#2532 - Tim Robbins

The Joe, Rogan, experience.

Join my day, Joe Rogan, podcast, my night, all day. [MUSIC PLAYING] Jamie's very geeked out on what you know. He didn't want to say-- Shawshank is his all-time favorite movie.

So he was kind of freaking out when he met you. Thanks, Jamie. Thank you. It's all-time. I mean, you're a part of one of like easily one

of the greatest movies in the history of people. I know it's such a gift. I mean, when people come up and say something about it, it usually is coming from a pretty deep place. Yeah.

If you didn't like that movie,

“there's something you should go to a doctor.”

There's something you need medication. There's nothing wrong with you. That's amazing movie. And we're that it's a Stephen King movie, too. He's arguably one of the most prolific guys in the history

of fiction. Yeah. And in the same novella, there was standby me, too. Oh, wow. So that's amazing.

So weirdy, it's stuff very so much. He had to do like a pseudonym at one point time. Remember, he did Richard Bachman, because he was turning out so many books, so like, hey, we can't keep selling these fucking Stephen King books.

And he's like, well, how would I come out with another name? Like, give me a fake name. He just started killing it. He's got to keep writing, he's got to get it. Yeah.

Wild, wild guy. Man. Yeah, just a very unusual human. You know, they exist. Hold him out a month, really?

Did you meet him like when you were filming the movie? Around the premier time. Yeah. So he's out there, man. You know, during his early days, I'm a fascinated by his

early days, because his early days, he was off the rails with cocaine and alcohol, and that's some of the best shit that he made. Really? He doesn't even remember reading it. Wow.

“I think Kooch, I think is one of the books his wife took out”

of the garbage, because he threw it away. He's like, fuck this book. It was Kooch, or one of the classics. Yeah. And she was like, are you out of your fucking mind?

Like, this is incredible.

And he was literally going to throw it out, because he was just out of his mind. He wrote the shining, right? Yeah. So what was it, Carrie? Yeah.

He threw Carrie away. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Yeah.

Shining was a big movie from a book, "Big Book" for me, I was, you know, working in a nine to five job and, you know, in between colleges, and it really like woke me up to all kinds of great possibilities in writing. Well, he hated the movie, which is so crazy, because he felt like Jack Knuckles and Gott insane too quickly.

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

The slower rollout. Yeah. Like Jack Knucklesom was kind of cookie already, like right away, which, you know, it's Jack Knucklesom, it's also Stanley Kubrick, it's like he's got to do his interpretation of it.

He just got to accept that. Of course. Yeah. That's some scary shit in that. Fuck man.

His books are insane. Yeah. It's like, what is going on inside that guy's, or was going on inside that guy's mind when he was writing that. God knows.

“I think what's he got clean, he kind of changed and straightened out and different”

human now. But boy, I'm fascinated by the off-the-rails days, because the books were so nuts. Was, was Shoshik during that time? I don't know. I must have been.

It must have been, because I don't think he got sober until it was decades after his career began. And then some of the great stuff, like, I think all the stand, I think all that stuff, he was out of his mind. He was writing all those books.

But in the midst of all that madness, there's a tenderness, you know, that's a great humanity to it all. Yeah. But also, just a true understanding of the darkest nature of humans and how they're influenced.

And then, of course, you know, demonic possession and Salem's lot and all that other crazy things. It was just, it was so good. But then the idea that a library can be the, you know, in Shoshik that a library can be the liberation.

Yeah. You know. Yeah. No, it was amazing. Amazing movie.

We were talking about your new show, Silo, which I did not knew. It's been around for three seasons. I just started watching it, so it's new to me.

I watched the first two episodes last night.

It was fucking great. And very original and interesting. And I was telling you before that it made me think of this place that they discovered fairly recently in Turkey called Darren Kuhu. And Darren Kuhu is this underground city that's massive.

I think it, I think it could, I think it could hold 20,000 people. Wow. Something nutty like that. I've seen pictures of it. Yeah.

Yeah.

So some guy lost one of his chickens went through a hole in the wall and never came

back. And he was trying to figure out where this fucking chicken went. So he broke down the wall to see what was going on. And then they realized that there's this insane underground city. Oh my god.

Yeah, underneath this town in Turkey. And it's massive. Just absolutely massive. We have no idea who made it. There's no historical record of it.

And they have a win. Well, you know, they make guesses based on stuff they find there. It's when you carbon-date an object, right? So you could go visit the pyramids today, right? And you could leave behind some stuff, right?

And then everybody dies, humanity dies out in a cataclysm and then a hundred thousand years from now. People start looking through the piles of some of these sites and the pyramids are probably still be there. And if there was any organic material left, like a book that you left or, you know, a leather

bound book or some piece of wood, they could carbon-date that. And then that would say the time that you were there. But it wouldn't say the time, the actual structure was made.

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

What's looking up when it was made? Do they know? No, definitely don't know. They didn't even know what existed. I mean, it was, when it was it found, I feel like it was found in the 20th century.

There must have been some kind of hostile force that they built it to. Exactly, or something going on outside, and not just hostile, but environmental. So 1963, rediscovered in 1963. Wow. Isn't it as fucking house, even today, only 10% of it is accessible to tourists.

The rest is still being explored. That's how nuts it is. So how many people do they think it held when it was operational? I think it's something like 20,000 people. And that's how big this place is.

That's amazing. So they don't know when or why, and depending on how, around 20,000 people, plus livestock, and food stores. Really? How they farmed down there?

Who fucking knows? I don't know, but they had grain storage. They had all kinds of stuff down there. Oil presses. There were 18 levels, reaching 85 meters, so 280 feet deep into the ground with ventilation

shafts, wells, stables, wine, and oil presses, storage rooms, chapels, and school rooms. Plus a half tonned circular stone doors that could be rolled shut from the inside only. So there were obviously either fighting off some sort of an army or the outside air was hostile. There was something going on.

Two hot or something. Could have been. Yeah. Many moments in the time that human beings were alive where there have been cataclysms. You know, there's this thing called the younger drives impact theory that's around 11,800

years ago. There's all this evidence that there was massive asteroid impacts all over the earth, common impacts. And they think that it was probably a reset of civilization. And so this could have been post that.

It could have been how some people survived in this areas.

Human beings have an amazing ability to survive.

Yeah. I mean, you know, which is silo?

“I mean, it's really a silo is a modern version of Darenku?”

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

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

Because you got to think that he must have written that before, right? Yeah. Many years ago. So it was just got lucky. Yeah.

Perfect. There we go. Synchronicity. Yeah. I'm been blessed that way, am I correct?

Yeah. What do you think that's about? Do you ever wonder why so lucky? Obviously you're very talented. But it's also, there's a lot of talented people that don't, nothing ever happens for them.

“I think it comes down to the ability to say no at crucial times when I was facing down”

either, you know, when I remember when I first had my first child and I was broke and

I got off for this comedy that was dumb and it was a million bucks and I needed the

money. And I also had an opportunity if I waited, Robert Altman was trying to put together the player. So I threw caution in the wind and said, no, I can't do that stupid comedy. What was the stupid comedy, do you remember?

Yeah. It was called folks.

to play my father in this thing and he said, what the fuck are you doing this script

for? I said, I need the money. He says, I don't know. I'm not sure I want to do this thing, man. I was like, thank you Alan Arkin for confirming what I was thinking.

Wow. And so I said no and then player came through and shifted my whole career. Yeah, it's a matter of following that voice in your head, the instinct, the one that's telling you this is the right way to go, even though there's all sorts of influence that want to lead you to the other direction.

There was a period of time about 10, 15 years ago when I got offered in the course of seven months, I got offered to play the head of the CIA three times. Did you ever wonder what that's all about? I couldn't even imagine, I mean, for some reason that was, I don't know, I have no idea. And then a couple years after that, again, you're looking down at your bills and your

mortgages and stuff and you need the money and just have the, I don't want to do that, right? Then a few years after, a couple years after that, I got offered in the course of a couple months, one to play the head of FIFA, which is a corrupt organization, but in the movie,

“it was, you know, they were the best people in the world, right?”

Not to mention that the head of FIFA was a Brazilian and I had, you know, but they were

offering a ton of money and basically it was FIFA producing a movie about itself.

And after that, I got offered to play the head of the Chilean mine that had just had this huge disaster and turns out the mining company was, they were really nice people, you know, according to the script. It wasn't bad management or anything, or, you know, that made the disaster happen. So I realized that the oligarchs are starting to make movie about themselves, it's all

at Garcogal cinema, it's like they produce movies that make themselves look really good. And you can get away with it. Oh, hell yeah, nobody knows, nobody cares, and they think they can buy anybody and they almost bought me, but I just, I have to, at times I just have to look, you know, face it down and say, listen, it's not right in my heart, I can't, I can't do it.

Yeah, well, that's great, you've got that north star. It's great that I had the luxury, you know, oftentimes people don't have that luxury. Right.

And one bad decision can pigeonhole you in a bad direction and then you'll never get the ones

that you really want. Right. These movies about you playing CIA had, did they ever get made? Oh yeah, yeah. There were TV shows and movies, yeah.

Was there any of it any good? No. [LAUGHTER] I remember the, I remember when we were doing movies like, you know, the day of the condor, you know, which was like, critical of the CIA and I think now we have the rogue CIA agents that

are actually good guys and, you know, listen, CIA, you know, whatever it does, nobody really knows the extent of what they do, but they do have a lot of good portrayals in the media. Well, I think there's good people that are in the CIA as well. And I think that it's necessary. I just think that they obviously have unchecked power and they've done some really fucking

shady shit, you know, and the name of this is the right thing to do right now, including selling drugs. Yeah. I remember that. I remember that.

I remember that.

“That's one of, I mean, I remember that because I was, I guess I was either right out”

of high school or was like in that area where the whole Oliver Stone thing was on television all the time and it was Oliver North. Oliver North. Excuse me. Yeah.

Oliver North in Ronald Reagan. And there was this guy, Jimmy Tingle, hilarious Boston set up comedian, who had a great joke about it. They're interviewing Ronald Reagan and they say, "Mr. President, did you ever sell arms to people who hate us?"

And he's like, "I don't remember." He goes, "Well, in the future, if you sell arms to people who hate us, jot it down." (Laughter) Man, you know what I mean? Oh, man.

He goes, "Put a post that on your refrigerator today. I sold arms to Iran."

“I remember that it was in the '80s, I did a play about it.”

I wrote a play about it. Really? We performed it with the actors gang, yeah. There was a meme that was on social media recently that was, it showed Oliver North during the whole Iran Contra trials when, you know, they got caught selling drugs in Los Angeles

to fund the Contra's versus the Santanistas in Icaragua.

a war analyst and it's like hilarious meme, like if you told me, if you told me, in 1980,

“whatever the fuck it was, where, you know, he got in trouble that he would eventually”

be the guy that they call upon for expert advice on what's going on overseas, like, "Yeah, that's a deep connection that goes back years." All the people that get it wrong, they got, particularly Iraq war, they got, anyone that got it wrong got promotions. Yeah.

And no one got in trouble. Fire, you know, people in the media as well, you know, they promoted it, they got, you know, better jobs. Well, this is kind of the only time in our lifetimes where there's actual real independent media.

You know, where there's independent journalists that are not connected to any major corporations that are operating either on sub-stack or online or on YouTube or on X, it's fascinating because they, they're the ones that are exposing all these connections that the media and the central intelligence agency and all these other government organizations have had, where they've all been working together forever, spinning narratives on TV.

And so, like, anytime something like the Iraq war happens where they go, "Oh, we've got weapons and mass destruction. We've got to go in there." No weapons and mass destruction. No one goes away, no one gets a trouble.

“And the same people are on TV telling you about some new thing that you have to pay attention”

to. It's like, "This is nuts." This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to.

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partners. Terms and limits apply, go to Chime.com/disclosures for more details. Well, some people get in trouble, people that come out against it.

And there's never any apologies.

I did, I risked a lot to do it, and wound up being right, but no one ever said, "Hey, you were right." This was during the Iraq War. What did you say? I was one of maybe 5 people that were famous that came out against that.

I went on in various television shows, made a couple of speeches, I got my appearance at the Baseball Hall of Fame, for Bull Durham, 15th anniversary or something like canceled by the head of the Baseball Hall of Fame, it was a real, it was funny because I was doing a show at the time, and I heard about it, and I was sort of riding a response, but it was already printed by the time I had my response.

So I've got the next day, I've got a bunch of people contacting me, and I hired a crisis

PR person for the first time in my life, and wound up getting my letter to Dale Petroski

that had the Hall of Fame out there with the press release, basically ambushed, trying to call me a trader and all this stuff. So I pushed back, and the publicist that I had hired was very smart. He said we're going to send this to all the sports writers, and it was the sports writers that wrote the articles defending freedom of speech at the time.

“So what year was this, is this the last afternoon of 11?”

This was a white one when we were cooking up the war, 2003. And I remember, and I also wrote a piece about that called Embedded that we've performed for the first time three weeks after Bush landed on that aircraft carrier with a mission and a complex thing. So that wound up playing across the country, we toured it, and we played the New York Public

Theater, and played the London. But it was attacked when we went to New York, you know, they sent someone from, it wasn't a theater critic. We were still in previews, and published this thing, I think, was a new Republic.

Basically calling me conspiracy theorist, and I semi it all this stuff, to try to discredit

this play that was playing at the public theater. How do they connect anti-semite? You know, it doesn't matter, that's what they throw out, it was not quite anti-semitic about

Of course. It's just one of the things they used to discredit people.

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

I was reading Foreign Press, I was reading stuff from Europe, and what they were writing about the weapons and message structure, and that there wasn't any evidence, and it wasn't being covered like it was, here it was more open, more transparent, the reporting, and so I was trusting that, and I trusting sources that I had trusted in the past, and realized that when I did question the attacks were of a syphras, so usually as a tell, like in

poker, that usually means you're on to something. You're over the mark.

When I came out against that first war in Iraq in '91, I remember the elder bush said,

well, this is a democracy, people have the right to oppose it, and that was their response. This one was like your trader, your sedan supporter, terrorists, sympathize, or all that stuff. They really attacked, and that told me that it was probably over the target, you know? Yeah.

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

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

Well, that's the way it works.

“They finally admit the truth later, you know, I think they're doing that now at COVID.”

You know, the Fauci is going to do his thing tomorrow, and I'm very curious to see what happens with that. Well, they don't give you a universal pardon for 10 years, if you didn't do something. I mean, you don't, you don't campaign for that, if there's not some smoke. Yeah.

That was a very scary time. You know, it was, you know, to come out, when people, when the media is attacking you, it's a very scary thing. But the great good fortune I had in 2003, so I'm living in New York at the time, right? So I would have to walk my kids to school, and I remember thinking, oh my God, what's

going to happen? You know, are there going to be people yelling at me, et cetera? That wasn't the truth, the truth was that people, if anything, said, you know, wait a go. Right.

Thanks for speaking for us. And if they disagreed, they said, you know, you have the right to do it. That's the way generally people are in this country. And should be. And we, I usually would take every year, I would take my kids to the final four.

And that year, it was in San Antonio.

“And I remember thinking, oh my God, I'm going down to Texas, and they're going to yell at”

me down there, and no one said damn thing. So the reality on the ground was a lot different than the reality they were creating. The reality they were creating was to intimidate other people in silence. It wasn't a based on any kind of real reality of people being angry at me. It was more them trying to intimidate others.

And so that same thing kind of happened, I recognized that same smell when COVID was happening. And people came out and started asking questions and were de-platformed or marginalized or canceled, and you know, I followed what you were going through with the Ivermectin, which was a drug that I had taken, and you know, I had lost my sense of smell and a day later it was back.

So I knew there was something going on with that. And you know, in an emergency, why not find whatever you can treat until your magic potion arrives, you know? It wasn't just that. It was like the completely disingenuous characterization of it as a veterinary drug.

And calling it horse paste or horse dewormer, which is crazy. Yeah. It's crazy to what, because maybe that would have worked in the 1980, but people would have to go to the Encyclopedia to find out what Ivermectin really was. But when you're trying to do that in 2020, it's just too easy to look up, oh look,

it got a Nobel Prize for using human beings. Oh, it's great for a yellow fever and dengue fever and river blindness and oh, this has been used billions of times. Oh, it's one of the safest, oh, what, wait a minute, it's in the world health organizations

essential medicines list.

This is crazy. But yet on television, it's horse dewormer. And even the Rolling Stone had an article where they showed people waiting in line. They said that people in Oklahoma were waiting in line at the emergency room with gunshot wounds, because they couldn't get in there because so many people were overdosing from

Ivermectin, which is just fake. Yeah. And it's in the Rolling Stone. You're like, why is going on?

Even the photograph was fake.

The photograph showed people wearing winter coats because really the line was people waiting for a flu shot. That was the actual line. And they were trying to say that these are people waiting in line to go to the emergency

“room for gunshot was like, first of all, how many fucking people are getting shot?”

No, go on over there. What's going on over there? Are you doing fights on the streets? Wild. Stuff going on at the time.

You know, it's this information. Yeah. And just orchestrated propaganda, orchestrated, organized, with big money behind the wild, wild watch. I suspect that that whole period of time was another way to divide us, you know, in the

larger picture, you know, orchestrated chaos, masquerading as a revolution, you know. It's, it's, there's been so many of those things over the past five years, you know, the clip. You know, alliances that you're building and then all of a sudden there's a new crisis. And now you don't like those people that you're building alliances with.

And it's just one after the other.

And ultimately at the end of the day, I think it's all about division.

It's all about dividing us and making us argue with each other, not finding common ground. And that's ultimately the strategy that's been used from time and memorial, you know,

“for the power to stay in power, how do you get people fighting with each other?”

Right. Yeah, people don't like to hear that, but that's a strategy that's been used all throughout history. And it's a good one. And it works.

Yeah. It works. When you have social media, and then you have not just our government, but many governments that have fake accounts. And these people just get outraged about things or attack things or, you know, have a narrative

that they push.

And you don't know if it's real people, you don't know what it is.

Just a bunch of accounts. You go to the accounts. A guy's face. You know, it's a woman wearing a dress. Hold in a book.

She seems normal. Meanwhile, it's a man somewhere with a bank of computers that are all connected to the internet, that's typing in. These different responses will a bunch of different, or now it's AI automated. You know, he tells us about to be a right-wing nationalist that's, like, attacking anything

that's crazy. Yeah. And it's on both sides. Yep. It's nuts.

I was over in London doing a project, and I noticed this was during their lockdown. And I noticed by my hotel there was this protest, and I went down to check it out. Put my mask on. I was very compliant at the start of all this. And I noticed, you know, what they were portraying as national front-right wingers was actually

hippies and homeopaths and pre-speech activists, and I talked to them. And I tweeted, hey, I don't think it's a right-left thing here. And hundreds of attacks, whether they're bots or, you know, organized army, you know, righteousness. I have no idea, but I just, at that point, I was like, fuck it, I'm not going to put

my foot in this water. These people are nuts. This is a crazy, crazy time. Yeah, it was crazy not just from the propaganda perspective, from actual people that I knew that were really terrified that got caught up in it at all.

And it was, you know, mass formations psychosis is what some people called it. Yeah. I think that's a good description.

“Robert Malone, I think, term that or got that from somebody else, but that's really what”

it was, like everybody just kind of went nutty. And there was people that were doing the government's job for the government, or the pharmaceutical drug companies' job for them. They were the ones that were forcing all these things. And they were doing it because they wanted to be, they wanted a solution, they wanted

to be correct. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people in this world that don't experience much real adversity. And when real adversity comes to them, they fall apart. And they don't, they don't know what to do, and they get scared, and they lump up together

in teams, and then they reinforce each other and repeat the same things, and they all want to be a part of the right side of history, or the right side of whatever it is. And also they're being led to believe that that's the virtuous thing to do, and, you know, so it's not like they're, you know, their intentions are good. Right.

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

And these are two things that have led to such great discovery for me.

I don't trust virtuous experts. I don't think, I don't think experts are, or, I don't believe in experts. I think if you, if you consider yourself an expert, you're done learning. You're done speaking with others. You're done challenging yourself.

And when we put our faith and trust in people that are deemed experts, it ultimately

throughout my experience, it's led to bad things. The experts that talked about weapons of mass destruction and experts that talk about, you know, various things that have led us to violent altercations throughout the world. I don't, I don't trust them anymore. I trust the idea that there are many sides to a story, and that there is very, there's

a lot to be gained from having dialogue with people you disagree with. Absolutely. I mean, you know, there are experts in some fields, and we do need them. It is important, like if you want information about the large Hadron collider, you don't understand, like, what are the, what are you guys doing over there?

“Like you need to talk to someone who actually understands it, who's an expert on particle”

colliders. And it takes a long time to develop that sort of knowledge base and have an understanding of what they're actually trying to accomplish. What is the Higgs Bowsen? What was this particle that, sort of, part of that what?

So the early stages of the universe, what, okay, you're going to measure it? I'll be in the bar. It exists for a quarter of a second or something like that. What are you guys doing? Yeah.

But the problem is, like, to bring it back to COVID, one of the things that Fauci said

that was so wild, he said, when you are criticizing Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science. Yeah. Well, that is one of, that just the fact that he felt so confident that he could say that, that is such a crazy thing to say.

And then science became like an object in a religion. Well, science is supposed to be data. It's supposed to be measuring data, and it's supposed to never be settled, and it's always supposed to have a bunch of people from various, various positions of viewing down on this thing, analyzing it with new studies, new data, new tests, new hypothesis,

working out and communicating with each other. It's not supposed to be a brick, like, you know, like, this is a brick. If you question the brick, like, no, no, this is a fucking fluid thing that exists only if you allow people to ask questions. The moment you stop questioning data, then like, and even real experts, like, guys from

MIT and Harvard, we're getting de-platformed off of Twitter because they didn't believe it. They were saying, look, I don't think this lockdown idea is a good idea. I think it's bad for children.

“I think children aren't even really susceptible to this disease, like, why are we doing”

this? What's going on? If you came a faith, it became dogma. Yeah. And if you questioned the dogma, you were a heretic.

Yeah. You were kicked out of the religion. It's, it's, it's, it was a scary time, and still is scary. You know, we deal, the actors gang, my nonprofit in Los Angeles, we have education programs. And we've been dealing with the ramifications of that lockdown for the last five years.

You know, this kids that are, you know, had two years robbed of them, from socialization and education. And that was your senior year of high school until the time. You know, fuck. And we're dealing with the, the, after effects of that.

And, uh, gratefully, uh, the kind of work we do bring some out again and, you know, get some expressing emotions, making eye contact, uh, having experiences with other children, and that are productive. And, you know, the goodness is, you can get out of that, fuck, but that was, it was really scary to see those kids walk in to classes, uh, after that lockdown, because they wouldn't

make eye contact looking at the floor, you know, kind of de-socialize, and traumatized, and, you know, it was really scary.

Critical development time.

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

Yeah. It's weird. You, you don't want to wear the mask. They keep trying to take it off and people yell at them, put it back on. So it's like, terror and anxiety and confusion.

“Also, you're not reading people's faces, which is like an important part of the development”

process. You get to know people. You read faces. You see how people talk. Also, everyone's wearing a mask.

Everyone's robbing a bag. Like, this is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've tried to approach it all with just the openness and compassion for people

that went through that. You know, I don't attach blame. I don't, you know, everyone, there was a pretty sophisticated propaganda machine that was

I have great compassion for people that felt into that. And I, you know, I just want us to not do it again. You know, I want us to have the knowledge and that the consciousness to not fall for that again. Yeah.

Hopefully, it's just, it was very eye-opening. It was so easy to pull off. You know, it was so easy to get people to just gang up like that. It was just, it said, it was, it said a lot about us, unfortunately. And, you know, I, I, I hold faith in humanity, but that was, that was a, that was a, that

was a tough one. I do as well.

“And I think it was a learning moment for a lot of people, whether they admit to it or not,”

whether they're public about it or not. Because I know a lot of people that just weren't public about their descent, but they really didn't like any of it. And they just didn't really have a position to talk about it. And, you know, they wanted to keep their job and wanted to keep their place in the community

or whatever it was that they were trying to protect. And they kept their mouth shut. But you'd get a couple of drinks in them when they were alone. They would tell you. Well, that begs the larger question is, you know, is it freedom of speech if, when you freely

speak, your job is threatened and your future is threatened? Is that, are we living in a free society, you know? It's a, and that, that's still, that's not just COVID, that's a lot of things. It's a lot of things. Yeah.

It's almost everything.

And it's one of the most important things that we do is we disagree.

We talk. You have conversations. And only way to learn. And you get exposed to information that maybe you didn't know before you establish this opinion that you're arguing.

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

“And you have to deal with that person and their opposing viewpoint.”

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

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

And that's what I love about sports. I love that you can go watch a game and not think about politics or think about differences and think about the team that you like and support them together.

“Same thing with theater or any kind of gathering of individuals, music.”

What I love about the theater that we do is that we're able to take people to a common

emotion, and we never want to have a completely, I don't, we only want audiences to think

the same, right. You want a disparate amount of people, different beliefs, that you can get them to share a common emotion, get them to laugh together, get them to feel something and cry together. That's the community you're able to build when you're doing a show, as you know, what really pissed me off was that when we had a theater in Los Angeles, two years we had

to be closed, and a year and a half in we were told we could open, but we'd have to check vaccine passports at the door and I talked to some people at the theater and we agreed it was, no we can't do that because what that is doing is it's basically saying the only people allowed in our theater are people that agree with what the government wanted, and that for me is not a theater, that betrays the whole purpose and function of what a theater

should be. It's a gathering place for the community that might think differently to bring them

together, and this was saying basically if you agree you can come in, and so we waited

another six months before we opened the theater until everyone could come in. Yeah, there was a time where you had to have a vaccine passport in order to perform, and

to go to a show, but you didn't have to have one if you were performing, and I did a mask in Square Garden, so the whole audience had to have vaccine passports, but I didn't. And so there was a senator, I forget it was, that was proposing a new law based on me sleeping, sneaking through the loophole that performers should have to be vaccinated as well, and he was upset that I didn't have that I wasn't vaccinated, and that I was performing.

You could have infected the entire Madison Square Garden, I could have been a super operator, but, you know, in London, because I spent a lot of time over their last five years, but their West End rebounded immediately, unlike Broadway, and the reason it did is because during that time period, you could show a vaccine passport, but you could also show a negative test, so they didn't demand that you have a vaccine.

So they didn't lose their audience, their audience came right back, and in Broadway,

they basically told a third of their audience, you're not welcome.

And so I can see why it might have been a struggle to get those people back into the theater. Well, it was great, it didn't make any sense.

“Like if the people are negative, they're negative, would you give a shit if they're vaccinated?”

Also, what about people that got COVID, and then recovered from it, who have so far superior immunity, seven X-seperia immunity, the people who are vaccinated, like, what are we doing here? Are you doing the pharmaceutical drug companies work for them? And you're making people follow along, and in lockstep, and it's just not, so it just

didn't even make sense that people are going along with this. Yeah. Well, glad that's in the rearview mirror. Yeah, for now. But I feel like it's a case study, and a lot of, if there are people that are manipulating

society, and I think there are, there's a lot of lessons that they learn from how we behave, and, you know, relatively speaking, without making light of the pandemic, relatively speaking, a fairly mild pandemic in terms of like, you know, the bubonic plague and all sorts of other things that have happened throughout history is Spanish flu, have killed way more people.

Like it could have been way worse, right? So just one that was just twice as bad as the flu got people to behave like that. Yeah. Yeah. But the good news is though, the uptake wasn't, you know, a lot of people took it

because they had to, it wasn't like the enthusiastically taking it. We did a play called Topsy Tervey, which was about lock down, and we performed that in Eastern Europe, and it was really interesting to see their response there, because one of them said

“afterwards, you know, I asked, you know, what was the uptake on the vaccines in Romania?”

And they said something like 40%, I said, well, how do you explain that? And they said, well, you know, we lived under the Soviet Union for many years, so we know how to look like we comply when we're not compliant. And I said, what else reminds you of the Soviet Union? They said, without a doubt, cancel culture.

I said, why? Well, Soviet Union used to keep files on all of us, right? So as long as you're a good party member, there wouldn't be a thing said. But once you stepped out of line, they brought out that old file, now that affair with your secretary from 30 years ago, it's going to ruin your life.

They're going to ruin your family, they're going to kill your career, and they're going to make a big public display of it to show other people to stay in line.

And they felt like cancel culture was basically operating in the same way as the Soviet

Union.

“It was really interesting to see that perspective in Eastern Europe, people that have lived”

under that kind of oppressive situation and their perspective on modern day. That must have really made you think about what happened to you during the Iraq war. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

That in particular, because back then, there's no real social media. And there's no real way to get your message out. Oh, man. They lied. They made up.

They made up things. They made up this. I was doing this play embedded at the time at the public theater, and we'd go out afterwards. And the New York Post wrote that I was making out with a woman under a palm tree at this club.

And it was just they just made it up and cut me in, you know, didn't really help my marriage at the time. And you know, they just lie. They'll attack you. They just decided you were an enemy, and they were going to pull out whatever stops

they could just credit you, and whatever way they can. Wild. Yeah.

That's a powerful thing when it hits you, and you realize, oh my god, the truth doesn't

Yeah.

“Well, that's what's so scary about it is that in this country where freedom of speech is”

supposed to be one of the cornerstones of our society, it's one of the most important

things we all recognize that separates us from everywhere else in history. This is the first country where really it's written into the doctrine of the country. You're supposed to have the freedom, the ability to express yourself. And that this is being attacked and suppressed in all sorts of different ways, not just stopping your ability to express yourself, but attacking you in a concerted effort and

well, lying about you, just lying about you in order to scare other people. It's very, very well-earned, and it's very unamerican. And the fact that the New York Post would do that to you, or whoever it was from the New York Post would do that, like what the fuck man? Well, the good news is there's no gullogs, you know, they don't arrest you in the middle

of the night and force you to into his kind of prison thousands of miles away. Sure, it could be worse. Yeah.

But it's not along the line of the American way of life, you know, and if you're a person

who really does appreciate what this experience and this experiment in self-government, which was the United States, it's supposed to have free discourse. That's a big part of it. The founding fathers recognize that. You've got to have the ability to talk about things.

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

And there's people that have, you know, lost opportunities, or, you know, in show business, that recently that, including my ex Susan Surandon, who, you know, was against what was happening in Israel and lost her agent, and, you know, it's hard to have an hard time to find a work. This is crazy.

This is nuts. Yeah. And especially someone like Susan Surandon, like one of the most respected and established actors of many generations, like she's been around forever. The fact that a take on something that, if you're just looking at it, like, what, what

are you, how could you defend that? Like, how could anybody defend that? Right. And even know how many people are dead, you have a complete wipe out of a city, like 90% of Gaza's gone, or whatever the percentage is, you look at the buildings.

You look at what it used to look like. You look at what it looks like now. This is defensible. Yeah. Yeah.

“And I think the point of it is to make a show of it and to say, see, we could do that”

to her. So we could do it to you. So shut the fuck up. Yeah. Yeah.

Especially the timing of when you do it, right? If you're against Gaza now, it's safer than being against what happened a year and a half ago, say, you know, especially close to October 7th, if you're one of the early, like Roger Waters, one of the early people talking about, this is, this is, you're watching genocide in real time, and they came for that guy.

And you know, more people see it the way he sees it now. And just like what happened to you with the Iraq War, you're 20 years from now, it's going to be a universally accepted opinion about it. Yeah. Well, it's just, it's crazy to go through something like that.

And for you to have gone through it like really early on, you know, for you to have gone through that in 2003, I guess it really doesn't form your opinions, though, like when you see things that are happening today, you got, okay, I see this before. What I started looking for after that was way to be someone that was more involved with something that could affect change.

In other words, I used my nonprofit. We started a prison program 20 years ago, and we see the change that happens, we, you

know, we have people that go in and basically offer rehabilitation in the form of theater,

and not doing plays or anything, but getting people to play emotions through characters that we introduced to them. And in doing so unlocking emotions that have been suppressed for many, many years. So in prison, there's one go to emotion, it's, it's angry, that's your survival face,

“that's your mask on the yard, you have to be a badass, so you're going to die.”

But sadness is compromising fear is compromising, and happiness is genuinely not encouraged either, so we get these guys in a room, we get to introduce them to these stock characters from a committed Delarte, and then they have to express their emotions and make the choices with their emotions in improv.

will encourage a different emotion in response to anger than anger, right?

“And what they come to understand is that they don't have to respond to anger with anger.”

There are other choices, and in fact, in real life, they can do that too if they can do it in an improv. And so what happens is these people tap into long dormant emotions and start to understand that they are more than the worst act that got them there. They tend to create bonds across gang ties, racial lines.

When we're putting together a group, we ask that rival gangs are in the same room with each other. Oh, wow.

“And what happens is these bonds are made through the sharing of emotion.”

We get these guys into an improv where they're all putting a flower on a grave of someone and saying something under their breath about the person that's deceased. And then at some point the facilitator will say, "Now look at each other and they're looking at each other with these eyes of sadness and they realize they have a lot in common." In that shared emotion, I had two guys come up to me, one black guy, one white guy.

They said, "We've got to tell you what happened two weeks ago."

Our shot call is said, "We're going to have a fight on the art," and so you never

questioned the shot call or so you know what this is going to happen, you know, and so what they did was they found each other. These two guys, and they rolled around on the floor, acting like they were killing each other. Wow. How convenient. So it looked like they were participating, but they weren't hurting each other.

Oh, wow. That's a good solution.

It's amazing what happens when you experience something like that in person, when you see

the transformation happen, and we see this in our school children as well. That's something that is deeply inspiring.

“You know that you've had something to do with some real change, right?”

For years, I was asked to, you know, attend fundraisers and you know, various causes, and you know, it's yeah, it's great that they're doing that and it's great that they're raising money for these organizations that need it. But at the end of the day, you don't really feel like it did anything other than go to a dinner. And this was a way to get my hands dirty and really, you know, get in the struggle of it. And I found it to be so much more satisfying, as far as whatever inclination I had towards activism was really fed by this, as opposed to hopping from fundraisers or fundraisers.

It just felt more real, it felt like something that I could take that experience and then I could say to my group, let's expand, let's get into more and more prisons. And now we're in 18 prisons in the state of California doing this program. Did you have to develop a curriculum like how you begin to reach out to these guys and how you set it up, like how you, it took a couple of years, you know, kind of pilot program and one prison in Chino and Norco in Southern California, trial and error, you know, what's the way to do it, what's the way not to do it.

Of course, you go through a training with the prison system of certain things to watch out for and, you know, you develop these lines where you say, you know, we're here to do this not to talk about your case, you know, there's all kinds of things you learn how to avoid the distractions that will derail the program. But essentially, it's a very physical way of working and it's also there is a lot of fun in it. So those two things together allow the entry for these guys that are, you know, they're in the room because they want to be there, but it's weird stuff for asking them to do, right.

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

Sure, it wouldn't be like, hey, hey, you know, we're all in the same club, it would be like, yeah, you thought we were in the same club, but here's a, here's a little thought and you realize he's talking right at one of your hypocrisies.

“And that was his genius, it was the ability to really tap into, we can be better. We can all be better.”

This episode is brought to you by visible. It's officially summer folks and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old fashioned summers we just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. You're best companion this summer, visible wireless visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just 25 dollars a month.

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Switch today at visible dot com plans start at 25 dollars a month or get our premium visible plus pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code rogan terms apply see visible dot com for plan features and network management details. There's been a few guys like that throughout history that really figured out a way to embed humor into social commentary the George Collins probably the most known for but you do you know about Bill Hicks. Yeah, for sure. So he was probably in my generation used to want to twist the people the most to look a lot of comics would watch him and go I what am I doing why am I doing what I'm doing this guy's doing something that's so much more meaningful.

Yeah, who was it in apatized documentary about Carl and there was a community that said. George Carl and was basically in the in early part of the century in 1900s.

“Philosophers debating used to be a huge deal right like hundreds of people thousands people come watch people debate to different points of view sure he said that's that's what the current philosophers of our generation of the better.”

The better stand up comedians was it test your belief system by saying something that you know might be controversial or you know challenges your world view. That's the great purpose and function of philosopher or stand up comedian is to take your world view shatter it a little bit and make you rethink. Yeah, and Hicks was sort of for our generation. He was like the first guy that really did that in a way that like some of the things that he said weren't even designed to be funny at all. It was just designed to make you think about things differently and then he would hit you with some funny things after that.

He would keep you occupied. Yeah. Provocative statements that you know the first reaction is fuck that no that's not true fuck that and then you realize oh shit he's bringing me there and it's like a great play can do that to a great movie can do that to provoke you and.

Challenge you and then thank you reef focus re think yeah it's just amazing how little of that we have today and how much content we have today.

Did you ever see the documentary.

“God, what is it with the documentary with William F. Buckley and yeah you know what I'm talking about. Gorbidol in Gorbidol yeah where they had these it was I guess it was NBC I think it was and NBC was failing in the ratings.”

We're going to say relentless enemies, but that's the world yeah the line enemies best of them best of them yeah great documentary yeah so they had a series of these debates on television. Gorbidol being a progressive and William F. Buckley being a conservative. But before on television where you have these long formed discussions with these two guys is intellectually jabbing at each other yeah and it was great it's like the documentary is really amazing. I was friends with Gorb. Oh really yeah he agreed to do my first film Bob Roberts which is about a right wing focusing candidate for Senate and Pennsylvania and.

Gorb. I agreed to play brickly paste my democratic opponent right so we played a politician which is something he always kind of flirted with in his real life.

Gor, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Howard Zinn are all in this documentary. I filmed it many years ago, shelved it and now I'm in the final stages of putting it together. I'm opening a new website and September 1st and this is one of many things that I have in my vault and my storage units that I've just been getting out over the past year and finding all this crazy stuff that I have that I've never finished because I've been going from project to project to project. So slow down a little bit and just opened up some sealed boxes and it's been really fun. It's one of the things is also I used to fuck around on film sets with this you know when I had enough money to buy a video camera for the first time and so I started making these little short films on movie sets and one of them is there's two films from when I was doing Howard the Duck.

And you know one of those endless productions that just went on and on and on so I just started amusing myself by making my own little short films and one including you know I'm sure illegally using the duck itself you know which I a character in one of the films.

“I forgot about Howard the Duck was crazy we walked on the set the full fucking weird we were that well I know right we we walked on the set.”

I walked on the set the first day and knew we were in trouble. But it wasn't ready. And it was a little too cute if you look at the comic book. How are the duck was not that cute no he was a cigar smoke. Yeah kind of fritz the catish like you know like really kind of yeah borderline obscene and it was a marvel comic right yeah yeah and so do you have an image of the old Howard the duck from the comic.

Yeah that guy yeah so I walked on the set and I saw that cute duck I was like oh yeah it was always with chicks.

Which was very weird like hey lady what do you do and you're fucking a duck. What is his charm got you what is what's the message there yeah so strange character very strange and I don't think they had the technology to pull it off.

“I remember you need to try again now yeah good take the old film and animate it but you know I spent six weeks on that film doing an ultra light chase with lasted maybe two minutes in the film.”

What's an ultra light plane it's you and wings and a motor and so there's a chase sequence at the end it's about two and a half minute three minute long did you actually have to get in one of those things.

No I mean I got in like a fake one good yeah could no you you that you have to be you have to fly it the guy yeah you have to that's fake of course right.

That's true so legit but was that one of those ones were your little voice he didn't listen. No not at all because that was early in my career right so it was George Lucas remember and he just George Lucas. Yeah he just done Star Wars.

Wow so it was it had to be good right.

“He went from Star Wars to Howard the Doug well he produced Howard the Doug okay but he had just produced Star Wars so you know it was like hell yeah.”

Right I don't it doesn't make sense on the page but. He'll figure it out they'll figure it out. I was like I was so lucky to again blessed because I got a movie called Five Corners that was with Joey Foster and John Tuturo. Right around the same time so I was already done that movie when Howard came out. So it's kind of saved my nice you already had one in the chamber yeah you had a good one on the pipe.

Like God. It's just I wonder why George did it like it seems so odd to try to do a movie with a talking duck. Yeah well maybe it made sense when they imagined it. Maybe they're on the acid or something it's like seems.

I was like 86 or something yeah and it was they were they were trying so hard and it just it was you know I felt for everybody including the director.

“I felt he tried his damn best you know and it was just betrayal by puppeteering.”

And it wasn't the puppeteers it was the right actual machinery.

Well it's kind of him if you think about Star Wars in particular it's kind of amazing they were able to pull that off with the technology.

That was available at the time. To have this crazy movie where like the cantina scene and yeah going there's all these different fucking creatures from different planets and like they did not have very good technology back then. Like if you watch that cantina scene now it looks terrible. Right. Like the masks don't move like yeah stock almost like you know looking at claymation around that time you know yeah.

Amazing what they can do but I do like the old school I do like the kind of analog version of because when the CGI and everything it's all so sophisticated.

Yeah they can do anything now and you almost want them not to be able to do everything you know 100% yeah. Just want little roughness around the edges it really helps. Well there's also a thing about CGI where the part of your brain that is looking at it recognizes that this is not a real thing happening like you as good as it looks there's something about it. Yeah, which is why a lot of the movie special effects guys like the monster guys like Rick Baker and the long those cont lines we did star wars yeah American world from London that thing outside the wolf that you see in the hallway.

That they wanted to make sure that it looked like a real thing right it was a physical object so you had a visit so in order to make it a physical object and obviously CGI wasn't even available back then. But you see it and you know it's a real thing whereas like later on he did they did the wolf man and Rick Baker did that as well and there's a lot of CGI in there and the transformation scenes and this part of it is just like your brains like this isn't really happening. I don't like yeah yeah it's kind of the same way in music too like when they correct everything and make the auto to you yeah great music has a little bit of mistaken you know that it has a little bit of like human error.

When you're hitting a chord on a guitar there's you know there's a way to play it perfectly but there's also a way to play it a little messed up right and I kind of prefer the little bit messed up like when Hendrix did the star spangled banner at woodstock. Yeah you know there was something about it it was like yeah yeah it was being done at that moment with full danger you know which is a great thing to listen to.

Yeah it's really happening it's not polished and edited and sent through a machine and you get the feeling that that maybe that was the second or third time you played it.

“Well maybe the first right which would have been even it more insane but you know yeah well that's why people like records. They love listening to the scratches and the pops and then you hear the.”

The voice like this just pure recorded voice there's no auto tuned there's no nothing messing with it especially like an old record. I have one of those 78s where you have to crank them up and. Wow and they have the little you know cone that you have one of those right oh wow 1920 or 1910 or something like that and I just imagine you know living on the prairie and order in this from sears robot right and getting your first. Record and putting it on and hearing this a voice coming from this acetate it must have been magical it must have been like you know transformative to you know amplified song that you can dance to or.

Love to right in your living room when do they first figure that out I think it was early part of 20 century Thomas Edison yeah like a little cylinder but when they sort of mass producing them.

“Like just records. Yeah, what was the first. I think is the 20. I think they might have mass produced those because people had them. I just a way different player let's have ask perplexity what was the first record was the first actual like record.”

That you could play with a needle like a real record. I want to say like 19 19.

12 inch 33 in a third RPM disc was pressed in Victor's vinyl based Victor Lack. But that's 33 in a third. What about the 78s or is it called say a 78 or so yeah. Twenty three men's side for roughly the July 7 48 vinyl LP arrived in June 21 1948 Columbia Records unveiled. Oh 33 in a third micro groove long plane record. So was that it. But in the 20s or 30s there was a micro groove.

Okay. So the 31 first vinyl disc. Wow. So 31 for the first vinyl disc 48 for the first real album.

Which is really nuts because if you think about like all the amazing albums of the 60s you're talking about a technology that didn't exist 20 years prior.

Oh that's weird nuts. Yeah nuts. Right. So like when you listen to Voo child like that technology 20 years ago didn't exist. Do you remember the magic of watching it for the first time like when you put that thing down when you're kid and you put it on the thing. Uh-huh. This music starts coming out. Oh yeah. Well I remember the ones where look at the vinyl grooves around a thousand X magnification. You see the waveforms of the music itself. That's crazy.

“Incredible. That those little weird imagine if you were like from another civilization and you saw these things you were like what the fuck is this?”

Like what do they have here? How did they figure that out? Yeah. What is this? You'd be like what that's they figured out how to make music out of that and you can hear a harp. You can hear banjo. You can hear drums or orchestra. Yeah. You can hear jazz joplin all in that. How'd you do that? Like what? And if it scratches its skips? I'm really encouraged that vinyl's making a comeback. I really very excited about that.

People love it. Yeah. It's all the difference. Like people love like wood tables. You know people like the world gets more digital. People want things that are organic something that a person made. Something that seems like it makes more sense.

I've been finding in my search for my archive and everything cassette tapes. They put on this sound amazing.

Really? Yeah. They sound really good. There's more information in a little cassette tape. You know what this MP3 that's been compressed, you know, and compressed and compressed. But you know, I really reels our obviously sound still great. But the cassette tapes really survived. I've been digitizing everything of course. You know, just to make sure that they don't decay. But it's been really interesting. A lot of my dad's music he recorded on cassette tapes.

He was a folk singer. They did five albums as a highwoman. But he was a classical musician and did choral music. And so he had a group that he would record on these cassette tapes. So we've been digitizing those because we're going to put them all on my new website.

“I think called Robins Radio, which will be my dad, my granddad, my brother and myself, the music that we've done over the years.”

Kind of playing on a constant loop when you come onto the website. Oh wow. So it's honor my dad. I've been digitizing also his scores. And, you know, he wrote music by hand. And so I've got boxes and boxes of that that I've trying to transcribe and make available probably in about six months. We'll have that archive up. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. When did they figure out how to put things on cassette tapes?

Does that happen? That was around when I was in high school. So I remember how to cassette deck on my car. Yeah. And there was pretty good technology. You could buy a really good microphones and plug them into a pretty good cassette player. Well, a track was the first, right? I think so. But those were so impractical.

Yeah. Plus they stopped in the middle of a song and then go to the next track and come really. Oh, really? Yeah. I remember driving with my friend Frank who lives in Austin right now. And we were driving back up to school on my first school of college.

“Thoughtsberg. And there was a eight track of bread playing. You remember that band, bread. And this was around 1977. And he rips it out of the eight track rolls down the window, throws it out of this is.”

We're never listening to that again. He's this is it's punk rock from this point forward.

And it was like a defining moment in my musical life was like Frank saying no more bread. It's six missiles now. That's hilarious.

His mom had an a track player. And she had, what is that song? Who sings it when my baby, when my baby smiles to me, I go to Rio.

“Dazing at it. Remember that song? Yeah, yeah. I don't remember who sings it.”

Pablo Cruz. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And she had a Pablo Cruz eight track in her car. I'm like, this lady's a wizard. She's got her own music because before then I think I'd only seen people play stuff that was on the radio. Right. And she put it in there and she pressed the button. I was like, this is crazy. She gets to pick what songs are on the radio and a car.

I thought it was the wildest thing I'd ever seen in my life.

Yeah. That was right. It was eight track first and the cassette.

And then the cassette was so much better. She's a little thin. Yeah, to flip it over, though, pop it out. Yeah, but those things are cooked in the sun, though. Oh, yeah. Oh, I lost a bunch of things to have one of them big books. We didn't cassettes in it and there's little vinyl things.

Yep. You'll leave it in your car and they get fucked. And then it gets stuck in the, in the, take a scene that you had to do with your finger. We had to try to wind it back with your finger. Which I did like a month ago with one of the old cassettes. Yeah, it's tricky. I just did that last month, right?

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

You know, yes. And a huge deal, too. You know, I, I'm more in the loss of video stores. Oh, yeah, because it's a great experience. Yeah, because you could go and you say, you know, I just saw this film. And there was some of that really loved film there.

Right. And he could say, well, if you liked that one, check this one out. Yeah.

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

Right. And I'm not trusting that algorithm is going to find, it's, you know, it's going to show me the way to battle about jeers or any kind of, of these great movies. I just, if the, the personal was lost.

Same thing with record stores. You could go in and, like, what's, what's new? And here, what's playing and, you know, talk to the guy and get what, what his opinion was. And book stores, too. You know, it's like, if you told me 30 years ago that it would be, you know,

it's very hard to find a bookstore or a record store or a video store. I would say you're crazy. Right. But now it's all like very convenient. You have access to everything.

But you don't have the, the arbiter that is a person. You have the arbiter that's almost a machine. Right. All right. You get a little bit of that with people online, recommending stuff.

Yeah. Just kind of cool.

You know, someone says, hey, I just saw the show.

It's fucking incredible. That's true. You get a little bit of that. And then you get IMDB and rotten tomato scores,

“which I think that does something, you know,”

they're, they're a little manipulated occasionally, but there's something to it where you get to see what people think about it. That helps. Yeah. That's nice. I think silos like 100% rotten tomatoes.

Really? Yeah. I know. That's nice. That's all. Once you said that, though, you put it out.

I know. Now it's that. I just killed it. They got a vomit. Oh, 100%.

We'll see you about that. But there's, there's almost too many shows. You know, there's just too much. I just got into the agency. I just finished season two of the agency.

Michael Fassbender. Yeah. It's a CIA series that's on Paramount. It's fucking incredible. It's so well-written. Yeah.

It's so well-acted. That it makes so many other shows seem really clunky, because it's just, it's so good. Yeah. He's got so many layers to it.

And it's subtle. And it's brilliant. And it's, and the Fassbender's one of my favorite actors. He's fucking incredible. He's great.

He's so good. He's so good in this. You know, he plays this CIA spook. So many things to choose from. Too many. Yeah.

Almost. Yeah. I mean, maybe. Essentially, you could waste your whole life just being in a pain. It used to be difficult to be entertained,

“which I think there's something to that.”

You had to go to a place. You had to pay. Buy your popcorn. Sit down. You had to make active choice in your life.

That was just like... Yeah, steps along the way. They've made it more convenient to be entertained. But then again, it's like, there's something lost in that. You know, like, oh, the movie starts at seven.

Come on, we've got to get out of here. We've got to go park. We've got to get there. Yeah. We've got to get there in time.

There was a lot to it. Or the idea that, you know, if there's only three choices, you're going to stump. You might stumble into something you wouldn't have watched. Right.

And be surprised. Oh, all the time. You'd go, what do they get? What do they have at the movie theater? Right.

Like, what's this? All right. Well, there's no more Star Wars tickets left. So we could go see this. You want to see this?

What is it? I don't know. You guys in it though.

Like, okay.

Yeah, let's check it out.

Take a guess. That's a crazy thing about Shawshank. Is that it wasn't a big hit in the movie theater, initially. No. Which is really hard to believe now.

Yeah. No, it was, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards. But nobody wanted to see it. That's nuts. Yeah.

Maybe it was a title. They didn't understand. Or I don't know what it was. I was in two films that year. And Shawshank had two really challenging titles.

But like, what's it about? Hot sucker? I don't know. What's it about? Shawshank?

Who the?

I had people coming up to me saying, I really liked you in that,

um, skrim-show reduction. [laughter] Like, um, yeah, I thank you. So they don't plan on meeting you. And they run into you at a restaurant.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That movie. There's Shawshank. Shimshank.

Shimshank. What did it come out against?

“What other films were out at the same time at Shawshank?”

Was there other, like, big movies? Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Jurassic Park? Yeah.

Whole fiction. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God. Ace Ventura, too.

Breath of one of the best years from movies in history. Oh, my God. Yeah. Pop fiction. Oh, my God.

But, um, you know, it made its way, interestingly enough, because, um, So Ted Turner was running Warner Brothers at the time, right? And Warner Brothers produced Shawshank redemption. And, um, when he sold the rights to it for television, he sold it to himself at the lowest cost possible.

So basically, he had a film nominated for seven Academy Awards. It was getting sold like it was a beach blanket bullshit, right? And, um, and so it didn't cost him anything to put it on his channel. Uh, so he put it on again and again and again. Was getting all those advertising dollars that come with playing something

on his TV channel.

“And, I think that's why it caught on because it was ubiquitous.”

It was always there.

It was always something you could see.

And so eventually people understood what kind of movie it was. Wow. And so that's a good example of where someone's business acumen or greed or whatever you want to call it. Uh, why don't winds up producing something quite lovely.

You know, something that actually I'm really grateful for, uh, because so many people know that film. And it's been like number one on IMDB for the last 15 years. And that's crazy. Yeah, that's crazy.

And that was one of those movies that also took off like wildfire once it got into video. Because once people could watch it at home. Yeah. That was even though if it didn't do as well in the theaters as it should have

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

Yeah. Yeah. That was something that was lost also during the pandemic. And I was really worried about that that it wasn't going to come back. It seemed like it was so easy to stream films at home

that people just for a while. It was hard to get people to go out to movie theaters. Yeah. And the experience is very different. Yeah.

It's very different. Yeah. It's been a struggle. You know.

“And, you know, I think also a lot of producers, you know,”

Hollywood or studios lost faith in their adult audience, even before the pandemic. I mean, they were producing movies for teenagers. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. But because they can, that can drive an economic engine.

But at the same time, you know, films like Shawshank Redemption would not get made today. Because they're about something that isn't about the, the whole huge multi-platform experience of action movie. And that's unfortunate.

And that's kind of migrated into streamers. You know, people adults that like to watch stuff tend to watch these longer form things. And that's a nice thing in a way because it's allowing filmmakers to make 10-hour films, you know, and you think about it.

A season of a show is 10 hours. And so you can think in this like kind of long form of telling a story, which is a nice thing which would have been impossible in old Hollywood.

So now you have the opportunity, creators have the opportunity to create a long form entertainment.

“Well, that I think is one of the beautiful things about some of these”

Netflix series is that you, you know, like things like strange things. You essentially have, you know, a 30-hour movie or however many episodes it is. And like Ozark is a great example of that.

It's like fucking amazing show.

And it's essentially like a movie every week. And the story continues to progress. And you get a chance to really stretch something out. And but you get the quality of like a great film. But you get it extended.

You know, these huge budgets, the fact that they're able to do this. Like, so because of streaming, it does. It has opened up this long form aspect of storytelling. But I think it's really difficult to do in a movie. Like, you kill Bill kind of did it a little bit.

For sure, you have two episodes of it. It's nice also as an actor. Like with silo, I've got, I've had three seasons. The first two seasons, my character represented something, which completely shifts in season three.

Oh, spoiler alert. No, I'm not telling you what it is. I can't believe he did that. I'm just telling you that. It did out for me.

And now I'm going to be looking for that. You won't, you won't even be able to guess. Okay. Okay. It's, it's such a profound,

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

That's interesting.

It's always wonder how far they map these things out.

You know, did he have a, did they even know that they were going to be picked up for season three when he started? No, but they knew at the end of season one, what the trajectory of two and three was. So if they got picked up, they had.

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

“So the other thing that you have to consider is that”

if you're an asshole, they'll fucking kill you. That's true. Right. Right.

You know, writers don't, you know, if an actor is like, trouble, right, right, right. They'll kill him. They will.

I've been told about, you know, one of the, one of the guys I worked with was, I won't say his name, but, you know, when I was directing for television, I did a couple episodes on this show,

and he told me about a show that he was doing, where there were three actors that were given a real hard time. And one of them was getting in trouble because of, you know, sexual and appropriateness. I won was getting in trouble because of,

you know, there were too much in their head. And the other was, you know, something else, you know, something about,

another, basically they shot them all in the anatomy

that was associated with what their problem was. So all three of them were shot in the finale. Oh, no. They said, well, we allowed a couple of them to survive, but one week really killed off.

It's like, so, you know, you don't mess with the writers, they're in television, they, they, they, they, we'll a lot of power. And not only that,

they're also looking for angles, different places to take to care. And if you're a douchebag, you're like, "Oh, what's the fucking thing?" Yes, yeah.

That'll be a good show. They got a lot of stuff. They got a lot of stuff. Let's turn them into a petta file. Oh, we killed them.

(laughing) Basically, you can do whatever you want. Here's the twist. Yeah. You didn't see this coming.

Yeah. Yeah. Watch out. Yeah. Be nice.

Well, you know, a great plot of fear in Hollywood when it comes to AI and replacing writers and replacing actors and just replacing this whole human-created thing of storytelling.

“And I think writers in particular are really terrified”

because you could kind of, you know, with with AI engines today, you could kind of take a few films, right? Like you could kind of take like a bullet and heat and a few, and they say,

"Make me a John Wick meets bullet meets heat." And this is the protagonist. This is what he's facing. These are the issues. And AI can turn it out in a few minutes.

And then you could say, "I'll make it more like Quentin Tarantino would do it." And then it'll do that. It'll fix it in that way. That's crazy.

And you say, "Okay, I want it more like Kubrick aspects to it. I want some weirdness to it. Some real thoughts. Some Easter eggs, some hidden aspects to it

that people connect later and they'll do that." It can do stuff instantaneously based on, and it's kind of stealing, right? But it's not, right? It's making an original thing,

but it's not. Because it's inspired by everything else

But that's kind of what people do,

but not in the same way. And we don't do it that quick either.

“And so for writers, it's fucking terrifying.”

And who do you sue? I mean, you can't sue a house. Well, artists are having a real problem with that. I have a real problem with it. Yeah.

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

I don't think you could plug that into it. No, no, no. So I think talented people will figure out a way to be individual and apart from AI. But I also really don't like the lack of protection

that the guilds and the unions are offering their membership. You know, there should have been a hard line for the actors union. And there wasn't. The hard line should have been, you know, you cannot use this to replace actors. Right.

Or writers. But there was compromise. And or writers for the writers union. I don't think that that protection was held up to the last negotiations. And I think that we're going to see the repercussions of that, you know, unfortunately.

“Well, that's what's scary is that ultimately economics has a major impact on the decisions that they make.”

And it's way cheaper to do with that way. It's way cheaper to use AI to write things than screen writers, especially really talented screen writers. Even though it's kind of drawing on the past creative work of really talented screen writers. They don't get compensated for it. I think ultimately people are going to want and appreciate something that's made by a human being.

Because it's one of the things, this is what we really, not just be entertained. We really love the fact that someone made something. Well, my girlfriend, Reed Marano, has been advocating for a seal to be put on projects that are made without AI. That's a great idea. That is a very good idea.

I think that's a great idea. I liked that a lot. I think, yeah, instead of like the parental warning. AI-free. Yeah, AI-free, right? No GMO Foods, bitch. There's something to do that.

I think that's a great idea, actually.

I think that might be the way that might be the solution is a seal.

Yeah, I liked that a lot. Makes sense. People, you know, when you see a great something that someone made, what one of the things that you really like about it is that it came from a human being's creativity. Yeah.

Like did you see obsession? No. It's fucking great. It's so good. It's so crazy and so creepy and so weird.

And so brilliant. And like, no one in it is famous and it's phenomenal. And it's really original and creepy. And one of the things I love is like, this is, what is it like, 25 or something like that?

Yeah. 25 years old, who, you know, had done a bunch of YouTube stuff. I love it. It's a complete accident. It just has this amazing idea.

And you've got these people who they're relatively unknown, but really talented. So we're craving that. Yes. We don't want the formula.

Right.

We never have one of the formulas.

And it's so maddening try to set a movie up right now. Because what they want is they want someone an actor that's worth $20 million. And they'll give you $10 million to do the film. You get the guy that they normally would have to pay $20 million. And you get him to do your film for, you know, $300,000.

You got to film. [laughs] It's no gamblers anymore. It's no risk takers. When I was coming up, you know, they had these guys that like,

actually, you know, Joe Roth gave me the money to do cradle Iraq. This, you know, he was basically like, "Here's the kid. Here you go, kid. Do it." I'm like, "Really? I get to do this."

Well, you know, I don't wound up with, you know, final cut and everything. They used to do that. They used to invest in the risk, right?

“Because only will the risk produce something genuine and new and fresh?”

If you don't gamble, and you're measured, and you're unaformula, and you've got your stars, it's kind of, the audience's going to know it. Yep. They know it's, oh, this is prepackaged and pre-programmed for my demographic. Yeah.

And I kind of resent it. Yeah. You know, whereas something like that obsession is like coming out of that field, no one is predicting it, programming it, it's just an accident.

Yeah.

That's what is exciting about, you know,

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

I gambled and it paid off. Right. Yeah. That's that, I don't know how much we have that experience setting more in Hollywood. Do you think it's just because of the extreme cost that's involved?

I mean, just to promote a film, like if you have a film, and it's got a budget, like, especially if you,

“I think it's probably why so many super hero movies get green lip, right?”

Because it's one of the only gambles, like if you're gambling on an Avengers movie, like you can't mess, get the Hulk smash bunch of shit, Captain America comes in. You're good. You're going to make your money back.

And so you kind of have to, you know, like if you're a money person, if you're not a creative person, you're just a money person who happens to be in the movie business, which I'm sure a lot of them are. Yeah.

They're just looking at us return on an investment. Yeah.

But I, you know, that's always been that way to some degree,

but I don't know. I don't know why it became such a risk to try new stuff. I mean, because they're not putting that much money into it, you know, those marble movies, they're costing them $150 million,

$200 million to produce. All right. This independent filmmakers that are proven independent filmmakers that are asking for, like, $5 million, 4 million, do a film.

So if they put some advertising in it, maybe it's going to cost them $14 million, and all told. And, you know, can they make that back? Is the marketplace going to support that?

Who knows? I wouldn't want to be an investor, but I also, you know, I have a nostalgia for a time when Robert Altman could make a film, you know?

Yeah. And it could just blow people's minds. And then the next film he made, you know, as he would briefly tell you, they're going to hate this one, you know.

I'd love that, you know. And people would either love it or hate it, but he was making his own films. He was making distinctive films that were him. Yeah.

Is it more difficult or easier to get a film released today if you make it yourself? Because you don't have distribution, right? So, you know, I suppose in the future there's going to be some form of distribution

that will be more egalitarian, but right now it's a huge risk. What it, how is distribution work? Like, say if you decided, you're going to get a bunch of investors together

and put together a film. Do you have to get distribution before you even start producing? Yes.

“You have to have foreign sales in place.”

Whoa. Foreign sales. Yeah.

Like, I think, basically,

the economic model right now is the investors want to be paid and not be losing money by the time they start shooting. In other words, they're not going to lose money.

They've already sold it for more than they've paid. And so there's really no risk, no gamble. Then, if the movie catches fire at a film festival, then they'll put the money into advertising it. If it doesn't catch fire at a film festival,

or with critics, they'll just, okay, I already made my money. We'll just sell it to DVDs, whatever. I want to fucking shitty environment to create something. That's hard. It's hard.

Yeah, my gal's struggling with that right now. I checked out of that hotel a while back. I was like, I don't want my heart broken like that. So I've just been doing things on my own. I've been producing things on my own,

shooting them, editing them. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this website was because I've got all this stuff that is unreleased and I'm just going to start releasing it slowly. Is that more satisfying to do it that way?

No, it's more satisfying to go to Can and win best actor. I mean, it's much more satisfying. When you have a machine behind you that's supporting it, it's great, you know, you know, a mystic river. You know, that kind of like, you have Warner Bros.

Like, we love this film. We're going to make sure that people see it.

“That's what you need. You need your sponsors that are that get it”

that want people to see it, that see the value of it. And they'll put money into advertising. And that's a great experience to be in. The other thing is just, you know, pretty lonely. It's just, you know, you're trying your best.

I was in three movies after I won the Oscar for Mystic River that I've considered three of the best movies in my career.

This is the secret life of words code 46 and catch catch a fire.

And they're all excellent movies.

“But they came at a time that were, you know,”

the producers or the people that were distributing them didn't really want to risk the money that would take. See, that's where there's a room for like a Cisco and Ebert type character today that can find those films and say, hey, this one slipped under the radar.

But this is really an actual person that's a giant movie buff that can go back and watch these and comment on them. And we don't really back then, Cisco and Ebert were the guys. If they gave you two thumbs down, you were fucked. Yeah.

You were fucked. And, you know, they're very caddy with each other. So it was fun to watch the outtakes. How much those guys actually didn't get along. Yep.

Yep. But I was lucky with them. They gave me great reviews. It was a good taste. Yeah.

They did. And they loved film. Yes. They clearly loved film. And they loved all aspects of it.

They would talk about great understanding and great passion. The subtleties of the performances.

“And what really, and how was put together.”

Even they talk about the score, you know. Yes. And they spend like 15 minutes on each film. Yeah.

Which was never happened.

And it was a hugely successful show, which is like really confusing where there's not something like that today. Yeah. Because there's so much content today. If you were like, it's not like what's out in the movies right now.

Like today, fucking there's a million shows that are streaming. There's so much shit going on. There's so much content that if you had a trusted source, you know, a person who's like a real good critic of stuff. Really, I'm not even a critic.

I'm going to appreciate her as a better word. Like someone is a real passionate enthusiast of film. And of different creative works. They could just talk about something. They recommend stuff.

Yeah. But then there's the burnout of that too. Like, you know, I would talk to some of these guys. And they'd be like, you know, for every one of those good films. We have to see like 10 direct, you know.

It's time spent watching these things kind of mind numbingly painful for some of these people. You know, imagine having to, you know, We threw the mock to get to the desk. I guess. But can't you just walk out of the film?

Like, it just like you walk out of a movie theater. And like this movie sucks. I've done that a few times. Me too. It's a boring.

It's a terrible place to be. Me too. Like I can't believe I'm leaving. Hard to do in a live theater. Because when they know you're there.

Right. But if you're, if you're watching it at home, I mean, it's really what you're trying to do. If you, you want to be one of the person says, this is the worst fucking movie I've ever seen in my life. And that's what you're doing. But if you want to be a person who's just enthusiasts of great stuff and just keep it on the positive side.

There's so much great stuff to review. And so many great things from the past that people haven't seen before. That you could sort of turn people on to. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that'd be great. It's kind of weird that there's not someone like that right now. That's weird. It is weird.

“I think maybe you should, you should do that.”

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

And the fried, you know, that idea that there's some exciting movie coming out on Friday. And we're going to go to it. Yeah. Yeah. That was huge.

Yeah. The movie was coming out. Like, I guess you have it right now with the Odyssey. Like, a lot of people are, it's like one of those movies that's so big. People are scrambling to go see it in the movie theaters.

Yeah. It looks excited about it. Along with a lot of the culture war controversies that everybody that I know that it's seen. I haven't seen it yet. It says fucking through all that away.

The movie's amazing. That's what I hear. Yeah. They're just like, it's almost like a good way to bait people and to get in really, you know. Yeah.

Comfortation. It's a bit tired of that though. Oh, yeah. Real tired of it. Yeah.

Like, oh, it's not correct. Yeah. And it's just, I'm tired of it from both sets. I don't want to, I don't want to hear judgment. Right.

I just, I, I'm, help me. I don't, I don't, I don't want to be in the middle of this fight constantly. You know. It's the only, I, I feel like this is. Again, what we were talking about before, you know, it's the,

uh, as long as we're fighting with each other. Yeah. And then we're fighting about films that are coming out. I was like, come on, guys. Just come down.

Come down. Like, I don't care. Is it, is it entertaining? Is it good? It doesn't have to be correct.

This doesn't mean anything to me. Yeah.

There's never been a time in history where correct was important to me.

Or indicative of great art.

Right. It's just, make it good. And buy all accounts.

“Everyone that I know that scene in the movie said it's fucking incredible.”

Yeah. I'm going to try to see it soon. The culture war part of it. It's like, at the very least, it got people excited to see it.

Hmm. And either to hate it or it. But I know a lot of people that wanted to go hate it. And because they were upset, you know. But Ellie has changed by this person.

I understand that. I just hell of a choice of black lady. Like, uh, who fucking cares? That's a matter. Probably that's a meet-up story.

Like, exactly as a Smith to be kidding with. Yeah. But apparently, it might actually be based on a real place though. You know, these to think that Troy was not a real place. And then they discovered it.

Um, I think that was. Was it in the 70s?

When did they discover Troy?

Because they used to think that it was completely mythical. It was just fiction, a work of fiction. And they didn't found the actual real city. And they're like, oh. Like, that's the weird thing about really old stories.

Is that like, there's so it's so ambiguous as to what was the root. What was the origin of this story? Was this a real event?

“You ever stood on the stage of old Roman amphitheater?”

Yes. That's something else. Yeah. That's wild. Yeah.

Those history and those stones. Mm-hmm. And, um, you know, we were doing a show over in Lyon, France and one of those theaters. And um, we found something out because we were doing rehearsal. And when you're talking to the other actor like this,

you can't hear it out there at all. Ah. And it's so it told us that that what they were doing was this, you know, back in the old days. Yeah. They had to perform out because you want me to hear if you were doing realistically talking to someone

making a contact. That's what we're about early film. As at early film, you have stage actors who are used to doing it with no microphones. You know, projecting now doing it on film. So it looks odd.

Yeah. It's like there was this transition every period. And then Brando came along and Brando just did it real. Yeah. And it was like, what the fuck is he doing?

Yeah. He's acting like a real person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That was a, you know, huge step forward for all of us. Yeah. That, uh, to take the illness off the theatrical and get more into the real, you know.

And again, if you really think about it, not a whole lot of time between, like, the invention of film, and then movie stars and all these things happening. Like, this is a completely new cultural thing.

“Like, from the early, like, what was the first film?”

Like, the first film with sound. What year was that? Yeah. It was first 1920s. Wow.

So think of that. So you have from 27. And then just a few decades later, you have on the waterfront. You have the hussler.

You have these, these incredible movies that do, they just have to figure out on the fly.

Yeah. You know, how to sit us in Cane. Yeah. And if you figure out on the fly, how to do this. But also the, if you ever watch the, the first films like the, the silent films.

And the ability to tell a story about words, which was a whole other, you know, talent. I mean, you watch those chaplain films. This is like that, man. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Well, Noss Verado. The original Noss Verado. I love that film. I saw that at a public library in San Francisco when I was a kid. They had a night where they played it.

And I want to see it. I was like, this is nuts. Incredible. Incredible. What year was that film?

1922. And then Metropolis was crazy movie. Yeah. Yeah. I love that old stuff.

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

Yeah. Seeing things moving around on a giant screen like this is mad. Alchemy. Yeah. Crazy magic.

Satan. And you had to read what they were saying to each other on the screen. Yeah. And then music would play. They had a guy with an organ that was playing music along with it.

Yeah. Super cool. It is super cool. I would love to. Like, if you could try time travel and go to one of those.

Oh, yeah. Maybe theaters. In fact. There is. There is.

I mean, one of the best vampire movies of all time too. And so the writing is just so good. Yeah. German expressionist. Jerry C. M. Peter Laurie.

It's just M. It's called M. Yeah. The letter M? Isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. 93. No, I never saw it. What is it about?

About a murderer that's stalking a bunch of people.

I was a huge fan of that whole genre of filmmaking.

Well, something so exciting about it.

“But when you limit the sensory input, like you have to read the words.”

And you want, it's all black and white in this music play. It's like it's a totally different thing that you're taking in. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's almost like half reading, half watching. Yeah.

You know, like you're reading, like, you don't hear their voices. You have to create their voices in your head. Yeah. And you're feeling in a different way too. Yeah.

Because of the, you know, it's black and white. So it's not real. But it is real. Right. Yeah.

It's, uh, it's a great, great form. Which you have more of those. It's just hard to imagine that this is only 100 years old. That from there, then now, this is 100 years. Yeah.

It's a blink of an eye. Yeah. And when you think about human history, like, when we think about, like, the 1500s versus the 1600s,

“who kind of think it's basically the same.”

If you're born in 15, 20 or 16, 20, it's fucking exactly the same. Right. And 1920 or 2020, uh, fucking completely different world you're living at. Huge. 1920, you have Nostvarado, 2026.

You have the Odyssey, you know. Right. You have, you have Dune. You have these insane films. Right.

Not to mention the technology you personally possess. Yes. Right. And you're pocket. Right.

At any moment in time, you could stream a movie. I could see Nostvarado right now on. Right. Yeah. Or the Robert Eger's one, the new one.

Yeah. That's fantastic. But it's just instantaneous. Everything's instantaneous and everything's right there for you. So it's great in that sense that you will be entertained.

There's something to watch no matter what. But you're missing something on the, like, the specialness of, like, having to go out and go to a place, even go to a video store and go get it, you know. Yeah. Something missing.

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

I am going to be an active participant in my life.

It's, it's when I first moved to LA that I first understood this in the, uh, late 70s.

“LA, as opposed to New York where I grew up, LA, you have to make a choice to find your fun.”

New York a little drop in your lap, right? If you walk down the street, something will present itself. But in LA, when I first moved out there, I realized, you got to drive there. You got to drive and find your fun. And, and you have to be an active participant in your, in your cultural life.

Um, and once I understood that about LA, I could understand how to live there. It was, it was at first very frustrating, because it was very boring, right? It wasn't happening, you know, when I walked out on the street. There was no street to walk out on. It was just too big.

But, um, it's that kind of, um, I have chosen this weekend to drive 30 minutes in that direction to see this punk rock band, right? And I will be an active participant in that. And once you do that, you're liberated. Then, then you, then you know anything's possible. But now it's like, I wanted it in my backyard.

Not only that, now that thing interrupts you while you're taking something else in. Right. It constantly wants your attention. It's like a puppy. It's like, what?

Hey, hey, hey, watch the movie. I want to be fed. Yeah, it's a constantly demanding your attention, or at least enticing you to take. Look at it, vibrating in your pocket. Yeah.

Have you ever thought about trashing it? I've gotten off social media for weeks at a time. I've done that. But I need it for work too much. I need it for emails.

I need to, I can't always just be in front of a laptop.

Do you have a, uh, like a flip phone? No, no. I'm thinking about getting it. I have a computer that I write on that's not connected to anything. My writing computer is just a Lenovo ThinkPad.

I never use it for anything other than writing. It does, if I go online, it's just a research something, like ask a question. Like, what is this? How does this work? It's never, I never surf the web.

I don't look at any websites. I don't do anything with it. And that helps a lot for that. But for phones, I have too many friends that are sending me funny things. There's always like some funny thing and I'm all right.

I get some back on Instagram, check it out. I'm crazy. There's too much coming at you. And the problem is if I put it down, which I do often for like the whole day, when I pick it up, I'll get 70 text messages to go through.

I know. And then I don't respond to some of some people get mad. And then like, I'm sorry.

Yeah. Too much coming in.

“And then there's so much, hey, look at this.”

Hey, check this out. Have you seen this? What do you think about that? Do you think this is real? You know?

And then the people that you don't respond to can oftentimes take the lack of response

as basically you're saying fuck you.

And it's not the case at all. Right. You just don't have the time to do it. Right. And you read it and you liked it and you smiled, but you didn't put a smiley on it.

Right. You have to put a little heart. Yeah. It's a very strange social dynamic. And it's not sure I'm very good at it.

No. It's probably a good time. Yeah. It demands too much. That's the problem.

It is much as it is interesting if you have a wide social circle. It demands too much of your time. If you have, you know, 100 units of attention that you have for use throughout the day. It demands too many units. Right.

There's just too much coming atcha.

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

I like sitting in my garden. Is that your thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I've been gardening. Yeah. That's the real thing. That's my peaceful place. That's a real thing.

It's real. Start. Yeah. Real plant grows out like comes from it. Yep.

You can eat stuff from it. Yeah. You need stuff to do, right? You need a thing that can take you away from the other things. Something to make more beautiful every day.

Something to, you know, something to care for. It's, you know, whether it's the garden in Los Angeles that, you know, I grow herbs. And I, you know, to walk down and put that those herbs, those fresh herbs in the omelet you're making. You know, it's a, it's a small thing, but it's huge. Yeah.

And then I have, back east I have, I planted a garden with my son this year. You know, like vegetable garden. He's, you know, having been there, but he's been saying that to me. It doesn't come out like crazy. And the cucumbers and, you know, that's such a beautiful view.

Yeah. There you go. That's this, it's a, I, I really love this. I love the idea that we can, you know, the earth has so much to offer us. You know, all it needs is a water and sunlight.

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

Yeah. Because you're going to eat. Yeah. You're going to survive. Yeah.

And then when you, when you're doing your harvest in the fall, you, you have an abundance, right? And then I learned how to pickle. And that's a joy. Because now you're, now you're set for the winner, right? Now you got a refrigerator full of pickled stuff.

And, you know, to be able to bite into a crisp pickle that you grew as cucumber in the summer in December. It's like, you know, this is how they survive. You know, this is, those, you know, the storage of crops and how you, how you make them survive through the winter.

“That's a, a skill that, you know, that, well, that's why we're still here.”

And then you find out that pickling and fermented foods and all those things are fantastic for your body. Incredible. In a way that other foods just aren't. Yeah. And helps your microbiome and helps your gut.

Yeah. And then you can, you know, use the extra pickled juice for a martini. Right. It's fantastic. Why can't you just drink it?

Yeah. I do have two pickled juice. I have a company that sells you these little packets of pickled juice. You need to drink it. Yeah.

It's a probiotic beverage. Yeah. I have, I have many jars of pickles that are, there's no more pickles in, but I keep the juice for, for drinking. It's, you know, fermented foods and, you know, I've learned, you know, so much about the gut biome and, and, and, and, and how to make that healthier. Uh, all these challenges were up against with all the poisons in our food and how to get around them and how to clean it clean yourself out.

And I just did a cleanse, uh, uh, one of those master cleanses I just did 14 days on.

Well, you don't need anything for 14 days and it's amazing how, how great you feel at the end of it.

14 whole days. No food at all. No food at all. Wow. What, what did you drink water?

Just a cayenne pepper and, uh, and maple syrup. And that'll, that'll get you through the day.

“And then, but every morning you're doing a purge, right?”

So you're cleaning out. You're cleaning out. You're cleaning out. All the poisons out. I do that a couple times a year.

14 days a long time with no food.

What is the first thing you eat when it was over?

You got to just ease your way back in. Like clear broth first, soups, then vegetables, then get over how long. A week re-entry. Yeah. Whoa.

I mean, you're eating, but you're not going for the steak first. Right, right, right. Yeah.

“And so you have to kind of ease your system back into it.”

Do you experience mental clarity when you do that? Total mental clarity. Interesting. Yeah. I've never done it.

First up, done is a day. First three days are tough. But then once you get past the third day, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty. The, your energy level is like constant throughout the day, and you can work. I play sports with it.

You know, it's around 10 days. You should stop doing the physical stuff. Too much. Too much. Exertion.

I can still take a bike ride and stuff. But you were working out three days in no food. Yeah. Wow. You have to, you know, everyone's going to have their own reaction.

So, you know, I'm not advocating even to do it. Right. You know, I don't want to be responsible for that. But for me personally, it's really helped. Because it also, it restarts your system.

It basically, you get really toxins.

You're certainly not drinking. You're not doing any kind of abusive shit to yourself. And basically, your body is, is thanking you by the clarity. It gives you, like you, you're really, like, and the other thing that happens is, I'll just start cleaning it, right?

So, you know, when I'm on a cleanse, I'm going to clean a closet. Because you're not only cleaning yourself. You're cleaning your environment, right? Right. And it's, you know, I just, I just did it two weeks ago.

So, yeah. How do you decide when to do it? Usually when you've been a little indulgent and you're not feeling too good. And, you know, you put on a little weight. Just like, I got, I don't feel good.

I want to, you know, clean out.

“You must lose a ton of weight doing that.”

Yeah. How much have you lost doing 14 days? 25 pounds. Whoa. About two a day.

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

And so your body's burning fat and ketones. When you run, I've been on ketogenic diets in the past. And then I've been on the carnivore diet, which says the exact same thing. Where your mental clarity is just so much better. Like everything just runs smooth.

It's just like you're, like you're saying, you have this level of flat energy throughout the day. There's no highs and lows crashing after a big meal. Or caffeine, pump, mumps, or yeah, all that stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. But, but stand up till, you know, midnight and fine. Maybe the energy's fine. And you sleep last two. You need less sleep for some reason.

I don't know why.

“I think it's probably good to give you digestive system a little break, too.”

Yeah. Let it relax. I mean, it's constantly work. Especially if you eat all throughout the day. If you're a snacker.

Then you have a little bite to eat, wake up in the morning. You have breakfast. Like your digestive system just constantly grinds you out this food and digesting everything. Yeah.

The real poison for me is sugar. You know, it manifested in alcohol for a while, but I don't drink that much anymore. But sugar is the big for everybody. Yeah. It's a tough one.

It's a very addictive. And you think, oh, it feels great when you first have it, but then it makes you pay. Well, it's also with modern diets, like the kind of sugar that we have available today.

Really never existed in the past before.

That's true. You know, for most of you in the history, if you want something sweet yet eat fruit. Right. You know, now all of a sudden you've got candy bars. You have stuff that comes to you in this insane form.

We have a hundred grams of sugar and something that you can eat. Right. That's nuts. Yeah. You know, or a drink.

You know, you get one of those. You're asking Robbins Blizzard. Is that the one that is? Oh, my God. That thing.

Those things will mess you up. Oh, you get a headache after you're done. I know. It's like, it's like alcohol. Yeah.

It's that expression. Candies, Danny, but liquor's quicker. Yeah. You know, liquor's just concentrated sugar. Mm-hmm.

Just like, you know. But, you know, I try not to be too much of a zealot about any of this stuff. But I have, like, my mom was introducing us to natural food in late 60s. So she, she had read a book called Poisons on our food and started taking process food out of our diet.

Like bread. This is early on. Yeah. So she, she was a real, you know.

“She really was a homeyopath before it was called a homeyopath.”

And wound up getting cancer and was told she had to have chemo and said, no, I'm not doing it. And kicked it herself, you know, with a change in what she was putting in her body.

And so I've always, you know, had had her as a kind of guidepost for my health.

She used to always say that the body is a temple and that the body can heal anything. And a lot of it has to do with how you approach it in your mind. And if you believe that you can heal yourself, you can heal yourself. And she's getting us from books. I think she got it from a combination of books and her faith in, you know, Catholicism.

I think every, every religion has a fasting day for some reason. That seems to be something that is common to all religion. That there's an, and it's important that you'd not eat one day a week. She wouldn't do that with us, you know, as kids, she wouldn't starve us for a day. But she did have a whole holistic approach to the way that she viewed illness.

And I remember her drumming it into our heads that if you ever get told by a doctor anything,

“you have to challenge it, you go to a different doctor and see if they say the same thing.”

Always, always, always. She lost her father and her brother within the course of a year to medical malpractice in the 50s. And so she had a serious distrust of the medical profession. And back then, it was like, there was no one even thought about suing from malpractice. It was like, that's the doctor, he's an authority figure.

You can't mess with him, right?

So she always approached it with a healthy level of questioning whenever she was given advice by doctors.

Wow. And it's interesting, she's always been, you know, I've always kind of wondered how she would have reacted to this recent thing and all that. Have you ever done ayahuasca? No. Yeah.

I have done DMT, which is the actual compound that's active in ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT. Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, when they tell you to go in, when I did it, they tell you to go in with an intention.

And my intention was to, you know, I was frustrated with feeling anger about what was going on in the world. And I saw I want to release that. I don't want to be consumed by that anger. And so I wound up in this, you know, the heavy duty, you know, journey that ayahuasca is. And my mom showed up.

Wow. And she's, I, it's not like you actually hear a voice, but you hear a voice, right? You basically, she's there. You know it's her, she's saying something to you. And what she said was, you're injured.

You're a warrior and you're injured. And you need to rest. But the fight's not over.

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

Whoa. What were you battling? I was battling my frustration with the dissolution of society. People being angry at each other over ridiculous things. Long friendships being affected.

People being canceled for expressing their opinion. All this stuff. And I, I, I wanted out, right? I, I wanted to be absolved of that. I didn't want to be engaged in it.

And what she told me in, in the course of this thing, believe it or not. You know, I understand people, all of you. Oh, that's woo. And you just tripping and whatever. But I, but I definitely felt her presence there.

And it was no doubt. It was her. I went through a whole journey with her. I saw things from our lives together.

And I, there was one moment where I was, you know, I was always been curious about

something that happened in kindergarten or something.

And she, you know, it's at one point I felt her presence.

“And she said, you were right about that.”

I'm sorry we didn't listen to you, you know. This kind of really profoundly deep experience. And, but at the end of it, I felt completely lighter. And completely, you know, relieved to have been through the experience. And a great, great connection with my mom.

You know, just like a beautiful, like, ah, she, she gets it. She's still around. I've had quite a few experiences in this realm. And my mom, in fact, you know, she, she, my father died when he was 80. And my mom was 78.

And she wasn't sick, but my dad had been dying for a while. And we all got down to say goodbye to him. They were living in Mexico at the time. And we went to the funeral. And my mom was very stoic and, and saying very strongly.

My father's favorite song at the funeral.

And she didn't cry. And we were all concerned about her. We hired a couple of people for when we left to take care of her.

“And she was really agitated the last night.”

And she was, um, I was there. And she said, you know, I don't, I don't trust these people. I don't know if they're going to talk about you or, you know, in your famous and all that stuff. And I said, mom, don't worry about it.

You know, they're just here to get you stuff if you need it. Don't worry about it. She, I go off, she wakes up the next morning. She says to my sisters who are still in the house with her. Everything I said last night, don't worry about it.

And they said, what happened, mom? She had a dream. She said, I was in my childhood home in Westwood, California. And I was something in my living room. I couldn't look at it.

I was just stone figure. I couldn't look at it. And it was disturbing me. I didn't want to look at it. But then I look out the bay window and then coming down the street.

I see led by my first friend in life.

A group of people coming towards the house. And it didn't make any sense. There were people from my childhood, people from my corals society. People from my work. But they were all there.

And they all came to the door. And when they showed up, I realized everything was going to be fine. And I realized, oh my god, that was the departed. They didn't come to say it's going to be okay. Wow.

And so my sister's left three days, four days later we got a phone call. My mom has died. She wasn't sick. And then my sister talks to the woman that was taking care of her. And she said it was really strange.

You know, the night before she died, she said, he's here. And they said, who's here? And she said, go, my husband, he's here. He's come to get me. And they said, no, Mary, he's not there.

And she said, oh, no, he most certainly is. And he looks very strong as he died, people. Goes to bed that night and passes. Wow. So even the most cynical person in the world that doesn't believe in afterlife or anything.

How do you explain that? How do you explain whatever chemicals were going on in your brain to bring her to that path? And she was going to bring her to that passing where she was going to join the person that she loved her entire life. That's a beautiful thing. Well, regardless of how you look at it.

I don't think there's any value in being cynical about these experiences.

“And even the ayahuasca experience, like this idea that you're hallucinating and that that's what this is.”

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

It's the same experience. Yeah. So like there's no value in being cynical about it. Like you get a, you get, there's something that you experience from it that's tangible. It's, it's real.

You feel it. It changes your perspective. It changes the way you feel about the world. Yeah. Like that's a real thing.

It's a real thing. Just because you can't put a measuring tape to it or you can't put it on a scale. Don't say it's not real. There's so many ways of being that we haven't even studied or have no idea about how people can communicate over 2,000 miles. Like a mother wakes up in the middle of the night knowing something's wrong with their child and five minutes later, the fucking phone rings.

Right. What the hell is that? Or twins, twins who have some sort of strange connection. Yeah. When I was, my grandfather was very close to, he, he was, had been dead for two months and I had a dream about him.

And he, and I woke up like startled and I heard his voice.

I'll take care of it.

And I didn't know what the hell it meant, but it was very clear.

It was like I'll take care of it. 15 minutes later, I got a phone call from Susan and my son Miles who was six years old at the time. He had run out into the middle of 7th Avenue and she said it was the weirdest thing. It was like something stopped him like that and a car goes behind him and a car goes in front of him. And I was like, I know exactly what just happened.

He was, he, whatever that is, whatever energy he could muster in whatever phase of being he was. He's fucking saved my son's life. He roically. I'm, I'm no doubt about that. Why would he show up and say that to me?

So don't worry, I'll take care of it. Wow.

So I, I, I totally believe this stuff.

“I, I believe that we, that life death, there's other planes of existence that we can get to through various means.”

It doesn't have to be iOS. It doesn't, there are, if you're open to listening in different ways. There are great things available for you. It's like the idea of an accident. Is it an accident that you run into that person that you've been wanting to talk to and all of a sudden now they're right in front of you?

Right. You know, that's not an accident. It's, it's divine, whatever, you know, whatever the divine is for you. There's, there's another level of energy that is going around. You know, we have an image studied what, how the heart communicates.

You know, there's that Spanish or Portuguese cardiologist that talks about the realm of communication in the electromagnetic field of the heart. And what that means and how the heart can communicate and has in parts of the heart have more neurons and parts of the brain. Right. What is that all about? And it's such that we don't, we don't think that way.

You know, we don't want to experience, we have a, it's a heart is a meat pump and that's, it just runs in your entire life. Yeah. But it doesn't, this guy's suggesting, no, it's electromagnetic energy. It's what makes us live longer if we're with someone else or with a pet. You know, that people that are isolated and alone are hurting and they're not having that electromagnetic connection with other people.

“That's why we crave crowds, that's why we want to be in, you know, groups of people.”

It's a natural thing. It keeps us alive. It keeps us activated in a community. Yeah. And, but we don't study that. We don't study what that is.

And I think it's kind of magical. And it's why solitary confinement is such a cruel process. So cool. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of people that think it's actual torture.

Of course it is. Yeah. Of course it is. You've got nothing to interact with. And it's why that, you know, it's why that lockdown is cruel.

You know, that we, you know, just the scope of that loneliness is just immense. You know, that some people had to deal with. Especially people that were already struggling. Yeah. Some people were already filled with anxiety and they already had suffered from depression.

And they were already weird socially. Yeah. And also they just completely isolated from everyone else for a year or a year and a half. Yeah. I'm worried you lived.

So it's weird this desire that people have to define things as real or not real. And, and also to let everyone know, oh, I'm not following for that nonsense.

“You know, but God, I mean, at one point in time do you have to say, well, all these stories, all these experiences that people have.”

Maybe there's something to it. And maybe this close mind didn't necessarily benefit, benefiting me in any way. Yeah. I mean, there's magic. Yeah.

Magic in the world. I mean, there's this old way of thinking. I became, do you know what the, there's a book called The Nature of Things by a kind of the creatures written in 350 BC. And it's Epicurianism. And Epicurianism now is about, you know, like food, you're like wine, whatever.

Back then it was like the whole purpose of this philosophy or religion, whatever you want to call it, was that all of life is a miracle.

All everything that you're seeing in front of you is the first time it's happening and will never happen again.

It's a collision of atoms in a particular way. That'll calm atoms, what they call them, the smallest particles that create unique experiences every moment of your life. And the whole purpose of life is to seek the pleasure of that and avoid pain.

too much pleasure creates pain.

“But this philosophy and this beautiful long form poem written by Lucretius in 350 BC is all about magic.”

It's all about this idea that, look how lucky we are to wake up in the morning and see that, fricking cactus blooming. You know, that's like when we get so, in your from that, so you know, an e-sicized from the magic and it's all just the doldrum and every day is the same. That's robbing yourself of so much, right, that the idea that, what if you just woke up and said,

hey, it's fucking magic. This is amazing. First of all, I'm breathing. Second of all, look at that sun coming in the window.

And this is going to be an amazing day.

Instead of like, oh, shit, I got to get up and you know, do my fucking thing, you know, like, no. And it's also relative because if you were dying in a hospital and you had this opportunity say,

“oh, you have to do is say these magic words and you'll be transported back to health in your home with a completely new perspective”

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

Yeah. And re-shade it. And the idea that you can also, even if things are bad that if you're approached life that way, didn't you, there is a possibility making everything better and it has to do with humility. It has to do it being able to say I can forgive somebody for something.

You can also ask forgiveness for something I have done. It's all about humility. It's all about humility in the face of not only your own personal experience, but in how you view the universe. I'm lucky to be here or what a blessing to be able to have this life I've had. I want to give and I want to, I had this beautiful experience when I was going through my, you know, one of my darkest periods.

This woman showed up and I met her once in my life, this Tibetan woman. She's a great singer and she said, "Why are you here?" She said, "You're in trouble. I'm going to take care of you." I don't even know her and I said, "All right, okay." She did this rakey healing on me. She sang incense and I didn't understand. I didn't understand why she was there. She makes me a meal that evening first evening. She's done all this healing on me.

And she says, "You know, she makes the meal I'm eating. I finish eating. I start taking the dishes, right?" She says, "What are you doing?" I said, "Well, you cooked, I'll clean." She says, "Sin-ah." So that's the problem with you people in the West. It's all a business deal.

“I'm doing this for you. Can you just accept that? I'm taking care of you. Can you accept that?”

And she said, "You will never know how to give love until you know how to receive love."

And it blew my mind. Because at the time I realized I was engaged in that kind of transactional way of looking at relationships. That the idea that giving completely is so much better, you actually get more out of it than you do receiving it. And once I understood that it kind of transformed everything from me. And that was the person that was a total stranger and she showed up just out of nowhere. And I said, "Finally at the end of it, I said, "Why are you here?"

And she said, "You have done good things for the world. We need you." And she left. And I didn't plan that. I had no idea that was going to happen, but it made me realize there are angels in this world.

If you are closed off and cynical, you will not see your angels. But if you are maybe sometimes just completely wiped and you have no, you know, you just ready to receive it.

“And maybe the fact that I was able to receive that, I think, really helped me and helped me shift to everything.”

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

But it's a reminder, it's that there is another energy in the world that is actually an energy of good. We have consumed by the bad all the time. It's all these, you know, negative forces that are trying to bring us down. I think that sometimes we get so defeated by those things that we are not open to the energy of the angels, the good. And when I say angels, I don't mean--

I know what you mean, you know. Yeah, super positive people, something. Some pure expression of love and compassion and generosity. Yeah. And this is the real problem with social media and algorithms in particular, is that it really highlights the things that make you upset.

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

We're actually poisoning yourself with that. Yeah, you are. And it's a constant battle because that damn thing's buzzing all the time. But I have gotten better with it.

I will not look at it first thing in the morning anymore.

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

Yeah.

“And what are their ramifications and the consequences of using it incorrectly?”

You know, because no one's teaching that. You know, they're not teaching children that in school. There should be a course on this is the negative aspect of social media. These are the negative aspects of interaction. This is what it's doing to your consciousness.

This is what it's doing to your focus.

It's stealing your joy. It's stealing your appreciation of the moment. Right. And it's leading you into conflict constantly. Possibly.

And, you know, that's a negative thing. That's a force of evil. Yeah. It's a strong word, but, you know. It's the right word, though.

Yeah. You know, it's again, there's these words. Good, evil, angel, God. They fuck with people because they're like, "Oh, what is that?" It's, I think, got to kind of abandon that way of thinking and just go, "Well, there's certainly

positive and negative and there's certainly love and evil." There's those are real things. And there's good in the world.

“And also, the more you concentrate on other things, the more your life is defined by those other”

things, whether it's good or bad. So, if you're constantly thinking about bad things, like, we can't have a very loving and amazing life. If you're constantly inundated with thoughts about negative things. And on the other side of it, if you're thinking in a positive way and enjoying love and

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

Not to mention, it's really good for your health. Yes. Well, you like you were saying before, one of the worst things for your health is loneliness. Yeah. Yeah.

It'll kill you. Tim Robbins. You're a cool motherfucker. Thank you, man. I enjoy talking to you.

I appreciate it. Great. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. My pleasure.

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