Nick Cutter (Craig Davidson) defends horror fiction’s narrative focus over factual precision, citing The Troop and his upcoming book The Deep, set in the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep. He and Joe Rogan critique ideological hypocrisy—like climate denial or religious contradictions—and explore parenting’s surreal challenges, from babies’ sleep struggles to societal attitudes toward children. They debate negligible senescence in animals like quahogs and hydras, warning of testosterone replacement therapy’s ethical risks in sports, where it could mask TBI effects or enable unfair recovery. Rogan’s promotion of The Deep underscores how Cutter’s behavioral research shapes his fiction, blending realism with chilling storytelling. [Automatically generated summary]
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It's really fun, and it's along the lines of Stand By Me or one of those classic old Stephen King books, like The Stand or Pet Sematary, where it's just twisted and dark, and there's psychological shit going on, and there's horrific things happening, there's monsters, and it's really fucking cool, man.
And When he sent it to me, he told me that Nick Cutter wasn't your real name.
Well, you know, I think the most concerning thing to me would be is that anyone...
Because, I mean, I grew up like you.
Like, Stephen King is my idol.
Steve, there's nobody I've read more than Stephen King.
And beyond that, like, I grew up as a horror reader.
I mean, I've read everything now.
I mean, you sort of diversify.
But I wouldn't even say diversify, because that's sort of like...
I love...
The horror genre.
So like Clyde Barker, obviously Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robert R. McCammon.
I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
That was sort of who I cut my teeth on.
So really my agent said, listen, you've been writing these things under your own name and they're kind of...
I wouldn't even classify them as literary, but maybe they would be a little more to that side rather than the horror genre.
And he sort of felt like, listen, people aren't going to...
People might be confused or people might, you know, let's have some separation basically.
And the best way to do this separation is just to give you a new name, put this horror work, because when I sent him the troupe, I mean there's no way it's anything other than just like, I wanted to write like an 80s style.
Hard fireball and sort of horror novel.
Like not splitting any hairs, not trying to make it meta-ironic or anything, just trying to go straight ahead the horror that I grew up loving and try and sort of be an homage to those writers in that time.
So there's no doubt it was going to come out as clearly a horror novel.
So he said, let's just make up a pseudonym.
And I wouldn't say I'm new to this, but...
You know, you have an agent as well.
I mean, I trust my agent.
I imagine in most cases you trust your agent, maybe not always.
I think maybe looking back, you know, what we did is we settled on this pseudonym and then I quickly went away, you know, trying to erase any sort of sentiment that I was ashamed of it.
Because I think that's...
I live in Toronto and I hang out with a lot of people in the horror genre, sort of genre writers, and their question was, like, are you ashamed?
I'm like, fuck no.
That would be the worst thing for me for people to think that, you know, because I'm as proud as what I've done as The Troop as any other writing I've ever done.
And I wrote a book just recently called Cataract City, which is...
So it's sort of like, I don't know, I wouldn't say Chuck Palahniuk, he was an early influence, but sort of like macho, like fighting, boxing, dogfighting, repossession, you know, those were sort of the things, really sort of manly endeavors that I was concerned about and interested in with those books.
But they certainly weren't literary like Alice Munro or something like that.
You wake up in the morning and what do you have to do?
Maybe go to a class for two hours a day.
Yeah.
And so I think people in that realm feel like they, because they have the time to, like, invest in, like, really crunchy mind sort of melting, you know, fiction that really tests you.
But, you know, and then they sort of look down on someone who just wants to read, like, for example, I didn't mention at all in my first, when I did my English degree, you won't talk about Stephen King.
And so first you read it just because you love Stephen King.
And then second, you know, I went back as a writer myself and you sort of treat the book as like an engine.
The way a mechanic treats an engine, you're trying to break it down and see what is working.
How does this work?
How does he scare you?
And that's where you realize his genius because it's like...
You know, I'm working on like a Model T Ford, and he's got like this, he's working on the DeLorean engine from Back to the Future.
That's how much he's above, you know, a lot of us in terms of like, he works at a level, I think, of like Conjuring Fear that is so difficult to, first of all, see how it works, break it down, and then try and do it yourself.
And so when you have people looking down on him for that, I just don't think they've really interacted with his work as closely as I have.
Because first of all, if you're saying he sucks, I'm like, I can't even touch him in some ways.
Well, I just think it's one of those things where it becomes...
It's trendy to say he sucks.
It puts you in this sort of elevated category of intellectual.
I think that's horseshit because fiction, like when you start talking about monsters or vampires, you're automatically a fool or you're doing foolish work.
And so, and what another thing Stephen King does really well is childhood.
I don't think there's another writer, to my mind, really, who writes about childhood as well as Stephen King captures it in a book like It or the movie The Body that became Stand By Me.
He captures that time in a boy's life especially.
It's just remarkable, you know what I mean?
And so I think now, too, I know Patton Oswalt did like, I think it was, I forget where he did it, but he did like a long article based on his admiration, really, for Stephen King.
So I think now there's a renaissance, finally, Stephen King has got to be close to 70 now, where people are finally like, okay, this guy's pretty good.
But he must write like 5,000 words a day, consistently, and it's strong, strong stuff.
So that was why Bachman came to be, because his agent was like, listen, we just can't be flooding the market with Stephen King.
We gotta, let's separate you out, let's just put some of these stuff out under a different name, and then, you know, you still have your book out every year, which is still at an astronomical rate.
So yeah, it was just, for him it was totally a sense of he just had too much to say.
I'm not sure, but it was based on really, it was based, Richard Stark or George Stark was his pseudonym, and that's when his pseudonym started stalking him, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That was definitely based on his experience having written under a pseudonym.
But that was another example of his ability to sort of not just be so prolific, but also be prolific under some really established territory as far as his work.
I think it's because the narrative is easier to write from that perspective, you know, even the voice that you find, I think, because it's like, oh, I'm a writer, this voice is...
Because I was reading, rereading The Body lately, made into Stand By Me, and that's, again, that's a writer character who's writing that, and...
You're right.
He does have a lot of writer characters, which is something I've avoided up to this point, but, you know...
Yeah, if I was being unkind, I would call them a bunch of kid fucking weirdos that live in the woods.
Not all of them.
There's great parts of Maine.
Bangor's a great city.
The real problem with Maine is there's some areas where there's nothing.
Like, there's an area between Portland, Maine, and Bangor, when you're driving up from Boston, where you go at least an hour without seeing anything, driving 70 miles an hour, and no radio.
Good fighters coming up, and I did a magazine article on one guy who...
You know, I just followed him to his first professional fight, actually, which was an interesting sort of thing to follow.
And he actually, he hurt himself really badly in that fight.
And that was it.
That was his career.
But I know the gym that he was working out of had, it was, I mean, it was, I've rarely been and felt that level of like, camaraderie, but also competition, sort of in such a tight, small area.
It's great that you guys in the UFC come up, and I think for a while there, it was mostly you guys were down in Las Vegas and a few other places, but then you decided to come up to Canada, and it's been good for you guys, it's been great for us too.
Yeah, I have a friend who was talking about a sitcom that he was working on.
And he was talking about, there's a woman that was one of the leads that was trying to introduce, she was also one of the writers, and she was trying to introduce these male characters that were like the type of guys that she likes.
And they were like, oh, he's too jockey.
He's too much of a meathead.
They didn't want anybody who was interested in other women other than the girl that they were with.
They didn't want that dilemma.
They didn't want anyone who was dominant over the woman in the relationship.
They didn't want anybody who was obsessed with their body or working out.
I think, I was thinking, too, about before coming here, like, you, your career has sort of had, I think you must have run up against that a lot.
Because, like, I remember when Fear Factor came out, there was a sense, you know, there were these hyperbolic newspaper articles like, ah, society's collapsing, you know, it's Fear Factor, like, you know what I mean?
People are doing things that, like, why are we getting people to eat bugs or stuff?
And I thought...
I love that show, you know what I mean?
And then the UFC comes along and it's the same kind of like, what was one of your politicians had the human cockfight?
90% of all school shooters, 90 plus, Are either on SSRIs or are recovering from SSRIs.
They're in withdrawal from antidepressants.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that the antidepressants cause that.
But I do believe there's, without a doubt, an over-prescription of medication.
Without a doubt.
You go to a doctor, the doctor's not going to look at a holistic approach to your life and say, Hey, you know, maybe you were raised by shitty human beings.
Not only that, all your inhibitions are going to be lessened.
Your ability to understand the consequences of your actions will be lessened.
Your ability to be depressed and to feel terrible about bad actions has also been removed.
There's a lot of things that happen when you put people on drugs that change your neurochemistry.
Doesn't mean that those drugs are bad.
I get these fucking tweets from these people that can't understand a complex argument or a nuanced conversation.
I have friends personally that have benefited greatly from antidepressants.
It's not that I deny them or don't support them.
I think there's definitely a place for them.
But I think when you look at all these people that have killed mass groups of people and you find this one common denominator over and over and over again, To ignore that but concentrate entirely on the tool itself is ridiculous.
Most human beings are absolutely incapable of walking to a school and shooting a bunch of children.
What is it about some human beings that are capable?
I don't know.
But that's not being discussed.
Gun control is being discussed.
The raising of children is not being discussed.
It's gun control that's being discussed.
I find that ridiculous.
I really do.
And I think that That sort of gets lumped in with this rejection of manliness, this support of anything that's anti-male, or this denial of these base male instincts that don't necessarily have to be harmful to other people, like competition.
I mean, my career is, in a way, you know, again, my early stuff was all about men doing men things, which some of it is silly and self-harming, but also it's like something that I think built into our genome we need to express in a certain way, you know what I mean?
So, but I know...
That a certain segment of readers were turned off immediately in the same way that these TV writers were just like, no.
And most likely you have a bad relationship with your mother or your sisters or someone in your family who just did a terrible job of expressing to you the responsibility of being the physically stronger sex.
And the one that...
Is the penetrator, not the penetratee.
This whole relationship between men and women, I think a huge part of it is how they're raised.
How human beings are raised and what kind of a relationship they have with their family.
Yeah, well, I think there may be a time in the future where we can understand and get to the root of these behaviors and perhaps access whatever it is that's wrong in a person's mind that makes them either have a desire to victimize children or have the ability to victimize children and not feel remorse for it or be attracted to it.
Do you, as a writer, do you, because as a comic, I watch a lot of things that I don't agree with.
Sort of jump into their head and see if you could trace a narrative through their eyes.
I have tried that.
I think that's...
You know, I know writers and I certainly know comedians who...
I mean, it's sort of like the rage-based comedian.
Like, you really want to sort of confront these things, you know, and really go on a good harangue about it.
And I think...
It's sometimes not even funny with a comedian, but it's really true and it's really honest and you're actually getting more of a social commentary at that point.
You're getting a really strong, distilled, powerful medicine.
And there's some writers who sort of work in this satirist vein, I guess, who sort of do the same thing over the length of a book.
Yeah.
So I've tried that.
I've never found as much success with it, at least not yet.
Because the same thing, of course, we have a strong conservative base.
Conservative radio always gets on my nerves.
It's funny because right now we have Rob Ford, our mayor in Toronto, who's doing all sorts of hilarious things.
is in rehab now.
Uh, you know, and he's like, he's no end of, of fun.
You know, I was sitting at the bar yesterday when I, I got in and I was talking to some exact defense contractor actually.
And he was like, he, you know, he sounds like, he seems like a pretty good guy.
At least he's straight out honest.
I'm like, he is a, he is a guy you could probably go out and feel like you'd have a beer with.
And I don't think he'd look down at you for sure.
But, um, he's also the mayor of our city and he's, he's a, I mean, he's a bit of a goof and he's a bit of a bully I find as well.
But it's funny to listen to the conservative pundits because they've got to turn themselves into paroxysms and back twists to try and defend his behavior basically.
And it gets more and more difficult to kind of defend the behavior of a man who keeps doing more and more...
He's just an old doddering old man, which, yeah, true enough.
I feel I heard some argument that he was actually asking her to tape him because he felt like his head was going to tapioca and he couldn't remember anything anymore.
So he's like, please tape me so that I remember all the things that I say.
I mean, I... These are one of, you know, you've heard this a lot of times, and of course you have to separate what he said and the reprehensible, clearly the long-standing, reprehensible nature of this man as he's, you know, sort of proven to be over like 20 years span.
And then of course the question is, and it's been asked already, why?
Why is he still in that position where everyone knows he was a racist dirtbag?
But no one was doing anything about it.
And I think at this point, the players basically pushed it.
They said, listen, if you don't get rid of this guy, we will not come out and play anymore.
Well, if it was something else, like say if he was...
Say if he was the president of a company, a big company, General Electric or something like that, and he had a little piece on the side, and he was like, hey, stop taking pictures with black eyes.
It wouldn't get nearly the response as someone who has benefited tremendously from black athletes.
And there were rumors that back a couple years ago he'd gone into the dressing room and all the basketball players have been in various stages of undress and he's like, I like seeing all this black...
Uh, and, and he actually only had one fight and it was up in Red Deer.
So like Calgary and then Red Deer is about two or three hours away.
And it was like in a, a civic center sort of a thing.
And, uh.
But he was really...
His father...
It's a great story, man.
I find the best stories sometimes are where you don't quite make it.
You know what I mean?
Like, athletically, it's like you put your heart and your guts and your soul into it and you're just not quite good enough.
You know what I mean?
There's something about you.
You just can't quite get over the hump.
You know, I think I find those are the stories that are the most...
It hit my heart the strongest.
And his father is on the Calgary SWAT team now, but he had played forever in the junior leagues of hockey.
And he made it up for a cup of coffee with the Leafs for like two games.
But he played professional hockey for two games.
And his son was like an incredible wrestler.
Sort of had the classic sort of MMA pedigree.
And, uh, but he drove a, uh, like a sandwich truck.
Do you know those things?
They go around to work sites, you know, uh, like a catering truck.
And so I followed him for like three or four days on that job.
And, um, he actually said that he, he let people take things on credit, you know, and so people would build up like a hundred, couple hundred bucks before they paid it off finally.
And one guy, I guess like just...
You know, we went to a mechanic shop and he was like, is so-and-so here?
He needs to settle his bill.
He's like, no, he went up.
He's like a wildcatter now up in Fort McMurray, like 10 hours away.
He just bailed.
He just left in the middle of the night.
So Tony, you know, who has had a wife and a young kid, got in the car, went up and found him and got his money back, you know?
So, I mean...
This is the sort of mentality that this guy had.
So, and I think I got a pretty strong story out of that just by being able to stay with him long enough.
He was really nice to speak to me, talk to me, and you got him burrowed inside of his head.
And I think the strongest work comes from as close as you can get to those people, you know?
It's like I've always felt like the mountain goes up and up and up.
You're going to hit your point on it at some point and you've got to be happy with that spot where you are on the mountain whenever you reach that spot.
I think that's the biggest part in life really is just accepting your spot on the mountain wherever it happens to be.
The idea that you're going to have some sort of a long and successful, fruitful career by throwing your bones at another person, trying to separate themselves from their consciousness, that's quite ridiculous.
Because just the very act of doing it and preparing for that very act, the amount of damage that your body and your brain even endures is...
But we have this idea in our heads that a guy has to be an undefeated champion.
My son's going to be a champion someday.
Man, if you're really lucky, your son won't be a champion.
If you're really lucky, your son will learn the valuable lessons of martial arts as far as character development and as far as your ability to overcome what seem to be insurmountable obstacles.
But...
To become a champion, you have to be a crazy person.
You're not going to know that wall until you run into it.
And I feel like for some people, like I was talking to one guy, just a guy at the gym, and he said something more or less like the best that he ever felt in a fight was when he was up against someone he knew was better than him.
And he knew he was going to lose.
And if they fought a hundred times, he'd lose a hundred times.
But he, that guy, he made that guy see something about himself.
He got that close to him that the other guys sort of recognize I'm a frail.
I'm made out of the same crumbling stuff that he's made out of.
And so, you know, sort of pierced that Teflon armor that, that I think some fighters carry around with themselves.
And he's like, that's, that's all I could do.
That for me is the victory.
I still lost.
But I made that guy discover something about himself that he hadn't discovered up until that point because he'd never been tested to the point that I was able to test him.
And I thought, that's another part about just recognizing what you're able to do.
And it may not be beating him, but you find some other measure of success.
And then outside of that, the other variables are genetics.
Some people have a different psychology.
What's really interesting is people that have been bullied, and especially people that have larger brothers that bullied them in the house their whole life, those are the scariest fuckers on the planet.
And it's usually, for whatever reason, the younger brother that's the real beast.
Because the younger brother endures the beatings that the older brother gives him, and because of that he develops this sort of steely determination that's quite frightening.
That totally makes sense, both on a physical level, but on an emotional kind of...
You know, you're getting that adamantium kind of mindset about things and just got to keep prevailing.
I've always thought too, like, because I do watch a lot of MMA and I love it both as a sport and boxing as well, but also like the psychological aspect of it really fascinates me and I've always felt like how...
Painful it must be to come up.
I always think about like Michael Jordan and who were, you know, we would think differently of Dominique Wilkins if Michael Jordan ever existed.
And I think we'd think differently of so many fighters if GSP hadn't existed or Silva or, you know, John Jones, these sort of long reigning sort of champions.
And you would know better having been through it, but there's, you know what I mean?
There's that next level who can't quite, you know, they have their one shot, they can't quite clear it.
And some are lucky to have another opportunity to sort of go back at it and can still make a good career for themselves.
I find that MMA, especially in the UFC right now, is there's some long-reigning champions, and that's what people love.
You know, they sort of love, but all the focus is on them, and then these people, the guys underneath who could be awesome were it not for a GSP. But that's the whole purpose of being a champion.
I had friends who were martial artists and fighters and either former pro fighters or guys who had been involved in fighting their whole life who universally texted me and emailed me and said, dude, that fight took years off that guy's life.
He said, that guy could go a couple of months outside of training, like, get injured, be out for a couple months, then come back in and outwork everybody.
I mean, comparatively, I know when my dad retired, it was like a trap door opened under his life in a way because he was like used to having this routine to his life and you look forward to it.
But I think, you know, the first week you're like, oh, this is great.
And then the second week it's like...
What the hell am I doing?
I feel like my...
And then if you're looking down the barrel of that when you're at 60, 65, well that's one thing.
When you're looking down the barrel of that when you're 32, 33, something like that, it's got to be a different...
This is what I was...
This is what I'm good at.
This is all I'm good at, I think some of them might think.
And then it's like, God, I've got a long existence ahead of me doing what?
Well, I think the only person that's ever going to truly understand what it's like to say, like, beat Jon Jones and enter into a world championship fight with the whole world watching, the cage door shuts and the Bruce buffer, it's time!
They're the only ones that'll ever understand that.
I will never understand it.
I've watched...
And I've done commentary on more than a thousand fights.
Yeah, I assume it is, certainly in terms of, but I mean, I felt like I was amped up to the point where every one of my synapses was screaming.
I'm just not built to do that, you know?
Maybe they have, maybe there's a calmness.
I feel like sometimes you look and the top fighters are able to kind of establish a certain calmness that I've never really found in those situations in my life, whether it's a playground scuffle or, you know, an amateur boxing match.
Well, the calmness, a lot of it comes with the experience itself being something that you recognize and you've been there before and you know how to deal with it.
Whereas someone who has never...
Like, if you took a guy who has never competed at all before and you threw him in a UFC fight, they would fucking shit their pants.
But if you take a guy like a Jon Jones, because we keep talking about him...
He trains his whole life in wrestling, so he's wrestled for many, many years, competed at a very high level in wrestling, then started competing in MMA, trains every day, constantly in the gym, constantly working out with these really high-level guys.
You have a comfort level with just the recognition of what this is.
You understand it, you get in there, you know what you can do, you're very aware of what you're capable of because you have literally pushed yourself to your limits in training.
And you get in there and you're much calmer than a person who's completely alien to the experience.
So I think for you, like, doing it a couple of times, like, you didn't have a chance to get used to it.
I feel like that's, in my experience watching as well, there's that kind of...
That's a separation level.
It's as much as your heart and your talent.
And there is, you know, heart is something that is one of these ephemeral qualities that no one...
But I mean, there are fighters that you know that's what they have.
That's what's getting them through.
It's not necessarily their talent, it's their...
I think heart is a combination of a lot of things that are kind of impossible to quantify, but you can see it in different athletes.
It doesn't have to be a fighter.
That seems to be where it's most obvious to notice it, but there's lots of athletes that I like, and usually it's because they have some quality of heart that distinguishes them in my eyes, and they're not the best.
But they've taken their skills as far as they can go.
Most likely that he probably just wasn't trained correctly or to the best of his ability.
If you've got a guy like Emmanuel Stewart who gets a hold of a boxer from the time that he first starts and teaches him just incredibly perfect technique, perfect strategy, the mindset, like a custom auto, what he did with Mike Tyson, molds his mindset.
You can do something that if the guy grows up with some Midwest boxing club in the middle of nowhere with a guy who doesn't really know how to box, and that's the guy who's teaching him.
And that's the guy who brings it through his amateur career, and that's the guy who turns him into a pro.
That guy might be lacking in just giant chunks of knowledge that a guy like, say, a Freddie Roach has.
You never know what would create a champion out of a contender.
Yeah, and also even mid-fight, you know, because Gaddy was someone who used to get himself drawn into firefights when he didn't need to, you know, and whether he's really listening to his trainer at that point or not, I don't know.
But I know for me, too, even the amateur things that I did, what I really took away from it and what I really enjoyed was the training part of it.
You know, I trained...
I was living in Iowa at the time, and...
There was a boxing club at the bottom of, like a really sort of, it was at the bottom of a Gold's Gym in Coralville, which is sort of like just outside of Iowa City.
And it was run by a coach and two girls, two female fighters, the Kleinfelter sisters.
And they were like 130, one of them was maybe 130, one of them was like 115. Tough as nails, fast, and you'd spar.
I knew I was going to have to get in this amateur boxing match.
And so I was like, well, you better not be easy on me, and I'm not going to be able to really punch a girl, I didn't think.
Ultimately, I wasn't able to.
But even if I wanted to punch them, I don't think I would have really been able to lay leather on them because they were fast and they were mean.
And even if I did touch them, they'd be like, you know, you punch like a softie.
Like, this is weak, weak-ass shit.
But what I really took away from it is really enjoying the...
The discipline, you know, with nutrition and with the road work.
I mean, I did all that stuff.
I loved doing that.
And I felt like that was the only thing that I could actually take into my own hands and that I had some sort of agency in.
You know what I mean?
I can run as hard and as far and I can hit the bag until my arms feel like noodles.
And the one thing that I noticed, and I've said it before, is like...
And I feel like other people have noticed this because I've gotten a lot of fights when I was young, but I don't think I ever won one.
And I feel like I must exude this kind of waft of something that like, I just am not a fighter.
But every time I've gotten in a fight, it's been more that someone is, I feel like is taking, trying to take advantage of me or has been picking on me for a long period of time.
And it's the only way that this is going to stop or been, or been picking on someone that I cared about.
And I always got the sense afterwards that the person who beat me up, basically, knew that.
They're like, I can draw Davidson into a fight, and he'll willingly go in.
He'll go into the bear trap, and then I'll just be able to beat him up.
And the only good thing about it, ultimately, is that the picking on stuff stopped.
You know what I mean?
But I had to take a beating in order to sort of affect that, you know?
And then, you know, there was a bike rack and I remember he like rang my head off of it and I'd get him in a, you know, sort of a headlock and...
And I remember being like face down and there's like ice melt on the street, you know, those blue crystals they put down, you know, and my face is pressed into it.
And thankfully, it goes on for a while.
Clearly I'm beat.
And he's like, are we had enough here?
I'm like, yeah, I mean, I've had enough.
That's enough.
So he goes back inside chuckling with his buddy.
I'm sitting out there on the street bleeding.
I don't even want to go back into the Y, you know what I mean?
I'm going to have the people inside going, what the hell happened?
Do you need help?
And I'm like, I just want to crawl into a hole and, you know, not see humanity for about a month.
So my brother goes inside, gets my clothes, we go.
I find out later this guy, we, lacrosse is a big sport in our country.
And he was like the enforcer on the lacrosse team, like the AAA lacrosse team.
So he was a tough guy.
Like I didn't have a chance, you know, right from the get-go I didn't have a chance.
And then, you know, I discover his name because we lived in a small town and you sort of, these things sort of come to you as time goes by.
And then my buddy calls me up a couple years later, he's, He says, did you hear about so-and-so?
I said, no.
I was away at university at this point.
He's like, they went camping in the woods.
And him and his dad, and this word gets back to your idea of abuse.
He stabbed his dad 44 times.
Killed him.
Killed him in the woods and they caught him just walking down the street with the knife in his hand.
And, uh, and, you know, later on they interview his mom and his mom was like, yeah, he was, uh, you know, he basically would sit out on the porch saying that he, George Bush was going to come in Air Force One anytime, pick him up for some top secret mission.
So he clearly had some, some mental instabilities that didn't present themselves at the age at which at least they were maybe emerging, but I thought later...
Yeah, you fucking people, especially in this day and age...
When you're dealing with cities and traffic and the unnatural stress of slamming 200 fucking million people together like this, they've done these studies on population density just with rats, and they've shown how bizarre rat behavior gets when you get too many rats in a contained environment, and it mirrors human beings' behavior.
As far as human beings, when you have a small amount of them, everybody seems to get along fine.
But when you jam them together, you start getting all these mental illnesses.
Well, that's what they do with rats.
If you have a certain amount of rats and you jam them into a box, A certain amount of them will just sit in a corner and start nodding their heads up and down and back and forth, and it gets really weird.
He was also explaining to us how intelligent these dolphins are, and the dolphins go on hunger strikes, they have to force feed them, and they take them away from their mothers, and they buy them from Russians.
Like, I think a lot of animals just end up starving because they just won't learn to eat an animal that's not, you know, that they're normally used to catching in some way.
There's no apes that live anywhere where there's not something that might fuck them up, whether it's a spider or a snake that they should avoid or something.
I mean, you do all sorts of weird things for your kids.
I think sometimes zoos exist but for the benevolence of kids or the needs of kids so that parents feel like, well, shit, you're not going to see this any other way.
I love you.
I want you to see them.
I'll gloss over.
I'll say, oh, look at the happy monkeys.
Even though in some part of you knows these are not happy monkeys.
This is not natural either.
But you know you're not going to take them to Borneo either.
I mean, I guess if you were into adopting it, the one part of that story, like you understand, like you have kids, you know, I have kids.
I think if you don't have kids and you've tried to have kids, I think people might feel that there's a loss in their life and something that needs to be filled, you know, and often you fill it with an animal of, you get really into dog breeding or you have 17 cats or something like that.
But you think, man, if I was an inch tall, you would make sport out of me, you would make mincemeat out of me, and you would have not a goddamn care in the world about that.
On pit bulls, which I thought would have been really interesting, because one thing I noticed in research was, like, people in different parts of this country breed pit bulls differently based on where they are from.
Like, Kentucky, Arkansas, they breed, like, a really lean...
It's almost like fighters, like a really lean, fast version of a dog, whereas in California...
Or, sorry, Florida and Miami area, they breed, like, really big...
Bulky, kind of.
That's sort of what the genes that they want to put together.
And yeah, for the purposes of fighting these creatures.
And I mean, I like pit bulls.
I've met, you know, nice pit bulls, you know.
But I do know, from what I've researched anyways, that they're like bred into...
They're built to be fighting creatures.
That's sort of what they were bred for.
And not sort of what, that's exactly what they were bred for.
And so that sort of thing is always in their DNA helix.
It's sort of sunk in there.
And, you know, you go onto these Pitbull forums and you experience, in the same way with V, like a very strong emotional kind of like, you don't understand, you don't get it.
And I wasn't even coming from a perspective of like intolerance or hatred.
I was just coming from a perspective of I just would like to talk about it.
This was what they do with this one was they, sort of like tractor pulls.
For dogs.
So they hook them up to sledges and they see how many bricks they can carry.
And that's sort of like, I mean, I'd much rather that, right?
Just like strength events, basically, for these dogs.
But I sort of had the temerity, I guess, to say...
I can see why you're doing this.
You're sort of doing this because these dogs have these instincts and it's better to have them pulling a sledge than fighting one another or fighting other dogs.
And you're just sort of assaulted by these people who are like, you don't get it at all.
These are the nicest creatures ever.
And I wasn't even coming from saying they're not nice.
You know, I, I, again, I feel like a lot of it with animal ownership is the owner.
It's really not the dog always, you know, a dog when it's born can go any number of different ways.
But when you see a pit bull owned by a guy who's driving around like a jacked up pickup truck and his dog's got like a spiked collar on and he's carrying around by a length of, you know, chain, you're like, that dog might potentially have been raised with a certain higher, you You know, the aggression might have been brought out of them more than this dog that had grown up with a family with three kids in it, you know?
Yeah, there's guys that enjoy beating the fuck out of people.
Like I said, a lot of them have had the fuck beaten out of them and it becomes...
And that's one of the things that they say that's the most horrific thing about sexual abuse is that a lot of the abused become abusers when they get older.
And my wife is a child services social worker, which I mean, it's tough.
It's tough.
And she told me this one story.
I can repeat it.
And she goes over with this other, with a cop actually, to apprehend these kids.
Opens the door, dirtbag father answers, my kids aren't here.
Kids haven't been here for days.
She's like, well, we have reports that your wife said that They are here because they're certainly not with your ex.
And, you know, basically they had a warrant.
They got inside.
Room's empty.
Apartments empty, as far as they could tell.
Closets open.
Closets open ajar.
So they open it up.
Two kids in there, in the closet.
And the one thing that my wife noticed was that the wallpaper, I don't know who wallpaper is inside of the closet, but whatever, it was ripped in rags.
eggs and the kids had been eating it because they had been in there for so long that, uh, that that was sort of how it, how it came that way they got to the point where they were, they were eating the wallpaper.
You know, you read about shit like that, and this guy goes on this horrific cycle of childhood abuse and becomes this criminal, and he winds up meeting this woman and falling in love and actually having a family, but still keeps fucking up and can't figure out a way to stop.
And you hear it from the woman, like the woman who married him, her point of view of, like, what could he do?
The guy grew up, like, in this horrific state, and he's broken.
No, I mean, in that case, I put myself in the mind of the social worker.
Because, you know, it was easier for me to put myself in the mind of my wife rather than put myself in the mind of someone like that.
You know what I mean?
But even in the troupe, there's a character, Shelley, who is...
You know, has some very serious things wrong with him.
And so, yeah, I think part of it is trying to put yourself as closely into that mindset as you can while recognizing that you can never quite bridge that gap.
You know what I mean?
Because...
I mean, that's just a leap that I can't quite make, you know?
So you just have to hope that you're getting close enough that the reader is...
I've always said as a writer, you just need to be one step ahead of your reader.
It means you have to have done that little bit more research or just spent more time thinking about these things that a reader hopefully is going to read really quickly and it's going to be like, okay, okay.
It's not...
Nothing is really sticking out that is enough that's going to make them sort of check up, which all people do in a book or a movie.
They're like, okay, you've just...
This is too far.
Suddenly you've sort of crossed some sort of boundary that I'm no longer quite with you in the way that I was before.
And you never know what it is.
I was having dinner yesterday at the hotel bar and I ended up next to this guy talking to him and he was like a big Tom Clancy reader.
And I said, oh, I've had people, like, I had a guy get in touch with me once, because I wrote some sort of book that had some military stuff in it, and he sort of said, well, you know, not to be a nitpick or anything, but the clip capacity of an M16 is actually 16 rounds and not 17, as you said.
And I'm like, I get it.
I mean, I get it.
I get that's wrong.
That's a mistake.
But I think probably what I'm trying to do is not really having...
It'd be great if I could have caught that and it was more scrupulous to fact.
But really, you're trying to weave a narrative in fiction.
If you don't get the facts right, if you're doing something about medical stuff and you haven't been scrupulous about it, then yeah, then you're going to get...
But I mean, the guy mentioned, he's like, that's why I can't read Stephen King, because he gets apparently too many things wrong.
And I'm like...
I am so deep into most Stephen King narratives that I don't...
And he's like, well, I've done research and there's absolutely not a damn thing wrong with fracking and it's a myth, just like global warming is a myth.
And I was like, okay, I think we're probably on different sides of this and I'm not going to get into an argument with you about it, but...
That's where you just tune out of a conversation.
You're just like, okay, I'm out of this right now.
Yeah, you can't fight every battle, but there's a sense of like, because that's the conservative thing, is like to come right at you, and I feel like, well, fuck, if I don't come back and say something, I've sort of just like let him believe that his point is valid from my perspective.
Well, I like to talk to people that have strong beliefs in systems, in things rather, to find out how their belief systems are formed.
I want to know, is there a logical, rational sort of basis to their belief systems, or is it just that they've sort of adopted this predetermined pattern, which is very common.
What's really fascinating about it is that they're always supporting big business, but yet no one gets fucked over more than blue-collar folks when it comes to big business.
It's like sometimes this outlook is actually the one that's most injurious to you in a way of your own life and your own, you know, sort of happiness in a way.
I mean, if you think about it, the people that are less educated...
to work for a company or need a company to employ them.
Those are more likely people that are going to get lower paying jobs.
Those are more likely people that are going to need some form of public assistance or if it's possible.
But yet those are the people that have this pull yourself up by your own bootstraps mentality and that these fucking welfare rats, they have all these crazy ideas in their head.
Whereas the educated people who are more likely to be able to fend for themselves or more likely at least to have the possibility to have a higher paying job because of the fact they're educated, at least in theory, are more likely to support public assistance or more likely to be are more likely to support public assistance or more likely to be against some of the environmentally destroying policies of It's real weird how people just sort of form these patterns that they lock into.
And that, as you said, can be really against their own self-interest and self-benefit going forward.
But I don't know about you, but I found like as I've gotten older, like when I was in school, I was a total like lib, like almost as left as you could go, as piecey as you could go.
And as I get older, I feel like I come to some sort of, not the center, I'll always be to the left.
But you know what I mean?
There's certain things about liberal, you know, that get on my nerves as well.
Like, I mean, and that's just, I feel like any fully rounded human being is not going to always be in one camp entirely.
A strong religion, religious kind of context and flavor to things as well, which kind of has a...
You talk about things happening when you're a kid.
I've always felt that that's one of the things...
That really influences your thinking and the way that you have an outlook on the world.
And I think that's a part of what religion does, is they want to get you young and they want to get you indoctrinated and they want to sort of have a good soldier for the battle going forward kind of a thing.
And I never grew up that way.
I don't know about you, but I... We're not a very religious household, but I've certainly come across a lot of religious...
And some of whom are totally awesome and really nice and really...
My wife actually came up really Baptist.
And there was some point around when she was 18 or 19, I was just like, I can't do this anymore.
I'm tired of feeling bad about myself for X, Y, Z. And so she sort of left the fold.
But she said that was one of the most difficult things she ever did, peeling away from really all of her friends, all of...
All of that, you know, because of the entire, it was a nice little safe bubble that she was in.
And she still likes a lot of those people to this day.
But overall, it was something she felt she had to do in order to sort of grow, I guess, or make some sort of separation from that time in her life.
You're believing in Adam and Eve and resurrections and miracles and no evidence whatsoever to support any of these things that are completely contrary to anything that you've ever experienced and then all the evidence that you see of science.
Oh, Earth is only 6,000 years old according to this book.
Oh, okay.
Didn't they just find some hundred-million-year-old shit lies, propaganda by the liberal media?
And one of the funniest things is, you know, really hardcore Christians will make fun of, you know, Scientology, which, fair enough, go ahead, I'm perfectly fine if you want to make fun of Scientology, but to obligate their own kind of weird stories that their book presents as well,
it's like, Yeah, it's, there's a certain, are you not spotting the irony here that there's a certain similarity between their weird Thetan-run sort of stories and your weird, you know, died and reborn after three days, kind of, and all the sort of, you know, stories that we sort of beggar reality as well.
Well, I think compartmentalized thinking is very dangerous.
And I think once you just sort of make your mind up that your way is the only way, and you stop being objective, and you cease all introspective thought, you get sort of locked into this mindset, and you put these blinders on.
They don't allow you to see yourself.
It's how ridiculous you are.
And that's how people get caught doing dumb shit, like Ted Haggerty, the guy who was...
There was that other one recently where that KKK guy shot like, and then they find out he'd had sex with a black male prostitute dressed as a woman or something like that.
when you're when you espouse a certain viewpoint that's totally against all of that you know and is really mean-spirited and hateful towards that kind of a thing that really gets on your nerves Yeah.
But when you think about, like, the most obvious defense, that's the one.
If I'm getting accused of something, I'll just accuse other people of the same thing that I'm running up into.
I was wondering that, too.
Like, for you, you know, I talked about earlier about, like, when I read Stephen King the second time as an adult, as a writer myself and trying to break it apart.
Do you do that with other comedians?
Do you, like, listen to them the first time and just, like, fuck, that's so good.
And then the second time you sort of try and...
Just see what they're doing.
Not to copy it or steal anything, but just see how are they forensically almost putting together these jokes and how are they...
That's sort of my feeling about guys like Lenny Bruce, who, in my opinion, is probably the most important comedian ever.
And he was the guy who got arrested the most, and he was the guy who pushed the boundaries of understanding language and content, and what's the intent of what you're trying to say, and what are we doing when we're suppressing this intent?
And he was a brilliant, brilliant guy, who ultimately went mad.
But I will listen to his comedy and try to put myself into this sort of...
Almost innocent mindset of the people that were living in the 1960s listening to this kind of comedy, trying to wrap my head around what kind of an impact this guy would have had.
I don't necessarily try to deconstruct their comedy.
Comedy is different in a lot of ways than fiction.
And I think in fiction, when you're reading a great novel, like you're reading Moby Dick or something like that, it still holds true.
It holds the test of time.
When you read that, you can kind of get a feeling for the way the narrative is driven and the way the use of words shapes the environment that you're imagining and Comedy is very different in that.
It's just, I guess I certainly did when I was first starting out, but I don't really do that anymore.
If I watch comedy now, I watch it just to enjoy it.
And there's some stuff that you realize, this is awesome, this is outside of what I could possibly do anyways.
I imagine you listen to some comedians and it's the same.
It's like, what they're doing is fabulous, but it's so far afield from the stuff.
It allows you actually just to enjoy it totally as a fan, because there's no worry about, well, this is going to influence me in some way that would be problematical.
You know, I worry about that too because I am a little bit of a chameleon.
So if I start reading too many, say like noir books, suddenly that becomes, or westerns, you know, I think I want my next book wants to be sort of like a horror western sort of a thing.
So first of all, I need to read a lot of those things just to situate myself, I think, in that time and sort of get the feel for it.
But you do worry that you're going to be like...
You know, you don't want to be derivative.
I guess that's the thing, right?
And that, you know, because in comedy, it's joke-stealing, but it's all plagiarism.
It's the same thing.
And there's some writers who probably get too close to their source material, and then they find out later that, like, this is so close that it's almost copying what this other person is, who I really admire.
I see why I did it, but fuck, I'm not my own self here.
Any description that you have of any of these various aspects is going to resonate with people because they directly have either literary experience in it, some film experience in it, an actual real life experience.
So there is no real truly original thought anymore.
No, but I found, I don't know about you with comedy or with some of the other things you've done, but one of the biggest leaps I made is recognizing that my own life has value.
You know what I mean?
There are interesting moments in my life, interesting scenes, things that I've experienced, and you bring them in in the service of a character.
It's transported and you're telling it through a character's eyes.
And I've always felt like there you don't have to make anything up.
You're just going back and remembering as deeply as possible.
And those things are original, even if it's within a story that itself might have been told a thousand times.
The one thing that you can go back and you can stake a claim on is like, this comes from some element of my own life and I know it has to be original.
I mean, even that's not original because other human beings have experienced it and that's your hope is that you're actually going to be able to reach into their I think the word isn't original.
And the real problem that people have is when they're intentionally derivative.
And what that does is it stifles creativity.
Because someone, like, say if someone...
I don't want to give away the story of your book, The Troop...
But if someone read your book and decided, you know what, I'm going to make my own story about this exact scenario, and then they kept going back to your book, and they started adding elements to it with different dialogue, but the same elements, and here's the fucking guy.
I mean...
That's gross.
And it upsets us.
When we find out that your originality, what we conceive to be, or perceive to be originality, is really just you copying and twisting around the original work of someone else.
But I know in publishing, say when the Da Vinci Code came out, publishers were like, we need the next...
Da Vinci Code.
And there were a lot of sort of knockoffs of it with the same kind of ideas.
But they were actually, you know, the writers, whether they wanted to write them or not.
Sometimes money, you know, has an influence there.
You know, if someone's going to offer you a nice amount of money to write what you know is sort of a bit of a knockoff.
You know, people may be enticed into sort of doing that.
You know, whether that's why they got into writing in the first place, you have to assume not, you know?
But, yeah, I found like there's some element of that and there's some element of...
Publishers sort of don't want originality sometimes.
Sometimes they're like, this is a known commodity.
This is working really well.
We would like you to do stuff like this.
And sometimes they're even scared of originality.
Same as Lenny Bruce.
People who are that original, it's not an easy road to hoe.
Whereas if you do sort of do maybe a rip-off of a Dane Cook act, I think you might initially get a better pop than you would if you're really charting sort of really original territory.
If you're an idiot and you're ripping off someone, yeah, you might get a little reaction.
There's a few of those guys out there right now.
But I think that what we appreciate in someone is we appreciate artistic expression, meaning that We're all influenced by music and movies and literature and things that we've experienced in life.
There's influences that are just undeniable.
But what is your intent when you sit down to create something?
Is your intent to express yourself in your own unique language, your own unique experiences, in your own creativity?
Or are you just copying shit?
And when you're just copying shit, that makes us angry.
If you're being super original, that's almost in a way a fake originality.
You know what I mean?
I've noticed that as well.
You're not really as original as you think you are, but you've convinced other people that you're really original, and that's a double delusion, whereas Nickelback is what they are.
Well, when someone's affected, what I get about Mumford and Son is I like a lot of their songs.
I think some of their songs are very good, especially their early songs.
But now I feel like they're in this groove of doing that certain kind of music, and so they dress a certain kind of way, and I'm like, you're wearing a costume.
You might as well be dressed up as a fucking clown, okay?
Because you're dressed up like a guy.
You look like a pioneer or something.
You're out there with a mason jar in your hand, you're playing a fucking homemade fiddle.
And the second stage is you want to do something on your own.
And that second stage, I think, with you is dealing with The idea that you're confident enough that this joke means a lot to me, whether it's going to go over, I can actually deal with that.
Whereas in the first stage, you couldn't possibly deal with a reaction that didn't feed some sort of sense of accomplishment or get them to laugh or that.
I think sometimes with comedians that I've watched, obviously, I rarely watch them through the early stages of their career.
But the comfortability there, and it's the same with writers, they're like...
If I fail, that's fine.
I want to fail doing something really interesting, really original to me, and that really is an expression of what the hell I got into this in the first place for.
And in a way, that's how I got into comedy because I would see an HBO special and then I would tell my friends, holy shit, did you see Sam Kinison last night?
He had this joke and then I would tell them the joke and they would laugh at me telling them the joke and I would sort of realize through the rhythm of doing Sam's material in his voice.
Well, Ray Carver, the short story writer, the American short story writer, would be an example of a style that you look at and you're like, I could do this.
But you can't.
Once you really set your mind to like, I'll try and write a Carver type story...
That's what makes the genius there, I think, is that it seems easy, it seems that something you can do, but the genius is not only in the genius of him, but in the genius of his deceptively simple style.
So I tried to write, say, a Carver story, and it was a total nightmare and a failure.
You know, we have things in the writing.
We call them trunk stories, basically stories that you write.
You throw them in a trunk.
You're never going to see them again.
And my trunk is full of stories like that.
And I imagine your trunk, similarly, is full of stuff.
And these are all things that, like, you need to go through.
I mean, I probably was rejected...
200 times at magazines before I finally placed a story.
I could literally have filled a shopping bag or a pillowcase with rejection slips.
It's a pretty small percentage in terms of the ones that, you know, I always think of it's like, you know, the way a pearl gets created.
You've got like an oyster and a little bit of sand gets in it.
And then if enough like, nacre or whatever goes around it, then I'm like, okay, that's enough.
It feels like the characters are strong enough.
I've got an idea of the plot and where I want to send these characters.
Then you sort of harvest that pearl and it becomes a short story.
It becomes a novel.
But there's several that just are imperfect.
You can tell just in their conception they're imperfect.
I don't have a, you know, it's different, right?
See, I would write a story.
I'd send it out.
If it's not working, you don't really know until you get enough rejections that it's clearly okay.
That's This fucking thing ain't working.
You guys get up on stage.
That's the difference.
How many times do you tell a joke that you really feel strong about or work on a piece of material before you have to say, this isn't meeting my expectation of what I thought?
Or do you just keep telling it anyway and just say, fuck it.
Yeah, sometimes it's like you feel the energy of the room and maybe I can slip this in.
With me too, I think it's a matter of I've had some stories that constantly got rejected and then I think you get a bit of a name for yourself and then those will find acceptance because they're like, okay, well he's done this and this and this.
But I find to me like speed is something.
I wrote The Troop probably in about six weeks, which is the fastest I've ever written anything.
But it was fun.
I'd come out of wherever the room where I write and my wife would be like, you look...
You don't look like all bedraggard and haggard like you do when you stumble out after working on your other books like a vampire's been sucking your blood out for eight hours.
And I'm like, that's sort of what has told me that I hope I'm able to write a lot more books in the horror genre because I just enjoy the writing of it.
It's more fun to me.
It's more...
It comes...
Like that.
And I mean...
The reason I think that came to you so fast, first of all, because you're passionate about it, but second of all, because you've been working at it a long time, and when those things come, you know how to deal with them.
And I think now I know better, okay, if the idea comes to me, I'm ready to make hay with it.
And there are gaps in publishers who you wonder, like, I read this book, Wool, by a writer called Hugh Howey, and it's sort of sci-fi, really, really damn good, and you find out his history as he's been rejected by X number of publishers, and you're like...
How did that happen?
You know what I mean?
But it does.
It does happen.
And it's great that there's that opportunity now that like, okay, well, listen, that's fine.
I get it.
You guys have whatever agenda that you're pursuing.
This is what I want to write.
And I have a way to get it out to my hopefully readership and build it that way.
And then sort of the audience reaction and gauge how it's worked.
So that's, yeah, that's a similar idea to an editor.
I mean, an editor relationship with a writer is pretty important, obviously, because the one thing is you can't go snatch your book off the shelves once it's there.
It's there.
You got to live with how it is.
So you got to work as hard as you can in this stage to make it as, I mean, it's never going to be perfect.
There's going to be things about it that you'll look at five years later and just go, what?
Why did I do that?
But each book, I think each book, probably just like each maybe one of your comedy CDs, is an expression of that time in your life, too.
You know, out of the 150 sets, maybe 100 of them are from like a year ago that I've got stored.
Like I take the MP3s and I save them.
And then maybe 50 of them or so are over the last 50. I'll have four or five months.
And then what I'll do is never listen to the old ones, but always think that I'm going to, like a pack wrap, like a hold on to them.
But the most recent ones are the really important ones.
Like on this phone, this is a new phone.
It only has Santa Barbara.
It only has Friday night show in Santa Barbara.
That's it.
But eventually, you know, over the course of a few months, it'll have again, like a Wednesday night, I'm at the Ice House.
I'll have that set on it.
I'll listen to that.
Thursday, and I'll break out the notebook, and I'll listen to it with the headphones on, and then my next set, I'll add the notes, and then I'll try to figure out what I did differently, and then it'll grow.
But the beautiful thing about comedy is it has built-in editors, and it's the audience.
And that's, I guess that's a danger that we both face in our separate, you know, but very close, closely related kind of careers.
So it's about listening to the right.
And ultimately, it's like listening, because, especially with horror, you have someone, you know, I've had plenty of emails, and I know you have too, like, what kind of a person are you?
I mean, yeah, so do I. I love my son, and I know you love your kids too, but, you know, there's some points where me and my wife look at each other where, you know, I mean, I don't know if you had good sleepers, but me, like, our kid's a toddler now, and he still doesn't sleep well, but...
Man, there were times like four o'clock in the morning when he hadn't slept.
And I feel like I was just like, there was some hellish fourth dimension that had opened up that I was staring straight into.
And I just think, I think, but then that's part of the rites of passage of, of you, of you being a parent.
But, but if there's someone said, I want anything to do with that.
Yeah, but I've never heard it, but I've had people who are pretty close to intolerant on that level as well, you know?
And I don't get it either, and I certainly, before I had kids, yeah, I'm more comfortable with them now, and I'm more, like, sympathetic towards other people who are struggling with their kid out in public.
I mean, I wrote an article for Esquire and it was about, and you would have some knowledge of this basically because it's in MMA, is hormone replacement therapy or testosterone, TRT. And there's this study, it's called negligible senescence.
But that's sort of the idea of TRT, is that the proponents say that, you know, you're not going to live forever.
Of course, that's not the body that we've been gifted by, you know, by nature.
But, you know, most, when you talk to guys, and I talk to guys, I use my father as, you know, my dad's 65, now 66. And he's like, I don't want to live forever, of course.
I just want to be able to be, to carry groceries up to my house when I'm 80. Yeah.
I want to have that sort of quality of life for as long as I can.
And then when that whole house comes down, let it come down immediately.
See, I feel like that's one where he's, like, forced to go into, like, wars with guys who are 15, even 20 years younger than him, and I feel like, you know what I mean?
But then, you know, the people that I grew up watching as boxers didn't, you know, you just had to keep throwing yourself into that fray, and if your body's collapsing around you, that's the choice that you've made.
His take on traumatic brain injury is so studied, and he's been involved in assisting football players and athletes of- Concussions.
Yeah, a lot of them who have had really dramatic changes because of head trauma.
And the way he describes it, it's like, you never know what it's going to be that does it.
It could be, you go jet skiing one day, and you know, just the bouncing on the water, and something's wrong in your brain, and then your body shuts down its testosterone, your libido drops, you feel depressed.
Yeah, and you go to the doctor, I'm depressed, they put you on antidepressants.
I mean, it's like, And what he's finding is that the pituitary gland is incredibly sensitive to trauma.
And so, obviously, when you're dealing with a sport that one of the big goals is to shut the brain down with impacts, with a strike, Giving them testosterone so that it negates the effects of brain trauma sort of just masks the real issue that's going on.
So it's not as simple as their body getting older and they need testosterone to live a nice quality of life.
It's a matter of medication that sort of overrides this issue where they're getting their brain fucked up.
And so, you know, of course, my editor wanted me to look at the sports side of a thing, and I did, and I think there was some really interesting stuff to be found on that side of it.
And I come down on your side too.
I mean, just like, we've been having combat sport events since...
Yeah, I mean, of course, you don't want to...
Some people would say, well, listen, we also fix MCLs and ACLs and we're able to do great things with medicine.
So, you know what I mean?
Like, why not take the advancement, these benefits that we have...
do think there's there's the fairness to the sport but when i just before i left the hotel i saw a commercial where it's like an underarm now you just go in the morning you swipe it on and you head about your day so like just for not sports taken out of it just generally um from my what i've the research that i've done which was just in service of that article um you know i i wouldn't i like i'm more or less said if my dad wanted to use it i would be like listen if it works uh and if you try it you know what i mean uh
You know, when it makes some benefit to your life, you know, I'd be like, of course, I'd be all for it.
It's really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to manipulating the human body.
It's essentially a low-level form of genetic engineering.
Mm-hmm.
And what you're going to be able to do instead of introducing these synthetic hormones into your system, what you're going to be able to do is they're going to have nanobots that repair tissue.
They're going to have your body's ability to recuperate.
A lot of people don't understand what hormones do and the various different roles that they play in your body, but a hormone doesn't necessarily make you bigger.
What makes you bigger is it makes you, when you take testosterone, it makes you recover quicker.
And one of the ways guys can cheat is that they can work harder and they can put in more time because their recovery is shorter.
Yeah.
insane sessions in the gym and they'll be fresh as a daisy in the morning.
Yeah.
Whereas the other person has to sort of will themselves to get up and through hard work and determination can really put in the time and get better the traditional way.
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Tomorrow we'll be back with Tim Kennedy, mixed martial arts superstar and fascinating individual.
And then we've got a lot of podcasts coming up, folks.