#1095 - T.J. English & Joey Diaz

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Okay.

Boom, and we're live with Joey Diaz and TJ. English. Joey turned me on to you a long time ago, Mr. English. He gave me a copy of The Westies. Right? What year was that?

Joey Diaz (0:18)

98, 99

Joe Rogan (0:19)

It's a long time ago he gave me that book.

It's fantastic. Really fascinating stuff.

T.J. English (0:25)

First book I published.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Was it really?

T.J. English (0:27)

The Westies, yeah, 1990

Joe Rogan (0:29)

How'd you guys find out of each other?

Joey Diaz (0:31)

He wrote a book, a friend of mine turned me on to a book named Havana Nocturne that was a small book of fascinating read and I was just blown away by it. And I went to a party one night and there was a literary agency and I go, do you fucking guys read Havana Nocturne? They go, we optioned it.

And I was like, that's fucking it. That's gonna be a great book.

It broke down how Fidel took over it from three different cities, how it was going down in three different categories. And then I heard that he was writing a book about West New York and Union City Cubans where I grew up. And I emailed him and I told him who I was, that my mother had a bar and I grew up in that shit. And he hit me back and we became friends. He came to a show and...

T.J. English (1:19)

Yeah, Joey reached out to me, unfortunately when I was just about finishing this book. So I had done most of the work and it was down on paper, but it was a trip. It was like he was like a character who walked out of the book. And I wished I'd met him earlier because I hadn't met too many characters like him. Union City's amazing place. I don't think people realize it. It's one of those little enclaves, happens to be Cuban. It's like a mafia neighborhood, but it was Cubans, not Italians. Or it was like Hell's Kitchen, which I wrote about in the Westies, which was an Irish neighborhood. Very intense neighborhood, high premium on loyalty.

Young males running loyalty games on each other all the time from the age of six.

How far you'll go.

Joe Rogan (2:09)

Can I turn the sucker up towards you?

T.J. English (2:11)

How far will you go for me?

What are you willing to do for me? In the case of Hell's Kitchen in the Westies, it was cut up bodies. Was not only would you kill somebody for me, but will you make the body disappear?

And they tested each other with the cutting up of the bodies. In Union City, a lot of it was political. Some of it was political. How anti-fidel are you? How badly do you wanna kill, you know, Fidel and help us reclaim our lost homeland? That was kind of behind a lot of things. It wasn't spoken about a lot, but it was sort of a hidden motivation.

Joe Rogan (2:48)

Westies is a really fantastic book.

Like you went deep into that whole sort of sub scene. You know, it's a very interesting crime infested area.

T.J. English (3:01)

Well, what I try to do with these books is to tell the macro story, the larger historical, sociopolitical story, and then get intimate and tell the interpersonal stories between the characters that actually live this story. That's a challenge. You gotta find people who are willing to talk to you and share information with you that they've kept quiet probably most of their lives.

And then you get at the interpersonal stuff because these stories really are just human beings caught up in something that's bigger than them.

Joe Rogan (3:34)

And how long, when you're writing a book like The Corporation, which is your new book, or Westies, any of your books, how much time do you spend doing the research and how much time do you spend actually writing the book?

T.J. English (3:44)

It takes about three years to do these books on average, and two of those years is research, probably. Yeah, a lot of research.

Joe Rogan (3:54)

So do you bring this to the book company, the publisher, and you say, hey, this is what I want to write a book about?

T.J. English (3:58)

You do a proposal. And I do very, very detailed proposals. For The Corporation, I did a proposal, it was 125 pages long. And it's a chapter by chapter breakdown. It's almost like a condensed version of the book.

And you get more money from a publisher that way as an advance, because you're showing them the whole thing, practically, they can see the finished product almost.