The Taproot Podcast - Taylor Sheridan, Yellowstone, and the Last American Myth

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

A young man tells his therapist he has watched all of Yellowstone four times. He has never ranched or owned anything bigger than a dog, and what he wants is Kayce Dutton’s vision quest. In this episode of Discover + Heal + Grow, Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S, takes Taylor Sheridan seriously as the most-watched mythmaker in America, a smart writer whose failures reveal what a culture actually needs. The story starts with the Four Sixes Ranch: a cattle empire that grew on Comanche grass leased from Quanah Parker, then floated for a century on oil, and was finally bought by the man who wrote Yellowstone. From there the episode follows the thread of jurisdiction and what lies under the ground through Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River. It traces how the Yellowstone pilot’s vision of land, tribe, and federal power collapsed into a soap opera. Sheridan sits inside a seventy-year American conversation about cattle money and oil money that runs from Giant to The Beverly Hillbillies to Dallas, a show that helped the country exorcise the Kennedy assassination and fall in love with Texas oil. Joel also looks at Landman, Mayor of Kingstown, and Lioness as a map of the American extraction economy. He brings in Umberto Eco, Hideo Kojima, Peter Brooks, and Ien Ang to explain why audiences crave an enemy they can finally see. The clinical question underneath it all is how to honor the real grief behind the cowboy fantasy without buying the prescription it sells: that the only way to be a whole person is to become a baron. In this episode The Four Sixes Ranch, Burk Burnett, Quanah Parker, and oil Jurisdiction in Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River “That makes me a Comanche”: the enemy-of-everyone hero How Yellowstone lost its helicopter and its vision Giant, The Beverly Hillbillies, Dallas, and Who Shot J.R. Landman, Mayor of Kingstown, Lioness, and Jeffersonian nostalgia The Yellowstone finale, the estate tax, and land returned to the tribe Masculinity, dissociation, and economic grief in the therapy room Taylor Sheridan, Yellowstone, Landman, Yellowstone finale, 1883, 1923, Hell or High Water, Wind River, Sicario, Mayor of Kingstown, Lioness, Dallas, Giant, Beverly Hillbillies, Four Sixes Ranch, Quanah Parker, Comanche, Texas oil, American West, cowboy myth, masculinity, men’s mental health, psychology, cultural criticism, therapy, Birmingham therapist

In 1870, a 19-year-old named Samuel Burke Burnett bought 100 head of cattle, wearing the brand, 6, 6, 6, wait for it, 6. And the legend says that he won the ranch with 4-6s in a poker game, but that's not true. And the fact that everyone repeats it anyway tells you the ranch was in the business of myth before it was in the business of cattle, like most of the West. And Burnett built an empire on grass, and a good deal of that grass belonged to the Camantric. and to understand how a Texas cattleman ended up grazing his herds on a Comanche reservation, you have to know who Quana Parker was. In 1836, Comanche Raiders hit Fort Parker in East Texas and carried off a nine-year-old girl named Cynthia Ann Parker. She grew up at Comanche, married the war leader, Petta Nakona, and had children.

And when Texas Rangers recaptured her in 1860, she never had a man. adjusted to white life again, and she tried to go back to the Indians. Her story is the loose source for the movie The Searchers, John Ford's 1956 Western, one of the most famous films ever made about a white family's obsession with a captive who doesn't want to be rescued. Her son was Quana, and he grew up to lead the Quadi, the hardest holdout Comanche band. He fought the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls in 1874. And in 1875, he became the last Comanche leader to bring his people onto the reservation at Fort Sill. What Quana did next is why he belongs in an episode about Taylor Sheridan's movie and TV show universe centered around his hit Yellowstone.

He became the most successful businessman on the reservation. The Comanche and the Kiowa land in the... southwest Oklahoma, was prime grass with no cattle on it. And Texas cattlemen, like Burke Burnett, wanted it. So Quana negotiated grazing leases and collected the fees. He and Burnett became friends, and Burnett is credited with helping build Quana's big house, the Star House. And in 1905, the two of them hosted Theodore Roosevelt for a wolf hunt on that leased pasture.

The son of a captive white woman and a Comanchee, chief, the man who had fought Texas to the end, became a landlord to the Texas cattle baron. And then the four-sixes, fortune grew fatter and fatter on his people's grass. And then the oil came in. And the group that bought it, cattle, horses, and mineral rights, included was led by Taylor Sheridan, who had just made the most watched show on television about a family fighting to keep its ranch from being sold. Two years later, he put out a show called Landman about the oil business in West Texas.

And that is a century of American power in one property. One incredibly successful property that connects with the soul of so many disenfranchised and confused Americans. Some of them very wealthy who are losing their place in time and history. And some of them very poor who are trying to connect with wealth. and a material stake in the empire that they live in. Grass taken out of native lands by a lease and a treaty, oil under the grass, and a dynasty floating on the oil.

And then finally a writer who turned the myth of the disappearing cowboy into enough money to buy the original cowboy branch. This episode is about how we get here and about why the myth that is being sold is incredibly valuable to the people who are buying it. I'm Joel Blackstock. This is the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast, Discovery Hill Grow, and this is the episode all about Taylor Sheridan's Empire

that he built off of the show, Yellowstone. That's a little bit more of the show's theme song than you normally hear during the intro. Can you hear like a little tiny bit of Aaron Copeland there? Like that sound of a reverberating vast canyon of undiscovered American potential that you associate with films like Jeremiah Johnson. Like you can, you know, Aaron Copeland when he's doing like Appalachian Spring and he's borrowing from the Quaker song, simple gifts. But instead of going, he's going, do do do do do do do do do do do. do do do like and sort of bending things back towards this melting pot of themes with like individual kind of folk melodies i think

that is what brian tyler when he's composing the theme song to the original um yellowstone you know uh uh pilot that becomes a very very different show by the end um is is trying to go for and there's a lot more to that theme song that is not a heard in the show. So why are we talking about Yellowstone? This is a therapy podcast. You promised me after the last weird series about oil or something that we were going to talk about therapy. Well, we're going to talk about the silos we put around it. I'm going to talk about Taylor Sheridan.

So that, you know, there's a ton of people who come in to me as patients, or, you know, this comes up in consultation groups, or it comes up in a lot of the people that I talk to around. because Yellowstone's a popular show. Like, I mean, a lot of people are, like, explaining to me what the show is before they get into how some part of it affected them. Because I'm in, like, I don't know, a Colombian weave shirt or I dress anywhere from, like, stoner 70s looking therapist to, like, like, Alabama bass fishermen, like, depending on the day of the week. So anyway, you know, it's fine, like, to make a lot of different assumptions about me. But people come in and they see somebody in this, you know, kind of, well,

and hippie thing and they're like, oh, let me tell you about this cowboy show that I like, and they start explaining it. I'm like, hey, hey, hey, hey, stop. I've seen the show. I know what you're talking about. And there's a select few moments that really speak to people. And if you are expecting me to like make fun of this show, oh, that's not what this is. I'm not doing that. I watch Yellowstone from the beginning to end. It becomes a very different show. And Taylor Sheridan is kind of a fascinating guy. I don't think it's high art. I'm also not going to make fun of it.

And like, if you want me to be a TV snob and be like, ooh, this, you know, thing is, I mean, remember that there's plot lines on a show like Downton Abbey about how a girl gets left at the altar because the guy she's marrying overcomes his dementia to remember that he's so old that he shouldn't get married. And this is not like done in levity.

This is a serious British drama. I've watched Downton Abbey, too. I like taking apart TV and looking at the myths that different times and the Earth's history we tell ourselves through that medium. I'm not here to make fun of Taylor Sheridan. I also think that he's a very smart guy who doesn't care about a lot of the things that he writes for different reasons at different points. Probably by the time that Yellowstone is ending,

he has a very different relationship with it than when he starts. There is a difference in watching a stupid person pretend to be very smart, and then watching a smart person write something stupid. And not all of it, but a lot of what Taylor Sheridan produces, maybe not rights, when he's turning it over to the show and there's like, you know, the Tulsa Kings, you know, type stuff. That is Taylor Sheridan sort of just like handing a show off to somebody else because he doesn't care. Maybe you don't know who Taylor Sheridan is and I should back up.

I'm tired of this dirty old city entirely too much work. I never eaten at play sidewalks. Think I'll walk off. my steady job today. Who set me free? Somewhere in the middle of... Taylor Sheridan was a semi-successful actor who wanted out. He was kind of a B-List TV guy.

And he spent years being cast as this sort of handsome. But typecast, honestly, by his handsomeness, for some not being a very good actor, which... He's kind of a middleweight. You know, he was mostly visible as, like, the deputy chief of police on like sons of anarchy or you know i i don't even watch that kind of tv that much but like something like would have been like the a bad guy in like the show the practice or something like nypd blue um that the kind of television that i watched in like metal

school um but he walked away from it over money he gave himself these you know he he said i don't want to do this anymore i don't really like acting i'm not moving up i'm not going through Hollywood, I want to be a cattle rancher. I'm going to walk away and I'm going to buy a small ranch. I'm going to eke out a life. I'm going to give Hollywood one more chance. And so he wrote three scripts. And he said, if none of them sold, it'd just leave the industry and he'd go raise cattle. And this was not going to be like a huge successful cattle ranch because he's not a rich guy at this point. It'd be like, you know, something that will let him, you know, eat out of life and then have a life and not of renown. And so he, what he was taking that he

was analyzing in those scripts because it was interesting to him at the time is like what you get in those cop shows is people fighting over jurisdiction oh yeah it's this county so it's the sheriff no it's the local police because it's next to a prison oh so known the prison warden has jurisdiction oh wait no here's it's a drug trafficking crime so now the FBI is taking over those are what a lot of the fights on that show or not that show but those types of shows are about it's people fighting about that kind of stuff um that's where the drama and the tension and the twists come from it's jurisdiction and so that was interesting to him and he he used a lot of that to write his early work so you know who owns this crime who owns this body who owns this land you know underneath you know

whatever is this question of like does it matter or isn't this kind of silly he wanted to mind some of those existential veins that tv shows don't really have time to do and so whether you know wealth is just this crime that has been around long enough to draw its own border and now it's the law those are kind of the bigger themes that you see him stumbling upon in his boredom with the kind of stuff he was filming. And so, you know, you can see that in the Yellowstone pilot. But the reason that Taylor Sheridan got to write the Yellowstone pilot is that he wrote three scripts. He wrote Wind River.

He wrote Heller High Water and he wrote Sicario. And then two of them went on to win like huge Oscars. And Wind River is like pretty good, but it's not really directed as well. The pacing's a little bit off. Um, and a lot of those are comparing the bad guys, which is, you know, not a terribly deep idea, but it's, it's the Joker looking in Batman's eyes and saying, you are, you and me are not so different, um, about saying that like American policy is very similar to the enemies that America has or that the police's, you know, tactics are very similar to the criminals that they're

trying to block up or whatever. Um, but they were, they were well written scripts. They, you know, two of them won Oxsiger's best picture. I don't even remember. I saw them when they came out a long time ago. I think Hellar Highwater is a really good movie. Sicario, I think, is kind of too smart for its own good, but it works. And Wind River is probably my favorite, but it does, it's like it's a script. It's a better script.

It's just not a better movie. But those movies all were like, he read three scripts as a Hell Mary to be like, yeah, if any of these do anything, then I'll hang out in the industry a little bit longer. And all of them got a ton of renown. So he gets handed this show to do the pilot with this giant budget, and it's going to star big actors. And he writes the show Yellowstone. You've got a brooding Kevin Costner and even a BBC star who's cast 10 years younger than she actually is because she's such a phenomenal actress.

And he shoots it like this feature film with helicopters. And the directing in that first one that Sheridan does is like that pilot is highly inspired by true detective. Like they kind of look like that was the visual language that had just won all the awards on TV. He's kind of aiming for that. By the end of the show, it could not be further from what true detective is for both the show's faults. And it opens on this highway wreck where the cattle baron, John Dutton, is putting down an injured horse on a road that's being cut through his land. And, you know, the central plot is this jurisdiction fight. you know the dutton cattle drift onto broken rock reservation and any cattle that are on their

reservation now become the property of the indians but if he uses his helicopter to terrorize the cattle and scare them and they run back on his and they belong to him and just the silliness and the arbitrary of this but how serious we have to take it as a society in order to have a civilization and the camera keeps going up onto these helicopters that will immediately disappear by the time the second season happens because there's no money for a helicopter or over the land and there are these heavy moralogues about how different people own the land and the land really maybe owns itself and the aerial shot is this god's eye picture of can you even really pretend to own this thing um and it the the pilot sets the show up for a very different show

than the show becomes probably a better one and over the next few seasons you start to get more and more and more a soap opera. And not just because the budget is cut, because it really isn't cut that much, because it is like the biggest show on television. I really think it's just because Taylor Sheridan, when all the rules are removed and there's no oversight, wanted to write a soap opera more than he wanted to write the show that he set out to write, or that he sold to Paramount, which created the Paramount Network. And, you know, he basically ran that network for seven years until restructuring made him leave. But he did everything that they did. So of the three movies, movies that Taylor Sheridan wrote that got him the show, Yellowstone.

Hell or Haywater is probably the best movie that comes out of it. There's these two brothers, and they're robbing branches of a bank that is for closing on their dead mother's farm. And the reason that the bank wants the farm is that the oil has been found underneath it, so they realize that it's actually worth for closing on, but the brothers don't have the money. And so there's all this stuff about, you know, what value is and what money is and rights and property and debt and all that. And, you know, Toby is the brother, and he's laundering the bank's own money back, you know, to pay off the reverse mortgage. So he's, like, stealing money from the bank to pay the bank back. And the whole point is, like, money's not real.

And he wants to put the land in this trust, so the royalties will go to his sons. And the film's idea of escaping poverty is not, you know, really revolution or reform. It's becoming, like, a very small oil owner, which is exactly the move that Sheridan himself will make, later at a much larger scale sort of protects you from like the bullshit of living in america and um there's there's really good lines in that movie it's a good movie um but there's this the texas you know ranger who's chasing them alberto park comanchee you know in the best scene in the film he looks out at the towns they're driving through and says that 150 years ago all of this belonged to his ancestors until his grander

parents, you know, take it, and now the banks are taking it from them. That the people who stole it are having it stolen from them by, like, a bigger force, which just implied to be capitalism or something. And you just have jurisdiction stacked on type of jurisdiction, and had Jared and continued to mind those themes, he might have got somewhere that was a lot more interesting than where he lands. You know, Gil Birmingham, probably just because he's, like, one of the bigger actually Native American actors that's out there shows up in a bunch of Sheridan's stuff.

And then the other half of the brothers, of the, you know, because by making, you know, two brothers, he's making them both sympathetic and not sympathetic, you know, two people and the same family fighting for the same cause. One of the brothers is a sociopath, and there's a line that I like a lot. A lot of people say it's cheesy, but I think this is good screenwriting. If I was a better screenwriter, this kind of stuff I'd really. right um but he sits down at a poker table across from a camanche and the camansi tells the brother who's a sociopath do you know what camanche means it means enemy of everyone and tanner the brother

who's a sociopath says do you know what that makes me then and the guy says yeah it makes you an enemy and he says no it makes me a comanche because he's a sociopath and like those movies were good. When River puts this whole kind of apparatus on this reservation where the jurisdiction is literally a trap. There's this murder on tribal land, but it falls into a gap

between agencies. So that nobody's really responsible for closing the murder. And so you have like the private investigators of the oil crew that sign off on it and then you have a reason that the Native Americans don't want to investigate the murder. And so the FBI is like sent in as a third party

and it's clever. And then Sicario is about the U.S. and drug running and how essentially, and this is a mind that's faint. Sheridan is a good writer. He's not an original one. He is good at picking up old ideas and kind of dusting them off and then presenting them to the public in this way that resonates with the current moment, I think. That's his strength. And so Sicario is kind of about, hey, like, the U.S. claims that it's fighting drugs, but it actually needs to be fighting drugs in order to be the U.S. and that means that it has to make sure the drugs exist

and also like the drug runners are the same thing as like the FDA and the FBI and all of these rules that are supposed to make sure that that doesn't happen are really silly and you're in the eyes of the protagonist watching that happen that's the one that does the best probably because Roger Deacons who's just fantastic does the cinematography but all three of these movies

the lines around property as violence being cooled off into this codified law. And the cooling is the only thing that really separates, like the man with the deed from the man with the gun. And, you know, Burnett grazing his herds on lease reservation grass is the real history that these films are fictionalizing. The veins in culture that shared in a stumbling upon, ignorant or not, are actually extremely real.

And the things that speak to him and make him want to, you know, write these themes, I think are incredibly important. there's a reason why they happen to resonate heavily with not, you know, who I think Hollywood would have wanted him to be, which is the Oscar winning fancy, you know, do the next madman, do the next sopranos. Sheridan doesn't care. He doesn't really want to win Oscars. He cares about winning an Oscar enough to become wealthy. And that's what separates him from the kind of showrunner who I think is like actually like a great showrunner, like a David Chase or a Matt whiner. He's

he does he could probably be them if he tried and he doesn't want to try, which to me is fascinating. I would like to write the Aaron Sorkin like, you know, biopic of him. But, you know, Sheridan's been casting the, oh God, if

Aaron Sorkin wrote like a biopic of Taylor Sheridan, it would be the most insufferable thing. I'm kidding. But like, there's a minia star. farming farmers The same old story told How this outlaw paid their mortgage

And saved their little home Others tell you of a stranger That come to beg a meal Underneath his mapkin Left a thousand dollar bill Sheridan didn't invent the ranch melodrama, but he did inherit American tradition of doing them. And he was continuing, I think, a much older story about what happens when cattle money meets oil money. And the first big statement of it is, you know, giant.

You know, Edna Ferber's novel turned in 1956 into the movie with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. I think they talk about that one of Mad Men. Maybe I'm thinking of another Rock Hudson picture, but I think somebody mentions it. And then, you know, Hudson's, you know, Bick Benedict in that movie runs Rieda, you know, enormous cattle ranch, old Texas aristocracy. And, you know, Dean's jet rink is this ranch hand who inherits a scrap of land and he strikes oil on it and he becomes richer than the family that employed him. There's also like another one that's bad that has Paul Newman in it.

Paul Newman was in some bad movies based on novels. I can't remember which that one was. I don't know. there's another bad Paul Newman movie from that era where like 55 or something where he like runs an airplane factory I don't know that movie sucks but anyway by the end you know big has to let the oil companies drill his land even though he doesn't want to and the cattle empire is living on royalties that it despises and it's all about how becoming wealthy makes you miserable but also becoming wealthy is like the only thing that you can aspire to be in America and you know

then giant is this cattle aristocracy watching itself become this costume that's worn over an oil fortune, which is exactly the history of the four-sixes, the ranch that Sheridan will, spoiler alert in real life, not on the show later by. I'm sure they'll write that into the show at some point too. But six years, I'm curious how they will, because Four-sixes is a real ranch, like it exists in real life, and Taylor Sheridan buys the ranch halfway through making the show Yellowstone and then gets the rights to make a new show called 4-6s

about the ranch, but he already made himself like another character who's not the owner, who's like sort of implied to be in tension with the owners. So I'm wondering how they'll split that difference if that show ever gets made. My guess is that it probably won't. That one will fall through it,

but anyway, back to the thing. So, you know, you also have like the Beverly Hillbillies in 1962, and it's this, whole joke about how like why are we making these people rich based on mineral rights like the absurdity of the way that cold work we kind of forgot you know uh what 1919 felt like but now that we're you know in the 50s and 60s we're watching you know why is it you know this poor mountain man shoots at some food and he misses and he hits a gusher and he moves his family to Beverly Hills like this is kind of silly um but it was the way that we were pointing our

entire economy. And the show Dallas, which I think is probably like the most instrumental, it picks up the story after the war between the cattle and the oil was over. Dallas is not a show about cattlemen becoming oilmen. It's just a show about oil. You know, South Fork cattle is this ranch that belongs to Miss Ellie's family. And if you ever, I never really watched the show. Dallas until I got older and was like interested in the history of TV but like um it's not good

but it was something that like boomers always punched down on like I heard about the show Dallas because there were so many people who were my teachers and my parents or you know relatives just do people at church that made fun of how bad the show was but it was clear that it was important because they it came up a lot Dallas like premiered in 78 you know five years after the Arab, you know, oil embargo and a year before the second oil shock. So it's, you know, kind of in the midst of all the Carter crisis of confidence stuff. And at the exact moment, you know, oil prices were pulling money and power out of the frostbelt and into Texas. And manufacturing and managerial respectability were draining out.

You know, oil, real estate and wildcat extraction were coming in. So there was this whole idea that the people who had the power and the power, the money were like the old wealthy people like the the kennedy's and that was a reality that was changing it was moving to basically what would become a billionaire class in america and i think that that is the reason why the show dallas was important even if it wasn't well regarded or well liked is it was and and why its revivals failed it was explaining at that time to people how they should understand the nature of power because dallas is not a show about a good character.

It's a show about a bad family who does bad things that you still kind of have to get along with and love enough to watch what they do that week. You know, and there's something stranger to. Like when Kennedy is assassinated, the national press had branded Dallas the city of hate, which didn't make a ton of sense. It became this shorthand for the violent end of the East Coast, you know, Ivy League, public service idea of power, you know, these noble barons who served, you know, for years, these dynasties that were just supposed to govern you. And the show never really mentioned that.

It never said Dealey Plaza, never said Kennedy. But I would argue, and this isn't an original point. I mean, Matt Christman and other people have said this. It helped them, it helped America understand how power in America was changing. and who was really, you know, running the world. It's no, it's all in the past they will say, but it's still going on here today. It's no secret that there were a lot of conspiracy theories, some of which are probably true, or at least more validated by mainstream academia than they were at the time about the JFK assassination. But you had, as this power changed, these kind of elites that were sweater vests and fancy watches and, you know, bow ties and tie pins and all this stuff, that were losing control of American politics to basically Texas oil money that would refine, you know, define the next general.

generation. And at this time, Kennedy's shot and the nation tries to solve the murder of the president in Dallas and what happened. And then there's another assassination of the assassin. And there's so much that's so weird that a soap opera that gets America to obsess over basically what would turn out to be a cop out, who killed JR, which turns out to just the whole season was a dream. nobody killed jr but for a long time everyone's trying to figure out on the show dallas who shot jr you know this guy who's a bad guy uh and a nation obsessing about what happens in dallas uh it was television doing what it does best it was television letting people grieve and feel something by proxy so that they didn't really have to admit them to themselves that they were sad or what they

were doing was ritual or the TV had become our religion or any of the things that we don't want to think about they just got to go ahead and do it so they got this sweet emotional release and that's what TV does best and it did it did in 1980 then the coal company came with the world's largest show and they tortured the timber and stripped all the land well they dug further cold till the land was forsaken Then they rode it all down As the progress of man Because, oh, the times they were a changing There was a new aristocracy

And it was not the Kennedys It was not people who came by this By old money or learning or connection with Europe It was the Ewing's. You know, it was prestige drawn purely By happening to buy land To let your cows eat and shit on That happened to have oil under it

And that was how America was going to hand out royalty From here on out. You know, whatever happened under the land. It was a casino. It was a dice roll. And during this time in 86, you know, the price of oil fell by more than half in the first months of 86. And then the Texas boom, the Dallas had been selling for eight years, started to collapse

into the bank failures of the late 80s. And that spring, the show ended. It's season with Bobby Ewing, who had been killed off a year earlier, stepping out of the shower and the fall it revealed that the entire previous season had been a dream and so you get one of the most defining things in screenwriting which is this is a cop out this is a shitty trope don't do that don't kill your character off and then invest your audience and all the characters and solving the murder and then just tell people oh this season of television hasn't happened you know i doubt anyone in the writers room minute as commentary and then there's been leaks like they actually meant to kill him

and then it ruined the show so they had to walk it back but a show about oil wealth erased an entire whole year of its own history as a dream in the same year that oil wealth money was evaporating melodrama absorbs whatever the economy does to its audience including the parts that it can't admit i mean another side but it's this podcast so y'all are used to these but I remember talking to people in college and saying, I miss scripts being written. This reality TV show stuff. Yeah, I know they have writers and like, you know,

the people come up with the scenarios or whatever. But if you keep pointing the camera at people with personality disorders, and then you just film them, what you're going to get in 10 years is going to be politicians and wealthy people that pretend to have personality disorders or worse, do have personality disorders, becoming the new actual ruling class. Like you're training everybody by basically shooting the Kardashians in 2005

or whenever it came out. I never watched it. I just know when I started to hear about it. You're training people to say, this is who should rule us. And did that happen? I don't know. You decide.

Anyway, back to my notes. You know, Peter Brooks has this interesting book, and he talks about, like, why melodrama, you know, keeps getting this job on behalf of culture. And he says that after the French Revolution tore down, you know, the old religious and aristocratic order, Western life sort of lost any agreed upon moral structure. And so melodrama rushed in to feel, you know,

fill the basically like a void that we have without the church to say, this is what's good and this is what's evil, and project on these things and punch down on these things, because there wasn't a government or road legislature to do it well after massive societal change. And so you do have a certain kind of realism that you can locate the sacred somewhere when you're watching a play and the play is complicated and you're trying to say, yeah, I know that some people will think that guy's bad and this guy's good, but really that guy's and this guy's bad. There is something that brings catharsis to you. And that this is why we watch a certain kind of TV, a kind of TV that Dallas was, a kind of TV that by the end of the show Yellowstone,

Yellowstone is. Once capital replaced God as the organizing principle, that's what Brooks is saying. And he doesn't mean like, you know, he's not saying that you de-throne God. He's saying that culture stopped paying attention to religion and they started paying attention to this other thing as religion because culture will always have religion he's not really making a religious point um you know the that melodrama narrowed to this one value system that everyone could share and everyone could participate in and there was this you know dynastic soap opera that became the way that we turned the invisible you know invisible you know machinery of our economy into this fight that we can follow and participate in without really

taking risks without really changing it we can feel like we're releasing the energy from the angst that it creates but we aren't really changing it we don't have to take a risk we're just it's a release valve in the way that like something like football you know is and and there is is something to that. There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. Sign was painted. It said private property. But on the backside, it didn't say nothing.

This land was made for you and me. What changes from Dallas to Yellowstone and American culture is the direction of the feeling, not the class it serves. Dallas was this triumphant myth of new money arriving that was not prepared to handle it and their struggles as they tried to come into that kind of affluence. And Yellowstone is an elegy. It's the myth of a family who used to have that kind of wealth, one lawyer or one tax bill, you know, away from extinction. But in both cases, the people that you were taught to love are the ones who own the land. And the value and the purpose and the right to inherit the money or have the money is just as arbitrary in both shows.

It is about the dead king's power. One is coming in and the other is going out. One is about the king beneath the land. This family is discovering that they actually have inherited Camelot, not a cattle field. And the other one is about them figuring out that the king is dead. And now Camelot is broken. Yellowstone helps. a country that no longer trust its institutions,

fall in love with the people positioned to inherit whatever is left after those institutions finished collapsing. And here is the point around all that freely language put very simply. The show Dallas helped people grieve that there was no longer the sort of coastal aristocracy that was going to run the country. It was now going to be a casino economy. of people who had oil money, and then later the same oil money

would be invested, one, in technology, and then two in the defense industry. What moves slowly from Texas to California that defines the country's wealth forever, it's DARPA, and it is Silicon Valley, which starts with Texas Instruments. What this show Yellowstone is about is targeted at liberals,

even though it's a show that a lot of people accuse of being kind of a right-wing thing or something. And Sheridan laughs at that and says, no, it's not. I think his politics are, like, simpler, honestly, then we don't have to get into that right now. But Yellowstone is helping, you know, your Democratic dad understand the people who are going to run the world.

When he thought that, you know, Bill Clinton playing the saxophone and this new, cool, Democrat boomer thing was going to be the norm, and then Hillary Clinton loses, and then Joe Biden loses, and then Kamala Harris loses, and then you have what you have. It is a show that is supposed to introduce people

who are not familiar to the new people, who are the new power structure, that are not necessarily good people, but they're your people, so they're the protagonist, even though you would have thought they would be the antagonist. Both shows are doing that. So if I take a deep breath and put that more simply and get a drink of water and put that more simply, the reason why a lot of millennials,

Democratic fathers, or a lot of conservative-leading or moderate-leading millennials are getting into the show and it's speaking to them is it's explaining to them why the world does not look like it used to look and why it's going to look different and who the new people who arbitrate power are in the same way that the people who really thought that john f kennedy was the future who watch him got shot had to grieve a funeral in dallas again this is a point made by people other than me um about the show dallas when they were thinking of who killed jr and what's going on and is it a conspiracy theory and what's happening okay i don't really like these people but i've come through this work of fiction to understand them even though they're not me and they don't really

represent me and they're not good. I get it. My argument is that is the role that Yellowstone plays now. It is telling you the people who run the world, whether or not they are good or bad, are the future, and it's helping you get to know them, and it's helping you get comfortable with them, even if you don't like them, and even if they're not the people that you would pick. And that's why it's very big right now. And that's why it speaks to a lot of people, some people who are right of center and some people who are left or center, and some people who are caught up in the melodrama, but don't really know what they think. A lot of people have brought the show up in therapy.

I've heard a lot of other therapists that either have people that it speaks to that you would expect it to or don't expect it to. That's where I think it falls right down in the culture. That's why a lot of millennials are watching it with their liberal father who is sort of being like, yeah, Cowboys. I mean, I grew up with John Wayne and I grew up with whatever, and like this is an update of that. And it helps me understand how the world works.

Because I'm losing the world. I'm losing the world that I knew, but what I do understand is betrayal by family, betrayal by culture, what I suppose it allies, political allies, you know, cultural allies, whatever. The terror of losing legacy, the terror that the world is actually not going to be better for my children that I live through some epoch that is gone. And the sense of being moved around by forces larger than myself that I'm trying to navigate and survive but couldn't possibly control or even understand. I think that's what the show is doing. And that is giving birth to this whole new kind of, you know, America does this every 15 to 20 years, but like genesis of the next version of the Western mythology that we have to explain ourselves to ourselves. It's like even when it's self-deprecating, a uniquely American myth.

I know the runners want to tell you. There ain't no cowboy in my head. So now he's buried by the day scene. So I could stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe. But the show like the park is named after a jurisdictional act. Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872. That's not lost on Charitin when he's writing the pilot, even if he loses the show that he writes in the pilot while writing the show.

But it's carved out of land that Native American nations had used for thousands of years and turned into federal property in the name of the public. And the fictional Dunn Ranch sits between the park and the reservation so that there's three kinds of ownership that the show is about, you know, federal land, tribal land, and then private capitalist land. And they're laid out in this map before the show goes anywhere. That's, I think, what the pilot sets the show up to be about, and the show loses that, which maybe, what does it lose it for?

I mean, I watch the show, but I think that's, says something about what happens to Sheridan and what happens to America, enough for me to want to do an episode about this. I mean, the first season is really built on that geometry that's triangular, though. There's three roughly equal forces that are grinding against each other. There's the native nations that are given a lot more screen time and a lot more power. There's, but a different kind of power than the Dutton's. And then there's the Dutton's that are giving this, you know, actual power, but it's also

fading and tentative. They have to expend so much energy to keep it. it's against time, whereas the Native Americans are almost on the side of time in the beginning. But it's settler money pretending to be permanence, and the developers, you know, the funds, the agency is coming to convert all of it into just yield. They want to extract the value out of what the Native Americans have always had and what this family has had relatively recently in history. And you can still see, like in the first season, all these setups that never pay off.

Spoiler, they don't pay off. about jurisdiction and how those fights of jurisdiction that Sheridan's head was at when he's leaving Hollywood to become the showrunner for this new thing after he's left acting to become a Hollywood guy. You know, these two men like switch barrels at one point in three different ways. So like a gun that has killed somebody may be like on a place where it couldn't, you know, be gotten if it's used later in a murder that doesn't happen. There's dinosaur bones that get dug up, which would have involved like a whole other federal agency, had the showrunner cared to get into federal antiquities law

or things that he sets himself up to never get into. You know, there's native characters that are set up to face similar choices to their enemies because of the jurisdictional mechanisms. And the show doesn't ever go there because it no longer is what the show is about. It's no longer what Sheridan is about. It's no longer what America is about. One side clearly wins. you know, halfway through the show being written. Sheridan halfway through is running the Paramount

network. He's running something like 15 projects that he's either directly writing or just kind of show running by handing an initial script off to the producer. That tends to be more like the Tulsa Kings type stuff that he doesn't pay attention to. But he is paying attention to way more projects. It's not about the money for him. It is about the creative power. Maybe a little bit about the money. But like he's paying way more attention at the same time to more shows than any showrunner really has juggled since like what's the name of the guy that wrote like the practice and allie mcgill like that guy a boston legal like it this is not this is not what you do in this era of television with the type of triple a television that sheridan is selling to paramount it just it's not

the way hollywood works anymore it's not the way that tv works anymore david kelly that's what i'm thinking over e david kelly or something i don't know i would like wait till my parents like left or the babysitter was over to like watch the practice because it wasn't allowed to watch it but i thought it was like edgy when I was, this would have been like third or fourth grade. I don't know. Anyway, sorry. So halfway through when Sheridan realizes that this show is not really the story that he set out to tell, either he's not interested in the characters in that way, but he still has these huge ambitions to be, you know, a director that I like, like Terrence Malick, who's talking about how there's this perennial philosophy that is sort of inherent in land that leads one back to

mysticism, and if somebody spends enough time in nature, they get back there. You know, I do think that Taylor Sheridan has that impulse. He's just not that. I don't even want to say good because he makes more money than Teres Malik, but he doesn't have those ability to follow through on the themes that he thinks he understands as a writer and probably a person, but it's what he's aiming for. And so what happens is like those themes get put into the prequel series, like 1883 and 1923. And a lot of those have great scenes but aren't really great shows, a ton of money thrown at them.

there are interesting ideas. I just don't think that this universe comes together in the way that Taylor Sheridan wanted it to, and if you had a glass of whiskey with him, he probably would tell you that. You know, these jurisdictional plots that the whole thing was supposed to be about and the kind of cycle of time returning something that was like long ago given a way back in a gift economy with the Native Americans, I don't want to spoil the show, but like, you see the thing that he set himself up for and he doesn't do it. And part of that is that Taylor Sheridan buys the four-sixes, which is this ranch.

And then he starts to make himself, but he doesn't even have enough money to buy it. It's the biggest cattle ranch in the world. Maybe not the world. I think Australia probably has a speed there because there's like sheep ranchers the size of Alabama. I'm sure they do cattle and stuff too. But the four-sixes is one of the biggest cattle ranches in America. And when Taylor Sheridan becomes like a part-owner of that, the show almost becomes like a parody.

like he starts to write advertisements for the show. Like there's like, I think like, I don't know, Will Smith and, what's that really bad movie that's based on Isaac Asimov, I Robot. Like there's a part in the Will Smith movie from like the early 2000s where it's just all product placement. The movie is like terrible. And like at one point, the police chief is like, Smith, I'm going to fire you for being the police chief.

You're a bad cop. You give me a badge in your gun. And then he's like, I don't care. leaving the force and then he says but smith stop i want to tell you nice shoes you got on and then will smith like takes off his converse from 2005 which happened to be the year the movie's made and hold them up in camera for a close-up shot and says thank you vintage 2005 you know you get that kind of product placement by the end of yellowstone um like beth dutton will be drinking a drink and and then be like, oh my gosh, this is the best drink ever who made it?

Four Sixes. What is that? Is that a real place? Let me look up on my computer. Oh, it is a real place. Wow. There's multiple times where people type in a website address where like the search bar entering the URL is in full view of the camera. And then they're like, wow, four sixes. This is a real place that you can get products from that exists in real life. They're the best in the world. Wow. Taylor Sheridan is an owner of Four Sixes by the time that's happening. the prequels, the prestige, you know, all of the silliness that Yellowstone has to absorb when he's fighting, Taylor Sheridan's fighting with the network and fighting with his showrunner. Evidently he didn't get along with when Costner by the end had a different idea or something. I don't know.

All the prestige and the seriousness that he wanted to treat the series with, but then he all of a sudden was given this opportunity to make a ton of money. kind of goes into Elsa Dutton's story and these early prequels that are, you know, very grand and grand and grand, and get to explore eras that we associate with, like, grand, gold, and cinema, like the 1920s and in 1800s. And then, you know, the ending, which is more interesting, so the ending in the show is not even really worth talking about, because it isn't the ending he planned.

It also isn't really an ending that is an ending. It's an ending that just sets up, like, a billion spinoffs. But you see, you know, when I watch TV, I don't really care about the story that I'm seeing as much as the tortured relationship to the writer and the art. I mean, I watch The Sopranos for David Chase. I watch the Madman for Matt Werner and the writer's room of whatever season is happening, which is a wildly different thing because Matt Werner is not like a David Chase. And, you know, like I watch Halt and Catch Fire for both of the Chris's. like I watch these shows because I can sort of see what somebody's trying to do and then I can say, I guess this is a critic, but like as a listener, how how old did that work?

And if your idea was still really good, I don't really care if it worked that well because I'm kind of trying to grade you on your ideas, man, and ideas speak to me. So give me some interesting ones. That's why I don't love reality TV. I don't think it has any interesting ideas other than can't you extract drama with a syringe from personality disorders. Yeah, you can. Um, you, there's an infinite amount. That's what they are. Like, why, why, why are we on season 12 at this? Yellowstone gets silly. It gets campy. Characters start to be characters, charters of themselves that if they did these things in real life, they would end up in jail or dead. And they'd just start to be that like, ain't it crazy? There won't be no cowboys next year. But let me, while we're still alive, to show you how cool a cowboy can drag a horse's foot. And this is a crazy tradition no one knows about.

that, uh, yehow. And then there's like the cheesiest song. And the world plays like cue, whatever, the show ends. In my heart, there's an open bar with seats for both of us. But now I'm drinking in my car because you went to Alcoholics Anonymous. Whiskey makes me pee my pants. As doctors are like second chances. They say they're just for babies, adults. get broken hearts but you can't

they sent out invitations to the Demerick There's enough time to move the So like lay the rest of Taylor Sheridan shows After Yellowstone went south That he started writing next to each other And they become this map of the parts Of the American economy

That he was trying to get people To be honest about With his limited understanding of how those work I don't think he's a great politician I wouldn't vote for him Well I mean hell who knows It depends on how he's not who's up against. But, you know, Mayor of Kingstown is this show that he writes with,

uh, his special relationship with Jeremy Renner about how American prisons become this own economy that become this impossible standard where to do the cruelty that they require, requires that cruelty to also be inflicted on innocent people who prisons are supposed to protect from whatever. You know, lioness is the same thing, but it's, it's about the women in the CIA who are supposed to go into the Middle East to keep the empire's wars running. in the places that the oil comes from,

but then they end up doing all of the things to people like them who they were supposed to protect the rest of the world from, or the people who they were trying to protect from the thing that, the enemy is the whatever. I mean, he does a whole lot of this paradox. You and I are the same Batman. Landman is not as great of it. I mean, those are better shows probably,

but Landman is a little bit more interesting in that you can, to peek into the mind of the writer. And it comes out in 2024. And it grew out of the Texas monthly podcast, Boomtown, which was about the oil business and the Permian Basin. You know, cattle oil incarceration, the military, issues with cartels, jurisdictional problems, all the things that Andrews Taylor Sheridan, but also all the things that, you know, I think the void that he picked up after Dallas in America was responding to. And, you know, you know, you You know, every show has the same man at the center. In Kingston, it's Jeremy Renner, and he's the fixer, and he stands between the inmates,

but also the gangs, but also the guards, but also the police, while he's holding the whole Carlson machine in balance. But he's just like a guy that's, like, worn down by it, but also he's outside it, and he, all the gangs respect him, but he's not a part of any gang. I think that's how Sheridan sees himself. You know, in Landman, that's why he says, I'm not right, I'm not left. You're telling me that this is a Red State show. It's not that stupid.

it. He sees himself as sort of criticizing everybody. You know, Billy Bob Thornton is like this fixer and landman who stands between the oil company and the landowners and the owner of the company and the investors and the roughnecks and the cartels that are trying to exploit them and the local politicians and Congress. And he's holding the whole extraction machine together because it has to be done, man. There's the speech that's in Digger that just came out, which is kind of a flawed movie. But like it, you know, whatever. There's scenes in it that work. The speech that he gives in Landman is almost the same speech that Tom Cruise gives

and Digger. They're three episodes in. John Ham's character gives to the board. So the premise of Kingstown, you know, the prison is this last product. An American can't really make anything anymore, but there's this dying town that can still sell slaves, but they have to sell them by a different name. And I think that Sheridan sees himself as being like liberal and lefty and radical when he makes a show like that, but he also wants to speak to the kind of like downhome values with something like Landman that like liberalism and academia, they just overcomplicate anything and it becomes so stupid. And like I don't agree, I do probably agree with him on those points because I think

those points are pretty surface level obviously correct. What you'll get in all of Taylor Sheridan shows though is that he has this belief that if everybody just went and built a cabin and lived off the land, they would be a better country because people would be taught values directly from doing that, which while that probably is a good aspirational thing that more people should do, I mean, I definitely benefited a lot from going out and working in the woods. I don't think that it is the foundation for a mass produced economy in the way that Sheridan thinks. And remember, like Thomas Jefferson is kind of like Sheridan in this way. I know that this sounds like a crazy reach at first, but like, let me get there. Thomas Jefferson,

like, die is pretty broke. I mean, the Library of Congress exists just because they were like, oh, let's take pity on him. He's got this cool library of books, but he spent all his money on expensive French, you know, French wine while he watched the slaves work and, you know, whatever gimmicks he imported.

And he was bad with money, so let's help him out and we'll go ahead and buy his library from, you know, Monticello. But what Thomas Jefferson actually thought was that there should be a nation that was full of yeoman farmers, that if you owned the land and you did the work, in the same way that Sheridan sort of sees himself, as a benevolent John Dutton,

that, you know, all of this, you have some stake in the land, and you're working hard, and you're disciplined, and it's teaching you values, and that then you sell your wares, and once you've sold your wares, you own land, which means that you mean something as a man,

and, you know, of course all these other people, are Thomas Jefferson's case, working for you that are just enslaved people, and like you're not doing any work, you're drinking French wine and watching them, even though he's very smart and writes a lot. Ben really worked that hard in the field. You know, Charitin's different and that he thinks that you should be a cowboy that's like going out and doing whatever.

But like, dude, who are you selling a million stakes to? The same economy that Charitin advocates for when he criticizes, you know, like the idealistic city liberals who are coming in and gentrifying whatever is the same way where Thomas Jefferson's like economic, falls apart. Like the only reason why a farm has value is that it produces more food than it eats, and then you sell that to people who live in cities who cannot own land because they're compacted together. And there's a lot of shows later like the Madison, where Taylor Sheridan will have these liberal characters that are like, I live in New York City and I don't know how to do anything

except go to a liberal coffee shop, and so I have no values. But when I went out and I had to grow wheat for a day, I realized that's where I learned everything, which it's not that those kinds of personality disorders or whatever he's finding in life or is affected by and clearly riding badly into his shows, like, don't exist. It's just that, like, he sells that as an economic vision that works. Like, everyone in New York should just have, like, 800 hectares of land. Okay, dude, like, so we're going to have 19 planets. So anyway, I don't want to deconstruct screenwriting that much, but there is an underlying currency of, smugness about how everybody should just do the same job that I do that taught me

what I know instead of this is what I know this is what it taught me and let me share that with you which is where he comes off better is without the smugness to you know present an economic system that I think is not possible just based on you know physics and the amount of land that exists but even though he writes very conservative characters and very liberal characters in a way that's like really stupid and out of touch. There is a pattern across all of it where Sheridan feels these

systems with a real accuracy that they don't work. He diagnoses the malfunction, even if he can't really diagnose the solution. There's a prison economy. There's a military industrial complex. There's predatory finance. There's an oil patch. There's this always

trying to win the next fight at the expense of the eventual war that we're going to lose. That I think everybody in a America, right-leaning people, he, you know, sells that to like, yeah, this is the right thing to do, but, like, you realize that it's going away. And to liberal people, he's saying, yeah, okay, but these people are still fighting for a way of life that you participate in, whether or not you want to admit that you do, and they're

kind of heroes, whether or not they're taking away the way of life that you thought that you were supposed to have under Clinton and Obama, like, whatever. and that that is why that show is interesting to me right now and the way that is affecting kind of people across the aisle and not even on either aisle, people that are politically indifferent still feel these things as true. Because the exhaustion and the unsustainability of it is true and that's what it's connecting with people.

So, I mean, to bring it home, like, who is a cowboy? There aren't cowboys anymore. There aren't. Like, I went to Montana. I rode up into the mountains with people who wore cowboy hats and were familiar with horses and were for all intents and purposes cowboys. And there's not enough land.

There's not enough economy. There's not enough upward mobility for the people who took me on my fishing trip, not even upward mobility, like they have to get better every year, but just like upward mobility, like they have a plan and that is a career. For the people who took me on my like trout fishing trip and camping trip, like up in Montana, to exist in the way that Sheridan is grieving that they're about not to. And I think that we are united in that grief, and that's why these shows work right now.

There is this structural and faceless credit scoring model and pricing algorithm and private equity firm and company that is a part of a company that is a part of a company where all of the people who are part of all of the conglomerates feel really bad about what they have to do, but they're all powerless to stop it because it's, really just a market price and you're gone. The world is different. And I think that's what these shows are about and why it's helping the left and right grieve together. And Umberto Echo says in the name

of the rose, uh, the poor man's curse is not poverty, but that he cannot tell who his real enemy is. And I think Sheridan diagnoses poverty well, even if he can't really diagnose what makes somebody rich or what sustainability is. There's this dark inversion where he's saying that the Dutton's are this inevitable evil that is protecting you from something that is much worse. And I think that Democrats feel that because the enemies that they had 15 years ago, they wish that they had now. And that is the wish that Sheridan is granting people who didn't even ask for that

wish to be granted in words that they said out loud. like he takes inflation, he takes supply chains, he takes capital, he takes, you know, a renting economy, a land economy, market, market equities is this firm that represents sort of like Black Rock. And he talks about this defranchising of all of the incentive structures that run our economy and how nobody could fix it even if they knew what was happening, but probably nobody does. And the fantasy is not wealth or land. It's legibility. It's the ability to finally see clearly what's happening so that you can stop it. Even if you can't stop it, you know who you lost two. And I think Sheridan is speaking to this group of people who do not understand what is happening.

I know I've said that a bunch of different ways. But I think that a lot of things are aligning in its work to make that a reality. I don't have time or probably interest to do a Hideo-Kashima. Metal Gear Solid podcast. A lot of people ask after the article, and I just, I wrote an article because I played Metal Gear Solid 3 Delta, Snake Eater, whatever, when it was released and I liked it, and it was in my head for minutes, I wrote an article. But I just, I'm not able to do that, but I do think that Hideo-Kajima and Taylor Sheridan are similar in that the arc of those series, I mean, Hideo Kajima, I think, is a much better writer than Sheridan, but a much harder one to read. So he's going to be less popular.

You know, the arc of both of those series is this discovery that the enemy is not actually a person, but this system. And then when you deal with the system, it's a system within a system. You know, there's the Patriots that's a set of incentives and information that are outlived by everybody. And they've become the system that runs themselves. But even when you take that apart, they're hooked into things. that you like and you can't really get rid of it. And that there's this an inevitability to modernization that hooks everything up into these.

You know, all of the teeth of the gears are interlinking. And because of that, if you pull a gear loose, you're breaking the machine in a way that you don't understand for a long time and probably what you did will be worse. Or set yourself up to be dealing with a villain that is worse than you ever thought you would face. if you could get those guys to speak the same language, which I don't think you can. I think Sheridan and Hideo-Kajima could have a conversation that would be interesting.

You know, in the episodes about O'Ilan Empire, like I was sort of trying to say that when an empire can't carry its citizens' fantasies as currency anymore, their fantasies of power, the citizens will go looking for that power somewhere else, where they can actually find it in a more material way. and that becomes this smaller kingdom that they can actually see. And I think that's why the people in Yellowstone and the people in Dallas, even though they were bad, became heroes at a time of national uncertainty.

In the 70s when Saigon was falling and gas lines and the factories were just leaving the country or failing to provide an economy for the towns that they inhabited and the culture produced Star Wars in 77, and there's this fallen republic where power is inside of an ordinary farm boy to build the next republic. A year later, Dallas happens. And Star Wars is the one that gets all the money and the attention, but Dallas is probably the show that matters more than Star Wars, which is why I think that we should watch Yellowstone crowd now. Because it arrives in 2018 as the same answer for the decline. The power is the family that owns the land,

governs it, owns territory, keeps its own enforcers, and answers to no institution, and does all this evil stuff, but they don't matter. Ultimately, they're going to go away. They're just protecting you from the next thing that is worse. And I think that is part of the national dissociation

that you see the world feeling as there is a regime change. And that is why the show insists that the only option to participating in the current culture is radical individualism. It's not that radical individualism saves you or is sustainable. It's that that thing feels safer than participating in anything. It's a part of the thing that I was talking about in the O'Ill and Empire series, that there's a mass dissociation happening.

And in the same way that Taylor Sheridan's character, I believe his name is Tanner, I think the bad brother, who's a sociopath. like in hell or high water. When he says, you know, I am an enemy of everyone, people, the audience is supposed to clock him as a fallen hero and not an antagonist because it feels like being an enemy of everyone is a better option than being an ally to anything that is unsustainable future that no one can picture where everyone is still smaller and there is unknown horror and at least this guy knows what he's fighting. Even if it's me, he's an anti-hero. And when

anti-heroes become the heroes of the culture, I think your culture isn't a place that is, in the best case, very scared. I mean, remember, Sheridan's fallback plan before any of this happened was to go become a rancher. And remember the rancher that we start with is Burke Burnett, you know, the owner of the cattle brand, whose fortune was oil sitting on mineral rights, while making a show that defends, you know, this oil industry, a show that mourns the family ranch. He sort of left the class that he's supposed to be explaining their lot in life to, which is, I think, why Sheridan lost his ability to explain the lot in life to these people. I'm sure that he'll write Stevens to Gauls type action movies with, because he's not a bad writer,

kind of interesting setups for the rest of his career, and I would be shocked if he did anything else. Remember in my opening metaphor where Burnett's herds grew fat on grass leased from Comanche and Kiowa reservations, Quana Parker's people were the last Comanche band to ever come in and surrender the fiercest. Native American tribe probably did it ever existed when you, combined guns and horses. And the four-sixes that Sheridan now owns a large part of starts on Comanche lands and it ends in Sheridan's hands. So what does he do when he is the subject of his own criticism? What do any of us do? I'm not trying to call this guy out. I'm not saying he should have done something different. I'm saying that this is a psychology problem. You know, Tanner's

joke at the poker table turns out to be a description of the man. who wrote the episode in a way that we never really would have gotten to if he had not gotten the success. What if you turned this guy who was a sociopath into a showrunner? I'm not saying Taylor Sheridan is, but we talked through our characters. He became an enemy of everyone. He owns the ground that the Comanche were moved off of, and he sells the costume back to the rest of us every Sunday night. Just like every revival of the Western genre has always pretended not to do,

but secretly always done. Oh, I'm not the myth of America. I'm deconstructing it. To help you understand why the myth was always a lie. But this new myth that I'm laundering through that deconstruction is right. That's what the Western genre has been since it started. I mean, go back to anything. Even the weird stuff that Tommy Lee Jones writes that I like,

the neo-Westerns, like, that is what. the Western genre is. Pretending that you get it so much that you're giving somebody this new mythology because you're taking the old one apart. And we only do it as a culture of Americans

when we're deeply in crisis, which is why Taylor Sheridan is relevant now. You know, the way that we project on these characters is real, and the people who came into my office and people that came into many other characters' office and they were projecting on you know, Casey Dutton and finding

wanting to go through a transformational spiritual process because they saw this show are not wrong and those things are still real and they're still out there and the guy who goes in the you know teco bus you know a shop that just opened in their open concept not a mall mall and they're like oh well i mean i'm trying to go to a bar but i get a free glass of whiskey here and oh i guess i will buy a four hundred dollar cowboy hat and i guess it's just rabbit for felt but uh you all fit my boots and this is a style of life I didn't know I wanted that now is speaking to me, which is also me. Like, I have a pair of Ticovas boots.

I have them fitted Ticovas. I wouldn't buy a hat from Tocovus. But, like, I'm not punching down on anybody. I'm saying that you're seeing this happen because there is a transfer of power. The same one that Dallas announced in 1978 and that Sheridan is mourning now. And then he got the opportunity to participate in, which doesn't really even make him a hippocry. because if he turned it down, what would be different? Nothing. The only door that this shows us is that there is an oligarch in everybody.

And ideally, your only option is to keep your personality intact, your identity. And as sort of a Jungian leading therapist in the way that I practice, you know, what strikes me most is that in this guy, there's a whole body of work that says this process, destroys stories in a way internally. It destroys mythology in a way internally that we don't know, we don't recognize while we're participating in it, and that we can do that at a macro level, too, you know, with a nation. So what do you do with that? I don't know, man. I think it's interesting, and I've wanted to talk about the show for a minute. I'm not punching down on people that like it.

What I'm saying, because I like it, I wear a cowboy hat, I drive a truck. What I'm saying is that being able to deconstruct a myth feels so powerful. It's kind of intoxicating. And Sheridan wrote a show in a universe and a personality on being able to do that. It doesn't mean that you have the ability to prescribe anything to replace the myth. And that is a dangerous place to be because we don't know what comes next, but we feel right because we're getting rid of the lie, right? And that relationship to your parents, to the religion that you're leaving, to the thing that you're deconstructing, to the economy that you're moving away from is a dangerous place for a society to be and one that we should check.

Just like Jefferson, the clinical danger of a prescription smuggled inside of deconstruction of an old myth, is that the only intact way to be a self is to become this barren that, has the wholeness and the privilege and the capital and the choice between our oligarch and it has the right to coherent identity and everything else is this dissolution of becoming a part of the crowd and that puts everybody at odds with the people who have made it who have survived who have distinguished themselves in a way that I don't think is good and the work is really not to mock that but it's to find a way to grieve the lives that we were brought up believing, right and left, and then find a new way to live together in rootedness that actually is a way that a nation could continue to exist 150 years from now, 200 years from now, a thousand years from now if we're feeling crazy.

And I don't think that the seeds of that plant are in Yellowstone, but I do think that the grief and the explanation that everyone is feeling are there. And the strange thing is that like Sheridan's own ending to a lot of his shows, it points back to the answer. There was always like hold the land, hold the ownership, don't give this up at any cost, even if it is hard. When it's one family, it's impossible. But there's other ways to do this without becoming an oligarch tyrant who has to kill people and do terrible stuff and become an anti-hero. I think it's our job. incumbent on us as therapist as people to teach other people that there is a way of not giving up our respect and not giving up our power, not giving other people the right to exploit us that still

can give us a guiding myth about how to live. And I think that where Sheridan comes closest to saying that is at the end of 1883 when he says, the land through Elsa, the character says in her sappy, but not entirely wrong way, it'll outlast all of us. And if we find the best way to live with it, and if we find the best way to live with each other on it, we might have a shot. We get to be around another 150 years because we listen to something that is older than us and deeper than us that knows how to do it.

Yet, we're always going to fight about what those details are, so I don't want to make it sound simple. But I do think the seeds of that perennial philosophy and the deepest influence that Terence Malick's cinematography had on Taylor Sheridan to write their shows. If we listen to the systems that have been around longer, they might have something to teach us. But I don't want to prescribe too much because part of what I'm saying is that I think there are things that we can only learn when we listen to them. We don't know everything right now, neither do I.

We should just be open to that. But part of being open is figuring out what does not work. And Taylor Sheridan has done a great job of pointing to that. just like listening to all of the reality TV show stars that had a personality disorder got us to the form of government that we're in now. I don't think that listening to the next round of oligarchs is the best way forward. I think Sheridan's pointing that out, even if he doesn't have a great prescription, I don't either. We should trust that this is maybe the wrong way to go, and his show is uniting the left and right in way that a lot of shows don't or a lot of media doesn't, and that we know that we are going in the wrong direction.

This is Joel. Thank you for listening to the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. I appreciate you. Confusion in the neighborhood. Nothing protects us like an earmark could from bearing glow. Nation poles. The rules are strictly information old. We showed up late to the ex-on-ray. We bought our props and tow. Tuck on the toe. Now we're wasted on the Senate floor. We put ecstasy tab to the water supply Now we're wasted on the Senate floor Let's see who's gay and who gets lonely When you're wasted on the Senate's floor

We cast our eyes