Timothy Denevi on Hunter S Thompson and the Art of Journalism (Part 1)

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2:26Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:17hey it's ryan holiday welcome to another episode of the daily stoic podcast i've said this a bunch of times but my way of understanding what's happening in the world now is usually to go back in time right we can learn a ton from reading the stoics marx aurelius writes meditations in the midst of a plague what he saw what what he learns from how people behave and that can shape and inform how we're to behave in the middle of the pandemic that we were going through, for instance. I've raved about a couple books that have really helped me. Speaking of pandemics, I've raved about The Great Influenza, raved about Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here.

3:54And more recently, I read this book by Timothy Denevieve. That's called Freak Kingdom, Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism. Hunter S. Thompson is one of the great writers of all time. Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are two books we carry in the Painted Porch, which I read when I was falling in love with reading as a high school and college student. And he's always been a fascinating character. He has this outsized reputation as this drinker, partyer, crazy person. But he was also, as today's guest explains, a masterful journalist, artist someone who deeply understood human nature and was very clear about what was happening in the world around him in fact fear and loathing in las vegas people don't realize there's a book about the american dream it's not a book about getting obliterated it's a it's why is he getting obliterated it's a response to the despair there's this amazing scene where he looks out over las vegas and he says you can see the high watermark of the 60s which has come receding down into the emptiness and the materialism, temptation of a town like Las Vegas.

5:10All of which is to say, when I read this book, I was blown away because it was explaining so much of what I felt like was happening in the world, but also about human nature, right? The epigraph in Fear and Loathing Las Vegas is, he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. That's a a quote from Samuel Johnson that Thompson picks up on and is clearly motivated by. It clearly explains what he's doing, and it explains so much of what people are doing now. So when I read this book, I loved it, and I reached out to Tim and asked him if he wanted to come on the podcast. He's a great writer.

5:45He's an assistant professor at George Mason. He's got his MFA from the University of Iowa. Awesome writer. You've got to read this book. We had a really long two-hour in-person convo. So I'll bring you part two later in the week. But for now, here is my conversation with Timothy Denevieve. And check out his new book.

6:15Well, I love your book. Thank you. Yeah. That's nice of you to say. I always especially appreciate it when a fellow westerner you know enjoys uh where are you from i'm los gatos but my family's from sacramento oh really italians yeah we're all from uh the other side of the river where in sacramento so my mom says where my grandfather's or great-grandfather's house was um i think it was the other side of the so i'm writing about joan didion now is the other side of the tracks of her house and i gotta go back and figure out like east west and all that but you know that's um well i i lived there a little bit as a child too um you know before coming back to the san jose area where my family is now you want some joan didion trivia yes this is her table did you get it in the oh my god where do you think it was at the franklin avenue house or do you think she because she took everything everywhere you know she took her piano yeah like this is beautiful yeah you got to get that cup off that you're exactly right she would tell me to do that yeah there's a coaster if you want it.

7:23No, I got the table and I've seen pictures of a different dining room table that these chairs are at, but I've never seen a picture of her at the table. So I don't know where it was in her house. She was, she always took that furniture. She went to Brentwood after Malibu and Malibu was after Franklin Avenue. Right. And then I have her chair. Like it was like a writing chair and uh i had that that's what i sit at every day that's amazing you want to see it when we go i do definitely yes yes i want i desperately wanted the desk uh which was like a piece of sacramento history also it was like from her family uh 60 000 seemed like a lot of money for a desk a lot of i agree with you on that on that end uh i think my wife would have killed me and so would the bank um yeah i'm i'm as a sacramento when i weirdly didn't have a relationship with john didion like i don't think i knew she was from sacramento until i mean i guess i vaguely understood it in some of the books but i like at no point growing up in Sacramento, was it ever discussed that one of the greatest writers of the 20th century was from that town?

8:43You're exactly right. It wasn't until, you know, even the 2010s, where she finally began to be identified in kind of a proud way. Like before that, she was derogatory about and protective of it. And the city, you know, with Thompson, they've done the same thing. It was later when the city began to celebrate her, like how Louisville began to celebrate him. But you're right. I didn't, I knew her, but I always identified her with Los Angeles. Interesting. Yeah. And then the other writer that I, I'm slightly more fanboyish about than Didion is John Fonte. I just read Brotherhood of the Great. Oh, really?

9:17Because about Roseville. Yeah. His wife's family was from Roseville. I've never seen another writer capture the Northern Italian experience, the Northern Italian immigrant experience better than him. Have you read any of the other ones? No, I'm going to read In the Dust. ask the dust i have that one of the great novels of all time uh crazy story which we should talk about um but he has a bunch it's maybe 1933 was a bad year the road to los angeles he has a couple books about his journey he's he's seen as an la writer but he's from colorado and so it's just a weird it's such an interesting snapchat to america to give the italian american experience Colorado to LA than Northern California but as someone who loved books I just think what would it have done to me earlier to know that there were people who did this in the place that I was from Sacramento is not a literary or artistic city in its own self-reckoning so that it wasn't I went to uc riverside it wasn't until i got to riverside that i met susan straight the novelist and she she was the first professor i met on campus because she taught this honor seminar that we had to take in the summer before we started and like they assigned us to read her book and i was like a person wrote this like from where i'm from yeah but i wasn't no like a person wrote this about the place that they're from and that place is not new york or paris or london this is a person this is a writer writing about an off the map place riverside inland empire and is doing it at a high level and then it's just this is her job and that like all these light bulbs went off for me yeah i love it william saroyan yeah saroyan wrote about the central valley like i just when i read him something in honolulu i was like you can write about the bay area you know not the san francisco or the you know la type noir story but just about where we're from and the physicality of it yes and that that thing can shape you and if it's interesting to you you can make it interesting yes to the the reader listener whatever um yeah uh fonte i'll tell you about ask the dust so fonte i did this piece about this a couple years ago but so fonte he writes ask the dust it's supposed to be his breakthrough novel and he publishes it with this small publisher called stackpole and sons comes out like 33 something like that anyways is it 33 i forget what year it comes out maybe later maybe it's like 38 i think it's 38 and that same year stackpole which was also it was more of a military publisher they did a lot of books military history they published an unauthorized edition of mein comp oh wow hitler being then like it'd be like if putin had written a book yeah and they felt like people should read it and they also felt like fuck putin no royalties for you so they translated in english and they don't it's not an authorized edition oh wow at hmh howton mifflin still publisher today had the american rights they and hitler's literary agency and hitler himself sue stackpole and sons and win in federal court enforcing the murderous dictators copyright in america oh my god and the the the legend it's true and not true but the legend is acid dust sells out its first printing or is selling through its first printing in a good clip it would have been a huge book this distracts the publisher sucks up its marketing budget which they spend on legal fees which they didn't lose and and ask the dust is then forgotten until 1970 whatever when charles bukowski discovers the lone surviving copy in the los angeles public library wow i didn't know that story it's incredible the book is so good is that what you would recommend for someone who'd read brotherhood of the grape and is looking for something to read by fonte i think so it's it's definitely his magnum opus um his short stories are good.

13:35He wrote this book, Full of Life, which was his most popular book. It wasn't a popular book, but it gets turned into a big movie that basically pays for everything. So basically what happens is once Ask the Dusk is destroyed, he is sort of heartbroken and then just becomes a well paid but little known screenwriter. He has a nice house in Malibu, paid for by movies that were never made and was a frustrated novelist and sort of a drunk and and a you know tortured dude as a result of this experience um and uh he he writes a couple he wrote one more bandini novel before ask the dust i'm forgetting what it's called i've read all of them and then after um after and this way nerdier than people probably want to do but uh after um uh bukowski rediscovers ask the dust as fonte is dying of diabetes they're like chopping off his legs in the hospital blind he dictates to his wife the sequel dreams from bunker hill how's that because that's done it's not done written out he told his wife yeah novel while i was in the hospital it's really good um I think you would like 1933 was a bad year because it's about Fonte as a kid.

14:56It's the youth Italian-American experience. But Ask the Dust is fascinating in that. So basically the premise of Ask the Dust is Arturo Biendini, a delusional, narcissistic, aspiring writer who you can't help but relate to as a writer, falls in love with this Mexican girl who works at a diner in Bunker Hill. and she's racist towards him and he's racist towards her and like you don't like you don't think of like the american racism experience is primarily a black white story as we understand it i feel like and then sort of see two characters get it from two angles that are less discussed and the interplay between each other is fascinating yeah that's fascinating yeah because he has this self-hatred and she has this self-hatred and then they're in this sort of abusive toxic relationship which is sort of metaphor metaphorical for the toxic relationship that every aspiring artist has with los angeles and i i don't think i understood how colorism worked within like the italian immigrant community too where the one generation earlier darker italians yeah and you're ashamed of that the one generation next and i i think we map on our own kind of um you know general American experience.

16:10A lot of that gets lost. So that sounds fascinating that it was interplayed out between both of them. Well, there's also, I think this is in Brotherhood of the Grape, there's a new world, old world in it, which I saw my grandfather was an immigrant from Yugoslavia and my grandmother was from Germany. And so, but she sort of assimilated and he, he was more like, yeah, making wine in his basement kind of a guy. And you know what I I mean, and like, I could see how it played out for my mom. Like, I've talked about this before, but my parents, my mom didn't, doesn't identify as anything but an American because she's white and, you know, was born here.

16:48Whereas for him, he was an immigrant. Right. And so I think Infante, to have parents from Italy in that, like, who came, his parents would have been born probably in the 1800s to come to America. Like, there's this, you know, Infante loves baseball. And so obviously in the Black American experience, it's different because you're stamped with this thing. Passing is so much harder. And so these are all themes that I, of course, missed when I read Past the Dusk at 20. But now I think about it a bit.

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20:29Yeah, but they're also so integral to things I missed growing up in California that are integral to the way I kind of look at it now and understand its tensions. that when you're a kid, you sense something, maybe a little off where people may be struggling or angry or resentful within different communities, within different cities. But I think it's hard to even remember that post-war space and even that in-between-the-war space that like Dante wrote about and that really defined LA and San Francisco. And we just kind of got trickled down, you know, all these like years and generations later. Well, my parents spent a lot of time in Sausalito when I was growing up, they had this little boat that we would go to.

21:10And so they would take us out and we would go to Angel Island. And like Ellis Island is a integral part of New York's understanding of itself and its identity and thus America. The idea that there was an immigration hub on the West Coast of the United States, totally lost. California doesn't see it. Like California feels like the end of the line, not like the beginning of the entry point into america yeah and i the dimaggio story you know like they're all fishermen they're all northern italians and the climate's so similar yeah in northern california you know and so their whole family migrated out there um my dinevi family too kind of at the same time and it's such a strange thing to be so far away from where they were to still be trying to practice the same family skills yeah fishing and within an environment that's similar but so radically different when i think fonte's father and then the character in the book is like a bricklayer he's a stonemason so he's this old world stonemason technique that it's like you would you and i would have seen those houses yeah you know that those that that generation of people built yeah and that's their sort of version of the american dream um the other the other one that i got is i write about harvey milk in the book i'm doing now like and and i read this interesting biography and he spends a big time talking about why San Francisco was a gay hub.

22:32And I, I just thought it was like, you know, like these things are just generous. Yeah. And he's talking about how actually it was to send a boys to Europe or to send boys to the Pacific in World War II. They would take them from all over the country and then put them on trains and get them there. And then the ones who they realized were gay, the navy did not allow onto the ships you know that this is basically like an x these are these this is the refuge of discriminatory uh navy policies and you just what i just didn't think about that and you realize that these little decisions start just the genesis of a community and then um like yeah i ended up in sacramento because there was a big slovenian community in san francisco so my grandfather came over from europe and and you know lands on the east coast and just makes his way towards his people and you know then somehow i end up in sacramento like these yeah and and didion i mean didion ends up in sacramento because of the fucking donner party i know so she would have been looking at us as the new people like she did she's like a seventh generation or something yeah and i i think she always was seeing out ahead of her in an interesting way you know my family would be looking up towards her you know it would be on the other side of the tracks would be trying to be more white after coming over as italians and she knew all the communities there but she i think from a young age her gaze was outward you know toward new york toward other places and then i mean the donna party such a horrific story yeah what a what a creation myth for your family that you're one of the ones that survived like you know and all of that well and then by the time i grew up in sacramento i don't know about you but like all the as this happened in basically all the american cities this is also what dreams of bunker hill and fonte's writing about like you don't think when you think downtown los angeles you don't think big victorian mansions which is what was bunker hill gets raised and it becomes these skyscrapers and to think like when i was a kid the houses in the in the 40s or the 30s like like the blocks of houses that the people like Didion grew up in, that was all an abandoned downtown.

24:47Like that was not safe, not nice. Everyone who had money, the dream would be to move to the suburbs. Yes. And I grew up in a nice suburb of Sacramento. And that was like where the athletes lived. Like everyone was trying to get out. Whereas to Didion, the whole center of gravity would have been these areas that by the time these other generations are here, it's like you're not even getting the language of it. And the symbolism of it, because the dream has moved from a big house downtown to a big house, big track house in the suburbs. Like Auburn or somewhere like that outside. And we forget the way that the floods worked, as you know, on that town.

25:26To have that higher ground downtown, you know, meant that that house would be there, you know, 30, 40. And we don't realize 70 years why that survived the floods. It's the best real estate. And that's where they built that big Victorian mansion. Sure. You know, and now we're playing in an adult baseball tournament, recreational father-son tournament, actually with the Italians. And we played a Sacramento team. So I'm playing first base and I was asking, you know, what's the flood situation like now? And he said, really, since 86, they haven't had, you know, or it's not happening in the same way.

25:54So the entire logic of the city and what I think of a relic, I think of something that exists now where its narrative no longer makes sense in the present. Well, Sacramento is a weird town in the sense that it's a river town, but it's a river town from San Francisco. Like you don't go, oh, the people went around South America, landed in San Francisco and then took boats from San Francisco to Sacramento. The whole that none of that sentence makes any sense to people, you know, for the gold rush. Like that's when this was happening. So none of that makes any sense anymore. And so, yeah, growing up where I like it's not how I read Didion that I really understood Sacramento as a river place.

26:34My only memory of the two one was river rafting, you know, in the summer. But but I remember a couple of times in my childhood, a whale would swim up the American River. And and you'd be like, what? That doesn't make sense. How could a whale get from the ocean to here? And then how could the river be deeper? because the what you were so disconnected from water like i didn't live anywhere near there that wasn't you know the the purpose of that had gone the only time i would see it would be like on tv when they were showing that bridge and during a king's game or something you know what i mean like it it's just um the yeah the the the reason the city exists is no longer why the city exists yes but everything that represents that original reason continues in our present without the explanations that we might have understood, you know, 40, 50, 70 years ago.

27:29So one more author, since you mentioned Auburn, Ambrose Bierce, who I thought a lot about as I was reading your book. Ambrose Bierce being, I think, and Hunter S. Thompson, both being two authors that I think are proof of the idea that what is it, like a cynic is a is a spurned idealist you know um he lived in auburn for a long time i didn't find that out until later um but but the i he was a san francisco guy he was but that i that that when i think of hunter s thompson i was thinking of of ambrose spears in that i my understanding of hunter s thompson is the wild party in hunter s thompson i didn't until i read your book get my sense of him as the sort of political idealist who basically has his heart broken over and over again and then just decides ironically to do what he talks about in uh fear and loathing which is uh making a beast of yourself to getting to get rid of the pain of being a man yeah you know and i i think that again probably with you too we got the trickle-down effect of the 1960s growing up many of our teachers may have been at San Francisco State, you know, or on the West Coast barricades during all of that, University of California upheaval, just the political upheaval of the 60s.

28:50And I hadn't understood him that way either. So it took me a while to kind of get back into his writing when I was in my 20s and trying to be a writer myself and seeing just how diligent and careful he was, which is not what we think of when we hear him, into as a journalist, as a journalist, A lot of my students I teach writing will try to start at Hunter Thompson. And they have to understand he took 15 years as a serious journalist playing the game, learning how to do the investigative reporting and the lead paragraph general journalistic writing before he then responded against it and found his own form.

29:31Yeah, it's like you watch Patrick Mahomes and you see him throwing these sideways passes and scrambling and doing it. And you don't realize that's not him not learning the playbook. That's him having learned the playbook and played in the system since he was a kid all the way up. And then there is this element of mastery where you get to throw it away and improvise and exist on instinct and intuition. And yeah, if you see Hunter S. Thompson or other writers as unorganized and stream of consciousness and undisciplined, you're missing all of the discipline and order that built them up into the point where they could either do that on purpose or be so talented that they could get away with it.

30:20Yeah, I mean, creativity, I used to think it was the blank page and then just something. But it really is that response to a system, you know, and seeing what other people don't when they look at that. And I mean, Mahomes coming from a baseball background, a lot of quarterbacks do, but how rare that he could implement that kind of off balance, you know, response. And I love that show on Netflix, because the creativity of the camera angle close to him, where you see the decision making. I mean, that reminds me when I think of writing creativity. Again, it's not going from nothing to something. It's looking at what already is there and trying to see what other people don't and create something new from that.

30:54Yes. And you have to have the core mastery of language and word choice and all the ingredients that then can come together in a new way. But, yeah, you don't see Hunter S. Thompson as trying at all. And that is a sign of mastery, I think. But yeah, he was so good first and he learned all the basics first and then he threw away everything else. Yeah. And I think that's hard to do too because it's a risk. Sure. You know, he wasn't doing it. The artistic explanation could be like, well, I had to do this. I would have been in no other place. You know, like art is that expression of, you know, not being able to conform to whatever.

31:39But with Thompson, he needed to make money as a journalist. And so he still, as someone using the first person, having political opinions, using a more hybridized space, using found information within his text, he was taking a risk. And at the time, there happened to be publications that found it thrilling. And he had a method to that madness, a careful method. But he may not have made the money he was trying to make and be able to support his family by choosing not to write the standard objective, you know, reportage story. Yeah. And also it's there's a certain survivorship bias, right? You know, these writers by their handful of big pieces and you don't see, but they published and it's there in the archives, just a bunch of boring articles about regular events in the news.

32:27Right. Like like and then ultimately, once they become so successful, they could stop doing those things. and keep them out of their collections when they put them together later yeah but it's like you know didion was writing like a weekly column for like look magazine or whatever yeah yeah like and probably 85 of them are totally unremarkable uninteresting indistinguishable from the other crap that was being published by other people at that time and then it's like to go to your baseball metaphor it's like there's a lot of misses there's a lot of singles and then you remember the person for a couple of key home runs or grand slams or, you know, pinch big moments, but there's thousands of at-bats between those two things.

33:11That's exactly right. And they often, I think of Didion and Thompson. I think of Thompson with Kentucky Derby, it's decadent and depraved, which is what began to set him apart in our kind of cultural conversation, one of the things. And then Didion with slouching towards Bethlehem, she had no idea if she'd gotten that right when she went for like a month to San Francisco and she had the cinematic kind of narration. And then with those really beautiful essayistic parts that came in like, you know, cold spring and San Francisco in 1967, neither of them thought like I made it. Those are the pieces that are going to, you know, suddenly rise to the top of the national conversation.

33:43They weren't sure. And both in, in a kind of fascinating way did. So even their big hits or home runs at the time, they weren't sure that they'd done them the way they hoped. And I, I, it's also hard to separate how big they were in the moment. And they were big writers and the fact that for the next 40 years, those books sold 50 to 150 ,000 copies, whatever it is, right? Like, like that, that, that new non or the nonfiction classics section at every bookstore. It's, it's not that the books were ever the Da Vinci code or some massive, you know, pop sensation. It was more just that they stuck around and they were rediscovered by generation after generation after generation and that that there's and and actually it would take a while for it to really have the resonance that it did yes because you don't see it as a coming of age classic until multiple generations have come of age to it exactly and i think they were both really good at looking how the media was talking about an event like hippies yeah or hell's angels and seeing when they saw that up close what was going on how wrong the media narrative in time or life or look where it was.

34:55And that lasts today in a really nice way, I think. Yeah. You don't see them as contrarians, but effectively both Hell's Angels, incredible book, and Didion's couple books of essays there were really counter-programming, not weirdly, like counter-programming to popular culture, but there's also weirdly something conservative about them do you know what i mean like hunter s thompson is ultimately indicting the hell's angels he's just understanding why they're popular exactly and didion is it's like didion's inner sacramento in um is going like these people don't know the answer there's a five-year-old on acid like somebody help these children yeah right she's not going oh look at these hippies with their long hair she's actually understanding them and dismissing and arguing against them and judging them for different reasons, but it's resonating.

35:53Ultimately, they're both indictments of American culture in that time. And the promise. I mean, that's why even when I'm working on the Didion stuff now, reading her a lot, I still am always remembering, you know, it's in Fear and Loathing, Thompson's, it's the wave speech, but the failure of the 60s. It's that sense that your inevitable energy would prevail and that you'd win and that the movement would naturally reach its goals, but without the hard daily application, such change demands. And that the other side, the mean and militaristic forces, wouldn't in their power and planning defeat you and your idealism in that.

36:30And I think both saw the promise and the failures on a tactical level of the counterculture movement in the 1960s in a really clear manner. I think about that Hunter S. Thompson speech all the time. For people who haven't read Fear and Loving Las Vegas, maybe you've seen the movie, you think it's this book about debauchery and partying and craziness, when really it's this sort of elegy and sad meditation on the failure of all the idealism of the 60s. He says, you look outside your hotel room in Las Vegas and you see the high watermark of the 1960s, the death of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Robert F.

37:06Kennedy, both Kennedys. You see, and he's like, this is where it peaked. And now we're here in Las Vegas doing what we do. And so there's some irony that the book would become popular and people would be doing the Las Vegas version, not the, hey, change is really hard. Political organization is really hard. Good meets against implacable evil. And even if you win the cultural battle, if you don't mop up the other stuff, it doesn't stick. And he's making a beast of himself in sort of the depressing realization that the bad guys won. Yeah. You know, and that, I think we still see it today. I mean, many of them are gone, but so many of those key players when they were young then are still fighting the same battles in their 70s and 80s now.

38:05Yeah. I mean, I for a long time thought it was a new conversation based on the 60s, many of our political arguments now. but the more I read about it maybe I'm just getting older the more I realize it's the same conversation we've really been having yeah and it's depressing and heartening and scary but we've really been fighting those same battles you know and it's what makes me crazy is when the younger generation now in their 20s um or whatever don't really through their lack of reading or because TikTok can't capture it again I'm sounding very old don't realize how that conversation has evolved but is is still continuing well it's weird given those two books, which are laments of the failures of the 60s, culturally, we took this lesson from those that change is brought about by organizing, marching, and writing music and art.

38:54And that's fundamentally not what the civil rights movement was or how it worked. And uniquely, the civil rights movement was centered around marching because marching was illegal. Yes. Right. They only got together in groups and marched because it was illegal. And then they would clash with the police and the police would show how bankrupt their authority was. And and the mask would slip. Right. Well, marching for the most part is not illegal anymore. And so the idea that you just have to get a large group of people together and that will send a message to the people in power. You know, Kennedy was on the side of the civil rights march for the most part.

39:44And even he looks at the march on Washington and just sort of like, OK, that doesn't solve the legislative issue that we have. The civil rights movement worked because fundamentally it ultimately changed public opinion by the overreaction to the entrenched interest. But like, yeah, we took this message from it because ultimately they did prevail in the long run to a degree that like, hey, the way to bring about change is to change your profile picture on social media, to sign a petition, right, to call your representatives, which isn't it at all. I agree. And I love when Thompson writes about the 60s and with protests.

40:25He said, you know, the powers that be at first, they had to respond to it. It was illegal to march. Bull Connor, whether he wanted to or not, the police chief, he had to respond to that act. And he, as a person in power, could have his power at least undermined or even taken away from him. by the end of the 60s and the start of the 70s, Thompson writes about how Nixon doesn't care how many people march. He's like, you're marching. It's not going to change my position. And that terrifies Thompson because then he realizes, one, like in Chicago, you can just, which, you know, daily on the other side, just beat the shit out of the protesters.

40:56Right. Or two, you can't affect national change like that as a group anymore. It has to be more on the community or local level. Yeah. And for him, it was a shock because he believed that too. Enough people get together. Yes. Enough people go in the right direction. Yeah. You know, their energy will prevail. And by, you know, 68 into 72, you just his realization that, oh, my God, they're insulated from that. The people in power doesn't matter. That's not going to work on them. Well, also, I feel like you capture this well in the book. Hunter S. Thompson has this sort of big picture realization.

41:23And then he has a small picture realization of just running for local office. And he sees how rigged the system is, how hard it is to win, even though, like, I wouldn't vote for Hunter Thompson. He's a drug addict. He's a crazy person. But I think he gets this point. He gets he he, unlike a lot of cultural critics, artists, writers, organizers, has actual firsthand experience in how entrenched interests protect their power, protect themselves, push away potential disruptors, co-opt potential organizers or change agents. And so he has this sense of, oh, OK, so he understands what Nixon's doing at the local and the national level and the Nixon like figures are doing at this level.

42:08And so it really is kind of just astute understanding of what's happening, rooted in his understanding of history, psychology, local politics, whatever. that again is masked by the fact that he has this reputation of being a wild man badass when there's really not just astute cultural commentary but like very relevant and modern information that Black Lives Matter could use or whatever your group is yeah yeah and I what I think is um fascinating too is I when it comes to a successful politician you know one of the skills is to be a good vote counter and whether that's in the senate to know how many you have whether that's when you're running for speaker to know how many you have before you do it bobby kennedy when he was his brothers like um you know right hand man was a great vote counter you know at the nomination um process and thompson and aspen when he was running for mayor or he had his friends um you know running for positions in the city council he was an excellent vote counter and he knew how many votes were out there yeah he knew how many he needed to get so he writes about it often comically he often dramatizes his bewilderment sure so well yeah you know but he's writing about that now at a desk um you know days weeks months later and the hymn on the page you know the hymn that's kind of a buffoon or acting or being excessive um you know that hymn was also the one that understood when to challenge and when to pull back yeah and how to move against in aspen um an elite like powerful group that wanted and eventually would succeed in um you know developing this gorgeous place just so they can make more and more and more money you know now the billionaires my friends in aspen saver place the millionaires yeah but back then you know and he was another favorite writer of mine is james salter um and so he was an aspen resident and worked with thompson yeah on that i mean he's a lot like fonte where he spent a period of his life writing screenplays nobody you know made movies from but made enough money off it and he told me he regretted that more than anything because a book is something that lasts you know It's a technology.

44:06Did you get to meet James Alter? Yeah, I spent some time with him. It was really nice in 2014. Yeah, he's another incredible novelist that I guess you wouldn't make anymore. He's sort of a figure of the 20th century where he's got this, I mean, he's one of the great fighter pilots, like a great fighter pilot. Like not like he was in the army or like in the air, but like was an elite fighter pilot, like a top gun level fighter pilot. Yes. And so he has this kind of first love, which is that, and this second love, which is writing. and yeah his his his novels are incredible i mean that gets to mastery too he shot down two migs in korea yeah you know he was a professional you know he's a pilot they would go i always remember how he writes about going to morocco to do target practice yeah where they trail this giant target and shoot with paint i mean just the daily level of practice and skill it takes yeah to not crash a jet yeah or to be able to shoot another jet down yeah it is still mind-blowing and he and his writing i think communicates that beautifully but he was also ended up in aspen and completely different person than thompson was still trying to make the immediate control your immediate surroundings and politics better you know and worked with them yeah so i've gotten to know a number of fighter pilots because my books have sort of made their way through the military and starting to get the sense that oh like a navy seal fighter pilot author actor hedge fund trader that these are all kind of these elite professions that are more the same than they are different The level of mastery, self-control, you know, sort of compulsion, you know, the ambition required that they're they're they're all speaking a language or on a wavelength that they understand.

45:47And sort of like recognizes like, do you know what I mean? Or a game recognizes game like that. So for Salter to move from the fighter pilot world to the writing world and and sort of see them as this. I always love that about him. yeah me too he's so great uh also not super appreciated kind of after his death was maybe rediscovered a little bit yeah like a writer's writer but i think again we get one version of him you know he's writing about sex you know he's writing about new york i mean i think he wrote about about fighting about fighter pilots about flying better than anybody i've read but he was also right when joan didion was you know living on franklin avenue he was friends with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.

46:29You know, he would stay with them when he'd go to do treatments. He was part of that world too. And I think that gets lost also when we talk about him. He's a writer's writer. He taught at the workshop in Iowa. His sentences are beautiful, but I think for someone to last, it has to go beyond just that craft. He has to have been, I think he captured something that we're still trying to figure out about what post-war America was like. And it could be his white Jewish like background and experience. But even beyond that, I think it was coming out of the army that, you know, shared sense of skill and mastery and then falling out.

47:02And like so many people in the 1960s, not knowing where to go or what to do. He didn't want to be a businessman in that sense. He didn't want to, you know, live the life of many of the people that he saw around him, but he still struggled and wasn't sure. Yeah. You get this sense. He goes to West Point. It's this culture that he loves, this sort of discipline, order structure, old world values and virtues. And then to leave the army and be in the 60s, you're like, who are these people? Right. Like, what is this about? I think that's also what makes Tom Wolfe's writing so good is Tom Wolfe is clearly a character from the generation before.

47:38But then he's writing about Ken Kesey and, you know, like he's writing about their. they're they're a part of it but they're apart from it and since they the reason they're not in it is what makes them able to write about it right like they're so they're they're kind of outsiders so they're able to make fun of it and they see it differently um and and then that so you have to have just a just slightly different vision than everyone else in your time or you are just a part of the, you're just participating in the culture rather than documenting the culture. Exactly. I think the hardest thing in writing is to understand what's necessary from what's not and what you're trying to compose.

48:24And that little bit of an outsider's perspective can help so much. What's something only I could say about this as opposed to what does everyone else think about this? You have to have this, his take on astronauts is different. his take on you know the the merry pranksters is different like and the same same goes like nobody else would have saw uh the hell's angels the way that hunter s thompson saw them which is both sort of more heroic in some ways than people anticipated and then also much darker much more disturbing you know um trending towards something real almost nihilistic um and same with didion And, you know, everyone else would have been going to Woodstock and here she is sort of just talking about this is horrible.

49:13Yeah. I mean, Los Angeles in 68, done a lot of research into Bobby Kennedy's death. You know, that last week, I mean, James Baldwin was there trying to write a screenplay for Malcolm X. Didion was there. You know, all these writers, I think that as a Westerner, we, I don't know how you feel, but San Francisco is kind of the city. It's the culture. You know, it's the physical capital for me. you know sorry sacramento but it's the physical capital of of california but at that time so much of the nation not through the hollywood sense but the cultural sense was i thought i think now being defined by um that los angeles space and scene and so many writers from all over the world yeah were there when everything was going on and think of james baldwin i mean when martin luther king was killed he was there and bobby kennedy was killed he was there he had gone out to palm springs to try to get the uh screenplay done you know on malcolm x and i think all in their different ways and from their different perspectives of brilliance were feeling something that had always been unraveling and was now on the surface or was breaking and wrong and we were kind of getting these fragmented point of views from everyone about what was happening in the larger sense yeah america right yeah the center will not hold it's san francisco and now they're sort of both sensing this stuff's not working it's not adding up and then california kind of being this island uh which people don't see it as that but this kind of island from the rest of america is sort of maybe suspending them a little bit and allowing them to see it differently i don't know i think you're right and we forget today how long it took news to get to california it took the new york you didn't get the new york times delivered in the same easy way in the 60s you didn't get the same newscasts at the same time before right satellites in this you know late 60s you had to plan the event like it's election day we're going to set a satellite up or you know i'm thinking of hawaii and across the country but we california was a long way it was much further from the east coast yeah you know in terms of the way communication and information worked in the 1960s than it is now yeah right and even yeah the california connection to hawaii i think it's kind of forgotten and just that yeah california is looking i think america tends to look towards europe but california there's this understanding of the east being a part of it right and even even like all this stuff about the china lobby and all this stuff back then there was just this People were like, no, the center of gravity is this way.

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53:38If you're not doing something that's so topical, it has to come out the next day in the New York Times. These writers could do this great long form. You're not getting down to Washington on the train to cover this event. You're having to think about what it means and what it represents. And even the time, like Hollywood operates on such a different timeline than every other bit of media because a movie takes so long to get made. So, yeah, you're just operating on a slightly longer view. And I think that gives, that's something we missed today, the ability not just to mull over it, but creatively try different avenues and aspects formally that we began to see, you know.

54:20When you're not working on such a topical issue, you can take more chances sometimes. You're not as rushed. Do you think with James Salter and Hunter S. Thompson, what's interesting about both of them, Hunter S. Thompson obviously much more so almost to the point of caricature, but these were both really talented people who also had these sort of like secret lives or addictions or compulsions. And so that's what's fascinating about Hunter S. Thompson sudden is he's this sort of critic of the excesses of American culture and the ambitions and the egos and the insatiability of someone like Nixon as if he is not himself is not hooked on a different drug.

55:02Exactly. And with James Halter, I mean, as a bisexual man, you know, coming out of the military, that was something that he, you know, wasn't writing a memoir about, you know, In 1960, he was writing about sex and he was writing about differences in power and he was writing about the danger of it but also the kind of beauty and rush of it too. And I think it was so informed, that writing, by the thing that he couldn't necessarily write about. I think Thompson's not – the way Thompson does it, I think a lot of it goes back to his Louisville experience too, feeling it as an outsider there, things you have to be quiet about.

55:39You're not part of the family structure there, the families that run Louisville then. That could get you out of trouble. If you get in it, you have to be more circumspect. We think of him as this author that will say anything or do anything. But he understood the power structures around him and was always looking for ways to indict them. And I think relying on his own issues with alcohol addiction, with amphetamine, seeing in these insatiable politicians, like you said, what he's thinking about a lot. in his own life on an everyday way. Well, the big fallacy of Hunter S. Thompson is that he's this disruptive, center of attention, life of the party guy, which he is in his writing, but you're not getting press passes and traveling on the presidential plane or in the motor.

56:29He's obviously in the event, some exceptions, much more low key and self-controlled and blending into the background or he wouldn't be able to observe the things that he's doing. Exactly. And I think a good chunk of his writing is like what he wished he had said or what he could have said, what needed to be said, and not what he was literally able to do as a journalist. Exactly. He's trying to be invisible. A good comparison, I think, today, and there's not that many, but is a Jordan Klepper from The Daily Show. So you'll see in moments when he's at January 6th or CPAC, you know, the funny interactions, like, really?

57:12You know, where he's more – he's inserting himself more. But I write about CPAC and some of these other right-wing events. He is spending 90 % of the time listening, nodding his head. You know, he's not arguing back. He's doing the grunt work to get all the perspectives and information he can before some of those moments will come up. And Thompson, I bet, at those scenes when he was reporting from the presidential primaries, when he was sent to do a job, he was invisible like that 90, 95, 98 % of the time, too, until he got too famous to be later. It's funny you brought that up, right? Because we're talking about Hunter S.

57:47Thompson being the guy that sort of throws out the rules, but it's based on an understanding of mastery. I think when people see Jordan Klepper, you think he's just walking around owning people, owning people, making fun of them to their face. Actually, the art of what he does, first off, he's probably not doing it 90 % of the time. You're only seeing a snippet of what gets filmed. And the art of what he's doing is you're not even noticing that you're being owned and made to be a fool. But that just the sheer amount of those events that he's been to over the years, he knows how to blend in. He knows how to sense who the people are.

58:23And it's only for 12 seconds on camera that it gets wild. and then he's probably out before you even notice it exactly um yeah when he guest hosted the daily show he had me on he read my stuff that's great yeah he's awesome that's great yeah but people probably think that's a fun raucous uh disruptive put middle finger in your face gig and almost certainly to one get access to the people you need to get access to and then to not be lynched by the mob yeah you have to have a very artful fluid ability to do that yeah you know the best and thompson do this we think of him as indicting everybody else but he allows people to indict themselves by by speaking what they think is the correct perspective and the audience then sees how far away they are from reality often and what they're saying and clepper does a great job of that and thompson talked to everybody you know we forget that too he read everybody yeah so many I think young writers today too, they will see maybe writing they disagree with, whether culturally, personally, identity-wise, politically, as being something they don't need to read because they don't agree with it.

59:39And only a generation earlier, and even us growing up, you had to read everybody. You could take them down and destroy them. You can do whatever you want, but you had to read what you don't agree with. You had to talk to the people at the event who you don't agree with and listen, and they will reveal their positions. as they articulate themselves to you. When you have to be able to do that so you can not get conned, right? Yes. So I was telling you about the Stackpole and Sons publishing Mein Kampf. So when Stackpole and Sons, they published their edition, which was the full edition of Mein Kampf.

1:00:12But HMH's edition had a lot of the real bad stuff taken out. Oh, wow. That's partly why Hitler was seen the way that he was in America. So when HMH publishes their edition of Mein Kampf, one of the guys sends it to FDR, who recently become president. And FDR, you can see this copy I talked about in the piece that I wrote, writes back, I think, a letter, maybe in the margins. But he's like, live it because he had read Mein Kampf in German. Right. Like he'd actually read it. And he was like, this is not what is actually happening here. It's much worse than you say. So FDR had this understanding of the facts, not just the facts, but the full unpleasantness of the facts, because he engaged with the material as opposed to seeing it from far away.

1:01:06And I think you make a good point about Hunter S. Thompson, which is like Hunter S. Thompson isn't looking at Nixon, let's say, or McGovern or McGovern. Who's the bad one? Humphrey. No, no, no. The conservative from Arizona. Oh, Goldwater. Goldwater. He's looking he's not looking at those guys the way some people today look at Trump, which is like they read about him in an article. they see the tweets like he knew everyone in the campaigns he interviewed interviewed the candidates direct his horror and terror and disgust them was based on having gotten up close and personal with it and understanding what it is what it represented and what the full end game was what you have to do you can't you can't pretend it doesn't exist or just be holier than thou about it self-righteous you have to you have to know what they're doing and more you have to know how they do it yes and you wrote about this in um one of your first books where you talk about media manipulation you know and he would watch you know um nixon completely stage or create an event yeah and get the um version of nixon nixon wanted to everybody and he'd watch his entire national press pool just report it dutifully yeah and not question you know the the artifice of it to begin with and And that outraged him, you know, but he had to see Nixon up close and see the press's failure to become anything more than a messaging system for the Nixon that Nixon wanted people to see.

1:02:40And that outraged him. And he was great at kind of articulating how easily that was to do that. Yeah. And so, yeah, what's disruptive and courageous and brave about Thompson is not that he's saying this to Nixon's face, which would have gotten quickly kicked out of setting the gospel, but it's that he's saying the things that everyone else who's watching is thinking but not saying. Yes. And laundering out. Yes. You know, because of their objectivity or their deadline that they need to make. Right. But they're being manipulated. Right. And that's what he's trying to talk about. They're being manipulated and they are manipulating.

1:03:16Exactly. And that it's a symbiotic relationship. It pays off for them. Yes. Well, and he really captured, which again, you have to be that kind of, I also think of Conrad with language. You're just outside of it, English, but you're within it. And so I love Joseph Conrad's prose as an outsider. I think Thompson is that outsider within the system. Yeah. And he didn't want to burn it down, which I think is interesting in the 60s where you had Oscar Acosta, you know, the civil rights attorney who was throwing firebombs. Yeah. You know, and then you have their letters are great. You know, Thompson's like wants to live within the system.

1:03:52Acosta wants to burn it down. And so Thompson wasn't, you know, radical in that. You know, we also see him, I think, more radical now. Like you said, he had more of a conservative small C strain in him. But he was outraged that his colleagues, who he was both a part of and not, would just keep perpetuating what was going on for their own benefit and for the benefit of others. One of the things I thought about from your book more recently, I know, you know, the comedian Hassan Minhaj. Yes. He's from he's from Davis. Oh, I didn't know. Ish kid. Oh, yeah. But, you know, you think fear and loathing Las Vegas.

1:04:27You go, OK, I understand it's not literally true because it's the recollections of a person who is obviously not fully there because they're so high. but i think his reputation would be fundamental hunter s thompson's reputation the reputation that book would be fundamentally different if we said well this was actually three trips as you point on the book and the fbi conference you were at it happened totally differently you like sort of basically that book is emotionally true and factually untrue which is sort of the distinction he was making in his comedy that like look the large events of this are true and things did happened to me but i've you know amped up the valence here and i've done this here and people are like you made it all up you're you know like he took his major hit about it probably lost uh a hosting game with the daily show around it and i'm from my understanding of history and also art i'm like what are you people talking about and it's interesting the way that not only do we is it unfair but it's this interesting way that we sort of throw the baby out of the bathwater where we get, we have to go, actually, none of the things, none of the underlying indictments are true either, which of course could not be further from the truth.

1:05:43Like everything he's saying is true. His personal relationship with it is more or less in some spheres, but you're missing what the point of art is.

1:05:58Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, That would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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