#2532 - Tim Robbins

27:31You know, disinformation. Yeah, and just orchestrated propaganda, orchestrated, organized, with big money behind it. Wild, wild to watch. I suspect that that whole period of time was another way to divide us, you know, in the larger picture. You know, the orchestrated chaos masquerading as a revolution, you know. So there's been so many of those things over the past five years. Alliances that you're building and then all of a sudden there's a new crisis and now you don't like those people that you were building alliances with. And it's just one after the other. And ultimately, at the end of the day, I think it's all about division.

28:17It's all about dividing us and making us argue with each other and not finding common ground. And that's ultimately the strategy that's been used from time immemorial, you know, for the power to stay in power. How do you get people fighting with each other? 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. And especially in today's day and age when you have social media and then you have not just our government, but many governments that have fake accounts. And these people just get outraged about things or attack things or, you know, have a narrative that they push.

28:59And you don't know if it's real people. You don't know what it is. Just a bunch of accounts. You go to the accounts, a guy's face. You know, it's a woman wearing a dress, holding a book. She seems normal. Meanwhile, it's a man somewhere with a bank of computers that are all connected to the Internet that's typing in these different responses with a bunch of different – or now it's AI automated. Yeah. You tell this bot to be a right-wing nationalist that's attacking anything. Yeah, it's crazy. It's on both sides. 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.

29:37And I went down to check it out, put my mask on. I was very compliant at the start of all this. And I noticed what they were portraying as national front right-wingers was actually hippies and homeopaths and free 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 organized army of righteousness. I have no idea, but it was I just at that time at that point. I was like fuck it I'm not gonna not gonna 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 all and it was you know mass formation psychosis is what Some people called it.

30:36Yeah, I think that's a good description of Robert Malone I think termed 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 company's job for them. They were the ones that were enforcing all these things. Yeah. 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, they lump up together in teams and then they reinforce each other and repeat the same things.

31:18And, and they all want to, 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, and, you know, so it's not like they're, you know, their, their intentions are good. Right. Uh, and, um, because of that, you know, I've, I've had a similar experience where, you know, friends of mine and, um, people I love that, you know, fell into that as I did, I fell into it for a while, you know, that kind of fear based kind of behavior. And, um, I just, uh, I, I've come to understand in my later years that one of the things that's truly liberating is the ability to say I don't know yeah and I may have been wrong these are two things that have led to such great discovery for me um it's it's I I really don't trust anymore I don't trust virtuous experts I don't I don't think uh I don't think experts are or I don't believe in experts I I I think if you consider yourself an expert, you're done learning.

32:28You're done speaking with others. You're done challenging yourself. And when we put our faith and trust in people that are deemed experts, ultimately, throughout my experience, it's led to bad things. The experts that talked about weapons of mass destruction, The experts that talk about various things that have led us to violent altercations throughout the world. 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 there are experts in some fields and we do need them.

33:16It is important. And like if you want information about the Large Hadron Collider, you don't understand like 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 boson? What is this particle that is a part of that? What? It's the earliest stages of the universe. 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.

33:47What 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 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. It became 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 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.

34:34It'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 were 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 why are we doing this like what's going on it became a faith it became dogma yeah and if you question the dogma you were a heretic yeah you weren't kicked out of the religion it's it's uh it's was a scary time and still is scary you know we deal uh the actors gang my non-profit in los angeles we have education programs and um we've been dealing with the the ramifications of that lockdown for the last five years you know those kids that are had two years robbed of them from socialization and education.

35:38Imagine that was your senior year of high school too. Oh my God. Fuck. We're dealing with the after effects of that. And gratefully, the kind of work we do brings them out again and gets them expressing emotions, making eye contact, having experiences with other children that are productive. And, you know, the good news is you can get out of that funk. But that was it was really scary to see those kids walk in to classes after that lockdown because they wouldn't make eye contact looking at the floor. You know, kind of de-socialized and traumatized. And, you know, it was really scary. Critical development time for them.

36:25Absolutely. Yeah, and all of a sudden they're wearing, like, imagine being a toddler and all of a sudden everyone has a mask on. Yeah, it's weird. 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 developmental process. You get to know people. You read faces. You see how people talk. All of a sudden everyone's wearing a mask. Everyone's robbing a bank. Like, this is crazy. Yeah, 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.

37:03You know, I don't attach blame. I don't, you know, everyone. There was a pretty sophisticated propaganda machine that was happening. And I have great compassion for people that fell into that. And I, you know, I just want us to not do it again. I want us to have the knowledge and the consciousness to not fall for that again. Yeah, hopefully. It's just, it was very eye-opening that it was so easy to pull off. You know, that it was so easy to get people to just gang up like that. It was just... It said a lot about us, unfortunately. Definitely. And, you know, I hold faith in humanity, but that was a tough one.

37:58I do as well. And I think it was a learning moment for a lot of people, whether they admit to it or not, whether they're public about it or not. Because I know a lot of people that just weren't public about their dissent, but they really didn't like any of it. And they just didn't really have a position to talk about it. and 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?

38:34Are we living in a free society? Right. Right. And that's still, that's not just COVID. That's a lot of things. It's a lot of things. It's almost everything. And it's one of the most important things that we do is we disagree. We talk. You have conversations. It's the 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 a coworker who you don't necessarily agree with, but it's a human being expressing something to you in person.

39:26And you have to deal with that person and their opposing viewpoint. 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. And so the water cooler was completely eliminated. The idea of the accidental conversation at a bar where you're watching a game on the television and then 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. Yeah. All these moments of meeting up that were eliminated.

40:16And, you know, it's what I love about sports. I love that you can go watch a game and not think about politics or not think about your 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—we don't want audiences that 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.

41:07That'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 have a theater in Los Angeles, it was two years we had to be closed, and a year and a half in we were told we could open but we'd have to check vaccine passports at the door and 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 is a gathering place for the community that might think differently to bring them together.

41:57And 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 there was an exemption in New York and you had to have a vaccine passport if you wanted to go to a show, but you didn't have to have one if you were performing. And I did Madison Square Garden. So the whole audience had to have vaccine passports, but I didn't. And so there was a senator, I forget who it was, that was proposing a new law based on me sneaking through the loophole that performers should have to be vaccinated as well.

42:49And he was upset 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 spreader, yeah. Well, you know, in London, because I spent a lot of time over there the 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.

43:30And so I can see why it might have been a struggle to get those people back into the theater. It didn't make any sense. Like if the people are negative, they're negative. What do you give a shit if they're vaccinated? Also, what about people that got COVID and then recovered from it who have far superior immunity, 7x superior immunity to people who are vaccinated? Like, what are we doing here? Like, this is – you're doing the pharmaceutical drug companies work for them. Yeah. And you're making people follow along in lockstep. And it's just nuts. It just didn't even make sense that people were going along with this.

44:06Yeah. Yeah. Well, glad that's in the rear view mirror. Yeah, for now. But, you know, I feel like it's a case study in a lot of. I mean, if there are people that are manipulating society, and I think there are, there's a lot of lessons that they learn from how we behave. And, you know, relatively speaking, without making light of the pandemic, relatively speaking, a fairly mild pandemic in terms of like, you know, the bubonic plague and all sorts of other things that have happened throughout history. the spanish flu have killed way more people like it could have been way worse right so just one that was just twice as bad as the flu got people to behave like that yeah yeah well the good news is though um the uptake wasn't uh you know a lot of people took it because they had to it wasn't like enthusiastically taking it uh we did a play called topsy-turvy which was about lockdown and we performed that in Eastern Europe.

45:08And, um, it was really interesting to see their response there because, uh, I would, uh, one of them said afterwards, you know, I asked, uh, you know, what was the uptake on the vaccines in, in Romania? And they said something like 40%. I said, well, how do you explain that? And they said, well, you know, we lived under the Soviet union for many years, so we know how to look like we comply when we're not complying. and I said what else reminds you of the Soviet Union they said without a doubt cancel culture I said why I said well Soviet Union used to keep files on all of us right so as long as you're a good party member there wouldn't be a thing said yeah but um 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.

46:08And they felt like cancel culture was basically operating in the same way as the Soviet Union did. And it was really interesting to see that perspective in Eastern Europe, people that have 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. 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 I was doing this play embedded at the time at the public theater and we'd go out afterwards.

46:50And the New York Post wrote that I was making out with a woman under a palm tree at this club. and they just made it up and cut me in. It didn't really help my marriage at the time. They just lie. They basically lie. They'll attack you. They just decided you were an enemy and they were going to pull out whatever stops they could. They're going to discredit you in 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 matter here. 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.

47:35Like 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, It's not just stopping your ability to express yourself but attacking you in a concerted effort and lying about you, just lying about you in order to scare other people. It's very Orwellian and it's very un-American. And the fact that like the New York Post 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 gulags.

48:11Yeah. You know, they don't arrest you in the middle of the night and force you into some kind of prison. thousands of miles away. Sure. It could be worse. Yeah. But it's not, it's not along the line of the American way of life, you know, and if you, if you are a person who really does appreciate what this experience in this, this experiment in self-government, which was the United States, it's supposed to have free discourse. That's a big part of it. And the founding fathers recognize that you've got to have the ability to talk about things. Right. 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.

48:54And 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 lost opportunities in show business recently, including my ex, Susan Sarandon, who was against what was happening in Israel and lost her agent. And, you know, having a hard time finding work. This is crazy. This is nuts. Yeah. And especially someone like Susan Sarandon, 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 is what?

49:38What are you? How could you defend that? Like, how could anybody defend that? I don't even know how many people are dead. You have a complete wipeout of a city like 90 % of Gaza's gone or whatever the percentage is You look at the buildings look what it used to look like you look at what looks like now. This is defensible. Yeah. Yeah And and 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 were 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 they came for that guy yeah and you know more people see it the way he sees it now and just like what happened to you with the Iraq war 20 years from now it's going to be a universally accepted opinion I bet yeah yeah well that's just it's crazy to go through something like that and for you to have gone through it like really early on you know for you to have gone through that in 2003 I guess it really does inform your opinions though like when you see things that are happening today you go okay I've seen this before What I started looking for after that was a way to be someone that was more involved with something that could affect change.

51:15In other words, I used my nonprofit. We started a prison program 20 years ago. And we see the change that happens. 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've 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 anger. That's your survival face. That's your mask on the yard. You have to be a badass or you're going to die. but um uh sadness is compromising fear is compromising and happiness is genuinely not encouraged either uh so we get these guys in a room we get to introduce them to these stock characters from the cometa dell 'arte and then they have to express their emotions and make choices with their emotions in improv and what they find is that if uh someone approaches them in anger in an improv, the facilitator will encourage a different emotion in response to anger than anger, right?

52:33And 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. Like we get these guys into an improv where they're all putting a flower on a grave of someone and saying something under their breath about the person that's deceased.

53:26And then at some point the facilitator will say, now look at each other. And they're looking at each other with these eyes of sadness. And they realize they have a lot in common, you know, in that shared emotion. I had two guys come up to me, one black guy, one white guy. They said, we've got to tell you what happened two weeks ago. So our shot callers said, you know, we're going to have a fight on the yard. And so, you know, you never question the shot caller. And so you know this is going to happen. 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.

54:08Wow. How convenient. Yeah. 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 a real change, right? whereas for years I was asked to you know attend fundraisers and you know various causes and uh I 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 uh this was a way to get my hands dirty and really you know, get in the struggle of it.

55:06And I found it to be so, so much more satisfying as far as whatever inclination I had towards activism was, was really fed by this as opposed to hopping from fundraiser to fundraiser. 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 these programs. Did you have to develop a curriculum, like how you begin to reach out to these guys and how you set it up? It took a couple of years, you know, kind of pilot program in one prison in Chino and Norco in Southern California.

55:56Trial 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 uh 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 we're asking them to do right and uh if they can have a laugh about it and then something about it shifts some kind of consciousness inside them that that that means something to people.

56:52You've got to remember these people are, you know, when we started, there was only one other program in the state of California that was offering rehabilitation through any theater. So there was a couple music programs and two theater programs. And now we're able to lobby the state to get more funding for arts and corrections because art is a transformer. It is something that can shift consciousness. I truly believe that. I've seen it with my own work that I've done. I've seen how people can think in a different way after they see something in the theater or in the movies. A good stand-up can do the same thing.

57:39How George Carlin used to shift my consciousness every new special because he would always be challenging me. Sure. It wouldn't be like, hey, we're all in the same club. It would be, yeah, you thought we were in the same club. But here's a little thought. And you realize he's talking right at one of your hypocrisies. And that was his genius. It was his ability to really tap into we can be better. 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 where you just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action.

58:19Your best companion this summer? Visible Wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just$25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at Visible.com, plan start at$25 a month, or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save$10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGAN. Terms apply. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. Yeah, there's been a few guys like that throughout history that really figured out a way to embed humor into social commentary.

59:12George Carlin's probably the most known for it. But do you know about Bill Hicks? Yeah, for sure. He was probably in my generation, he was the one that twisted people the most. Like a lot of comics would watch him and go, what am I doing? Why am I doing what I'm doing? This guy's doing something that's so much more meaningful. Yeah. Who was it in Apatow's documentary about Carlin? There was a comedian that said... And George Carlin was basically, in the early part of the century, in 1900s, philosophers debating used to be a huge deal, right? Like hundreds of people, thousands of people come watch people debate two different points of view.

59:53He said, that's what the current philosophers of our generation are the better stand-up comedians. The ones that test your belief system by saying something that might be controversial or challenges your worldview. That's the great purpose and function of a philosopher or a stand-up comedian is to take your worldview, shatter it a little bit, and make you rethink. Yeah. Yeah. And Hicks was sort of, for our generation, he was like the first guy that really did that in a way that, like some of the things that he said weren't even designed to be funny at all. It was just designed to make you think about things differently.

1:00:38And then he would hit you with some funny things after that, to keep you occupied. Yeah. 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, too. A great movie can do that, too. Provoke you and challenge you and then make you refocus, rethink. Yeah, it's just amazing how little of that we have today. and how much content we have today. Did you ever see the documentary? God, what is it? The documentary with William F. Buckley and the other...

1:01:22Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Gore Vidal? Gore Vidal, yeah. Where they had these... I guess it was NBC, I think it was, and NBC was failing in the ratings. I was going to say Relentless Enemies, but that's the line. Yeah, the line. Best of Enemies. Best of Enemies, yeah. Great documentary. Yeah. So they had a series of these debates on television, Gore Vidal being a progressive and William F. Buckley being a conservative. Very interesting because this kind of hadn't happened before on television where you have these long form discussions with these two guys just intellectually jabbing at each other.

1:01:58Yeah. And it was great. It's like the documentary is really amazing. I was friends with Gore. Oh, really? Yeah. And he agreed to do my first film, Bob Roberts, which is about a right-wing folk singing candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania. And Gore agreed to play Brickley Paste, my Democratic opponent. And so he played a politician, which is something he always kind of flirted with in his real life. Oh, yeah. And so I got to be quite friendly with him. And I actually did a documentary that I'm editing right now about four soldiers from World War II that became great writers. Gore, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Howard Zinn are all in this documentary.

1:02:53I filmed it many years ago, shelved it, and now I'm in the final stages of putting it together. I'm opening a new website on September 1st, and this is one of the many things that I have in my vault. And my storage units that I've just been getting out over the past year and finding all this crazy stuff that I have that I've never finished because I've been going from project to project to project. So I slowed down a little bit and just opened up some sealed boxes, and it's been really fun. And it's one of the things is also I used to fuck around on film sets with this, you know, had enough money to buy a video camera for the first time.

1:03:33And 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 just went on and on and on. And so I just started amusing myself by making my own little short films, including, I'm sure, illegally using the duck itself, which I made a character in one of the films. I forgot about Howard the Duck. It was crazy. We walked on the set. What a fucking weird movie that was. I know, right? We walked on the set. I walked on the set the first day and knew we were in trouble. The puppet.

1:04:23It wasn't ready. And it was a little too cute. If you look at the comic book, Howard the Duck was not that cute. No. He was a cigar-smoking, kind of shitty, mean duck. Yeah. Kind of Fritz the Cattish-like, you know, like really kind of borderline obscene. 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, uh-oh. Yeah, he was always with chicks. He was always with chicks, yeah. Which was very weird. Like, hey, lady, what are you doing? You're fucking a duck?

1:05:08What's going on here? Bestiality? Like, what is this? What is his charm got you? Like, what's the message there? Yeah, yeah. He was a strange character. Very strange. And I don't think they had the technology to pull it off. Maybe they need to try again now. Yeah, it'd be good. They could take the old film and animate it. But, you know, I spent six weeks on that film doing an ultralight chase that lasted maybe two minutes in the film. What's an ultralight plane chase? You know the ultralight planes? Uh-huh. Basically, it's you and the wings and a motor. and so there's a chase sequence at the end that's about two and a half minute, three minute long.

1:05:51Did you actually have to get in one of those things? No. I mean, I got in, like, a fake one. Good. Yeah. No, you have to fly it. Yeah. Yeah. You have to, that's fake, of course, right? The duck's real. Looks so legit.

1:06:12Yeah. But was that one of those ones where your little voice, you didn't listen? No, not at all. Because that was early in my career. Right. So it was George Lucas. I remember. And he just George Lucas. Yeah. He just done Star Wars. Whoa. So it was it had to be good. Right. He went from Star Wars to Howard the Duck. Well, he produced Howard the Duck. OK. But he had just produced Star Wars. So, you know, it was like, hell, yeah. Right. It doesn't make sense on the page, but they'll figure it out. They'll figure it out.

1:06:50I was so lucky, too, again, blessed, because I got a movie called Five Corners that was with Jodie Foster and John Turturro right around the same time. So I had already done that movie when Howard came out. So it's kind of saved my ass. You already had one in the chamber. Yeah. You had a good one on the pipe. Yeah. Thank God.

1:07:19I 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 were on acid or something. It just seems. I just remember those poor puppeteers, man. They were trying to make this thing work. And just, I don't think the technology really existed. It was like 86 or something? Yeah, and they were trying so hard. It was, you know, I felt for everybody, including the director. I felt he tried his damn best. And it was just betrayal by puppeteering. And it wasn't the puppeteers. It was the actual machinery.

1:08:03Well, 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. Yeah. You go in there, there's all these different fucking creatures from different planets. And, like, they did not have very good technology back then. No. Like, if you watch that cantina scene now, it looks terrible. Right. It looks so clunky. Like, the masks don't move. Like, everyone's got their faces stuck. It's almost like looking at claymation around that time. Amazing what they can do.

1:08:44But I do like the old school. I do like the kind of analog version. Because with the CGI and everything, it's all so sophisticated. They can do anything now, and you almost want them not to be able to do everything. Oh, 100%. You just want a 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, 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 along those lines, who did Star Wars.

1:09:25Yeah, yeah. American Werewolf in London, that thing outside, the wolf that you see in the hallway. Yeah, yeah. That they wanted to make sure that it looked like a real thing. Right. It was a physical object. So you had a physical. So in order to make it a physical object, and obviously CGI wasn't even available back then. But you see it and you know it's a real thing. Whereas like later on, he did. They did the Wolfman and Rick Baker did that as well. And there's a lot of CGI in there and the transformation scenes. And this part of it is just like your brain's like, this isn't really happening.

1:09:58Yeah. I don't like it. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of the same way in music, too. Like when they correct everything and make the auto-tune. Yeah. Great music has a little bit of mistake in it. Yes. It has a little bit of human error. When you're hitting a chord on a guitar, 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, it was immediate. It was being done at that moment with full danger, you know?

1:10:41Which 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 maybe that was the second or third time he'd played it. ever. Or maybe the first. Which would have been even 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 voice. Like, it's just pure recorded voice. There's no auto-tune. 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 oh wow and uh they have the little uh you know cone that oh 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 ordering this from sears roebuck right and getting your first you know record and putting it on and hearing this a voice coming from this acetate it must have been magical It must have been transformative.

1:11:58This amplified song that you can dance to or fall in love to right in your living room. When did they first figure that out? I think it was early part of the 20th century. Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison? Yeah, they had this little cylinder. But when they started mass producing them in... Oh, like just records? Yeah, when was the first? I think in the 20s, maybe? I think they might have mass produced those because people had them. Just a way different player. Let's ask perplexity. What was the first record? What was the first actual record disc that you could play with a needle? Like a real record?

1:12:40I want to say like 1919. I'm just taking a wild guess. There's a famous viral video of a guy dropping that time of set us. 1931. 12-inch, 33-1⁄3. RPM disc was pressed in Victor's vinyl-based Victorlac. But that's 33 and a third. Mm-hmm. What about the 78s? Is it called, say, a 78? I think so, yeah. 23 minutes beside versus roughly the shellac. 48. Vinyl LP arrived in June 21, 1948. Columbia Records unveiled, oh, 33 and a third microgroove, long-playing record. So was that it? But in the 20s and 30s, there was a microgroove. 47 you get the 45 Oh okay 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 all the amazing Albums of the 60s You're talking about a technology that didn't exist 20 years prior Nuts So when you listen to Voodoo Child Like that technology 20 years ago didn't exist.

1:13:53Do you remember the magic of watching it for the first time? Like when you put that thing down when you're a kid and you put it on the thing and the music starts coming out? Oh yeah. Well I remember the ones where they, look at that, look at the vinyl grooves around a thousand X magnification you see the waveforms of the music itself, that's crazy. Incredible. That those little weird imagine if you were like from another civilization and you saw these things you'd be like what the fuck is this? Like, what do they have here? How did they figure that out? 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.

1:14:30You can hear banjo. You can hear drums. An orchestra. Yeah, you can hear Janis Joplin all in that. Yeah. How'd you do that? Like, what? And if it scratches, it skips? I'm really encouraged that vinyl's making a comeback. I'm really very excited about that. People love it. Yeah. It's all the difference. Like people love like wood tables. You know, people like as the world gets more digital, people want things that are organic, something that a person made, something that seems like it makes more sense. I've been finding, you know, in my search for my archive and everything, cassette tapes that I put on.

1:15:07They sound amazing. Really? Yeah, they sound really good. because, you know, there's more information in a little cassette tape than on a, you know, whether it's MP3 that's been compressed, you know, and compressed and compressed and compressed. But, you know, reel-to-reels are 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 the Highwaymen, but he was a classical musician and did choral music, and so he had a group that he would record on these cassette tapes.

1:15:57So we've been digitizing those because I'm going to put them all on my new website, a thing called Robin's 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. Yeah. So I just honor my dad. I've been digitizing also his scores, and he wrote music by hand, and so I've got boxes and boxes of that that I'm trying to transcribe and make available. Probably in about six months we'll have that archive up. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. When did they figure out how to put things on cassette tapes?

1:16:42That happened. That was around when I was in high school. I remember I had a cassette deck on my car. Yeah. And there was pretty good technology. You could buy really good microphones and plug them into a pretty good cassette player. Well, 8-track was the first, right? I think so, but those were so impractical. Well, they were huge. Yeah, plus they'd stop in the middle of a song and then go to the next track and continue. Oh, really? Yeah. I remember driving with my friend Frank, who lives in Austin right now, and we were driving back up to school, my first school, college, Flatsburg, and there was an eight-track of Bread playing.

1:17:21You remember that band Bread? Uh-huh. And this was around 1977. And he rips it out of the eight-track, rolls down the window, throws it out of this. This is, we're never listening to that again. This is, it's punk rock from this point forward. And it was, it was like a defining moment in my musical life was like Frank saying, no more bread. No more bread. He's going to put his foot down. It's Sex Pistols now. That's hilarious. Yeah. I remember my first introduction to 8-track. My friend Javier, when I lived in Florida, his mom had an 8-track player. And she had, what is that song? Who sings it?

1:18:00When my baby, when my baby smiles at me, I go to Rio de Janeiro. Remember that song? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't remember who sings it. Pablo Cruz. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. And she had a Pablo Cruz 8-track in her car. I'm like, this lady's a wizard. She's got her own music. Because before then, I think I'd only seen people play stuff that was on the radio. Right, right. And she put it in there, and she pressed the button. And I was like, this is crazy. She gets to pick what songs are on the radio? In a car? I thought it was the wildest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Yeah. Yeah. That was right. It was eight track first, then the cassette.

1:18:38And then the - The cassette was so much better. CDs, yeah. You had to flip it over, though. Pop it out, flip it over to the other side. Yeah, but those things get cooked in the sun, though. Oh, yeah. Oh, I lost a bunch. I used to have one of them big books where you had cassettes in it, one of these little vinyl things. Yep. You leave it in your car and they get fucked, and then it gets stuck in the tape machine that you had to do with your finger, where you had to try to wind it back with your finger. which I did like a month ago with one of the old cassettes. You had to stick your pinky in there.

1:19:06I just did that last month trying to re-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 mourn the loss of video stores. Oh, yeah. It was a great experience. Well, yeah, because you could go and you say, you know, I just saw this film, and there was someone that really loved film there. Right. And he could say, well, if you like that one, check this one out. Yeah. That's now been replaced by an algorithm.

1:19:44Right. And I'm not trusting that algorithm is going to show me the way to Battle of Algiers or any kind of great movies. I just, the personal was lost. Same thing with record stores. You could go in and like, what's new? And hear what's playing and, you know, talk to the guy and get what his opinion was. And bookstores, 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, 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 arbiter that is a person.

1:20:27You have the arbiter that's almost a machine. Right. You get a little bit of that with people online recommending stuff. Yeah. Which is kind of cool. You know, someone says, hey, I just saw this show. It's fucking incredible. That's true. You get a little bit of that. And then you get IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes scores, which I think does something, you know. 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 Silo's like 100 % Rotten Tomatoes. Is it really? Yeah, right now it is. That's nice.

1:21:01Once you said that, though, you put it out there. I know. Now it's dead. The assholes are going to come. I just killed it. They're going to bomb it. They're going to bomb it into oblivion. Oh, yeah? A hundred percent? We'll see about that. But 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. It's a CIA series that's on Paramount. It's fucking incredible. It's so well written. It's so well acted. It makes so many other shows seem really clunky because it's just so good. It's got so many layers to it and it's subtle and it's brilliant.

1:21:43And Fassbender is one of my favorite actors. He's fucking incredible. He's great. He's so good. He's so good in this. He plays this CIA spook. So many things to choose from. Too many. Yeah. Almost. Yeah. I mean, essentially, you could waste your whole life just being entertained. Like, it used to be difficult to be entertained, which I think there's something to that. You had to go to a place, you had to pay, buy your popcorn, sit down. You had to make an active choice in your life. Now it's 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.

1:22:20You know, like, oh, the movie starts at 7. Come on, we got to get out of here. We got to go park. We got to get there. We got to get there in time. there was a lot to it. Or the idea that if there's only three choices you might stumble into something you wouldn't have watched. Right. And be surprised by it. Oh, all the time. You'd go, what do they have at the movie theater? Like, what's this? All right, well, there's no more Star Wars tickets left so we could go see this. You want to see this? What is it? I don't know. Yeah. This guy's in it though. I like him. Like, okay. Yeah, let's check it out.

1:22:51And you would just take a guess. That's the 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 nominated for seven Academy Awards, but nobody went 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, one, Hudsucker Proxy and Shawshank Redemption, two really challenging titles. But, like, what's it about? A Hudsucker? I don't know. What's it about? Shawshank? Who knows? I had people coming up to me and saying, I really liked you in that scrimshaw reduction.

1:23:36Yeah, thank you. Especially if they don't plan on meeting you and they run into you at a restaurant. Like, that movie, that's just scrimshaw. Shimshank. Shimshank, Shawshank. What did it come out against? What other films were out at the same time as Shawshank? Was there other big movies? Forrest Gump. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Jurassic Park. Pulp Fiction. Oh, Jesus. Ace Ventura. Oh, my God. Ace Ventura, too? That's one of the best years for movies in history. Oh, my God. Yeah. Pulp Fiction. Oh, my God. But, you know, it made its way, interestingly enough, because... So, Ted Turner was running Warner Brothers at the time, right?

1:24:23and Warner Brothers produced Shawshank Redemption. And when he sold the rights to it for television, he sold it to himself at the lowest cost possible. So basically you had a film nominated for seven Academy Awards that was getting sold like it was beach blanket bullshit, right? And so it didn't cost him anything to put it on his channel. so he put it on again and again and again was getting all those advertising dollars that come with playing something on his his tv channel 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 winds up producing something quite lovely.

1:25:28Something that actually I'm really grateful for because so many people know that film and it's been like number one on IMDb for the last 15 years. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's crazy. And that was one of those movies that also took off like wildfire once it got into video. 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 i really i always remember that when you know i'm in a movie and it doesn't quote unquote perform you know i i i i'm the i'm i'm the turtle i i know the turtle can win the race yeah yeah it's uh that was something that was lost also during the pandemic and i was really worried about that that it wasn't going to come back it seemed like it was so easy to stream films at home that people just for a while it was hard to get people to go out to movie theaters yeah and the experience is very different yeah it's very different yeah it's been a struggle you know um and you know i think also a lot of producers in Hollywood or studios lost faith in their adult audience even before the pandemic.

1:26:46I mean, they were producing movies for teenagers and, you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but because they can be, that can drive an economic engine. But at the same time, you know, films like Shawshank Redemption would not get made today because they're about something that isn't about the whole huge multi-platform experience of an action movie. And that's unfortunate. And that's kind of migrated into streamers. 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, when you think about it, a season of a show.

1:27:38is 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, you know. Right. You've got to keep it under two hours. So now you have the opportunity, creators have the opportunity to create long form entertainment. Well, that I think is one of the beautiful things about some of these Netflix series is that you, like, things like Stranger 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.

1:28:15And it's essentially like a movie every week. And the story continues to progress. And you get a chance to really stretch something out. But you get the quality of, like, a great film, but you get it extended you know with these huge budgets the fact that they're able to do this so because of streaming it has opened up this long form aspect of storytelling that I think is really difficult to do in a movie Kill Bill kind of did it a little bit you have two episodes of it it's nice also as an actor like with Silo I've had three seasons the first two seasons my character represented something which completely shifts in season three.

1:29:00Oh, spoiler alert. Don't tell me. No, I'm not telling you what it is. I'm just telling you that I'm going to be looking for that. You won't even be able to guess. Okay. Good. It's such a profound 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 because I always wonder how far they map these things out. You know did he have a did they even know that they were gonna 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 it got picked up 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 mmm right so The other thing that you have to consider is that If you're an asshole they'll fucking kill you it's true writers don't if an actor is like trouble they'll kill him they will I've been told about one of the guys I worked with was I won't say his name but 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 giving him a real hard time.

1:30:31And one of them was getting in trouble because of, you know, sexual inappropriateness. One 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 we really killed off. So, you know, you don't mess with the writers in television. They wield a lot of power. Not only that, they're also looking for angles, different places to take the character.

1:31:13And if you're a douchebag, you're like, let's fucking kill this guy. Yeah, that'll be a good show. Let's figure out a way to kill this guy off. turn him into a pedophile and then we kill him you can basically you can do whatever you want here's the twist you didn't see this coming watch out be nice there's a lot 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.

1:31:58Right. Like you could kind of take like Bullet and Heat and a few. And they say, make me John Wick meets Bullet meets Heat. And this is the protagonist. This is this is what he's facing. These are the issues. And AI can churn it out in a few minutes. And then you could say, make it more like Quentin Tarantino would do it, and then it'll do that. It'll fix it in that way. That's crazy. And then you say, okay, I want it more like Kubrick aspects to it. I want some weirdness to it, some real thought, some Easter eggs, some hidden aspects to it that people connect later. And it'll do that. It can do stuff instantaneously based on, and it's kind of stealing, right?

1:32:44But it's not, right? It's making an original thing, but it's not because it's inspired by everything else that's already been made. But that's kind of what people do, but not in the same way. And we don't do it that quick either. And so for writers, it's fucking terrifying. Yeah, and who do you sue? I mean, you can't sue AI. 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. I'm writing a companion piece to the player right now, and what would happen if that character was alive today.

1:33:30And 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 the last negotiations.

1:34:19And I think that we're going to see the ramifications 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 it that way. It's way cheaper to use AI to write things than screenwriters, especially really talented screenwriters. Even though it's kind of drawing on the past creative work of really talented screenwriters. They don't get compensated for it. I think ultimately people are going to want and appreciate something that's made by a human being. Because it's one of the things, it's what we really like.

1:34:56Not just be entertained. We really love the fact that someone made something. Well, my girlfriend, Reed Morano, 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 like 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 that. I think that's a great idea, actually. I think that might be the solution is a seal. yeah i like that a lot makes sense that people you know when you see a great something that someone made what what one of the things that you really like about it is that it came from a human being's creativity 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 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 loved is like this is what is he like 25 or something like that director yeah i think he's 25 years old yeah who you know had done a bunch of youtube stuff i love it it's a complete accident yeah just has this amazing idea and you got these people who they're relatively unknown but really talented we're craving that yes yes we don't want the formula right we never have what wanted the formula and it's so maddening to try to set a movie up right now in Hollywood because what they want is they want someone an actor that's worth 20 million dollars and they'll give you 10 million dollars to do the film you get the guy that that they normally would have to pay 20 million dollars and you get him to do your film for you know 300 ,000 you got a film good luck there's no gamblers anymore that's there's no risk takers when i was coming up you know you had these guys that like actually joe you know joe roth gave me the money to do cradle rock this for you know and he says it was basically like here's the here you go kid do it i'm like really i get to do this well you know i don't wound up with you know final cut and everything, they used to do that.

1:37:14They 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 on a formula and you got your stars, it's going to, the audience is going to know it. They know it's, oh, this is prepackaged and preprogrammed for my demographic. Yeah. And I kind of resent it. Yeah. You know? Whereas something like that obsession is like coming out of left field. No one is predicting it, programming it. It's just an accident and people love it. Yeah. That's what is exciting about, you know, it's like when you're trying a new material in a club and you're like, I don't know if it's going to work, but I'm going to fucking do it.

1:38:06And 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, I don't know how much we have that experience anymore 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, I think it's probably why so many superhero movies get greenlit, right? Because it's one of the only gambles, like if you're gambling on an Avengers movie, you can't miss. Get the Hulk to smash a bunch of shit. Captain America comes in. You're good.

1:38:47You'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. They're just looking at it as a return on investment. Yeah. but you know that's always been that way to some degree but I don't know I don't know why it became such a risk to try new stuff I mean because they're not putting that much money into it you know those Marvel movies they're costing them$250 million $200 million to produce there's independent filmmakers that are proven independent filmmakers that are asking for like 5 million four million do a film so if they put some advertisement in it maybe it's going to cost them 14 million all told and you know can they make that back is the marketplace gonna support that who knows i i wouldn't want to be an investor but i also um you know i i i i have a a uh nostalgia for a time when robert altman could make a film you know yeah and uh it could just blow people's minds and then the next film he made you know as he would gleefully tell you they're gonna hate this one you know and i love that you know that and people would either 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 really 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 how does 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.

1:40:57Whoa. 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.

1:41:24Then if the movie catches fire at a film festival then they'll put the money into advertising If it doesn't catch fire at a film festival or with critics, they'll just you know, okay I already made my money, you know, we'll just sell it to You know DVDs whatever what a fucking shitty environment to create something hard. It's hard Yeah, my gal struggling with that right now. I checked out of that hotel a while back, you know I was like I I don't want my heart broken like that So I've just been doing things on my own. I've been producing things on my own, shooting them, editing them. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this website was because I've got all this stuff that is unreleased.

1:42:05And 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 Cannes 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, Mystic River, you know, that kind of like you have Warner Brothers 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.

1:42:40The 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, but nobody's seen them. Secret Life of Words, Code 46, and Catch a Fire. And they're all excellent movies. But they came at a time where the producers or the people that were distributing them didn't really want to risk the money they would take. See, that's where there's a room for like a Siskel and Ebert type character today that can find those films and say, hey, this one slipped under the radar.

1:43:24But 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, Siskel and Ebert were the guys. If they gave you two thumbs down, you were fucked. Yeah. You were fucked. Yeah. And, you know, they're very catty with each other. It was a fun thing. It's fun to watch the outtakes, how much those guys actually didn't get along. Yeah. Yep. I was lucky with them. They gave me great reviews. It was good. They had good taste. Yeah. They did. And they loved film. Yes. They clearly loved film. And they loved all aspects of it.

1:44:00And they would talk about it with great understanding and great passion, the subtleties of the performances and what really and how it was put together. Even they talk about the score. You know? Yeah. They loved it. Spend like 15 minutes on each film. Yeah. Which was never happened. And it was a hugely successful show, which is like really confusing why 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.

1:44:37There's so much content that if you had a trusted source, you know, a person who's like a real good critic of stuff, who really, not even a critic, an appreciator is a better word. Like someone who's a real passionate enthusiast of film and of, you know, different creative works that could just talk about something and recommend stuff. 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 dreck, you know, and the time spent watching these things kind of mind numbingly painful for some of these people.

1:45:20You know, imagine having to, you know, weed through the muck to get to the. 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 too Like I can't believe I'm leaving hard to do in the live theater though because when they know you're there Right, that's different. Yeah, 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 the one of the person says This is the worst fucking movie I've ever seen in my life.

1:45:49And that's what you're doing But if you want to be a person who's just an enthusiast of great stuff and just keep it on the positive side There's so much great stuff to review and so many great things from the past that people haven't seen before that you could sort of turn people on to. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that would be great. It's kind of weird that there's not someone like that right now. It is weird. It is weird. I think maybe you should do that. Produce that. No, I'm busy. You should produce that. 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 friday you know that idea that there's some exciting movie coming out on friday and we're gonna go to it yeah it was huge yeah that was huge and a movie was coming out like I guess you have it right now with the odyssey like a lot of people are that's like one of those movies that's so big people are scrambling to go see it in the movie theaters and it's getting people excited about it along with a lot of the culture war controversies that everybody that i know that's seen i haven't seen it yet it says fucking throw all that away the movie's amazing that's what i hear yeah yeah they're just like it's almost like a good way to bait people into getting really uh you know confrontational about it tired of that oh yeah real tired of it yeah Like, oh, it's not correct.

1:47:16Yeah. It's just, I'm tired of it from both sides. I don't want to hear judgment. Right. I just, help me. I don't want to be in the middle of this fight constantly. You know, it's the only, I feel like this is, again, what we were talking about before. You know, it's the, as long as we're fighting with each other. Yeah. And then we're fighting about films that are coming out. I was like, come on, guys, calm down. Calm down. Like, I don't care. It's just, is it entertaining? Is it good? Doesn't it have to be correct? Doesn't mean anything to me. There's never been a time in history where correct was important to me.

1:47:54Yeah. Or indicative of great art. Right. It's just make it good. And by all accounts, everyone that I know that's seen the movie said it's fucking incredible. Yeah. I'm going to try to see it soon. But the culture war part of it is like, at the very least, it got people excited to see it. and either to hate it or... But I know a lot of people that wanted to go hate it because they were upset, you know. But Elliot Page played this person. I don't understand that. Helen of Troy is a black lady. Like, ugh, who fucking cares? It doesn't matter. Not only that's a made-up story. Exactly. It's a myth to begin with.

1:48:31Yeah. It apparently might actually be based on a real place, though. You know, they used to think that Troy was not a real place, and then they discovered it. I think that was, wasn't it the 70s? When did they discover Troy? Because they used to think that it was completely mythical, that it was just fiction, a work of fiction. And then they found the actual real city. And they're like, oh. Like, that's the weird thing about really old stories is that, like, there's so, it's so ambiguous as to what was the root, what was the origin of this story? Was this a real event, a real place? Have you ever stood on the stage of an old Roman amphitheater?

1:49:10Yes. That's something else. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. Yeah. There's history in those stones. Mm-hmm. And, you know, we were doing a show over in Lyon, France, in one of those theaters. And we found something out because we were doing rehearsal. And when you're talking to the other actor like this, you can't hear it out there at all. Ah. And so it told us that what they were doing was this, you know, back in the old days. Yeah. They had to perform out because you wouldn't be able to hear if you were doing realistically talking to someone making eye contact. That's what's weird about early film is that early film, you have stage actors who are used to doing it with no microphones projecting now doing it on film.

1:49:55So it looks odd. Yeah. It's like there was this transitionary period and then Brando came along and Brando just did it real. And everybody's like, what the fuck is he doing? Yeah. Like he's acting like a real person. This is crazy. Him and Montgomery Cliff too. Yeah. That was a huge step forward for all of us. Yeah. To take the onus 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 that was first 1920s 727 29 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 Hustler, you have these incredible movies that they just have to figure out on the fly.

1:51:03Citizen Kane. They have to figure out on the fly how to do this. But also if you ever watch the first films, like the silent films, and the ability to tell a story without words, which was a whole other talent, But, I mean, you watch those Chaplin films. That man was insanely talented. Well, Nosferado. The original Nosferado. 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 went to see it. I was like, this is nuts. Incredible. Incredible film. What year was that film? 1922. 1922. And then Metropolis was a movie. That's a crazy movie.

1:51:46Yeah. Yeah. I love that old stuff. Oh, that's great. Those movies are great. And at the time, you've got to imagine the experience of going to see that where no one had seen movies before. This is like a new thing. You've seen things moving around on a giant screen. You're 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. Like, what? Yeah. Super cool. It is super cool. I would love to. If you could time travel and go to one of those movie theaters back there.

1:52:23There he is. I mean, one of the best vampire movies of all time, too. And so creepy. The lighting is just so good. German expressionist. Did you ever see M? Peter Lorre. It's just M? It's called M, yeah. The letter M? Isn't it M? 1931. Yeah, 1931. No, I never saw it. That's really good. What is it? What's it about? About a murderer that's stalking a bunch of people. Yeah, I was a huge fan of that whole genre of filmmaking. Well, there's something so exciting about it because when you limit the sensory input, you have to read the words and it's all black and white and there's music playing. It's a totally different thing that you're taking in.

1:53:13It'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 because of the, you know, it's black and white. So it's not real, but it is real. Right. So, yeah, it's a great, great form. We should have more of those. It's just hard to imagine that this is only 100 years old. That from there to now, this is 100 years. That'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, we kind of think it's basically the same.

1:53:52If you're born in 1520 or 1620, it's fucking exactly the same. Right. But if you're born in 1920 or 2020, a fucking completely different world you're living in. Huge. 1920, you have Nosferatu. 2026, you have The Odyssey, you know. Right. You have Dune. You have these insane films. Right. Not to mention the technology you personally possess. Yes. Right. In your pocket. Right. Any moment in time you could stream a movie. I could see Nosferatu right now on here. Yeah. Or the Robert Eggert's one, the new one, which is fucking fantastic. But it's just instantaneous. Everything's instantaneous and everything's right there for you.

1:54:30So 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 specialness of having to go out and go to a place, even go to a video store and go get it. Yeah. There's something missing. I think that that's really at the core of it though is the – I've decided this is what I'm going to do today, the whole thing, like pre this. like 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 it'll drop in your lap right if you walk down the street something will present itself but in LA when I first moved out there I realized you got to drive there.

1:55:32You got to drive and find your fun. And you have to be an active participant in your cultural life. And once I understood that about LA, I could understand how to live there. 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 i have chosen this weekend to drive 30 minutes in that direction to see this punk rock band right that 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 want 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 hey hey watch the movie i want to be fed yeah it's constantly demanding your attention or at least enticing you to take a look at it vibrating in your pocket you know yeah have you ever thought about trashing it?

1:56:47I'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 can't always just be in front of a laptop. Do you have a flip phone? No. No. I'm thinking about getting one. 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. If I go online, it's just to 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.

1:57:27But for phones, I have too many friends that are sending me funny things. There's always like some funny thing, and I go, all right, I guess I'm back on Instagram and check it out. Like, oh, Jesus, this is crazy. There's too much coming at you. And the problem is if I put it down, which I do often for like the whole day, when I pick it up, I'll get 70 text messages to go through. I know. And then I don't respond to some and some people get mad and they're like, I'm sorry. It's like it's too much. It's too much coming in. And then there's so much. Hey, look at this. Hey, check this out. Have you seen this?

1:58:02What do you think about that? You think this is real? and then the people that you don't respond to can often times take the lack of response as basically you saying fuck you and it's not the case at all you just don't have the time to do it and you read it and you liked it and you smiled but you didn't put a smiley on it you have to put a little heart it's a very strange social dynamic I'm not sure I'm very good at it No. No. That's probably a good sign. Yeah. Yeah. It demands too much. That's the problem. As much as it is interesting, if you have a wide social circle, it demands too much of your – if you have, you know, 100 units of attention that you have for use throughout the day, it demands too many units.

1:58:52Right. There's just too much coming at you. Yeah. And it'll take away from other things that you do. And that's a real problem. Yeah. Yeah, I like sitting in my garden. Is that your thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have a really good I've been gardening. Yeah, that's that's the real thing. That's my peaceful place as a real thing It's real. It's dirt. Yeah, real plant grows out life 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 care for. I have a garden in Los Angeles that I grow herbs.

1:59:37To walk down and put those herbs, those fresh herbs in the omelet you're making. It's a small thing, but it's huge. and then I have back east I planted a garden with my son this year like vegetable garden I haven't been there but he's been saying the tomatoes are coming like crazy and the cucumbers yeah there you go I really love this I love the idea that we can the earth has so much to offer us all it needs is 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.

2:00:30When you grow things and 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're doing your harvest in the fall, you have an abundance, right? And then I learned how to pickle. Ah. And that's a joy because now you're set for the winter, right? Now you've got a refrigerator full of pickled stuff. And, you know, to be able to bite into a crisp pickle that you grew as a cucumber in the summer in December, it's like, you know, this is how they survived. This is the storage of crops and how you make them survive through the winter.

2:01:16It's a skill that, well, that's why we're still here. And then you find out that pickling and fermented foods and all these 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 use the extra pickle juice for a martini. and it's fantastic. Or you could just drink it. I actually buy pickle juice. I have a company that sells you these little packets of pickle juice and you drink it because it's a probiotic beverage. Yeah, I have many jars of pickles that there's no more pickles in, but I keep the juice for drinking.

2:01:57And, you know, fermented foods and, you know, I've learned so much about the gut biome and and how to make that healthier. And all these challenges we're up against with all the poisons in our food and how to get around them and how to clean yourself out. And I just did a cleanse, one of those master cleanses I just did 14 days on where you don't eat anything for 14 days. And it's amazing how great you feel at the end of it. 14 whole days, no food at all? No food at all. Wow. What did you drink, water? It's lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup. And that'll get you through the day. But every morning you're doing a purge, right?

2:02:45So you're cleaning out. You're cleaning all the poisons out. I do that a couple times a year. 14 days is a long time with no food. It is. What's the first thing you eat when it was over? You got to ease your way back in, like clear broth first, then soups, then vegetables, then get to the next. Over how long? about a week re-entry. Yeah. Whoa. I mean, you're eating, but you're not going for the steak first thing. 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.

2:03:21The most I've done is a day. First three days are tough, but then once you get past the third day, it's pretty, it's pretty, your energy level is like constant throughout the day and you can work you i play sports with it you know i it's it's around 10 days you should stop doing the physical stuff too much exertion i can still take a bike ride and stuff but you were working out three days of no food yeah wow um you have to you know everyone's going to have their own reaction so you know i'm not advocating even to do it because 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 rid of toxins uh you're certainly not drinking you're not doing any kind of abusive shit to yourself and uh and basically your body is is thanking you by the clarity it gives you like you you're really like and the other thing that happens is i'll just start cleaning shit right so you know When I'm on a cleanse, I'm going to clean a closet.

2:04:31Because you're not only cleaning yourself, you're cleaning your environment around you. And it's, you know, 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 and just like, I don't feel good. I want to, you know, clean out. You must lose a ton of weight doing that. 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.

2:05:20When you run on, I've been on ketogenic diets in the past, and then I've been on the carnivore diet, which does the exact same thing, where your mental clarity is just so much better. Like everything just runs smooth. It's just like you were saying, you have this level flat energy throughout the day. There's no highs and lows like crashing after a big meal. Or caffeine bumps or all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, but staying up till midnight and fine. The energy's fine. And you'll sleep less too. You need less sleep for some reason. I don't know why. Also, I think it's probably good to give your digestive system a little break, too.

2:06:02Yeah. Let it relax. I mean, it's constantly work, especially if you eat all throughout the day. If you're a snacker and then you have late at night, you have a little bite to eat, wake up in the morning, you have breakfast. Like your digestive system is just constantly grinding out this food and digesting everything. Yeah. 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 very addictive. And, you know, you think, oh, it feels great when you first have it, but then it makes you pay.

2:06:43Well, 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 human history, if you wanted something sweet, you had to eat fruit. Right. You know, and now all of a sudden you've got candy bars. You have stuff that comes to you in this insane form where you have 100 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. What is it? Baskin Robbins Blizzard. Is that the one that has one? Oh, my God. That thing? Those things will mess you up.

2:07:16Oh, you get a headache after you're done. I know. It's like alcohol. Yeah. What's that expression? candy's dandy but liquor's quicker yeah you know liquor's just concentrated sugar it's 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 processed food out of our diet. Oh, wow. White bread. This was early on, like 1967. Yeah. So she was a real, you know, she really was a homeopath before it was called a homeopath.

2:08:11And wound up getting cancer and was told she had to have chemo and said, no, I'm not doing it. and kicked it herself with changing what she was putting in her body. And so I've always had her as a kind of guidepost for my health. She used to always say 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. Is she getting this from books? I think she got it from a combination of books and her faith in Catholicism. I think every religion has a fasting day for some reason.

2:09:04That seems to be something that is common to all religion, that it's important that you not eat one day a week. She wouldn't do that with us as kids. She wouldn't starve us for a day. But she did have a 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. 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.

2:09:51And back then, it was like no one even thought about suing for malpractice. It was like, that's the doctor. He's an authority figure. You can't mess with him, right? So she always approached it with a healthy level of questioning whenever she was given advice by doctors. Wow. And it's interesting. She, you know, she's always been, you know, I've always kind of wondered how she would have reacted to this recent thing and all that. But I have you ever done ayahuasca? No. Yeah. I have done DMT, which is the that's the actual compound that's active in ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT.

2:10:42Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, when they tell you to go in, when I did it, they tell you to go in with an intention. And my intention was to, you know, I was frustrated with feeling anger about what was going on in the world. And I said, I want to release that. I don't want to be consumed by that anger. and so uh i wound up in this you know the heavy duty you know um journey that ayahuasca is and my mom showed up wow yeah and um she's i it's not like you actually hear a voice but you hear a voice right you basically if she's there you know it's her she's saying something to you and what she said was you're injured you're a warrior and you're injured and you need to rest but the fight's not over oh 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.

2:12:20and I wanted out. I wanted to be absolved of that. I didn't want to be engaged in it and what she told me in the course of this thing, believe it or not, you know, I understand people will be, oh, that's woo-woo and you're just tripping and whatever but I definitely felt her presence there. It was no doubt. I went through a whole journey with her. I saw things from our lives together and there was one moment where I was, you know, I was always been curious about something that happened in kindergarten or something I don't remember. And she, you know, at one point I felt her presence and she said, you were right about that.

2:13:04I'm sorry we didn't listen to you, you know, and this kind of really profoundly deep experience. And, um, but at the end of it, I felt completely lighter and completely, you know uh 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 she's still around i've had quite a few experiences in this realm um and my mom in fact uh you know uh she she my father died uh when he was 80 and my mom was 78 and um she wasn't sick but my dad had been dying for a while and we all got down to say goodbye to him they were living in mexico at the time and we went to the funeral and my mom was very stoic and and sang very strongly my father's favorite song at the funeral and she didn't cry and we were all concerned about her we hired a couple people for when we left to take care of her and uh she was really agitated the last night and she was, I was there and she said, you know, I don't, I don't trust these people.

2:14:19I don't know if they're going to talk about you or, you know, and you're famous and all that stuff. I said, mom, don't worry about it. You know, they're just here to get you stuff if you need it. Don't worry about it. She, I go off, she wakes up the next morning. She says to my sisters who are still in the house with her, uh, everything I said last night, don't worry about it. And they said, what, what happened, mom. She said, I had a dream. She said, I was in my childhood home in Westwood, California. And I was something in my living room. I couldn't look at it. It was a stone figure. I couldn't look at it.

2:14:52It 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 choral society, people from my work, but they were all there and they all came to the door. And when they showed up, I realized everything was going to be fine. And I realized, oh my God, that was the departed that had come to say it's going to be okay. And so my sisters left. Three days, four days later, we got a phone call.

2:15:31My mom has died. She wasn't sick. And then my sister talks to the woman that was taking care of her. And she said, it was really strange. You know, the night before she died, she said, he's here. And they said, who's here? And she said, Gil, my husband, he's here. He's come to get me. And they said, no, Mary, he's not, he's not there. And she said, oh no, he most certainly is. And he looks very strong because he died feeble, goes to bed that night and passes. Whoa. So even the most cynical person in the world that doesn't believe in afterlife or anything, how do you explain that? How do you explain whatever chemicals were going on in her brain to bring her to that passing where she was going to join the person that she loved for her entire life?

2:16:26That's a beautiful thing, 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, 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 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.

2:17:09It'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. That's a real 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. That'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. What the hell is that? Or twins. Twins who have some sort of very strange connection with each other.

2:17:44When I was – my grandfather, who I was very close to, he had been dead for two months. And I had a dream about him. And I woke up like startled and I heard his voice. And he said basically, don't worry, I'll take care of it. And I didn't know what the hell it meant, but it was very clear. It was like, I'll take care of it. Fifteen minutes later, I get a phone call from Susan. And my son, Miles, who was six years old at the time, 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.

2:18:29And I was like, I know exactly what just happened. Whatever that is, whatever energy he could muster in whatever phase of being he was, he fucking saved my son's life. Heroically. I'm no doubt about that. Why would he show up and say that to me? He said, don't worry, I'll take care of it. Wow. So I totally believe this stuff. 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 ayahuasca. 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?

2:19:30Right. You know, that's not an accident. It's divine whatever, you know, whatever the divine is for you. There's another level of energy that is going around. You know, we haven't even studied how the heart communicates. you know there's that spanish or portuguese cardiologist that talks about the realm of communication in in in the electromagnetic field of the heart and what that means and how the heart can communicate and has in parts of the heart have more neurons in parts of the brain and 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.

2:20:23Yeah. Uh, but it doesn't, this guy's suggesting, no, it's electromagnetic energy. It's what makes us live longer. If we're with someone else or with a pet, you know, the, some that people that are isolated and alone are hurting and they're not having that electromagnetic connection with other people. That's why we crave crowds. That's why we 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 that's why solitary confinement is such a cruel punishment.

2:21:00So cool. Yeah. 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 the, But, you know, that's why that lockdown is cruel. 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. Some people were already filled with anxiety and they already had suffered from depression. They were already weird socially. Then all of a sudden they're just completely isolated from everyone else for a year or a year and a half, depending on where you lived.

2:21:39so 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 falling for that nonsense you know but god i mean at one point in time do you have to say well all these stories all these experiences that people have maybe there's something to it and maybe this closed-mindedness is not benefit benefiting me in anyway. Yeah. I mean, there's magic, magic in the world. I mean, there's this old way of thinking. I became, do you know what the, uh, um, uh, there's a book called the nature of things by a guy named Lucretius written in 350 BC and it's Epicureanism and Epicureanism now is about, you know, you like food, you like wine, whatever.

2:22:27Back 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. Everything that you're seeing in front of you is the first time it's happening and will never happen again. It's a collision of atoms in a particular way. They don't call them atoms, but they call them the smallest particles that create unique experiences every moment of your life. And the whole purpose of life is to seek the pleasure of that and avoid pain. And the pain can be either living isolated or without the idea of magic or indulging in something where it creates pain.

2:23:13Too much pleasure creates pain. But this philosophy in 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 frickin' cactus blooming. You know, that's like when we get so inured from that, so, you know, anesthetized from the magic, and it's all just a doldrum every day is the same, that's robbing yourself of so much right that that the idea that what if you just woke up and said hey it's fucking magic it's this is amazing first of all i'm breathing second of all look at that sun coming in the window and this is going to be an amazing day instead of like ah shit i gotta get up and you know do my fucking thing you know like no that's also relative because if you were dying in a hospital and you had this opportunity say okay I'm all you have to do is say these magic words and you'll be transported back to health in your home with a completely new perspective and a completely new appreciation for just being healthy and alive 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.

2:24:44I am so lucky to be healthy and mobile if I am, and I can just go do what I want to do and live my life and go say hi to people I love. Yeah. Appreciate it. And the idea that you can also, even if things are bad, that if you approach life that way, then you, there is a possibility of making everything better. And it has to do with humility. It has to do with being able to say, uh, I can forgive somebody for something. I can also ask forgiveness for something I've done. These, it's all about humility. It's all about a humility in the face of not only your own personal experience, but in how you view the universe.

2:25:26Like, um, I were either I'm lucky to be here or, uh, what a blessing to be able to have this life I've had, um, 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, uh, I'd met her once in my life, this Tibetan woman, she's a great singer. And she, I said, why are you here? She said, you're in trouble. I'm going to take care of you. And I didn't even know her. And I said, all right, okay. And so she did this Reiki healing on me. She sang. She wrote incense. And I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why she was there.

2:26:19She makes me a meal that evening, the 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 all clean. She says, sit down. That's the problem with you people in the West. It's all a business deal. I'm doing this for you. Can you just accept that? I'm taking care of you. Can you accept that? And she said, you will never know how to give love until you know how to receive love. And it blew my mind. Because at the time, I realized I was engaged in that kind of transactional way of looking at relationships.

2:27:08that 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 for me. And that was a person that was a total stranger, and she showed up just out of nowhere. And I said, finally, at the end of it, I said, why are you here? and she said, you have done good things for the world. We need you. And she left.

2:27:47And, you know, so 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. they are manifested as human beings but there are certain kinds of people that are there for you if you are open for it if you are closed off and cynical you will not see your angels but if you are maybe sometimes just completely wiped and you have no you know you just ready to receive it and maybe the fact that i was able to receive that i think really helped me and and helped me shift everything it's always a struggle of course it doesn't that lesson doesn't mean that i'm that way forever right but it's a reminder it's a it's it's it's that there that there is another energy in the world that is actually a energy of good we have consumed by the bad all the time.

2:28:55There's all these negative forces that are trying to bring us down. And I think that sometimes we get so defeated by those things that we are not open to the energy of the angels, the good. And when I say angels, I don't mean... I know what you mean. Yeah. Super positive people. Like 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.

2:29:51and doing it from a positive perspective and not concentrating on all these external things that could be making you angry or making you frustrated or filling you with anxiety. You'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 like we were talking about film and records as 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.

2:30:31And what are the ramifications and the consequences of using it incorrectly? Because no one's teaching that. 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. Constantly. And, you know, that's a negative thing. That's a force of evil. Yeah. Strong word, but, you know. It's the right word, though.

2:31:13You 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 you got to kind of abandon that way of thinking and just go well there's there's certainly positive and negative there's certainly love and in and evil there's those are real things and there's good there's good in the world and also the more you concentrate on other things the more your life is defined by those other things whether it's good or bad so if you're constantly thinking about bad things like Like, well, you can't have a very loving and amazing life if you're constantly inundated with thoughts about negative things.

2:31:50And 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 has got to 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 will have that butterfly effect out to the rest of the people they come in contact with. Not to mention it's really good for your health. Yes. Well, 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.

2:32:24Thank you, man. I enjoyed talking to you. I appreciate it. It was great. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Goodbye.

2:32:43Thank you.