Latest / NO FILTER / Joe Rogan Experience _2532 - Tim Robbins

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Joe Rogan Experience _2532 - Tim Robbins · NO FILTER

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night.
• 0:09
  Speaker 3: All day. All right. Jamie's very geeked out. I want
• 0:14
  to let you know. He didn't want to say it.
• 0:16
  Shawshank is his all-time favorite movie. So he was kind
• 0:18
  of freaking out when he met you.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Thanks, Jamie. No problem. Thank you.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's all-time.
• 0:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, you're a part of one of, like, easily
• 0:25
  one of the greatest movies in the history of people.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: I know. It's such a gift. I mean, when people...
• 0:31
  Come up and say something about it. It usually is
• 0:35
  coming from a pretty deep place. Yeah.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: If you didn't like that movie, there's something. You should
• 0:40
  go to a doctor. You need medication. There's something wrong
• 0:43
  with you. It's an amazing movie. And weird that it's
• 0:46
  a Stephen King movie, too. That guy is arguably one
• 0:50
  of the most prolific guys in the history of fiction.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And in the same novella, there was Stand By Me, too.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: Oh, wow. That's amazing. It's so weird. His stuff varies
• 1:02
  so much. He had to do a pseudonym at one
• 1:04
  point in time. Remember? He did Richard Bachman.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06
  Speaker 3: Because he was churning out so many books. They're like, hey,
• 1:08
  we can't keep selling these fucking Stephen King books. And
• 1:12
  he's like, well, how would I come up with another name? Like,
• 1:14
  give me a fake name. And he just started killing
• 1:16
  it under a fake name. Just got to keep writing it.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Got to, got to, got to. Yeah.
• 1:19
  Speaker 3: Wild. Wild guy. Yeah. Just a very unusual human.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: You know? They exist. Yeah. Totally met him once.
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: Did you meet him like when you were filming the movie?
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Around the premiere time. Yeah.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So he's out there, man. Yeah. You know, during
• 1:35
  his early days, I'm fascinated by his early days because
• 1:40
  his early days, he was off the rails with cocaine
• 1:43
  and alcohol and some of the best shit that he made.
• 1:46
  He doesn't even remember writing it.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: I think Cooch, I think is one of the books
• 1:51
  his wife took out of the garbage bin. Cause he
• 1:53
  threw it away. He's like, fuck this book sucks.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: It was, it was.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: Cujo or one of the classics.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:59
  Speaker 3: And she was like, are you out of your fucking mind? Like,
• 2:02
  this is incredible. And he was literally going to throw
• 2:05
  it out. Cause it was just out of his mind.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: He wrote the shining, right? Yeah. So what was it?
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: Carrie?
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:10
  Speaker 3: He threw Carrie away. Crazy.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: Crazy.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: That's crazy. Yeah. Shining was a big movie from a book,
• 2:18
  big book for me. I was, you know, working in a,
• 2:22
  Nine to five job and in between colleges and it
• 2:25
  really like woke me up to all kinds of great
• 2:29
  possibilities in writing.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: Well, he hated the movie, which is so crazy because
• 2:34
  he felt like Jack Nicholson got insane too quickly.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Because in the book– I read the book too.
• 2:41
  It's very different, similar but different. it's more of a
• 2:45
  drawn out process of him becoming possessed by the property.
• 2:50
  Slower rollout.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:51
  Speaker 3: He like Jack Nicholson was kind of kooky already, like
• 2:54
  right away, which, you know, it's Jack Nicholson. It's also
• 3:00
  Stanley Kubrick. It's like, he's got to do his interpretation
• 3:03
  of it. You just got to accept that.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That's some scary shit in that.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: Fuck man. His books are insane. It's like, What is
• 3:12
  going on inside that guy's– or was going on inside
• 3:14
  that guy's mind when he was writing that?
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: God knows.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: I think once he got clean, he kind of changed
• 3:19
  and straightened out and different human now. But boy, I'm
• 3:24
  fascinated by the off-the-rails days because the books were so nuts.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Was Shawshank during that time?
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: I don't know. It must have been. It must have
• 3:34
  been because I don't think he got sober until– it
• 3:39
  was decades after his career began.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: Some of the great stuff, like I think all the stand,
• 3:48
  I think all that stuff, he was out of his
• 3:49
  mind and he was writing all those.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: But in the midst of all that madness, there's a tenderness,
• 3:53
  you know?
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah. Oh, a great humanity to it all.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, but also just a true understanding of
• 4:00
  the darkest nature of humans and, and how they're influenced.
• 4:05
  And then of course, you know, demonic possession and, Salem's
• 4:09
  lot and all that other crazy shit. It was like,
• 4:11
  he was just, it was so good.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: But then the idea that a library can be the, uh,
• 4:16
  you know, in Shawshank that the library can be the liberation. Yeah. Yeah.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: No, it was amazing. Amazing movie. Um, we were talking
• 4:24
  about your new show silo, which I, not new. Um,
• 4:29
  it's been around for three seasons. I just started watching it.
• 4:31
  So it's new to me. I watched the first two
• 4:33
  episodes last night. It was fucking great. And very original
• 4:36
  and interesting. And I was telling you before that it
• 4:39
  made me think of this place that they discovered fairly
• 4:43
  recently in Turkey called Derinkuyu. And Derinkuyu is this underground
• 4:48
  city that's massive. I think it could hold 20,000 people.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: Something nutty like that.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: I've seen pictures of it.
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: Found completely by accident.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: So some guy lost one of his chickens, went through
• 5:05
  a hole in the wall and never came back. And
• 5:07
  he was trying to figure out where this fucking chicken went.
• 5:09
  So he broke down the wall to see what was
• 5:11
  going on. And then they realized that there's this insane
• 5:16
  underground city.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, underneath this town in Turkey. And it's massive. Just
• 5:22
  absolutely massive. They have no idea who made it. There's
• 5:26
  no historical record of it.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Any idea of when?
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, they make guesses based on stuff they
• 5:33
  find there. But it's when you carbon date an object, right?
• 5:36
  So you could go visit the pyramids today, right? And
• 5:39
  you could leave behind some stuff, right? And then everybody dies.
• 5:43
  Humanity dies out in a cataclysm. And then 100,000 years
• 5:46
  from now, people start looking through the piles of some
• 5:50
  of these sites and the pyramids will probably still be there.
• 5:53
  And if there was any organic material left, like a
• 5:55
  book that you left or a leather-bound book or some
• 5:58
  piece of wood, they could carbon date that. And then
• 6:01
  that would say the time that you were there. But
• 6:03
  it wouldn't say the time that the actual structure was made.
• 6:06
  So who knows how long people– show me some more
• 6:08
  pictures of that, please. I was looking up when it
• 6:10
  was made. Do they know? No, definitely don't know. They
• 6:13
  didn't even know it existed. I mean it was– when
• 6:15
  was it found? I feel like it was found in
• 6:19
  the 20th century.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: There must have been some kind of hostile force that
• 6:23
  they built it to escape from.
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: Or something going on outside. And not just hostile, but environmental.
• 6:33
  So 1963, rediscovered in 1963.
• 6:36
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: That's crazy. It was in his fucking house. Even today,
• 6:42
  only 10% of it is accessible to tourists. The rest
• 6:45
  is still being explored. That's how nuts it is. So
• 6:49
  how many people do they think it held when it
• 6:51
  was operational? I think it's something like 20,000 people. That's
• 6:56
  how big this place is.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: So they don't know when or why, and depending on how,
• 7:05
  around 20,000 people.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: Plus livestock.
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: Plus livestock and food stores.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: Really? How'd they farm down there?
• 7:12
  Speaker 3: Who fucking knows? I don't know. But they had grain storage.
• 7:15
  They had all kinds of stuff down there.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Oil presses.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: 18 levels reaching 85 meters.
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: So 280 feet deep into the ground with ventilation shafts, wells, stables,
• 7:27
  wine and oil presses, storage rooms, chapels, and school rooms.
• 7:31
  Plus a half ton circular stone doors that could be
• 7:34
  rolled shut from the inside only. So they were obviously
• 7:39
  either fighting off some sort of an army or the
• 7:42
  outside air was hostile. There was something going on.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Got too hot or something.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: Could have been. Yeah.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: Well, there's been many moments in the time that human
• 7:50
  beings were alive where there have been cataclysms. There's this
• 7:54
  thing called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory that's around 11,800
• 7:58
  years ago. There's all this evidence that there was massive
• 8:01
  asteroid impacts all over the earth, comet impacts.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: Uh-huh.
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: And they think that it was probably a reset of civilization.
• 8:08
  And so this could have been post that. It could
• 8:12
  have been how some people survived in these areas.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Human beings have an amazing ability to survive. Yeah.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: I mean– Which is Silo.
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: I mean it's really– Silo is a modern version of
• 8:25
  Darren Cooley.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And here I was in the middle of
• 8:29
  lockdown when I received those scripts. And I was like, oh,
• 8:33
  this is actually talking about right now. Yeah. This is
• 8:37
  about a controlled society where information is censored and where
• 8:44
  compliance is necessary. And if you don't comply, you get
• 8:47
  sent out into the hostile environment. It was all too
• 8:52
  familiar metaphorically for me.
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: Perfect timing.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, perfect timing.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: Because you got to think that he must have written
• 8:58
  that before, right?
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, many years ago.
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: So it was just– Got lucky.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Here we go.
• 9:04
  Speaker 3: Synchronicity.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: I've been blessed that way in my career. Yeah.
• 9:08
  Speaker 3: What do you think that's about? Do you ever wonder
• 9:10
  why you're so lucky? Obviously, you're very talented, but it's
• 9:14
  also there's a lot of talented people that don't nothing
• 9:17
  ever happens.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: I think it comes down to the ability to say no.
• 9:23
  At crucial times when I was facing down either, you know.
• 9:28
  You know, I remember when I first had my first
• 9:32
  child and I was broke and I got offered this
• 9:36
  comedy that was dumb and it was a million bucks
• 9:40
  and I needed the money. And I also had an
• 9:43
  opportunity if I waited. Robert Altman was trying to put
• 9:47
  together the player. So I threw caution in the wind
• 9:53
  and said, no, I can't do that stupid comedy.
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: What was the stupid comedy?
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: Do you remember? Yeah, it was called Folk. I remember
• 10:04
  flying out to L.A. to meet on it. And I'm
• 10:07
  with Alan Arkin. And he was the guy that was
• 10:11
  going to play my father in this thing. And he said,
• 10:14
  what the fuck are you doing this script for? I said,
• 10:17
  I need the money. He says, I don't know. I'm
• 10:19
  not sure I want to do this thing. I was like,
• 10:26
  thank you, Alan Arkin, for confirming what I was thinking.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And so I said no. And then player came
• 10:33
  through and shifted my whole career. Yeah.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: It's a matter of following that voice in your head,
• 10:41
  the instinct, the one that's telling you this is the
• 10:43
  right way to go.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: Even though there's all sorts of influence that want to
• 10:47
  lead you into the other direction.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: There was a period of time about 10, 15 years
• 10:52
  ago when I got offered in the course of seven months,
• 10:57
  I got offered to play the head of the CIA
• 11:00
  three times.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: Did you ever wonder what that's all about?
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: I couldn't even imagine. I mean, for some reason, that was,
• 11:10
  I don't know. I have no idea. And then a
• 11:13
  couple years after that– and again, you're looking down at
• 11:17
  your bills and your mortgages and stuff and you need
• 11:20
  the money and just have to– I don't want to
• 11:22
  do that, right? Then a few years after that, a
• 11:25
  couple years after that, I got offered in the course
• 11:27
  of a couple months, one, to play the head of FIFA.
• 11:33
  Which is a corrupt organization, but in the movie, they
• 11:37
  were the best people in the world, right? Not to
• 11:40
  mention that the head of FIFA was a Brazilian. But
• 11:44
  they were offering a ton of money, and basically it
• 11:46
  was FIFA producing a movie about itself. Oh, wow. And
• 11:50
  after that, I got an offer to play the head
• 11:52
  of the Chilean mine that had just had this huge disaster.
• 11:57
  And it turns out the mining company, they were really
• 11:59
  nice people, according to the script. It wasn't bad management
• 12:06
  or anything or, you know, that made the disaster happen.
• 12:09
  So I realized that, that the oligarchs are starting to
• 12:12
  make movie about themselves. It's got oligarchical cinema. It's like
• 12:17
  they produce movies that make themselves look really good.
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: And you can get away with it.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: Oh, hell yeah.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Nobody knows. Nobody cares. And they think they can buy
• 12:25
  anybody and they almost bought me, but I just, I
• 12:28
  have to, at times I just have to look, you know,
• 12:31
  face it down and say, listen, it, it's not right
• 12:33
  in my heart. I can't, I can't do it. Yeah.
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: Well, that's great. You've got that North star.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: It's great that I had the luxury. Yeah. You know,
• 12:41
  oftentimes people don't have that luxury. Right.
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: And one bad decision can pigeonhole you in a bad
• 12:48
  direction and then you'll never get the ones that you
• 12:50
  really want.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: These movies about you playing CIA had, did they ever
• 12:54
  get made?
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: There were TV shows and movies. Yeah.
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: Was any of it any good?
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: No. No. I remember when we were doing movies like,
• 13:12
  you know, the Day of the Condor, you know, which
• 13:14
  was like critical of the CIA. And I think now
• 13:18
  we have the rogue CIA agents that are actually good guys. And,
• 13:21
  you know, listen, CIA, you know, whatever it does, nobody
• 13:25
  really knows the extent of what they do. But they
• 13:28
  do have a lot of good, portrayals.
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: In the media. Well, I think there's good people that
• 13:37
  are in the CIA as well. And I think that
• 13:39
  it's necessary. I just think that they obviously have unchecked
• 13:43
  power and they've done some really fucking shady shit, you know,
• 13:47
  in the name of this is the right thing to
• 13:48
  do right now, including selling drugs.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I remember that Iran Contra. I remember that.
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: That's one of the, I mean, I remember that because
• 13:57
  I was, I guess I was either right out of
• 14:00
  high school. It was like in that area. Where the
• 14:02
  whole Oliver Stone thing was on television all the time.
• 14:05
  Oliver North. Oliver North, excuse me. Oliver North and Ronald Reagan.
• 14:09
  And there was this guy, Jimmy Tingle, hilarious Boston stand-up
• 14:13
  comedian who had a great joke about it. Where they're
• 14:16
  interviewing Ronald Reagan and they say, Mr. President, did you
• 14:20
  ever sell arms to people who hate us?
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: And he's like, I don't remember.
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: He goes, well, in the future, if you sell arms
• 14:29
  to people who hate us, Jot it down. Make a
• 14:35
  note of it.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: He goes, put a post-it on your refrigerator.
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: Today, I sold arms to Iran.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: I remember that was in the 80s. I did a
• 14:46
  play about it. I wrote a play about it.
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: We performed it with the actors gang, yeah.
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: There was a meme that was on social media recently
• 14:54
  that was– it showed Oliver North during the whole Iran
• 14:58
  concert trials. When they got caught selling drugs in Los
• 15:02
  Angeles to fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
• 15:06
  And then he goes to jail. And then the same
• 15:08
  guy you see later on Fox News as like a
• 15:11
  war analyst. And it's like this hilarious meme. Like if
• 15:17
  you told me in 1980, whatever the fuck it was,
• 15:20
  where he got in trouble, that he would eventually be
• 15:23
  the guy that they call upon for expert advice. on
• 15:26
  what's going on overseas.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a deep connection that goes back years. All
• 15:32
  the people that get it wrong, particularly Iraq War, anyone
• 15:37
  that got it wrong got promotions.
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and no one got in trouble.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: No one got fired. People in the media as well,
• 15:43
  they promoted it. They got better jobs.
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: Well, this is kind of the only time in our
• 15:50
  lifetimes where there's actual real independent media. where there's independent
• 15:54
  journalists that are not connected to any major corporations that
• 15:57
  are operating either on Substack or online or on YouTube
• 16:00
  or on X. It's fascinating because they're the ones that
• 16:05
  are exposing all these connections that the media and the
• 16:10
  Central Intelligence Agency and all these other government organizations have
• 16:12
  had where they've all been working together forever, spinning narratives
• 16:17
  on TV. And so like anytime something like the Iraq
• 16:19
  war happens where they go, oh, we've got weapons of
• 16:21
  mass destruction. We've got to go in there. No weapons
• 16:24
  of mass destruction. No one goes away. No one gets
• 16:26
  in trouble. And the same people are on TV telling
• 16:28
  you about some new thing that you have to pay
• 16:29
  attention to. It's like, this is nuts. This episode is
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• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Well, some people get in trouble, people that come out
• 17:34
  against it. And there's never any apologies. I did. I did. I,
• 17:39
  you know, I risked, you know, a lot to do
• 17:41
  it and, you know, wound up. being right but no
• 17:45
  one ever said hey you were right you know and this.
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: Was during the iraq war yeah um what did you
• 17:50
  say i uh.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: I i was one of maybe five people that were
• 17:58
  famous that came out against that wolf um went on
• 18:02
  you know in various television shows and made a couple
• 18:04
  speeches i got my appearance at the Baseball Hall of
• 18:08
  Fame for Bull Durham, 15th anniversary or something like, canceled
• 18:12
  by the head of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: It was funny because I was doing a show at
• 18:20
  the time, and I heard about it, and I started
• 18:24
  writing a response, but it was already printed by the
• 18:28
  time I had my response. So the next day I
• 18:31
  got a bunch of– people contacting me. I hired a
• 18:36
  crisis PR person for the first time in my life and, uh,
• 18:40
  wound up getting my letter to Dale Petroski, the head
• 18:43
  of the hall of fame out there with the, uh,
• 18:47
  with the press release. They were basically ambushed trying to,
• 18:51
  you know, to call me a traitor and all this stuff. And, um,
• 18:55
  So I pushed back and the publicist that I had
• 18:58
  hired was very smart. He said, we're going to send
• 19:00
  this to all the sports writers. And it was the
• 19:03
  sports writers that wrote the articles defending freedom of speech.
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: At the time. So it was.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: What year was this?
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Is this right after 9-11? This was right when we
• 19:13
  were cooking up the war, 2003. So and I remember,
• 19:19
  you know, and I also wrote a piece about that
• 19:21
  called Embedded. that we've performed for the first time three
• 19:26
  weeks after Bush landed on that aircraft carrier with a
• 19:29
  mission accomplished thing. So that wound up playing across the country.
• 19:35
  We toured it and played in New York Public Theater
• 19:37
  and played in London. But it was attacked when we
• 19:41
  went to New York. They sent someone from, there wasn't
• 19:45
  a theater critic while we were still in previews and
• 19:48
  published this thing in,– I think it was the New Republic.
• 19:53
  Basically calling me a conspiracy theorist, anti-Semite, all this stuff
• 19:58
  to try to discredit this play that was playing at
• 20:01
  the– How did.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: They connect anti-Semite?
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. That's what they throw out. There was
• 20:07
  nothing anti-Semitic about the play. Of course. It was just–
• 20:11
  it's one of the things they used to discredit people.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: What did you know about– so what made you compelled
• 20:19
  to come out against the war?
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: I was reading foreign press. I was reading stuff from
• 20:24
  Europe and what they were writing about the weapons of
• 20:28
  mass destruction and that there wasn't any evidence and it
• 20:32
  wasn't being covered like it was here. It was more open,
• 20:35
  more– transparent, the reporting. And so I was trusting that
• 20:40
  and trusting sources that I had trusted in the past.
• 20:44
  And I realized that when I did question, the attacks
• 20:49
  were vociferous. So that usually is a tell, like in poker.
• 20:53
  That usually means you're on to something.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: You're over the mark.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: When I came out against that first war in Iraq
• 21:01
  in 1991, I remember the elder Bush said, well, you know,
• 21:07
  this is a democracy. People have the right to oppose it.
• 21:10
  And that was their response. But this one was like
• 21:13
  you're a traitor, you're a Saddam supporter, terrorist, sympathizer, all
• 21:17
  that stuff. They really attacked. And that told me that
• 21:21
  I was probably over the target, you know. Yeah.
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: That had to be– a very disturbing moment because look,
• 21:28
  it turns out you were right. And not only were
• 21:30
  you right, but now today in 2026 is universally accepted
• 21:34
  that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That was
• 21:37
  a terrible war and it was not something that should
• 21:39
  have ever happened.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: Universally.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: If you said it today, it's not even remotely controversial.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, that's the way it works. They finally admit
• 21:48
  the truth later. You know, I think they're doing that
• 21:51
  now with COVID, you know, the Fauci is going to
• 21:54
  do his thing tomorrow. Yeah. I'm very curious to see
• 21:57
  what happens with that.
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: Well, they don't give you a universal pardon for 10
• 22:02
  years if you didn't do something. I mean, you don't
• 22:05
  campaign for that if there's not some smoke.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a very scary time. You know, it was,
• 22:12
  you know, to come out, when people, when the media
• 22:17
  is attacking you, it's a very scary thing. But the
• 22:20
  great good fortune I had in 2003 was, So I
• 22:24
  was living in New York at the time, right? So
• 22:26
  I would have to walk my kids to school. And
• 22:29
  I remember thinking, oh, my God, what's going to happen?
• 22:33
  Are there going to be people yelling at me, et cetera?
• 22:36
  And that wasn't the truth. The truth was that people,
• 22:40
  if anything, said, you know, way to go. Thanks for
• 22:44
  speaking for us. And if they disagreed, they said, you know,
• 22:47
  you have the right to do it. That's the way
• 22:49
  generally people are in this country.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: And should be.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: And I usually would take– every year I would take
• 22:56
  my kids to the Final Four. And that year it
• 23:00
  was in San Antonio. And I remember thinking, oh, my God,
• 23:03
  I'm going down to Texas and they're going to yell
• 23:05
  at me down there. And no one said a damn thing.
• 23:08
  So the reality on the ground was a lot different
• 23:10
  than the reality they were creating. The reality they were
• 23:13
  creating was to intimidate other people into silence. Hmm. it
• 23:16
  wasn't a based on any kind of real reality of
• 23:19
  people being angry at me. It was more, uh, them
• 23:23
  trying to intimidate others. And so that same thing kind
• 23:27
  of happened. I recognize that same smell, uh, when COVID
• 23:31
  was happening, when people came out, uh, and started asking
• 23:35
  questions and were deplatformed or, um, marginalized or canceled. And, uh,
• 23:42
  You know, I followed what you were going through with
• 23:45
  the ivermectin, which was a drug that I had taken. And,
• 23:51
  you know, I had lost my sense of smell and
• 23:53
  a day later it was back. So I knew there
• 23:56
  was something going on with that. And, you know, in
• 23:58
  an emergency, why not find whatever you can treat until
• 24:03
  your magic potion arrives, you know?
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: It wasn't just that. It was like the completely disingenuous
• 24:09
  characterization of it as a veterinary drug. and calling it
• 24:13
  horse paste or horse dewormer, which is crazy. It's crazy
• 24:19
  because maybe that would have worked in 1980 when people
• 24:22
  would have to go to the encyclopedia to find out
• 24:24
  what ivermectin really was. But when you're trying to do
• 24:28
  that in 2020, it's just too easy to look up, oh, look,
• 24:31
  it got a Nobel Prize for use in human beings. Oh,
• 24:35
  it's great for yellow fever and dengue fever and river blindness.
• 24:38
  And oh, this has been used billions of times. Oh,
• 24:40
  it's one of the... safest. Oh, wait a minute. It's
• 24:42
  in the World Health Organization's essential medicines list. This is crazy.
• 24:47
  But yet on television, it's horse dewormer. And even the
• 24:50
  Rolling Stone had an article where they showed people waiting
• 24:53
  in line. They said that people in Oklahoma were waiting
• 24:56
  in line at the emergency room with gunshot wounds because
• 24:59
  they couldn't get in there because so many people were
• 25:01
  overdosing from ivermectin, which is just fake. And it's in
• 25:06
  the Rolling Stone. You're like, What is going on? This
• 25:10
  is insane. Even the photograph was fake. The photograph showed
• 25:13
  people wearing winter coats because really the line was people
• 25:16
  waiting for a flu shot. That was the actual line.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: And they were trying to say that these are people
• 25:21
  waiting in line to go to the emergency room for
• 25:23
  a gunshot. Well, it's like, first of all, how many
• 25:25
  fucking people are getting shot in Oklahoma? Like, what's going
• 25:28
  on over there? Are you going to have gunfights on
• 25:30
  the streets?
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: There was some wild stuff going on at the time.
• 25:33
  You know, the disinformation and the- Yeah.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: And just- Orchestrated propaganda. Orchestrated, organized with big money behind it.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Wild.
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: Wild to watch.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: I suspect that that whole period of time was another
• 25:49
  way to divide us in the larger picture. Orchestrated chaos
• 25:57
  masquerading as a revolution. There's been so many of those
• 26:03
  things over the past five years. Mm-hmm. you know, alliances
• 26:07
  that you're building and then all of a sudden there's
• 26:09
  a new crisis and now you don't like those people
• 26:12
  that you were building alliances with. And it's just one
• 26:15
  after the other. And ultimately, at the end of the day,
• 26:17
  I think it's all about division. It's all about dividing
• 26:21
  us and making us argue with each other, not finding
• 26:24
  common ground. And that's ultimately the strategy that's been used
• 26:30
  from time immemorial for the power to stay in power.
• 26:35
  How do you get people fighting with each other?
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, people don't like to hear that, but that's a
• 26:41
  strategy that's been used all throughout history. And it's a
• 26:44
  good one.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: And it works.
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it works. And especially in today's day and age
• 26:47
  when you have social media and then you have not
• 26:51
  just our government, but many governments that have fake accounts.
• 26:55
  And these people just get outraged about things or attack
• 26:57
  things or have a narrative that they push. And you
• 27:01
  don't know if it's real people. You don't know what
• 27:03
  it is. It's just a bunch of accounts. You go
• 27:04
  to the accounts, a guy's face. It's a woman wearing
• 27:07
  a dress, holding a book. She seems normal. Meanwhile, it's
• 27:10
  a man somewhere with a bank of computers that are
• 27:13
  all connected to the internet that's typing in these different
• 27:15
  responses with a bunch of different– or now it's AI automated.
• 27:19
  You tell this bot to be a right-wing nationalist that's
• 27:23
  like attacking anything that's.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy. It's on both sides and it's nuts.
• 27:28
  I was over in London– doing a project, and I
• 27:33
  noticed this was during their lockdown, and I noticed by
• 27:37
  my hotel there was this protest, and I went down
• 27:40
  to check it out, put my mask on. I was
• 27:42
  very compliant at the start of all this. And I
• 27:47
  noticed what they were portraying as national front right-wingers was
• 27:52
  actually hippies and homeopaths and free speech activists, and I
• 27:56
  talked to them. And I tweeted, hey, I don't think
• 28:01
  it's a right-left thing here. And hundreds of attacks, whether
• 28:09
  they're bots or an organized army of righteousness, I have
• 28:14
  no idea. But at that point, I was like, fuck it.
• 28:18
  I'm not going to put my foot in this water.
• 28:21
  These people are nuts. This is a crazy, crazy time.
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was crazy not just from the propaganda perspective
• 28:28
  but from actual people that I knew that were really
• 28:30
  terrified that got caught up in it all. And it
• 28:33
  was mass formation psychosis is what some people called it.
• 28:38
  I think that's a good description. Robert Malone I think
• 28:41
  termed that or got that from somebody else. But that's
• 28:44
  really what it was. Like everybody just kind of went
• 28:46
  nutty and there was people that were doing the government's
• 28:48
  job for the government or the pharmaceutical drug company's job
• 28:52
  for them. They were the ones that were enforcing all
• 28:55
  these things. And they were doing it because they wanted
• 28:58
  to be, they wanted a solution. They wanted to be correct.
• 29:01
  And unfortunately, there's a lot of people in this world
• 29:04
  that don't experience much real adversity. And when real adversity
• 29:08
  comes to them, they fall apart and they don't know
• 29:11
  what to do. And they get scared and they lump
• 29:15
  up together in teams and then they reinforce each other
• 29:18
  and repeat the same things. And And they all want
• 29:21
  to be a part of the right side of history
• 29:24
  or the right side of whatever it is.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: And also they're being led to believe that that's the
• 29:28
  virtuous thing to do. And, you know, so it's not
• 29:31
  like they're, you know, their intentions are good. Right. And
• 29:36
  because of that, you know, I've had a similar experience where,
• 29:39
  you know, friends of mine and people I love that,
• 29:42
  you know, fell into that as I did. I fell
• 29:45
  into it for a while, you know, that kind of
• 29:47
  fear-based kind of behavior. And I just, I've come to
• 29:54
  understand that. in my later years that one of the
• 29:57
  things that's truly liberating is the ability to say, I
• 30:00
  don't know. Yeah. And I may have been wrong. These
• 30:06
  are two things that have led to such great discovery
• 30:09
  for me. Um, it's, it's, I really don't trust anymore.
• 30:14
  I don't trust virtuous experts. I don't, I don't think, uh,
• 30:19
  I don't think experts are, are, are, I don't believe
• 30:24
  in experts. I think if you consider yourself an expert,
• 30:27
  you're done learning. You're done speaking with others. You're done
• 30:33
  challenging yourself. And when we put our faith and trust
• 30:38
  in people that are deemed experts, ultimately, throughout my experience,
• 30:44
  it's led to bad things. The experts that talked about
• 30:48
  weapons of mass destruction, the experts that Talk about various
• 30:53
  things that have led us to violent altercations throughout the world.
• 30:58
  I don't trust them anymore. I trust the idea that
• 31:02
  there are many sides to a story and that there
• 31:05
  is very– there's a lot to be gained from having
• 31:10
  dialogue with people you disagree with.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: Absolutely. I mean there are experts in some fields and
• 31:17
  we do need them. It is important. Like if you
• 31:20
  want information about the Large Hadron Collider, you don't understand, like,
• 31:24
  what are you guys doing over there? Like you need
• 31:26
  to talk to someone who actually understands it who's an
• 31:28
  expert on particle colliders. And it takes a long time
• 31:31
  to develop that sort of knowledge base and have an
• 31:34
  understanding of what they're actually trying to accomplish. What is
• 31:37
  the Higgs boson? What is this particle that's a part
• 31:40
  of that? What? It's the earliest stages of the universe.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: Okay. Okay.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: You're going to measure it?
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: I'll be in the bar.
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: It exists for a quarter of a second or something
• 31:48
  like that? What? What are you guys doing? Yeah. But
• 31:51
  the problem is, like, to bring it back to COVID,
• 31:54
  one of the things that Fauci said that was so wild,
• 31:57
  he said, when you are criticizing Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science.
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: Well, that is one– just the fact that he felt
• 32:05
  so confident that he could say that, that is such
• 32:08
  a crazy thing to say. And then science became like
• 32:12
  an object.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: It became a religion.
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: Well, science is supposed to be data. It's supposed to
• 32:17
  be measuring data, and it's supposed to never be settled.
• 32:22
  And it's always supposed to have a bunch of people
• 32:24
  from various positions of viewing down on this thing, analyzing
• 32:29
  it with new studies, new data, new tests, new hypothesis,
• 32:34
  working out and communicating with each other. It's not supposed
• 32:36
  to be a brick. Like this is a brick. If
• 32:39
  you question the brick, like no, no, no. This is
• 32:41
  a fucking fluid thing that exists only if you allow
• 32:44
  people to ask questions. The moment you stop questioning data,
• 32:50
  then like– and even real experts, like guys from MIT
• 32:54
  and Harvard were getting deplatformed off of Twitter because they
• 32:57
  didn't believe it. They were saying, look, I don't think
• 32:59
  this lockdown idea is a good idea. I think it's
• 33:01
  bad for children. I think Children aren't even really susceptible
• 33:05
  to this disease. Like, why are we doing this? Like,
• 33:07
  what's going on?
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: It became a faith. It became dogma. And if you
• 33:11
  question the dogma, you were a heretic. You were kicked
• 33:14
  out of the religion. It was a scary time and
• 33:18
  still is scary. You know, we deal, the Actors Gang,
• 33:22
  my nonprofit in Los Angeles, we have education programs. And
• 33:27
  we've been dealing with the ramifications of that lockdown for
• 33:31
  the last five years, you know. this kids that are,
• 33:34
  you know, had two years robbed of them from socialization
• 33:38
  and education.
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: And that was your senior year of high school.
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: Oh my God.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: You know, fuck. And we're, we're dealing with the, the, the,
• 33:46
  the after effects of that. And, uh, gratefully, uh, the
• 33:51
  kind of work we do brings them out again and,
• 33:53
  you know, get some expressing emotions, making eye contact, uh,
• 33:58
  having experiences with other children and that are productive and,
• 34:02
  The good news is you can get out of that funk,
• 34:06
  but it was really scary to see those kids walk
• 34:11
  in to classes after that lockdown because they wouldn't make
• 34:16
  eye contact looking at the floor. It was kind of
• 34:19
  de-socialized and traumatized, and it was really scary.
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: Critical development time for them. Yeah, and all of a
• 34:28
  sudden they're wearing– imagine being a toddler and all of
• 34:31
  a sudden everyone has a mask on.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: It's weird.
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: You don't want to wear the mask. They keep trying
• 34:36
  to take it off. People yell at them, put it
• 34:37
  back on. So it's like terror and anxiety and confusion. Also,
• 34:42
  you're not reading people's faces, which is like an important
• 34:44
  part of the developmental process. You get to know people.
• 34:47
  You read faces. You see how people talk. All of
• 34:50
  a sudden, everyone's wearing a mask. Everyone's robbing a bank. Like,
• 34:52
  this is crazy.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know. I, I've tried to
• 34:58
  approach it all with, uh, just a openness and a
• 35:02
  compassion for people that went through that. You know, I,
• 35:05
  I don't attach blame. I don't, you know, everyone, there
• 35:09
  was a pretty sophisticated propaganda machine that was happening. And I,
• 35:14
  I have great compassion for people that fell into that.
• 35:18
  And I, I, I, you know, I, I just want
• 35:22
  us to not do it again. You know, I want
• 35:24
  us to have the, uh, knowledge and the, the consciousness
• 35:28
  to not fall for that again. Yeah.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: Hopefully it's just, it was very eyeopening that it was
• 35:35
  so easy to pull off, you know, that it was
• 35:40
  so easy to get people to just gang up like that.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: It was just, it said it, it was, it said
• 35:47
  a lot about us, unfortunately. And, um, you know, uh, I, I,
• 35:54
  I hold faith in humanity, but that was a tough one.
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: I do as well. And I think it was a
• 36:01
  learning moment for a lot of people, whether they admit
• 36:03
  to it or not, whether they're public about it or not.
• 36:06
  Because I know a lot of people that just weren't
• 36:07
  public about their dissent, but they really didn't like any
• 36:10
  of it. And they just didn't really have a position
• 36:13
  to talk about it. And, you know, they wanted to
• 36:15
  keep their job and wanted to keep their place in
• 36:17
  the community or whatever it was that they were trying
• 36:19
  to protect and they kept their mouth shut but you'd
• 36:22
  get a couple of drinks in them when they were
• 36:23
  alone they would tell you.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: Well that begs the larger question is you know is
• 36:27
  it freedom of speech if when you freely speak your
• 36:32
  job is threatened right your future is threatened is that
• 36:36
  are we living in a free society you know right
• 36:40
  um And that's still– that's not just COVID. That's a
• 36:45
  lot of things.
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: It's a lot of things. It's almost everything. And it's
• 36:50
  one of the most important things that we do is
• 36:53
  we disagree. We talk. You have conversations.
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: It's the only way to learn.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: And you get exposed to information that maybe you didn't
• 37:01
  know before you establish this opinion that you're arguing.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: Do you know what was the big problem? tragedy, in
• 37:08
  my opinion, during that time period is that we totally
• 37:12
  lost the water cooler conversation, that accidental conversation that happens
• 37:18
  at work with a co-worker who you don't necessarily agree with,
• 37:22
  but it's a human being expressing something to you in person.
• 37:28
  And you have to deal with that person and their
• 37:32
  opposing viewpoint. We got into our own... silos of thought
• 37:39
  and algorithms of thought. And everything we experienced during that
• 37:43
  period of time was an affirmation of what we believed
• 37:47
  rather than a challenge to it. And so the water
• 37:51
  cooler was completely eliminated. The idea that the accidental conversation
• 37:56
  at a bar, um, where you're, you know, watching a
• 38:00
  game on the television and someone sits next to you
• 38:04
  that It's not necessarily of your belief system, but you
• 38:08
  buy him a beer and you watch the game together.
• 38:11
  All these moments of meeting up that were eliminated. And,
• 38:18
  you know, that's what I love about sports. I love
• 38:21
  that you can go watch a game and not think
• 38:24
  about politics or not think about your differences and think
• 38:27
  about the team that you like and support them together.
• 38:32
  Same thing with theater or any kind of gathering of individuals, music.
• 38:41
  What I love about the theater that we do is
• 38:43
  that we're able to take people to a common emotion.
• 38:47
  And we never want to have a completely... We don't
• 38:53
  want audiences that think the same, right? You want a
• 38:58
  disparate amount of people, different beliefs... that you can get
• 39:03
  them to share a common emotion, get them to laugh together,
• 39:05
  get them to feel something and cry together. That's the
• 39:10
  community you're able to build when you're doing a show,
• 39:13
  as you know. What really pissed me off was that
• 39:19
  we have a theater in Los Angeles, and it was
• 39:22
  two years we had to be closed. And a year
• 39:25
  and a half in, we were told we could open,
• 39:28
  but we'd have to check. vaccine passports at the door
• 39:32
  and I talked to some people at the theater and
• 39:35
  we agreed it was no we can't do that because
• 39:38
  what that is doing is it's basically saying the only
• 39:41
  people allowed in our theater are people that agree with
• 39:44
  what the government wanted And that for me is not
• 39:48
  a theater that betrays the whole purpose and function of
• 39:52
  what a theater should be. It's a gathering place for
• 39:55
  the community that might think differently to bring them together.
• 39:59
  And this was saying basically, if you agree, you can
• 40:02
  come in. And so we waited another six months before
• 40:06
  we opened the theater until everyone could come in. Yeah.
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: Um, There was a time where you had to have
• 40:15
  a vaccine passport in order to perform. And there was
• 40:21
  an exemption in New York. And you had to have
• 40:23
  a vaccine passport if you wanted to go to a show.
• 40:27
  But you didn't have to have one if you were performing.
• 40:30
  And I did Madison Square Garden. So the whole audience
• 40:33
  had to have vaccine passports. But I didn't. And so
• 40:38
  there was a senator. I forget who it was. that
• 40:40
  was proposing a new law based on me sneaking through
• 40:46
  the loophole that performers should have to be vaccinated as well.
• 40:50
  And he was upset that I wasn't vaccinated and that
• 40:54
  I was performing.
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: You could have infected the entire Madison Square Garden.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: I could have been a super spreader, yeah.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, in London, because they spent a lot
• 41:03
  of time over there the last five years, but West
• 41:06
  End rebounded immediately. unlike Broadway. And the reason it did
• 41:12
  is because during that time period, you could show a
• 41:15
  vaccine passport, but you could also show a negative test.
• 41:18
  So they didn't demand that you have a vaccine. So
• 41:22
  they didn't lose their audience. Their audience came right back.
• 41:27
  And in Broadway, they basically told a third of their audience,
• 41:29
  you're not welcome. And so I can see why it
• 41:33
  might have been a struggle to get Those people back
• 41:36
  into the theater.
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: It was great. It didn't make any sense. Like if
• 41:39
  the people are negative, they're negative. What do you give
• 41:41
  a shit if they're vaccinated? Also, what about people that
• 41:43
  got COVID and then recovered from it who have far
• 41:47
  superior immunity, 7X superior immunity to people who are vaccinated?
• 41:52
  Like what are we doing here? Like this is– you're
• 41:55
  doing the pharmaceutical drug companies work for them. And you're
• 41:59
  making people follow along. In lockstep and it's just nuts.
• 42:04
  It just didn't even make sense that people were going
• 42:06
  along with this.
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I'm glad that's in the rearview mirror.
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, for now. But I feel like it's a case
• 42:16
  study in a lot of– if there are people that
• 42:18
  are manipulating society and I think there are, there's a
• 42:22
  lot of lessons that they learn from how we behave
• 42:25
  in society. You know, relatively speaking, without making light of
• 42:29
  the pandemic, relatively speaking, a fairly mild pandemic in terms of, like,
• 42:33
  you know, the bubonic plague and all sorts of other
• 42:35
  things that have happened throughout history, the Spanish flu have
• 42:38
  killed way more people. Like, it could have been way worse, right?
• 42:43
  So just one that was just twice as bad as
• 42:46
  the flu got people to behave like that.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the good news is, though, the uptake
• 42:53
  wasn't– you know, a lot of people took it because
• 42:58
  they had to. It wasn't like enthusiastically taking it. We
• 43:04
  did a play called Topsy Turvy, which was about lockdown.
• 43:07
  And we performed that in Eastern Europe. And it was
• 43:11
  really interesting to see their response there. Because I would,
• 43:15
  one of them said afterwards, you know, I asked, you know,
• 43:18
  what was the uptake on the vaccines in Romania? And
• 43:22
  they said something like 40%. I said, well, how do
• 43:25
  you explain that? And they said, well, you know, we
• 43:28
  lived under the Soviet Union for many years, so we
• 43:31
  know how to look like we comply when we're not complying.
• 43:36
  And I said, what else reminds you of the Soviet Union?
• 43:39
  They said, without a doubt, cancel culture. I said, why?
• 43:42
  I said, well, Soviet Union used to keep files on
• 43:46
  all of us, right? So as long as you're a
• 43:47
  good party member, there wouldn't be a thing said. But
• 43:52
  once you stepped out of line, They brought out that
• 43:54
  old file. Now that affair with your secretary from 30
• 43:57
  years ago is going to ruin your life. They're going
• 43:59
  to ruin your family. They're going to kill your career.
• 44:03
  And they're going to make a big public display of
• 44:05
  it to show other people to stay in line. And
• 44:10
  they felt like cancel culture was basically operating in the
• 44:13
  same way as the Soviet Union did. And it was
• 44:16
  really interesting to see that perspective in Eastern Europe. People
• 44:20
  that have you know, lived under that kind of oppressive
• 44:25
  situation and their perspective on modern day.
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: That must have really made you think about what happened
• 44:31
  to you during the Iraq war.
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: That in particular, because back then there's no real social media.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: There's no real way to get your message out.
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: Oh man, they, they lied. They made up, they made
• 44:44
  up things. They made up this. I was, I was
• 44:47
  doing this play embedded at the time. At the public theater.
• 44:50
  And we'd go out afterwards. And the New York Post
• 44:54
  wrote that I was making out with a woman under
• 44:56
  a palm tree at this club. And they just made
• 45:02
  it up. And it didn't really help my marriage at
• 45:05
  the time. They just lie. They basically lie. They'll attack you.
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: They just decided you were an enemy. And they were
• 45:13
  going to pull out whatever stops they could.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: They're going to discredit you in whatever way they can. Yeah.
• 45:19
  That's a powerful thing when it hits you and you realize,
• 45:22
  oh my God, the truth doesn't matter here. Yeah.
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: Well, that's what's so scary about it is that in
• 45:26
  this country where freedom of speech is supposed to be
• 45:29
  one of the cornerstones of our society, it's one of
• 45:31
  the most important things we all recognize. It separates us
• 45:34
  from everywhere else in history. Like this is the first
• 45:37
  country where really it's written into the doctrine of the country.
• 45:42
  You're supposed to have the freedom, the ability to express yourself.
• 45:46
  And that this is being attacked and suppressed in all
• 45:49
  sorts of different ways, not just stopping your ability to
• 45:52
  express yourself but attacking you in a concerted effort and
• 45:57
  lying about you, just lying about you in order to
• 45:59
  scare other people. It's very Orwellian and it's very un-American.
• 46:04
  And the fact that like the New York Post would
• 46:06
  do that to you or whoever it was from the
• 46:07
  New York Post would do that, like what the.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: Fuck, man? Well, the good news is there's no gulags.
• 46:13
  They don't arrest you in the middle of the night
• 46:17
  and force you into some kind of prison thousands of
• 46:21
  miles away.
• 46:22
  Speaker 3: Sure, it could be worse. Yeah. But it's not along
• 46:26
  the line of the American way of life. And if
• 46:29
  you are a person who really does appreciate what this
• 46:34
  experience and this experiment in self-government, which is the United States.
• 46:41
  It's supposed to have free discourse. That's a big part
• 46:45
  of it. The founding fathers recognized that. You've got to
• 46:47
  have the ability to talk about things.
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 46:50
  Speaker 3: And if you don't, we're fucked because if someone can
• 46:53
  tell you what you can and can't say, that's step one.
• 46:56
  And then everything else falls in line after that. The
• 46:59
  next thing you know, you've got a dictatorship.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: Right. And there's people that have lost opportunities or– In
• 47:07
  show business recently, including my ex, Susan Sarandon, who was
• 47:13
  against what was happening in Israel and lost her agent
• 47:16
  and having a hard time finding work. This is nuts.
• 47:22
  Speaker 3: And especially someone like Susan Sarandon, one of the most
• 47:26
  respected and established actors of many generations. She's been around forever.
• 47:33
  The fact that a take on something that if you're
• 47:37
  just looking at it, like what is– how could you
• 47:41
  defend that? Like how could anybody defend that? I don't
• 47:43
  even know how many people are dead. You have a
• 47:45
  complete wipeout of a city. Like 90 percent of Gaza
• 47:49
  is gone or whatever the percentage is. You look at
• 47:51
  the buildings. You look at what it used to look like.
• 47:53
  You look at what it looks like now. This is defensible?
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And I think the point of it is
• 47:59
  to make a show of it and to say, see,
• 48:02
  we could do that to her. So we could do
• 48:04
  it to you. So shut the fuck up. Yeah.
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: Especially the timing of when you do it, right? If
• 48:09
  you're against Gaza now, it's safer than being against what
• 48:14
  happened a year and a half ago, say. Especially close
• 48:18
  to October 7th. If you're one of the– like Roger Waters,
• 48:22
  one of the early people talking about this is– You're
• 48:25
  watching genocide in real time. And they came for that guy.
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 48:32
  Speaker 3: And, you know, more people see it the way he
• 48:34
  sees it now. And just like what happened to you
• 48:37
  with the Iraq war, you're 20 years from now. It's
• 48:40
  going to be a universally accepted opinion. I bet.
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: Well, it's just. It's crazy to go through something like
• 48:50
  that and for you to have gone through it like
• 48:52
  really early on, you know, for you to have gone
• 48:55
  through that in 2003. I guess it really does inform
• 48:59
  your opinions though. Like when you see things that are
• 49:01
  happening today, you go, okay, I've seen this before.
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: What I started looking for after that was a way
• 49:09
  to be someone that was more involved with– something that
• 49:15
  could affect change. In other words, I used my non-profit
• 49:20
  we started a prison program 20 years ago and we
• 49:25
  see the change that happens we have people that go
• 49:30
  in and basically offer rehabilitation in the form of theater
• 49:36
  and not doing plays or anything but getting people to
• 49:40
  play emotions through characters that we introduce to them. And
• 49:44
  in doing so, unlocking emotions that have been suppressed for many,
• 49:49
  many years. So in prison, there's one go-to emotion. It's anger.
• 49:54
  That's your survival face. That's your mask on the yard.
• 49:58
  You have to be a badass or you're going to die.
• 50:01
  But sadness is compromising. Fear is compromising. And happiness is
• 50:08
  genuinely not encouraged either. So we get these guys in
• 50:14
  a room, we introduce them to these stock characters from
• 50:17
  the Commedia dell'arte, and then they have to express their
• 50:20
  emotions and make choices with their emotions in improv. And
• 50:24
  what they find is that if someone approaches them in
• 50:28
  anger in an improv, the facilitator will encourage a different
• 50:32
  emotion in response to anger than anger, right? And what
• 50:35
  they come to understand is that they don't have to
• 50:39
  respond to anger with anger. There are other choices. And
• 50:44
  in fact, in real life, they can do that too,
• 50:46
  if they can do it in an improv. And so
• 50:48
  what happens is these people tap into long dormant emotions
• 50:52
  and start to understand that they are more than the
• 50:56
  worst act that got them there. They tend to create
• 51:02
  bonds across gang ties, racial lines. When we're putting together
• 51:08
  a group, we ask that rival gangs are in the
• 51:11
  same room with each other. And what happens is these
• 51:15
  bonds are made through the sharing of emotion. Like we
• 51:18
  get these guys into an improv where they're all putting
• 51:21
  a flower on a grave of someone and saying something
• 51:24
  under their breath about the person that's deceased. And then
• 51:28
  at some point the facilitator will say, now look at
• 51:31
  each other. And they're looking at each other with these
• 51:34
  eyes of sadness and they realize they have a lot
• 51:37
  in common, you know, in that shared emotion. I had
• 51:40
  two guys come up to me, one black guy, one
• 51:42
  white guy. They said, we've got to tell you what
• 51:45
  happened two weeks ago. Our shot caller said, you know,
• 51:49
  we're going to have a fight on the yard. And so,
• 51:52
  you know, you never question the shot caller. And so
• 51:55
  you know what's going to happen. And so what they
• 51:58
  did was they found each other, these two guys. And
• 52:01
  they rolled around on the floor acting like they were
• 52:06
  killing each other. Wow.
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: How convenient.
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: So it looked like they were participating, but they weren't
• 52:16
  hurting each other. Oh, wow.
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: That's a good solution.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: It's amazing what happens when you experience something like that
• 52:24
  in person, when you see the transformation happen. And we
• 52:27
  see this in our school children as well. That's something that.
• 52:32
  is deeply inspiring. You know that you've had something to
• 52:37
  do with a real change, right? Whereas for years I
• 52:42
  was asked to, you know, attend fundraisers and, you know,
• 52:45
  various causes. And, you know, yeah, it's great that they're
• 52:52
  doing that and it's great that they're raising money for
• 52:53
  these organizations that need it. But at the end of
• 52:57
  the day, you don't really feel like it did anything
• 53:00
  other than go to a dinner. And this was a
• 53:03
  way to get my hands dirty and really get in
• 53:06
  the struggle of it. And I found it to be
• 53:10
  so much more satisfying as far as whatever inclination I
• 53:15
  had towards activism was really fed by this as opposed
• 53:20
  to hopping from fundraiser to fundraiser. It just felt more real.
• 53:26
  It felt like something that I could– Take that experience
• 53:30
  and then I could say to my group, let's expand.
• 53:32
  Let's get into more and more prisons. And now we're
• 53:35
  in 18 prisons in the state of California doing these programs.
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: Did you have to develop a curriculum like how you
• 53:43
  begin to reach out to these guys and how you
• 53:45
  set it up?
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: It took a couple of years, you know, kind of
• 53:49
  pilot program in one prison in Chino and Norco in
• 53:54
  Southern California. Trial and error. You know, what's the way
• 54:01
  to do it? What's the way not to do it?
• 54:03
  Of course, you go through a training with the prison
• 54:05
  system of certain things to watch out for. And, you know,
• 54:08
  you develop these lines where you say, you know, we're
• 54:13
  here to do this, not to talk about your case.
• 54:16
  You know, there's all kinds of things you learn how
• 54:18
  to avoid the distractions that will derail the program. But essentially,
• 54:25
  it's a very physical way of working, and it's also–
• 54:29
  there is a lot of fun in it. So those
• 54:31
  two things together allow the entry for these guys that
• 54:37
  are– they're in the room because they want to be there,
• 54:40
  but it's weird stuff we're asking them to do.
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: And if they can have a laugh about it and
• 54:46
  then– something about it shifts some kind of consciousness inside them,
• 54:52
  that means something to people. You've got to remember these
• 54:55
  people are, you know, when we started, there was only
• 54:58
  one other program in the state of California that was
• 55:03
  offering rehabilitation through any theater. So there was a couple
• 55:08
  music programs and two theater programs, and now we're able
• 55:13
  to lobby the state to, get more funding for arts
• 55:16
  and corrections because art is a transformer. You know, it
• 55:20
  is something that can shift consciousness. I truly believe that.
• 55:24
  I've seen it with my own, the work that I've done.
• 55:29
  You know, I've seen how people can think in a
• 55:32
  different way after they see something in the theater or
• 55:35
  in the movies or, you know, a good stand-up can
• 55:40
  do the same thing. You know, how George Carlin used
• 55:42
  to shift my consciousness every new special because he would
• 55:45
  always be challenging me. Sure. It wouldn't be like, hey,
• 55:49
  you know, we're all in the same club. It would be, yeah,
• 55:52
  you thought we were in the same club. But here's
• 55:55
  a little thought. And you realize he's talking right at
• 55:59
  one of your hypocrisies. And that was his genius. It
• 56:03
  was his ability to really tap into we can be better. Right.
• 56:07
  We can all be better.
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks,
• 56:12
  and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels
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  Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Yeah,
• 57:05
  there's been a few guys like that throughout history that
• 57:07
  really figured out a way to embed humor into social commentary.
• 57:13
  George Carlin is probably the most known for it. But
• 57:16
  do you know about Bill Hicks?
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure.
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: So he was probably– in my generation, he was the
• 57:21
  one that twisted people the most. Like a lot of
• 57:24
  comics would watch him and go, what am I doing?
• 57:27
  Why am I doing what I'm doing? This guy is
• 57:29
  doing something that's like so much more meaningful.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Who was it in Apatow's documentary about Carlin? There
• 57:36
  was a comedian that said George Carlin was basically– In
• 57:42
  the early part of the century, in 1900s, philosophers debating
• 57:48
  used to be a huge deal, right? Like hundreds of people,
• 57:51
  thousands of people come watch people debate two different points
• 57:54
  of view. Sure. He said that's what the current philosophers
• 57:59
  of our generation are the better stand-up comedians, the ones
• 58:03
  that test your belief system by saying something that might
• 58:08
  be controversial or challenges your world view. That's the great
• 58:14
  purpose and function of a philosopher or a stand-up comedian
• 58:18
  is to take your worldview, shatter it a little bit
• 58:22
  and make you rethink.
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And Hicks was sort of– for our generation,
• 58:30
  he was like the first guy that really did that
• 58:33
  in a way that– like some of the things that
• 58:35
  he said weren't even designed to be funny at all.
• 58:37
  It was just designed to make you think about things differently.
• 58:39
  And then he would hit you with some funny things
• 58:41
  after that. To keep you occupied.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: Provocative statements that, you know, the first reaction is, fuck that. No,
• 58:52
  that's not true.
• 58:53
  Speaker 2: Fuck that.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: And then you realize, oh, shit, he's bringing me there.
• 58:56
  And it's like a great play can do that, too.
• 58:58
  A great movie can do that, too. Provoke you and
• 59:02
  challenge you and then make you refocus, rethink.
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just amazing how... little of that we have
• 59:11
  today and how much content we have today did you
• 59:16
  ever see the documentary um god what is it the
• 59:20
  documentary with william f buckley and uh the other Yeah,
• 59:24
  you know what I'm talking about.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: Gore Vidal?
• 59:26
  Speaker 3: And Gore Vidal, yeah.
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: Where they had these– it was– I guess it was NBC,
• 59:30
  I think it was. And NBC was failing in the ratings.
• 59:33
  I was going to say Relentless Enemies, but that's the line.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the line.
• 59:36
  Speaker 3: Best of Enemies. Best of Enemies, yeah. Great documentary.
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 59:40
  Speaker 3: So they had a series of these debates on television,
• 59:44
  Gore Vidal being a progressive and William F. Buckley being
• 59:48
  a conservative. It was very interesting. because this kind of
• 59:52
  hadn't happened before on television where you have these long
• 59:55
  form discussions where these two guys just intellectually jabbing at
• 59:59
  each other.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: And it was great. It's like the documentary is really amazing. I, uh,
• 1:00:04
  I was friends with Gore. Oh really?
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, he, uh, I, he, uh, agreed to do
• 1:00:10
  my first film, Bob Roberts, which is about a right
• 1:00:14
  wing folk singing candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania. And, um,
• 1:00:20
  Gore agreed to play Brickley Pace, my Democratic opponent, right?
• 1:00:25
  And so he played a politician, which is something he
• 1:00:27
  always kind of flirted with in his real life. There
• 1:00:31
  it is. And so I got to be quite friendly
• 1:00:35
  with him. And I actually did a documentary that I'm
• 1:00:39
  editing right now about four soldiers from World War II
• 1:00:45
  that became great writers. Gore, Kurt Vonnegut. Norman Mailer and
• 1:00:51
  Howard Zinn are all in this documentary I filmed it
• 1:00:56
  many years ago shelved it and now I'm in the
• 1:00:59
  final stages of putting it together I'm opening a new
• 1:01:02
  website on September 1st and this is one of the
• 1:01:05
  many things that I have in my vault and my
• 1:01:08
  storage units that I've just been getting out over the
• 1:01:10
  past year and finding all this crazy stuff that I
• 1:01:13
  have that I've never finished because I've been going from
• 1:01:15
  project to project to project so I slowed down a
• 1:01:19
  little bit and just opened up some sealed boxes and it's,
• 1:01:23
  it's been really fun. It's one of the things is also,
• 1:01:27
  I used to fuck around on film sets with this,
• 1:01:31
  you know, when I had enough money to buy a
• 1:01:33
  video camera for the first time. And so I started
• 1:01:36
  making these little short films on, on movie sets. And
• 1:01:40
  one of them is there's two films from when I
• 1:01:43
  was doing Howard, the duck. And, you know, one of those,
• 1:01:49
  Endless productions just went on and on and on. So
• 1:01:53
  I just started amusing myself by making my own little
• 1:01:55
  short films, including, you know, I'm sure illegally using the
• 1:02:00
  duck itself, you know, which I made a character in
• 1:02:04
  one of the films.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: I forgot about Howard the Duck.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: It was crazy. We walked on the set.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: What a fucking weird movie that was.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: I know, right? We walked on the set. I walked
• 1:02:17
  on the set. The first day I knew we were
• 1:02:20
  in trouble.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: Why did you know we were in trouble?
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: The puppet. It wasn't ready. And it was a little
• 1:02:28
  too cute. If you look at the comic book, Howard
• 1:02:32
  the Duck was not that cute.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: He was a cigar-smoking, kind of shitty, mean duck. Yeah.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: Kind of Fritz the Cat-ish-like, you know, like really kind
• 1:02:43
  of borderline obscene.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: It was a Marvel comic, right? Yeah.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: And so do you have an image of the old
• 1:02:50
  Howard the Duck from the comic? Yeah. That guy. Yeah.
• 1:02:55
  So I walked on the set and I saw that
• 1:02:58
  cute duck. I was like, uh-oh.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, he was always with chicks.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: He was always with chicks, yeah.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: Which was very weird. Like, hey, lady, what are you doing?
• 1:03:08
  You're fucking a duck? What's going on here?
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: Bestiality?
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 2: Like, what is this?
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: What is his charm got you? Like, what's the message there?
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: It was a strange character.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: Very strange. And I don't think they had the technology
• 1:03:22
  to pull it off.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: Maybe they need to try again now.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be good. They could take the old
• 1:03:28
  film and animate it. But, you know, I spent six
• 1:03:34
  weeks on that film doing an ultralight chase that lasted
• 1:03:38
  maybe two minutes in the film.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: What's an ultralight plane chase?
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: You know the ultralight planes? Basically, it's you and the
• 1:03:45
  wings and a motor. And so there's a chase sequence
• 1:03:49
  at the end that's about two and a half minute,
• 1:03:51
  three minute long.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: Did you actually have to get in one of those things?
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: No. I mean, I got in like a fake one. Good. Yeah. No,
• 1:04:00
  you have to fly it.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. You have to. That's fake, of course, right?
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: The duck's real.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: Looks so legit. Yeah.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: Was that one of those ones where your little voice,
• 1:04:18
  you didn't listen?
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: No, not at all, because that was early in my career, right?
• 1:04:23
  So it was George Lucas, I remember. That was George Lucas. Yeah,
• 1:04:27
  and he'd just done Star Wars.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: Whoa.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: So it had to be good, right?
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: He went from Star Wars to Howard the Duck.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: Well, he produced Howard the Duck.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: But- he had just produced star Wars. So, you know,
• 1:04:41
  it was like, hell yeah. Right. I don't know. It
• 1:04:44
  doesn't make sense on the page, but he'll figure it out.
• 1:04:47
  They'll figure it out. I was so lucky to again,
• 1:04:54
  blessed because I got a movie called five corners that
• 1:04:59
  was with Jodie Foster and John Turturro, uh, right around
• 1:05:03
  the same time. So I was, I'd already done that movie.
• 1:05:07
  When Howard came out. So it's kind of saved my ass.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 3: You already had one in the chamber.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: You had a good one on the pipe.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: Thank God. It's just I wonder why George did it.
• 1:05:23
  Like it seems so odd to try to do a
• 1:05:26
  movie with a talking duck.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, maybe it made sense when they imagined it.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: Maybe they were on an acid or something. It seems weird.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: I just remember those poor puppeteers, man. They were trying
• 1:05:37
  to make this thing work. I don't think the technology
• 1:05:41
  really existed.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 3: It was like 86 or something?
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and they were trying so hard. I felt for everybody,
• 1:05:51
  including the director. I felt he tried his damn best.
• 1:05:55
  It was just betrayal by puppeteering. And it wasn't the puppeteers.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: It was the actual puppeteers.
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: Machinery.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: Well, it's kind of– if you think about Star Wars
• 1:06:07
  in particular, it's kind of amazing. They were able to
• 1:06:09
  pull that off with the technology that was available at
• 1:06:13
  the time to have this crazy movie where– like the
• 1:06:17
  cantina scene. Yeah. There's all these different fucking creatures from
• 1:06:22
  different planets and like they did not have very good
• 1:06:26
  technology back then. Like if you watch that cantina scene now, like, whoa.
• 1:06:31
  It looks terrible.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 3: It looks so clunky. Like the masks don't move. Like
• 1:06:35
  everyone's got their faces stuck.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: It's almost like looking at claymation around that time.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Amazing what they can do. But I do like
• 1:06:47
  the old school. I do like the kind of analog
• 1:06:50
  version of it. Because with the CGI and everything, it's
• 1:06:53
  all so sophisticated and so– They can do anything now,
• 1:06:58
  and you almost want them not to be able to
• 1:07:00
  do everything.
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 3: Oh, 100%.
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: You just want a little roughness around the edges. It
• 1:07:07
  really helps.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 3: Well, there's also a thing about CGI where the part
• 1:07:10
  of your brain— that is looking at it recognizes that
• 1:07:14
  this is not a real thing happening. Like, as good
• 1:07:16
  as it looks, there's something about it. Yeah. Which is
• 1:07:19
  why a lot of the movie special effects guys, like
• 1:07:22
  the monster guys, like Rick Baker and along those lines
• 1:07:26
  who did Star Wars.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 3: American Werewolf in London, that thing outside, the wolf that
• 1:07:30
  you see in the hallway.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 3: They wanted to make sure that it looked like a
• 1:07:37
  real thing.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: It was a physical object. So you had a physical,
• 1:07:41
  so in order to make it a physical object, and
• 1:07:42
  obviously CGI wasn't even available back then, but you see
• 1:07:46
  it and you know, it's a real thing. Whereas like
• 1:07:49
  later on he did, they did the wolf man and
• 1:07:52
  Rick Baker did that as well. And there's a lot
• 1:07:54
  of CGI in there and the transformation scenes. And this
• 1:07:56
  part of it is just like your brain's like, this
• 1:07:59
  isn't really happening. I don't like it.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of the same way in music too.
• 1:08:04
  Like when they, Correct everything and make the auto tune. Yeah.
• 1:08:09
  Great music has a little bit of mistake in it. Yes.
• 1:08:11
  It has a little bit of human error. When you're
• 1:08:16
  hitting a chord on a guitar, there's a way to
• 1:08:19
  play it perfectly, but there's also a way to play
• 1:08:22
  it a little messed up.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: And I can't. I kind of prefer the little bit
• 1:08:26
  messed up.
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 3: Like when Hendrix did the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 3: You know, there was something about it. It was like... Yeah,
• 1:08:34
  it was immediate.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: It was being done at that moment with full danger.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 3: Uh-huh. You know?
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: Uh-huh. Which is a great thing to listen to.
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah. It's really happening.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: It's not polished and edited and... Sent through a machine.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: And you get the feeling that maybe that was the
• 1:08:55
  second or third time he'd played it.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 3: Right. Ever.
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: Well, maybe the first. Right, right, right. Which would have
• 1:09:02
  been even more insane. But, you know, yeah.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: Well, that's why people like records. They love listening to
• 1:09:09
  the scratches and the pops, and then you hear the voice,
• 1:09:14
  like this just pure recorded voice. There's no auto-tune. There's
• 1:09:18
  no nothing messing with it.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 3: Especially like an old record.
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: I have one of those 78s where you have to
• 1:09:26
  crank them up. Oh, wow. And they have the little,
• 1:09:29
  you know, cone that amplifies it. Oh, you have one
• 1:09:34
  of those.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow. 1920 or 1910 or something like that. And
• 1:09:37
  I just imagine, you know, living on the prairie and
• 1:09:41
  ordering this from Sears Roebuck, right? And getting your first,
• 1:09:46
  you know, record. And putting it on and hearing this,
• 1:09:51
  a voice coming from this acetate, it must have been magical.
• 1:09:56
  It must have been, like, you know, transformative. You know,
• 1:09:59
  this amplified song that you can dance to or fall
• 1:10:04
  in love to right in your living room.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 3: When did they first figure that out?
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: I think it was early part of the 20th century.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 3: Thomas Edison? Yeah, they had, like, this little cylinder thing.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: But when they started mass-producing them in... Oh, like just records?
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, when was the first... I think in the 20s, maybe?
• 1:10:21
  They might have mass-produced those because people had them. Just
• 1:10:24
  a way different player. Let's ask perplexity. What was the
• 1:10:28
  first record? What was the first actual record disc that
• 1:10:35
  you could play with a needle? Like a real record.
• 1:10:42
  I want to say like 1919. I'm just taking a
• 1:10:47
  wild guess. There's a famous viral video of a guy
• 1:10:49
  dropping that time.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: 1931.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 3: 12-inch, 33-1-3rd RPM disc was pressed in Victor's vinyl-based Victrolac.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: But that's 33-1-3rd. What about the 78s? Is it called 78?
• 1:11:02
  I don't think so, yeah. 23 Minutes Beside versus roughly
• 1:11:04
  the Shellac 78.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: 48. Vinyl LP arrived in June 21, 1948. Columbia Records unveiled.
• 1:11:15
  Oh, 33 and a third micro groove, long playing record.
• 1:11:18
  So was that it?
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: But in the 20s and 30s, there was a micro groove.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 3: 47, you got the 45. Oh, okay.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: So the little one singles. 31 first vinyl disc.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 3: So 31 for the first vinyl disc, 48 for the
• 1:11:35
  first real album, which is really nuts because if you
• 1:11:38
  think about all the amazing albums of the 60s, You're
• 1:11:42
  talking about a technology that didn't exist 20 years prior.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's weird.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 3: Nuts.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 3: Nuts, right? So like when you listen to Voodoo Child,
• 1:11:51
  like that technology 20 years ago didn't exist.
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: Do you remember the magic of watching it for the
• 1:11:58
  first time? Like when you put that thing down when
• 1:12:00
  you're a kid and you put it on the thing
• 1:12:02
  and the music starts coming out?
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Well, I remember the ones where they– look
• 1:12:07
  at that. Look at the vinyl grooves around. a thousand
• 1:12:10
  X magnification. You see the waveforms of the music itself.
• 1:12:13
  That's crazy.
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: Incredible.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 3: That those little weird, imagine if you were like from
• 1:12:18
  another civilization and you saw these things, you'd be like,
• 1:12:21
  what the fuck is this? Like, what do they have here?
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: How did they figure that out?
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 3: What is this? You'd be like, what? That's, they figured
• 1:12:28
  out how to make music out of that. And you
• 1:12:30
  can hear a harp. You can hear banjo. You can
• 1:12:33
  hear drums.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: An orchestra. Yeah.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: You can hear jazz Joplin all in that.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: How'd you do that? And if it scratches, it skips?
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: I'm really encouraged that vinyl is making a comeback. I'm
• 1:12:46
  really very excited about that.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: People love it.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's all the difference.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 3: People love wood tables. As the world gets more digital,
• 1:12:56
  people want things that are organic, something that a person made,
• 1:13:00
  something that seems like... It makes more sense.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: I've been finding in my search for my archive and
• 1:13:06
  everything cassette tapes that I put on. They sound amazing.
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they sound really good. Because there's more information in
• 1:13:18
  a little cassette tape than on a– whether it's MP3
• 1:13:21
  that's been compressed and compressed and compressed and compressed. But
• 1:13:28
  reel-to-reels obviously sound still great, but the cassette tapes really survived.
• 1:13:33
  I've been digitizing everything, of course, just to make sure
• 1:13:37
  that they don't decay. But it's been really interesting. A
• 1:13:42
  lot of my dad's music he recorded on cassette tapes.
• 1:13:46
  He was a folk singer. They did five albums as
• 1:13:49
  the Highwaymen, but he was a classical musician and did
• 1:13:54
  choral music and so he had a group and he
• 1:13:56
  would record on these cassette tapes and so we've been
• 1:13:59
  digitizing those because we're I'm going to put them all
• 1:14:03
  on my new website this thing called Robbins Radio which
• 1:14:06
  will be my dad my granddad my brother and myself
• 1:14:11
  the music that we've done over the years kind of
• 1:14:14
  playing on a constant loop when you come onto the
• 1:14:16
  website oh wow yeah so I was to honor my
• 1:14:19
  dad I've been digitizing also his scores and you know
• 1:14:24
  he wrote music by hand and so I've got boxes
• 1:14:29
  and boxes of that that I've trying to transcribe and
• 1:14:33
  make available probably in about six months we'll have that
• 1:14:36
  archive up.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 3: Oh that's awesome yeah when did they figure out how
• 1:14:40
  to put things on cassette tapes does that that happened
• 1:14:44
  that was around when I was in high school I
• 1:14:47
  remember I had a cassette deck on my car.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: And there was pretty good technology you could buy really
• 1:14:53
  good microphones And plugged them into a pretty good cassette player.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 3: Well, 8-track was the first, right?
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: I think so, but those were so impractical.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 3: Well, they were huge.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, plus they'd stop in the middle of a song
• 1:15:07
  and then go to the next track.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I remember driving with my friend Frank, who lives
• 1:15:13
  in Austin right now. And we were driving back up
• 1:15:15
  to school, my first school, college, Plattsburgh. And there was
• 1:15:19
  an 8-track of Bread playing. You remember that band Bread?
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 3: Uh-huh.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: And this was around 1977. And he rips it out
• 1:15:28
  of the 8-track, rolls down the window, throws it out.
• 1:15:33
  We're never listening to that again. It's punk rock from
• 1:15:37
  this point forward. And it was like a defining moment
• 1:15:40
  in my musical life was like Frank saying, no more Bread.
• 1:15:43
  No more Bread.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: No more bread.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 3: He's going to put his foot down.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: It's Sex Pistols now. That's hilarious.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: I remember my first introduction to 8-track. My friend Javier,
• 1:15:55
  when I lived in Florida, his mom had an 8-track player.
• 1:15:58
  And she had, what is that song? Who sings it?
• 1:16:02
  When my baby, when my baby smiles at me, I
• 1:16:05
  go to Rio de Janeiro. Remember that song? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:16:08
  I don't remember who sings it. Pablo Cruz.
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 3: Okay, yeah. And she had a Pablo Cruz 8-track in
• 1:16:15
  her car. I'm like, this lady's a wizard. She's got
• 1:16:18
  her own music. Because before then, I think I'd only
• 1:16:21
  seen people play stuff that was on the radio.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: Right, right.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 3: And she put it in there and she pressed the button.
• 1:16:26
  I was like, this is crazy. She gets to pick
• 1:16:30
  what songs are on the radio in a car? I
• 1:16:33
  thought it was the wildest thing I'd ever seen in
• 1:16:35
  my life.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. That was right. It was eight-track first, then
• 1:16:39
  the cassette, and then the CDs.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 3: The cassette was so much better. You had to flip
• 1:16:42
  it over, though, pop it out, flip it over to
• 1:16:44
  the other side.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but those things are cooked in the sun, though.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Oh, I lost a bunch. I used to
• 1:16:49
  have one of them big books with cassettes in it
• 1:16:51
  and these little vinyl things. You leave it in your car,
• 1:16:54
  and they get fucked, and then it gets stuck in
• 1:16:56
  the tape machine, and you had to do it with
• 1:16:59
  your finger. You had to try to wind it back
• 1:17:01
  with your finger.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Which I did like a month ago with one
• 1:17:05
  of the old cassettes.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 3: You had to stick your pinky in there.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: I just did that last month trying to re-spool it.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, nobody knows what the fuck we're talking about today. Well, then,
• 1:17:16
  you know, VHS tapes was the next one. Because that
• 1:17:19
  was the first time where you could choose to watch
• 1:17:21
  a film at home.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: Yes. And a huge deal, too. You know, I mourn
• 1:17:28
  the loss of video stores. Oh, yeah.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 3: It was a great experience.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, because you could go and you say, you know,
• 1:17:35
  I just saw this film. And there was someone that
• 1:17:37
  really loved film there.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: And he could say, well, if you like that one,
• 1:17:41
  check this one out.
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: That's now been replaced by an algorithm. Right. And I'm
• 1:17:47
  not trusting that algorithm is going to show me the
• 1:17:51
  way to Battle of Algiers or any kind of– these
• 1:17:54
  are great movies. I just– the personal was lost. Same
• 1:18:00
  thing with record stores. You could go in and, like,
• 1:18:03
  what's new and hear what's playing and, you know, talk
• 1:18:05
  to the guy and get what his opinion was. And bookstores, too.
• 1:18:10
  You know, it's like if you told me 30 years
• 1:18:13
  ago that it would be, you know, it's very hard
• 1:18:15
  to find a bookstore, a record store, or a video store,
• 1:18:18
  I would say you're crazy. But now it's all, like,
• 1:18:21
  very convenient. You have access to everything, but you don't
• 1:18:25
  have– the arbiter that is a person you have the
• 1:18:29
  arbiter that's almost a machine.
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 3: Right you get a little bit of that with people
• 1:18:34
  online recommending stuff yeah just kind of cool you know
• 1:18:38
  someone says hey i just saw this show it's fucking
• 1:18:39
  incredible that's true you get a little bit of that
• 1:18:43
  and then you get imdb and rotten Tomatoes scores, which
• 1:18:46
  I think does something. They're a little manipulated occasionally, but
• 1:18:51
  there's something to it where you get to see what
• 1:18:53
  people think about it. That helps.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's nice. I think Silo is like 100% Rotten Tomatoes.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 3: Is it really?
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right now it is. That's nice.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 3: Once you said that, though, you put it out there.
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: I know. Now it's dead.
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 3: The assholes are going to come.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: I just killed it.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 3: They're going to bomb it.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: They're going to bomb it into oblivion.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah?
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: 100%?
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 3: We'll see about that. But there's almost too many shows.
• 1:19:19
  You know, there's just too much. I just got into
• 1:19:21
  The Agency. I just finished season two of The Agency.
• 1:19:25
  Michael Fassbender. It's a CIA series that's on Paramount. It's
• 1:19:31
  fucking incredible. It's so well written. It's so well acted
• 1:19:36
  that it makes so many other shows seem really clunky
• 1:19:38
  because it's just– it's so good. It's got so many
• 1:19:42
  layers to it and it's subtle and it's brilliant and
• 1:19:45
  it's– and Fassbender is one of my favorite actors. He's
• 1:19:47
  fucking incredible.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: He's great.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 3: He's so good. He's so good in this. He plays
• 1:19:52
  this CIA spook.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: So many things to choose from.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 3: Too many.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 3: Almost.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 3: I mean– Maybe. Essentially, you could waste your whole life
• 1:20:01
  just being entertained.
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: Just.
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: Like it used to be difficult to be entertained, which
• 1:20:05
  I think there's something to that. You had to go
• 1:20:06
  to a place, you had to pay, buy your popcorn,
• 1:20:09
  sit down.
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: You had to make an active choice in your life.
• 1:20:12
  Now it's just like– Yeah, steps along the way.
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 3: They've made it more convenient to be entertained. But then again,
• 1:20:18
  it's like there's something lost in that. Like, oh, the
• 1:20:22
  movie starts at 7. Come on. We got to get
• 1:20:23
  out of here. We got to go park. We got
• 1:20:25
  to get there. We got to get there in time.
• 1:20:27
  There was a lot to it.
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: Or the idea that if there's only three choices– You
• 1:20:33
  might stumble into something you wouldn't have watched. Right. And
• 1:20:37
  be surprised.
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 3: Oh, all the time. You'd go, what do they have
• 1:20:39
  at the movie theater? Like, what's this?
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: Well, there's no more Star Wars tickets left. So we
• 1:20:45
  could go see this. You want to see this? What
• 1:20:47
  is it? I don't know.
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: This guy's in it, though. I like him. Like, okay.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's check it out.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 3: And you would just take a guess. That's the crazy
• 1:20:54
  thing about Shawshank is that it wasn't a big hit
• 1:20:57
  in the movie theater initially.
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 3: Which is really hard to believe now.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but
• 1:21:08
  nobody went to see it.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: That's nuts.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Maybe it was a title they didn't understand, or
• 1:21:13
  I don't know what it was. I was in two
• 1:21:16
  films that year, one, Hudsucker Proxy and Shawshank Redemption, two
• 1:21:19
  really challenging titles. But, like, what's it about? Hudsucker?
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: What's it about? Shawshank?
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 3: Who knows?
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: I had people coming up to me and saying, I
• 1:21:30
  really liked you in that– Scrimshaw reduction. I'm like, um, yeah,
• 1:21:38
  thank you.
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 3: Especially if they don't plan on meeting you and they
• 1:21:41
  run into you at a restaurant.
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 2: Like, oh, it's Tim Robbins.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 3: That movie.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: It's Trimshaw. Shimshank. Shimshank Shawshank.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 3: What did it come out against? What other films were
• 1:21:53
  out at the same time as Shawshank? Was there other, like,
• 1:21:56
  big movies?
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 2: Forrest Gump.
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Jurassic Park.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: Pulp Fiction.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: Oh, Jesus.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 3: Ace Ventura.
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 3: Ace Ventura, too? That's one of the best years for
• 1:22:08
  movies in history. Oh, my God.
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 2: Pulp Fiction.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God. But, you know, it made its way,
• 1:22:19
  interestingly enough, because... So Ted Turner was running Warner Brothers
• 1:22:24
  at the time, right? And Warner Brothers produced Shawshank Redemption.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 3: And.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: When he sold the rights to it for television, he
• 1:22:34
  sold it to himself at the lowest cost possible. So
• 1:22:38
  basically you had a film nominated for seven Academy Awards.
• 1:22:43
  It was getting sold like it was beach blanket bullshit.
• 1:22:49
  And so it didn't cost him anything to put it
• 1:22:52
  on his channel. So he put it on again and
• 1:22:56
  again and again, was getting all those advertising dollars that
• 1:23:00
  come with playing something on his TV channel. And I
• 1:23:04
  think that's why it caught on, because it was ubiquitous.
• 1:23:08
  It was always there. It was always something you could see.
• 1:23:12
  And so eventually people understood what kind of movie it was.
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: And so that's a good example of where someone's business
• 1:23:21
  acumen or reputation greed or whatever you want to call it,
• 1:23:26
  winds up producing something quite lovely, something that actually I'm
• 1:23:32
  really grateful for because so many people know that film.
• 1:23:35
  And it's been like number one on IMDb for the
• 1:23:38
  last 15 years, 20 years.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 3: Isn't that crazy?
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy.
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 3: And that was one of those movies that also took
• 1:23:44
  off like wildfire once it got into video because once
• 1:23:48
  people could watch it at home.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 3: That was– even though if it didn't do as well
• 1:23:52
  in the theaters as it should have, on video it
• 1:23:55
  did fantastic.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, which is why I really– I always remember that
• 1:24:00
  when I'm in a movie and it doesn't quote-unquote perform.
• 1:24:06
  I'm the turtle. I know the turtle can win the race. Yeah.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's– That was something that was lost also during
• 1:24:18
  the pandemic, and I was really worried about that, that
• 1:24:20
  it wasn't going to come back. It seemed like it
• 1:24:23
  was so easy to stream films at home that people
• 1:24:26
  just– for a while, it was hard to get people
• 1:24:29
  to go out to movie theaters.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 3: And the experience is very different.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 3: It's very different.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's been a struggle. And I think also a
• 1:24:36
  lot of producers in Hollywood– or studios lost faith in
• 1:24:45
  their adult audience even before the pandemic. I mean, they
• 1:24:49
  were producing movies for teenagers and, you know, there's nothing
• 1:24:55
  wrong with that, but because they can be, that can
• 1:24:58
  drive an economic engine. But at the same time, you know,
• 1:25:02
  films like Shawshank Redemption would not get made today because
• 1:25:08
  they're about something that isn't about the, the whole, huge
• 1:25:14
  multi-platform experience of an action movie. And that's unfortunate. I mean,
• 1:25:20
  that's kind of migrated into streamers. You know, people, adults
• 1:25:24
  that like to watch stuff tend to watch these longer
• 1:25:28
  form things. And that's a nice thing in a way
• 1:25:32
  because it's allowing filmmakers to make 10-hour films. You know,
• 1:25:36
  when you think about it, a season of a show
• 1:25:40
  is 10 hours. And so you can think in this
• 1:25:43
  like kind of long form of telling a story, which
• 1:25:46
  is a nice thing, which would have been impossible in
• 1:25:49
  old Hollywood. Right. You've got to keep it under two hours.
• 1:25:53
  So now you have the opportunity– creators have the opportunity
• 1:25:57
  to create long form entertainment.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 3: Well, that I think is one of the beautiful things
• 1:26:01
  about some of these Netflix series is that you– like
• 1:26:06
  things like Stranger Things. You essentially have a 30-hour movie.
• 1:26:11
  Or however many episodes it is. And like Ozark is
• 1:26:14
  a great example of that. It's like a fucking amazing show.
• 1:26:17
  And it's essentially like a movie every week. And the
• 1:26:21
  story continues to progress. And you get a chance to
• 1:26:25
  really stretch something out. But you get the quality of
• 1:26:30
  like a great film. But you get it extended. You know,
• 1:26:33
  with these huge budgets, the fact that they're able to
• 1:26:36
  do this like– So because of streaming, it has opened
• 1:26:40
  up this long-form aspect of storytelling that I think is
• 1:26:44
  really difficult to do in a movie. Like Kill Bill
• 1:26:46
  kind of did it a little bit.
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: For sure, yeah.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 3: You have two episodes of it.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: It's nice also as an actor, like with Silo, I've
• 1:26:53
  had three seasons. The first two seasons, my character represented something,
• 1:26:58
  which is— completely shifts in season three.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 3: Oh, spoiler alert. Don't tell me.
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: No, I'm not telling you what it is. I can't
• 1:27:05
  believe you did that. I'm just telling you that.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 3: Lift it up for me. I know I'm going to
• 1:27:07
  be looking for that.
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: You won't even be able to guess.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 3: Okay. Oh, good.
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: Good. It's such a profound, and it was fun to play.
• 1:27:18
  It was like this kind of like, and I was
• 1:27:21
  told about this at the beginning. The creator said, you know, listen,
• 1:27:25
  wait till season three.
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 3: That's interesting because I always wonder how far they map
• 1:27:29
  these things out. Did they even know that they were
• 1:27:34
  going to be picked up for season three when he started?
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: No, but they knew at the end of season one
• 1:27:41
  what the trajectory of two and three was.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 3: So if they got picked up, they had a plan?
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: Well, if they were going to get picked up, they
• 1:27:46
  would have to tell the studio what two and three are.
• 1:27:52
  So the other thing that you have to consider is
• 1:27:55
  that if you're an asshole, they'll fucking kill you.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 2: It's true.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: Writers don't, you know, writers don't, you know, if an
• 1:28:06
  actor is like trouble.
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 3: Right, right, right.
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: They'll kill him.
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 2: They will.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: Why not? I've been told about, you know, one of
• 1:28:16
  the guys I worked with was, I won't say his name, but,
• 1:28:20
  you know, when I was directing for television, I did
• 1:28:24
  a couple episodes on this show and, He told me
• 1:28:26
  about a show that he was doing where there were
• 1:28:29
  three actors that were giving him a real hard time.
• 1:28:32
  And one of them was getting in trouble because of
• 1:28:36
  sexual inappropriateness. One was getting in trouble because. of– they
• 1:28:40
  were too much in their head. And the other was
• 1:28:44
  something else, something about another– basically they shot them all
• 1:28:49
  in the anatomy that was associated with what their problem was. Yeah.
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 2: All three of them were shot in the finale.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: Oh, no. He said, well, we allowed a couple of
• 1:29:00
  them to survive, but one we really killed off. So,
• 1:29:03
  you know, you don't mess with the writers. They're in television.
• 1:29:07
  They wield a lot of power.
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 3: Not only that, they're also looking for angles, different places
• 1:29:13
  to take the character. And if you're a douchebag, you're like,
• 1:29:16
  let's fucking.
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: Kill this guy. Yeah, that'll be a good show.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 3: Let's figure out a way to kill this guy off.
• 1:29:21
  Let's turn him into a pedophile and.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: Then we kill him. Basically, you can do whatever you want.
• 1:29:29
  Here's the twist. I didn't see this coming.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Watch out. Yeah. Be nice.
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, there's a lot of fear in Hollywood
• 1:29:38
  when it comes to AI and replacing writers and replacing
• 1:29:43
  actors and just replacing this whole human created thing of storytelling.
• 1:29:49
  And I think writers in particular are really terrified because
• 1:29:53
  you could kind of, you know, with with. AI engines today,
• 1:29:57
  you could kind of take a few films, right? Like
• 1:30:01
  you could kind of take like Bullet and Heat and
• 1:30:05
  a few– and they say, make me John Wick meets
• 1:30:08
  Bullet meets Heat. And this is the protagonist. This is
• 1:30:13
  what he's facing. These are the issues. And AI can
• 1:30:17
  churn it out in a few minutes.
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 3: And then you could say make it more like Quentin
• 1:30:22
  Tarantino would do it and then it will do that.
• 1:30:24
  It will fix it in that way.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: That's crazy.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 3: And then you say, OK, I want it more like
• 1:30:28
  Kubrick aspects to it. I want some weirdness to it,
• 1:30:32
  some real thought, some Easter eggs, some hidden aspects to
• 1:30:36
  it that people connect later. It will do that. It
• 1:30:40
  can do stuff instantaneously based on– and it's kind of stealing, right?
• 1:30:45
  But it's not, right? It's making an original thing but
• 1:30:48
  it's not. because it's inspired by everything else that's already
• 1:30:51
  been made, but that's kind of what people do, but
• 1:30:55
  not in the same way. And we don't do it
• 1:30:57
  that quick either. And so for writers, it's fucking terrifying. Yeah.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: And who do you sue? I mean, you can't sue AI.
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 3: Well, artists are having a real problem with that.
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: I have a real problem with it. Yeah. I don't,
• 1:31:08
  I don't like it at all, but I also have
• 1:31:11
  faith in the individuality of the human, um, experience and, uh,
• 1:31:16
  what I, what you like, I'm writing, uh, a, um,
• 1:31:21
  a companion piece to the player, uh, right now. Uh,
• 1:31:25
  and you know, what would happen if that character that was, uh,
• 1:31:30
  alive today. And so, um, I have my perspective that
• 1:31:35
  only I'm going to bring to that. Right. I don't
• 1:31:37
  think you could plug that into it.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 3: No, no, no.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: So I, I think talented people will figure out a
• 1:31:43
  way to be individual and apart from AI and, But
• 1:31:47
  I also really don't like the lack of protection that
• 1:31:53
  the guilds and the unions are offering their membership. You know,
• 1:31:59
  there should have been a hard line for the actors union.
• 1:32:04
  And there wasn't. The hard line should have been, you know,
• 1:32:07
  you cannot use this to replace actors. Right. Or writers.
• 1:32:11
  But there was compromise. Or writers. For the writers union.
• 1:32:16
  I don't think that that protection was held up at
• 1:32:19
  the last negotiations, and I think that we're going to
• 1:32:22
  see the ramifications of that, unfortunately.
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 3: Well, that's what's scary is that ultimately economics has a
• 1:32:30
  major impact on the decisions that they make, and it's
• 1:32:35
  way cheaper to do it that way. It's way cheaper
• 1:32:37
  to use AI to write things than screenwriters, especially really
• 1:32:41
  talented screenwriters, even though it's kind of drawing on the
• 1:32:44
  past creative work. Of really talented screenwriters.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 3: They don't get compensated for it. I think ultimately people
• 1:32:51
  are going to want and appreciate something that's made by
• 1:32:54
  a human being. Because it's one of the things, it's
• 1:32:56
  what we really like. Not just be entertained. We really
• 1:32:59
  love the fact that someone made something.
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: Well, my girlfriend, Reed Morano, has been advocating for a
• 1:33:06
  seal to be put on projects that are made without AI.
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 3: That's a great idea. That is a very good idea.
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: I think that's a great idea.
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 3: I like that a lot. I think, yeah, instead of
• 1:33:17
  like the parental warning.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: AI-free.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, AI-free, right? No GMO foods, bitch.
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 2: There's something to that.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 3: I think that's a great idea, actually. I think that
• 1:33:28
  might be the way– that might be the solution is
• 1:33:30
  a seal. Yeah, I like that a lot. Makes sense.
• 1:33:35
  People– When you see a great something that someone made,
• 1:33:40
  one of the things that you really like about it
• 1:33:42
  is that it came from a human being's creativity. Did
• 1:33:46
  you see Obsession?
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: No. It's fucking great.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 3: It's so good. It's so crazy and so creepy and
• 1:33:52
  so weird and so brilliant. No one in it is famous,
• 1:33:57
  and it's phenomenal, and it's really original and creepy. One
• 1:34:01
  of the things I loved is this is– what is he,
• 1:34:03
  like 25 or something like that?
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: The director.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I think he's 25 years old.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 3: Who, you know, had done a bunch of YouTube stuff.
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: I love it. It's a complete accident. Huge hit.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 3: Has this amazing idea. And you've got these people who
• 1:34:18
  they're relatively unknown, but really talented.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: We're craving that. Yes. Yes. We don't want the formula. Right.
• 1:34:25
  We never have wanted the formula. And it's so maddening
• 1:34:28
  to try to set a movie up right now in
• 1:34:31
  Hollywood because what they want is they want. Someone, an
• 1:34:35
  actor that's worth $ 20 million, and they'll give you $ 10
• 1:34:39
  million to do the film. You get the guy that
• 1:34:42
  they normally would have to pay $ 20 million, and you
• 1:34:45
  get him to do your film for, you know, $ 300, 000,
• 1:34:49
  you got a film.
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 3: Good luck.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 2: There's no gamblers anymore.
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 3: That's crazy.
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 2: There's no risk takers.
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: When I was coming up, you know, you had these
• 1:34:57
  guys that, like, actually, you know, Joe Roth gave me
• 1:35:00
  the money to do Cradle Will Rock. And he says,
• 1:35:03
  it was.
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 2: Basically, like, here's the, here you go, kid, do it.
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: I'm like, really? I get to do this. Well, you know,
• 1:35:10
  I don't wound up with, you know, final cut and everything.
• 1:35:14
  They used to do that. They used to invest in
• 1:35:17
  the risk, right? Because only, only will the risk produce
• 1:35:22
  something genuine and new and fresh. Uh, if you don't gamble, you're,
• 1:35:28
  and you're, you're measured and you're on a formula and
• 1:35:32
  you got your stars, it's going to, The audience is
• 1:35:34
  going to know it. Yep. They know it's– oh, this
• 1:35:38
  is prepackaged and preprogrammed for my demographic. Yeah. And I
• 1:35:42
  kind of resent it.
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: You know? Whereas something like that obsession is like coming
• 1:35:48
  out of left field. No one is predicting it, programming it.
• 1:35:53
  It's just an accident and people love it. Yeah. That's
• 1:35:57
  what is exciting about– it's like when you're trying a
• 1:36:01
  new– material in a, in a club. And you're like,
• 1:36:05
  I don't know if this is going to work, but
• 1:36:06
  I'm fucking do it. And it gets the laugh. That's
• 1:36:10
  that thrill is what it's all about. Right. That's the,
• 1:36:14
  that's the moment where you go, I gambled and it
• 1:36:17
  paid off.
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That's that. I don't know how much we have
• 1:36:22
  that experience anymore in, in, in Hollywood.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 3: Do you think it's just because of the extreme cost
• 1:36:28
  that's involved? I mean just to promote a film. Like
• 1:36:31
  if you have a film and it's got a budget,
• 1:36:33
  like especially– I think it's probably why so many superhero
• 1:36:37
  movies get greenlit, right? Because it's one of the only gambles.
• 1:36:40
  Like if you're gambling on an Avengers movie, like you
• 1:36:43
  can't miss. Get the Hulk to smash a bunch of shit.
• 1:36:46
  Captain America comes in. You're good. You're good. You're going
• 1:36:49
  to make your money back. And so you kind of
• 1:36:52
  have to– you know, like if you're a money person,
• 1:36:56
  if you're not a creative person, you're just a money
• 1:36:58
  person who happens to be in the movie business, which
• 1:37:00
  I'm sure a lot of them are. They're just looking
• 1:37:02
  at it as a return on investment.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But I, you know, that's always been that way
• 1:37:08
  to some degree, but, um, I don't know. I don't
• 1:37:12
  know why it became such a risk to try new stuff. Um,
• 1:37:19
  I mean, because they're not putting that much money into it.
• 1:37:21
  You know, those Marvel movies, they're costing them $ 250 million,
• 1:37:25
  $ 200 million to produce. Right. There's independent filmmakers that are
• 1:37:29
  proven independent filmmakers that are asking for like $ 5 million,
• 1:37:33
  $ 4 million to do a film. So if they put
• 1:37:36
  some advertisement in it, maybe it's going to cost them
• 1:37:40
  $ 14 million, all told. And, you know, can they make
• 1:37:44
  that back? Is the marketplace going to? Support that. Who knows?
• 1:37:48
  I wouldn't want to be an investor, but I also,
• 1:37:51
  you know, I have a nostalgia for a time when
• 1:37:58
  Robert Altman could make a film, you know, and it
• 1:38:02
  could just blow people's minds. And then the next film
• 1:38:05
  he made, you know, as he would gleefully tell you,
• 1:38:08
  they're going to hate this one, you know, and.
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 3: I love that, you know, that.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: And people would either love it or hate it, but
• 1:38:16
  he was making his own films. He was making distinctive
• 1:38:20
  films that were him.
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 3: Is it more difficult or easier to get a film
• 1:38:27
  released today if you make it yourself?
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: Because you don't have distribution, really. So, you know, I
• 1:38:36
  suppose in the future, there's going to be some form
• 1:38:39
  of distribution that will be more egalitarian. But right now,
• 1:38:44
  it's a huge risk.
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 3: How does distribution work? Like, say if you decided You're
• 1:38:48
  going to get a bunch of investors together and put
• 1:38:50
  together a film. Do you have to get distribution before
• 1:38:53
  you even start producing?
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: Yes. You have to have foreign sales in place. Whoa.
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 3: Foreign sales.
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think basically the economic model right now is
• 1:39:07
  the investors want to be paid and not be losing
• 1:39:11
  money by the time they start shooting. In other words,
• 1:39:14
  they're not going to lose money. They've already sold it
• 1:39:16
  for more. Then they've paid. And so there's really no risk,
• 1:39:21
  no gamble. Then if the movie catches fire at a
• 1:39:28
  film festival, then they'll put the money into advertising. If
• 1:39:31
  it doesn't catch fire at a film festival or with critics,
• 1:39:35
  they'll just, you know, okay, I already made my money.
• 1:39:37
  You know, we'll just sell it to, you know, DVDs, whatever.
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 3: God, what a fucking shitty environment to create something.
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: It's hard. It's hard. Yeah, my gal's struggling with that
• 1:39:47
  right now. I checked out of that hotel a while back.
• 1:39:50
  I was like, I don't want my heart broken like that.
• 1:39:53
  So I've just been doing things on my own. I've
• 1:39:56
  been producing things on my own, shooting them, editing them.
• 1:40:00
  That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this
• 1:40:02
  website was because I've got all this stuff that is unreleased. Yeah.
• 1:40:07
  Just going to start releasing it slowly.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 3: Is that more satisfying to do it that way?
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: No, it's more satisfying to go to Cannes and win
• 1:40:14
  Best Actor. I mean, it's much more satisfying. When you
• 1:40:19
  have a machine behind you that's supporting it, it's great.
• 1:40:22
  You know, Mystic River. You have Warner Brothers like, we
• 1:40:27
  love this film. We're going to make sure that people
• 1:40:29
  see it. That's what you need. You need your sponsors
• 1:40:33
  that get it, that want people to see it, that
• 1:40:36
  see the value of it. And they'll put money into advertising.
• 1:40:39
  And that's a great experience to be in. The other
• 1:40:42
  thing is just, you know, pretty lonely. It's just, you know,
• 1:40:45
  you're trying your best. I was in three movies after
• 1:40:49
  I won the Oscar for Mystic River that I've considered
• 1:40:53
  three of the best movies of my career. But nobody's
• 1:40:55
  seen them. Secret Life of Words, Code 46, and Catch
• 1:41:01
  a Fire. And they're all excellent movies. But they came
• 1:41:06
  at a time where the producers or the people that
• 1:41:11
  were distributing them didn't really want to risk the money
• 1:41:15
  that it would take.
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 3: See, that's where there's a room for like a Siskel
• 1:41:19
  and Ebert type character today that can find those films
• 1:41:22
  and say, hey, this one slipped under the radar. But
• 1:41:25
  this is really an actual person that's a giant movie
• 1:41:28
  buff that can go back and watch these and comment
• 1:41:32
  on them. And we don't really– Back then, Siskel and
• 1:41:36
  Ebert were the guys. If they gave you two thumbs down,
• 1:41:38
  you were fucked.
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 3: You were fucked.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 3: And, you know, they were very catty with each other.
• 1:41:43
  It was a fun thing. It's fun to watch the outtakes,
• 1:41:47
  how much those guys actually didn't get along. Yeah.
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I was lucky with them. They gave me great reviews.
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 3: It was good. They had good taste.
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah. They did. And they loved film.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 3: They clearly loved film, and they loved all aspects of it,
• 1:42:01
  and they would talk about it great understanding and great passion,
• 1:42:05
  the subtleties of the performances and what really and how
• 1:42:09
  it was put together. Even they talk about the score,
• 1:42:11
  you know.
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And they spend like 15 minutes on each film.
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: Which was never happened.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 3: And it was a hugely successful show, which is like
• 1:42:22
  really confusing where there's not something like that today.
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 3: Cause there's so much content today. If you were like,
• 1:42:30
  it's not like what's out in the movies right now.
• 1:42:32
  Like today, fucking there's a million shows that are streaming. There's,
• 1:42:37
  there's so much shit going on. There's so much content
• 1:42:39
  that if you had a trusted source, you know, a
• 1:42:44
  person who's like a real good critic of stuff, really,
• 1:42:48
  I'm not even a critic and appreciator is better word.
• 1:42:50
  Like someone who's a real passionate enthusiast of film and of,
• 1:42:54
  you know, different creative works. They could just talk about
• 1:42:57
  something and recommend stuff.
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But then there's the burnout of that too. Like,
• 1:43:03
  you know, I would talk to some of these guys
• 1:43:05
  and they'd be like, you know, for every one of
• 1:43:07
  those good films, we have to see like 10 dreck,
• 1:43:12
  you know, and the time spent watching these things kind
• 1:43:17
  of mind numbingly painful for some of these people, you know,
• 1:43:22
  imagine having to, you know, Weed through the muck to
• 1:43:26
  get to the gems.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 3: I guess. But can't you just walk out of the film?
• 1:43:29
  Just like you walk out of a movie theater and
• 1:43:31
  you're like, this movie sucks. I've done that a few times.
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: Me too.
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 3: It's a terrible place to be.
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: Me too.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 3: You're like, I can't believe I'm leaving.
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: Hard to do in the live theater though because when
• 1:43:39
  they know you're there. Right.
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 3: That's different.
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 3: But if you're watching it at home, I mean, it's
• 1:43:45
  really what you're trying to do. You want to be
• 1:43:47
  the one of the person that says, this is the
• 1:43:48
  worst fucking movie I've ever seen in my life. And
• 1:43:51
  that's what you're doing. But if you want to be
• 1:43:53
  a person who's just an enthusiast of great stuff and
• 1:43:55
  just keep it on the positive side, there's so much
• 1:43:58
  great stuff to review and so many great things from
• 1:44:01
  the past that people haven't seen before that you could
• 1:44:05
  sort of turn people on to.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that would be great.
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 3: It's kind of weird that there's not someone like that
• 1:44:11
  right now.
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: It is weird. It is weird. I think maybe you
• 1:44:15
  should do that, produce that.
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 3: No, I'm busy.
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: You should produce that.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 3: But I mean it just doesn't even make sense that
• 1:44:22
  there's so many different– like there's so much content but
• 1:44:27
  yet there's not that one thing that was a really
• 1:44:29
  big part of the movie experience when we were younger.
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And the– that idea that there's some exciting movie
• 1:44:36
  coming out on Friday and we're going to go to it. Yeah.
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 3: It was huge.
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 3: That was huge. Yeah. And a movie was coming out.
• 1:44:43
  Like I guess you have it right now with The Odyssey.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 3: Like a lot of people are– it's like one of
• 1:44:47
  those movies that's so big people are scrambling to go
• 1:44:50
  see it in the movie theaters and it's getting people
• 1:44:52
  excited about it along with a lot of the culture
• 1:44:55
  war controversies that everybody that I know that's seen it,
• 1:44:58
  I haven't seen it yet, says fucking throw all that away.
• 1:45:00
  The movie is amazing.
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: That's what I hear.
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 3: They're just like– it's almost like a good way to
• 1:45:06
  bait people into getting really confrontational about it. Aren't you getting.
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: Tired of that though?
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Real tired of it. Yeah.
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: Like, oh– It's not correct.
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: It's just– I'm tired of it from both sides. I
• 1:45:21
  don't want to hear judgment. Right. I just– help me.
• 1:45:27
  I don't want to be in the middle of this
• 1:45:30
  fight constantly. It's the only– I feel like this is, again,
• 1:45:36
  what we were talking about before. It's the– as long
• 1:45:39
  as we're fighting with each other. Yeah. And now we're
• 1:45:41
  fighting about films that are coming out. I was like,
• 1:45:43
  come on, guys. Calm down. Calm down.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 3: Like I don't care. It's just– is it entertaining? Is
• 1:45:48
  it good? It doesn't have to be correct. It doesn't
• 1:45:51
  mean anything to me. There's never been a time in
• 1:45:53
  history where correct was important to me.
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Or indicative of great art. Right.
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 3: It's just make it good. And by all accounts, everyone
• 1:46:01
  that I know that's seen the movie says it's fucking incredible.
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 3: I'm going to try to see it soon. But the
• 1:46:06
  culture war part of it is like at the very
• 1:46:09
  least it got people excited to see it.
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 3: And either to hate it or– but I know a
• 1:46:13
  lot of people that wanted to go hate it because
• 1:46:15
  they were upset. But Elliot Page played this person.
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: I understand that.
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 3: Helen of Troy is a black lady. Like who fucking cares?
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 2: It doesn't matter.
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 3: Not only that, it's a made-up story.
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It's a myth to begin with.
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah. It apparently might actually be based on a real
• 1:46:36
  place though. They used to think that Troy was not
• 1:46:39
  a real place and then they discovered it. I think
• 1:46:42
  that was– was it in the 70s? When did they
• 1:46:46
  discover Troy? Because they used to think that it was
• 1:46:49
  completely mythical, that it was just fiction, a work of fiction.
• 1:46:52
  And then they found the actual real city. And they're like, oh.
• 1:46:56
  Like that's the weird thing about really old stories is
• 1:47:00
  that like there's so– it's so ambiguous as to what
• 1:47:03
  was the root– what was the origin of this story?
• 1:47:05
  Was this a real event? Have you ever.
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: Stood on the stage of an old Roman amphitheater? Yes.
• 1:47:12
  That's something else.
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's wild.
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. There's history in those stones. And, you know,
• 1:47:19
  we were doing a show over in Lyon, France, in
• 1:47:22
  one of those theaters. And we found something out because
• 1:47:27
  we were doing rehearsal. And when you're talking to the
• 1:47:30
  other actor like this, You can't hear it out there
• 1:47:32
  at all. So it told us that what they were
• 1:47:37
  doing was this, you know, back in the old days.
• 1:47:39
  They had to perform out because you wouldn't be able
• 1:47:42
  to hear if you were doing realistically talking to someone
• 1:47:45
  making eye contact.
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 3: That's what's weird about early film is that early film
• 1:47:49
  you have stage actors who are used to doing it
• 1:47:52
  with no microphones projecting now doing it on film. So
• 1:47:57
  it looks odd. It's like there was this transitionary period
• 1:48:00
  and then Brando came along and Brando just did it real.
• 1:48:05
  And everybody's like, what the fuck is he doing?
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 3: Like he's acting like a real person. This is crazy.
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Montgomery cliff too.
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That, was a huge step forward for all of us. Yeah.
• 1:48:19
  To take the onus off the theatrical and get more
• 1:48:22
  into the real.
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 3: And again, if you really think about it, not a
• 1:48:26
  whole lot of time between like the invention of film
• 1:48:32
  and then movie stars and all these things happening. Like
• 1:48:35
  this is a completely new cultural thing. Like from the
• 1:48:39
  early– like what was the first film? Like the first
• 1:48:42
  film with sound. What year was that?
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: 1920s?
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 3: Wow. So think of that. So you have from 27
• 1:48:53
  and then just a few decades later you have On
• 1:48:55
  the Waterfront. You have The Hustler. You have these incredible
• 1:48:59
  movies that they just have to figure out on the fly.
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: Citizen Kane.
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 3: And they have to figure out on the fly how
• 1:49:08
  to do this.
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: But also, if you ever watch the first films, like
• 1:49:13
  the silent films, and the ability to tell a story
• 1:49:16
  without words, which was a whole other talent. I mean,
• 1:49:22
  you watch those Chaplin films. That man was insanely talented.
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 3: Well, Nosferatu. The original Nosferatu.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: I love that film.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 3: I saw that at a public library in San Francisco
• 1:49:33
  when I was a kid. They had a night where
• 1:49:35
  they played it, and I went to see it. I
• 1:49:37
  was like, this is nuts.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: Incredible.
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 3: Incredible film. What year was that film?
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: 1922.
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 3: 1922.
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: And then Metropolis was another one. Oh, yeah.
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 3: That's a crazy movie. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I love that old stuff.
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's great. Those movies are great. And at the time,
• 1:49:53
  you've got to imagine the experience of going to see
• 1:49:56
  that where no one had seen movies before. This is
• 1:49:58
  like a new thing.
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 3: You're seeing things moving around on a giant screen. You're like,
• 1:50:02
  this is mad. Yeah.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: Alchemy. Yeah. Crazy magic. Satan.
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 3: And you had to read what they were saying to
• 1:50:09
  each other on the screen.
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 3: And then music would play. They had a guy with
• 1:50:12
  an organ that was playing music along with it.
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: Like, what?
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Super cool.
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 3: It is super cool.
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: I would love to. Like, if you could time travel
• 1:50:20
  and go to one of those movie theaters back there.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 3: There he is. I mean, one of the best vampire
• 1:50:28
  movies of all time, too. And so creepy.
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: The lighting is just so good. Yeah. German expressionist. Do
• 1:50:36
  you ever see M? Peter Lorre.
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 3: It's just M?
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 1: It's called M, yeah.
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 3: The letter M?
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: Isn't it M? 1931. Yeah, 1931.
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 3: No, I never saw it.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: It's really good.
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 3: What is it? What's it about?
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: About a murderer that's stalking a bunch of people. Yeah,
• 1:50:56
  I was a huge fan of that whole genre of filmmaking.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 3: Well, there's something so exciting about it because it, like,
• 1:51:04
  when you limit the sensory input, like you have to
• 1:51:07
  read the words and you want, it's all black and
• 1:51:09
  white and there's music playing. It's like, it's a totally
• 1:51:12
  different thing that you're taking in.
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 3: You know, it's like, it's almost like half reading, half watching.
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 3: You know, like you're reading, like you don't hear their,
• 1:51:21
  their voices. You have to create their voices in your head.
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And you're feeling in a different way too because
• 1:51:26
  of the, you know, it's black and white, so it's
• 1:51:28
  not real, but it, it is real. And so, Yeah,
• 1:51:34
  it's a great, great form. We should have more of those.
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 3: It's just hard to imagine that this is only 100
• 1:51:40
  years old. That from there to now, this is 100 years.
• 1:51:44
  That's a blink of an eye.
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 3: And when you think about human history, like when we
• 1:51:49
  think about like the 1500s versus the 1600s, we kind
• 1:51:52
  of think it's basically the same. If you're born in
• 1:51:54
  1520 or 1620, it's fucking exactly the same.
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 3: But if you're born in 1920 or 2020, it's a
• 1:52:00
  fucking completely different world you're living in.
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: Huge.
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 3: 1920, you have Nosferatu. 2026, you have The Odyssey, you know?
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 3: You have Dune. You have these insane films. Right.
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: Not to mention the technology you personally possess. Yes. Right.
• 1:52:17
  In your pocket.
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 3: Right. Any moment in time, you could stream a movie.
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: I could see Nosferatu right now on here. Yeah.
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 3: Or the Robert Eggert's one, the new one.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 3: Which is fucking fantastic. But it's just instantaneous. Everything is
• 1:52:29
  instantaneous and everything is right there for you. So it's
• 1:52:32
  great in that sense that you will be entertained. There's
• 1:52:35
  something to watch no matter what. But you're missing something
• 1:52:40
  on the specialness of like having to go out and
• 1:52:44
  go to a place, even go to a video store
• 1:52:47
  and go get it. There's something missing.
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: I think that that's really at the core of it
• 1:52:55
  though is the– I've decided this is what I'm going
• 1:52:59
  to do today, the whole thing, you know, like pre this.
• 1:53:04
  Like I am going to be an active participant in
• 1:53:07
  my life. It's when I first moved to L.A. that
• 1:53:10
  I first understood this in the late 70s. L.A., as
• 1:53:16
  opposed to New York where I grew up, L.A., you
• 1:53:19
  have to make a choice to find your fun. New York,
• 1:53:23
  a little drop in your lap, right?
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: If you walk down the street, something will present itself.
• 1:53:29
  But in L.A., when I first moved out there, I
• 1:53:31
  realized you got to drive there. You got to drive
• 1:53:34
  and find your fun. And you have to be an
• 1:53:37
  active participant in your cultural life. And once I understood
• 1:53:42
  that about L.A., I could understand how to live there.
• 1:53:45
  It was at first very frustrating because it was very boring, right?
• 1:53:49
  It wasn't happening when I walked out on the street.
• 1:53:52
  There was no street to walk out on. It was
• 1:53:54
  just too big. But it's that kind of– I have
• 1:54:01
  chosen this weekend to drive 30 minutes in that direction
• 1:54:07
  to see this punk rock band, right? And I will
• 1:54:10
  be an active participant in that. And once you do that,
• 1:54:14
  you're liberated. Then you know anything is possible. But now
• 1:54:19
  it's like I want it in my backyard.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 3: Not only that, now that thing interrupts you while you're
• 1:54:26
  taking something else in.
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 3: It constantly wants your attention. It's like a puppy. It's like, hey, hey, hey,
• 1:54:33
  watch the movie.
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: I want to be fed. Yeah.
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 3: It's constantly demanding your attention or at least enticing you
• 1:54:39
  to take a look at it, vibrating in your pocket. Yeah.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: Have you ever thought about trashing it?
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 3: I've gotten off social media for weeks at a time.
• 1:54:52
  I've done that. But I need it for work too much.
• 1:54:55
  I need it for emails. I need to– I can't
• 1:54:57
  always just be in front of a laptop.
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: Do you have a– like a flip phone? No, no.
• 1:55:03
  I'm thinking about getting one.
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 3: I have a computer that I write on that's not
• 1:55:07
  connected to anything. My writing computer is just a Lenovo ThinkPad.
• 1:55:13
  I never use it for anything other than writing. If
• 1:55:16
  I go online, it's just to research something, like ask
• 1:55:19
  a question like, what is this? How does this work?
• 1:55:21
  I never surf the web. I don't look at any websites.
• 1:55:25
  I don't do anything with it. And that helps a
• 1:55:27
  lot for that. But for phones, I have too many
• 1:55:31
  friends that are sending me funny things. There's always like
• 1:55:33
  some funny thing and I'm like, all right, I guess
• 1:55:35
  I'm back on Instagram. Check it out. Like, oh, Jesus,
• 1:55:37
  this is crazy. There's too much coming at you. And
• 1:55:42
  the problem is if I put it down, which I
• 1:55:44
  do often for like the whole day, when I pick
• 1:55:47
  it up, I'll get 70 text messages to go through.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: I know.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 3: And then I don't respond to some and some people
• 1:55:53
  get mad and they're like, I'm sorry. It's like, it's
• 1:55:57
  too much. It's too much coming in. And then there's
• 1:55:59
  so much, Hey, look at this. Hey, check this out.
• 1:56:03
  Have you seen this? What do you think about that?
• 1:56:05
  You think this is real?
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, And then the people that you don't
• 1:56:09
  respond to can oftentimes take the lack of response as
• 1:56:14
  basically you saying fuck you. Right. And it's not the
• 1:56:17
  case at all.
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: You just don't have the time to do it. Right.
• 1:56:22
  And you read it and you liked it and you smiled,
• 1:56:24
  but you didn't put a smiley on it. Right.
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 3: You have to put a little heart. You got to
• 1:56:28
  double click it.
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: It's a very strange social dynamic. I'm not sure I'm
• 1:56:34
  very good at it. No. No.
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 3: It was probably a good time.
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 3: It demands too much. That's the problem. As much as
• 1:56:41
  it is interesting, if you have a wide social circle,
• 1:56:45
  it demands too much of your– if you have 100
• 1:56:48
  units of attention that you have for use throughout the day,
• 1:56:51
  it demands too many units. Right. There's just too much
• 1:56:54
  coming at you.
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 3: And it will take away from other things that you do.
• 1:56:57
  And that's a real problem.
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I like sitting in my garden.
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 3: Is that your thing?
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah.
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I have a really good, I I've, I've been gardening. Yeah. That's,
• 1:57:09
  that's the real thing. That's my peaceful place.
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 3: That's a real thing.
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: It's real.
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 3: It's dirt.
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 3: Real plant grows out. Life comes from it.
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: Yep. You can eat stuff from it. Yeah.
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 3: You need stuff to do, right? You need a thing
• 1:57:21
  that can take you away from the other things.
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: Something to make more beautiful every day. Something to, you know,
• 1:57:28
  something to care for. Um, it's, you know, whether it's
• 1:57:34
  the garden, I have a garden in, in Los Angeles that,
• 1:57:37
  you know, I grow herbs and I, you know, the,
• 1:57:40
  to walk down and put that, those herbs, those fresh
• 1:57:43
  herbs in the omelet you're making, you know, it's a,
• 1:57:46
  it's not, it's a small thing, but it's huge. Yeah.
• 1:57:48
  And then, uh, I have back East, I have, I
• 1:57:51
  planted a garden with my son this year, you know,
• 1:57:53
  like vegetable garden and he's, you know, I haven't been there,
• 1:57:57
  but he's been saying the tomatoes are coming like crazy
• 1:57:59
  and the cucumbers and, You know, that's such a, yeah,
• 1:58:02
  there you go.
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 4: That's this uh it's a i've i've really love this
• 1:58:08
  i love the idea that we can you know the
• 1:58:11
  earth has so much to offer us you know all
• 1:58:14
  it needs is water and sunlight and it'll produce all
• 1:58:18
  these beautiful things well.
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 3: There's built-in human rewards for growing things too like it's
• 1:58:25
  a human reward system That we have had in our
• 1:58:28
  DNA for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. When
• 1:58:32
  you grow things and they produce fruit and they produce vegetables,
• 1:58:37
  like it's exciting.
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 3: Because you're going to eat.
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 3: You're going to survive.
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And then when you're doing your harvest in the fall,
• 1:58:44
  you have an abundance, right? And then I learned how
• 1:58:47
  to pickle. Ah. And that's a joy because now you're
• 1:58:51
  set for the winter, right? Now you've got a refrigerator
• 1:58:54
  full of pickled stuff. And, you know, to be able
• 1:58:59
  to bite into a crisp pickle that you grew as
• 1:59:03
  a cucumber in the summer in December, it's like, you know,
• 1:59:07
  this is how they survived. You know, this is those,
• 1:59:10
  you know, the storage of crops and how you how
• 1:59:15
  you make them survive through the winter. It's a skill that,
• 1:59:19
  you know, that. Well, that's why we're still here.
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 3: And then you find out that pickling and fermented foods
• 1:59:27
  and all those things are fantastic for your body.
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: Incredible.
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 3: In a way that other foods just aren't.
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 3: And helps your microbiome and helps your gut.
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And then you can, you know, use the extra
• 1:59:37
  pickle juice for a martini.
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: And it's fantastic.
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 3: Or you can just drink it.
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I do that too.
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 3: Actually buy pickle juice. I have a company that sells
• 1:59:45
  you these little packets of pickle juice and you drink
• 1:59:47
  it because it's a probiotic beverage.
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I have many jars of. pickles that are, there's
• 1:59:53
  no more pickles in, but I keep the juice for,
• 1:59:56
  for drinking. It's, and, you know, fermented foods and, you know,
• 2:00:02
  I've learned, you know, so much about the gut biome and, and,
• 2:00:08
  and how to make that healthier. And all these challenges
• 2:00:13
  we're up against with all the poisons in our food
• 2:00:16
  and how to get around them and how to clean, clean,
• 2:00:19
  clean yourself out. And, I just did a cleanse, one
• 2:00:23
  of those master cleanses I just did 14 days on
• 2:00:26
  where you don't eat anything for 14 days. And it's
• 2:00:29
  amazing how great you feel at the end of it.
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 3: 14 whole days, no food at all.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: No food at all.
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 3: Wow. What did you drink?
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: Water? Lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup. And that
• 2:00:43
  will get you through the day. But every morning you're
• 2:00:45
  doing a purge, right? So you're cleaning out. You're cleaning
• 2:00:49
  all the poisons out. I do that a couple times
• 2:00:51
  a year.
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 3: 14 days is a long time with no food. It is.
• 2:00:55
  What's the first thing you eat when it was over?
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: You got to ease your way back in, like clear
• 2:01:00
  broth first, then soups, then vegetables, then get to the
• 2:01:04
  next thing.
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 2: Over how long?
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: About a week re-entry. Yeah. Whoa. I mean, you're eating,
• 2:01:10
  but you're not going for the steak first thing. Right, right, right. Yeah.
• 2:01:14
  And so you have to kind of ease your system
• 2:01:15
  back into it.
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 3: Do you experience mental clarity when you do that?
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: Total mental clarity.
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 3: Interesting.
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 3: I've never done it. The most I've done is a day.
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 2: First three days are tough.
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: But then once you get past the third day, it's
• 2:01:30
  pretty– your energy level is like constant throughout the day.
• 2:01:37
  And you can work. I play sports with it. It's–
• 2:01:42
  around 10 days, you should stop doing the physical stuff.
• 2:01:46
  Too much exertion. I could still take a bike ride
• 2:01:49
  and stuff.
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 3: But you were working out three days of no food?
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: You have to, you know, everyone's going to have their
• 2:01:57
  own reaction. So, you know, I'm not advocating even to
• 2:02:00
  do it.
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: Because, you know, I don't want to be responsible for that.
• 2:02:04
  But for me personally, it's really helped. Because it also,
• 2:02:07
  it restarts your system. It basically, you get rid of
• 2:02:10
  the toxins. You're certainly not drinking. You're not doing any
• 2:02:13
  kind of. abusive shit to yourself. And, uh, and basically
• 2:02:18
  your body is, is thanking you by the clarity it
• 2:02:21
  gives you. Like you, you really like, and the other
• 2:02:25
  thing that happens is I'll just start cleaning shit. Right. So,
• 2:02:29
  you know, when I'm on a cleanse, I'm going to
• 2:02:31
  clean a closet because you're not only cleaning yourself, you're
• 2:02:35
  cleaning your environment around you. And, um, it's, uh, I,
• 2:02:40
  you know, I, I just, I just did it two
• 2:02:42
  weeks ago. So, Yeah.
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 3: How do you decide when to do it?
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: Usually when you've been a little indulgent and you're not
• 2:02:51
  feeling too good. And, you know, you put on a
• 2:02:55
  little weight and just like, I don't feel good. I
• 2:02:59
  want to, you know, clean out.
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 3: You must lose a ton of weight doing that. How
• 2:03:03
  much have you lost doing 14 days?
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: 25 pounds.
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 3: Whoa.
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: About two a day.
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah.
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 3: So then your body is running completely on ketones, right?
• 2:03:16
  Because your body is running on fat.
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 3: And so your body is burning fat and ketones. When
• 2:03:22
  you run on– I've been on ketogenic diets in the
• 2:03:25
  past and then I've been on the carnivore diet, which
• 2:03:27
  does the exact same thing, where your mental clarity is
• 2:03:30
  just so much better. Like everything just runs smooth. It's
• 2:03:34
  just like you were saying. You have this level flat
• 2:03:38
  energy throughout the day. There's no highs and lows like
• 2:03:41
  crashing after a big meal.
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: Or caffeine pumps or all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But
• 2:03:49
  staying up till, you know, midnight and fine. The energy
• 2:03:53
  is fine. And you'll sleep less too. You need less
• 2:03:57
  sleep for some reason. I don't know why.
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 3: Also, I think it's probably good to give your digestive
• 2:04:02
  system a little break too.
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 3: Let it relax. I mean, it's constantly work. Especially if
• 2:04:07
  you eat all throughout the day, if you're a snacker
• 2:04:10
  and then you have a late at night, you have
• 2:04:12
  a little bite to eat, wake up in the morning,
• 2:04:13
  you have breakfast, like your digestive system is just constantly
• 2:04:17
  grinding out this food and digesting everything.
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. The real, the real poison for me is,
• 2:04:23
  is sugar. You know, it manifested in alcohol for a while,
• 2:04:28
  but I don't drink that much anymore. But sugar is the,
• 2:04:31
  is the, is the big.
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 3: For everybody.
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a tough one. It's a, it's a very
• 2:04:36
  addictive and, and you know, you think, oh, it feels
• 2:04:40
  great when you, Yeah, first have it, but then it
• 2:04:43
  makes you pay.
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 3: Well, it's also with modern diets, like the kind of
• 2:04:49
  sugar that we have available today really never existed in
• 2:04:52
  the past before.
• 2:04:53
  Speaker 1: That's true.
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 3: For most of human history, if you wanted something sweet,
• 2:04:56
  you had to eat fruit.
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 3: And now all of a sudden you've got candy bars.
• 2:05:01
  You have stuff that comes to you in this insane
• 2:05:03
  form where you have 100 grams of sugar in something
• 2:05:07
  that you can eat. Right. That's nuts.
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 3: Or a drink. You get one of those– What is it,
• 2:05:12
  Baskin-Robbins Blizzard? Is that the one that has alcohol?
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 3: That thing?
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: Those things will mess you up.
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 3: Oh, you get a headache after you're done.
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: I know. It's like alcohol.
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: What's that expression? Candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker. Yeah. You know,
• 2:05:28
  liquor's just concentrated sugar. It's just like, you know. But,
• 2:05:35
  you know, I try not to be too much of
• 2:05:39
  a zealot about any of this stuff. But I have–
• 2:05:44
  like my mom was introducing us to natural food in
• 2:05:48
  late 60s. So she had read a book called Poisons
• 2:05:52
  on Our Food and started taking processed food out of
• 2:05:56
  our diet.
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 3: Oh, wow.
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: White bread. This was early on, like 1967. Yeah. So
• 2:06:02
  she was a real– she really was a homeopath before
• 2:06:10
  it was called a homeopath. And wound up getting cancer
• 2:06:15
  and was told she had to have chemo and said, no,
• 2:06:19
  I'm not doing it. And kicked it herself, you know,
• 2:06:21
  with changing what she was putting in her body. And
• 2:06:26
  so I've always, you know, had her as a kind
• 2:06:30
  of guidepost for my health. She used to always say
• 2:06:34
  the body is a temple and that the body can
• 2:06:38
  heal anything. And a lot of it has to do
• 2:06:42
  with how you approach it in your mind. And if
• 2:06:44
  you believe that you can heal yourself, you can heal yourself.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 3: Is she getting this from books?
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: I think she got it from a combination of books
• 2:06:55
  and her faith in, you know, Catholicism. I think every,
• 2:07:01
  every religion has a fasting day for some reason. That
• 2:07:07
  seems to be something that is common to all religions.
• 2:07:11
  It's important that you not eat one day a week.
• 2:07:15
  She wouldn't do that with us. You know, as kids,
• 2:07:17
  she wouldn't starve us for a day. But she did
• 2:07:20
  have a holistic approach to the way that she viewed illness.
• 2:07:25
  And I remember her drumming it into our heads that
• 2:07:30
  if you ever get told by a doctor anything, you
• 2:07:34
  have to challenge it. Go to a different doctor and
• 2:07:37
  see if they say the same thing. Always, always, always.
• 2:07:40
  She lost her father and her brother within the course
• 2:07:45
  of a year to medical malpractice in the 50s. And
• 2:07:48
  so she had a serious distrust of the medical profession.
• 2:07:52
  And back then, it was like there was no one
• 2:07:55
  even thought about suing for malpractice. It was like, that's
• 2:07:58
  the doctor. He's an authority. figure. You can't mess with him, right?
• 2:08:02
  So she always approached it with a healthy level of
• 2:08:09
  questioning whenever she was given advice by doctors.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 1: And it's interesting. She, you know, she's always been, you know,
• 2:08:18
  I've always kind of wondered how she would have reacted
• 2:08:22
  to this recent thing and all that. Um, but, uh, I, I, I,
• 2:08:30
  have you ever done ayahuasca? No.
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I, I, I've done DMT, which is the, that's
• 2:08:37
  the actual compound that's active in ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an
• 2:08:41
  orally active version of DMT.
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I was, uh, You know, when they tell
• 2:08:48
  you to go in, when I did it, they tell
• 2:08:49
  you to go in with an intention. And my intention
• 2:08:53
  was to, you know, I was frustrated with feeling anger
• 2:08:58
  about what was going on in the world. And I said,
• 2:09:00
  I want to release that. I don't want to be
• 2:09:03
  consumed by that anger. And so I wound up in this,
• 2:09:09
  you know, the heavy duty, you know, journey that ayahuasca is.
• 2:09:17
  And my mom showed up. Wow. Yeah. And she's, it's
• 2:09:25
  not like you actually hear a voice, but you hear
• 2:09:27
  a voice, right? You basically, if she's there, you know
• 2:09:30
  it's her. She's saying something to you. And what she
• 2:09:34
  said was, you're injured. You're a warrior and you're injured
• 2:09:41
  and you need to rest. But the fight's not over. Wow.
• 2:09:47
  That's what she told me in response to my intention. Whoa.
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 3: What were you battling?
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: I was battling my frustration with the dissolution of society,
• 2:10:09
  people being angry at each other over ridiculous things, long
• 2:10:14
  friendships being affected. people being canceled for expressing their opinion,
• 2:10:20
  all this stuff. And I wanted out. I wanted to
• 2:10:25
  be absolved of that. I didn't want to be engaged
• 2:10:29
  in it. And what she told me in the course
• 2:10:33
  of this thing, believe it or not, you know, I
• 2:10:35
  understand people will be, oh, that's woo-woo and you're just
• 2:10:37
  tripping and whatever. But I definitely felt her presence there.
• 2:10:42
  It was no doubt. I went through a whole journey
• 2:10:44
  with her. I saw things from our lives together. There
• 2:10:49
  was one moment where I was, you know, I was
• 2:10:52
  always been curious about something that happened in kindergarten or something.
• 2:10:58
  I don't remember. And she, you know, at one point
• 2:11:02
  I felt her presence and she said, you were right
• 2:11:05
  about that. I'm sorry we didn't listen to you. You know,
• 2:11:08
  and this kind of really profoundly deep experience. And, um,
• 2:11:14
  but at the end of it, I felt completely lighter
• 2:11:18
  and completely, you know, uh, relieved to have been through
• 2:11:22
  the experience and a great, great connection with my mom,
• 2:11:27
  you know, just like a beautiful, like, ah, she, she
• 2:11:31
  gets it. She, she's still around. I've had quite a
• 2:11:35
  few experiences in this realm. Um, And my mom, in fact, uh,
• 2:11:41
  you know, uh, she, she, my father died, uh, when
• 2:11:45
  he was 80 and my mom was 78 and, um,
• 2:11:50
  she wasn't sick, but my dad had been dying for
• 2:11:52
  a while. And, uh, we all got down to say
• 2:11:55
  goodbye to him. They were living in Mexico at the time.
• 2:11:58
  And we went to the funeral and my mom was
• 2:12:00
  very stoic and, and sang very strongly my father's favorite
• 2:12:04
  song at the funeral. And, She didn't cry, and we
• 2:12:07
  were all concerned about her, and we hired a couple
• 2:12:09
  people for when we left to take care of her.
• 2:12:13
  And she was really agitated the last night, and I
• 2:12:17
  was there, and she said, you know, I don't trust
• 2:12:19
  these people. I don't know if they're going to talk
• 2:12:21
  about you and your fame and all that stuff. I said, Mom,
• 2:12:24
  don't worry about it. They're just here to get you
• 2:12:28
  stuff if you need it. Don't worry about it. I
• 2:12:30
  go off. She wakes up the next morning. She says
• 2:12:33
  to my sisters who are still in the house with her,
• 2:12:37
  everything I said last night, don't worry about it. And
• 2:12:40
  they said, what happened, Mom? She said, I had a dream.
• 2:12:44
  She said, I was in my childhood home in Westwood, California,
• 2:12:49
  and there was something in my living room, and I
• 2:12:50
  couldn't look at it. It was a stone figure. I
• 2:12:52
  couldn't look at it. It was disturbing me. I didn't
• 2:12:55
  want to look at it. But then I look out
• 2:12:57
  the bay window, and then coming down the street, I see,
• 2:12:59
  led by my first friend in life, a group of
• 2:13:03
  people coming towards the house. And it didn't make any sense.
• 2:13:07
  There were people from my childhood, people from my choral society,
• 2:13:11
  people from my work. But they were all there, and
• 2:13:14
  they all came to the door. And when they showed up,
• 2:13:16
  I realized everything was going to be fine. And I realized, oh,
• 2:13:19
  my God, that was the departed that had come to
• 2:13:22
  say it's going to be okay. And so my sisters left.
• 2:13:31
  Three days, four days later, we got a phone call.
• 2:13:33
  My mom has died. She wasn't sick. And then my
• 2:13:38
  sister talks to the woman that was taking care of her.
• 2:13:42
  And she said it was really strange. You know, the
• 2:13:45
  night before she died, she said, he's here. And they said,
• 2:13:50
  who's here? And she said, Gil, my husband. He's here.
• 2:13:53
  He's come to get me. And they said, no, Mary,
• 2:13:57
  he's not there. And she said, oh, no, he most
• 2:14:00
  certainly is. And he looks very strong because he died feeble.
• 2:14:06
  goes to bed that night and passes. So even the
• 2:14:12
  most cynical person in the world that doesn't believe in
• 2:14:15
  afterlife or anything, how do you explain that? How do
• 2:14:18
  you explain whatever chemicals were going on in her brain
• 2:14:22
  to bring her to that passing where she was going
• 2:14:24
  to join the person that she loved her entire life?
• 2:14:27
  That's a beautiful thing, regardless of how you look at it.
• 2:14:31
  Speaker 3: I don't think there's any value in being cynical about
• 2:14:34
  these experiences. And even the ayahuasca experience, like this idea
• 2:14:39
  that you're hallucinating and that that's what this is, doesn't matter.
• 2:14:45
  It's the same experience. If you really did make contact
• 2:14:48
  with your mother in the afterlife and you really did
• 2:14:51
  have this communication versus whatever the fuck hallucination means, I
• 2:14:56
  don't know what you mean by that, it's the same experience.
• 2:15:00
  So there's no value in being cynical about it. Like
• 2:15:03
  you get a, you get, There's something that you experience
• 2:15:08
  from it that's tangible. It's real. You feel it. It
• 2:15:12
  changes your perspective. It changes the way you feel about
• 2:15:15
  the world. Like that's a real thing.
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 1: That's a real thing.
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 3: Just because you can't put a measuring tape to it
• 2:15:21
  or you can't put it on a scale, don't say
• 2:15:23
  it's not real.
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 1: That's silly. There's so many ways of being that we
• 2:15:26
  haven't even studied or have no idea about. How people
• 2:15:30
  can communicate over 2,000 miles. Like a mother wakes up
• 2:15:34
  in the middle of the night knowing something's wrong with
• 2:15:36
  their child and five minutes later the fucking phone rings.
• 2:15:39
  What the hell is that?
• 2:15:40
  Speaker 3: Or twins. Twins who have some sort of very strange
• 2:15:43
  connection with each other.
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: When I was– my grandfather, who I was very close to,
• 2:15:48
  he was– had been dead for two months and I
• 2:15:53
  had a dream about him. And I woke up like
• 2:15:57
  startled and I heard his voice. And he said basically,
• 2:16:00
  don't worry. I'll take care of it. And I didn't
• 2:16:04
  know what the hell it meant, but it was very clear.
• 2:16:06
  It was like, I'll take care of it. Fifteen minutes later,
• 2:16:11
  I get a phone call from Susan. And my son, Miles,
• 2:16:15
  who was six years old at the time, had run
• 2:16:18
  out into the middle of Seventh Avenue. And she said
• 2:16:21
  it was the weirdest thing. It was like something stopped
• 2:16:25
  him like that. And a car goes behind him and
• 2:16:28
  a car goes in front of him. And I was like,
• 2:16:32
  I know exactly what. just happened. He, he was, he,
• 2:16:37
  whatever that is, whatever energy he could muster in, in
• 2:16:41
  whatever phase of being he was, he fucking saved my
• 2:16:46
  son's life heroically. I'm no doubt about that. Why would
• 2:16:52
  he show up and say that to me? He said,
• 2:16:54
  don't worry, I'll take care of it. Wow. So I, I,
• 2:16:59
  I totally believe this stuff. I believe that we That life, death,
• 2:17:04
  there's other planes of existence that we can get to
• 2:17:08
  through various means. It doesn't have to be ayahuasca. If
• 2:17:14
  you're open to listening in different ways, there are great
• 2:17:22
  things available for you. It's like the idea of an accident.
• 2:17:25
  Is it an accident that you run into that person
• 2:17:28
  that you've been wanting to talk to and all of
• 2:17:30
  a sudden now they're right in front of you? That's
• 2:17:32
  not an accident. It's divine whatever. Whatever the divine is
• 2:17:38
  for you, there's another level of energy that is going around.
• 2:17:45
  We haven't even studied how the heart communicates. There's that
• 2:17:52
  Spanish or Portuguese cardiologist that talks about the realm of
• 2:17:57
  communication in the electromagnetic field of the heart and what
• 2:18:01
  that means and how the heart can communicate and has
• 2:18:06
  an impact. parts of the heart have more neurons than
• 2:18:09
  parts of the brain. And what is that all about?
• 2:18:12
  And it's such that we don't, we don't think that way.
• 2:18:15
  You know, we don't want to experience, we have a,
• 2:18:19
  it's a heart is a meat pump and that's, it
• 2:18:22
  just runs in your entire life. Yeah. But it doesn't,
• 2:18:26
  this guy's suggesting, no, it's electromagnetic energy. It's what makes
• 2:18:30
  us live longer if we're with someone else or with
• 2:18:32
  a pet, you know, that some, that people that are,
• 2:18:36
  isolated and alone are hurting and they're not having that
• 2:18:40
  electromagnetic connection with other people. That's why we crave crowds.
• 2:18:44
  That's why we want to be in groups of people.
• 2:18:47
  It's a natural thing. It keeps us alive. It keeps
• 2:18:50
  us activated in a community. But we don't study that.
• 2:18:55
  We don't study what that is and I think it's
• 2:18:58
  kind of magical.
• 2:18:58
  Speaker 3: That's why solitary confinement is such a cruel punishment.
• 2:19:01
  Speaker 1: So cool.
• 2:19:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean there's a lot of people that think
• 2:19:04
  it's actual torture.
• 2:19:06
  Speaker 1: Of course it is. Of course it is. You've got
• 2:19:09
  nothing to interact with. And it's why that lockdown was cruel.
• 2:19:19
  The scope of that loneliness is just immense that some
• 2:19:24
  people had to deal with.
• 2:19:25
  Speaker 3: Especially people that were already struggling. Some people were already
• 2:19:28
  filled with anxiety and they already had suffered from depression.
• 2:19:31
  They were already weird socially. And then all of a
• 2:19:34
  sudden they're just completely isolated from everyone else for a
• 2:19:37
  year or a year and a half, depending on where
• 2:19:39
  you lived. It's weird this desire that people have to
• 2:19:43
  define things as real or not real and also to
• 2:19:47
  let everyone know, oh, I'm not falling for that nonsense. But, God,
• 2:19:53
  I mean at one point in time do you have
• 2:19:54
  to say, well, all these stories, all these experiences that
• 2:19:57
  people have, Maybe there's something to it and maybe this
• 2:20:00
  closed-mindedness is not benefiting me in any way.
• 2:20:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean there's magic. There's magic in the world.
• 2:20:08
  I mean there's this old way of thinking. I became–
• 2:20:13
  do you know what the– there's a book called The
• 2:20:18
  Nature of Things by a guy named Lucretius written in
• 2:20:22
  350 BC and it's Epicureanism. And Epicureanism now is about
• 2:20:26
  you like food, you like wine, whatever. Back then it
• 2:20:29
  was like the whole purpose of this philosophy or religion,
• 2:20:33
  whatever you want to call it, was that all of
• 2:20:38
  life is a miracle. Everything that you're seeing in front
• 2:20:42
  of you is the first time it's happening and will
• 2:20:44
  never happen again. It's a collision of atoms in a
• 2:20:48
  particular way. They don't call them atoms, but they call
• 2:20:50
  them the smallest particles that create unique experiences every moment
• 2:20:56
  of your life. And the whole purpose of life is
• 2:20:59
  to seek the pleasure of that and avoid pain. And
• 2:21:04
  the pain can be either living isolated or without the
• 2:21:09
  idea of magic or indulging in something where it creates pain.
• 2:21:14
  Too much pleasure creates pain. But this philosophy in this
• 2:21:18
  beautiful long-form poem written by Lucretius in 350 B.C. is
• 2:21:24
  all about magic. It's all about this idea that look
• 2:21:28
  how lucky we are to wake up in the morning
• 2:21:30
  and see that freaking cactus blooming. You know, that's like
• 2:21:37
  when we get so inured from that, so, you know,
• 2:21:41
  anesthetized from the magic and it's all just a doldrum
• 2:21:47
  every day is the same. That's robbing yourself of so much, right?
• 2:21:52
  That the idea that What if you just woke up
• 2:21:55
  and said, hey, it's fucking magic. This is amazing. First
• 2:21:59
  of all, I'm breathing. Second of all, look at that
• 2:22:01
  sun coming in the window. And this is going to
• 2:22:05
  be an amazing day. Instead of like, ah, shit, I
• 2:22:09
  got to get up and, you know, do my fucking thing,
• 2:22:12
  you know. Like, no.
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 3: That's also relative because if you were dying in a hospital.
• 2:22:19
  And you had this opportunity to say, okay, all you
• 2:22:23
  have to do is say these magic words and you'll
• 2:22:25
  be transported back to health in your home with a
• 2:22:28
  completely new perspective and a completely new appreciation for just
• 2:22:33
  being healthy and alive.
• 2:22:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 3: It's just hard for people to shift that perspective and
• 2:22:39
  think like that all the time. But if you could
• 2:22:41
  force yourself just as an exercise to say, I am
• 2:22:44
  so lucky to be above ground. I am so lucky
• 2:22:47
  to be healthy and alive. mobile if I am, and
• 2:22:50
  I could just go do what I want to do
• 2:22:52
  and live my life and go say hi to people
• 2:22:55
  I love.
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:22:57
  Speaker 3: Appreciate it.
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 1: And the idea that you can also, even if things
• 2:23:02
  are bad, that if you approach life that way, then
• 2:23:05
  there is a possibility of making everything better. And it
• 2:23:08
  has to do with humility. It has to do with
• 2:23:10
  being able to say, I can forgive somebody for something.
• 2:23:15
  I can also ask forgiveness for something I've done. It's
• 2:23:20
  all about humility. It's all about humility in the face
• 2:23:23
  of not only your own personal experience but in how
• 2:23:26
  you view the universe. Like I– either I'm lucky to
• 2:23:32
  be here or what a blessing to be able to
• 2:23:37
  have this life I've had. I want to give. I
• 2:23:42
  want to– I had this beautiful experience yesterday. When I
• 2:23:46
  was going through my, you know, one of my darkest periods,
• 2:23:50
  this woman showed up. And I'd met her once in
• 2:23:55
  my life, this Tibetan woman. She's a great singer. And she,
• 2:24:01
  I said, why are you here? She said, you're in trouble.
• 2:24:05
  I'm going to take care of you. And I didn't
• 2:24:06
  even know her. And I said, all right, okay. And
• 2:24:10
  so she's. She did this Reiki healing on me. She sang.
• 2:24:15
  She wrote incense. And I didn't understand it. I didn't
• 2:24:19
  understand why she was there. She makes me a meal
• 2:24:22
  that evening, the first evening. She's done all this healing
• 2:24:25
  on me. And she says, you know, she makes the
• 2:24:29
  meal I'm eating. I finish eating. I start taking the dishes, right?
• 2:24:34
  She says, what are you doing? I said, well, you
• 2:24:37
  cooked all clean. She says, sit down. That's the problem
• 2:24:42
  with you people in the West. It's all a business deal.
• 2:24:46
  I'm doing this for you. Can you just accept that?
• 2:24:49
  I'm taking care of you. Can you accept that? And
• 2:24:52
  she said, you will never know how to give love
• 2:24:54
  until you know how to receive love. And it blew
• 2:24:58
  my mind. Because at the time, I realized I was
• 2:25:04
  engaged in that kind of transactional way of looking at relationships.
• 2:25:10
  That the idea that giving completely is so much better,
• 2:25:17
  you actually get more out of it than you do
• 2:25:22
  receiving it. And once I understood that, it kind of
• 2:25:26
  transformed everything for me. And that was a person that
• 2:25:29
  was a total stranger, and she showed up just out
• 2:25:32
  of nowhere. And I said, finally, at the end of it,
• 2:25:34
  I said, why are you here? And she said, you
• 2:25:38
  have done good things before. for the world, we need you.
• 2:25:44
  And she left. And, you know, so I didn't plan that.
• 2:25:54
  I had no idea that was going to happen, but
• 2:25:59
  it made me realize there are angels in this world.
• 2:26:04
  They are manifested as human beings, but there are certain
• 2:26:07
  kinds of people who That are there for you if
• 2:26:11
  you are open for it. If you are closed off
• 2:26:15
  and cynical, you will not see your angels. But if
• 2:26:19
  you are maybe sometimes just completely wiped and you have no,
• 2:26:24
  you know, you're just ready to receive it. And maybe
• 2:26:31
  the fact that I was able to receive that, I think,
• 2:26:33
  really helped me and helped me shift everything. It's always
• 2:26:37
  a struggle, of course. That lesson doesn't mean that I'm
• 2:26:40
  that way forever. But it's a reminder. It's that there
• 2:26:47
  is another energy in the world that is actually an
• 2:26:51
  energy of good. We are consumed by the bad all
• 2:26:56
  the time. There's all these negative forces that are trying
• 2:27:00
  to bring us down. And I think that sometimes we
• 2:27:04
  get so Defeated by those things that we are not
• 2:27:08
  open to the energy of the angels, the good. And
• 2:27:12
  when I say angels, I don't.
• 2:27:13
  Speaker 3: Mean– I know what you mean. Yeah. Super positive people.
• 2:27:17
  Something– some pure expression of love and compassion and generosity.
• 2:27:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:27:25
  Speaker 3: And this is the real problem with social media and
• 2:27:28
  algorithms in particular is that it really highlights the things
• 2:27:33
  that make you upset.
• 2:27:34
  Speaker 1: It does.
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And that kind of energy is like, really, is that,
• 2:27:39
  is that a your everyday life? Well, it is if
• 2:27:41
  you dive into the negativity all day long and you're
• 2:27:45
  engrossed in social media and getting upset about things rather
• 2:27:49
  than experiencing the life that's actually in front of you
• 2:27:53
  and doing it from a positive perspective and not concentrating
• 2:27:57
  on all these external things That could be making you
• 2:28:01
  angry or making you frustrated or filling you with anxiety.
• 2:28:04
  You're actually poisoning yourself with that.
• 2:28:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you are. And it's a constant battle because that
• 2:28:11
  damn thing is buzzing all the time. But I have
• 2:28:14
  gotten better with it. I will not look at it
• 2:28:17
  first thing in the morning anymore. Well, it's much like.
• 2:28:19
  Speaker 3: We were talking about like film and records being a
• 2:28:22
  new thing. This is a really new thing. And this
• 2:28:24
  is very invasive. It's a very new thing and very invasive.
• 2:28:28
  And it's going to take a while for people to
• 2:28:30
  figure out the right way and the wrong way to
• 2:28:32
  use it. And what are the ramifications and the consequences
• 2:28:36
  of using it incorrectly? Because no one's teaching that. They're
• 2:28:41
  not teaching children that in school. There should be a
• 2:28:43
  course on this is the negative aspect of social media.
• 2:28:47
  These are the negative aspects of interaction. This is what
• 2:28:50
  it's doing to your consciousness. This is what it's doing
• 2:28:52
  to your focus. It's stealing your joy. It's stealing your
• 2:28:59
  appreciation of the moment. Right.
• 2:29:01
  Speaker 1: And it's leading you into conflict constantly. Constantly. And, you know,
• 2:29:08
  that's a negative thing. That's a force of evil. Yeah.
• 2:29:12
  Strong word, but, you know.
• 2:29:13
  Speaker 3: It's the right word, though. You know, it's, again, there's
• 2:29:15
  these words, good, evil, angel, God. They fuck with people
• 2:29:19
  because they're like, oh, what is that? It's, I think.
• 2:29:23
  got to kind of abandon that way of thinking and
• 2:29:26
  just go, well, there's certainly positive and negative. There's certainly
• 2:29:29
  love and evil. Those are real things. And there's good.
• 2:29:34
  There's good in the world. And also, the more you
• 2:29:37
  concentrate on other things, the more your life is defined
• 2:29:40
  by those other things, whether it's good or bad. So
• 2:29:43
  if you're constantly thinking about bad things, like, well, you
• 2:29:46
  can't have a very loving and amazing life if you're
• 2:29:48
  constantly inundated with thoughts about negative things. And on the
• 2:29:53
  other side of it, if you're thinking in a positive
• 2:29:55
  way and enjoying love and friendship and community and just
• 2:29:59
  doing stuff that you actually find value in, well, it's
• 2:30:02
  got to give you better energy. And also the way
• 2:30:06
  you interact with other people will be different. So you'll
• 2:30:08
  affect the way they feel and that will have that
• 2:30:11
  butterfly effect out to the rest of the people they
• 2:30:13
  come in contact with.
• 2:30:14
  Speaker 1: Not to mention it's really good for your health. Yes.
• 2:30:17
  Speaker 3: Well, like you were saying before, one of the worst
• 2:30:19
  things for your health is loneliness.
• 2:30:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it'll kill you.
• 2:30:24
  Speaker 3: Tim Robbins, you're a cool motherfucker.
• 2:30:26
  Speaker 1: Thank you, man.
• 2:30:26
  Speaker 3: I enjoyed talking to you.
• 2:30:27
  Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
• 2:30:28
  Speaker 3: It was great. Thank you very much.
• 2:30:29
  Speaker 1: Thanks for having me.
• 2:30:30
  Speaker 3: My pleasure. Goodbye.