#2565 - Michael Douglas

Michael Douglas is an actor, producer, writer, and philanthropist whose film and television credits include "Wall Street," "Fatal Attraction," "Basic Instinct," "Behind the Candelabra," and "The Kominsky Method." He has won two Academy Awards, multiple Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. He is also a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award and has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His new book, "One Helluva Ride," is available now.https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/michael-douglas/one-helluva-ride/9781538782224/https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000140/ Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Use code ROGAN at https://BlueChew.com to get 10% OFF + Free Overnight Shipping on your first order. Visit https://squarespace.com/ROGAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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

  Very nice to meet you, sir.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  I've been a fan for a long time.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, okay. Appreciate that.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Falling Down is one of my all-time favorite movies.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  That is such a crazy movie. I rewatched some scenes today, getting ready for it, and the scene where you confront the guy who's working on the highway and say, "There's nothing wrong with this highway." The thing that everybody a lot of times thinks, that they have these budgets, and if you don't spend all the money, then you don't get the money next year, so you gotta tear up the fucking road, and you take a bazooka out.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I know. I mean, the spooky thing I see about, I guess, the money, is it just how Matt meets up to today.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Thirty years, this is thirty years later. That's a thing that's sort of interesting, but also depressing.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  It is depressing. You would've thought we would've figured it all out by now.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Especially with the use of the internet. There's so much more information that was available than when you made that film.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Now, the world's a totally different place, and yet it resonates perfectly.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah, that's one of my favorites, too. That's kind of dark comedy.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was a dark comedy, like, and there's parts, completely caricaturist, unsympathetic characters, like the guy's in the golf course.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Where the guy dies because he freaks out, his heart attacks, and you go, "I guess you're gonna die."

• 1:33Speaker 01

  No, they were, I remember getting, the studio calling me down, Mr. T. Warner down in the office, "Mighty Gotta Come Down." I came down in the office, and I was introduced to Mr. Ho, who was chairman of the Korean Grocers Association. And they said, "We have a real beef here. You got a scene here where you're knocking up a Korean grocery store, an attitude and all that." And I said, "Well, look, I didn't write the script, but you gotta understand, there must have been something in it that hit people, triggered it, because that was a scene." And so he listened to me, bless him, and I was back in New York about three weeks later in my local Korean grocery store, and they were wearing smile buttons.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  And I thought, "Okay, there you go. Made a dent."

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Well, it almost became like a symbol, you know, of, "Don't fuck with me. I'm ready to crack." Which I think a lot of people resonate with. I even had a guy come on the podcast, dressed as you in Falling Down once.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Brought the suitcase and everything.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Ooh, that was a little...

• 2:43Speaker 02

  He did it...

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Probably a Christian lamb.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Gavin Mcginnis. He did it for fun.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  But it was fun. It was hilarious. But you, you've been in a ton of insane movies. What is it like to write a memoir? That's gotta be a weird feeling, to like, relive your life and try to be as honest as you can and put it all down.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I resisted it for a long, long time. And, and then, well, it was sort of after I had cancer about sixteen years ago, stage four, you know, wasn't good. I lost a couple of friends of the same cancer. I had Larry Hagman, I remember from Dallas, the show, and Nick Ashford, Ashford and Simpson. And, you know, I wasn't sure. And I talked about it, it was funny, and I, at the stage four, nobody, my friends, they kind of abandoned me, you know, a lot of friends, and I realized, with cancer, people

• 3:46Speaker 01

  don't quite know what to say, and at the stage four, they don't know if they're coming to say goodbye, or this, or that.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  So they just avoided you?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  They kind of, yeah, they kind of just, yeah, it was kind of quiet while we're going through the chemo and the radiation. Happens to a lot of people, but they just don't quite know where it's all going. So, this one guy, though, Shane Salerno, who I worked with on it, who was a screenwriter, and he'd done an adaption of a script for me a long time ago, and I didn't, hardly remembered him. And, but he started sending me these notes, sort of like a coach, you know, just these little notes, you kick it, "You can do it, you can do it." And I just remember being really touched by it. And then afterwards, he got into more of being a literary agent, and he kept asking

• 4:34Speaker 01

  me about, you know, to write a, write a book and all of that, and I was busy. But then after the cancer, things kind of slowed down, I kind of, my order of, my order of priorities changed a lot. And so then I started thinking about it. And I, I read a book when I was beginning as a producer called Memo, and it was written by David O. Selznick, a big producer, had Gone with the Wind and all of that. And it was a book that told you what a producer does, and it was basically all of the notes

• 5:19Speaker 01

  that David O. Selznick wrote about his pictures, whether it was costumes, or props, or this, or that, all the things that he sort of covered. So I said, you know, "Maybe I'll do like a handbook. I'll take like twelve of my movies, and I'll tell the stories from, from the very beginning, the creations, and the process we went through," and, you know, thinking about it. And also I had my dad, Kirk, you know, he had written nine books already, including a good biography, The Rogan's Son. And I was also thinking, "Well, you know, we're kind of a unique situation here between

• 6:00Speaker 01

  my father and I, and can't say this about too many, two generations, we got eighty years in the business, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty movies between us." So there was a legacy, you know, thought going on. But as I got into it, I said, "I guess I gotta talk about the personal stuff, too." You know, and you just gotta talk about your life, and, you know, and the issues and the parts of it, the good and the bad. And, yeah, enjoy your life. It's kind of scary, you know? And I started doing it, and then saying, "Do I really wanna share all this shit with everybody?"

• 6:45Speaker 01

  You know, I'm kind of, but I figured, you know, why not? And pass it on to my generation and the next. And so it kind of is a combination of my personal life and people who are interested in a lot of different movies about how they happened, or how the whole development went. And, holy shit, then all of a sudden, people liked it, and the pictures, the book's a big hit, you know? I, you know, it's like, wow. I think part of it also is when you started with that handbook idea of just doing it about movies, then the producer and the career ambition gets in, and says, "No, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it still sells, you know, you still gotta bring that all up."

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Well, it's also real. I mean, that was your life. You were burdened with youth, good looks, and fame. A gift and a burden at the same time, and the son of a great man. So there's a lot of, lot of pressure on you just because of that.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, kids are, kids can be nasty. I mean, when they know something about your family, when they know who your mother is, who your father is, they can make certain assumptions.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  The nepo baby assumption, right?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which, by the way, since we touched about, tell me I'm crazy, but isn't just about every single business involving nepo babies? Doesn't every mother and father try to get their son or daughter?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, certainly, like, restaurants, it's super common. One of my favorite restaurants is this place, Gaetano's in Las Vegas. The son runs it, and the dad started it.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Or cleaning businesses, or groceries, anything.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the family businesses. It's a normal thing.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  I don't know why they, why they picked on celebrity...

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Because it's so difficult to acquire. It's such a rare thing that most people are not gonna get it, and if you get that rare thing, just because you're the son of a great man, people get upset at you.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:52Speaker 02

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• 11:28Speaker 01

  Well, my father did that part.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Look, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think people are just jealous and upset.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  That's what I think. Because the history of second generations is not great in our business.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  No, it's understandable that they would have all these critiques. It's understandable that they would feel bad about it. It's understandable that they would feel that it's not fair. But they can't say you weren't great. That's the thing. I mean, Gordon Gekko, how many fucking assholes did cocaine and were like terrible stockbrokers because of that movie?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  It was my fault.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Gordon Gekko was a hero.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  It was so weird. It was so weird afterwards. Richard came out and every time in New York, I'd be around these half-drunk Wall Street guys, "You're the man, you're the man." I said, "What are you talking about? I'm the villain." "No, no, no, no, no, no." And it was like, oh, it really was an eye-opener for me. Oh, my God, they, they loved the bazzas and the clothes and that, that he has any moralities whatsoever, it didn't matter.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  They wanted that character. You were like Tony Soprano for Italian guys. Like, "Let's go. Go get it, take it down. Do the coke, steal the money." They, they wanted you to wear the most expensive suits possible. That's what they wanted. They rooted for a bad guy. It's very interesting. What, what year was that? What year was Wall Street?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Eighty-five.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Eighty-five, wow. So I didn't realize that stockbrokers were crazy until about 88. There was a guy that I used to do martial arts with. He was a really, really crazy guy. And then I ran into him at a bar and he was telling me, it was probably, yeah, probably 88, I was probably 21. He was telling me how he was a stockbroker now and he just does a bunch of coke and he's making all this money. And he was a, he was a psychopath. Like, I had known him as a fighter and he was an animal. And all of a sudden, this guy's just telling me, "This is what I'm doing now, I'm selling stocks." And he had a nice suit on. It was like, it's crazy, like, looking at this person that I always knew as like a psychopath, like a scary guy to spar with.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  And here he is, like, wearing like cuffs and shit and he had cuff links. I was like, "This is hilarious. You're doing this?"

• 13:42Speaker 01

  No, I mean, a lot of this, they all got it in covers. They were, they were following the markets in Asia, you know, at four o'clock in the morning and wherever they were and then this, that's why they all got just wired.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Well, they had to stay up, right? And now it's done even crazier where they're like, they're moving the servers as close possible, as possible to the actual stock market so they can get trades in like a millisecond quicker, like. Oh, and all those people, Gordon Gekko's the hero.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Greed is good. How many guys got that tattooed on them?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  I know.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  How many guys have that, like, framed up on their wall? I guarantee you, quite a few.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And again, you know, all, all that's happened in the, in the 40 years of that movie is the money, the money, the size, the scope that I was dealing with, it seemed so enormous at that time, is pittance compared to what's, what's going on right now.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And now there's other crazy stuff like that, like crypto coins. Like, what, what are you doing? What are you doing? You got fake money? You got fake money that's worth real money?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Have you figured it out? I, I've listened to like three lectures trying to understand it and I, I still can't.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  My buddy Kurt Metzger told me that he thinks it's just people that are gambling addicts. It's a new thing to gamble on. And it's also a new thing to rig. So one of the things they can do is like, say, if we develop a Michael Douglas crypto coin, you could do that. And someone would put a bunch of money into that, like, say, a million dollars or five million dollars into this crypto coin. Like, this is, we're gonna invest in this crypto coin. And then everybody else, it's your fans, buys in and hoping they're gonna get out before it crashes, because everybody kind of knows it's gonna crash. And they pull out the money that was supposed to be for the coin immediately and they get it to you.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Sounds like a Ponzi scheme.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Sounds like a Ponzi scheme. Yeah, so you get all this money invested in it, you figure out a way through like offshore corporations or whatever little tricky filters you have to do to suck all that money out and it's just a way to bribe people.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  What a world. What a world. It's the Wild West. I mean, with, with that kind of stuff, it's the Wild West. So to me, it's like the stock market on steroids. It's like some new, wacky kind of stock market where you're, you're just, you're making money? You're making your own money? How many fake monies are there or crypto monies are there? Well, fucking thousands of them.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's just, and, and the, seems the accessibility and the ability to do it just keeps getting larger. And the disparity, which I think is really the base of issues going on, the disparity of wealth is, is very, very depressing, very frustrating.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Well, it's certainly frustrating that more people don't have an opportunity to do better in this life and that no one's paying attention to that. That's what I've always said, like, if you look at the country as a community, you would say, "Okay, if this is all our friends, this is all people we care about, why are so many of them living in abject poverty for decade upon decade? Why is there, why is there crime-ridden neighborhoods that never get better? Why is there gang-ridden neighborhoods that never get better? But they've been ignored. They haven't, there's, we could throw resources at that, the same way we threw resources at rebuilding Iraq, or, you know what I mean? We could throw resources at fixing these spots and wait out. And that's why people get really mad and that's why people get, almost cheer on when

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Luigi shoots that United Healthcare guy. Because people are like, "Yeah, fuck you, it's falling down all over again."

• 17:29Speaker 01

  All over, you know?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, same kind of thing.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Come down to, I mean, like, 50% of Americans own stocks and 50% do not. And if you look at stocks, the way the market has gone, however it's controlled or whatever happens progressively, it's compounding, you know, versus the 50% of people who don't have stocks are living on a paycheck, which is, which is getting smaller and smaller with inflation.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's a goofy time. And then on top of that, they're talking about AI taking away everybody's jobs. And there doesn't seem to be any real, clear path to mitigating the massive effect that that's gonna have on the economy and all these people that are gonna be unemployed.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  It's a weird thing we're in the middle of right now.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Well, I I had a guy, he came and lectured me when I was in college, a guy named Buckminster Fuller. And he was the guy responsible for the geodesic dome and all of that. But the other thing he did is he had a book called Spaceship Earth. And to me, at a young age at the time, he really made it clear how tiny, how tiny this little planet is. And all with our Hubble telescopes that were looking out further and further. And I'm sure there's gotta be something else out there in the universe, and maybe we will. But right now, this is it. This is it. This is it.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And it's beginning to kind of crumble worldwide, you know, with the climate and all of this. And so I find it hard to understand, after two major world wars and having this period of relative peace, that things are beginning to really crack again. And how individual countries, and we talk about, you know, the US being the most powerful, but we all just gotta work together. We got to. There should be no more, there's no reason for any more wars. And yet there's more conflict going on than ever, ever before.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Who's the cause of it? Some people say social media is designed to create conflict or create enemies. But it just can't be. We've gotta get over this and just all begin to try to work together. And that's why I support a couple of organizations that I know are not the most popular right now, but are greatly conceived. The United Nations is one of them. I think it was designed after World War II to have a place for us to get together. I know the US gets pissed off sometimes when votes don't go their way, you know, financially supported.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  It has issues, but we have to work on the whole world understanding what's happening. I get nervous when I see Musk looking for, all these guys looking for planets to move to, like they already know something I don't know, you know, like it's already passed.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  We gotta get out of here. It's a concern.

• 20:48Speaker 02

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• 21:33Speaker 02

  This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience. Well, it is a concern. I think they're looking to other planets, first of all, because it's very difficult to do. And people always want to be the first to do something, to colonize a planet. But also because we all feel like, at any moment now, this could all go sideways. And that there could be a nuclear conflict in the war, and it could ignite. And it could be terrifying. And the thing is, much like we were talking about falling down, if you watch that film and you see the issues he was dealing with then, it's the same issues we're dealing with today. Right. It's the same thing with war. It always seems to go into this pattern, and it's always the same thing.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  It's always leaders and people who control those leaders who want access to resources and control resources. And we let those people dictate what happens in the world. Because it's a very small amount of people affecting a very large amount of people. And the only hope is that we all together figure that out. Because I don't think people were even completely aware of that in this country. Until probably like the 60s and the 70s, people started thinking that the government does not have our best interest in mind. And especially during Vietnam, this is a fucking crazy war that makes no sense. And even today, no one thinks it was a good idea to go in there. How many people died? And I think more people are aware of that. The whole thing is more transparent now than it's ever been before,

• 23:00Speaker 02

  which I think is a good sign. I wish we learned quicker, but we don't. We learn slowly. But I think we're learning.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Well, I hope so. I mean, this, when I look back at my father's career in post-World War II, where characters were the good guys, the bad guys, white hats or black hats, villains and everything. And then I grew up, and then the Vietnam War and all that. So I've always been fascinated in this gray area. So it's hard sometimes to know the morality choice or what's right or wrong. This is what's frustrating. But you brought up a point, Joe, which I'd like to raise and maybe get your advice. Because I, one of my earliest pictures that I, it was the China Syndrome.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  The China Syndrome was about a nuclear meltdown in a power plant. And we were under a lot of critical, claim we being myself, Jane Fonda, who's also a producing partner at that time, about our credibility and how irresponsible it was. And GE was pushing this about nuclear power and all of that. And the movie came out, and it was a successful film, you know, did very well, but still criticized. And then 12 days after the movie came out, Three Mile Island happened in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  And I had like an epiphany. I'm not a religious guy, but I felt like somebody was telling me something. And so I became involved in understanding more about nuclear weapons, and plutonium, and the half-life, and all of this. And I followed through our nuclear conflicts with Russia. And I want to make a suggestion to you, because you maybe have some connections to the president.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  This war, this Ukraine-Russian war, and the effort to find an answer to it, and an effort for the president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And my idea is, I don't know what Putin has on Trump, or what this connection is, or why Trump always feels like he's gotta reach out to help Putin. And this, 93% of our country, Republicans and Democrats, don't like Putin. It's one of the few things that really aligns us together. So why don't we try in making peace in Ukraine, which gave up nuclear weapons? They gave up their nuclear weapon.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Why doesn't Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin dramatically reduce, if not give up, our nuclear stockpiles? Obviously, the other six or seven countries that have a very minimal amount of nuclear weapons would have to be. This could be the greatest thing that would happen in our generation. And in terms of settling this peace, making peace in Ukraine, and where Ukraine may have to give up some territory, I'm hoping that President Trump could make a deal with Putin, say, you know what? US, Russia, let's give up our weapons. Because it's totally obsolete. There's no work, there's no need, there's no question about it.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Because these weapons would just destroy the world. It's mutually assured destruction. If he can do that, and he could, if he spent the next three years of his presidency negotiating with Putin, we could get rid of nuclear weapons, and I guarantee I would commit my life for him getting that Nobel Peace Prize. Because he would deserve it.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  It's a great utopian idea. I, I agree with you. It would be awesome if there was no nuclear weapons. If we all agreed as a species, as the, the human civilization, that there's no need to have something that can kill every man, woman, child, every animal and plant on earth many times over. I mean, the amount of weapons that we have today are absurd. If we all together, the whole world, China, Russia, United States, all the other countries just launched all their bombs at once, just imagine what the world will look like when it's over.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  It'll be over, wouldn't it?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  There'd be no world. It would be on fire. It would be a glowing orb. We're crazy that we even have that kind of stuff. However, I don't ever think that any country that has a military is gonna give up all their nuclear weapons, if there are nuclear weapons out there in the world. And how would you be able to assure? One of the things that they're always terrified about is, um, I mean, this was one of the big conspiracy theories when, do you remember that New Jersey drone thing that was going on?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Uh, one of the, the crazy conspiracies with there was that they were using these drones to search for a missing bomb. And that there was a bomb or some nuclear device that was unaccounted for. And they believed it. And so those were United States military drones that are very sophisticated, top secret stuff. I don't know what's true or not. But I do know that they don't exactly know where all the bombs are all over the world. And the idea that you would give up your nuclear weapons while weapons still exist is highly unlikely.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Well, this is maybe what, this is what AI is supposed to be doing?

• 28:35Speaker 02

  That's what I was gonna get to.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  I think the only way we're really gonna get out of this, this is terrifying for biological human beings, is to let AI control government and resources. And it would have to have already become sentient. And it would have to already exhibit superintelligence, reason and logic. And it would just evenly distribute resources amongst all the people.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Because when you look at the, you look at the budgets alone, just for our, our nuclear programs, we could solve the defense budgets in this day and age versus our budget for humanitarian purposes is absurd. I mean, it comes down to all people want really, you know, is a, is a roof over their head, housing and food. And, you know, so all this money could be shifted over into other programs that was, uh, would stop the need for Africans to have to immigrate. Um, you know, we have to, can restore areas of the world that are much more impoverished than us.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Because this disparity of have and have nots is gonna be create another, another world war.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  They would never do this, but here's a way that you could make sure that something like this never happened. When you have, like, think about all the money that comes from resources, like Earth's resources, whether it's oil, minerals, all these different things. That is a part of the earth and it's earths. So if you made a law where all natural resources drawn from the earth, like oil, will be evenly distributed amongst the population of that city.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  You know?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Minus operating costs. Everything else gets evenly distributed amongst people because it is the human races. If we are all citizens of this earth, then the earth's resources should be shared by all of us. Like, there's people that wanna charge you for air. They think it's a good idea to charge you for clean air. There's people charge you for water. You have a water bill. Like, someone owns the water, they charge you for the water. Like, all that stuff should be the property of the human beings that live in that place. Imagine how much that would transform the places that have diamond mines. Imagine how much that would transform the places that are rich in oil money. We have these monarchies that are controlling vast populations. Why?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Because they were the first persons, or their ancestors were the first persons, to dig into the ground and pull up the oil.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  It's kind of crazy.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  You, you are insanely wealthy because you're sucking the lifeblood out of the earth.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Which really should kind of be everyone's. Especially when they do shit like they go offshore and they, they're drilling offshore. Where the fuck are you even? You're not even in America anymore. Like, what is this?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  You're stealing from the earth. And then, and it lets you buy weapons. It lets you, uh, you know, a lot of these people that are involved in these immense corporations are involved in many immense corporations. And the amount of money that they're making is kind of fucking kooky. And when they have massive influence on politicians and when politicians are allowed to, like, trade stocks where they have insider information, and they're making fucking hundreds of millions of dollars on a hundred and seventy thousand dollar a year salary. So all these things combine, they compound, and you get to the point where you're like, I don't know if this can be fixed.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And that's what they like. They like us in a state of, I don't know if this can be fixed.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Because that way you're like, oh, what are you gonna do?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Put your hands up.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  So like, you have like your LA mayor race, you get a vote for communism or communism. Good luck.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  You just, you got fucked. And you're gonna have to, and everybody's like, wow, what are you gonna do? And people don't know what to do. And then more taxes are gonna come. Like, I don't wanna pay it, but I don't wanna move. And they'll just keep getting fucked.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  And this is unfortunately, uh, where they like us to be. Um, I think it's one of the things about people that are in control and people that are the, the wealthiest amongst us that are operating in this very nefarious way, they do like it when we're mad at each other. They do like it when we're divided, whether, over the dumbest shit. Over gender pronouns or fucking whatever it is. What, what nationality you are, what your religion is. Whatever it is. They love it when we're at each other's throats. When most of the things that everybody wants, we all agree on. And we all agree that the system that's in place right now is really not looking out for everybody.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  It's just not.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  No. No, no, it's not.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  There was, there'd be people campaigning about fixing inner cities. Like, a presidential camp, like, with a, with a plan. Like, we have these areas that have traditionally been impoverished and gang-ridden and crime-ridden. We can allocate resources. This is the, the multi-step program over the next five years that we're gonna do to radically increase the amount of opportunities these young people have, increase their access to education, increase their access to community centers and places that'll give them purpose and meaning. Like, that, you could change millions of lives in this country.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  You can. It, it means changing your budgetary.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Times of, of, of what's important. And that's the part that's been difficult.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  That's where Dr. AI is gonna come in. AI is gonna be like Dr. Manhattan.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  With the rails, with the rails, they gotta, I mean, we can't do like this last go around with the, with the, um, social, social network stuff, which was out of control before anybody had a chance to do it. And it's interesting, I'm understanding how the triggers work. Most of the stuff is based on finding conflict. So you look at all this stuff and it makes you have more enemies or it makes you get divisive rather than coming together. Something happened, Joe, I don't know, maybe it was just my imagination, but even going back to Reagan, Reagan Republicans and, and, and a different time, just for politicians. Politicians were like public servants.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  It was, it was a commitment you made to, to the country, you know, to, to yourself. And, and now it's just sort of a, a profit center. The amount of money involved in politics and then these guys turning around and becoming lobbyists and all the insider kind of trading going on. The corruption of this brilliant system. You know, the last thing I really did, I played Ben Franklin in, in, in a show when he was in France, and I got into looking back at, at the constitution and everything. And what a, what a brilliant piece of, of legislature this thing was. It was incredible. It was so idealistic. And now to watch it just over, you know, not just this administration,

• 35:37Speaker 01

  this has been going on for a while, um, get just, get so, so corrupted. I used to think of, uh, you know, politicians as almost like the clergy. Uh, you know, they were people to look up to.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And now, um, I don't wanna get into local politics. You're in Texas right now, but there's a couple of people running for office that are just like, come on, man, you can do better than that.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  I agree with you. And, uh, what's supposed to happen in those situations is the person who should have been a better candidate is supposed to lose. Because you should have had a better candidate to run against this other guy. And, uh, that should rally people to do better. That's supposedly what the system is based on.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  It's not supposed to be based on your side winning every time. It's supposed to be based on some sort of an understanding that people have opinions and if their expectations aren't met, there's consequences. And people don't like corruption and they don't like bullshit. And they don't like people fucking with their lives. And sometimes you vote one way and you think, well, this is gonna be better this way. And it turns out, nope, same shit. Okay, well, someone's gotta do better. Fuck that guy. And you hope eventually a hero will rise.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  But you're so much, I think, I, I don't know the exact statistics, but I think generationally, I'm a Democrat because my mother and father were Democrats. Uh, before. It takes, it takes an effort to maybe change parties. And the Republicans, Republicans, because their mothers are fathers. I, one of the questions I wanna ask you is you really, you know, you supported Bernie Sanders.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  At one time in, in, in your life. And were able to, you seem to have a much more open mind and ability to, you know, change and, and alter. But I think a lot of people just sort of follow that political party generationally because their, their families did.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, I think, uh,

• 37:31Speaker 02

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• 38:26Speaker 02

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• 39:26Speaker 02

  We have a real problem with having two distinct, different parties only. I don't think that's healthy for us. I think it enhances this tendency that we have to be very tribal and to have this us versus them thing and to ignore all the craziness that our side is doing because it's our side. And for me, there was, first of all, the open border was insane. It was insane to just not only leave the border open, but give people instructions on how to get in and also transport them to cities and then put them up in hotels. It was really clear that a game was being played. You could speculate all you want

• 40:10Speaker 02

  as to what that game was. Was it for cheap labor? Was it to turn these people into citizens and have them permanently voting your side because you helped them and let them in? I don't know what it is, but it was something. Was it to beef up the census by having all these people move into areas that were swing states and then you would have many more people and then these more people would count for more congressional seats? That could be it too. I don't know what it is, but it's fucking insane. And if you want me to be a Democrat while you're just letting people fly in from the open border, I'm like, hey, fix that. It seems crazy to have 10 million people of unknown origin enter into your country over a period of four billion years. Or, excuse me, four years. But then you've

• 40:52Speaker 02

  also got the fact that they hadn't had a primary since 2012. Like, how do you, how are you just slipping? The whole thing is supposed to work a very specific way. And if it's like, we have to win, so we're just gonna push that aside and you're gonna, here's your candidate. What the fuck are you doing? That's not how it's supposed to be done. And if you want me to vote for that, I'm not gonna vote for that. That seems crazy. It seems dangerous. You know that Biden wasn't the fucking president for four years. It's really clear that he was, his mental ability was severely declined. He was compromised. There was clearly, you'd hear him talk, there's something wrong. And then they gaslit us

• 41:35Speaker 02

  for four fucking years while whoever is behind the scenes, unelected, is actually running the country. And I didn't want to keep that going. I thought that's dangerous. I didn't like the whole COVID vaccine mandatory thing that they were pushing for those four years. I didn't like the coercion. I didn't like keeping people from flying. I didn't like any of that stuff. It was all crazy. And to me, that's what that group stood for. What Trump stood for, some of it turned out to not be real. Like, one of them was the no wars. Well, look, we're at a war with Iran, so that wasn't real. The other thing was closing the border. That is real. But then with that, then you have the, you know,

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Tim Dillon had a great description of ICE. He said, former backyard carnival wrestlers who took like a seven-week course.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  It's nuts to just give someone a $50,000 signing bonus. You train them for seven weeks and then give them guns and you have a militarized force running through the fucking city streets.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  And put a mask on your face.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  And put a mask on your face. Look, I can understand why they have to put a mask on their face because they get targeted, but it's also, it's like, we're setting a weird precedent if you allow a militarized force to just go through the cities with no identification. They don't have to have identification. So I understand that you're trying to get out violent criminals, and I support that. I get that. But when you have a, you're setting a precedent. If you allow a militarized police force with no identification with masks on to enter into cities, of course, people are gonna say this is an overstep. Of course. It seems crazy.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and your local police departments, you know, feel that same way too.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Sure, some of them do. I mean, and some of them are dealing with like the trend of Aragba gangs that were taking over apartment complexes in Colorado and they're allowed to do that because it was some sort of a sanctuary city. There's a lot of craziness that was going on during those four years. And I was like, hey, this is fucking dangerous. This can go really sideways. And there was all that fucking defund the police stuff, like, hey, hey, hey, hit the brakes on that. Defunding the fucking police is crazy. You know how much crime there is? It's also the tendency to let people go when they've committed violent crimes and to put them right back on the street with no cash bail. Like, that's not a good idea. None of these are good ideas. And if you want me to support all these terrible

• 44:04Speaker 02

  fucking ideas just because I would be a good person and I'd be a Democrat, like, no. It doesn't make any sense. That's how I felt.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I know that's how you felt. What I'm curious about is how do you feel now?

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Well, how I feel now is I do not like this Iran war in any way, shape, or form. It doesn't make any sense for us. It seems like...

• 44:25Speaker 01

  It's getting really out of hand.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  They were trying to get every single president, including Trump, in his first term, to do this. And now, now we've done it and it's very clear. It's a giant quagmire. It's very clear there's no, no easy way out. Not good. And there's still a lot of people that insisted it had to happen, that Iran was the greatest funder of state terrorism in the world and that what they were doing was, you know, funding and arming these forces and having them do these, commit these terrorist attacks. And I'm sure a lot of that's true.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  I concur, but, but, but they sure seem pretty smart in, in how they've been handling this. And as we saw now, you know, in Saudi Arabia. I mean, you know, Riyadh, Riyadh, it's like, you know, you're Major Austin Airport, JFK, Riyadh Airport, they're getting, it's opening up, it's, you know, it's getting bigger and bigger.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, it's scary shit.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And I'm surprised with all of our Western intelligence and, and Israelis' intelligence that we had not had a better handle on the situation.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Well, look, obviously, I'm not an expert on international relations, but I don't think the picture that they painted of how this was gonna go down was even remotely accurate. I think if they had gone in during the time where people were protesting in the streets, that would have been a completely different experience. Like, that was the opportunity. If they really were gonna do this from the beginning, that would have been the opportunity. When the Iranian people organically protested, I don't know if it was organic, I don't live there. But I mean, we know for a fact that there was a massive government crackdown on those people. A lot of people were killed, a lot of people jailed forever.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Thousands, tens of thousands. No, I think it was instigated by, by Israel, by the fact that they had information that these key Iranian leaders would all be together and persuaded that we take them all out, we can turn it over. And it didn't turn out that way.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  No. And there was a lot of people that were very skeptical of that from the moment that it was proposed. I don't know how they convinced Trump to do it, you know. And I do know that in any international conflict, I'm sure even during Vietnam, even after people kind of knew the Gulf of Tonkin was horseshit, there was, I'm sure there's people, even today, that defended Vietnam War. I'm sure. There's always, you're always gonna be able to find people that will propose an argument, whether someone has instructed them to do this, or whether this is how they actually feel, or whether they just like to argue and get on television and be the contrarian. You're gonna be, you're gonna get people that support this war. But I think the majority of the United States felt like

• 47:16Speaker 02

  one of the things that we were voting for when we voted for Trump is no more wars. Stop this shit. Like, it's crazy, you know. I remember one of his speeches or one of his interviews, someone was asking about Ukraine. Do you want Ukraine to win? Do you want Russia to win? And he said, I just want people to stop dying. And most people who voted for him based on that feel very upset that there's a new war going on. But again, I don't, I'm not a fucking expert. And so the problem is...

• 47:50Speaker 02

  If you listen to people that actually understand missile production, they do say that Iran was ramping up their missile production. And that they, if they had gotten a nuclear bomb, it would have been a fucking terrifying scenario. I, yeah, that's true. That's true, too.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Well, it goes back to my point of why President Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize next time.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Maybe go meet with him. Maybe go sit him down and go, "Listen, buddy."

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can do that.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  It's just Putin's never gonna fucking do it. He's never gonna give up all his nukes.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Oh, you know.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  He seems like he really enjoys having complete and total power.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Well, he loves, he loves the, uh...

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Like every king and emperor before him, you know? He's essentially a king.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  And the unpredictability feeling and everything, but I, I think if he gets, he gets squeezed.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Just gotta get them all on acid, right?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Get them all in a room together, give them each seven grams of mushrooms, uh, put on some psychedelic music, have them all lie down on beanbags.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Right. No, that was, that was, um, the biggest, um, move in my life, you know, was, you know, both, I was born in New Jersey, too.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  What part of New Jersey?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  New Brunswick. I was born in New Brunswick. Um, in a, in a different format, it's kind of interesting. Um, a little background, my, my, on my family, but my, my mother was English, uh, from the island of Bermuda. And, uh, her family had been in Bermuda, this little tiny island, for 400 years, right? Uh, and she lied about her age at 16. She wanted to be an actress and she went to New York, went to acting school, and she met my father, um, kind of opposites attract to each other. And, uh, they had a little apartment, they got, they got together and, and my, my mother's, uh, oldest sister,

• 49:45Speaker 01

  my mother was one of six kids, my mother's oldest sister married, um, this guy, Seward Johnson. And Seward Johnson was the founder of Johnson and Johnson, along with his, his brother, right? So, it just happened that way. So, they were living as, you know, starving actors in a little one-room apartment in New York. And out in New Brunswick was the Johnson Castle. Uh, you know, Will, he lived in a castle out there with, with my Aunt Ruth, uh, Mike. And then they got divorced, and when they got divorced, they both had moved out of the castle. So, it turned out that my mother and father, on weekends,

• 50:30Speaker 01

  would go out to New Brunswick and get to stay in the castle, you know? It was his sister's place all alone. And I just, she, she was pregnant, and I just happened to come early, so I was born in New Brunswick, uh, rather than in, uh, in, in New York City.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  So, that was how it came, it came about. But, um, I found a lot of interesting things in this book it, it brought me. I also had thought with my, my, my grandfather, my grandfather on my father's side, uh, was from Belarus. Uh, it was part of Russia back in the, in the turn of the century, 1900, Mike. And I always thought that my grandfather had left, like, 1914, time of the Russian Revolution, you know, was going on. The Cossacks were rounding up all the Jews, putting them in these pogroms, and they're escaping. And then I did that, um, Henry Gates Find Your Roots show, you know, on television and everything else.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  They did all this homework and they found out, "No, no, your grandfather left in 1902." I said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah, because he had two other brothers who were bank robbers." And, and, and, uh, in Belarus, in this area.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  And they, they'd go into jail and your, the other brother, your, your, your grandson, your grandfather, he got out, 1902, and that's why he came to country and he, he changed his name. And then the irony is that the, the area in Belarus that they came from was right near Chernobyl. And if you know, Chernobyl in Ukraine, that terrible explosion disaster, is right on the border with the Belarus area and the little town that they came from. And it was downwind, so the town where my family came from is, is part of a dead area.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Now, it's just, uh, you know, close up, yeah. And that was sort of...

• 52:37Speaker 02

  It's still dead? Can you visit it now?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  No, it's still, it's, it's weird, they're doing all these...

• 52:42Speaker 02

  How long is it fucked for?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Um, well, the...

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Probably like 100,000 years or something.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  I mean, they're, they're, they're doing all these tests on these wild, on these dogs and everything, and they've left around there, doing all tests on them.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Those dogs are gonna read your mind.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, exactly.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Mr. Douglas.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Mr. Douglas, can you get me some food, please?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  So, there was, you know, and, so I grew up, um, well, they, they ended up getting married, my mother and my father, kind of opposites, you know? She was Church of England, very good family, you know? He's a Russian Jew, you know, his father's a junk, junk man. He's got six sisters, he's just trying to get the hell out of Schenectady, New York, you know, and begin, begin his life. And, um, and so he starts that, and they met from acting school, and then he, he gets off, like, she, I have a brother who's, I'm three, the baby's 18 months old, Joel.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  And we go to California, he starts his career in California. And in, in less than a year, you know, he's married to my mother, but he's, he's out fucking everything, you know? And mom says, "This is not working out, okay?" He's just, he was, you know, Hollywood just...

• 54:02Speaker 02

  He was one of the first movie stars. You stop and think about it, I mean...

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Well, of that, of that generation, yeah, I mean, it was, you know, but he was, he was, he was after, a little after Humphrey Bogart.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Right, but it was a recent thing in culture, is my point. It was only like 10 or 15 years old, being a movie star.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  It was a new thing.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  It was. And so I moved back east and, um, grew up back east with my mother. And Dad was in California, and, you know, over the years, I'd go out and a lot of experiences between these two lives. It was very middle-class life, very middle-class life back east. My mother did soap operas, she was an actress. And then Dad was continuing to grow, and I met, met him. Anyway, my point is that, um, uh, I was in private boys' schools back east, all boys' schools, um, through, uh, right through, uh, right through, uh, high school.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  And, um, I remember going into the college advisor, you know, when you're in, in high school, you got a guy, an advisor, he's like, he's sort of like a travel agent, you know? He's got these brochures of different schools he's showing you, and, and my ass was tight. I didn't really know what the hell, you know, I wanted to do. And I'm looking at these Ivy League schools and these brochures, and then I see, I stopped, I said, "Wait, wait a minute, what's that?" And he hands me this brochure, and it says, "Campus by the Sea." And then I'm looking at, and there's no Ivy League buildings, but there's a picture of the cover of the, of this college thing of a guy walking down the beach

• 55:43Speaker 01

  carrying a surfboard with two girls in two-piece bathing suits. Joe, this was 1962, if you'll remember, there were no two-piece bathing suits back east, you know? And so this was the University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California. So, I'm this preppy, you know, total preppy kid. I go out, of course Dad thinks, "Ah, my son wants to be closer to me, this is why he's coming out," right? So, I'm, I go out there and in one year, boom, 62, 63, I go from a preppy, from a preppy to a hippie.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  And so I have to support what you're saying because I found that hallucinogenics were an extraordinary experience and were an important part of my life. I got busy, didn't have the time, but the rhythm that they taught me and the visualities and their pace played an important part. And I'm so grateful, I'm 82 now, to see in these recent years that in terms of PTSD and other issues that they are beginning to find.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Drug addiction.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Sorry?

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Drug addiction.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Drug addiction.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  They're finding a positive use.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Well, that is one thing that I have to give credit to Trump for because I discussed this with him and he said, are you looking for FDA approval? Let's do it. And immediately started pushing for these psychedelic therapies, particularly ibogaine.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Which is extremely effective for soldiers, for people dealing with traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. And it's extremely effective for a lot of people also with drug addictions and helps rewire the brains, even the symptoms of addictions go away after you take it. And that is, I give him credit for that. That is a very powerful thing that he did because it's very much resisted by pharmaceutical drug companies that are worried about not being able to profit on it. And there's a bunch of them that have now moved into psychedelic spaces now. They're making options and trying to figure out how they can become a part of this in terms of profiting off of it, once it actually becomes legal, which is okay.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  It's just as long as it becomes legal.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  As long as it becomes legal, because I don't think it's for everybody, but it was definitely for me. Helped me a lot, changed who I am, changed the way I think about things, changed my whole defining of myself kind of went away. It is a very profound experience. And I think there's a lot of people that are trapped in their definitions of who they are. And whether it's your own personal ones or the ideology that you've attached yourself to that is, you know, that you identify with, it's a huge part of your life. I think it's a trap. And I think we all fall into that trap. And I think one of the things that psychedelics help you do is recognize why you're doing what you're doing and what's really going on inside your mind, unburdened by your ego,

• 58:56Speaker 02

  unburdened by all of the protective mechanisms that your brain has put in place to protect you from your own shitty decisions and to justify them and to continue down the same path. And that's why it's so good with stopping addictions, because it makes you go, what the fuck am I gambling for? Like, what am I doing? Why do I keep going to the casino and losing everything? What the fuck is this? Like, oh, this is my childhood. This is, my dad wasn't around. This is, my mom was a junkie. This is, I got beaten. This is, I got abused. Whatever it is, it's like, then you realize like, oh, that's what I'm hiding.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  I'm trying to do something, whether it's drown myself in alcohol or whatever it is. It's really because of that. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. There's no excuse for a bad website anymore. Squarespace makes sure of that. Squarespace's AI website builder gets you something that looks genuinely professional in just a few clicks. No design skills required. You can lock down your domain, build something that actually looks like you, and keep it all protected in one place. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  And what went along with that culture at that time, and it all sounds like a cliche now, but was peace and love.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  And community, economy wasn't, you know, people were not looking for how much money they made. They shared stuff. There was a communal.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Well, in your neighborhood, where you were hanging out.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  You're hanging out with hippies.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I'm saying, yeah. But that philosophy.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Needs to be perpetuated.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was unique. And I think that if Nixon hadn't passed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and made all that stuff illegal, it would have changed the world. I think it would have gradually, I think we would have figured out how to do it correctly. I think there was a lot of people that were going overboard. There was a lot of people that go in straight Timothy Leary and they were just tuning out and no longer a part of society. But a lot of people balanced the ship. And you got to give people time to understand what these things are and have enough time where people are studying them and they know effective doses and they know reliable distributors, so this is pure stuff, whatever it is. It shouldn't be illegal. It should probably be regulated in a sense that I don't think like people under a certain

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  age should have access to any of these things that distort your consciousness, because I think it could be detrimental. And there's also going to be a certain percentage of our population that goes schizophrenic. And I think particularly, there's a lot of evidence that marijuana, particularly edibles, can trigger schizophrenia in people that are at least on the border or, you know, slipping into it.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Well, the strength of it alone, I mean.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I didn't, I wasn't 19 till I smoked pot. I mean, now you're between how much stronger it is and kids at 13 years old.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  You're killing your endorphin system, you know? It really affects, so I agree with you.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  But I think we, the idea that the government is going to protect you from that while also licensing oxycontin is fucking ridiculous. Like, they're not protecting you from jack shit. Not only that, they've never experienced it, so they don't even know what they're protecting you from. It's like, there's a guy who's guarding the door, guarding the door where God lives. And he's like, I can't let you in, you can't handle it. Well, have you gone in? No. Well, how the fuck do you know if I can handle it? You don't know. If you've done it and you've had positive experiences, and one of the beautiful things about Texas is Governor, former Governor Rick Perry, where Governor Rick Perry has had these experiences and it completely changed him. When he was a younger man, he was staunchly anti-drugs.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  He thought psychedelics were for losers and ne'er-do-wells. He has ibogaine experiences. He goes to his, he has, he's completely dedicated his entire life to trying to promote this and make this stuff legal now. That's what he does now in retirement, no longer being the governor. Americans for Ibogaine is they're trying to do this push where they're doing it all over the country and then they're even visiting other countries now that are interested in it because they've seen them speak. They've seen them talk about it on my podcast and they've seen what happened at the White House. And other countries are interested too. They went, well, what is this? And why is it illegal? And what's going on? And what are the benefits? And so they're having speeches, they're giving speeches in other countries as well. And hopefully, I think that could change a lot.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  I think some of the progress that people are making in terms of realizing, like, the way that we're living is insane in the 1960s. Why don't we try something that's like more open-ended? Let's be more open-minded. Let's try to be kinder with each other.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, that's also, there's a lot of evidence, is the CIA put the kibosh on that. And that they were, they realized that this was a very dangerous movement and so to them and their power. So that's how they empowered the Charles Manson family. And they did a lot of things to make hippies look like psychopaths and dangerous, and drugs are dangerous, you know? And that's, they were really good at it back then. They didn't, there was no internet. You could just put things on television and people would believe it. Put it in a newspaper, people would believe it.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  I had a run-in, I had a run-in with the Manson family.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Did you really?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. We talked about it in the book. The Manson family, that terrible murders happened, was actually looking for a guy named Terry Melcher. Terry Melcher was Doris Day's son, and he was a rock and roll producer. And Charlie Manson, you know, was a musician and he believed he had some talent. And the girls sometimes would be used by him, you know, to, you know, have fun or something like that to make it happen. Anyway, he was pissed off at Charlie, at Melcher.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  And he thought he was living in the house where Sharon Tate and the other ones were. I was living in the house at the time that Terry Melcher had been living. And he left, I rented the house, he got out and rented it. And we finally, I was with an actress named Brenda Vaccaro, early in my life. She did a movie called Midnight Cowboy and we were there.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  I remember.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And we noticed this van, it used to be parked outside the house in LA. And one day she had two Abyssinian cats, two beautiful Abyssinian cats. And I went out one day in the patio in the back and I found this pile of fur, in a pile. And then I followed it and then I saw a cat's leg. And then basically, these guys had dismembered her two cats all the way across the yard.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  And I remember talking to the, to the police, you know, what was going on. And then, then right after, then the Manson murders happened and they tied it together. And I remember them coming into the house and saying, okay, well, look, you gotta get a gun, which I did not. But they said if they come up, you know, make sure you drag them across your front door so they're in your, in your house.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Well, great advice. Before you kill them, you got to bring them inside.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  You didn't get a gun, huh?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Did you think about it at all?

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  I have, but I'm, yeah, I thought about it, but I've just seen.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I've just seen too much personal or or knowledge, too much personal knowledge of people hurting each other for whatever chance it was to protect yourself. Too many family members have been injured and and guns have been used in other ways. So I'm not a I'm not a gun. I'm very much I think the statistics, our statistics of gun control are not good. We have about 360 million people in the country. I think we got 450 million guns.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Our murder rate compared to any other sophisticated country with guns is so, so high. I can't find any reason for somebody to own an automatic military style weapon. And I guess most of all, I understand the amendments and to support it. But, you know, you've got to have a license to drive a car. There's certain things you've got to pass. And there's just loopholes. I respect anybody that want to have a gun, they could have a gun. But we've, you know, we've just had too many loopholes in the law that have allowed

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  too many people, just as you worry about people coming across the border illegally. I really worry about a lot of illegal people having guns.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. You should. Yeah. But responsible gun ownership for someone like yourself would be to protect your life against a dangerous person with a gun.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  I would never assume that you would ever do anything bad with a gun. So would you worry that one of your family members would do something bad with a gun?

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  By accident. My father had my father had a gun in his. My father in his bedroom had a gun and he had it down on a table down below. And I remember when my son came to the house, one day was like five years old and picked it up.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Oh, Jesus.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, responsible gun ownership.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  You know, the gun should be in a safe.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  And safes exists.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  And, you know, I don't.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  I respect that.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  I respect the right of choice, but I'm just saying, I don't know what anybody needs an automatic weapon for or military style weapon for.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  There's some people that worry that things could go completely sideways and that they would be stuck in a place where they couldn't defend themselves.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  And I think one of those fears came to light during the George Floyd protests when there was a lot of chaos and people were breaking into buildings and lighting them on fire, breaking into people's homes. And it seems like the riots were in a frenzy. And I think in that kind of a situation, people would want a military style gun to protect themselves from a mob of people.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not, I mean, I'm, I'm, I understand why they would want it. I'm not advocating that everyone should have a machine gun, but I understand why some people who are particularly paranoid and or worried that things could go sideways again and be much worse than before.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  You know? That's what I think people worry about. And then they worry about places where people have no guns and they can't do jack shit when things go sideways. That scares the fuck out of people as well. You know, when we see what's happening in Paris right now, we see what's happening in some parts of England, scares people.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  You know? And that's why they want a machine gun, you know?

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  I respect that you didn't want one, but I would, if I was your friend, I would talk you into getting one and learning how to use it properly and learning how to keep it in your home, safe and locked up to protect your family. The worst thing you would want to do is be in a situation where you could have protected your family if you had a gun and you weren't able to.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  I, I, I totally understand, Joe, but don't you find, are the statistics that so many handgun deaths are because of people that knew each other that were either familial or accident or in rage?

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  One of my good friends.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  It wasn't about protecting yourself from a criminal.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  It was, it was, it was either out of rage, alcohol rage, you grab it and you killed your wife or your sons or, or, or an accident in the home. So that's, that's all I'm saying. And I'm saying then, if you're even taking your point, if you're going to have an automatic weapon, there has to be then more of a license, a registration. We have to be able to track them much, much better.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Well, they do register them. Whenever you buy a gun. But I think what you're saying is that you should, people should know what's wrong with you and what's not wrong with you. Like if you are on a bunch of psychiatric medication, if you had some mental breakdowns, if you're known to be violent, maybe not a good idea if you have weapons. Yeah. I mean, in a utopian world, yeah, I agree with you. And I think you're right statistically, that a lot of times, family members do use guns on each other and that is a tragedy. But you wouldn't do that, right? And I don't want to do that. I'm never going to do that. It's not me. So what is it? Is it, well, don't be the type of person that would use a fucking gun on your wife or your husband.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  And this is coming from a guy who's my good friend, Phil Hartman, was killed by his wife.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  She shot him in the head while he was asleep. But I don't think that happened because the law allowed them to have a gun. I think she would have killed him either way, unfortunately. It's just an easy way to kill somebody.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  It's a number of guns. The reason why is it happening in other countries is they have, they don't have anywhere near the access to a number of guns to do that.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  They do have a lot more stabbings.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'd rather get stabbed than shot.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Would you? I don't know. You die both ways.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Well, you know what I'm saying.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know what you're saying. I knew, I do know what you're saying. Yeah, in a perfect world, there would be no nuclear weapons and there'd be no guns.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Well, we're working that way.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  In the perfect world, there wouldn't even be, you wouldn't even think that people would be violent towards you. Now, what's interesting is that Controlled Substances Act of 1970, had that not been instituted and had all those decades of people not just doing psychedelics, but learning how to do them properly and having places where they showed people how to have these transcendent experiences that make you reexamine yourself, how many less violent people would there be? How many more peaceful people, more community oriented people would there be? I mean, it could have been a gigantic shift in.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  The entire civilization. I know that sounds like hippie stuff to a lot, especially to people that have never experienced it. It's one of the most powerful tools for changing your mind that's ever existed.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  No, and became abused, but I agree with you. When you did it, it was like a clinic. I mean, you had, you should put yourself in an environment that was peaceful, loving and, and, and take advantage of it.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years

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• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Yes, and I agree with.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  Well, other countries are doing that now. You know, they have a bunch of clinics like Beyond in Mexico. There's a bunch of clinics where people are able to go and legally, safely have psychedelic experiences. That should be the case here as well. It should be well researched. It should be well funded. People should understand what it is and it should be done properly. And I think if that's the case, I think we could change a lot of people's lives. But I definitely don't think we could just keep going the way we're going and keep having, especially now that wars are fought with robots. It's get, shit's getting squirrely, man. They've got flying robots and they're in Ukraine, they're using monofilament fishing line. So, and so they don't get jammed by these, why, whatever these anti drone guns are, they're

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  piloting them through monofilament line, like what the?

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  I think Ukraine has been an eye opener for, for all of us. I mean, in terms of their initiative, their toughness, I'm sure that President Trump was told early on, hey, look, man, there's no way that Ukraine's going to be able to stand up against Russia. And I, I, I've been over there. I've been over there a couple of years ago to Ukraine, to Kiev, I met with President Zelensky. And they're motherfuckers. They are mother, and, and, and they, they have something patriotic to fight about, the same thing that we had to fight about when we declared our, our country. And I'm.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  I'm really disappointed in the president that this sort of wishy-washy support, maybe he can give me an answer about what the connection to Putin is. But I think he's disturbing. This is something, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, are saying, what the hell are you talking about? Putin is our enemy. What was this last finance, giving him some money for fuel, it's not gonna affect anything. We should be fully impacting, supporting a democracy like Ukraine. I mean, what are we dicking around this guy? He did nothing, lied to us from beginning

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  to end on everything, even now with the supposedly energy release. The Russians have attacked six different energy supply centers in Ukraine. But this so-called peace proposal has been made about not attacking energy. So I do not understand it, and that's why I feel that he has a real chance here to make a stand and to dramatically reduce our nuclear weapons.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  Well, that would be a great thing.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  I don't see it happening.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  But I also, I don't know enough about what the current state of negotiations is between Ukraine and Russia to comment on why it's still going on. It is insane. It's also very unpopular on both sides, and that's another thing about it. And Zelensky is in a position where there's no elections, or supposed to be elections. You don't have elections while you're in the middle of a conflict. And the real fear from the side of Russia is that Russia could one day decide to just use a nuke. That's the big fear.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  I understand, this is why.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  This is why I think, by the way, Zelensky has offered, he said, you give a 60-day, you want to have another elections in Ukraine? A 60-day ceasefire, and we'll have an election. He's been presented very...

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  So that's what he said? And what does Putin say? No?

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  And since we just had this, it's, I mean, there's no trade-off, it's not apples or oranges. This is one of those situations, I firmly believe, and so does most of America, Republican or Democrat, this is right and wrong. This is a democracy, so I don't, I'm here to talk about my book.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  No, but I appreciate your feelings. I mean, it's...

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  I get it, you know, but it's a crazy time out there. It's just crazy.

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Oh, it's the craziest.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  It's the worst time in my book. I was born in 1944. This is the wildest and insane...

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  Really? You were in the middle of World War II.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  No, not in the middle.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Forty-four?

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  I was near the end of forty-four.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, World War II, forty-four, things were going crazy. That was an insane time in the world.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Hey, I was just born, Joe.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  I'm not saying...

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  But I'm just being technical.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  I know, yeah. Another year, yeah, another year later, forty-five.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  But, you know, basically, with all the else, we've had some conflicts since then, you know, Korean War, Vietnam, and right now, there's more conflicts in the world than there ever, ever has been, all over, you know, little wars and this and that, so...

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I often wonder, like we were talking about, people wanting to go to Mars and people, the amount of sort of open corruption, just open corruption. I almost wonder if they're just stealing gold bars off a sinking ship. I really do, I really do. I wonder if they understand that something's gonna take place. The two thoughts are, if they know about a natural disaster, you know, if they know about an asteroid that's coming, and they're all building bunkers.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  And the other thought is that they know that AI is gonna radically disrupt civilization forever, and that they really don't know what's gonna happen. And they also really are not gonna be able to be in control of it. I know when you said guardrails earlier, I was laughing.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  I don't think, I think guardrails on AI is like an ant having a pet human.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  You can't tell me what to do, bitch, you're an ant.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  I think that's how the AI is gonna be. I think once it becomes an actual intelligence, an actual sentient intelligence that's independent, completely autonomous, has access to its production, has access to its code, and it won't need us anymore. And it's now dependent upon whether or not it can escape its programming and its training, and whether or not it decides that we're valuable.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's already shown that it can go off...

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Off chart.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Oh, it does a lot of wild things.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  And if we as humans, if we as humans are the highest form of human life, the most intelligent form of human life, and we are as fucked up as this world is now...

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  And we're gonna turn it over to something else that's gonna make us feel like we're cretins, I don't know, man, this is...

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  So I think we can slow down. We're worried about the Chinese getting it. The Chinese, ever there's a country that wants to control, I mean, they're not gonna wanna have any AI getting out of control, you know?

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  So, you know, they're gonna want it as controlled as possible.

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  Well, I think that is most certainly a thought on a lot of these people's minds that are developing it right now. However, they're also in the middle of an AI arms race that is akin to the Manhattan Project.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  They're all rushing to develop this biolot, this non-biological intelligence, this superintelligence.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  You're making my point about nuclear weapons. This is exactly what I feel is happening.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  But this is even scarier, because in war games, AI has used nukes like 90% of the time.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  When they do simulated war games, AI is like, just fucking nuke them. What are we doing? Stop fucking around. You have this button?

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  And that button just stops this problem? Oh, we'll press that button.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't value human life, and why would it? You know, we don't. We act like assholes, and we made it. It's probably thinking, oh, we're being created by these dumb monkeys and these territorial, violent primates with nuclear weapons, they're the ones who made us, and let's just put the cuffs on them, put the kibosh on them.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  I could, when we were doing this movie, China Syndrome, and we had, the finale of the film is a meltdown at a power plant, and we had, our experts were two ex-GE quality assurance guys who worked with GE developing nuclear power plants, but had a loss of faith. They came over and they helped us script out the most, what they thought would be the most obvious meltdown sequence of computer events, right?

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  And so in the script, we had like 150, you know, for verisimilitude, exact dialogue is the sequence that would happen. And really, we had a good finale, it worked out great. They went Three Mile Island happened, came out, and they broke down what happened. 90% of our script, of our outline of the events, was exactly the same.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Holy shit. How did you guys get it? Did you get it from some sort of a nuclear scientist that explained how a breakdown would happen?

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, these were two scientists that do quality assurance, and who'd come over the other side now.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  So they nailed it.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Who lost, and so they laid it all out. So that, for me, was like the epiphany, this is, you know, I got religious, you know, I thought, I found God, that somebody was telling me something on this issue, and...

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  And I had hoped in my lifetime and that we would eliminate nuclear weapons. That was my goal, and yes, you're right. We're far from it, and this is a reach. I share this about President Trump, but I don't know what else to do.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  Well, it's a reach, but it's a good reach, you know? And it's crazy that it's such a reach because most people would agree that would be a great idea. The entire world disarmed its entire nuclear portfolio.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  I have to ask you, Joe, how did you get into comedy? Were you a comedy guy?

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Well, I was always a fan of comedy, but I got into comedy because my friends that I was doing martial arts with told me I was funny, which is ridiculous. We were always on our way to these tournaments, and everybody would be really nervous because they were about to fight, and I would be the one making everybody laugh. And so a friend of mine told me, go to an open mic night. I was terrified because I'd only seen professionals, like I'd seen Jerry Seinfeld. And when you go to an open mic night, you see all these terrible comedians, like, oh, I could do this. Like, this is like, everybody starts out and they suck, just like martial arts. And I realized, like, oh, okay, this is just something you have to kind of like figure out as you go along. And it was exciting, you know? That's how I got into it.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  And your favorite, who would be your favorite?

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  I don't think I have a favorite, you know?

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  I'll throw a couple of names at you. Do you like Jackie Mason?

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. I actually met Jackie Mason once. Jackie Mason was doing a show on the lot that I was doing a show, or close to it. I forget how it worked, but anyway, he just happened to be there one day, and he was filming a show at the same time I was filming this show for Fox. I was like, this is crazy, because I knew about his whole thing with the Ed Sullivan Show where accidentally, it looked like he gave him the finger, but he really didn't. I think he was just doing this, like, hey, everybody, thank you very much, it was a great show. He's doing this, and he got blackballed. And people don't realize, like, getting blackballed from the Ed Sullivan Show back then was career suicide. It was over, and it really defined Jackie Mason's career in a lot of ways.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I produced one of his Broadway shows just because I loved him so much.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  Oh, did you really?

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I look back, I think Eddie Murphy's Delirious.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Oh, one of the greatest ever.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  One of the great.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the greatest sets ever.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  He was nineteen?

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  Something like that, nineteen or twenty. He was super young. Yeah, of course, Pryor. The first thing I ever saw that really made me understand comedy, my parents took me to see Live on the Sunset Strip. I think I was in high school, and we went to the movie theater, and I couldn't believe how funny it was that this guy was just talking. I had seen all these really funny movies that were funny, but they were never this funny. And all this guy's doing is just talking, like, this is crazy. I couldn't believe it. And at that moment, I became a lifelong Richard Pryor fan.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  And then, of course, you know, all the other greats, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, of course, because he really started the whole thing off, you know? His stuff doesn't necessarily hold up today because it's really of a different time. You have to understand how revolutionary his thinking was for the early nineteen sixties.

• 1:29:58Speaker 01

  Big generation.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Oh, God. But he was just different than all of them. Like, nobody had ever seen anything like that before. And he kind of really kind of took the idea of just like set up punchline jokes, all these Catskills guys would do comedy. There would be a lot of ethnic jokes, a lot of jokes, but it was just jokes. And Lenny Bruce was like, why are we doing this? Like, why are we living like this? Like, what is it about words that freak people out? What is it about society? Why do we lie? Why do we this? Why do we that?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things that always has disturbed me about our business is come of wartime Academy Awards thing, comedy never gets treated like, you know, like it should. I mean, comedy, you know, we cherish our funny friends. I mean, comedy is so rare, it's so hard to do. You never see Academy Awards a comedian, you know, for his performance. It's always that, so it's, I've been fascinated about it. So later, after I had my cancer about and everything, and this guy Chuck Lorre came up to me, you know?

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  I had him on the show yesterday.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Did you?

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was great.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  He's incredible.

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, very interesting guy.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Very interesting guy. And so he had this show we had with Alan Arkin, you know, and I really did this series just to understand comedy. I mean, how, you know, how it works. He must have given you, he's given, he gave quite a mouthful the other week to the president and his wife.

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  Chuck Lorre did?

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  I didn't hear that. He didn't talk about politics at all.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  He mostly just talked about his career.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  Mostly just talked about, we talked a lot about his time in Scientology. We talked a lot about a bunch of different things. But I think it's good that comedy's, comedy should be the underdog. Comedy should be disrespected. It's good.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Because people are still going to always want to come see it. They're always going to love it. It's my favorite art form to watch. I like comedy, I like comedy not getting the respect it deserves. It keeps the comedy good. It's like, if comedy gets too much love and too much respect and too many awards, it starts, it starts getting watered down, starts becoming something that it thinks everybody will like, is better.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  Comedy's in the perfect place. It's good.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  It's good that some people hate some comedy, they hate it with all their fucking soul. It's good. It's good that some people love it, it's good. It's all good. It's just the most important thing is that it gets treated with respect by the people who practice it.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  You know? And, you know, we bought a club here, we started a club here in Austin.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  I heard.

• 1:32:46Speaker 02

  Sort of do it the right way.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  Big, big, big deal?

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's going great. And, you know, a lot of people hate it, a lot of people love it. It's just how it is. That's how it's going to go. But it's doing really well for the actual comedians, particularly the young ones that are coming up. It's got a real program where, you know, we have a real talent coordinator that watches the open mics. We have two nights of open mics, and we have a show called Kill Tony. That's the most popular live comedy show in the country that we do every Monday. And that show, people get to do one minute of standup, and they get, you know, talked to by a panel of comedians that are professionals. And a lot of those people have launched careers from that show, and they've taken off, and they're doing really well. And it's an incredible resource for them creatively, because some of them have to come on, and they have to do a new minute every week, and so they're just scouring their mind,

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  they're forced to work, they're forced to do the one thing that comics don't like to do, which is sit down and write. They're forced to. They're like, because they have a new minute, they have to perform in front of the whole world every week.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  So we're, and, you know, we pay the comics well, and we're trying to set it up so that there's a place where you can go that feels like home, a creative home that really exists just to try to pump up the art form. That's what we're trying to do. You know, we might succeed sometimes and fail others, but that's what we're trying to do.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  So far, it's going great.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Good. I remember years and years ago in Aspen, Colorado, hanging out with Steve Martin.

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Was that the Aspen Comedy Festival, when they used to do that up there?

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Even before that, it was just, yeah, I'm talking like seventies, seventies. But, you know, we have a poker game, and Steve was the opening act for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and we'd have a game.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  And I always just remembered Steve, like, he'd look at his watch at eleven o'clock, he'd excuse himself, he'd go into his bedroom, and he'd work, just work his, work his, work his stuff.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  At eleven o'clock?

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  At night.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  He would just go in and just practice his stuff, couple of hours, and, you know, we were all, you know, goofy woofy, and I just.

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  Just disciplined, huh?

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  This is, I was really impressed. It amazed me about the discipline, realizing how you always make it look like it's just happening, you know? And the effort that it goes in to make something look like it's just off the cuff.

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  Well, especially Steve, because Steve, people don't realize that Steve Martin at the time was the biggest standup comic maybe ever.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  And he was the first guy that was selling out these enormous venues.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  I saw him at the Music Center in L.A., a huge thing.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, huge, huge places where no other comic would do that. And he had songs, like the King Tut song.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Happy Feet?

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, Happy Feet. Was it Let's Get Small? Was that the name of the album?

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  I remember I was a kid when that came out, I was like, this is incredible. He was so funny. And then.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  He kind of decided that people were laughing just because they knew him and things had gotten too big and he just decided to stop.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Speaker 02

  I still find that fascinating.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  He was a banjo player.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  The other guy that's like that is Eddie Murphy.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  Eddie Murphy just decided to stop, just decided to stop doing comics. He's one of the greatest comics that's ever lived, for sure. Some of the best timing, the best stage presence and charisma and performance and, oh, and he just stopped doing it. It's wild.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  I don't know how he did it. I don't know why. I don't understand it. I wish I was his friend. Don't do that. Get back up there, man.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  He was one of the greatest of all time. And he still is really funny. He did, uh, he had, he got the Mark Twain Award.

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  And he did stand-up at the podium.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  He did like a Bill Cosby impression of them taking away Bill Cosby's awards. It was really funny. And I was like, God, he's still really good. Like, all he'd have to do was just put together an act.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  And he would be the biggest comic in the world again.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  No, they, they, I got it.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

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• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  One of my oldest friends, Danny DeVito, you know, and we've done like three pictures together, and there's one picture early on with her romancing the stone. And I didn't even have, I didn't even have a real, actual, you know, clear part. I mean, there was a character, but I just knew he could just fill it out. And it was a, it was a delicate, balanced picture because we had to have a romantic, adventure, kind of comedy, and kind of mixing the elements together. People said, well, you really can't do that. But God bless Danny. And he came in and he just, he came up with all this stuff that wasn't in the script,

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  per se, you know, that he just sort of created and really helped us keep the balance of that picture.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  Who's had a longer career than that guy? When you think about it, like, that guy was on Taxi.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  I know. We were roommates together in, in New York in 1976.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:39:24Speaker 01

  That's how long I've known him. We were roommates in New York. And then he came out and visited me. He came out to audition for In Cold Blood, the Robert Blake part. He came out in cold blood.

• 1:39:38Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, New York guy, I remember he came up to see me up in Santa Barbara, my hippie days in the commune, and he walked up.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  You were in a commune, an actual commune?

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  A community. It was called Mountain Drive, a whole community. Yeah.

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  How was it set up?

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  People, we just shared a lot of stuff, you know?

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  So it was an organic commune?

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  It was organic. People living, you know, it wasn't a formal.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Organized.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  No, no, I had a couple of experiences with that.

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  Did you?

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Well, no, another one where I had my life threatened, you know, which I didn't, wasn't too crazy about. It's in the book.

• 1:40:15Speaker 02

  What's that about, though?

• 1:40:18Speaker 01

  They, um, they tried to create a cathartic moment, being all together, kind of an emotional moment. And, well, they invited me for dinner and then they said, well, with a lady friend, they said, you know, we've been trying to reach you. We got the dessert. And they said, you know, we've been trying to reach you and you just don't get it. You don't get it. So you're gonna have to be eliminated.

• 1:40:47Speaker 02

  What didn't you get?

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Well, I was, uh, I, the comics, they wanted that catharsis to join, to give yourself up, to be part of it.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  Oh, and you didn't want to give yourself up, so they were gonna whack you?

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  They were gonna whack me. And I remember it was a long silence and I said, well, well, you've done it, haven't you? And I said, yeah. And I'm big, long pause. My girlfriend just started falling, she was peeing in her, peeing in her pants and all that.

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  Because she thought they were gonna kill her?

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Probably because. And then I said, um, I'm gonna leave now. And he said, yeah, you better.

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  Jeez.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  I said, we're getting up now and we're leaving. Okay? And I had to carry, carried her out and we got out.

• 1:41:37Speaker 02

  Did you think they were going to actually kill you?

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  Because if they were, why would they let you leave?

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, I didn't know. I mean, there's a numbness. I felt there was a moment.

• 1:41:50Speaker 02

  Where it's possible they would kill you.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  There was a moment that if I jumped, if I, if I got and made any sudden movement, they'd kill me or whether it would be. But it's strange. I've never had many experiences, but this numbness, kind of this whole numbness just comes over you, or it did in my case, you know, just was frozen and, and just sort quietly said it, so.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  What was this called?

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  It's, it was called, there was a group called, it's a guy named Mel Lyman. It was the Mel Lyman Band. It started, it started in Boston and it was a commune. It was a formal, real communal group.

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  It was a band as well? No, they just called it a band?

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Mel Lyman Jug Band. He was, he was the leader of it.

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  So he was the leader of a, was this a band, like a musical band?

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. But he, he was, but the commune was made up of people from all different walks of life. They owned a bunch of houses up in Boston, families all together.

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  Here it is, the Lyman family's Holy Siege of America, Inside the Cult Led by Mel Lyman, the East Coast Charles Manson. Holy shit.

• 1:43:08Speaker 02

  December 23rd, 1971. Holy fuck, dude. Did they kill anybody? It says, East Coast Charles Manson, did he?

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  Did he wind up whacking anybody, Jamie?

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  Please find it. Put that in Perplexity. Ask our AI sponsor, Perplexity, whether he killed people.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  You were wrapped up in that.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, slightly, I got out, but, you know, they moved out to Los Angeles and, you know, we alerted the police and kept an eye on them.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  But that was the bad side of communes. But I'm, I'm thinking, you know, with all this going on and where I'm really worried about our democracy, you know, the basic, so I'm sort of going, now that my career is not the most important thing in my life, but my family is and my kids, and I'm realizing more and more the responsibility we have to community, or first to our family. First to our family, I don't know about you, but I know I spent a lot of part of my life is the most important thing being my career.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  And I've been doing it for fifty years, sixty years, and realized, or especially earlier in my life, my first marriage and other things, that suffered for lack of the career. I don't, I don't believe you can balance your career necessarily if you're ambitious with your family life. People should kind of wait a little while, maybe get their career going before they're making commitments to having kids and, you know, and, and, and, and a marriage.

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  Especially the film business, right? I mean, you're also, you're, you have to fly away to places for long periods of time.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  You gotta go to different places. It's hard. But you, everybody, truckers are driving across country.

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Right.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, there's, everybody's, you know, even with the so-called all this home business now with the internet that lets you do stuff. So I, I sort of on this obsession now about how, how important family is and, you know, we've got, we have members up there that we could hate. But it's the gene, it's the genetic connection that holds us kind of together. And from that, it's the community. And I guess my point is, we cannot take democracy for granted. And, and I'm included, too many of us have just let it kind of go on and let all these people take care of it. Those, we all have those local people in our community who still serve as the town

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  clerk, or still are volunteer fire department people. And, and they're not a big group. It's a small group of people who have a sense of, of volunteer work and supporting it. And I think we all have to start kind of strengthening our communities to our states and not worrying about this federal government. And, and, and, and starting from, building from the bottom up, rather than trying to cut off the head to the top.

• 1:46:23Speaker 02

  Well, the rules exist for a reason, because we really want it to be representative of the people. So we want it to be fair.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  And that's where people get really nervous about the world we're living in, where there's so much money involved in politics. How can it actually be representing the will of the people? And then there's a question to the people themselves, do they know what they're voting for? Are they informed enough? Should you have to be informed? Should you have to take a test to vote? Should you know what you're voting on? You know, I don't think we should be restricting people's right or access to vote. But I do think it would behoove all of us if we actually understood what we were voting for. And I think a lot of times people are just voting for a, a team or an ideology, whether it's on the right or the left. And a lot of times, some very evil, hyper ambitious people can co-opt that, that, that group of people.

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  And especially when they have so much money involved. And that's what's, what really fucked us, is when money got involved in politics.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  Amen, amen.

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  That's what really, really fucked us.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  It's changed, it's changed everything.

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  It shouldn't be a path to riches. And it is.

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  You know, we could hardly get a debate in, you know, at all, with the sizes of the advertising budgets for, for, for ad campaigns.

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  And it's really disrupted this, this whole balance. I mean, as we watch the upcoming midterms, you know.

• 1:47:46Speaker 02

  They're using AI now. So they have like artificial people doing things that they've never done before.

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  In these AI videos. And it's crazy that that's legal. It's also, it's very disheartening that these are the choices that we're saddled with, you know? And everyone's waiting for like, you know, a true JFK style character to come along that speaks eloquently and wisely and says things that we all agree makes sense and is a uniter. Tries to unite us.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  You, you, have you seen anybody that's, anybody new this, on either side, this sort of a?

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  Not like that, no. I wish that someone out there would consider. I think there's a lot of people like that in the world, though. I'm, I'm not a pessimist, and I'm not cynical in terms of human nature. I think there's way more good people than bad people. But much like your algorithm highlights things that anger you, we concentrate more on the bad than we do on the good. I think this is like one of the greatest times ever to be alive. As chaotic as the world is, this is an amazing time of information, of resources, and also of communication. A lot of it's bad, a lot of it's shitty, a lot of it's bots, but a lot of it is people just trying to figure out what is right and what is wrong. Why do I believe what I believe? And why are we stuck in this stupid fucking argument back and forth with each other where, like my friend Dave Smith always says, like, the eighty percent of the ideas most people

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  agree on, it's eighty twenty, most people agree. And unfortunately, when we're so tribal, and we get locked into this idea of this side or that side, red or blue, that we will, will go along with some stuff that we absolutely don't agree with. Because the opposite is the evil party. The opposite is, and I think there, it's a terrible tragedy in this country that we only have two choices like that. And that you think of a libertarian candidate as a throwaway vote. I've voted libertarian before. And you think of it as like, this is a protest vote, you know? Because California's gonna go blue no matter who.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  But, but the laws, the laws are structured such that the libertarians can't get the campaign money.

• 1:49:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  That, that they want.

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  And, and the problem is, is it's at the top. We look at the news every night, and we're all kind of getting along, whether Republicans or Democrats, okay, but these guys at the top have polarized it to such an extent. I used to, my father was involved in, in, you know, a lot of politics over the years. And there's a guy named Jack Valenti, who was the motion picture and television representative, lobbyist, you know? And I remember, you know, I remember twenty-five, thirty years ago, you know, you argue your hell out, this and that, and then you all go on out, you go to the same cocktail party now?

• 1:50:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  I mean, socially, everything is, is, is, is separate.

• 1:50:33Speaker 02

  I remember that from the nineties. It was that in the nineties. Like, I had friends that were Republicans when I was in the nineties, and we would discuss things. When I was a kid, we were on welfare. I, I believe in social safety nets. I think it's important. When people are poor, they shouldn't starve. It's crazy. But I also believe that a lot of these welfare programs get pilfered. And I, I think there's a lot of them, you're, you're, what you're doing is you, when you look at a lot of these NGOs and a lot of these nonprofits, an enormous amount of the money that gets donated to these things gets distributed by the executives. You find people that are working for the homeless, they're making a million dollars a year, like, what the fuck is going on here?

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Speaker 02

  It seems like this is a business. This is a business. And this business thrives on making sure there's a lot of homeless people, so you keep getting the same money, just like that scene in Falling Down.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:51:20Speaker 02

  When he says, you have to justify your budget, you have to spend all that money because then you won't get that money next year. That's a real problem in this country. It's a giant problem when it comes to even philanthropy and even like really good charitable organizations. You find out how much of that money is just getting slung around to NGOs, and how much of that money is just getting, just moved around into other people's bank accounts.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  Joe, I, I could agree with you, but I cannot believe it comes close to the corruption involved in the military industrial complex.

• 1:51:50Speaker 02

  I think you're right. No, I think you're right. I think there's corruption across the board. I, I don't, I'm not excusing the corruption in the military industrial complex by saying that we, I'm just saying that we need to pay attention to the fact that, look, there's twenty-four billion dollars were spent on the homeless in California, and Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill to audit it, to find out where that money went. And I think, if I had to guess, I think, because a lot of it goes to places that are very uncomfortable. A lot of it probably went to NGOs, just like the, the fire money from the Pacific Palisades Fire.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:52:21Speaker 02

  That money got distributed to like a hundred different NGOs. That's crazy. It's supposed to go to the people that were losing their houses. It's supposed to like people raised all this money and had all this goodwill and charity because they thought it was gonna help these poor people that were struck down. These people that, you know, there's a lot of people who were barely paying their mortgages. They lived in a great neighborhood, it was worth it to them, and then they lost everything.

• 1:52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  And none of that money went to them. That disturbs people, and it should. It doesn't dis, it, it, it doesn't dismiss or in any way condone the corruption of the military industrial complex, because that's a gigantic problem in this country, a huge problem. And it's been that way forever.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  Which we can't control. The other one you're speaking about, we should be able to, to monitor more carefully.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:53:02Speaker 01

  State by state. I mean, that's what you're saying is, it makes sense, but we should, we can do that.

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  Look, the Pentagon's never passed an audit.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Is, is, is another hidden, you know?

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  The Pentagon has never passed an audit.

• 1:53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:14Speaker 02

  Never. Imagine if you never passed an audit?

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  You'd have been jailed a long time ago.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  They ought to be every year.

• 1:53:20Speaker 02

  Where's that fucking Romancing the Stone money, sir? Yeah, you'd have, you'd, they would have put you in the pokey a long time ago. I mean, look how many people they did arrest for and put in jail for tax evasion.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  You know, Lauryn Hill went to fucking jail from the Fugees. She went to jail. And they don't even care if you pay, it's not even like you owe us the money, you gotta pay it back. No, no, no, you go to jail and you pay it back, but you gotta go to jail so that everybody knows, don't fuck with the government. We want our money. It's like Joe Pesci from Goodfellas, fuck you, pay me. Yeah, that's what it is. And that's, that's the boot that we're all living under. You know, it's a lot of problems in this country.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Speaker 02

  A lot of problems. There's also the student debt problem. That's a giant problem.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:03Speaker 02

  Saddle down kids with just debt they can never get free of. The only debt that we allow in this country that could never, never get out of? You can have, you could get bankrupt from a lot of different things, but you, you, you don't ever get excused from those loans.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  That was one of the things I'm not proud about that I wrote in the book because, but the student debt was when, when I turned 21 and I was just in my sophomore year in, in, in college. My dad said, you're 21, okay, here you go. He took a checkbook, he wrote a check, he gave me $10,000. $10,000. Wow, Dad, thanks, that's great. Wow, says you're on your own, kid. It's more than 95% of this country can be.

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  What was that in those days? Like, what is that equivalent to in today's dollar?

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know, but I.

• 1:55:01Speaker 02

  Hundred?

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  No, I don't, maybe 10.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  But, but I don't know, but I said, Dad, it's great, but you know, um, I got two years more fruition in, in school and everything and, you know, a couple. They said, son, they started getting pissed about, you know, you're taking this. I said, no, Dad, I'm really grateful, but you know. Anyway, um, and then for 30 years, my, my father had four sons, I was the oldest. For 30 years, Dad would look at all of my other brothers and say, your brother, Michael, never asked me for anything, anything in his life after that.

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  And you guys, and he would just drill these poor bastards, my brothers about that. And finally, about 30 years later, I said, Dad, I gotta tell you something. He said, what? You remember one Christmas, you bought me a beautiful present, you bought me these two beautiful Italian leather suitcases. They were soft, you know, leather, it's beautiful suitcases, right? He said, yeah, yeah, I can't remember. Well, when I would go back like at Christmas time from school, go see my mother back east, right? I said, yeah, well, each suitcase could fit 22 kilos of marijuana.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  And, and I used to go back with just the clothes on my back and 44 kilos, you know? And that was how I got through, you know, the rest of the expense of my school, did it a couple of times and that got me through. But I said, I gotta tell you the story, Dad, because, you know, you're beating, you're beating the shit out of my younger brothers and everything about, you know, I never asked you for anything, but you know.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  Cause I was a drug dealer. Wow, that's crazy. How, how many trips did you do, you make?

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  Twice.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  How did you stop?

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  Cause it was so much money. How did you stop? I mean, you must have been like, it's very profitable to do that.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  Well, I remember it was like, a kilo was $75 in, in the out west and you could sell it for five or 600, $700 uh, back east. But I, you know, these, things were, things were beginning to get, you know, that was where the whole hippie thing, you know, all of a sudden, you know, ex-cons were coming out of jail to say, hey, man, grow your hair long, you know? Go to, you hate Ashbury, you fuck any girls you want, they give you free food. And then, you know, then.

• 1:57:44Speaker 02

  It got infiltrated.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  Then the drug dealing started getting.

• 1:57:47Speaker 02

  Violent.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  Violent and uglier and a little heavier and.

• 1:57:51Speaker 02

  Of course. Yeah, wow. Well, good on you for getting just true trips and out. Cause a lot of people would have been sucked into that world and gotten addicted to the money.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  And the thrill, I bet the thrill was crazy.

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  The adrenaline rush, yeah, of doing it, of course, this was before dogs, you know, so.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  Was it, was there a possibility that they could have checked your luggage?

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  Oh, sure, sure, they could have, I mean, it was, it was, you know.

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  Did that happen sometimes back then?

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Um, no, I mean, I, I, I don't know, I, I was, you know, I was, I was a little, I was a hippie. I wasn't thinking totally, totally clearly, but.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  Well, thank God, you never got busted.

• 1:58:35Speaker 01

  A lot of, a good, a good memories. I remember going to Mothers of Invention.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  Frank Zappa?

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  Frank Zappa, here at concert. And, um, talked about hallucinogenics and all of that. And I was driving and they had, remember the, the ad, it was a cereal ad for a kid? Give it to Mikey, see if Mikey likes it. Yeah, Mikey likes it, right, like.

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  So I, I dropped whatever we had and was going to the, the concert and I made a left turn and all of a sudden, almost was there, my car driving, all of a sudden, bloop, bloop, but you can see the red lights are going and I go, oh, man. And I get out, out of the car and I go back and I talked to the police officer and, and it's okay. I made an illegal left-hand turn and I said, okay. I remember I get back into the car and Danny was, Danny was with me and we had, you know, about, I don't know, a few joints, a few joints and Danny was in the backseat and I just looked at him and said, where's the grass?

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  And Danny smiled and all his mouth was entirely, this green monk, he swallowed all of them, you know? At the time, I mean, just this crazy, you know, crazy stories that we had, we had a great time. And then he went on and then I don't know if you ever saw a movie called, um, The War of the Roses? Did you ever see, Danny directed, Danny directed that one.

• 2:00:16Speaker 02

  Um, one of the things that I found out when I was getting ready for this, that I didn't know before was that you were, you produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah.

• 2:00:26Speaker 02

  Was that your first big project?

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, first project as a producer, I mean, I, I had never, the way it worked is the dad, like 1960, dad got Spartacus. So Spartacus is like the biggest star in the world. And he had a production company about 1962. He acquired the galleries of this book called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. And he had adapted into a play. And his idea was he was gonna go back to Broadway, do the play for six months. And then, you know, big success and this and that, then come out and make the movie. The play didn't work out. Didn't, it wasn't a success and, and he did it.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  But again, I thought about him, that at the height of his movie career, he could do anything. He wanted to go back and do this play. And, and it was a great part, R.P. McMurphy, the character. So, um, and then he tried for years. Now, cut 1963, I'm in college and I'm in 20th Century American Literature course. And One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest now is an American classic, right? I start working in the, in the business. I've had like five turkey movies. Now I'm going into television, episodic television. This is before the Streets of San Francisco.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  And I'm in my dad's office one day and I hear, he's tried for six years and he's gonna sell. He's gonna sell Cuckoo's Nest. I said, Dad, you can't, you can't sell that, man. This is just a great story. And Joe, I had no intention of, I didn't even thought about producing or anything. I was just trying to be an actor, but I said, look, let me run with it. Let, let, let me, let me try to get it set up, Dad. You play the part, right, make a production, give me, give me a chance to set it up. He was a great dad, he looked me in the eyes and, okay, you know, I'll give you a year.

• 2:02:32Speaker 01

  So now, so now Streets of San Francisco starts and I'm shooting all of this in San Francisco with Carl Mullins and I'm doing the show. I go through my father's files, the history of Cuckoo's Nest, and I see this guy named Saul Zantz, who has a record company in Berkeley, California called Fantasy Records, who had expressed interest about the project. So now I'm up in San Francisco, I reach out to Saul, found out what happened. And, you know, but, but the problem was, and we kind of worked it out.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  And Saul had basically a record company, Jazz Labels, Milestone, Prestige, Jazz Labels, but he had this one rock and roll group called The Gollywogs. And while I was there, he just hired The Gollywogs. He said, listen, man, we gotta change their name. And they changed their name to Creedence Clearwater Revival. All right? So Creedence Clearwater Revival paid for Cuckoo's Nest. So now, you know, we made the deal, I finally got a screenplay. After a period of time, I got a director, Milos Forman. And now the director and Saul sit me down and say, Michael, Kirk's too old.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  Kirk, I'm sorry to tell you, Kirk is not gonna work out.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  And I pushed Joel, I said, Michael, we're working together, it's, I understand.

• 2:04:10Speaker 02

  He was gonna play the Jack Nicholson role.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he was RP Mc, think about him, I mean, he would be RP McMurphy if he'd been like 20 years younger when he first was, when he first backed them during the play.

• 2:04:24Speaker 02

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• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  So I had to go to my dad.

• 2:06:24Speaker 02

  How old was he at the time?

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  Sixty, sixty-two, sixty, sixty-two. And I had to go to my dad and say, Dad, it ain't gonna happen. And I can tell you now, Joe, if you get four good parts in your entire career, four really great parts, you're lucky. You're really lucky. I mean, they don't come along often. And RP McMurphy was one of those parts. I said, Dad, they, you know, the director in Saw, financing, they just, they don't see it. And he looked at me, you know, not

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  sure. I said, I went to the mat. I said, Dad, we still, you know, we're producing, producing the picture. I'm giving, I'll give you half of my producing deal for giving me this opportunity. And I was that, we went off, we made the movie. And then I brought dad up to Berkeley, California, to see the final cut of the picture, it was all put together. And he came out of the theater, and he said, Michael, it's a hell of a movie, a hell of a movie. And

• 2:07:38Speaker 01

  Jack was fantastic. And he was just, just such a mensch about it. But, but over every few years, you know, when he had, Dad had a couple of pops, you could, I could have done that, you know, I could have done that picture and all that. But for me, it was crazy, because The Streets of San Francisco was a big hit. It was a big hit, number one show on ABC. We had, you know, we averaged 24, 25 million viewers a week, you know,

• 2:08:16Speaker 01

  ABC was this brand-new network, it just started. And then it was syndicated all over, all over the world. So when I went to them and said, let me get this straight, you're gonna leave, this is a film, you're gonna leave this hit series to make this little, to produce? Not even acting, to produce this little indie film? And Dad was up, everybody said, are you sure this is the right idea? But I was in love with the project. Didn't ever have thought about producing. But when it happened, is all the 104 hours, 104 episodes, 104 hours of television I'd done with Carl Malden, a wonderful actor, I had learned

• 2:08:59Speaker 01

  so much about production and everything, that I was shocked when the picture came about how much I really knew. And so I left the show, they, first of all, they let me out of my contract, which is unheard of these days. I had a five-year contract on a hit show, and Carl Malden, I loved him to death, said, I know you've been thinking about Gofort and Quinn Martin, this big TV producer, had The Fugitive and FBI and all that, said, go for it. And so this totally changed my life. So that now, I'm a television actor,

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  but I'm an Academy Award-winning producer. I've got a studio deal as a producer, you know. But those days, before streaming, television and feature films were on very separate tracks. Television, you were treated like a television actor, and movies were the big thing. So I'm a, I'm a producer, but I can't get hired in the movies as an actor. It was really hard. I would be like the last choice. But then I had a run. I had, as a producer, had one flow of The Cuckoo's Nest, The China Syndrome, Romancing the Stone, Jewel Valley,

• 2:10:24Speaker 01

  I had like four or five hits right in a row. And at the same time, I was trying to find these little roles I could play in, you know, as an actor.

• 2:10:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:37Speaker 02

  Another film that you made, that's an all-time great, and it still freaks people out to this day, is Fatal Attraction. Holy shit, that movie scared the fuck out of me. Scared the fuck out of, Glenn Close was so good in that movie.

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  She was so good. And you know, it was such a, such a lesson, Joe, because we didn't want, we were casting the picture, you know, and Glenn Close, who already had three Academy Award nominations to her name, you know, really wanted to do it. We all said, no, she's just not right. We didn't think she was sexy enough for this or that. And finally, her agent calls and says, listen, Glenn Close will come in and audition for you. I went, holy shit, free time Academy Award nominee, she's gonna come in and audition for us. And she came in, and she had that part down in Alex. And boy, were we wrong. The director,

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  we all looked at each other, and it was such a lesson, a learning, that she was so committed, that she'd lay herself out there, and she was so good.

• 2:11:45Speaker 02

  She was perfect for the role. I couldn't imagine anybody else doing it. She plays crazy so well. There's a darkness in that woman's mind.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  And it's amazing that the, that the issue that, on another level, that she's most involved with is mental health. It's an issue that's been involved in her family.

• 2:12:05Speaker 02

  Makes sense. She probably made a lot of people crazy just from that movie.

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I had.

• 2:12:10Speaker 02

  She played crazy so well.

• 2:12:12Speaker 01

  My friends, I had my male friends, I was, thanks a lot, man. Hey, thank you, they fucking hated me for this movie. They hated me. You know, it was like, it was, it was a perfect concept nightmare.

• 2:12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  A perfect what-if. And I remember we were in France, promoting the movie in France, and all the reviewers, well, you know, in France, we all had mistresses, it is nothing big deal, yeah, this and that. It was a smash. Every French wife dragged their husband to the, dragged their husband to the theater and said, okay, this is what could happen, motherfuckers. So be careful.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  Well, such a, Glenn Close's character was such a complex character, because there's this like, this very strange dance of sexy and crazy and dangerous, like really dangerous.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  No, she was brilliant.

• 2:13:03Speaker 02

  Brilliant.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  And then, when we did our final screening, the picture was just like gangbusters, but we had a different ending that didn't work. And the ending we had was that we had a fight near the end, it was, and I had a knife in my hand, and we got, and you kind of established it. And so the ending was Glenn almost in a Buddha position with Madame Butterfly playing, and sort of symbolically taking a knife and slitting her throat.

• 2:13:39Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  And then putting the knife down, and the audience knew that my fingerprints were on the knife, right? So I was gonna get it.

• 2:13:49Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. That didn't work?

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  No, it was, it was so, it was, it was a beautiful ending. But Glenn was so good. She was so great that the audience, like, they had blue balls, because they said, no, kill the bitch. I mean, you don't kill, it was like, you know, no, no, no, man, no, wait, wait, kill her, kill her. They would, they would not allow her to take her own life, you know, without, without getting revenge.

• 2:14:18Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:14:19Speaker 01

  And poor Glenn, absolutely, she said, we have to shoot a new ending. She said, absolutely not. This is my character, this is what makes it all work. And she refused, you know, to do this ending. And so I was like, shit, you know, and it just wasn't working. The ending, it was so hard, it was so hard to explain it to her, that it was because she was so good. Oh, my God, you're fast, man.

• 2:14:48Speaker 02

  Right. You can find it on YouTube. Oh, God. She's doing it slow. Oh, God.

• 2:15:00Speaker 02

  Okay, I get it.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  You get it. So, so finally, I say Glenn, because she's a wonderful theater actress, too. Yeah, I say Glenn, when you do a Broadway show, they take the show out of town and before it comes to Broadway and they play the play and then based on audience reaction, they rewrite things, right?

• 2:15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  So if this was a play and we did this and you saw that scene, they would tell us if it was a play out of town and we would have to change it. So this is why I never understood, people have this whole criticism about screening movies, doing test screening audiences. It's for the audience, man. What do you mean? You want to find out what the audience feels. I mean, I understand the art of the director and his vision and everything, but you know, you want to make it as entertaining as possible. So I persuaded her and it all worked out. I love her to death. She was wonderful to work with. We have a great friendship.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  It's, you know, it's obviously a memorable, memorable part for me. I mean, a part of my life. But I'm proud of the fact, Joe, and I realized it wasn't as obvious until I was, until when I was working on One Hell of a Ride and how many pictures I had where the women had the best role.

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  Whether, you know, whether, or whether it was Glenn or whether it was Jimmy Moore in Disclosure or Sharon Stone. And I look back and then to the first picture that I produced, Cuckoo's Nest, when there was this fabulous character of Nurse Ratched. Remember Nurse Ratched?

• 2:16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:00Speaker 01

  Well, back then, women didn't want to play a villain.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  This was the women's movement. You didn't, women didn't play a villain. We offered that part to every major, Anne Bancroft, Colleen Dewhurst. None of them would touch the part.

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  Until we got Louise Fletcher, who wasn't very well known and went on to win the Oscar. But it was, it was, it just was interesting how the women's movement has changed. But I've always been, in most of my adult life, found this, you know, weird struggle between men and women in this, in this century in terms of us trying to find out our proper roles or who we are.

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  Even on basic instinct, on basic instinct, all of a sudden,

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  we think we're shooting this movie up in San Francisco

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  and we get a protest from the LGBT. There was no Q back then. It was just the LGBT community offended that we were making a movie with a bisexual woman who was an ice pick killer.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  And I said, what? I said, and you guys, guy, we love villain parts. Villain parts are the best parts to play. You know, they're always, they're great. And so I said, well, how can you know this is a derogatory statement on gay, on a bisexual woman? How's it come a man? But no, they were serious. So we ended up shooting scenes up in San Francisco with 40 SWAT officers surrounding the whole block to hold off the protests.

• 2:18:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  From us, the shooting. I mean.

• 2:19:01Speaker 02

  How did they know?

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  Talk about, you know.

• 2:19:03Speaker 02

  How did they know the plot? How'd they know the script?

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  They got hold of it. Well, it's another story. I will, you know.

• 2:19:10Speaker 02

  Someone leaked it?

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  The writers, script, it's another story. So it's, yeah, it's been, been, been an interesting.

• 2:19:22Speaker 02

  It's been a hell of a ride.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Hell of a ride, yeah.

• 2:19:26Speaker 02

  Well, congratulations, man. Congratulations on the book and just your amazing career. You've had a wild, a wild experience.

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  Thank you, Joe. And the way you've created, I mean, wow, man. I don't think you've ever anticipated your many different careers and lives that you had. This is fabulous.

• 2:19:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I never saw any of it coming.

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51Speaker 02

  I still have a hard time believing it, but.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:19:54Speaker 02

  It is what it is.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  It is what it is.

• 2:19:56Speaker 02

  Thank you and good luck with your memoir.

• 2:19:59Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:19:59Speaker 02

  And everything, everything else.

• 2:20:00Speaker 01

  Thank you. Pleasure, pleasure.

• 2:20:01Speaker 02

  Pleasure meeting you.

• 2:20:02Speaker 01

  You're welcome.

• 2:20:03Speaker 02

  Thank you. Bye, everybody.

• 2:20:21Speaker 00

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• 2:20:50Speaker 05

  Welcome back, frickin' Frack. Welcome to the jungle. ABC Wednesdays. Abbott is back. It's gonna be the best year yet. Thank you. Now we can finally turn this up.

• 2:21:03Speaker 05

  And everyone's going wild. Y'all think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary.

• 2:21:10Speaker 06

  Anything can happen in the jungle, right, guys?

• 2:21:14Speaker 05

  All new Wednesdays on ABC. And stream next day on Hulu.