The Joe Rogan Experience - #1911 - Mark Boal

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Mark Boal is a screenwriter, producer, and journalist. His new series, "Echo 3" is available now on Apple TV+.

The Joe Rogan Experience Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day Tell me why, tell me I mean I can give you some theories Okay, just keep this like a fist from your face And we're good to go What's your theory? Okay, wow

Do I need these? Yeah, they're better Keeps us from talking over each other locks you in holy shit you get used to it okay it's a little trippy hearing your own voice yeah yeah i did so many radio shows back in the day i just yeah it's normal to me i'll get into it. But my theory has to do with authenticity and what you represent and how rare that is. covered in other ways in the culture but you as an individual and what you bring feels and i think is it's not like an illusion very authentic and that's super rare and so shouldn't be super rare though right that's what's confusing like people should just be able to be themselves i mean there's big commercial interests in it not being. Yeah.

I mean, it's hard. There's also people read a lot of social media and they read comments about themselves and they like think about what people are saying. And then they like self-analyze too much and self-censor and self-correct. And, you know, I do all that stuff on my own enough where I'm pretty introspective and I analyze myself and I'm probably my harshest critics. I don't need a lot of other people's input on that. And when you do get a lot of people's input on that, I think people start leaning in certain directions politically and socially, and they start saying things cause they think it'll gain them favor with certain groups. And and yeah i mean the temptation

when you're doing media is to sell something yeah so as soon as you're trying to sell something you're going to get into crafting it a certain way crafting a persona do you ever come across so do you have uh those considerations when you're putting together like like the hurt locker for instance which is one of my all-time favorite movies. Thank you. It's such a good movie. Thank you. It's so good because it's so like you can see how he would be like that. You could see how he would be drawn to go back there. You could see how the pull of, and the chaos of it all.

And then there's a scene where he's, I believe he's in a supermarket. And it's just fucking boring life is just the mundane normal life and he just wants to go back to war yeah it's it and i'm like i buy it all in you know it's like it's very rare that you know you see him there's like no suspension of disbelief you buy him you're watching that film you're like whoa like i could see well that was a big part of what we were trying to do was to was to so i had been in i had been in baghdad as a reporter in 2004 i guess and um i had seen some of what what's depicted in the film. And so I had witnessed the bomb squad

going out and defusing bombs. And I wrote an article about it, and then the idea came along for a screenplay. I had the idea to write a screenplay, put it that way. And my whole thing is, over the course of a year, I didn't know how to write a screenplay, but my whole thing as I the course of a year, I didn't know how to write a screenplay, but my whole thing is I was learning how to do it. And doing rewrites was to try to replicate

the experience that I had that I felt when I was there. Okay. So to do that, there was a lot of craft and whatnot involved in how to in creating that, that I had to learn. But it also meant breaking a lot of rules of narrative and storytelling that you normally would do to make a movie effective, but that in this case would have made it less authentic to the experience. Like one, for example, is that most war movies are organized around a mission. It's like in the beginning of the movie, you're told, hey, this is what we got to do. And then the rest of the movie plays out like Saving Private Ryan or what have you. When I was in Baghdad,

one of the things I was struck by was this ceaseless hamster wheel repetition of the war, that it wasn't organized around a single mission. It was this futile attempt to try to find all these bombs that had been dispersed throughout the country by the counterinsurgency. So I couldn't organize it around a mission. I had, at least in my mind, to keep it authentic. I had to kind of make the story similar enough to the reality, which was like everyday new mission, like a kind of, you know, episodic structure, they call it. So there are all these decisions along the way that get made to create that feeling that you have where you go, oh, I can suspend, I can suspend my disbelief because this feels, this feels real.

or hanging out with these guys, talking to them, witnessing what they were doing, trying to get deep inside of it, learning about IEDs and how they work and really getting inside their mentality, hanging out with them. And then there's another point at which you kind of put yourself into the piece too. And it's funny that you mentioned the scene at the end. And it's been really instructive to me because when I was doing screenings for The Hurt Locker, a lot of times at the end of the screening, like a vet would come up.

And that scene in the grocery store where Sergeant James, that's the character name, was like kind of first time back from the war. And he's like overwhelmed by the commercialism of the supermarket and all the choices of cereal and it's not just that it's boring it's that it's like so meaningless compared to what he'd just been doing and he can't he can't function and you've seen this guy operate on such a high level for the past, whatever it is, hour and a half. Yeah, there's a scene right there. Oh.

He can't choose, you know? All this, like, consumer shit. It was such a good representation of what these guys have to go through. But my... Sorry. It was such a good representation of what these guys have to go through. But my... Sorry. And Renner is so good there, too. He's amazing. But that actual thing had happened to me coming back.

I felt this sense of dislocation, and I was only there for like a couple of weeks, but I felt this sense of like how surreally grotesque like certain parts of our wealth are after you're in after you see this poverty and you see the hardship of the war. So that was like my thing. That wasn't like a research thing. And it's just interesting. It was like totally from my heart. And I remember putting it in and thinking this is one of the rare things in the movie that like I didn't get from reporting. And it actually turned out to be one of the things

that translated the most to other people. And it kind of taught me about like, well, sometimes if you just dig deep enough, probably there's a chance anyway, that like your experiences or my experiences if you're really being honest about them and this goes back to where we started this conversation will translate to other people even if you don't even if you think they're super hyper fucking specific to you yeah does that make sense yes it might be hyper so that's what i'm so relatable

it's relatable because it is in retrospect but at the time i was like this is just a weird thing that happened to me no but you nailed it because you because in the context of the movie you know you see that this guy is i mean every time he's diffusing a bomb this could be it and he's over there in this this chaos ridden war zone and then he comes back and he's wandering through a supermarket aisle it was perfect it was the perfect juxtaposition and it really does you you you do relate to it because i think all of us are aware that you kind of get accustomed to whatever you're around. You get accustomed to chaotic home life or a peaceful home life. You get a very busy workplace where people are yelling at each other and everything is constantly moving fast or boring, droning, cubicle life. People understand that there's certain ways of living and existing that you can get accustomed to.

And they kind of make sense when you've adjusted and adapted to them. But then to have such a clear difference between being in a war zone and being in a supermarket, it was perfect. Well, thanks. I'll take that. Yeah, no, it was really good, man. Well, thanks. I'll take that. Yeah, no, it was really good, man. It's like, what does it feel like to have the responsibility of trying to relay

one of the most complex aspects of human life, which is war? It's funny, when you said perfect, I just flashed on, not to not answer your question, but I remember there was some reviewer at the time that called it a near-perfect movie. Oh. And I remember calling him up and being like, near-perfect? What the fuck? Like, is that near really necessary?

Well, it's... Because I want to put it on the... I wanted to put it on the DVD. Anyway, we did. We left it on there. It's still... I mean, you know, it's hard for someone to say something's absolutely perfect.

No, of course, and it's stupid. Yeah. it's perfect but that's what he does when you said perfect what the fuck bro near perfect what's near yeah what more do you want yeah no i do feel the sense of responsibility i mean i think that uh i think we're all responsible i think whether you're doing a topic like that where i tend to do real life stuff, although this most recent thing is fictional. I think that anybody in the media has a huge sense of responsibility that comes with the territory, whether they feel it or not or take it on. I don't know. I think it would be nice if we lived in a world where people felt more responsible because i think a lot of what is put out there is very irresponsible and i'm not even talking about like with true

stories of like history where you're distorting history that's obviously irresponsible but there's so much of our cultural production the corporate production that is, in my view, irresponsible. I take the responsibility seriously just because I know in that case, there are people that were still downrange and in harm's way. So there were all kinds of things that I was careful to not depict because I didn't want to put anybody like that's the most basic level of responsibility, right? Nobody should get hurt because you burned some classified thing. So like in terms of like tactics that are used tactics or like there was, um, at the time in the war, there was, there was a, um, there, there was this like jamming system that was, that help prevent like remote detonation of these IEDs, electronic jamming systems.

And I didn't depict that at all. And then after the movie came out, a bunch of army guys were like, that wasn't realistic. I'm like, yeah, I mean, it is super realistic. But yes, I left some things out. Because, yeah, that makes sense. Because people called me and they're like, dude, I mean, it is super realistic, but yes, I left some things out. Because, yeah, that makes sense. Because people called me and they're like, dude, you can't put that in. That would be bad. Yeah.

So there's that level of responsibility. But then there's another responsibility to more like mystical things like truth and history, which I also feel pretty acutely. When you talk about irresponsible depictions, what do you mean by that? I mean, I think that media is really important to our culture, to our civilization. And one way to think about it is like, there's more responsibility now around, let's say, portraying diversity.

We've gotten a lot better at at least trying to make movies and television shows that are more reflective of like what the country really looks like but there's other areas where i don't see that same level of responsibility one is like the obvious one that that the right talks about all the time is like depiction of guns and violence where there's just so much and i i mean, I have violence in this show. I'm not like saying like, and I'm not like anti-firearm or anything, but there's so much irresponsible kind of taking heavy shit that has real consequences

and aestheticizing it is irresponsible to me. It's fucked and um and and there's that's a kind of abuse of i think of like the responsibility that that that comes with the power of telling stories when you're telling a story like in a way it's it's a kind of like remote teaching you're kind of putting something out in the world and saying like this is how it is so that's that's another one is like plot teaching you're kind of putting something out in the world and saying like this is how it is So that's that's what another one is like plot people abuse plot all the time which which kind of bugs me because If I'm telling you a story and I and the plot is so radically disconnected from how things really work I'm not talking about science fiction

But even within science fiction if I pause it to you like here's here are the set of rules of this story and then i break them i think that's really irresponsible because it's fucking with people's heads it's like making them dumber in a certain way that i mean it would take me a while to explain but these are the kinds of things that i think about sometimes no it makes sense like you're trying to do a film that's impactful but it's also you it's it's easy to follow because you understand that this is how people behave and this is how it really go down here's an example like if i made a movie about iraq where you ended up feeling like really good about the war.

Like a feel good movie about the war. Yeah. Happens all the time. Yeah. You know, I think that's irresponsible. Not that there aren't like amazing stories of heroism and not that there aren't moments about that war to feel good about,

but the overall gist of it is it like was um a catastrophe how is it managing that when you're dealing with studios and executives and all these different people and you know like they is it difficult to get people on board with what you're trying to do? You're really trying to make it authentic. I don't really – typically I haven't really messed with any of that stuff. That's good. We made those movies – Catherine Bingham and I made those movies like independently. Oh, that's nice.

So we had – Well, that makes sense. It was like very cowboyish. I mean we had financing from from a whole bunch of different places like we pre-sold the foreign rights so this is getting inside baseball but we never had to deal with like a fox or a universal or a sony and even when we made zero dark 30 that was financed by one person me Megan Ellison, who just wrote a check. Jesus. What a gangster.

Yeah. I love Megan. Shout out to Megan. Yeah. That's a crazy move. How much did that movie cost? It depends if you include the production budget. I think it was around $40 million.

And then promotion, I think she put up another $20 something. Yeah, it's pretty big money. Luckily it worked. I know. I lost a lot of her money on Detroit. Oh, did you? But she made a lot on Zero Dark Thirty. Yeah, it's interesting

what catches and what doesn't catch in the movie world. We were talking the other day about The Northmen, about how it's probably one of the most realistic depictions of what

it must have been like to be living as a Viking. There's no traditional, normal modern day superhero type people. There's no, like, traditional, like, normal modern-day superhero-type people. There's no... Everyone is, like, this chaotic person from history filled with flaws, filled with... It's so realistic,

but yet it didn't really do that well. It didn't? Supposedly. That's what I've been told. I don't know. He's a good filmmaker, that guy. Yes. He's a serious filmmaker.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes it comes down to scale. I don't know what the budget of that movie was, but I know that it was big. So sometimes it's like, I think about this a lot. It's like you want to spend, you want to be able to get back what you spent. And the temptation is always to go bigger, but then that puts a higher expectation on the movie's performance.

When you've had a series of successful films, is there ever a moment where they come to you and say, listen, what do you think about doing like a big blockbuster action movie and kind of bringing some of that nobody ever fucking asked me that no no they never do i mean i did i i did some like script doctoring for a while which is kind of the closest i've come to that which was great because it was crazy good money where you come in and they're like okay you have a week they pay you by the week or two weeks can you like give the bad guys some different lines of dialogue or something like that or like can you fix the third act so i've done that but um nobody's ever said here's our prized piece of ip here's like spider-man whatever right to

you know we want you to shepherd it through no the thing is that would be a great story for like the media like we've taken this guy who does these very authentic films and we've applied him to you know yeah it'd be a good story but they don't they don't need that they don't want that like you know what i mean if i'm running one of those companies i wouldn't hire me like you don't want to have that conversation you're just like dude here's how we do it we have a we have a playbook okay it's worked every fucking time and we're gonna do the same playbook again and i'd be like well yeah but can't we change it up and what if we made it more realistic and what if we tried to like make it more authentic they'd be like bro we're selling toys yeah for kids they they are but adults watch it too that

would be the temptation the temptation well every once in a while you get like a chris nolan or somebody that has the in like insane artistic chops and also like the marketplace power with a number of like to to change it up like the watchman yeah or like the watchman's a good example too but like he did it with dark night yes but that's unusual yeah and those and those systems i mean they're they're factories you know so i had a hard enough time just making this at Apple. So I don't, I mean, not that they weren't great, not to talk any shit about them, but those are really industrial products when you go and watch a Marvel movie. Yeah. And there's a limit to how much any one person, any one filmmaker can or writer can really change

what they're trying to do with their product so it's ultimately i mean the money is great but it's ultimately not that it's a different it's not that interesting it's just a totally different thing kind of yeah yeah it'd be like asking a comedian to write a song. Yeah. It's just, they're both entertainment, but it's just like one of them. It would be asking you to be like, Hey, why don't we just, I'll give you like double what you're making now, triple what you're making now, but we got to, you got to just like condense this shit up. Right. You got to just get to the good stuff and you're going to have 15 minutes with

each guest, 10 minutes with each guest. We're going to put you on NBC. You'd be like, I don't know if you could do that. I'd be like, how much money? You'd be like, I'll do it. I might be able to do this. You can figure it out. No.

Yeah, it is interesting. You might be able to do it, but you might not be as good at it. That's the other thing. It wouldn't be the same thing. Yeah. There's a thing that people like at a podcast that it's a hang. It's a conversation.

That's what the people that are listening right now, they feel like they're here with you. That's what they like about it. It's like if I was in the room, things wouldn't be any different. It would be the same sort of thing. It's not like there's a lot of people standing by with bated breath, staring at clipboards, making sure notes get hit and all that kind of shit will, yeah, that'll ruin the final experience for the people that are listening to it.

The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the more influence, the more different ideas, the more commercialized it becomes. You know, the beautiful thing about this show is there's no, no one has any influence. Zero.

So it's just conversations. That's what, like, I think resonates with people. They're just listening to people talk and just two guys having a conversation about his art. Yeah. think you're so comfortable in your skin that you don't you don't modulate to like hit a note which is which is what is so much of the culture right now i don't think you can because people know it they know when you're doing that like they feel it yeah they feel like oh he's kind of bullshit in here yeah you know like you can get it but the thing is like that's the format if you're on late night television.

That's like, you have to do that. People love it. Yeah. So it does work. Yeah. It's just, it's just like, unfortunate,

I think. Yeah. I think it is. It is, but it's, it's interesting that there's these new, like,

that's one of the things that's interesting about the success of your work. It's like, there's something about authenticity and something about,

there's an audience for everything. There's an audience for everything. There's an audience for the selling toys, Marvel movies. I love those movies. They're fun. Yeah.

I like to watch the Hulk smash it. Yeah. It's exciting. Yeah. But there's a giant difference between the way you feel about that

versus Zero Dark Thirty or versus the Hurt Locker or this new thing, Echo 3, which I haven't had a chance to see because it comes out Friday, right? It comes out.

On Friday, the fifth episode will be out. It on Apple TV so it's up now it's out on Apple TV and why did you decide you have to actually have Apple TV yeah or you could sign up for a free trial and watch my show oh you do that you can what you can can, there's a seven day free. It's like six bucks to her seven bucks a month. I can't believe I'm shilling right now for the Apple corporation. They clearly need it. It's like worth two and a half trillion. They do. They have two and a half. They're not doing that well. No, they're only in everyone's pocket. So if you could just give them six or seven, I think it's 699 for the trial or no, the trial is free for every month at 699. I've seven, I think it's $6.99. For the trial? No, the trial is free.

For every month it's $6.99. I've had it forever. It's the best. I love Apple TV. I'll chill for them. Just fucking sign up for the trial. Here's my proposition if you haven't. Sign up for the trial. You'll watch.

You'll get the first six episodes if you signed up today. And then you can decide if you want to go pay the $6.99. So watch it for six hours and then cancel it. No, then pay $7 and watch the last four hours. Then do whatever the fuck you want. There it is right there. So tell me how this came about. And what are you trying to do with this?

Well, the biggest thing about this is it's um it's um 10 hours it's a tv it's a tv show but i was trying to think of it more like a movie so it's like a everybody says this everybody says 10 like they're making a 10-hour movie it's like a thing right now people say like o are yeah, this really is a 10-hour movie in the sense that the way most TV is structured is It's just designed to get you to click every hour or half hour is designed to get you to click on the next hour Obviously right so That entails all kinds of things with plot and with how you have to set things up

and resolve them within the hour and then leave other things hanging. And what I like about movies is it's just one thing. So the idea here was maybe audiences are ready for something where in the first hour you're getting into the story i mean there's crazy action it's not like it's boring but you're getting into the story it's not it's not like meant to resolve something in that first hour and then in the second hour you're getting a little bit deeper and you're learning a little bit more and then in third second hour, you're getting a little bit deeper in. You're learning a little bit more. And then in the third hour, and it keeps changing over the course.

And where you end up, I guarantee you where you end up in the last hour is not where you would have ever imagined in the first hour. Even though there's a lot about this that seems like it's about a woman that is kidnapped. So it's like a high-pressure situation. She's kidnapped. And I kind of was thinking like, how would I tell this story, which is a fictional story? I mean, it does happen, right? Like today. But how would that really go down if somebody was held in a foreign country, in this case in Venezuela? What would really happen if, as a couple like complicating factors, the woman who is kidnapped, who's a brilliant scientist, The woman who is kidnapped, who's a brilliant scientist. She's interested in, she does research into psychedelics. She's a psychopharmacologist. She's down in the Amazon looking for psychoactive compounds for research, for addiction research.

research, but she also has like this relationship with the CIA, which is a little bit unclear what the depth of the relationship is. So that's who gets kidnapped. How would she go through that in real life? Like if we take that as a hypothesis that something like that could happen, which clearly it could, it's not like every day, but Americans do get rolled up in foreign countries. How would she move through that experience and what would the experience be like for her? And then what would happen if the two people closest to her, her brother and her husband, were both in special forces? And how would they deal with it in real life?

Not in Taken, I like Taken, but not that version, but how would they actually deal with it in real life? Not in Taken. I like Taken, but not that version. But how would they actually deal with it? And the idea was to make a 10-hour movie with that as the plot engine. And then put inside of it pretty much everything else i've been thinking about for the last 10 years like all my other interests like slammed into that plot which is which is kind of a capacious enough story and a clear enough story because it's like obvious like what you want to see happen you want them to get her out right when you say all your other interests what do you mean by that well just, just whatever else I've been thinking,

like I've been thinking a lot about other shit besides kidnapping. So I mean, it's a story about family. Okay. It's a story about their relationship, the relationship between husband and wife. It's a story about honesty. It's a story about love.

It's a story about how couples lie to each other and what the price of lying is. It's a story about men and how men relate to each other. In that these two guys know each other well because they're in the same unit together, but they also have a somewhat complicated past. And they have this mission that they have to deal with that's not like a mission that has been given to them by the government. So it's not like a mission that has been given to them by the government. So it's not like their job. So it has a different quality to it because it's their, it's their person they love most in the world. And,

and so it's about how these two guys interact with each other. It's about representations of masculinity, which is something we can talk about. It's about how the fucking world works. How would the CIA respond to a situation like that? One of the things was like, there, there was always these conversations. I was writing the script, like, who are the bad guys? Who are the bad guys? You always need a bad guy, particularly in a kidnapping story. the bad guys you always need a bad guy particularly in a kidnapping story the bad guys are obviously going to be the kidnappers but you know i think a little bit about kind of trying to when we talked about responsibility trying to try to like get rid of some of that black and

white thinking and give people something that has a little more gray in it and so one of the things we do in the show is like i'll put you inside the room of the rebels who are involved in the kidnapping i'll i want i want you to understand who they are and where they're coming from because just making them like mustache twirly bad guys isn't really it's not really going to be that helpful to my final ultimate goal, which is to put you at the end of this 10 hours in a place that you didn't see coming and give you an experience that you didn't really think you were going to have and a series of thoughts and emotions that probably you haven't had in exactly this way before. But if I give you the same shit you've always seen and i'm like oh here's the bad guy this is how

the bad guy behaves you know that you've seen a million bad guys then it's very hard for me to like at the end of it give you a new emotional response and that's like or a new psych or a new thought process and so i don know, that's all the shit. That's some of the shit I've been thinking about. What is the difference in the challenge of putting together a 10-hour film, essentially, that's broken into one-hour increments, versus a traditional film format? How much different is your process?

And how much more planning is involved? And how much more time? It's five times as long, obviously. And that's just like – I didn't really know because when I started, I just thought, oh, it's just five times. But it's like five times as long but like 100 times harder because – And connected. Yeah. Yeah.

It's – I mean the biggest thing is the delivery system, I would say is the, I don't know that my process changes that much, but see in a movie, I have you, if you pay the money, if I can get you to pay the money and you go into a theater, okay, this is dating back before people just stayed home. But let's say back in the day when people still went to theaters, I have you, you're not likely to walk out unless it's fucking terrible because you pay the money, you've parked your car, you're going to sit. Now, the fact that I have you somewhat as a captive audience is a huge advantage to me because it means I can like disperse out effects in a much more calibrated way. I don't have to give you like a dopamine hit every 30 seconds because I'm not trying to keep you in your seat and I can tell a much more complicated story and challenge you a lot more. When it's TV, I don't fucking have anything of your attention, right? Like you could be streaming it in the kitchen making eggs. You could be like on your – it could be on your phone. Spending like weeks building the most bitching special effects, realistic action sequence ever committed to television, which I think we've done here and there in terms of the realism of the combat.

Like in the beginning of the of this of of episode one, there's like a 15 minute action sequence that takes place on a snowy mountain. Afghanistan meant to be Afghanistan. And it's guys fighting in the snow, which we really haven't seen that much of. And there's Black Hawk helicopters and 50 caliber machine guns. And it's beautifully shot, the best sound mixing in the world, like the sound of the bullets ricocheting off the mountains are sick. And an enormous amount of energy went into making sure like this, all the snow match, like the snow that we got on that day Match the visual effects of the fake snow for the days. We weren't there if you're watching that shit on your phone, right?

It's just like you're just gonna be like, oh, what's this? How frustrating is that? That's how people consume films Well, that's the advantage of a film like that. So to me, it's like i work the same way but but the audience is like like openness when you're in a movie because you're is totally different when you're in tv so tv tends to be a lot more pushy and salesy in terms of how the storytelling goes because they're like it's not like you have somebody for two hours you have somebody for two minutes before they decide to get up and go to the fridge. Yeah. Or change the channel. Like, how easy is it just to change the channel?

Yeah, or stare at your phone while you're at home. Whatever. It's fucked. It's so hard. I kind of blew all that off, like, maybe stupidly, but I kind of was thinking to place the bet that there are audiences out there that want something really dope and that are willing to hang in there and give their attention to it. Most certainly. And it's also like you can't play to the people that are not going to pay attention, right?

You have to kind of create it for the person that's going to be deeply embedded in the experience. Yeah, you just don't know how big that audience really is until you go out there. Yeah. What did you mean when you were talking about masculinity? in the experience. Yeah. You just don't know how big that audience really is until you go out there. Yeah. What, what did you mean when you were talking about, um, masculinity, when you were talking about like depictions of masculinity?

Um, it's just something that I was thinking about because, um, the, the characters in this, I mean, I've been interested in that for a long time. I mean,

the, the, the character in The Hurt Locker has a lot of very classically masculine traits. Sergeant James, you know, he's very, like, incredibly brave and stoic. and stoic and in a way one of the themes of the her locker was like deconstructing that and showing that some of his heroism was like a flight from intimacy because in the end he like leaves his wife and child to go back to fight and then zero dark 30 was a little different because that had a very strong female lead but this this show has these two guys who are like hyper-masculine because they're meant to be in CAG and Delta. They're meant to be like the, among the best of the best of America's fighting force.

So as an opener, most people will look at that and be like, these are real fucking men. And then the question is like, you probably know this because you have like, it seems like you have like some team guys in your life or, you know, around the office. Most, most usually depictions of, of, um, soldiers or operators are pretty often pre like cartoony. And I think that right now in the culture, there's a lot of talk about like a crisis of masculinity. I don't know if any of your guests have ever talked about that, but there's this idea in the culture right now that, you know,

post me to men, particularly white men are, are like kind of a drift in this like, feminist environment where they feel like they can't be themselves. Like there's this term toxic masculinity and we can talk about whether or not that's true and how big of a problem that is but what I don't think is really debatable is if you look at like the net amount of like images in the culture there really aren't that many in portrayals of men right now that are that both where that where the men both embody like classical masculine traits and are also pro-social like they're not assholes right yeah they're not

mutually exclusive they're no but they are they're not mutually exclusive right but they are often but media depictions in media depictions they are unless it's like a superhero. Yeah. So unless you have like blue lightning coming out of your ass, it's hard to find, you know, and that wasn't always the case. Like if you look back in the history of movies, you see all kinds of portraits of men who are, have a more like nuanced kind of portrayal. So that's something that I was thinking about here. Like these guys in the, in the, the characters in the show, like relate to each other emotionally,

but they also like are very handy with like an M four. That's not something you really see very often. And I think that there's an interest in that. I think there's a hunger for that. It's sort of what I think is part of why you're, again, this is not to take anything away from like your intellect or your humor or anything, but I think it's part of why like people gravitate to you

is because you represent, I think, a certain kind of masculinity, which is rare. I don't know that it's rare like in the world, but it's like rare in the media culture in that you're, like, very, you know, you're not, like, one of the big differentiators. I think men and women, by the way, are, like, more the same than they are different.

Like, there's, what makes a good man and what makes a good woman are, like, the same things, right? Like, we want men and women to be kind and like compassionate and curious and responsible. Those are all. But there are certain traits that are, you know, modulated by testosterone that are much more inherently male than female. Like violence is one of them. Yeah. female like violence is one of them yeah and i mean if you look at like any social metric around the world like 95 of the heavy heavy like murder type crimes they're like committed by men

but the other one is like um an appetite for risk and danger is also like i'm not a scientist but my understanding is also associated with that molecule testosterone that men have that women just don't have as much of right and acts on your brain it acts on your behavior so you know and that's something like violence is something that's like a kind of a part of your like public persona i mean it within the context of a sport obviously mm-hmm and it's just rare that you see that coupled with vulnerability coupled with intelligence and so when it you know or any kind of like imagination, let's say I'm talking again, I'm talking about portraits in the media.

So for me, as I was thinking about these guys and I have 10 hours, so there's plenty of time to get them to like, to show them in different ways. It was like, what would it be like to show not only what these guys would really do in terms of tactics, but how would they actually behave how would they actually talk to each other so anyway that was the idea yeah that's a an interesting dance and i would imagine that you have more room to do that in a 10 hour thing than you would in a two-hour thing like you you can you have more room for nuance you have more room for nuance and you have more room for i wouldn't say you have more room for nuance i would say you have more room for like more characters too like in 10 hours which is

great because that i mean allows you to present a more complicated picture of the world. Yeah. So that's cool. Like I can go off and take you inside the CIA. I can go take you in the, you know, behind the scenes of how Venezuelan military intelligence is thinking about X, Y, Z part of the plot. And a lot of that would... And I can... A lot of the show is in Spanish.

I mean, it takes place in Colombia. And I can bring you into these, like, Colombian characters, Colombian journalists. A lot of that stuff would not survive in a two-hour movie. So it is nuanced, but I don't...

I think it's, it's more like scope is like the great advantage of TV. If you take advantage of it, we have so much room, you have room for complexity. Yeah. For complexity. Yeah. It's like this conversation. Yeah. It's gotta be like very satisfying in that regard to have that kind of a palette as, as opposed to the traditional format of a film. It is. It's cool. It's cool. It's interesting. Do you find, do you think you'll be doing more of that? I mean, I, I want to do both, you know, hopefully I'm not, hopefully they don't take away my, they don't take it by bus pass and fucking make me walk. No, you know, I want to be able to do both they each have their virtues i mean in a way the

distinctions are becoming less and less meaningful you know because now like movies come out and then they go straight to netflix and vice versa i don't know it's all just a big soup i'm just more focused on like what's good whatever the format is it's a big soup but i feel like what's good, whatever the format is. It's a big soup, but I feel like what's good gets discussed. And that's one of the great things about today with social media is that things don't even have to get promoted in a traditional sense. They get promoted by the people that actually enjoy it. People start talking about things on Twitter and Facebook, and next thing you know, people are watching it just by word of mouth.

Yeah, that's like a whole part of this. I don't understand that stuff at all. You don't have to. I don't know. I mean, I know it exists. I'm just like, I don't have that like Facebook, Twitter. You don't have any of those things? No.

Like Instagram too. I just went on TikTok recently. Oh no. That's the worst. Oh my God. No, it's amazing. That's the worst oh my god no it's amazing that's chinese spyware i know it is but like i mean really is i know it really is like really should be illegal there there i mean everyone's already so up in my shit i did i

spent two years investigating preparing a piece on trump and russia where i like went to the ukraine like my my my that's dude that that horse left the barn a while ago what was the chinese can have what they want it's getting fucking lying there's nothing in there anyway what was that like you you spent two years yeah i was trying to make i wanted to after 2016 after trump was elected i i did a uh it didn't get made but i did a lot of research into like his whole, the whole Russia story. And, um, and then, um,

wrote a script and sold it to Showtime. And at the last minute they killed it when Showtime got bought by Viacom. Damn. Um, yeah, it was, what was, what was your take on that?

Like, cause like I have the most cursory understanding of Trump and Ukraine and Russia and the Biden laptop and Burisma and all that shit. I just, I'll watch a few YouTube commentators talking about it. I'll read a few articles in the Atlantic and I don't know what's real. Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't, I don't think anybody really got it, um, really got it right. I mean, the, the, it's kind of the problem with the media today. The narrative that started about collusion that the left just like fucking doubled down on

and tripled down on was kind of not really right in the beginning. And then when the evidence didn't bear fruit to what they had been proposing, people said, well, then there's like nothing here. So it's a super complicated story, but it hasn't really been told. I mean, that's definitely for sure. Why did they kill that? That seems like a fascinating take.

I would love to see your take on it. I think that they thought it was like probably bad business why well i thought it would be cool to like you know fuck with the sitting president on tv you know i was like television's never done this before this can be like a me and they were like yeah that's not that's not a smart idea bad for regulation it's just like you're a multinational company with business before the fucking government. Just no. Have you thought about doing that independently? Yeah.

I mean, I should have. I should have done. Yeah, I should have done it independently. I should have done it independently. Maybe it'd be good now because time has passed. The thing is that every day something else crazier happens on that story. Right. On the Trump story. Like every week he's doing something else where you're just like, that's even fucking crazier than the shit I wrote down.

So it's hard to keep up with it. But, you know, Russia isn't going anywhere. And there are people are starting to realize now some of the stuff that that was even pretty obvious in 2016 about how about how much they're committed to like security and adventurism and like pushing out. That's not going to change anytime soon. Adventurism. It's just like I just mean like military like trying trying to use their military to like get shit it's like a historical term but like it just that's what they're that's what that putin has has has been and i'm by no means like an expert so i'm really talking out of my ass right now but putin has what i understand is that putin has like basically failed at a lot of other typical things that people do.

Like Russia has not been able to build a technology sector. We don't have one. Like we're not driving Russian cars. We're not like Russian computers. They don't have like a, the energy sector is good. But they haven't really built, he hasn't really been able to build that much. What do you attribute that to? I don't think he's very good at it but he's good at security so he puts like a lot of energy into like military military intelligence like propaganda security fucking with other

people's elections which they are pretty good at like they definitely yeah they're really good at it they kind of are the best in the world at it. That's the most fascinating aspect. I mean, they fucked with ours pretty heavily, especially on social media. Yeah. And people are like, oh, they're in Trump's pocket. Well, this is what they do. They undermine democracy. They get people fighting.

Yeah. And they consistently go into all these places where people communicate and debate ideas and they do it with bots. Yeah. And they, they make some points outrageous because they connect them to preposterous points. They, they, they do something where they undermine our trust and that's the overall long game goal is to undermine democracy. It's not simply to get a puppet in office like that was the simplistic version yeah what they're trying to do but when you you know we we did a story we covered a story recently where they found out that 19 of the top 20 Facebook Christian pages were run by troll farms in in in

Russia and it's like wow that's great that's amazing. They're just trying to get people radicalized and trying to get people to be polarized to the opposite side and trying to divide us as much as possible and undermine any faith that we might have in the way we have our elections and the way the government is run. It's like a consistent effort to undermine our faith in the way our democracy works. Yeah. And they would argue that it's pretty easy to do because we're already at each other's throats. And it's all accentuated by things like TikTok and Facebook and social media and the algorithms. I mean, so far, my TikTok is pretty innocent. What do you get? Well, you know, I clicked on the stupidest shit. But are you comfortable with them, like,

fully having access to all of your passwords and every keystroke you make on your phone? No, that freaks me out. I mean, I was, I, one of my earliest interests as a journalist was privacy. I was writing about internet privacy in like 1997. Oh, wow. Okay.

And I realized that this whole thing that was coming for our convenience was going to be a giant system that, that really in the name of convenience took away our privacy. Like you can, you can go through the internet without, without giving all your privacy. It's just not, it's just a huge,

hugely inconvenient thing to do. And that troubles me a lot. I mean, I think privacy is really, really important, but it's weird because I, at that time I was lot. I mean, I think privacy is really, really important, but it's weird because at that time, I was really concerned about, like, corporations spying on people,

gathering people's information and using that to target them with products, and the reason that's bad, it's not that I care if, like, you get targeted with a product, but the reason that's bad, I think, just socially is, like, it leads to this winnowing of like what your like worldview is because you're always just getting pumped the same shit you already believe in right and you

don't go out there and hunt and gather anymore so that so i was like oh that's really concerning because it's gonna because it's gonna it's gonna like diminish like our ability to like have like diverse opinions but then what i didn't really anticipate i don't think anybody really anticipated this was how many people were willing to just give their privacy away like just throw it away yeah and so it's like yeah it's fucked to be spied on but the truth is like they're most people are dying to have their lives shared with the world, at least the young ladies I see on TikTok. And there's this tremendous amount of exhibitionism and this tremendous like desire to like share every aspect of the self

or at least like a persona of the self. And that is kind of unprecedented in human history. That's never happened before. It's like a persona of the self. And that is kind of unprecedented in human history. That's never happened before. It's like a giant social experiment. Yeah. And I guess I'll sound old by saying that I think it's probably might not end well. But I don't think anybody really saw that piece of it coming, the exhibitionism. My hope is that it it does have

negative aspects to it and it does lead to a lot of mental health problems it does lead to rampant narcissism it does lead to a distortion of what is actually important in life um but that we'll adjust and that people will recognize it for what it is. And it'll become a thing where people understand the pitfalls of it, like we understand the pitfalls of alcohol and drugs and all sorts of other things. It's like we'll kind of get a sense of what it is and what it does. And I think it kind of snuck up on people where it didn't exist before. There's no playbook, right?

It's like in all of human history, there's never been a time where you could be a TikTok star or a YouTube star or whatever and have all of your life exposed to the world and also reap tremendous financial benefit from that and maybe even more significantly, tremendous amounts of attention and capture, audience capture, which is you're being molded and influenced constantly by the people that you interact with.

And I've been able to see that from the difference between people who read comments and interact with fans and are deeply embedded in their own, you know, air quotes, community versus people that are just kind of independent. They just do. They just are interested in what they're interested in. They just talk and they've maintained some sort of personal sovereignty through it all. You see a very different trajectory in the way their content goes. And the people that are constantly interacting and constantly reading

comments and responding to comments and taking in those comments, they become more homogenized. You become more in line with whatever the zeitgeist is telling you. It's very difficult to have independent, individual perspectives that are unique. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's one of the obvious downsides, but what about the people who are not even making it?

I mean, you're, I think you're talking about people that are like successful and that have like careers. Sort of, but even people that have, what about just someone that has like, yeah,

like 2000. It's all the same. I really think it's the same. Cause even someone who has 2000 followers, it's like you're interacting with 200 people in the comments versus 20,000, whatever. It's all the same. I really think it's the same because even someone who has 2,000 followers, it's like you're interacting with 200 people in the comments versus 20,000. Right. But it's the same thing. You're interacting with all these people that are also connected to this web of people

that are thinking and behaving a certain way because there's reward for that. Yeah. So how are we going to grow out of that? Well, that's what's crazy is because it's also being influenced by China. It's being influenced by these Russian troll farms. And also, I guarantee the United States is doing it as well. Why would they not? Like, we know they do because there's a bunch of bots that retreated and reposted, rather,

without reposting it, by just posting it individually. The very same message about Elon Musk when he took over Twitter Should one man have all this power and it was like the same exact quote over and over and over and over and over and over In these accounts that looked like they were just regular people, but they clearly weren't there are bots And you know that was one of the big points of contention when Elon purchased Twitter They're bots. And that was one of the big points of contention when Elon purchased Twitter. Tell me how you know how many bots you have.

And they were saying it's probably 5% or less. And he was like, there's people that have analyzed and say it might be 80%. Wow. Yeah. That's wild. That was some guy from the FBI, correct? That's a high number. The guy who formerly worked for the FBI? Do you remember that?

Yeah. Yeah. So this is a guy, I believe he's a data analyst who was looking over the numbers and how this works. And it's obviously effective. And it's something that we know the other countries are doing. Why wouldn't we do it? Well, there's the Voice of America, which is our version of propaganda, but I think that's directed outwards. What is that? The Voice of America is this giant, I think it comes out of the State Department, and it's this giant broadcasting system that the U.S. government owns

that's available all around the world that puts out our propaganda. I'm not even aware of that. Yeah, like if you... It's because they don't play it here. The state-owned international radio broadcast of the United States. It's really big. Largest and oldest U.S.-funded international broadcaster,

Voice of America produces digital TV and radio content in 48 languages, which it distributes to affiliate stations around the globe. The problem with that is, like, if you know that it's coming from the voice of America, you can kind of interpret that with a filter. The more effective version is either trolls or bots or people that are paid to say certain things where they look like normal people. And this dovetails in with what you were saying about the mistrust of authority authority the mistrust of information the mistrust of government it all kind of is in the same uh part of the same phenomenon of like this

breakdown of of the older hierarchies of this is true and this is false and you know it because it's on the news. Well, there's no real Walter Cronkite anymore. There's no real objective source of information where you can watch them and say that that is what's going on in the world. Dude, the job is open. I don't want that fucking job. No.

You can take it. I think there's people that are doing that work, the Matt Taibis of the world, the people that are independent journalists who are actual journalists. Yeah. There's Glenn Greenwald. There's a few of them out there, but there's just not that many. It's just – it's very difficult to be successful independent of a system. Yeah. They're also talking to a very specific slice of the population.

It's not that there aren't truth tellers out there. There are a lot of them. But nobody has that kind of fatherly position anymore that a lot of people are listening to. Like I don't know how many people read Taibbi's stuff. He's good, but it's not like, it's not like. It's not Walter Cronkite. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's, that's a big change. Yeah, it is a big change. That's a big change. And, and nobody has the answer for that or that I've ever talked to. That, that fracturing of, of, of how not, of like social consensus. Yeah. You can't agree on anything. Right. a fucking problem it is a problem it's a really big problem because it means that i mean you need some level of cohesion and agreement to problem solve yeah especially when the problems are intricate you also need some trust in the facts that are being distributed. Yeah.

So like global warming is like an issue. It's a problem. And it's like a real problem. And people can't even agree on like the facts of that, which is just so – it just makes you wonder like where – I don't know that I'm as optimistic as you are like where all this goes because to me it looks like some of these indicators look like what happens when a culture is like in decay. Oh, we're in decay. You know? There's no question about that. I just don't think it necessarily has to end terribly. I am I'm very optimistic about human beings because I think ultimately even

things that I disagree with like like woke ideology I think ultimately what they're trying to do is make the world a better place what is that what is what is woke ideology to you woke idea I mean I just I think we need to define it because yeah before I jump in and well I think one of the best ways to describe it is a group of ideas that are also attached to ideas that are ridiculous and I think that's the case with right-wing ideology as well I think we have an inherent problem where we're very tribal and we're looking for a team and ultimately in this country there's only two teams yeah that's right there's team right and team left I have a whole bit about it's like the crips it's like the crips and the

bloods it is you know and if you're not on one the other one yeah yeah it's hard not to be on one and things get captivated you know like well there's certain things that cannot be questioned there's certain things like a man can be pregnant and you should have drag queen shows in kindergarten because it's not a problem. And then people go, well, what about children? What about that? We were talking about queer issues. OK, we've got to leave it alone because this is in the woke world. Everything LBGTQ is beyond reproach and you have to leave it alone.

In the right wing world, you have preposterous notions about a woman's right to choose. You have radical control over people's bodies that is based on religious ideology. Life begins at the moment of conception. And even in cases of rape, abortion should be illegal. So we're so polarized with preposterous ideas on both the right and on the left where you can't question things because if you do, it's against the tribe. And then you'll be a person without a country or a person without a group to be a part of. That's what gets me. It's not even the ideology. It's the mechanisms involved are so inherent to the human condition that we will adopt a predetermined pattern of thinking and behavior because it's more convenient than formulating our own ideas and thinking about things on their own.

Yeah, and there's a lot of enforcement on both sides. There's a lot of police work. I mean, I think people have always been into their opinions, but but what's really new is how is how? How policed it all is yes and attacking people so I differ from the convention Yes, and also virtue signaling which is a completely new thing where you can publicly display your disdain For someone who steps outside the lines and therefore you supposedly boost your social cred but it doesn't really work that well it's kind of akin to um name dropping like people think oh i was at leonardo caprio's and it was amazing people think wow they're gonna think i'm amazing i was at leonardo caprio's but really they're thinking look at this fucking idiot name dropping like it's so obvious to everyone else

but yet name dropping is still a thing you know it doesn't work but yet it's so obvious to everyone else, but yet name dropping is still a thing. You know, it doesn't work, but yet it's like almost people can't help but say it. Or when people brag about something that they've done or brag about how much money they have or brag about their accomplishments, you know, they think, well, I'm not even bragging. I'm just saying what I've been able to do. been able to do. And they just rattle off facts that may or may not be important to what they're talking about because they want you to know that they've got this thing and they think that that's going to help them socially with you. You're going to look at them in a higher class of human being now. But it doesn't work. And I think that's the same thing with cancel culture and with virtue signaling. It doesn't really work. Even if people repeat it and chime in, cancel culture and with virtue signaling it doesn't really work even if people

repeat i don't know i don't know i don't know yeah i don't know what you mean like it doesn't work i mean it doesn't work in the sense of it doesn't elevate the person who thinks it's elevating them oh you know the person the person who virtue signals and you know attacks it does within that group though probably i mean i this is way outside my pay grade but i i mean i think it's working to me when you say it doesn't work that means it would like be failing it's clearly working on some level because it's so big all of it yeah we're so at each other's throats that it's definitely happening, which means it works on some level. What I'm saying is like the motivation for it is to create a benefit for the person that is doing the canceling and a person that's doing the virtue signaling and a person that is espousing these beliefs that are in line with the ideology regardless of facts.

And I don't think that works. And I think there's an inclination to do that. And that's why I relate it to name dropping. I think it's one of those things that everybody knows what you're doing when you do it, but yet people still do it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's just like it's all part of the same rush to get a single to get a single narrative yeah and like

gotta find out what the deal with this thing is gotta come to your opinion on it gotta have your story on it gotta gotta like gotta come to that narrative and then and then usually there's two like one narrative on each side right and then they're in they're in conflict obviously designed to be that way because i mean you can sell more tickets with a fight than you can with people agreeing so there's there's this commercial interest in that if you're talking about like cnn and fox there's like no there's really no upside for either of those places to be like we really agreed with what they said the other night that's like bad and dumb business-wise but there's this rush for like a single narrative and you see it you see it in in in just to take it back to entertainment too you see it in entertainment all the time where it's like let's let's make this as simple

as possible let's tie it up nice yeah let's and and and that's the world doesn't really work that way but our world is increasingly working that way yeah and um there's like a concept that i think about a lot is ambiguity in my like when i'm when i'm making a a a work of art okay ambiguity just means something that has more than one meaning people say like well would you what do you mean what were you trying to say it's like well not one thing for starters not one thing saying one thing there's a word for that like if i'm making a if i'm making a movie and i'm trying to tell you one thing one idea like about how the war works or something we usually call that propaganda

like if i'm trying to just convince you of something yeah but but ambiguity is like i'm trying to show you a couple of different things that can all coexist that in some ways might seem on the surface to be mutually exclusive like a guy who's a killer but also has like an emotional life or a woman who's like like like deeply dishonest but also has this like tremendous sense of integrity it's possible for more than one thing to be true at the same time yes but that is what's being lost in everything that you're talking about yeah that sense of like multiple explanations multiple factors and and that is it's part of the politics, which is very black and white.

It's part of all this online stuff that I don't know anything about that's also super black and white, right? It's what you're talking about with the virtue signaling. It's like good or bad. It's never like, hey, how can we step back and have a more nuanced view? And how can we kind of find like a synthesis that includes all of it? And how can we come to this conversation

from a place of love and a place of like humility? It's always just like, how can we fuck this guy and get the narrative? But that's all like a simplification thing. And I think that's why i said like culture and decay because the simpler shit gets and the less like nuanced it gets the harder it is to see like the bogeys behind the trees i think human beings have a natural inclination to try to tie things up nice so they make sense so they don't have to think about it

as much anymore they could define it in their head. Now I know what it is. But in this world, there's such a massive influx of information. There's so much data to take in. There's so many opinions. There's so many perspectives. There's so many facts. It's so hard to find where the facts are coming from, whether they've been filtered or distorted. And I think people get real scared by that. And then they really try to adhere towards an ideological perspective. They really try to adhere towards whatever the rules of their tribe are. Yeah. But you got to resist that. Yes, you do. Because when you do that, you're, you're going to be missing out. Like there's no ideology that can cover everything. Right. I mean, except for like the, like, you know, maybe like a scientific law.

But like once you get past like the laws of gravity and some of the more basic stuff, like any ideology that seeks to explain how the world works is going to be missing all kinds of things on the edges of it. Where I think this is going, I mean, this is all technologically driven, right? The access to this information, the ability to distribute this information, the way people are communicating, and the fact that there's so much data out there that you have to go through is all because of technology. It's all because of social media. It's all because of the Internet. It's all because anyone at any point in time can put something on their phone or put them on a computer and put it out there in the world,

on their phone or put them on a computer and put it out there in the world and you're dealing with more data on a daily basis than the human race has accumulated over the entire course of written history every day. It's just constant masses, mass amounts of data. And you don't know what's right and what's wrong. And you want to be a good person. What's all the data you're talking about? Just, well, just communication. Just whether it's Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you're dealing with videos, you're dealing with text, you're dealing with people writing paragraphs and stories and blogs, just the sheer raw amount of information that is being distributed and the communication that's going back and forth between human beings it's unprecedented right like in the old days if you were let's say if it was 1970 72 and you were 22 years old and you hadn't been drafted into vietnam and you wanted to know like

what was going on in vietnam yeah curious right you would see it on the news and you'd see like because back then the press corps had a lot more freedom and they were actually allowed to go where they wanted to in the war but if you were really looking for like your your like um the conceptual framework that would that would ground you and orient you you probably wait until the December issue of Esquire magazine came out. And you'd read this like giant 15,000 word article by Michael Hare or something. And then you'd know. And all your friends would read that too.

And then they would know. And that's what I'm talking about. That sort of like centralization of opinion is what has been like kind of blown into a million. But even back then. It's not just like the quantity of information. It's the fact that there's no hierarchy of like – I mean there is. You can still select what you want. But I don't know.

That's very different from today where if you were trying to figure out what was really going on in the Ukraine, for example, and unless you really knew which journals to dig into, it'd be kind of hard. I think it was even – I think it's very hard now. But I think maybe it might be easier now if you're objective. I think back then it was just as hard. During the Vietnam War, have you ever seen William F. Buckley debate Noam Chomsky? Fascinating. I mean, that's something that's gone too, right? Where's that level of public intellectual discourse?

Oh, yeah. Those guys were like, yeah. It's an amazing conversation watching them go back and forth. And then there's Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley and those classic series of debates they did on television, which is that great book or great film rather. What is it called? Something Enemies? Best of Enemies or something like that? The Doc you're talking about? Yes. About that series of debates that they did on television. They were trying to display both the left and the right and have them have some sort of a discourse about it on television.

It turned out to be riveting. Yeah. And they did it just because they were failing. They're like, fucking throw anything up there. Let's get these guys to talk. And it turned out to work very, very well. It's always been hard to figure out who's right and who's wrong. And when there's these compelling speakers that are great orators and they're saying things with such eloquence and such articulation. Right.

But I'm saying that the level of thought, of complexity, the amount of ambiguity in their statements, that's also changed. You don't have that level of thought or that level of complexity in the public discourse today. Well, I think it was much more difficult to be a public intellectual back then. You had to really have proven your metal you were it was a different thing they wouldn't just let any fucking kid off a tiktok on you know abc news to talk about the way the world works right but now we're getting that is that true or like just some random dude on tiktok is talking about how the way the world works oh well they if you go to fox news or if you go to umNBC, there will be, on a regular basis, very young people that are talking about very important issues. And they may be a YouTube influencer. They may be a person who recently graduated from a university and has some info information about things you're you know

right noam chomsky and gorvada or noam chomsky and um william f buckley i mean that's those are two like rock solid intellectuals oh yeah chomsky like in like invented new kinds of new like lines of thought and linguistics yeah he's like a legit he's a legit linguist yes yes no doubt Buckley to like his own way yeah well Buckley's yeah I mean he was a little bit more problematic but it's there they're very very intelligent people that have sort of earned their right to get to that position to debate things whereas today it's just wow but what I I think is going to happen, and this is neither good nor bad because I think it's inevitable. I think technology is going to – there's going to be a new technology that emerges, that changes things as radically, if not more, than what the internet has done.

And I think most likely it's going to be human neural interfaces. Okay. And those are around the corner. And they're going to be here before you know it, and they're going to sneak up on us just like the internet snuck up on us. What is that exactly? That's the chip in your head or something? Yes.

They're going to use it initially for people with ALS and various injuries and diseases and where they can't control their muscles anymore. And it's going to rewire the way the human mind interacts with the physical body. But I think ultimately, it's going to remap the way people communicate with each other. And in Elon's words on this podcast, he said, you're going to be able to talk without using words. Are we going to miss this? No. I'm happy to miss it. It's going to happen.

We're going to be old. They're going to drill into our head. We're going to be like late adopters, like when grandpa got email. Okay. Grandpa got the neural link. Eight years old. I think it's going to be. I'm happy to miss it.

That doesn't sound. Well, in Elon's perspective, we're already cyborgs, right? Because we already have these things in our pockets. It's just not physically embedded into your actual body. But one day it will be. And it will be because it will be better than not having it in there. When the technology sufficiently advances to the point where you know it's safe, you know it's everywhere, you know everyone has it, you're missing out, it's everywhere.

You know, everyone has it. You're missing out. And all these people are gaining some sort of an advantage either in the workplace or an industry or whatever it is, or socially from using that you're going to use it. Well, maybe there'll be like a whole tribe of people that are like primitives that just reject this shit and just continue to hunt and like not get the neural

link. That's always been the case. I mean, that's one of the things that Graham Hancock points out when, you know, he has this amazing show, Ancient Catastrophe or Ancient Apocalypse. Ancient Apocalypse. That's on Netflix. There's a very advanced human civilization that lived a long time ago that was destroyed by impacts, by comet impacts. We went through a comet storm. And this is like what caused the end of the Ice Age.

There's actually like legitimate scientific inquiry into this called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. And it's based on actual real data that they get from soil. Actual real data that they get from soil, like when they do core samples of the Earth, they can find out that at this point when the Ice Age ended around 12,800 years ago, there's a lot of iridium in the soil. And that's very common in space and very rare on Earth. And it also coincides with when Earth was passing through these comet storms and they think that this is probably why there's all these ancient structures that are unexplained like go back late a pay and some of the stuff in our is this like a are we is this like a UFO thing or this is a different thing okay no it's not no not at all okay no it's it's so it's like it's a catastrophe. A civilization pre-Babylonia that was advanced.

Advanced to the point where they could build things like the pyramids. Advanced to the point where they could build these immense structures that are unexplainable today. Like things in Lebanon where they have these enormous stone blocks that were carved or thousands of tons. They have zero idea how they did it. Like what are they doing with it? How are they going to move it? They did this so long ago no one even knows who did it or why they did it. Right.

What they believe is that at one point in time, whether, you know, if anatomically similar human beings, they used to think, like when I was in high school, they thought, you know, human beings like us have only been around for like 50,000 years, 100,000 years. Now they've taken that way back to almost a million years. So that gives so much more time for people to evolve and for technology to advance. And the concept is that there was an advanced human culture that existed thousands and thousands of years before we thought it did so instead of six thousand years ago being the birth of civilization

agriculture written language they think it was way before that like maybe even thirty thousand years ago and that these people had reached a very high level of sophistication and then massive natural disasters all over the world and knocked people down to almost the Stone, and then they rebuilt again. And that's what we're experiencing now. But one of his points is they talk about these ancient hunter-gatherer tribes that existed for thousands and thousands of years, and how could it be possible that they existed as well as these advanced cultures? He's like, but that happens now.

You could go to New Guinea, and you could see people that are hunter-gatherers right now. While you have an iPhone, you can film them with your space device. You could go to the Amazon and see uncontacted tribes. You can go to North Sentinel Island. There's uncontacted people that are living. Less and less, but yeah. Less and less. Less and less.

But the idea is that people have always coexisted that are at various stages of technological superiority and efficiency. Okay. And that there will be people that are fucking tribal people. But they'll basically be like a tribe. That's how bad it'll be. They might just stay the way they are now. If you opt out, you're basically going to be like a guy with there and that's how bad it'll be they might just say the way they are opt out You're basically like a guy with a bow and arrow in the jungle. It'll be that it'll be that bad I was thinking more like I want to get most of the

advantages of contemporary civilization like I'd still like the Car that drives itself and the cool toaster. I just don't want the fucking thing in my brain You know what? I mean, I don't want to be levels of of it you can get it in your brain or you wear it as a hat yeah i'll do that maybe the hat one is like a flip phone yeah i'll take the hat yeah you know but i don't want to have to go to like you know to a reservation and be like in the jungle by myself well i don't necessarily think it even has to be that different but it could be like homesteading it could be like people that you know make their own bullets right you know because there's a lot of that there is a lot of that yeah i mean it could be people that just are they they

they prefer uh subsistence living which people really do you know that's like life below zero and all those people that live in modern times that subsistence hunt yeah well there's a lot of people that do that because they have no choice there is but there's also a lot of people do it because they have a choice because they've lived the other way i'm talking about like third world yes you know where which is what like you know there's so much poverty out there it's's hard to yeah, it's hard to Keep that in mind because America is like the wealthiest country in the world Also the most guns and also the most religious

We the most religious. Yeah, really? Yeah More than say like Iran or they have I don't know if we're more than Iran I didn't look at the map that closely but there was a map i saw and it had like belief in god in red and it was just the u.s was like looked like the reddest country to me i could find the map for you that's interesting i'd like to know we are like compared to god compared to um um every other let me put it to you this way compared to every other English speaking country. Sure. Western world, like England has a very different system than,

than we do in terms of belief in. So most, most God fearing wealthiest and most guns. Yeehaw. We win. And biggest military. Yeah. Yeah. Did you read that book there? I think it's called Sapiens. Yes, because when you were talking about the Ancient man it made me think of that because I one of the things I remember from that book was that

The homo sapien I leave if I I could be misremembering this so correct me if I'm wrong, but one of his ideas was that people as we know it basically murdered all of these other Neanderthals and different species of humanoids or whatever the correct term is and that that's how we spread, that there was a mass genocide because that at one time and i don't know if this conflicts with what you're talking about or not but that

at one time this may have been post the the environmental event that that wiped out the more advanced civilization at one time there were all these different types of on the planet and obviously we won and the neanderthals are not here anymore. And if I remember correctly, his thesis was that we did that with killing and that there's something very innately violent in our DNA. Well, it's certainly plausible.

We've certainly done a lot of killing and it makes sense that if there was something that was similar to us but not quite us and somehow posed a threat or was in competition with us, that we would kill it. There's also theories about biological integration that we mated the Neanderthals out of existence. And there's some substantiation of that and the fact that a lot of people, particularly people of European descent, have Neanderthal genetics. So there was some sort of interbreeding with people. Yeah, I think both of those things could be true. Well, I mean, to deny the idea that human beings committed genocide or were violent

towards others is ridiculous. Right, we've seen recently. There's nothing but evidence of that, of us doing it to us. So the idea that we wouldn't do it to the Hobbit people that live in the island of Flores. Exactly. I'm sure we killed everybody. Yeah. It's like they keep finding new humans that don't exist anymore, like the Denisovans, which is fairly recent.

You know, they've found it. I don't know about that one. Oh, the Denisovans that was in Russia. And I believe that was one of the first examples they found of it. But it's a completely new strain of human being that shares some of our biology, but it's not a homo sapien like modern humans the way we are today. They think there was probably quite a few, like there was some parallel evolution going on and this competition, just like there is in other primates, right? Yeah. There's the bonobos and there's traditional chimpanzees.

Yeah, so here's the Denisovans. They're just like there's differences in the anatomy that are innate. They were almost – it looks like they're thicker. They got larger heads. It's a totally different kind of a thing. And I feel like this was fairly recently. Jamie, did they say when they found the den? They look much sturdier.

It's a cave, right? The Den of Seven Cave is what they found, I think. Yeah. So what's the difference? The lungs are different. No, it's just they look bigger. They look thicker and more stout. And there's a bunch of differences in the femoral length and the shape of the heads.

Wow. That's an antithelial. But just Google Denisovan history. And so we get a time frame instead of just images. Because why is that only showing you images? Just go to all. Go to all, not images. Yeah.

There. So Denisovans are a distinct species of humanoid, a close... What'd you do? Oh, I was looking at the other left-hand corner. That's okay. Distinct subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia

during the lower and middle Paleolithic. Denisovans are known for, from few physical remains and consequently, most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. And I think that was like, what year, 2010.

Yeah, so 12 years ago. What is the Paleolithic? How long ago is that? That's a good question. What's the Paleolithic, Jamie? I used to know this kind of thing. Yeah, me too. From around 3 million to around 300,000 years ago. That's the lower. The middle Paleolithic period, which followed, would last from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. That's the lower. The middle Paleolithic period was, uh, that which followed would last from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago.

So they lived alongside of us and they were a totally different kind of person. Don't you think our ethics should be farther along if we've been around for, for that many hundreds of thousands of years? I think that's the, uh, part of this theory. The ancient catastrophe theory is that

we we had to reboot and this is the idea about it that you know we did get knocked back into chaos and like a severely harsh primal way of living the way to describe it is like this is an instantaneous ending of the ice age due to impacts all over the earth. And there's evidence of this in the form of nanodiamonds, which it's called trinitite, which exist at the Trinity explosion. When they first detonated a nuclear bomb, they found that the impact created these micro diamonds, these nanodiamonds. Well, they find that all over the earth at around 12 800 years ago which would indicate that the impact was so substantial that it created these things but

i'm saying since then we've developed a lot of really advanced technology but has has there been the same evolution in our ethics well there's most certainly if you you know study steven pinker's work this is the safest like most understanding least racist least violent least rapey time in human history if you go back and think of all the horrific crimes that have been committed since the beginning of time, and you look at them on a scale, even though we say, oh, there's so much chaos in the world today, there's so much horror. And that's absolutely true. But there's less than there's ever been before.

It's better. And, you know, they call Pinker an apologist for just talking about data. But it's like very clear. If you just look at the sheer numbers of murders, the sheer numbers of all the horrific things that people have been known for forever. There's less of them now than ever before. And I think it will continue to get less and less and less. But it's not perfect. Well, the dentistry is better too, right?

Yeah, there's a lot better. Imagine going to a dentist. Imagine getting an ACL surgery 500 years ago. Yeah. There's none. You're fucked. You blow your knee out, you're dead. Just use a fucking piece of stone.

Yeah. Use a weird fucking knee brace made with goat skins and shit and twigs. Yeah, it's better now. And it will continue to get more complex. Whether or not it's preferable is what's interesting. Oh, really? I would never go there. No, no. Personally. I what's interesting. Oh, really? I would never go there. No, no.

Personally. I don't mean in terms of ethics. I mean in terms of technology, like the medical technology and the advances, whether it's like the way we live now. Look, if you were a person who lived in the days of Genghis Khan and you got invaded, like, yeah, it's way better today than then. Sure. You get a coldy fucking die probably. Yeah. Well, it's way better today than then. Sure, you get a cold, you fucking die probably. Yeah, well, not only that, the amount of violence, the sheer amount of horrific violence from hordes of raiders

coming into your village and butchering everybody and lighting everything on fire, that was a commonplace occurrence. It's less common now and will be less common in the future. But what I'm saying is that I think that human beings as we are biologically today are more suited in in a certain the way we interface with the world with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle I think it's more satisfying to our actual of like our our intellectual and physical bodies,

the way we exist with earth and nature. People find great peace in living in the country and fishing for their food. I totally buy into that. I don't think we've evolved physically the same way technology has evolved. Right. I mean, it even comes down to something like this room which has

a conditioned air temperature right and we don't experience the extremes of temperature on our skin that we would normally have been going through for thousands of years you would have no idea right now if it's august or january or we're in this yeah and you can live in 72 degrees like year-round or whatever you like 69 yeah nobody knows what that does but maybe that's part of why people are so um have a certain amount of like feeling of cognitive dissonance and overload because they're not getting the same amount of sensory input yeah that would have been in the in in, that you would have felt had you been living in nature with Genghis Khan as your, well, I mean, if you just look at, in terms of what's

available in the United States, in terms of environments, the, what people would say arguably is the most disconnected part of the world is California. And they're the least connected to weather because every day is beautiful. It's perfect. They don't have to worry about huddling up for the winter. They don't have to worry about storms coming. You lost me on a turn there. I'm down with California being the most artificial. What do you mean disconnected?

Disconnected to nature. Oh, to nature. To weather. Yeah, because it's a fucking desert. I mean, LA is a desert. It's a stable all year round. It never rains. It's never too cold.

You can exist as a homeless person so easily never too cold it's what I don't like this is a homeless person so easily yeah it's what I don't like it one of the things I don't like about LA yeah any things it's not good for you it's not I you need the I need the weather to kind of remind me of change yeah you know and and that and that I can change because the world's changing. It denotes time. It lets you know that things are happening. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's one of the weirdest things about California. And it just adds to the weirdness of what it's like to live in a city that's dominated by show business. Yeah. It's like also you don't have to deal with weather. I'm not going to defend LA. No, I mean, look, I lived there forever. I'm not going to defend LA. No, I mean, like I lived there forever. I love lots of aspects of LA.

Really? Yeah, it's a tough place to live, I think. It's a weird place. That's the point is that it's just weird. Yeah. Because I don't think people are, I mean, you could certainly be a nuanced, very evolved, you want some coffee?

Yeah, I'll try some. You could be. Thank you. No problem. By the way, thank you for taking such good care of me and the hospitality oh my pleasure it's it's really nice very standing my pleasure my pleasure i'm a fan i love your work thank you um but i'm just saying that i just think that you know uh we we're set we are part of nature and i think we're set up to experience like that. We're set up to experience cold weather, and I think it enhances a sense of community when you have to bundle up together because a hurricane is coming.

There's a thing that happens with people. There's negative things. There's looting and crazy things that happens when chaos ensues. But I think that ultimately human beings are better off when we deal with weather and we deal with the fact that nature is a real factor that you have to take into consideration and you are ultimately powerless and you just have to do your best to prepare and get ready for it but it's happening whether you like it or not if you live in boston and it's january and a blizzard's coming there's not a fucking goddamn thing you can do to turn that off there's not a button you can switch there's not a fucking goddamn thing you can do to turn that off.

There's not a button you can switch. There's not a fan they can blow that sends it out into the ocean. You're dealing with that fucking snow. It's coming in, and everybody's got to prepare. And you get food, and you get candles,

and you get firewood, and you ride that bitch out. And I think that's good for people. I do too. I do too. I think being in nature, at least for me, I don't know about other people, but it's very important for me, like the wilderness and contact with, um, environments that aren't manmade. Yeah.

I think that's the key. It's environments that exist outside of us. Yeah. I think so too. And there's just something very humbling about that and very. There's something about it that just centers me. You know, I mean, I'm not alone in that. I'm not saying anything that radically interesting, but but I think it's something that it's harder and harder to find. You have to go seek it out. Yeah. Right. You have to like intentionally be intentionally be like hey in two weeks i'm going to go camping i'm going to go on a backpacking trip whereas in at a different time in our lives it would just hit you in the face because you wake up in the morning and you're in you know you're you're in it not only that i think human beings have evolved to deal with those sort of complex factors of nature it's like an inherent part of what we are as a human being. It's the way the mind is structured,

the way the human consciousness is structured. I think that's, we evolved this way. And I think when that is absent, there's like this sort of confusion. And I don't think that's good for us. Yeah, I agree, I agree. Do you link up drugs with nature? Well, I think drugs are certainly a part of nature, especially some drugs, especially things like psilocybin.

Yeah. You know, it's an habit. You listen to the stone ape theory. Do you know about that? I actually read about it last night. Oh, really? Yeah. I read about it last night oh really yeah i read about it last night when i was like looking around for stuff that had been on your show and i read about it last night

i used to cover um psychedelic drugs for uh rolling stone and so i used to write about them i had not read that particular theory but i i used to think a lot about psychedelics and I was part of a little bit, a group of people that knew Alexander Shulgin who was like the godfather of MDMA. But actually the stone ape theory, I literally just read about it. It's really fascinating. I'll buy it.

I'm happy to buy into it. It doesn't seem like, I don't know how controversial or accepted it is, but it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility to me. I don't think it is either, but it's very controversial. Is it really? Yeah, very. Your main protagonist in Echo 3, isn't she researching psychedelics to help soldiers with ptsd isn't that part of what she's doing yeah she's researching psychedelics to help with addiction which is although um ptsd is another is another um illness that that people are exploring was psychedelics i mean psychedelics started as a as a at least in this

country in as a as a um as a therapeutic which ones lsd well they tried it as they tried it as a lot of things they tried it as mind experiment you know they tried it as um mind control the cia yeah but i just mean it came out of it came out of the idea of being therapeutic yeah cia does that well you know where it came out of it came out of the idea of women's fertility drugs i just mean it was to induce labor that was when they yeah when when they were initially creating lsSD. I think part of the research was about coming up with drugs that induce labor. And Hoffman, when he was working on synthesizing LSD, got it in his hands and then went on that famous bike ride because he was tripping balls. Because through his skin, he had absorbed all this acid and was just tripping balls and trying to figure things out. And then the CIA got a hold of it and they said, well, what can we do with this?

And they didn't really know because it was a fairly new compound in terms of modern human use. Although there is some real clear evidence that even back in ancient Greece, they were using it in the form of ergot, which is a very similar effect. But they started doing all kinds of wild stuff I'm sure you've seen some of those experiments they did with soldiers I have I mean I'm much more interested in the idea that it has I mean not to take anything away from the whole topic of the CIA doing crazy shit, but I'm much more interested in the, the notion that they have, um, therapeutic, practical, that's in, even in my own life. Um, I think that, um, I think that that's really interesting. And, and MDMA, um, which as you know, is total, I mean, first of all, all of these drugs are not to be taken lightly

and they're not for everybody, in my opinion. Yes. I mean, especially LSD. Yes. You know, there's a huge amount of danger associated with them if if if if you have certain kind of certain kind of tendencies schizophrenia or also just like a if you have repressed shit that you're not in touch with mm-hmm the last thing you want to do is like find that out when you're on an asset trip mmm

because it could be a really bad experience it depends it depends but i just mean they're dangerous i just want to say like it's not i just wanted to it's fraught with peril yeah it's fraught with peril it's not for everybody before i go off extolling their virtues oh yeah just because i i think that you know especially for kids and stuff oh yeah um but but mdma is less so because it doesn't ask as much of you. And MDMA, I just know this because I wrote about this guy Shulgin who I mentioned, initially was used before it became a popular street drug or a club drug. I mean, it was discovered at the turn of the century in like 19, I don't remember, 13 or 17 or something. But then in the 60s, after the crackdown, you know, LSD was like,

kind of like popular in the 50s. And then in the 60s, it popular in like a very elite circle. And then in the 60s, it broke out wide. And then you had the Golden Gate suicides and the government clamped down. And after the 60s, there is a very strong policing of any research into psychedelics. But while that was going on, MDMA was being used very quietly as a therapeutic drug for couples in California among couples therapists. And it has this kind of like ability to make you empathetic i don't know if you've ever done it but yeah it it like it like creates a feeling of empathy for yourself and vulnerability and empathy for other people and um that's fucking amazing that there's a molecule out there that can fit inside the receptors in your head and make you feel that way yeah and um the character in the tv show it like is all in on that type of research

and so at the beginning of the show um she's going down to columbia to find the next mdma if you will because as you know there's all these compounds in Amazon that have not yet been really analyzed. And the idea is there's still things to be discovered there. That's a really interesting perspective. And that is one that's uniquely available today in terms of human history when or the history at least in the United States like the it's very common and very commonly discussed use of psilocybin

therapies for veterans with PTSD MDMA therapy ayahuasca therapy ibogaine for people with addiction problems all those things. There's so many anecdotal reports and so many people that have experienced it and have had positive experiences, including a lot of legitimate intellectuals and academics who discuss this openly now, like guys like Michael Pollan, journalist, who were very respected, who discuss this openly now, as opposed to it was ridiculed, particularly during the 1970s when they passed that sweeping Schedule 1 Psychedelics Act where they made everything the most illegal category. When they did that, they sort of stigmatized it in the public's eye as well because it became against the law and negative and this is your

brain on drugs. Any questions? All that shit. Yeah, I remember. you know, this is your brain on drugs. Any questions? You know, all that shit. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, that sort of really flavored the way people view things. If you tried to do psychedelic therapy for veterans during the Nancy Reagan era,

there's not a chance in hell it would stick. No, you're going to jail. Right, but today it's openly discussed. Yeah, and it's also like interesting to think about them not simply for people that are ill. Right, yeah. Not to take people that are ill. Right. Yeah. Not to take anything away from that. Right.

Because I think we should do everything we can for our veterans. And I think we owe them a huge debt. Absolutely. Whatever works. Like, let's try it. But it's interesting to think of them just for people that are interested in like self-exploration. Yes. And yeah, personal development. There's, there's legitimate applications for that. But the way I describe it is that psychedelics, all psychedelics I think are like a tool.

You could do a good job with them and build something beautiful if you know what the parameters and what the restrictions and the abilities of these tools are, or you could fuck up everything, you know? What's your favorite part of it? Loss of ego. That's a big one. And also the fact that these realms, whatever you're doing,

whether it's completely inside your own mind and a hallucination, or whether or not it is an actual chemical gateway to another dimension, you know, when you want to go full tinfoil hat, wacky conspiracy, or whether you want to look at it like from a reductionist perspective. Right.

At the end of the day, these things are so available. Like it's so easy to get there, particularly like something like dimethyltryptamine. You're 15 seconds after you take it, you're in another dimension. Like there's a doorway. Oh really? Yeah. I've never, i've never done that it's like mushrooms times a million plus aliens really it is the most profound psychedelic

experience by far that i've ever had happened to me and i think most people would agree that it's the most potent of all psychedelics but it's also the most transient because your body produces it your your your brain knows what it is and so your body brings it back to baseline very quickly as opposed to things like lsd which takes hours and hours to bring back to baseline you when you do dimethyltryptamine you're back to normal in a half an hour you're totally sober right the length is part of the is part of the thing of of of those longer acting drugs because you have to go deeper into yourself and process it process it survive it get through it it's like uh it's more involving it's also

more of a relinquishing of the ego because you had to let it go for so long yeah it just takes it away from you yeah it's like your phone like if you had a phone and you're like we're gonna have a conversation but i'm gonna put my phone right here and I'll just get back to you in a few minutes. Oh, what were you saying? Oh, hold on a second. I'm going to text this guy back real quick. You're not thinking, right? Because you're distracted.

Yeah. With something that's like, well, but one of the things that people do with whether it's DMT or mushrooms or they like make a conscious decision that this is what they're doing now. You have to. Set and setting. Yeah. This is what we're doing now. You have to. Set in setting. This is what we're going to do. We're going to sit here. And I think that has a factor in it as well because you're making a conscious decision to try to explore your mind and to try to have this experience that you think will be educational, evolutionary. You're going to evolve from this.

You're going to change and grow. Yeah. It should be available to everybody i mean i don't think it should be used by everybody but i don't think it should be restricted i don't think it should be something that the government people that have never had any of these experiences on their own can regulate because i think it's foolish it's like you're you're talking about something you have no experience in i don't know i don't know what you think it should be legal or illegal think about all the benefits you just described who should be deciding whether or not those people get to experience those benefits should it be a bunch of pencil pushers in the

fucking pentagon should it be the the people that get elected to capitol hill the fuck out of here those people have they have no experiences in it i think there's some i think there's some value in it being hard to get hard to get because because it it does it's it i'm sure you would agree it's not something to do casually it's not something you should just like i don't think and this is like me like somebody else can have a totally different opinion, but like, I wouldn't do it casually. Like I wouldn't just be like, oh shit, I have 20, I have four hours to kill. Let me go roll over here and grab some LSD and see what happens. So I think the fact that you have to, I'm not saying we should be throwing people in jail. That's a different story. Let's just put that aside for a second in terms of punishment.

But I think having these things hard to acquire is probably not a bad thing because it definitely separates the wheat from the chaff in the sense of casual use. I don't know. Probably what I'm saying makes no sense because anybody that wants to get it, Molly can get it and go to a club which is also insane to me, but I I Don't it's not for me about the question isn't about government control or not or a pencil pusher controlling my mind. It's more just like Until we get to the place where the culture understands what they are and

And how and how their potential for like sacred experiences, until we get to that place and there's a place of respect, I'd be hesitant to be the guy that's like, yeah, let's just throw it in every convenience store and see what happens. Well, I think it's a matter of education and personal responsibility, just like alcohol, just like many things that are available readily right now. And, uh, at all the drugs that I would make readily available, I don't think alcohol would be the big one. I don't think I'd make it so convenient and easy to get. If you had to pick one drug, why would I say that one? That one's like so destructive. It fucks with your ability to use your motor skills. People drive it. Yeah, they commit violence on it It's not a smart drug to have available But I think we understand it culturally and there's enough education exactly an awareness. That's the key to psychedelics

We need cultural awareness. Yeah, and right now we've been in the dark and infantilized Yeah, our governments locked down on these sacred substances and they've kept them from us. But the thing is that people that have kept them from us are not people who have consumed them. They're not people that are users where they use them in a sacred setting and understand what the benefits and the powerful impact these things can have on your mind. It's being done by people that don't have the experience, and they're the ones that, well, I don't think we should have. It's giving people brain damage.

We've got to make missiles. We're busy here. I don't think they're the people. I don't think grown adults should be able to tell other grown adults what they can and can't do with their body and their consciousness, particularly when they haven't experienced it themselves. And there's a lot of that going on. Yeah. Yeah.

I agree. I think there's a distinction between telling somebody what to do and just availability. That's all. Yes. Well, I think there's the thing with alcohol. Alcohol is readily available, but you have to be 21 to be able to buy in a liquor store. And so it's readily available because you can make money on it. Right? That's the big thing.

Well, also because people enjoy it and they want to have the freedom to be able to have a cocktail. Like if you and I right now would just bust it out a couple glasses, had a little whiskey, it's nice. I like it. Is that what's going to happen, by the way? We can. Do you want to? I wouldn't say no.

Okay. Let's get some ice and some glasses. I mean, we've been talking about all this i mean there's nothing wrong with it right it's like but you're a grown adult a very mature person you know how to handle it i am the same way i know how to handle it it's not like some people are not some people are not good at it and they don't know how to handle it and what do we do about those do we make it illegal because some people are just inherently alcoholics like i don't know how to handle it. And what do we do about those? Do we make it illegal because some people are just inherently alcoholics? Like, I don't think so. I think it's personal responsibility and education.

And I think treatment centers and counseling and having it distributed by trained professionals that know what it is, know what the dosage is. That way it will be regularly. Like if you were going to buy MDMA, this is pure MDMA. This is not something that came from the cartel. It's cut with fentanyl. This is pure pharmaceutical grade MDMA in this dose, depending upon your body weight, this is what you should take. And I think that is something that unfortunately we don't have because we've been restricted for so long. It's been a normal part of our society to not have access to these things. Which is more urgent, educating people about these drugs or educating them with media literacy about how to navigate a world where there's all this data and you can't tell right from wrong?

That's a very good question. See, I would think the latter is like a bigger issue. Like I'm more worried about kids who are glued to their phones for 10 hours a day. Yeah. Then I am about their, um, you know, someone's inability to find some really good MDMA. I'm worried about both things, but I think one can enhance the other. And I think through psychedelics, you have an understanding of the impact of things and the way it affects your consciousness, including the kind of media that you consume. And I think maybe that would be better for everybody to just have a reset in your perspective of how you view things. Like a holiday, a psychedelic holiday.

Yeah, a little psychedelic holiday. We call it the Joe Rogan day. Just have a day. It's like a day. Once a year. My friend Ari does this thing called Shroom Fest every year where like all over the world in July, he encourages people to take shrooms for like X amount of days. And people do it through social media. They talk about it.

They get psyched up for it. They get the set and setting correct. And it's his own personal thing repeatedly over several days yeah you repeatedly oh really or not or do it once just do it during that time period he calls it shroom fest and the idea is that the whole you know all the people that are in on it yeah are doing it together and so there's sort of a sense of community involved in that which i think was a big part of how psychedelics were consumed throughout history for sure i mean that was uh that's the concept of Brian Murarescu's book

we're talking about ancient Greece Brian Murarescu who's a scholar who did all this work on Ulyssidian mysteries and that during ancient Greece they what these people were drinking when they were drinking wine they were drinking wine mixed with psychedelics. And they found physical evidence in the ceramic vessels that they used to hold the wine. They found evidence of ergot and other psychedelics. All right. Here we go. And that. Thank you.

That this has actually now become a field of study at Harvard because of his work and his book. And when he came on the podcast and talked about it, it's so... Cheers to you, sir. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. It's such an interesting subject to come from an actual...

And he's, you know, hardcore, intellectual, straight-laced. He doesn't do drugs, never done anything, hasn't had experience before. He's just relaying this in terms of, straight-laced. He doesn't do drugs. Never done anything. Hasn't had experience before. He's just relaying this in terms of human history. And that it seems like that was the birth of democracy. That was the birth of all these different complex societal structures that we still enjoy today, which came out of ancient Greece. Most likely came out because of these psychedelic rituals. And he's never tried them?

No. He wants to, and he will eventually, but he wanted to make sure that he wrote this book as a very straight-laced academic. Interesting. And he's brilliant. He's the perfect guy to relay it because he was obsessed with it for over a decade. And initially, his initial obsession with it was ridiculed. People were like, what the fuck are you doing? And then ultimately, upon physical evidence and proof of this,

and then also the proof that this was forbidden by the Romans, and that they chased it out, and that you can see how these people escaped and brought it to other parts of Europe, where they find very similar artifacts and very similar vessels and these things in France and Spain. So they escaped from Greece and they went to other places to try to continue these rituals while they were being persecuted. This just makes me feel like we're in the most stoner conversation ever. It is, but it's by a guy. In this case, he's a legitimate academic. this just makes me feel like we're in the most stoner conversation it is but

it's by a guy in this case he's a by the way that doesn't that doesn't make it not true it's just a pretty stoner conversation well the real stoner conversation is the stoned ape theory that one's not right lay it on me cuz I well Terence McKenna came up with this theory and his brother Dennis who's a brilliant scientist is the best at describing it see if you can find Dennis McKenna explains the stoned ape theory because he explained it on this podcast he'll do a far better job of explaining it than me because he can tell it to you in a way where he understands how the psilocybin and the psychedelic compounds impact the human neurochemistry.

So the way he describes it is like he's an actual scientist. And so when you listen to him describe it, you're like, whoa. I know there's a video of that out there from him on the podcast. But his brother came up with the idea that when human beings existed in the rainforest when we were, you know, ancient primates, that the rainforest receded into grasslands. And as they did, human beings experimented with different food sources. And one of the things they did is they found where undulates would leave their manure, these mushrooms would grow out of them.

And they would flip those manure patties over and find beetles and food. And the mushrooms that grew on them, they would experiment with them. This is an animation, but it says that he... Okay, play this. Hold on, this might not actually be him. Well, it's Dennis and Terrence.

In the late 1970s, Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis McKenna were the first that proposed the Stone 8 hypothesis. and Terrence. animals that are pooping. Well, in the subtropics, the most common mushroom coming out of those cow patties is flaccid comensis, a potent magic mushroom. One thing that mushrooms and other psychedelics do reliably is they induce synesthesia. Synesthesia is the perception of one sensory modality and another. Hearing colors, for example, or seeing music. You have these profound experiences and you have to put yourself in their place. And imagine what the impact of such an experience must have been on an early hominid.

These magic mushrooms open up the floodgates of information you receive. Basically, you can think of it as a contact fluid between the synapses within the brain. Wow, what a competitive advantage, especially if you're working with a geometry of weapons or having to put together something that will give you a better chance of survival. The fact that this happened not once, not twice, but millions upon millions of times over millions of years

is a very plausible explanation for the tripling of the brain two million years ago. It's not so simple to say that they ate psilocybin mushrooms and suddenly the brain mutated. I think it's more complex than that, but I think it was a factor. It was like a software to program this neurologically modern hardware to think, to have cognition, to have language,

because language is essentially synesthesia. Language is an association with inherently meaningless sound except that it's associated with the complex of meaning. A great deal of the brain's real estate you might say is devoted to the generation and or the comprehension of language. Those neural structures are not found in our ancestors. That's the human trait to have so much physiology devoted to generating and understanding language. And that's a reflection of evolutionary events that made us what we are. Yeah, that's Dennis. So the idea is that the human brain more than doubled in size over a period of 2 million years, which is the greatest mystery in the entire fossil record.

And they don't know why. to grasslands, which would allow these animals, these early hominids, to start to move around and experiment with different food sources. And we know that they ate mushrooms. So why do you think you're so into all of this early man, how it all came to be? Because I've noticed this and some of the other things we've been talking about they all have that in common like you're very fascinated with fascinated by primates yeah we are one you know why are we like this right now and we since we know i'm just curious why why it's what about it like is fascinating to you because i'm like i'm down

for it i think it's interesting but you fucking love it because i'm like i'm down for it i think it's interesting but you fucking love it and i'm and i'm just like wow why is he so i mean because to me i don't really this will sound i'm not shitting on it anyway but i don't i don't know that i care what what at all like what made us grow a million years ago? Like, I think it's interesting and I'm cool to talk about, but like, I feel like you have, uh, like a thirst for it and a, and a, um, and I'm in a, um, a desire to unpack something. Yeah. What is that? Well, I think, uh, well, first of all, I'm fascinated by human history and then I'm fascinated by biological history. Yeah. fascinated by human history and then i'm fascinated by biological history yeah i'm fascinated by the

concept of evolution and the scope of time how long it took for us to become what we are today and where's it going that's what i think about all the time that's what i think about like human neural interfaces and complex technology and innovation like yeah where is that going to lead us because it's changed us so much from the 1920s if you go to 1922 to 2022, that is one of the, if not the biggest change in all of human history in terms of the way people interact with each other, behave, access to services and goods and just information in general. It's fascinating to me. It's what we are now. Just how much our culture has changed since the invention of social media. It's changed so much. And I'm so curious as to where it goes. And I'm so curious

as to how we got here. And that there are some primary factors that, like psilocybin, that might have been ignored by mainstream academics when they discuss how we got here and what we are. academics when they discuss how we got here and what we are. And do you think you're interested in all of that because you feel like there's something essential to be learned from that history? That and because I smoke a lot of weed and it's a fun thing to think about when you're high. It is. It's like so fascinating. But yeah, I mean, there's definitely something to be learned from it. If you don't know how you got here, it's very difficult to extrapolate. It's so long ago, man.

I mean, it's not how you and I got here. Right. But we are here and we are a part of that chain of evolution. I know. But the time period is so big. It's like I can't even wrap my head around it. Nor can I. I don't think anyone can.

I think you just try. You just try to look at it. It's like when you're thinking about the scope of space. It's like, can you really wrap your head around it? No, but I'm fascinated by it. The James Webb Telescope. I'm like, tell me more, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tell me more.

But you don't really grab it all. Yeah. But it's interesting. Yeah. You know, but you don't really grab it all. Yeah. But it's interesting. Yeah. It is. I mean, I think it's like interesting how it links up to social issues too. Yes. Like if I was to write an article about you, I think it's interesting that you have this one part of you that's very like down to discover what these primal pieces of our history are

and then at the same time i don't know what the connection is but i but it's notable at the same time like on your other life outside of this you like your involvement with ufc which is like your involvement with ufc which is like a very like evolved but still has a very blank still has a very atavistic aspects yes yes you know you see what i'm going i know what you're saying i don't know what it is and it like when i if i was to do that article i would come to it with total um with no bias to try to figure it out, because I don't have like a point of view about it. But it's just, it's interesting that that same, and not to put you on the spot, but I'd rather talk about you than talk about me, that that same, that those things coexist in the same person. I don't think that's a total accident.

Well, my fascination with martial arts is that martial arts is a vehicle for developing your human potential. And outside of war and outside of being a police officer or a firefighter, it's one of the most difficult things that a person can navigate. And those people, especially champions, are extraordinary human beings because what they're doing is what I call high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences. And they're choosing to do that against people that are their same weight,

that are equally skilled and equally prepared and they've managed to find a solution to better all the people that are around them those people the the great ones that they're there's some of the most extraordinary people that you'll ever meet so that's an evolutionary thing too yes but yes and it's also it's like they're choosing to be uncomfortable they're choosing to do something insanely difficult it's a total choice when you get into the octagon you decide to let them shut that gate behind you you can quit at any moment any moment yeah but yet the real great ones i've got nothing but profound respect for you know even

people that you would think on the surface are like a guy like conor mcgregor you would think on the surface he's he's so crazy he's talked so much shit and there's like that's an extraordinary human being that's a rare one in x amount a million kind of people that can do what he does and talk the kind of shit he does and then get into an octagon and fuck people up. But you mean mentally. Mentally. You don't mean extraordinarily. Control of the mind. Well, extraordinarily physically, obviously.

Yeah. But extraordinarily mentally. Are you a fan of MMA? No. I'm going to show you this fight between Conor McGregor and Jose Aldo. Now, Conor McGregor at the time was this incredibly brash, shit-talking Irish guy from Dublin who was beating all these people up. And he gets a shot at the title. And he gets a shot at the title against this guy, Jose Aldo.

And Aldo is a fucking legend. And everyone respects Aldo. And everyone's terrified of Aldo and Aldo is a fucking legend and everyone respects Aldo and everyone's terrified of Aldo and all Connor does through the entire training camp and the entire all the press conferences is just talk mad shit about hold on a second talks mad shit about him the entire time months of press conferences talk takes his belt from him at a press conference and screams at him and is like, inside this guy's head. So he's created the ultimate emotional pressure cooker. And Aldo is overwhelmed by the moment. And in those extreme moments of conflict, people either rise to the occasion or they're

overwhelmed by the moment. The kind of person who's like a Conor McGregor who can rise to the occasion is truly an extraordinary person. And it's best embodied by this one fight. So if you watch this one fight, it's quick. This is Conor coming out, big smile, super loose, to the biggest fight by far of his career. The biggest fight in all of martial arts history

so he gets into the octagon this is jose aldo world champion legend but overwhelmed by the moment and connor's talking to him he's talking to him it's like let's go boy let's go boy and he's on his knees he's super loose he's that and you see aldo nervous right and this is a guy Aldo's a destroyer he's wiped out everybody and the two of them are going at it and Aldo just can't wait to hit him so he makes a critical error and he slept him he slept him with one shot in the big and look, he climbs on top, and look what he does. Just climbs on top of the octagon. He's like, look at that.

And he's making the money thing, like he's shuffling off money. And now he's become the richest MMA fighter of all time, and he's a huge business with Proper 12, but to be a person that can do that under that kind of pressure, that's an extraordinary human being. There's very, very, very few of them that have ever walked the face of the earth that can do that in front of that many people

in that moment, which is built up over months and months and months, really years of taunting them, but months and months and months. And to get to that one moment when you look at each other in the octagon and he looks at me he goes let's go boy let's go boy and you see all those like holy shit this is really happening but connor couldn't be more relaxed that's mind management that's confidence preparation intelligence emotional

intelligence there's so many factors. Like, look how relaxed. He's like, let's go, boy. Let's go, boy. And look how relaxed he is. He's like he's fucking around. Like, he doesn't even feel the pressure of the moment. He's just eating that pressure. Right.

And he goes out there and just lights them up. It's amazing. It's amazing. That's, to me, part of what I love about this. It's like seeing, like, how does someone handle this pressure? How does someone handle this moment? How do you handle this guy in Jose Aldo who's a fucking assassin, an assassin,

and get him so in his head that he charges forward and gets clipped with a perfect left hand? Like, out of character. He's usually a more clever fighter. That was a bad fight move that he made. 100%. Just like rookie. Not only was it a bad fight move that he made. A hundred percent. Just like rookie. Not only was it a bad fight move, but Conor anticipated it. So if you watch Conor warming up in the green room, in the dressing room, before the fight,

he's practicing that very move, and he imitates Jose Aldo's movement and behavior. It's like he knew he was going to do that. So he's so far ahead of this game. Yeah. That's why it's so interesting to me. See, look at him. Look at him in the dressing room on the left-hand side. See, he's mimicking his movement and what he's going to do. And he even mimicked the way Aldo moves around, how Aldo, it's not in this particular clip, but he mimics how Aldo is kind of stiff. And he likes to really load up on his shots because he's got big power.

And he wants to move forward. He wants to crack Conor so bad that he just moves forward and he leaves an opening. And he gets fucked up. See, that's why it's so fascinating to me. People don't understand what it is because they look at it from the outside. It's violence and it's horrible and it's like it's high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences. And it's the craziest game you can play, the wildest game you can play. You can play football.

Football is amazing, right? Yeah. But there's a lot of people helping you. There's a ball. There's timeouts. There's none of that in this. This is the wildest game a person can play. Football is a game. This is like a sport. It's timeouts. There's none of that in this. This is the wildest game a person can play. Football is a game.

This is like a sport. It's combat sports. Combat sports are what all sports aspire to. If someone wins a basketball game, they can always say, yeah, well, I could have kicked your ass. You might have beat me at basketball, but I could kick your ass. Nobody gets their ass kicked and goes, yeah, well, I'll fuck you up at basketball. Because no one cares no one cares you just got fucked up yeah and this is not like a bullying thing this is not someone

who's bigger stronger who picks on someone who's not defense who's defenseless this is two people that are champions the elite of the elite and they choose to meet and they prepare for each other. It's, to me, it's the most exciting thing in the world. Yeah. Well, you do it. You give a great explanation for it. Thank you. You really did it. You really brought it to life for me.

Well. And you made me appreciate it. And it's not just men. You know, one of my favorite fighters ever is Rose Namajunas, this female MMA fighter who's like a peace-loving hippie yeah you know and you know she's she she she won the title and then in her title speech she was telling everybody we just got to be better people yeah we got to get along better but i think without that narrative that you put on it it's hard for people to understand yeah well. Well, it's one of those things. That's like the story of it as a storyteller that I see you doing.

Like you created a whole way of understanding the experience that if I didn't have that, I just look at it. I'm like, okay, that's a dude that missed his right hand, another dude that connected with that. So that's why the story of it is so important. There's so much to that story. That is a crazy story. And that was the rise of Conor. And then Conor went on to beat Eddie Alvarez to become a concurrent two division champion. He was the first double champ. So he held both the lightweight and the featherweight title at the same time, which is crazy. And then he abandoned the featherweight title and kept the lightweight title. And then, I mean, those types of people that are the elite of the elite in combat sports athletes,

they're some of the most, they could do anything. They just, that's what they interfaced with. That's what they chose to succeed at. They would have succeeded as a special forces operator. They would have succeeded as a fighter jet pilot. would have succeeded as a special forces operator. They would have succeeded as a fighter jet pilot. They would have succeeded as anything that's very difficult to do if they were obsessed with it

and they chose to give themselves to it. So you admire excellence. Yes. As I do too. Yes. I mean anybody that's really good at something. Yes. It doesn't matter to me what it is.

You could be like the best bricklayer in the world. Yes. I think that's just so interesting. And I want to learn about like, how did you do that? Yes. I admire excellence and I admire people that are obsessed with things that are just really focused on just trying to do their very best with this thing, whether it's cabinetry or literature.

Some, I admire focus and dedication. And I admire what a human being is able to do with creativity. And fighting is creativity. There's creativity involved in fighting. Because you're setting things up. It's totally up to you in that moment. You don't think of it as creativity because we think of a painting or a piece of music.

No, I think of it as, i don't know if it's like purely creative but it there's certainly creativity involved there has to be there is there most certainly is you know some of the best fighters are super super creative you know they they they make things happen in these moments yeah because there's expression there's a level where it's past skill yeah and it's past training and it's past like muscle force reaction time and shit like that yeah it's a martial art is what it is it's an art art yeah that's why like when i see that when i see like connor knocking out all to me that's beautiful yeah that is a work of art yeah it's a fascinating work of art yeah i think half the

country would think it's scary yeah more than half the country would think it's scary yeah more than half the country would think it's scary come on man you know 20 people 10 of them are pussies you know like it's like people are scared of everything yeah like people it's like so many people have never had to overcome difficult things in their lives well you know what developed the character but you know what it is also you see it as a work of art because i think you want because i think you have the background and the understanding of all that went into it yeah and i would argue that that's i'm not you're not the only guy like that obviously anyone that's that's like a fan probably has some of that but that that's also true of, of what you would normally consider a

work of art. Like that's also true of a movie or a play or a musician that the deeper your background is in understanding what they're doing, the more you can, the more you can appreciate. And if you don't have any background at all and you're just raised on, just to pick on TikTok because it's easy, and you're just raised on TikTok videos, you might not appreciate something that's like really high level. For sure.

You know? Sure. I mean, if you grow up today and you don't have any background in music, you can't appreciate what a concert pianist has to do to get to a position to play Mozart. Yeah. But if you are a musician and you watch

some brilliant pianist just nail it. You're like, oh my God. Because you can appreciate the art form, you understand the effort that's involved. You have a comprehensive understanding of this expression. Yeah, and I think it's like, we were talking about responsibility earlier a little bit. I think it's like a little bit up to the artist to assume that audiences want to have that appreciation, want to do that work. Yeah.

Because some people do. Some people do. And if they don't, they should. Well, you have to play for the people that do. Really, you have to kind of make it for yourself. Well, you have to do both. You have to make it for people like yourself. You have to do both. You have to play it for the people that have the appreciation, and you also have to – I mean, you don't have to, but I think of it for me. Like I want to bring people in that aren't necessarily looking for the experience that I'm trying to give them. Right. You open the door for them to appreciate it

I want it. I want to I Want to like I want to get them in I want to almost trick them in the door Like I want to give them shit that makes them feel like I Can appreciate this like this is to be easy for me. I'm going to give you in the first 10 minutes a really cool action sequence. This is going to be an easy ride for you. I'm going to show you all the tropes

that make you feel comfortable with guns, guys being heroic. And then I may then take you someplace four hours later that you weren't necessarily looking to go and that's the beauty of it but i need to but that's like yeah you're luring them there's a little yeah man there's i mean because if it was just strictly speaking hey i just want to hit this really arty crowd i think that's limiting i'm not trying to just talk to the people that, um, you know,

like battle of Algiers, you know, like some fucking cinema that I like. Well, isn't that the benefit of having 10 hours to do it too? I think that's, I don't think, yeah,

it's the benefit of like, it's the benefit of, um, of being in the, of, of having this kind of like really privileged position that I have to try shit. Yeah. You know?

And, um, the thing that's different about it is when you make a movie, it's like it involves or television show, it involves money. I mean, it's not like, it's not like writing a poem where I can just do it. You know, I need money. And like, in this case, it's like a lot of money. It's like close to a poem where I can just do it. You know, I need money. And like, in this case, it's like a lot of money. It's like close to $100 million. Jesus. Thank God Apple's rich. I don't even think they know where that money is.

They don't know how much money. They have more money than most countries. It's kind of crazy. They just make computers and phones and they fucking run shit. They're also a health company really? they think I mean

because of the watches? yeah because like I had a scene in the beginning there's this wedding scene in the pilot and one of the one of the characters

is smoking this woman's smoking a cigarette and they're like you can't do that. Because no tobacco use, Apple wouldn't promote. The use of- No, but it's not promoting it. Well, it's depicting it.

Right, but- So I was like, so I'm on this call with this lawyer and she's like, yeah, you can't do that. And sort of saying, well, that's really too bad because it is like part of the character, this woman's character. And she said, well,

you just cannot depict smoking tobacco. This lawyer. And I'm like, I cannot depict smoking tobacco. She's like, correct. Something that millions of people do. But then I go,

but I can pick smoking another substance. And she's like, our policy is you cannot depict smoking tobacco. And I'm like, what about marijuana? She's like, our policy is you cannot depict smoking tobacco. So I'm like, okay, according to this lawyer, like I'm good with marijuana. So she rolls up a joint and there's no issue with that whatsoever it's a schedule one substance it's against the law federally that's hilarious but you can have them drinking whiskey like we're doing no problem and and smoking a joint no right

right yeah the idea is that so she rolls a joint cigarette is the great demon that cannot be discussed there she goes oh yeah you found that be discussed. There she goes. Oh, yeah. That's hilarious. Yeah, there she is. Good for her. That's a good compromise. Yeah, I was totally down with that. Yeah.

It's just unfortunate. I mean, the reason why I was talking is like Columbia, people smoke. It's not like the U.S. where we've kind of moved away from cigarettes. There's still a lot of smoking down there. It just seems ridiculous creatively because you're making characters and there are human beings that smoke just like there's human beings that have gambling addictions

there's human beings that you know they have bad personal hygiene it's all real you can have flawed human beings that have drinking problems like why is that that would

it's silly they let me they let me get away with so much. I get it. And the only other thing that they were very, very, like, hyper-vigilant about was any depiction. I'm going to get in so much trouble for talking about this. This is so dumb of me.

See, I haven't had a drink in, like, two weeks because my liver values were high. So my doctor was like, don't drink. So now I've had had a drink so i'm going to talk about this but yeah um any depict any any apple products had to be depicted like perfectly which sounds easy but it's not so you couldn't have like a crack screen on someone who's like an explorer it's not even that it's just like like a c you probably couldn't do that that didn't even occur to me i just mean like you have a scene in which someone picks up the phone and um because you're filming like they don't they're not actually talking right right into the phone into like an action they're not having an actual conversation with somebody on the other end so whatever like the phone has like a screen on but on the apple product the screen goes off after x number of seconds right so they're like on in your show here the screen's on for 10 seconds it's supposed to go off after whatever it is or that ringtone

that you have on that you put in on in the sound mix is for ios 7 but the phone is like 8 and you're just like how does anybody even know that you know or like the shade of blue that you have on that text message is not the correct shade of blue i'm like it looks right to me i kind of can appreciate that me too it's fine i it's just it was just we spent a lot of money fixing mistakes like that because i remember I was watching a film once. I think it was Jumanji, where they're texting each other on Sony phones, but it's showing an ellipsis, like iMessage, where you know that the person is responding.

Yeah. I'm like, hey. Like, you're fucking with me. You caught that. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me. Jeez.

Sneeze. Yeah, I caught it. it it's like i don't like fuckery yeah yeah i like that they did that all anybody can say whatever they want about the plot or the charactering of the show characterizations in the show i guarantee you all the apple shit is correct you can't have it freezing on you there's nothing wrong there's no mistakes in the portrayal of any that makes sense though i mean you know they are in some ways at least if not promoting apple products they want them to be used accurately yeah yeah yeah it was a fair trade yeah it was a fair trade it was just funny and the fact that you let her smoke a joint that's okay yeah the joint's okay it's weird there's all kinds of things i mean they they're you know really no restrictions i mean i guess some but like i don't

really trade in like gratuitous violence or like nudity which is a big thing obviously on tv that helps you get viewers so we didn't really have a lot of nudity actually there's no nudity a little bit um and the violence is all very realistic in the sense that I believe in like trying to put you in the audience like in the situation of whatever is being depicted to see what it would feel like to be in that. If you were in a shootout, what it would really feel like, which means the camera work is very realistic. work is very realistic as opposed to using close-ups to kind of like distort and fuck with your perception and make the violence look more beautiful or more um exciting or more um safe right that makes sense you know like i hate in movies when the bad guy shoots like 50 times and doesn't hit anybody and and and you never have a big shot that shows the geographical relationship between the two people that are shooting each other and it's all just like selling a gun

selling a close-up of a gun selling the bullet flying out right right and you're never actually like showing the audience how it would really go down yeah that's the difference between the suspension of disbelief involved in a lot of like action films yeah yeah which i love like john wick is amazing yeah i'm not taking anything and there's a time and a place for it like with two gummies on a saturday afternoon yeah it it's fun. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. But there's also this other idea of like, hey, let's put the audience in the situation as opposed to having the audience,

like let's put the audience at eye level with our characters where they really feel what the characters would be feeling or what they would feel if they were in the room as opposed to like some most movies like the audience is sort of like put above the action so you can watch it from a safe perspective and not feel like you're implicated in it and you're embedded and you're yeah and you can enjoy it. So in your show, you're embedded. A little bit. Yeah. So that I can then, like, hopefully, after the violence, track you into, like, a psychological and emotional place.

It's not just about, like, showing you how it would be to be in a firefight. It's also about, like, the scenes that follow it so that I can keep you feeling things that that um i want you to be feeling do what who are your favorite filmmakers like who do you draw inspiration from i mean i think that uh i don't know i think like there will be blood oh yeah is probably the best I think like there will be blood. Oh yeah. Is probably the best, um, movie that I've seen. Like current,

it's not current, but like in my adult life. Um, um, some of Quentin's early work too. Um, and then I like a lot of movies that people haven't really heard of like I mentioned like Battle of Algiers and there's a movie called Army of Shadows that's a French movie

but I don't really like get inspiration from other movies what do you get inspiration from I get inspiration from I don't know but it's not movies i get inspiration from like things that i see like in the world and then i kind of like something clicks and i'm curious it's really i just follow my curiosity and then i go and do a lot of research into whatever that thing is if it's in this case it's like what it would be like to be kidnapped so that i like read books about that and talk to people who've been kidnapped and so forth and i i don't know exactly the mechanism of what it is about the the situation that that ignites some curiosity but then i just sort of follow my curiosity. And then after all the research is done,

I somehow try to take that and shape it into a story that I think can have meaning for other people. But some writers get inspiration just from like their own personal lives, which I do too. Like obviously we all like come to something from our own like personal experiences, but I very much depend on like the outside world. I'm not just like sitting in my head, like being like, Oh, well, how would, how will it be real? I'm never like, Oh, it'd be really cool. If then this happened, I'm much more like, Hey, how would this really happen? And that's

like a question that you can, I mean, there's a lot of answers to it, but it's a, it's like, it's like, if you can, you can answer that question by talking to people you know like like it like you can call up a special forces guy and be like how would you deal with this situation you can call up 30 of them and have all these different conversations and then like meld it down into something that seems like that crystallizes the heart of it all. How difficult is that process of like trying to take someone's depictions and descriptions and personal experiences and trying to put that into dialogue with fictional characters and just. I mean, it's not just dialogue. I mean, I don't, I love

it. It's not just dialogue though. Like a lot of people think of screenwriting as dialogue, which is not really right. Although a lot, it, it, it's, it's not just dialogue. You're also writing like the, the image, which is way in, in a lot of ways, way more important than what people are saying in a movie it's like a motion picture right it's like an image that you're seeing so there's words being spoken but it's really like how do people look what are they doing how are they moving through space some of that is up the up to the director but a lot of it is governed by the screenwriter too so you're really writing like a series of images and then there's dialogue like in addition to that and the dialogue is how the characters

speak and then there's some things that that dialogue is good for and there's some things that like are really fucking hard to do with dialogue as opposed to like the written word like if i was to if i was to write a story about about anything like you for example just as a just to take an example in prose it'd be really easy to like write about what you're thinking about just like he he thought you just like write it out but if it's a if it's a movie like the only way i can get access to your brain is is either through your behavior right because there's no like thought bubble over your head so i either have to like describe what you're doing in such a way that it

reveals who you are, or I have to have you say some shit that's really revealing about who you are. That's, that's pretty hard. Like, like depicting people's inner states. And then you don't have total control over it because an actor,

another human beings like taking your work and like bringing it to life so they bring a whole nother level of like inspiration and artistry and interpretation and meaning on top of whatever it is you were originally starting with what is that feeling like when you're seeing someone like jeremy renner like taking your words and bringing them to life and you have to so you have expectations of what it's going to be like. And then you see this artist interpretation of it and you're, what is that feeling like when you're watching it all come to life? It can be like a great,

a great pleasure. You know, it can be amazing. A lot of times it's better. Really? You know, a lot of times you're like, Oh my God,

there's so much better than I thought it was. know if it's a good actor right if it's a great actor like like jeremy is you know you're like wow i must be really fucking good you're like no it's just like he's he's bringing so much to it yeah you know he's putting so much like like intensity into it if you have an actor that's not as skilled it can go the other way and you're like god this stuff sucks so it all depends on like the intelligence and talent of the actor usually that's got to be tricky in the casting process to try to figure out who's who yeah i mean that's kind of the big one the big thing about directing is like you try to cast it right it's like kind of the big decision, and everything else follows it.

But it's a hugely collaborative thing that's unique to the performing arts where you don't have total control. Like as a novelist or as a journalist or whatever, prose, you have total control. It's a collaboration, and that can be amazing. It can be totally amazing. What is your creative process like? Like if you have, if you decide you're gonna make a film, what is it like from the moment you sit down?

Like do you have a concept in your head? Are you driving around your car and you're thinking about some guy who defuses bombs? Do you like, where does it come from and how do you set about bringing it to life? I mean, it's I don't know that I have like the same process every time. Like I said, there's usually some some experience that either I'm told about or happens to me. Like for example, the action sequence that starts, I'll give you a very specific example that starts this show. I knew I needed an action sequence somewhere in the beginning of it because that's just like a demand of the form. Like you're

selling a thriller, you need to have some action in the beginning. And it's also a way of like introducing people to the fact that this is a story with danger and stakes. And it's something I do well. So I knew that I had to have something like that. And I was kind of casting around until I was reading about an operation in Afghanistan, Operation Anaconda. And there was a series of events. This was like in 2000. The thing happened in 2002. There was a series of events in the beginning of it. in the beginning of it and a friend of mine who had been on um uh he wasn't on that op but he knew about it because he i think he overlapped with some of the team guys that were on it um started

talking to me about this this very specific thing that happened on a mountain in afghanistan in 2002 okay and i heard the story from somebody that had like pretty good knowledge of it and it wasn't like my story it didn't fit like what i was doing exactly but there were some pieces of that story of the way that one navy seal commando thought that somebody that was on his team was dead and he wasn't really sure basically a guy got shot and he was presumed to be dead and he got left and then there was a controversy about whether he was actually really dead or not and i i know that that all the like particulars of that story didn't like make it over into my into what I ended up writing. But just that idea that you could be in combat, you know, under fire, see one of your buddies go down. Be reasonably sure that he was dead and then have a and then lay and leave because you had to for your own safety.

And then later find out that maybe he was maybe he wasn't that like is is like stuck in me you know like i couldn't get it i couldn't it just like stuck so it's when things like that stick that they become inspiration in a certain way or like i remember talking to, um, I know this was actually in a book I read about somebody that had been kidnapped in Columbia and she was a, uh, she was like a political, uh, consultant or she was working on a political campaign and she got kidnapped by a rebel group. And then she was held for a really long time, wrote a book about it. One of the things that she talked about in her book was that like a week into her kidnapping,

she met a very senior guy in the rebel camp. And she lost her temper with him. She like unloaded on him. Because she was fucking pissed because she was being held captive. And she was rude to him. And she like regretted it for the next like 10 years of her life.

And I thought that like stuck in me. Like how you could be kidnapped and be so fucking desperate to get out. And at the same time angry that you're kidnapped. And then here you have the one opportunity. You're now talking to the guy who controls your fate. And you can't control your emotions and you like, you know, let loose on him. And that's just like a very human thing. Right. let loose on them. And that's just like a very human thing, right?

So like it's just accumulating. I kind of like scour out there and accumulate all these moments that seem real to me and that seem like illuminative of something else bigger. And then when I have enough of those, I start writing. So you just sort of like let it build in your mind until it's something you kind of have to get out? Yeah. And it's like a delicate moment. Like how do you know when you have too much?

And there's also times on projects where I fuck that process up and I've gotten so much information and didn't write it out. And it's like you miss that window. And you're like, ah, I'll do it like next month or in two months. And then it's like it's gone. There's just like this moment in time where like I have enough. If I learn one more thing, I'm going to get overwhelmed. And that's the moment when you have to say, okay, I'm going to put it all down. I'm going to now go into a place which is not.

Because I can intellectualize about all this stuff a lot and talk about like the different theoretical pieces of it but where you just let that go and you follow your instincts and you're hoping that like your sense of truth or my sense of truth is like what's guiding it i don't mean truth like this shit really happened i don't mean like truth like a set of facts but i mean like a artistic, like a meaningful depiction of human life truth. And you just hope that you have like, for me, if I stay quiet enough in myself and like don't take an easy out and don't copy some shit I've seen before and don't, you know, succumb to anxiety about like getting it done quickly or whatever it is and i just follow like hey there was something about that moment when i heard that story about or read that story about the woman who like lost it on her captor and like i just need to stay with that curiosity and really try to honor it and not try to come to it with like a whole bunch of ideological fucking suppositions because those are always wrong

and not try to like really like slap myself on top of it but just like try to follow the truth of that moment um which is a hard thing to do like you have to be very relaxed and have a lot of like faith in yourself and stuff and then um you just got to do that over and over and over again, you know? And if it's 10 hours, it's like, Oh my God, it's 600 pages of fucking scripts. I mean, I had a writer's room and, and, and writers helping me, but ultimately I ended up rewriting a lot of it. So, um um that's kind of the process and sometimes it's it's better to be you know at home and like totally comfortable in my like setup and i have everything really how i need it to be and sometimes i the stuff i write like in the back of a pickup

truck bouncing on a jungle road on the way to set is like just as good if not better where there's like a gun to my head and someone's saying like we're gonna be on set in five minutes and you need to finish the scene and i'm like you know sometimes the pressure creates like like a kind of like i don't know like a kind of like uh force a window of Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure it's the same way with, with, with all writers. Like, Oh, I don't know how other people work, but, um, it can, I mean, I grew up like having to write for, for, for money, like as a journalist, like you get paid by the word. So I learned to write like on a fucking subway, you know, you do it wherever you have to do it but i think that

that process before you start typing is also writing that process of thinking about it even though you're not physically like putting words in order it's part of the whole imaginative enterprise and it's it's an important part for me to like sift out the, the, I hesitate to keep using this word truth, but to sift out whatever might be authentic from all the other influences. And if I find myself doing something that feels like, hey, I'm really just doing this

because I copied somebody because I saw a scene like this in another movie. I mean, there's one or two instances where I like rip somebody off in this show, but by and large, if it felt like I was ripping ripping somebody off I like won't allow myself to do it that doesn't mean it's better because people have done amazing shit and there's like nothing wrong with copying them but I try to not do that so when you have these moments, like when you're thinking about this woman who screamed at her captor, do you have a way that you just immediately try to write them down so you don't forget them? Do you try to capture when it hits you and resonates with you?

Just try to, like,, I gotta go somewhere real quick and just sit down and write that out. How do you make sure that it doesn't slip away from you? Sometimes it does slip away, man. I mean, a lot of times I like, because I'll have a notebook or whatever and write it down.

But sometimes shit slips away and you lose it. But then it comes back later. I mean, things come back in the most magical ways. That's the best part of it i mean i remember writing there's a scene in episode four where um uh one of the characters uh who's the special forces guy is talking to a friend of his in the cia and he's he's asking for

help with this like problem of getting his sister out. And I remember sitting there and being like, this is a pretty hard scene to write because I got to do it. The conversation has to happen pretty quickly just because of the needs of the plot. I don't have a lot of time for this. And they're on the phone. So the dialogue is really going to be the only thing that lives. There's no image that's going to be interesting. It's two fucking guys talking on the phone. So the dialogue is really going to be the only thing that lives. There's no image that's going to be interesting. It's two fucking guys talking on a phone.

It's the most boring thing to look at. So the dialogue has to be really elevated in that case. You see what I mean? So I was like, oh, this is actually pretty hard. And for whatever reason, it was coming down to the wire. And I was trying to imagine. I knew what the special forces guy was going to say because it was obvious what he was going to say. And all of a sudden as I was writing this CIA guy, I wrote this line where he goes, not every problem has a solution.

Which I was like, oh, that's a really good fucking line. And I was like, oh, wow, I was kind of happy about it. like oh it's a really good fucking line and i was like oh wow i was kind of happy about it and um i was talking to a friend of mine like four or five days ago who worked on the show who is the sound mixer this guy paul audison who's amazing and he was telling me i really liked that line that was so good like it really made me think about my life, like, that sometimes there are problems and we don't. We just have to accept that they exist. You know, we have to live with the consequences of them. There's not a solution to every problem.

I was like, thanks, Paul. And then I got off the phone, hung up, and I remembered, oh, fuck. Like, 15 years ago in a bar in D.C., there was a CIA guy who fucking told me that, talking about Syria. Oh. And so, you know, like the providence of it had like kind of been lost in like my – in like the neural network of my brain or whatever. my brain or whatever but so things you do like drop things but i feel like if they're meaningful they kind of they kind of come back some sometime and and when you have when you have like 10 hours to fill there's just like so many times where you're where like something will come back in that that you might have left on the

wayside a long time ago well you're constantly cultivating your gardens of thought and creativity too right yeah i mean i i i i try to i mean that's a nice way of putting it as a garden but yeah i try to like um you know i try to like stay open to other people is the biggest thing and stay open to other experiences so that I'm not always like, just like riffing on myself, which is a little bit limiting. Well, listen, man, the process, whatever it is, the result is amazing. I'm a, I'm a big fan. You do some really awesome shit and I can't wait. Check this out. Echo three on Amazon or excuse me on apple on amazon sorry apple and uh it's uh available now right yeah it's available now are all the

episodes available now is if no one through one through five will be are available right now then it's like an episode every week there's a new episode that drops every Friday. Okay. Up until you get to 10. So you got to consume them one at a time. Exciting. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks, man. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you very much. And thanks for everything you do.

Really appreciate it. Yeah, it's lovely. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye.