The Joe Rogan Experience - #336 - Scott Sigler

Episode Date: March 12, 2013

Scott Sigler is an American author known for science fiction and horror books, such as Nocturnal, Ancestor, Infected and Contagious. Before being published, Scott built an online audience by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks for free as podcasts.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! Powerful author, Scott Sigler You know you're a bad motherfucker when you look at the back of your book and it says A worthy successor to Michael Crichton That's some powerful praise right there

I didn't even say that myself I know, isn't it awesome when someone else has something super cool about you? Yeah, yeah. You're like, ooh, look at that. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty badass, dude. And you said Nocturnal's being turned into a TV show right now? Are you in the process of creating something?

They're working on it right now, yeah. How much control do you have as a writer when that happens? I've been shocked by it. Normally, you have very little or no control at all. And a couple points in my career i've been very lucky to work with people like let's get this as close to the vision you want as possible and this is the guy who produced hellboy and hellboy 2 and the watchman's names lloyd levin wow and lloyd has been they've kept me involved at all phases of this right now they're

finishing up the pilot script for it so i don't write the pilot script but the the guys who um who are writing it um kind of send me the plot steps here's what we want the episode to be like does that sort of match what you're looking at and then because i'm writing the bible for it so we're going to look at the 12 episode arc of the first season and make sure everything fits in so we don't have any crazy ending that doesn't make any sense and then i get to give them feedback. Well, you could try these things, and it's very collaborative. That's amazing. That's a beautiful thing to hear.

I love when you hear that. It's one of the most frustrating things to listen to when you hear someone who had a vision and they tried to express this vision to these other people that had the money, and the people with the money are like, no, no, no, no, we got this. We need a girl. You need this you need a we need add a black guy you know that's the way it usually works though I mean the guys who can raise 20 million dollars get to kind of call the shots yeah it's a yeah it's a weird thing to see I I've told this story before there was a there was a guy named

Dave I don't remember his last name I apologize but he was a really funny guy and he's a really funny actor he And he's a really funny actor. He's been in a bunch of movies. Like a real over-the-top, hilarious guy. Well, he got his first starring role in a movie. And I had a very small part in this movie. And I watched all these people in suits. This man had cufflinks on.

Like beautiful, expensive cufflinks. A perfectly tailored, expensive fucking suit. pin-striped, a fat Rolex with diamonds on it. I mean, this guy was fucking loaded, right? And he's doing, like, he's giving this guy line reads, telling him how he should do it. Like, I want you to come in like, whoa! The guy thinks he's funny. Like, he's actually, he's got so much power and so much money

that he literally is telling the comedian how to be funny. And it was a horrific thing to watch. The movie was called Frank McCluskey's C.I. or something like that. It was terrible, terrible. And they gutted it. They had two ideas. They had one that was going to be a PG-13 and one was going to be PG or one was going to be R.

Whatever they went less, it went down. It was all toilet jokes. You cut them out. You have nothing. It was ridiculous. You stop the people who are good at what they do from doing what they do. You hired them for that purpose in the first place.

It's kind of counterintuitive. You've got to think a guy who is such a bad motherfucker that he did The Watchmen. If he produced The Watchmen, that guy knows what he's doing. He's brilliant. It's been great. That was such a good movie. It was an excellent movie and great source material to start with.

I'm a huge fan of Hellboy. When this popped up, I watch Hellboy. My stuff is super hard science-based. We try to make all the bad things plausible. So when you get to the nasty bits and the blood's flying, you're fully bought in. You're like, I know how this works. I learned about this in science class, like that.

And you go watch Hellboy, which is a little bit more supernatural, but the creature effects and the way everything was shot, and it was just one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen to look up on the screen. And now that guy's interested in turning this. It's like, I could not wish for anything closer, more closely matched. That's gotta be an amazing feeling. What a perfect combination. Yeah.

The universe is probably about to send an asteroid our way. Things are going too well. It's my fault. Things are going too well. You're all going to die and it's my fault. Sorry. Yeah. That must be very comforting to know that you got a guy that's willing to listen to you.

Well, I had the first book, Infected. That was a whirlwind because I started out giving all my books away as free audiobooks, recorded myself, chopped them up as podcasts, gave them away as podcasts for free to build up an audience because I couldn't get anybody in New York to pay attention. Because they don't, well, we don't know if you're horror, we don't know if you're sci-fi, we don't know if you're thriller, we don't know if you're sci-fi, we don't know if you're thriller, we don't know if you're military.

All these different ass-kicking genres coming together. So I couldn't get a book deal. Start giving the books away for free. Build up an audience. Landed a print deal with Random House for Infected. And part of that deal was immediately optioned by Rogue Pictures for a movie. And that's the last I heard of it for like two years.

I got to go down and have a couple meetings with some people. But script writer, never got like two years. I got to go down and have a couple of meetings with some people. But script writer, never got to meet him, never got to see the script. It immediately just kind of went off into the weeds and nothing ever came out of it. So this is pretty exciting so far to see things progressing. Wow, that's amazing, man. Like I said, that's an awesome thing to hear when things are just falling into place in the proper order. It's an awesome thing to hear when things are just falling into place in the proper order.

Yeah. Now, when you write a book and then you're going to have your book turned into a television series and you're sort of giving up your ideas to other people, how does that feel? Is that a strange feeling? What is that like? Well, this is the second time around for me for doing this. And it is, it's a little bit strange, but largely it's very exciting because what they do, I can't do. I'm not the guy with the Rolex

who's trying to control things. The people who can pace this out for a one hour television show and can kind of visualize the 12 episode arc and then get someone to pay for it and get it shot correctly and get it up on a screen. That's a skillset I don't have at all. So it's really, I'm giving up a little bit, but largely it's exciting. Like I want to

see the shit in this book on TV. I want to see it on the screen. So it's really not that nerve wracking at all. You have no idea how it's going to turn out. But at this point in my career, I concede that. I realized that the end product, I'm going to have a tiny amount of control on it. And you're just kind of hoping for the best. You hope these guys got the, you hope they've got the right vibe, and they're going to want to put something as kick-ass on the screen as is in the book. Wow, that's got to be a very, very interesting process. I wish you luck with that. Thanks. It's going to be a fascinating journey, and tell us, what's the plot of the book in a summary? Tell us, what's the plot of the book in a summary?

Nocturnal is kind of a throwback to 80s buddy cop movies. And I grew up on the whole trading places, Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, all that. Turner and Hooch. Turner and Hooch. And just love that genre. So this starts out as sort of a buddy cop procedural where there are Brian Clouser and Pookie Chang, two San Francisco homicide inspectors, and Brian's having these really nasty, nasty dreams about killing people. And early on in the book, they go to a site and the murder scene matches his dream exactly. And suspicion falls on him immediately that he's doing these borderline superhuman things to go

shred people and body parts all over the place. And then it turns into the procedural from there. They kind of have to follow the rabbit trail. And it's hard to summarize without spoiling it, but it gets kind of paranormal, not really the supernatural. There's a rational explanation for everything, but they uncover this massive conspiracy within the police department. There's a rational explanation for everything. But they uncover this massive conspiracy within the police department. There's been a cover-up that's been going on for 200 years to stop this, to let this particular group of people who are

sacrificing innocents, let them continue to sacrifice. Brian Poo, you've got to figure out how to shut that down and stay alive. Wow. That's some deep conspiratorial shit, man. 200 years of people keeping their mouth shut? Yeah. Well, it plays off of the police department.

And as I was researching this, one of the phrases that came up, like the biggest gang in New York is the cops. And that goes back to when they first put in the police department and they started to get a lot of power. The organized crime and the gangs were, you could get away with a lot of stuff. But at some point, if you crossed the cops, whether they be good cops or corrupt cops, you were screwed because they had a level of power you couldn't match. So yeah, they're the ones who have been keeping this thing quiet because there are a pattern of serial killers in San Francisco. And this other organization has a way of getting rid of the serial killers when the cops can't even find them. So the cops are actually trying to keep this quiet and protect it because the end result is more people live and less people die,

but it's completely illegal as hell. When you write a book like this, how much, when you're looking at human corruption and cop corruption, how much did you investigate? Did you go and look at actual cases to find out what's plausible, or do you just go completely on your instincts and what you know just by general information? was organized crime set up in San Francisco and learning a lot of things that way. Because fortunately, at this point in the writing career, I've learned to try and stay away from diving down the rabbit hole because you can learn all this incredible, amazing stuff. And then one percent of it actually makes it into the book.

And all the time you've invested in researching that for these kind of thriller style books is time that you get nothing out of that. Right. So a lot of the superficial stuff, learning how the mafia was run out of San Francisco and replaced by the Tongs and the Russians and a lot of other groups, all that stuff is super cool, and a ton of that goes in there. And the police department was pretty helpful in research for this. It's not your typical, these are dirty cops and they're going to shake you down.

They actually are trying to do something that benefits the greater good, but they have to totally ignore the law they're sworn to protect in order to get the end result. So it's a bit of more fun corruption, if you can imagine that. Wow. That's a, that's, that's a fascinating subject. And I've always been fascinated by like the idea of secret societies that have been around for 200 years doing horrible things and they've been pulling it off. And usually, even in jest, no one takes those things serious. If you discuss skull and bones or something like that,

everybody's like, oh, please, it's a fucking fraternity. They goof off there. It's no big deal. The Illuminati, all that good stuff, yeah. But the idea of it is it's a constantly fascinating source for people because every now and then you find one that's real. Every now and then you find like a Jerry Sandusky case where no one really did tell the cops for 20 years of child molesting. It really did happen.

And you're like, whoa, these things can happen. Or the Miami, did you ever see Billy Corbin's documentary, Cocaine Cowboys? Cocaine Cowboys 1 and Cocaine Cowboys 2 are two of my favorite documentaries ever. They're amazing. And this guy, Billy Corbin, who directed it, one of the things he pulled out was that there was one year where the Miami Police Department's graduating class from the police academy, Miami Police Department's graduating class from the police academy, half of them, all of them, either wound up in jail or murdered. Whoa.

Yeah. Half of them were murdered and half of them went to jail. The whole thing was like a crazy criminal organization. The entire police force was massively corrupt in the cocaine era. I mean, if you go to Miami, have you ever been? No, never been to Miami. It's avoidable. It's not totally necessary. The amount of money involved back then was just astronomical.

Somebody's going to bite on that sooner or later. The amount of banks there is insane. The banks per capita there are much higher than anywhere else. It's because they were all laundering cocaine money. I mean, for real. I mean, that's really the root of it all. I mean, the actual impact that cocaine had on the economy of Miami is undeniable.

But this guy wrote about how crazy the police corruption was back then, or rather did this documentary where he showed it. I mean, it's possible. People can go off the rails. That was just a couple of decades ago. Well, you've got the money and you've got the power, and they're isolated from a lot of the self-examination. Corruption at the upper or top levels of the police department can make a lot of shit go away.

That's the place it seems most likely to... That's realistic. They have their hands on the drugs, their hands on the criminals, their hands on the money. If somebody's going to go bad, that's a good place to do it. Yeah, it's fascinating when you find out that it's true, though. It's like, wow, a corrupt cop, a bunch of corrupt cops. Like, they tried it. You almost wonder why it doesn't happen more often.

It probably does. Yeah. Well, probably they're probably pretty good at – like you said, it's the biggest gang around. Why would you want to piss off the gang? Probably plenty of little subtle corruption. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. The guys who can shoot you and it's legal,

I think everybody knows at the end of the day, you really got to be careful around those guys because they can kill you and it's okay. They're licensed to kill. And they can just say you attacked them. How many times have we seen a cell phone camera of someone videotaping a cop and the cop

beats the shit out of the kid and then you hear from the arrest papers that the police officer lied that the kid attacked him or lied that the kid spit on him or said something. There was a guy on Alex Jones recently. Same thing. These cops just, they have ultimate power. That's a bad thing.

Whenever any human beings got ultimate power over other people. And the thing people I think tend to forget is there's millions of cops across the country. And with that many, a sample set that big and those opportunities, some of those individuals, a very small percentage of those individuals are going to take that opportunity. Some of them are going to be nuts. You only hear about those guys. You don't hear about the 999,000 that are just, you know, doing their job and willing to take a bullet for you every day. But yeah, it happens. Yeah. And when like a Christopher Dormer case happens, you know, then people go, Jesus Christ,

this is, this could be a cop too. That guy, how'd that guy get through, you know it's crazy then people go jesus christ this is this could be a cop too that guy how'd that guy get through you know or what happened to him in overseas it turned him into that guy you know who knows but how much of that um plays a part of your writing it's just sort of in a broad educational sense like you just pay attention to all that stuff it's largely to to weave the tapestry of reality i mean people, there's a certain amount of things people are expecting from a fictional novel, things that feel familiar. Well, there's got to be some level of corruption. One cop's got to be a total badass.

Somebody's going to rough some guys up just because you're familiar with it. You've seen that. So a lot of those things go into, a lot of them are invisible in the book. I tend, both with the science and with culture, is to put in a lot of them are invisible in the book. I tend, both with the science and with culture, is to put in a lot of things you're already familiar with so that you're like, okay, yeah, okay, yeah. And if you say, yeah, 20 or 30 times, like, I know that, I know that, then when it starts to go up to the next level

where the crazy shit starts to happen, we've already got this rapport. I've already got a rapport with you and you've allowed yourself to buy in completely. So having those elements like, you know, realistic police things, actually using the real history of the mafia in San Francisco, anything like that

allows you to fall further into the story. So it's very important to use real stuff and kind of create that illusion. That's awesome, man. I've always wanted to be a writer in some sense. I've never had the time, but I've always thought it'd be an awesome thing. I wrote a terrible script once,

but I always thought it'd be. You know what we could do? I was on the way up here. We were talking about starting a new show called Get In My Shorts, where I talk to people who like say exactly what you said. We sit down for 10 minutes. I interview you about the fiction stuff that you like, the movie stuff you like, etc. Tell me you think this is a stupid idea. We were talking about this.

And then at the end, like, okay, well, let's throw out some ideas for a story, and I'll help bounce stories together. And then when we get done, you get up and walk away. And then, like, a week later, I've got, like, a 5-, 10-page short story. And then that's the kind of thing that you would do. When you take off your clothes. Yeah. Then Joe got naked.

That sounds like it would be a fun idea. That doesn't sound bad at all. So you get to write a story without the actual grunt work of getting down and writing. You come up with a big idea, and then you turn it over to somebody who does this on a regular basis. It's exactly like taking lessons for something. Like, here's what I want to do, and I want to have this, and then this guy, and then this chick should get naked, because obviously that's very important to a story. And then this sort of thing should happen to me, and I'd be like, all right, let's go see what we can do.

We'll go back and hook that up. There's so many fascinating occupations out there. There's just not enough time in the world. But writing has always been a particularly romantic one. It's the idea of putting together something that's crafting a story entirely in your head, slapping it down on paper, and then it exists entirely in the heads of the people that are reading it. The romance of it is so utterly overblown. I've been lucky enough to do this full-time for five years now.

This is all I do. This is my job. And it's similar to MMA when you see the guys come in the ring and you're like, oh, look at all this pageantry and all this wonderful stuff and the spotlights on them. And except for the Ultimate Fighter show, you don't see the years that go in of just getting crushed and working all the time and all the sacrifice and all the things you've got to do. And then you get that moment, oh, the book's in the store and I'm on tour.

And that lasts two weeks. And then you go right back into the dungeon and do it some more. It's a great effing job. I don't want to do anything else. I'm so happy to be doing it. But, yeah, those moments of romance are like little tiny things that pop up every now and then. Yeah, well, to everybody outside of it that doesn't have to do the work, that's where it's romantic.

Yeah, the work can be grueling. Sitting there smoking a cigarette in front of your typewriter like you're Hunter Thompson. Who were your favorite writers when you were coming out? Definitely Stephen King was the single biggest influence on me, watching his ability to tell a story and characterize. biggest influence on me watching his ability to tell a story and characterize and like a pair he the thing that always mesmerized me about him is he could take a secondary character give you one paragraph of description like here's a vocal twitch here's a physical twitch and here's this this thing they believe and then you've got you know that guy's name 20 years later yeah he's the

master of that um and then ann mccaffrey was a huge sci-fi reader, the Dragon Riders of Pern, that series. So that was kind of more of the science fiction area of things. And Tom Clancy was another big one too. Tom Clancy's ability to take thousands of different things, research them in detail, and kind of put them all together where they come together at the end for a super over-the-top ending. Those are probably the biggest three. And Jack London's another gigantic one, too. When I was a kid, I read something somewhere where they were criticizing Stephen King's books. And it was in some...

I grew up in Boston, in Newton, one of the suburbs of Boston. There was a lot of snobby people. There was a lot of people that were like, Stephen King, what bass writing I remember like thinking that like why would you ever criticize a guy who's first of all so fucking prolific I mean and it's really fun stuff like how stuffy do you have to be to not appreciate a good Stephen King book I you know it's he's on a completely different level than say uh the Twilight writer.

But you still run into that today. Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight and these books come out and they blow up because it resonates with the end reader. And all of this pompous, arrogant bullshit about I'm writing art and you know what? Unless your book has sold 200,000, 300,000 copies, no one's going to remember your name in 50 years. You're going to be gone, unless you get your book dusted off somewhere. So the guys who are actually making stuff that resonates with people, that makes millions of people extremely happy

to read it again and again, and then go see the movies, they get shat on all the time. All the time. And Stephen King now is getting an enormous amount of, he's getting his props now from the industry, I think. But yeah, 25 25 30 years ago everybody was all pissed that this dirty butt kid from maine came out of nowhere and has eaten all their

lunches because he writes great stories that people love they were they were pissed they wanted those books sold not him yeah they're crazy if you you read the shining and tell me that's not an amazing book yeah the the movie's great but the uh the TV show I didn't really dig that much, but the movie was good. The Jack Nicholson movie, although very different from the book, but the book's sensational. My favorite book of his is Misery. Yes. You go through Misery,

and he didn't just play with a story there. He actually played with a typography on the page. If you actually read the page, Paul, the main character, has to write this story for Annie. And then they switch font, bring in the margin, so it looks like regular typewriter page. And then as the story's progressing, letters start to fall off of the typewriter. And the farther it goes, first it's the end, then the E, then the L.

And as you get towards the end of the book, where not only is Paul's real life story happening, but the fictional story is coming to a conclusion too. There's all these scrawled pencil marks in there. And just looking at the page starts to stress you the fuck out. And it wasn't until like the third time I read it, I'm like, cause I read it once. I'm like, okay, that was killer. It was killer. And read it again. And then I'm like, I'm reading the third time. I'm like, why am, why am I so angry? What is going on? And I stopped and look at him like, and it it's just so he even understands the art form of what visual how visually things look on a page you know why why is that he was on all sorts of drugs when he wrote that shit that guy was back in the day he was on some heavy duty shit he said that i think it was christine he didn't even remember writing it was one of them yeah didn't

like didn't remember writing it the The car's alive, man. I think he was just fucked up, man. He was, first of all, he did a lot of cocaine. Yeah. And smoked a lot. It was fascinating that he said that cigarettes

were one of the things that he really missed when it came to the creative process. You were talking about that with David Lee Roth the other day, that nicotine's such

a huge part of the process. Well, I don't smoke, I don't partake in it, but there seems to be undeniable proof that it's some sort of a mental stimulant. And it does something to accelerate thinking, or it does something to the mind. Because too many people, like intelligent people,

like Bertrand Russell, wouldn't get on a plane if he couldn't smoke. Like, if they didn't have a room in the smoking section, he wouldn't get on a plane. This fucking poor guy was just attached to this tit, this tobacco tit.

Try some nicotine, Joe. See if it does anything. No, thanks, fella. It's just nicotine. I don't want it. See if it calms you down. Get out of here. Go fuck yourself.

You're not going to get me on that crazy horse. But, yeah, so many writers have been smokers, you know. But the thing about Stephen King, he quit. And so he still puts out great stuff.

But I think he struggles more. Do you hear what he does, though? Supposedly, because this is a bit of Tebes, that he allows himself to have one cigarette every time he finishes a novel. No wonder he writes so many novels. Yeah, and that's right. Tebes' joke is, like, I wrote 32 novels today. Yeah, that's right. Teeb's joke is like, I wrote 32 novels today. Yeah, that's funny.

That's interesting that he allows himself one cigarette a year or so. Is that what he's doing? I guess he's probably kicking out about a novel a year, if not more.

He just, he's got a different style of writing, too. When you can effortlessly bring in the supernatural the way he does, there's not an enormous amount of research that's necessary.

I know when he wrote The Green Mile, he researched a lot of things about the prison system and actual history. But if it's a modern-day ghost story, you don't have to research anything. You just sit down and do your thing. And that allows him to write a little bit faster than a lot of people. Did you ever read The Tommyknockers? Oh, yeah. Oh, I love that one, man. Yeah. He's got the best, in my opinion, the best supernatural scenarios.

He comes up with so many different. Maximum Overdrive. Did you guys like that? Yeah, I love that movie. And it's interesting. Now, I'm coming to my fifth and final book with Random House, and I write these hard science techno thrillers with the fuck ton of monsters in them and in super and you know science fiction stuff so they always start out normally like oh i've seen this before this is csi episode then things go absolutely haywire and you're in for the ride but i've been kind of jonesing to

get back to the the stephen king that inspired me when i was a kid, which is, you know, you can spend so much more time on character and plot and developing things if you don't have these large structural organizations like the cops or trying to get, like the one I'm writing now is Pandemic. It's the final book in the Infected trilogy. And I'm trying to get help on what it's actually like in the Situation Room.

And the series has taken itself to that level, but I don't follow politics for shit. I have no fucking idea what i'm talking about the situation you mean the situation room the president yeah the white house not like that like the cnn show with wolf right yeah the first book infected is anybody who reads it has read stephen king will see the influence as plain as day because it's largely it's uh one university of michigan linebacker who blew out his knee in the rose bowl so never not to go never got to go pro was would have been a number one draft pick hands down. But now he works in computer support because he didn't finish his degree and he can't play ball anymore. So there's this giant, super dangerous guy with a lot of rage issues who works really hard to control his rage.

And then he gets infected by this alien vector, this other thing going on. And he spends a large part of the book trying to not kill people. But most of that takes place in his apartment and in the town of Ann Arbor. And that's the Stephen King angle, which is we're going to take a small town. We can develop this out. I can do whatever I want. And I don't have to justify why isn't the SWAT team kicking in the door and all these other things. So now that I'm writing this complicated crap with Situation Room, I'm like, I think that's kind of run its course. I want to get back to the smaller cast and the smaller towns. I grew up in small town Michigan, and I think that's why a lot of stuff resonated with me.

It's the same thing, just a different accent. And I want to, for the future, I'm going to probably try and get back more into that kind of thing. I thought it was amazing that Stephen King wrote so many books about a writer from Maine. Yeah. It's like, after a while, you're like, come on, man, really? What the fuck are you doing?

You got another book about a writer from Maine? Like, Jesus. You're rolling on it. I know you want to write a book a year, but fucking come on. You can't be a baseball player or a fireman or some shit. Yeah. It's got to be a goddamn writer from Maine. That's why you got into The Green Mile, which is about as different than anything else he's written.

That thing is amazing. Christine is another one of my favorites. Have you read any of his son's work? Joe Hill? I've read Horns and have read the first couple collections of the Lock and Key comic book, which is what he's

becoming most well known for. Oh, really? What is the Lock and Key comic book? Lock and Key is I forget where the family originates but they wind up moving to a mansion they inherit in rhode island so it's very similar to forgive me lock and key fans if i have this wrong it's very similar to old school stephen king small town family goes moves into this haunted house it's kind of shining-esque and there's a lot of different

keys that will open up different rooms in the house. And the rooms in the house are all these crazy paranormal portal type things. But the artist, I believe, is Gabriel Rodriguez. And they both won Eisner Awards, which is the Academy Award of comic books for this. So he's really, although obviously he's had an enormous amount of press coverage from being Stephen King's son and writing horror, you know, a ton. He's also developed this comic book thing with IDW as the publisher, and it's an enormous, enormous success. I read the one, I think it's called Little Yellow Box or something like that. What is it?

I don't want to even give away what the plot is, but it was great stuff. It's, I'll pull it up on a screen. What was that, the Dark Tower series is that king yeah the dark tower yeah i i read the first one a lot when it first came out but all my friends are so addicted to that series have you read have you followed that i i followed it up i think through book six yeah and then um i don't think it's a spoiler at this point it's 20 years old there's a point in the series where stephen king actually writes himself into the series so the characters are actually talking to Stephen King, who's going like, wait a minute, I wrote you guys. And I was like, okay, that's just too meta for me.

I'm out. I'm out. But I think the first three Dark Tower books are the single best trilogy of any kind anywhere. Those three books are just effing mad. If he'd have stopped right there, they're still a masterpiece. The series went on. I think the first three books are... There's never been anything better written, in my opinion. It's perfect. Wow. Yeah, he was a bad motherfucker

and still is. Yep. Heart-Shaped Box is his son's book. That's it, Heart-Shaped Box. I read that one. It's about a haunted suit. Yeah. Really good stuff, man. He looks a lot like his dad, too. It's kind of creepy. Still like shades of his dad. Yeah. But he he's got a his style is unique i mean it's it's very much his it's sort of influence you can tell but very much is well it's everybody writes horror is influenced

by stephen king you know that's like i don't know how to you know can't not be there's there's no way to not be a lot of a lot of people get into it specifically because you read those books or you read Peter Straub or any of the other, you know, the heavyweights back in King's day, John Saul, et cetera. And you read those and those call to you and you want to make shit like that. And then when you start making your own shit, well, of course, it's going to have a little bit of that, a little bit of that in there. And King rarely admits he's influenced by a ton of people. And he's like, if you read my stuff closely closely enough you see their stuff in the book it's just the way it goes yeah he was actually a big proponent of reading other guys stuff to help your writing yeah i read stephen king on

writing oh yeah great book that's a it's a bible yeah for me because it's specifically because it gets rid of a lot of the pomp and circumstance and the you you know, the nose up in the air. It's, it's, it's so blue collar. And, you know, for a small town guy like me, you read that. It's like, you can read on writing by Stephen King and see, stop falling in love with yourself. Stop sucking your own dick. Pardon the phrase. You're not that important. You're not that great. Just tell the story. Stop putting in words that are going to make everybody realize how important you

are and just tell your, tell your story. And that's like the main gist of it is how to streamline everything and not be a pompous windbag, but still tell your great story. So it really resonated with me. Being a pompous windbag is a problem in pretty much everything, isn't it? Oh, everybody. Everybody. Yeah. Actually, on my podcast, because I give away all my books as free audio books, I play up the pompous windbag. That's like the joke within a joke. I come on and talk about awesome the story is going to be and all this other stuff. And the fans, they eat it up.

It's funny. That's my shtick. I can't do stand-up, but I can do that thing. Because you get used to it after a while. When people get very successful at something, and then they start to believe their own bullshit, and that's when you start to get that crazy self-importance coming on and what's the sad thing about that is when you start to see people like that the majority of their fans are like oh god he was so awesome

back in the day but now look at him you know it happens to a lot of people the pressure or something the pressure of uh success i think yeah the success though i mean if you're surrounded by yes men all the time yeah and nobody's there criticizing your ideas. And you're not objective and you don't sort of self-analyze. A lot of people don't like to self-analyze. It gets them confused. But we've all seen the real-life pompous windbag, and it's a shocking thing.

It's so gross, too. One of the reasons why it's so gross is because you hope and pray that you could never be that guy. You hope and pray that if the situation was reversed and you were in his shoes, it wouldn't be possible. It couldn't be possible. I feel like there's a lot of getting your ass kicked early in life and just failure after failure. There's an enormous amount to be said for trying things and failing as opposed to people who like the first thing they try, out of the gate, huge success. as opposed to people who like the first thing they try,

out of the gate, huge success. And then you haven't developed that humble nature of, I tried 28 things and 27 of them failed miserably. So this one thing, I'm not going to get too crazy with this. We're having success. You tend to see that in Hollywood and in writing. Some people come out of the gate, get that big novel, it blows up. Then after that, they don't have much success and they can't figure out what's going on

because they think they're very important. this is not amazing they change their own frequency that they're putting out because of their success and that sabotages them that's and that that's the sad thing that's what that's what hamstrings them uh happens to so many though yeah to so many different art forms to music musicians it happens to you know you know the guys that are the lead singers of these big bands and then they go fucking Looney Tunes, the band falls apart. And well, what was it? Was it partying, drugs, adulation? Adulation is a serious possibility. Adulation's a big drug. It's a scary one. You can get delusional on that shit. You know, it's a, it's, it's a fascinating one for character development though, isn't it?

It is. You can play off any time you've got a story where you've got someone in a position of power, it's almost impossible to write them from, here's a normal, humble person in this position of power. If you're writing about the mayor of San Francisco is in the story, the police chief of San Francisco,

it's almost impossible for them to get to that position if they're a nice, regular, humble person. Because at some point in any political construct, you have to become cutthroat and you have to look at other people as an obstacle to be removed. And there can't be humanity involved. Like everybody at the top politics right now, those are some cutthroat people. Even Barack Obama didn't get where he was by playing nice. And so when you're writing a character about someone in that higher position of power, you have to channel some of that in there. There has to be that level of self-assuredness all the way up to arrogance and that dismissive nature as well. You know, if you're in my way,

I'm going to tell you, you probably shouldn't be in my way because it's not going to go well for you. And then that full on confidence, and then you just get rid of them. If you crush them, then too bad, I told you. When you start to write a story, do you have a full idea in your head before you sit down in front of a computer, or do you have, like, I want to write a vampire cop drama? I mean, what is it? Do you have a bunch of different ways that it gives birth in your mind?

It tends to come from several different places. I watch as much science TV as I can, and I read up as much as I can. And in the natural world, there's always something like, oh, look at that. This creature can do that thing. The water bear can survive in space. Holy crap. And that'll stick.

And then at some other point, you will watch something about, here's asexual reproduction. If they're in this particular chemical environment, then that'll stick. And then a couple things stick. And then at some point, I'll just be working on something else and four or five things will come together. And then that's the center point of the idea. I'm like, well, what if we had creatures that did this and then this happened and then they

took over the world kind of a thing. From there, you have to go and hammer out an outline. I try and hammer out an outline with the tiny bit of science knowledge that I have. And then I'm really fortunate because, again, because of the podcast, I started getting people, scientists, emailing me going, wow, I love what you're doing. You're really trying to get the science right. You fucked this up.

So if you get into neurochemistry again, I'm a PhD. Give me a call. And I started getting all this shit in. Oh, that's amazing. Now I've got this battery of people. I'll do the outline. And then I will send them all the outline and say, all right, tear it up. And then they shred it.

They shred it, and they'll come back. Well, you can't do that, but here's some other. We just found out about this. You could do this. That is so cool. What an awesome resource. It's amazing. And they have a blast with it.

And then I restructure my outline, do a detailed first draft, and then we repeat. For people that are listening right now that are going, well, what's this podcast? What's the name of your podcast? Podcast is Scott Sigler's Audiobooks. If you go to iTunes and search for Scott Sigler, S-C-O-T-T-S-I-G-L-E-R, you'll find that. Or scottsigler.com. We have them there.

We've been going on seven years now. Is that right? That's awesome. Every Sunday for seven years, we put on an episode. I want you to pull a picture up of those water bears. I think they're also called tardigrades. Tardigrades, that's it, yeah. They can survive in space.

It's so weird when nature is as crazy as anything you could ever think of in fiction. Yeah. And it's just undeniable. There it is. Here's a photograph of it. This is a real thing. That's why the science is, you know, those things are crazy. Look at these fucking things.

And they're super tiny. But, you know, those things are crazy. Look at these fucking things. They're super tiny, but, you know, of course, my brain immediately looks at this and goes, okay, what if that was eight feet long? Let's make that thing eight feet long. Jesus. And let's make that hide, you know, pretty much bulletproof. Let's do those two things to it. For the folks listening and not watching, this thing looks like a giant rhino with, like, a circular diamond drill for a mouth.

Fleshlight. It looks like a super diamond alien fleshlight. It looks like a Star Wars creature. It also looks like it has a cotton cape on or something like that. It doesn't look like it's skin. Dude, that thing survives in space. It can survive in space. The membranes get a little different when you get down that small. That's the kind of thing

where maybe a graphic artist who does a lot of acid could come up with that. Maybe. Then it shows up and you're like, that's the picture right there. Oh my god, look at its fucking mouth. Jesus Christ. For the folks at home, it's literally got a giant shark mouth. Wow, it's literally got a giant shark mouth.

Wow. That's ridiculous. See, this is it. Listen to this. I just realized this. I'm finishing up a book called Pandemic, which it goes infected, then contagious, then pandemic. And there's a creature in Pandemic, and the mouth is similar to that. And I just realized that that's where I got it from.

That thing has been floating in the back of my head forever and it's actually popped out in this book oh look at that photo that is insane yeah that is insane folks it's the you can find them they're called either water bears people call them that or tardigrades i think it's the scientific name for it and they are the creepiest looking motherfucker how small are those things they're microscopic they're microscopic yeah a couple of microns I think if I have that right

spooky little creatures but then you get and that gives you so many storytelling possibilities you've got a creature that seems insignificant you can't even see it and yet if we suddenly lost our atmosphere for whatever reason or the chem the the environment changed significantly and all the humans died this thing

could still be around and then this thing could start evolving and yeah maybe the universe really doesn't have a sense of time and just sets up these little uh extra seeds laying around genetic material like tardigrades just in case you assholes hit that button and nuke the whole planet sideways. These little motherfuckers can grow into something that can survive in a vacuum. It would start over real quick. If we got wiped out, it would start over again pretty fast.

I wonder. I wonder what it would be next. Would it be dolphins? Would it be some sort of sea creature? This is the shit I think about all the time for the books. And odds are you're not going to get any sea creature for This is the shit I think about all the time for the books. And odds are you're not going to get any sea creature for a couple reasons. Number one, no hands.

There's no tool use. And number two, no fire. The two biggest factors that go in are tool use and fire. True. And then I think you also are not going to get, this drives me crazy when I watch sci-fi shows about this man lion.

Lions don't need to evolve. They're an apex predator. There's no need for them to change anything for the most part. It's the little things that have to run from everything else. And especially with humanity, I think, as we evolved up, the biggest thing was losing the hair

and having to invent some way to stay warm. And you start to use tools to make clothes and tools to hunt. And as soon as something has to use a tool and figures that out, that's the flashpoint. From there, it goes crazy. Why did we lose the hair? I'm not entirely sure. I don't know. But there wasn't a large need for it in a greatly temperate

environment like Savannah, Africa. So in the human body, all evolution, if there's something that you just don't need anymore and you're burning calories to keep that thing going and taking energy to support that, if you have successive mutations where that thing gets smaller and smaller, there's no penalty. There's no penalty. Oh, well, his hands are this big and he can't use a spear. You're not going to survive that long. But if your earlobes shrink and you can hear just fine, there's no penalty.

So evolution kind of gets rid of the stuff that you don't need. It is fascinating what you say, though, about the intelligent sea creatures never be able to get their physical environment to change. Right, right. Yeah, that's an interesting point. I never really thought about the no fire thing. But yeah, how could they create something? If you can't make fire and refine metal,

then you are cut off at the knees as far as what you can do from there. And James Cameron played with that in The Abyss with having his intelligent water-based species, but it's very difficult to conceive any way you could get that to going. So it's land-based. It's got to have hands or appendages that are ready to become hands, a couple of basic things.

So it could easily start out with some kind of primate or some kind of small mammal right off the bat. But there's also some pretty kick-ass reptiles out there and birds. Did you hear about the Ukrainian army has been training dolphins to use, like, knives? And they've been attaching knives and pistols to their head, and they've trained them to use them. So they can now use these knives to do things. Pistols? Yeah.

So right now this was on the news today that they lost the dolphins that had the pistols or the guns on them. And they're on the loose right now so there's these rogue dolphins that have guns on them that are just terrorizing the sea. Come on. I swear to God, it's true. Dolphins apparently swam away to get laid. They were out looking for some and they haven't come back.

Why would they come back? They got guns, man. Guns and bitches. Yeah, they got guns and they're trying to get some more. Dolphins are one of the few creatures that they murder. They'd kill for no other reason than just to kill and also dolphins rape, which is guns and they're trying to get someone. Dolphins are one of the few creatures that they murder. Yeah. They'd kill for no other reason than just to kill. And also dolphins rape, which is messed up. So now you've got these things swimming around. And they're trained to kill divers is the problem.

They're specifically trained to kill divers. I'm going to rape a dolphin Saturday at Sea Road in San Diego. These dolphins are trained to kill divers? Yeah. They're military. They're trained to kill. That's the program. It's the aquatic mammal program. Specific divers or any divers?

Enemy divers. Enemy divers. I'm sure the Ukrainian controllers, this is inherited from the Russian program, and they would have specific parameters to train them to go out and kill a certain shape or a certain color. How fucked up is that? They train dolphins to go out and be assassins. What a douchey move.

Dolphins rule. Dolphins are very creepy, though. They kill babies. They kill the baby of when a female gives birth. I think she won't mate with a male for several years. So if a male comes along and it's not his baby, he just kills him. Get her to mate again. Dolphins are the gangsters of the sea.

They are not messing around. Except for killer whales. Except for killer whales. Killer whales eat them. Nobody screws with a killer whale. Yeah. They're the apex of the sea. They are not messing around. Except for killer whales. Except for killer whales. Killer whales eat them. Nobody screws with a killer whale. Yeah. They're the apex of the apex next to humans? Other than humans, they've got no predator.

There's nothing that hunts a killer whale. I thought Happy Feet was kind of a fascinating monster movie in sort of a way, a monster alien movie, because it dealt with the whole idea of living in this semi-aquatic world, and all of a sudden these aliens from the other part of the world, from the surface, come and fuck everything up and kidnap people and take photographs and shit.

It's really kind of interesting when you think about how much life must suck if you live in the ocean, and these crazy assholes live out above the ocean with these giant metal machines that they've created to scoop, literally scoop life in nets.

Take you right out. They don't give a fuck what they get. Dolphins, whoops. Sorry. Sometimes they give dolphins on purpose. Imagine what it was like for whales, which are pretty effing intelligent and have language and communication. And for, what, I think 100 million years, something like that, nobody screws with a whale because you can't because they're gigantic and they just ignore you. And for, what, I think 100 million years, something like that, nobody screws with a whale because you can't because they're gigantic and they just ignore you.

Then all of a sudden, here come these ships and here come these harpoons and they're screwed. There's nothing they can do. There's nothing they can do. Who was the first guy to try to harpoon a whale? That guy was a bad motherfucker. You've got to think about that. That's a gangster move.

I'm going to eat a whale. You know, I mean, that guy's not playing games. I don't know. What I've heard about that's probably, you know, it's kind of an ice age thing or a place where there's ice. So the whales have to break the ice to come up to breathe. And a whale breaking through the ice to a blowhole can get out there. You just stab that son of a bitch. And I don't know how they did it, but somebody figured out that's a lot of good eating.

Wow. That's harsh life. Yeah. Harsh life when you got to eat a whale. The dolphin thing reminds me of, I've got, some of my fans were tweeting today because that basically the same thing happens in my book, the GFL. So I've got title fight, which is what I emailed you on to start with, which is an MMA sci-fi story. And then we have the Galactic Football League, which is a young adult series, but it's an American pro football league 800 years in the future with aliens playing the different positions based on their physiology. So you've got, like, 1,500-pound linemen. You've got receivers and D-backs that can jump 20 feet in the air.

And it's this crazy hodgepodge of stuff. But intelligent dolphins are part of that that whole thing too so it's uh that with the galactic football league series which is the rookie the starter the all pro and the mvp and then the title fight i think i'm one of the few guys who's merging sports and science fiction because a lot of time the jock is anathemic to science fiction guys they like don't like the jocks very much yeah what is uh what is that story about uh title fight is uh it's kind of a classic rocky-esque type story but there is a heavyweight champ of the galaxy named korak the cutter and this is octagon full-on octagon it's straight out i'm a huge mma champion of the heavyweight

champ of the galaxy so in this in this in this universe I've created, in the Siglerverse, if you're going to be a combat fighter, you can't have any body modifications. It has to be all natural. So there's no hydraulics or no cybernetics or anything like that. And he is of a race called Quith, which have three castes. There's a leader, there's a warrior, and there's a worker, kind of an insectile type approach. And the warriors are these giant, badass things with an extra set of arms,

and they're very mean and very tough, and they are perennially the champions. And then along comes this nasty-ass human fighter named Kyle North, who comes out of a place called the Purist Nation, which is, in my universe, this is the backwater, human-only world where they hate all the alien races and won't get along with anybody. But they're mean and they're nasty, and this guy's name is Kyle North, and he was created by an author named Matt Wallace who co-wrote this with me. And Matt's an ex-pro wrestler, so he's a bad MF.

And it's following their arcs. The human who will do anything to be the champion, sacrifice his own body, kill whoever he's got to kill, make any deal, and the highly, almost Ronan-like, the honorable existing champion, and the two different mentalities clash for that final championship ring. Like, the second half of the book is nothing but the fight. It's just a brutal fight. How big is the human?

In this, this is trying to, I'm trying to track out the growth of humans in just the last 50 years. In the NFL in particular, 50 years ago, the average NFL lineman weighed 253 pounds at 253 pounds. You can't even play college ball. Now these guys like the, the starting offensive line for the Dallas Cowboys 50 years ago, could not get a job anywhere in football. Probably couldn't even get a scholarship.

They're just not big enough. So we've seen the average weight go from two 53, somewhere like three 10, three 15, somewhere in that ballpark. And that's not evolution. That's just better nutrition. And these guys getting the opportunity and cultivating the big guys.

Cause 50 years is enough time for evolution to kick in. But eight centuries from now, you can kind of see that progressing out. So the main character in the galactic football leagues, names, Quentin Barnes, he's a quarterback and he's a seven feet tall, 380 pounds.

And he's, and they're like, well, he's kind of small. He could play tight end. He'd be a small tight end. And then everybody's exponentially larger based on quarterback alignment. So Kyle North, I think, in the book, he's 6'8", 380.

And that's the heavyweight champ of the world. Jesus Christ. And just cut, too, because this is our cover with him. Wow. That looks like gay porn, son. It does. You might want to switch that up. Why is he flexing so hard?

Why is he flexing so hard? Well, we grabbed an image, and we searched for MMA fighter on all the image sites, and we got a lot of gay porn. That's all we got. That's all we got. Yeah. Unfortunately, and fortunately, depending on your sexual preference. I was hoping to find just some gigantic Dan Severin type dude,

and none of that was available for us. Well, Fedor Emelianenko, one of the greatest fighters of all time, he didn't have a body anything like that. Yeah. That looks like James Irvin, but even bigger than James Irvin. Maybe James Irvin when he was a heavyweight. He was a very muscular MMA fighter, but most guys aren't built like that because either you have to have extreme genetics to be built like that or you've got to spend too much time lifting

weights. You get that at more of the, I mean, you get some really cut physiques at the middleweights and light heavyweights. Not as much. Not as much. You know, the best guys are longer and leaner. Right. You know, the really heavily muscledcled guys it's just too much fuel

right those bodies require you see like a guy like spiders spiders got yeah that cut yeah Anderson Silva's a perfect example of what I think is like the ultimate fighter body but occasionally you'll see a guy who's like really thickly muscled at 185 and you want to tell them and listen you need to just get rid of all that muscle just do aerobic exercises only from now on. You got your plenty of muscle, just wrestle and kickbox and, and run like a lot and drop some weight, man. You're, you're, you're hindering yourself by having this crazy beach body, you know?

Do you think that affects their fighting performance to be overly muscled? Certainly. Absolutely. It's just not effective. It's, not effective. It's like having too much horsepower in a car where your brakes can't, rather your wheels can't get any traction because you're just spinning your wheels,

and then you run out of gas quick. That's what happens if you have too much horsepower in a car. And that's how it happens in a person, too. If you have an overly muscular body, the resources that it requires are substantial. You've got to pump blood through all these extra tissues. That's, that's serious shit.

It's a lot of work for your heart. So you should be as, you know, you should be strong, but as lean as you can be close to natural weight, close to natural weight. It's great. If you can,

if you can, if you can compete against the larger guys who cut weight, you know, that's, that's, it's been really cool to watch with WEC coming in and the MMA actually getting more weight classes. Yeah. Because I wrestled at 126 in college, and watching the MMA, there's nowhere to see guys of that size, at least until WEC came along, and they started to get more of the flyweight in there. And is the UFC going to continue to expand to all the weight classes? Yeah, they're thinking about going to 115

as well. We went to 125. You're like, yes! Those guys are like Tasmanian devils. Some people don't like it because they say those fights aren't as exciting, but I think they're the most technical fights. Mighty Mouse Johnson is one of my favorite fighters. Demetrius Johnson, he's the flyweight champion.

I feel like the people who are saying that are the same people back in UFC 1, 2, and 3 when Gracie would be all tied up with somebody like, well, this isn't exciting. I'm like, it's because you have no idea what you're looking at. This is mesmerizing. Dan Severin fighting Gracie is mesmerizing to watch. I think for some people, bigger is better, especially Americans. We're such knuckleheads. We want to see the biggest guy, and we'll see the biggest guy in the house.

It's like John L. Sullivan. You can lick any man in this room. They used to say it back then, lick. I don't know why. I don't know why I was licked. You can't really say that now. I can lick any man in this room. Everybody's like, hey, what the fuck are you trying to say, man?

I think I was six and I got in trouble at my grandma's house. And my grandma's this German immigrant. And she's like, I'll give you such a lick. And I'm like, I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. I'm like, I don't know what's going on, grandma, but I'm just going to behave from now on because I don't want to crush you. That's a terrifying threat. I was like, what are you talking about, old woman?

I don't know what you mean by that. Just hold me down and lick me. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, but for fighters, the correct weight class and going in and fighting to your optimum weight class can be the difference between being a successful fighter with a championship career and being a guy who never quite rises to the top like you see in mma there's a few guys that are like sort of what they call tweeners like they're not really a 155 or they're really too big for

that but they're really too small for 170 right there's there's a few guys like that that are just like somewhere in the middle there they should be like maybe a 165 like bj penn fighting crazy giving up a lot of weight. Yeah, BJ Penn just, that's his choice. He just chooses to fight the bigger guys. He's not afraid to fight bigger guys. And when he was younger, he was able to pull it off pretty well. But, you know, the game is moving

in a forward and progressing direction constantly. You're never going to slow down the progress of these young guys that are up and coming. They're better. They're going to be better. They're going to be better. They're never going to slow down the progress of these young guys that are up and coming. They're better. They're going to be better. They're going to be better. They're going to be more technical. It doesn't mean that the older guys can't still win occasionally,

but those guys have to evolve as well. You see in boxing like Bernard Hopkins this week won a world title. Isn't that insane? It's crazy. I watched it and it's a beautiful performance because he just did everything correctly. He's like such a craftsman in there.

And he's got these old-school sort of moves and just knows how to cover up, knows where the punches are going before you even think about throwing them, knows what you're going to do, finds your patterns, and then knows how to step around you and knows how to keep you moving. It was beautiful to watch.

Well, in MMA, there's not a whole lot of those guys that are like these old school, like perfect fighters. You know, Anderson, you know, Anderson's one of them. And then you've got John Jones, who's just this phenom who's, although he has all this great success, really, he's got so much to learn still, too, which is the most scary thing about him. He hasn't even tapped into his potential. Right, right. You know, and then the really good guys in the 170-pound division, there's like six or seven of them, you know. Like this weekend, there's six different killers that are fighting in Montreal. You've got Diaz is fighting George St. Pierre.

Oh, yeah, I know. You've got Carlos Conda is fighting Johnny Hendricks. And Jake Ellenberger is fighting Jake Shields. No, no, no. Jake Ellenberger is fighting... God damn it. Nate Marquardt. Oh, Nate.

Yeah, okay. That's Nate Ellenberger and... Or Jake Ellenberger and Nate Marquardt is a sick fight. That's... Is that all on the same card? Yeah, that's all on the same card. That's live from Montreal. That's exciting. How long have you been an MMA fan?

Like UFC 1. Really? Yeah. Was a big MMA fan and it was this crazy spectacle because that's the thing. Would a ninja beat up a karate master? And then somebody said, well, let's find out and put everybody together.

And I remember watching the early ones, and this guy's a fifth-degree ninjitsu black belt and comes out and just gets his ass handed to him. And I was excited because I was a wrestler, and you were watching this early on, and I'd never heard of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I had no idea what these guys were doing. But when the wrestlers would come in and just mop the floor with these dudes,

and it was exciting for me. It was justifying. It was like, great, I took Taekwondo, and there's all these forms, and I fully appreciate what it is you guys do, but these forms, I don't get it. The fight's going to go to the ground anyways, and you watch that in MMA, and the fight would go to the ground. The guys who would do things on the ground were the guys who would win. And so really got into it then, and then when dan severin came out uh he's a michigan boy and watching his fights with it and

he was just you know awesome awesome to watch watching him watch fight a kickboxer and do full-on suplexes on guys who had no idea what a suplex was yeah effing it was beautiful so me and all my wrestling buddies would get together and watch those and just go ape shit we were just like we couldn't even get through one of those without beating the crap out of each other. It was awesome. And then to watch it come up and what's happened since Dana has taken over, it's just been one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Yeah, it's very strange.

As you were talking about the size of football players changing over a period of 50 years, look at how much better the MMA fighters have gotten in the 20 years that it has existed. Yeah. It's really shocking. It's shocking to see now. Like Diaz and Georges St-Pierre, both of these guys, there was nobody like them 10 years ago.

They didn't exist. Nobody was that good. These guys are on a complete, this is the highest level we've ever experienced. And every time St time saint pierre improves like he you know just beat carlos condit had a long time off in the recouping from his knee surgery he recovers from that and has the kind of fight a good solid long tough fight now just a couple months later he's going in there against diaz i love that because i think you know since it's only like four months later or whatever it is, he's

got time to recover, time to rest up a little bit, and then boom, get right back into it. So he'll be more used to the experience, probably put on a better performance, won't feel the ring rust as much, just experienced it recently. Is that enough time for him to

analyze the other fighters' style, though, and work it in. An enormous amount of training has got to be, he's going to do this. Here's his tendencies. When he puts his right foot forward, this is what's going to happen. Do you think four months is enough time for him to... Because that guy's an effing killer, man. Both guys are killers, but I think, first of all, St. Pierre has been eyeing

Diaz for a long time because they were supposed to fight before. Diaz tested positive in a marijuana thing, and know that he it took him you know all this time before he uh was able to uh get a fight again after the condit fight and so you know he's uh he's had some you know a bunch of a bunch of weird issues like uh outside of the cage and that one that one being a big one that they suspended him for a long time for marijuana, which is just really fucking ridiculous.

That really drives me bananas. But he's been wanting this fight forever. Diaz has been calling out for this fight forever. And Georges Saint-Pierre has been cage-side for his fights and talking about fighting him. So these guys have been sizing each other up for a long time. It's not just four months to get ready. Right.

This is a long time coming. We played this yesterday. There's a video of Nick Diaz hitting a speed bag for 23 minutes in a row. It's one of the craziest things I've ever seen. He just... 23 minutes. That is so long. Most folks have no idea how difficult that is.

I don't think I can keep my arms up for 23 minutes, let alone hit the bag. And he's hammering at it. I mean, these guys are both in amazing, amazing shape. So I'm so excited about it, not just because it's a championship fight, because I think it represents these guys who are two all-time greats, in my opinion. And it represents them in their perfect primes. They're both in the best situation they could possibly be. Nick Diaz comes off the BJ Penn fight, a fantastic performance.

The Carlos Condit fight, questionable decision. And a close fight. But Carlos Condit used a very good strategy of moving and keeping away from Nick. And Nick has that aggressive, in-your-face style. He wants to commit to a fight. And George... George does not dance around.

He doesn't dance around. And with his wrestling style as well, this is going to be a really interesting fight. Because, first of all, Nick Diaz has a nasty guard. He's got very good sweeps. He's got very good submissions off of his back, and he gets real comfortable there. He knows how to tie you up. It's not an amateur that you have on his back,

and he's dangerous off his back. You have to mind your P's and Q's. And then is he going to be able to stop the takedown? If he does stop the takedown, what does the stand-up look like? Does George kick him from the outside? Does Nick pressure him into a stand-up slugfest? What does it become? It's going to be fascinating. I can't wait. I'm excited for that fight. Yeah, I'm very excited for it as well. You were one of the first guys that I ever heard of

that took his books and put it on the internet as an audio podcast. What led you to decide to do that? I couldn't get a book deal, frankly. Going back, I guess, geez, I guess 15, 16 years. I was trying to get published for about 11 or 12 years, writing a book every two years, working a full-time job, all the regular stuff. And then back in the day, actually writing the submission letter and sending it to publishers, sending it to agents, going to conventions, trying to meet, make the right connections to get, just to get somebody to look at the book. Then I got an agent and, uh, I wound up with a deal with, uh, AOL Time Warner when my book EarthCore was supposed to be in every store in May of 2002. Um, and then the 9-11 recession hit before it went to press and the economy dropped and Time Warner scrapped everything

that wasn't profitable. So I'd, I'd gotten to that point where I had a book deal. Then the publisher folded. It happens. And it took me three years to get the rights back to my book. So now when I get the rights back in 2005, I have this professionally edited book. The editor's name was Paul Whitcover, was a great guy. I thought it was a really solid piece of work and we can't get another book deal for it. Then I learned about podcasting, see what Dave Weiner and Adam Curry are doing with podcasting. And I'm like, oh, that's really cool serialized stuff. So I went to look for audio books to listen to. Cause the first thing that happened in my head being a writer was somebody's putting out serialized books, just like the radio dramas, the forties

and fifties. I started Googling it. And after two days of trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong to Google it, and I can't find any, I then realized nobody has done this yet. And at that point, I'm like, I've got a professionally edited book and it was ready for mass market production. Here's this new technology that if somebody hears an episode, they can immediately instant message it to a friend, email it to a friend, chat room it. And anybody who clicks on that is going to start hearing the story right away. I've got speed of light marketing with this and word of speed of light, word of mouth. And then I'm like, shit. And I figured out how to record, how to make an RSS feed, how to make a website and got it all done just so I could get it out there and then put

some marketing to work. Like the first guy to ever do a podcast only novel and hope it would get picked up by some blogs and different sites. And it did, and I started to get a followership. And when I got to the end of EarthCore, I had three other books done, and I just started podcasting them. And I've been going at it ever since. So I was of the mind that if the publishers are the gatekeepers and they won't let me in, because it's not a Western, it's not a horror story, it's not a vampire story. They want very specific things they can sell. You've got a lot of different genres. They don't like you very much. I was like, if I can get to the end user, if I can go to the end listener and show them how kick-ass my stuff really is, I'm betting money

that my shit is so good. I can give it to you for free. And then they'll still pay for it anyways. That was the thought process. And I thought I would get a lot of followers and a lot of followers would turn into a book deal. Initially that didn't happen because I was going to publish like I have 10,000 people listening to me every Sunday. How can you not put this out? And their question is, well, what's a podcast? They had no idea what it was. Well, here's verifiable stats. They didn't, they didn't know what the internet was. They had no idea. They didn't know what the internet was. I swear to God, they didn't know what the internet was. And it was missed. I thought I had this awesome plan and everything's going to work out great.

And I get to the point where I'm supposed to get the contract and get the book deal. And they didn't care about the podcast at all. So then I just kept on doing it. And eventually things kind of caught up. Finally, the end of the story is we put out that novel Ancestor as a print book. The one you've got is the one that's been rewritten for Random House. But this was just a little trade paperback put out by a small Canadian imprint, one lady working

out of her garage. We put that out on April 1st, 2007, and it was the number one horror, number one sci-fi book on Amazon. And it was the number two fiction book on Amazon behind one of the Harry Potter novels. Wow. And New York crapped an egg roll. It was awesome, because I had a new agent

at that point who had the book Infected on their desk. And people were like, oh, this is it. We like this. This is good. Then all of a sudden this guy that they've never heard of anywhere is number one in horror, number one in sci-fi. And then that got us into auction for Infected and then have been rolling ever since. Wow. That's amazing.

What an awesome story. Yeah. So you're sort of self-created. Very much self-created. I love stories like that. A lot of it is my audience. We're going to go sell this book on this day, spread the word, and they went out and spread the word. And this is the audience that you created with this blog, this podcast of your novels.

Did you profit off of it? How did you have it set up? Did you have to pay for it to download it? No, it's always been free from square one. The whole book is free. The whole book is free. The model we have now is if you just want it for free or you can't afford it and you like the story because everybody gets into pickles here and there, you can listen to every episode every week and you can get the whole thing for free. If you download a book I've done before, you're going to hear 30 episodes with an ad inserted before every episode, just like what you do. So it's going to be ad supported, free content, and you can listen to it. If you don't want to hear me talk before the episode,

and you don't want to hear the ads, then you can go spend money and buy the audio book. So I totally leave it up to the audience. If you want to buy the print or buy the ebook, you can do that. You want to buy the audio book? Absolutely. That's why we're in business. If you don't want to do that, or you can't afford it, you can go get all my books, every word of it for free, everything unabridged. The way it's been from square one. That's a beautiful way to do it audio book. Absolutely. That's why we're in business. If you don't want to do that or you can't afford it, you can go get all my books, every word of it for free, everything unabridged the way it's been from square one. That's a beautiful way to do it, man. Yeah. So that way you pay for the bandwidth costs and all that stuff through the advertising. Yeah. Yeah. Everything we've covered everything with the advertising and advertising has become a solid, solid thing for us after seven years are doing pretty good with it. Um, but largely it's

just the, the just the general attitude behind this whole thing has been, I don't think anyone out there minds spending money for shit that they like. The problem is when you buy that record or you buy that audio book and you heard the sample and you're like, well, that was great.

Then you get to the end of it and you're like, this guy got lazy. This story ends crappy. I have wasted my time. I've wasted my money. You're pissed off. You're angry that you spent money on something that you didn't like. So I flip that.

I'm like, I'm going to give it to you and you're going to listen to it. And when you get to the end, you are going to miss work and you are going to go all night long and not be able to sleep because I'm in your skull taking over. And then when they get done like that, I like that book. I like the way that ended. This is my author. Then they go buy everything that I've ever made. Right. And if people get to the end and they didn't like it, it's no sweat off anybody's

balls. Like, well, I didn't spend anything on it. It's not really for me. And it creates this sense of this crazy sense of goodwill that even people who don't really like your stuff, as soon as they hear somebody else going, oh, you know, I really like a hard science monster story. It's like, oh, you got to check out the Sigler guy. And like it, everybody loves the fact that you leave it up to the customer and just leave it up to it's up to them it's their money you decide if you want to spend it or not it's not up to me to trick you that's an awesome ethic i love that and uh that's sort of the same thing we do with this podcast we know there's some people have like they have where you sign up and you can pay x amount of money and access the old podcasts and some of them have it set up where if you want to watch on Ustream, you've got to pay

for a monthly thing. But I've always felt like what this thing does is so amazing is the word of mouth. And the best way to do that is to make it as accessible as possible, to put it out there as quickly and as easy and to make it as downloadable as possible. I mean, going back to Stephen King, if Stephen King was to start doing a weekly podcast of his fiction and actually read his fiction, he could charge for that and would make a significant amount of money for that.

He'd make more advertising. Here's the problem. Stephen King's the worst guy ever to read his books. His books are awesome, but when he's reading them, I'm like, oh, this motherfucker can't read books. Not his thing. He doesn't command it enough. I don't know. Maybe you have a strong voice.

Stephen King has sort of a almost like a mumbly voice while he's reading his amazing book. Ari's more mumbly. Ari would never be able to pull it off. Well, the performance of the book, I've had seven years to polish that up. When I started out the First on Earth course, I just use all the voices i used to use to make my buddies laugh

in high school i'm like i have no idea what i'm doing just throw it in there and we'll make it as entertaining as possible and i've always tried to be as make every book as over the top as it can be so there's a loud rock intro loud rock outros i'm you know peaking the meters when i'm talking and just trying to make it exciting and energetic and fun it It's not just money, it's people's time. If you're going to take an hour of somebody's time, you better have some good shit because they can't get that hour back, ever. Dude, you're saying all the right shit. I love you.

That's how you should think, man. I think it would be awesome if everybody thought that way. The biggest thing is the free because now there's so many entertainment options. When Stephen King was coming up in the 70s, there was movies, books, and TV, and that was all there was and now I got to compete against fucking xbox and playstation and downloaded content and podcasts and vidcast and youtube I got to compete against all that just to try and get somebody to get like yeah I'm going to go and ask for 10 hours of your time to read

this this book that doesn't really mean anything that's a tough sell today that's a super tough sell especially with the with younger kids Cause video games are amazing entertainment experiences. You know, for you to get them to put that down and pick this book up for a while, you've really got, you got to bring good stuff. How many hours do you think it would take to read one of these books? Do you think you can read one of these in 10 hours?

I think somebody could read it at 10, 10 to 20 hours. Yeah. 10 to 20. My stuff reads a little fat. It's, it's looks thicker than it is. Cause there's an enormous amount of dialogue.

There's a lot of regular guy dialogue, and that means like two, three words line, two, three words line, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, stuff goes real fast. So people are surprised at how fast they read it. Like this giant honking thing, they're like, I can't believe I finished it so fast. I'm like, well, there's an enormous amount of just dialogue in there. And this other book that I have here is Ancestor? Yep. And what's this one about?

want to just dialogue in there. And this other book that I have here is Ancestor. What's this one about? Ancestor is an effort by a biotech company to create a herd animal with transplantable human organs. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people die because there's just not enough organs to go around. And if you got a bad liver, for you to live, somebody else has to die. It's a zero-sum game. So they try and come up with a chimera. It's an animal with genes from multiple species. So basically something along the lines of a sheep or a cow, but with transplantable lungs, liver, kidneys, everything a growing body could need. If they can pull this off and put this thing out to pasture, it's just like raising cows. You just harvest them when you need them and you make trillions of dollars. This is old-school horror movie sci-fi,

so something goes horribly wrong. And instead of winding up with a 200-pound herd animal with the perfectly transplantable organs and goes out and eats grass, they wind up with a 650-pound pack predator, and this, of course, happens on a remote island in Lake Superior. So we wind up with all of our characters

stuck on an island with 100 of these 650-pound pack predators that just go through you like a knife through butter. What do these things look like? They're not all that dissimilar from the American Werewolf in London. You got out there. But the biggest thing I did with them, I kind of combined a little bit of a bear and a gorilla. But the defining thing they have, and fans draw tons of pictures of this. If you Google Sigler Ancestor, you'll probably see this. They have

this giant sail fin. So they've got a variation on the Demetronon sail fin because the genome is based on the ancestor of all mammals. The thought is if they dial back the genetic clock, let's get back to the base set of code, Then we will have exactly what we want and there won't be any endogenous retroviruses. There won't be any crazy stuff. We can then from there, customize the animal we want, right? And they, but they don't get it all the way right.

And this thing has this, yeah, that's one of the things it says. That's from Predator. Scroll back over to the left. That's one of my fans did a full four foot tall mock out of the thing. That's the monster right there. And they have this sail fin that they keep back and you start to find

out they start to use it for communication. So they signal each other when they're closing in on you. So if you see that fin pop up somewhere, kind of like a land shark, you're effing screwed. Whoa. They're pretty, they're fully CGI'd in the trailer. If you want to get the trailer on there. Yeah, someone CGI'd this? Yeah, my buddy Kevin Capizzi, who's amazingly talented.

Go to YouTube and search for Sigler Nocturnal Trailer. And so you're doing a movie of Nocturnal, but Ancestor. Oh, Sigler Ancestor Trailer, excuse me. Ancestor, or this is going to be a TV series. What is going on with Ancestor? Nothing right now. There have been a couple people who have been like, we'd like to race people.

But there's a trailer? Yeah, I do trailers for the books. Again, trying to compete against YouTube, you've got to be on YouTube. The thing with a book trailer is if you make a really kick-ass book trailer and it's the kind of thing that people will share, the money you spend on that is money that will continue to work for you. People will keep watching that for years. Every four minutes, someone dies while waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney.

Imagine a technology that could provide those organs for a fee, and imagine what a company would do to monopolize that technology. The biotech firm Genada tried to solve this problem by creating the Ancestor, a creature with transplantable human organs but they didn't get the docile her dad they envisioned instead their work awakened something big something evil something very very very hungry.

You want a monopoly? A monopoly on human life. Nothing sells like life itself. When we succeed, we will be the only vendor. And be able to charge whatever the market will bear.

And for the millions of people not quite ready for death, the market will bear quite a lot. That's my favorite part. i don't know what that is that sure as fuck ain't no cow so you created that yourself uh no we we had people do it the aaron proctor uh shot the thing but we went out and found a guy to do it, and he got all his actor friends and put it together in the CGI, and we got permission from Century Media to use In This Moment's music for it.

We shot it like we're shooting a five-minute movie. We went out in the mountains in the snow and had an effing blast doing it, but that kind of thing, people still watch that when we're from 30, 40, 50 times a day. My trailer for Infected's at a quarter of a million views, and it just keeps getting views. So somebody's going to watch that you know whenever from 30 40 50 times a day my trailer for infected's at a quarter of a million views and it just keeps getting views so somebody's gonna watch that and that's exactly the kind of book they want then they go buy the book it's the only form of marketing in the publishing industry that will continue to sell books for you year after year so we go out and

spend i spend a ton of money on my trailers well that's really interesting is this a common thing am i just it's getting more it's common, yeah. And a lot of book trailers are awful. It's a floating book cover with music and words floating in. But there's people who go out and just shoot. I mean, they do full on three, four minute movies to try and sell the book. Have you seen one of these, Brian?

Have you ever seen one, Jamie? Not for this style. I've seen something like it. Wow. I've never heard of it that's fascinating we did the first one in 2008 and it was relatively unheard of now

but it's more common now now as a professional writer and a man I need you to explain to me Fifty Shades of Grey the fuck is going on what the fuck is going on it's the naughty factor

I think it's the it's a I think and I'm guessing here as I'm trying to figure out primarily that's a female readership. I'm trying to figure out the female mind,

which is not something I'm that gifted at. Or gay dudes pretending to be straight. They might read that. I don't know. But I think, number one, it's not your usual sex scene. This is some stuff where you're reading, and you're like, oh my goodness,

can you put that in a book? And then at some point, it tipped. And enough people had read it that it became, okay, you've got the hive mentality. Well, God, a million people have read this, so it's not that bad. And then the other factor that I think everybody just ignores is I haven't read it, but it's probably a great book. It does not sell that many copies unless that writing specifically appeals to the people who are buying it and they love the reading experience. I think one of the reasons why women don't trust porn stars or strippers or prostitutes or other women that will do things along those lines for money is because secretly I think there's a fear in the female community that all would have to happen would be just a few hundred girls start

doing terrible things then they would all start doing it as a sort of a mass movement and when a book like 50 shades of gray comes along and it's ball gags and you know all the crazy shit that they're doing in that move in that book go back to the terrible part what's um what's terrible about uh 200 girls going out and having a grand old time? Nothing terrible. I mean, terrible from their point of view. From the established, yeah.

Yeah, their own social norms of, you know, not wanting to be a slut and not wanting to be promiscuous. I think, you know, a book like Fifty Shades of Grey can literally change culture. Oh, yeah. I'm sure you got it. So did Sex and the City. Sex and the City, same thing.

Yeah. I bet the sales of bondage instruments have gone up significantly since that book has come out. Well, you think about women in the 90s, before Sex and the City came along, it was sort of like there was no MILF world. There was no, you know, there was no people weren't really turned on

by really hot 50-year-olds. That didn't exist. There was none of that that and then all of a sudden it became okay and then all these women that were like over 40 was like fucking I'm getting divorced I'm gonna go get some dick yeah hang out my friends I don't like hanging out with men either Jesus Christ like somewhere along the line they realize their marriage is a big charade yeah it's I think we're seeing more especially a lot of the porn stars being more open about what they do and going on their own podcast and talking about like, yeah, this is my job. This is super fun.

People are accepting it more and more in a book like Fifty Shades of Grey. Hopefully the norms of our parents are going away. And if somebody wants to go get laid and the other person's into it, what's the problem? Nobody's getting hurt. Yeah, unless your ball gags on real tight. Yeah, you get hurt. You get like a lip strain. Sooner or later, the autoerotic asphyxiation is going to kick in.

Somebody's going to strangle, get choked to death, and that's sad. Whenever anybody dies from autoerotic asphyxiation, I always smell foul play. I was like, look, if you were going to figure out a way to discredit a guy, like there was a preacher that died, and he died. He had a wetsuit on. He had a black dildo preacher that died, and he died. He had a wetsuit on. He had a black dildo up his ass, and he was doing autoerotic excruciation. Yeah.

And he died. And that guy, I was figuring, well, you know what? That guy's a priest. Who knows what kind of creepy shit he did, you know? But he's probably not a stupid priest. You know what I mean? Come on. He could be very well stupid.

That's a good way to whack someone, absolutely. Yeah, but it's a good way. I mean, it's, like could be very well stupid. That's a good way to whack someone. Absolutely. Yeah, but it's a good way. I mean, it's like as embarrassing as possible. Yeah. The only difference is you could make it a little worse by leaving pornography around, like gay porn or kiddie porn or something like that. If you cross me, I'm going to leave kiddie porn all around you. You're going to die of autosphyxiation.

Yeah, you can see the mafia threatening that. It'll make somebody straighten up. Well, they said that's what happened with David Carradine. I know. I heard the same thought when that happened i'm like i don't give a shit what anybody does in their own private time but i'm not buying that he crossed someone he had to have crossed someone or owed somebody money or something because that was just nuts well the rumor was that there was some organized crime involvement in his death that

was the the rumor but the rumor somebody easily could have just made that up. I mean, there's so many goddamn rumors. It just seems so implausible that you do that. But I've never tried. Maybe it's the greatest thing ever. I'm never going to find out. It's supposed to be awesome, but it's not my cup of tea. Yeah, so skydiving is supposed to be great, too. I'm not going to do that, either.

Brian's dad was trying to get talked into skydiving. Tell that story. Yeah, his friend was always like, hey, you've got to go sky was always like, hey, you got to go skydiving with me. You got to go skydiving with me. And then one day, her parachute got tangled up with her emergency parachute, and she died. And this was like a week before he was going to go skydiving with her. Yeah. So, yeah.

Not for me. No. Did he find out by just going to work skydiving with her. Yeah. So, yeah. Not for me. No. Did he find out by just going to work and she wasn't there? Oops. Not for me. More power to the people who want to do it, but not for me. I avoid the crazy life-threatening stuff. Yeah, that's a funny one.

The skydiving one's a really funny one. It's like you want that big adrenaline rush. Wait until they come up with virtual skydiving. That sounds like it's going to be pretty badass. Well, those little fan things sound pretty fun. Have you ever done one of those where you're over that big fan and you're just kind of floating in the sky? Eddie Bravo did that.

He said it's amazing. Yeah, it seems amazing. They have one in Universal. We should do it one day. Yeah, that'd be great. Hey, you fly. Yeah. There's like a technique to it, too, apparently. Because if you do it a certain way, you can fall. Does that give you the same drastic fight or flight response, though, as looking out, jumping out of a plane, and you're like, if anything goes wrong, I'm going to die. That's the thrill.

I've got to think for these people. Yeah, absolutely. That's a big part of it. It's the part that people don't want to sort of admit it. It's a thrill. What's the thrill part? Well, the thrill is that you're almost dying. Yeah.

Bungee jumping is the same thing. Your body is reacting like it's going to die and you're tricking that. Yeah. But not really. Like you're pretty sure it's not going to. So it's not a full on I'm going to die moment. Well, you only make that mistake once. Then it's you're all set. Yeah. We're weird with our manipulation of our fight or flight responses the things we do like wing suits and shit like that fucking you know uh organized fighting's the same thing you are you are channeling that base primitive instinct to establish dominance over another member of your species it's just the all of the things that used to go with that in primitive times are gone and it's just down to that one instinct.

You are going in there to test your mettle against another person and see if you can beat them, if you can establish dominance on them. That's all that stuff is, and the guys who are the best at establishing dominance are the guys who rise to the prominence in their sport. We're starting to see younger and younger guys retire as well. That's good. That's being an issue now. Is it they're retiring because they've already got damage, or they're retiring ahead of damage? Well, everybody's got a certain amount of damage. That's good. It's being an issue now. They're retiring because they've already got damage, or they're

retiring ahead of damage? Well, everybody's got a certain amount of damage. That's the reality. The reality is, if you've done some hard sparring, you've got damage. It doesn't seem like there's any getting around that. I mean, how much of it recovers after, you know, a couple months? How much is a couple weeks?

How much is never? Depends. I've seen fights where guys got beat up and they were never the same guy again they just weren't though they were missing something they were at if they were at 10 before they were at eight now right you know and that was where they were now and they could have a fairly successful career at eight but they would never be 10 again now that's something the nfl is facing because they've got a hundred years of results to look at. But for something like the UFC, which is new, you wonder at what

point does it come in where they start to go, do we need to increase the size of the gloves or outlaw some of the various moves? That actually is less safe. The bigger gloves is because they hit harder? No, the bigger gloves, there's two issues with them. One is that you don't break your hands as much so you can pretty much punch a guy anywhere.

Not always. Some guys have fragile hands, even with the big gloves like Floyd Mayweather. He's had several operations on his hands because he kept breaking them. Whereas the MMA gloves are smaller, and you can't take as many shots with them. The bigger gloves, you can take more punches, and in fact it's not really necessarily the concussive blows that do a lot of brain damage. It's just the constant sub-concussive trauma

that is the real issue. So there's a guy named Nick Deney, who was a MMA fighter who just retired. I believe he was a pre-med student, I think. But a very, very smart guy, nonetheless, whatever his educational background was. But that was his concern, was the sub-concussive traumas.

You start thinking, why can't I remember where I put my fucking car keys? Is that normal absent-mindedness, or am I missing a gear now? And that's a real concern. And it's still safer than boxing. I mean, by far, right? Supposedly, yes, because boxing has less options. For one, you can't clinch in a boxing match. You're not supposed to.

You can't take a guy to the ground if you're stuck in a situation. As far as repetitive head trauma goes, though? Depends. I mean, how you're training. How you're training is what's really important because a lot of boxers who are very smart, they don't train that hard as far as sparring. They don't spar hard. They spar like they'll get good sparring partners and they'll box at like a 50-60% ratio.

They don't try to murder each other. Whereas there's a lot of MMA gyms where guys are trying to murder each other. And not to say that doesn't take place in boxing, because there's some camps where it certainly does. But for the most part, if you're watching a high-end boxing camp where there's a lot of money on the line, they're having good, hard sparring, but they're also working. They're working on a guy imitating a certain guy's style or putting a certain amount of pressure on a fighter or whatever.

In the high-end camp, if you're dealing with Floyd Mayweather camp or somewhere along anywhere in that range, you're dealing with it. They have a strategy to it. In MMA, you have a bunch of gyms like that, but then you also have a massive amount of gyms where people are just sort of making it up as they go along, and they think the harder you go, the better it is. So let's go hard. We're badasses. We're going hard every day.

And they'll go hard even to the head. Like we had Boss Rutten on yesterday and he was talking about a Holland style sparring. They would go full blast the body into the legs, but to the head they would pull punches because they realize you're damaging each other. In a lot of the less experienced MMA

gyms or the less well-structured MMA gyms, they don't realize that. And so they're punching each other full blast in the face in training, and they're fucking each other up. Wow. Yeah. It can add up. It adds up.

Yeah. There's no way it doesn't add up. It's like you look at a guy like Alistair Overeem. He's been stopped something like nine times, maybe even ten. I think this might be the tenth time he's been stopped in his career in that Bigfoot fight. I mean, that's a lot of times, man. That's a lot of times of the fight being stopped from you getting punched too many times,

where you're just gone. You're not supposed to get nine of those in your life, right? I don't think you're supposed to get one, actually. You can get up to nine. That's an awful lot. Yeah. And you watch it affect, after a few of those, you watch it start to affect their ability to fight.

They're not the same guy out there. Oh, it certainly does, especially if they're not involved in any testosterone replacement therapy because one of the things about all that trauma is there's been a lot of studies that show that it starts to shut down your testosterone, like multiple concussions, that it shuts down. It does a lot of damage to your pituitary. Apparently, the pituitary is quite sensitive to concussive blows.

And when you get blasted a bunch of times, they've shown that it starts to lower your testosterone and it starts to make guys depressed. It's one of the things that makes you depressed. But it's a scary thing, especially for a guy like you, I'm sure, who you make your living with your mind. Yeah. Well, I'm just going to get back into some MMA boot camp and stuff. And I did a little Krav Maga San Francisco, had an MMA course,

and I was having a ball doing that. But I was not going to get hit in the head. This is my business. And then when I actually did spar, I got hit about three times and never saw a punch. I'm like, yeah, I don't process that. Whatever you just did. I didn't see anything. Let's go back to grappling, grappling. I can do all goddamn day long, but I, I don't see punches. So I'm out. Yeah. Well, the key is you got to do only with people who you really totally trust. Yeah. You got to do it. with people who you really totally trust. You've got to do it. It's hard if you do it with strangers or if you do it with a guy who's got a chip on his shoulder. Some guys, you just tag them lightly, and all of a sudden you're in a war.

Oh, right. That can happen. What do you do? Do you stop the sparring partner? Most of the time, guys don't. Most of the time, they just engage in the war with the sparring partner. You don't stop them and say, hey, what are we doing here? Because you don't trust them now because now he's swinging at you full blast.

It happens all the time. I think that was one of the biggest problems in MMA in the early days of mixed martial arts camps was guys getting beat up too much in the gym before they ever even got into the cage. Right. But, yeah, I don't. It makes you wonder what, and that's one of those things that I get into a lot in that Galactic Football League series I told you about,

is size, speed, and strength continue to increase. Now we're seeing things in the NFL where it's just, it's basic physics and you can put all the padding you want around a guy unless they do something drastic to improve that helmet. When you get more, the more force that is on bigger, faster, stronger bodies are going to produce more force. That brain bounces around inside the head. And when you project football players out to the four and 500 pound size and fighters up to the 400 pound size, it's something you try and try and get into that in the fiction itself too. It's like, what,

what is the average career like when you're getting hit on a regular basis by something that can bench press 1500 pounds and can run 30 miles an hour, you know, your career is like two, three seasons tops. And then you're just a vegetable. There's nothing you can, unless you can get in the head and create some kind of additional structure between the brain and the skull. There's only so much that they can do other than change the rules to stop so much damage. Unless you can get in the head and create some kind of additional structure between the brain and the skull, there's only so much that they can do other than change the rules to stop so much damage.

Did you, in your fiction, ever create some other sort of protective wear that people would wear? Or did you eschew it altogether, which is what a lot of people think would be the solution, to stop a lot of the head-butting each other and smashing heads? Get rid of the helmets. The first time I heard that, I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard of. And then I started to think about it a little bit. I'm like, you know, rugby does not have the same – it's not the same kind of contact. Rugby, you do not get a 15-yard head start and take someone out of the picture.

But it's very rough and very physical, and yet they don't take the impact that American football players do. I do some of the magic hand-waving with that. I'm like, well, this new helmet technology protects against this much. And then you just don't explain it, because if we could explain it, we would be doing it right now. So it is taken into account. But the main character, Quentin Barnes, it's a seven-book series. We've got four books done. And by book five, he's already starting to feel the effects of, you know, I stand in the pocket. And if I do my job right, sometimes I'm getting rid of the ball and standing there when something that weighs 800 pounds is hitting me as hard as it can.

That's what you get paid to do. And it's going to start impacting him. So I'm excited about that. The last three books start to get into the character analysis. What happens when one of the ultimate professional athlete, the top of his game, things aren't processing as fast anymore, and he can't make the decisions as quick as he could, and his reads aren't quite as good as they were before, and his body's starting to hurt. So follow him all the way from a 19-year-old rookie through this league to the point where he's like at some point he's going to have to make a decision.

Do I continue to play and do what I love and die doing what I love, which is admirable and going to die anyway, so why not? Or do you look to the future and be like, what are the next 40 years of my life going to be like? So it's going to be, it's a huge influence in the book as to what's going to happen. When you just stop and think about what an actual football player today, a 310 pound man who can run like, like literally like a track star of the 1930s, you know, when you stop and think about the kind of damage they can do, and you sort of look towards the future and extrapolate 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now.

Especially when this drastic change has happened in just the last 50, 60 years. It's unbelievable. When you look at where the guys are a third larger than they used to be in just 50 years. Yeah. So you extrapolate that out. And, of course, there's genetic and physical limitations. But as nutrition improves and science improves and genetic engineering improves, you're going to wind up in the future pro sports.

A couple centuries from now, pro sports, you're not – I mean, they're not even going to look human. They're going to look like a different species. That's how I came up with the idea for the book is I used to be able to – I used to do a little stuff for ESPN when I was in college, like manage the teams coming off the field or hold the dish and that kind of a thing. And I was 126 pounds and Michigan, Michigan State's a giant football game every year. It's huge. ESPN is there and my producer Al Killian, I'm on the headset with him and he's got me bringing the teams out of their

dressing room. And then he starts screwing with me because I'm 19. I don't know any better. And he's in my ear. He's going, listen, if they don't come out at the right time, ESPN is going to lose $5 million of advertising and that's going to be on you. And I'm like, he was fucking with me because he could,

because I didn't know any better. And I'm like so stressed out. And then let Michigan State out of the locker room at the point in time and all these giant human beings are coming out. And then as they're coming out, they're running, walking by the door to the Michigan locker room. Michigan locker room door opens up

and standing in the door is Greg Skrepnack. You ever heard of him? No. He was 6'8", 360. He was a giant, giant man. Plus he's got all the gear on. And I'm a little tiny thing. I'm freaking out.

I'm like, hell, hell, Michigan's going to come out. He's like, you don't let them come out of that locker room. I don't care what you have to do. And so I, he's giant. He's six foot eight. I'm five, eight. I'm 125 pounds. And he goes to step out and I just put my hand right, right on his sternum.

I just stiff armed him and went, stop right there. You guys can't come out of that locker room yet. And just, and he just, stop right there. You guys can't come out of that locker room yet. And he just looked confused. He was like, who is this little person? And he managed to wait. And all the guys were behind him. And he managed to wait just long enough for Michigan State to come out. Then I got out of the way and they came out.

But I wrote the whole concept of the book in that one moment, the whole GFL series. I had my hand in this guy's ear. My nose came up to his sternum. And I remember thinking, it's like he's a completely different species than me. And after that, I went home and started writing that book. Like, what if we have different species playing football, and the whole thing blew up from there? Wow. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm lucky I'm alive. They really are completely different species. If you're dealing with those super athlete, pro football players,

we're getting some really enormous, enormous human beings now. In the combine, I read, I may have read this incorrectly, they had three guys, three offensive linemen, 310 pounds, who ran four 640s. Those are gazelles. If I stand still and they run at me and hit me like that, I am dead on impact. That's how much force is involved. I'm just dead. There's nothing you can do. It's crazy. I wonder how many of these up and coming players are more aware of the risks now because of the past few years, all the different stories that have been

coming out about players, depression, post career suicides. I think the veterans probably are, but when you are 22 years old and someone's paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars to play football, and that's been your dream your whole life, you're still 22 and you're bulletproof. I think the rules have to come in to adjust behavior. It has to be run from the top down. Because you were 22, and if I was playing in the NFL, nobody could tell me anything. I'm going to go hit that motherfucker as hard as I possibly can.

That's how I make my money. That's how people know me because I'm the guy go hit that motherfucker as hard as I possibly can. That's how I make my money. That's how people know me because I'm the guy who brings the heat. It's never going to stop from the players themselves. Yeah, and you start to think, if I get hurt, I'll get out. But I won't get hurt too bad. I'll be smart. They also try and remember back to that age. There is this rationalization of maybe I'll get hurt and won't be quite as smart.

I'm willing to pay that price in order to have this moment right now. I'm willing to give up years down the road. And at 22, 23, 24, that is a perfectly rational logical decision. You're like, this makes sense to me. It's not until you get 20 years down the road, you're like, boy, I'm glad I didn't get any brain damage. That would suck right now. Yeah.

It's also a thing when you're 22 and you love playing football. Yeah. That's another thing. It's a very fucking exciting thing to do. As is MMA fighting. As is a lot of motocross riding. There's a lot of crazy, dangerous things that people really enjoy doing. And ultimately, that's really our choice. We should have that across the board.

We're hardwired to go out and seek that kind of danger. Evolutionarily speaking, we're hardwired to go out and seek that kind of danger. Evolutionarily speaking, we're hardwired to go out. We have to go get into life and death situations to hunt, to defend, to fight off other tribes. And the people who have those instincts are the people who wound up living and reproducing and passing that on. So as an 18 to 27-year-old male, you are hardwired for war. And a lot of guys aren't. That's cool. But a lot of guys have that. That's what they inherited. It's like, that's cool but a lot of guys have that that's what they inherited is like let's go out and kill some shit like that's in you i had that in me i wasn't very

good at because i was so small wrestling was a good outlet but you know you know what that feeling is like and and these kind of activities provide a safe rational outlet for those things but it's in there and it's going to come out one way or another yeah for a lot of men so i mean and then again like as you said some don't have it in them yeah for a lot of men yeah that's it's going to come out one way or another. Yeah, for a lot of men. And then again, like as you said, some don't have it in them. But for a lot of men, yeah, it's a real issue because it's sort of just you have a whole reward system set up in your DNA that you have no

control over and you have all these things that you enjoy. There's very little outlet for it when you're working in a cubicle and it's hard to make your body free of the influence of all these instincts. There's things that can't be rationalized. There's just things you cannot explain away.

Like when I used to wrestle and finally got to compete against people my own size because I played football too and played as hard as I could and did everything I could. But I got my ass kicked. I weighed 120, 125 pounds. When I wrestled going up against guys my own weight, I was able to, you know, uh, dominate people and, and just things like a cross face or, and it's, uh, you know, it's kind of mean to say, I guess one of the greatest feelings of my whole life is I suplexed the kid and broke his collarbone. And when I, when I brought him up, put him back, he landed his collarbone and broken, he just stuck there. And it was utterly primitive. It was just, you

know, why would you be happy you just heard another human being he was a good guy i knew him he's a nice guy but when i that that for that brief moment all the all the chemistry inside and everything else is like ah that's how you do it does that help you when you're writing when you're writing something like ancestor when you're writing about this crazy gigantic pack predator i into it. I get into it a ton, especially in the new book pandemic. The thought process is we are modified by society. We have a set of rules that we live by a certain camaraderie, helping out our fellow man, helping our fellow women, you know, in our growing culture, the growing equality of women. And there's no need to be a douchebag.

By and large, you don't need to be a douchebag. You can get along just fine being a good guy. And then take these people who are aspiring to become these better people, who are genuinely good people, and then put them in the pressure cooker. When you start to get into it, and it's like, you and me, Joe, are both in this room, but if I get out that door, I'm going to live and you're going to die. And if we both stay here together, we might both die, and there's a tiny chance we might live. That's what I play with that door, I'm going to live and you're going to die. And if we both here stay here together, we might both die.

And there's a tiny chance we might. That's what I play with a lot is what, what does a person do when their life is actually on the line and their situation, they have absolutely no control over. Do we regress to that lizard brain? Do we start looking out for number one? And I don't get into it too much. Like I don't, you protect your kids, you protect your family.

There's a guy you've known for 20 years. You two are going to, you know, you're going down together, but it's, it's largely when the strangers are brought together, get a small amount of time to gel, to get to know each other.

So it's not completely alien. It's itself. It's, it's one of my group. Then bring in the 650 pound pack predators. What happens? What do these characters do? That sounds awesome,

man. I'm going to read this. I can't wait to read it. It sounds like a great idea. I love your whole philosophy. I love what you did. I love the way you became sort of self-actualized by going out and putting it online yourself and reading your own books and putting it out in an audio book form and making it free.

I think it's brilliant. It's beautiful. I love the fact that it worked. I love your whole philosophy on giving it to people that can't afford it and you just put a little ad in there. it's brilliant. It's beautiful. I love the fact that it worked. I love your whole philosophy on giving it to people that can't afford it, and you just put a little ad in there. It's great. It's beautiful.

It's all perfect. It's great. Thank you very much for coming on, man. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on the show. I've been a fan since broadcast news days. So it really is a big thrill. Thanks, man.

I really appreciate it. And for folks who are interested in checking out more of Scott's book, the last name's Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R. I've got Nocturnal in front of me and Ancestor, and your website is? ScottSigler.com. And it's just Scott Sigler on Twitter, right? Yes, Scott Sigler on Twitter, Facebook.com slash Scott Sigler.

We get out to all the interwebs everywhere we can get to him. Well, dude, thank you very much. And folks, go support. Go get one of these books. I'm reading. I'm going to start this one tonight. Sweet. That's awesome.

Thank you very much, brother. I really, really appreciate it. Really fun time, man. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, too. Thank you to Hover, one of our sponsors for this episode.

If you go to hover.com forward slash Rogan, you will get 10% off your domain name registrations. Thanks also to audible.com if you go to audible.com forward slash joe you can get one free audio book and you will also get 30 days of free service at audible.com an awesome service where you can even get scott sigler book nocturnal right that's the only one that's up there right uh infected contagious and ancestor are up on Audible. They're all there. They're all there, you freaks. So go there. Go there. Get it.

Check it out. Go to Onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements. Thursday night, San Diego, California, the American Comedy Company, Brian Redband, Tony Hinchcliffe, Yoshi, Billy Bonnell, Jason Tebow.

It's going to be a hell of a show, ladies and gentlemen. Go down there and check it out. And if you're around Pasadena on Wednesday night at the Ice House Comedy Club, it's me, Ari Shaffir, and Ian Edwards. All right, folks, that's the end of this episode. We'll be back in about 10 minutes with Justin Wren. We're doing a double podcast day. My man's out there saving pygmies.

This shit's going to be crazy. Thank you, Scott podcast day. My man's out there saving pygmies. This shit's gonna be crazy. Thank you, Scott Sigler. I really enjoyed that. Thank you very much. ...... ... ...... Thank you.