#1264 - Timothy Denevi

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Here we go.

Five. You get less enthusiastic after it's been a few times. You're like, you're not really, we're live? All right, we're live. What's up, man? Thanks for doing this.

Timothy Denevi (0:12)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

My pleasure. Sorry for the starts. We've been having issues with our equipment.

Good to see you though, man. What's up?

Timothy Denevi (0:21)

Good to be here and talk to Hunter Thompson.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

My pleasure. So your book, Freak Kingdom.

Timothy Denevi (0:27)

You know, we live in interesting times right now. It's kind of a shit show at every single moment.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

Keep this about a fist from your face. Pull that sucker. There you go.

Timothy Denevi (0:36)

What should I do with my hands? Should I put them up?

Joe Rogan (0:37)

You can do whatever you want with your hands, man.

Timothy Denevi (0:39)

I'll shoot with this one.

Joe Rogan (0:40)

What is all this? You got a lot of writing.

Timothy Denevi (0:43)

Well, when I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure my sentences never sounded like Thompson's sentences.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

Oh, right.

Timothy Denevi (0:49)

So I didn't write out a lot of his sentences, but this morning before coming on, I went and got some of my favorite quotes and just wrote them out longhand to get a sense of what his perspective was and rhythm was again.

Joe Rogan (0:59)

Didn't he do that with The Great Gatsby?

Timothy Denevi (1:01)

He did it like a few times. He did it by hand, he typed it out.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

Yeah. I loved that idea that he was trying to find the rhythm of the words. That's such a fascinating notion because comedians do that.

In the early days of comedy, like a lot of guys before they ever start going on stage themselves, they'll imitate their favorite comedians bits like they'll do a Richard Pryor bit, and they'll do it to their friends and they'll get a sense of the rhythm and the timing and get those laughs from doing a Richard Pryor bit to their friends, and then they get that bug. It's like part of what infects them.

Timothy Denevi (1:36)

I mean, that's the hardest thing to steal. We're not plagiarizing, but we're trying to understand what decisions they made.

Joe Rogan (1:41)

Yeah.

Timothy Denevi (1:41)

It's beautiful work.

Joe Rogan (1:42)

Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't plagiarizing, but it's so unfortunate when someone does. When you have someone, whether it's Hunter or Richard Pryor, anyone who's just got a truly exceptional and unique mind.

Timothy Denevi (1:57)

Or someone who doesn't like our president and decided when he ran in 2016 to plagiarize Richard Nixon's 1968 convention speech in Miami.

Joe Rogan (2:05)

Did he do that?

Timothy Denevi (2:05)

Directly.

Joe Rogan (2:06)

Really?

Timothy Denevi (2:06)

Yeah, that was the headline in the fucking Times. It said, Trump's inspiration, Nixon is the one. So the lines about crime and barbarians at the gates, crime, law, and order, those were all from Nixon's shitty but successful 1968 Miami convention speech and Thompson knew how effective that that was.

Joe Rogan (2:25)

Yeah, I wonder if he did that on purpose because he was so good. And one thing that Trump is so good at, he's so good at getting the media to talk about him. Exactly. And one of the best ways to get the media to talk about him was give them something to be angry about that no one else is going to give a fuck about.

Timothy Denevi (2:41)

He was like, oh, Melania plagiarized, but I plagiarized much better from Nixon.

Joe Rogan (2:45)

That's right.

Timothy Denevi (2:45)

So Trump would have loved it.

Joe Rogan (2:47)

Melania took some lines from Michelle Obama's speech, right? Yeah.

Timothy Denevi (2:51)

Oh, if you plagiarized Nixon, that's okay. I mean, so Freak Kingdom, the book about Hunter S. Thompson, I mean, it's really about taking the fucking emotion of living in this present, looking back at Thompson's career, and then trying to write it like a novel to dramatize all of the experiences he went through that are today so applicable to us and just show his perspective that's so applicable to us today.

Joe Rogan (3:12)

What do you got here, Jamie?

From New York Times. It's Donald Trump's convention, but the inspiration, Nixon.

Timothy Denevi (3:19)

I was like, are you running on Nixon? That's what you're running on?

Joe Rogan (3:22)

There are some parallels, you know. I mean, do you remember when Hunter got together with Bill Murray and Bill's brother, and they did that thing where they were trying to get people to, Nixon got a bad deal, we've got to bring him back, and people were going along with it.