Scott Sigler joins Joe Rogan to discuss his Nocturnal adaptation into a TV show with producer Lloyd Levin, blending 80s buddy-cop procedural and conspiracy themes. His Ancestor—a horror-sci-fi hybrid about a 650-pound chimera—broke Amazon’s #1 sci-fi/horror charts after bypassing traditional publishing via podcasting. Sigler’s bold marketing, like CGI book trailers, redefined self-promotion, proving niche storytelling can outmaneuver gatekeepers while reshaping audience expectations. [Automatically generated summary]
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Scott Sigler is with us today.
We're going to get into that a little bit later because my man has made a big mark doing exactly that, releasing his own books on tape, you motherfuckers.
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This Thursday night, there is a show at the American Comedy Company in San Diego, California.
If you're in that area, it's going to be fun.
It's going to be Brian Redbanner, little buddy Brian.
So that's this Thursday night at the American Comedy Company.
There's still a few tickets left, so jump on that shit, bitch.
Tomorrow night, Wednesday night, I'm at the Ice House with Ari Shafir and Ian Edwards.
I was going to do one of those crazy shows where I bring a lot of people on, but I'm trying to work out all this new shit, so we're all three of us going to do longer sets.
Ian Edwards, if you've never seen him, really, really funny guy, and Ari, of course, is awesome.
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Alright, freaks.
We got Scott Sigler in the house.
We're going to get jiggy with it.
We got a lot of shit to talk about.
We're going to talk about some scary shit, too.
unidentified
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train my day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Normally you have very little or no control at all.
A couple points in my career, I've been very lucky to work with people who are like, let's get this as close to the vision you want as possible.
And this is the guy who produced Hellboy and Hellboy 2 and The Watchmen.
His name is Lloyd Levin.
And Lloyd has been...
They've kept me involved at all phases of this.
Right now they're finishing up the pilot script for it.
So I don't write the pilot script, but the guys who are writing it...
Kind of send me the plot steps.
Here's what we want the episode to be like.
Does that sort of match what you're looking at?
Because I'm writing the Bible for it.
So we're going to look at the 12-episode arc of the first season and make sure everything fits in so we don't have any crazy ending that doesn't make any sense.
It was an excellent movie and great source material to start with.
But, I mean, I'm a huge fan of Hellboy.
When this popped up, I mean, I watch Hellboy and I'm like...
Because my stuff's super hard science-based.
We try to make all the bad things plausible.
So when you get to the nasty bits and the blood's flying, you're fully bought in.
You're like, I know how...
I know how this works.
I learned about this in science class.
Like that.
And you go watch Hellboy, which is a little bit more supernatural, but the creature effects and the way everything was shot, and it was just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen to look up on the screen.
And now that guy's interested in turning this.
It's like I could not wish for anything more closely matched.
That was a whirlwind because I started out giving all my books away as free audiobooks, recording myself, chopping up his podcast, giving away his podcast for free to build up an audience because I couldn't get anybody in New York to pay attention.
Well, we don't know if you're horror.
We don't know if you're sci-fi.
We don't know if you're thriller.
We don't know if you're military.
All these different ass-kicking genres coming together.
So I couldn't get a book deal.
Start giving the books away for free.
Build up an audience.
Landed a print deal with Random House for Infected.
And part of that deal was immediately optioned by Rogue Pictures for a movie.
And that's the last I heard of it for like two years.
I got to go down and have a couple meetings with some people.
But...
Script writer, never got to meet him, never got to see the script.
It immediately just kind of went off into the weeds and nothing ever came out of it.
So this is pretty exciting so far to see things progressing.
Well, this is the second time around for me for doing this.
And it's a little bit strange, but largely it's very exciting.
Because what they do, I can't do.
I'm not the guy with the Rolex who's trying to control things.
The people who can...
Pace this out for a one-hour television show and can kind of visualize the 12-episode arc and then get someone to pay for it and get it shot correctly and get it up on a screen.
That's a skill set I don't have at all.
So it's really, I'm giving up a little bit, but largely it's exciting.
Like, I want to see the shit in this book on TV. I want to see it on the screen.
So it's really not that nerve-wracking at all.
You have no idea how it's going to turn out.
But at this point in my career, I concede that.
I realize that the end product, I'm going to have a tiny amount of control on it, and you're just kind of hoping for the best.
You hope they've got the right vibe, and they're going to want to put something as kick-ass on the screen as is in the book.
And as I was researching this, one of the phrases that came up, like, the biggest gang in New York is the cops.
And that goes back to when they first put in the police department and they started to get a lot of power.
The organized crime and the gangs were – you could get away with a lot of stuff.
But at some point, if you crossed the cops, whether they be good cops or corrupt cops, you were screwed because you just – they had a level of power you couldn't match.
So yeah, they're the ones who've been keeping this thing quiet because there are a pattern of serial killers in San Francisco.
And this other organization has a way of getting rid of the serial killers when the cops can't even find them.
So the cops are actually trying to keep this quiet and protect it because the end result is more people live and less people die, but it's completely illegal as hell.
When you write a book like this, how much when you're looking at human corruption and cop corruption, how much did you investigate?
Did you go and look at actual cases to find out what's plausible or did you just go completely on your instincts and What you know just by general information?
There's a significant amount of research, but it's broad.
It's not deep.
It's broad research.
Let's look into what kind of corruption there has been and how was organized crime set up in San Francisco and learning a lot of things that way because fortunately at this point in the writing career I've learned to try and stay away from diving down the rabbit hole because you can learn all this incredible amazing stuff and then 1% of it actually makes it into the book.
And all the time you've invested in researching that for these kind of thriller-style books is time that you get nothing out of that.
So a lot of the superficial stuff, learning how the mafia was run out of San Francisco and replaced by the Tongs and the Russians and a lot of other groups, all that stuff is super cool and a ton of that goes in there.
And the police department was pretty helpful in research for this.
It's not your typical, these are dirty cops and they're going to shake you down.
They actually are trying to do something that benefits the greater good, but they have to totally ignore the law they're sworn to protect in order to get the end result.
So it's a bit of more fun corruption if you can imagine that.
And I've always been fascinated by like, uh, the idea of secret societies that have been around for 200 years doing horrible things and pulling it off.
And usually, you know, even in, uh, in jest, no one takes those things serious.
But, um, But the idea of it is it's a constantly fascinating source for people because every now and then you find one that's real.
Every now and then you find like a Jerry Sandusky case where no one really did tell the cops for 20 years of child molesting.
It really did happen.
And you're like, whoa, like these things can happen.
Or the Miami – did you ever see Billy Corbin's documentary Cocaine Cowboys?
Mm-hmm.
Cocaine Cowboys 1 and Cocaine Cowboys 2 are two of my favorite documentaries ever.
They're amazing.
And this guy, Billy Corbin, who directed it, one of the things he pulled out was that there was one year where the Miami Police Department's graduating class from the police academy Half of them, all of them, either wound up in jail or murdered.
The guys who can shoot you and it's legal, I think everybody knows at the end of the day you've really got to be careful around those guys because they can kill you and it's okay.
I mean, how many times have we seen a cell phone camera?
Someone videotaping a cop and the cop beats the shit out of the kid and then you hear from the arrest papers that the police officer lied that the kid attacked him or lied that the kid spit on him or said something.
There was a guy on Alex Jones recently.
Same thing.
These cops just have ultimate power.
That's a bad thing.
Whenever any human being's got ultimate power over other people.
I mean, there's a certain amount of things people are expecting from a fictional novel, things that feel familiar.
Well, there's got to be some level of corruption.
One cop's got to be a total badass.
Somebody's going to rough some guys up just because you're familiar with it.
You've seen that.
So a lot of those things go into, a lot of them are invisible in the book.
I tend both with the science and with culture is to put in a lot of things you're already familiar with so that you you're like okay yeah okay yeah and if you say yeah 20 or 30 times like I know that I know that then when it starts to go up to the next level where the crazy shit starts to happen we've already got this rapport I've already got a rapport with you and you're you've allowed yourself to buy in completely so having those elements like you know realistic police things actually using the real history of the mafia in San Francisco Anything like that allows you to fall further
into the story.
So it's very important to use real stuff and kind of create that illusion.
So you get to write a story without the actual grunt work of getting down and writing.
You come up with a big idea and then you turn it over to somebody who does this on a regular basis.
It's exactly like taking lessons for something.
Like, here's what I want to do and I want to have this and then this guy and then this chick should get naked because obviously that's very important to a story.
And then this sort of thing should happen in the end.
I'd be like, alright, let's go see what we can do.
There's so many fascinating occupations out there.
There's just not enough time in the world.
But writing has always been a particularly romantic one.
You know, it's the idea of putting together something that, you know, crafting a story entirely in your head, slapping it down on paper, and then it exists entirely in the heads of the people that are reading it.
I've been lucky enough to do this full-time for five years now.
This is all I do.
It's my job.
And it's similar to MMA when you see the guys come in the ring and you're like, oh, look at all this pageantry and all this wonderful stuff and the spotlight's on them.
And, you know, except for the Ultimate Fighter show, you don't see the years that go in of just getting crushed and working all the time and all the sacrifice and all the things you got to do.
And then you get that moment, oh, the book's in the store and I'm on tour.
And that lasts two weeks.
And then you go right back into the dungeon and do it some more.
It's a great effing job.
I don't want to do anything else.
I'm so happy to be doing it.
But yeah, those moments of romance are like little tiny things that pop up every now and then.
Definitely, Stephen King is the single biggest influence on me, watching his ability to tell a story and characterize.
The thing that always mesmerized me about him is he could take a secondary character, give you one paragraph of description, like here's a vocal twitch, here's a physical twitch, and here's this thing they believe, and then you know that guy's name 20 years later.
He's the master of that.
And then Anne McCaffrey was a huge sci-fi reader, the Dragon Riders of Pern, that series.
So that was kind of more of the science fiction area of things.
And Tom Clancy was another big one, too.
Tom Clancy's ability to take thousands of different things, research them in detail, and kind of put them all together where they come together at the end for a super over-the-top ending.
He's on a completely different level than, say, the Twilight writer.
But you still run into that today.
Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight and these books come out and they blow up because it resonates with the end reader.
And all of this pompous, arrogant bullshit about I'm writing art, and you know what?
Unless your book has sold 200, 300,000 copies, no one's going to remember your name in 50 years.
You're going to be gone.
Unless you get your book dusted off somewhere.
So the guys who are actually making stuff that resonates with people, that makes millions of people extremely happy to read it again and again, And then go see the movies.
They get shed on all the time.
All the time.
And Stephen King now is getting an enormous amount of, he's getting his props now from the industry, I think.
But yeah, 25, 30 years ago, everybody was all pissed that this dirty butt kid from Maine came out of nowhere and has eaten all their lunches because he writes great stories that people love.
You go through Misery, and he didn't just play with a story there.
He actually played with the typography on the page.
So if you actually read the page...
Paul, the main character, has to write this story for Annie.
And then they switch font, bring in the margin so it looks like a regular typewriter page.
And then as the story's progressing, letters start to fall off of the typewriter.
And the farther it goes, first it's the N, then the E, then the L. And as you get towards the end of the book, where not only is Paul's real-life story happening, but the fictional story is coming to a conclusion too, there's all these scrawled pencil marks in there.
And just looking at the page starts to stress you the fuck out.
And it was It wasn't until the third time I read it, I'm like, because I read it once, I'm like, okay, that was killer.
That was killer.
I read it again, and then I'm like, I'm reading it the third time, I'm like, why am I so angry?
What is going on?
And I stop and look, and I'm like, it's just, so he even understands the art form of how visually things look on a page.
Well, I don't smoke, I don't partake in it, but there seems to be undeniable proof that it's some sort of a mental stimulant and it does something to accelerate thinking or does something to the mind.
Because too many people, like, intelligent people, like Bertrand Russell, like, wouldn't get on a plane if he couldn't smoke.
Like, if they didn't have a room in the smoking section, he wouldn't get on a plane.
This fucking poor guy was just attached to this tit, this tobacco tit.
Now, I'm coming to my fifth and final book with Random House, and I write these hard science techno thrillers with a fuckton of monsters in them and science fiction stuff.
So they always start out normal.
You're like, oh, I've seen this before.
This is a CSI episode.
Then things go absolutely haywire and you're in for the ride.
But I've been kind of jonesing to get back to the Stephen King that inspired me when I was a kid, which is you can spend so much more time on character and plot and developing things.
If you don't have these large structural organizations like the cops, we're trying to get, like, the one I'm writing now is Pandemic.
It's the final book in the Infected trilogy, and I'm trying to get help on what it's actually like in the Situation Room.
And the series has taken itself to that level, but I don't follow politics, for sure.
I have no fucking idea what I'm talking about in the Situation Room.
The first book Infected is, anybody who reads it as read Stephen King will see the influence as plain as day.
It's largely, it's one University of Michigan linebacker who blew out his knee in the Rose Bowl, so never got to go pro.
Would have been a number one draft pick, hands down.
But now he works in computer support, because he didn't finish his degree, and he can't play ball anymore.
So there's this giant, super dangerous guy with a lot of rage issues who works really hard to control his rage.
And then he gets infected by this alien vector, this other thing going on, and he spends a large part of the book trying to not kill people.
But most of that takes place in his apartment and in the town of Ann Arbor.
And that's the Stephen King angle, which is we're going to take a small town, we can develop this out, I can do whatever I want, and I don't have to justify why isn't the SWAT team kicking in the door and all these other things.
So now that I'm running this complicated crap with Situation Room, I'm like, I think that's kind of run its course.
I want to get back to the smaller cast and the smaller towns.
I grew up in small town Michigan.
I think that's why a lot of stuff resonated with me.
It's the same thing, just a different accent.
And I want to, for the future, I'm going to probably try and get back more into that kind of thing.
Yeah, I've read Horns and have read the first couple collections of the Lock and Key comic book, which is what he's becoming most well-known for, I think.
Well, it's – everybody who writes horror is influenced by Stephen King.
That's like – I don't know how to – Can't not be.
There's no way to not be.
A lot of people get into it specifically because you read those books or you read Peter Straub or any of the other – the heavyweights back in King's day.
John, Saul, etc.
And you read those, and those call to you, and you want to make shit like that.
And then when you start making your own shit, well, of course, it's going to have a little bit of that in there.
And King readily admits he's influenced by a ton of people, and he's like, if you read my stuff closely enough, you see their stuff in the book.
Actually, on my podcast because I give away all my books as free audio books, I play up That's like the joke within a joke.
Talk about awesome the story is going to be and all this other stuff.
And the fans, they eat it up.
It's funny.
That's my shtick.
I can't do stand-up, but I can do that thing.
Because you get used to that after a while.
When people get very successful at something and then they start to believe their own bullshit, and that's when you start to get that crazy self-importance coming on.
And the sad thing about that is when you start to see people like that, The majority of their fans are like, oh, God, he was so awesome back in the day, but now look at him.
Music, musicians, it happens to, you know, you know the guys that are the lead singers of these big bands, and they go fucking Looney Tunes, and the band falls apart, and what was it?
Anytime you've got a story where you've got someone in a position of power, it's almost impossible to write them from, here's a normal, humble person in this position of power.
If you're writing about the mayor of San Francisco is in the story, the police chief of San Francisco.
It's almost impossible for them to get to that position if they're a nice, regular, humble person.
Because at some point in any political construct, you have to become cutthroat.
And you have to look at other people as an obstacle to be removed.
And there can't be humanity involved.
Like everybody at the top politics right now, those are some cutthroat people.
Even Barack Obama didn't get where he was by playing nice, you know?
And so when you're writing a character about someone in that higher position of power, you have to channel some of that in there.
There has to be that level of Self-assuredness all the way up to arrogance and that dismissive nature as well.
If you're in my way, I'm going to tell you, you probably shouldn't be in my way because it's not going to go well for you.
And then that full-on confidence and then you just get rid of them.
But then you get, and that gives you so many storytelling possibilities.
You've got a creature that seems insignificant.
You can't even see it.
And yet, if we suddenly lost our atmosphere for whatever reason, or the environment changed significantly and all the humans died, this thing could still be around.
Maybe the universe really doesn't have a sense of time and just sets up these little extra seeds laying around, genetic material like tardigrades, just in case you assholes hit that button and nuke the whole planet sideways.
These little motherfuckers can grow into something that can survive in a vacuum.
But there wasn't a large need for it in a greatly temperate environment like Savannah, Africa.
So in the human body, all evolution, if there's something that you just don't need anymore and you're burning calories to keep that thing going and taking energy to support that, if you have...
Successive mutations where that thing gets smaller and smaller, there's no penalty.
There's no penalty.
Oh, well, his hands are this big and he can't use a spear.
You're not going to survive that long.
But if your earlobes shrink and you can hear just fine, there's no penalty.
So evolution kind of gets rid of the stuff that you don't need.
You hear about the Ukrainian army has been training dolphins to use like knives and they've been attaching knives and pistols to their head and they've trained them to use them so they can now use these knives to do things.
I'm sure the Ukrainian controllers, this is inherited from the Russian program, and they would have specific parameters to train them to go out and kill a certain shape or a certain color.
I thought Happy Feet was kind of a fascinating monster movie in sort of a way, a monster alien movie, because it dealt with the whole idea of living in this semi-aquatic world, and all of a sudden these aliens...
From the other part of the world, from the surface, come and fuck everything up and kidnap people and take photographs and shit.
It's really kind of interesting when you think about how much life must suck if you live in the ocean.
And these crazy assholes that live out above the ocean with these giant metal machines that they've created to literally scoop life in nets.
Imagine what it was like for whales, which are pretty effing intelligent and have language and communication.
And for, what, I think 100 million years, something like that, nobody screws with whales because you can't because they're gigantic and they just ignore you.
Then all of a sudden, here come these ships and here come these harpoons and they're screwed.
What I've heard about that's probably, you know, it's kind of an ice age thing or a place where there's ice, so the whales have to break the ice to come up to breathe, and a whale breaking through the ice so a blowhole can get out there.
You just stab that son of a bitch, and I don't know how they did it, but somebody figured out that's a lot of good eating.
The dolphin thing reminds me of, I've got, some of my fans were tweeting today, because that basically, the same thing happens in my book, The GFL.
So I've got Title Fight, which is what I emailed you on to start with, which is an MMA sci-fi story.
And then we have the Galactic Football League, which is a young adult series, but it's an American pro football league, 800 years in the future, with aliens playing the different positions based on their physiology.
So you've got 1,500-pound linemen, you've got receivers and D-backs that can jump 20 feet in the air, and it's this crazy hodgepodge of stuff.
But intelligent dolphins are part of that whole thing, too.
So it's that with the Galactic Football League series.
Which is the rookie, the starter, the all-pro, and the MVP. And then the title fight, I think I'm one of the few guys who's merging sports and science fiction, because a lot of times the jock is anathemic to science fiction guys.
A title fight is kind of a classic Rocky-esque type story, but there is a heavyweight champ of the galaxy named Korak the Cutter, and this is full-on octagon.
So in this universe I've created, in the Siglerverse, if you're going to be a combat fighter, you can't have any body modifications.
It has to be all natural.
So there's no hydraulics or no cybernetics or anything like that.
And he is of a race called the Quith.
Which have three casts.
There's a leader, there's a warrior, and there's a worker.
Kind of an insectile type approach.
And the warriors are these giant badass things with an extra set of arms.
They're very mean and very tough, and they are perennially the champions.
And then along comes this nasty-ass human fighter named Kyle North.
Who comes out of a place called the Purist Nation, which is, in my universe, this is the backwater, human-only world where they hate all the alien races and won't get along with anybody.
But they're mean and they're nasty, and this guy's name is Kyle North, and he was created by an author named Matt Wallace, who co-wrote this with me.
And Matt's an ex-pro wrestler, so he's a bad MF. And it's following their arcs.
The human who will do anything to be the champion, sacrifice his own body, kill whoever he's got to kill, make any deal, and the highly, you know, almost Ronan-like The honorable existing champion and the two different mentalities clashed for that final championship ring.
The second half of the book is nothing but the fight.
I'm trying to track out The growth of humans in just the last 50 years.
In the NFL in particular, 50 years ago, the average NFL lineman weighed 253 pounds.
At 253 pounds, you can't even play college ball.
The starting offensive line for the Dallas Cowboys 50 years ago could not get a job anywhere in football, probably couldn't even get a scholarship.
They're just not big enough.
So we've seen the average weight go from 253 to somewhere like 310, 315, somewhere in that ballpark.
And that's not evolution.
That's just better nutrition and these guys getting the opportunity and cultivating the bigger guys because 50 years isn't enough time for evolution to kick in.
But eight centuries from now, you can kind of see that progressing out.
So the main character in the Galactic Football League's name is Quentin Barnes.
He's a quarterback and he's seven feet tall, 380 pounds.
And they're like, well, he's kind of small.
He could play tight end.
He'd be a small tight end.
And then everybody's exponentially larger based on quarterback to lineman.
So Kyle North, I think, in the book, he's 6'8", 380. And that's the heavyweight champ of the world.
Yeah, Anderson Silva is a perfect example of what I think is like the...
Ultimate fighter body.
But occasionally you'll see a guy who's like really thickly muscled at 185 and you want to tell him, man, listen, you need to just get rid of all that muscle.
Just do aerobic exercises only from now on.
You've got plenty of muscle.
Just wrestle and kickbox and run like a lot.
And drop some weight, man.
You're hindering yourself by having this crazy beach body, you know?
It's like having too much horsepower in a car where your wheels can't get any traction because you're just spinning your wheels, and then you run out of gas quick.
That's what happens if you have too much horsepower in a car.
And that's how it happens in a person, too.
An overly muscular body, the resources that it requires are substantial.
You've got to pump blood through all these extra tissues.
That's serious shit.
It's a lot of work for your heart.
So you should be strong but as lean as you can be.
Well, it's been really cool to watch with WEC and the MMA actually getting more weight classes.
I wrestled at 126 in college, and when you're watching the MMA, there's nowhere to see guys of that size, at least until WEC came along and they started to get more of the flyweight in there.
And is the UFC going to continue to expand to all the weight classes?
I feel like the people who are saying that are the same people like back in UFC 1, 2, and 3 when they're like, you know, Gracie would be all tied up with something like, well, this isn't exciting.
I'm like, it's because you have no idea what you're looking at.
This is mesmerizing.
Dan Severn fighting Gracie is mesmerizing to watch.
Yeah, but for fighters, the correct weight class and going in and fighting at your optimum weight class can be the difference between being a successful fighter with a championship career and being a guy who never quite rises to the top.
You see in MMA, there's a few guys that are what they call tweeners.
They're not really a 155-er.
They're really too big for that, but they're really too small for 170. There's a few guys like that that are just somewhere in the middle there.
They should be maybe a 165. Like BJ Penn fighting crazy...
Yeah, BJ Penn, that's his choice.
He just chooses to fight the bigger guys.
He's not afraid to fight bigger guys.
And when he was younger, he was able to pull it off pretty well.
But the game is moving in a forward and progressing direction constantly.
You're never going to slow down.
The progress of these young guys that are up and coming.
They're better.
They're going to be better.
They're going to be more technical.
It doesn't mean that the older guys can't still win occasionally, but those guys have to evolve as well.
You see in boxing, Bernard Hopkins this week won a world title.
It's crazy.
I watched it and it's a beautiful performance because he just did everything correctly.
He's like such a craftsman in there.
And he's got these old school sort of moves and just knows how to cover up, knows where the punches are going before you even think about throwing them, knows what you're going to do, finds your patterns, and then knows how to step around you, knows how to keep you moving.
It was beautiful to watch.
Well, in MMA there's not a whole lot of those guys That are like these old school, like, perfect fighters.
Anderson, you know, Anderson's one of them.
And then you've got John Jones, who's just this phenom, who's, although he has all this great success, really, he's got so much to learn still, too, which is the most scary thing about him.
He hasn't even tapped into his potential.
And then the really good guys in the 170-pound division, there's like six or seven of them.
Like this weekend, there's six different killers that are fighting in Montreal.
You've got Diaz is fighting George St. Pierre.
You've got Carlos Condit is fighting Johnny Hendricks.
And Jake Ellenberger is fighting Jake Shields.
No, no, no.
Jake Ellenberger is fighting...
God damn it.
Nate Marquardt.
Jake Ellenberger and Nate Marquardt is a sick fight.
Was a big MMA fan, and it was this crazy spectacle, because that's the thing, like, wow, would a ninja beat up a karate master?
And then somebody said, well, let's find out, and put everybody together.
And I remember watching the early ones, and, you know, this guy's a fifth-degree ninjutsu black belt, and comes out and just gets his ass handed to him.
And a lot of the guys...
And I was excited, because I was a wrestler.
And you were watching this early on, and I'd never heard of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
I had no idea what these guys were doing.
But when the wrestlers would come in and just mop the floor with these dudes, and it was exciting for me.
It was justifying.
You're like, great.
Yeah, I took Taekwondo, and there's all these forms, and I fully appreciate what it is you guys do.
But these forms, I don't get it.
The fight's going to go to the ground anyways.
And you'd watch that in MMA, and the fight would go to the ground.
The guys would do things on the ground were the guys who would win.
And so really got into it then.
And then when Dan Severin came out, he's a Michigan boy, and watching his fights with it, and he was just awesome, awesome to watch.
Watching him fight a kickboxer and do full-on suplexes on guys who had no idea what a suplex was.
It was beautiful.
So me and all my wrestling buddies would get together and watch those and just go apeshit.
We couldn't even get through one of those without beating the crap out of each other.
It was awesome.
And then to watch it come up and what's happened since Dana has taken over, it's just been one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
It's very strange, as you were talking about, the size of football players changing over a period of 50 years.
Look at how much better the MMA fighters has gotten in the 20 years it has existed.
It's really shocking.
It's shocking to see now.
Like Diaz and George St. Pierre, both of these guys.
There was nobody like them 10 years ago.
They didn't exist.
Nobody was that good.
These guys are on a complete...
This is the highest level we've ever experienced.
And every time St. Pierre improves, like he just beat Carlos Condit, had a long time off in the recouping from his knee surgery.
He recovers from that and has the Condit fight.
A good, solid, long, tough fight.
Now, just a couple months later, he's going in there against Diaz.
I love that.
Because I think, you know, since it's only like four months later or whatever it is, he's got time to recover, time to rest up a little bit, and then boom, get right back into it.
So he'll be more used to the experience, probably put on a better performance, won't feel the ring rust as much.
I'm so excited about it, not just because it's a championship fight, but I think it represents these guys who are two all-time greats, in my opinion, and it represents them in their perfect primes.
They're both in the best situation they could possibly be.
Nick Diaz comes off the BJ Penn fight with a fantastic performance.
The Carlos Condit fight where Questionable decision.
A close fight.
But Carlos Condit used a very good strategy of moving and keeping away from Nick.
Nick has that aggressive, in-your-face style.
He wants to commit to a fight.
George does not dance around.
He doesn't dance around.
And with his wrestling style as well, this is going to be a really interesting fight.
First of all, Nick Diaz has a nasty guard.
He's got very good sweeps, he's got very good submissions off of his back, and he gets real comfortable there.
He knows how to tie you up.
You know, it's not an amateur that you have on his back, and he's dangerous off his back.
You have to mind your P's and Q's.
And then, you know, is he going to be able to stop the takedown?
If he does stop the takedown, you know, what does the stand-up look like?
I was trying to get published for about 11 or 12 years, writing a book every two years, working a full-time job, all the regular stuff.
And then back in the day, actually writing the submission letter and sending it to publishers, sending it to agents, going to conventions, trying to make the right connections, just to get somebody to look at the book.
Then I got an agent, and I wound up with a deal with AOL Time Warner.
My book, EarthCore, was supposed to be in every store in May of 2002. And then the 9-11 recession hit before it went to press.
And the economy dropped and Time Warner scrapped everything that wasn't profitable.
So I'd gotten to that point where I had a book deal.
Then the publisher folded.
It happens.
And it took me three years to get the rights back to my book.
So now when I get the rights back in 2005, I have this professionally edited book.
The editor's name was Paul Whitcover.
He was a great guy.
I thought it was a really solid piece of work.
And we can't get another book deal for it.
Then I learn about podcasting.
See what Dave Weiner and Adam Curry are doing with podcasting.
And I'm like, oh, that's really cool.
Serialized stuff.
So I went to look for audiobooks to listen to.
Because the first thing that happened in my head, being a writer, was somebody's putting out serialized books just like the radio dramas of the 40s and 50s.
I start Googling it, and after two days of trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong to Google it, and I can't find any, I then realized nobody has done this yet.
And at that point, I'm like, I've got a professionally edited book, and it was ready for mass market production.
Here's this new technology that if somebody hears an episode, they can immediately instant message it to a friend, email it to a friend, chat room it, and anybody who clicks on that is going to start hearing the story right away.
I've got speed of light marketing with this, and speed of light, word of mouth.
And then I'm like, shit.
And I figured out how to record, how to make an RSS feed, how to make a website, and got it all done just so I could get it out there and then put some marketing to work like that.
The first guy to ever do a podcast-only novel.
And hope it would get picked up by some blogs and different sites.
And it did, and I started to get a followership.
And when I got to the end of EarthCore, I had three other books done, and I just started podcasting them.
And I've been going at it ever since.
So I was of the mind that if...
The publishers are the gatekeepers and they won't let me in because it's not a western.
It's not a horror story.
It's not a vampire story.
They want very specific things they can sell.
You've got a lot of different genres.
They don't like you very much.
I was like, if I can get to the end user, if I can go to the end listener and show them how kick-ass my stuff really is, I'm betting money that my shit is so good I can give it to you for free and then they'll still pay for it anyways.
That was the thought process.
And I thought I would get a lot of followers and a lot of followers would turn into a book deal.
Initially that didn't happen because I was going to publish.
I have 10,000 people listening to me every Sunday.
I swear to God, they didn't know what the internet was.
I thought I had this awesome plan and everything's going to work out great and I get to the point where I'm supposed to get the contract and get the book deal and they didn't care about the podcast at all.
So then I just kept on doing it and eventually things kind of caught up.
Finally, the end of the story is we put out that novel Ancestor as a print book.
The one you've got is the one that's been rewritten for Random House, but this was just a little trade paperback put out by a small Canadian imprint, one lady working out of her garage.
We put that out on April 1st, 2007, and it was the number one horror, number one sci-fi book at Amazon.
And it was the number two fiction book on Amazon behind one of the Harry Potter novels.
The model we have now is if you just want it for free or you can't afford it and you like the story because everybody gets into pickles here and there, you can listen to every episode every week and you can get the whole thing for free.
If you download a book I've done before...
You're going to hear 30 episodes with an ad inserted before every episode, just like what you do.
So it's going to be ad-supported free content, and you can listen to it.
If you don't want to hear me talk before the episode and you don't want to hear the ads, then you can go spend money and buy the audiobook.
So I totally leave it up to the audience.
If you want to buy the print or buy the e-book, you can do that.
If you want to buy the audiobook, absolutely, that's why we're in business.
If you don't want to do that or you can't afford it, you can go get all my books, every word of it for free, everything unabridged.
We've covered everything with the advertising and advertising has become a solid thing for us.
After seven years, we're doing pretty good with it.
But largely, it's just the general attitude behind this whole thing has been, I don't think anyone out there minds spending money for shit that they like.
The problem is when you buy that record or you buy that audio book and you heard the sample and you're like, Then you get to the end of it and you're like, this guy got lazy.
This story ends crappy.
I have wasted my time.
I have wasted my money.
You're pissed off.
You're angry that you spent money on something that you didn't like.
So I flip that.
I'm like, I'm going to give it to you and you're going to listen to it.
And when you get to the end, you are going to miss work and you are going to go all night long and not be able to sleep because I'm in your skull taking over.
And then when they get done like that, I like that book.
I like the way that ended.
This is my author.
Then they go buy everything that I've ever made.
And if people get to the end and they didn't like it, it's no sweat off anybody's balls.
It's like, well, I didn't spend anything on it.
It's not really for me.
And it creates this crazy sense of goodwill that even people who don't really like your stuff...
As soon as they hear somebody else going, oh, you know, I really like a hard science monster story.
It's like, oh, you've got to check out the Sigler guy.
And, like, everybody loves the fact that you give – leave it up to the customer.
I mean, going back to Stephen King, if Stephen King was to start doing a weekly podcast of his fiction and actually read his fiction, he could charge for that and would make a significant amount of money for that.
But the biggest thing is the free because now there's so many entertainment options.
You know, when Stephen King was coming up in the 70s, there was movies, books, and TV, and that was all there was.
And now I've got to compete against fucking Xbox and PlayStation and downloaded content and podcasts and vidcasts and YouTube.
I've got to compete against all that just to try and get somebody to get, like, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and ask for 10 hours of your time to read this book that doesn't really mean anything.
That's a tough sell today.
That's a super tough sell, especially with younger kids because video games are amazing entertainment experiences.
For you to get them to put that down and pick this book up for a while, you've really got to bring good stuff.
Ancestor is an effort by a biotech company to create a herd animal with transplantable human organs.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people die because there's just not enough organs to go around.
And if you've got a bad liver for you to live, somebody else has to die.
It's a zero-sum game.
So they try and come up with a chimera.
It's an animal with genes from multiple species.
So basically something along the lines of a sheep or a cow, but with transplantable lungs, liver, kidneys, everything a growing body could need.
If they can pull this off and put this thing out to pasture, it's just like raising cows.
You just harvest them when you need them and you make trillions of dollars.
This is old-school horror movie sci-fi, so something goes horribly wrong.
And instead of winding up with a 200-pound herd animal with perfectly transplantable organs and goes out and eats grass, they wind up with a 650-pound pack predator.
And this, of course, happens on a remote island in Lake Superior.
So we wind up with all of our characters stuck on an island with 100 of these 650-pound pack predators that just go through you like a knife through butter.
They're not all that dissimilar from the American Werewolf in London you got out there.
But the biggest thing I did with them, I kind of combined them.
A little bit of a bear and a gorilla.
But the defining thing they have, and fans draw tons of pictures of this.
If you Google Sigler ancestor, you'll probably see this.
They have this giant sail fin.
So they've got a variation on the Dimetronon sail fin.
Because the genome is based on the ancestor of all mammals.
The thought is if they dial back the genetic clock, let's get back to the base set of code, then we will have exactly what we want and there won't be any endogenous retroviruses, there won't be any crazy stuff.
We can then from there customize the animal we want, right?
But they don't get it all the way right.
Yeah, that's one of the things.
That's from Predator.
Scroll back over to the left.
One of my fans did a full four-foot-tall maquette of the thing.
That's the monster right there.
And they had this sail fin that they keep back, and you start to find out they start to use it for communication.
So they signal each other when they're closing in on you.
So if you see that fin pop up somewhere, kind of like a land shark, you're effing screwed.
Whoa.
They're fully CGI'd in the trailer.
If you want to get the trailer on there, that's...
Again, trying to compete against YouTube, you gotta be on YouTube.
The thing with a book trailer is, if you make a really kick-ass book trailer, and it's the kind of thing that people will share, the money you spend on that is money that will continue to work for you.
People will keep watching that for years.
Every four minutes.
unidentified
Someone dies while waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney.
Aaron Proctor shot the thing, but we went out and found a guy to do it, and he got all his actor friends and put it together in the CGI, and we got permission from Century Media to use In This Moment's music for it.
We shot it like we were shooting a five-minute movie.
We went out in the mountains in the snow and had an effin' blast doing it.
But that kind of thing, people still watch that whenever from 30, 40, 50 times a day.
My trailer for Infected's at a quarter of a million views, and it just keeps getting views.
Somebody's gonna watch that, and that's exactly the kind of book they want, then they go buy the book.
It's the only form of marketing in the publishing industry that will continue to sell books for you year after year.
So we go out and spend, I spend a ton of money on my trailers.
I think one of the reasons why women don't trust porn stars or strippers or prostitutes or other women that will do things along those lines for money is because secretly I think there's a fear in the female community that All would have to happen would be just a few hundred girls start doing terrible things and they would all start doing it as sort of a mass movement.
And when a book like Fifty Shades of Grey comes along and it's ball gags and all the crazy shit that they're doing in that book.
I think we're seeing more, especially a lot of the porn stars being more open about what they do and going on their own podcast and talking about, like, yeah, this is my job to do.
This is super fun.
People are accepting it more and more.
In a book like Fifty Shades of Grey, hopefully the norms of our parents are going away.
And if somebody wants to go get laid and the other person's into it, what's the problem?
The only difference is, like, you could make it a little worse by leaving, like, pornography around, like gay porn or kiddie porn or something like that.
Yeah, his friend was always like, hey, you gotta go skydiving with me, you gotta go skydiving with me, and then one day, uh, she, her, her, her, uh, Parachute got tangled up with her emergency parachute and she died.
And this was like a week before he was going to go skydiving with her.
Does that give you the same drastic fight or flight response, though, as looking out, you know, jumping out of a plane and you're like, if anything goes wrong, I'm going to die.
Now that's something the NFL is facing because they've got, you know, a hundred years of results to look at.
But for something like the UFC, which is new, you wonder at what point does it come in where they start to go, do we need to increase size of the gloves or outlaw some of the various moves?
Because a lot of boxers who are very smart, they don't train that hard as far as sparring.
They don't spar hard.
They spar, like, they'll get good sparring partners and they'll, you know, box at like a 50-60% ratio.
You know, they don't try to murder each other.
Whereas there's a lot of MMA gyms where guys are trying to murder each other.
And not to say that doesn't take place in boxing, because there's some camps where it certainly does.
For the most part, if you're watching a high-end boxing camp where there's a lot of money on the line, they're having good hard sparring, but they're also working.
They're working on a guy imitating a certain guy's style or putting a certain amount of pressure on a fighter or whatever.
In the high-end camp, if you're dealing with Floyd Mayweather camp or somewhere along, anywhere in that range, you're dealing with it.
They have a strategy to it.
In MMA, you have a bunch of gyms like that, but then you also have a massive amount of gyms where people are just sort of making it up as they go along.
And they think the harder you go, the better it is.
So let's go hard.
We're badasses.
We're going hard every day.
And they'll go hard even to the head.
Like we had Bas Rutten on yesterday, and he was talking about Holland-style sparring.
They would go full blast to the body and to the legs, but to the head they would pull punches because they realize, you know, you're damaging each other.
In a lot of the less experienced MMA gyms or the less well-structured MMA gyms, they don't realize that.
And so they're punching each other full blast in the face in training, and they're fucking each other up.
Well, I'm just going to get back into some, like, MMA boot camp and stuff, and I did a little Krav Maga San Francisco, had an MMA course, and I was having a ball doing that, but I was not going to get hit in the head.
Like, this is my business.
And then when I actually did spar, I got hit about three times and never saw a punch.
Most of the time, they just engage in the war with a sparring partner.
You don't stop them and say, hey, what are we doing here?
You don't trust them now, because now he's swinging at you full blast.
It happens all the time.
I think that was one of the biggest problems in MMA. In the early days of mixed martial arts camps, those guys getting beat up too much in the gym before they ever even got into the cage.
It makes you wonder, and that's one of those things that I get into a lot in that Galactic Football League series I told you about, is size, speed, and strength continue to increase.
Now we're seeing things in the NFL Where it's just basic physics.
And you can put all the padding you want around a guy unless they do something drastic to improve that helmet.
The more force that is on, bigger, faster, stronger bodies are going to produce more force.
That brain bounces around inside the head.
And when you project football players out to the 400- and 500-pound size and fighters up to the 400-pound size, It's something you try and get into that in the fiction itself, too.
It's like, what is the average career like when you're getting hit on a regular basis by something that can bench press 1500 pounds and can run 30 miles an hour?
Your career is like two, three seasons tops, and then you're just a vegetable.
Unless you can get in the head and create some kind of additional structure between the brain and the skull, there's only so much that they can do other than change the rules to stop so much damage.
Did you, in your fiction, ever create some other sort of protective wear that people would wear?
Or did you eschew it altogether, which is what a lot of people think would be the solution, to stop a lot of the head-butting each other and smashing heads?
I'm like, well, this new helmet technology protects against this much, and then you just don't explain it, because if we could explain it, we would be doing it right now.
So it is taken into account, but the main character, Quentin Barnes, is a seven-book series.
We've got four books done.
And by book five, he's already starting to feel the effects of, you know, I stand in the pocket and if I do my job right, sometimes I'm getting rid of the ball and standing there when something that weighs 800 pounds is hitting me as hard as it can.
That's what you get paid to do.
And it's going to start impacting him.
So I'm excited about that.
The last three books start to get into character analysis.
What happens when the ultimate professional athlete, the top of his game, things aren't processing as fast anymore.
And he can't make the decisions as quick as he could.
And his reads aren't quite as good as they were before.
And his body's starting to hurt.
So follow him all the way from a 19-year-old rookie through this league to the point where he's like, at some point he's going to have to make a decision.
Do I continue to play and do what I love and die doing what I love, which is admirable and going to die anyway, so why not?
Or do you look to the future and be like, what are the next 40 years of my life going to be like?
It's a huge influence in the book as to what's going to happen.
When you just stop and think about what an actual football player today, a 310-pound man who can run literally like a track star of the 1930s, when you stop and think about the kind of damage they can do and you sort of look towards the future and extrapolate, 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now.
And of course there's genetic and physical limitations.
But as nutrition improves and science improves and genetic engineering improves, you're going to wind up in the future, pro sports, a couple centuries from now, pro sports, they're not even going to look human.
They're going to look like a different species.
That's how I came up with the idea for the book.
I used to do a little stuff for ESPN when I was in college, like manage the teams coming off the field or hold the dish and that kind of a thing.
I was 126 pounds and Michigan, Michigan State's a giant football game every year.
It's huge.
ESPN is there, and my producer, Al Killian, I'm on the headset with him, and he's got me bringing the teams out of their dressing room, and then he starts screwing with me, because I'm 19, I don't know any better.
And he's in my ears going, listen, if they don't come out at the right time, ESPN is going to lose $5 million of advertising, and that's going to be on you.
And I'm like, he was fucking with me because he could, because I didn't know any better.
And I'm like, so stressed out.
And then, let Michigan State out of the locker room at the appointed time, and all these giant human beings are coming out.
And then as they're coming out, They're walking by the door to the Michigan locker room.
The Michigan locker room door opens up, and standing in the door is Greg Skrepnack.
And I'm like, little tiny thing, I'm freaking out.
I'm like, Al, Al, Michigan's going to come out.
He's like, you don't let them come out of that locker room.
I don't care what you have to do.
And so I remember, he's giant, he's 6'8", I'm 5'8", I'm 125 pounds, and he goes to step out, and I just put my hand right on his sternum, I just stiff-armed him, and went, stop right there, you guys can't come out of that locker room yet!
And he just, he looked confused.
He was like, who is this little person?
And he managed to wait, and all the guys were behind him, and he managed to wait just long enough for Michigan State to come out, then I got out of the way, and they came out.
But I had, I wrote the whole concept of the book in that one moment, the whole GFL series.
I had my hand on this guy's ear, my nose came up to his sternum, and I remember thinking, it's like he's a completely different species than me.
And that was, and after that, I went home and started writing that book.
Like, what if we have different species playing football, and the whole thing blew up from there.
I wonder how many of these up-and-coming players are more aware of the risks now because of the past few years, all the different stories that have been coming out about players' depression.
I think the veterans probably are, but when you are 22 years old and someone's paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars to play football, and that's been your dream your whole life, you're still 22 and you're bulletproof.
I think the rules have to come in to adjust behavior.
It has to be run from the top down.
You were 22, and if I was playing in the NFL, nobody could tell me anything.
I'm going to go hit that motherfucker as hard as I possibly can.
That's how I make my money.
That's how people know me because I'm the guy who brings the heat.
It's never going to stop from the players themselves.
And then again, as you said, some don't have it in them.
But for a lot of men, yeah, it's a real issue because you have a whole reward system set up in your DNA that you have no control over and you have all these things that you enjoy.
There's very little outlet for it when you're working in a cubicle and it's hard to make your body free of the influence of all these instincts.
When I used to wrestle and finally got to compete against people my own size, because I played football too, and played as hard as I could and did everything I could, but I got my ass kicked.
I weighed 120, 125 pounds.
When I wrestled, going up against guys my own weight, I was able to dominate people and just things like a crossface.
It's kind of mean to say, I guess, one of the greatest feelings of my whole life is I suplexed the kid and broke his collarbone.
When I brought him up and put him back, he landed his collarbone and broke and he just stuck there.
And it was utterly primitive.
It was just, you know, why would you be happy if you just hurt another human being?
He was a good guy.
I knew him.
He's a nice guy.
But for that brief moment, all the chemistry inside and everything else was like...
I get into it a ton, especially in the new book Pandemic.
The thought process is we are modified by society.
We have a set of rules that we live by, a certain camaraderie, helping out our fellow man, helping our fellow women.
You know, in our growing culture, the growing equality of women, and there's no need to be a douchebag.
By and large, you don't need to be a douchebag.
You can get along just fine being a good guy.
And then, take these people who are aspiring to become these better people, who are genuinely good people, and then put them in the pressure cooker.
When you start to get into it and it's like you and me, Joe, we're both in this room, but if I get out that door, I'm going to live and you're going to die.
And if we both here stay here together, we might both die.
And there's a tiny chance we might.
That's what I play with a lot is what what does a person do when their life is actually on the line and their situation they have absolutely no control over?
Do we regress to that lizard brain?
Do we start looking out for number one?
And I don't get into it too much.
You protect your kids.
You protect your family.
There's a guy you've known for 20 years.
You two are going down together.
But it's largely when the strangers are brought together, get a small amount of time to gel, to get to know each other so it's not completely alien itself.
I love the way you became sort of self-actualized by going out and putting it online yourself and reading your own books and putting it out in an audiobook form and making it free.
I think it's brilliant.
It's beautiful.
I love the fact that it worked.
I love your whole philosophy on giving it to people that can't afford it and you just put a little ad in there.
And for folks who are interested in checking out more of Scott's book, the last name is Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R. I've got Nocturnal in front of me and Ancestor, and your website is...
Use the code name Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements.
Thursday night, San Diego, California, the American Comedy Company, Brian Redband, Tony Hinchcliffe, Yoshi, Billy Bonnell, Jason Tebow, It's going to be a hell of a show, ladies and gentlemen.
Go down there and check it out.
And if you're around Pasadena on Wednesday night at the Ice House Comedy Club, it's me, Ari Shafir, and Ian Edwards.
All right, folks, that's the end of this episode.
We'll be back in about 10 minutes with Justin Wren.