March 12, 2013 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:48:13
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Hello, my friends. | ||
| We're off and running again. | ||
| This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is brought to you by audible.com. | ||
| If you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you can save yourself some money by getting a free audio book. | ||
| And you can also, on top of that, as if that wasn't cool enough, you also get 30 days free Audible service. | ||
| Audible is really a fantastic service, a fantastic thing to have if you're a commuter, if you're stuck on a plane, if you're on the bicycle just staring at a fucking stupid life cycle thing telling you you're not going fast enough. | ||
| Books on tape are an amazing way to pass time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Audible.com forward slash go. | ||
| Joe? | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| What's my name? | ||
| My name is Go. | ||
|
unidentified
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His book's on here. | |
| Awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Nocturnal's on there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Are all your books on there? | ||
| No, they're not all on there. | ||
| Just Nocturnal? | ||
| Infected is on there. | ||
| Contagious is on there. | ||
| I sense a trend. | ||
| Blood is red. | ||
| Infectious, contagious. | ||
| Audible.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| Go there, get a free audio book. | ||
| There's more than 100,000 titles to choose from. | ||
| It's an awesome service. | ||
| And if you have WhisperSync, WhisperSync is an app that is amazing. | ||
| And what it does is you can listen to the audio book, then you can read it. | ||
| You can read the book. | ||
| It works with the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. | ||
| You read it and when you shut it off, when you shut it down, it picks up in your car or on your smartphone exactly where you left off the book reading it. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| The audio accompaniment syncs up to what you're reading. | ||
| So it's a really, really cool service. | ||
| Audible.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| We're also brought to you by Hover. | ||
| Hover is a domain name company that's owned by the same people that own Ting, our good friends, who provide the ethical cell phone service. | ||
| And Hover takes that same approach to domain name registration. | ||
| If you go to Hover.com forward slash Rogan, you can get 10% off your domain name registration. | ||
| It's a very cool company. | ||
| The service is very fair. | ||
| They have free Whois privacy, which I usually have to pay for on other services. | ||
| Very, very intuitive. | ||
| I've registered websites there myself. | ||
| It's an excellent place to register your websites. | ||
| And they're a sponsor of the show. | ||
| They support the show. | ||
| So we love them. | ||
| Hover.com forward slash Rogan. | ||
| Go there and get yourself 10% off your domain name registrations. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Tony Hinchcliffe is there, of course. | ||
| Hilarious Tony Hinchcliffe. | ||
| One of the best up-and-coming guys today. | ||
| Really fucking good writer. | ||
| Very funny kid. | ||
| Jason Teab, who's awesome, of course. | ||
| You've heard him on our podcast. | ||
| He's been on many of the Ice House Chronicles. | ||
| Very funny guy. | ||
| Real veteran of comedy. | ||
| Billy Bonnell, another very funny guy. | ||
| Billy's so funny, man. | ||
| That dude's going to blow up. | ||
| That guy in five years, huge. | ||
| And Yoshi, who's awesome as well. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that's Wednesday night at the Ice House. | ||
| We're also brought to you by Onnit.com, which is... | ||
| You know what the fuck it is. | ||
| Go there and buy some shit. | ||
| Buy some weapons. | ||
| People say we're selling weapons. | ||
| We're not. | ||
| We're selling fitness equipment. | ||
| Some of the best way to get functional strength is with something called a steel mace. | ||
| And yes, if you wanted to bonk someone in the head with it, it would be a good thing to bonk someone in the head with. | ||
| But that's not what it's for. | ||
| What it's for, you fucks, is functional strength. | ||
| What we concentrate on on it is things that improve your performance, whether it's your mental performance with nootropics or your mood through new mood or your ability to perform at high levels of energy for longer periods of time with shroom tech. | ||
| What we're just trying to do is improve the way your body functions, improve your fitness, your health and your fitness. | ||
| And that's what these mace bells are about. | ||
| They're these gigantic What a maze ball looks like, it looks like something that you would see in a gladiator movie. | ||
| Or a video game as your first weapon. | ||
| Yeah, it's a cannonball on the end of a long steel pipe and you swing it around and do all these different exercises with it. | ||
| And in controlling something like that, it's surprisingly hard, especially when you grip it really low on the end of the pole because you have all this leverage working against you. | ||
| And what it does is it gives you real functional strength. | ||
| We have 10-pound ones, and that seems like, oh my god, what 10 pounds? | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| Try it. | ||
| It's such a weird workout. | ||
| Club bells the same way. | ||
| We have these steel clubs. | ||
| I use a 15-pound one and a 25-pound one. | ||
| And they're fucking hard. | ||
| It's hard to do with a really light amount of weight. | ||
| It's all functional shit, like kettlebells, like battle ropes. | ||
| Go to Onnit.com, check out all our shit, and if you use a code name ROGAN, you will save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| 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
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train my day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Powerful author, Scott Sigler. | ||
| You know you're a bad motherfucker when you look at the back of your book and it says, a worthy successor to Michael Crichton. | ||
| That's pretty sweet. | ||
| That's some powerful praise right there. | ||
| I didn't even say that myself. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Isn't it awesome when someone else says something super cool about you? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| You're like, ooh, look at that. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty badass, dude. | ||
| And you said Nocturnal's being turned into a TV show right now? | ||
| You're in the process of creating something? | ||
| They're working on it right now, yeah. | ||
| How much control do you have as a writer when that happens? | ||
| I've been shocked by it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then I get to give them feedback. | ||
| Well, you could try these things. | ||
| And it's very collaborative. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| That's a beautiful thing to hear. | ||
| I love when you hear that. | ||
| It's one of the most frustrating things to listen to when you hear someone who had a vision... | ||
| And they tried to express this vision to these other people that had the money. | ||
| And the people with the money are like, no, no, no, we got this. | ||
| We need a girl. | ||
| You need this. | ||
| Add a black guy. | ||
| That's the way it usually works, though. | ||
| I mean, the guys who can raise $20 million get to kind of call the shots for the most part. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I've seen it. | |
| It's a weird thing to see. | ||
| I've told this story before. | ||
| There was a guy named Dave. | ||
| I don't remember his last name. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| But he was a really funny guy. | ||
| And he's a really funny actor. | ||
| He's been in a bunch of movies. | ||
| Like, a real over-the-top, hilarious guy. | ||
| Well, he got his first starring role in a movie. | ||
| And I had a very small part in this movie. | ||
| And I watched all these people in suits. | ||
| This man had cufflinks on. | ||
| Like, beautiful, expensive cufflinks. | ||
| A perfectly tailored, expensive fucking suit, pinstriped a fat Rolex with diamonds on it. | ||
| I mean, this guy was fucking loaded, right? | ||
| And he's giving this guy line reads, telling him how he should do it like, I want you to come in like, whoa, whoa! | ||
| The guy thinks he's funny. | ||
| He's got so much power and so much money that he literally is telling the comedian how to be funny. | ||
| It was a horrific thing to watch. | ||
| The movie was called Frank McCluskey C.I. or something like that. | ||
| Terrible! | ||
| Terrible! | ||
| They gutted it. | ||
| They had two ideas. | ||
| They had one that was going to be a PG-13 and one was going to be PG or one was going to be R. | ||
| And when they went, whatever they went less, it went down. | ||
| It was all toilet jokes. | ||
| Like you cut them out. | ||
| You have nothing. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| You stop the people who are good at what they do from doing what they do. | ||
| You hired them for that purpose in the first place. | ||
| It's kind of counterintuitive. | ||
| Well, you got to think a guy who is such a bad motherfucker that he did The Watchmen. | ||
| If he produced The Watchmen, that guy knows what he's doing. | ||
| He knows. | ||
| He's brilliant. | ||
| I mean, it's been great. | ||
| That was such a good movie. | ||
| 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's got to be an amazing feeling. | ||
| What a perfect combination. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The universe is probably about to send an asteroid our way. | ||
| Things are going too well. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's my fault. | |
| Things are going too well. | ||
| You're all going to die and it's my fault. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| That must be very comforting to know that you've got a guy that's willing to listen to you. | ||
| Well, I had the first book infected. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, that's amazing, man. | ||
| Like I said, that's an awesome thing to hear when things are just falling into place in the proper order. | ||
| Now, when you write a book and then you're going to have your book turned into a television series... | ||
| And you're sort of giving up your ideas to other people. | ||
| How does that feel? | ||
| Is that a strange feeling? | ||
| What is that like? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, that's got to be a very, very interesting process. | ||
| I wish you luck with that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks! | |
| It's going to be a fascinating journey. | ||
| And tell us, what's the plot of the book in a summary? | ||
| Nocturnal is kind of a throwback to 80s buddy cop movies. | ||
| And I grew up on the whole Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, all that. | ||
| Turner and Hooch. | ||
| Yeah, Turner and Hooch. | ||
| And just love that genre. | ||
| So this starts out as sort of a buddy cop procedural where there are Brian Clouser and Pookie Chang, two San Francisco homicide inspectors. | ||
| And Brian's having these really nasty, nasty dreams about killing people. | ||
| And early on in the book they go to a site and the murder scene matches his dream exactly. | ||
| And suspicion falls on him immediately that he's doing these borderline superhuman things to go shred people and body parts all over the place. | ||
| And then it turns into the procedural from there. | ||
| They kind of have to follow the rabbit trail. | ||
| It's hard to summarize it without spoiling it, but it gets kind of paranormal, not really the supernatural. | ||
| There's a rational explanation for everything, but they uncover this massive conspiracy within the police department. | ||
| There's been a cover-up that's been going on for 200 years. | ||
| To stop this, to let this particular group of people who are sacrificing innocence, let them continue to sacrifice. | ||
| Brian Pooh, you gotta figure out how to shut that down and stay alive. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's some deep conspiratorial shit, man. | ||
| 200 years of people keeping their mouths shut? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it plays off of the police department. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| That's a, that's, that's a fascinating subject. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If you, you know, discuss skull and bones or something like that, everybody's like, Oh please, it's a fucking fraternity. | ||
| They goof off there. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| Illuminati, all that good stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Half of them were murdered and half of them went to jail. | ||
| The whole thing was like a crazy criminal organization. | ||
| The entire police force was massively corrupt in the cocaine era. | ||
| If you go to Miami, have you ever been? | ||
| No, never been to Miami. | ||
| It's avoidable. | ||
| It's not totally necessary. | ||
| The amount of money involved back then was just astronomical and somebody is going to bite on that sooner or later. | ||
| The amount of banks there is insane. | ||
| The banks per capita there are much higher than anywhere else. | ||
| It's because they were all laundering cocaine money. | ||
| I mean for real. | ||
| I mean that's really the root of it all. | ||
| I mean the actual impact that cocaine had on the economy of Miami is undeniable. | ||
| But this guy wrote about how crazy the police corruption was back then, or rather did this documentary where he showed it. | ||
| I mean, it's possible. | ||
| People can go off the rails. | ||
| That was just a couple of decades ago. | ||
| You've got the money and you've got the power, and they're isolated from a lot of the self-examination. | ||
| Corruption at the upper or top levels of the police department can make a lot of shit go away. | ||
| That's the place it seems most likely That's realistic. | ||
| They have their hands on the drugs, their hands on the criminals, their hands on the money. | ||
| If somebody's going to go bad, that's a good place to do it. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating when you find out that it's true, though. | ||
| It's like, wow, a corrupt cop. | ||
| A bunch of corrupt cops. | ||
| They tried it. | ||
| You almost wonder why it doesn't happen more often. | ||
| It probably does. | ||
| They're probably pretty good at, like you said, it's the biggest gang around. | ||
| Why would you want to piss off the gang? | ||
| You know, there's probably plenty of little subtle corruption, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're licensed to kill. | ||
| And they can just say you attacked them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The thing people I think tend to forget is there's millions of cops across the country. | ||
| And with that many... | ||
| A sample set that big... | ||
| And those opportunities, some of those individuals, a very small percentage of those individuals are going to take that opportunity. | ||
| Some of them are going to be nuts. | ||
| You only hear about those guys. | ||
| You don't hear about the 999,000 that are just doing their job and willing to take a bullet for you every day. | ||
| But yeah, it happens. | ||
| Yeah, and when a Christopher Dormer case happens, then people go, Jesus Christ. | ||
| This could be a cop too? | ||
| That guy? | ||
| How'd that guy get through? | ||
| Or what happened to him overseas that turned him into that guy? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But how much of that plays a part of your writing? | ||
| Just sort of in a broad educational sense? | ||
| Like you just pay attention to all that stuff? | ||
| It's largely to weave the tapestry of reality. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's awesome, man. | ||
| I've always wanted to be a writer in some sense. | ||
| I've never had the time, but I've always thought it would be an awesome thing. | ||
| I wrote a terrible script once. | ||
| You know what we can do? | ||
| I was on the way up here. | ||
| We were talking about starting a new show called Get In My Shorts, where I talk to people who say exactly what you said. | ||
| We sit down for 10 minutes. | ||
| I interview you about the fiction stuff you like, the movie stuff you like, etc. | ||
| Tell me you think it's a stupid idea. | ||
| We were talking about this. | ||
| And then at the end, like, okay, well, let's throw out some ideas for a story, and I'll help bounce stories together. | ||
| And then when we get done, you get up and walk away. | ||
| And then like a week later, I've got like a 5-10 page short story. | ||
| And then that's the kind of thing that... | ||
| When you take off your clothes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That Joe got naked. | ||
| That sounds like it would be a fun idea. | ||
| That doesn't sound bad at all. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We'll go back and push that up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a... | ||
| The romance of it is so utterly overblown. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well, to everybody outside of it that doesn't have to do the work, that's where it's romantic. | ||
| Yeah, the work can be grueling. | ||
| Sitting there smoking a cigarette in front of your typewriter like you're Hunter Thompson. | ||
| Crap. | ||
| Who were your favorite writers when you were coming up? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Those are probably the biggest three. | ||
| And Jack London's another gigantic one, too. | ||
| When I was a kid, I read something somewhere where they were criticizing Stephen King's books. | ||
| I grew up in Boston, in Newton, one of the suburbs of Boston. | ||
| There was a lot of snobby people. | ||
| There was a lot of people that were like, Stephen King, what base writing. | ||
| I remember thinking that. | ||
| Why would you ever criticize a guy who was, first of all, so fucking prolific? | ||
| And it's really fun stuff. | ||
| How stuffy do you have to be to not appreciate a good Stephen King book? | ||
| 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. | ||
| They were pissed. | ||
| They wanted those books sold, not him. | ||
| Yeah, they're crazy. | ||
| You read The Shining and tell me it's not an amazing book. | ||
| The movie's great, but the TV show I didn't really dig that much. | ||
| But the movie, the Jack Nicholson movie, although very different from the book, but the book's sensational. | ||
| My favorite book of his is Misery. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Why's that? | ||
| He was on all sorts of drugs when he wrote that shit. | ||
| He was back in the day. | ||
| He was on some heavy-duty shit. | ||
| He said that, I think it was Christine, he didn't even remember writing it. | ||
| It was one of them, yeah. | ||
| Didn't remember writing it. | ||
| The car's alive, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he was just fucked up, man. | |
| First of all, he did a lot of cocaine and smoked a lot. | ||
| It was fascinating that he said that cigarettes were one of the things that he really missed when it came to the creative process. | ||
| You were talking about that with David Lee Roth the other day, that nicotine is such a huge part of the process. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Try some nicotine, Joe, see if it goes anywhere. | ||
| No, thanks, fella. | ||
| It's just nicotine. | ||
| I don't want it. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| You're not going to get me on that crazy horse. | ||
| But, yeah, so many writers have been smokers, you know. | ||
| But the thing about Stephen King, he quit. | ||
| And so he still puts out great stuff. | ||
| But I think he struggles more. | ||
| Do you hear what he does, though? | ||
| Supposedly, because this is a bit of Thieb's, that he allows himself to have one cigarette every time he finishes a novel. | ||
| No wonder he writes so many novels. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why the Thieb's joke is like, I wrote 32 novels today. | ||
| Yeah, that's funny. | ||
| That's interesting that he allows himself one cigarette a year or so. | ||
| Is that what he's doing? | ||
| I guess he's probably kicking out about a novel a year, if not more. | ||
| He's got a different... | ||
| Different style of writing, too. | ||
| When you can effortlessly bring in the supernatural the way he does, there's not an enormous amount of research that's necessary. | ||
| I know when he wrote The Green Mile, he researched a lot of things about the prison system and actual history. | ||
| But if it's a modern-day ghost story, you don't have to research anything. | ||
| You just sit down and do your thing. | ||
| And that allows him to write a little bit faster than a lot of people. | ||
| Did you ever read The Tommyknockers? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, I love that one, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's got the best... | ||
| In my opinion, the best supernatural scenarios. | ||
| He comes up with so many different... | ||
| Maximum Overdrive. | ||
| Did you guys like that? | ||
| I love that movie. | ||
| And it's interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You mean the Situation Room, the president? | ||
| Yeah, the White House. | ||
| Not like the CNN show with Wolf Blitz. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I thought it was amazing that Stephen King wrote so many books about a writer from Maine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, after a while, you're like, come on, man, really? | ||
| What the fuck are you doing? | ||
| You got another book about a writer from Maine? | ||
| Like, Jesus! | ||
| We're rolling on it. | ||
| I know you want to write a book a year, but fucking come on. | ||
| You can't be a baseball player or a fireman or some shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's got to be a goddamn writer for me. | ||
| That's why he got into The Green Mile, which is about as different than anything else he's written. | ||
| That day was amazing. | ||
| Christine is another one of my favorites. | ||
| Have you read any of his son's work? | ||
| Joe Hill. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What is the Lock and Key comic book? | ||
| Lock and Key is... | ||
| I forget where the family originates, but they wind up moving to a mansion they inherit in Rhode Island, so it's very similar to... | ||
| Forgive me, Lock and Key fans, if I have this wrong. | ||
| It's very similar to old school Stephen King. | ||
| Small town. | ||
| Family moves into this haunted house. | ||
| It's kind of shining-esque. | ||
| And there's a lot of different keys that will open up different rooms in the house. | ||
| And the rooms in the house are all these crazy paranormal portal type things. | ||
| But the artist, I believe, is Gabriel Rodriguez. | ||
| And they both won Eisner Awards, which is the Academy Award of comic books for this. | ||
| So he's really... | ||
| although obviously he's had an enormous amount of press coverage from being Stephen King's son and writing horror, you know, a ton. | ||
| He's also developed this comic book thing with IDW as the publisher, and it's an enormous, enormous success. | ||
| I read the one, I think it's called Little Yellow Box or something like that. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I don't want to even give away what the plot is, but it was great stuff. | ||
| It's I'll pull it What is that? | ||
| The Dark Tower series? | ||
| Is that King? | ||
| The Dark Tower. | ||
| I read the first one when it first came out, but all my friends are so addicted to that series. | ||
| Have you followed that? | ||
| I followed it up, I think, through book six. | ||
| And then, I don't think it's a spoiler at this point. | ||
| It's 20 years old. | ||
| There's a point in the series where Stephen King actually writes himself into the series. | ||
| So the characters are actually talking to Stephen King, who's going like, wait a minute, I wrote you guys. | ||
| And I was like, okay, that's just too meta for me. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| But I think the first three Dark Tower books are the single best trilogy of any kind anywhere. | ||
| Those three books are just effing meta. | ||
| There's still a masterpiece. | ||
| The series went on. | ||
| I think the first three books are... | ||
| There's never been anything better written, in my opinion. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| Yeah, he was a bad motherfucker and still is. | ||
| Heart-shaped box is his son's book. | ||
| That's it, heart-shaped box. | ||
| I read that one. | ||
| It's about a haunted suit. | ||
| Yeah, really good stuff, man. | ||
| He looks a lot like his dad, too. | ||
| It's kind of creepy. | ||
| Shades of his dad. | ||
| But his style is unique. | ||
| It's very much his. | ||
| It's sort of influenced, you can tell, but very much is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just the way it goes. | ||
| Yeah, he was actually a big proponent of reading other guys' stuff to help your writing. | ||
| Have you read Stephen King on writing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Great book. | ||
| That's a Bible for me. | ||
| Because it's – specifically because it gets rid of a lot of the pomp and circumstance and the nose up in the air. | ||
| It's so blue collar. | ||
| And for a small town guy like me, you read that. | ||
| It's like you can read On Writing by Stephen King and see stop falling in love with yourself. | ||
| Stop sucking your own dick. | ||
| Pardon the phrase. | ||
| You're not that important. | ||
| You're not that great. | ||
| Just tell the story. | ||
| Stop putting in words that are going to make everybody realize how important you are and just tell your story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
story. | |
| And that's like the main gist of it is how to streamline everything and not be a pompous windbag but still tell your great story. | ||
| So it really resonated with me. | ||
| Being a pompous windbag is a problem in pretty much everything, isn't it? | ||
| Oh, everybody. | ||
| Everybody, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It happens to a lot of people. | ||
| The pressure or something. | ||
| The pressure of success. | ||
| I think, yeah, the success, though. | ||
| I mean, if you're surrounded by yes-men all the time, and nobody's there criticizing your ideas, then... | ||
| And you're not objective, and you don't sort of self-analyze. | ||
| A lot of people don't like to self-analyze. | ||
| You get some... | ||
| Confused. | ||
| But we've all seen the real-life pompous windbag, and it's a shocking thing. | ||
| It's so gross, too. | ||
| One of the reasons why it's so gross is because you hope and pray that you could never be that guy. | ||
| You hope and pray that if the situation was reversed and you were in his shoes, it wouldn't be possible. | ||
| It couldn't be possible. | ||
| I feel like there's a lot of getting your ass kicked early in life and just failure after failure. | ||
| There's an enormous amount to be said for trying things and failing, as opposed to people who like the first thing they try, out of the gate. | ||
| Huge success. | ||
| And then you haven't developed that... | ||
| That humble nature of, I tried 28 things and 27 of them failed miserably. | ||
| So this one thing, I'm not going to get too crazy with this. | ||
| We're having success. | ||
| You tend to see that in Hollywood and in writing. | ||
| Some people come out of the gate, get that big novel. | ||
| It blows up. | ||
| Then after that, they don't have much success and they can't figure out what's going on because they think they're very important. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| They change their own frequency that they're putting out because of their success and that sabotages them. | ||
| And that's the sad thing. | ||
| That's what hamstrings them. | ||
| It happens to so many, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To so many different art forms, too. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Was it partying, drugs, adulation? | ||
| Adulation's a serious possibility. | ||
| Adulation's a big drug. | ||
| It's a scary one. | ||
| You can get delusional in that shit. | ||
| It's a fascinating one for character development though, isn't it? | ||
| It is. | ||
| You can play off them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If you crush them, then too bad, I told you. | ||
| When you start to write a story, do you have a full idea in your head before you sit down in front of a computer? | ||
| Or do you have, like, I want to write a vampire cop drama? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Do you have a bunch of different ways that it gives birth in your mind? | ||
| It tends to come from several different places. | ||
| I watch as much science TV as I can and I read up as much as I can. | ||
| And in the natural world, there's always something like, oh my, look at that. | ||
| Look, this creature can do that thing. | ||
| The water bear can survive in space. | ||
| You know, holy crap. | ||
| And that'll stick. | ||
| And then at some other point, you will watch something about, you know, here's asexual reproduction. | ||
| If they're in this particular chemical environment, then that'll stick. | ||
| And then a couple things stick. | ||
| And then at some point, I'll just be working on something else and four or five things will come together. | ||
| And then that's the center point of the idea. | ||
| I'm like, well, what if we had creatures that did this and then this happened and then they took over the world kind of a thing. | ||
| From there, you have to go and hammer out an outline. | ||
| I try and hammer out an outline with the tiny bit of science knowledge that I have. | ||
| And then I'm really fortunate, again, because of the podcast, I started getting people, scientists, emailing me going, wow, I love what you're doing. | ||
| You're really trying to get the science right. | ||
| You fucked this up. | ||
| So if you get into neurochemistry again, I'm a PhD, give me a call. | ||
| And I started getting all this shit in. | ||
| Oh, that's amazing. | ||
| Now I've got this battery of people. | ||
| I'll do the outline. | ||
| And then I will send them all the outline and say, all right, tear it up. | ||
| And then they shred it. | ||
| They shred it and they'll come back. | ||
| Well, you can't do that, but here's some other. | ||
| We just found out about this. | ||
| You can do this. | ||
| Oh, that is so cool. | ||
| What an awesome resource. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And they have a blast with it. | ||
| And then I restructure my outline, do a detailed first draft, and then we repeat. | ||
| For people that are listening right now that are going, well, what's his podcast? | ||
| What's the name of your podcast? | ||
| The podcast is Scott Sigler's Audiobooks. | ||
| And if you go to iTunes and search for Scott Sigler, S-C-O-T-T-S-I-G-L-E-R, you'll find that. | ||
| Or scottsigler.com. | ||
| We have them there. | ||
| We've been going on seven years now. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Every Sunday for seven years we put on an episode. | ||
| I want you to pull a picture up of those water bears. | ||
| I think they're also called tardigrades. | ||
| Tardigrades, that's it, yeah. | ||
| They can survive in space. | ||
| It's so weird when nature is as crazy as anything you could ever think of in fiction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's just undeniable. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Here's a photograph of it. | ||
| This is a real thing. | ||
| That's why the science is... | ||
| Look at these fucking things. | ||
| And they're super tiny. | ||
| But, of course, my brain immediately looks at this and goes, okay, what if that was eight feet long? | ||
| Let's make that thing eight feet long. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| And let's make that hide pretty much bulletproof. | ||
| Let's do those two things to it. | ||
| For the folks listening and not watching, this thing looks like... | ||
| It looks like a giant rhino with a circular diamond drill for a mouth. | ||
| Fleshlight. | ||
| Yeah, like a super diamond alien fleshlight. | ||
| It looks like a Star Wars creature. | ||
| It also looks like it has a cotton cape on or something like that. | ||
| It doesn't look like it's skin. | ||
| Dude, that thing survives in space. | ||
| It can survive in space. | ||
| The membranes get a little different when you get down that small. | ||
| That's the kind of thing... | ||
| Where maybe a graphic artist who does a lot of acid could come up with that. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| And then it shows up and you're like, that's the picture right there. | ||
| Oh my god, look at its fucking mouth. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| For the folks at home, it's literally got a giant shark mouth. | ||
| Wow, that's ridiculous. | ||
| See, this is it. | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| I just realized this. | ||
| I'm finishing up a book called Pandemic, which it goes infected, then contagious, then pandemic. | ||
| And there's a creature in Pandemic, and the mouth is similar to that, and I just realized that that's where I got it from. | ||
| That thing has been floating in the back of my head forever, and it's actually popped out in this book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Look at that photo. | ||
| That is insane. | ||
| That is insane. | ||
| Folks, you can find them. | ||
| They're called either water bears, people call them that, or tardigrades, I think is the scientific name for it. | ||
| And they are the creepiest looking motherfuckers. | ||
| How small are those things? | ||
| They're microscopic? | ||
| They're microscopic, yeah. | ||
| They're incredibly, a couple of microns, I think. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| It's spooky little creatures. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then this thing could start evolving and... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It would start over real quick. | ||
| If we got wiped out, it would start over again pretty fast. | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| I wonder what it would be next. | ||
| Would it be dolphins? | ||
| Would it be some sort of sea creature? | ||
| This is the shit I think about all the time for the books. | ||
| And odds are you're not going to get any sea creature for a couple reasons. | ||
| Number one, no hands. | ||
| There's no tool use. | ||
| And number two, no fire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The two biggest factors that go in are tool use and fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| And then I think you also are not going to get – this drives me crazy when I watch sci-fi shows about this man-lion. | ||
| Lions don't need to evolve. | ||
| They're an apex predator. | ||
| There's no need for them to change anything for the most part. | ||
| It's the little things that have to run from everything else. | ||
| And especially with humanity, I think, as we evolved up, the biggest thing was losing the hair and having to invent some way to stay warm. | ||
| And you start to use tools to make clothes and tools to hunt. | ||
| And as soon as something has to use a tool and figures that out, that's the flashpoint. | ||
| From there it goes crazy. | ||
| Why did we lose the hair? | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It is fascinating what you say, though, about the intelligent sea creatures never be able to get their physical environment to change. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, that's an interesting point. | ||
| I never really thought about the no fire thing. | ||
| But yeah, how could they create something? | ||
| If you can't make fire and refine metal, then you are cut off at the knees as far as what you can do from there. | ||
| And James Cameron played with that in The Abyss, with having his intelligent water-based species. | ||
| But it's very difficult to conceive any way you could get that to going. | ||
| So it's land-based. | ||
| It's got to have hands or appendages that are ready to become hands. | ||
| A couple of basic things. | ||
| So it could easily start out with some kind of primate or some kind of small mammal right off the bat. | ||
| But there's also some pretty kick-ass reptiles out there and birds. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pistols? | |
| Yeah, so right now this was on the news today that they lost the dolphins that had the pistols or the guns on them. | ||
| And they're on the loose right now. | ||
| So there's these rogue dolphins that have guns on them that are just terrorizing the sea. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I swear to God, it's true. | ||
| Dolphins apparently swam away to get laid. | ||
| They were out looking for some. | ||
|
unidentified
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And they haven't come back. | |
| Why would they come back? | ||
| They got guns, man. | ||
| Guns and bitches. | ||
| Yeah, they got guns and they're trying to get someone. | ||
| Dolphins are one of the few creatures that they murder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They'd kill for no other reason than just a kill. | ||
| And also dolphins rape, which is messed up. | ||
| So now you've got these things swimming around. | ||
| And they're trained to kill divers is the problem. | ||
| They're specifically trained to kill divers. | ||
| So... | ||
| I'm going to rape a dolphin Saturday at Sea Road in San Diego. | ||
| These dolphins are trained to kill divers? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're military. | ||
| They're trained to kill. | ||
| That's the program. | ||
| It's the aquatic mammal program. | ||
| Specific divers or any divers? | ||
| Enemy divers. | ||
| Enemy divers. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How fucked up is that? | ||
| They train dolphins to go out and be assassins. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a douchey move. | ||
| Dolphins rule. | ||
| Dolphins are very creepy, though. | ||
| They kill babies. | ||
| They kill the baby when a female gives birth. | ||
| I think she won't mate with a male for several years. | ||
| So if a male comes along and it's not his babies, he just kills them. | ||
| Get her to mate again. | ||
| Dolphins are the gangsters of the sea. | ||
| They are not messing around. | ||
| Except for killer whales. | ||
| Killer whales eat them. | ||
| Nobody screws with a killer whale. | ||
| The apex? | ||
| Of the apex? | ||
| Next to humans? | ||
| Other than humans, they've got no predator. | ||
| There's nothing that hunts a killer whale. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Take you right off. | ||
| They don't give a fuck what they get. | ||
| Dolphins, whoops. | ||
| Sometimes they get dolphins on purpose. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's nothing they can do. | ||
| There's nothing they can do. | ||
| Who was the first guy to try to harpoon a whale? | ||
| That guy was a bad motherfucker. | ||
| You got to think about that. | ||
| That's a gangster move. | ||
| I'm going to eat a whale. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, that guy's not playing games. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's harsh life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Harsh life when you've got to eat a whale. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They don't like the jocks very much. | ||
| Yeah, what is that story about? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's straight out. | ||
| I'm a huge MMA champ. | ||
| Heavyweight champion of the galaxy. | ||
| Heavyweight champion of the galaxy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just a brutal fight. | ||
| How big is the human? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And just cut, too, because this is our cover with him. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That looks like gay porn, son. | ||
| It does. | ||
| You might want to switch that up. | ||
| Why is he flexing so hard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's where we got that. | |
| Why is he flexing so hard? | ||
| Well, we grabbed an image and we searched for MMA fighter and all the image sites and we had a lot of gay porn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all we got. | |
| That's all we got. | ||
| Unfortunately. | ||
| And fortunately, depending on your sexual preference. | ||
| I was hoping to find just some gigantic Dan Severin type dude and none of that was available for us. | ||
| Well, Fedor Emelianenko, one of the greatest fighters of all time, he didn't have a body anything like that. | ||
| That looks like James Irvin. | ||
| But even bigger than James Irvin. | ||
| Maybe James Irvin when he was a heavyweight. | ||
| He was a very muscular MMA fighter. | ||
| But most guys aren't built like that. | ||
| Either you have to have extreme genetics to be built like that, or you've got to spend too much time lifting weights. | ||
| You get some really cut physiques at the middleweights and light heavyweights. | ||
| Not as much. | ||
| The best guys are longer and leaner. | ||
| You know, the really heavily muscled guys, it's just too much fuel those bodies require. | ||
| You see like a guy... | ||
| Like spiders, spiders, he's not that cut. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Do you think that affects their fighting performance to be overly muscled? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's just not effective. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Close to natural weight. | ||
| Close to natural weight is great. | ||
| If you can compete against the larger guys who cut weight... | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, they're thinking about going to 115 as well. | ||
| We went to 125. You're like, yes! | ||
| Those guys are like Tasmanian devils. | ||
| Some people don't like it because they say those fights aren't as exciting, but I think they're the most technical fights. | ||
| Like Mighty Mouse Johnson is one of my favorite fighters. | ||
| Demetrius Johnson, he's the flyweight champion. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think for some people, bigger is better, especially Americans. | ||
| We're such knuckleheads. | ||
| We want to see the biggest guy, and we'll see the biggest guy in the house. | ||
| It's like John L. Sullivan. | ||
| You can lick any man in this room. | ||
| They used to say it back then, lick. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I don't know why it was lick. | ||
| You can't really say that now. | ||
| I can lick any man in this room. | ||
| Everybody's like, hey, what the fuck are you trying to say, man? | ||
| I think I was six and I got in trouble at my grandma's house. | ||
| And my grandma's is a German immigrant. | ||
| And she's like, I'll give you such a lick. | ||
| And I'm like, I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know what's going on, grandma, but I'm just going to behave from now on because I don't want to crush it. | ||
| That's a terrifying threat. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was like, what are you talking about, old woman? | |
| I don't know what you mean by that. | ||
| Just hold me down and lick me. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is that all on the same card? | ||
| Yeah, that's all on the same card. | ||
| Yeah, that's live from Montreal. | ||
| That's exciting. | ||
| How long have you been an MMA fan? | ||
| Oh, like UFC 1. Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just experienced it recently. | ||
| Is that enough time for him to analyze the other fighters' style though and work it in? | ||
| Because an enormous amount of training has got to be, he's going to do this. | ||
| Here's his tendencies. | ||
| When he puts his right foot forward, this is what's going to happen. | ||
| Do you think four months is enough time for him to... | ||
| Because that guy's an effing killer, man. | ||
| Both guys are killers. | ||
| But I think, first of all, St. Pierre has been eyeing Diaz for a long time because they were supposed to fight before. | ||
| Diaz tested positive in a marijuana thing and it took him all this time before he was able to get a fight again after the Condit fight. | ||
| He's had a bunch of weird issues outside of the cage. | ||
| And that one being a big one, that they suspended him for a long time for marijuana, which is just really fucking ridiculous. | ||
| That really drives me bananas. | ||
| But he's been wanting this fight forever. | ||
| Diaz has been calling out for this fight forever. | ||
| And George St. Pierre has been cage-side for his fights and talking about fighting him. | ||
| So these guys have been sizing each other up for a long time. | ||
| It's not just four months to get ready. | ||
| This is a long time coming. | ||
| We played this yesterday. | ||
| There's a video of Nick Diaz hitting a speed bag for 23 minutes in a row. | ||
| It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen. | ||
| He just... | ||
| 23 minutes! | ||
| That is so long! | ||
| Most folks have no idea how difficult it is. | ||
| I don't think I can keep my arms up for 23 minutes, let alone hit the bag. | ||
| And he's hammering at it. | ||
| These guys are both in amazing, amazing shape. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Does George kick him from the outside? | ||
| Does Nick pressure him into a stand-up slugfest? | ||
| You know, what does it become? | ||
| It's going to be fascinating. | ||
| I can't wait. | ||
| I'm excited for that fight. | ||
| Yeah, I'm very excited for it as well. | ||
| You were like one of the first guys that I ever heard of That took his books and put it on the internet as an audio podcast. | ||
| What led you to decide to do that? | ||
| I couldn't get a book deal, frankly. | ||
| Going back, I guess, geez, I guess 15, 16 years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How can you not put this out? | ||
| And their question is, well, what's a podcast? | ||
| They had no idea what it was. | ||
| Here's verifiable stats. | ||
| They didn't know what the internet was. | ||
| They had no idea. | ||
| They didn't know what the internet was? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And New York crapped an egg roll. | ||
| I mean, it was awesome. | ||
| Because I had a new agent at that point who had the book Infected on their desk. | ||
| And people were like, oh, this is it. | ||
| We like this. | ||
| This is good. | ||
| Then all of a sudden, this guy that they've never heard of anywhere is number one in horror, number one in sci-fi. | ||
| And then that got us into auction for Infected. | ||
| And then I've been rolling ever since. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| What an awesome story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So you're sort of self-created. | ||
| Very much self-created. | ||
| I love stories like that. | ||
| A lot of it is my audience. | ||
| We're going to go sell this book on this day, spread the word, and they went out and spread the word. | ||
| And this is the audience that you created with this blog, this podcast of your novels. | ||
| Did you profit off of it? | ||
| How did you have it set up? | ||
| Did you have to pay for it to download it? | ||
| No, it's always been free from square one. | ||
| The whole book is free. | ||
| The whole book is free. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The way it's been from Square One. | ||
| That's a beautiful way to do it, man. | ||
| So that way you pay for the bandwidth costs and all that stuff through the advertising. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just leave it up to – it's up to them. | ||
| It's their money. | ||
| You decide if you want to spend it or not. | ||
| It's not up to me to trick you. | ||
| That's an awesome ethic. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And that's sort of the same thing we do with this podcast. | ||
| We know there's – some people have, like – They have where you sign up and you can pay X amount of money and access the old podcasts. | ||
| And some of them have it set up where if you want to watch on Ustream, you got to pay for a monthly thing. | ||
| But I've always felt like what this thing does is so amazing is the word of mouth. | ||
| And the best way to do that is to make it as accessible as possible. | ||
| To put it out there as quickly and as easy and to make it as downloadable as possible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| Stephen King's the worst guy ever to read his books. | ||
| His books are awesome, but when he's reading them, I'm like, oh, this motherfucker can't read books! | ||
| Not his thing. | ||
| He doesn't command it enough. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe you have a strong voice. | ||
| Stephen King has sort of almost like a mumbly voice while he's reading his amazing book. | ||
| Ari's more mumbly. | ||
| Ari would never be able to pull it off. | ||
| Well, the performance of the book, I've had seven years to polish that up. | ||
| When I started out the first on Earth course, I just used all the voices I used to use to make my buddies laugh in high school. | ||
| I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing. | ||
| Just throw it in there and we'll make it as entertaining as possible. | ||
| And I've always tried to make every book as over the top as it can be. | ||
| So there's a loud rock intro, loud rock outros. | ||
| I'm, you know, peeking the meters when I'm talking and just trying to make it exciting and energetic and fun. | ||
| It's not just money, it's people's time. | ||
| If you're going to take an hour of somebody's time, you better have some good shit because they can't get that hour back ever. | ||
| Dude, you're saying all the right shit. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| That's how you should think, man. | ||
| I think it would be awesome if everybody thought that way. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How many hours do you think it would take to read one of these books? | ||
| Do you think you can read one of these in 10 hours? | ||
| I think somebody can read it 10 to 20 hours. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 10 to 20 depending on... | ||
| My stuff reads a little faster. | ||
| It looks thicker than it is because there's an enormous amount of dialogue. | ||
| There's a lot of regular guy dialogue and that means like two, three words line, two, three words line, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. | ||
| Stuff goes real fast. | ||
| So people are surprised at how fast they read it. | ||
| Like this giant honking thing, they're like, I can't believe I finished it so fast. | ||
| I'm like, well, there's an enormous amount of just dialogue in there. | ||
| And this other book that I have here is Ancestor. | ||
| What's this one about? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And what do these things look like? | ||
| 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... | ||
| Yeah, someone CGI'd this? | ||
| Yeah, my buddy Kevin Capizzi, who's amazingly talented. | ||
| Go to YouTube and search for Sigler Nocturnal Trailer. | ||
| And so you're doing a movie of Nocturnal, but Ancestor... | ||
| Oh, Sigler Ancestor trailer, excuse me, yeah. | ||
| Ancestor, or this is going to be a TV series. | ||
| What is going on with Ancestor? | ||
| Nothing right now. | ||
| There have been a couple people who have been like, we'd like to... | ||
| But there's a trailer? | ||
| Yeah, I do trailers for the books. | ||
| 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
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Someone dies while waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney. | |
| Imagine a technology that could provide those organs for a fee, and imagine what a company would do to monopolize that technology. | ||
| The biotech firm Genata tried to solve this problem by creating the ancestor. | ||
|
unidentified
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A creature with transplantable human organs. | |
| But they didn't get the docile herd animal they envisioned. | ||
| Instead, their work awakens something big. | ||
| Something evil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
something very, very hungry. | |
| You want a monopoly? | ||
| A monopoly on human life. | ||
| Nothing sells like life itself. | ||
| When we succeed, we will be the only vendor and be able to charge whatever the market will bear. | ||
| And for the millions of people not quite ready for death, the market will bear quite alone. | ||
| That's my favorite part. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I don't know what that is, but that sure as fuck ain't no cow! | ||
| So you created that yourself? | ||
| No, we had people do it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, that's really interesting. | ||
| Is this a common thing? | ||
| Am I just out of the loop? | ||
| It's getting more common, yeah. | ||
| And a lot of book trailers, they're awful. | ||
| It's a floating book cover with music and words floating in. | ||
| But there's people who go out and just shoot, I mean, they do full-on three, four-minute movies to try and sell the book. | ||
| Have you seen one of these, Brian? | ||
| Have you ever seen one, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not this style, but I've seen something like it before. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I've never heard of it. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| We did the first one in 2008, and it was relatively unheard of now, but it's more common now. | ||
| Now, as a professional writer and a man, I need you to explain to me Fifty Shades of Grey. | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| What the fuck is going on? | ||
| It's the naughty factor, I think. | ||
| And I'm guessing here. | ||
| I'm trying to figure out, primarily, that's a female readership. | ||
| Trying to figure out the female mind, which is not something I'm that gifted at. | ||
| Or gay dudes pretending to be straight, they might read that. | ||
| I don't know, but I think, number one, it's... | ||
| It's not your usual sex scene. | ||
| This is some stuff where you read and you're like, oh my goodness, can you put that in a book? | ||
| And then at some point it tipped and enough people had read it that it became okay. | ||
| You've got the hive mentality. | ||
| Well, God, a million people have read this, so it's not that bad. | ||
| And then the other factor that I think everybody just ignores is I haven't read it, but it's probably a great book. | ||
| It does not sell that many copies unless that writing specifically appeals to the people who are buying it and they love the reading experience. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Go back to the terrible part. | ||
| What's terrible about 200 girls going out and having a grand old time? | ||
| Nothing terrible. | ||
| I mean, terrible from their point of view. | ||
| From the established, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, their own social norms of not wanting to be a slut and not wanting to be promiscuous. | ||
| I think a book like Fifty Shades of Grey can literally change culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I'm sure you got it. | ||
| So did Sex and the City. | ||
| Sex and the City. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I bet the sales of bondage instruments have gone up significantly since that book has come out. | ||
| Well, you think about women in the 90s, before Sex and the City came along, it was sort of like there was no MILF world. | ||
| People weren't really turned on by really hot 50-year-olds. | ||
| That didn't exist. | ||
| There was none of that. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, it became okay. | ||
| And then all these women that were over 40 were like, fuck it, I'm getting divorced. | ||
| I'm going to go out and get some dick. | ||
| Hang out with my friends. | ||
| I don't like hanging out with men either. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Somewhere along the line, they realized their marriage is a big charade. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Nobody's getting hurt. | ||
| Yeah, unless your ball gags on real tight, you get hurt. | ||
| You get like a lip strain. | ||
| Sooner or later, the autoerotic asphyxiation is going to kick in. | ||
| Somebody's going to strangle, get choked to death, and that's sad. | ||
| Whenever anybody dies from autoerotic asphyxiation, I always smell foul play. | ||
| If you were going to figure out a way to discredit a guy, like there was a preacher that died. | ||
| And he died. | ||
| He had a wetsuit on. | ||
| He had a black dildo up his ass. | ||
| And he was doing auto-erotic asphyxiation. | ||
| And he died. | ||
| And that guy, I was thinking, well, you know what? | ||
| That guy's a priest. | ||
| Who knows what kind of creepy shit he did. | ||
| He's probably not a stupid priest. | ||
| You know, I mean, come on. | ||
| He could be very well stupid. | ||
| That's a good way to whack someone, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, but it's a good way. | ||
| I mean, it's like as embarrassing as possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| If you cross me, I'm going to leave kiddie porn all around you. | ||
| You're going to die of auto-asphyxiation. | ||
| Yeah, you can see the mafia threatening that. | ||
| It'll make somebody straighten out. | ||
| Well, they said that's what happened with David Carradine. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I heard the same thought. | ||
| When that happened, I'm like, I don't give a shit what anybody does in their own private time, but I'm not buying that. | ||
| He crossed someone. | ||
| He had to have crossed someone or owed somebody money or something because that was just nuts. | ||
| Well, the rumor was that there was some organized crime involvement in his death. | ||
| That was the rumor. | ||
| That's the rumor. | ||
| Somebody easily could have just made that up. | ||
| I mean, there's so many goddamn rumors. | ||
| It just seems so implausible that you do that. | ||
| But I've never tried. | ||
| Maybe it's the greatest thing ever. | ||
| I'm never going to find out. | ||
| It's supposed to be awesome, but it's not my cup of tea. | ||
| Yeah, so skydiving is supposed to be great, too. | ||
| I'm not going to do that either. | ||
| Brian's dad was trying to get talked into skydiving. | ||
| Tell that story. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| Did he find out by just going to work and she wasn't there? | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| More power to the people who want to do it, but not for me. | ||
| I avoid the crazy life-threatening stuff. | ||
| Yeah, that's a funny one. | ||
| The skydiving one's a really funny one. | ||
| You want that big adrenaline rush? | ||
| Wait until they come up with virtual skydiving. | ||
| That sounds like it's going to be pretty badass. | ||
| Well, those little fan things sound pretty fun. | ||
| Have you ever done one of those where you're over that big fan and you're just kind of floating in the sky? | ||
| Eddie Bravo did that. | ||
| He said it's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it seems amazing. | ||
| They have one in Universal. | ||
| We should do it one day. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be great. | ||
| Yeah, you fly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's like a technique to it, too, apparently. | ||
| Because if you do it a certain way, you can fall. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, that's the thrill. | ||
| I've got to thank for these people. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That's a big part of it. | ||
| It's the part that people don't want to, they don't want to sort of admit it. | ||
| It's a thrill. | ||
| What's the thrill part? | ||
| Well, the thrill is that you're almost dying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A bungee jump is the same thing. | ||
| Your body is reacting like it's going to die, and you're tricking that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But not really. | ||
| Like, you're pretty sure it's not going to, so it's not a full-on I'm-going-to-die moment. | ||
| Well, you only make that mistake once. | ||
| Then you're all set. | ||
| Yeah, we're weird with our manipulation of our fight-or-flight responses, the things we do, like wing suits and shit like that. | ||
| Well, fucking, you know, organized fighting is the same thing. | ||
| You are channeling that base primitive instinct to establish dominance over another member of your species. | ||
| It's just all of the things that used to go with that in primitive times are gone, and it's just down to that one instinct. | ||
| You are going in there to test your mettle against another person and see if you can beat them, if you can establish dominance on them. | ||
| That's all that stuff is, and the guys who are the best at establishing dominance are the guys who rise to the prominence in their sport. | ||
| We're starting to see younger and younger guys retire as well. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That's being an issue now. | ||
| Well, is it they're retiring because they've already got damage or they're retiring ahead of damage? | ||
| Well, everybody's got a certain amount of damage. | ||
| That's the reality. | ||
| The reality is if you've done some hard sparring, you've got damage. | ||
| It doesn't seem like there's any getting around that. | ||
| How much of it recovers after a couple months? | ||
| How much is a couple weeks? | ||
| How much is never? | ||
| Depends. | ||
| I've seen fights where guys got beat up and they were never the same guy again. | ||
| They just weren't. | ||
| They were missing something. | ||
| If they were at 10 before, they were at 8 now. | ||
| And that was where they were now. | ||
| And they could have a fairly successful career at 8, but they would never be 10 again. | ||
| 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? | ||
| That actually is less safe. | ||
| The bigger gloves is because they hit harder? | ||
| No. | ||
| The bigger gloves, there's two issues with them. | ||
| One is that you don't break your hands as much, so you can pretty much punch a guy anywhere. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| Some guys have fragile hands. | ||
| Even with the big gloves, like Floyd Mayweather, he's had several operations on his hands because he kept breaking them. | ||
| Whereas the MMA gloves are smaller and you can't take as many shots with them. | ||
| The bigger gloves, you can take more punches. | ||
| And in fact, it's not really necessarily the concussive blows that do a lot of brain damage. | ||
| It's just the constant sub-concussive trauma that is the real issue. | ||
| So there's a guy named Nick Denis who was a MMA fighter who just retired. | ||
| I believe he was a pre-med student, I think. | ||
| But a very, very smart guy nonetheless, whatever his educational background was. | ||
| But that was his concern, was the sub-concussive traumas. | ||
| You start thinking, like, why can't I remember where I put my fucking car keys? | ||
| Like, is that normal... | ||
| Or am I missing a gear now? | ||
| And that's a real concern. | ||
| It's still safer than boxing. | ||
| I mean, by far, right? | ||
| Supposedly, yes. | ||
| Because boxing has less options. | ||
| For one, you can't clinch in a boxing match. | ||
| You're not supposed to. | ||
| You can't take a guy to the ground if you're stuck in a situation. | ||
| As far as repetitive head trauma goes, though... | ||
| Depends. | ||
| I mean, how you're training. | ||
| How you're training is what's really important. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, yeah. | ||
| It's going to add up. | ||
| It adds up. | ||
| There's no way it doesn't add up. | ||
| You look at a guy like Alistair Overeem, he's been stopped something like nine times, maybe even ten. | ||
| I think this might be the tenth time he's been stopped. | ||
| In his career, in that Bigfoot fight, that's a lot of times, man. | ||
| That's a lot of times of the fight being stopped from you getting punched too many times, where you're just gones. | ||
| You're not supposed to get nine of those in your life, right? | ||
| I don't think you're supposed to get one, actually. | ||
| You get up to nine, that's an awful lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you watch it affect, after a few of those, you watch it start to affect their ability to fight. | ||
| They're not the same guy out there. | ||
| It certainly does, especially if they're not involved in any testosterone replacement therapy. | ||
| Because one of the things about all that trauma is there's been a lot of studies that show that it starts to shut down your testosterone. | ||
| Like multiple concussions that it shuts down. | ||
| It does a lot of damage to your pituitary. | ||
| Apparently the pituitary is quite sensitive to concussive blows. | ||
| And when you get blasted a bunch of times, they've shown that it starts to lower your testosterone and it starts to make guys depressed. | ||
| It's one of the things that makes you depressed. | ||
| Scary thing, especially for a guy like you, I'm sure, who you make your living with your mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, I don't process that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Whatever you just did, I didn't see anything. | ||
| Let's go back to grappling. | ||
| Grappling I can do all goddamn day long, but I don't see punches, so I'm out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the key is you got to do only with people who you really totally trust. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got to do it. | ||
| It's hard if you do it with strangers or if you do it with a guy who's got a chip on his shoulder. | ||
| Some guys, you just tag them lightly and all of a sudden you're in a war. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That can happen. | ||
| And what do you do? | ||
| Do you stop the sparring partner and stuff? | ||
| Most of the time, guys don't. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Get rid of the helmets. | ||
| The first time I heard that, I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard of. | ||
| And then I started to think about it a little bit, like, you know, rugby does not have the same, it's not the same kind of contact. | ||
| Rugby, you do not get a 15-yard head start and take someone out of the picture. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's very rough and very physical, and yet they don't take the impact that American football players do. | ||
| I do some of the magic hand waving with that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Especially when this drastic change has happened in just the last 50, 60 years. | ||
| The guys are a third larger than they used to be in just 50 years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you extrapolate that out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You ever heard of him? | ||
| No. | ||
| He was 6'8", 360. He was a giant, giant man. | ||
| Plus, he's got all the gear on. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, that's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, I'm lucky I'm alive. | ||
| They really are a completely different species. | ||
| If you're dealing with those super athlete, pro football players, we're getting some really enormous human beings now. | ||
| In the combine, I may have read this incorrectly, they had three guys, three offensive linemen, 310 pounds, who ran four 640s. | ||
| Those are gazelles. | ||
| If I stand still and they run at me and hit me like that, I am dead on impact. | ||
| That's how much force is involved. | ||
| I'm just dead. | ||
| There's nothing you can do. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and you start to think, if I get hurt, I'll get out. | ||
| But I won't get hurt too bad. | ||
| I'll be smart. | ||
| They also, you know, try and remember back to that age, there is this rationalization of, maybe I'll get hurt and won't be quite as smart. | ||
| I'm willing to pay that price in order to have this moment right now. | ||
| I'm willing to give up years down the road. | ||
| And at 22, 23, 24, that is a perfectly rational, logical decision. | ||
| You're like, this makes sense to me. | ||
| It's not until you get 20 years down the road, like, boy, I'm glad I didn't get any brain damage. | ||
| That would suck right now. | ||
| Yeah, it's also a thing when you're 22 and you love playing football. | ||
| That's another thing. | ||
| It's a very fucking exciting thing to do, as is MMA fighting, as is a lot of motocross riding. | ||
| There's a lot of crazy, dangerous things that people really enjoy doing, and ultimately that's really our choice. | ||
| We should have that across the board. | ||
| We're hardwired to go out and seek that kind of danger. | ||
| Evolutionarily speaking, we're hardwired to go out. | ||
| We have to go get into life and death situations to hunt, to defend, to fight off other tribes. | ||
| And the people who have those instincts are the people who wound up living and reproducing and passing that on. | ||
| So as an 18 to 27-year-old male, you are hardwired for war. | ||
| And a lot of guys aren't. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| But a lot of guys have that. | ||
| That's what they inherited is like, let's go out and kill some shit. | ||
| That's in you. | ||
| I had that in me. | ||
| I wasn't very good at it because I was so small. | ||
| Wrestling was a good outlet. | ||
| But you know what that feeling is like. | ||
| And these kind of activities provide a safe, rational outlet for those things. | ||
| But it's in there and it's going to come out one way or another. | ||
| Yeah, for a lot of men. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's things that can't be rationalized. | ||
| There's just things you cannot explain away. | ||
| Like... | ||
| 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... | ||
| That's how you do it. | ||
| Does that help you when you're writing, when you're writing something like Ancestor, when you're writing about this crazy, gigantic pack predator? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's one of my group. | ||
| Then bring in the 650 pound pack predators. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| What do these characters do? | ||
| That sounds awesome, man. | ||
| I'm going to read this. | ||
| I can't wait to read it. | ||
| It sounds like a great idea. | ||
| I love your whole philosophy. | ||
| I love what you did. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It's all perfect. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Thank you very much for coming on, man. | ||
| I really, really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you for having me on the show. | ||
| I've been a fan since the broadcast news days. | ||
| It's a big thrill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, man. | |
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| 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... | ||
| ScottSigler.com. | ||
| And it's just Scott Sigler on Twitter, right? | ||
| Yeah, Scott Sigler on Twitter. | ||
| Facebook.com slash Scott Sigler. | ||
| We get to all the interwebs everywhere we can get to them. | ||
| Well, dude, thank you very much. | ||
| And folks, go support. | ||
| Go get one of these books. | ||
| I'm reading. | ||
| I'm going to start this one tonight. | ||
| Sweet! | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's awesome. | |
| Thank you very much, brother. | ||
| I really, really appreciate it. | ||
| Really fun time, man. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, too. | ||
| Thank you to Hover, one of our sponsors for this episode. | ||
| If you go to Hover.com forward slash Rogan, you will get 10% off your domain name registrations. | ||
| Thanks also to Audible.com. | ||
| If you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you can get one free audio book and you will also get 30 days of free service at audible.com. | ||
| An awesome service where you can even get Scott Sigler book. | ||
| Nocturnal, right? | ||
| That's the only one that's up there, right? | ||
| Infected, Contagious, and Ancestor are up on Audible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus. | |
| They're all there. | ||
| They're all there, you freaks. | ||
| So go there. | ||
| Go there. | ||
| Get it. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| Go to audit.com. | ||
| That's O-N-N-I-T. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We're doing a double podcast day. | ||
| My man's out there saving pygmies. | ||
| This shit's going to be crazy. | ||
| Thank you, Scott Sigler. | ||
| I really enjoyed that. | ||
| Thank you very much. |
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