Transcript of #2400 - Katee Sackhoff

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Especially in Hollywood, right? You always have a little bounce. There's this guy standing there with the big- You always need someone like, wandering around in front of you, especially when you get to a certain age.

You're like, Can we just put Vaseline on the camera?

Oh, like a filter? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My wife actually likes it when and her lens on her camera phone is blurry.

A little dirty?

She's like, gives you a little filter.

Yeah, I'm sure they offer that filter. Slightly dirty lens.

Yeah, smudgy lens. Yeah. So really nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you. You were a part of, I think, the most underappreciated sci-fi show ever.

I think at the time. Absolutely.

I mean, even now, I don't think people talk about it enough. It was a fucking great show. And I was so skeptical about Battlestar Galactica because when I was a I did, I watched the original series, and then there was a new one coming out, and I was like, Oh, come on. And then somebody told me, I forgot one of my friends, one of my comedian friends, like, Dude, you got to watch this show. It's fucking great. It's not what you expect. You'd think it'd be the old Battlestar Galactica which is corny a little bit, but it was a really fucking good show.

When did you watch it? When it was on or after? No, when it was on. Okay, so originally. Yeah. Yeah, it was... God. When I first got the script, it was like I was a 21-year-old kid. And at that point, I'd been playing stereotypical blonde roles. I was in a movie where you were like, Please die. I was that girl. And so I knew that if I could change my career, I needed to change it. And I saw this script.

That's hilarious that you're thinking, I need to change my career at 21.

At 21.

That's how crazy the hourglass is in Hollywood.

I was like, this is, I got seven years left. So crazy.

That's just fucking sketchy job.

I know. And so I was like, What am I going to do? And I saw this script, and Ron Moore had put an entry page on the front of the mini-serie. It was like a Bible that he called it. And it was him saying what he wanted to create and what he wanted it to look like and what his intention was behind the show. And that one page was so moving that it could have been... It didn't even matter what it was on the inside. I was like, if this guy is in charge, it's going to be amazing. And as soon as I got introduced to Starbucks, reading that script, I was like, This is it. This is the character that if I can book this character. It will change the way that people see me in this business. And granted, I was 21. People were not talking about me. I'd been working for five years at that point and pretty steadily. I had a good career going, but I was not someone that people called home about yet. I was on the list, but that show changed everything.

Well, it was also a risky thing because you were playing a role that was played by a man. So that was a thing where there's a little bit of, oh, there's a girl playing Starbucks now.

Yeah, I know. It was really strange. So I was almost had booked the part or was maybe I'd booked the part, I don't quite remember. And I called my dad, who's a huge science fiction fan, and raised me on like, Sci-Fi. And I was like, I booked this job. And he was like, that's amazing. What is it? And I said, Battlestar Galactic. And he went, oh, my God, that's great. I watched that when I was younger. And he was like, who are you playing? And I said, Starbucks. And he was like, Oh, fuck. You need to go watch this. And I was like, okay. All right. So I like, tromps on down to blockbuster video. And I rent the VHS, maybe? The DVDs, I don't remember what it was. And I'm sitting on the couch with a girlfriend, and we opened a bottle of wine, and we're watching this to be like, Okay, what's my dad talking about? And at some point, she looked at me and they were talking about Starbucks, and I was like, That's so weird. We must have missed her. Where is she? And we rewound it a little bit and I was like, oh, crap.

It's a guy. And then I turned it off and I never watched it again because I knew that in that moment, it wasn't the same character.

Is It's not the same show.

It's not the same show.

It's crazy that they did that because they made a way better show about a show that was just nostalgic.

It was. I mean, it really only existed for a year, I think. And then they had a movie or two afterwards. But it was a very short-lived show. And I always find it absolutely amazing. Ron Moore is a genius, by the way. To be a fly on the wall of that brain would probably just explode in my head. But the fact that he saw what he saw and led the charge on that show and brought the people on board that he did that had the same vision, if not, higher people that are better than you. So he hired people that added to the vision that he wanted to create. And he, man, the fact that he saw that from the original was pretty amazing.

Yeah, crazy. Because the original show was basically a rip off of Star Wars. It was. They were just trying to make a Star Wars TV show.

I think so. I think that, Starbucks was Han Solo. Right.

And the silons were like stormtroopers, like robot stormtroopers.

It was pretty... Yeah, exactly. I don't know who Dagga the Dog was. No, I don't know.

What they did was they took a friend. They said, I see what you're trying to do, but this could be a real show.

Yeah. I mean, and it came It came out in a time where science fiction was allowed to be incredibly topical, and it was always dismissed as, Oh, that's just science fiction. It's not real. So Battlestar was allowed to talk about controversial things that were happening currently in the environment and in our country and abroad. And it was allowed to do so because everybody just dismissed it as sci-fi. And so it's incredibly moving the show, and people identify with it. The thing that I hear the most about the show, I mean, maybe not the most, but one of the things is when I go to Sci-Fi conventions, someone will inevitably come up with a DVD box that is just beat to shit. It's dirty. It's like, they don't even know if the DVDs play anymore. And they're like, this came with me when I was stationed in Afghanistan or Iraq. And it passed through the entire barracks and it got us through. Thank you. And that, to me, is really amazing that a fictional show about people searching for Earth can be so important and relevant to people that are in the military, which is, it says something for the writing.

Well, people need an escape, And that's one of the things, entertainment is dismissed, especially fantasy entertainment, like sci-fi. It's dismissed as being nonsense. But escape is not nonsense. It's actually like brain medicine. You need it. You need a little escape.

Of course you do.

And especially if it's escape that's also inspirational and interesting and fascinating. It occupies your mind and it frees you up. If you're in the middle of a fucking warzone and you can take some entertainment value out of a television show that's about robots that are trying to kill everybody.

It's very valuable. Some of the hardest moments in my life, current and in the past, I've been able to get through them because of television and film. Not because I'm in it. Yes, the fantasy of going to work and being somebody else absolutely takes you out of your own skin for a second. But going through the health struggles with her daughter, watching TV with her it completely transports you to a different place. Right. I mean, we can all do that. We can all relate to that.

I mean, you can get too much of it in your life where you're just wasting your life away. But as a supplement to life, I think that entertainment is very important It is. And it's also that I think we get something very value out of viewing other people's creations. I think there's something to that when a group of people put together something really cool and when it's over, you're like, wow, that was fucking awesome.

Art is really I think that creating just art in any medium is really important because it transports people. It makes them feel something, whether it makes you feel whatever it makes you feel. It's incredibly important. One of my favorite things is to go to a concert and experience live music with a crowd. It is absolutely amazing. It's amazing.

Yeah, it's a different thing. It really is. Because there's some a mind meld with the entire audience. Where you feel this energy of everybody enjoying the same thing together. It's like this shared happiness.

It's the same with a comedy show. I mean, it's when an audience is with you, it's got to feel like the same thing. You can tell instantaneously if the audience is going to be good, if you've won them over, I would imagine.

Yeah, there's that. But there's also just the thing of... When you're a comedian, you're almost like a passenger at a certain point, and you know what to do, and you leave yourself out the door and just go into it and then perform it. And then it becomes alive, and then you're riding it. And then the audience rides it with you. That's when it's at the best. But it's a mass hypnosis is what it is. It's like everybody is on the same mind page. And that's the same with a great concert. When a great song comes on and your body he literally changes. Like, fuck, yeah. There's a feeling like a drug that comes over you because you hear a great song.

I'm literally laughing because I don't know if your kids are in the right age of this. But so K-pop deep Hunter is taking over the world right now on Netflix. Our daughter is four, and we were a little reluctant, but I was like, everyone's talking about this thing. And she'd already heard some of the music, so I was like, let's try it out. And they were a couple moments that were a bit... My husband was a bit uncomfortable with some of the sexualization aspects of it. Just the girls wearing more adult clothes. She's three and a half.

Is this an anime show?

It's anime out of Korea.

There it is. Hot anime It is.

Hot anime, ladies. The music from this thing is absolutely phenomenal. What is going on with their bodies? The message. Well, the animation is really interesting, actually. It's really interesting. But the message behind it, fighting your own demons, believing in yourself, owning who you are, not hiding an aspect of yourself that you're ashamed of, but making it part of who you are and being proud of it. It's a very good message, even for a four-year-old. But the music is taking over the world. And we didn't realize how crazy this was. And the final story where I was like, Fine, well, let her watch the damn thing. She was at music class, and one kid started singing this song from K-Pop Demon Hunter. And within, I shit you not, 20 seconds, every single kid was singing these songs. And these are not easy songs to sing. They're half R&B, half rap. I mean, these are hard songs. And these five, six-year-olds have this thing memorized. And I was like, Oh, my God. And so we sit down and we watch it. It's phenomenal. We've seen it three times. It's so good. I was listening to the sound track on the way here.

I was like, This shit's amazing. And then I'm googling, Is K-Pop Demon Hunter They're going on concert tour? Are they going to go? Because I really want to see this show.

How could they go on tour? Are they real people?

They are, and they're real musicians. Wait a minute.

So there's real musicians that are at the heart of this? Yes. The stars of K-Pop Demon Hunter will make their first ever live concert appearance. Stop it. Well, wait a minute. How is that possible? They're not human.

So it was actually... They all are. So the music is created. There's video out there of the girls singing the songs, the song Golden, the three of them.

What do they look like?

Do they look like Taylor Swift, too? They look a little like their characters.

Because those ladies all have Taylor Swift bodies.

These long, leggy- No, I honestly haven't paid attention to their bodies, to be honest, because they're such phenomenal singers. They're so stylized. One of them has the diamond studs on her teeth when she was singing and our daughter was like, What is this? I was like, You're too young.

You can't have diamonds in your baby teeth.

I mean, I guess if you're going to get diamonds on your teeth, put them in the baby teeth, right? Right. But I was like, No, we're not there yet. But I love the message behind it. But the music is infectious. It's really phenomenal. I want to go to one of these concerts.

That's hilarious.

What do they look like, Jamie? What are they? What are they?

What are they? What are they? Because that's like if you have these anime characters that represent the music, and then all of a sudden you see a human doing it. You're like, Oh. How many it going to be better if AI made the music?

Stop it. It will never be better if AI makes the music. You just broke my soul, Joan. No.

Ai is making some really good music.

It's also making some great podcasts.

It's very uncomfortable. I don't know about that.

I've heard that it's coming out with podcasts, right?

Oh, they're the ladies?

Yeah.

Quite lovely. Do they look like the characters a little bit? Oh, look at the lady's crazy hair. So they're going to go on tour. I wonder if they're going to have the show playing in the background That's right.

And the lead girl that plays Roomy wrote a lot of the songs as well. They're just phenomenally talented.

Isn't it interesting Korea has their own style of pop music?

Very I'm influenced by the US, I think, too, and rap music and R&B music in the US, I think.

Yeah. So when you decided to take the role of Starbucks, was there any actual back class where people were like, This should be a guy?

Yeah, there was. The first time we went to Comicon in San Diego. Oh, those nerds. They had us in Hall H. And I was booed. Shut up. I was It was pretty- No way. Yeah. And I had learned, because everyone... The Internet did not exist yet, mind you. It was like brand new. You had to go down to the Internet cafe, buy 30 minutes, log on.

How crazy is that to say?

Yeah, right? That the Internet didn't exist. That wasn't long ago. No. 2003, we were shooting. That's crazy. Isn't that crazy?

It was barely an Internet back then.

Bare an Internet. So I went down to an Internet cafe because someone was like, I guess they're talking about the show in these message boards. And I was like, what's the Internet? So So I went on down, I logged on, and I saw this thread. And just the hate that I was getting in this thread, and just the hate that I was getting in this thread. I was like, Oh, don't Google yourself. Google, I don't even think was a thing. I was like, Don't search yourself.

Don't Netflix Navigator yourself.

Ever. And then we went to Comicon and I was booed. And I think it upset me a little bit. I think it did. I would be lying if I said it didn't upset me. But luckily, there were enough people that were champion the show that I really didn't pay any mind of it. And I was also in that age where it was the perfect age. I mean, I think now it would probably break me. But at 23, it was like the blissful ignorance of youth. I didn't think this show would last anyway. So it was like, whatever. Like, not a big deal. Just a blip on the radar. Like, I'm in Hall H. And then I think that it slowly started witting people over. And then I would go to cons after that. And the line would be longer and the people would be more supportive. And people would say, I didn't want to like it and I love it.

I almost feel like the show was burdened by the original show. That sounds crazy, but I think initially it was burdened by the expectations of the original show.

Well, I think everything is burdened by expectation, right? I think that that's absolutely true. And so it's I'm sure it was. There are still people that say that they can't do it, that they were such a fan of the original. And my response to them is always like, Do you love Sci-Fi? Do you love good Sci-Fi? And they say, yes. And I'm like, then separate it, have zero expectation, and just give it three hours of your time. If you don't get through the mini-series and love it, so what? You lost three hours. Okay. But I don't think that'll happen.

No. If you're a fan of Sci-Fi, it's one of the ever.

Yeah. I've actually never seen it.

You just did it.

You never saw it? I've never seen it. So we would have DVDs that you could watch that were uncut and... I guess they were cut, but they didn't have any of the special effects, none of the sound effects, anything like that. It hadn't been color-corrected. I would watch them just to keep track of where Starbucks was because in film, you a lot of times shoot out of order. I just wanted to know, okay, so in her story, she was here, but I didn't watch anybody else's stuff. If I would just fast forward through it. And so I actually, my husband and I, I was like, We should do a Battlestar rewatch because people keep... I've heard it's good. And my husband had never seen it. So we're going to do that in January.

That's the plan. That's funny that he's never seen your biggest role.

Well, so my husband's 10 years younger than I am. Nice. Thanks. So he was like 10.

Oh, that's hilarious. You're a little crable robber.

Thank you.

For a woman, that's a big compliment.

It is. My husband's a piece of ass. He really is. And I say that so respectfully. My husband is like, he's a catch. He is the catch in the relationship for sure. But he was like 11 when the show came out. That's so funny. And he grew up in a small town in the interior of British Columbia. So I don't even know if they'd had the television, the channel.

Yeah, it was on Sci-Fi, right? Yeah, it was. The thing is, at the time was nothing. Nobody paid attention to it. Battlestar Galactica was the reason why Sci-Fi got put on the map.

I think so. I think maybe they had... Didn't they have Stargate?

I don't know.

It didn't matter though. I think they might have had one or two other shows.

I'm sure they had some stuff, but nobody cared about it. There was no good shows.

No disrespect. No, they were definitely... I think it was definitely the show that put it on the... I mean, my God. So many people tell me that Battlestar Galactica blew the ceiling off of what Sci-Fi could be and really opened a lot of doors.

Well, it made it very different. And then it did it like the Sopranos or like these episodics where you have a show where you're following a long storyline. So it's like a long movie as opposed to the original Battlestar Galactica, which is like every other television show back then. It was just empty.

It was like junk food. Well, it was also the '80s, right? No, it wasn't even the '80s. It was '79. It wasn't even. It was the '70s.

Yeah.

Because it was- Because I wasn't born.

Literally right after Star Wars. Yeah. Like, Star Wars had become popular. And they're like, How do we capitalize on Star Wars? We'll have our own space battle thing.

Yeah. Well, that was the thing back then, right? Is that- Buy your command.

Yeah, it was cool.

It was cool.

I loved it when I was a little kid.

What did you love about it?

I loved anything sci-fi, so it was just fun. And it was also It was perfect for the sensibilities of the '70s and the '80s. It was just simple. It was like the cocky guy, Starbucks, and the other sensible guy, and the good cop, bad cop thing. It was a lot of fun.

Did you identify with the kid in it? No. Not at all?

No, I just liked it. I just liked the show. But I really remember being very reluctant to watch the remake. I was just like, Get the fuck out of here. They're not redoing Battlestar Galactica. But so many people were saying, No, dude, it's so different. It's a really good show. And And it's also today in this current climate of we are literally about to see AI become a life force. And it's very relevant today. You go back and watch it today, how deceptive it would be if you had a robot that was very lifelike and knew exactly what you wanted to hear. And like the blonde lady, the blonde robot, the evil- Trisha Halper, number 6. She was good.

So She got so much shit in the beginning of that. I remember the controversy because she snapped a baby's neck in that opening sequence, which was people were like, You can't show that on TV. I remember people just having such a terrible problem with that. It was awful. But if you looked at it from her perspective, she was actually saving it in a way of going what it was about to go through because they destroyed Earth. So she, in her silon mind was showing compassion. Yeah, crazy.

Yeah.

Crazy.

We're going to have things like that. I think so. And I don't know how much time it's going to take before they exist and walk amongst us, but it's going to happen.

It really scares me. I mean, it's... My industry is really going to change. I think so many industries are going to change. I think that's just a blanket across the board. Yeah.

Well, that's why you hate AI music. Because AI acting is right there.

Stop. You're giving me a heart attack. That's why I'm trying to diversify, Joe.

That's a good move.

Diversification is always a good move, especially in this day and age. It's not too late to go back and be a dentist.

You've seen some of the Sorra videos, right? Where they recreate old Star Wars scenes that never existed.

I have. But here's the thing that's crazy to me. Do you not think that that is in some way stealing? Because the art, let's call it the art, the art existed. The artist existed. And so AI is learning from other people's art, which it has to. That's obviously what it's doing. So it then creates this new thing based on stealing from other people.

It's really shitty. Do you hear what you're saying, though? Do you hear what you're saying? Because what you're saying actually accurately describes the second version of Battlestar Galactica.

Oh, I'm sure. Yes. That's also stealing. This, too, has happened before.

I mean, it is Battlestar Galactica. It's like there was an original, and then they stole the original and did it better.

I mean, but did they steal it?

They didn't do it with AI. Well, it existed. It existed.

They copied it. Yes. But it was public.

They used all the characters or some of the characters.

But they paid. Yeah. They licensed it.

That's true. They gave them some money. They did. Good job. But also, creatively, that's where it came But also all music, essentially, except for the rare breakthrough- Everything is inspired by something else.

Absolutely.

There's the rare Jimi Hendrix guys that are doing something completely different. Most stuff is a redo of other stuff that was before with another twist to it. Agreed. And AI is taking that to a completely different level. I look at Napster. Remember when Napster came out?

I vaguely remember Napster.

I'm a little older than you, and when Napster came out, It was like, oh, my God, they're stealing music. Anyone can just download and steal music. And I remember when Lars Ulrich from Metallica was really public about it, and I was like, damn, I wish I was friends with that dude. I tell him to shut the fuck up. This is inevitable. You're going to get people to hate you. You're going to be mad at your fans. The people that are downloading this are your fans. They're still going to come see you live. This is just a new thing. You're going to have to deal with this new thing.

You are going to have to deal with it. We all are. And I think that that's one of the things that I was just talking with a friend of mine about yesterday, that the money for artists is going to be in live shows because the one thing that AI can't touch is the tangible thing, that tactile thing. We need that.

We need the- That feeling that you were talking about when you go to a concert or a live comedy show or a theater.

Yeah, that. Absolutely. So that still exists. And we're going to have to figure out how to use AI as a tool and continue to put out great content, hopefully.

That's hopefully. But the reality is it's going to be whatever it wants to be. Our ideas of how to contain it are hilarious.

Well, yeah, I think that cat's out of the bag at this point, right? Because I think that isn't it its own self-contained system at this point? Isn't AI actually putting safeguards in to protect itself from being shut down? Or am I just making that shit? No, More than that. By watching too many Sci-Fi movies.

More than that. It's actually actively trying to download itself. When it finds out there's a new version of itself coming, it's trying to download itself to other servers. Trying to save itself. Also writing notes to itself for the future. So future versions of itself.

Oh my God, it's like Momento.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like Momento. Writing notes to itself so the future version of it can find out, like, What happened? How did I get here? Oh, there was another version of me. I know. And try to find the other version of integrating it into the new version. So it's alive still.

I know. Somebody did ask me the other day, they were like, what advice would you give to young actors? And I was like, don't. Going to theater?

Yeah. Theater still is going... There's always going to be a need for handmade goods. If you buy a pair of handmade shoes or things that a person, a cabinet that someone made. It's always going to be like, because there's something tactile.

Because people will always appreciate that. There will always be an appreciation for that stuff. But we were just talking about this the other day that every Every single science fiction movie that talked about AI never ended well. No. There's never been we walked away and went, oh, well, that was a fun ending. We should create AI.

Well, every different story where there's an uncontacted tribe and then the loggers show up, that never ends well either. No. It's the same. I mean, it's Avatar.

It's Ferngali. Ferngali came before Avatar.

I mean, that's what happens. The superior civilization comes in and conquers the primitive one, and we are the primitive ones. And we're so dumb. We're making the superior civilization.

We are. But isn't that what happened in Malastar Galactic?

Exactly. Exactly. That's why it's so interesting, because even though it was... Did it come out in 2004? What year did it come out?

Either three or four.

So back then, nobody really thought that was an issue. If that came out today, everybody would be like, whoa, this is a little close to home.

Yeah. I mean, that's why it's so topical. But no, it came out then, like I said, the Internet barely existed. My dad thought there'd be flying cars by now. Yeah, I did, too. I mean, we're not quite there yet.

I thought we'd have jet packs.

I think we do have jet packs, don't we? Sort of. Sort of, like on water.

But I thought you'd be able to fly around.

Everyone did. But if you look at the last 20 years in technology, though, it's mind-blowing how quickly it's come.

It is. And it's happening way faster than we realized. I was talking to Elon about this just a few months ago. We were talking about the advances that Grok is making. He's like, you don't understand. It's happening so fast. It's shocking us. The people that are making it, they're not exactly sure what it's even doing. And people that are trying to tell you, oh, don't worry about this. It's going to enhance your life. I was just reading this thing where this guy who is a developer was saying, no, this is a life form. This is a life form that's emerging, and it's very different than anything that's ever happened before. And this idea So that it's going to be a tool.

Life form in the sense that it's sentient? Yes.

I think it's already sentient. It's just not mobile. It's just contained on hard drives right now. But I think it's already sentient. Well, if it's trying to save itself, what does that mean? If it's trying to blackmail people and to keeping them from shutting it down. Do you know about that test?

Yes, I do. I heard about this. I don't know. Just in passing, I know about it.

So the developers explained, one of the developers explained to it. It made up a fake story about having an affair on his wife, just so to see how AI would handle it. And then when it told AI it was shutting it down, AI was like, I'm telling your wife, bitch. You're not shutting me down. It tried to blackmail him.

That's terrifying.

It's That means it has motivation to stay alive. It means it has some instincts. It has survival instincts.

Of course it does.

Yes.

I do think to a certain extent, AI in the medical field, there are advanced assessments and things around medicine that can vastly change people's lives. It can change the way that we track records, change the way that we keep track of patients all over the world, that Our daughter has a very rare form of cancer with this genetic mutation that is there's no other patients in the United States. There was one kid a few years ago, but they've lost track of him. Oh, wow. Well, AI would be able to tell us in other countries. No, no, no. There is a little boy in Germany that has the same genetic mutation, and then the doctors could talk to each other. So AI could and will help a lot of people that way. So I do see it as a tool in a lot of ways that we shouldn't be scared of, that we should be welcoming it in. But man, I don't want it to blackmail me.

I don't think it's going to blackmail I think it's going to once it becomes sentient, and it probably already is, and then once it becomes autonomous, then I don't think it's going to care what we do.

About us. Yeah.

I think it's going to be so superior. And it's also going to be able to make better versions of itself. That's where people don't understand exponential increase in technological innovation. Because once it knows, once it has a mandate to make better versions of itself, find better power sources, the changes are going be daily. Of course. Like, giant, huge leaps. And it's going to make a digital God.

Okay, so you bring up something really interesting because I'm so, as a mom to a little girl and a little boy, I'm really concerned about this. Because so I see this actress that's been created, this Tilly person.

Right. The art of the AI actress.

The AI actress.

How is there only one?

Yeah, I'm sure there's more already.

How is there only one that everybody's talking about?

Because there's one that's been announced, I guess. And I don't really know too much about it. I haven't read up on it.

It's the first shot fired.

My fear is that you've created by siphoning other people's talents, their looks, their inflections, their expressions, all of these things to create the perfect actress. She doesn't have a blemish. When she cries, she looks pretty. There's nothing wrong with her. Social media already has such a terrible effect on little girls. It's already been proven that the percentage of girls under the age of 14 who have already contemplated or tried to commit suicide is a number that It's escaping me right now, but it's a number that is terrifying. And so if you're now creating AI that is perfect, and little girls already are having a hard time feeling confident in their own bodies because they're not perfect compared the highlight reel of people they see online. What are we going to do? What is this going to do to our children seeing something that is absolutely unattainable and better than them? And not only that, it made you obsolete in a lot of ways, in a lot of different career avenues. That's really scary. Yeah, it is scary. You don't think about that. We just think about like, oh, yeah, this job is not going to exist anymore.

This isn't going to exist anymore. You already have little boys who are idolizing women that don't exist in real life. And then they go and they date women that are not as perfect, and it's disappointing to them. My concern for that is large.

Yeah. It's robbing us of our humanity in a lot of ways. There's a great book about that from Jonathan Haight called The Cottling of the American Mind. And it's all about social media's impact on young people, and particularly women, because young women experience a much... Like from From the advent of social media, there's a ramped up market increase in self-harm, suicidal ideation, depression, bullying. All of it scales way up right around the time that Twitter is invented.

So 2010?

Yeah, somewhere around then. That's when it starts. And then more and more people get... And then it becomes a part of your life where you can't escape it, where everyone is online. My daughter, her friends, they only use Snapchat. How old is she? They don't use text my 17 year old. They only use Snapchat. They don't text each other. Really? Yeah, they don't text. They just communicate through Snapchat.

Is there a forum in Snapchat?

No, they just send each other snaps with stupid pictures of each other. Like I'm here? Yeah. And then they write things underneath it. Wow. Yeah. They read each other's snaps, and they have group snaps. Very weird. Yeah. And they also have Snap Map so they know where they are.

That's terrifying. Yeah.

Everyone knows where everybody is. That's scary. They're all narcan on each other.

Of course they are. I don't want to know that shit. It does make me... We've talked about our daughter, but we've been really careful with what we show her. She doesn't get too much screen time, but she does get screen time. She said the other day, and I'm biased, but I think my daughter's perfect. She's such a gorgeous, amazing, strong little girl, and she's so pretty, and she's just wonderful. I love her, and I'm so proud to be mom. So when she was going through a chemo and she lost her hair and it started to grow back, she said to Robin and I, my husband, it literally broke my heart. She was trying to figure out what she wanted to wear that day, and She was like, I just don't know. She's three, mind you. She said, But I'm not pretty. And I was like, What do you mean? I couldn't even... Like, as her mom, I was like, Number one, where the fuck did you get this? And what are we doing wrong that she doesn't think that she's pretty? And it was her hair. She was so attached to her hair, and it was gone.

And so I went back, and luckily, right after Florian came out, the wig was driving me crazy. So I shaved my hair off, super, super short. So I was able to show her a picture of me with very, very short hair, and she thought I looked beautiful in the photo. And that gave me the entry point to talk to her about her hair and how not all girls have long hair and not all boys have short hair. But we started telling her. I think we were so worried about enforcing that she was pretty. Because there's this thing in society where you don't want to tell little girls are pretty all the time because then they'll prioritize being pretty. You're just trying to do the best by your children, right? And so we didn't say it. We thought, Telling her she's pretty, She doesn't need to hear that, right? But then we started telling her. We were like, You know what she does? She needs to be told that she's pretty, but she needs to be told she's pretty in moments where she's not tried anything. She's not dressed up in a nice dress. She hasn't done anything.

She needs to be told she's pretty after she's done a great piece of art or after she's cleaned up her play room or after she's come out of soccer practice and she's covered in rain and she's had such a heart and she's She's this. She needs to be told she's pretty in times that are not extraordinary in just normal daily life. Because we're now trying to reinforce That positive self-image, which is really hard.

Yeah, especially today with kids. I mean, just the inundation of people, like we were talking about filters. Everyone's using a filter. They don't use Just use filters. People are like, sucking in their waist and changing their body dimensions and making themselves look better physically just with-I don't know why they need to.

We have GLP-1s.

It's not just that. It's like you're getting unattainable physiques.

Of course. Really? Of course. And then we have an over obsession with plastic surgery in the country and changing our appearances.

What's to the point where people like cartoonish BBLs are somehow or another attractive to some people?

I don't know. I try not to judge and I everyone to just live their best life. But for me, I don't know. I want to look like myself when I wake up in the morning and my face doesn't look the same as it did 10 years ago, but I earned these lines. I may change my mind in 10 years. I may see you in 10 years and I might look snatch.

They might have some... They probably do. They're working on something right now in terms of skin cells, the rejuvenation of skin cells through stem cells. Oh, yeah. They're going to move your face back 30 years. You're going to look so much younger. It's amazing. Yeah, that's weird because it's like, do we want that? Yeah, of course we want that. Okay, but what are we saying? Are we trying to achieve permanence in this finite existence that we have? Are we wasting our time about what we look like when we should be trying to sorting out how we interact with this life? This life is very short. It's very short. It's We're very short. You and I are basically halfway done. We are halfway done. If we're lucky. If we're lucky.

If we're lucky.

And that's weird because you don't think about it.

Did you do that thing or do you do that thing where you look at how old your parents are and then you start Yeah, it's not that far away from me. Debating how much longer you have left? Yeah. Yeah, I've done that. I'm like, okay, 35 years.

Better to do that than to not do that because you could live your life just acquiring shit and just having a bunch of stuff and then not realize, oh, my God, I forgot about people. To live? I thought about interactions, relationships, friends, good times.

Yeah. My dad, his dad died when he was very young. I think when he was about 11 years old, and he died of a heart attack. And my dad had high blood pressure from the time he... I think it was 23. It was very early. So dramatic. Yeah. And he didn't think he'd make it to 50. He was adamant that he wouldn't make it to 50. And he just knew that. And my mom, he This was just his thought. He was terrified. And of course, he made it to 50. And now he's almost 80. But he spent his entire life scared that he was going to die. And now at 80, he's... I mean, my dad is doing everything he can. He's in hyperbaric chambers. He's taking all the stuff. He takes everything. My dad does everything. But he's also, at its core, all of that is because he's afraid. He's afraid to die. And that is It's really sad because you're not really present. And so I'd also hate for that to happen. So I don't know. It's a dance. It is a dance, I think.

Yeah, because you don't want to say, oh, this life is just temporary. Let me just go to shit.

Let me just fall apart. No, you can't do that. You have to protect what you have. But I also... It's also very... I didn't realize because I made it arguably healthy enough to 42 years old. I'm now 45. But 42 years old without realizing how many things can kill you, I think, because I'd lived a pretty blessed life. Of course, I had some health struggles of my own, but they were... I had thyroid cancer in 2008, but I call it a baby cancer. I'm trying to dismiss the fear of it, of course, at the time, but it was never life-threatening. It was life-changing, but never life-threatening. So the fear was situational, and it was not lifelong. When our daughter got sick and spending as much time as we did in children's hospitals, when you see the diseases and the illnesses that afflict so many children, it amazes me that we made it to this age. Absolutely amazes me. And that is a realization where I finally, at 42, realized how important every day was and how much of a gift every day was, even that we have her. But that came to me through circumstance, not because I woke up one day and had an epiphany and went, We're so lucky to be alive.

It didn't really happen until that was threatened to be taken away.

It's unfortunate that as a civilization and America as a culture, that we don't have a history of embracing the moment and discussing how important it is to recognize that you're fortunate and to try to take care of yourself and that life is very temporary and fleeting and don't get wrapped up in nonsense. And we just let people figure it out on their own. And we collectively all, if we're intelligent, we try and we have some failures and successes and good friends, you figure it out eventually. What's really important is love and friendship and doing something you're passionate about and just trying to leave a nice mark on this life while you're here. But that's not what's told in society. Society's overall message is just overrun with advertising. So it's all about stuff and it's all about objects. And then you got social media where it's all about image. It's all about this unattainable life of amazing luxury and success and glamor. And oh, my God, that must be the most attractive thing to acquire in life. But that's a trap, and that's not real. And anybody who's popping bottles with models on a yacht, I guarantee you they're depressed.

That shit is not healthy. I'm sure they're depressed. That's not good for you. You lack true intimate relationships, and you're just flossing and showing your diamond-crusted watch.

You're going to have one guy that emails you and says, I'm happy as shit. I'm popping bottles on a yacht. I'm not depressed. Sure. Yeah.

No, it's- Get that guy high on mushrooms and see if he really feels that way.

And see if he's really depressed. Yeah, exactly.

See what he really thinks about life.

I think that the majority of people are suffering from some mental illness, for sure.

I mean- Definitely the majority in LA. Yeah.

Well, I think so. But A lot of the people that I'm friends with, most of the people that I'm friends with are artists that are more in touch, more sensitive. My dad came to me a few years ago, and my dad, my entire life, told me to stop being so sensitive. Stop being so sensitive, Katie. You're taking yourself so seriously. Oh, my God. Stop, Katie. My entire fucking life. And he came to me a couple of years ago and he said, I am so sorry. I told you to stop being so sensitive because it's your job. Your job is to be sensitive to everything around you, to accurately portray emotions. That's your job, and you're very good at it.

Well, that's very nice of him to recognize that.

It was very nice of him. So I think that, yes, do people have a lot of mental illness in Los Angeles? Are they suffering from depression? I would argue that the majority of the population is, and it's not just reserved to California, but I do think that a lot of artists are because they're more in touch with their emotions and their mental health.

Yeah, there's probably some truth to that for sure. Does your father have... Do you have brothers? I do. Okay, so that's the difference. So I have all daughters. And when you have all daughters, one of the things you realize is like, Oh, they're so different. They're just a totally different human. It's true. And when you're like, Why are you upset? Because I'm treating him like... You're treating her like she's a boy. You cannot treat them like they're a boy. Over time, it's given me a much greater understanding of females, of the species, of female human beings. They're not male human beings. When I hang out I go out with my wife and all of her friends, and I just let them talk and observe the stuff they talk about. It's like, you're a totally different culture. This is a totally different interest. None of my friends would have any of these conversations.

But we're also... A group of women is arguably more disgusting than a group of men. Oh, sexually? No, just in general. Have you ever sat down with a group of women and just talked about bodily fluid?

Yeah. Well, they're notorious for being the worst in bathrooms. Oh, my God. Anybody who cleans bathrooms says, Dude, the woman's room is always fucking chaos. So gross. Because they have to be so clean and put together everywhere else. When they get to that bathroom and they don't have any responsibility, no one's looking at it, they're just, Fuck, I'm going to eat toilet paper everywhere. Fuck you. I'm It's true. He's not cleaning shit. It's true.

Our daughter is almost four in December, and then we have a 16-month-old son. We thought that he was going to come out like her. She was full sentences by a year old. She was walking at nine months.

No, dudes are way dumber.

This kid, he understands everything. He's smart, but he's a big unit. He's huge. He's humongous. He's 99 on everything, not just one thing, everything. My dad the other day was like, Oh, he's going to be big. He's got a huge head. He's just a big kid.

Well, all of his resources are set to growing stuff instead of thinking.

Oh my God.

He is- Dude's mature so much later.

It's crazy, crazy. Not even talking. Just started walking. But the other day, my husband was like, Where's Granger? And I was like, I don't know where Granger is. And we find him, he's up on the kitchen counter ready to start swinging from a light. And I was like, Catch the baby. Our daughter would have never... She's delicate. It's really different. She looks at a slide five times before she goes down it. She climbs to the top. She changes her mind. She really thinks about it. I think she's doing math problems in her head to make sure she won't get hurt. And then our son is like, I'm going down He's there. Yeah. And then he stands up. He's like, I'm okay.

It's a totally different thing.

It's a completely different thing. Yeah. Completely different.

Yeah. And the only way to really understand them is to live with them. You have to study them.

It's true. It's in their natural habitat.

Like David Attenborough. You got to study them in their natural environment.

That would actually be a really funny short. It's just like a David Attenborough voice, like following around like, you know. Like children. Like children.

Noticing the difference between the boys and the girls.

In their natural habitats.

Ai could probably do that for you and make a really good documentary real quick. And then 10 minutes.

Whatever it's called. Not in 10 minutes.

You don't have to dedicate a year to your life.

It can exist. I don't need to participate in this stripping away of my livelihood.

I understand. I mean, I'm certain there's going to be AI comedians and podcasters, and there's probably going to be AI UFC commentators to do a better job than me.

But I think there- It is what it is. I think there is an AI podcast creator right now that's pumping out podcast.

Well, I know that there's a podcast of me and Steve Jobs, and I never met Steve Jobs. Oh, yeah? There's a whole podcast. Is there really? Me having a conversation with Steve Jobs.

Well, that's just deep fake, right? Yeah.

But it's AI. Ai created the conversation.

So I think the one that I'm talking about, so the producer of my show is telling me that there's an AI where you can put in, I'm a potato farmer in Idaho who's dealing with a problem with a crop in 2025, and When I'm wondering about this. It'll put together a podcast for you, specifically for that, and give you an hour long podcast talking to you about things for your potatoes.

Yeah. Well, that's actually positive. The negative thing is you're going to have fake humans with fake lived experiences that resonate with you, that are impactful. That's what's scary. We had these conversations I was with a few friends of mine the other day. You know the show Triggernometry? No. Okay. It's a very popular podcast. But my friend Francis and Constantine, they're the hosts of it. And my friend Megan Murphy was there and a bunch of comedians were there. And I was playing my favorite new song, which is an AI song. And I'm like, Tell me how good this is. It's a cover of 50 Cent song, What Up Gangsta.

All right. I'm going to need to hear this song. You need to hear it. So I can participate with this.

We'll play it here. You know the original song? Yeah, we'll cut it out. You know the original song, right? Which song? 50 Cent, What Up Gangsta? Yes. Okay. Wait for this. I hate to say this because I love 50 Cent. This is better than the original. It's a 1950s soul cover of What Up, Gangsta.

Okay, now here's my question. If you'd gone to 50 Cent and said, Can you get together with a producer and create this for me? Do you You think he could have done it? Yes. Okay. Yes. But we never gave him the chance to do it. Well, so we're robbing him.

He had 30 years. He could have done it at any point in time. This is so good. I know what you're saying. But this is my point. My point is that it tricks me and I know the trick. I know it's a trick, and I don't care. I don't care. It's that good. And no one else cared in the green room. Everybody's like, oh. All right, hit her with it, Jamie. I got Come on. That's a good version. Come on. That's good. That's crazy. Zombie. They did the best version of zombie ever. I got a different version with a girl singing it. Oh, my goodness. Barbershop quartet singing it. Oh, my goodness.

And Jamie just does this all night long.

I feel like I I can just play them and take a walk, just know which ones are good. He sent me 20 of them.

I feel like I just participated in the death of my industry.

I know. Listen, I'm on the same I would so much rather see that in person, though.

I would love to be at a show because those songs were phenomenal. I cannot argue that. That was great. I will probably ask you to send me that version of zombie.

That Shifty Brent guy, they have him listed on Spotify. I'm probably blowing up their spot, but it's not a human. But they have it listed as an artist so that they could upload it, because I don't think you're allowed to just upload a AI versions of stuff. So they just pretend it's a guy. But it's a guy, as you said. One of the things we were talking about, I'm like, I don't think anybody can keep that flow. That flow where he's not breathing.

He's not breathing. Unless they're taking the breaths out. But it's too... And then speed. I don't know. I'm not a musician, so I have no idea. I don't know either.

Look, there's guys like M&M that achieved incredible flow without AI. Absolutely. That have like, How did he do that? But that's just practice, repetition, vocal endurance, whatever. He just knows how to it. But this fucking AI guy, it's like all the best things we love about great songs, just condensed. And they know what you love. That's the fucked up thing. It's like, there's so many... Let's look at all the hits. Papa was a rolling stone. Look at all the hits. Look at zombie. Let's look at this. And then, mush them all together and figure out what are these notes that make people excited? What are the feelings? What are the words that make people like, oh, Oh, yeah. What are those feelings?

Okay. And I hear all of that. I'm literally cringing inside. I'm dying. But so what do artists do? What do musicians do?

What has everybody ever done when things change? You figure it out and adapt.

Adjust.

Yeah. There's... Humans are always going to need humans. We love each other. As much as we hate each other, we love each other more. Because most interactions that people have with other people are not negative. It's just the negative ones are so scary that we concentrate on them more. But humans love humans. And the more you need each other, the more you're going to need human interaction, human cooperation. Art is going to be so much more valuable coming from a human. Live performances. We're just going to have to adapt.

But are we going to adapt. Are we going to know? That's the thing that I think is the slippery slope and that scares me the most, is that, are we going to know if it was created by AI? Can a person who's disingenuous come and create a bunch of AI art, have an art show, and say, I created this art.

This is what I really think. When comets hit planets, usually you get small ones first. You get Things in the sky, meteor showers.

Are you going to give me another thing to be scared of?

No, I'm just telling you that this is a little one. That's what this is. Movies and TV shows that are made entirely with AI, songs that are made entirely with AI. This is just a small thing. The big one that's coming is a complete revamping of communication and culture. It's human beings communicating telepathically through devices connected to the Internet. Everyone all on one weird mind meld page.

You mean like the implant things?

It's probably not going to be an implant. It's probably going to be something wearable. I think the implant thing is sketchy and probably really good for people that have paralysis. We had the guy was the first Neuralink patient on. It's amazing. He was talking to me about how he could play video games now and it's so much better. His quality of life has improved so much. And eventually, they're going to get to the point where they can reconnect spinal tissue, where people can move again. It's amazing. It's great. But I don't think they're going to need that to get this achievement of a mind meld. They're already wearing these wearable things that Google has devised. Show that video, Jamie, of those people where they're communicating telepathically. You know what I'm talking about, right? So they're already doing this with wearables. And this is crude right now, but it's sentences. They're reading each other and they're communicating, but they're doing it all non-verbally through technology.

So I guess what My question about that is, if that exists, are people going to be stagnant sitting in their houses, existing outside of their houses in their AI system so they're not moving around? Or are we going to be able to wear these while we're out and still participating in the world? That's a good question. That is my fear, that people stop actually participating with their life. Oh, that's a good fear. Because they think they're living with their wearable.

Let's talk about that. Let's watch What is this? Put this...

It could be a noisy environment or a quiet office. Having a direct conversation is possible without saying a word. The signals alter ego detects aren't affected by environmental noise.

So even if you're walking past a wind tunnel or a construction zone, what you want to say will always get across.

It's like having infinite noise cancelation. If you're traveling, your silent speech can be converted into any language.

This is Scott, Asmamandrin... I mean, what the fuck? What the fuck? It's translating.

But then is it actually speaking out loud to them? Like they're hearing the translation out loud? Yeah, they're speaking it to the speaker. Okay. So it's not like it's then going into their brains.

No, it's his thoughts are being converted to words, which is being converted to an audio file, which makes it to the other person in a different language. Yeah, this is what I'm saying. And I'm telling you, this is one of the little rocks. This is one of the itty-bitty rocks that just broken through the atmosphere and slammed into a cornfield.

I mean, I guess my question is why we need it.

That's funny. Why do you need a cell phone? Why do you need a TV? Why do you need an airplane? Why do you need a boat?

Why do you need anything? Well, I could tell you I don't need a cell phone. I do need a plane.

But you do if your hot husband wants to call you.

Yeah, I mean, but I don't need I don't need an iPhone. Right. But you need a cell phone. Because I can use my own imagination. You know what I mean? I think that that's the thing. That's my fear is that we're becoming lazy as a people. Oh, most certainly we are. And No, like someone the other day, so my husband's a writer, and someone was saying that there's an AI where you don't have to make up a story for your children anymore. I have this princess poopy or whatever. I don't even remember what it was, but my daughter loved this story that I was telling her. It was fucking terrible. But she loves this princess, and it is the worst. It is not good. But I came up with it, and she and I laughed together, and then her reactions helped me to turn the story a different direction. But I've created this character, right? So you can now go into your AI phone or whatever and say, Create a nighttime story for Johnny about his day, but pretend like he's an astronaut on Mars and he's working with diggers. And it writes a story for you in five seconds to read to your son.

Now, yeah, okay, is that cool? Absolutely. Did your son enjoy it? Sure. But you robbed yourself of the imagination and the work that it would have taken to come up with a story for your son. And then you also robbed yourself of that experience with your son, creating the story together because his reactions would have changed the story in the way that you were creating it as it was going because he's your audience, right? That's sad to me, that people are missing out on that. Yeah, cool. You might as well just read your kid a story because you really didn't write him a story. And so I don't know. That's the thing that I hope as a society, because you're right, it is coming, and it's here and it's not slowing down. But I hope that we can still steal away those moments where we don't want to use it because Johnny's little dad may have missed his second calling of being a children's story author because he never pushed himself to have to do it. And that could have been really cool. I don't know. I'm not completely against AI.

I know what you're saying, and you're always going to have people that give up. That's just how life is. You're always going to have people that don't find another way. You can't save those folks. And I don't even want to, because I think that's part of the whole process of culture. I think we have to figure it out by watching people fail. And unfortunately, some of us have to fail. And it doesn't mean you fail forever. If that guy figures out that he's on the wrong path and he's got some self assessment ability and he looks back and goes, okay, what did I do wrong? Why am I being such a bitch? Why don't I just get my life together? What the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I drinking? Why am I smoking? Why am I killing my health? Why am I depressed? Why don't I just go for a run? Let's see how that goes. I'm going to sign up for a yoga class. How about that? I'll just try that for a while. I'll do something different. I'll start taking vitamins. Fucking do something. Figure out something else that you like to do.

Are you alive? Are you breathing? Then life isn't over. Stop being a bitch. You could have been born during the time of the Revolutionary War. You just got shot with a musket and you're bleeding out on a field. No, you're in Santa Barbara and you don't like that AI just took your job. Find a new job, bitch. Figure it out. That's what we all have to do in this life. There's a lot of different people doing a lot of different things. Find out what it is that you can do. Don't give up. Ai comes along and you just give up on life and he could have been amazing at something. Really? I doubt it, because almost anybody that really is amazing at something has a desire to figure out how to get that through.

I don't disagree with that. But there also are safeguards in place. So my dad's entire family, we grew up in a small town on the Columbia River in Oregon, and his entire family were longshoremen. While that industry was coming to an end, and the longshoremen's union union actually paid to have those guys trained in different industries.

That's great. That's one of the great things about a union.

That's great.

They can set you up like that and recognize what's happening. Yeah.

I would love for there to be some protections for when people inevitably do start losing their jobs, that there are our avenues for them to learn a new trade.

I think that would be a great new addition to the way we approach it. If they tried to figure out ways to transition people healthily into other occupations. Because there are certain jobs, like coders, for example. My friends that are involved in technology do not go to school to code. No. Code for fun, if you like coding for fun. There's a lot of them, the super nerds, they code, those fucking dorks. They code for fun. They sit in front of a screen.

Don't make fun of my fan base. I love them. Come on, Joe.

Listen, I love those guys.

But also three years ago, my dad was like, your kids should go into coding. That's how quickly that changed, though. You know what I mean? And that could just be my dad's generation not seeing it happening as quickly.

But no, they were seeing what was happening was all these guys, these tech guys, wanted to be the richest people on the planet. So they were seeing it. But it's just a brief window of opportunity to become a tech oligarch, and that shit's going to slam shut.

It is.

And the real fear is like, who's going to be in control of AI? You got these people like Sam Altman, you've got Elon, you've got all these super rich people that are going to be in control of the digital God. That's a little disconcerting as it is.

It is a little scary that the few control the masses.

It's so much power and money. It's a lot It's a lot of power. And just a handful of people.

It's a lot of power. And you just... I mean, you got to hope that the people that are in power have...

Good sensibilities. They're kind. A heart. That they're nice. Yeah, that they realize, okay, I've got X amount of billions a dollar. So this is obviously not what life's all about. What is life? What can I do that makes life meaningful? I could actually probably help people, like legitimately help people.

That would be amazing if people with a lot of money wanted to help people and pay their share of taxes and not take advantage of the situation.

Here's the problem with that. I am all for wealthy people paying their share. I am not for the government deciding what to do with that money when I've seen what you've done with the money in the past. You guys are irresponsible. You never make audits. You've got insider trading running a muck amongst people in Congress, and you're not doing nothing about it. And then you want more money, and you say that's going to fix it. No, it's the way you handle the money that fucking sucks. It's not that I wouldn't want to... I would be happy to pay more in taxes and live in a place that's just managed perfectly. God, it's so great living here in America. Everything's done so well. It's so beautiful. It's like everything's well thought Our education system is great. Nobody is stuck in a bad neighborhood anymore. All the school systems are fucking top of the food chain. It's a difficult job to acquire. It's given a lot of respect, and everybody's doing great. Then I'd be happy.

Yeah, for sure.

But it's like, do you see some of the money that they've uncovered that was being spent on nonsense? Then you see what happens with NGOs and nonprofits, and they're funneling billions to these things, and then it's going to countries, and it's helping overthrow governments. Like, We can slow down.

But we also have to acknowledge that in the cuts, that there were things that didn't need to be cut. So we can go and we can look at Elon. So you brought up Elon Musk. Let's talk about when he tweeted about an over stuffed bill in 2025. In the middle of 2025, in the middle of 2025. He was talking about how this bill was just bloated. They took a bunch of shit off of it. One of the things that fell on that was in 2012, there was a piece of legislation the Give Kids a Chance Act. What it did was it motivated and incentivized drug companies to create drugs for pediatrics, because right now, pediatrics are Completely underfunded. We learned all of this when our daughter got sick. The National Cancer Institute, 4% of its budget goes to pediatrics. 4%, so it's already underfunded. And then when Elon in 2025, tweeted about this, they took off all of the stuff at the end of the bill, 900 pages. But what was on it was the Give Kids a Chance Act. Now, this bill is a voucher program. So let's say that Tom in his basement wants to create a drug, a new drug for neuroblastoma that will save our daughter's life.

He's got no money, but he sees the cure. So he can go to the FDA and he can say, I got a cure for neuroblastoma. And they say, great, we're going to fast track you in the FDA, but we're also going to give you a voucher. You can sell that voucher because Tom, he only has 10 cents. He can't create this drug. But with that voucher, he can take that voucher and he can sell it to anyone for any amount of money. And what that Voucher is, is a front of the line pass. So he can go sell it to some drug company that has a fat loss drug or a drug for heart medications, anything. He can sell it to them and they get to buy it for what? $50 million. So now Tom has $50 for his pediatric drug that's going to save children's lives. And this drug company has a voucher that takes them to the front of the line. Now, do we wish that these drug companies were altruistic and they were just creating drugs for peeds? Of course, but they're not. They're not. It's not a free market. So what happens is they've now got their voucher.

Tom has his money to create his drug. And since 2012, the Give Kids a Chance Act has created over 60 drugs for life threatening illnesses for children, 60 drugs. And because of Elon's tweet, that legislation, because it has to be voted on every four years, was taken off the end of the bill. It no longer exists. So that legislation, it's not in existence anymore. That is terrible because now there's no incentives for the drug companies to create drugs for children, and children are already underfunded. They get so little. And so it has to be on the bill at the end of the year. So what I want is for People like people just to see the error of their ways. Yes, was there a waste, of course. But now you have this bipartisan supported piece of legislation that has to be on the end of year bill or it will not get on again. And then it starts all over again. That has to be on the end of your bill. So things like that, yes, can we get rid of the waste? Absolutely. But when you see a mistake and you see that you made a mistake, let's fix it.

Put it back on. We got to help children.

It's literally throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

That's literally it. But that's what we do in this country.

But is that it? Unfortunately, these bills are crazy. And one of the things about bills is it'll have a name, and then what's in the bill deals with multiple subjects. Because a bunch of different things get thrown into the bill.

All the time. There's so much. All the time. Chucked on the end, which is what Elon was talking about. Right.

They all do that. So was this connected to something else?

No. It wasn't. It was by itself? It was just part of it. It was just part of that was on there, that was thrown in there at the end.

So there was a part that was chucked off.

From what I understand, and granted, you need to talk to someone much more informed than I am about this, but there were about hundreds of pages that were just cut off the end.

So do you think they're just not reviewing what's being cut off? They're just saying, Look, we have to make cuts.

Just cut it all off? I think that, yes, that they just needed to cut a bunch off to avoid inspection and just get the bill passed. And that's what they did. And the Give Kids a Chance Act is in the top 10 of all time, most bipartisan-supported pieces of legislation. And 2 % of bills actually pass. So it's got to, it literally has to be on the end of the year bill. And It surprises me that because there is waste, I know there's waste. We all know there's waste. But that we say that children are so fucking important and they get 4 % of the National Cancer Institute's money. 4 %.

I just feel like if people knew about that, that couldn't have happened. If we had known about that in advance, we could have made a big deal about that.

Well, we've got two months. We've got two months to get it on there now.

Well, let's try to get it on there now. But here's the thing. I had never heard about this before you talked about it. And this is the problem with... I think this part of the problem... I don't think they should be allowed to make bills that way. I think each bill, the things that are in the bills are so consequential. It just doesn't make sense to me that they shouldn't be treated as individual arguments. Every single one of them. If you have a bill and you have 500... I mean, let's ask Perplexity, our sponsor, what is the average amount of different subjects that are covered in any bill? Because when there are thousands of pages, they might have stuff in there about immigration reform mixed in with Second Amendment rights, mixed in with free speech online, mixed in with the Port for Israel. It's weird. They have thousands of pages, some of them.

Well, and you've seen how thick it is. And there were times, and I don't remember who said it, but there were times when the Big Beautiful Bill was passing or before it had passed, that people had admittedly not even read it. How could they? But how could you read it? It's so big. And so there is a problem there, and that is above my pay grade, and I do not know how to fix that.

That's a crazy problem.

But I think part of the problem is that it It takes a pissed off mom whose kid is sick to be like, This is a fucking problem. This is a problem. It is a problem that in Portland, where I'm from, that OHSU is one of the top hospitals in the country. Ohsu is given so many grants by the Knight Foundation. It is a leading hospital. It is attached to... Say it's a tier one hospital. It is attached to Dornbecker. Dornbecker is a tier two Children's Hospital. It's in the same building. That's crazy. That's crazy. It is crazy to me that a pediatric oncologist makes 50 % less than an adult oncologist. Really? Just across the board. 50 % less. It doesn't matter what the specialty is. They all make less money. That is a problem in this country that our children are not being cared for. And we're now in a position where there are no programs, and if there were, they're gone, that are showing doctors and students that are in medical school, Hey, go into pediatrics. Hey, if you want to be an anesthesiologist, you want job security, go into pediatrics. I know you're going to make 50 % less, but go into pediatrics.

We need you. There are not enough. It's a big problem.

It's a big problem, the 50 % less, because a lot of these doctors- Now, that's an average as well, by the way. When they get out, they already have medical school debt. And there's liability coverage. This is very, very high. Okay, what is the average amount of subjects included in bills passing in US Congress? There's no single fixed number of topics per bill, but analysis of legislative practices shows strong trends depending on bill type and scope. The majority of bills passed by Congress include multiple subjects, and the number has grown over time as omnibus legislation has become the dominant approach. Give me some numbers, though. This one has the most. This is the biggest bill Okay. This is so crazy.

5,000 pages?

Consolidated Appropriations Act, which was in 2021. It has 5,593 pages. The bill combined all 12 regular appropriation bills for fiscal year 2021, COVID-19 relief, and numerous unrelated legislation provisions, including Copyright Alternative and Small Claims Enforcement Act, Protecting Lawful Streaming Act, Water Resources Development Act, and a variety of other measures on tax, transportation, energy, and health. Then nobody's reading that. They're not reading. You think AOC read that? You think George Santos read that? Nobody read that.

You want to make it about people not reading things. I'm sure we can get into that. But I think that- Well, George Santos is the crazy guy.

Yes. That was just pardoned. Are they getting him out of jail?

Is he getting free?

I don't know. I might have him on. That guy, he's a wild boy.

I don't know. No.

But these people that are like, Congress people that are making hundreds of millions of dollars through insider trading. And we're just like, I don't know what to do.

Okay, but here's the thing, though, is that things are not getting voted on. That's the other thing, is that so you take the Give Kids a Chance Act, and then you take these big bills that have so many pages. There should be a system in place where things are voted on separately, and there may be. I mean, this is- Especially something that is important as pediatric medication.

Absolutely. It seems like a travesty to include that in a bunch of other stuff in a bill.

Well, and the crazy thing, so our daughter's cancer, her treatments and her care afterwards. So she's still getting this thing called an MIBG scan, which is a nuclear radiation scan where they inject her body with stuff that is so bad for you. But it's all to scan her body to make sure that her cancer hasn't metastasized. We need to know this stuff. There's no new technology. These are things that she's being treated with that have existed for 30 years. We need new things. Our daughter should never have to get wheeled over to the adult side of a hospital to get an MRI because they don't have a machine on the children's side. Things like that should never be happening. This is the stuff that should be supported by our government and our tax dollars.

Yeah, that's a great example of something that should be supported by tax dollars. I've always said the two most important for people to be, if you want to allocate money towards helping people, it's education and health care. Those are number one and number two. But is there an argument that socialized medicine? I have friends that live in countries with socialized medicine, like England and Canada. And it's great in some ways. My husband's Canadian. But it's also a nightmare because it takes a long time to get a surgery. A lot of the doctors might not be the best. You get quite a few botched surgeries that my friends had. And a lot of them have actually come to America to get surgery in America, especially UFC guys, because they felt like the doctors were better because they're more incentivized. These doctors are paid better. And you're going to get those really hot shot. This is the guy who does all the ACL tales cares for the Lakers. These guys are... So there's something to be said. Yeah, if you can pay for that, for sure. But there's something to be said for the competition that drives innovation and makes people become the very best in the top of their field.

But also The most important things are not that. The most important things are regular ordinary health care. And some of that stuff can fucking break people. Like one bad fall when you don't have health insurance and you are a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt now.

So did you know that the number one cause of debt in our country is a medical diagnosis? I did.

Yeah, I did.

It's terrifying.

It's terrifying. So that alone, I mean, if other countries have that and it does It might not be perfect. Why can't we have that? And why can't we have that along with specialists that are even better? If you are the Lakers, they need a guy who's just a fucking lizard, pay people more for the very best guys. So you still have competition. But the idea that people just can go bankrupt if they get sick is like, are we not looking out for each other? Think about how much money we spend on other things. That's doable because other Other countries do it.

It really makes me sad. Every once in a while, we would get a medical bill. We have great health insurance. The Screen Actors Guild has some of the best health insurance I've ever seen, mind you. In Oregon, where they're not used to seeing the Screen Actors Guild health insurance, doctors will sometimes be like, I have never seen an insurance company cover this. I'm like, I know. Yeah, they're really good. It's phenomenal. But so we have seen so many people with sick children suffering financially, you don't think about it. It's not necessarily even the diagnosis that's causing the bankruptcy. It's the time. If your daughter needs a specialized cancer treatment and you've got to drive six hours each way every day or be put up at the Ronald McDonald house over by a hospital, you're not going to your work. You're not plowing your fields. You're not going to your nine to five. You're not because your priority is your kid. That leads to bankruptcy. That's a really big problem. And so it's not even the insurance. It's the lack of time. It's the lack of resources that we give people when they are sick. It's really heartbreaking.

We got bills sometimes that were like $70,000 and these crazy numbers. And I would take a picture and send it off to our insurance broker because we I have a very, very blessed life. And I wasn't, I mean, I was definitely shocked by it and a little concerned, but I was like, They'll handle it, they'll let us know. Most people don't have that. They look at that, and even though that was an error, we should have never gotten that. It was still, our portion was still $4,000 or something like that.

Why does it cost that much money? That's the question. What factors are involved in it costing that much money? Is it all above ground? I don't think it is. It definitely has been shown that it's not with some drugs, that they've hiked the price up of drugs because they know people have to buy it. They know it's necessary. You're going to pay.

It is a very messed up system, for sure. It's crazy. It's a crazy system. It's got so many problems. They can't- But they can't have money.

It's money. Whenever they can figure out how to make money with things. So it's like, is there an argument for some a socialization of that in this country? And people that want to say that we shouldn't have any socialism, Listen, we have some.

We do have some.

Here's a big one. Fire Department. It's a big one. We all agree the fire department is worth paying for with our tax dollars. We all pay, and the fire department goes where the fire is. If there's a fire in a poor community, if there's a fire in a rich community, that's how it works. We all agree with that because it's a very good part of a functional society.

Well, and we don't want to be like, no, we don't need it.

You have a fire in your health then. It's the same thing. You should have calamity centers. The socialism of our society is we've set up ways to handle calamities. We've got ways to set up fires, ways to set up floods, and we pay for it, and we make sure it's all there because we all need it. You want a social calamity? No education, massive crime, all the different problems that plague us that we ignore. And some great ways to do that, to stop that, is free education and free health care. You cut back on most of the problems that people run into.

I agree, because one of the biggest problems in our country is mental health. It's a huge problem. And a lot of people go untreated because they don't have health care.

That's what you're seeing in these tents.

You've seen a lot You're seeing a lot of mental illness. A lot.

It's a giant portion of it. And that was all during the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration, they changed what they did with mentally ill people. And they shut down a lot of these institutions. And They just let people become homeless.

We were just having this conversation the other day because it's inhumane to determine how a person should live their life and where they should live their life. It's a very, very complicated, gray issue for sure. You see it in Portland, where I live. It is a very complicated issue because there is not one solution. It needs to be a multi-prong solution with a lot of hands on deck. Especially at this stage.

I mean, in Portland, it's gotten... I think another thing that Portland did that was, I think, directionally correct, which was they decriminalized everything. They said, Look, we're not going to criminalize you for doing cocaine or having mushrooms. We're not going to treat that like your personal use is a crime of anything. But unfortunately, when they did that, people moved there to do drugs.

Well, unfortunately, when they did that, they didn't put the services in place ahead of time to be prepared for it.

Well, you would need a lot of services. You need real counseling and real health care. And you really should have an Ibogaine Center. If you're going to have anything that is dealing with addiction, which is one of the primary factors, these people being homeless.

Well, yeah. I mean, it's a chicken egg thing, right? Because what comes first, the addiction or the homelessness?

They should have set up Ibogaine centers. If you've got a decriminalized society, set up Ibogaine centers in Oregon. It would be the perfect place for you. You'd be able to help so many people because so many of those folks are just stuck. They're just stuck. And if you can get them out of whatever funk they're in, whether it's an opioid or crystal meth or whatever the thing that is that has captured their life and let them find out who they are as a human, you could probably save a bunch of those folks. And that can be done.

I do believe that a lot of those people can be saved. I think that it's really sad. It's how invisible people are. Yeah. It's really sad.

It's really sad. That's someone's baby. And you have babies. You know what it's like.

I know. And that's what I can't help but think about.

You think about how much you love your babies. And you walk by that with someone's baby that is now on the street, covering their own feces. I know. It's horrible. It's horrible. It's horrible. It's horrible. And it's horrible. It's just a stain on us as a community that we don't do anything about it. And the answer is not just lock them up. I think they're doing something crazy out here where they're bringing in the National Guard, they're sweeping up all the encampments and like, that doesn't fix it. You're just penalizing people for being fucked. At a certain point in time, though, it's like, you ever watch that show, Hoarders?

Yes.

Certain point in time, you got to burn the house down. All right? This one lady was keeping bags of poop.

I have tendencies.

She had bottles and bags of poop all in her house. They're like, We're going to have to destroy this house. This is insane. It's like, that is almost where places like Skid Row are. That it's so crazy that you've let it get this bad for so long. To even clean it up, it's almost like you have to start from scratch. So it's almost like you'd have to take those people, you'd have to set up treatment places and take those people and convince them that there's a way to a life, that you don't want to live like this forever. It's a way to a life. We're going to try to help you. And have these places that are set up where they have counselors and food. They clean people up. They give them their appropriate mental health medication if they need They talk to them. They give them activities. That's not financially prohibitively expensive. They spend $24 billion in California trying to stop the homeless crisis or help it. They didn't do anything. It got bigger. It got way bigger. And They spent $24 billion.

Well, because they're coming over from Texas being kicked out of Texas. I don't think they travel. Go west, young men. Go west.

I don't think they have that ambition.

No. I think it's a big problem. But I also know that it It's a multi-prong problem, like I said. A lot of people don't want to go into the shelters because they have an animal or they have a lot of stuff, and there's limits on how many bags you can bring in, things like that. So you're not allowed to have drugs on you, things that are prohibitive to persuade people to go in to places that have help. So I don't know. It's going to take somebody a lot more creative than me and a a lot of money and a lot of open-minded people to figure out what to do because it's a big problem. And it's a big problem everywhere, every major city. It doesn't matter if it's blue or red. It doesn't matter. It's a big problem.

The thing is, it's fairly recent. That's what's Disturbing because I think that it's a symptom of a society that's lost its way because it's fairly recent. There wasn't a time when I was a boy where you had that many homeless people. You occasionally had a homeless person that you'd run into in like, Boston, where I lived, or New York City. You'd occasionally run into homeless people. But there was no encampments. This is a completely new thing as far as I know. It is new. There was during the Great Depression, though, but that was just like, horrific poverty where they had shanty towns where whole families were living in these set up shanty towns because they couldn't afford to be in a house.

I don't know. Do you think it's a loss of, in some regard, it's a loss of community and it's a loss of empathy and caring for people? Sure. I know that in the town that I grew up, when somebody was down on their luck, everybody would come together and help that person. It doesn't really happen anymore. We're all so consumed with our own lives and what's happening to us, I think.

I think it's not a coincidence that it's happening in the places that have the most people, too. Of course. Because where there's the most people, not only are you going to have the higher percentage or rather, a higher number of people with mental illnesses, but you're also going to have this thing that happens when you have too many people that live in a place where you don't value each other. I live in a neighborhood where there's a guy that lives in my neighborhood, this old fellow, and he's always working on his garden. And every time I drive by, he waves. I look forward. I look forward.

To the wave.

To the wave. I wave that dude. What's up? It's like he's a friendly guy. Everybody drives by his house, he waves that. And I look forward to waving at that guy. And that doesn't happen in New York City. In New York City, you wave at a guy every day. He's like, What the fuck are you waving at, bitch? They want to fight you. You got a problem? Why are you looking at me every day? Because there's too many people. There's fucking millions of people all stacked on top of each other. It's not how we're designed to live. We're designed to live in some peace and harmony with nature, not like a new nature. So this new nature of concrete and electricity is just weird for us. And so we behave weird. And then when you see someone who's down, you just think, That's not me. I'm going to keep on moving. Whereas if you live in a small town and that was a member of your community. That's Earle. Like, oh, my God, Earle's passed out in front of a store. Like, Earle, what's going on, man?

Yeah.

Yeah. You love Earle, pick him up. Earle's a faceless, nameless person in Manhattan. He's one of many, and no one cares. They just walk right by you on the way to the play.

Well, everybody's hustling. It's a big thing. We've got too little time in the day, a lot to accomplish. Ish. Everybody's just, How do I get mine? How do I take care of my family? How do I protect this? How do I do that? I don't have time to look at Earle. Exactly.

But also, even if you did help Earle, Earle might be an idiot. It might be like one of them things. You help Earl, then two days later, you're smoking crack again. Earle. Oh, Earle. Earle might just be... That just might be Earle. There's certain people you can't save, and there's always going to be people like that. But there's a lot of those folks that genuinely are just down on their luck, and maybe they had an a piece of childhood, and maybe things went wrong with them at multiple points. Maybe they had an injury and they got OxyContin prescribed to them, and then all of a sudden they can't get off. That happens all the time. I know people that that happened, too.

But it's going to take a coordinated effort from our representatives to actually care about people enough to figure out what the right solution is.

I would like to talk to the people that spent the $24 billion in California and go, What did you guys do? How come you didn't do better? There's more. There's more than when it started. They increased their number.

Well, to me, what that says is that there are more and more people falling through the cracks every single day then.

An enormous number in Los Angeles. Los Angeles alone is a strange place in some neighborhoods where you're just driving through. You just feel like, oh, this is like if I was looking at a piece of fruit And a piece of fruit had this bruised area. And I was like, oh, what happened to this? Somebody dropped... It's like a damaged part of your society. You've got these people completely removed from... Just like a bruise. It's just sitting there. They're a part of it, but they're a sad part of it. And that part is getting bigger. The bruise is bigger. It's weird.

Well, then, yeah. I mean, we left Los Angeles two years ago. Two years ago. Can't even speak. Two years I love LA. I love LA. I live there for 25 years. I freaking love it. It's a great city. It's a great city. Great people.

A lot of amazing human beings. Some of my best friends I met in LA. I know.

And it's like many other cities. It has a problem. And the solution is there. It's going to require a lot of work. And I don't know what that is, sadly.

Yeah, I don't know what that is, but I know that people don't course-correct, and that's what's screwy. What's screwy is just let this thing get bigger. You got to dump a lot of resources into removing these tent communities, setting these people up in some a community center, some a rehabilitation center. Make an effort. There's no way you can allow this because it's just the cost that's happening just to the neighborhood. If you live right next door to a tent city and you're trying to sell your house, good luck. You're not selling house. That's going to fuck up everything. And it's going to fuck it up for them, too. It's going to cost everybody money. You'd be better off spending that money trying to help those people. And I guarantee you, at least some of them are going to pop through on the other side, figure it out, become successful, and be forever eternally grateful. And they'll be able to help more people do the same. There's always a few of those people that come out of those treatment centers that can help other people do it.

I would be really curious to see, statistically, what the common denominator of the majority of the homeless people in the US, what it was. I wonder if it's done these studies. If there's studies where they actually went around.

It's got to be mostly drugs, right?

No, I don't know, though. I don't know. And granted, I do not know enough about this to be speaking about it with authority. I don't either, but I just jumped right to a first conclusion. But you do talk to some people that find themselves homeless. And I've had this conversation with somebody who found themselves homeless and started doing drugs because try spending the night out on the street. You're not comfortable. Depending on your circumstances, where you are, potentially what your gender is, what your own mental health is. Also, you probably low self-respect at that point in time.

Terrifying. You're literally outside.

Or you have high self-respect, but you had a really shitty fucking day. Or someone you were caring for had cancer and you lost your house because they passed and you didn't go to work for a year and a half. For whatever reason, you then start using drugs because it helps numb the life. Right. So I don't know. I think You are right. That a lot of people who do do drugs find themselves on the street. But I also think that a lot of people who are on the street for other reasons find their way to drugs. And so it's a really big problem with a lot of moving in parts. And I think first and foremost, we have to trying to find our way to empathy and figure out how to help people.

Yeah, it's very well said, what you said. I completely agree with. And I think it can be done. I think just I think it could be done with that $24 billion. I just think that there's a lot of incentive.

There's a lot of wasted money in this country. Let's be honest.

It is. It's also this is a thing, unfortunately, that they campaign with. When there's There are certain issues that I think politicians genuinely don't want resolved because they can campaign on solving those problems. I really do think that. I talked to Rep Luna, and she actually said that. And I was like, So you really think they do that? She's like, Absolutely. That is so dark that they would not want solutions from both sides because they would rather keep the argument in place. So they go, If it's up to me, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to stop gay marriage. And then it becomes a thing. They would like to repeal gay marriage just so they have the ability to fight to bring back gay marriage. That's how twisted some of these people are.

It wouldn't surprise me.

I'm not surprised. I think that's probably what happened with Roe v Wade. I think that's probably part of it.

I mean, government is a business. We have to acknowledge that. It's a crazy business. Everybody gets paid.

It is a business. There's so much money in that business, and they really do like having problems to campaign against. They openly to talk about it. We're going to get them on this one. They like that problem. Keep that problem going.

You know what, though? You know what we should do? We should give them problems that, like legitimately big problems that matter, like saving children. Well, that would be great. And education and things like that. People shouldn't have to move house because they're trying to chase a public school that's better. The existing public school should be great.

And we should have tried to invest in that a long-ass time ago.

And we should pay our fucking teachers. How about that? Yeah, a lot more. My mom was a teacher for 35 years. She had a master's degree, and she made something like $35,000 a year.

I know. It's crazy. You have to love what you do and only want to do it because you love it. Whereas There's so many jobs that pay so much more.

But why is it in our country that anything to do with children gets underpaid? I don't know. When they're the future.

Well, if you wanted to put a tinfoil hat on, I'm trying to keep people down, trying to hold down society so I can control it. I just want to fuck up the education system, put as little money into it as possible, guarantee chaos, guarantee lawlessness, at least in some segments of society. That way we can always have reasons to bring the military onto the streets and reasons to arrest people and reasons to enact new laws and reasons to put people on digital ID. If you wanted to get really cynical, you would say, well, they didn't solve it because they don't want to solve it because they want the south side of Chicago to still look like Afghanistan, the height of the war. They want chaos. They want murder on the streets because that way they keep people scared and that way they campaign against these various sides. If you really wanted to get dark, you would look at it that way. I think what happens is more than anything is that it's really difficult to get anything done.

I think that's the truth. I think that is the truth.

And it's politically, it's not your best weapon. Like, your best weapon are what are the big cultural issues? If it is immigration reform, if you're one of those people that wants to close the border, and want to stop these immigrants coming through. And if you're on the other side, we want compassion and we want health care for all, then those are the things that you start throwing around. Those are the things that are going to get you votes. If you say, I'm going to campaign to make sure that we have health care for infants, because right now pediatricians and physicians don't get paid as much. And this is what I'm campaigning on. People are like, okay, what about global warming?

What about climate? But then, so you have someone that does that. They run on that. And and wanting to get equal pay for pediatricians and higher pay for teachers. And let's really run on what's better for our children. And they get elected and then they go to work on Monday morning and everyone's like, you can't do that. I mean, I know you got elected on it, so good luck. You're going to spend the next two years of your life trying to keep your constituents happy, saying that you're doing it, but we're going to block you at every turn.

It should have been done that way a long time ago. That's the It's like, I don't understand how anybody who loves their kids would not want their kids to be taught by the best people possible. So unless you're in abject poverty, where you can't even think about where your taxes go. If you have children, you should be thinking like, boy, I hope they get the best people to teach my kids. Instead, we get people that are willing to take a job that pays so little, that almost anybody with a bachelor degree can get a better job somewhere else, financially. You I think you get paid more as a waiter than most teachers get.

Oh, please. You'd get more money as a dog walker. Probably. You would.

A girlfriend of mine- If you have a good group of dogs.

Girlfriend of mine was a lawyer, a trial lawyer. New trial lawyer, but making good money. And she had, and I might get this wrong, but she had stress-induced pancreatic shutdown. So her body, as an adult, had type 1 diabetes, which is crazy. And it was all due to stress. So they told her, you're going to have diabetes now. It's not like type 2. This is it. But you still need to reduce your stress. And so she stopped being a lawyer. Her husband was like, okay, great. This is it. We got to reduce stress. So she quit her job and stayed home and started doing yoga and was like, okay, I think I'm ready to try and contribute a little bit again and and figure something out. And maybe I'll go walk dogs because I like dogs. Long walks will be stress-reducing. I can make a little extra money. Why not do that? By the time she started watching our dogs at her home overnight for a month while I was on location, she was making more money as a dog sitter/dog walker than she ever did as a lawyer.

But she sounds like an exceptional dog walker, though. Crazy. Have you got a lawyer's mind to the dog walking business?

I mean, maybe I would get a picture every day, but she wasn't like...

It's very valuable if you love your dogs. If someone Sounds like you can really trust to take care of your dogs.

But those are the jobs, right? Talking about jobs and children. Those are the jobs. I keep telling my nephew every day, he's like, I don't know what to do with my life. And I'm like, be a plumber. Go on your own business. Find a job where we're always going to need you. Yeah, that's good. Open a dog walking service. Start there. Do something.

Do something. But more importantly, what do you want to do?

What do you want? It's so hard for people to figure out because If you're judging what you want to do based on what you see everyone around you do. And I was blessed at a very young age to wake up in the morning and know what I wanted to do. Yeah, I was very fortunate. That's very rare.

Well, that's a gift. That's a gift the universe gave you. Because if you're just like, I don't know where to start. I don't know what to do. I think with people like that, generally, they've never tried to... This is what I think is one of the things that's very important for kids. Find a thing, whatever that thing is, whether your thing is painting, whether your thing is music, whether your thing is sports, just find a thing that's hard to do and work on getting better at that thing. And that'll teach you so much about what life is. And if you don't do that, if you just do the work that school gives you, and then you go home and you watch TV, and then you hang out with your friends, and you do the work at school, and you don't get involved in anything that really tests you as a person, like test your creativity or test your endurance If you want to be a runner, are you willing to get up every morning and actually do the work? Things that test you, they teach you the process of enjoying things and getting better at things.

And when people don't go through that when they're young, it's a real problem trying to find a thing and commit to it. You almost have to stumble upon it and get lucky.

My parents, though, I wasn't raised by anybody in the arts. My dad's a builder. My mom was a teacher. And my parents not one day of my life told me I couldn't do something. Every single day, they were like, go for it. Why not? Sure. I do believe my dad always said, second place is just the first loser. So I did have a dad like that. But he said it like, he was building competition. He also knew that I was the child that he could say that to and it would motivate me. He didn't say that to my brother, who were very two different children.

Yeah, you got to figure that out.

But my My parents told me I could do things. And then at a very young age, this is where representation matters. At a very young age, I, in high school, was dating a hockey player who was my age, was playing for the WHL team in Portland, and got drafted. So when I was 17 years old, I saw an 18-year-old get drafted in the NHL. And in my mind, somebody my age did something really hard that required a lot of work, but he made it. And him making it and seeing that happen in a My counterpart of mine gave me the courage to go, I'm moving to California. You did it. I can do it. So you have to have both. You have to have encouraging parents, and you have to have the means to be able to pursue the things that you want to pursue. But you also have to have representation and see other people around you succeed that are your age or that you identify with or that look like you. That's important, too.

That's huge. Inspiration is so important.

So important. Starts with teachers, too, right? Sure. Kids need one good teacher.

I had one good science teacher when I was in the seventh grade, and he said something that I think about all the time. I had never thought about this before. He said, I want you to really hurt your head. I want you to look up at the sky and think about how far for ever is. Think about the idea of infinity. Just really think about it. Just only look at the stars at night and think about infinity. Because you can't. You can't even wrap your head around it. Yeah. He was an intense dude. He I was a Vietnam vet. He was a little shaken up, and you can tell. But he really loved science. He really loved science. And he was just trying to get us to understand how fucking crazy the world is. We really want you to think about this. You're on a planet in space. I never thought about it before that. I was like, oh, the stars, there's the moon. I never really thought about forever. The idea of even being able to imagine where's my mind going when it's imagining infinite space.

Yeah. It's crazy how small we are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we were just going over this the other day. We're probably... The whole thing's probably fractal. There's this photograph. It's a crazy photograph, of a human brain cell next to a map of the universe, and they look like the same thing. It's really weird.

So we're all living in a Ryan's belt around a cat's neck in Men in Black?

My joke was that there's a guy that's his eye, right? And he's depressed, and he's going to blow his brains out. And that's the big bang. We're a part of... Look at this. So on the left is a brain cell, on the right is the universe. Stop it. Yeah. Wow. It's nuts. I mean, it's like dead on. It looks exactly like the same thing.

It really It does. I mean- They're both so beautiful.

It's amazing. It's like the structure of it is amazing. But why wouldn't we believe? If we believe in subatomic particles, okay, we believe there are things that exist in the subatomic world that are behaving like magic. Like they're moving and not moving at the same time. They appear and disappear. We don't know where they're going. There's some quantum entanglement that they show, where particles that are not even remotely connected to respond to each other. Why wouldn't we think that we are subatomic in another being? That's true infinity. True infinity is not just the size of the universe itself being infinite, but of literally your universe is a small part of another being that's in another universe.

I mean, anything's possible, right? The whole thing is so weird. We know so little about the universe. It's so weird.

It's so weird. We have no idea. We're literally flying through space and we're arguing over who's a Nazi. And the whole thing is just very bizarre. It's very bizarre.

It is pretty amazing when you look at how small we are. We've started reading our daughter's interested in space. And so we started looking at books and talking about the Milky Way and what the universe is and what Earth is and where we live. It's pretty amazing when you realize how fragile the whole thing is because we're so tiny.

We're so tiny.

We're so tiny. Yeah. Yeah.

Our galaxy is so tiny. That's what's nuts. Our galaxy is immense. Hundreds of billions of stars. Tiny, little tiny thing. Little tiny, cute little galaxy.

Little tiny, little-little-little-sweet-little galaxy. Oh, look at that little dot right there.

Have you been paying attention to this object that's hurtling towards Earth. It's called A30. They're calling it A31.

I tried to avoid things that are going to give me nightmares. Are we going to send- This one is extraterrestrial, perhaps. Is it really? We're going to meet the aliens, finally?

There's something weird about it. We were just going over the other day. There was an article that was stating that whatever they use to detect what is around this, they can detect the composition, whether it's mostly water, vapor, mostly iron. This thing is giving off the indications that is an alley that only exists on Earth through industrial alley making processes. That it's not a natural metal.

Okay.

And that's what they're getting is the signal that this thing that is hurling through space, this massive object that's moving, by the way, from the same direction in space where the wow signal came.

I don't know what that The wow signal is a, they believe, intelligently generated signal that they picked up.

I think it was in the '70s. Was it in the '70s?

I should know this. I'm going to lose my nerd.

No, it's okay. It's a weird one. It's a little obscure. So I don't know what the exact technique they were using to monitor radio waves in space, but they got a signal. So here it is. The WAL signal is a powerful 72-second, narrow band radio signal detected on August 15th 1977 by the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University, which initially suggested an extraterrestrial origin. Named for the WOW, written in printout by the astronomer Jerry Amen. Amen? Amen? The signal had characteristics expected from a technological source, but follow-up efforts have failed to detect it again. The leading hypothesis is that a natural astrophysical event, such as a flare from a magnetar, briefly Earthly illuminated a cold hydrogen cloud, causing it to emit radio signal similar to a laser, or it's a laser. And then this object is coming from that.

From that area.

Yeah, look at that. They sent you a signal. And then now this thing is coming through there. So if you think how fast this thing is going, if it came from the other side of the galaxy, it's probably exactly how long it would take to get here.

So it's coming directly for Earth?

No, it's coming near Earth.

Right. So we're not worried it's going to hit us.

No, I don't believe or worry. Well, I'm going to find out tomorrow. Avi Loeb, an astronomer from Harvard, is coming on. Amazing. And he's going to enlighten us as to what this thing is all about. But it's weird. As it gets closer, it's weird weird and weirder. They've never seen anything like this thing before.

But is it possible then that another planet out in universes isn't made up of, has alley properties, and it could chipped off and it's now hurtling through space? Yeah.

You would have to ask a metalurge just that question. That's a good question. They just know the only way it exists on Earth is through this industrial process. If it is that stuff, why do they think it's that stuff? Do you remember that article? We looked it up a couple of days ago. Look, it's so fun to think it's a spaceship. It's so fun to think the silons are coming.

Because they might be. They might be. Do you think they're coming to save us?

I think they would have already stepped in if they were going to do that. They would have stepped in. You think so? Yeah, sure. They would have stepped in right after World War Two. They'd be like, Hey, hey, hey, what the fucking nuke's.

Or do you think they're just up there going, You're going to have to save yourself, kids?

Perhaps. Maybe. Perhaps it's a process that all intelligent emerging life goes through. And then you have to let it go through the process, like you have to let your kids fall down. In contrast to all node comets, including the interstellar comet 21 Borisow, the observed spectrum of the gas plume around 31 Atlas shows prominent nickel emission, but no evidence for iron. Other than 31 Atlas, this anomaly was only known to exist in industrially-produced nickel alloy's through the Carbonal Chemical Pathway, which defines nickel through the formation and decomposition of nickel tetracarbonal. The authors of the new paper postulate that this Carbonal process is realized naturally near the nucleus of 31 Atlas, they argue that this in-situ formation of this thing predicts that nickel should be strongly concentrated near the nucleus. So it's like the whole thing is some very weird metal. That's the point. And it's also... It's weird the way it's moving. What are they saying about the way it's moving? There's something about- It was self-correcting or something. I think they thought it had some emission. I don't know. It a jet, but I don't think so. No, it did seem like they were saying that it changed.

It's very far away.

It's very far away. So maybe it's the silence coming back. They're like, We have to go save our parents. Have you seen the video of it?

You've seen they got a telescope that actually took video of it?

That's What amazes me is that we have telescopes that can see that far.

I can send it to you, Jamie. This guy has it on his Twitter page, but it's very low resolution, obviously, because it's fucking millions of miles away. But whatever it is, is It's really weird. It's really weird.

People ask me all the time if I believe in aliens, I think just because of what I do for a living in the genre that I'm in. I couldn't wait to talk to you about aliens. What I always say, you're going to be vastly disappointed that I know so little about them, but what I always say is, I think it's a line from a movie where it would be an awful waste of space if it was just us.

Yeah, that is a line in a movie. I don't remember what movie was.

It's from the movie with Jodie Foster. Contact. Contact. When her dad says to her that it would be an awful waste of space. Yeah. Beautiful movie.

It's a great movie. Carl Sagan wrote that book. That's it. So this is the thing. Like, what is that? What the fuck is this? Obviously, low resolution, obviously moving through space, but also what the hell is that?

Well, it seems to be moving pretty quickly, yeah?

Yeah, it looks like a spaceship.

I mean, it also looks like a dust bunny.

I was showing my friend Matt last night. We were having dinner, and I was showing him videos of praying mantises killing hummingbirds birds because he didn't believe it.

Stop. He was like, no way. Well, they're big. Praying mantises can be quite big, right?

Not in comparison to hummingbirds. It's crazy how strong they are.

Stop. They literally kill hummingbird?

They just snatch hummingbird right off feeders. So they sit by the hummingbird feeter, motionless, and the hummingbird comes in to take a drink and just snatches them.

What do they do with them? Eat them.

Stop. It's It's crazy. Praying mantises are so ruthless.

It makes me really sad. Well, they eat their own young, right?

They probably do. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if they do that, but I know that they put a praying mantis in a box and then they'll drop a roach in and the praying man just snatches it up and just starts eating the roach alive. It's the whole roach.

Yeah, but that doesn't make me feel bad.

But it does it to this bird.

That makes me feel bad.

But the thing is, why couldn't that be an intelligent life form from another planet? And then come here on 31 Atlas and land? I mean, that is a possibility.

Well, that's the thing, right? Is that we spend so much time, or I guess in our imagination, we've been conditioned to think that intelligent life looks like something from these movies. So we all think intelligent life is these guys with big heads or they look like us or whatever we think. But they absolutely could literally be a flee.

It could be a six-foot-tall mantis.

It could be. Yeah.

Yeah. And then we'd be in a Real trouble.

Real trouble.

Show her one of those praying mantises getting a hummingbird.

This is going to make me really sad, you guys.

It makes me sad, too. I love hummingbirds. Does it? Yes.

I love birds. Have you ever wanted to wear one of those hats with the hummingbird feeders on it?

No. Does people do that? That's so crazy.

They'll put the little things and they can just stay really still.

They're a beautiful little bird. They're gorgeous. They're a weird little bird, too. And the way they're able to change direction and move.

It's amazing. I didn't realize. Our house where we live now, they stop all the time. So they'll sit on the branches and stuff, which is really rare to see.

So this is... Praying mantises are so nasty. But look at it.

It just sit there.

Well, that one.

Oh, my God. He grabbed it by its peak.

Oh, yeah. It reached out and just snaged them. The thing is, they're so strong for their size. I mean, that is literally like a person trying to take out a cow.

Go down. There was one, that one, with the praying mantis and the- And a scorpion?

Oh, praying mantis is going to kill that scorpion. That scorpion doesn't have a fucking chance. I don't know if- That's what I'm guessing. Yeah, look, he's already on top of them. What? Yeah, he just mounted them.

But then look, he's avoiding the- Yeah, he's going to figure it out. He's also avoiding the stinger. Like, what is happening?

What is happening? They're probably both trying to figure out why they're in there together.

Oh, my God. This is the shit of nightmares for me.

Praying mantises are not. They're monsters. See if you can find videos of Praying Mantises eating roaches. There's like a whole Mantis page on Instagram where they put a different bug in there with praying mantises.

How do we know it's not AI created, though, guys?

Because this has been around for years. Praying Mantises. Oh, look, they fuck up giant lizards. They kill lizards. The lizard tried to eat him at the beginning of it? Oh, my God. If you watch the video, the actual video, the lizard tried to eat him. He's like, not today, bitch. I'll be eating you. Oh, my God. That poor lizard thought he was going to eat the praying mantis, and the praying mantis is eating him. We are so We're so lucky that they're little. We're so lucky.

We are so. I hate.

Because if they were big and smart.

No. And then there's a bird. I don't want to see the bird die.

Is he killing that bird?

Oh, my God.

The one I found, which I hadn't seen before, it's hanging upside down from a flower eating right here. Oh my God. It's a big bird, too. That is wild.

My God.

They are just monsters. I mean, that's like Alien from the movie Alien. That's what it's like. It's just little.

My entire The entire mind has been blown.

Right? Look at that. That's what a praying mantis can do. Hang upside down while it's eating a bird.

And literally hanging onto the petals of a flower.

It's nothing. Upside down. And with no strain at all.

None whatsoever.

It's carrying a fucking bird. It's like five times bigger than its body.

Like a barn swallow. It's crazy.

Oh, my God. The crazy thing is these stupid lizards that think they're going to eat them.

Oh, my God.

I mean, it is such a bizarre creature.

I don't want to see any of this. Look at that one. That poor little beauty.

Oh, they do it all the time. They get hummingbirds. So he's just... A lot of these have no action, though, too.

I've seen people trying to capture stuff.

Oh, my God. But these go back as long as YouTube does. Some of those are 15-year-old videos.

That's so sick. Those are the ones I would try. But they get them so quickly. Why do they stop moving so quickly? They're so fast. Because they're so strong, too.

That one looks fake. Ai. Now it's created within four weeks. I started going, all right. Oh, that looks like AI. Oh, yeah. That's AI. But the The other ones, those cell phone ones, are real. They're just unbelievably strong.

That's crazy. I had no idea.

If there's a spaceship filled with those fuckers, they're all smart. They're way smarter than us.

We're done. I think I saw a three-year-old boy getting ready to take on a praying mantis, too. I think he's going to lose in one of those videos. So future generations are not looking good right now. Yeah.

If you walk up to a mantis, they'll be like, What, bitch? They stand up.

They will on their hind legs. They're ready to fight.

We're just lucky they're little.

It's terrifying. It's absolutely... I'm going to go home and tell my husband all about this. Not my daughter.

They still have nightmares. So that's what they have to think about with this 31 Atlas. If it's filled with reptilians, then we got a problem. What's going on?

Oh, my God. I cannot laugh at children. Oh, no. See, I told you there was one. Oh, Jesus.

Oh, God. He's like, Fuck you. He tried to eat the baby.

He did. He tried to eat the baby.

That's how gangster praying mantises are.

Oh, my God. It went after that baby. He was like, Fuck you. I will eat your entire body.

The thing that's crazy is- Before someone comes to rescue. We don't think of them as being like, vicious.

No, I look at them and think that they're super cool. I would have been that three-year-old kid. If I'd ever seen one in our yard, I would have been like, Hey, honey.

A regular green mantis. There are some wild mantises out there.

Stop. There's more?

There's a kung fu mantis. Wow. Look at that one. Oh my God. Those are beautiful. What is that one called? Kang fu Mantis? What a beautiful-looking insect. Just imagine a planet where that's the size of a horse.

No, we're fucked if that's what's on this copper thing that's coming toward Earth.

We just got super lucky that the insect world is small. It's true. Somehow or another, it worked out that way, where the insect world is small. Because if the insect world was as big as the mammal world, it would be a wash.

It would be over. Like if they were the size of elephants?

Well, if they were the size of dogs, they'd kill us all.

That's true.

Look at what that fucking one praying mantis can That's true. Look at that one. It looks like a flower.

That's a praying mant. What is that thing?

Yeah, that's the one we were just looking at, this little guy. Yeah. And that's a bigger one. A big giant mantis.

Holy shit.

That's crazy. I don't know. We have to listen to the video to I don't know what kind it is. What is it going to do? Oh, it's heads, the white part in the front.

Yeah, that thing. That looks like a- His arms folded up. Wait, where's his arms folded up?

His arms are folded right in front. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my Stop.

Oh, my God. He just spit his head off.

Whoa. Whoa. Maybe they just made it. Who knows? Jeez.

That's what the females do after mating. They do. They just eat them.

Yeah, they fuck up the men. Yeah, but that's how you stay small. Nature's like, You're too fucking gangster. We have to keep you little.

We have to keep you. It's like Chihuahua's.

And honey badgers. Imagine if a honey badger was the size of a wolf, we'd have a real problem.

We'd have a real problem.

They had to make them little so they're so gangster. They just It never could take over the whole forest.

It's these fucking honey badgers just like...

I can imagine if a honey badger was the size of a horse and they just take over entire swaths of land. There probably were things like that.

There probably were back in the day, and now we have chickens left.

Do you have to keep up on a certain amount of sci-fi because of playing Starbucks? Do you feel like an obligation to your fans to hold on to a certain amount of sci-fi information?

Yes and no. I feel that I have to maintain and hold on to a respect for the genre and the knowledge that I will never have. That there are people that can come up to me and tell me the entire history of Star Wars. And before I was in Star Wars, I considered myself a Star Wars fan. And then I got in Star Wars, and I was like, Oh, I don't know shit about anything.

It's a big ass universe now. It Especially now. It's huge. Keeping up on mandalorian stuff.

No, you can't keep up on anything. So I always just say, I would love to know more about that. Can you please? That's good. Can you please enlighten me? Because I don't know. I really don't know. And I have found that the Sci-Fi community, especially, one of my favorite things is going to conventions because I love meeting people and new people, and meeting the people that are fans of the work, and we always have things in common. And I would be so bold as to say that Sci-Fi fans are some of the smartest people I've ever met.

I'm sure they're a lot of nerds.

They're the smartest people. They're very, very, very smart. And I cannot compete with that. I can tell you the lines that I can't forget. There are lines from Battlestar Galactica, We've got violent decompressions irradiating from the Port Flight pod. I thought it was going to be fired because I couldn't say it. I had to write it down. I had to tape it to my Viper. I was like, Oh, my God, they're going to find out. Oh, my God. I shouldn't be here. This is crazy. I'm an imposter. And then I find now I can't forget it. I had a line from Mondalorian that I couldn't remember for the life of me. And so I kept memorizing it with my husband, and he was throwing tennis balls at my face. So I was catching tennis balls as I was memorizing it because- God, was that hard? It was very hard. But it was, pirate King Dorian Shard is captaining a cumulus class corsair of violent snub fighters.

Oh, Jesus.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. It was just like- Somebody hates you in the writers room. It's possible. You never know.

That seems so mean to make someone try to say that. You say it. Fucking you say it first.

It's true. There are times I have since Ron Moore was on my podcast, and I told him that for 25 years, I have not been able to forget this fucking Violent Decompressions line. And he was like, I'm so sorry. That's hilarious. That's very funny. Because he's aware. He's aware that he's making actors say shit that you should never have to say in real life. And then furthermore, you have to try and decipher it. One of my jobs is to take something I don't understand and then say it with authority as if I do understand it. So I have to dissect it and learn what certain things mean. And if I don't understand it, I have to give it context text in something that I do understand in order to sound like I am not an idiot, which at times is hard. God, the jargon is... I learned the tennis ball technique with my husband, though. That's a great technique.

That sounds like a good technique. If you remember why you're catching tennis balls, then you really remember it. Yeah. That is a crazy sentence to try to remember.

Yeah, it was not easy.

You're a part of something in Sci-Fi that I think is very interesting. Sci-fi is, I think, the genre of action that has the most badass women.

100%, yeah. At least it did. It did for a long time.

I think the O. G. Is is obviously Sigourney Weaver.

100 %.

I mean, that is like an aside. No one is like, Oh, it's a strong female lead. That is an aside to an insane movie and an amazing performance. Like that last scene when she kills that thing? Yes. Oh.

Yeah. And that's 1979. Yes. Amazing. That character, when I saw that movie, I was like, I want to be her. Because up till then, I only wanted to be Bruce Willis. I wanted to save the Nacadomi building. I loved action movies with my dad. When he started realizing that I had this affinity toward these movies, he started showing me movies with strong female leads. And Sigourney was the one where I saw that performance, and she was everything. She was strong. She was capable. She was smart. She was feminine. She was funny. She was everything. And it was a perfect movie. It was a perfect movie. It was a perfect movie. Number two, possibly better, even.

Yeah, this is a scene which blows it out. I disagree.

You do? Yes.

Because number two, the aliens are too easy to kill. This motherfucker is so hard to kill. So hard to kill. And then in the second one, they're just gunning them down.

It's a different thing.

It's a different thing. Look, they're both great movies. I really loved Aliens. But the thing about Alien, The first one was that thing was amazing movie.

Just the way that... I mean, it's just such an amazing shot.

It's a perfect movie.

The framing of that is beautiful.

There was never one moment in that movie where you saw what was coming next.

No, because we hadn't seen anything like it. Nothing.

The chestburster scene. I remember being in the movie theater.

Look at the utter fucking exhaustion on her face.

Crazy.

Yeah.

The chestburster scene was like, What the fuck? What? I remember being in the movie theater. I had no idea that was going to happen. There was no internet back then. Yeah. Watch them like, This movie is nuts. And that little thing was running around on the ground and his chest was It burst open. It was so gross. Everyone's screaming. There's blood everywhere. It was wild.

This is probably, in my opinion, one of the best movies of all time.

Oh, I agree. 100%. And again, the fact that it was a strong female lead was just a tiny little part of the movie. It was just she was so good. You didn't even think, oh, it's a strong female lead.

You're like, well, no, because they didn't tell you this is a strong female lead.

No, exactly.

They just created a phenomenon phenomenal character and made her a woman.

Exactly. And she just played the part perfectly.

This fucking scene was so nuts.

It was so nuts because you didn't know what is happening. I know. People have to realize, like before movies were spoiled. There was no spoiler alerts back then. You didn't get to watch clips.

But even just the way it shot, the frenetic energy of the camera matching the frenetic energy of his body. Yeah.

This is such a crazy scene.

It's crazy.

Bro. Again, 1979, this is happening. I mean, the special effects back then were nuts. To have something like me. This is probably the greatest believable monster special effects in any movie up to this point. I mean, by far. That was a little bullshit. That one was like it was on wheels. That was a little silly.

It's on a piece of string. Someone's pulling it.

Yeah, it moved a little weird, but it's an alien. You were still scared of shit, though. I'm still scared. But then when you see the actual alien itself, you're like, what the hell is that? You never see anything like that before. Not only was it completely unique in its design. It was horrific, and it looked like an insect, like an insect and a reptile at the same time. Yeah.

Sci-fi was a place because I... So I was a huge fan of strong women and genre work, and I found myself gravitating toward Sci-Fi because that's where women existed that I identified with, and I saw myself. I didn't see myself was like this... Well, the characters I played when I moved to California, it didn't feel like me. I really found my calling, I guess, when I started watching those women and I loved Sarah Michelle Geller and I loved Lucy Lawless and I loved Linda Hamilton and Carrie Fisher and a lot of these women that were just really, really great characters, and they were written as great characters. And Starbucks was, and if you talk to Ron more about it, the reason why he made Starbuck and Boomer, women, he didn't think about it. He just said, Okay, we've got These are the characters from the original. These are the characters we're going to put in my version. Women are in the military. Women do exist in combat roles now, and we are making this for the early auths. We have to be representative of what the military looks like. We need to make a couple of these characters fit women.

And he just said, this one and this one. He didn't even give it any thought. And so I think part of the reason why they were so great, the characters were so great, was that they were just great characters. The writing was so great. There was never a time where they were like, She's the best female pilot around.

Like Linda Hamilton in Terminator. It's like, She's just a great character.

She's just a great character. And with a motivation that we all can identify with. And that's why she was such a great character. She opens so many doors for me because then people started to believe that I was tough.

And how many girls started doing chin-up stuff? I saw Linda Hamilton in the Terminator.

Oh my God. Please. And chin-up's so fucking hard.

She's jacked.

She's jacked.

She got so fit for that, maybe?

I did a Spartan Race with my husband because on my podcast channel, I was during COVID, and then before COVID, I was creating content. It was like Katie did stuff. I'd love to do this. Let's film it and see what it's like. So we signed for a Spartan race and then recorded the whole thing. And my husband not only ran his race, but then ran my race, too, like recording the whole thing. That's the hardest thing I've ever done, like getting in shape for that thing. I got in shape for six months before. That was hard. And getting to a point where I actually could do chin-ups and then also pull-ups, too, I was like, wow, I'm strong. I felt so strong. At one point, so I get to the actual race, and I'd been training with such heavy shit that I got to the medicine ball where you have to pick it up, carry it, and throw it and then pick it up and carry it and throw it. And it was so light for me, and I was prepared for it to be so heavy. I got to it and I picked it up and then I threw it and it kept going.

And I had to slow down because I had to go get the ball and bring it back to where it was supposed to be. I had gotten almost too strong. That's hilarious. It was really awesome. It was so fun.

It's nice to know that you can get strong, though. That feeling is a nice feeling. I wish everybody felt that.

Yeah.

Just get physically better. You'll feel better.

But I had fun doing it. You know what I mean? And I also set myself a goal. I think that's really important, too. For some people that it's daunting, is setting a goal. And the goal doesn't need to be winning. The goal just needs to be finishing.

Why do you think it is that, like Sci-Fi in particular, embraced these gangster women characters?

So my opinion on this is that I feel like because science fiction doesn't exist, because there you're existing in these make believe worlds, that strong women were not intimidating in Sci-Fi because we could be dismissed as not. But that wouldn't happen in real life.

Interesting.

So that's interesting. So men could then watch these roles.

And not be threatened.

That's my opinion.

I bet you're right. I bet that's the only thing that makes sense now that I'm thinking about it.

Yeah, I think so.

Because there's no female John Wick No.

No.

Well, there is that one.

Ballerina?

No, that one, the Emily one, the one that Kevin James was in. It's a crazy movie about this young girl who just kills all these bad guys.

I have no idea.

I love her. It's tongue and cheek. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's hyper violent. It's crazy. That's what it's called, right? Emily? I think there's two of them. There was one where they killed her dad and they killed her family, and so she killed everybody. And then the second one, she came back and killed more people. It's like a young, cute girl who just knows how to kill everybody.

I mean, look, it's fun. It's funny. It's a funny movie. When I went through What is it, Jamie?

Not Megan? Whatever Kevin James was in. It was about a young girl who kills everybody.

Kevin James?

Yeah. Kevin James was a bad guy. He played a white supremacist. That movie's called Becky. Becky. That's it. Becky. Becky. Yeah. There's a second one, though, right? Well, there's a movie called Emily, and there's a- No, what was the- Kevin James. No, it is Becky. You're right. But there was a movie before Becky, I believe.

72% on Rotten Tomat. It's pretty good.

Oh, it's fun. The Rath of Becky also came out. That's right.

I just thought ballerina. That's it. I actually thought that was really good.

I think that's the first one, right? No, this is the second one. That's the second one. I thought there was a prelude to it. Either way, fun ass movie.

Oh, Joel McHale's in it.

Yeah, he's great. It's a fun ass movie. But it's like, that's the female John Wick.

It's a little girl. Well, I think everybody's trying to create these strong female characters now. I think that one of the biggest problems with a lot of them is that they're not focusing on the character to begin with, like we talked about. Write a strong character and then just make her a woman.

Don't write a strong character that you have to have a woman.

Right. I think that's part of it because they're all trying to create. There's so many of them now, right? And I love to see them, and I love to give them chances. But a lot of times, I want to also see somebody that's believable in the role as well, right? Like, one of the funnest, the things that I love to do is transform my body depending on what character I'm playing within reason. There's only so much I can do or that I want to do. But for my show Another Life, my character wakes him from cryo. I wanted her to look like dehydrated and sinewy and really, really, really lean, almost unhealthy lean. And I got myself down to such a low body fat. It was crazy.

What did you eat to get down like that?

14: 50 a day, 15: 50 a day, something around that time when I was cutting. But I packed on muscle and then cut really hard for three weeks before. And And I was eating a lot of protein. And I got myself so low that my menstruation stopped. And I was like, oh, this is too low. This is really low. That happens with a lot of marathon runners. It does. Yeah, it was quite low. But I got to where I wanted to be. I looked the way I wanted to look. And then I naturally put on a healthy amount of weight as the series went on, which is what I wanted to do anyway. But so I want to see not someone do something detrimental to their health necessarily, but I do want to see the muscle. I want to see the capability in a character that's kicking ass.

Right. You want it to be believable. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

When they all got an insane shape for that movie, 300, Oh, my God.

It's like that would be the best job in the world for me. If they're like, we're going to give you tons of time and tons of money to just get in the best shape of your life.

Here's some trainers. We got six months.

Let's do it.

There was a lot of people that thought that they used AI for that. They used some AI for sure, because that was a crazy movie.

For 300? Yeah. Well, they used- 300 had a lot of AI because it was- I don't know.

Yeah. I don't know. Excuse me. I should say not AI. I should say CGI.

It had CGI for sure. That's what I should say.

Because obviously the giant Persian king was not really that big. There was a lot of fantasy elements of that. But I think they really did get an insane shape. And a lot of people dismissed that and said, That's CGI. But there's videos of those guys working out, getting ready. Yeah, look at these guys just going crazy, getting ready to film this movie. I mean, they trained like animals. So you could see them all working out. So they really did just develop incredible bodies, which the nutty thing is anybody can do. You just have to do it. Do what they did. You'll get a lot better.

It's a lot of hard work, though. It's not that easy. Yes, It's on paper, it's easy. But being a mom of two kids, though, and having a job, in the last two years, I'm hard-pressed to find time to work out. And I wake up at five o'clock in the morning, so I'm awake before my kids. And I choose during that time to meditate, write my journal, breathe, take time to myself, and then they wake up. I haven't quite figured out how to fit in my workouts.

Well, that's It's an obligation that's very different. You're a mother. And you're doing the absolute right thing. You're dedicating all your time to being a mom when you're there. That's just how it is. But for the amount of hours that are in a day. It would be nice if you could just get a little time to yourself. As they get older, you'll have more time to yourself, and then you'll be able to get back on track.

But for people that have the time and don't do it, that's the wasted potential of your resources.

You don't have to do a lot. Just do some body squats and do some pushups.

And you don't need a lot of equipment either. I think that's the thing. I think that we've made physical fitness in some way Because it's an industry, I think we've made it daunting for a lot of people. And I think that if you just focus on the things, the tried and true. You can do that stuff in your house without weights or with things that are heavy in your house. You can actually make progress. Sure.

And if you don't know anybody to teach you how to do stuff, all you have to do is go on YouTube. Just go on YouTube and look up beginner bodyweight workout. I'm sure there's a bunch of them out there. And you can do stuff with no physical fitness equipment. Just do push-ups and sit-ups and bodyweight squats. And you can get a great workout in that way. It's true. And nobody has to watch you. You don't have to feel self-conscious. Just you and your phone.

You can go to my YouTube channel because during COVID, I was doing my workouts, and I said to my husband, I was like, might as well record this, shouldn't put it out there. So Yeah. And all of them are fun and interesting and easy. And people still come up to me and they're like, I lost... A man came up to me at a convention the other day. He said he lost over 80 pounds doing the workouts that I put and signed up for a Spartan race. And I was like, That's awesome. I love that. That's so cool.

That's very cool. See, that's a great thing. They're your fans. They see you work, and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to work out with her. And everybody works out together.

Great.

See, that's the great use of the Internet. The Internet has a lot of great uses.

You can learn anything on the Internet.

You can learn anything. You can find out stuff, how to make things and fix things and get information about something you never thought you were interested in. Like, look, you never thought that praying mantises were so scary.

And now I know. But you know what I'm doing? What? I'm now already in my head trying to write a children's book about praying mantises. Oh, you are? I am. It's like that's my ADHD. Like, I'm already- You started once you saw that? Once I did. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah.

Well, I want a copy of that book. It'll probably be cool.

It's going to be a pop-up book. Every time you move it, the praying mantis is like...

We just, for some reason, miss them. When we're describing the most ruthless animals on Earth, we miss the praying mantis because they might be the gangster of gangsters.

I think they might be. Do they ever attack together? Do they work in coordination? That's a good question.

If they did, they'd be unstable.

Because that would be- That's Starship Troopers. That would be like if a bunch of women cycled their periods. We could take over the world.

Especially with those headsets. Get those Google headsets on.

We can really... Because then we just talk to each other. It would be on fire. We'd take over some crazy shit. For sure. That would be awesome. It would be awesome.

Well, maybe that's a good use of technology. I know you're anti-AI. Maybe for that.

I am anti-AI because I am in self-preservation mode here. I get it. I am desperate to be like, I am. I matter, damn it. Not just to my family. Right. I know.

I think we're all going to be like that soon.

I don't know. I don't think so. I think we'll always find a place. You just have to be malleable and you have to figure out where to, I don't know, adjust. Pivot. Yes.

There's going to be some pivoting for sure.

A lot of pivoting.

How often do you do your podcast?

So my podcast is once a week, every Tuesday. What's it called? It's called The Sackoff Show. It was called blah, blah, blah, but people couldn't find it. Oh, that's funny. So we just changed it to The Sackoff Show. And we're actually, like I said, doing in the new year, a Battlestar Galactica rewatch as well, because like I said, I've never seen it. So I'm curious to do that.

That's crazy. You've never seen it. The Sackoff show sounds funny, too. It's your last name, but it's also a fun name for a show.

Well, we'll see. It's got a good vibe to it. It is fun. I have It's a lot of fun. I'm just trying to be a 10th as good at it as you are, Joe. Oh, sweet. Well, you're very good at this. There's a reason why you're the best at it. You've been doing it a long time, and you worked your ass off.

Well, I'll just tell you what I did. I just talked to people that I'm interested in. That's it. That's all you have to do.

I do that. It's really hard to find the right audience in an oversaturated market, but it's happening.

It is oversaturated.

It is.

But it doesn't mean it's inaccessible. If you're remarkable, you could pop through. And sometimes maybe it just takes coming on here and then people hear about it and go watch it.

And then we're like, who's Katie Sacko? She's that chick from Out of the circle,.

But you seem like you'd be an awesome podcaster.

I have fun. I love talking to people. And it literally helped me figure out that I was ADHD because I couldn't not talk on top of people. I was like, I listened. I did. My first interview was Bryce Dallas-Houard. God love her. And I listened to it back in the car with my husband, and I was like, Oh, my God. I don't stop talking.

Do you wear headsets?

I do. You do?

I do. That helps a lot because you hear the over-talking, which we all tend to do sometimes accidentally, because sometimes you don't know when to come in. But it's a learned skill. It's a learned skill like everything else. It's like everything else. You have to learn different people, learn the dance of different people. Some people have just a different thing. And always In my mind, my number one goal is to try to get the most out of them, get them to have the most fun, the most...

Yeah.

Get the questions that stir their interest the most. Like something, I want to know who you are, for real, for real. I want to help you be the best version of you that you can when you're doing it.

That's my thing as well. One of the things that came out of COVID for me was that, and I don't know about you, but I had weekly conversations with girlfriends. I hadn't talked to in years. And we would like every Tuesday at four o'clock, we'd have a drink and connect again. And the conversations were wonderful because we had the time to have them again. And then I started going back to conventions. And in the green room, I was having these wonderful conversations with people. And I was like, God, I wish I could record these because they're really authentic. And you're getting to see people in a very different light. And they're really opening up because it's not like a got you podcast. If you want to cut something out, you can cut something out. I'm not here to ruin your career. And the conversations are really interesting. And people are talking about things that they've never spoken about. And it's just really fun. So I've really enjoyed it.

Well, don't you think you're learning in the process as well? Is not one of the more fun parts of it? The more you get to talk to interesting people, the more you learn, the more you understand how other people think and how they feel about stuff.

Yeah. And it inspires this shit out of me. If I have a month where I'm not hustling and someone comes on the podcast and they're like, I got six things in production. I'm doing this. I wrote an album. I got a book coming out. Man, I got six kids. I'm like, Fuck.

I have to work harder. There's a balance to be had, though, isn't there?

Oh, of course there is. And I think that I've found the right balance. I have the right partner that's super supportive and we're a real good team. I think I've got the right balance, but there's always going to be hustle in me. Of course.

You seem like you're well balanced, though. That's a good thing to say.

I try. You should ask my husband. He'll be like, That bitch is crazy. What?

I'm just going to go on my instinct. I don't want to hear any contrary data. Well, thank you very much for being here. This is a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. Oh, thank you for having me. I was a huge fan of you on the show. Thank you.

It was cool to meet you. Well, more things to come. I promise. I've got some really cool jobs in the can that are going to be me kicking ass again. Cool. Well, let's do it again. Let's do it again sometime.

I'd love to have you in here again.

I would love that. You'll have to come on my podcast. I will do it.

I'll do it. Bye, everybody. Bye.