Scott Sigler joins Joe Rogan to dissect Earthcore’s visual storytelling and animal intelligence, debunking evolutionary simplicity with examples like chimp warfare and cooperative wolf hunts. His meticulous writing process—magnetic whiteboards, Scrivener, and free serialized audiobooks—contrasts with organic "gardener" authors like King, who Rogan critiques for Doctor Sleep’s pacing. Sigler defends depicting morally complex characters (e.g., Klan members) with realism, sparking debate on ethics in fiction, while Rogan praises Ferrell’s absurd comedy and dismisses shallow online criticism. Ultimately, the episode blends sci-fi worldbuilding, creative discipline, and a sharp critique of media exploitation and audience expectations. [Automatically generated summary]
If we got hit, and then the power went off, and then the Ustream gets it five seconds later.
Well, if an asteroid hit like Arizona, it would take a while before we knew.
Well, not really.
That's too close.
But if it hit like Sweden, we probably wouldn't know for like a second or two.
We probably would hear about it like a week in advance, though.
If one of those dinosaur killers is on the way, they'd be fucking looting and rioting.
And there would be no more Squarespace.com.
Like our segue?
It's like a professional.
I should be on the radio.
Squarespace, by the way, they made a mistake in their copy.
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Brian has made literally dozens of websites while we've been doing these commercials, and they're excellent.
There was a time where it was sucky, man.
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The biggest shock we had was we came to San Francisco and start looking around and one of the places found literally a converted, it's a one bedroom apartment that is now a tenancy in common or a condo.
Now there's even protesters blocking, like, the Google bus, the Google buses that pick up all the 20-something Ivy League graduates who are just wicked smart, hardworking people who go to work for Google.
And they get on their bus with their Wi-Fi, you know, and they're...
It's a perfect little limo bus.
And then you've got regular working class Joes parking in front of it with a picket sign.
And sometimes rattling the bus or throwing stuff at the bus.
People are blaming the Silicon Valley tech companies for the rents rising to the point where if you just want to work at a bookstore, if that's what your calling is, you want to do that, you can't afford to live in the city at all anymore.
I can't think of it either, but to be one of these people on the bus and all of a sudden the populace is rising up against you and burning torches and banging signs against the bus, that's got to be pretty scary.
It's super hard for the people working for these companies to relate, I think, because I've had the opportunity to go do a couple things on the Google campus with a company I used to work for, and they are super hard-working people, super nice, really creative and clever.
I mean, all of these cultures are very open in letting people pursue what they want to pursue, and they just bust their ass.
They work really hard, so they can't really relate.
I think that what you're dealing with when you see a situation like this is this insane new wealth, this insane tech wealth, this industry that's over the last couple of decades has become so gigantic.
The amount of money that it generates is just freakish.
When you think about cell phones, think about any other product that you sell.
You know, you might have one, and this guy might have one.
They're preparing because seriously, man, if other people get killer robots first, we've got a real problem.
It's the Oppenheimer dilemma.
Do you make the atomic bomb knowing it's going to kill millions of people or do you let the Russians make it first and kill millions of people over here?
Well, also our ability to, first of all, as citizens, to recognize that we're getting screwed over on a daily basis and also recognize that the government is invading our privacy on a daily basis.
You know, when people start recognizing those kind of things and you look at, like, some of the lawsuits that have been brought up against people, some of...
Some of the people that have lost like giant chunks of their time in their life fighting off the government, whether it's because of taxes or because of regulations or whatever the fuck it is.
If you stopped and thought about engineering that and making it the way it is, you would never design it this way.
The way it is is so gross and the IRS can go after people.
If you don't pay your taxes, they just throw you in prison.
They want you to be so scared that you have to pay them their money.
If you don't pay them their money, they treat you as if you're a dangerous criminal that you have to take out of society and lock into a cage.
I mean, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that our government and our – not just our government, but our military is run through technology in just a few years to the point where it's going to get real gray whether or not – like who has power?
Is it going to be country?
Is it going to remain countries?
Is it going to eventually shift into corporations or corporate entities?
We were talking about like how much money there is in technology and creating things.
At a certain point in time, the technology is going to reach the point where people can essentially do whatever the fuck they want.
It's absolutely the case that the corporations have gotten to an insanely influential place, an insanely powerful ability to control the results of elections and the way the world works.
I mean, it's really incredible.
What's most incredible is that it's a bunch of people.
A corporation is just a bunch of people.
A bunch of people are doing some things that's really bad for humanity and making fuckloads of money.
To me, it's really a borderline organism because as a collective organism, all of the people working within it, there's a certain pattern of behaviors that have led to those corporations being successful in living for 100 years or longer.
Only people who are following those patterns of behaviors mostly are going to be successful in there, so it's self-perpetuating.
So you've got this certain type of behavior, which is always put the company first, screw the rules, screw people, go out and make things profitable.
That works, so these companies grow and continue to live and spawn off other companies, and it just keeps on going.
To me, they're not living organisms only by a technicality of definition.
Now, as an author, when you see something like this, that you see perhaps a good majority of the people have probably overlooked, when you look at it like that, I mean, it's got to seem almost like a work of fiction.
I mean, if the system in and of itself, like the way it's constructed now and just the idea of sending people to go kill people they don't even know on the other side of the world, all of it is just so bizarre.
Mm-hmm.
If it didn't exist in this form, and someone brought it to you as a script, you'd be like, whoa.
The leap from having a system that can communicate everywhere all over the world at one time and then jumping to something that can actually make its own decisions and decide its own destiny, I think that's, and I know very little about it, but that's way bigger than people think.
It's not just, oh, we're going to make this smart robot and it will go through and make decisions.
You know, self-determination is a whole different ballgame that they haven't been able to tackle yet.
It seems inevitable just based on the exponential growth of technology, meaning that 1 equals 2, and 2 plus 1 is 3, and then 3 plus 2 is 5. When you start seeing how quickly things are developing and how quickly technology is improving and enhancing, you realize that if we were in a horror movie, and there was a horror movie about robots that eventually took over and just started raping people and eating them...
It would probably start out a lot like what we're seeing on the news.
We'd have like quick flashes of like a new robot technology and then six months later Sony releases another one and then five months after that they create some sort of an artificial brain cell that actually works better than a real brain cell.
They start inserting them into people's bodies and then you cut to Fifty years later, apocalyptic, nightmare scenario, robots eating cinder blocks, running down the street, finding the last vestiges of humanity, hiding under sewer pipes.
My hope is if it ever does come down to that, people are really good at doing labor and figuring things out, and they also breed and make more copies of themselves.
So if you're a robot artificial intelligence, Killing all the people is a complete and utter waste of time.
Why would you do that?
Here's this relatively free labor pool that makes more copies of itself and continues to do what you want, which goes back to the concept of the Coca-Cola brand or IBM or British companies that are 500 and 600 years old.
You know, that's sort of already happening.
There are self-determined human beings who are serving the greater purpose of the overlord organization.
So your artificial intelligence could easily be like that.
So I'm hoping that when we get taken over, they'll just want to give us jobs.
And this is a trope that's played on science fiction all the time.
And I have it in some of my books, too.
Which is, once you get your artificial race or artificial intelligence to the point where it can reproduce on its own...
When robots can make other versions of itself, that's when we're no longer necessary.
When something can breed and make copies of itself, and I'm not necessarily talking a big factory to crank things out, although that works, when robots can basically make baby robots that harvest energy and resources from the environment and get bigger and become an adult and fully functional and capable of carrying on work, then we're screwed.
Yeah, as soon as they figure out how to make better robots, they're like, you guys made a fucking terrible design with us.
Let's just fix all of that.
I mean, I wonder if we're arrogant and thinking that our special abilities as people, whether it's our emotions, our creativity or whatever, that they're actually really special and that they're not replicable.
But what if robots are like, oh, dummy, it's so easy to make something like you.
You're not even that complex.
You guys are based on really pretty obvious emotions, very predictable behavior patterns under stress.
You guys are fucking simple.
You like to think you're super complicated because it makes you happy.
Those scenes with Rutger Hauer, where Rutger Hauer's dying and he doesn't want to kill Harrison Ford, but he was thinking about killing him, but he loves and respects life so much that he winds up ultimately not killing him.
That's a fucking powerful movie, man.
And not far off from what would actually happen.
If you had something and you engineered emotions into it, and if you didn't, then what do you got?
You got a fucking city filled with robot psychos that have no emotions?
You would want to engineer all the same flaws that people have.
If you wanted to create artificial people, what in fact if you did that?
Wouldn't they be a person?
Wouldn't they be subject to jealousy and poor decision making and Everything outside of drugs, because they would be robotic.
At some point, well, when they put their tongue to the battery, it's a whole different experience.
At some point, it would become indiscernible.
You couldn't tell the difference.
Gosh, I'm forgetting it, but there's that something test where You put a blindfold or put a blind between people, and if you can't tell the person on the other end that computer is a robot or a person, as a human being, you can't tell.
Am I talking to a robot or am I talking to a human being?
In text form?
Or in voice or text form.
But this is, if you get to that point, that's one of the definitions of we have gotten close or achieved artificial intelligence.
But you think they got to that point where they're not willing to plug something into their head that's going to let them Do you know anybody who's ever complained they can't find the remote control and have to get up and change the channel or something like that?
There's a few, but I think there's less people like that than we would like to think.
We've seen it with the Edison company and their reaction to Tesla and trying to find ways to stop this technology from coming out because if the technology comes out, they no longer have that giant cash cow and that's worth fighting for.
There's some mutation where they have a pattern on their wing that makes them, that reacts with the predator.
The predator looks at it and goes, that either looks like something I've eaten that tastes horrible or that looks like something bigger than me and it's dangerous.
And then that butterfly continues on and it happens again and again and again.
And the fact that we've really only come into our modern-day culture in the past two centuries or so.
So a lot of things I look at as an author are just staggering.
And even looking at something like the butterflies...
Of course, my first reaction is always...
What can I do with that?
How can I work that into a story?
Because that's real and that's cool and we can do something with it.
But yeah, there's a lot of things I look at and even having a decent knowledge of science and evolution and those things, you look at it and go, how the fuck did that happen?
A lot of times I find myself arguing myself like, no, yeah.
The one that gets me is like the crabs that put crap on their shell.
Yeah, these crabs will grab whatever happens to be around them and then use their saliva and glue it to their claws like a boxer crab.
And it'll glue anemones, which are deadly to it, onto its claws.
So if another predator comes up, they're like, they put up, they're dukes, they put up two anemones.
Look up boxer crab if you guys want to show this.
And it wards off predators.
And now you can see that anything with that behavior, of course, has a survival advantage.
That makes sense.
But at what point does some crazy crab eat a bad piece of fish and get so high that it's like, I'm going to cut this off here and put this on my claws and wave it around for a little while?
I see stuff like that.
That's one that always throws me for a loop.
Like, how did that first actually happen?
And, you know, when I talk to my science consultants, they break it down into finer and finer detail.
I'm like, what you say makes perfect sense.
I understand.
However, he's got friggin' sea anemones on his claws.
Oh, that's one thing that I really wanted to talk about with the ocean.
This is a crazy fucking thing that I just discovered.
You know Sea Shepherd?
You know those companies that go out and fight those whalers?
They caught this Japanese whaling ship.
And the Japanese whaling ship, they have this really sneaky thing they're doing where you're allowed to, under some provision, some unilateral agreement, you're allowed to whale hunt.
You could take a whale if it's for scientific research.
So they left in some weird loophole for scientific research.
So what these guys do is they go out and they slaughter these whales and then they say it's for scientific research and they just sell the meat.
Like, they're whaling.
They're just killing these whales.
The way they're doing it is under this weird loophole in the law.
If you go to Sea Shepherd, one of the more recent stories about it, they got a helicopter and they flew over the boat and took photos of these dead whales.
There it is.
Yeah, it's dark, man.
It's really dark.
And if you look as they pull back and they show you, there's a website address.
And if you go to that website address, there's an English version and a Japanese version.
But the images are pretty shocking.
If you go and look at it online, they even have video of them slaughtering one of the whales.
But to me, when I look at that, that to me is just like us going to another planet and killing some alien being.
We would never stand for that.
If we showed up on Mars and Mars had whales on it and we just started gutting whales and using them for scientific research, people would go fucking crazy.
Like, what are you doing?
We found this intelligent life form that communicates.
It has a voice.
It has language.
They have some sort of a weird differentiation between different sections of the world and they have different accents.
Yeah, but at the same time, if there's a resource there that we need or someone can make money from, and the propaganda machine kicks in, and we find this alien intelligence, and then your president is on the radio saying, this is a significant danger to the human race, and we have to act right now because they do all of these horrible things.
We've watched it on our planet.
Dozen times in our own lifetime where somebody comes out with a propaganda machine and we're so manipulatable that we'd be like, oh, well, if we don't bomb them first, they're going to bomb us.
And if you have no way of recognizing your culture, if you have no way of objectively assessing your situation, if you're stuck in a world where you need...
constant movement even to breathe.
They're carrying a lot of body mass.
You need to get fish.
They need to feed all the time.
So they're constantly in movement.
They don't have any time for self-reflection.
They don't have a fucking couch where they can kick back with their pipe and watch Masterpiece Theater and ponder and write poetry.
And then that poetry can be read by others.
And if we existed in a world like that, we were just flying around in three-dimensional space, I don't think we'd be very much different than Darwin's.
And it's the development of agriculture and society and cities and getting that safety that comes with a large number of people working together.
That's the only thing that's allowed us to do those things as well.
You go back...
40,000, 50,000 years with us, and there was no different.
We'll kill anything that moves.
Kill and eat anything that moves, and if you don't do it, something's going to kill you, and it was only the development of society that allowed people to start writing poetry and making art and doing all those other things.
I was so high, I definitely shouldn't have been on a boat.
But there I was.
And when you're that high, you're very vulnerable and very sensitive and very introspective and almost painfully so sometimes.
So me looking in the eyes of that dolphin had me absolutely convinced, just watching these things play, that I'm probably being extremely prejudiced in how highly I value human...
Human cognition and our ability to change our environment being the ultimate measure of intelligence.
Well, it's also, there's probably no social stigma to fucking, and probably the female tigers want to have sex as well, so there's not as much of a need to fuck or to rape each other.
Doesn't that make sense?
Like, if wild animals, if it just became real rapey, like wild animals just rape each other, they would never eat anything.
There's some people who think that the octopus and squids are really wicked smart, like being able to be tool users and figure out puzzles significantly.
But yeah, that's the only aquatic breathing animal that I can think of.
They used to think at one time that it was just camouflage, that they were just adapting to their environment, which they're also capable of doing.
But they also somehow or another communicate with each other by their skin, by the way they look, and they think that that squid ink It may serve two purposes.
It may, one, try to ward off predators in some way, create confusion, allow it to escape, but also it might be like eraser fluid.
Like, when wolves decide they're going to sneak up on somebody, like, if they do something, like, if they have a situation, like, wolves, like, they'll corner an animal.
Like, they'll have, like, some will go this way and others will wait for them on the other end.
Like, they somehow or another communicate with each other.
So they have all these monkeys in the trees and what they do is they send chimps after them to chase them and they start swinging on the trees and then on the other end they have chimps waiting as the monkeys try to escape.
So they've herded them into this area where these dominant chimps will be waiting.
And the chimps will attack the monkeys in the trees.
But they corner them.
They trap them.
They get them on the sides and they get them in the front.
And they corral them into an area where other chimps are waiting.
And then they grab them.
But they figure that out.
How do they organize that?
Do they talk about it?
How do they know?
How do I know there's going to be people on the other end or chimps on the other end waiting?
They've somehow or another figured out a way to talk to each other and say, look, man, I want to eat a monkey.
You guys want to eat some monkeys?
This is how we do it.
They hide in the trees.
What we got to do is chase them down there, and Mike and Bob, you guys will stand on the corners, chase them this way, and then Tommy at the end is just going to gather them all up and we're going to eat.
That would take people, like if a bunch of random people were stranded on a deserted island and they had to figure out how to hunt, It would take them until they were on the brink of starvation until they figured that out.
They'd be like, well, let's go try to get some food.
But it would take a long fucking time to devise strategies.
The trippy thought with that to me is not knowing how long they've been exhibiting this behavior, that's exactly how they catch monkeys and orangutans and chimpanzees.
So was somebody watching the humans do this and go, that shit works great.
But, I mean, the way they treat monkeys, and the way we treat whales, the way we treat killer whales.
It really is a perplexing question, like what will the next thing, how will that treat us?
If there is an artificially intelligent, super genius robot that becomes some sort of a synthetic organic thing that's almost indistinguishable from humans but infinitely smarter, how is it going to deal with us?
Is it going to deal with us the way we deal with the chimps, or the way the chimps deal with the monkeys, or the way we deal with the dolphins, or the way the killer whales deal with the dolphins?
Or there's just the basic problem of we're too smart.
If we had monkeys in the L.A. area and they walked around with switchblades and guns and every now and then would start killing people, you'd be like, we've got to get rid of those monkeys.
And you know, this is a funny conversation because whenever you have this conversation about artificial intelligence, you're going to get a lot of naysayers and a lot of people that claim that they know what's going to happen, like, listen.
This is why I think it might actually be affecting people.
This is also why I think people enjoy inspiration.
I think when you see someone who's really bad, you really don't think that anything's good.
You think this is what life is.
Life is really terrible.
Life is terrible comedy.
Someone's bombing on stage.
And on the opposite, when you see something really spectacular, it raises your standards for things that you could accomplish, things that you could be excited to see.
It raises your standards.
If you go to see Avatar or some spectacular movie, you leave there.
And you would think it would be the inverse of that.
Oh, I want to follow the guy who bombed, because even if I phone it in, I'm going to do well, and I don't want to follow Avatar because it's spectacular, and I'm going to look poor.
Some people have this really ultra-competitive mindset, and a lot of comics like to bring terrible comedians with them on the road.
They bring guys who just really shouldn't even be going on stage, and the comic is really pretty good.
So it'll be like this death show for 20 minutes, and then the comic comes in like a hero.
And everybody's super excited to see him.
I've seen that happen on numerous occasions, but that's famine mentality.
That famine mentality that there's not enough for everybody.
The famine mentality that you have to get all the accolades and anybody that's threatening whatsoever to your talent, to your abilities, it should be just minimalized.
That's a dangerous mindset to have, especially in the world of comedy.
I think if you instead choose to be inspired by good performances, then everything becomes inspirational.
It's not like everything's competitive.
Instead of it being competitive, you get all the same juice that you would get from the competitive aspect of it, but you get it in a positive form.
Instead, you're inspired and happy for people's success, happy for great movies.
Happy for great music, happy for great comedy.
When you see great things, inspired by them.
So everywhere around you, you see inspiration.
Instead of everywhere around you, you're seeing competition, people doing better than you, something that diminishes your idea of who you are as a person because you don't measure up on paper to Michael Bay or this guy or that guy.
Instead of that, it's the opposite.
Instead, you know, the mentality is you're constantly being inspired.
It's better now, but I've had significant issues with other authors.
People start out at the same time I did, roughly, and have similar career arcs moving up, and then they just catch lightning by the tail for something, and the next thing you know, they're huge.
And I'm like, we're basically working equally...
Everybody's working their fingers to the bone, like every other profession.
Anybody who succeeds anywhere is probably working their ass off.
And then you just watch something blow up and you're like, that's difficult to overcome.
And like you say, a lot of it has been adjusting the perspective.
You have to step back and say, I'm still doing really well and I'm making a lot of people really happy with my stories and my books and I can now aspire to get to that level.
So I have to write something better and market it better and connect better and finally get that out there.
Well, I think sometimes it's just a matter of people finding out about it.
It's really that simple.
It's like the product is there for a long time, but there's so much product.
You walk into a Barnes& Noble and start roaming through the fiction section and find a bunch of authors you don't know, and you read the back of the book, and you see a few recommendations that you probably respect, and you go, fuck it, I'll take a chance.
But for the most part, the choices are endless, and new books are coming out constantly.
And people hearing about what you do and then maybe hearing two or three times before they're familiar.
Like, this is my second time in the show.
And the first time, we got a ton of new readers.
People were like, God, that guy sounds pretty cool.
Let me check out his books and we've got all these fans now.
Now on the second time, maybe you get more.
And, you know, all of that effort, the next book's out, it's called Pandemic, it's out January 21st, and just trying to get people exposed to it so that they can say, that sounds like my cup of tea, or yeah, I don't think I'd be interested in that.
That's the real game.
It's not getting people to read or forcing people to read it.
It's just a matter of if nobody's ever heard of me, they don't get the opportunity to make that decision if my stuff is in their alley or not.
You know, anybody getting to the Anne Rice, Stephen King, Dean Kuntz, you know, any of those levels where they just flat out, he doesn't have to worry about it anymore.
Stephen King could give a crap about marketing because that's all going to get taken care of for him.
He's earned that and he's totally fine.
I put a lot of time into marketing and trying different things to get the word out.
All of that Every minute I spend doing that is a minute I'm not creating or refining a story.
One of the things we did today was, for all of the listeners, remember that book I told you about last time, Tidal Fight, which was the science fiction MMA? We decided we're just going to give that away to all your listeners through January.
So these are the kind of things that, and it's not like, you know, the Stephen Kings and the Joe Hills don't still do, or their people do that marketing stuff for them.
But yeah, we have to do things like that to be like, just like, I know if you read my shit, I'm going to own you.
It's deep because Mark was like super, super open with them and they're like, While he was filming this documentary, they were doing this documentary on this unstoppable MMA fighter.
This guy was this wrestler who was just destroying people.
He's built like a fucking superhero, super athlete, taking people down and smashing them.
No, that's when he's fat.
You got to get him when he's young.
You got to get him when he's young.
Mark Kerr, huge.
Just find an image of him when he was just unbelievably huge.
So anyway, this documentary, they start doing this documentary, and along the lines...
It exposes his drug use.
And he's open when he shoots up right in front of these people.
And they capture this guy completely spiraling out of control.
They just come in at the right moment as they're filming this documentary and catch this guy who's one of the best fighters in the world completely spiraling.
On camera, shooting up.
You gotta just get a picture of him when he was in his prime.
There's some photos of him fighting in the UFC. Yeah, that's him.
Holy cow.
Oh, that doesn't work.
Look at the size of that motherfucker.
I mean, that was when they were calling him the smashing machine.
He was 265 pounds of American muscle and Mexican supplements.
And he was smashing people.
But along the way, he developed an addiction to, I believe it was opiates.
I think he eventually went and became a car salesman.
But I think it's an important documentary.
It's an important, not just from the point of view of someone who...
He's having a serious problem with drugs, but it's also steroids.
He was absolutely on massive amounts of steroids.
He was also fighting in MMA, which is the thing about traumatic brain injuries and punches and kicks that you take.
Sometimes the cumulative damage can lead these guys to be really depressed and suicidal.
Crazy.
If they sustain too much damage, if they're not really careful about it, if they don't give themselves enough time to recover, they can get really depressed.
So here's this guy taking shots to the head all the time, taking morphine or heroin or whatever the fuck he's taking, you know, and they caught him in this documentary.
They came in thinking he was the baddest motherfucker on earth, and they left with this really in-depth piece on a guy whose life is being absorbed by drugs.
Drugs are just stealing his life, just taking it in little pieces.
Let's check that out.
He wound up fighting later in his career, like no steroids, no drugs, a completely different body.
If you could just cut out half the movie and have that movie have no ending and like...
It was a good effort.
It was a good attempt.
I think ultimately what Conan needs and deserves is that guy is the perfect Conan.
He's a good actor.
He looks like a savage.
Keep that.
Keep him as the Conan.
And just get a real writer who's a real fucking crazy person who can come up with something badass and follow the Robert E. Howard script.
Follow what that guy...
And then do it through the eyes of a real visionary.
Get a real James Cameron type dude or a...
How about Martin Scorsese does Conan?
How about you have a movie where it's like a really dark fantasy movie that plays out like a real film instead of plays out like some bullshit comic book?
I haven't seen it, but one of the funniest things ever is when news reporters have to talk about that movie, because that smog sounds, they always go, Smaug!
Up next, the distillations of Smaug, and they always say, Smaug!
And then goes to her boss and says, I think this is significant.
You need to read it.
Her boss reads it.
Lucy reads it, contacts my print agent.
We were done with our current film agent at the time.
We'd worked together five years.
Great guy, but we didn't make anything happen.
So time to change something.
So we talked to Lucy...
Lucy takes over, and now we're not only almost closed on Nocturnal, but then the people who make Justified and Elementary are closing in an option for the Infected series, of which Pandemic is the last book.
I don't know about San Francisco, but if you get super rich, you could buy basically your own small country in Michigan and call it Detroit because it's already named.
When I used to work in Maine, when I used to do stand-up, I used to do a gig in Bangor, and you couldn't go to Bangor without driving by Stephen King's house.
You had to, just to know that's where Stephen King lives, man.
When you start writing a book, do you, like, sit down and, like, say, okay, I want to figure out something to write about, or do you just have, like, a flash of...
Inspiration and then record it, write it down, and then take off with it.
The ones I write for Random House, they're thrillers with a lot of horror and sci-fi in them.
But the thriller structure is things are planned out to get to this really crazy over-the-top ending.
So a lot of times I'll have the concept, then I'll try and work through a loose structure to come up with an ending that's going to be just balls out spectacular, and then sort of work backwards from there.
So if I do that correctly, if I reverse outline it correctly, by the time and go from, this is insane, I would never buy into this, to this is a guy having a cup of coffee at his kitchen table in the morning, It feels like a seamless transition.
You never notice that I'm gradually upping the level of madness until you get to that crazy end and you're just fully hooked and believing every moment of it.
So it's mostly structured.
I don't think I have it in me to just write and then let it go and see where the story goes because I need to have 30 or 40 threads that all funnel towards that last ending.
Even Pandemic, which is the third book in a series, it goes Infected, then Contagious, then Pandemic.
has a relatively calm beginning and an earth-shattering end, but they're a complete story unto themselves.
Simply because I don't believe in extorting fans out of their money.
You get a full story for this book if you don't want to read the next book.
You don't have to buy that to see what happens at the end of the first book.
I'll just cut them in half.
So for Pandemic, it's largely...
The end of Pandemic is just apeshit crazy.
It's the whole world screwed.
And you had to come up with, how do I do this much damage and then work it back from there?
I mostly enjoy the Tetris game of getting it all to come out, and it's really a love-hate relationship, because if you're as anal retentive about, like, this has to—you have to feel closure at the end of this book, and I have to tie up all the threads— When you do that, as you're working through, some of the characters change who they are, and all of a sudden you're like, okay, now this guy would never do this thing.
He would never go into the haunted house alone.
He just wouldn't do it.
And then you have to say, all right, how do I get around that?
And it usually breaks stuff.
So you have to tear the building down and go back and build it up all over again.
And when I do that with the book Nocturnal, I was just talking about my business partner, A. Kovacs, had to deal with me.
I was miserable for like six months because I wrote...
Three full drafts, and at the end of every full draft, I'm like, this doesn't work.
This is not believable.
I could not get through this book and go, that's what would happen.
So I had to rip it all down and start over and move all the parts around again.
And I never thought I would get it.
I was like, I'll never get this right.
This will never work out with this concept that I have.
And I finally got it to work with some great help from Julian Pavia, who's my editor at Random House.
We finally got it figured out, but I was friggin' miserable.
So I would like, eventually I want to get to the Gardner phase.
Maybe this is from being a big reader before the e-book set, but it wasn't that long ago to buy the new Stephen King book for $7.95 in paperback.
$7.95 was a chunk of money.
You're like, okay, I want this and I'm buying this.
It better be good.
And then not Stephen King, but somebody else, you buy a book and you're like, I didn't get my money's worth and I worked hard for that money.
I've never forgot what that feels like.
And even though I still give all my stuff away, everything you can get on my website at scottsigler.com, serialized books for free, or at patiobooks.com.
And everything I've published, we give away for free as a serialized audiobook.
We run advertising against it, but you listen to the ad at the beginning of the show, just like your show, then you get 30 or 40 minutes of the episode.
You don't have to pay for anything, you can listen to it all you want.
A lot of times what happens is a lot of people have money to spend on entertainment and they don't mind spending that money on entertainment if they know they're going to get something good.
What pisses people off is to spend their money on something and then find out that they don't actually like the product.
So if I give these stories away...
You know, that's my competitive advantage over Stephen King.
If you go into a bookstore and you see Scott Sigler and Stephen King and you've never heard of me, you're going to buy Stephen King because he's a proven brand.
He's a proven storyteller.
But if you go into a bookstore and Stephen King's $24.95 and Scott Sigler's free, maybe I'll try this first, then go get the Stephen King.
Now I've got a chance for people to try out my stuff.
And if they listen to a couple of books and they know what they're getting from then on, then they buy everything that comes out the day it comes out.
If everything became like Amazon OneClick, where it's just like your computer has all your credit card information in it, and if you want something, you just click on it, and you go Amazon OneClick.
Because the Amazon OneClick would only be slightly more difficult than just clicking on it and downloading it.
Slightly more difficult because you've got to pay a dollar.
If they just keep downloading all of our books for free and never pay for anything, that's fine.
Because at the very least, they're going to go to work or they're going to talk to their friends and go, oh my god, you should have this crazy, gross story I heard called Infected.
It's nuts.
This guy stabbed himself with a fork for like five pages.
It's nuts.
And then eventually somebody they're talking to is going to go check it out or just go buy the book.
So it's not, you know, it's one where our goal is we entertain people.
That's what we do.
We take you out of your world, bring you into ours, get rid of all your stress for a little while.
That's what we do for a living.
Some people want to do that for free.
Some people will pay for it.
And even the people who get it for free are going to go out.
If we're good enough at our jobs, they're going to go out and talk to their friends about it, and we're going to wind up getting that word-of-mouth exposure.
But we're big on...
We've got a giant chip on our shoulder.
I work so hard to make my stuff so good that I can give it to you for free.
It's cool to think that you're also getting, by giving it away for free, you're getting that word-of-mouth exposure, which you would be willing to pay a lot of money for that.
I've got some kettlebells in the office, like, goddamn sons of bitches, and get mad.
But it's worked in a good relationship.
I hate to admit it, but I bitch a lot during this process because I get so frustrated because I want it to be good.
I so badly want it to be perfect, and I want people to read it and walk away like, holy crap, that's the best book I ever read.
That's what I'm after every time.
So when the editor's coming back going, yeah, this isn't working, I'm like, I've put eight months of work into that thing that you just want to get rid of.
So I still listen and it's not easy because I got a bit of an ego with the fiction but eventually these people break me down and we make a more refined, better story.
It's very honest in that approach and I think that's one of the reasons why you're so prolific and successful with your writing is that you have that ability to look at yourself and the entire situation objectively.
It's very difficult to do for a creative person.
A lot of creative people are really bad at taking criticism.
I'm not good at it, but the three primary people involved in the process, my business partner, my agent, and my editor, it's, you know, I trust these people, they're successful at what they do, and at some point when they're telling you something that is directly opposite of what you think, you still have to sit down and be like, I'm going to evaluate what you're saying on its own merits.
And it's not like every time I change it.
There's stuff I'll be like, fine, don't fucking publish the book if you don't want that in there.
I don't give a shit.
If that doesn't go in the book, you don't get the book.
There's certain things where, as a storyteller, you might not be able to put into words the impact this moment will have, but you know, in your subconscious kind of, you know that structurally it's going to impact this point, this point, this point, and then the ending.
And that if you don't have this moment, that the editor doesn't really end.
He's like, who cares what he had for breakfast, for example?
It doesn't matter.
Like, yes, but when they get to the end...
And see that breakfast food again at the end of the book, it's going to tie everything together and it's going to give the reader this sense of completeness in his or her whole soul and they'll be more satisfied with the book.
So there are things that I can't really explain or I'll try to explain and they're not listening, but eventually I'm just like, I know this works and that's got to go in there and that's just the end of the story.
But then, part of the give and take is, you know, there's some quid pro quo, and I've had my editor come back.
Okay, you can keep that, but if you keep that, you've got to give up this.
With the technology of e-books, couldn't you just take those chunks, those huge chunks that they tell you to take out and make it kind of like a director's cut?
Like, hey, you buy the e-book and I'm also giving you this whole thing I worked on, this storyline that they told me to cut out.
But all he cares about is he knows if I get this much of the book set up, he knows the sales process.
If you buy into the first 50 pages, he can sell the book.
Then your editors can fix the rest of it.
So he's not that invested in the full length of the book.
And then the real work is done with Julian, the guy over at Crown Random House, who reads, not only does he read it all the way through, he's reading it all the way through five times and having to pay close attention.
We're talking like 500-page books.
And he has to pay super close attention every time, and I could not do his job at all.
It's better than Microsoft Word because Microsoft Word, once you get past 100 pages, 200 pages, you're copying big chunks and moving around, and it becomes a nightmare because you're going to screw something up.
But Scrivener, you just grab this icon and drag it before this icon.
It rearranges everything.
So I've gotten pretty adept at using that.
I highly recommend it.
It's great for scatterbrain to keep everything flowing.
And then a lot of times it'll just be, you know, I get overwhelmed with the screen and everything going on, and I'll just pull out the 3x5 index cards and start writing everything down again.
Bullet points on those, put them up on the board, and go through it that way.
So you like to do it digitally, you like to do it manually, you like to just mix it up and constantly keep doing it in a different way that keeps your brain moving?
Yeah, what I find is when you get stuck, there's a couple different things.
Number one, if you're just staring at that screen and you're stuck, just getting your hands involved in a pen, just an ink pen and paper...
It's a tactile experience.
It's a different experience.
It activates different parts of your brain.
Sometimes you're like, oh, now I get it.
Now I see what I was stuck on.
So that's part of it.
And other parts of it is there's only so much screen real estate, so you can only see so many things at one time.
If you're really stuck, you pull back, write all these index cards, you put it up on this four-foot by five-foot whiteboard, and you kind of look at everything.
That can spring your brain free at times, too.
So largely, it's grabbing whatever.
If I get stuck in one area, I'll start going to other areas.
And when I get really overwhelmed and frustrated, I am more comfortable slipping back into the eight-year-old version of me, which is a little piece of paper and some notes or an index card, and go back and just write it out until it all kind of flows out of the page.
It's something I probably need to start using more in Scrivener because I get distracted trying to stay in touch with social media and everything else.
And if you're on the computer and a fan is asking a question, the natural impulse is to go answer that question.
So, you know, getting to a point where I can just ignore all that.
But I was just in Vegas for the New Media Expo, and when I really get into it, and I was under deadline, so I started writing at noon.
We're staying at the Rio.
Don't have the seafood buffet at the Rio, I will tell you that.
I don't know what it was, but it was Linda Blair shit.
It was pretty crazy.
But I'm writing, and it's like noon out, and there's the window, and the window's open, and by the time I got finished, it looked out, and it was pitch black outside.
So sometimes...
I can't imagine it's the same thing when you're writing more of the short-form jokes and moving around from the jokes, but for this long-form things like 50-page story, my own screen came up and that's all I was working on.
Didn't look at anything else, just wrote the whole thing through.
My groove is usually also to move around the house.
I like to pick up my laptop and go sit somewhere else.
Go sit in my living room.
Go sit upstairs.
Go sit in front of the TV. Don't even watch TV. Just sit on the couch.
I think that when I do that, instead of just being in my office and staring at the screen, sometimes just being in a different space, sitting in a different place, just go, oh, we're here now.
And just that changing of your routine, just a little variation on it, sometimes can spark the mind in interesting new directions.
You get down these wormholes and just getting any other kind of sensory input, which goes back to, now I'm going to write things down instead of type them out.
Anything like that can...
Because it's all in there.
All that stuff you want to come up with is in there.
It's not like you have a factory where you have to make all this crap.
It's all already in there.
You're just kind of figuring out how to mine it out of your own brain and put it onto the page.
You know, and I used to bring a recorder, but now with these new cell phones, you don't have to.
Your phone can record amazing notes.
And I just go for a walk.
Walk my dogs or something like that, go down the street, and just when I'm thinking about something, and I've got something in my head, and I'm done writing, and then I'm reviewing the things that I wrote, like, how would I view this if I was a person who was reading it?
Like, how would I take this?
Like I'll take it into consideration as I'm walking.
It's like the fact, you know, there's something about forcing yourself to do a mundane, very obvious task, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.
And then you can get into that groove of introspective thought.
Every now and then I'm still glancing down to get some kind of tracking going on, which I don't need to do anymore, but I can't break myself with a habit.
I do this sometimes when I'm overwhelmed with an idea.
I'll just close my eyes and just start typing.
So I don't need to do it anymore, but I can't break that habit of looking down at the screen.
You get used to those, and then you go to a laptop, and it feels weird.
Yeah.
A lot of people are...
Typing their stuff on laptops now.
So, like, the way you learn how to type on a laptop is you want your fingers to be right in that position of J and F, the fingers across the board, and then from there you go.
If you go back and forth from laptop to keyboard, there's like a thinking part.
But the speech recognition software is fascinating to me because I wonder if that'll ever be something that I'm interested in because I For the walks, I have to imagine, right?
Like, this would be a good book, and this would be a good book, and trying to keep track of everything.
So the creative part, being a scatterbrained little kid, fortunately, just has never been an issue for me.
With me, it's always been the discipline of being able to write it down and trying to fight the ADD, and I have to keep working on this To make it the best it can be, when after the first draft, I'm kind of already done with it.
I'm like, oh, I want to go do something else.
But you can't.
You've got to go back and keep hammering on that sword and make it a good weapon.
There's no one pattern, which is what's fascinating about the human brain.
Everybody's got a different way of doing it.
And just keep working at it until you get to that end product where you can hopefully look at what you finished with.
And I think all creative people kind of have the same thing.
You probably have it too.
Like, that's a pretty good joke.
That's not the best it could possibly be, but I think that's pretty good.
That's going to go in the arsenal for the next stand-up.
And with me, it's like, that book is pretty good.
I would work on that book for the next 10 years every day to try and make everything perfect, but...
At least for me, there is no perfection.
You hear some authors go, I keep working until I have absolutely the perfect phrase and the perfect sentence and the perfect paragraph and the perfect page.
That's great, but we've got to put a book out and sell some books.
I've gotten to the point now where, unless it's for research, I don't go back and reread the old books.
And I heard an interview with Bryan Cranston on Nerdist that really helped a ton with that, which, you know, he's just kicking everybody's ass at Breaking Bad, and he's like the baddest actor ever at this moment.
He was really focused on...
He puts everything he has...
Into that performance.
And then the second he walks off the set, he's done.
He's like, I'm not paying attention to that anymore.
I'm moving on to the next thing.
I did it as best I can.
So with my books, because I get worked...
Every time I reread a book and find a mistake or some kind of goof up or something, the character motivation isn't right, I get super angry and super worked up.
When you're done with a project, you've internalized everything that you're going to learn from that.
I feel like as an artist, as a craftsperson, whether it's a writer or anything, or a musician, I think you're getting better all the time or you're not getting better.
It's one of the two.
Either you're getting better all the time and you're constantly working on improving things, or you're not.
And there's only a certain amount of time that you should consider the past.
Certain amount of time you consider past work.
Because if you consider it, you're really robbing yourself of present work.
You're really robbing yourself of the focus that you could be using on working on the shit that you're thinking about right now.
So in that mindset, I just start getting repulsed by my old stuff.
Like, I don't want to talk.
I don't want to see it.
If I find myself on TV, I go...
Flip the channels.
The other day I was in my car two times in a row and Raw Dog was playing my comedy.
I'm like, shut up.
I don't want to fucking hear me.
I don't want to hear me.
I don't want to even think that I was a different person 10 years ago.
I'm not doing stand-up, but listening to stand-up that show me how much I have changed as a person.
And I'm on Pandora.
All I listen to is comedy on Pandora.
That's like when I'm not writing.
Okay, I gotta pick up the office.
I gotta clean up.
Let's put on some comedy on Pandora and just let that cycle through and hear new stuff.
And I started a new channel for the Andrew Dice Clay channel.
And when I was in college, we were all crazy for Dice.
We'd gather in a room and watch the VHS. It'd be like eight guys watching.
Ah, Dice Clay, you're the best!
And then I'm listening to it now and I'm hearing him do all these old bits.
And I'm like, oh, I love this bit.
And then I'm listening to it and I'm like...
Yeah, this isn't really all that funny to me anymore.
This is so racist and so misogynist.
And not like, you know, like somebody who's really good at racist humor right now is Daniel Tosh, like can do it in a way that doesn't make you uncomfortable.
Like, I don't know how he does it, but listening to Andrew DeSclay is like, this isn't for me anymore.
And I realized what we were all laughing at was that amazing delivery.
His delivery and his timing were great, but the actual subject matter was, and I'm like, I cannot believe how much I have changed that I don't find this funny anymore.
But if you, yeah, if you were alone in your car, or if you're in your home and you're completely sober and you're listening to some of the horrible things he said, you're like, what the fuck, man?
And her original joke wasn't even a Pearl Harbor joke.
It was just a denture joke about old people eating SpaghettiOs because SpaghettiOs got so much shit for having that image of a SpaghettiO holding an American flag that they put up on Pearl Harbor Day.
I got the most recent one that came up, and you don't think it's bad until somebody actually kind of calls you on it.
In the book Nocturnal, there's a character who has Tourette's Syndrome and also has a voice box, has lost his voice box due to throat cancer.
So it's kind of preposterous.
And then he's always talking to the main character, trying to make the main character come like, fucker, pricker, sicker, dicker, sucker.
And it's this crazy combination of things, which is actually a true story that a friend of mine who got arrested was in the drunk tank, and there was a guy with the voice box, and he had Tourette's, and he's telling me the story about it.
I'm like, that's so going in a book.
Are you kidding me?
That's fucking awesome.
And then, one of my long-time fans finally listens to this book, and we do the audiobooks, and it's really over the top when we do it in the audiobooks.
It sounds like the guy from South Park, basically.
And she's like, that's not funny.
I have threats.
And I'm like, you know, you're like, okay.
So now you have to write, because it directly impacts her, and it looks like we're mocking her, but you have to write an apology.
You're like, yeah, I'm not going to apologize for the story, because it's a character, but, you know...
It's unfortunate that that hits you in your personal soft spot, so to speak.
And I didn't mean to marginalize you, but I'm not changing the story.
Isn't it funny, though, that if someone can say that's not funny, and then you're not allowed to talk about it, but if it wasn't funny at all...
If it was like a tragic situation where a person had Tourette's and it was out of control and it was in a story, then that would be different because that's not mocking.
That's not putting into a comedy.
You could depict it.
You can depict Tourette's and depict Tourette's being an issue that maybe the people that actually have it can say, oh, that's very similar to what I have to deal with.
Even being able to explain like, well the point of the joke is that you never know whether he has it or not or he's just using it as an excuse to be an asshole to everybody.
But, you know, that one person, that's what every character that I create goes through something to that effect where somebody calls out and goes, yeah, that's not funny, dude.
On Pearl Harbor Day, they sent out a tweet featuring their mascot holding an American flag asking people to quote, take a moment to remember, hashtag Pearl Harbor with us.
It offended a lot of people.
Corporations climbing on to sentimental American historic traditions seemingly looking for people and business.
It wasn't good, but you were offended for another reason.
I'm offended because they're referring to SpaghettiOs as pasta.
I mean, it sucks that the only survivors of Pearl Harbor are being mocked by the only food they can still chew.
But her response was so perfect, because she was one of the few people that didn't bow down and take it and just say, I'm sorry, even though she didn't mean it.
Because you can engage them or you can engage the people that are being nice.
Sometimes I'll engage people in a mocking way if I'm giggling at them.
But to get actually angry at them?
For what?
It's one thing if you did something wrong or if there's some sort of remorse that you have for your actions and maybe someone's reacting to that.
Something real, not like this Natasha thing.
It's possible you could fuck up and say something you didn't really mean, or you said it too quickly, didn't realize how ridiculous it was until after you said it.
But if there's none of that, and then you're getting hate, what are you doing?
Are you going to pay attention to people who just look to hate people for no fucking reason?
A lot of people are very uncomfortable with when they get hyper-criticized, when someone attacks them and attacks them in a way that actually makes sense.
But I think those people that do that, whether they like it or not, they're helping you.
Because even if they're wrong, they're forcing you to consider whether or not there's any merit in what they're saying.
And if you can't find any merit in what they're saying, then you're relieved of any future attacks like that.
It's like, oh, you're another crazy person that has a distorted view of reality.
And the reason why you have this distorted view of reality could be many, many, many, many different reasons.
You could be fucking jealous.
You could be crazy.
You could be psychotic.
You could just do that.
I've gone to people's Twitters.
They'll say something hateful to you, and you think about responding, and then you go to their Twitter feed, and it's just them attacking everyone.
Fucking Demi Moore, Kobe Bryant, fucking anybody you can find.
That's what some people do.
They throw out a bunch of different lures and hope somebody bites, and they're not even a real person.
Unfortunately, I pretty much wean myself from looking at Amazon reviews anymore, because there's just some asshole-ishness that goes on there like nobody's business.
On Amazon I'll go and once in a while I'll see a one star review and you know like I worked my ass off for two years you son of a bitch.
What do you got to say about it?
And once in a while they're like they take the book apart and like from your perspective I can see that's a crappy book the way you see it.
No problem.
But most of them are just they didn't actually read the book You can tell from the review.
They read 20 pages and stopped and gave you a one-star review.
And you get all super pissed off.
And then you go and you click on that and you read through their other reviews and it's just endless stars, one-star reviews, and five stars for Twilight.
And you're like, okay, that's not really my audience.
You know what I found really fascinating about people like that?
The people who are really harsh on writers or movies or what have you and you read their criticisms and There's often a lot of work put into that stuff.
A lot of work put into the criticisms.
Like I've gone to people's Yelp pages.
You read like a really evil Yelp and you're like, okay, let's go to this guy's Yelp page and see what he, you know, he hates this restaurant so much.
Let's see what he says about everything.
And everything is like really well-written destruction of various restaurants or various things.
And you go, oh, I see what that guy's doing.
He's distracting himself from his own failures.
He's attacking everything as being mediocre and in do so, not even realizing how ironic it is that he's put all of his energy into criticizing other people's work because he's avoiding doing his own.
That's a big thing with a lot of these bloggers and critics and people that are writing.
That a fighter going through a defeat, like, they're looking for some reason to stay alive when they're telling you, oh, I had staph, and then I got the flu, and then...
Maybe those things are true.
But the reason why they have to tell you about those things is they're fucking falling apart.
Yeah, they put their life in They're clawing and looking for something to gain some sort of a victory.
Like, you might have kicked my ass, but I was in a car accident six weeks ago, man.
I had to deal with insurance.
And they find some reason to give them some reason that they're worth something.
I think they just have to treat the situation with respect.
And they have to treat what a fighter is actually doing, and they have to treat it differently than playing basketball, because it's not the fuckin' same thing.
Because I don't think that has any place in martial arts.
I believe if you want to get shitty about a football player, if that's your tradition, that's fine.
But if you want to add that same sports guy bullshit talk to martial arts, I say fuck you.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You don't know what you're...
Some fucking dummy, some dumb, dumb football guy, he does amateur football, was talking about Anderson Silva breaking his leg, and he's saying, this is why I would never cover MMA, and I don't watch it, and never will.
And I'm like, dummy, you're a part of the number one sport for traumatic brain injuries.
The number one, football.
And you're also amateur football, which means you don't even get paid.
So the universities pimp these kids out.
They make fucking...
Billions of dollars on college football.
That's what you cover.
And you make your living off of it while the players make none.
And they're getting fucking brain damage left and right.
It's just, in being a former small-time sports writer and a former small-time college athlete, being able to see both of those sides of the coin, and anybody competing at that level, just the amount of work and talent just to get to be sucky at something...
It's astronomical.
And most of these writers, they've never done anything even close to what they're talking about, and their whole career is based on how much of a dick can I be?
And that's how they got attention for the longest time.
I don't think that that's going to last anymore.
I think that that sort of...
That was fine when everything was being distributed by media networks, when everything that...
You couldn't really comment on it.
If you were a fan of Jim Rome, the radio show, ten years ago or so, what kind of feedback could you ever give him?
There was no feedback, and when he did something controversial, people listened and they watched.
It was an adequate way of gathering up attention.
But I think that these wannabe guys and these guys that are coming along now that are trying to do that, they're really fucking themselves by playing this act of being this really shitty sports guy talk.
Because I think, ultimately, that's going to be exposed as being a really ineffective way of communicating, negative, and not really fun to listen to, either.
I don't know that that'll ever go away, because I think, unfortunately, a lot of the people watching this stuff want a way to feel better about themselves, and bitching about players is still huge.
It's awesome because you've got to give that over to somebody who's creative in a different area than you.
We picked out parts of the book, like an actual scene from the book we could turn into that trailer, and then gave it over to these guys.
The company's named Aureus Grex, and they're here in L-A-U-R-E-S-G-R-E-X, I think.
The guy who directed it, his name's Adrian Picardi, and he already shot a thing earlier for Ancestor, but said, do this, and then have to watch how he does the whole thing.
And they shot that in the same warehouse where they filmed Inception, and so that was pretty fucking sweet.
You know, you get to go and you're like, holy shit, this is where they shot that one movie, and it was pretty fun.
But it's thrilling to watch what other people do with your work, because I don't do that, so I have to see how they bring it to life.
Because you, as the author, you see everything in your head.
You know how it's exactly supposed to look.
But when the director gets a hold of it and the producer gets a hold of it, they're seeing something else.
And they're the ones who make the pictures move.
So you gotta kinda go with what they go with.
I mean, what we're trying to do as we work toward getting infected to be a TV series and nocturnal to be a TV series is just trying to make myself indispensable to these guys.
Like, I'm always here.
I'm always ready to answer questions.
I'm ready to go to work for you anytime you want.
So that if it comes to one of those points where like, I think what you want to show might not, you know, exactly be what the fans want to see.
Maybe you can influence that.
But That's all you can hope for is to influence things a little bit because that's not your job.
But yeah, Stephen King apparently just hated the crap out of that thing.
But I've never really got the impression, just being a fan, that he's all of that interested in his movie adaptations.
He did Maximum Overdrive, which he was very involved in, and a couple other things, but for the most part, he's largely not part of what goes on in his films, it seems like.
So you wonder if that movie was like, alright, screw this, I gotta pay more attention to what's going on.
Well, I think he had some huge, like Carrie, the original Carrie, which still to this day, like they tried to do a new Carrie, and it just wasn't happening.
I have a feeling that there's a bunch of different perceptions of reality.
It's just like people have different ear sizes and different brain power and people are born with different vision.
I think some people's perception of reality is fucking weird.
And I think that's why they like shitty music and they like shitty movies.
I think the filter that they're seeing the world through is very different than the filter that you or I. Maybe that filter is shaped by culture or life experience or the lack of neurochemicals.
They don't have enough shit firing and they don't eat cholesterol.
Whatever they're missing.
They're missing something and they see the world in weird...
Not that I thought that it was that bad, but with Pacific Rim, the thing that just drove me nuts was I paid good money to see a giant monster and a giant robot beat the living shit out of each other.
Can you turn off the frigging rainstorm so I can see a little bit of detail on what's going on here?
Well, that's one of the things that I really loved about the new Hobbit movie, is that the special effects they did were just enough.
I mean, there was a bunch of craziness.
I don't give any spoiler alerts, but up until the time they get to the dragon, there's a few silly scenes, and there was a lot of fun involved and everything.
But the dragon itself is so well done, and the scenes are so well lit.
Joe, have you noticed, like, I'm sure you have noticed, the last UFC, Jam Man showed me this, and now I can't stop looking at it, is how many people wear headphones now around their necks after every fight or before a fight?
They're throwing eggs at the bus, and then he puts those on, and the music plays, and they're all saying, go home, go home, and he's smiling, just walking past everybody.
He used to play for Boston Celtics and I can't think of who he's playing for now but I believe the bus is going back to Boston and people are booing him and he puts those things out.
When you are confronted with scenarios like that, like, say, if you have a racist character in your film, or in your book, rather, and you're constructing him, do you hold back on certain things you think other people would find offensive, or do you try to paint him in as vile a way as possible, which would include someone yelling out racist things like that?
There's my own self-checking on that, and a lot of times I kind of have to get over myself.
Like, this is...
This is language that I don't like and can't stand, but this character is not me and have to get to the point where the character would actually use it.
Because those people are out there, and that's largely what I have to explain with my fiction a ton.
Like, why would you put that in your book?
That's not funny or that's not cool.
Like, yes, but there are people out there who do that.
This is reality.
There's really people like this.
So to make the story feel real, we put these real assholes we have to deal with every day, put them in the book.
So I'll use them.
What's fascinating to me is the amount of pushback I get from over on the publisher side.
The publisher side, you come out with that language of the character like, we're going to have to dial that down.
I'm like, he's a Klan member.
No, we're not going to dial that down.
He's burning a cross.
He's a Klan member.
And they'll be like, no, we can't have that.
And those are one of the things, like I mentioned earlier, that's one of the things I had to put my foot down.
I'm like, that's going in the book because that's real life and people actually say that.
And so that can get tricky.
But if you're doing horror right or any kind of writing right, I think there's a lot of stuff you cross that makes you feel super icky.
Like, you know, am I influencing someone to perform these kind of acts by putting it in the book?
And most of the crazy violent shit that's always in the back of your head, because my books are ridiculously violent, and always in the back of your head, like, okay, but what if someday some messed up kid reads my book and then says, I'm going to go reenact this torture scene on somebody?
And am I eventually going to be responsible for that?
So that's always a thought, and the racist stuff is a thought too, but largely just you let it roll.
Like, if you think that's what a real person would do and talk like and act like, then that goes in the book.
Well, the process of writing in any creative realm where you're doing film or you're doing comics or you're doing books, and going into the bad guy's head and making that bad guy live and breathe and feel like a real person, part of that process is the bad guy doesn't think he's a bad guy.
The supervillain doesn't think she's a supervillain.
You know, these people are always morally justified in everything they do.
They don't go out and commit evil.
They're committing acts that are logical to them and they're being just in their...
They're getting revenge or getting fair desserts on someone.
So being able to write from the perspective of someone who's doing awful, horrible shit, but they don't think it's horrible, that's one of the tricks to doing it.
That's what he did in that book, is the main character...
You don't really catch him going, I'm going to commit acts of evil.
He's just doing what he thinks is what should be done.
As we all do in human beings, those things we need to do, we find a way to morally justify them.
Whatever it is that you do that you may know is a bit squishy in the eyes of society, there's another part of your head that checks and balances the system that goes, it's okay if you do it and here's why.
It's even a good thing that you do it and here's why.
And that's what he did in that book.
And that's...
That's part of the screwed up part of writing.
And if you're just not writing superficial good guy, bad guy, Dudley Do-Right saves a day against Snidely Whiplash, and those stories are perfectly fine and people love them.
But if you're actually trying to get into the point where you make that bad guy, where you feel for the bad guy and empathize with the bad guy, that's tricky stuff.
And my goal at the end of my books is if there's a showdown between the good guy and the bad guy, is you're not really sure who you're rooting for.
If you've done it right, the reader's not really sure who they want to win that fight, even though one is morally reprehensible and the other one is supposedly good.
Well, you don't want to set up obvious paradigms and obvious characters that seem to have been repeated over and over again throughout time and more complex and weird.
And Tony Soprano-like, you can get the...
I mean, Sopranos was one of my favorite shows ever.
And one of the things I really liked about it was that Tony Soprano was a fucking murderer.
He was an evil scumbag murderer that you were rooting for.
I mean, it was a very, very fascinating way that they danced with that.
And I think what Bret Easton Ellis did in that book was completely unapologetic.
And that's why I found it so fascinating.
Because the way he described the horrific, sickening way he described these crimes was, you know, I mean, it was so clinical.
That it almost is like done in the mind of a psychopath.
Like, I didn't necessarily even enjoy it.
I just think it was really good.
There was parts of that book that are like, the part where he shows up to clean up some bodies that he left behind and the entire apartment had been cleaned.
And he locks eyes at the real estate agent.
And the real estate agent is this woman who's like selling the place.
And she's like, I know what you did.
Get the fuck out of here.
And they exchange this look.
It's a really fascinating scene of two monsters running into each other.
One of them a murderer, the other one a psychopath or sociopath.
Well, it's just this fascinating thing about creating fiction.
The fascinating thing about fiction is when you're creating an evil person, like what you're saying about will a person duplicate your acts?
Will they create copycat crimes?
Will they start looking into your way of describing things and recreating it in a horrific way in the real world that you'll feel responsible for?
Whether it's a racist thing, whether it's a violent thing, or whatever it is.
That's a fascinating thing to have to think about when you're creating fiction, is that you may be reinforcing or even perhaps inspiring an idea that's ultimately very evil.
I think that in the instances where art has influenced people to go do something, those people are looking for that moral justification even though they don't know they're doing it.
When the Night Stalker killer was out, if ACDC hadn't wrote the song Night Stalker, that guy would have found something else.
That guy would have found something else to validate his need to go out and kill.
Yeah, that would be super difficult to deal with, but I've kind of thought this through several times because I write some fucked up shit.
Yeah.
If it happens, how am I going to feel about that?
And I've already kind of, you know, because I'm not a bad guy either.
I'm just like the people I'm talking about.
I don't think I'm a bad guy.
I pre-justified that with that guy or that girl would have found something to latch onto and would have gone out and killed based on, you know, an Anne Rice story instead of my story.
Yeah, I'm very fascinated by the influence of something creative like that, whether it's a film that inspires Taxi Driver, which inspired John Hinckley.
I'm fascinated by that strange link between a creation, a creative creation...
That's turned into a movie or a book and how it influences people and how you can catch someone who's got the wrong fucking chemicals floating around in their brain and they read any one of your books and decide to enact a scene.
There was a guy who was arrested in Vancouver for enacting a dextracine.
It's basically the character is a total psychopath who's wearing a badge.
And functions perfectly normal in society.
But when it comes point to arrest a guy, instead of him just pulling the gun and going, okay, put your hands up, I got you, he leaves the gun in the holster, and he's always like, I can take you and you're going to serve life in jail.
Or, you can draw that gun, and if you shoot me down, you get to walk away.
But we got to go on the set, and Timothy Oliphant's reading the script, and his very fanboy is super cool.
And then he turns over and talks to the real Marshall, who's been the consultant on the show for all four years.
And Timothy asks him a question like, would my guy do this?
And you could see the Marshall...
Sweating it a little bit because he knows what he's going to say.
It's going to screw up a lot of work.
And basically what he says is, yeah, you wouldn't go for point A, B, C, D, and E to F. If you were me, you would have just gone straight to F and been done with it.
And then you can tell they're now going to go back and do rewrites.
Much like the John Lithgow thing with the bad rear naked choke.
They're so hoping it's going to be as realistic as possible, they're going to have to go change a bunch of crap.