#2532 - Tim Robbins

Tim Robbins is an Academy Award-winning actor, director, writer, and producer known for such films as "The Shawshank Redemption," "Mystic River," and "The Hudsucker Proxy." He currently stars in the Apple TV+ series "Silo."www.apple.com/tv-pr/originals/silo/www.timrobbins.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Open an account in minutes at https://Chime.com/Rogan Switch today at https://www. Visible.com for just 25/mo. Or Save $10 on your first month of Visible+ Pro with code ROGAN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Jamie's very geeked out, I want to let you know. He didn't want to say it. Shawshank is his all-time favorite movie, so he was kind of freaking out when he met you.

• 0:19Speaker 03

  Thanks, Jamie.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  I mean, it's all-time. I mean, you're a part of one of, like, easily one of the greatest movies in the history of people.

• 0:27Speaker 03

  I know, it's such a gift. I mean, when people come up and say something about it, it usually is coming from a pretty deep place, you know?

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you didn't like that movie, there's something, "You should go to a doctor." "You need medication, there's something wrong with you." It's an amazing movie. And weird that it's a Stephen King movie, too, you know? He's, that guy is arguably one of the most prolific guys in the history of fiction.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and in the same novella, there was Stand By Me, too.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. That's amazing. So weird, he writes, his stuff varies so much. He had to do, like, a pseudonym at one point in time, remember? He did Richard Bachman?

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Because he was churning out so many books, they're like, "Hey, we can't keep selling these fucking Stephen King books." And he's like, "Well, how would I come up with another name? Like, give me a fake name." And he just started killing it under a fake name.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  Just gotta keep writing it, gotta, gotta, gotta.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wild, wild guy. Yeah, just a very unusual human, you know? They exist.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Only met him once.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Did you meet him, like, when you were filming the movie?

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Uh, around the premiere time, yeah.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, he's out there, man. You know, during his early days, I'm fascinated by his early days, because his early days, he was off the rails with cocaine and alcohol, and some of the best shit that he made, he doesn't even remember rewriting it.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  I think Cujo, I think it's one of the books his wife took out of the garbage, because he threw it away. He's like, "Fuck this book, this book sucks."

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Cujo?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  It was Cujo, or one of the classics.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  And she was like, "Are you out of your fucking mind? Like, this is incredible." And he was literally gonna throw it out, because he was just out of his mind.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  He wrote The Shining, right?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  So, what?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Was it Carrie?

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  He threw Carrie away?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Crazy, crazy.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  That's crazy. Yeah, Shining was a big movie, a book, big book for me. I was, you know, working in a nine-to-five job, and, you know, in between colleges, and it really, like, woke me up.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  To all kinds of great possibilities in writing.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Well, he hated the movie, which is so crazy, because he felt like Jack Nicholson got insane too quickly.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, because in the book, you know, I read the book, too, it's very different, similar, but it's more of a drawn-out process of him becoming possessed by the property.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Slower rollout.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, like, Jack Nicholson was kind of kooky already, like, right away, which, you know, it's Jack Nicholson, like, it's also Stanley Kubrick. It's like, he's gotta do his interpretation of it, you just gotta accept that.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Of course. Yeah, that's some scary shit in that.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Fuck, man. His books are insane.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  It's like, what is going on inside that guy's mind, or was going on inside that guy's mind when he was writing them?

• 3:15Speaker 03

  God knows.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  I think once he got clean, he kind of changed and straightened out, and different, different human now. But, boy, I'm fascinated by the off-the-rails days, because the books were so nuts.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Was Shawshank during that time?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I don't know. It must have been. It must have been, because I don't think he got sober until, it was decades after his career began.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  And some of the great stuff, like, I think all the stand, I think all that stuff, he was out of his mind when he was writing all those.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  But in the midst of all that madness, there's a tenderness, you know?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, a great humanity to it all. Yeah, but also just a true understanding of the darkest nature of humans and

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  and how they're influenced, and then, of course, you know, demonic possession and Salem's Lot and all that other crazy shit. It's like, he was just, it was so good.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  But then the idea that a library can be the, you know, in Shawshank, that a library can be the liberation.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. No, it was amazing, amazing movie. We were talking about your new show, Silo, which I, not new, it's been around for three seasons. I just started watching it, so it's new to me. I watched the first two episodes last night. It was fucking great, and very original and interesting. And I was telling you before that it made me think of this place that they discovered fairly recently in Turkey called Darren Cuyu. And Darren Cuyu is this underground city that's massive. I think it, I think it could, I think it could hold 20,000 people?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Something nutty like that?

• 4:58Speaker 03

  I've seen pictures of it, yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  It was found completely by accident.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  So, some guy lost one of his chickens, went through a hole in the wall and never came back, and he was trying to figure out where this fucking chicken went, so he broke down the wall to see what was going on, and then they realized that there's this insane underground city.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, underneath this town in Turkey, and it's massive, just absolutely massive. They have no idea who made it, there's no historical record of it.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Any idea of when?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Well, you know, they make guesses based on stuff they find there, but it's when you carbon date an object, right? So, you could go visit the pyramids today, right? And you could leave behind some stuff, right? And then, everybody dies, humanity dies out in a cataclysm, and then 100,000 years from now, people start looking through the piles of some of these sites, and the pyramids will probably still be there, and if there was any organic material left, like a book that you left, or, you know, a leather-bound book, or some piece of wood, they could carbon date that, and then that would say the time that you were there, but it wouldn't say the time that the actual structure was made.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  So, who knows how long people, show me some more pictures of that, please?

• 6:09Speaker 04

  I was looking up when it was made.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Do they know?

• 6:12Speaker 04

  No, definitely don't know.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  They didn't even know it existed. I mean, it was, when was it found? I feel like it was found in the 20th century.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  There must have been some kind of hostile force that they built it to

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. Or something going on outside, and not just hostile, but environmental. So, 1963, rediscovered in 1963.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  And that's, it's in his fucking house. Even today, only 10% of it is accessible to tourists. The rest is still being explored. That's how nuts it is. So, how many people do they think it held when it was operational? I think it's something like 20,000 people. And that's how big this place is.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  That's neat, that's amazing.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  So, they don't know when or why, and depending on how, around 20,000 people.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Plus livestock.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Plus livestock, and food stores.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Really? How'd they farm down there?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Who fucking knows? I don't know, but they had grain storage, they had all kinds of stuff down there.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Oil presses?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  18 levels, reaching 85 meters, so 280 feet deep into the ground, with ventilation shafts, wells, stables, wine and oil presses, storage rooms, chapels, and schoolrooms, plus a half-ton circular stone doors that could be rolled shut from the inside only. So, they were obviously either fighting off some sort of an army, or the outside air was hostile, there was something going on.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Got too hot or something?

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Could have been.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Well, there's been many moments in the time that human beings were alive where there've been cataclysms. You know, there's this thing called the Younger Dry's Impact Theory, that's around 11,800 years ago, there's all this evidence that there was massive asteroid impacts all over the Earth, comet impacts, and they think that it was probably a reset of civilization. And so, this could have been post-that. It could have been how some people survived in these areas.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Human beings have this amazing ability to survive.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  I mean, you know?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Which is Silo. I mean, it's really, Silo is a modern version of Darren Cuyu.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And here I was, you know, in the middle of lockdown when I received those scripts, and I was like, "Oh, this is, this is actually talking about right now."

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  This is about a controlled society where information is censored, and where compliance is necessary, and if you don't comply, you get sent out into the hostile environment. Uh, it was all too familiar metaphorically for me.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Perfect timing.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, perfect timing.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Because you gotta think that he must have written that before, right?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, many years ago.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  So it was just got lucky.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Perfect synchronicity.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 02

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• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  I'm been blessed that way in my career, yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  What do you think that's about? Do you ever wonder why you're so lucky?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Obviously, you're very talented, but it's also, there's a lot of talented people that don't, nothing ever happens for them.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  I think it comes down to the ability to say no.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Uh, at crucial times, when I was facing down either, you know, you know, I remember when I first had my, uh, first child, and I was broke. And I got offered this comedy that was dumb, and it was a million bucks, and I needed the money. And I also had an opportunity, if I waited, uh, Robert Altman was trying to put together the player. So I threw caution to the wind and said, no, I can't do that stupid comedy.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  What was the stupid comedy? Do you remember?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it was called Folks.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  I remember flying out to LA to meet on it, and, uh, I'm with Alan Arkin. And, uh, he was the guy that was gonna play my father in this thing. And he said, what the fuck are you doing this script for? I said, I need the money. He says, I don't know. I'm not sure I wanna do this thing.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  I was like, thank you, Alan Arkin, for confirming what I was thinking.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so I said no, and, and then player came through and shifted my whole career, so.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a matter of following that voice in your head, the instinct, the one that's telling you this is the right way to go.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Even though there's all sorts of influence that wanna lead you into the other direction.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  There was a period of time, uh, about 10, 15 years ago, when I got offered, in the course of seven months, I got offered to play the head of the CIA three times.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Did you ever wonder what that's all about?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  No, I couldn't even imagine. I mean, for some reason, that was, I don't know, I have no idea. And then a couple of years after that, and again, you know, you're, you're looking down at your bills and your mortgages and stuff, and you need the money, and just have to, I don't wanna do that, right? Then a few months, a few years after, a couple of years after that, I got offered, in the course of a couple of months, one, to play the head of FIFA.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Uh, which is a corrupt organization, but in the movie, it was, you know, you know, they were the best people in the world, right?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Propaganda.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Not to mention that, uh, the head of FIFA was a Brazilian, and I had, you know, but they were offering a ton of money, and basically it was FIFA producing a movie about itself.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  And, uh, after that, I got a, offered to play the head of, uh, the Chilean mine that was, uh, had just had this huge disaster. And it turns out the mining company was, they were really nice people, you know, according to the script.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  It wasn't bad management or anything, or, you know, that, that made the disaster happen. So I realized that, that the oligarchs are starting to make movie about themselves. It's got oligarchical cinema. It's, it's like they produce movies that make themselves look really good.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  And you can get away with it.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Oh, hell yeah. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. And they, they think they can buy anybody. And they almost bought me, but I just, I have to, at times, I just have to look, you know, face it down and say, listen, it, it's not right in my heart. I can't, I can't do it.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that's great. You've got that North Star.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  It's great that I had the luxury to do that. You know, oftentimes, people don't have that luxury.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Right. And one bad decision can pigeonhole you

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  in a bad direction, and then you'll never get the ones that you really want.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. These movies about you playing CIA had, did they ever get made?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. There were TV shows and movies, yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Was any of it any good?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  I, I remember the, I remember when we were doing movies like, uh, you know, The Day of the Condor, you know, which was like critical of the CIA. And I think now we have the rogue CIA agents that are actually good guys. And, you know, listen, CIA, you know, whatever it does, nobody really knows the extent of what they do. But they do have a lot of good portrayals in the media, so.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  I think there's good people that are in the CIA as well. And I think that it's necessary. I just think that they obviously have unchecked power, and they've done some really fucking shady shit.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  You know, in, in the name of this is the right thing to do right now, including selling drugs.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  You know?

• 16:21Speaker 03

  I remember that. Iran-Contra. I remember that.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  That's one of, I mean, I remember that because I was, gosh, I guess I was either right out of high school, it was like in that area where the whole Oliver Stone thing was on television all the time. And it was just-

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Oliver North.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Oliver North, excuse me. Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. And, uh, there was this guy, uh, Jimmy Tingle, hilarious Boston stand-up comedian

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Uh-huh.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  who had a great joke about it. Where they're interviewing, uh, Ronald Reagan, and they say, Mr. President, did you ever sell arms to people who hate us? And, uh, he, he's like, I don't remember. He goes, well, in the future, if you sell arms to people who hate us, jot it down.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Make a note of it. He goes, put it posted on your refrigerator. Today, I sold arms to Iran.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  I remember that. That was in the eighties. I, I did a play about it. I wrote a play about it.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Really?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  And we performed it with the Actors Gang, yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  There was a meme that was on, uh, social media recently that was, it showed Oliver North during the, the whole Iran-Contra trials, when, you know, they got caught selling drugs in Los Angeles to fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And then he goes to jail. And then, then the same guy you see later on Fox News as like a war analyst. And it's like this hilarious meme, like if you told me, if you told me in 1980, whatever the fuck it was, where, you know, he got in trouble, that he would eventually be the guy that they call upon for expert advice on what's going on overseas, like.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a, it's a deep connection that goes back years. All the people that get it wrong, they get, they got, particularly Iraq war, they got, anyone that got it wrong got promotions.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And no one got in trouble.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  No one got fired, you know, people in the media as well, you know, they, they promoted it, they got, you know, better jobs.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Well, this is kind of the only time in our lifetimes where there's actual, real independent media. You know, where there's independent journalists that are not connected to any major corporations that are operating either on Substack, or online, or on YouTube, or on X. It's fascinating because they, they're the ones that are exposing all these connections that the media and Central Intelligence Agency and all these other government organizations have had, where they've all been working together forever, spinning narratives on TV. And so like anytime something like the Iraq war happens, where they go, oh, we've got weapons of mass destruction, we gotta go in there. No weapons of mass destruction, no, no one goes away, no one gets in trouble. The same people are on TV telling you about some new thing that you have to pay attention to. It's like, this is nuts.

• 19:01Speaker 02

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• 20:01Speaker 03

  Well, some people get in trouble, people that come out against it. And there's never any apologies. I did, I did, I, you know, I risked, you know, a lot to do it and, you know, wound up being right, but no one ever said, hey, you were right, you know, and we're sorry.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  This was during the Iraq war?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Um, what did you say?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  I, uh, I, I was one of maybe five people that were famous that came out against that. Well, um, went on, you know, in various television shows and made a couple of speeches. I got my, uh, appearance at the Baseball Hall of Fame for Bull Durham 15th anniversary or something like canceled, uh, by the head of the, the Baseball Hall of Fame.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  It was a real, uh, you know, it was funny because I was, I was doing a show at the time and, uh, I heard about it and I had, I started writing a response, but, uh, it was already printed by the time I had my response, right? So I got, the next day I got a bunch of, um, people contacting me. I hired a crisis PR person for the first time in my life and, uh, wound up getting my letter to Dale Petrowski, the head of the Hall of Fame, out there with the, uh, with the press release, they were basically ambushed, trying to, you know, to call me a traitor and all this stuff.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And, um, so I pushed back and the, the publicist that I had hired was very smart. He said, we're gonna send this to all the sports writers. And it was the sports writers that wrote the articles defending freedom of speech.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  At the time, so it was, um.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  What year was this? Is this, is this right after nine 11?

• 21:41Speaker 03

  This was, uh, right when we were cooking up the war, 2003. So, um, and I remember, you know, and I also wrote a piece about that called Embedded, uh, that we've performed for the first time, uh, three weeks after Bush landed on that aircraft carrier with the mission accomplished thing. So that wound up playing at, uh, across the country. We toured it and played in New York Public Theater and played in London. But it was attacked when we went to New York, you know, they sent someone, uh, from, it wasn't a theater critic, while we were still in previews and published this thing in, uh, I think it was the New Republic, uh, basically calling me, uh, conspiracy theorist, anti-Semi

• 22:26Speaker 03

  and all this stuff.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Anti-Semi.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  To try to discredit this play that was playing at the public theater.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  How did they connect anti-Semi?

• 22:32Speaker 03

  You know, it, it doesn't matter. That's what they throw out.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Right, of course.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  There was nothing anti-Semitic about the play.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  It was just, uh, it's, it's one of the things they use to discredit people.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  What did you know, um, about, so what made you compelled to come out against the war?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  I was reading foreign press. I was reading, uh, stuff from Europe and, um, what they were writing about the weapons of mass destruction and that there wasn't any evidence and it wasn't being covered like it was, uh, here. It was more open, more transparent, the, the reporting. And so I was trusting that and I trusting sources that I had trusted in the past and , uh, realized that when I did question, the attacks were vociferous, so yet usually is a tell, like in poker, that's like a, it usually means you're on to something.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  You're over the mark.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  If they, if, if you, if they, when I came out against that first war in Iraq in 91, I remember the, the elder Bush said, well, you know, this is a democracy, people have the right to, you know, oppose it. And that, that was their response. But this one was like, you're a traitor, you're Saddam supporter, terrorist sympathizer, all that stuff. They really attacked. And that told me that, uh, it's probably over the target, you know?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. That had to be a very disturbing moment because, look, it turns out you were right. And not only were you right, but now today in 2026 is universally accepted that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that was a terrible war and it was not something that should have ever happened.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Universally.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  If you said it today, it's not even remotely controversial.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that's the way it works. They finally admit the truth later, you know? I think they're doing that now with COVID, you know, the, Fauci's gonna do his thing tomorrow. I'm very curious to see what happens with that, so.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Well, they don't give you a universal pardon for 10 years if you didn't do something. I mean, you don't, you don't campaign for that if there's not some, some smoke.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a very scary time. You know, it was, you know, to come out, when, when people, when, when, when the media's attacking you, it's a very scary thing. But the great good fortune I had, uh, in 2003, so I was living in New York at the time, right? So I would have to walk my kids to school and, uh, I remember thinking, oh my God, what's gonna happen, you know? Are there gonna be people yelling at me, et cetera? And that wasn't the truth. The truth was that people, if anything, said, you know, way to go.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Uh, thanks for speaking for us. And if they disagreed, they said, you know, you have the right to do it. That's the way generally people are in this country.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  And should be.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  And, and we, I usually would take, uh, every year I would take my kids to, um, the Final Four and that year it was in San Antonio. And I remember thinking, oh my God, I'm going down to Texas and they're gonna yell at me down there and no one said a damn thing. So the reality on the ground was a lot different than the reality they were creating. The reality they were creating was to intimidate other people into silence. It wasn't based on any kind of real reality of people being angry at me. It was more, uh, them trying to intimidate others.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  And so that same thing kinda happened. I, I recognized that same smell, uh, when COVID was happening, when people came out and started asking questions and were deplatformed or, um, marginalized or canceled and, uh, you know, I, I, I followed what you were going through with the, the ivermectin, which was, uh, a drug that I had taken and, you know, I had lost my sense of smell and a day later it was back. So I, I knew there was something going on with that and, and, you know, in an emergency, why not find whatever you can treat until your magic potion arrives, you know?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  It wasn't just that, it was like the completely disingenuous characterization of it as a veterinary drug and calling it horse paste.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Or horse dewormer, which is crazy.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  It's crazy to, because maybe that would have worked in 1980, where people would have to go to the encyclopedia to find out what ivermectin really was. But when you're trying to do that in 2020, it's just too easy to look up, oh, look, it got a Nobel Prize for use in human beings. Oh, it's great for yellow fever and dengue fever and river blindness and, oh, this has been used billions of times? Oh, it's one of the safest, oh, wait, wait a minute, it's in the World Health Organization's essential medicines list?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  This is crazy.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  But yet on television, it's horse dewormer.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  And even the Rolling Stone had an article where they showed people waiting in line. They said that people in Oklahoma were waiting in line at the emergency room with gunshot wounds because they couldn't get in there because so many people were overdosing from ivermectin.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Which is just fake.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  And it's in the Rolling Stone and you're like, what is going on? This is, this is insane. Even the photograph was fake. The photograph showed people wearing winter coats because really the line was people waiting for a flu shot. That was the, the actual line.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  And they were trying to say that these are people waiting in line to go to the emergency room for gunshot wounds. Like, first of all, how many fucking people are getting shot in Oklahoma? Like, what, what's going on over there? Are you, you guys having gunfights in the streets?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  There was some wild stuff going on at the time, you know, the disinformation and the.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, and just orchestrated propaganda, orchestrated, organized.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  With big money behind it. Wild, wild to watch.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  I, I suspect that that whole period of time was another way to divide us, you know, in the, in the, in the, in the larger picture, you know, orchestrated chaos masquerading as a revolution, you know? It's, it's, it's, there's been so many of those things over the past five years, you know? You know, alliances that you're building and then all of a sudden there's a new crisis and now you don't like those people that you were building alliances with. And it's just one after the other and I, ultimately, at the end of the day, I think it's all about division. It's all about dividing us, uh, and making us argue with each other and not finding common ground.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  And, uh, that's ultimately the strategy that's been used from time immemorial, you know, for the power to stay in power. How do you get people fighting with each other?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, people don't like to hear that, but that's that's a strategy that's been used all throughout history.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  And it's a good one.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  And it works.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it works. And especially in today's day and age, when you have social media and then you have not just our government, but many governments that have fake accounts. And these people just get outraged about things or attack things or, you know, have a narrative that they push. And you don't know if it's real people, you don't know what it is, just a bunch of accounts. You go to the accounts, a guy's face, you know, it's a woman wearing a dress, holding a book, she seems normal. Meanwhile, it's a man somewhere with a bank of computers that are all connected to the internet that's typing in these different responses with a bunch of different, or now it's AI automated.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  You know, you tell this bot to be a right wing nationalist that's like attacking anything that's.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy, man. It's on both sides.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  And it's nuts. It's, I, I was over in London doing a project and I, I noticed, this was during their lockdown, and I noticed that by my hotel, there was this protest. And I, I went down to check it out, put my mask on, I was very compliant at the start of all this. And I, uh, I noticed, you know, what, what they were portraying as national front right wingers was actually hippies and homeopaths and free speech activists. And I, I talked to them. And I tweeted, uh, hey, I don't think it's a right-left thing here. And hundreds of attacks of, it's the, whether they're bots or, you know, organized army

• 30:41Speaker 03

  of, you know, righteousness, I have no idea. But it was, I just, at that time, at that point, I was just like, fuck it, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna put my foot in this water. These people are nuts. This is a crazy, crazy time.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was crazy, not just from the propaganda perspective, but from actual people that I knew that were really terrified, that got caught up in it all. And it was, you know, mass formation psychosis is what some people called it.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  And I think that's a, a good description. Robert Malone, I think, termed that or got that from somebody else. But that, that's really what it was. Like, everybody just kinda went nutty. And there was people that were doing the government's job for the government, or the pharmaceutical drug company's job for them. They, they were the, the ones that were enforcing all these things.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  The foot soldiers.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they, they were doing it because they wanted to be, they wanted a solution, they wanted to be correct. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people in this world that don't experience much real adversity. And when real adversity comes at them, they fall apart. And they don't, they don't know what to do, and they get scared, and they, they lump up together in teams, and then they reinforce each other and repeat the same things. And, and they all want to, to be a part of the right side of history, or the right side of whatever it is.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  And also, they're being led to believe that that's the virtuous thing to do.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  And, and, you know, so it's not like they're, you know, their, their intentions are good.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Uh, and, um, because of that, you know, I've, I've had a similar experience where, you know, friends of mine and, um, people I love that, you know, fell into that, as I did, I fell into it for a while. You know, that kind of fear-based kind of behavior. And, um, I just, uh, I, I've come to understand in my later years that one of the things that's truly liberating is the ability to say, I don't know.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  And I may have been wrong. That, these are two things that have led to such great discovery for me. Um, it's, it's, I, I really don't trust anymore, I don't trust virtuous experts. I don't, I don't think, uh, I don't think experts are, are, I don't believe in experts. I, I think if you, if you consider yourself an expert, you, you're done learning. You're done speaking with others.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  You're done challenging yourself. And, uh, when we put our faith and trust in people that are deemed experts, it ultimately, throughout my experience, it's, it's led to bad things. Um, the experts that talked about weapons of mass destruction, the experts that talk about, you know, various things that have led us to, uh, violent altercations throughout the world, I don't, I don't trust them anymore. I, I, I trust the idea that there are many sides to a story and that there is very, um, there's a lot to be gained from having dialogue with people you disagree with.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, there are experts in some fields and we do need them, it is important. Like, if you want information about the Large Hadron Collider, you don't understand, like, what, what are they, what are you guys doing over there? Like, you need to talk to someone who actually understands it, who's an expert on particle colliders. You know, and it takes a long time to develop that sort of knowledge base and have an understanding of what they're actually trying to accomplish. What is the Higgs boson, what, what is this particle that, is it part of that what? Is it the earliest stages of the universe? What, okay. You're gonna measure it?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  I'll be in the bar.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  It exists for a quarter of a second or something like that? What? What are you guys doing? Yeah, but the, the problem is, like, to bring it back to COVID, one of the things that Fauci said that was so wild, he said, when you are criticizing Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Well, that is one, that, just the fact that he felt so confident that he could say that, that is such a crazy thing to say. And then science became like an object.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Came a religion.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Well, science is supposed to be data. It's supposed to be measuring data, and it's supposed to never be settled. And it's always supposed to have a bunch of people from various, various positions of viewing down on this thing, analyzing it with new, new studies, new data, new tests, new hypothesis, working out and communicating with each other. It's not supposed to be a brick.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Like, you know, like, this is a brick, if you question the brick, like, no, no, this is a fucking fluid thing that exists only if you allow people to ask questions. The moment you stop questioning data, then like, and even real experts, like, guys from MIT and Harvard were getting deplatformed off of Twitter because they didn't believe it. They were saying, look, I don't think this lockdown idea is a good idea, I think it's bad for children, I think children aren't even really susceptible to this disease, like, why are we, why are we doing this? Like, what's going on?

• 35:37Speaker 03

  It became a faith. It, it became dogma.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  And if you question the dogma, you were a heretic.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  You were kicked out of the religion. It's, it's, uh, it, it was a scary time, and still is scary. You know, we deal, uh, the Actors Gang, uh, my nonprofit in Los Angeles, we have education programs. And, um, we've been dealing with the, the ramifications of that lockdown for the last five years. You know, there's kids that are, you know, had two years robbed of them.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  From socialization and education.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Imagine that was your senior year of high school, too?

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Fuck.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  And we're, we're dealing with the, the, the aftereffects of that. And, uh, gratefully, uh, the kind of work we do brings them out again and, you know, get some expressing emotions, making eye contact, uh, having experiences with other children and that are productive. And, you know, it, the goodness is, you can get out of that funk, but that was, it was really scary to see those kids walk in to classes, uh, after that lockdown, because they wouldn't make eye contact, looking at the floor, you know? Kind of desocialized and traumatized and, you know, it was really scary.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Critical development time for them.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and all of a sudden, they're wearing, like, imagine being a toddler and all of a sudden, everyone has a mask on.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's weird.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  You, you don't wanna wear the mask, they keep trying to take it off, people yell at them, put it back on, so it's like terror and anxiety and confusion. Also, you're not reading people's faces, which is like an important part of the developmental process. You get to know people, you read faces, you see how people talk, and all of a sudden, everyone's wearing a mask, everyone's robbing a bank, like, this is crazy.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 02

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• 38:54Speaker 02

  out Traeger grills.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you know, I, I've tried to approach it all with, uh, just openness and compassion for people that went through that, you know? I don't attach blame, I don't, you know, everyone, there was a pretty sophisticated propaganda machine that was happening. And I, I have great compassion for people that fell into that. And I, I, I, you know, I just want us to not do it again. You know, I want us to have the, uh, knowledge and the, the consciousness to not fall for that again.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, hopefully. It's just, it, it was very eye-opening, that it was so easy to pull off, you know? That was so easy to get people to just gang up like that, it was just.

• 39:46Speaker 03

  It said, it was, it said a lot about us.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, and you know, I, I hold faith in humanity, but that was, that was a, that was a tough one.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  I do as well, and I think it was a learning moment for a lot of people, whether they admit to it or not, whether they're public about it or not, because I know a lot of people that just weren't public about their dissent, but they really didn't like any of it, and they just didn't really have a position to talk about it. And, you know, they wanted to keep their job and wanted to keep their place in the community or whatever it was that they were trying to protect, and they kept their mouth shut. But you'd get a couple of drinks in them when they were alone, they would tell you.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Well, that begs the larger question is, you know, is it freedom of speech if when you freely speak, your job is threatened?

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Your future is threatened. Is that, are we living in a free society, you know?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  It's, and that, that's still, that's not just COVID, that's, that's a lot of things.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  It's a lot of things. It's almost everything.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  And it's one of the most important things that we do is we disagree. We, we talk, you have conversations and-

• 40:59Speaker 03

  It's the only way to learn.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  And you get exposed to information that maybe you didn't know before you establish this opinion that you're arguing.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Do you know what was the big tragedy, in my opinion, during that time period? Is that we totally lost the water cooler conversation. That accidental conversation that happens at work with a coworker who you don't necessarily agree with, but it's a human being expressing something to you in, in, in person. And you have to deal with that person and their opposing viewpoint.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  We got into our own silos of thought and algorithms of thought. And everything we experienced during that period of time was an affirmation of what we believed, rather than a challenge to it.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  And so the water cooler was completely eliminated. The idea that the accidental conversation at a bar, where you're, you know, watching a game on the television and someone sits next to you that is not necessarily of your belief system, but you buy them a beer and you watch the game together.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  All these moments of meeting up that were, were eliminated. And, you know, that's what I love about sports. I love that you can go watch a game and not think about politics.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Think about your differences and think about the team that you like and, and support them together. Same thing with theater or any kind of gathering of, of individuals, music.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  You, what I love about the theater that we do is that we're able to take people to a common emotion. And we never want to have a completely, I don't, we don't want audiences that think the same, right?

• 42:59Speaker 03

  You want a disparate amount of people, different beliefs, that you can get them to share a common emotion, get them to laugh together, get them to feel something and cry together. That is, that's the community you're able to build when you're doing a show, as you know. You know, you, you, what really pissed me off was that when we're, we had a, we have a theater in Los Angeles. And it was two years we had to be closed. And a year and a half in, we were told we could open, but we'd have to check vaccine passports at the door. And, and I talked to some people at the theater and we agreed it was, no, we can't do that. Because what that is doing is it's basically saying the only people allowed in our theater

• 43:44Speaker 03

  are people that agree with what the government wanted. And that for me is not a theater. That betrays the whole purpose and function of what a theater should be. It's a gathering place for the community that might think differently to bring them together.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  And this was saying basically, if you agree, you can come in. And that, so we waited another six months before we opened the theater, until everyone could come in.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a time where you had to have a vaccine passport in order to perform. And I, there was an exemption in New York. And you had to have a vaccine passport if you wanted to go to a show, but you didn't have to have one if you were performing. And I did Madison Square Garden, so the whole audience had to have vaccine passports, but I didn't. And so there was a senator, I forget who it was, that was proposing a, a new law based on me sleeping, sneaking through the loophole, that performers should have to be vaccinated as well. And he was upset that I didn't have, that I wasn't vaccinated and that I was performing.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  You could have infected the entire Madison Square Garden.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  I could have been a super spreader, yeah, but-

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Well, you know, in London, because I spent a lot of time over there the last five years, but they, their West End rebounded immediately, unlike Broadway. And the reason it did is because during that time period, you could show a vaccine passport, but you could also show a negative test. So they didn't demand that you have a vaccine. So they didn't lose their audience. Their audience came right back. And in Broadway, they basically told a third of their audience, you're not welcome.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  And so I can see why it might have been a struggle to get those people back into the theater.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Well, it was cra- it didn't make any sense. Like, if the people are negative, they're negative. What do you give a shit if they're vaccinated? Also, what about people that got COVID and then recovered from it, who have far superior immunity? Seven X superior immunity to people who are vaccinated? Like, what are you, what are we doing here? Like, this is, you, are you, you're doing the pharmaceutical drug companies' work for them.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  And you're making people follow along in lockstep, and it's just nuts. It just didn't even make sense that people were going along with this.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Well, glad that's in the rearview mirror.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, for now. But, you know, I feel like it's a case study in a lot of, I mean, if, if there are people that are manipulating society, and I think there are, there's a lot of lessons that they learn from how we behave. And, you know, relatively speaking, without making light of the pandemic, relatively speaking, a fairly mild pandemic, in terms of like, you know, the bubonic plague and all sorts of other things that have happened throughout history, the Spanish flu have killed way more people. Like, it could have been way worse, right? So just one that was just twice as bad as the flu got people to behave like that.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the good news is though, the uptake wasn't, you know, a lot of people took it because they had to. It wasn't like enthusiastically taking it. We did a play called Topsy Turvy, which was about lockdown, and we performed that in Eastern Europe. And it was really interesting to see their response there. Because I would, one of them said afterwards, you know, I asked, you know, what was the uptake on the vaccines in, in Romania? And they said something like 40%. I said, well, how do you explain that? And they said, well, you know, we lived under the Soviet Union for many years,

• 47:32Speaker 03

  so we know how to look like we comply when we're not complying.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  And I said, what else reminds you of the Soviet Union? And they said, without a doubt, cancel culture. I said, why? They said, well, Soviet Union used to keep files on all of us, right? So as long as you're a good party member, there wouldn't be a thing said.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  But once you stepped out of line, they brought out that old file. Now that affair with your secretary from 30 years ago is going to ruin your life. They're going to ruin your family, they're going to kill your career, and they're going to make a big public display of it to show other people to stay in line. And they felt like cancel culture was basically operating in the same way as the Soviet Union did. And it was really interesting to see that perspective in Eastern Europe. People that have, you know, lived under that kind of oppressive situation and their perspective on modern day.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  That must have really made you think about what happened to you during the Iraq War.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Right?

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  That in particular, because back then, there's no real social media.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  There's no real way to get your message out.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Oh, man, they, they lied, they made up, they made up things.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  They made up this, I was, I was doing this play Embedded at the time at the Public Theater, and we'd go out afterwards, and the New York Post wrote that I was making out with a woman under a palm tree at this club, and I, it was, it was just, they just made it up. And cut me, and, you know, didn't really help my marriage at the time. And, you know, they just lie. They basically lie, you know, they'll attack you.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  They just decided you were an enemy, and they were going to pull out whatever stops they could.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  They discredit you in whatever way they can.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a powerful thing when it hits you and you realize, oh my god, the truth doesn't matter here.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's what's so scary about it is that in this country where freedom of speech is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of our society, it's one of the most important things we all recognize that separates us from everywhere else in history, like this is the first country where really it's written into the doctrine of the country, you're supposed to have the freedom, the ability to express yourself, and that this is being attacked and suppressed in all sorts of different ways, not just stopping your ability to express yourself, but attacking you in a concerted effort and lying about you, just lying about you in order to scare other people. It's very Orwellian and it's very un-American, and the fact that like the New York Post

• 50:07Speaker 02

  would do that to you, or whoever it was from the New York Post would do that, like what the fuck, man?

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Well, the goodness is there's no Gulags.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  You know, they don't arrest you in the middle of the night and

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  force you into some kind of prison

• 50:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  thousands of miles away.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Sure, it could be worse, yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  But it's not, it's not along the line of the American way of life, you know, and if you're, if you're a person who really does appreciate what this experience in, this experiment in self-government, which was the United States, it's supposed to have free discourse, that's a big part of it, and the founding fathers recognized that, you've got to have the ability to talk about things.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  And if you don't, we're fucked, because if someone can tell you what you can and can't say, that's step one, and then everything else falls in line after that, and next thing you know, you've got a dictatorship.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Right, and there's people that have, you know, lost opportunities or, you know, in show business that recently that, including my ex Susan Sarandon, who, you know, was against what was happening in Israel and lost her agent and, you know, having a hard time finding work, this is

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  This is nuts, yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  And especially someone like Susan Sarandon, like one of the most respected and established actors of many generations, like she's been around forever.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  The fact that a take on something that, if you're just looking at it, like what is, what are you, how could you defend that? Like, how could anybody defend that?

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  I don't even know how many people are dead, you have a complete wipeout of a city, like ninety percent of Gaza's gone, or whatever the percentage is, you look at the buildings, you look at what it used to look like, you look at what it looks like now, like, this is defensible?

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and I think the point of it is to make a show of it and to say, see, we could do that to her, so we could do it to you, so shut the fuck up.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, especially the timing of when you do it, right? If you're against Gaza now, it's safer than being against what happened a year and a half ago, say.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  You know, especially close to October 7th, if you're one of the early, like Roger Waters, one of the early people talking about this is, this is, you're watching genocide in real time, and

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  They came for that guy.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  And, you know, more people see it the way he sees it now, and just like what happened to you with the Iraq War, you're twenty years from now, it's going to be a universally accepted opinion, I bet.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Well, it's just, it's crazy to go through something like that, and for you to have gone through it like really early on, you know, for you to have gone through that in 2003, I guess it really does inform your opinions, though, like when you see things that are happening today, you go, okay, I've seen this before.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  What I started looking for after that was a way to be someone that was more involved with something that could affect change, in other words, I used my nonprofit, we started a prison program twenty years ago, and we see the change that happens, we, you know, we have people that go in and basically offer rehabilitation in the form of theater, and not doing plays or anything, but getting people to play emotions through characters that we introduce to them, and in doing so, unlocking emotions that have been suppressed for many, many years.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  So, in prison, there's one go-to emotion, it's angry, that's your survival face, that's your mask on the yard, you have to be a badass or you're going to die. But sadness is compromising, fear is compromising, and happiness is genuinely not encouraged either. So, we get these guys in a room, we get to introduce them to these stock characters from the Commedia dell'arte, and then they have to express their emotions and make choices with their emotions in improv, and what they find is that if someone approaches them in anger in an improv, the facilitator will encourage a different emotion in response to anger than anger, right?

• 54:36Speaker 03

  And what they come to understand is that they don't have to respond to anger with anger, there are other choices, and in fact, in real life, they can do that, too, if they can do it in an improv. And so what happens is these people tap into long dormant emotions and start to understand that they are more than the worst act that got them there, they tend to create bonds across gang ties, racial lines, we, when we're putting together a group, we ask that rival gangs are in the same room with each other.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  And what happens is these bonds are made through the sharing of emotion, like we get these guys into an improv where they're all putting a flower on a grave of someone and saying something under their breath about the person that's deceased, and then at some point, the facilitator will say, now, look at each other, and they're looking at each other with these eyes of sadness, and they realize they have a lot in common, you know, in that shared emotion. I had two guys come up to me, one black guy, one white guy, they said, we've got to tell you what happened two weeks ago, we were, our shot caller said, you know, we're going to have a fight on the yard, and so, you know, you never question the shot caller, and

• 55:56Speaker 03

  so you know that's going to happen, you know, and so what they did was they found each other, these two guys, and they rolled around on the floor, acting like they were killing each other.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Wow, how convenient.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it looked like they were participating, but they weren't hurting each other.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  That's a good solution.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  It's amazing what happens, when you experience something that, like that in person, when you see the transformation happen, and we see this in our schoolchildren as well, that's something that is deeply inspiring, you know that you've had something to do with some, a real change, right? Whereas for years I was asked to, you know, attend fundraisers and, you know, various causes, and, you know, it's, yeah, it's great that they're doing that, and it's great that they're raising money for these organizations that need it, but at the end of the day, you don't really feel like it did anything, other than go to a dinner, and this was a way to

• 57:05Speaker 03

  get my hands dirty and really, you know, get in the struggle of it, and I found it to be so, so much more satisfying, as far as whatever inclination I had towards activism was, was really fed by this, as opposed to hopping from fundraiser to fundraiser.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  It just felt more real, it felt like something that I could take that experience and then I could say to my group, let's expand, let's get into more and more prisons, and now we're in eighteen prisons in the state of California doing these programs.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Did you have to develop a curriculum, like how you begin to reach out to these guys and how you set it up, like how you

• 57:48Speaker 03

  It took a couple of years, you know, kind of pilot program in one prison, in Chino and Norco in Southern California, trial and error, you know, what's the way to do it, what's the way not to do it, of course, you go through a training with the prison system of certain things to watch out for, and, you know, you develop these lines where you say, you know, we're here to do this, not to talk about your case, you know, there's all kinds of things you learn how to avoid the distractions that will derail the program, but essentially, it's a very physical way of working, and it's also, there is a lot

• 58:31Speaker 03

  of fun in it, so those two things together allow the entry for these guys that are, you know, they're in the room because they want to be there, but it's weird stuff we're asking them to do.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  And if they can have a laugh about it, and then something about it shifts some kind of consciousness inside them, that, that means something to people, you've got to remember, these people are, you know, when we started, there was only one other Program in the state of California that was offering rehabilitation through any theater. So there was a couple of music programs and two theater programs. And now we've were able to lobby the state to get more funding for arts and corrections. Because art is a transformer. You know, it is something that can shift consciousness. I truly believe that.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  I've seen it with my own, the work that I've done. You know, I've seen how people can think in a different way after they see something in the theater or in the movies. You know, a good stand-up can do the same thing. You know, how George Carlin used to shift my consciousness every new special because he would always be challenging me.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  It wouldn't be like, hey, hey, you know, we're all in the same club. It would be, yeah, you thought we were in the same club, but here's a little thought. And you realize he's talking right at one of your hypocrisies. And that was his genius. It was his ability to really tap into, we can be better.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  We can all be better.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks, and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old fashioned summers where you just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer? Visible Wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at visible.com.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Plans start at $25 a month or get our premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Yeah, there's been a few guys like that throughout history that really have figured out a way to embed humor into social commentary. George Carlin's probably the most known for it, but do you know about Bill Hicks?

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  So he was probably in my generation, he was the one that twisted people the most. Like, a lot of comics would watch him and go, what am I doing? Why am I doing what I'm doing? This guy's doing something that's like so much more meaningful.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Who was it in Apetos documentary about Carlin? There was a comedian that said, George Carlin was basically, in the early part of the century, in 1900s, philosophers debating used to be a huge deal, right? Like hundreds of people, thousands of people come watch people debate two different points of view.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  He said, that's what the current philosophers of our generation are the better stand-up comedians. The ones that test your belief system by saying something that, you know, might be controversial or, you know, challenges your worldview. That's the great purpose and function of a philosopher or a stand-up comedian is to take your worldview, shatter it a little bit, and make you rethink.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And Hicks was sort of, for our generation, he was like the first guy that really did that in a way that, like, some of the things that he said weren't even designed to be funny at all. It was just designed to make you think about things differently. And then he would hit you with some funny things after that, sort of to keep you occupied.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  Provocative statements that, you know, the first reaction is, fuck that. No, that's not true. Fuck that. And then you realize, oh shit, he's bringing me there. And it's like a great play can do that, too. A great movie can do that, too. Provoke you and challenge you and then make you refocus, rethink.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just amazing how little of that we have today and how much content we have today. Did you ever see the documentary, God, what is it? The documentary with William F. Buckley and the other, yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Gore Vidal?

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  And Gore Vidal, yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Where they had these, it was, I guess it was NBC, I think it was? And NBC was failing in the ratings.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  I was gonna say Relentless Enemies, but that's the lion.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the lion.

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  Best of Enemies.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Best of Enemies, yeah. Great documentary.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  So they had a series of these debates on television. Gore Vidal being a progressive and William F. Buckley being a conservative. Very interesting because this kind of hadn't happened before on television, where you have these long-form discussions where these two guys just intellectually jabbing at each other. And it was great. It's like, the documentary is really amazing.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  I was friends with Gore.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. He agreed to do my first film, Bob Roberts, which is about a right-wing folk singing candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania. And Gore agreed to play brickly paste my Democratic opponent, right? And so he played a politician, which is something he always kind of flirted with in his real life. There he is. And so I got to be quite friendly with him. And I actually did a documentary that I'm editing right now about four soldiers from World War II that became great writers.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Gore, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Howard Zinn are all in this documentary. I filmed it many years ago, shelved it, and now I'm in the final stages of putting it together. I'm opening a new website on September 1st, and this is one of the many things that I have in my vault and my storage units that I've just been getting out over the past year and finding all this crazy stuff that I have that I've never finished because I've been going from project to project to project. So I slowed down a little bit and just opened up some sealed boxes, and it's been really fun. It's one of the things is also, I used to fuck around on film sets with this, you know,

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  had enough money to buy a video camera for the first time. And so I started making these little short films on movie sets. And one of them is, there's two films from when I was doing Howard the Duck. And, you know, one of those endless productions that just went on and on and on. So I just started amusing myself by making my own little short films, including, you know, I'm sure illegally using the duck itself, you know, which I made a character in one of the films.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  I forgot about Howard the Duck.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Crazy. We walked on the set the first.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  What a fucking weird movie that was.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  I know, right? We walked on the set, I walked on the set, the first day I knew we were in trouble.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  Why'd you know we were in trouble?

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  The puppet, it wasn't ready. And it was a little too cute. If you look at the comic book.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Howard the Duck was not that cute.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  No, he was cigar smoking, kind of shitty, mean duck.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Kind of Fritz the Cat-ish, like, you know, like, really kind of borderline obscene and...

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  He was a Marvel comic, right?

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  And so, do you have an image of the old Howard the Duck from the comic? Yeah, that guy.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  So I walked on the set and I saw that cute duck. I was like, uh-oh.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was always with chicks.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  He was always with chicks, yeah.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Which was very weird, like, hey lady, what are you doing? You're fucking a duck? What's going on here? Bestiality? Like, what is this? What has his charm got you? Like, what is, what's the message there?

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  He was a strange character.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  Very strange, and I don't think they had the technology to pull it off.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Maybe they need to try again now.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it'd be good. They could take the old film and animate it. But, you know, I spent six weeks on that film doing an ultralight chase that lasted maybe two minutes in the film.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  What's an ultralight plane chase?

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  Ultralight planes, basically it's you and the wings and a motor. And so there's a chase sequence at the end that's about two and a half minute, three minute long.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Did you actually have to get in one of those things?

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  No. I mean, I got in like a fake one.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, you have to be, you have to fly it. The guy, yeah. You have to, that's fake, of course, right?

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  The duck's real. Looks so legit.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but...

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Was that one of those ones where your little voice, you didn't listen?

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  No, not at all, because that was early in my career, right? So it was George Lucas, remember?

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  That was George Lucas.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, he'd just done Star Wars.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  So it was, it had to be good, right?

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  He went from Star Wars to Howard the Duck?

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Well, he produced Howard the Duck.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  But he had just produced Star Wars. So, you know, it was like, hell yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  I don't know, it doesn't make sense on the page, but...

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  He'll figure it out.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  He'll figure it out, they'll figure it out. I was so lucky, too, again blessed, because I got a movie called Five Corners that was with Jodie Foster and John Turturro right around the same time. So I was, I'd already done that movie when Howard came out. So it's kind of saved my ass.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Nice. You already had one in the chamber.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  You had a good one on the pipe.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. My God.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  It's just, I wonder why George did it. Like, it seems so odd to try to do a movie with a talking duck.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, maybe it made sense when they imagined it.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Hmm. Maybe they were on acid or something. It's like, seems...

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  I just remember those poor puppeteers, man. They were trying to make this thing work and it, and just, I don't think the technology really existed or the...

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Well, it was like eighty-six or something?

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it was, they were, they were trying so hard and it just, it was, you know, I felt for everybody, including the director. I felt he tried his damn best, you know, and it was just betrayal by puppeteering.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  And it wasn't the puppeteers, it was the

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  actual machinery.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Well, it's kind of, if you think about Star Wars in particular, it's kind of amazing. They were able to pull that off with the technology that was available at the time.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  To have this crazy movie where you're like, the Cantina scene and

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  You go in, there's all these different fucking creatures from different planets and like, they did not have very good technology back then.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Like, if you watch that Cantina scene now, like, whoa, looks terrible.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  Looks so clunky. Like, the masks don't move, like, ah, everyone's got their faces stuck.

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  It's almost like, you know, looking at claymation around that time, you know?

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Amazing what they can do, but I do like the old school. I do like the kind of analog version of, because when, the CGI and everything, it's all so sophisticated and so... It, it, they can do anything now and you almost want them not to be able to do everything, you know?

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Oh, a hundred percent, yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  Just one, a little, little roughness around the edges really helps.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  Well, there's also a thing about CGI where the part of your brain that is looking at it recognizes that this is not a real thing happening. Like, as good as it looks, there's something about it.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  Which is why a lot of the movie special effects guys, like the monster guys, like Rick Baker and along those lines who did Star Wars.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  American Werewolf in London, that thing outside, the wolf that you see in the hallway.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  That, um, they wanted to make sure that it looked like a real thing, right? It was a physical object. So you had a physi... So in order to make it a physical object, and obviously CGI wasn't even available back then, but you see it and you know it's a real thing. Whereas like later on, he did, they did the Wolfman and Rick Baker did that as well. And there's a lot of CGI in there and the transformation scenes and this part of it is just like, your brain's like, this isn't really happening.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  I don't like it.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

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• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  It's kind of the same way in music too, like when they correct everything and make the auto-tune. You, great music has a little bit of mistake in it.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  You know, it has a little bit of, like, human error.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  Um, when you're hitting a chord on a guitar, there's, you know, there's a way to play it perfectly, but there's also a way to play it a little messed up.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  And I kind of prefer the little bit messed up.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Like when Hendrix did the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  You know, there was something about it. It was like, meow, meow, meow.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was immediate. It was at, it was being done at that moment with full danger.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  Which is a great thing to listen to.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's really happening.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  It's not polished and edited and sent through a machine.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  And you get the feeling that, that maybe that was the second or third time he'd played it.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  Ever. Or maybe the first.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Which would have been even more insane, but, uh, you know, yeah.

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  Well, that's why people like records. They love listening to the scratches and the pops and then you hear the, the, the voice, like, it's just pure recorded voice. There's no auto-tune. There's no, nothing messing with it.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Especially like an old record.

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  I have one of those, um, seventy-eights where you have to crank them up and

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  And they have the little, uh, you know, cone that

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Oh, you have one of those?

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  Nineteen twenty or nineteen ten or something like that. And I just imagine, you know, living on the prairie and ordering this from Sears Roebuck, right? And getting your first, you know, record and putting it on and hearing this, a voice coming from this acetate. It must have been magical. It must have been like, you know, transformative to, you know, this amplified song that you can dance to or fall in love to right in your living room.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  When did they first figure that out?

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  I think it was early part of the 20th century.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  Thomas Edison.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  Thomas Edison?

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, they had like this little cylinder.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  But when they started mass producing them in

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  Oh, like just records?

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, when was the first?

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  I think in the twenties, maybe?

• 1:16:38Speaker 04

  They might have mass produced those because people had them. I had just a way different player.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  Let's, uh, ask perplexity. What was the first record? What was the first actual, like, record disc that you could play with a needle? Like a real record?

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  I want to say like nineteen nineteen. I'm just taking a wild guess.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  There's a famous viral video of a guy dropping that time a set of something on TV.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  Nineteen thirty-one. Twelve-inch, thirty-three and a third RPM disc was pressed in Victor's vinyl-based Victrolac.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  But that's thirty-three and a third.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  Uh, what about the seventy-eights? Or is it called, say, a seventy-eight?

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  Twenty-three minutes beside versus roughly the shellac seventy-eight.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Forty-eight. Vinyl LP arrived in June 21st, 1948. Columbia Records unveiled, oh, thirty-three and a third micro groove, long playing record. So was that it?

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  But in the twenties or thirties, there was a micro groove.

• 1:17:41Speaker 04

  Forty-seven, you got the forty-five. Forty-nine, you got the forty-five.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, so the little ones singles.

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  Thirty-one, first vinyl disc.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Wow. So thirty-one for the first vinyl disc, forty-eight for the first real album, which is really nuts because if you think about like all the amazing albums of the sixties, you're talking about a technology that didn't exist 20 years prior.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  Wow, that's weird.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  Nuts.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Nuts, right? So like when you listen to Voodoo Child, like that technology 20 years ago didn't exist.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  Do you remember the magic of watching it for the first time? Like when you put that thing down when you're a kid and you put it on the thing and this music starts coming out?

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, I remember the ones where they, look at that. Look at the vinyl grooves around a thousand X magnification. You see the waveforms of the music itself. That's crazy.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  That those little weird, imagine if you were like from another civilization and you saw these things, you'd be like, what the fuck is this? Like, what do they have here?

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  How did they figure that out?

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, what is this? You'd be like, what, that's, they figured out how to make music out of that? And you could hear a harp? You could hear banjo? You could hear drums?

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  An orchestra?

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could hear jazz joplin, all in that?

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  How'd you do that? Like, what, and if it scratches, it skips?

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  I'm really encouraged that vinyl's making a comeback. I really very excited about that.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  People love it.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  It's all the difference.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Like, people love, like, wood tables, you know, people like, as the world gets more digital, people want things that are organic, something that a person made, something that seems like, that makes more sense.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  I've been finding, uh, you know, in my search for my archive and everything, cassette tapes. And then I put on, they sound amazing.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, they sound really good. Because, you know, there's more, there's more information in, in a little cassette tape than on a, you know, whether it's MP3, it's been compressed, you know, and compressed and compressed and compressed. But, uh, you know, I, reel to reels are obviously sound still great, but the cassette tapes really survived. I've been digitizing everything, of course, you know, just, just to make sure that they don't decay. But, um, it's been really interesting that my, a lot of my dad's music, uh, he recorded on cassette tapes. You know, he was a folk singer, uh, and they did five albums as the highwayman and, you know,

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  but he, he was a classical musician and did choral music, and so he had a group and he would record on these cassette tapes. And so we've been digitizing those because we're, I'm gonna put them all on my new website. This thing called Robyn's Radio, which will be my dad, my granddad, my brother and myself, the music that we've done over the years, kind of on, playing on a constant loop when you come onto the website.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I was to honor my dad. I've been digitizing also his scores and, um, you know, he, he wrote music by hand, and so I've got boxes and boxes of that that I've trying to transcribe and make available. Probably in about six months, we'll have that archive up, but.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. When did they figure out how to put things on cassette tapes? Does that, that happened, that was around when I was in high school. I remember I had a cassette deck on my car.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there was pretty good technology. You could buy a really good microphones and plug them into a, a pretty good cassette player.

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  Well, 8-track was the first, right?

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  I think so, but those were so impractical.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Well, they were huge.

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, plus they'd stop in the middle of a song and then go to the next track and continue.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. I remember driving with my friend Frank, who lives in Austin right now. And we were driving back up to school, my first school, college, Flatsburg. And, uh, there was a 8-track, uh, of Bread playing. You remember that band Bread?

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  And, and he, this was around 1977. And he rips it out of the 8-track, rolls down the window, throws it out, and this is, we're never listening to that again. He's, this is, it's punk rock from this point forward. And it was, it was like a defining moment in my musical life, was like Frank saying, no more Bread.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  No more Bread.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  He's gonna put his foot down.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  It's Sex Pistols now.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  That's hilarious. Uh, I remember my first introduction to 8-track. My friend Javier, when I lived in Florida, his mom had an 8-track player. And, uh, she had, what is that song? Who sings it? When my baby, when my baby smiles at me, I go to Rio, De Janeiro. Remember that song?

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  I don't remember who sings it. Uh, Pablo Cruz.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah. And she had a Pablo Cruz 8-track in her car. I'm like, this lady's a wizard. She's got her own music. Cause before then, I think I'd only seen people play stuff that was on the radio.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  And she put it in there and she pressed the button, and I was like, this is crazy. She gets to pick what songs are on the radio in a car? I thought it was the wildest thing I'd ever seen in my life.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That was right. It was 8-track first, then the cassette, and then the.

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  The cassette was so much better. It's a little, and you had to flip it over, though, pop it out.

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, but those things are cooked in the sun, though. I mean.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, I lost a bunch. I used to have one of them big books, where you had the cassettes in it, and these little vinyl things.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  You leave it in your car and they get fucked, and then it gets stuck in the, in the tape machine, and you had to do it with your finger. You had to try to wind it back with your finger.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  Which I did like a month ago with one of the old cassettes.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  You had to stick your pinky in there.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  I just, I just did that last month, trying to re-spool it.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, nobody knows what the fuck we're talking about today. Well, then, you know, VHS tapes was the next one. Cause that was the first time where you could choose to watch a film at home.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  Yes. And a huge deal, too, you know, um, I, I'm more in the loss of video stores.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. It was a great experience.

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, because you could go and you say, you know, I just saw this film, and there was someone that really loved film there.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  And he could say, well, if you like that one, check this one out.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  It, that was, that's now been replaced by an algorithm.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  And I'm not trusting that algorithm is gonna find, it's, you know, it's gonna show me the way to Battle of Algiers or any kind of, oh, these are great movies. I just, if, the, the personal was lost. Same thing with record stores. You could go in and like, what's, what's new? And hear what's playing and, you know, talk to the guy and get what, what his opinion was. And bookstores, too, you know, it's like, uh, if you told me 30 years ago that would be, you know, it's very hard to find a bookstore, a record store, or a video store, I would say, you're crazy. But now it's all like very convenient. You have access to everything, but you don't have, uh, the arbiter that is a person. You have the arbiter that's almost a machine.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  Right. You get a little bit of that with people online recommending stuff.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  It's just kinda cool. You know, someone says, hey, I just saw this show. It's fucking incredible.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  You get a little bit of that. And then you get IMDb and Rotten Tomato scores, which I think that does something, you know? They're, they're a little manipulated occasionally, but there's something to it, where you get to see what people think about it. That helps.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's nice. I think Silo's like 100% Rotten Tomato.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  Is it really?

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, right now it is. That's nice.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  That's, but once you said that, though, you put it out there.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

  I know, now it's dead. I just killed it.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  They're gonna bomb it. They're gonna bomb it into a Libby.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, 100%? We'll see about that.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  But there's, there's almost too many shows, you know? There's just too mu- I just got into The Agency. Um, I just finished season two of The Agency, Michael Fassbender. It's a CIA, um, series that's on Paramount. It's fucking incredible. It's so well-written. It's so well-acted. It makes so many other shows seem really clunky, cause it's just, it's so good.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  It's got so many layers to it, and it's subtle, and it's brilliant, and it's, and Fassbender's one of my favorite actors. He's fucking incredible.

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  He's great.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  He's so good. He's so good in this. You know, he plays this CIA spook.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  So many things to choose from.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Too many.

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Almost.

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  I mean, you could, essentially, you could waste your whole life just being entertained. Like, it used to be difficult to be entertained, which I think there's something to that. You had to go to a place, you had to pay, buy your popcorn, sit down.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  You had to make active choice in your life. Now it's just like.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, steps along the way. They've made it more convenient to be entertained, but then again, it's like, there's something lost in that. You know, like, oh, the movie starts at seven. Come on, we gotta get out of here. We gotta go park. We gotta get there.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  Gotta get there in time. There was a lot to it.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Or, or the idea that, you know, if there's only three choices, you're gonna stumble, you might stumble into something you wouldn't have watched.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  And be surprised by it.

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  Oh, all the time. You'd go, what do they, what do they have at the movie theater? Like, what's this? All right, well, there's no more Star Wars tickets left, so we could go see this. You wanna see this? What is it? I don't know. This, this guy's in it, though. I like him. Like, okay.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's check it out.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  And you would just take a, take a guess. That's the crazy thing about Shawshank, is that it wasn't a big hit in the movie theater initially.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Which is really hard to believe now.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, it was, uh, it was, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but nobody went to see it.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  That's nuts.

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Maybe it was the title they didn't understand, or I don't know what it was. I was in two films that year, one, Hudsucker Proxy, and Shawshank Redemption, two really challenging titles. But, like, what's it about? A hudsucker? I don't know. What's it about? Uh, Shawshank? Who knows? I, I had people coming up to me saying, I really liked you in that, um, scrimshaw reduction.

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, thank you.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  They don't plan on meeting you and they run into you at a restaurant like, that movie, Shawshank.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  Shimsank, Shimsank Shawshank.

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  What did it come out against? What other films were out at the same time as Shawshank? Was there, there are other like big movies?

• 1:28:14Speaker 03

  Forrest Gump.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Jurassic Park?

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Pulp Fiction.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:28:21Speaker 04

  Ace Ventura?

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Ace Ventura two?

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  That's one of the best years for movies in history.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  Pulp Fiction. Oh, my God.

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  But, um, you know, it, it, it, it made its way,

• 1:28:36Speaker 03

  interestingly enough, because, um, so Ted Turner was running Warner Brothers at the time, right? And Warner Brothers produced Shawshank Redemption. And, um, when he sold the rights to it for television, he sold it to himself at the lowest cost possible. So basically, you had a, a film nominated for seven Academy Awards. It was getting sold like it was beach blanket bullshit, right? And, and so it didn't cost him anything to put it on his channel. So he put it on again and again and again, was getting all those advertising dollars that come with playing something on his, his TV channel.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  And I think that's why it caught on because it was ubiquitous. It was always there. It was always something you could see. And so eventually people understood what kind of movie it was.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  And so that's a good example of where someone's business acumen or greed or whatever you want to call it, uh, winds up producing something quite lovely. You know, something that actually I'm really grateful for, uh, because so many people know that film. And it's been like number one on IMDb for the last 15 years.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  And that was one of those movies that also took off like wildfire once it got into video. Cause once people could watch it at home.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  That was even though if it didn't do as well in the theaters as it should have, on video it did fantastic.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Which is why I, I really, I, I always remember that when, you know, I'm in a movie and it doesn't quote unquote perform. You know, I, I, I, I'm the, I'm, I'm the turtle. I, I, I know the turtle can win the race.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, that was something that was lost also during the pandemic and I was really worried about that, that it wasn't going to come back. It seemed like it was so easy to stream films at home that people just, for a while, it was hard to get people to go out to movie theaters.

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  And the experience is very different.

• 1:30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  It's very different.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been a struggle, uh, you know, um, and, you know, I think also a lot of producers in Hollywood or studios lost faith in their adult audience even before the pandemic. I mean, they were producing movies for teenagers. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but, uh, because they can be, that can drive an economic engine. But at the same time, you know, films like Shawshank Redemption would not get made today because they're about something that isn't about the, the whole huge multi-platform experience of an action movie.

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  And, um, that's unfortunate and that's kind of migrated into streamers. You know, the people, the adults that like to watch stuff tend to watch these longer form things. And that's a, a, a nice thing in a way because it's allowing filmmakers to make 10 hour films. You know, when you think about it, a, a season of a, of a show is 10 hours. And so you can think in this like kind of long form of telling a story, which is a, it's a nice thing, which would have been impossible in old Hollywood, you know?

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  You gotta keep it under two hours. So now you have the opportunity, uh, creators have the opportunity to create long form entertainment.

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  Well, that I think is one of the beautiful things about some of these Netflix series is that you, you like, things like Stranger Things, you essentially have, you know, a 30 hour movie.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  Or however many episodes it is. And like Ozark is a great example of that. It's like fucking amazing show. And it's essentially like a movie every week. And the story continues to progress.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  And you get a chance to really stretch something out. And, but you get the quality of like a great film, but you get it extended, you know, with these huge budgets, the fact that they're able to do this like, so because of streaming, it does, it has opened up this long form aspect of storytelling that I think is really difficult to do in a movie. Like Kill Bill kind of did it a little bit.

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  You have two episodes of it.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  It was nice also as an actor, like with Silo, I've got, I've had three seasons. The first two seasons, my character represented something which completely shifts in season three.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  Oh, spoiler alert. Don't tell me.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  No, I'm not telling you what it is.

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  Bro, I can't believe you did that.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  I'm just telling you that.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Fucked it up for me. Now I'm gonna be looking for that.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  You won't, you won't even be able to guess.

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  Okay. Oh, good. Good.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  It's, it's such a profound, uh, it's, and it was fun to play. It was like this kind of like, and I was told about this at the beginning, the, the creator said, you know, listen, uh, wait till season three.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  That's interesting because I always wonder how far they map these things out. You know, did he have a, did they even know that they were going to be picked up for season three when he started?

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  Um, no, but they knew at the end of season one, what the trajectory of two and three was.

• 1:34:01Speaker 02

  So if it got picked up, they had a plan?

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  If they were going to get picked up, they would have to tell you what, they would have to tell the studio what two and three are.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Right? So, um, the other thing that you have to consider is that if you're an asshole, they'll fucking kill you. It's true.

• 1:34:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Writers don't, you know, writers don't, you know, if an actor is like trouble.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  They'll kill him. They will. I've heard, I've, I've, I've been told about, uh, you know, one of the, one of the guys I worked with was, uh, I won't say his name, but, you know, when I was directing for television, um, uh, I did a couple of episodes on this show and he told me about a, a, a show that he was doing where there were three actors that were giving him a real hard time. And, um, one of them was, uh, getting in trouble because of, you know, uh, sexual inappropriateness. Uh, one was getting in trouble because of, you know, there were too much in their head. And the other was, you know, uh, something else, uh, you know, something about, um, another, basically they shot them all in the anatomy that was associated with what their problem was. So,

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  all three of them were shot in the finale.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  They said, well, we allowed a couple of them to survive, but one we really killed off. It's like, so, you know, it, it, you don't mess with the writers. They're, they're in television. They, they, uh, they, they wield a lot of power and, uh,

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  Not only that, they're also looking for angles, different places to take the character. And if you're a douchebag, like, oh, let's fucking kill this guy.

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that'll be a good show.

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  They gotta let him kill this guy off. Turn him into a pedophile and then we kill him.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  Basically, you can do whatever you want. Here's the twist. I didn't see this coming.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Watch out.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  Be nice.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

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  and thousands of fee free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate crazy high. It's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. Well, you know, there's a lot of fear in Hollywood when it comes to AI and replacing writers and replacing actors and just replacing this whole

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  human created thing of storytelling. And I think writers in particular are really terrified because you could kind of, You know, with AI engines today, you could kind of take a few films, right? Like, you could kind of take, like, Bullet and Heat and a few, and they say, "Make me John Wick meets Bullet meets Heat." And this is the protagonist, this is what he's facing, these are the issues. And AI can churn it out in a few minutes.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  And then you could say, "Make it more like Quentin Tarantino would do it," and then it'll do that, it'll fix it in that way.

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  And then you say, "Okay, I want it more, like, cubric aspects to it. I want some weirdness to it, some real thought, some Easter eggs, some hidden aspects to it that people connect later," and it'll do that. It'll, it can do stuff instantaneously based on, and it's kind of stealing, right? But it's not, right? It's making an original thing, but it's not. Because it's inspired by everything else that's already been made. But that's kind of what people do, but not in the same way. And we don't do it that quick either. And so for writers, it's fucking terrifying.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and who do you sue? I mean, you can't sue AI.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  Well, artists are having a real problem with that.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  I have a real problem with it.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't like it at all. But I also have faith in the individuality of the human experience. And what I, what, like, I'm writing a companion piece to The Player right now. And, you know, what would happen if that character was alive today? And so I have my perspective that only I'm gonna bring to that.

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  I don't think you could plug that into an AI.

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  So, I, I think talented people will figure out a way to be individual and apart from AI.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  No doubt.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  But I also really don't like the, the lack of protection that the guilds and the unions are offering their membership. You know, there should have been a hard line for the Actors Union, and there wasn't. The hard line should have been, you know, "You cannot use this to replace actors."

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Right, or writers.

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  But there was compromise, and, or writers, for the Writers Union. I don't think that that protection was held up at the last negotiations, and I think that we're gonna see the ramifications of that, you know, unfortunately.

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's scary, is that ultimately economics has a major impact on the decisions that they make. And it's way cheaper to do it that way. It's way cheaper to use AI to write things than screenwriters, especially really talented screenwriters. Even though it's kind of drawing on the past creative work of really talented screenwriters.

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  They don't get compensated for it. I think ultimately, people are going to want and appreciate something that's made by a human being. Because it's one of the things, it's what we really like, not just be entertained, we really love the fact that someone made something.

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  Well, my girlfriend, Reed Moreno, has been advocating for a seal to be put on projects that are made without AI.

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  That's a great idea.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  That is a very good idea.

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  I think that's a great idea.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  I like that a lot. I think, I think, yeah, instead of like the parental warning.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  AI-free.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, AI-free, right?

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Speaker 02

  No GMO foods, bitch.

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  There's something to that, I think that's a great idea, actually. That, I think that might be the way, that might be the solution, is a seal. Yeah, I like that a lot. Makes sense. The people, you know, when you see a great something that someone made, what, what, one of the things that you really like about it is that it came from a human being's creativity.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Like, did you see Obsession?

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  It's fucking great. It's so good. It's so crazy and so creepy and so weird and, and so brilliant. And like, no one in it is famous, and it's phenomenal. And it, and it's really original and creepy. And one of the things I loved is like, this is, what is he, like, 25 or something like that? The director? Yeah. Oh, he's 25 years old.

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Who, who, you know, had done a bunch of YouTube stuff.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  I love it. It's a complete accident.

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  Huge hit.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  Has this amazing idea, and you got these people who, they're relatively unknown, but really talented.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  But we're craving that.

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  We don't want the formula.

• 1:42:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  We never have wanted the formula. And it's so maddening to try to set a movie up right now in Hollywood. Because what they want is they want someone, an actor, that's worth $20 million, and they'll give you $10 million to do the film. You get the guy that, that they normally would have to pay $20 million, and you get him to do your film for, you know, $300,000, you got a film.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Good luck.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  There's no gamblers anymore.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  There's no risk takers. When I was coming up, you know, you had these guys that like, actually, Joe, you know, Joe Roth gave me the money to do Cradle of Rock, this, you know, and he says, it was basically like, "Here's the, here you go, kid, do it." I'm like, "Really? I get to do this?" Well, you know, I wound up with, you know, final cut and everything. They used to do that. They used to invest in the risk, right? Because only, only will the risk produce something genuine and new and fresh. If you don't gamble, and you're measured, and you're on a formula, and you got your stars, it's gonna, the audience is gonna know it.

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  They, they, they know it's, "Oh, this is prepackaged and preprogrammed for my demographic."

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  And I kind of resent it.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  You know? Whereas something like that obsession is like, coming out of left field, no one is predicting it, programming it, it's just an accident. And people love it.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  That's what is exciting about, you know? It's like when you're trying a new material in a, in a club, and you're like, "I don't know if it's gonna work, but I'm gonna fucking do it." And it gets the laugh. That's, that thrill is what it's all about, right? That's the, that's the moment where you go, "I gambled and it paid off."

• 1:44:34Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  That's, that, I don't know how much we have that experience anymore in, in Hollywood.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Do you think it's just because of the extreme cost that's involved? I mean, just to promote a film, like, if you have a film and it's got a budget, like, especially, I think, is that, it's probably why so many superhero movies get greenlit, right? Because it's one of the only gambles, like, if you're gambling on an Avengers movie, like, you can't miss. Get the Hulk to smash a bunch of shit, Captain America comes in, you're good. Like, this is, you're good, you're gonna make your money back. And so you kind of have to, you know? Like, if you're a money person, if you're not a creative person, you're just a money person who happens to be in the movie business, which I'm sure a lot of them are.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  They're just looking at it as a return on investment.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, you know, that's always been that way to some degree. But I don't know, I don't know why it became such a risk to try new stuff. I mean, because they're not putting that much money into it. You know, those Marvel movies, they're costing $250 million, $200 million to produce.

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:45:43Speaker 03

  There's independent filmmakers that are proven independent filmmakers that are asking for like, $5 million, $4 million to do a film? So if they put some advertisement in it, maybe it's gonna cost them $14 million, all told? And, you know, can they make that back? Is the marketplace gonna support that? Who knows? I, I wouldn't want to be an investor, but I also, you know? I, I, I have a nostalgia for a time when Robert Altman could make a film, you know?

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  And it could just blow people's minds. And then the next film he made, you know, as he would gleefully tell you, "They're gonna hate this one," you know? And I love that, you know? That, and people would, either you love it or hate it, but he was making his own films. He was making distinctive films that were him, yeah.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  Is it more difficult or easier to get a film released today if you make it yourself?

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Because you don't have distribution, really. So, you know, I suppose in the future, there's gonna be some form of distribution that will be more egalitarian, but right now, it's a huge risk.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  What it, how does distribution work? Like, say if you decided you're gonna get a bunch of investors together and put together a film, do you have to get distribution before you even start producing?

• 1:47:11Speaker 03

  Yes, you, you have to have foreign sales in place.

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  Whoa. Foreign sales?

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, I think basically, the, the economic model right now is those, the investors want to be paid and not be losing money by the time they start shooting. In other words, they're not gonna lose money. They've already sold it for more than they've paid. And, and so there's really no risk, no gamble. Then, if the movie catches fire at a film festival, then they'll put the money into advertising. If it doesn't catch fire at a film festival, or with critics, they'll just, you know, okay, I already made my money, you know, we'll just sell it to, you know, DVDs, whatever.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  God, what a fucking shitty environment to create something.

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  It's hard, it's hard. Yeah, my, my gal's struggling with that right now. I checked out of that hotel a, a while back, you know, I was like, I, I don't want my heart broken like that. So I've just been doing things on my own. I've been producing things on my own, shooting them, editing them. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this website, was because I've got all this stuff that is unreleased, and just gonna start releasing it slowly.

• 1:48:25Speaker 02

  Is that more satisfying, to do it that way?

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  No, it's more satisfying to go to Cannes and win best actor. I mean, much more satisfying. When you have a machine behind you that's supporting it, it's great, you know, Mystic River, you know, that, that kind of like, you have Warner Brothers, like, we love this film, we're gonna make sure that people see it. That's what you need, you need your, your sponsors that, that are, that get it, that want people to see it, that see the value of it, and they'll put money into advertising, and that's a great experience to be in. The other thing is just, you know, pretty lonely, it's just, you know, you're trying your best. I was in three movies after I won the Oscar for Mystic River, that I've considered three of the best movies of my career, but nobody's seen them.

• 1:49:12Speaker 03

  This is The Secret Life of Words, Code 46, and Catch, Catch, Catch a Fire. And they're all excellent movies, but they came at a time that where, you know, the producers or the people that were distributing them didn't really wanna risk the, the money that would take.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  See, that's where there's a room for like a Siskel and Ebert type character today, that can find those films and say, hey, this one slipped under the radar, but this is really, an, an actual person that's a giant movie buff, that can go back and watch these, and comment on them, and we don't really, back then, Siskel and Ebert were the guys. If they gave you two thumbs down, you were fucked.

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  You were fucked.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  And, you know, they're very catty with each other, it was like, it was a fun thing, it's fun to watch the outtakes, how much those guys actually didn't get along.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I was lucky with them, they, they gave me great reviews.

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  It was good, they had good taste.

• 1:50:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, they did, and they loved film.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  Yes, they clearly loved film, and they loved all aspects of it, and they would talk about with great understanding and great passion, the subtleties of the performances, and what really, and how it was put together, even they talk about the score, you know.

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they'd spend like fifteen minutes on each film, too, which was, never happened, these days.

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  And it was a hugely successful show, which is like, really confusing, why there's not something like that today.

• 1:50:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  Because there's so much content today, if you were like, it's not like, what's out in the movies right now, like, today, fucking, there's a million shows that are streaming, there's, there's so much shit going on, there's so much content, that if you had a trusted source, you know, a person who's like, a, a real good critic of stuff, who really, not even a critic, an appreciator is a better word, like, someone who's a real passionate enthusiast of film, and of, you know, different creative works, that could just talk about something, and recommend stuff.

• 1:51:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, but then there's the burnout of that, too, like, you know, I would talk to some of these guys, and they'd be like, you know, for every one of those good films, we have to see, like, ten dreck, you know, and the time spent watching these things, kind of mind-numbingly painful for some of these people. You know, imagine having to, you know, weed through the muck to get to the gems.

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  I guess, but can't you just walk out of the film? Like, just like you walk out of a movie theater, and you're like, this movie sucks, I've done that a few times.

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  It's a boring, it's a terrible place to be.

• 1:51:51Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  You're like, I can't believe I'm leaving.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  Hard to do in a live theater, though, because when, when they know you're there.

• 1:51:56Speaker 02

  Right, that's different, yeah. But if you're, if you're watching it at home, I, I mean, it's really what you're trying to do, if you, you wanna be the one of the person that says, this is the worst fucking movie I've ever seen in my life, and that's what you're doing. But if you wanna be a person who's just an enthusiast of great stuff, and just keep it on the positive side, there's so much great stuff to review, and so many great things from the past that people haven't seen before, that you could, you sort of turn people on to.

• 1:52:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, oh, that'd be great.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  It's kinda weird that there's not someone like that right now.

• 1:52:27Speaker 03

  It is weird, it is weird. I think maybe you should, you should do that, produce that.

• 1:52:32Speaker 02

  No, I'm busy.

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  But I mean, it just doesn't even make sense, that there's so many different, like, there's so much content, but yet there's not that one thing that was a really big part of the movie experience when we were younger.

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the Fri, you know, that idea that there's some exciting movie coming out on Friday, and we're gonna go to it.

• 1:52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was huge, that was huge, when a movie was coming out, like, I guess you have it right now with The Odyssey, like, a lot of people are, it's like, one of those movies that's so big, people are scrambling to go see it in the movie theaters, and it's getting people excited about it, along with a lot of the culture war controversies that, everybody that I know that's seen it, I haven't seen it yet, it says, fucking throw all that away, the movie's amazing.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  That's what I hear.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  They just like, it's almost like a good way to bait people into getting really, you know, confrontational about it.

• 1:53:26Speaker 03

  Aren't you getting tired of that, though?

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, real tired of it, yeah.

• 1:53:29Speaker 03

  Like, oh, it's not correct, you know, and it's just, I'm, I'm tired of it from both sides, I don't wanna, I don't wanna hear judgment.

• 1:53:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  I just, I, I'm, help me, I, I don't, I don't, I don't want to be in the middle of this fight constantly, you know? It's the only, I, I feel like this is, again, what we were talking about before, you know, it's the, as long as we're fighting with each other.

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Speaker 03

  And then we're fighting about films that are coming out, I was like, come on, guys, calm down, calm down.

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  Like, I don't care, it's just, is it entertaining? Is it good? Doesn't it have to be correct? Doesn't mean anything to me. There's never been a time in history where correct was important to me.

• 1:54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, or indicative of great art.

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  Right, it's, just make it good, and by all accounts, everyone that I know that's seen the movie says it's fucking incredible.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  I'm gonna try to see it soon, but the culture war part of it is like, at the very least, it got people excited to see it. And either to hate it, or, but I know a lot of people that wanted to go hate it, and, because they were upset, you know, that Elliot Page played this person.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  I understand that, I just.

• 1:54:36Speaker 02

  Helen of Troy's a black lady, like, ugh, who fucking cares?

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  It doesn't matter.

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  Not only that, it's a made up story, like.

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  Exactly, it's a myth to begin with.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it apparently might actually be based on a real place, though. You know, they used to think that Troy was not a real place, and then they discovered it. I think that was, was it in the seventies? When did they discover Troy? Because they used to think that it was completely mythical, that it was just fiction, a work of fiction, and then they found the actual real city, and they're like, oh, like, that's the weird thing about really old stories, is that, like, there's so, it's so ambiguous as to what was the root, what was, what was the origin of this story? Was this a real event, a real place?

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  Have you ever stood on the stage of an old Roman amphitheater?

• 1:55:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  That's something else.

• 1:55:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  There's history in those stones.

• 1:55:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  And, you know, we were doing a show over in Lyon, France, in one of those theaters, and we found something out, because we were doing rehearsal, and when you're talking to the other actor like this, you can't hear it out there at all.

• 1:55:49Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  And it's, so it told us that, that what they were doing was this, you know, back in the old days.

• 1:55:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  They had to perform out, because you wouldn't be able to hear if you were doing realistically talking to someone making eye contact.

• 1:56:02Speaker 02

  That's what's weird about early film, is that early film, you have stage actors who are used to doing it with no microphones, projecting now doing it on film, so it looks odd.

• 1:56:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:14Speaker 02

  It's like there was this transitionary period, and then Brando came along, and Brando just did it real, and everybody's like, what the fuck is he doing?

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:23Speaker 02

  Like, he's acting like a real person, this is crazy.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, him and Montgomery Clift, too.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that was a, you know, huge step forward for all of us.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  That, to take the onus off the theatrical and get more into the real, you know.

• 1:56:40Speaker 02

  And again, if you really think about it, not a whole lot of time between, like, the invention of film, and then movie stars, and all these things happening, like, this is a completely new cultural thing, like, from the early, like, what was the first film? Like, the first film with sound?

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  What year was that?

• 1:57:02Speaker 03

  That was for a sound film.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  1920s? Seven, twenty-seven, twenty-nine. Wow, so think of that. So you have from twenty-seven and then just a few decades later, you have On the Waterfront, you have The Hustler, you have these incredible movies that they just have to figure out on the fly.

• 1:57:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 02

  You know, how to, Citizen Kane, and they have to figure out on the fly how to do this.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  But also, if you ever watched the first films, like the silent films, and the ability to tell a story without words.

• 1:57:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:34Speaker 03

  Which was a whole other, you know, talent. I mean, you watch those Chaplin films, it's like, that man was insanely talented.

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  Well, Nosferato, the original Nosferato.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  I love that film.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  I saw that at a public library in San Francisco when I was a kid. They had a night where they played it, and I went to see it. I was like, this is nuts.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  Incredible, incredible film.

• 1:57:56Speaker 02

  What year was that film? Twenty-two, nineteen twenty-two. Nineteen twenty-two.

• 1:58:00Speaker 03

  And then Metropolis was around that.

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's a crazy movie.

• 1:58:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that old stuff.

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great. Those movies are great. And at the time, you gotta imagine, like, the experience of going to see that where no one had seen movies before. This is like a new thing.

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  You're seeing things moving around on a giant screen, like, this is mad.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  Alchemy.

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:20Speaker 03

  Crazy magic, Satan.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  And you had to read what they were saying to each other on the screen.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  And then music would play. They had a guy with an organ that was playing music along with it, like, what?

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, super cool.

• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  It is super cool.

• 1:58:34Speaker 03

  I would love to, like, if you could time travel and go to one of those.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  Like, movie theaters back then. There is, there he is.

• 1:58:42Speaker 02

  I mean, one of the best vampire movies of all time, too.

• 1:58:45Speaker 03

  And so, the lighting is just so good.

• 1:58:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  German expressionist. Did you ever see M?, Peter Laurie?

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  It's just M?

• 1:58:59Speaker 03

  It's called M, yeah.

• 1:58:59Speaker 02

  The letter M?

• 1:59:01Speaker 03

  Isn't it M?

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  Nineteen thirty-one.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, nineteen thirty-one.

• 1:59:03Speaker 02

  No, I never saw it.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  That's really good.

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  What is it? What's it about?

• 1:59:06Speaker 03

  About a murderer that's stalking a bunch of people. Yeah, I was a huge fan of that whole genre of filmmaking.

• 1:59:17Speaker 02

  Well, there's something so exciting about it, because it, like, when you limit the sensory input, like, you have to read the words, and you want, it's all black and white, and there's music playing. It's like, it's a totally different thing that you're taking in.

• 1:59:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  You know, it's like, it's almost like half reading, half watching.

• 1:59:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:34Speaker 02

  You know, like, you're reading, like, you don't hear their voices. You have to create their voices in your head.

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're feeling in a different way, too.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Speaker 03

  Because of the, you know, it's black and white, so it's not real, but it is real, and so, yeah, it's a great, great form. We should have more of those.

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  It's just hard to imagine that this is only a hundred years old, that from there to now, this is a hundred years. It's a blink of an eye.

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:01Speaker 02

  And when you think about human history, like, when we think about, like, the fifteen hundreds versus the sixteen hundreds, we kind of think it's basically the same. If you're born in fifteen twenty or sixteen twenty, it's fucking exactly the same.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  But if you're born in nineteen twenty or twenty twenty, it's a fucking completely different world you're living in.

• 2:00:18Speaker 03

  Huge.

• 2:00:18Speaker 02

  Nineteen twenty, you have Nosferato. Twenty twenty-six, you have The Odyssey, you know?

• 2:00:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:00:24Speaker 02

  You have Dune, you have these insane films.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  Right, not to mention the technology you personally possess.

• 2:00:31Speaker 02

  Yes, right.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  In your pocket.

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  Right, or any moment in time, you could stream a movie.

• 2:00:36Speaker 03

  I could see Nosferatu right now on here.

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, or the Robert Eggers one, the new one.

• 2:00:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Which is fucking fantastic. But it's just instantaneous. Everything's instantaneous, and everything's right there for you. So it's great in that sense, that you will be entertained. There's something to watch, no matter what, but you're missing something on the, like, the specialness of, like, having to go out and go to a place, even go to a video store, and go get it, you know?

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  There's something missing.

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  I think, I think that that's really at the core of it, though, is the, you know, I've decided this is what I'm going to do today, the whole thing, you know?

• 2:01:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  Like, pre, pre-this.

• 2:01:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  Like, I am going to be an active participant in my life. It's when I first moved to LA that I first understood this, in the late seventies. LA, as opposed to New York where I grew up, LA, you have to make a choice to find your fun. New York, it'll drop in your lap, right? If you walk down the street, something will present itself. But in LA, when I first moved out there, I realized, you gotta drive there. You gotta drive and find your fun. And you have to be an active participant in your, in your cultural life. And once I understood that about LA, I could understand how to live there. It was, it

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  was at first very frustrating, because it was very boring, right? It wasn't happening, you know, when I walked out on the street. There was no street to walk out on. It was just too big. But it's that kind of, I have chosen this weekend to drive thirty minutes in that direction to see this punk rock band, right? And I will be an active participant in that. And once you do that, you're liberated. Then you, then you know anything's possible. But now, it's like, I want it in my backyard.

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  Not only that, now, that thing interrupts you while you're taking something else in.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:02:43Speaker 02

  It constantly wants your attention. It's like a puppy. It's like, woof, woof. You're like, hey, hey, hey, watch the movie.

• 2:02:49Speaker 03

  I want to be fed.

• 2:02:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's constantly demanding your attention, or at least enticing you to take a look at it, vibrating in your pocket, you know?

• 2:02:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Have you ever thought about trashing it?

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  I've gotten off social media for weeks at a time. I've done that, but I need it for work too much. I need it for emails. I need to, I can't always just be in front of a laptop.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  Do you have a, like, a flip phone?

• 2:03:18Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 2:03:19Speaker 03

  I'm thinking about getting one.

• 2:03:21Speaker 02

  I have a computer that I write on that's not connected to anything. My writing computer is just a Lenovo ThinkPad. I never use it for anything other than writing. It does, if I go online, it's just to research something, like, ask a question, like, what is this? How's this work?

• 2:03:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:03:37Speaker 02

  It's never, I never surf the web. I don't look at any websites. I don't do anything with it.

• 2:03:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:03:42Speaker 02

  And that helps a lot for that. But for phones, I have too many friends that are sending me funny things. There's always, like, some funny thing, and I go, all right, I guess I'm back on Instagram, check it out. Like, oh, Jesus, this is crazy. There's too much coming at you. And the problem is, if I put it down, which I do often for, like, the whole day, when I pick it up, I've got seventy text messages to go through.

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  And then I don't respond to some, and some people get mad, and then, like, I'm sorry. It's like, it's too much.

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  There's too much coming in, and then there's so much, hey, look at this, hey, check this out, have you seen this? What do you think about that? You think this is real? You know?

• 2:04:24Speaker 03

  And then the people that you don't respond to can oftentimes take the lack of response as basically, basically you saying fuck you.

• 2:04:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  And it's not the case at all.

• 2:04:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:04:35Speaker 03

  You just don't have the time to do it.

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  And you read it, and you liked it, and you smiled, but you didn't put a smiley on it.

• 2:04:41Speaker 02

  Right, you have to put a little heart, you gotta double-click it.

• 2:04:44Speaker 03

  It's a very strange social dynamic, and it's, I'm not sure I, I'm very good at it.

• 2:04:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:04:51Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:04:51Speaker 02

  It's probably a good sign.

• 2:04:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. It demands too much. That's the problem. As much as it is interesting, if you have a wide social circle, it demands too much of your, if you have, you know, a hundred units of attention that you have for use throughout the day, it demands too many units.

• 2:05:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:05:09Speaker 02

  There's just too much coming at you.

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:11Speaker 02

  And it'll take away from other things that you do, and that's, that's a real problem.

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I like sitting in my garden.

• 2:05:19Speaker 02

  Is that your thing?

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 2:05:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have a really good, I've been gardening, yeah. That's, that's.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  It's a real thing.

• 2:05:26Speaker 03

  That's my peaceful place.

• 2:05:27Speaker 02

  That's a real thing. It's real. It's dirt.

• 2:05:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:29Speaker 02

  Real plant grows out, life comes from it.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  Yep. You can eat stuff from it.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you need stuff to do, right? You need a thing that can take you away from the other things.

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  Something to make more beautiful every day. Something to, you know, something to care for.

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  It's, you know, whether it's the gar- I have a garden in, in Los Angeles that, you know, I grow herbs. And I, you know, to walk down and put that, those herbs, those fresh herbs in the amulet you're making. You know, it's, it's, it's a small thing, but it's huge.

• 2:06:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:04Speaker 03

  And then I have, back east, I have, I planted a garden with my son this year. You know, like vegetable garden. And he's, you know, I haven't been there, but he's been saying the tomatoes are coming like crazy and the cucumbers and, you know, that's such a-

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, there you go. It's this, uh, it's a, I, I really love this. I love the idea that we can, you know, the earth has so much to offer us, you know? All it needs is water and sunlight and it'll produce all these beautiful things.

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  Well, there's built in human rewards for growing things too. There's a human reward system that we have had in our DNA for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. When you grow things and they, they produce fruit and they produce vegetables, like it's exciting.

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:54Speaker 02

  Cause you're gonna eat.

• 2:06:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  You're gonna survive.

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then when you, when you're doing your harvest in the fall, you, you have an abundance, right? And then I learned how to pickle.

• 2:07:04Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 2:07:05Speaker 03

  And that's a joy, cause now you're, now you're set for the winter, right? Now you got a refrigerator full of pickled stuff. And, um, uh, you know, to be able to bite into a crisp pickle that you grew as a cucumber in the summer in December. It's like, you know, this is how they survive, you know? This is those, you know, the storage of crops and how you, how you make them survive through the winter. It's a skill that, you know, uh, that, well, that's why we're still here.

• 2:07:39Speaker 02

  And then you find out that pickling and fermented foods and all these things are fantastic for your body.

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 2:07:45Speaker 02

  In a way that other foods just aren't.

• 2:07:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47Speaker 02

  And helps your microbiome and helps your gut.

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then you can, you know, use the extra pickle juice for a martini.

• 2:07:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:07:55Speaker 03

  And it's fantastic.

• 2:07:56Speaker 02

  Or you could just drink it.

• 2:07:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do that too.

• 2:07:58Speaker 02

  I actually buy pickle juice. I have a, a company that sells you these little packets of pickle juice and you drink it. Cause it's a probiotic beverage.

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have, I have many jars of, uh, pickles that are, there's no more pickles in, but I keep the juice for, uh, for drinking. It's, uh, and you know, fermented foods and, uh, you know, I've learned, you know, so much about, um, the, uh, the gut biome and, and, and how to make that healthier and, uh, uh, all these challenges we're up against with all the poisons in our food and how to get around them and how to clean, clean, clean yourself out. And I just did a cleanse, uh, uh, one of those master cleanses I just did 14 days on. Where you don't eat anything for 14 days and it's amazing how, how great you feel at the end of it.

• 2:08:48Speaker 02

  14 whole days, no food at all?

• 2:08:50Speaker 03

  No food at all, no.

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  Wow, what, what did you drink, water?

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  It was lemon juice, cayenne pepper and, uh, and, and maple syrup. And that, that'll get you through the day. And then, but every morning you're doing a purge, right? So you're cleaning out, you're cleaning every, all the poisons out. I do that a couple of times a year.

• 2:09:08Speaker 02

  14 days is a long time with no food.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:09:11Speaker 02

  What's the first thing you eat when it was over?

• 2:09:13Speaker 03

  You gotta ease your way back in, like clear broth first, then soups, then vegetables, then get to the meat later.

• 2:09:21Speaker 02

  Over how long?

• 2:09:22Speaker 03

  About a week reentry.

• 2:09:23Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:09:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  I mean, you're eating, but you're not going for the steak first thing.

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 2:09:29Speaker 03

  You know, and so you have to kind of ease your system back into it.

• 2:09:33Speaker 02

  Do you experience mental clarity when you do that?

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  Total mental clarity.

• 2:09:36Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 2:09:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:38Speaker 02

  I've never done it. The most I've done is a day.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  First three days are tough, but then once you get past the third day, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty, the, your energy level is like constant throughout the day. And you can work, you, I, I play sports with it, you know, I, it's, it's, around 10 days, you should stop doing the physical stuff. Too much exertion. I can still take a bike ride and stuff, but-

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  But you were working out, three days of no food?

• 2:10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:09Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:10:10Speaker 03

  Um, you have to, you know, everyone's gonna have their own reaction, so, you know, I'm not advocating even to do it.

• 2:10:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:10:17Speaker 03

  Cause you know, I don't wanna be responsible for that, but for me personally, it's really helped. Because it also, it restarts your system. It basically, you get rid of toxins, uh, you're certainly not drinking, you're not doing any kind of abusive shit to yourself. And, uh, and basically your body is, is thanking you by the clarity it gives you. Like you, you're really, like, and the other thing that happens is I'll just start cleaning shit, right? So, you know, when I'm on a cleanse, I'm gonna clean a closet. Cause you're not only cleaning yourself, you're cleaning the, your environment around you. And, um, it's, uh, I, you know, I, I just, I just did it two weeks ago, so, yeah.

• 2:11:01Speaker 02

  How do you decide when to do it?

• 2:11:03Speaker 03

  Usually when you've been a little indulgent and you're not feeling too good. And, uh, you know, you put on a little weight and just like, I gotta, I don't feel good, I wanna, you know, clean out.

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  You must lose a ton of weight doing that.

• 2:11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Speaker 02

  How much have you lost doing 14 days?

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  25 pounds.

• 2:11:24Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:11:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, about two a day.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:29Speaker 02

  And then, so then your body's running completely on ketones, right? Cause your body's running on fat.

• 2:11:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  And so your body's burning fat and ketones, when you run on, I've, I've been on ketogenic diets in the past and then I've been on the carnivore diet, which does the exact same thing, where your, your mental clarity is just so much better. Like everything just runs smooth. It's just like you, you're, like you were saying, you have the, this level, flat energy throughout the day. There's no highs and lows, like crashing after a big meal.

• 2:11:59Speaker 03

  Or caffeine bumps or, yeah, all that stuff.

• 2:12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, but staying up till, you know, midnight and fine, the energy's fine. And you'll sleep less too, you need less sleep for some reason, I don't know why, I think.

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• 2:13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:58Speaker 02

  Let it relax. I mean, it's constantly work, especially if you eat all throughout the day. If you're a snacker and then you have lit at night, you have a little bite to eat, wake up in the morning, you have breakfast, like your digestive system's just constantly grinding out this food and digesting everything.

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, the, the real, the real poison for me is, is sugar.

• 2:14:19Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:14:19Speaker 03

  You know, it manifested in alcohol for a while, but I don't drink that much anymore. But sugar is the, is the, is the big-

• 2:14:28Speaker 02

  For everybody.

• 2:14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a tough one. It's a, it's a very addictive and, and you know, you think, oh, it feels great when you, yeah, first have it, but then it makes you pay, so.

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  Well, it's also with modern diets, like what, the, the kind of sugar that we have available today, really never existed in the past before.

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 2:14:48Speaker 02

  You know, for most of human history, if you wanted something sweet, you had to eat fruit.

• 2:14:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  You know, and now all of a sudden you've, you got candy bars. You have stuff that comes to you in this insane form, where you have 100 grams of sugar in something that you can eat.

• 2:15:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:15:03Speaker 02

  Like that's nuts.

• 2:15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:04Speaker 02

  You know, or a drink, you know, you get one of those, what is it, Baskin Robbins Blizzard? Is that the one that does that?

• 2:15:09Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 2:15:10Speaker 02

  That thing?

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  Those things will mess you up.

• 2:15:12Speaker 02

  Oh, you get a headache after you're done.

• 2:15:14Speaker 03

  I know, it's like, it's like alcohol.

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  What's that expression? Uh, uh, candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker.

• 2:15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just, you know, it's, liquor's just concentrated sugar. It's just like, you know, um, but, uh, you know, I, I try not to be too much of a zealot about any of this stuff. Um, but I, I have, like my mom, uh, was introducing us to natural food in late 60s. So she, she, she had read a book called Poisons on Our Food and started taking processed food out of our diet.

• 2:15:52Speaker 02

  Oh wow.

• 2:15:53Speaker 03

  White bread, this is early on, like 1967, yeah. So she, she was a real, uh, you know, um-

• 2:16:02Speaker 03

  She really was a homeopath before it was called a homeopath. And wound up getting cancer and was told she had to have chemo and said, no, I'm not doing it and kicked it herself, you know, with changing what she was putting in her body. And so I've always, you know, had had her as a kind of guidepost for my health. She used to always say the the body is a temple and that the body can heal anything. And a lot of it has to do with how you approach it in your mind. And if you believe that you can heal yourself, you can heal yourself.

• 2:16:43Speaker 02

  Is she getting this from books?

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  I think she got it from a combination of books and her faith in, you know, Catholicism. I think every every religion has a fasting day for some reason. That seems to be something that is common to all religion, that there's an it's important that you not eat one day a week. She wouldn't do that with us, you know, as kids, she wouldn't starve us for a day. But she did have a whole holistic approach to the way that she viewed illness. And I remember her drumming it into our heads that if you ever get told by a doctor anything, you have to challenge it.

• 2:17:30Speaker 03

  You go go to a different doctor and see if they say the same thing, always, always, always. She lost her father and her brother within the course of a year to medical malpractice.

• 2:17:41Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 2:17:42Speaker 03

  In the 50s. And so she had a serious distrust of the medical profession. And back then, it was like you there was no one even thought about suing for malpractice. It was like, that's the doctor, he's an authority figure, you can't mess with him, right? So she she always approached it with a healthy level of questioning whenever she was given advice by doctors.

• 2:18:07Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  And it's interesting, she, you know, she's always been, you know, I've always kind of wondered how she would have reacted to this recent thing and all that. But I I have, have you ever done ayahuasca?

• 2:18:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:18:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:28Speaker 02

  But I've done DMT, which is the that's the actual compound that's active in ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT.

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I was, you know, when they tell you to go in, when I did it, they tell you to go in with an intention. And my intention was to, you know, I was frustrated with feeling anger about what was going on in the world. And I said, I want to release that. I don't want to be consumed by that anger. And so I wound up in this, you know, the heavy duty, you know, journey that ayahuasca is, and my mom showed up.

• 2:19:14Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And she's I it's not like you actually hear a voice, but you hear a voice, right? You basically, if she's there, you know it's her, she's saying something to you. And what she said was, you're injured. You're a warrior and you're injured and you need to rest, but the fight's not over.

• 2:19:40Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  That's that was what she that's what she told me in response to my intention.

• 2:19:49Speaker 02

  Whoa. What were you battling?

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  I was battling my frustration with the dissolution of society, people being angry at each other over ridiculous things, long friendships being affected, people being canceled for expressing their opinion, all this stuff. And I I I wanted out, right? I wanted to be absolved of that. I didn't want to be engaged in it. And what she told me in in the course of this thing, believe it or not, you know, I understand people will be, oh, that's woo, and you're just tripping and whatever. But I but I definitely felt her presence there. It was no doubt it was her. I went through a whole journey with her.

• 2:20:39Speaker 03

  I saw things from our lives together. And I there was one moment where I was, you know, I was always been curious about something that happened in kindergarten or something, I don't remember. And she, you know, at one point, I felt her presence and she said, you were right about that, I'm sorry we didn't listen to you, you know, and this kind of really profoundly deep experience. And but at the end of it, I felt completely lighter and completely, you know, relieved to have been through the experience and a great, great connection with my mom, you

• 2:21:22Speaker 03

  know, just like a beautiful, like, ah, she she gets it, she she's still around. I've had quite a few experiences in this realm. And my mom, in fact, you know, she she my father died when he was 80 and my mom was 78. And she wasn't sick, but my dad had been dying for a while and we all got down to say goodbye to him, they were living in Mexico at the time. And we went to the funeral and my mom was very stoic and and sang very strongly my father's favorite song at the funeral. And she didn't cry and we were all concerned about her. We hired a couple of people for when we left to take care of her.

• 2:22:07Speaker 03

  And she was really agitated the last night and she was, I was there and she said, you know, I don't I don't trust these people. I don't know if they're going to talk about you or, you know, and your fame and all that stuff. I said, Mom, don't worry about it. You know, they're just here to get you stuff if you need it, don't worry about it. She I go off, she wakes up the next morning, she says to my sisters who are still in the house with her, everything I said last night, don't worry about it. And they said, what what happened, Mom? She said, I had a dream. She said, I was in my childhood home in Westwood, California. And I was something in my living room and I couldn't look at it, it was this stone figure, I couldn't look at it. It was disturbing me, I didn't want to look at it.

• 2:22:51Speaker 03

  But then I look out the bay window and then coming down the street, I see, led by my first friend in life, a group of people coming towards the house. And it didn't make any sense, there were people from my childhood, people from my coral society, people from my work, but they were all there and they all came to the door. And when they showed up, I realized everything was going to be fine. And I realized, oh, my God, that was the departed that had come to say it's going to be okay.

• 2:23:18Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:23:19Speaker 03

  And so my sisters left. Three days, four days later, we got a phone call, my mom has died. She wasn't sick. And then my sister talks to the woman that was taking care of her. And she said, it was really strange, you know, the night before she died, she said, he's here. And they said, who's here? And she said, Gil, my husband, he's here, he's come to get me. And they said, no, Mary, he's not, he's not there. And she said, oh, no, he most certainly is. And he looks very strong, because he died feeble. Goes to bed that night and passes.

• 2:24:03Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:24:05Speaker 03

  So even the most cynical person in the world that doesn't believe in afterlife or anything, how do you explain that? How do you explain whatever chemicals were going on in her brain to bring her to that passing where she was going to join the person that she loved her entire life? That's a beautiful thing, regardless of how you look at it.

• 2:24:25Speaker 02

  I don't think there's any value in being cynical about these experiences. And even the ayahuasca experience, like this idea that you're hallucinating and that that's what this is.

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  Doesn't matter. It's the same experience. If you really did make contact with your mother in the afterlife and you really did have this communication versus whatever the fuck hallucination means, I don't know what you, what do you mean by that? It's the same experience.

• 2:24:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

  So like, there's no value in being cynical about it. Like, you get a, you get, there's something that you experience from it that's tangible. It's, it's real, you feel it, it changes your perspective, it changes the way you feel about wor- the world.

• 2:25:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:11Speaker 02

  Like, that's a real thing.

• 2:25:12Speaker 03

  That's a real thing.

• 2:25:13Speaker 02

  Just because you can't put a measuring tape to it, or you can't put it on a scale, don't say it's not real.

• 2:25:19Speaker 03

  There's so many ways of being that we haven't even studied or have no idea about. How we, how, how people can communicate over two thousand miles. Like, a mother wakes up in the middle of the night, knowing something's wrong with their child, and five minutes later, the fucking phone rings.

• 2:25:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  What the hell is that?

• 2:25:35Speaker 02

  Or twins.

• 2:25:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:36Speaker 02

  Twins who have some sort of very strange connection with each other. Yeah.

• 2:25:40Speaker 03

  When I was, uh, my, my grandfather, who I was very close to, he, uh, he was, uh, had been dead for two months, and I had a dream about him. And he, and I woke up like startled, and I heard his voice, you know, and he said basically, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it." And I didn't know what the hell it meant, but it was very clear. It was like, "I'll take care of it."

• 2:26:04Speaker 03

  Fifteen minutes later, I get a phone call from Susan. And my son, Miles, who was like six years old at the time, had run out into the middle of Seventh Avenue, and she said it was the weirdest thing. Some, it was like something stopped him, like, like that, and a car goes behind him and a car goes in front of him.

• 2:26:26Speaker 03

  And I was like, "I know exactly what just happened."

• 2:26:31Speaker 03

  He, he was, he, whatever that is, whatever energy he could muster in, in whatever phase of being he was, he fucking saved my son's life. Heroically. I'm, I'm no doubt about that. Why would he show up and say that to me? He said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it."

• 2:26:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:26:52Speaker 03

  So I, I, I totally believe this stuff. I, I believe that we, that, that life, death, there's other planes of existence um, that we can get to through various means. It doesn't have to be ayahuasca. It doesn't, it, there are, if you're open to um, listening in different ways, there are great things available for you. It's like the idea of an accident. Is it an accident that you run into that person? That you've been wanting to talk to, and all of a sudden now they're right in front of you?

• 2:27:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:27:27Speaker 03

  You know, that's not an accident. It's, it's divine whatever. You know, whatever the divine is for you. It, it's, there's, there's another level of energy that is going around. Uh, you know, the, we haven't even studied what, how the heart communicates. Uh, you know, there's that Spanish or Portuguese cardiologist that talks about the realm of communication in, in, in the electromagnetic field of the heart and what that means and how the heart can, can communicate and has in parts of the heart have more neurons than parts of the brain and

• 2:28:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:28:05Speaker 03

  What is that all about? And it's such, we don't, we don't think that way. You know, we don't want to experience, we, we have a, it's a heart, is a meat pump, and that's, it just runs in your entire life.

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:20Speaker 03

  Uh, but it doesn't, this guy's suggesting, "No, it's electromagnetic energy. It's what makes us live longer if we're with someone else, or with a pet," you know, the, some, that people that are isolated and alone are hurting, and they're not having that electromagnetic connection with other people. That's why we crave crowds. That's why we wanna be in, you know, groups of people. It's a natural thing. It, it keeps us alive. It keeps us activated in a community.

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  Um, and, but we don't study that. We don't study what that is, and I think it's kinda magical.

• 2:28:53Speaker 02

  That's why solitary confinement is such a cruel punishment.

• 2:28:56Speaker 03

  So cruel, yeah.

• 2:28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that think it's actual torture.

• 2:29:00Speaker 03

  Of course it is.

• 2:29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29:02Speaker 03

  Of course it is. You, you've got nothing to interact with. And, um, it's why the, you know, that's why that lockdown is cruel, you know, that, we, you know, the, just the scope of that loneliness was, is just immense, you know, that some people had to deal with.

• 2:29:20Speaker 02

  Especially people that were already struggling. When some people were already filled with anxiety, and they already had suffered from depression, and they were already weird socially. Then all of a sudden, they're just completely isolated from everyone else for a year, or a year and a half.

• 2:29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:33Speaker 02

  Depending on where you lived. So it's weird, this desire that people have to define things as real or not real. And, and also to let everyone know, "Oh, I'm not fallen for that nonsense." You know, but, God, I mean, at one point in time, do you have to say, "Well, all these stories, all these experiences that people have, maybe there's something to it, and maybe this closed-mindedness is not benefit, benefiting me in any way."

• 2:29:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's magic.

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:02Speaker 03

  Magic in the world. I mean, it, it, there's this old way of thinking. I, I became, do you know what the, um, uh, there's a book called The Nature of Things by a guy named Lucretius, written in three hundred fifty B.C. And it's Epicureanism. And Epicureanism now is about, you know, you like food, you like wine, whatever. Back then, it was like, the whole purpose of this philosophy, or religion, whatever you wanna call it, was that, that, that all of life is a miracle. All, everything that you're seeing in front of you is the first time it's happening and will never happen again. It's a collision of atoms in a particular way. They don't call them atoms, but they call them the smallest particles

• 2:30:46Speaker 03

  that create unique experiences every moment of your life. And the whole purpose of life is to seek the pleasure of that and avoid pain. And the pain can be either living isolated, or without the idea of magic, or indulging in something where it creates pain. Too much pleasure creates pain. But this philosophy and this beautiful long-form poem, uh, written by Lucretius in three fifty B.C. is all about magic. It's all about this idea that, "Look how lucky we are to wake up in the morning and see that frickin' cactus blooming," you know?

• 2:31:30Speaker 03

  That's like, when we get so inured from that, so, you know, anesthetized from the magic, and it's all just the doldrum, and every day is the same. That, that's robbing yourself of so much, right? That, that the idea that, "What if you just woke up and said, 'Hey, it's fucking magic?'" It's, "This is amazing. First of all, I'm breathing. Second of all, look at that sun coming in the, the window. And this is gonna be an amazing day." Instead of like, "Ah, shit, I gotta get up and, you know, do my fucking thing," you know? Like, no, I,

• 2:32:10Speaker 02

  It's also relative, because if, if you were dying in a hospital, and you had this opportunity, say, "Okay, I'm, all you have to do is say these magic words, and you'll be transported back to health in your home with a completely new perspective, and a completely new appreciation for just being healthy and alive."

• 2:32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:31Speaker 02

  It's just, it's just hard for people to shift that perspective and think like that all the time. But if you could force yourself, just as an exercise, to say, "I am so lucky to be above ground. I am so lucky to be healthy and mobile if I am, and I could just go do what I wanna do and live my life, and, and go say hi to people I love."

• 2:32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:52Speaker 02

  Appreciate it.

• 2:32:53Speaker 03

  And the idea that you can also, even if things are bad, that if you approach life that way, then you, there is a possibility of making everything better, and it has to do with humility. It has to do with being able to say, "Uh, I can forgive somebody for something. I can also ask forgiveness for something I've done." These, it's all about humility. It's all about a hum, uh, humility in the face of not only your own personal experience, but in how you view the universe, like, um, I, we're, either I'm lucky to be here, or, uh, "What a blessing to be able to have this life I've had."

• 2:33:34Speaker 03

  I wanna give, and I wanna, I had this beautiful experience when I was going through my, you know, one of my darkest periods. This woman showed up, and uh, I'd met her once in my life, this Tibetan woman, she's a great singer, and she, she, uh, I, I, I said, "Why are you here?" She said, "You're in trouble. I'm gonna take care of you." And I, I didn't even know her, and I, I said, "All right, okay," and so she's,

• 2:34:07Speaker 03

  she did this Reiki healing on me, she sang, she wrote incense, and I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why she was there. She makes me a, a meal that evening, the first evening. She's done all this healing on me. And she says, uh, you know, she makes the meal I'm eating. I finish eating, I start taking the dishes, right? She says, "What are you doing?" I said, "Well, you cooked all clean." She says, "Sit down." That's the problem with you people in the West. It's all a business deal. "I'm doing this for you. Can you just accept that? I'm taking care of you. Can you accept that?" And she said, "You will never know how to give love until you know how to receive love."

• 2:34:52Speaker 03

  And it blew my mind, 'cause at the time, I, I realized I was engaged in that kind of transactional way of looking at relationships. That the idea that giving completely is so much better, you actually get more out of it than you do receiving it. And once I understood that, it kinda transformed everything for me, because, and that was a person that was a total stranger, and she showed up just out of nowhere. And I said, finally, at the end of it, I said, "Why are you here?" And she said, "You have done good things for the world. We need you."

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  And she left.

• 2:35:43Speaker 03

  And, you know, that's...

• 2:35:44Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:35:45Speaker 03

  So, I'm... I... I didn't plan that. I didn't... There was... I had no idea that was gonna happen. But it made me realize, there are angels in this world. They are manifested as human beings, but there are certain kinds of people that are there for you if you are open for it. If you are closed off and cynical, you will not see your angels. But if you are, maybe sometimes, just completely wiped, and you have no... you know, you're just ready to receive it. And maybe, the fact that I was able to receive that, I think, really helped me.

• 2:36:29Speaker 03

  And helped me shift everything. It's always a struggle, of course. It doesn't... That lesson doesn't mean that I'm that way forever.

• 2:36:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  But it's a reminder. It's that there... that there is another energy in the world that is actually an energy of good. We are consumed by the bad, all the time.

• 2:36:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:36:52Speaker 03

  There's all these, you know, negative forces that are trying to bring us down. And I think that sometimes we get so defeated by those things that we are not open to the energy of the angels, the good. And when I say angels, I don't mean...

• 2:37:09Speaker 02

  I know what you mean.

• 2:37:10Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Super positive people. Like, something... Some pure expression of love and compassion and generosity.

• 2:37:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this is the real problem with social media, and algorithms in particular, is that it really highlights the things that make you upset.

• 2:37:28Speaker 03

  It does.

• 2:37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that kind of energy is... Like, really, is that... Is that affecting your everyday life? Well, it is if you dive into the negativity all day long, and you're engrossed in social media and getting upset about things, rather than experiencing the life that's actually in front of you. And in doing it from a positive perspective, and not concentrating on all these external things that could be making you angry, or making you frustrated, or filling you with anxiety. When you're actually poisoning yourself with that.

• 2:38:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, you are. And it's a constant battle, because that damn thing's buzzing all the time. But I have gotten better with it. I will not look at it first thing in the morning anymore.

• 2:38:13Speaker 02

  Well, it's much like we were talking about, like, film and records being a new thing. This is a really new thing. And this is very invasive. It's a very new thing and very invasive, and it's gonna take a while for people to figure out the right way and the wrong way to use it.

• 2:38:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:38:28Speaker 02

  And what are the ramifications and the consequences of using it incorrectly? You know, 'cause this... No one's teaching that. You know, they're not teaching children that in school. There should be a course on, this is the negative aspect of social media. These are the negative aspects of interaction. This is what it's doing to your consciousness. This is what it's doing to your focus. It's stealing your joy. It's stealing your appreciation of the moment.

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  Right. And it's leading you into conflict, constantly.

• 2:38:58Speaker 02

  Constantly.

• 2:38:59Speaker 03

  And, you know, that's a negative thing. That's a force of evil.

• 2:39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:39:06Speaker 03

  Strong word, but, you know...

• 2:39:08Speaker 02

  It's the right word, though.

• 2:39:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:10Speaker 02

  You know, it's... Again, there's these words: good, evil, angel, god. They fuck with people, because they're like, "Oh, what is that?" It's, I think, gotta kind of abandon that way of thinking, and just go, "Well, there's certainly positive and negative. There's certainly love and evil. Those are real things. And there's good. There's good in the world." And also, the more you concentrate on other things, the more your life is defined by those other things, whether it's good or bad. So if you're constantly thinking about bad things, like, well, you can't have a very loving and amazing life if you're constantly inundated with thoughts about negative things. And on the other side of it, if you're thinking in a positive way, and enjoying love and

• 2:39:52Speaker 02

  friendship and community, and just doing stuff that you actually find value in, well, this has gotta give you better energy. And also, the way you interact with other people will be different, so you'll affect the way they feel, and that'll have that butterfly effect out into the rest of the people they come in contact with.

• 2:40:09Speaker 03

  Not to mention, it's really good for your health.

• 2:40:11Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, like you were saying before, one of the worst things for your health is loneliness.

• 2:40:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. It'll kill ya.

• 2:40:18Speaker 02

  Tim Robbins. You're a cool motherfucker.

• 2:40:20Speaker 03

  Thank you, man.

• 2:40:21Speaker 02

  I enjoyed talking to you.

• 2:40:22Speaker 03

  I appreciate it.

• 2:40:23Speaker 02

  Great. Thank you very much.

• 2:40:25Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:40:26Speaker 02

  My pleasure. Goodbye.

• 2:40:28Speaker 03

  Bye.