he needs to express the the nature of that incident and so tom wolf used those um to create it himself but then thompson recreated it too or wrote about it in hell's angels yeah but in a more distant way than wolf did which is crazy because he was actually there it's crazy dude that was the first time thompson never took acid because he was so upset he went to kizi and he's like it i'm not a journalist anymore that's so horrific what i saw it i he had friends that had told him that he's a personality where if he did acid to go to the bottom of the well for him you know this would be a really horrific thing and so he's like i don't care anymore and instead he just walked around and like was at peace like that's always funny

84:56when someone tells you how you're going to react to a drug relax right yes you're going to react to it how you're going to react to it what was it like for you when you finally finished this when you when you put the last page down and you knew you were done um i know that you like me uh share uh we have an adoration for this guy that's uh you mean he's one of my uh for sure personal heroes i mean it the last image i wrote was um one of the most beautiful thing thompson's thompson writes is something he didn't actually see was when nixon's um helicopter he saw it on tv left the white house lawn what happens is that you know giant helicopter with the white top and the blue its wheels lose their pressure so their wheels are you know flattened at the bottom but as the rotors begin to bring it up they become elongated wheels that still touch the ground thompson wrote that image and

85:47i've always loved that image so i was writing that in a sense when i was at cpac in um 2018 last year and i was walking out just after i wrote that and pence's helicopter was on the lawn right there and it was lifting off and i saw the wheels elongate just like that and i just had so much respect for thompson's ability as a we talk about fiction as a narrative writer to detail that instant you know and to detail the way that that elongated and went yeah and to have that be the emotion of nixon finally departing and so i felt you know i felt i gave it you know i threw as hard as i could i threw as many pitches as i could i threw for as long as i can you know and i hope that everybody knows it's my version of thompson and then it's a version of thompson written through the lens of donald trump but hopefully that it's through the effort and through the detail a version that might bring more

86:40people to thompson while also at the same time for thompson fans um you know being something that they can respect and engage beautiful well thank you for writing it thank you for um just highlighting who this guy was and thanks for all your work man i appreciate it thanks for being a good fan and for highlighting his work too your beautiful poster we didn't even talk about it the aspen wall poster that you have right in here is just so gorgeous yeah i got 100 all over the place it's fantastic it's good it's good yeah no i'm i'm a die hard for sure listen man thank you brother i'm so happy to be here thank you very much thank you thanks for doing this uh tell everybody the book where to get it how to get it freak kingdom hunter thompson's ten year mana crusade against american fascism it's available everywhere on amazon i'm at tim denevey on twitter and uh you should check out the gonzo

87:32voice um twitter hashtag which has thompson quotes all the time which is great and you know he's a great guy on instagram too there's a couple of them yeah jack's gone rx gonzo and the jackalope he's another guy who's got a bunch of guys and anita thompson does a great job on facebook and you know if you are interested in thompson you don't know him i hope you read free kingdom and that's a lens on his work you know to organize it and if you love thompson i hope you read free kingdom too because that's a way to engage them again beautiful thank you everybody bye thank you