Transcript: David Senra on Deadwood
Transcript of podcast #15
Below is the full transcript of my podcast with David Senra about Deadwood (and much more). You can listen to the audio here:
Liberty:
Hi, David. How are you?
David Senra:
Good. How's it going?
Liberty:
I'm good, thanks. What do you want to talk about today? The Wire? Breaking Bad? Sopranos?
David Senra:
I love when I got this calendar invite, what you named it.
Liberty:
Yeah, I'm going to do my disclaimer first. It's impossible to talk about Deadwood without a bunch of swear words and swearing, so be warned, this is going to be one of the podcasts with the explicit thing on it. So if you have kids around.
David Senra:
And any podcast I'm on is going to have to be explicit.
Liberty:
Yeah, but this one probably more than the others because it's part of the show and there's a bunch of anachronistic swearing that you don't hear every day, but with that said, welcome to fucking Deadwood, David.
David Senra:
There you go. That's what the calendar invite had.
Liberty:
Yeah, I couldn't resist, but first because I may have mentioned once or twice before that I like this show, so I have some stuff to say, but first, we've purposefully not talked about it since we've watched it because we're trying to save it for David so I want to ask you initial impressions? What are your thoughts on the show? How do you like it? Just get us started.
David Senra:
Okay, so I think the reason we're talking is because I've been reading your newsletter for a long time, for years. I feel like it's been years. And I don't watch that many TV shows because I have an obsessive personality and when I get into a show, it takes up way too much of my time.
The last time this happened to me is with Game of Thrones. I discovered the show before I even knew about the books. Once I started watching the show, there was already three or four seasons out and people kept saying how amazing it was. It's like, "Oh, I'm going to try this." And then I started watching the episodes, then I started re-watching the episodes, then I started reading all the books, then I started buying the encyclopedia of Game of Thrones.
I had seen you have great recommendations for all kinds of forms of media, TV included, but you were especially passionate about Deadwood. I was like, "All right, you know what?" And you whittled me down like water does rock over time. And I was like, "I'm going to give this a shot. I haven't watched a series in a long time. Let me try."
And from the first episode, I messaged you after. I was like, "Oh, I am already hooked." And so then you had the idea it's like, "Okay, if you watch all the shows and then there's a Deadwood movie, maybe do you want to do a podcast, and we just talk about Deadwood." And so I think I have to preface the statement here it's like I'm at a great disadvantage in this podcast because you're a Deadwood master. I've watched all three episodes and the movie, but you've watched the series multiple times, right?
Liberty:
I've seen it, I think, four times. I've listened to podcasts about it. I've read David Milch's book about it. I've read Matt Zoller Seitz new Deadwood Bible book about it. I even mention on some podcasts about Deadwood, because I kept dm'ing the host of the podcast, but the advantage you have is you've just watched it in the past few weeks. I haven't watched it recently, but I'm going to do my best.
David Senra:
I am going to basically be learning from you today.
Liberty:
So in general, how do you like it? What's the temperature?
David Senra:
I loved it, to answer your question. I thought the writing was some of the best, maybe if not the best writing that I've ever come across on a TV series. HBO in general are good for this I find I think all of my favorite. I think they have all my favorite shows, so Game of Thrones is my all-time favorite show, The Wire, Sopranos. And then I would put Deadwood up with the Sopranos and The Wire as well, but what I loved about it the most, and it took me time to appreciate, I didn't realize, I think until the middle of the second season, this is like, "Oh, Al Swearengen may be my favorite character, my favorite fictional character in any TV series that I have ever seen."
Liberty:
Probably the same for me. And that's the thing is when you start the show, you have all this baggage about Westerns, or just about TV shows in general. And so it starts and you're like, "Okay, Bullock, is the sheriff, he's the good guy. Al is the villain, he's the bad guy." And the scene is set, but over time you realize that that's the thing I love about Deadwood is it's very humanistic. It's about the messiness of being human. Everybody is great. There's no heroes. There are some really, really bad guys, but even these people are mostly complex people and they have their own motivations. And I kept thinking about it. And what's different is most shows they make you love to hate the villains. The villains are really bad and you're like, "Oh, I hope they get it. I can't wait until he gets what's coming to him." That's the feeling they're going for.
In Deadwood I feel like they flip that around and they make you hate that you love the villains because you're like, "Yeah, he's a murderer and a thief and a liar and a pimp, but I still love him, or even terrible characters like Wolcott who is a serial killer basically."
David Senra:
Oh, my God.
Liberty:
Once in a while you're like, "Oh, man, this guy's sense of humor is so great, or the way he turns a phrase," or when he gets all beaten up, and you're like, "I feel for him," but he's still terrible, but the show still makes you feel because everybody is a real person. I should mention people listening who haven't seen it, we're going to spoil the show, but it's a show that's impossible to spoil because what's good about it is not the plot, it's how it happens and the way people talk and the way they are, and the community, and all that stuff. So if you have never seen this show, maybe you should watch it before listening, but if you're on the fence and listening to this may make you want to watch the show it's still worth it because it's unspoilable to me. It's so unique. Even what you're hearing onscreen it's not going to be like that.
David Senra:
Well, what was fascinating to me is I didn't know it was based on real people and real events that these people actually lived. And I figured it out when George Hearst pops up because I had read the biography of his son William Randolph Hearst, and he's a big character in his son's life, obviously. And so that was like, oh, once I found that out I was like, "I'm not going to read what really happened with the real Seth Bullock or the real Al Swearengen." I started reading all the Wikipedia pages after I finished the show and the movie, actually.
Liberty:
That's good because they change enough, but what I'm curious is did you know that Wild Bill was getting killed?
David Senra:
No.
Liberty:
So that was a surprise.
David Senra:
That was a surprise because I knew he was a real character. I knew he lived and he actually exists, and he's actually buried there just like they said, and everything else, but I refrained from reading their life stories until I finished the show because I didn't want to know what was going to happen. I want to go back to what you just said, though, because I just experienced this for the first time and I'm not too sure I actually knew of the concept explicitly, even though the phenomenon is familiar with me. I read George R.R. Martin's 700 page book called Fire and Blood, which is a history of the Targaryen Dynasty that HBO has now turned into a show. They turn four chapters into this new show called House of the Dragon. And the author has spoken about the creation of the TV series is the fact that all the characters involved are morally gray.
And to your point, you have the villains that you could empathize with. And the heroes, the difference between who is the good guy and who is the bad guy is incredibly blurred. And in most cases the people that you thought were the good guy wind up doing heinous things. And the people that did heinous things wind up doing very generous things, or they would protect the people they loved. And that's the whole point because the point that he was making is it's more of a reflection of human beings in general. Now most of us don't have the extreme traits that like an Al Swearengen does who is known to be really good with a knife, let's just put it that way.
And what's fascinating to me, so I relate everything back to the fact that I read biographies for a living for Founders Podcast and I was having a discussion with two people that listen to the podcast and the discussion was essentially about entrepreneurship and investing, and they had both not watched Deadwood before. And I tried to explain what it's like. What's fascinating to me about the practice and the art of entrepreneurship is that in many cases you don't have to be a genius to build a great company, but you normally have to understand human nature and how to get humans to cooperate because you fundamentally have an idea, you have a product or a service you want to bring into the world, and you can't do that alone. So you need to be able to recruit people and then manage them and build an effective organization.
And I was like, listen, if you watch Deadwood, what you're going to be surprised at is the smartest player on the board is an uneducated orphan. A pimp who owns a brothel and sells sex and alcohol and commits murder yet the reason he's the smartest player in a very complex story, the reason in my opinion, he's the smartest player on the board is because he fundamentally knows human nature, and he knows he's able to predict how people are going to respond and what is motivating them by focusing on what their incentive is. And that idea, again, not recommending people kill people, not recommending people to be pimps, all that other stuff, but that fundamental idea you could take away is how is he doing what he's doing? And I think that if you take that one idea, study human nature, and then focus on the incentives with the people you're dealing with that is applicable to any kind of domain.
Liberty:
Absolutely, and it's Al's superpower. He even says it, and I don't remember which episode, but at one point he's talking about politicians outside trying to gain power over them. And he's saying, "They're too busy stealing to study human nature."
David Senra:
Yes.
Liberty:
Because they've missed something important. And when you talk about entrepreneurship and building something, Deadwood to me is about building human civilization. It's a metaphor for human civilization and where does it start, and it's very, very crude and rough and brutish, and over time you build up and you create these lies, basically, that everybody agrees upon. That's the title of one of the episodes, A Lie Agreed Upon. And everybody agrees that this guy is the sheriff, this guy is the mayor. "Oh, now we are doing this this way." And it's all really a lie. There's nothing concrete that forces people, but once they agree, it changes how everybody behaves.
So in the first season, every problem that Al has is like, "Okay, let's get my knife, or let's send Dan to kill the guy," but over time there's less and less killing of that kind. There's still violence, but not in the same way because now they're more civilized. Now they've moved past that point. And what the show to me reminds me of is as a metaphor for companies, for countries, for whatever it is, there's the real origin story which is often bloody and terrible and it's bad stuff happening from all angles it's hard to find someone who's all clean and pure in there. And then over time these origin stories get sanitized and they get changed. And now that people have moved on and are in a less rough circumstance, well, they revisit the past and like, "Oh, well, what actually happened is," and then they rewrite history.And I feel like Deadwood is a way to remind us that when Al talks about how he and Dan came in the swamp and they were chopping down trees and building the town, they really had to build a town from absolutely nothing to start this civilization, this community. Someone has to be there first. There's no infrastructure. There's no police. There's no rules already preexisting. You started from nothing. It's all made up. It's all someone that came up with it. And we tend to forget this because we all live, well, most of us live in societies that are pretty stable. And all that stuff happened hundreds of years ago.
David Senra:
That were built by other people in the past. I think that's a great observation you had that a theme of Deadwood as it progresses from the first to the third season is how malleable the world is. They were frontiersmen. There was no laws. Then over time there's more people that started setting up in a camp. Then they're like, okay, and to your point they look around. What do other forms of human civilization have? Well, we need some kind of law. We have the press here, we have a sheriff, we have a mayor, we have these committees of people that get together and they make decisions for the group. You know what I mean? When they're meeting you know it's a special meeting when they pull out the peaches.
And all the meetings are happening in Al's saloon in the Gem Saloon. We talked about, hey, if we ever did a video version of this podcast, we'd have to get a green screen in the back and it would be me and you sitting in the Gem Saloon because so many main events and important decisions take place in Al's establishment that he was the founder of, but there's something that Al says. So there's a character named Merrick. Merrick is the reporter, the publisher of the lone Deadwood newspaper. I don't know how you describe him, but to me he's a character where he's unbelievably nice and almost too nice for the rough environment that he lives in.
Liberty:
He's probably the most naive and idealistic character on the show. He thinks all things should be working this way and he doesn't realize it's actually very different.
David Senra:
And he happens to be neighbors. His newspaper is next to Al. And so there's a time where, I forgot who is beating up on Merrick?
Liberty:
It's Cy Tolliver's guys.
David Senra:
Okay. I couldn't remember if it was Hearst, or Cy. So Cy Tolliver's guys, they beat him up. To your point, he is really naive, way too nice for this rough environment that he is in, and he's going to get run over by people that do not have the same sense of ethics as him. So he's feeling down on himself and Al gives one of the greatest speeches I've ever heard in any show ever. And so much so that I went and looked for the quote and there's a ton of them online where you see a picture of Al and then they overlay the quote. I saved it and now it's in my favorites folder on my phone. And I look at this all the time because this is how I feel like, again, being a student of history reading biographies for a living, you see the full scope of humanity play out over and over again.
And a lot of it is we live in a very rough world. I think not being naive to that, that there are people out there, even if 95%, whatever percent you want to put out, even if 95% of all humans are nice and kind. And in my lived experience that's not been the case at all, but I know some people have had that lived experience that's fantastic, but let's say vast majority of humanity are nice to each other, or whatever the case is, that 5%, that 1%, that 10%, whatever you want to put, it's `borderline psychopathic or sociopathic, and they can do an unbelievable amount of damage. I just got done reading Stripe Press has this fantastic they're reprinting all these old and hard to find books.
Liberty:
Super nice design too.
David Senra:
Yeah, they're beautiful. Look at this one. So I just read Vannevar Bush's Pieces of the Action. They make the case that he's the most important American to ever live in terms of the impact of science and technology.
Liberty:
He was a mentor of Claude Shannon, my boy, yeah.
David Senra:
Unbelievable. There's so many people in that book. And at the end of that book that Stripe Press produced, there's 27 pages I think he goes to 250 historical figures that his life interacted with and he gives little descriptions of who they were and what role they played, but he makes the point. This guy is a genius and he's writing the book. It's published in 1970. He's 80 years old. He's had a lived experience so far beyond most anybody that's ever lived. He's one of the smartest people I've ever come across. One of the most formidable people I've ever come across. One of the people who has the most unique life experience. And this is a range of people that he was exposed to. And he says in the book, "We live in a rough world."
And this is somewhat of an academic. He was a company founder. He was an engineer. He was a scientist, but I really feel like what his conclusion, or one of the themes of the book is very similar to what Al tells Merrick. Merrick is sitting down there, he's downtrodden feeling sorry for himself. He's like, "I can't believe this guy smacked me around. I got beat up." Al smacks him in the face to get his attention, and he goes, "Pain or damage don't end the world." I'm going to read the exact quote. And I think if you haven't watched Deadwood, I've never come across writing like this in another TV show.
Liberty:
Oh, my God, yeah.
David Senra:
I had to rewind sometimes to figure out I was like, "What the hell does that mean?" It's written almost like a Shakespeare play to some degree. So he says, "Pain or damage don't end the world, or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you've got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man and give some back." And that idea is where he says "The world ends when you're dead. Until then you got more punishment in store."
That's a much harsher version of what Charlie Munger says. He's like, "Listen, if you live long enough, bad things are going to happen to you. It's inevitable. Everybody experiences bad things." Obviously, he's referencing, in his case, his nine-year-old son dying, I think of leukemia when he was a young man. And his whole point is like, okay, to what Al is saying and to what Charlie to me is saying is it's like what's the point? Are you going to sit there and complain? It's like, no, that is part of life. You've got to make yourself stronger and you've got to learn how to endure through these bad things. And so Charlie Munger may express that idea in a different language, but Al says, "Give some of it back and it's not going to end until you're dead."
Liberty:
And feeling sorry doesn't make the situation any better it just makes it worse. So that part, skip it as fast as possible and move on to the part where you're actually doing something. You're trying to take control back, or do something good, or whatever it is.
David Senra:
And what's Merrick's response? He gets back up and he gets back to work. That's all you can do.
Liberty:
Exactly. The thing is, Merrick was about to give up, not so much because he got a beating is because his equipment had been damaged. And so Al is like, "How long will it take you to fix this stuff?" And Merrick says, "Oh, the equipment is okay, but the psychic damage is what make me quit basically." And that's when Al was like, "That part, you can't let it stop you because it's always coming. There's always more."
I wrote something recently about expectations where if you expect that life should be always fine and without problem, then every problem is going to seem like a terrible imposition on you like how dare the world do this to me? It's not supposed to happen, but if you expect that problems are always going to come, then you can be prepared for it and you'll become the person that's good at solving problems and moving forward. That skill is going to always be in demand in the world. So it's all about what you expect.
David Senra:
That's a matter of perspective. And you realize with time that you can actually learn to change the way you view things. Andrew Carnegie has this fantastic quote in his autobiography. It's like young men should know that a sunny disposition is worth more than a fortune, and you can move your, I forgot the word he used, but your mentality from the shade to the sunshine.
Another way to think about the same idea is there's this guy named Henry Kaiser who was as famous in his day as say an Elon Musk is in the world you and I inhabit today. And Henry Kaiser built over 100 different companies. He was one of the people that built the Hoover Dam. He built the Liberty ships in World War II. The guy's career is just unbelievable, but one thing I learned from him that was absolutely fascinating, and I'm glad I read his biography and this lesson wasn't lost to history, was that he had this great saying that "Problems are just opportunities in work clothes." So same thing.
There's examples in the book one of his, if he's building a ship, or if he's building a construction company, whatever, something gets damaged. There was a flood at one point. I can't remember what they were building. They were building some kind of physical. He built mostly physical goods, although, his insurance company is still around to this day, his healthcare company, Kaiser Permanente, or however you pronounce it.
Liberty:
Permanente I think.
David Senra:
He comes across his employee in the book and his employee is all down and out and he's just like, "Look, it's all muddy here." And Kaiser, who again is facing severe economic loss is bouncing on his feet and laughing and he's like, "Yeah, it's rainy and muddy now, but look above." He goes, "The sun is coming out. The sun is going to dry all this up and then we're going to overcome this, and we're going to move on." And I think just distilling that mentality, that perspective down to the maximus like, "Problems are just opportunities in work clothes." It's fine. It's an opportunity. It's not a problem.
Liberty:
Absolutely. Another thing about this show that I don't know if you've noticed because there's a bunch of stuff. The first time I saw it mostly about trying to follow the plot and who are all these people, and then the second time you can look at different layers and different layers and the show has so many layers. Every time I've re-watched it I've enjoyed it as much or more as the previous time. So that's the sign of a good show to me. One of the things I've noticed is that almost every scene is not about what the characters are saying, the words are about a certain topic, but there's always something else that's going on.
So, for example, Al has a character called Jewel that's doing work around this saloon and she has cerebral palsy, and he's always in words, he's always on her case. He's always insulting her and screaming at her, but what it's really about is he is protecting her. He doesn't need her around, but he knows that she'd probably have a much worse life out there than here. So he keeps her close. When she's not able to do something, he's going to scream at her, but he's going to take the brush from her hand and do it himself, and pretend that he's showing her how to do it, but he's basically always helping her and protecting her. So the words may seem very to say one thing, but the actions and the kind of subtext is something else.
It's the same when Bullock and Alma meet. They're always talking about, oh, this claim, or that, but the real subtext is like, "I like you. Do you like me?" They're negotiating something else without words. Every scene to me, when I think about it it's about something else. And few shows have this many layers and I don't know if you've noticed that theme going on.
David Senra:
Yeah, to your point, his words, Al's words, what he's saying is completely hateful, but his actions, he's showing through his actions that he actually cares about Jewel. That's the thing about Al. He's even like that with Trixie when he does something terrible where Trixie tries to shoot Hearst, or she does shoot Hurst, and she unsuccessfully tries to attempt to murder him and fails. And then Hearst is this crazily powerful character. He's a real character. He existed in real life, but he wasn't like this psychopathic killer.
Liberty:
In the world of Deadwood I've seen this metaphor and I love it, is people like Al and Hearst are the gods of the camp just like in a Greek play where they are the gods. They are standing on the balconies above the town, so they're mythological figures.
David Senra:
Yeah, and everybody else on the board is dancing to the tune that they're the ones that are playing, but even in that case where she shoots Hearst, Hearst demands that she gets killed for that. Al knows that he's not strong enough to fight Hearst directly. And another good thing about the way Al thinks is he's very strategic and he's always flanking people. He's never going to fight you directly. I got to go to how he reminds me of Henry Singleton in a minute, so don't let me forget that, but in this scenario where he loves Trixie even though she was technically one of his prostitutes and now she's in another relationship with Seth's partner.
Liberty:
But he respects her.
David Senra:
But he still loves and he feels the need to protect her. She demonstrates that, too, because every time she's in trouble, she doesn't run to Sol Star, she runs to Al. This is where it's so heinous. He winds up killing. He's like, "Okay, well, I'm not going to give Hearst Trixie's corpse." So he winds up killing a woman that works for him that looks like Trixie.
Liberty:
Jen.
David Senra:
He murders an innocent woman to protect a woman he loves. I don't know what to do with that.
Liberty:
Yeah, how he processed that.
David Senra:
Obviously, don't kill innocent people, but the point is I think the writers obviously wanted you to think about the complexity of his relationship with Trixie. Not that, oh, he's a murderer. Obviously, humans scorn murderers, we don't like them. And so I just think that's extremely, to your point, this is not black and white. This is not straightforward. There's going to be me and you watching it having different interpretations and probably as you re-watch it, the interpretations change because they get deeper.
I wanted to tie this together real quick, where something else that's very interesting about Al with other people is how much time the show dedicates to him by himself thinking through strategies. And sometimes he's not by himself because he has this weird thing where he gives monologues when he is getting a blow job.
Liberty:
Or he talks to the severed head of a dead Indian chief.
David Senra:
Yeah, but you hear his strategy. So his strategy comes where he's talking to the severed head of a Native American and also when he's essentially getting sexual acts performed on him, which again goes to the show, but my point being is I had a weird reaction to that in the sense it's like, "Oh." One thing I learned about when I read about Henry Singleton, not only the book The Outsiders, but also in Distant Force is how much time he just spent alone in his office trying to think things through with what he wanted to do with his company. And in both books they compare and contrast the way he spent his time as CEO, how most CEOs spend their time.
And I think you see the difference. We were talking before we started recording, the importance of having time alone with your own thoughts. We were talking about going on walks, or exercising, or whatever the case was, but then Al applies that to his business, and his business is survival if you really think about it. He's like, "In my case, I'm not only worried about losing the Gem Saloon, but I'm going to war with other killers." There was a bunch of assassination attempts that happened in his saloon. And I think there's a message there where it's just like, okay, you see this person conducting his life. He is supposed to be this uneducated orphan and yet he spends more time thinking through the decisions he's making in life than I think any other character that we see other than maybe Hearst, who you see him a couple times laying on his back by himself in the room just alone with his thoughts.
Liberty:
Yeah, thinking through and doing a lot to acquire the information in the first place. He's always trying to embed his people elsewhere. Trixie will watch out what Sol and Bullock are doing. You go with Alma with the widow and try to get her on dope and talk about the claim. He's sending E.B. to spy for him in every kind of place with Blazanov. He has this network that's feeding in the information and then the processing of it. All the monologues the way I see it is all the characters on the show are very old school by definition, 1800s they can't express their emotions at all. The only way Al can talk about his childhood, or anything is when he's with someone who can't talk back, someone who's so below him in status. Every character can never express their emotions. Al has a bunch of feelings for Trixie, but he's never going to say it.
Another big theme in the show is that intelligence is currency in this town. Al is probably the smartest person. At first he's surrounded by nobody is on his level. The smartest person in the Gem Saloon at first is probably Trixie. And you can see why they're so close. He has someone he can actually talk to.
David Senra:
That's a good point.
Liberty:
I love Dan. Dan is like, they have this bond, but then when Silas Adams shows up he immediately sees that this guy is smart. I could do stuff with this guy that I can't do with Dan and my other henchmen. Johnny is never going to be the smartest guy. So smart people in this town are so few and far between they recognize each other. Same thing with Miss Isringhausen.
David Senra:
I cannot pronounce her name either.
Liberty:
Sarah Paulson plays a wonderful role where she's a Pinkerton undercover. She works for a detective private military agency. And so she pretends to be a little school teacher type, but she's actually a stone cold killer. And as soon as she talks with Al, Al realizes how smart she is and they're on the same level immediately and they respect each other. Every time someone smart comes around, the other smart people try to see, can I bring them to my side? It's such a rare currency in this world, and it's interesting. I see few shows that do it like that.
David Senra:
I love the juxtaposition between the people that are playing the game of life and people who are just existing. Most of the characters in the show are just existing. They're like they're blinder. Their focus is exactly what's in front of their face like, "What is good for me?" Like E.B. Farnum. They do a great job. His words and the greasy sleaziness match up with what he looks like. He eventually gets a new jacket halfway into this series, but I kept telling my wife, I'm like, "What? This guy owns a hotel. He makes a little bit of money, buy a different jacket," but they made him look like his physical character is a great indication of the stuff, the sleaziness and the weaselness that comes out of his mouth. And to your point, Al sees him as a useful idiot. And to some degree, I think E.B. thought of Al like a friend, but even the characters that are supposed to be morally upright like Seth, obviously. Bullock is supposed to play a role, but then you see him having an affair, you see him losing his temper.
Liberty:
Anger management issues.
David Senra:
Yeah. You see him asking at one point, "What kind of a man am I becoming?" Where I really feel like you just hit it on, there's just a few of them are actually seeing the board as the whole. Obviously, George Hearst is doing that, obviously, Al is doing that. Then you have these minor characters who me and you both cannot pronounce her name and you just mentioned her. And then to a lesser degree, Adams was smart where he switched sides because he saw, he's like, "Oh, my boss is going to lose and so I'm on the wrong team and if I stay on this team, that team is going to run me over. I should go see if I can provide services to Al." And to your point, Al realizes right away. So you just hit a couple of my favorite characters. Obviously my favorite character is Al. And then there's just some, I don't know why I like Adams. I just do. I have no idea. I really like him. I like Doc Cochran because Doc Cochran doesn't take any shit.
Liberty:
Yeah, well, he's seen too much in the Civil War, I think, to give a shit anymore. And he also, I think he uses his position as the only doctor in town. He's like, "Okay, Al, you're not going to kill me because you're going to be in big trouble without a doctor."
David Senra:
Because he's the one that has to take care of the sexually transmitted diseases of Al's employees. And he also has, he knows something that I noticed when I'm reading these books where when you come across these extremely intelligent, formidable people, usually they're also aggressive, but the worst thing you could do is not fight back. They will respect you more if you stand up to them then if you just let them roll over you, and Doc, he doesn't let Cy Tolliver.
Remember he's like, "Oh, that's it, I'm giving up." Because what they were doing with the Chinese prostitutes that they were importing in, he's like, "I'm not doing this." So he stood up to Cy Tolliver. He stands up to Al. He stands up to all of the bullies. And in some degree you have to describe, I think, Cy, George Hurst, and Al as a bully. They are definitely utilizing other humans to their ends and their ends only. And that stops besides Trixie, and some other relationships, and Cy with Joanie Stubbs where there may be one or two people they actually care and love about, but the rest of them are just disposable.
Liberty:
I think the character that has the least redeemable qualities is probably Cy Tolliver because all the others are bad guys, but you can find good sides to them, but Cy is just purely psychopath, sociopath.
David Senra:
I would say him and Wolcott.
Liberty:
Well, Wolcott is probably a sociopath, but he has lovable qualities. He has a good sense of humor. As a viewer you enjoy him on screen. Cy is more like you love to hate him. He doesn't have that many lovable qualities.
David Senra:
That's a good point. There's hints that he would kill prostitutes. Before that you see a cultured educated person. He's usually dressed better and more groomed. They're living in a frontier town. It's like, why does this guy look so good? He's obviously incredibly smart if he could be George Hearst who was one of the richest people in America at the time. He is second-in-command, but then you see that he's got some kind of weird uncontrollable, and then he has weird, you know, I've read a few books on serial killers and they have some kind of sexual not deviancy.
Liberty:
Compulsion.
David Senra:
Compulsion and these just weird uncontrollable relations with the opposite sex. And that comes out in his character. You mentioned another character that I like. I love Wu.
Liberty:
Oh, yeah. He's like Al from the other side of town.
David Senra:
And their reaction with each other, they can't speak the same language. It's great, but you mentioned somebody I didn't really care for, I didn't even really pay attention to, but as the series goes on, like Dan.
Liberty:
Oh, yeah.
David Senra:
Dan is this big gruff, mean killer, but as it goes on, you see his fierce loyalty to Al. You hear about the background. He's willing to sacrifice his life for his friend. He goes out and fights Captain Turner, and the longer the show goes on, the more I like Dan.
Liberty:
Yeah. At first he seems just a muscle, but he's a mix of a big grizzly bear and a Saint Bernard. It depends on the context.
David Senra:
Yeah, that's a really good way to put it, actually.
Liberty:
About the intelligence as currency. Another thing I love in this show is that some shows only the top players would be the smartest. And in this show, intelligence is distributed randomly. So when Wolcott meets Joanie he immediately noticed that she is smart, and they start talking about all kinds of stuff, and they play word games together. Anyone could be on Wolcott's level, even though Joanie is at the bottom of the social ladder in the city and Wolcott is at the very top. That's not a cool aspect of the show. It's like real life. Anyone could come out of anywhere. It's not all designed like in some shows where you know who's important because everybody else has won the cardboard piece of character.
David Senra:
Yeah, and to your point, you learn about them through their interactions with other people as to your point, when you see Joanie, when you're introduced to Joanie, she's like, "Oh." Cy bought her essentially when she was a little girl, 14 or 15, or whatever it is. He seems to almost be in love with her kind of. Cy he has some kind of weird.
Liberty:
In his weird way.
David Senra:
Yeah, but he's also extremely ruthless and mean, but then she realizes, hey, she finds herself in a situation where she has no power and no control. She's essentially sold into sexual slavery when she was a teenager, but then through the surviving in that environment now she's probably in that environment for 10 or 15 years, whatever the timeframe has been, she's developing a very unique set of skills. And then she can also use those. It's a sense of resourcefulness where it's like, okay, I can't beat the men on physical power even though she carries a gun with her all the time, which is obviously really smart, but they're somewhat predictable in what they want. Usually men want power, money, and sex. And so she uses that as a way to maneuver herself and in a sense where she disentangles herself from Cy. Who funded her brothel?
Liberty:
It was Cy's partner played by Ricky Jay the card guy that left after stealing from Cy.
David Senra:
Okay, there you go. Yeah, because I was like, "Where did she get the money?" I know Cy said maybe he was going to do it, but I couldn't remember if it came from him.
Liberty:
I think she was setting up, but then he gave her some more.
David Senra:
And then he winds up stealing money from Cy and disappearing, right?
Liberty:
Yeah. He was supposed to die in the show originally, but they didn't end up filming the scene so they just had the throwaway line, but Cy was supposed to kill him after finding out he stole from him, but that didn't happen.
David Senra:
And so you think about that, you go from 14, 15-year-old sold into sex slavery maybe 10 years, 15 years later, finding a way to open their own business and have a level of freedom. Now obviously that turned out extremely negative, but she finds a way to survive and she demonstrates her intelligence through actually surviving in an environment where she's still physically weaker, she's at a disadvantage. She doesn't have the money, she doesn't have the physical strength, and she doesn't have a team of killers like most of these people do. All the powerful people on the board and Cy included have, whether he's killing, doing the killing himself, they have people willing to kill for them. That's their version of conflict resolution. It's like, okay, well let's come to terms, let's try to partner up on this. And if we can't do that we're going to go to war, and we're going to settle our dispute to the death.
Liberty:
Another interesting theme about this power is that it's not used the same by all of the characters. So people like Hearst, they want power to control the town, exploit the gold and the resources. Al wants power, but mostly so others don't have power over him. It's a negative. The only reason he wants power, the only political maneuvers he does in the town to form this mock government it's just so others don't come in and have power over him. His goal seems to be to stay free and independent. And that's interesting, too, because it would be easy to have Al as the crime boss who is just thinking about money and controlling everybody else. And then it's a power struggle between Al and Cy and Hearst about who's controlling the town, but Al is doing this flip thing where he's like, "No, I just want others not to control me." That's another layer that I love.
David Senra:
That's a good point. And if you think about it, why would he go from Chicago? I think that's where he escaped from, right?
Liberty:
Yeah, I think so.
David Senra:
Because he had all those warrants out for his arrest because he kept killing people over there. He's really good with his knife.
Liberty:
I think he killed a corrupt policeman, actually.
David Senra:
Yeah. And so you think about it it's like, well, what kind of personality would go to the frontier? I'm fascinated by the history of the American West. I've read a bunch of books on it because it's complete. There were no laws because there's no civilization. And the stuff people did during those times are obviously the worst things that they could possibly do to each other, but think about the personality type that you have to have, or character to go out of Chicago, which is way more, and even though Alma, what's her?
Liberty:
Alma Garret? Yeah, I think she came from New York.
David Senra:
The Garrets.
Liberty:
Brom.
David Senra:
Her husband who obviously gets killed. He's in an environment he can't survive in.
Liberty:
Yeah, he's way over his head.
David Senra:
But what kind of person is going to leave Chicago? What kind of person is going to leave New York and then go to the frontier? You go from the height of American civilization at the time to no civilization at all. And to your point, the kind of people that did that did not like other people having control, or power, or telling them what to do.
Liberty:
Well, you see what happens when they get the barest minimum of government in the town. When Bullock and Charlie Utter become fire marshal, and they just go into Number 10 Saloon and they're like, "Oh, your stove-pipe is dangerous." People freak out. It's like, "Who do you think you are? You're the government and telling me what to do?" And these people came there because they just can't handle authority. They just went as far as possible to get away from any kind of authorities and laws. And that's the first wave of people came there. Then when it became like, "Oh, there's tons of gold there," then there's a bunch of people who were not as idealistic or driven by that. They're just driven purely by money, but it feels like the first wave of people, like the people from the Number 10 Saloon, Al, Dan, all these people are like, "Don't mess with my life." And then the other wave of people like Hearst they don't care about that. They just want the gold. They just want the money.
David Senra:
So that's actually, obviously, Hearst is a very unlikable character. I don't think there's many redeeming qualities at all that they present to the viewer.
Liberty:
He is interesting to watch and to listen to, but as a person terrible, terrible.
David Senra:
Well, I think there's actually, so I always have a view of things through entrepreneurship and the fact that George Hearst, I think one of the main themes in studying the history entrepreneurship is the importance of focus. And I think that's going to become even more important in the age that we live in because we live in the age of infinite distraction. So literally, we can fill our entire, we can amuse ourselves to death every single day. And I think some of the best, especially for founders and entrepreneurs and investors, too, it's the ability to actually focus, put blinders on like a horse does and only focus on what you're actually, what business that you're building. What is the service that you're providing for other humans? And these are the weird thoughts I have when I'm watching the show because George comes out. George Hearst comes right around, he's like, "I only care about the color."
And so that's his word for I want gold. I am only focused on gold. Every other decision I am making has to do with whether it's breaking a strike through killing people, or whatever the case is give me getting more gold. Now, obviously, that is meant I think for the viewer to be like, this guy is greedy and he's already richer than he needs to be. And he treats all the workers poorly. Obviously, that's the negative aspect of it, but his idea where he's just like, "Gold confers power. Power comes to any man who has the color." And so, therefore, in his mind because he wants the accumulation of power through money and control of other people, in his mind he's like, "I can't think about anything else than the color, than gold." And that is the one idea he had where that's actually a real genius idea because he's refusing to allow himself to be distracted off his goal.
Now we can obviously take issue with his ruthlessness and his achievement of that goal, but I think that in terms if you study people that get to the top of the profession, or do anything difficult, it's not like a scattershot approach. They're not working on 10 different things at once. They are focused on whatever objective they have and the desire they have in life they're running after that thing, and not allowing themselves to be distracted. And I think that is actually one of the best lines in the entire show where he is like, "I only care about the color."
Liberty:
For every polymath, Ben Graham, or Henry Singleton, there is way more people who were maniacally focused on one thing like Buffett. "I'm only investing. I'm only thinking about business all day long."
David Senra:
Even Singleton. Yes, obviously genius. I don't think you and I could replicate him. The guy was grandmaster chess, he could play it blindfolded, all this crazy stuff, but his focus, though, was on building, making Teledyne as valuable as possible. I think he started the company when he was 43. He ran it for 20 years, then goes off to his ranch, or whatever, but during that 20 years his focus is like, "I'm going to be the best I can, and it is just one thing I am focused on."
Liberty:
That's a good point.
David Senra:
And then once he left, then he starts going on the ranch. And he had some good ideas when he went on the ranch were like guys, I think, the third largest private landowner in the United States, unbelievably wealthy, and yet he talks about in I think it's in Distant Force where he's says like, "He fills out every single check that his ranch, every single expense, he's the one handwriting the check." And he calls it a kind of discipline. And he's like, "Of course, I could hire somebody else to do this, but the whole point is the money is the lifeblood about any kind of organization, whether it's a private company, or it's this cattle ranch. And me knowing every single expense that this ranch has, it's a kind of discipline, and a form of education to actually know what's going on." So I think that speaks to his ability to focus.
Liberty:
Yeah, figure out what matters and stay close to that thing. Don't create distance over time because it's more convenient for you, or whatever, but then you lose track of the thing that really matters. Another great theme in this show that I now see in a new light, now that I've read The Deadwood Bible, because to me, David Milch, the creator of the show, and this is one of those shows, Deadwood is one of those shows like Madman, or Sopranos that is very centered around one person. Some shows have a writer room and everybody contributes, and it's a group effort. And some shows it's the voice of one person and there's still plenty of other people helping them, but it's more the author thing. So almost every character in Deadwood is dealing with addiction and abuse, and now that I've learned about the life of David Milch I understand why.
Milch was abused and molested as a kid for years in a camp for many years in a row at a camp that he went to. Later in life he was a drug addict. He was a gambling addict. I think over his career he made a lot of money with NYPD Blue. He had maybe $100 million dollars and he lost pretty much all of it gambling, and giving it away to people around him. He was super generous. He was giving money to all his employees and people around, but the guy had very, very big problems with addiction, and maybe the root of that was the abuse. And so in Deadwood, when you look at through this lens, and people who knew him say, "That David Milch put himself in some characters." And Al is one of the avatars of David Milch. He's not the same, but people recognize some of him in there.
Hearst has some characteristic of David Milch, too. Milch had a bad back, so he was laying on the ground and dictating scenes and other people were writing them. And so when you see Hearst standing on the door, or on a plank, or something, that's a David Milch thing, but almost everybody else, many, many of the women on the show, if you read between the lines, it sounds like they were abused as children. There's tons of characters that are alcoholics, or on drugs like Calamity Jane. She's basically trying to kill herself with alcohol after Bill dies. And even the doctor, Doc Cochran when he is on the job he doesn't drink. And as soon as he punches out, you're going to find him drunk in his tiny hut at the end of the street. All these characters, this theme it's just basically David Milch trying to exercise his demons I feel like. And once you see it like that to me, it feels even more poignant and emotional.
David Senra:
How many shots of liquor are on screen throughout the series? It's like every time they make a statement we're going to take a shot. It's unbelievable. And to your point, I don't know if that was intentional or not, but you're not going to watch the show and be like, "Hey, you know what? I'm missing out of my life a heavy alcohol habit." Because they make terrible decisions when they're drunk. They destroy their health. Usually it leads to some sort sort of violence like Calamity Jane is the perfect example. She's also one of my favorite characters, like her attitude.
Liberty:
She's amazing. I've never seen a character like that on any other show. Robin Weigert, the actress, I don't know how she does it.
David Senra:
The dialogue that she has is amazing. Her attitude is fantastic, but then you empathize and you start to like the character, but then you realize she is essentially homeless. She sleeps outside most of the time. She is usually woken up in a violent manner like somebody is shaking her because she is so drunk, and she is drinking an entire bottle of alcohol to the head every night.
Liberty:
Or she wakes up, one time she says, "I woke up, bruises all over me, my horse gone, and I don't know what happened."
David Senra:
Yes.
Liberty:
What kind of life is that to lead?
David Senra:
Blacking out. To your point, though, that's what I love. I discovered this guy named David Ogilvy when I was reading Warren Buffett's shareholder letters because Warren Buffett was investing into Ogilvy and Mather, which is the advertising agency that David founded. And Warren is like, "David Ogilvy is a genius." I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting. I should read about him." So I start reading. David wrote a bunch of books and I start reading all his books. I'm like, "Oh, I love this guy." Now I've read five or six, and I've done a bunch of podcasts on him, but he says something that's really interesting. He says, "Down with committees, search all the parks in your city. You'll never find a statue that's dedicated to a committee." And I think the best products, the best companies, the best experiences usually come from the mind and the energy of one person. And then they refuse to compromise. They have to recruit other people to bring their vision to life like David did, but what you picked up on is I was listening to Ian McShane, McSheen, McShane?
Liberty:
McShane, I think.
David Senra:
McShane, and that guy is an extremely accomplished actor, lives a really interesting life. And he said, "That David, the showrunner, was in complete control of the narrative." And he also said, "That he was the best showrunner that Ian had ever worked for." And he would say, "It's not just the words on the page, but he would watch the words that he wrote and then he'd see the scenes and then he'd watch, and then he would have the combination of the two, and he'd go back and he's like, I noticed something else. And he would change it on the fly." And he talked about that. David had complete control over the entire environment. So it speaks to your point. It's like this is not a committee, it is the obsessive mind of a gifted writer that wanted to bring Deadwood to life and refused to compromise on his vision.
Liberty:
I have so much to say about this. One of the things that made Deadwood so different is that they had this set, basically, this 360 degree set of the town built up on Melody Ranch in California somewhere. And basically any other show you have a set for this angle, or this room, or, okay, you want another angle? Well, we got to change it. We got to pick up a crew. And everything has to be planned in advance, but when the set is already built from all angles, you can improvise, you can change things. And after a while, the actors figured out that David was always changing the script at the last minute. So they all started hanging around the ranch even when they weren't shooting. And so David would be like, "Oh, you're around. Let's do a scene." And then they would do something just based on what they had.
The actors found it very, very challenging because they have these very difficult words to say. And they got the pages the morning of the day of because David last night found a new way to make this scene even better. So he was always changing it to the last minute. So that probably was very difficult in the moment, but the result, it is super organic. And then David would write something for E.B. for season one and then he'd watch the actor for a while and he realized that the actor that played E.B. was super nervous. He was an anxious guy. He had sweaty palms in real life. So he wrote that in. Not only that, he said, "Oh, he is a nervous guy, he's anxious." He gave him the longest speech and so he was even more nervous, so it brought out the actor's real traits, but inside of the character. So the character seems so realistic because it was custom-made for the actor. There was this feedback loop.
All the other actors came to David and were like, "The guy who does E.B. he fucks up all the time. It takes him 25 takes to do this long speech. Do we need him? Is he the right guy?" And David was like, "He can take as long as he wants because when he gets it it's amazing." And that's all he cared about, the final product, the final results. If it works, it works however you have to do it. Jim Beaver, the actor who plays Ellsworth, one of the rare characters that everybody loves in the show. I can't say anything bad about him. His wife died I think during the filming of the show, or not long before. And David wrote a scene for Ellsworth where he is talking to Alma and he is talking about, I used to have a wife and a daughter and they died, and this and that.
And all the other actors were like, they went to Beaver, and they said, "How could David do this to you? He's using your pain. He's exploiting you, or something." Everybody were shocked. And Jim Beaver said, "It's the best thing that ever happened to me. David could understand what I was going through and gave me a way to make something good out of something terrible, and to use these emotions to make something beautiful and to process them through a character."
I think David Milch probably had so much pain in his life. He had a very difficult life. In fact, I think most of his family are basically gangsters and his father is the only person in the family that wasn't in the family crime business because the others said, "We need someone legit in the family, so you're going to be the legit guy. We're going to keep you out of it." But all his uncles and people around, he probably saw all kinds of stuff through his life. So I feel like he probably could understand this kind of deep pain that maybe some other writers, or showrunners wouldn't. So yeah, Deadwood was probably from HBO's perspective, it was a mess because they never had scripts in advance. They never knew what was going on. Everything was improvised. Everything was expensive because you have all these extras in this big set, but that's why it's unique. If they had the same process as every other show it would probably look and feel like every other show a bit more.
David Senra:
So I didn't know any of that background that you just said. And what I thought of it's like David was working on something that was alive. It's not like, "Okay, this is what we have written down on the paper. We're just going to stick with it." That's something I learned about Walt Disney that I was surprised when I read his biography it was just like Walt Disney. You think of Mickey Mouse, you think of animation, you think of Snow White, you think of everything else, and then you realize that the thing that he was most proud of as he was dying, he said, "There was two things he was most proud of. That he was able to keep control, start his company, but keep control of it because he lost control of his first company and Disneyland." And the reason was, he made the point that when he made Snow White, or a Mickey Mouse movie, or whatever, he's like, "Once it's done, it's just done." He's like, "I wanted to work on something that was alive."
Liberty:
It's ongoing.
David Senra:
"I could constantly change and improve and change the direction of and redo and maybe take away down this part of the park, or this ride, and then put something else up and in its place." That sounded a lot like David's approach to the creation of a show it's like, "It's alive, let's react. Let's optimize for flexibility." And then as I go on, at your point, as the seasons go on and I understand not only more of who E.B. Farnum is as the character, but also the actor portraying the character, then that's going to influence the direction of the show, and more importantly, the experience of the viewer.
Liberty:
And the way the show is very theatrical makes sense when you know it's improvised because Deadwood is a Western, but it's a Western where you never see wide open nature, and nature is not romanticized and the town is the stage, and almost all of the story happens on this stage. And so the theatrical language and the way people act makes sense. If you look at the town as a stage, that's the theater, that's where everything happens almost. It's very different from almost any Western I've seen, and even more so at first, it wasn't even supposed to be a Western. When David Milch went to HBO to pitch the show, it was set in Ancient Rome. So the themes were about building civilization a lot, all of the same kind of themes what was Ancient Rome. And the HBO guys said, "Oh, that sounds great, but we already have a show about Rome in production." I don't know if you've seen the show Rome, but that's what they were making at the time.
David Senra:
Yeah, I think I've seen a couple episodes, but I didn't stick with it.
Liberty:
That seems a good one. So David Milch on the fly were like, "Well, it could be set in Deadwood." And he went with this idea, but he just reset it in Deadwood. That's the kind of brilliance that this guy had where the guy was a kind of college professor reading all of the ancient classes. That's why the show is so rich in language and references and themes, and all that. It's like the guy was distilling 1,000 books into these rough guys screaming cocksuckers at each other that's so unique. Where are you going to find that?
David Senra:
Well, the same interview I was watching with Ian McShane he made the point after he made that he thought that David was the best showrunner that he ever worked for and he had complete control. He said, "That Deadwood was the only show that ever combined a theater workshop with television." To your point where it's like, "Yeah, we have a stage, we have the wording, but we're also," he used the word improvisation, and he made the point, "It's not like we could improvise, but that David would."
Liberty:
Yeah, oh, for sure. Some of what I've read in the Deadwood Book basically says that some of the actors like Powers Boothe who plays Cy Tolliver, he's of an old school, and he was a star in his day. He had his way of working and he wasn't going to change for David Milch. So while the other actors were sticking around just in case David needed them, he was back in L.A., or something. And so he probably was in much fewer of those improvised scenes than some of the others just because he didn't have the flexibility to adapt to David's point of view, which it is solely up to him. Not everybody needs to want to change how they're doing everything, but it was so unique in that way that some actors just couldn't keep up with that kind of work.
David Senra:
Cy was in one of my favorite movies ever. Did you ever watch the movie Tombstone?
Liberty:
I have, but so many years ago it's almost like as if I haven't watched it.
David Senra:
Oh, I've probably seen that movie 10 times when I was growing up because of Val Kilmer. His representation of Doc Holliday is one of my favorite all-time characters ever, but Cy was, I think it was Wild Bill in that. So when I saw him in Deadwood, I'm like, "Oh, it's Wild Bill."
Liberty:
Oh, the actor who plays Wild Bill, Keith Carradine, I think he does an incredible job of being one of those gods of the camp. His voice is present, the way he moves.
David Senra:
His beautiful hair.
Liberty:
Oh, yeah, beautiful mullet. I don't know, all the characters you see them for the first time in the first episodes. And they have this way of conveying that I've had a life before this, that there's a richness outside of the show sometimes just by one line. There's a line in the Deadwood movie, it's not a spoiler if you haven't seen it yet, but there's a guy who is getting beaten down in the street and some bystander, random bystander says, "I hope you die. I hope you die in the street like my father." And that's all he says, but that's a Milch line. There's a whole story in just one sentence that you can think of for a whole day you could spin off a show for just that guy. So that's the thing with Milch is every line, everything conveys a past.
David Senra:
I was surprised how much time, because you figure you have the main characters, but how much time they dedicated to people that didn't seem like the guy that kept harassing, he winds up getting kicked by a horse. He's a terrible person.
Liberty:
Oh, Steve the drunk.
David Senra:
Yeah, Steve the drunk. He's on screen a ton. As it went on, I was like, "Why are they dedicating?" I want to go into if you have any information about why the show was canceled because I'm thinking, I didn't know HBO has had this before where they just maybe do four seasons, or something. So when I saw that Deadwood was only three seasons, that's one reason I agreed to give it a shot because I was like, "Man, I do not have time. I am not going to get lost in a nine season, 90 episode hole right now. I don't have time in life like that." And so when I saw it was three seasons I was like, "Cool," but as we were progressing through the back half of season three, I'm like, "How are they going to wrap this up?" And then I see the last episode, I'm like, "Oh, they don't wrap it up."
Liberty:
No.
David Senra:
So what, they spent so much time I'm like, I'm thinking they knew that it was going to end in season three. So I'm like, "Why are they dedicating so much time to these theater people?" I was interested to see where that plot line was going. So do you have any idea what did they talk about in the books? Does David ever talk about?
Liberty:
The story just came out. The real story just came out in The Deadwood Bible. Matt Zoller Seitz found a way. He interviewed the HBO people, he interviewed people around David, and it's super tragic, it's super frustrating. Basically, nobody wanted it to end, but it ended because misunderstandings and egos, and stuff like that. So there was supposed to be a fourth season. David Milch wrote a book during season three. It's called Tales from the Black Hills.
And in the book it implies that the show is going to continue for a fourth season. And then there's a page at the end that says like, "Oh, the show had been canceled." Just added at the end. I think the guy from HBO went to David Milch and he wanted to get a negotiation going like, "Hey, maybe for next season you could have six episodes, or maybe eight episodes." Because it's an expensive show with all the extras and everything. And it had decent ratings, but it wasn't putting the world on fire. And I think David Milch saw that as a kind of, I don't know, maybe an insult. I don't know how we took it, but he took it very hard and he was like, "Well, how about zero?"
David Senra:
Oh, wow.
Liberty:
So the guy from HBO, I think it's Chris Albrecht, but the guy from HBO was like, "David, don't go crazy. Think about it. Let's talk about it on Monday. Take the weekend, think about it. Relax man." So David was like, "Shit, they're going to cancel us." So Timothy Olyphant who plays Bullock had just put a big downpayment on a big house and everything. And so David Milch is super protective, and he was like "Oh shit." And so David Milch called Timothy Olyphant and he's like, "You maybe want to be careful with your house, man, because I think HBO may be about to pull the plug, or something." David started talking to the cast. And so once it gets out to the cast the agent is calling HBO and people are talking about it.
David Senra:
Oh man.
Liberty:
And so the HBO guys come the next week and they're like, I think the way Chris Albrecht put it is, "The show canceled itself." Rumors were leaking out. And the crew, there's all kinds of crew running the show doing the construction, and the lighting, people were talking about do we have a job next year? In the end, because David Milch was working on a pilot for another show he wanted to do for HBO, so I think at the time he was overworked and working on two things at the same time he was like, "If they want to cancel us, fine. I'll work on my other thing." But looking back, I think what both sides were saying is, "Well, if we could have just sat together and talked about it, maybe we could have gotten eight episodes, maybe we could have gotten 10. There was something to get other than zero." But because people reacted under emotion in the moment, they got nothing at all. And that's the most frustrating part of this. I so wish I could see what the fourth season would be like.
David Senra:
Well, not only that, think about it, it ends in 2006?
Liberty:
Yes, I think so.
David Senra:
That's pre streaming. It has undoubtedly been viewed more times after it was canceled than it was being watched during, right?
Liberty:
Yeah. Even during, it wasn't that bad. I thought it was canceled because it was not getting any traction like Firefly, but for the first year they were playing it right after the Sopranos on Sunday night. So it was getting, I don't know, six, seven, eight, 10 million. I don't remember the number, but millions and millions of viewers, but it's a difficult show. So if streaming existed, you didn't have to wait for the DVDs and people could start from the first episode, it would definitely have been more popular.
David Senra:
I think it's an example of something I noticed when reading these biographies that I think entrepreneurs, investors know maybe can learn from the past experience, life experiences of other people. It's like you have to hold on for a chance to get lucky, and that usually technology, the constant invention of new technologies will unlock an opportunity that you can't possibly see today. So in 2006, you have no idea that by 2022 there's going to be what, billions of people paying for streaming services all over the world and that makes the content that you're making now, or that they were making then so much more valuable. The economic and the financial value to HBO has grown with time because now not only Deadwood, obviously, plays a role in this, but the amount of high quality content they have increases with time as well, and they wind up picking up new subscribers in the future and then somebody might sign up for HBO today to watch Fire and Blood, and then they'll go back.
The only reason I ever paid for HBO was because of Game of Thrones. And every time when they got rid of The Wire, or the Sopranos, or whatever, I would stop using it. I've been paying for it ever since because of Game of Thrones. Now they have rehooked me with Fire and Blood, and then you rehook me. There's no way they could have possibly said that, "Hey, we're going to gain a customer because he's going to be reading an email newsletter and the guy writing the newsletter is completely obsessed with this show and he watched it four times." You know what I mean?
Somebody had just told me this term where if you're doing something over a long term, actually, it was Patrick from Invest Like the Best who said this. "His idea is he wants to do his podcast for the rest of his life." And I feel the same way about Founders. I want to do my podcast for the rest of my life. And so his point is, "If we're playing these long term games, we can plant seeds now that don't have to reap anything for two years, three years, five years. And he calls that concept over a long period of time infinite ROI, and so it's like that only works if you are dedicated to not stopping what you're doing because you allow all the stuff you're doing to compound many decades into the future."
Liberty:
Building a body of work is increasing the surface area of luck, basically. Luck can hit you in more places because you have this huge archive behind you of stuff that could become timely again, or someone finds the right thing at the right place and they make a connection to you, or whatever.
David Senra:
I watched Deadwood for the first time, what, 15 years after it was created, and I didn't notice that show could be made today. You know what I mean? If you put it on air, "Hey, we have this new thing." And you just start playing these episodes, no one would be like, "Oh this is in 2006." No, they would be like, "Damn, this is really good."
Liberty:
And streaming also makes these non-episodic shows so much more valuable because before streaming if you missed the first couple episodes and you start Deadwood on the fourth episode. And a lot of people were like, "Oh, okay, I'm too lost. There is no way I can get in." All these shows the golden era of HBO, this first golden era with Sopranos, and The Wire, and Deadwood, and all that, Rome, all these shows were so much harder to get into at the time because if you missed the beginning and you're on the fifth episode it's like, "Who are all these people? There's a cast of 30 people and they talk weird and where are they?" It's so much easier now to get into that stuff. So the value of the content went up over time rather than down. That's great.
David Senra:
I mean, the amount of characters in Deadwood.
Liberty:
And they keep adding more. In season three, there's a whole theater troop that comes in.
David Senra:
The last season I had forgotten, Adams and Al keep fighting over Hawkeye, like, "Who the hell is Hawkeye?" I had forgotten. You know what I mean?
Liberty:
His butler.
David Senra:
I had to go back. Yeah, exactly. I was like, "Oh." And then he winds up popping up because he's trying to recruit soldiers in this war for Hearst, or against Hearst, or whatever the case is, but there's just so many people to keep track of. I'm like, "Oh, okay, I forgot about that guy."
Liberty:
So there's a couple more themes I want to run by you and see what you think of them. One of them is the way violence is shown on this show. In the book Deadwood Bible by Matt Zoller Seitz, Milch talks about how he finds violence on most shows super boring, doesn't interest him at all. So his approach was, if I'm going to show violence, it's either going to be so quick, it's over so quickly that it's just shocking, or it's going to be so long and drawn out that you're like, "I can't take it anymore, too much." And so once in a while, Dan is going to just stab someone, or Adam is going to pick up someone and impale them like a deer on the wall, or something. And other times it's going to be Dan and Captain Turner in the middle of the street and it's like, "I can't take this anymore." That's one of the fights that has most affected me emotionally that I've seen on screen.
David Senra:
It's not often you see somebody rip somebody's eye out.
Liberty:
Oh, yeah. And drown them in the puddle in the middle of the mud in the street and it goes on forever. And these are not Matt Damon doing a fight, or something. They're just grappling and falling off a balcony and rolling around.
David Senra:
It's not choreographed. It's very messy.
Liberty:
Bullock and Al fight, it's messy, but then the healing process is messy. Al is on his back for episodes. The kidney stones, these episodes where everybody is on top of him at the end it's like a Renaissance painting.
David Senra:
I fast forwarded those parts where Doc pulls out that long steel thing he's like, "All right, Al, I'm going to put this up your urethra." I was like, "I'm not watching that." I was like, "No sir, there's no way I'm going to freaking watch that." So your point, though, about violence, though.
Liberty:
Yeah, so what do you think of it? What do you think of the approach? Did it land with you?
David Senra:
Yeah, I mean I just think HBO is known. It didn't stick out to me in one way or the other because how violent Game of Thrones is. I just saw a clip where there's a guy I think his name is Coco, or something, and he goes up in the Sopranos and he approaches Tony's daughter Meadow. He lightly threatens her and I think rubs her face, but freaks her out. And so the next part of the scene is Tony chasing that guy down in a bar and he starts beating him almost to death. I think the guy survives, with the butt of his gun. There's a guy that's trying to, I forgot the character's name, who's trying to get Tony to stop. And every time Tony puts the gun in his face, he's like, "You sit down." So anyways, he winds up taking the guy that was threatening his daughter and not only beating him, but then turning him over and opening his mouth, and putting it on the curb, or the edge of the bar.And then they're like, "No, don't do that." And he stomps as hard as he can on the guy's back of his head. And the whole time it's just Tony Soprano full of rage. This huge man gritting his teeth. He's like, "My fucking daughter. My daughter." He's spitting stuff everywhere. Complete rage. And then he puts his foot to the back of the guy's head and then the next thing you see is just teeth all spread out on the floor.
And then The Wire, just all this stuff, like the Red Wedding, the episode of Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, which people they had filmed themselves watching and all you see is people screaming with horror what was taking place. So this was definitely less violent than to your point that he was doing it fast. You notice that even when they're, I think the most disturbing, or the most graphic forms of murder are the ones done with the blades because the shooting when Bullock and Wild Bill, they shoot that guy and they're like, "We're not sure who got him first."
Liberty:
My money be on you.
David Senra:
Exactly. All the shooting deaths happen really, really quickly. And it was over and less bloody.
Liberty:
It's not romanticized. It's bang and it's over,
David Senra:
But the cutting of a throat, you know what I mean? And then the corpse.
Liberty:
And Wu's pigs.
David Senra:
Yeah, and are sending them to Wu to have the bodies disposed of. Who was the character's name that it was the girl that Al killed that looked like Trixie?
Liberty:
Jen.
David Senra:
Jen, okay. They show her neck, which is in the coffin. And then you see they kill a lot of people in the Gem Saloon by slicing their throat and you see the amount of blood that is now left on the floor that then they have to clean up, but they definitely didn't make it more gruesome, or spend more time on it than other series.
Liberty:
I think one of the most disturbing, violent scenes, and I'm not saying it's the worst ever, but for the show is when Cy is killing the two kids that tried to rob him, the girl and the boy, and he hit him in the head and their skull is fractured until you see it from her point of view, she's seeing things all wobbly, and he's like, "Oh, is your skull fractured?" And Cy is just taunting her, so sociopathic.
David Senra:
I forgot about that. That actress winds up becoming really famous after that. I forgot her name.
Liberty:
She's super famous now.
David Senra:
Kristin Bell.
Liberty:
Kristin Bell. I think it was one of her first roles as she was starting, what was it, Veronica Mars?
David Senra:
Veronica Mars.
Liberty:
That was something. I think the last big theme I have for you is that the show does a great job of showing how pain rolls downhill. So a lot of the time some character is going to be very angry with someone who is above them somehow. Bullock is going to be angry at something Hearst said, but Bullock can't take it out on Hearst directly. So he's walking outside and he sees E.B. and he beats E.B. And EB is angry at something and he is going to take it out on Richardson.
All these characters if they can't get at the person they're really angry at, like Steve the drunk, he is angry at Bullock, but he is going to take it out on Fields and try to tar him. This way that everybody is sometimes you're just a bystander, but you could be in the crosshairs just because of something totally out of your control. That rings true, too. In life sometimes you're just at the wrong place at the wrong time, or you're just lower down the ladder the social hierarchy than someone else and they're going to take it out on you. The show does a good job.
David Senra:
I think it resonates with you because that's part of human nature, unfortunately. Hurt people hurt people is the way I would describe it.
Liberty:
Exactly.
David Senra:
And I experienced that with my own, I talked about this on a few podcasts because if you examine both sides of my family tree and you just have people regularly abusing their family members, their kids it's distasteful. And to some point of learning from books in my own thing, this is like I'm searching for mentors of people that are actually good people, or people that actually built good lives because I didn't have any of those examples growing up.
And one I thought of which was really brutal, and it speaks to your point where Cy Tolliver is pissed off at Hearst because Hearst is you go from, "We were supposed to be equals and now you've completely made me your subordinate. And then you basically threatened me." I think he smacked him a couple times, or whatever the case is. And so he's sitting on the balcony at one of the last episodes and he's looking at Hearst and he has his gun out and he's like, "I'm going to get him back." And he doesn't, he's afraid to do it. So then he turns around and without being provoked stabs his employee, the opium addict, I forgot his name.
Liberty:
Leon, I think.
David Senra:
And then he just sits there and watches him die. He just bleeds to death. That's a perfect example where it's like he wasn't mad at Leon. He was mad at whatever the emasculation, or the subordination that Hearst had done to him that he thought he was powerful. And then Hearst showed him what real power was and he didn't like it. And instead of processing that like an adult, or a mature person, or dealing with that, they go around hurt people, hurt people. He turned around and he stabbed this guy and killed him and took his life for nothing.
Liberty:
It's the same with Wolcott when he goes and kills the prostitutes. Right before that he was talking with Cy, and Cy was trying to blackmail him and then that anger in Wolcott. And he was like, that's when Cy says, "Well, I'm past surprise." And then Wilcott has this great speech about, "Oh, past this, past that, but past surprise, could it be possible? Let's make sure you're not past surprise." And then he goes kill people just to get back at Cy in some way because he knows that Cy likes Joanie, and this is Joanie's place.
And so another example of this redirection of anger that's so toxic in the world because it's as you say it's so true it is part of human nature, and the world would be such a better place if people could process when they're angry or hurt rather than just take it out on someone else.
David Senra:
Violence is the fatal flaw of humanity is the way I think about it because I've read Will Durant and Ariel Durant. I've read a lot of their writing and they were some of the greatest historians. They literally tried to catalog human nature in the history. They dedicated, I think it was a five decade career just trying to examine what are humans, what do we do? What are the stories that show up? And they said, "Violence is a part of nature. You see it. If there's humans, there's going to be violence." And they said "That in all ages, men are dishonest and governments are corrupt."
And as you read their work and you see those three unfortunately very dark sides of humanity, the corruption, the subjugation of people using corruption as a tool to subjugate other people, dishonesty and violence. And I remember thinking it's even hard to conceive, and I'm definitely not a naive person. I think somebody that has read as much history as I have it would be impossible for you to be naive. You're not really paying attention to what you're reading then, but I remember having these thoughts, "Imagine a world in which humans didn't physically harm each other."
Liberty:
And psychologically too.
David Senra:
Okay, I'd much rather have psychological harm than literally you're in the wrong place at the wrong time like Cy stabs Leon, or Bullock beats E.B. Farnum to the edge of death. It took him multiple episodes, and not only it was definitely psychologically harm from that beating, but you saw E.B.'s face and hiding in the dark, and all the other stuff, but just imagine a world in which humans didn't engage in violence you can't, because what Will and Ariel Durant make in their book is like, "There is no part of human history when humans weren't killing each other. That doesn't exist. Every single day that we've ever existed we have killed each other." And to me, that's why I always say on the podcast, "You can't read a life story of somebody and not realize that humans are all, me and you included, fatally flawed." Now, hopefully, me and you never kill anybody, right?
Liberty:
I hope so.
David Senra:
Yeah. You know what I mean? God forbid. The only thing I could ever think about doing this is obviously in defense of our children. We're both fathers and that's why Cormac McCarthy's book The Road, I encourage every dad to read that book, specifically. Obviously, mothers have that maternal protective instinct as well, but there's a line in that book that I quote to my daughter all the time, the two main characters in that book. Fundamentally, it's a book about post-apocalyptic society, but it's like, no, it's a relationship between a father and a son. That is the story. And he says towards the end he's like, "I was sent here by God to protect you. I will kill anybody that lays their hand on you." And I have a picture of that page underlined and I save it on my phone too, but I tell my daughter that. It's like, "I am sent here by God to protect you and my job is to if need be give my life for you." But just the idea, I don't want to sound crazy, which I fantasize about a world in which there's not violence.
Liberty:
Well, my glass half-full, optimist kind of guy take on this would be, it's like the expectations we're talking about at first. Some people are like, "Oh, but the world should be like that, but it's terrible because it isn't." I try to look at it as it used to be so much worse. Everybody was living under basically warlords. Almost no one had agency over their lives. Everybody was super impoverished, and dying from random infections, and war could break out at any time between tribes and regions. And so it used to be 100% violence, and this and that. And now it's like, I don't know, 20%. It's like the Steven Pinker approach of like, "Well, if you actually look at the numbers, it's never been more peaceful." And so it's still terrible, but at least I try to take comfort in the fact that we seem to be moving in the right direction, even if it doesn't always seem like this in 2022.
David Senra:
It's funny that you say this because I just finished reading Vannevar Bush's autobiography Pieces of the Action, which I reference at the beginning of the podcast. And on the very last page, the book is on my desk, and hearing you talk, I was like, "Oh, I just read this two or three days ago." And on the very last page he wraps up the book and he goes, "Listen, when I get down," this is an 80-year-old genius. These are the words of an 80-year-old genius. And I think there's some wisdom in them. He goes, "When I get downcast, I read history. We may yet be crude, but we have come so far." That's exactly the same idea that you just expressed there.
Liberty:
That's wise. That's so wise. It's the same thing with when people talk about how, "Oh, but inequality, and these people are so rich, and they're so poor." It's true. This could be much better, but before everybody was poor and that wasn't good either. It's not like we came from a world where everybody was rich and now these bad people made some people poor and some people rich. No, everybody was poor. So we should still always strive to improve. There's no destination where we're going to be like, "Okay, this is enough, or we can't do better." I think we can do much, much, much better than what we're doing now when it comes to things like violence and opportunity, and all that, but if I could press a button and be reincarnated as someone 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 5,000, I don't think I could pick a date where I would press the button. I'd rather be alive today.
David Senra:
100%.
Liberty:
If it was random. Some people look at the king of France and, "Oh, if I could." No, no, if you could be a random person then. And even the king of France didn't have antibiotics, and a microwave, and DVDs.
David Senra:
Internet, how me and you are talking right now, no, 100%. This is the best time in history to be alive is right now. That's undeniable. I would not go back and be the king of France 1,000 years ago. That guy is shitting in a bucket. No thank you. I have indoor plumbing. I have AC. Most importantly I have the internet, or penicillin, or just look at all, like no way, no way. This is the best time. Again, when people say stuff like that, I just don't think they've read enough history, or studied enough history. I look at history as something to learn from. It's not something to go back to.
Liberty:
Listen, David, I could talk with you all day and we could probably do three or four other podcasts on other topics, but I'm going to have to let you go.
David Senra:
Anytime you want, man.
Liberty:
Anything else you want to add at the end, or any last thoughts about Deadwood, or anything we haven't touched, or what did your wife think of it? Anything else? I'm curious.
David Senra:
She loved it. I think that the fact that it didn't go too difficult on the violence to your point. And in many cases you saw the violence after the fact when they broke the strike and then they put the guy's dead body in the middle of the town, and all you saw was a knife to his chest. I was surprised, but, again, it's the dialogue, it's the characters, it's Al, all the characters are great, but I'm telling you I would just watch it just for Al, and now I know I'm going to wind up re-watching in the future.
I want to see it now that I knew, again, when you meet him, I'm like, "Why is this guy fighting with this other guy, and they're setting up a tent to sell hardware, and they're trying to do a negotiation with him, and this Al guy is a hard-ass. You got to be careful how you talk to him because we've already seen him kill a bunch of people. He tried to kill a little kid." All the crazy things, but then you understand. I did not understand who he was as a person. It's the same thing when I reread books, you don't get it, you change. They're not going to change what happens in the show, but we change as people and our understanding changes.
Liberty:
Exactly. When you re-watch Deadwood for the second time, I think it's probably the more crucial time because especially the first five episodes, or something, you know Al so differently, and then everything reads differently when you see it for the second time, so we will have to talk about it when you have a chance to re-watch it. I'm going to put in the show notes some stuff. I have more material for you. There's a podcast about Deadwood that I love. The two hosts are great friends, they're having a great time, so it's fun to listen to and they do impressions. They're great at doing Al and Cy, and every character. They basically watch the show together with subtitles on mute, and they talk about it scene by scene and do impressions. And so I listen to this in the evening before going to bed, 10, 15 minutes always puts me in good mood. I'm going to put that in the show notes for the listeners.
There's a 25 minute video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz, the guy who made The Deadwood Bible. Five, 10 years ago, he did this video essay about Deadwood, about some of the themes, some of the scenes, some of the writing. It's narrated by Jim Beaver who does Al's work. It's a great little essay. I'm going to put that in the show notes. I'm going to put links to all the books, everything. So if you, or anyone listening wants to check it out, wants to go deeper in Deadwood, but I feel like this is the show I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to convert as many people to at least give it a try at least three episodes. It's not for everybody. If it's not for you it's fine, but the people that it's for, it's really for because nothing else is like it.
David Senra:
It grabs them. So I told you, I told a few friends about it and one in particular he starts watching. He got way ahead of me. Obviously, I've been busy recently, everything's going on in my life in the last two months, but he got way ahead of me and he finished it and he loved it so much. So now I say, "You tell everybody, you tell me, I tell him." And so I also bought him for his birthday, his birthday was in September, I bought him The Deadwood Bible at your recommendation too.
Liberty:
Oh nice. He's going to love it. It's a great book.
David Senra:
He sent me a message the other day because he got hit by that hurricane. He lives in Central a Florida and he was without power for a few days. He's like, "I'm reading my Deadwood Bible in the conditions of Deadwood by candlelight with no electricity.'
Liberty:
Oh man.
David Senra:
He's got his power back, though, so that's good, but Liberty, thank you as always for inviting me, man. I'm happy to do podcasts with you anytime you want.
Liberty:
That's a perfect note to end it. Reading The Deadwood Bible in the conditions of Deadwood. I can't do a better sentence than that. It's almost a David Milch image. So, man, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for giving it a try, right? You say you don't watch that many shows.
David Senra:
I don't.
Liberty:
So thank you for taking a flier on it. I'm glad you and your wife liked it. Thank you so much. Have a good day.
David Senra:
I'll talk to you soon.
Liberty:
Bye-bye.
