The Joe Rogan Experience - #2532 - Tim Robbins

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Tim Robbins is an Academy Award-winning actor, director, writer, and producer known for such films as "The Shawshank Redemption," "Mystic River," and "The Hudsucker Proxy." He currently stars in the Apple TV+ series "Silo."www.apple.com/tv-pr/originals/silo/www.timrobbins.net Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Open an account in minutes at https://Chime.com/Rogan Switch today at https://www.Visible.com for just 25/mo. Or Save $10 on your first month of Visible+ Pro with code ROGAN.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Rogan podcast, checking out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Jamie's very geeked out. I want to let you know. He didn't want to say it. Shawshank is his all-time favorite movie. So he was kind of freaking out when he met you.

Thanks, Jamie. Thank you. It's all-time. I mean, you're a part of easily one of the greatest movies in the history of people. I know. It's such a gift. I mean, when people come up and say something about it, It usually is coming from a pretty deep place.

Yeah. If you didn't like that movie, there's something, you should go to a doctor. You need medication. There's something wrong with you. That's an amazing movie. And weird that it's a Stephen King movie, too. You know, that guy is arguably one of the most prolific guys in the history of fiction. Yeah.

And in the same novella, there was Stand By Me, too. Oh, wow. That's amazing. It's so weird. He writes stuff varies so much. he had to do like a pseudonym at one point time, remember? He did Richard Bachman. Yeah, yeah.

Because he was turning out so many books. They're like, hey, we can't keep selling these fucking Stephen King books. And he's like, well, how would I come out with another name? Like, give you a fake name. And he just started killing it under a fake name. Just got to keep right now. Yeah, wild, wild guy. Yeah.

Just a very unusual human, you know, they exist. Yeah. Only met him once. Really? Yeah. Did you meet him like when you were filmed the movie? Around the premiere time, yeah. Yeah.

So he's out there, man. Yeah. You know, during his early days, I'm fascinated by his early days, because his early days, he was off the rails with cocaine and alcohol. And some of the best shit that he made. He doesn't even remember writing it. Wow. I think Cooch, I think is one of the books his wife took out of the garbage because he threw it away. He's like, fuck this book.

Coojo sucks. It was Coocho or one of the classics. Yeah. And she was like, are you out of your fucking mind? Like, this is incredible. And he was literally going to throw it out because he was just out of his mind. He wrote The Shining, right?

Yeah. So what? Was it Carrie? Yeah. He threw Carrie away? Crazy. No way. Crazy.

That's crazy. Yeah. Shining was a big movie from a big book for me. I was, you know, working in a nine to five job and, you know, in between colleges. And it really like woke me up to all kinds of great possibilities in writing. Well, he, he hated. hated the movie, which is so crazy because he felt like Jack Nicholson got insane too quickly. Really?

Yeah, because in the book, I read the book too. It's very different, similar, but it's more of a drawn-out process of him becoming possessed by the property. A slower rollout. Yeah, like Jack Nicholson was kind of kooky already, like right away, which, you know, it's Jack Nicholson. It's also Stanley Kubrick. It's like he's got to do his interpretation of it. You just got to accept that. Of course.

Yeah. That's some scary shit in that. Fuck, man. His books are insane. Yeah. It's like what is going on inside that guy's mind or was going on inside that guy's mind when he was writing them? God knows. I think once he got clean, he kind of changed and straightened out and different human now.

But boy, I'm fascinated by the off the rails days because the books were so nuts. Was Shawshank during that time? I don't know. It must have been. It must have been. Because I don't think he got sober until it was decades after his career began. Wow. Some of the great stuff, like, I think all the stand, I think all that stuff, he was out of his mind and he was writing all those. But in the midst of all that madness, there's a tenderness. Oh, yeah. Oh, great humanity to it all. Yeah. Yeah. But also just a true understanding of the darkest nature. of humans and how they're influenced and then of course you know demonic possession and

Salem's lot and all that other crazy shit like he was just it was so good but then the idea that a library can be the you know in Shawshake that the library can be the liberation yeah yeah no it was an amazing amazing movie we were talking about your new show silo which I just not new it's been around for three seasons I just started watching it so it's new to me. I watched the first two episodes last night. It was fucking great and very original and interesting. And I was telling you before that it made me think of this place that they discovered fairly recently in Turkey called Darren Kuyu. And Darren Kuyu is this underground city that's massive. I think it could I think it could hold 20,000 people.

Wow. Something nutty like that. I've seen pictures of it. It found completely by accident. So some guy lost one of his chickens, went through a hole in the wall and never came back. And he was trying to figure out where this fucking chicken went. So he broke down the wall to see what was going on. And then they realized that there's this insane underground city. Oh, my God. Yeah, underneath this town in Turkey. And it's massive, just absolutely massive. They have no idea who made it. There's no historical record of it. Any idea of when? Well, you know, they make gases based on stuff they find there, but it's when you carbon date an object, right? So you could go visit the pyramids today, right?

And you could leave behind some stuff, right? And then everybody dies. Humanity dies out in a cataclysm. And then 100,000 years from now, people start looking through the piles of some of these sites and the pyramids would probably still be there. And if there was any organic material left, like a book that you left or, you know, a leather-bound book or some people, piece of wood, they could carbon date that. And then that would say the time that you were there. But it wouldn't say the time that the actual structure was made.

So who knows how long people, show me some more pictures of that, please? I was looking up when it was made. Do they know? No, definitely don't know. They didn't even know it existed. I mean, it was, when was it found? I feel like it was found in the 20th century. There must have been some kind of hostile force that they built it to escape from.

Or something going on outside. And not just hostile, but environmental. So, 1963, rediscovered in 1963. Wow. That's crazy. It's in his fucking house. Even today, only 10% of it is accessible to tourists. The rest is still being explored.

That's how nuts it is. So how many people do they think it held when it was operational? I think it's something like 20,000 people. That's how big this place is. That's amazing. So they don't know when or why, and depending on how, around 20,000 people. Plus livestock. And food stores.

Really? How they farmed down there? Who fucking knows? I don't know. But they had grain storage. They had all kinds of stuff down there. Oil presses. 18 levels reaching 85 meters.

So 280 feet deep into the ground with ventilation shafts, wells, wells, stables, stables, wine and oil presses, storage rooms, chapels, and school rooms, plus a half tonne circular stone doors that could be rolled shut from the inside only. So they were obviously either fighting off some sort of an army or the outside air was hostile. There was something going on. Got too hot or something. Could have been. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's been many moments in the time that human beings were alive where there have been cataclysms.

You know, there's this thing called the Younger Drys Impact Theory that's around a lot. 11,800 years ago, there's all this evidence that there was massive asteroid impacts all over the earth, common impacts. And they think that it was probably a reset of civilization. And so this could have been post that. It could have been how some people survived in these areas. Human beings have an amazing ability to survive. Yeah. I mean, you know.

Which is Silo. I mean, it's really a mom. Silo is a modern version of Darren Coo. Yeah. Yeah. And here I was, you know, in the middle of lockdown when I received those scripts. And I was like, oh, this is actually talking about right now. Yeah. This is about a controlled society where information is censored and where compliance is necessary.

And if you don't comply, you get sent out into the hostile environment. It was all too familiar metaphorically for me. Perfect timing. Yeah, perfect timing. Because you've got to think that he must have written that before, right? Yeah, many years ago. So it was just got lucky. Yeah, yeah.

Perfect. Here we go. Synchronicity. Yeah. I'm been blessed that way in my career. What do you think that's about? Do you ever wonder why you're so lucky? Obviously, you're very talented.

But it's also, there's a lot of talented people that don't, nothing ever happens for them. I think it comes down to the ability to say no. Mm. at crucial times when I was facing down either, you know, you know, I remember when I first had my first child and I was broke and I got offered this comedy that was dumb and it was a million bucks and I needed the money and I also had an opportunity if I waited, Robert Altman was trying to put together the player. So I, through,

caution in the wind and said, no, I can't do that stupid comedy. What was the stupid comedy? Do you remember? Yeah, it was called Folks. I remember flying out to L.A. to meet on it. And I'm with Alan Arkin. And he was the guy that was going to play my father in this thing. And he said, what the fuck are you doing this script for? I said, I need the money.

He says, I don't know. I'm not sure I want to do this thing. I was like, thank you, Alan Arkin, for confirming what I was thinking. Wow. Yeah. And so I said no, and then the player came through and shifted my whole career. Yeah, it's a matter of following that voice in your head, the instinct, the one that's telling you this is the right way to go. Yeah.

Even though there's all sorts of influence that want to lead you into the other direction. There was a period of time about 10, 15 years ago when I got offered in the course of seven months, I got offered to play the head of the CIA three times. You ever wonder what that's all about? I couldn't even imagine. I mean, for some reason, that was, I don't know, I have no idea. And then a couple years after that, and again, you know, you're looking down at your bills and your mortgages. and stuff and you need the money and just have to, I don't want to do that, right?

Then a few months, a few years after, a couple years after that, I got offered in the course of a couple months, one to play the head of FIFA, which is a corrupt organization, but in the movie it was, you know, they were the best people in the world, right? Propaganda. Not to mention that the head of FIFA was a Brazilian and I had, you know, but they were offering a ton of money

and basically was FIFA producing a movie about itself. Oh, wow. And after that, I got an offer to play the head of the Chilean mine that had just had this huge disaster. And it turns out the mining company was, they were really nice people, you know, according to this script. It wasn't bad management or anything that made the disaster happen. So I realized that the oligarchs are starting to make movie about themselves. It's got oligarchical cinema. It's like they produced movies.

that make themselves look really good. And you can get away with it. Oh, hell yeah. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. And they think they can buy anybody. And they almost bought me. But I just, I have to, at times I just have to look, you know, face it down and say,

listen, it's not right in my heart. I can't, I can't do it. Yeah. Well, that's great. You've got that North Star. It's great that I had the luxury to do that. Oftentimes people don't have that luxury. Right.

And one bad decision can pigeonhole you in a bad direction. and then you'll never get the ones that you really want. Right. Yeah. These movies about you playing CIA had, did they ever get made? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There were TV shows and movies, yeah.

Was any of it any good? No. I remember when we were doing movies like, you know, the day of the Condor, you know, which was like critical of the CIA. And I think now we have the rogue CIA agents that are actually good guys. And, you know, listen, CIA, you know, whatever it does, nobody really knows the extent of what they do. But they do have a lot of good portrayals in the media. Well, I think there's good people that are in the CIA as well.

And I think that it's necessary. I just think that they obviously have unchecked power. And they've done some really fucking shady shit. Yeah. You know, in the name of this is the right thing to do right now, including selling drugs. Yeah, you know? I remember that. I remember that.

I remember that because I was, gosh, I guess I was either right out of high school. It was like in that area where the whole Oliver Stone thing was on television all the time. And it was just. Oliver North. Oliver North, excuse me. Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. And there was this guy, Jimmy Tingle, hilarious Boston stand-up comedian who had a great joke about it. Where they're interviewing Ronald Reagan.

And they say, Mr. President, did you have a lot of? sell arms to people who hate us. And he's like, I don't remember. He goes, well, in the future, if you sell arms to people who hate us, jot it down. Make a note of it. He goes, put a post it on your refrigerator. Today, I sold arms to Iran. I remember that was in the 80s.

I did a play about it. I wrote a play about it. Really? And we performed it with the actors gang, yeah. There was a meme that was on social media recently that was, it showed Oliver North during the whole Iran-Contra trials when, you know, they got caught selling drugs in Los Angeles to fund the contras versus the San Dinas, Nicaragua. And then he goes to jail. And then the same guy you see later on Fox News as like a war analyst. And it's like this hilarious meme.

Like if you told me, if you told me in 1980, whatever the fuck it was, where, you know, he got in trouble that he would eventually be the guy that they call upon for expert advice on what's going on overseas. Yeah, it's a deep connection that goes back years. All the people that get it wrong, they got, particularly Iraq War, they got, anyone that got it wrong got promotions. Yeah, and no one got in trouble. No one got fired, you know, people in the media as well, you know, they promoted it. They got, you know, better jobs. Well, this is kind of the only time in our lifetimes where there's,

actual real independent media, you know, where there's independent journalists that are not connected to any major corporations that are operating either on substack or online or on YouTube or on X. It's fascinating because they, they're the ones that are exposing all these connections that the media and the central intelligence agency and all these other government organizations have had where they've all been working together forever, spinning narratives on TV. And so, like any time something like the Iraq war happens where they go, oh, we've got weapons of mass destruction, we got to go in there. No weapons of mass destruction.

No one goes away. No one gets in trouble. And the same people are on TV telling you about some new thing that you have to pay attention to. It's like, this is nuts. This episode is brought to by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America.

That means real people, millions of them are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at CHIME is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their CHIM card, it gives you 5% cashback on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate crazy high. It's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com slash Rogan takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank, Banking Services and Chime Card provided by Chimes Bank Partners. Terms and Limits Apply. Go to chime.com slash disclosures for more details. Well, some people get in trouble, people that come out against it. And there's never any apologies. I did. I did. I risked a lot to do it. And, you know, wound up being right. But no one ever said, hey, you were right.

This was during the Iraq War. Yeah. What did you say? I was one of maybe five people that were famous that came out against that wolf. Went on, you know, in various television shows and made a couple of speeches. I got my appearance at the Baseball Hall of Fame for Bull Durham, 15th anniversary or something like, canceled by the head of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Wow. It was funny because I was doing a show at the time, and I heard about it, and I had, I started writing a response, but it was already printed by the time I had my response, right?

So I got the next day, I got a bunch of people contacting me. I hired a crisis PR person for the first time of my life and wound up getting my letter to Dale Petrosky, the head of the Hall of Fame, out there with. the uh with the press release with the various basically ambushed trying to you know to call me a traitor and all this stuff wow and um so i pushed back and the the publicist that i had hired was very smart he said we're going to send us to all the sports writers and it was the sports writers that wrote the articles defending freedom of speech wow at the time so it was um what year was this is this right after 9-11 this was uh white when we were cooking up the war 2003. So, and I remember, you know, and I also wrote a piece about that called Embedded that we've

performed for the first time of three weeks after Bush landed on that aircraft carrier with a mission accomplished thing. So that wound up playing it across the country. We toured it and played in New York Public Theater and played in London. But it was attacked when we went to New York. You know, they sent someone from. there wasn't a theater critic while we were still in previews and published this thing in, I think it was the New Republic, basically calling me conspiracy theorist, anti-Semite, all this stuff,

to try to discredit this play that was playing at the public theater. How do they connect anti-Semite? You know, it doesn't matter. That's what they throw out. There was nothing anti-Semitic about the play. Of course. It was just one of the things they used to discredit people. What did you know about, so what made you compelled to come out against the war?

I was reading foreign press. I was reading stuff from Europe and what they were writing about the weapons of mass destruction and that there wasn't any evidence. And it wasn't being covered like it was here. It was more open, more transparent, the reporting. And so I was trusting that and trusting sources that I had trusted in the past. and realized that when I did question, the attacks were vociferous, so usually is a tell, like in poker. That's like a, it usually means you're on to something. You're over the mark.

If they, if you're, if they, when I came out against that first war in Iraq in 91, I remember the elder bush said, well, you know, this is a democracy. People have the right to, you know, oppose it. And that, that was their response. But this one was like your traitor, your Saddam supporter, terrorist sympathizer, all that stuff. They really attacked. And that told me that it was probably over the target, you know. Yeah. That had to be a very disturbing moment because, look, it turns out you were right.

And not only were you right, but now today in 2026 is universally accepted that there were no weapons mass destruction. That was a terrible war. And it was not something that should have ever happened. Yeah. universally. If you said it today, it's not even remotely controversial. Yeah. Well, that's the way it works. They finally admit the truth later, you know. I think they're doing that now with COVID. You know, the Fauci's going to do his thing tomorrow. I'm very curious to see what happens with that.

Well, they don't give you a universal pardon for 10 years if you didn't do something. I mean, you don't campaign for that if there's not some smoke. Yeah, that was a very very important. scary time. You know, it was, you know, to come out, when people, when, when the, when the media's attacking you, it's a very scary thing. But the great good fortune I had in 2003, so I'm living in New York at the time, right? So I would have to walk my kids to school. And I remember thinking, oh my God, what's going to happen, you know? Are there going to be people yelling at me, etc. And that wasn't the truth. The truth was that people, if anything, said, you know, way to go.

Right. Thanks for speaking for us. And if they disagreed, they said, you know, you have the right to do it. That's the way generally people are in this country. And should be. And I usually would take, every year I would take my kids to the final four. And that year it was in San Antonio. And I remember thinking, oh my God, I'm going down to Texas and they're going to yell at me down there. And no one said a damn thing. So the reality on the ground was a lot different than the reality they were creating. The reality they were creating was to intimidate other people into silence. It wasn't based on any kind of real reality of people being angry at me.

It was more them trying to intimidate others. And so that same thing kind of happened. I recognize that same smell when COVID. was happening when people came out and started asking questions and were deplatformed or marginalized or canceled. And, you know, I followed what you were going through with the Ivermectin, which was a drug that I had taken. And, you know, I had lost my sense of smell.

And a day later, it was back. So I knew there was something going on with that. And, you know, in an emergency, why not? find whatever you can treat until your magic potion arrives, you know. It wasn't just that. It was like the completely disingenuous characterization of it as a veterinary drug and calling it horse paste or horse dewormer, which is crazy. Yeah. It's crazy to what because maybe that would have worked in 1980, where people would have to go to

the encyclopedia to find out what Ivermectin really was. But when you're trying to do that in 2020, it's just too easy to look up, oh, look, it got a Nobel Prize for use in human beings. Oh, it's great for a yellow fever and dange fever and river blindness. And, oh, this has been used billions of times. Oh, it's one of the safest, oh, wait a minute, it's in the World Health Organization's Essential Medicines list. Yeah. This is crazy.

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

Yeah. And it's in the rolling stone. And you're like, what is going on? This is insane. Even the photograph was fake. The photograph showed people wearing winter coats. Because really the line was people waiting for a flu shot. That was the actual line.

And they were trying to say that these are people waiting in line to go to the emergency room for a gunshot. Well, it's like, first of all, how many fucking people are getting shot in Oklahoma? Like, what's going on over there? Are you going to have a gun fights on the streets? Wild stuff going on at the time. You know, the disinformation and the... Yeah, and just orchestrated propaganda. Orchestrated, organized, with big money behind it.

Wild. Wild. Wow. Wow. I suspect that that whole period of time was another way to divide us, you know, in the larger picture. You know, the orchestrated chaos masquerading as a revolution, you know. it's it's it's there's been so many of those things over the past five years you know you know alliances that you're building and then all of a sudden there's a new crisis and now you don't like those people that you were building alliances with and it's just one after the other and I ultimately at

the end of the day I think it's all about division it's all about dividing us and making us argue with each other not finding common ground and that's ultimately the strategy that's been used from time and memorial, you know, for the power to stay in power. How do you get people fighting with each other? Right. Yeah, people don't like to hear that, but that's a strategy that's been used all throughout history. Yeah. And it's a good one.

And it works. Yeah, it works. And especially in today's day and age when you have social media and then you have not just our government, but many governments that have fake accounts. And these people just get outraged about things or attack things or, you know, have a narrative that they push. And you don't know if it's real people. You don't know what it is.

Just a bunch of accounts. You go to the accounts. A guy's face. You know, it's a woman wearing a dress, holding a book. She seems normal. Meanwhile, it's a man somewhere with a bank of computers that are all connected to the internet that's typing in these different responses with a bunch of different. Or now it's AI automated.

Yeah. You know, you tell this bot to be a right-wing nationalist that's like attacking anything. Yeah, it's crazy. And it's on both sides. And it's nuts. I was over in London doing a project, and I noticed this was during their lockdown, and I noticed by my hotel there was this protest, and I went down to check it out, put my mask on. I was very compliant at the start of all this. And I noticed, you know, what they were portraying as national front right wingers was actually hippies and homeopaths and free speech activists.

And I talked to them. And I tweeted, hey, I don't think it's a right left thing here. And hundreds of attacks, whether they're bots or organized army of, you know, righteousness. I have no idea. But it was, I just at that point, I was like, fuck it. I'm not going to put my foot in this water. These people are nuts. This is a crazy, crazy time.

Yeah, it was crazy. It's crazy not just from the propaganda perspective, from actual people that I knew, that were really terrified, that got caught up in it all. And it was, you know, mass formation psychosis is what some people called it. I think that's a good description. Robert Malone, I think, termed that or got that from somebody else.

But that's really what it was. Like, everybody just kind of went nutty. And there was people that were doing the government's job for the government or the pharmaceutical drug company's job for them. They were the ones that were enforcing all these things. forcing all these things. Yeah. And they were doing it because they wanted to be, they wanted a solution, they wanted to be correct. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people in this world that don't experience much real adversity. And when real adversity comes to them, they fall apart. And they don't know what to do. And they get scared. And they lump up together in teams. And then they reinforce each other and repeat the same things. And they all want to be a part of the right side of history or the right side of whatever. it is. And also they're being led to believe that that's the virtuous thing to do. And, you know, so it's not like their, you know, their intentions are good. Right. And because of that, you know, I've, I've had a

similar experience where, you know, friends of mine and people I love that, you know, fell into that, as I did. I fell into it for a while, you know, that kind of fear-based kind of behavior. And I just, I've come to understand in my later years that one of the things that's truly liberating is the ability to say I don't know. Yeah. And I may have been wrong. These are two things that have led to such great discovery for me. It's, it's, I really don't trust anymore. I don't trust virtuous experts.

I don't, I don't think, I don't think experts are, or, or, or, I don't think experts are, or, or, or I don't believe in experts. I think if you consider yourself an expert, you're done learning. You're done speaking with others. You're done challenging yourself. And when we put our faith and trust in people that are deemed experts, ultimately, throughout my experience, it's led to bad things. The experts that talked about weapons of mass destruction,

and the experts that talk about, you know, various things that have led us to violent altercations throughout the world. I don't trust them anymore. I trust the idea that there are many sides to a story and that there is very, there's a lot to be gained from having dialogue with people you disagree with. Absolutely. I mean, you know, there are experts in some fields and we do need them. It is important. Like, if you want information about the large Hadron Collider, you don't understand. Like, what are you guys doing over there?

Like, you need to talk to someone who actually understands it who's an expert on particle colliders. You know, and it takes a long time to develop that sort of knowledge base and have an understanding of what they're actually trying to accomplish. What is the Higgs boson? What is this particle that is a part of that? What? It's the earliest stages of the universe. Okay. You're going to measure it.

I'll be in the bar. It exists for a quarter of a cell. or something like that? What? What are you guys doing? Yeah, but the problem is, like, to bring it back to COVID, one of the things that Fauci said that was so wild, he said, when you are criticizing Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science. Yeah. Well, that is one, just the fact that he felt so confident that he could say that is such a crazy thing to say. And then science became like an object. Came a religion. Well, science is supposed to be data. It's supposed to be measuring data and it's supposed to never be settled and it's always supposed to have a bunch of people from various

positions of viewing down on this thing analyzing it with new studies new data new tests new hypothesis working out and communicating with each other it's not supposed to be a brick like you know like this is a brick if you question the brick like no no this is a fucking fluid thing that exists only if you allow people to ask questions the moment you stop questioning data than like, and even real experts, like guys from MIT and Harvard were getting deplatformed off of Twitter because they didn't believe it. They were saying, look, I don't think this lockdown idea is a good idea. I think it's bad for children. I think children aren't even really susceptible to this disease.

Like, why are we doing this? Like, what's going on? It became a faith. It became dogma. And if you questioned the dogma, you were a heretic. You weren't kicked out of the religion. It was a scary time and still is scary. You know, we deal, the actors gang, my nonprofit in Los Angeles, we have education programs.

And we've been dealing with the ramifications of that lockdown for the last five years. You know, those kids that are, you know, had two years robbed of them from socialization and education. Imagine that was your senior year of high school, too. Oh, my God. You know. Fuck. And we're dealing with the after effects of that. And gratefully, the kind of work we do brings them out again and, you know, get some expressing emotions, making eye contact, having experiences with other children and that are productive.

And, you know, the goodness is you can get out of that funk, but that was it was really scary to see those kids walk in to classes. after that lockdown because it wouldn't make eye contact looking at the floor. You know, it's kind of desocialized and traumatized. And, you know, it was really scary. Critical development time for them. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And all of a sudden, they're wearing, like, imagine being a toddler and all of a sudden, everyone has a mask on.

Yeah, it's weird. You don't want to wear the mask. They keep trying to take it off and people yell at them, put it back on. And so it's like terror and anxiety and confusion. Also, you're not reading people's faces, which. is like an important part of the developmental process. You get to know people. You read faces.

You see how people talk. All of a sudden, everyone's wearing a mask. Everyone's robbing a bank. Like, this is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've tried to approach it all with just the openness and compassion for people that went through that. You know, I don't attach blame.

I don't, you know, everyone, there was a pretty sophisticated propaganda machine that was happening. I have great compassion for people that fell into that. And I, you know, I just want us to not do it again. You know, I want us to have the knowledge and the consciousness to not fall for that again. Yeah, hopefully. It's just, it was very eye-opening that it was so easy to pull off, you know, that it was so easy to get people to just gang up like that. It was just... It said a lot about us,

unfortunately. And, you know, I hold faith in humanity, but that was a tough one. I do as well, and I think it was a learning moment for a lot of people, whether they admit to it or not,

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

And they kept their mouth shut. But you'd get a couple of drinks in them when they were alone. They would tell you. Well, that begs the larger question is, you know, is it freedom of speech if when you freely speak, your job is threatened? Right. Your future is threatened.

Is that, are we living in a free society, you know? Right. And that's still, that's not just COVID, that's a lot of things. There's a lot of things. It's almost everything. And it's one of the most important things that we do is we disagree. We talk. You have conversations.

It's the only way to learn. And you get exposed to information that maybe you didn't know before you established this opinion that you're arguing. Do you know what was the big tragedy, in my opinion, during that time period, is, that we totally lost the water cooler conversation, that accidental conversation that happens at work with a coworker who you don't necessarily agree with, but it's a human being expressing something to you in person. And you have to deal with that person and their opposing viewpoint.

Yeah. We got into our own silos of thought and algorithms of thought. everything we experienced during that period of time was an affirmation of what we believed rather than a challenge to it. Yeah. And so the water cooler was completely eliminated, the idea that the accidental conversation at a bar where you're, you know, watching a game on the television and someone sits next to you that is not necessarily of your belief system, but you buy them a beer and you

watch the game together. You know, all these moments of meeting up that were eliminated. And, you know, that's what I love about sports. I love that you can go watch a game and not think about politics. Right, right. And think about the team that you like and support them together. Same thing with theater or any kind of gathering of individuals, music,

what I love about the theater that we do is that we're able to take people to a common emotion. And we never want to have a completely... We don't want audiences that think the same, right? You want a disparate amount of people, different beliefs, that you can get them to share a common emotion,

get them to laugh together, get them to feel something and cry together. That's the community you're able to build when you're doing a show, as you know. You know, what really pissed me off was that when we have a theater in Los Angeles, it was two years we had to be closed. And a year and a half in, we were told we could open, but we'd have to check vaccine passports at the door.

And I talked to some people at the theater, and we agreed there was no, we can't do that because what that is doing is it's basically saying the only people allowed in our theater are people that agree with what the government wanted. And that for me is not a theater. That betrays the whole purpose and function of what a theater should be. It's a gathering place for the community that might think differently to bring them together. And this was saying basically, if you agree, you can come in. And so we waited another six months before we opened the theater until everyone could come in. Yeah, there was a time where you had to have a vaccine passport in order to perform.

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

I could have been a super spreader. Yeah. Well, you know, in London, because they spent a lot of time over their last five years, but they, their West End rebrand. immediately, unlike Broadway. And the reason it did is because during that time period, you could show a vaccine passport, but you could also show a negative test. So they didn't demand that you have a vaccine.

So they didn't lose their audience. Their audience came right back. And in Broadway, they basically told a third of their audience, you're not welcome. And so I can see why it might have been a struggle to get those people back into the things. It didn't make any sense. Like if the people are negative, they're negative.

What do you give a shit if they're vaccinated? Also, what about people that got COVID and then recovered from it who have far superior immunity, 7x superior immunity to people who are vaccinated? Like, what are we doing here? Like, this is, are you, you're doing the pharmaceutical drug companies work for them. Yeah. And you're making people follow along in lockstep. And it's just nuts.

It just didn't even make sense that people were going along with this. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that's in the rear view, mirror. Yeah, for now. But, you know, I feel like it's a case study in a lot of, let me, if there are people that are manipulating society, and I think there are, there's a lot of lessons that they learn from how we behave. And, you know, relatively speaking, without making light of the pandemic, relatively speaking, a fairly mild pandemic in terms of like, you know, the bubonic plague and all sorts of other things that have happened throughout history. history, the Spanish flu, have killed way more people. Like, it could have been way worse, right? So just one that was just twice as bad as the flu got people to behave like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the good news is, though, the uptake wasn't, you know, a lot of people took it because they had to. It wasn't, like, enthusiastically taking it. we did a play called Topsy Turvey, which was about lockdown, and we performed that in Eastern Europe. And it was really interesting to see their response there because I would, one of them said afterwards, you know, I asked, you know, what was the uptake on the vaccines in Romania? And they said, something like 40%. I said, well, how do you explain that? And they said, well, you know, we lived under the Soviet Union for many years, so we know how to look like.

like we comply when we're not complying. And I said, what else reminds you of the Soviet Union? They said, without a doubt, cancel culture. I said, why? I said, well, Soviet Union used to keep files on all of us, right? So as long as you're a good party member, there wouldn't be a thing said. Yeah. But once you stepped out of line, they brought out that old file.

Now that affair with your secretary from 30 years ago is going to ruin your life. They're going to ruin your family. They're going to kill your career. and they're going to make a big public display of it to show other people to stay in line. And they felt like council culture was basically operating in the same way as the Soviet Union did. It was really interesting to see that perspective in Eastern Europe, people that have lived under that kind of oppressive situation and their perspective on modern day. That must have really made you think about what happened to you during the Iraq war.

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

Of course. They made up this. I was doing this play embedded at the time at the public theater, and we'd go out afterwards, and the New York Post wrote that I was making out with a woman under a palm tree at this club, and they just made it up. and got me in, you know, didn't really help my marriage at the time. And, you know, they just lie. They basically lie, you know, they'll attack you.

They just decided you were an enemy and they were going to pull out whatever stops they could. They were going to discredit you in whatever way they can. Wild. Yeah, that's a powerful thing when it hits you. And you realize, oh, my God, the truth doesn't matter here. Yeah, well, that's what's so scary about it is that in this country where freedom of speech is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of our society. It's one of the most important things we all recognize. It separates us from everywhere else in history.

Like this is the first country. We're really, it's written into the doctrine of the country. You're supposed to have the freedom, the ability to express yourself. And that this is being attacked and suppressed in all sorts of different ways, not just stopping your ability to express yourself, but attacking you in a concerted effort and lying about you, just lying about you in order to scare other people. It's very Orwellian and it's very un-American and the fact that like the New York Post would do that to you or whoever it was from the New York Post would do that like what the fuck man? Well the good news is there's no gulags yet you know they don't arrest you in the middle of the night and force you to into some kind of prison thousands of miles away.

Sure it could be worse. Yeah. But it's not it's not along the line of the American way of life. And if you are a person who really does appreciate what this experience in, this experiment in self-government, which is the United States, it's supposed to have free discourse. That's a big part of it. And the founding fathers recognize that. You've got to have the ability to talk about things. Right.

And if you don't, we're fucked because if someone can tell you what you can and can't say, that's step one. and then everything else falls in line after that. And next thing you know, you've got a dictatorship. Right. And there's people that have, you know, lost opportunities or, you know, in show business that recently, that, including my ex Susan Sarandon, who, you know, was against what was happening in Israel and lost her agent and, you know, having a hard time finding work. This is crazy. This is nuts, yeah. And especially someone like Susan Sarandon, like one of the most.

most respected and established actors of many generations. Like, she's been around forever. The fact that a take on something that if you're just looking at it, like, what is, what are you, how could you defend that? Like, how could anybody defend that? Right. I don't even know how many people are dead. You have a complete wipe out of a city, like 90% of Gaza's gone, or whatever the percentage is.

You look at the buildings. You look at what it used to look like. You look at what looks like now. This is defensible? Yeah. Yeah. And I think the point of it is to make a show of it and to say, see, we could do that to her, so we could do it to you. So shut the fuck up. Yeah. Yeah. Especially the timing of when you do it, right? If you're against Gaza now, it's safer than being against what happened a year and a half ago, say. You know, especially close to October 7th. If you were one of the early, like Roger Waters, one of the early people talking about this is, this is, you're watching.

watching genocide in real time. And they came for that guy. Yeah. And, you know, more people see it the way he sees it now. And just like what happened to you with the Iraq War, you're 20 years from now, it's going to be a universally accepted opinion, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's just, it's crazy to go through something like that.

And for you to have gone through it, like, really early on, you know, for you to have gone through that in 2003. I guess it really does inform your opinions, though. Like when you see things that are happening today, you go, okay, I've seen this before. What I started looking for after that was a way to be someone that was more involved with something that could affect change. In other words, I used my nonprofit. We started a prison program 20 years ago. and we see the change that happens.

We, you know, we have people that go in and basically offer rehabilitation in the form of theater. And not doing plays or anything, but getting people to play emotions through characters that we introduced to them. And in doing so, unlocking emotions that have been suppressed for many, many years. So in prison, there's one go-to emotion. It's angry. That's your survival face. That's your mask on the yard. You have to be a badass or you're going to die.

But sadness is compromising, fear is compromising, and happiness is genuinely not encouraged either. So we get these guys in a room. We get to introduce them to these stock characters from the Commeda del Arte, and then they have to express their emotions and make choices with their emotions in impromooms. in improv. And what they find is that if someone approaches them in anger in an improv, the facilitator will encourage a different emotion in response to anger than anger, right? And what they come to understand is that they don't have to respond to anger with anger. There are other choices.

And in fact, in real life, they can do that too if they can do it in an improv. And so what happens is these people tap into long dormant emotions. and start to understand that they are more than the worst act that got them there. They tend to create bonds across gang ties, racial lines. When we're putting together a group, we ask that rival gangs are in the same room with each other. Oh, wow. And what happens is these bonds are made through the sharing of emotion. Like we get these guys into an improv where they're all putting a flower.

on a grave of someone and saying something under their breath about the person that's deceased. And then at some point the facilitator will say, now look at each other and they're looking at each other with these eyes of sadness and they realize they have a lot in common, you know, in that shared emotion. I had two guys come up to me, one black guy, one white guy. They said, we've got to tell you what happened two weeks ago. We were, our shot callers said, you know, we're going to have a fight on the yard. And so, you know, you never questioned the shot caller. And so you know what this is going to happen, you know.

And so what they did was they found each other, these two guys. And they rolled around on the floor acting like they were killing each other. Wow. How convenient. So it looked like they were participating, but they weren't hurting each other. Oh, wow. that's a good solution it's amazing what happens when you experience something that like that in person when you see the transformation happen and we see this in our school children as well that's something

that is deeply inspiring you know that you've had something to do with some some a real change right whereas for years i was asked to you know attend fundraisers and you know various causes and, you know, it's, yeah, it's great that they're doing that, and it's great that they're raising money for these organizations that need it, but at the end of the day, you don't really feel like it did anything other than go to a dinner. And this was a way to get my hand sturdy and really, you know, getting the struggle of it. And I found it to be so much more satisfying as far as whatever inclination I had towards activism was really fed by this as opposed to hopping from fundraiser to fundraiser.

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

Of course, you go through a training with the prison system of certain things to watch out for and, you know, you develop these lines where you say, you know, we're here to do this, not to talk about your case. You know, there's all kinds of things you learn how to avoid the distractions that will derail the program. But essentially, it's a very physical way of working, and it's also, there is a lot of fun in it. So those two things together allow the entry for these guys that are, you know, they're in the room because they want to be there, but it's weird stuff we're asking them to do. Right. And if they can have a laugh about it and then something about it shifts some kind of consciousness inside them, that means something to people. You've got to remember these people are, you know, when we started, there was only one other program in the state of California that was offering rehabilitation through any theater. So there was a couple of music programs and two theater programs.

And now we're able to lobby the state to get more funding for arts and corrections. Because art is a transformer. You know, it is something that can shift consciousness. I truly believe that. I've seen it with my own, the work that I've done. You know, I've seen how people can think in a different way after they see something in the theater and the movies or, you know, a good standup and do the same thing. you know, how George Carlin used to shift my consciousness every new special because he would always be challenging me.

Sure. It wouldn't be like, hey, hey, you know, we're all in the same club. It would be, yeah, you thought we were in the same club. But here's a little thought. And you realize he's talking right at one of your hypocrisies. And that was his genius. It was his ability to really tap into we can be better. Right.

We can all be better. This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks, and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old-fashioned summers we just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer? Visible Wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings.

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George Carlin's probably the most known for it. But do you know about Bill Hicks? Yeah, for sure. So he was probably in my generation, he was the one that twisted people the most. Like a lot of comics would watch him and go, what am I doing? Why am I doing what I'm doing? This guy's doing something that's like so much more meaningful. Yeah.

Who was it in Apatow's documentary about Carlin? And there was a comedian that said, George Carlin was basically, in the early part of the century in 1900s, philosophers debating used to be a huge deal, right? Like hundreds of people, thousands, people come watch, people debate two different points of view. Sure.

He said, that's what the current philosophers of our generation are the better stand-up comedians, the ones that test your belief system. by saying something that, you know, might be controversial or, you know, challenges your worldview. That's the great purpose and function of a philosopher or a stand-up comedian is to take your worldview, shatter it a little bit, and make you rethink. Yeah. Yeah.

And Hicks was sort of for our generation. He was like the first guy that really did that in a way that, like, some of the things that he said, weren't even designed to be funny at all. It was just designed to make you think about things differently. And then he would hit you with some funny things after that. He heard to keep you occupied. Yeah. Provocative statements that, you know, the first reaction is, fuck that.

No, that's not true. Fuck that. And then you realize, oh, shit, he's bringing me there. And it's like a great play can do that, too. A great movie can do that, too. Provoke you and challenge you and then make you refurb. focus, rethink. Yeah, it's just amazing how

little of that we have today and how much content we have today. Did you ever see the documentary God, what is it? The documentary with William F. Buckley and the other Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Gorvadole? In Gorvadole, yeah. Yeah. Where they had these, it was, I guess it was NBC, I think it was, and NBC was failing in the ratings. I was going to say Relentless Enemies, but that's the That's the wolf, yeah, the lion. Best of enemies. Best of enemies, yeah.

Great documentary. Yeah. So they had a series of these debates on television, Gorvidal being a progressive and William F. Buckley being a conservative. It was very interesting because this kind of hadn't happened before on television where you have these long-formed discussions with these two guys just intellectually jabbing at each other. Yeah. And it was great.

It's like the documentary is really amazing. I was friends with Gore. Oh, really? Yeah. He agreed to do my first film, Bob Roberts, which is about a right-wing folk singing candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania. And Gore agreed to play Brickley Pace, my Democratic opponent, right? And so he played a politician, which is something he always kind of flirted with in his real life. Oh, that.

And so I got to be quite friendly with him. And I actually did a documentary that I'm editing right now about four soldiers from World War II that became great writers. Gore, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Howard Zinn are all in this documentary. I filmed it many years ago, shelved it, and now I'm in the final stages of putting it together. I'm opening a new website on September 1st, and this is one of the many things that I have in my vault and my storage units that I've just been getting out over the past year and finding all this crazy stuff that I have that I've never finished because I've been going from project to project to project. So I slowed down a little bit and just opened up some sealed boxes, and it's been really fun. It's one of the things is also I used to fuck around on film sets with, this, you know, had enough money to buy a video camera for the first time.

And so I started making these little short films on movie sets. And one of them is, there's two films from when I was doing Howard the Duck. And, you know, one of those endless productions that just went on and on and on. So I just started amusing myself by making my own little short films, including, you know, I'm sure illegally using the duck itself, you know, which I made a character in one of the films. I forgot about Howard the Duck. It was crazy.

We walked on the set. What a fucking weird movie that was. I know, right? We walked on the set. I walked on the set the first day I knew we were in trouble. Why did you know we were in trouble? The puppet. It wasn't ready.

and it was a little too cute. If you look at the comic book, Howard the Duck was not that cute. No, he was cigar smoking, kind of shitty, mean duck. Yeah, it kind of fritz the caddish, like, you know, like really kind of borderline obscene. It was a Marvel comic, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And so do you have an image of the old Howard the Duck from the comic? Yeah, that guy. Yeah. So I walked on the set and I saw that cute duck. I was like, uh-oh. Yeah, he was always with chicks.

He's always with chicks, yeah. Which was very weird. Like, hey, lady, what are you doing? You're fucking a duck? What's going on here? Beastiality? Like, what is this? What is his charm got you?

Like, what's the message there? Yeah, yeah. It was a strange character. Very strange. And I don't think they had the technology to pull it off. Maybe they need to try again now Yeah, it'd be good We could take the old film and animate it

But, you know I spent six weeks on that film Doing an ultralight chase That lasted maybe two minutes in the film What's an ultralight plane chase? You know the ultralight planes? Uh-huh Basically it's you and the wings

And a motor And so there's a chase sequence at the end That's about two and a half minute, three minute long Did you actually have to get in one of those things? No. I mean, I got in like a fake one. Good.

Yeah. No, you have to be, you have to fly it. The guy, yeah. You have to, that's fake, of course, right? The duck's real. Looks so legit. Yeah. But was that one of those ones where your little voice he didn't listen?

No, not at all because I was early in my career, right? So it was George Lucas, I remember. And he just done, George Lucas. Yeah, and he just done Star Wars. Whoa. So it had to be good, right? He went from Star Wars to Howard the Duck. Well, he produced Howard the Duck.

Okay. But he had just produced Star Wars. So, you know, it was like, hell yeah. Right. It doesn't make sense on the page, but he'll figure it out. They'll figure it out. They'll figure it out. I was so lucky, too, again, blessed,

because I got a movie called Five Corners that was with Jody Foster and John Tuturo right around the same time. So I had already done that movie when Howard came out. So it's kind of saved my ass. You already had one in the chamber. Yeah. You had a good one on the pipe.

Yeah. My God. I just, I wonder why George did it. Like, it seems so odd to try to do a movie with a talking duck. Yeah, well, maybe it made sense when they imagined it. Maybe they were on an acid or something. It just seems... I just remember those poor puppeteers, man.

They were trying to make this thing work. And just, I don't think the technology really existed or the... Well, it was like 86 or something? Yeah, and it was... They were trying so hard. And it just was, you know, I felt for everybody, including the director. I felt he tried his damn best, you know, and it was just betrayal by puppeteering. And it wasn't the puppeteers.

It was the actual machinery. Well, it's kind of, if you think about Star Wars in particular, it's kind of amazing. They were able to pull that off with the technology that was available at the time. Yeah. To have this crazy movie where, like the cantina. scene and yeah you go on there's all these different fucking creatures from different planets and like they did not have very good technology back then like if you watch that canteen a scene now like oh it looks terrible right right so clunky like the masks don't move like ah yeah yeah

yeah yeah it's almost like you know looking at claymation around that time you know yeah yeah amazing what they can do but i do like the old school. I do like the kind of analog version of, because when the CGI and everything, it's all so sophisticated and so they can do anything now and you almost want

them not to be able to do everything. Right. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Just want a little roughness around the edges. It really helps. Well, there's also a thing about CGI where the part of your brain that is looking at it recognizes that this is not a real thing happening.

Like, as good as it looks, There's something about it. Yeah. Which is why a lot of the movie special effects guys, like the monster guys, like Rick Baker and along those lines, we did Star Wars. Yeah, yeah. American War off in London, that thing outside, the wolf that you see in the hallway. Yeah, yeah.

That, they wanted to make sure that it looked like a real thing, right? It was a physical object. So in order to make it a physical object, and obviously, CGM wasn't even available back then. But you see it and you know. it's a real thing. Whereas, like, later on, they did the Wolfman and Rick Baker did that as well. And there's a lot of CGI in there and the transformation scenes. And this part of it is just like your brain's like, this isn't really happening.

Yeah. I don't like it. Yeah. Yeah. Summer heats up in FX's The Shards. Set in 80s Los Angeles, the Shards follows a group of beautiful privileged prep school students who are preyed on by The Trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers. across the city. This fever dream

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the auto tune, you... Great music has a little bit of mistake in it. It has a little bit of human error. When you're hitting a chord on a guitar, there's You know, there's a way to play it perfectly, but there's also a way to play it a little messed up.

Right. And I kind of prefer the little bit messed up. Like when Hendricks did the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Yeah. You know, there was something about it. It was like, you know, no, how, yeah. Yeah. You know.

Yeah. It was being done at that moment with full danger, you know, which is a great thing to listen to. Yeah. It's really happening. Yeah. It's not polished and edited and sent through a machine. And you get the feeling that maybe that was the second or third time he'd played it.

You know, ever. Well, maybe the first. Right, right, right. Which would have been even more insane. But, you know, yeah. Well, that's why people like records. Well, they love listening to the scratches and the pops, and then you hear the voice, like this just pure, recorded voice.

There's no auto-tuned. There's no nothing messing with it. Especially like an old record. I have one of those 78s where you have to crank them up. Oh, wow. And they have the little, you know, cone that amplifies it. Oh, you have one of those. Right. Oh, wow. 1920 or 1910 or something like that.

And I just imagine, you know, living on the prairie and ordering this from Sears Roebuck, right? and getting your first, you know, record and putting it on and hearing this, a voice coming from this acetate, it must have been magical. It must have been, like, you know, transformative. You know, this amplified song that you can dance to or fall in love to

right in your living room. When did they first figure that out? I think it was early part of the 20th century. Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison? Yeah, they had a lot of it. like a little cylinder. But when they started mass producing them in...

Oh, like just records? Yeah, when was the first... I think in the 20s maybe? They might have mass produced those because people had them. Just a way different player. Let's ask perplexity. What was the first record?

What was the first actual, like, record disc that you could play with a needle? Like a real record. I want to say, like, 1919. I'm just taking a wild guess. There's a famous viral video of a guy drop in that time I said it. 1931. 12 inch 33 and a third RPM disc was pressed in Victor's vinyl-based Victorlac.

But that's 33 and a third. What about the 78s? Is it called, say, a 78? I think so, yeah. 23 minutes beside versus roughly the Shalak 70. 48. Vinyl LP arrived in June 21st, 1948. Columbia Records unveiled, oh, 33 and a third micro-grove,

long playing record. So was that it? But in the 20s or 30s there was a micro groove. 47, you get the 45. 49. Oh, okay. So the little ones singles.

First vinyl disc. Wow. So 31 for the first vinyl disc, 48 for the first real album, which is really nuts because if you think about like all the amazing albums of the 60s,

you're talking about a technology that didn't exist 20 years prior. Wow, that's weird. Nuts. Yeah. Nuts, right? So, like, when you're listening to Voodoo Child, like, that technology 20 years ago didn't exist. Do you remember the magic of watching it for the first time?

Like, when you put that thing down when you're a kid and you put it on the thing and this music starts coming out? Oh, yeah. Well, I remember the ones where they... Look at the vinyl grooves around 1,000 X magnification. You see the waveforms of the music itself. That's crazy. Incredible. That those little weird, imagine if you were like from another civilization and you saw these things, you'd be like, what the fuck is this? Like, what do they have here? How did they figure that out?

Yeah, what is this? You'd be like, what that's, they figured out how to make music out of that and you can hear a harp. You can hear banjo. You can hear drums. An orchestra. Yeah, you can hear jazz Joplin all in that. Yeah. How'd you do that? Like what? And if it scratches, it skips. I'm really encouraged that vinyl's making a comeback. I really very excited about that. People love it. Yeah. It's all the difference. Like people love like wood tables.

You know, people like as the world gets more digital, people want things that are organic, something that a person made, something that seems like it makes more sense. I've been finding, you know, in my search for my archive and everything, cassette tapes. And they put on, they sound amazing. Really? Yeah. They sound really good. Because, you know, there's more information in a little cassette tape than on, you know, whether it's MP3 that's been compressed, you know, and compressed and compressed and compressed.

But, you know, reel-the-reels are obviously sounds still great, but the cassette tapes really survived. I've been digitizing everything, of course, you know, just to make sure that they don't decay. But it's been really interesting. a lot of my dad's music, he recorded on cassette tapes. He was a folk singer. They did five albums as the Highwayman, but he was a classical musician and did choral music,

and so he had a group, and he would record on these cassette tapes. And so we've been digitizing those because I'm going to put them all on my new website, this thing called Robbins Radio, which will be my dad, my granddad, my brother, and myself, the music that we've done over the years playing on a constant loop when you come on to the website.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So I was to honor my dad. I've been digitizing also his scores, and he wrote music by hand, and so I've got boxes and boxes of that that I've trying to transcribe and make available probably in about six months. We'll have that archive up.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, when do they figure out how to put things on cassette daves. Does that, that happened, that was around when I was in high school. I remember I had a cassette deck on my car. Yeah.

And there was pretty good technology. You could buy really good microphones and plug them into a pretty good cassette player. Well, A-track was the first, right? I think so, but those were so impractical. Well, they were huge. Yeah, plus they'd stop in the middle of a song

and then go to the next track and continue it. Yeah. I remember driving with my friend Frank, who lives in Austin right now, and we were driving back up to school, my first school, college, Flatsburg. And there was an eight track of Bread play. You remember that band, Bread? And this was around 1977.

And he rips it out of the eight track, rolls down the window, throws it out of this. We're never listening to that again. It's punk rock from this point forward. And it was like a defining, moment in my musical life was like Frank saying no more bread no more bread he's going to put his foot down it's sex pistols now that's hilarious uh I remember my first introduction to a track my friend Javier when I lived in Florida his mom had an eight track player and uh she had what is that song

who sings it when my baby when my baby smiles of me I go to Rio de Janeiro remember that song yeah yeah yeah I don't remember who sings it uh Pablo Cruz. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. And she had a Pablo Cruz eight track in her car. I'm like, this lady's a wizard. She's got her own music.

Because before then, I think I'd only seen people play stuff that was on the radio. Right, right. And she put it in there and she pressed the button. And I was like, this is crazy. She gets to pick what songs are on the radio in a car. I thought it was the wildest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Yeah, yeah. That was right.

It was eight track first than the cassette. And then the cassette was so much better. You had to flip it over, though. Pop it out, flip it out. Yeah, but those things are cooked in the sun, though. Oh, yeah. Oh, I lost a bunch. I used to have one of them big books where you had the cassettes in it,

one of these little vinyl things. Yep. You leave it in your car and they get fucked, and then it gets stuck in the tape machine that you had to do it with your finger. You had to try to wind it back with your finger. Which I did like a month ago with one of the old cassettes. You had to stick your pinky in there.

I just did that last month. to re- spool it. Yeah, nobody knows what the fuck we're talking about today. Well, then, you know, VHS tapes was the next one because that was the first time where you could choose to watch a film at home. Yes. You know?

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

Right. And he could say, well, If you like that one, check this one out. Yeah. That's now been replaced by an algorithm. Right. And I'm not trusting that algorithm is going to find, you know, there's going to show me the way to Battle of Algiers or any kind of all these are great movies.

I just, if the personal was lost, same thing with record stores. You could go in and like, what's new and hear what's playing and, you know, talk to the guy and get what his opinion was and bookstores, too. You know, it's like, if you told me 30 years ago that it would be, you know, it's very hard to find a bookstore, a record store, or a video store, I would say you're crazy. Right. But now it's all like very convenient. You have access to everything, but you don't have the arbiter that is a person. You have the arbiter that's almost a machine.

Right. You get a little bit of that with people online recommending stuff. Yeah. It's kind of cool. You know, someone says, hey, I just saw the show. It's fucking incredible. That's true. You get a little bit of that.

And then you get IMDB and Rotten Tomato scores, which I think does something, you know. They're a little manipulated occasionally, but there's something to it where you get to see what people think about it. That helps. Yeah, that's nice. I think Silo's like 100% rotten tomatoes. Is it really? Yeah, right now it is. That's nice.

Once you said that, though, you put it out there. I know, now it's dead. I just killed it. They're going to vomit. They're going to. Bombing into a glibbean. Oh, yeah, 100%. We'll see about that.

But there's almost too many shows. You know, there's just too much. I just got into the agency. I just finished season two of the agency. Michael Fastbender. It's a CIA series that's on Paramount. It's fucking incredible. It's so well written.

It's so well acted. It makes so many other shows seem really clunky because it's just, it's so. good. He's got so many layers to it and it's subtle and it's brilliant and it's and Fastbender is one of my favorite actors. He's fucking incredible. He's great. He's so good. He's so good in this. You know, he plays this CIA spook. So many things to choose from. Too many. Yeah. Almost. Yeah. I mean, essentially you could waste your whole life just being entertained. Like it used to be difficult to be entertained, which I think there's something to that. You had to go to a place, You got to pay, buy your popcorn, sit down.

You got to make active choice in your life. Now it's just like... Yeah, steps along the way. They've made it more convenient to be entertained. But then again, it's like there's something lost in that. You know, like, oh, the movie starts at 7. Come on, we've got to get out of here. We've got to go park.

We've got to get there. Yeah. Gotta get there in time. There was a lot to it. Or the idea that, you know, if there's only three choices, you're going to stumble, you might stumble into something you wouldn't have watched. Right. and be surprised.

Oh, all the time. You'd go, what do they have at the movie theater? Like, what's this? All right, well, there's no more Star Wars tickets left. So we could go see this. You want to see this? What is it? I don't know.

This guy's in it, though. I like him. Like, okay. Yeah, let's check it out. And you would just take a guy. That's the crazy thing about Shawshank is that it wasn't a big hit in the movie theater initially. No.

Which is really hard to believe now. Yeah. No, it was nominated for, seven Academy Awards, but nobody went to see it. That's nuts. Yeah. Maybe it was a title they didn't understand or I don't know what it was. I was in two films that year, one Hudsucker proxy and Shawshank Redemption, two really challenging titles. But like, what's it about? A Hudsucker? I don't know. What's it about? Shoshay, who know? I had people coming up to me and said, I really liked you in that scrimshaw reduction.

I'm like, um, yeah, thank you. They don't plan on meeting you and they run into you at a restaurant. Like, uh, you're, same Robin. That movie. The Shamshush is Trimshank. Shamsank, Shashank. What did it come out against? What other films were out at the same time as Shawshank?

Was there other, like, big movies? Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Jurassic Park. Whatever? Pulpiction. Oh, Jesus. Ascentura.

Oh, my God. Ace Ventura, too? That's one of the best years for movies in history. Oh, my God. Yeah. Pulp Fiction. Oh, my God. But, you know, it made its way, interestingly enough, because...

So, Ted Turner was running Warner Brothers at the time, right? And Warner Brothers produced Shawshank Redemption. And when he sold the rights to it for television, he sold it to himself. at the lowest cost possible. So basically you had a film nominated for seven Academy Awards that was getting sold like it was a beach blanket bullshit, right? And so it didn't cost him anything to put it on his channel. So he put it on again and again and again

was getting all those advertising dollars that come with playing something on his TV channel. And I think that's why it caught on because it was ubiquitous. It was always there. It was always something you could see. And so eventually people understood what kind of movie it was. Wow. And so that's a good example of where someone's business acumen or greed or whatever you want to call it winds up producing something quite lovely.

You know, something that actually I'm really grateful for. because so many people know that film and it's been like number one on IMDB for the last 15 years and that crazy? Yeah, it's crazy. And that was one of those movies that also took off like wildfire once it got into video

because once people could watch it at home yeah that was even though if it didn't do as well in the theaters as it should have on video it did fantastic. Yeah which is why I really I always remember that when you know I'm in a movie

and it doesn't quote unquote perform. You know, I'm the turtle. I know the turtle can win the race. Yeah. Yeah. That was something that was lost also during the pandemic, and I was really worried about that, that it wasn't going to come back.

It seemed like it was so easy to stream films at home that people just for a while, it was hard to get people to go out to movie theaters. Yeah. And the experience is very different. Yeah. It's very different. Yeah, it's been a struggle, you know.

And, you know, I think also a lot of producers in Hollywood or studios lost faith in their adult audience, even before the pandemic. I mean, they were producing movies for teenagers. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that because they can drive an economic engine. But at the same time, you know, films like Shawshank Redemption would not get made today because they're about something that isn't about the whole huge multi-platform experience of an action movie. And that's unfortunate. And that's kind of migrated into streamers. You know, people that adults that like to watch stuff tend to watch these longer form things.

And that's a nice thing in a way because it's allowing filmmakers to make 10-hour films. You know, when you think about it, a season of a show is 10 hours. And so you can think in this like kind of long form of telling a story, which is a nice thing, which would have been impossible in old Hollywood, you know. Right. You've got to keep it under two hours. So now you have the opportunity, creators have the opportunity to create long form. entertainment. Well, that I think is one of the beautiful things about some of these Netflix

series is that you, you're like, things like stranger things. You essentially have, you know, a 30-hour movie or however many episodes it is. And like Ozark is a great example of that. It's like, fucking amazing show. And it's essentially like a movie every week. And the story continues to progress. And you get a chance to really stretch something out. But you get the quality of like a great film, but you get it extended, you know, with these huge budgets, the fact that they're able to do this. So because of streaming, it does, it has opened up this long form aspect of storytelling that I think is really difficult to do in a movie.

Like Kill Bill kind of did it a little bit. For sure. You have two episodes of it. It was nice also as an actor, like with Silo, I've got, I've had three seasons. The first two seasons, my character represented something, which. completely shifts in season 3. Oh, spoiler alert, don't tell me. No, I'm not telling what it is.

I'm just telling you that. I'm just telling you that. Ficked it up for me, and I'm gonna be looking for that. You won't even be able to guess. Okay, good. Good. It's such a profound, and it was fun to play. It was like this kind of like, and I was told about this at the beginning.

The creator said, you know, listen, wait till season three. That's interesting because I always wonder how far they map these things out. You know, did he have a, did they even know that they were going to be picked up for season three when he started? No, but they knew at the end of season one what the trajectory of two and three was. So if they got picked up, they had a plan. Well, if they were going to get picked up, they would have to tell you what they would

have to tell the studio what two and three are. Right? So the other thing that you have to consider is that if you're an asshole, they'll fucking kill you. It's true. Right. You know, writers don't, you know, if an actor is like trouble. Right, right, right.

They'll kill them. They will. Why not? I've been told about, you know, one of the guys I worked with was, I won't say his name, but, you know, when I was directing for television, I did a couple episodes on this show. and he told me about a show that he was doing where there were three actors that were giving him a real hard time. And one of them was getting in trouble

because of, you know, sexual inappropriateness. One was getting in trouble because of, you know, there were too much in their head. And the other was, you know, something else, you know, something about another. Basically, they shot them all in the anatomy that was associated with what their problem was. So all three of them were.

shot in the finale. Oh, no. They said, well, we allowed a couple of them to survive, but one we really killed off. So, you know, you don't mess with the writers. They're in television.

They wield a lot of power. Not only that, they're also looking for angles, different places to take the character. And if you're a doucheback, you're like, let's fucking kill this guy. Yeah, that'll be a good show. Let's figure out how to kill his guy off. Turn him into a pedophile,

and then we kill him. You can basically You can do whatever you want. Here's the twist. I didn't see this coming. Yeah. Yeah. Watch out.

Yeah. Be nice. Well, you know, there's a lot of fear in Hollywood when it comes to AI and replacing writers and replacing actors and just replacing this whole

human-created thing of storytelling. And I think writers in particular are really terrified because you could kind of you know with AI engines today you could kind of take a few films right like you could kind of take like bullet and heat and a few and they say make me John Wick meets bullet meets heat and uh this is the protagonist this is this is what he's facing these are the issues and AI can churn it out in a few

minutes and then you could say uh make it more like quentin tarantino would do it and then it'll do that. It'll fix it in that way. That's crazy. And you say, okay, I want it more like Kubrick aspects to it. I want some weirdness to it, some, some real thought, some Easter eggs, some hidden aspects to it that people connect later. It'll do that. It'll, it can do stuff instantaneously based on, and it's kind of stealing, right? But it's not, right? It's making an original thing, but it's not. Because it's inspired by everything else that's already been made. But that's kind of what people do. but not in the same way and we don't do it that quick either and so for writers it's

fucking terrified yeah and who do you sue I mean you can't sue a well artists are having a real problem with that I have a real problem with it yeah I don't I don't like it at all but I also have faith in the individuality of the human experience and what I what you like I'm writing a a companion piece to the player right now and you know what would happen if that character that was alive today and so I have my perspective that only I'm going to bring to that right I don't think you could plug that into it no no no so I I think talented people will figure out a way to be individual

and apart from AI and no but I also really don't like the the lack of protection that the guilds and the unions are offering their membership. You know, there should have been a hard line for the actors union, and there wasn't. The hard line should have been, you know, you cannot use this to replace actors. Right. Or writers. But there was compromise and or writers for the writers union. I don't think that that protection was held up the last negotiations, and I think that we're going to see the revifications.

of that, you know, unfortunately. Well, that's what's scary is that ultimately economics has a major impact on the decisions that they make. And it's way cheaper to do it that way. It's way cheaper to use AI to write things than screenwriters, especially really talented screenwriters, even though it's kind of drawing

on the past creative work of really talented screenwriters. They don't get compensated for it. I think ultimately people are going to want and appreciate something that's made by a human being. Because it's one of the things, that's what we really like, not just be entertained, we really love the fact that someone made something.

Well, my girlfriend, Reed Morano, has been advocating for a seal to be put on projects that are made without AI. That's a great idea. Yeah. That is a very good idea. I think that's a great idea. I like that a lot.

I think, yeah, instead of like the parental warning. AI free. Yeah, AI free, right? Yeah. No GMO Foods, bitch. There's something to do that. I think that's a great idea, actually. I think that might be the way, that might be the solution is a seal.

Yeah, I like that a lot. Makes sense. The people, you know, when you see a great something that someone made, one of the things that you really like about it is that it came from a human being's creativity. Yeah. Like, did you see obsession? No. It's fucking great.

It's so good. It's so crazy and so creepy. and so weird and so brilliant. And like, no one in it is famous and it's phenomenal and it's really original and creepy. And one of the things I loved is like, this is, what is he like 25 or something like that? Yeah, I think so.

He's 25 years old. Yeah. Who, you know, had done a bunch of YouTube stuff. I love it. It's a complete accident. Yeah, it just has this amazing idea. And you got these people who, they're relatively unknown, but really talented.

But we're craving that. Yeah. Yes. Yes. We don't want the formula. Right. We never have what wanted the formula. And it's so maddening to try to set a movie up right now in Hollywood.

Because what they want is they want someone, an actor that's worth $20 million, and they'll give you $10 million to do the film. You get the guy that they normally would have to pay $20 million, and you get him to do your film for, you know, $300,000. You got a film. Good luck. There's no gamblers anymore. There's no risk takers.

When I was coming up, you know, you had these guys that like, actually Joe, you know, Joe Roth gave me the money to do Cradle Rock. And he says, it was basically like, here's the, here you go, kid. Do it. I'm like, really? I get to do this. Well, you know, I wound up with, you know, final cut and everything. They used to do that.

They used to invest in the risk, right? Because only will the risk produce. something genuine and new and fresh. If you don't gamble and you're measured and you're on a formula and you got your stars, it's going to, the audience's going to know it. Yep. They know it's, oh, this is pre-packaged and pre-programmed for my demographic. Yeah.

And I kind of resent it. Yeah. You know? Whereas something like that obsession is like coming out of left field, no one is predicting it, programming it, it's just an accident and people love it. Yeah. That's what is exciting about, you know,

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

I gambled and it paid off. Right. Yeah. That's that, I don't know how much we have that experience anymore in Hollywood. Do you think it's just because of the extreme cost that's involved, I mean, just to promote a film, like if you have a film

and it's got a budget, like, especially I think is that, it's probably why so many superhero movies get greenlit, right? Because it's one of the only gambles, like if you're gambling on an Avengers movie, like you can't miss. Get the Hulk to smash a bunch of shit. Captain America comes in. You're good.

You're good. You're going to make your money back. And so you kind of to have to, you know, like if you're a money person, if you're not a creative person, you're just a money person who happens to be in the movie business, which I'm sure a lot of them are. They're just looking at it as a return on investment. Yeah. But, you know, that's always been that way to some degree. But I don't know.

I don't know why it became such a risk to try new stuff. I mean, because they're not putting that much money into it. Marvel movies, it cost them $250 million to produce. Right. There's independent filmmakers that are proven independent filmmakers that are asking for like $5 million, $4 million to do a film. So if they put some advertisement in it, maybe it's going to cost them $14 million, all told.

And, you know, can they make that back? Is the marketplace going to support that? Who knows? I wouldn't want to be an investor, but I also, you know, You know, I have a nostalgia for a time when Robert Altman could make a film, you know, and it could just blow people's minds. And then the next film he made, you know, as he would gleefully tell you, they're going to hate this one, you know. And I love that, you know, that.

And people would either love it or hate it, but he was making his own films. He was making distinctive films that were him. Yeah. Is it more difficult or easier to get a film released today if you make it yourself? Because you don't have distribution, really. So, you know, I suppose in the future there's going to be some form of distribution that will be more egalitarian. But right now, it's a huge risk. How is distribution work?

Like, say if you decided you're going to get a bunch of investors together and put together a film. Do you have to get distribution before you even start producing? Yes, you have to have foreign sales in place. Whoa. Foreign sales. Yeah, like I think basically the economic model right now is the investors want to be paid and not be losing money by the time they start shooting. In other words, they're not going to lose money.

They've already sold it for more than they've paid. And so there's really not. No risk, no gamble. Then if the movie catches fire at a film festival, then they'll put the money into advertising. If it doesn't catch fire at a film festival or with critics, they'll just, you know, okay, I already made my money. You know, we'll just sell it to, you know, DVDs, whatever. God, what a fucking shitty environment to create something. It's hard.

It's hard. Yeah, my gal's struggling with that right now. I checked out of that hotel a while back, you know, I was like, I. I don't want my heartbroken like that. So I've just been doing things on my own. I've been producing things on my own, shooting them, editing them. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this website was because I've got all this stuff that is unreleased.

And I'm just going to start releasing it slowly. Is that more satisfying to do it that way? No, it's more satisfying to go to Cannes and win best actor. I mean, much more satisfying. When you have a machine behind you that's supporting it, it's great. You know, Mystic River, you know, that kind of like, you have Warner Brothers like, we love this film. We're going to make sure that people see it. That's what you need.

You need your sponsors that get it, that want people to see it, that see the value of it, and they'll put money into advertising. And that's a great experience to be in. The other thing is just, you know, pretty lonely. It's just, you know, you're trying your best. I was in three movies after I won the Oscar for Mystic River that I've considered three of the best movies in my career, but nobody's seen them. This is a secret life of words, Code 46, and Catch a Fire.

And they're all excellent movies. But they came at a time where, you know, the producers or the people that were distributing them didn't really want to risk the money that would take. See, that's where there's a room for like a Siskel and Ebert type character today that can find those films and say, hey, this one slipped under the radar. But this is really an actual person that's a giant movie buff that can go back and watch these and comment on them. And we don't really. Back then, Siskel and Ebert were the guys.

If they gave you two thumbs down, you were fucked. You were fucked. Yeah. And, you know, they're very catty with each other. It was fun thing. It's fun to watch the outtakes. How much those guys actually didn't get along. Yeah.

Yep. But I was lucky with them. They gave me great reviews. It was good. They had good taste. Yeah. You know. They did.

And they loved film. Yes. They clearly loved film. And they loved all aspects of it. And they would talk about with great understanding and great passion, the subtleties of the performances and what really and how was put together. Even they talk about the score, you know. Yeah. They loved it.

And they spend like 15 minutes. on each film, too, which was never happened. And it was a hugely successful show, which is like really confusing where there's not something like that today. Yeah. Because there's so much content. Today, if you were like, it's not like what's out in the movies right now. Like today, fucking, there's a million shows that are streaming.

There's, there's so much shit going on. There's so much content that if you had a trusted source, you know, a person who's like a a real good critic of stuff who really, I'm not even a critic, an appreciator is a better word. Like someone who's a real passionate, enthusiast of film and of, you know, different creative works,

they could just talk about something and recommend stuff. Yeah. But then there's the burnout of that, too. Like, you know, I would talk to some of these guys and they'd be like, you know, for every one of those good films, we have to see like 10 drek, you know,

and the time spent watching these things kind of mind-nummingly painful for some of these people. You know, imagine having to, you know, weed through the muck to get to the gems. I guess, but can't you just walk out of the film? Like, just like you walk out of a movie theater

and you're like, this movie sucks. I've done that a few times. Me too. It's a horrible place to be. Me too. I mean, like, I can't believe I'm leaving. Hard to do in the live theater, though, because when they know you're there.

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

and just keep it on the positive side, there's so much great stuff to review and so many great things from the past that people haven't seen before that you could sort of turn people on to. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that'd be great. It's kind of weird that there's not someone like that right now.

It is weird. It is weird. I think maybe you should do that. No, I'm busy. You should produce that. But I mean, it just doesn't even make sense that there's so many different, like, there's so much content, but yet there's not that one thing

that was a really big part of the movie experience when we were younger. Yeah. And the Friday, you know, that idea that there's some exciting movie coming out on Friday and we're going to go to it. Yeah, it was huge. Yeah. That was huge.

Yeah. a movie was coming out. Like, I guess you have it right now with The Odyssey. Like, a lot of people are, like, one of those movies that's so big, people are scrambling to go see it in the movie theaters, and it's getting people excited about it, along with a lot of the culture war controversies that, everybody that I know that's seen, I haven't seen it yet,

says fucking throw all that away. The movie's amazing. That's what I hear. Yeah. They just, like, it's almost like a good way to bait people and to getting really, you know, confrontational about it. Aren't you getting tired of that, though? Yeah, real tired of it.

Yeah. Like, oh, it's not correct. Yeah. And it's just, I'm tired of it from both sides. I don't want to, I don't want to hear judgment. Right. I just, I'll, help me. I don't, I don't want to be in the middle of this fight constantly, you know.

It's the only, I feel like this is, again, what we were talking about before. You know, it's the, as long as we're fighting with each other. Yeah. And then we're fighting about feeling. films that are coming out. I was like, come on, guys, calm down. Calm down. Like, I don't care. It's just, is it entertaining? Is it good? It doesn't have to be correct. It doesn't mean anything to me. There's never been a time in history where correct was important to me. Yeah, or indicative of great art. Right. It's just make it good. And by all accounts,

everyone that I know that's seen the movie said it's fucking incredible. Yeah. I'm going to try to see it soon. But the culture war part of it is like, at the very least, it got people excited to see it. and either to hate it or but I know a lot of people that wanted to go hate it and because they were upset you know but Elliot Page played this person I understand that I just Helen of Troy is a black lady like oh who fucking cares doesn't matter not like that's a made up story like exactly it's a myth to begin with yeah it apparently might actually be based on a real place though you know they used to think that Troy was not a real place, and then they discovered it. I think that was, was it in the 70s?

When did they discover Troy? Because they used to think that it was completely mythical, that it was just fiction, a work of fiction, and then they found the actual real city. And they're like, oh, like, that's the weird thing about really old stories. It's so ambiguous as to what was the root, what was the origin of this story? Was this a real event and a real place? it on the stage of old Roman amphitheater? Yes.

That's something else. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. Yeah. There's history in those stones. Mm-hmm. And, you know, we were doing a show over in Leon France in one of those theaters, and found something out because we were doing rehearsal.

And when you're talking to the other actor like this, you can't hear it out there at all. Ah. And it's, so it told us that what they were doing was this. you know, back in the old days. Yeah. They had to perform out because you wouldn't be able to hear if you were doing realistically talking

to someone making eye contact. That's what's weird about early film. Is that early film, you have stage actors who are used to doing it with no microphones projecting now doing it on film. So it looks odd. Yeah.

It's like there was this transitionary period and then Brando came along and Brando just did it real. And everybody was like, what the fuck is he doing? Yeah. Like, he's acting like a real person. This is crazy.

Yeah. Him and Montgomery Cliff, too. Yeah. Yeah, that was a, you know, huge step forward for all of us. Yeah. To take the onus off the theatrical and get more into the real, you know. And again, if you really think about it, not a whole lot of time between, like, the invention of film and then movie stars and all these things happening. Like, this is a completely new cultural thing.

thing. Like from the early, like, what was the first film? Like, the first film with sound. What year was that? Yeah, this first sound film. 1920s? Yeah. 27, 29. Wow. So think of that. So you have from 27 and then just a few decades later, you have on the waterfront, you have the hustler, you have these incredible movies that do they just have to figure out on the fly, you know, how to, Citizen Kane. And they have to figure out

on the fly how to do this. But also the, if you ever watch the first films, like the silent films, and the ability to tell a story without words, which was a whole other, you know, talent. I mean, you watched those chaplain films. That man was insanely talented. Well, Nospherado.

The original Nospherado? I love that film. I saw that at a public library in San Francisco when I was a kid. They had a night where they played it, and I went to see it. I was like, this is nuts. Incredible. And you got to think, what year was that film?

1922. 1922. And then Metropolis was a little bit. Oh, yeah. That's a crazy movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love that old stuff. Oh, that's great.

Those movies are great. And at the time, you've got to imagine, like, the experience of going to see that where no one had seen movies before. This is, like, a new thing. Yeah. You're seeing things moving around on a giant screen. Like, this is mad. Alchemy. Yeah.

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

It is super cool. I would love to. Like, if you could time travel and go to one of those. Oh, yeah. Like movie theaters back there. There is. I mean, one of the best vampire movies of all time, too. And so creepy.

And the lighting is just so good. Yeah. German expressionist. Do you ever see M? Peter Lorry It's just M It's called M yeah The letter M isn't it

1931 No I never saw it No I never saw it's really good What is it what's it about? About a murderer That's stalking a bunch of people Yeah I was a huge fan of that whole Genre of filmmaking

Well something's so exciting about it Because it like When you limit the sensory input like you have to read the words and you watch it's all black and white and you this music playing it's like it's a totally different thing you're taking in yeah you know it's like it's almost like half reading half watching yeah you know like you're reading like you don't hear their voices you have to create their voices in your head yeah and you're feeling in a different way yeah because of the you know it's black and white so it's not real but it it is

real and so yeah it's it's uh it's a great great form We should have more of those. It's just hard to imagine that this is only 100 years old. That from there than now, this is 100 years. That's a blink of an eye. When you think about human history, when we think about the 1500s versus the 1600s, we kind of think it's basically the same.

If you're born in 1520 or 1620, it's fucking exactly the same. Right. But you're born in 1920 or 2020, it's a fucking completely different world you're living in. Huge. 1920, you have Nosferado, 2026. you have the Odyssey, you know. Right.

You have Dune. You have these insane films. Right. Not to mention the technology you personally possess. Yes. Right. In your pocket. Right.

Any moment in time, you could stream a movie. I can see Nosferatu right now on here. Right. Yeah. Or the Robert Eggers one, the new one. Yeah. Which is fucking fantastic. But it's just instantaneous. Everything's instantaneous and everything's right there for you.

So it's great in that sense that you will be entertained. There's something to watch. or what, but you're missing something on the, like, the specialness of, like, having to go out and go to a place, even go to a video store and go get it, you know? Yeah. There's something missing. I think that that's really at the core of it, though, is the, you know, I've decided this is what I'm going to do today, a whole thing, you know, like pre-this.

I am going to be an active participant in my life. It's when I first moved to L.A. that I first understood this in the late 70s. L.A., as opposed to New York, where I grew up, L.A., you have to make a choice to find your fun. New York, it'll drop in your lap, right? If you walk down the street, something will present itself. But in L.A., when I first moved out there, I realized you got to drive there. You've got to drive and find your fun.

And you have to be an active participant in your cultural life. And once I understood that about L.A., I could understand how to live there. It was at first very frustrating because it was very boring, right? It wasn't happening, you know, when I walked out on the street. There was no street to walk out on it. It was just too big. But it's that kind of, I have chosen this week. to drive 30 minutes in that direction

to see this punk rock band, right? And I will be an active participant in that. And once you do that, you're liberated. Then you know anything's possible. But now it's like, I want it in my backyard. Not only that, now that thing interrupts you while you're taking something else in. Right.

It constantly wants your attention. It's like a puppy. It's like, wharf. You're like, hey, hey, hey. Watch the movie. I want to be fed. Yeah. It's constantly demanding your attention, or at least enticing you to take a look at it, vibrating in your pocket, you know.

Yeah. Have you ever thought about trashing it? I've gotten off social media for weeks at a time. I've done that, but I need it for work too much. I need it for emails. I need to, I can't always just be in front of a laptop. Do you have a, like a flip phone? No.

No. I'm thinking about getting a look. I have a computer that I write on that's not connected to anything. My writing computer is just a Lenovo think pad. I never use it for anything other than writing. If I go online, it's just to research something. Like, ask a question. Like, what is this? How does this work? It's never, I never surf the web.

I don't look at any websites. I don't do anything with it. And that helps a lot for that. But for phones, I have too many friends that are sending me funny things. There's always like some funny thing and I'm all right I guess I'm back on Instagram Check it out like oh Jesus is crazy There's too much coming at you

And the problem is if I put it down Which I do often for like the whole day When I pick it up I'll get 70 text messages to go through I know and then I don't respond to some And some people get mad and then like I'm sorry It's like it's too much Yeah, it's too much coming in And then there's so much hey look at this

hey, check this out. Have you seen this? What do you think about that? You think this is real? You know? And then the people that you don't respond to can oftentimes take the lack of response as basically you're saying fuck you. And it's not the case at all. Right.

You just don't have the time to do it. Right. And you read it and you liked it and you smiled, but you didn't put a smiley on it. Right. You have to put a little heart. You got a double-click it. It's a very strange social dynamic. And it's, I'm not sure I, I, I'm very good at it.

No. No. It's probably a good sign. Yeah. Yeah. It demands too much. That's the problem. As much as it is interesting, if you have a wide social circle, it, it demands too much of your, if you have, you know, 100 units of attention that you have for use throughout the day.

It demands too many units. Right. There's just too much coming at you. Yeah. And it'll take away from other things that you do. And that, that's a real problem. Yeah. Yeah, I like sitting in my garden.

Is that your thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've been gardening. Yeah. That's a real thing. That's my peaceful place.

That's a real thing. It's real. It's dirt. Yeah. Real plant grows out. Life comes from it. Yep. You can eat stuff from it.

Yeah, you need stuff to do, right? You need a thing that can take you away from the other things. Something to make more beautiful every day. Something to, you know, something to care for. It's, you know, whether it's the garden, I have a garden in Los Angeles that, you know, I grow herbs. And, you know, to walk down and put that, those herbs, those fresh herbs in the alma you're making. You know, it's a, it's a small thing, but it's huge. Yeah.

And then I have, back east, I have, I planted a garden with my son this year, you know, like vegetable garden. And he's, you know, I haven't been there, but he's been saying, the tomatoes are coming like crazy and the cucumbers. And, you know, that's such a, yeah, there you go. It's this, it's a, I, I really love this. I love the idea that we can, you know, the earth has so much to offer us, you know, all it needs is water and sunlight and it'll produce all these beautiful things. Well, there's built-in human rewards for growing things, too. It's a human reward system that we have had in our DNA for thousands and thousands.

thousands and thousands of years when you grow things and they produce fruit and they produce vegetables. Like it's exciting. Yeah. Because you're going to eat. Yeah. You're going to survive. Yeah.

And then when you're doing your harvest in the fall, you have an abundance, right? And then I learned how to pickle. Ah. And that's a joy because now you're set for the winter, right? Now you've got a refrigerator full of pickled stuff. And, you know, to be able to bite into it. a crisp pickle that you grew as a cucumber in the summer in December, it's like, you know, this is how they survived.

You know, this is those, you know, the storage of crops and how you make them survive through the winter. That's a skill that, you know, that, well, that's why we're still here. And then you find out that pickling and fermented foods and all those things are fantastic for your body. Incredible. in a way that other foods just aren't. Yeah.

And helps your microbiome and helps your gut. Yeah. And then you can, you know, use the extra pickle juice for a martini. Right. And it's fantastic. Or you can just drink it. Yeah, I do that too. I actually buy pickle juice.

I have a company that sells you these little packets of pickle juice and you drink it because it's a probiotic beverage. Yeah, I have many jars of pickles that are there's no more pickles in, but I keep the juice for drinking. It's and you know fermented foods and you know I've learned you know so much about the gut biome

and how to make that healthier and all these challenges were up against with all the poisons in our food and how to get around them and how to clean yourself out and I just did a cleanse

one of those master cleanses I just did 14 days on where you don't eat anything for 14 days and it's amazing how how great you feel at the end of it. 14 whole days, no food at all. No food at all. Wow. What did you drink water?

It's lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup. And that'll get you through the day. But every morning you're doing a purge, right? So you're cleaning out. You're cleaning all the poisons out. I do that a couple times a year. 14 days is a long time with no food. It is.

What is the first thing you eat when it was over? You got to ease your way back in, like clear broth first, then soups, then vegetables, then get to the worst thing. About a week re-entry. Really? Yeah. Whoa. I mean, you're eating, but you're not going for the steak first thing. Right, right, right.

Yeah. And so you have to kind of ease your system back into it. Do you experience mental clarity when you do that? Total mental clarity. Interesting. Yeah. I've never done it. The most I've done is a day.

First three days are tough. but then once you get past the third day, it's pretty, it's pretty, your energy level is like constant throughout the day. And you can work, I play sports with it, you know,

it's, around 10 days you should stop doing the physical stuff. Really? Exertion. I can still take a bike ride and stuff. But you were working out, three days of no food? Yeah.

Wow. Wow. You have to, you know, everyone's going to have their own reaction, so, you know, I'm not advocating even to do it. Right. Because, you know, I don't want to be responsible for that. But for me, personally, it's really helped. Because it also, it restarts your system. It basically, you get rid of toxins.

You're certainly not drinking. You're not doing any kind of abusive shit to yourself. And basically your body is thanking you by the clarity it gives you. Like, you're really, like, and the other thing that happens is I'll just start cleaning shit, right? So, you know, when I'm on a cleanse, I'm going to clean a closet. Because you're not only cleaning yourself, you're cleaning your environment around you. And it's, you know, I just did it two weeks ago. So, yeah.

How do you decide when to do it? Usually when you've been a little indulgent and you're not feeling too good. and you know you put on a little weight and just like I got I don't feel good I want to you know clean out you must lose a ton of weight doing that yeah how much have you lost doing 14 days 25 pounds whoa yeah about two a day wow yeah and then so then your body's running completely on ketones right because your body's running on fat yeah and so your body's burning fat and ketones When you run on, I've been on ketogenic diets in the past, and then I've been on the carnivore diet, which does the exact same thing, where your mental clarity is just so much better. Like everything just runs smooth.

It's just like you're, like you were saying, you have this level, flat energy throughout the day. There's no highs and lows, like crashing after a big meal. Or caffeine pump bumps or, yeah, all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, but, but staying up till, you know, midnight and fine. The energy is fine. And you'll sleep less too. You need less sleep for some reason.

I don't know why. Also, I think it's probably good to give your digestive system a little break too. Yeah. Let it relax. I mean, it's constantly work. Especially if you eat all throughout the day, if you're a snacker, and then you have late at night, you have a little bite to eat, wake up in the morning, you have breakfast.

Like, your digestive system is just constantly grinding out this food and digesting everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the real poison for me is sugar. You know, it manifested in alcohol for a while, but I don't drink that much anymore. But sugar is the big... For everybody. Yeah, it's a tough one.

It's a very addictive. And, you know, you think, oh, it feels great when you first have it, but then it makes you pay. Well, it's also with modern diets, like the kind of sugar that we have available today, really never existed in the past before. That's true. You know, for most of human history, if you wanted something sweet, you'd eat fruit. Right.

You know, now all of a sudden, you've got candy bars. You have stuff that comes to you in this insane form where you have 100 grams of sugar and something that you can eat. Right. That's nuts. Yeah.

You know, or a drink. You know, you get one of those, what is it, Baskin-Robbins Blizzard? Is that the one that is? Oh, my God. That thing? Boom. Those things will mess you up.

Oh, you get a headache after you're done. I know. It's like alcohol. Yeah. What's that expression? Candy's dandy, but liquor's quicker. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, you know, liquor's just concentrated sugar.

Mm-hmm. It's just like, you know. But, you know, I try not to be too much of a zealot about any of this stuff. But I have, like my mom was introducing us to natural food in late 60s. So she had read a book called Poisons on Our Food and started taking processed food out of our diet and white bread. This was early on, like 1967. Yeah. So she was a real, you know, she really was a homeopath before it was called a homeopath.

And it wound up getting cancer and was told she had to have chemo and said, no, I'm not doing it and kicked it herself, you know, with changing what she was putting in her body. And so I've always, you know, had her as a kind of guidepost for my health. She used to always say the body is a temple and that the body can heal anything. And a lot of it has to do with how you approach it in your mind. And if you believe that you can heal yourself, you can heal yourself. Is she getting this from books? I think she got it from a combination of books and her faith in Catholicism.

I think every religion has a fasting day for some reason. That seems to be something that is common to all religion. It's important that you'd not eat one day a week. She wouldn't do that with us, you know, as kids. starve us for a day. But she did have a whole holistic approach to the way that she viewed illness. And I remember her drumming it into our heads that if you ever get told by a doctor anything, you have to challenge it. You go go to a different doctor and see if they say the same thing. Always, always, always. She lost her father and her brother within the course of a year to medical malpractice.

in the 50s. And so she had a serious distrust of the medical profession. And back then, it was like there was no one even thought about suing for malpractice. It was like, that's the doctor. He's an authority figure.

You can't mess with him, right? So she always approached it with a healthy level of questioning whenever she was given advice by doctors. Wow. And it's interesting. She, you know, she's always been, you know, I've always kind of wondered how she would have reacted to this recent thing and all that.

But I have you ever done ayahuasca? No. Yeah. I've done DMT, which is the, that's the actual compound that's active in ayahuasca. Iowaska is an orally active version of DMT. Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, when they tell you to go in, when I did it, they tell you to go in with an intention.

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

Oh. That was what she, that's what she told me in response to my intention. Whoa. What were you battling? I was battling my frustration with the dissolution of society, people being angry at each other over ridiculous things, long friendships being affected. affected people being canceled for expressing their opinion, all this stuff. And I wanted out, I wanted to be absolved of that. I didn't want to be engaged in it.

And what she told me in the course of this thing, believe it or not, you know, I understand people, oh, that's woo-woo, and you're just tripping and whatever. But I definitely felt her presence there. It was no doubt. It was here. I went through a whole journey with her. things from our lives together. And there was one moment where I was, you know, I was always been curious about something

that happened in kindergarten or something I don't remember. And she, you know, at one point I felt her presence and she said, you were right about that. I'm sorry we didn't listen to you, you know. And this kind of really profoundly deep experience. And but at the end of it, I felt completely lighter and completely, you know, relieved to have been through the experience. And a great, great connection with my mom, you know, just like a beautiful, like, ah, she gets it. She's still around.

I've had quite a few experiences in this realm. And my mom, in fact, you know, she, my father died. when he was 80 and my mom was 78 and she wasn't sick but my dad had been dying for a while and we all got down to say goodbye and they were living in Mexico at the time and we went to the funeral and my mom was very stoic and sang very strongly my father's favorite song at the funeral and she didn't cry and we were all concerned about her and we hired a couple people for when we left to take care of her and she was really agitated the last night and she was, I was there and she said, you know, I don't trust these people. I don't know if they're

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

It was disturbing me. I didn't want to look at it. But then I look out the bay window, and then coming down the street, I see, led by my first friend in life, a group of people coming towards the house. And it didn't make any sense. There were people from my childhood, people from my choral society, people from my work. But they were all there and they all came to the door. And when they showed up, I realized everything was going to be fine. And I realized, oh, my God, that was the departed.

That had come to say it's going to be okay. Wow. And so my sister's left. Three days, four days later, we got a phone call. My mom has died. She wasn't sick. And then my sister talks to the woman that was taken care of her. And she said it was really strange.

You know, the night before she died, she said, he's here. And they said, who's here? And she said, Gil, my husband, he's here. He's come to get me. And they said, no, Mary, he's not there. And she said, oh, no, he most certainly is. And he looks very strong because he died feeble. Goes to bed that night and passes.

So even the most cynical person in the world, that doesn't believe in afterlife or anything. How do you explain that? How do you explain whatever chemicals were going on in her brain to bring her to that passing where she was going to join the person that she loved for her entire life? That's a beautiful thing.

Regardless of how you look at it. I don't think there's any value in being cynical about these experiences. And even the ayahuasca experience, like this idea that you're hallucinating and that that's what this is, it doesn't matter. It's the same experience.

If you really did make contact with your mother in the afterlife and you really did have this communication versus whatever the fuck hallucination means. I don't know what you mean by that. It's the same experience. Yeah. So there's no value in being cynical about it. Like you get a, you get, there's something that you experience from it that's tangible. It's real. You feel it.

It changes your perspective. It changes. the way you feel about the world. Like, that's a real thing. That's a real thing. Just because you can't put a measuring tape to it or you can't put it on a scale, don't say it's not real.

There's so many ways of being that we haven't even studied or have no idea about. How people can communicate over 2,000 miles. Like a mother wakes up in the middle of the night knowing something's wrong with their child and five minutes later the fucking phone rings. Right.

What the hell is that? Or twins, twins who have some very strange connection with each other. Yeah. When I was, my grandfather, who I was very close to, he had been dead for two months, and I had a dream about him. And I woke up, like, startled and I heard his voice, you know, and he said basically, don't worry, I'll take care of it. And I didn't know what the hell it meant, but it was very clear. It was like, I'll take care of it. 15 minutes later, I get a phone call from Susan. and my son, Miles, who was six years old at the time,

had run out into the middle of 7th Avenue, and she said it was the weirdest thing. It was like something stopped him like that, and a car goes behind him and a car goes in front of him. And I was like, I know exactly what just happened. He was, whatever that is, whatever energy he could muster in whatever face, of being he was, he fucking saved my son's life.

Heroically. I'm no doubt about that. Why would he show up and say that to me? He said, don't worry, I'll take care of it. Wow. So I totally believe this stuff. I believe that we, that life, death, there's other planes of existence that we can get to through various means. It doesn't have to be ayahuasca.

There are, if you're open to listening in different ways, there are great things available for you. It's like the idea of an accident. Isn't an accident that you run into that person that you've been wanting to talk to? And all of a sudden now they're right in front of you. Right. You know, that's not an accident. It's divine whatever, you know, whatever the divine is for you. So there's another level of energy that is going around.

You know, we haven't even studied how the heart communicates. You know, there's that Spanish or Portuguese cardiologist that talks about the realm of communication in the electromagnetic field of the heart and what that means and how the heart can communicate and has in parts of the heart have more. neurons and parts of the brain and what is that all about? And it's such that we don't, we don't think that way. You know, we don't want to experience. We have a, it's a heart is a meat pump and that's, it just runs in your entire life. Yeah. But it doesn't, this guy's suggesting, no, it's electromagnetic energy.

It's what makes us live longer if we're with someone else or with a pet, you know, that people that are isolated and alone are hurt. And they're not having that electromagnetic connection with other people. That's why we crave crowds. It's why we want to be in, you know, groups of people. It's a natural thing. It keeps us alive. It keeps us activated in a community.

But we don't study that. We don't study what that is. And I think it's kind of magical. That's why solitary confinement is such a cruel punishment. So cool, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of people that think it's actual torture. Of course it is.

Yeah. Of course it is. You've got nothing to interact with. And it's why the, you know, it's why that lockdown is cruel, you know. You know, just the scope of that loneliness is just immense, you know, that some people had to deal with. Especially people that were already struggling. Some people were already filled with anxiety and they already had suffered from depression. They were already weird socially.

And then all of a sudden they're just completely isolated from everyone else for a year. year or a year and a half, depending on where you lived. So it's weird this desire that people have to define things as real or not real. And also to let everyone know, oh, I'm not falling for that nonsense. You know, but God, I mean, at one point in time, do you have to say, well, all these stories, all these experiences that people have, maybe there's something to it and maybe this closed-mindedness is not benefiting me in any way. Yeah, I mean, there's magic.

magic in the world I mean there's this old way of thinking I became do you know what the there's a book called The Nature of Things by a guy named Lucretius

written in 350 BC and it's Epicureanism and Epicureanism now is about you know you like food you like wine whatever back then it was like the whole purpose of this philosophy or religion whatever you want to call it

was that that all of life is a miracle. Everything that you're seeing in front of you is the first time it's happening and will never happen again. It's a collision of atoms in a particular way. They don't call them atoms, but they call them the smallest particles

that create unique experiences every moment of your life. And the whole purpose of life is to seek the pleasure of that and avoid pain. And the pain can be either living isolated or without the idea of magic or indulging in something where it creates pain, too much pleasure creates pain.

But this philosophy and this beautiful long-form poem written by Lucretius in 350 BC is all about magic. It's all about this idea that look how lucky we are to wake up in the morning and see that freaking cactus blooming. You know, that's like, when we get so inured from that, so, you know, anesthetized from the magic and it's all just the doldrum every day is the same. That's robbing yourself of so much, right? That the idea that what if you just woke up and said, hey, it's fucking magic. This is amazing.

First of all, I'm breathing. Second of all, look at that sun coming in the window. And this is going to be an amazing day. Instead of like, oh, shit, I got to get up and, you know, do my fucking thing, you know. Like, no. That's also relative because if you were dying in a hospital and you had this opportunity, say, okay, all you have to do is say these magic words and you'll be transported back to health in your home. with a completely new perspective and a completely new appreciation for just being healthy and alive.

Yeah. It's just hard for people to shift that perspective and think like that all the time. But if you could force yourself just as an exercise to say, I am so lucky to be above ground. I am so lucky to be healthy and mobile if I am and I can just go do what I want to do and live my life and go say hi to people I love. Yeah. Yeah. And the idea that you can also, even if things are bad, that if you approach life that way, then you, there is a possibility making everything better. And it has to do with humility. It has to do with being able to say, I can forgive somebody for something. I can also ask forgiveness for something I've done. It's all about humility. It's all about humility in the face of not only your own personal experience, but in how you view the universe. Like, I, we're either, I'm lucky to be here or, what a blessing to be able to have this life I've had. I want to give.

I want to, I had this beautiful experience when I was going through my, you know, one of my darkest periods. This woman showed up. And I met her once in my life, this Tibetan woman. She's a great singer. And she said, why are you here? She said, you're in trouble. I'm going to take care of you. And I didn't even know her.

And I said, all right, okay. And so she did this Reiki healing on me. She sang. She wrote incense. And I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why she was there. She makes me a meal that evening, the first evening. She's done all this healing on me.

And she says, you know, she makes the meal I'm eating. I finish eating. I start taking the dishes, right? She says, what are you doing? I said, well, you cooked all clean. She says, sit out. That's the problem with you people in the West.

It's all a business deal. I'm doing this for you. Can you just accept that? I'm taking care of you. Can you accept that? And she said, you will never know how to give love until you know how to receive love. And it blew my mind.

Because at the time, I realized I was engaged in that kind of transactional way of looking at relationships. That the idea that giving completely is so much better, you actually get more out of it than you do receiving it. And once I understood that, it kind of transformed everything for me. And that was the person that was a total stranger, and she showed up just out of nowhere. And I said, finally, at the end of it, I said, why are you here? And she said, you have done good things for the world. We need you. And she left.

Wow. So I'm, I didn't plan that. I had no idea that was going to happen, but it made me realize there are angels in this world. They are manifested as human beings, but there are certain kinds of people that are there for you if you are open for it. If you are closed off and cynical,

you will not see your angels. But if you are maybe sometimes just completely wiped and you have no, you know, you're just ready to receive it. And maybe the fact that I was able to receive that, I think, really helped me and help me shift to everything. It's always a struggle, of course. That lesson doesn't mean that I'm that way forever. Right.

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

Super positive people. Like something, some pure expression of love and. compassion and generosity. Yeah. Yeah. And this is a real problem with social media and algorithms in particular is that it really highlights the things that make you upset. It does.

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

Yeah, you are. And it's a constant battle because that damn thing's buzzing all the time. But I have gotten better with it. I will not look at it first thing in the morning anymore. Well, it's much like we were talking about like film and records being in new thing. This is a really new thing. And this is very invasive. It's a very new thing and very invasive. And it's going to take a while for people to figure out the right way and the wrong way to use it. Yeah. And what are the ramifications and the consequences of using it incorrectly?

You know, because no one's teaching that. You know, they're not teaching children that in school. There should be a course on this is the negative aspect of social media. These are the negative aspects of interaction. This is what it's doing to your consciousness. This is what's doing. to your focus. It's stealing your joy. It's stealing your your your appreciation of the moment. Right. And it's leading you into conflict constantly. Constantly. And, you know, that's a negative thing. That's a that's a force of evil. Yeah. Strong word, but you know. It's the right word though. You know, it's again, there's these words, good, evil, angel, God. They fuck with people because they're like, oh, what is that?

It's, I think, got to kind of abandon that way of thinking and just go, well, there's certainly positive and negative. There's certainly love and evil. Those are real things. And there's good. There's good in the world. And also, the more you concentrate on other things, the more your life is defined by those other things, whether it's good or bad. So if you're constantly thinking about bad things, like, well, you can't have a very loving and amazing life if you're constantly inundated with thoughts about negative things. And on the other side of it, if you're thinking in a positive way and enjoying love and friendship and community and just doing stuff that you actually find value in, well, it's got to give you better energy.

And also, the way you interact with other people will be different. So you'll affect the way they feel and that'll have that butterfly effect out to the rest of the people they come in contact with. Not to mention it's really good for your health. Yes. Well, like you were saying before, one of the worst things for your health is loneliness. Yeah. Yeah, it'll kill you. Tim Robbins, you're a cool motherfucker.

Thank you, man. I enjoy talking to you. I appreciate it. It's great. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Goodbye.