Transcript of #2532 - Tim Robbins

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All right, Jamie's very geeked out, I want to let you know. He didn't want to say it. Shawshank is his all-time favorite movie, so he was kind of freaking out when he met you.

Thanks, Jamie.

No problem. I mean, thank you. It's all-time— I mean, you're, you're a part of one of, like, easily one of the greatest movies. In the history of people.

I know, it's such a gift. I mean, when people come up and say something about it, it usually is coming from a pretty deep place, you know?

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

Yeah, and in the same novella, there was, uh, Stand By Me too.

Oh wow, that's amazing. So weird, he writes— his stuff varies so much. He had to do like a pseudonym at one point in time, remember? He did Richard Bachman. Yeah, because he was churning out so many books. So like, hey, we can't keep selling these fucking Stephen King books. And he's like, well, how would I come out with another name? Like, give me a fake name. And he just started killing it under a fake name.

Just gotta keep writing, gotta, gotta, gotta.

Yeah, wild, wild guy, man. Yeah, just a very unusual human. You know, they exist.

Yeah, I've only met him once.

Really?

Yeah.

Did you meet him like when you were filming the movie?

Around the premiere time.

Yeah. Yeah, so he's out there, man.

Yeah.

You know, during his early days— I'm fascinated by his early days because his early days, he was off the rails with cocaine and alcohol, and some of the best shit that he made, he doesn't even remember writing it.

Wow.

I think Cujo, I think is one of the books his wife took out of the garbage because he threw it away. He's like, fuck this book, this book sucks. It was Cujo or one of the classics.

Yeah.

And she was like, are you out of your fucking mind? Like, this is incredible. And he was literally gonna throw it out because he was just out of his mind.

He wrote The Shining, right? Yeah.

So what was it, Carrie? Yeah, he threw Carrie away.

Crazy. No way.

Crazy.

That's crazy. Yeah, Shining was a big movie for me— a big book for me. I was, you know, working in a 9-to-5 job and, you know, in between colleges, and it really, like, woke me up to all kinds of great possibilities in writing.

Well, he hated the movie, which is so crazy, because he felt like Jack Nicholson got insane too quickly.

Really?

Yeah, because in the book, you know, I read the book too, it's— Very different, similar, but it's more of a drawn-out process of him becoming possessed by the property.

A slower rollout.

Yeah, he, like, Jack Nicholson was kind of kooky already, like, right away, which, you know, it's Jack Nicholson. Like, it's also Stanley Kubrick. It's like, he's got to do his interpretation of it. You just got to accept that.

Of course. Yeah, that's some scary shit in that.

Fuck, man, his books are insane. Yeah, it's like, what is going on inside that guy's mind, or was going on inside that guy's mind when he was writing them?

God knows.

I think once he got clean, he kind of changed and straightened out and different, different human now. But boy, I'm fascinated by the off-the-rails days because the books were so nuts.

Was, was Shawshank during that time?

I don't know, it must have been. It must have been, 'cause I don't think he got sober until— it was decades after his career began.

Wow.

Some of the great stuff, like— I think The Stand, I think all that stuff, he was out of his mind when he was writing all those.

But in the midst of all that madness, there's a tenderness, you know? Oh, yeah.

Oh, a great humanity to it all.

Yeah.

Yeah, but also just a true understanding of the darkest nature of humans and—

Yeah.

And how they're influenced. And then of course, you know, demonic possession and Salem's Lot and all that other crazy shit. It was like, he was just so good.

But then the idea that a library can be the, you know, in Shawshank, that the library can be the liberation.

Yeah, yeah, no, it was amazing, amazing movie. We were talking about your new show Silo, which I did— not new, it's been around for 3 seasons. I just started watching it, so it's new to me. I watched the first 2 episodes last night. It was fucking great. And if very original and interesting. And I was telling you before that it made me think of this place that they discovered fairly recently in Turkey called Derinkuyu. And Derinkuyu is this underground city that's massive. I think it could hold 20,000 people.

Wow.

Something nutty like that.

I've seen pictures of it. Yeah.

Found completely by accident.

Yeah.

So some guy lost one of his chickens, went through a hole in the wall, and never came back. And he was trying to figure out where this fucking chicken went, so he broke down the wall to see what was going on, and then they realized that there's this insane underground city.

Oh my God.

Yeah, underneath this town in Turkey, and it's massive, just absolutely massive. They have no idea who made it. There's no historical record of it.

Any idea of when?

Well, you know, they make guesses based on stuff they find there,— but it's when you carbon date an object, right? So, you could go visit the pyramids today, right? And you could leave behind some stuff, right? And then, everybody dies, humanity dies out in a cataclysm, and then 100,000 years from now, people start looking through the piles of some of these sites, and the pyramids will probably still be there. And if there was any organic material left, like a book that you left or, you know, a leather-bound book or some piece of wood they could carbon date that, and then that would say the time that you were there, but it wouldn't say the time that the actual structure was made. So who knows how long people— Show me some more pictures of that, please. I was looking up when it was made. Do they know? No, definitely don't know. They didn't even know it existed. I mean, it was— When was it found? I feel like it was found in the 20th century.

There must have been some kind of hostile force that they built it to escape from.

Exactly, or something going on outside. And not just hostile but environmental. So 1963, rediscovered in 1963.

Wow.

That's crazy. It was in his fucking house. Even today, only 10% of it is accessible to tourists. The rest is still being explored. That's how nuts it is. So how many people do they think it held when it was operational? I think it's something like 20,000 people. That's how big this place is.

That's amazing.

So they don't know when or why, and depending on how— around 20,000 people.

Plus livestock.

Plus livestock and food stores.

Really? How'd they farm down there?

Who fucking knows? I don't know, but they had grain storage. They had all kinds of stuff down there.

Oil presses.

18 levels reaching 85 meters. So 280 feet deep into the ground with ventilation shafts, wells, stables, wine and oil presses, storage rooms, chapels, and schoolrooms, plus half-ton circular stone doors that could be rolled shut from the inside only. So they were obviously either fighting off some sort of an army or the outside air was hostile. There was something going on.

Got too hot or something.

Could have been.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, there's been many moments in the, the time that human beings were alive where there have been cataclysms. You know, there's this thing called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory that's around 11,800 years ago. There's all this evidence that there was massive asteroid impacts all over the Earth, comet impacts, and they think that it was probably a reset of civilization. And so this could have been post that. It could have been how some people survived in, in these areas.

Human beings have this amazing ability to survive. Yeah. I mean, you know, which is Silo.

I mean, it's really a— Silo is a modern version of Darren Koody.

Yeah. Yeah. And here I was, you know, in the middle of lockdown when I received those scripts, and I was like, oh, this is actually talking about right now. Yeah. This is about a controlled society where information is censored and where Compliance is necessary, and if you don't comply, you get sent out into the hostile environment. It was all too familiar metaphorically for me.

Perfect timing.

Yeah, perfect timing.

Because you gotta think that he must have written that before, right?

Yeah, many years ago.

So it was just— got lucky.

Yeah, yeah.

Perfect synchronicity.

Here we go.

Yeah.

I've been blessed that way in my career, yeah.

What do you think that's about? Do you ever wonder why you're so lucky? Obviously you're very talented, but it's also— there's a lot of talented people that don't— nothing ever happens for them.

I think it comes down to the ability to say no at crucial times. When I was facing down either, you know, you know, I remember when I first had my first child and I was broke and I got offered this comedy that was dumb, and it was a million bucks, and I needed the money. And I also had an opportunity if I waited. Robert Altman was trying to put together The Player. So I threw caution to the wind and said, no, I can't do that stupid comedy.

What was the stupid comedy?

Do you remember? Uh, yeah, it was called Folks. I remember flying out to LA to meet on it, and I'm with Alan Arkin, and he was the guy that was gonna play my father in this thing, and he said, "What the fuck are you doing this script for?" I said, "I need the money." He says, "I don't know. I'm not sure I wanna do this thing." Right? I was like, "Thank you, Alan Arkin, for confirming what I was thinking." Wow. Yeah. And so I said no, and then— —player came through and shifted my whole career.

Yeah, it's a matter of following that voice in your head, the instinct, the one that's telling you this is the right way to go. Yeah. Even though there's all sorts of influence that want to lead you into the other direction.

There was a period of time about 10, 15 years ago when I got offered in the course of 7 months, I got offered to play the head of the CIA 3 times. You ever wonder what that's all about? I couldn't even imagine. I mean, for some reason that was— I don't know. I have no idea. And then a couple years after that, and again, you know, you're looking down at your bills and your mortgages and stuff and you need the money and just have to— I don't want to do that, right? Then a few years after, a couple years after that, I got offered in the course of a couple months, one, to play the head of FIFA. Which is a corrupt organization, but in the movie it was, you know, they were the best people in the world, right? Propaganda. Not to mention that the head of FIFA was a Brazilian, and I had, you know, but they were offering a ton of money, and basically it was FIFA producing a movie about itself. Oh, wow. And after that, I got an offer to play the head of the Chilean mine that had just had this huge disaster, and it turns out the mining company was They were really nice people, you know, according to the script.

And it wasn't bad management or anything, or, you know, that made the disaster happen. So, I realized that the oligarchs are starting to make movie about themselves. It's oligarchical cinema. It's like they produce movies that make themselves look really good.

And you can get away with it.

Oh, hell yeah. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. And they think they can buy anybody. And they almost bought me, but I just, I have to— At times I just have to look, you know, face it down and say, listen, it's not right in my heart. I can't do it.

Yeah, well, that's great that you've got that North Star.

It's great that I had the luxury to do that. Oftentimes people don't have that luxury.

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

There were TV shows and movies, yeah.

Was any of it any good? No.

I remember when we were doing movies like, you know, The Day of the Condor, you know, which was like critical of the CIA. And I think now we have the rogue CIA agents that are actually good guys. And, you know, listen, CIA, you know, Whatever it does, nobody really knows the extent of what they do, but they do have a lot of good portrayals in the media.

Yeah, well, I think there's good people that are in the CIA as well. Of course, of course. And I think that it's necessary. I just think that they obviously have unchecked power and they've done some really fucking shady shit. Yeah. You know, in the name of this is the right thing to do right now. Including selling drugs.

Yeah, you know, I remember that. Iran-Contra.

I remember that. That's one of the— I mean, I remember that because I was— gosh, I guess I was either right out of high school, it was like in that area where the whole Oliver Stone thing was on television all the time. And it was Oliver North.

Oliver North. Excuse me.

Yeah, Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. And there was this guy, Jimmy Tingle, hilarious Boston stand-up comedian who had a great joke about it. Where they're interviewing Ronald Reagan, and they say, "Mr. President, did you ever sell arms to people who hate us?" And he's like, "I don't remember." He goes, "Well, in the future, if you sell arms to people who hate us, jot it down.

Make a note of it." He goes, "Put a Post-it on your refrigerator.

Today, I sold arms to Iran." I remember that.

That was in the '80s. I did a play about it. I wrote a play about it. Really? And we performed it with the Actors Gang, yeah.

There was a meme that was on social media recently that was— it showed Oliver North during the whole Iran-Contra trials when, you know, they got caught selling drugs in Los Angeles to fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And then he goes to jail. And then the same guy you see later on Fox News as like a war analyst. And it's like this hilarious meme. Like, if you told me— if you told me in 1980, whatever the fuck it was, it was where, you know, he got in trouble, that he would eventually be the guy that they call upon for expert advice on what's going on overseas.

Like, yeah, it's a deep connection that goes back years. All the people that get it wrong, they get— they got— particularly Iraq War, they got— anyone that got it wrong got promotions.

Yeah. And no one got in trouble.

No one got fired. You know, people in the media as well. You know, they promoted it.

They got, you know, better jobs. Well, this is kind of the only time in our lifetimes where there's actual real independent media, you know, where there's independent journalists that are not connected to any major corporations that are operating either on Substack or online or on YouTube or on X. It's fascinating because they, they're the ones that are exposing all these connections that the media and the Central Intelligence Agency and all these other government organizations have had. Where they've all been working together forever, spinning narratives on TV. And so like any time something like the Iraq War happens where they go, oh, we've got weapons of mass destruction, we got to go in there. No weapons of mass destruction. No one, no one goes away. No one gets in trouble. And the same people are on TV telling you about some new thing that you have to pay attention to. It's like, this is nuts. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America.

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Well, some people get in trouble, people that come up out against it, right? And there's never any apologies. I, I did, I did. I, you know, I risked, you know, a lot to do it and, uh, you know, wound up being right, but no one ever said, hey, you were right, you know.

And this was during the Iraq War. Yeah. What did you say?

I, I was one of maybe 5 people that were famous that came out against that war. Went on, you know, in various television shows and made a couple speeches. I got my appearance at the Baseball Hall of Fame for Bull Durham, 15th anniversary or something like, canceled by the head of the the Baseball Hall of Fame. It was a real, uh, you know, it was funny because I was, I was doing a show at the time and, uh, I heard about it and I had, I started writing a response, but, uh, it was already printed by the time I had my response. Right. So I got the next day, I got a bunch of, um, people contacting me. I hired a crisis PR person for the first time in my life. And, uh, Wound up getting my letter to Dale Petroski, the head of the Hall of Fame, out there with the press release. They were basically ambushed, trying to call me a traitor and all this stuff. Wow. And so I pushed back, and the publicist that I had hired was very smart. He said, we're going to send this to all the sportswriters.

And it was the sportswriters that wrote the articles defending freedom of speech. Wow. At the time, so it was—

What year was this? Is this right after 9/11?

This was right when we were cooking up the war, 2003. So, and I remember, you know, and I also wrote a piece about that called Embedded that we performed for the first time 3 weeks after Bush landed on that aircraft carrier with the mission accomplished thing. So that wound up playing at —across the country. We toured it and played the New York Public Theater and played in London. But it was attacked when we went to New York, you know. They sent someone from— that wasn't a theater critic, while we were still in previews, and published this thing in, I think it was The New Republic, basically calling me a conspiracy theorist, anti-Semite, all this stuff to try to discredit this play that was playing. At the public hearing.

How did they connect anti-Semite?

You know, that doesn't matter. That's what they throw out. There was nothing anti-Semitic about the plot. Of course. It's one of the things they use to discredit people.

What did you know about— so what made you compelled to come out against the war?

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

You're over the mark.

When I came out against that first war in Iraq in '91, I remember the elder Bush said, well, you know, this is a democracy, people have the right to oppose it, and that was their response. But this one was like, you're a traitor, you're a Saddam supporter, terrorist sympathizer, all that stuff. They really attacked. And that told me that I was probably over the target, you know? Yeah.

That had to be, a very disturbing moment because look, it turns out you were right. And not only were you right, but now today in 2026, it's universally accepted that there were no weapons of mass destruction. That was a terrible war. And it was not something that should have ever happened. Yeah. Universally. Yeah. If you said it today, it's not even remotely controversial. Yeah.

Well, that's the way it works. They finally admit the truth later. You know, I think they're doing that now with COVID you know, the Fauci's gonna do his thing tomorrow. Yeah, very curious to see what happens with that.

So, well, they don't give you a universal pardon for 10 years if you didn't do something. I mean, you don't, you don't campaign for that if there's not some, some smoke.

Yeah, that was a very scary time. You know, it was, you know, to come out when, when people, when, when the, when the media is attacking you It's a very scary thing, but the great good fortune I had in 2003, so I was living in New York at the time, right? So I would have to walk my kids to school, and I remember thinking, oh my God, what's going to happen? You know, are there going to be people yelling at me, etc.? And that wasn't the truth. The truth was that people, if anything, said, you know, way to go. Right. Thanks for speaking for us. And if they disagreed, they said, "You know, you have the right to do it." That's the way generally people are in this country. And should be. And I usually would take, every year I would take my kids to the Final Four, and that year it was in San Antonio, and I remember thinking, "Oh my God, I'm going down to Texas and they're gonna yell at me down there," and no one said a damn thing. So the reality on the ground was a lot different than the reality they were creating.

The reality they were creating was to intimidate other people into silence. It wasn't based on any kind kind of real reality of people being angry at me. It was more them trying to intimidate others. And so that same thing kind of happened. I recognized that same smell when COVID was happening, when people came out and started asking questions and were deplatformed or marginalized or canceled. And, you know, I followed what you were going through with the ivermectin, which was a drug that I had taken and, you know, I had lost my sense of smell and a day later it was back. So I knew there was something going on with that. And, you know, in an emergency, why not find whatever you can treat until your magic potion arrives? You know? It wasn't just that.

It was like the completely disingenuous characterization of it as a veterinary drug. And calling it horse paste or horse dewormer, which is crazy. It's crazy to— because maybe that would have worked in 1980, where people would have to go to the encyclopedia to find out what ivermectin really was. But when you're trying to do that in 2020, it's just too easy to look up, oh, look, it got a Nobel Prize for use in human beings. Oh, it's great for yellow fever and dengue fever and river blindness. And oh, this has been used billions of times. Oh, it's one of the safest. Oh, wait a minute. It's in the World Health Organization's essential medicines list. Yeah, this is crazy. Yeah. But yet on television, it's horse dewormer. Right. And even the Rolling Stone had an article where they showed people waiting in line. They said that people in Oklahoma were waiting in line at the emergency room with gunshot wounds because they couldn't get in there because so many people were overdosing from ivermectin. Right. Which is just fake. Yeah. And it's in the Rolling Stone, and you're like, what is going on? This is, this is insane.

Even the photograph was fake. The photograph showed people wearing winter coats because really the line was people waiting for a flu shot. That was the actual line, right? And they were trying to say that these are people waiting in line to go to the emergency room for gunshot wounds. Like, first of all, how many fucking people are getting shot in Oklahoma? Like, what's going on over there?

Are you— there was some fights on the streets, wild stuff going on at the time. You know, the disinformation and the—

Yeah, and just orchestrated propaganda, orchestrated, organized, with big money behind it. Wild, wild to watch.

I suspect that that whole period of time was another way to divide us, you know, in the larger picture, you know, orchestrated chaos masquerading as a revolution. You know, there's been so many of those things over the past 5 years, you know, alliances that you're building and then all of a sudden there's a new crisis and now you don't like those people that you were building alliances with. And it's just one after the other. And ultimately, at the end of the day, I think it's all about division. It's all about dividing us and making us argue with each other, not finding common ground. That's ultimately the strategy that's been used from time immemorial, you know, for the power to stay in power. How do you get people fighting with each other? Right.

Yeah, people don't like to hear that, but that's a strategy that's been used all throughout history. And it's a good one. And it works. Yeah, it works. And especially in today's day and age when you have social media and then you have not just our government, but many governments that have fake accounts and these people just get outraged about things or attack things or, you know, have a narrative that they push. And you don't know if it's real people. You don't know what it is. It's just a bunch of accounts. You go to the accounts, a guy's face, you know, it's a woman wearing a dress, holding a book. She seems normal. Meanwhile, it's a man somewhere with a bank of computers that are all connected to the internet that's typing in these different responses with a bunch of different— or now it's AI automated. Yeah. You know, you tell this bot to be a right-wing nationalist that's like attacking anything that's Yeah, it's crazy.

And it's on both sides and it's nuts. I was over in London doing a project and I noticed— this was during their lockdown— and I noticed by my hotel there was this protest and I went down to check it out, put my mask on. I was very compliant at the start of all this. And I noticed, you know, what they were portraying as National Front right-wingers was actually hippies and homeopaths and free speech activists. And I talked to to them. And I tweeted, hey, I don't think it's a right-left thing here. And hundreds of attacks, whether they're bots or, you know, organized army of, you know, righteousness, I have no idea. But it was— I just, at that time, at that point, I was like, fuck it, I'm not gonna put my foot in this water. These people are nuts. This is a crazy, crazy time.

Yeah, it was crazy not just from the propaganda perspective, but from actual people that I knew that were really terrified that got caught up in it all. And it was, you know, mass formation psychosis is what some people called it. Yeah, I think that's a good description of— Robert Malone, I think, termed that, or got that from somebody else. But that, that's really what it was. Like, everybody just kind of went nutty. And there was people that were doing the government's job for the government, or the pharmaceutical drug company's job for them. They, they were the, the ones that were forcing all these things. Yeah. And they were doing it because they wanted to be— they wanted a solution, they wanted to be correct. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people in this world that don't experience much real adversity. And when real adversity comes at them, they fall apart. And they don't know what to do. And they get scared. And they lump up together in teams, and then they reinforce each other and repeat the same things. And they all want to be a part of the right side of history or the right side of whatever it is.

And also, they're being led to believe that that's the virtuous thing to do. And, you know, so it's not like they're— you know, their intentions are good. And because of that, you know, I've had a similar experience where, you know, friends of mine and people I love that, you know, fell into that, as I did. I fell into it for a while, you know, that kind of fear-based kind of behavior. And I just— I've come to— understand in my later years that one of the things that's truly liberating is the ability to say, "I don't know." Yeah. And, "I may have been wrong." These are two things that have led to such great discovery for me. It's, I really don't trust anymore, I don't trust virtuous experts, I don't think, I don't think experts are— I don't believe in experts. I think if you consider yourself an expert, you're done learning. You're done speaking with others. You're done challenging yourself. And when we put our faith and trust in people that are deemed experts, it ultimately, throughout my experience, it's led to bad things. The experts that talked about weapons of mass destruction, the experts that talk about, you know, various things that have led us to violent altercations throughout the world, I don't trust them anymore.

I trust the idea that there are many sides to a story and that there is very— there's a lot to be gained from having dialogue with people you disagree with. Absolutely.

I mean, you know, there are experts in some fields and we do need them. It is important. Like if you want information about the Large Hadron Collider, you don't understand like, what are you guys doing over there? Like you need to talk to someone who actually understands it, who's an expert on particle colliders, you know, and it takes a long time to develop that sort of knowledge base and have an understanding of what they're actually trying to accomplish. What is the Higgs boson? What was this particle that— So part of that— what? So the earliest stages of the universe? Okay. You're going to measure it?

I'll be in the bar.

It exists for a quarter of a second or something like that? What? What are you guys doing? Yeah, but the problem is, like, to bring it back to COVID, one of the things that Fauci said that was so wild, he said, when you are criticizing Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science. Yeah. Well, that is one— just the fact that he felt so confident that he could say that, that is such a crazy thing to say. And then science became like an object. It became a religion. Well, science is supposed to be data. It's supposed to be measuring data, and it's supposed to never be settled. And it's always supposed to have a bunch of people from various, various positions of viewing down on this thing, analyzing it with new studies, new data, new tests, new hypothesis, working out and communicating with each other. It's not supposed to be a brick. Like, you know, like this is a brick. If you question the brick, like, no, no, no, this is a fucking fluid thing that exists only if you allow people to ask questions. The moment you stop questioning data, then like, and even real experts, like guys from MIT and Harvard were getting deplatformed off of Twitter because they didn't believe it.

They were saying, look, I don't think this lockdown idea is a good idea. I think it's bad for children. I think children aren't even really susceptible to this disease. Like, why are we doing this? Like, what's going on?

It became a faith. It became dogma. And if you question the dogma, you were a heretic. You were kicked out of the religion. It was a scary time and still is scary. You know, we deal— The Actors Gang, my nonprofit in Los Angeles, we have education programs and we've been dealing with the ramifications of that lockdown for the last 5 years. These kids that had 2 years robbed of them from socialization and education.

Imagine that was your senior year of high school too.

Oh my God. Fuck. We're dealing with the aftereffects of that, and gratefully, the kind of work we do brings them out again and gets them expressing emotions, making eye contact, having experiences with other children that are productive, and the good news is you You can get out of that funk, but it was really scary to see those kids walk into classes after that lockdown because they wouldn't make eye contact, looking at the floor, you know, kind of desocialized and traumatized. And, you know, it was really scary.

Critical development time for them. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And all of a sudden they're wearing— like, imagine being a toddler and all of a sudden everyone has a mask on.

And it's weird. You, you don't want to wear the mask.

They keep trying to take it off and people yell at them, put it back on. So it's like terror and anxiety and confusion. Also, you're not reading people's faces, which is like an important part of the developmental process. You get to know people, you read faces, you see how people talk. All of a sudden everyone's wearing a mask, everyone's robbing a bank.

Like, this is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've tried to approach it all with just the openness and compassion for people that went through that. You know, I don't attach blame. I don't, you know, everyone— there was a pretty sophisticated propaganda machine that was happening, and I have great compassion for people that fell into that. And I, you know, I just want us to not do it again. You know, I want us to have the knowledge and the— the consciousness to not fall for that again.

Yeah, hopefully. It's just— it was very eye-opening that it was so easy to pull off, you know, that it was so easy to get people to just gang up like that.

It was just— It said a lot about us. Yeah. Unfortunately. And, you know, I hold faith in humanity, but that was a tough one.

I do as well, and I think it was a learning moment for a lot of people, whether they admit to it or not, whether they're public about it or not, because I know a lot of people that just weren't public about their dissent, but they really didn't like any of it, and they just didn't really have a position to talk about it. And they wanted to keep their job and wanted to keep their place in the community or whatever it was that they were trying to protect, and they kept their mouth shut. But you get a couple of drinks in them when they were alone, They would tell you.

Well, that begs the larger question is, you know, is it freedom of speech if when you freely speak, your job is threatened and your future is threatened? Is that— are we living in a free society? You know, right. It's— and that's still— that's not just COVID. That's a lot of things.

That's a lot of things. It's almost everything. It's one of the most important things that we do is we disagree. We talk. You have conversations and—

It's the only way to learn.

And you get exposed to information that maybe you didn't know before you establish this opinion that you're arguing.

Do you know what was the big tragedy, in my opinion, during that time period is that we totally lost the water cooler conversation. That accidental conversation that happens at work with a coworker who you don't necessarily agree with, but it's a human being expressing something to you in person, and you have to deal with that person and their opposing viewpoint. Yeah. We got into our own silos of thought and algorithms of thought, and everything we experienced during that period of time was an affirmation of what we believed. Believed, rather than a challenge to it. Yeah. And so the water cooler was completely eliminated, the idea that the accidental conversation at a bar where you're, you know, watching a game on the television and someone sits next to you that is not necessarily of your belief system, but you buy them a beer and you watch the game together. Yeah. All these moments of of meeting up that were eliminated. And, you know, that's what I love about sports. I love that you can go watch a game and not think about politics or not think about your differences and think about the team that you like and support them together.

Same thing with theater or any kind of gathering of individuals, music. You— what I love about the theater that we do is that we're able to take people to a common emotion. And we never want to have a completely— we don't want audiences that think the same, right? You want a disparate amount of people, different beliefs, that you can get them to share a common emotion, get them to laugh together, get them to feel something and cry together. That's the community you're able to build when you're doing a show, as you know. You know, what really pissed me off was that when we had a— we have a theater in Los Angeles, and it was 2 years we had to be closed. And a year and a half in, we were told we could open, but we'd have to check vaccine passports at the door. And I talked to some people at the theater, and we agreed it was, "No, we can't do that." because what that is doing is it's basically saying the only people allowed in our theater are people that agree with what the government wanted. And that for me is not a theater.

That betrays the whole purpose and function of what a theater should be. It's a gathering place for the community that might think differently to bring them together. Yeah. And this was saying basically, if you agree, you can come in. And that— so we waited another 6 months before we opened the theater until everyone could come in.

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

You could have infected the entire Madison Square Garden.

I could have been a super spreader.

Yeah. Well, you know, in London, because I spent a lot of time over there the last 5 years, but their West End rebounded immediately, unlike Broadway. And the reason it did is because during that time period, you could show a vaccine passport, but you could also show a negative test. So they didn't demand that you have a vaccine. So they didn't lose their audience. Their audience came right back. And in Broadway, they basically told a third of their audience, "You're not welcome." And so, I can see why it might have been a struggle to get those people back into the theater. Well, it was crazy.

It didn't make any sense. Like, if the people are negative, they're negative. What do you give a shit if they're vaccinated? Also, what about people that got COVID and then recovered from it who have far superior immunity, 7x superior immunity to people who are vaccinated? Like, what are we doing here? Like, this is You are— you, you're doing the pharmaceutical drug companies' work for them. Yeah, yeah, and you're making people follow along and in lockstep, and it's just nuts. It just didn't even make sense that people are going along with this. Yeah.

Well, glad that's in the rearview mirror. Yeah, for now.

But you know, I feel like it's a case study in a lot of— let me— if there are people that are manipulating society, and I think there are, there's a lot of lessons that they learn from how we behave. And, you know, relatively speaking, without making light of the pandemic, relatively speaking, a fairly mild pandemic in terms of like, you know, the bubonic plague and all sorts of other things that have happened throughout history, the Spanish flu have killed way more people. Like, it could have been way worse, right? So just one that was just twice as bad as the flu got people to behave like that. Yeah, yeah.

Well, the good news is, though, the uptake wasn't, you know, a lot of people took it because they had to. It wasn't like enthusiastically taking it. We did a play called Topsy Turvy, which was about lockdown, and we performed that in Eastern Europe, and it was really interesting to see their response there. Because one of them said afterwards, you know, I asked, you know, what was the uptake on the vaccines in Romania? And they said something like 40%. I said, well, how do you explain that? And they said, well, you know, we lived under the Soviet Union for many years, so we know how to look like we comply when we're not complying. And I said, what else reminds you of the Soviet Union? They said, without a doubt cancel culture. I said, why? He said, well, Soviet Union used to keep files on all of us, right? So as long as you're a good party member, there wouldn't be a thing said. Yeah. But once you stepped out of line, they brought out that old file. Now that affair with your secretary from 30 years ago, it's gonna ruin your life. They're gonna ruin your family, they're gonna kill your career, and they're gonna make a big public display of it.

To show other people to stay in line. And they felt like cancel culture was basically operating in the same way as the Soviet Union did. And it was really interesting to see that perspective in Eastern Europe, people that have, you know, lived under that kind of oppressive situation and their perspective on modern day.

That must have really made you think about what happened to you during the Iraq War. Yeah. —right? That in particular, because back then there's no real social media. There's no real way to get your message out.

Oh man, they lied. They made up things. They made up this— I was doing this play, Embedded, at the time at the Public Theater, and we'd go out afterwards, and the New York Post wrote that I was making out with a woman under a palm tree at this club. And I It was just— they just made it up and got me, and, you know, didn't really help my marriage at the time. And, you know, they just lie. They basically lie. You know, they'll attack you.

They just decided you were an enemy and they were going to pull out whatever stops they could.

They're going to discredit you in whatever way they can. Wild. Yeah, that's a powerful thing when it hits you and you realize, oh my God, the truth doesn't matter here.

Yeah, well, that's what's so scary about it is that in this country where freedom of speech is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of our society, in our society. It's one of the most important things we all recognize that separates us from everywhere else in history. Like, this is the first country where really it's written into the doctrine of the country. You're supposed to have the freedom, the ability to express yourself, and that this is being attacked and suppressed in all sorts of different ways, not just stopping your ability to express yourself, but attacking you in a concerted effort and lying about you, just lying about you in order to scare other people. It's very Orwellian and it's very American. And the fact that like the New York Post would do that to you, or whoever it was from the New York Post would do that, like, what the fuck, man?

Well, the good news is there's no gulags. Yeah, you know, they don't arrest you in the middle of the night and, right, force you into some kind of prison, you know, thousands of miles away.

Sure, it could be worse. Yeah, yeah, but it's not, it's not along the line of the American way of life, you know, and And if you are a person who really does appreciate what this experience and this experiment in self-government, which is the United States, it's supposed to have free discourse. That's a big part of it. The Founding Fathers recognized that you've got to have the ability to talk about things. Right. And if you don't, we're fucked, because if someone can tell you what you can and can't say, that's step one. And then everything else falls in line after that. And next thing you know, you've got a dictatorship. Right.

And there's people that have, you know, lost opportunities or, you know, in show business that recently that including my ex Susan Sarandon, who, you know, was against what was happening in Israel and lost her agent and, you know, having a hard time finding work. This is crazy. This is nuts.

Yeah. And especially someone like Susan Sarandon, like one of the most respected and established actors of many generations. Like she's been around forever. The fact that a take on something that if you're just looking at it, like what is— what are you— how could you defend that? Like, how could anybody defend that? Right. I don't even know how many people are dead. You have a complete wipeout of a city, like 90% of Gaza is gone. Or whatever the percentage is. You look at the buildings, you look at what it used to look like, you look at what it looks like now, like this is defensible?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think the point of it is to make a show of it and to say, see, we could do that to her so we could do it to you. So shut the fuck up.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. Especially the timing of when you do it, right? If you're against Gaza now, it's safer than being against what happened a year and a half ago, say. You know, especially close to October 7th. If you're like one of the early— like Roger Waters, one of the early people talking about this is— this is— you're watching genocide in real time. And they came for that guy. Yeah. And, you know, more people see it the way he sees it now. And just like what happened to you with the Iraq War, you're— 20 years from now, it's going to be a universally accepted opinion, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's just— it's crazy to go through something like that, and for you to have gone through it like really early on, you know, for you to have gone through that in 2003, I guess it really does inform your opinions though. Like when you see things that are happening today, you go, okay, I've seen this before.

What I started looking for after that was a way to be someone that was more involved with something that could affect change. In other words, I used my nonprofit. We started a prison program 20 years ago, and we see the change that happens. We have people that go in and basically offer rehabilitation in the form of theater, and not doing plays or anything, but getting people to play emotions through characters that we introduced to them. And in doing so, unlocking emotions that have been suppressed for many, many years. So in prison, there's one go-to emotion. It's anger. That's your survival face. That's your mask on the yard. You have to be a badass or you're going to die. But sadness is compromising, fear is compromising, and happiness is genuinely not not encouraged either. So we get these guys in a room, we introduce them to these stock characters from the Commedia dell'Arte, and then they have to express their emotions and make choices with their emotions in improv. And what they find is that if someone approaches them in anger in an improv, the facilitator will encourage a different emotion in response to anger than anger, right?

And what they What they come to understand is that they don't have to respond to anger with anger. There are other choices, and in fact, in real life they can do that too if they can do it in an improv. And so what happens is these people tap into long-dormant emotions and start to understand that they are more than the worst act that got them there. They tend to— create bonds across gang ties, racial lines. We, when we're putting together a group, we ask that rival gangs are in the same room with each other. Oh, wow. And, um, what happens is these bonds are made through the sharing of emotion. Like, we get these guys into an improv where they're all putting a flower on a grave of someone and saying something under their breath about the person that's deceased. And then at some point the facilitator will say, "Now look at each other," and they're looking at each other with these eyes of sadness and they realize they have a lot in common, you know, in that shared emotion. I had two guys come up to me, one black guy and one white guy.

They said, "We gotta tell you what happened 2 weeks ago. We were— our shot callers said, you know, we're gonna have a fight on the yard, and so, you know,— you never question the shot caller, and so you know what's gonna happen, you know. And so what they did was they found each other, these two guys, and they rolled around on the floor acting like they were killing each other. Wow. How convenient. Yeah. So it looked like they were participating, but they weren't hurting each other. Oh, wow.

That's a good solution.

It's amazing what happens when you experience something like that in person, when you see the transformation happen. And we see this in our school children as well. That's something that is deeply inspiring. You know that you've had something to do with some real change, right? Whereas for years I was asked to, you know, attend fundraisers and, you know, various causes. And, you know, it's— yeah, it's great that they're doing that, and it's great that they're raising money for these organizations that need it. But at the end of the day, you don't really feel like it did anything other than go to a dinner. And this was a way to get my hands dirty and really, you know, get in the struggle of it. And I found it to be so, so much more satisfying. As far as whatever inclination I had towards activism was really fed by this as opposed to hopping from fundraiser to fundraiser. Mm. It just felt more real. It felt like something that I could take that experience and then I could say to my group, "Let's expand. Let's get into more and more prisons." And now we're in 18 prisons in the state of California doing these programs.

Did you have to develop a curriculum, like, how you— begin to reach out to these guys and how you set it up?

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

So, there was a couple music programs and two theater programs, and now we're able to lobby the state to get more funding for arts in corrections because art is a transformer. Art, you know, it is something that can shift consciousness. I truly believe that. I've seen it with my own— the work that I've done. You know, I've seen how people can —think in a different way after they see something in the theater or in the movies, or, you know, a good stand-up can do the same thing. You know how George Carlin used to shift my consciousness every new special because he would always be challenging me. Sure, yeah. It wouldn't be like, "Hey, you know, we're all in the same club." It would be, "Yeah, you thought we were in the same club, but here's a little thought," and you realize he's talking right at you. That's one of your hypocrisies. And that was his genius. It was his ability to really tap into, we can be better.

We can all be better. This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks, and boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old-fashioned summers where you just wanna enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer, Visible Wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon. Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at visible.com. Plans start at $25 a month, or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code Rogan. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. Yeah, there's been a few guys like that throughout history that really have figured out a way to embed humor into social commentary. Yeah, George Carlin's probably the most known for it, but do you know about Bill Hicks? Yeah, for sure. He was probably in my generation, he's the one that twisted people the most.

It's like a lot of comics would watch him and go, I— what am I doing? Why am I doing what I'm doing? This guy's doing something that's like so much more meaningful.

Yeah, who was it in Apatow's documentary about Carlin? There was a comedian that said George Carlin was basically— in the earliest part of the century, in the 1900s, philosophers debating used to be a huge deal, right? Like hundreds of people, thousands of people come watch people debate two different points of view. Sure. He said And that's what the current philosophers of our generation are, the better stand-up comedians. The ones that test your belief system by saying something that, you know, might be controversial or, you know, challenges your worldview. That's the great purpose and function of a philosopher or a stand-up comedian is to take your worldview, shatter it a little bit, and make you rethink.

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

Yeah. Yeah. Provocative statements that— you know, the first reaction is, "Fuck that. No, that's not true. Fuck that." And then you realize, "Oh, shit. He's bringing me there." And it's like a great play can do that, too. A great movie can do that, too. Provoke you and challenge you and then make you refocus, rethink.

Yeah, it's just amazing how little of that we have today and how much content we have today. Did you ever see the documentary? God, what is it? The documentary with William F. Buckley and the other— yeah, you know I'm talking about. Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal. Yeah. Yeah, where they had these— it was, I guess it was NBC, I think it was, and NBC was failing in the ratings. I was gonna say Relentless Enemies, but that's the— that's the— well, yeah, the line, Best of Enemies. Best of Enemies. Yeah, great documentary. Yeah, so they had a series of these debates on television. Gore Vidal being a progressive and William F. Buckley being a conservative. Very interesting because this kind of hadn't happened before on television where you have these long-form discussions with these two guys just intellectually jabbing at each other. Yeah, and it was great. It's like the documentary is really amazing.

I, I was friends with Gore. Oh really? Yeah, he, he agreed to do my first film, Bob Roberts, which is about a I was a right-wing folk singing candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania. And Gore agreed to play Brickley Paiste, my Democratic opponent, right? So he played a politician, which is something he always kind of flirted with in his real life. There he is, yeah. And so I got to be quite friendly with him, and I actually did a documentary that I'm editing right now. About 4 soldiers from World War II that became great writers. Gore, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Howard Zinn are all in this documentary. I filmed it many years ago, shelved it, and now I'm in the final stages of putting it together. I'm opening a new website on September 1st, and this is one of the many things that I have in my vault and my storage units that I've just been getting out over the past year and finding all this crazy stuff that I have that I've never finished because I've been going from project to project to project. So I slowed down a little bit and just opened up some sealed boxes, and it's been really fun.

It's one of the things is also I used to fuck around on film sets with this, you know, when I had enough money to buy a video camera for the first time. And so I started making these little short films on on movie sets, and one of them is— there's two films from when I was doing Howard the Duck. And, you know, one of those endless productions that just went on and on and on. So, I just started amusing myself by making my own little short films, including, you know, I'm sure illegally using the duck itself, you know, which I made a character in one of the films. I forgot about Howard the Duck.

It was crazy.

It was crazy. We walked on the set the first—

What a fucking weird movie that was.

I know, right? We walked on the set— I walked on the set the first day and knew we were in trouble. Why'd you know we were in trouble? The puppet. It wasn't ready. And it was a little too cute. If you look at the comic book, Howard the Duck was not that cute.

No, he was a cigar-smoking, kind of shitty, mean duck. Yeah.

Kind of Fritz the Cat-ish, like, you know, like really kind of borderline obscene. And it was a Marvel comic, right? Yeah, yeah. And so, um, do you have an image of the old Howard the Duck from the comic? Yeah, that guy. Yeah. So I walked on the set and I saw that cute duck. I was like, uh-oh.

Yeah, he was always with chicks. Look at that, always with chicks. Yeah, which was very weird. Like, hey lady, what are you doing? You're fucking a duck. What's going on here? Bestiality? Like, what is this? What is his charm got you? Like, what is the— what's the message there?

Yeah. Yeah. So it was a strange character. Very strange. And I don't think they had the technology to pull it off. I remember— they need to try again now.

Yeah, it'd be good.

They could take the old film and animate it. But You know, I spent 6 weeks on that film doing an ultralight chase that lasted maybe 2 minutes in the film.

What's an ultralight plane chase?

You know what the ultralight planes are? Uh-huh. Basically, it's you and the wings and a motor. And so, there's a chase sequence at the end that's about 2.5 minutes, 3 minutes long.

Did you actually have to get in one of those things?

No. I mean, I got in, like, a fake one. One. Good. Yeah, good. No, you have to be— you have to fly it. The guy— yeah, you have to— that's fake, of course, right? The duck's real.

Looks so legit. Yeah, but was that one of those ones where your little voice, you didn't listen?

No, not at all, because that was early in my career, right? So it was George Lucas Oh, wow. George Lucas. Yeah, and he'd just done Star Wars. Whoa!

So, it had to be good, right? He went from Star Wars to Howard the Duck. Well, he produced Howard the Duck.

Okay. But he had just produced Star Wars. So, you know, it was like, "Hell yeah." Right. I don't know. It doesn't make sense on the page, but— He'll figure it out. He'll figure it out. They'll figure it out. I was so lucky too. Again, blessed. Because I got a movie called Five Corners that was with Jodie Foster and John Turturro right around the same time. So, I was— I'd already done that movie when Howard came out. So, it's kind of saved my ass.

Nice. You already had one in the chamber. Yeah. You had a good one on the pipe. Yeah. Thank God. It's just, I wonder why George did it. Like, it seems so odd to try to do a movie with a talking duck.

Yeah, well, maybe it made sense when they imagined it.

Maybe they were on acid or something. It just seems—

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

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

It's almost like, you know, looking at claymation around that time, you know. Yeah. Amazing what they can do. But I do like the old school. I do like the kind of analog version of— because when the CGI and everything, it's all so sophisticated and so— they can do anything now, and you almost want them not to be able to do everything. Right.

Oh, 100%. Yeah.

Just want a little roughness around the edges. It really helps.

Well, there's also a thing about CGI where the part of your brain that is looking at it recognizes that this is not a real thing happening. Like, as good as it looks, there's something about it.

Yeah.

Which is why a lot of the movie special effects guys, like the monster guys, like Rick Baker and along those lines who did Star Wars—

yeah, yeah.

American Werewolf in London, that thing outside, the wolf that you see in the hallway, yeah, yeah, that they wanted to make sure that it looked like a real thing. Thing, right? It was a physical object. So you had a physi— so in order to make it a physical object, and obviously CGI wasn't even available back then, but you see it and you know it's a real thing. Whereas like later on he did— they did The Wolfman, and Rick Baker did that as well, and there's a lot of CGI in there and the transformation scenes, and this part of it is just like your brain's like, this isn't really happening. Yeah, I don't like it.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of the same way in music too, like when correct everything and make the auto-tune. You— yeah, great music has a little bit of mistake in it. Yeah, you know, it has a little bit of like human error. When you're hitting a chord on a guitar, there's, you know, there's a way to play it perfectly, but there's also a way to play it a little messed up, right? And I kind of prefer the little bit messed up, like when Hendrix did the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock.

Yeah, you know, there was something about it. It was like just like, you know, immediate.

It was at the— it was being done at that moment with full danger, you know, which is a great thing to listen to. Yeah, this—

it's really happening. Yeah, it's not polished and edited and sent through a machine.

And you get the feeling that, that maybe that was the second or third time he'd played it, you know, right, ever, or maybe the first, right, which would have been even more insane. But, you know, yeah.

Well, that's why people like records. They love listening to the scratches and the pops, and then you hear the voice, like, this just pure recorded voice. There's no Auto-Tune, there's no nothing messing with it, especially like an old record.

I have one of those 78s where you have to crank them up, and— oh wow— and they have the little, you know, cone that amplifies, right? Oh, you have one of those?

Oh, wow.

1920 or 1910 or something like that. And I just imagine, you know, living on the prairie and ordering this from Sears Roebuck, right? And getting your first, you know, record and putting it on and hearing this, a voice coming from this acetate. It must have been magic. It must have been like, you know, transformative to, you know, this amplified song that you can dance to or fall in love to right in your living room.

When did they first figure that out?

I think it was early part of 20th century.

Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison?

Yeah, they had like a little cylinder. But when they started mass-producing them in— like just records.

Yeah, when was the first?

I think in the '20s.

They might have Mass-produced those because people had them. I don't know, just a way different player. Let's, uh, ask Perplexity, what was the first record? What was the first actual, like, record disc that you could play with a needle? Like a real record. I want to say like 1919. I'm just taking a wild guess. Yes, there's a famous viral video of a guy dropping that tima setas. 1931, 12-inch, 33 and a third RPM disc was pressed in Victor's vinyl-based Victrolac.

But that's 33 and a third. Mm-hmm. What about the 78s? Or is it called—

say, a 78? So yeah, 23 minutes side versus roughly the shellac. '48 vinyl LP arrived on June 21st, 1948. Columbia Records unveiled Oh, 33 1/3 microgroove long-playing record. So was that it?

But in the '20s and '30s, there was a microgroove. '47, you got the 45.

Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. So the little singles.

'31, first vinyl disc.

Wow. So '31 for the first vinyl disc, '48 for the first real album, which is really nuts because if you think about like all the amazing albums of the '60s '80s, you're talking about a technology that didn't exist 20 years prior. That's weird. Nuts. Yeah, nuts. Yeah. So like when you listen to Voodoo Child, like that technology 20 years ago didn't exist.

Do you remember the magic of watching it for the first time? Like when you put that thing down when you're a kid and you put it on the thing, uh-huh, this music starts coming out.

Oh yeah, it's just— well, I remember the ones where they— look at that, look at the vinyl grooves around on 1,000x magnification, you see the waveforms of the music itself. That's crazy. Incredible. That those little weird— imagine if you were like from another civilization and you saw these things. You'd be like, what the fuck is this? Like, what do they have here? How did they figure that out? Yeah, what is this? You'd be like, what? That's— they figured out how to make music out of that? And you can hear a harp. You can hear banjo. You can hear drums. An orchestra. Yeah, you can hear Janis Joplin. All in that? Yeah. How'd you do that? Like, what? And if it scratches, it skips.

I'm really encouraged that vinyl is making a comeback. I really very excited about that. People love it. Yeah, yeah, it's all the difference.

Like, people love like wood tables, you know. People like, as the world gets more digital, people want things that are organic, something that a person made, something that seems like it makes more sense.

I've been finding, you know, in my search for my archive and everything, cassette tapes, and then I put on— they sound amazing. Really? Yeah, they sound really good because, you know, there's more, there's more information in a little cassette tape than on a, you know, whether it's MP3 that's been compressed, you know, and compressed and compressed and compressed. But, you know, reel-to-reels are obviously sound still still great, but the cassette tapes really survived. I've been digitizing everything, of course, you know, just to make sure that they don't decay. But it's been really interesting that a lot of my dad's music, he recorded on cassette tapes. You know, he was a folk singer. They did 5 albums as The Highwaymen. And, you know, but he was a classical musician and did choral music. And so he had a group, then he would record on these cassette tapes, and so we've been digitizing those because we're— I'm going to put them all on my new website, this thing called Robbins Radio, which will be my dad, my granddad, my brother, and myself, the music that we've done over the years, kind of playing on a constant loop when you come onto the website.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So, it's to honor my dad. I've been digitizing also his scores and You know, he wrote music by hand, and so I've got boxes and boxes of that that I'm trying to transcribe and make available. Probably in about 6 months we'll have that archive up.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, when did they figure out how to put things on cassette tapes? Does that happen? That was around when I was in high school. '70s. I remember I had a cassette deck in my car.

'70s. Yeah. Yeah, and there was pretty good technology. You could buy really good microphones and plug them into a pretty good cassette player. Well, 8-track was the first, right? I think so, but those were so impractical. Well, they were huge. Yeah, plus they'd stop in the middle of a song and then go to the next track and continue. Oh really? Yeah, I remember driving with my friend Frank, who lives in Austin right now, and we were driving back up to school, my first school college, Plattsburgh, and there was an 8-track of Bread playing. You remember that band Bread? Uh-huh. And, and he— this was around 1977— and he rips it out of the 8-track, rolls down the window, throws it out. This is— we're never listening to that again. This is— it's punk rock from this point forward. And it was, it was like a defining moment in my musical life, was like Frank saying, no more Bread, no more Bread. He's gonna put Sex Pistols now.

That's hilarious. Yeah, I remember my first introduction to 8-track. My friend Javier, when I lived in Florida, his mom had an 8-track player, and she had— what is that song? Who sings it? When my baby, when my baby smiles at me, I go to Rio de Janeiro. Remember that song?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't remember who sings it. Pablo Cruz. Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, and she had a Pablo Cruz 8-track in her car. I'm like, this lady's a wizard. She's got her own music. Because before then, I I think I had only seen people play stuff that was on the radio. Right, right. And she put it in there and she pressed the button and I was like, this is crazy. She gets to pick what songs are on the radio in a car? I thought it was the wildest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Yeah, yeah.

That was right, it was 8-track first, then the cassette, and then the—

The cassette was so much better. CDs, yeah. And you had to flip it over though, pop it out, flip it over.

Yeah, but those things are cooked in the sun. —though. I mean, oh yeah, I lost a bunch.

I used to have one of them big books with cassettes in it and these little vinyl things. Yep. You leave it in your car and they get fucked, and then it gets stuck in the tape machine that you had to do with your finger.

We had to try to wind it back with your finger, which I did like a month ago with one of the old cassettes.

You had to stick your pinky in there.

I just did that last month, trying to restart it.

Yeah, nobody knows what the fuck we're talking about today. Well, then, you know, VHS tapes was the next one because that was the first time where you could choose to watch a film at home.

Yes, you know, yes, and a huge deal too, you know. I, I mourn the loss of video stores. Oh yeah, it was a great experience. Well, yeah, because you could go and you say, you know, I just saw this film, and there was someone that really loved film film there, right? And he could say, well, if you like that one, check this one out. Yeah, that was— that's now been replaced by an algorithm, right? And I'm not trusting that algorithm is going to find— it's, you know, it's going to show me the way to Battle of Algiers or any kind of— oh, these are great movies. I just— if the, the personal was lost. Same thing with record stores. You could go in and like, what's, what's new? And hear what's playing and, you know, talk to the guy. And get what his opinion was. And bookstores too, you know, it's like, if you told me 30 years ago that it would be, you know, it's very hard to find a bookstore, a record store, or a video store, I would say you're crazy. But now it's all like very convenient. You have access to everything, but you don't have the arbiter that is a person.

You have the arbiter that's almost a machine. Right.

You get a little bit of that with people online recommending stuff. Yeah, just kind of cool, you know, someone says, hey, I just saw this show, it's fucking incredible. That's true. You get a little bit of that, and then you get IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores, which I think that does something, you know. They're a little manipulated occasionally, but there's something to it where you get to see what people think about it. That helps.

Yeah, that's nice. I think Silo's like 100% Rotten Tomatoes. Is it really? Yeah, right now it is. That's nice.

That's— once you said that though, you put it out there.

I know, now it's dead. I just killed it.

They're gonna vomit into a plate. Oh yeah, 100%.

We'll see about that.

But there's almost too many shows, you know, there's just too much. I just got into The Agency. I just finished season 2 of The Agency, Michael Fassbender. It's a CIA series that's on Paramount. It's fucking incredible. It's so well written. It's so well acted that it makes so many other shows seem really clunky because it's just— it's so good. Yeah, he's got so many layers to it, and it's subtle, and it's brilliant. And it's— and Fassbender is one of my favorite actors. He's fucking incredible. He's great. He's so good. He's so good in this. You know, he plays this CIA spook.

So many things to choose from. Too many.

Yeah, almost. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe essentially you could waste your whole life just being entertained. Like, it used to be difficult to be entertained, which I think there's something to that. You had to go to a place, you had to pay, buy your popcorn, sit down.

You gotta make an active choice in your life.

Now it's just like, yeah, steps along the way they've made it more convenient to be entertained. But then again, it's like there's something lost in that, you know, like, oh, the movie starts at 7. Come on, we got to get out of here. We gotta go park. We gotta get there. Yeah, gotta get there in time. Time. There was a lot to it.

Or the idea that, you know, if there's only 3 choices, you're gonna— you might stumble into something you wouldn't have watched. Right. And be surprised by it. Oh, all the time.

You'd go, what do they have at the movie theater? Like, what's this? All right, well, there's no more Star Wars tickets left, so we could go see this. You want to see this? Like, what is it? I don't know. Yeah, this guy's in it though. I like him. Like, okay. Yeah, let's check it out. And you would just take take a— take a guess. That's the crazy thing about Shawshank is that it wasn't a big hit in the movie theater initially. No. Which is really hard to believe now. Yeah.

No, it was, uh, it was— it was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, but nobody went to see it. That's nuts. Yeah. Maybe it was the title they didn't understand, or I don't know what it was. I was in 2 films that year, one Hudsucker Proxy and Shawshank Redemption, 2 really challenging titles. But, like, what's it about? Hudsucker? I don't know. What's it about? Shawshank? Who knows? I had people coming up to me saying, "I really liked you in that Scrimshaw Reduction." I'm like, "Um, yeah, thank you." Especially if they don't plan on meeting you and they run into you at a restaurant, like, "Ah, Tim Robbins!

That movie! Shawshank Redemption!" Shrimp's Shrimp Shank.

Shim Shank. What did it come out against?

What other films were out at the same time as Shawshank? Was there other like big movies? Oh wow. Oh wow. Jurassic Park.

Whatever. Pulp Fiction. Oh Jesus. Ace Ventura.

Oh my God. Ace Ventura too. That's one of the best years for movies in history. Oh my God. Yeah. Pulp Fiction. Oh my God.

But, you know, it made its way, interestingly enough, because— so Ted Turner was running Warner Brothers at the time, right? And Warner Brothers produced Shawshank Redemption. And when he sold the rights to it for television, he sold it to himself at the lowest cost possible. You had a film nominated for 7 Academy Awards that was getting sold like it was beach blanket bullshit, right? And so, it didn't cost him anything to put it on his channel. So, he put it on again and again and again. Was getting all those advertising dollars that come with playing something on his TV channel. And I think that's why— it caught on because it was ubiquitous. It was always there. It was always something you could see. And so eventually, people understood what kind of movie it was. Wow. And so that's a good example of where someone's business acumen or greed or whatever you want to call it, winds up producing something quite lovely. You know, something that actually I'm really grateful for. For, because so many people know that film, and it's been like number 1 on IMDb for the last 15 years. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, it's crazy. And that was one of those movies that also took off like wildfire once it got into video, because once people could watch it at home— yeah, that was— even though if it didn't do as well in the theaters as it should have, on video it did fantastic.

Yeah, which is why I really— I always remember that when you know, I'm in a movie and it doesn't, quote unquote, perform, you know, I'm the turtle. I know the turtle can win the race.

Yeah. Yeah. That was something that was lost also during the pandemic. And I was really worried about that, that it wasn't going to come back. It seemed like it was so easy to stream films at home that people just For a while, it was hard to get people to go out to movie theaters. Yeah. And the experience is very different. Yeah. It's very different.

Yeah, it's been a struggle, you know. And, you know, I think also a lot of producers in Hollywood or studios lost faith in their adult audience even before the pandemic. I mean, they were producing movies for Teenagers, and you know, there's nothing wrong with that, but— because they can be— that can drive an economic engine. But at the same time, you know, films like Shawshank Redemption would not get made today because they're about something that isn't about the whole huge multi-platform experience of an action movie. That's unfortunate. And that's kind of migrated into streamers. You know, the people, the adults that like to watch stuff tend to watch these longer-form things. And that's a nice thing in a way because it's allowing filmmakers to make 10-hour films. You know, when you think about it, a season of a show is 10 hours. And so you can think in this like kind of long-form of telling a story. Story, which is a nice thing, which would have been impossible in old Hollywood, you know? Right. You've got to keep it under 2 hours. So now you have the opportunity— creators have the opportunity to create long-form entertainment.

Well, that I think is one of the beautiful things about some of these Netflix series is that you— things like Stranger Things, you essentially have a 30-hour movie or however many episodes it is. And like Ozark is a great example of that. It's like fucking amazing show, and it's essentially like a movie every week, and the story continues to progress, and you get a chance to really stretch something out. And but you get the quality of like a great film, but you get it extended, you know, with these huge budgets. The fact that they're able to do this, like, so because of streaming It has opened up this long-form aspect of storytelling that I think is really difficult to do in a movie. Like, Kill Bill kind of did it a little bit. For sure, yeah.

You have 2 episodes of it. It was nice also as an actor, like with Silo, I've had 3 seasons. The first 2 seasons, my character represented something, which completely shifts in season 3.

Oh, spoiler alert. Don't tell me.

No, I'm not telling you what it is. Just shut the fuck up, bro.

I can't believe you did that.

I'm just telling you that—

Fucked it up for me. Now I'm gonna be looking for that.

You won't even be able to guess. Okay, good. Good. It's such a profound— And it was fun to play. It was like this kind of like— And I was told about this at the beginning.

The creator said, "Listen, wait till season 3." That's interesting, because I always wonder how far they map these things out. Did he have a— Did they even know that they were going to be picked up for season 3 when he started?

Were they recorded? No, but they knew at the end of season 1 what the trajectory of 2 and 3 was.

So if it got picked up, they had to find out.

Well, if they were going to get picked up, they would have to tell you what— they would have to tell the studio what 2 and 3 are. Mm. Right? So, um, the other thing that you have to consider is that if you're an asshole, they'll fucking kill you. It's true. Right, right. Writers don't— you know, writers don't— They don't— if an actor is, like, trouble— Right, right, right. —they'll kill him. They will. I've heard it. I've been told about— one of the guys I worked with was— I won't say his name, but when I was directing for television, I did a couple episodes on this show, and he told me about a show that he was doing where there were 3 actors that were giving him a real hard time. And one of them was getting in trouble because of sexual inappropriateness. One was getting in trouble because they were too much in their head. And the other was something else, something about another— Basically, they shot them all in the anatomy that was associated with what their problem was. So, all three of them were shot in the finale. Oh, no. They said, well, we allowed a couple them to survive, but one we really killed off.

It's like, so, you know, it— you don't mess with the writers there in television. They, they, they wield a lot of power.

And not only that, they're also looking for angles, different places to take the character. And if you're a douchebag, like, let's fucking—

yes, yeah, that'll be a good show.

Turn him into a pedophile. Basically, you can do whatever you want. Here's the twist. You didn't see this coming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Watch out. Yeah. Be nice.

Well, you know, there's a lot of fear in Hollywood when it comes to AI and replacing writers and replacing actors and just replacing this whole human-created thing of storytelling. And I think writers in particular are really terrified. Because you could kind of, you know, with AI engines today, you could kind of take a few films, right? Like you could kind of take like Bullet and Heat and a few, and they say, make me a John Wick meets Bullet meets Heat. And this is the protagonist. This is what he's facing. These are the issues. And AI can churn it out in a few minutes. And then you could say, make it more like Quentin Tarantino would do it, and then it'll do that. It'll fix it in that way. That's crazy. You say, okay, I want it more like Kubrick aspects to it. I want some weirdness to it, some, some real thought, some Easter eggs, some hidden aspects to it that people connect later. It'll do that. It'll— it can do stuff instantaneously based on— and it's kind of stealing, right? But it's not, right? It's making an original thing, but it's not because it's inspired by everything else that's already been made.

But that's kind of what people do, but not in the same way. And we don't do it that quick either. And so for writers, it's fucking terrifying. Yeah.

And who do you sue? I mean, you can't sue AI.

Well, artists are having a real problem with that.

I have a real problem with it. Yeah. I don't, I don't like it at all, but I also have faith in the individuality of the human. Experience. And what I— like, I'm writing a companion piece to The Player right now. And, you know, what would happen if that character was alive today? And so I have my perspective that only I'm going to bring to that. I don't think you could plug that into— No, no, no, no. So I think talented people will figure out a way to be individual and apart from AI. No doubt. But I also really don't like the lack of protection that the guilds and the unions are offering their membership. You know, there should have been a hard line for the Actors Union and there wasn't. The hard line should have been, you know, You cannot use this to replace actors. Right. Or writers. But there was compromise. And— or writers, for the writers' union. I don't think that that protection was held up at the last negotiations, and I think that we're gonna see the ramifications of that, you know, unfortunately.

Well, that's what's scary is that ultimately economics has a major impact on the decisions that they make. And it's way cheaper to do it that way. It's way cheaper to use AI to write things than screenwriters, especially really talented screenwriters. Even though it's kind of drawing on the past creative work of really talented screenwriters. Right. They don't get compensated for it. I think ultimately people are going to want and appreciate something that's made by a human being, 'cause it's one of the things— it's what we really like. Not just be entertained, we really love the fact that someone made something.

Well, my girlfriend, Reed Morano, has been advocating for a seal to be put on projects that are made without AI.

That's a great idea. Yeah. That is a very good idea.

I think that's a great idea.

I like that a lot. I think, yeah, instead of like the parental warning. AI free. Yeah, AI free, right? Yeah. No GMO foods, bitch. There's something to that. I think that's a great idea. Actually, that— I think that might be the way— that might be the solution, is a seal. Yeah, I like that a lot. Makes sense that people, you know, they're— when you see a great something that someone made, what, what one of the things that you really like about it is that it came from a human being's creativity. Yeah. Like, did you see Obsession? No. It's fucking great. It's so good. It's so crazy and so creepy and so weird and, and so brilliant. And like, no one in it is famous, and it's phenomenal, and it's really original and creepy. And one of the things I loved is like, this is— what is he, like 25 or something like that? Yeah, I think so. Oh, he's 25 years old. Yeah. Who, who, you know, had done a bunch of YouTube stuff. I love it.

It's a complete accident. Just huge shit.

Has this amazing idea, and you got these people who— they're relatively unknown but really talented.

We're craving that. Yes, yes. We don't want the formula, right? Never have wanted the formula. It's so maddening to try to set a movie up right now in Hollywood, because what they want is they want someone, an actor that's worth $20 million, and they'll give you $10 million to do the film. You get the guy that they normally would have to pay $20 million, and you get him to do your film for, you know, 300,000, you got a film. Good luck. There's no gamblers anymore. That's crazy. There's no risk-takers. When I was coming up, you know, you had these guys that like— actually, Joe, you know, Joe Roth gave me the money to do Cradle Will Rock. This for— and he says it was basically like, here's the— here you go, kid, do it. I'm like, really? I get to do this? Well, you know, wound up with, you know, Final Cut and everything. They used to do that. They used to invest in the risk, right? Because only will the risk produce something genuine and new and fresh. If you don't gamble, and you're measured, and you're on a formula, and you got your stars, it's gonna— the audience is gonna know it.

Yep. They know it's, oh, this is prepackaged and preprogrammed for my demographic. Yeah. And I kind of resent that. Want it. Yeah. You know, whereas something like that obsession is like coming out of left field. No one is predicting it, programming it. It's just an accident and people love it. Yeah. That's what is exciting about, you know, it's like when you're trying a new material in a club and you're like, I don't know if it's going to work, but I'm fucking do it. And it gets the laugh. That thrill is what it's all about, right? That's the moment where you go, "I gambled and it paid off." Right. Yeah. That's— I don't know how much we have that experience anymore in Hollywood.

Do you think it's just because of the extreme cost that's involved? I mean, just to promote a film, like, if you have a film and it's got a budget, like, especially— I think it's probably why so many superhero movies get greenlit, right? Right? Because it's one of the only gambles— like, if you're gambling on an Avengers movie, like, you can't miss. Get the Hulk to smash a bunch of shit, Captain America comes in, you're good. Like, this is— you're good, you're gonna make your money back. And so you kind of have to, you know, like, if you're a money person, if you're not a creative person, you're just a money person who happens to be in the movie business, which I'm sure a lot of them are. Yeah, they're just looking at as a return on investment. Spent.

Yeah, but I, you know, that's always been that way to some degree, but I don't know. I don't know why it became such a risk to try new stuff. I mean, because they're not putting that much money into it. You know, those Marvel movies, they're costing them $250 million, $200 million to produce, right? There's independent filmmakers that are proven independent filmmakers that are asking for like $5 million, $4 million to do a film. So if they put some advertisement in it, maybe it's going to cost them $14 million all told. And, you know, can they make that back? Is the marketplace going to support that? Who knows? I wouldn't want to be an investor, but I also, you know, I have a nostalgia for a time when when Robert Altman could make a film, you know? And it could just blow people's minds. And then the next film he made, you know, as he would gleefully tell you, "They're gonna hate this one," you know? And I love that, you know? And people would either love it or hate it, but he was making his own films. He was making distinctive films that were him.

Yeah.

Is it more difficult or easier to get a film released today if you make it yourself?

Because you don't have distribution, really. So, you know, I suppose in the future there's gonna be some form of distribution that will be more egalitarian, but right now it's a huge risk.

How does distribution work? Like, say if you decided you're gonna get a bunch of investors together and put together a film, do you have to get distribution before you even start producing?

Yes, you have to have foreign sales in place. Place. Whoa. Um, foreign sales. Yeah, like, uh, I think basically the, the economic model right now is those— the investors want to be paid and not be losing money by the time they start shooting. In other words, they're not going to lose money. They've already sold it for more than they've paid. And, and so there's really no risk, no gamble. Um, Then if the movie catches fire at a film festival, then they'll put the money into advertising it. If it doesn't catch fire at a film festival or with critics, they'll just, you know, okay, I already made my money, you know, we'll just sell it to, you know, DVDs, whatever.

God, what a fucking shitty environment to create something.

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

Is that more satisfying to do it that way?

No, it's more satisfying to go to Cannes and win Best Actor. I mean, much more satisfying when you have a machine behind you that's supporting It's great, you know, Mystic River, you know, that kind of like you have Warner Brothers like, we love this film, we're going to make sure that people see it. That's what you need. You need your sponsors that are— that get it, that want people to see it, that see the value of it, and they'll put money into advertising. And that's a great experience to be in. The other thing is just, you know, pretty lonely. It's just, you know, you're trying your best. I was in 3 movies after I won the Oscar for Mystic River, that I've considered 3 of the best movies in my career, but nobody's seen them. The Secret Life of Words, Code 46, and Catch a Fire.

And they're all excellent movies, but they came at a time where, you know, the producers or the people that were distributing them didn't really want to risk the money that would See, that's where there's a room for like a Siskel and Ebert type character today that can find those films and say, hey, this one slipped under the radar, but this is really an actual person that's a giant movie buff that can go back and watch these and comment on them. And we don't really— back then, Siskel and Ebert were the guys. If they gave you two thumbs down, you were fucked. Yeah, you were fucked. Yeah. And you know, they're very catty with each other. It was like, it was —fun thing. It's fun to watch the outtakes, how much those guys actually didn't get along.

Yeah, yeah. But I was lucky with them. They gave me great reviews.

It was good. They had good taste.

Yeah, you know, they did. And they loved film.

Yes, they clearly loved film, and they loved all aspects of it. And they would talk about with great understanding and great passion the subtleties of the performances and what really— and how it was put together. Even they talk about the score You know, yes, they spend like 15 minutes on each film.

Yeah, which was— yeah, never happened.

And it was a hugely successful show, which is like really confusing why there's not something like that today. Yeah, well, there's so much content today. If you were like— it's not like what's out in the movies right now. Like today, fucking, there's a million shows that are streaming. There's, there's so there's so much shit going on, there's so much content that if you had a trusted source, you know, a person who's like a real good critic of stuff, who really— I'm not even a critic, an appreciator is a better word. Like someone who's a real passionate enthusiast of film and of, you know, different creative works, they could just talk about something and recommend stuff.

Yeah, but then there's the burnout of that too. Like, you know, I would talk to some of these guys and they'd be like, you know, for every one of those good films, we have to see like 10 dreck, you know. And the time spent watching these things, kind of mind-numbingly painful for some of these people, you know. Imagine having to, you know, weed through the muck to get to the gems.

But can't you just walk out of the film like— it just— like you walk out of a movie theater and you're like, this movie sucks? I've done that a few times. Me too. It's a boring— it's a terrible place to be. Me too. You're like, I can't believe I'm leaving.

Hard to do in the live theater though, because when they know you're there, right?

That's different. Yeah. But if you're, if you're watching it at home, I mean, it's really what you're trying to do. If you, you want to be one of the person says, this is the worst fucking movie I've ever seen in my life, and that's what you're doing. But if you want to be a person who's just an enthusiast of great stuff and just keep it on the positive side, there's so much great stuff to review and so many great things from the past that people haven't seen before. That you could sort of turn people on to. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that'd be great.

It's kind of weird that there's not someone like that right now. It is weird.

It is weird. I think maybe you should— you should do that. Produce that. No, I'm busy. You should produce that.

But I mean, it just doesn't even make sense that there's so many different— like, there's so much content, but yet there's not that one thing that was a really big part of the movie experience when we were younger.

Yeah. And the Friday, you know, that idea that there's some exciting movie coming out on Friday and we're gonna go to it. Yeah, it was huge.

That was huge. Yeah, the movie was coming out. Like, I guess you have it right now with The Odyssey. Like, a lot of people are— that's like one of those movies that's so big, people are scrambling to go see it in the movie theaters, and it's getting people excited about it, along with a lot of the culture war controversies that Everybody that I know that's seen it— I haven't seen it yet— says fucking throw all that away, the movie's amazing. That's what I hear. Yeah, yeah, they just like— it's almost like a good way to bait people into getting really, you know, confrontational. I'm tired of that though. Oh yeah, real tired.

Yeah, like, oh, it's not correct. Yeah, and it's just— I'm tired of it from both sides. I don't want to— I don't want to hear judging judgment. Right. I just— help me. I don't want to be in the middle of this fight constantly, you know. It's the only— I feel like this is, again, what we were talking about before, you know. It's the— as long as we're fighting with each other.

Yeah.

And now we're fighting about films that are coming out. I was like, come on, guys, calm down.

Calm down. Like, I don't care. It's just, is it entertaining? Is it good? It doesn't have to be correct. Doesn't mean anything to me. There's never been a time in history where correct was important to me.

Yeah, or indicative of great art, right?

It's just make it good. And by all accounts, everyone that I know that's seen the movie said it's fucking incredible. Yeah, I'm gonna try to see it soon. But the culture war part of it is like, at the very least, it got people excited to see it. Hmm. And either to hate it or— but I know a lot of people that wanted to go hate it and because they were upset you know, but Elliot Page played this person.

I understand that. I just—

Helen of Troy is a black lady, like, who fucking cares? Doesn't matter. Not only that, it's a made-up story. Like, exactly, it's a myth to begin with. Yeah, it apparently might actually be based on a real place though. You know, they used to think that Troy was not a real place, and then they discovered it. I think that was Was it in the '70s? When did they discover Troy? Because they used to think that it was completely mythical, that it was just fiction, a work of fiction, and then they found the actual real city. And they're like, oh. Like, that's the weird thing about really old stories is that, like, there's so— it's so ambiguous as to what was the root, what was the origin of the story. Was this a real event? A real place?

Have you ever stood on the stage of an old Roman amphitheater? Yeah. Yes. That's something else.

Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. Yeah.

There's history in those stones. Mm-hmm. And, you know, we were doing a show over in Lyon, France in one of those theaters, and we found something out, because we were doing rehearsal, and when you're talking to the other actor like this, you can't hear it out there at all. Ah. And so it told us that what they were doing was this. This, you know, back in the old days. Yeah, they had to perform out because you wouldn't be able to hear if you were doing realistically talking to someone, making eye contact.

That's what's weird about early film, is that early film you have stage actors who are used to doing it with no microphones projecting, now doing it on film, so it looks odd. Yeah, it's like there was this transitionary period, and then Brando came along, and Brando just did it real, and everybody's like, "What the fuck is he doing?" Yeah. Like, "He's acting like a real person. This is crazy." Yeah.

Him and Montgomery Clift, too. Yeah. Yeah, that was a, you know, huge step forward for all of us. Yeah. You know, to take the onus off the theatrical and get more into the real, you know.

And again, if you really think about it, not a whole lot of time between like the invention of film and then movie stars and all these things happening. Like, this is a completely new cultural thing. Like, from the early— like, what was the first film? Like, the first film with sound? What year was that? That was first sound. 1920s? 1927, '29, something like that. Wow. So think of that. So you have from '27 and then just a few decades later you have On the Waterfront. The Hustler. You have these incredible movies that they just have to figure out on the fly. You know, how to do Citizen Kane. And they have to figure out on the fly how to do this.

But also, if you ever watched the first films, like the silent films, and the ability to tell a story without words, which was a whole other talent. Talent. Uh, I mean, you watch those Chaplin films, this is like— that man was insanely talented.

Well, Nosferatu, the original Nosferatu. I love that film. I saw that at a public library in San Francisco when I was a kid. They, they had a night where they played it and I went to see it. I was like, this is nuts. Incredible. And I don't think— what year was that film? 1922.

1922. And then Metropolis was— oh yeah, that's a crazy movie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love that old stuff.

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

Yeah, crazy magic. Satan.

And you had to read what they were saying to each other on the screen. Yeah. And then music would play. They had a guy with an organ that was playing music along with it.

Like, what? Yeah, super cool. It is super cool. I would love to, like, if you could try time travel and go to one of those. Oh yeah, movie theaters back then. There's— there he is.

I mean, one of the best vampire movies of all time too. And so the lighting is just so good.

German Expressionist. Uh, do you ever see M? The, uh, Peter Lorre.

It's just M?

It's called M, yeah. The letter M? Isn't it M? 1931. Yeah, 1931.

No, I never saw it. It's really good. What is it? What's it about?

About a murderer that's stalking a bunch of people. Yeah, I was a huge fan of that whole genre of filmmaking.

Well, there's something so exciting about it because it, like, when you limit the sensory input, like, you have to read the words words, and you want— it's all black and white, and there's music playing. It's like it's a totally different thing that you're taking in. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's almost like half reading, half watching. Yeah. You know, like you're reading, like you don't hear their, their voices. You have to create their voices in your head.

Yeah. And you're feeling in a different way too because of the, you know, it's black and white, so it's not real, but it, it is real. And right, so yeah, it's, it's It's a great, great form. We should have more of those.

It's just hard to imagine that this is only 100 years old. That from there to now, this is 100 years. That's a blink of an eye. Yeah. And when you think about human history, like when we think about like the 1500s versus the 1600s, we kind of think it's basically the same. If you're born in 1520 or 1620, it's fucking exactly the same, right? But you're born in 1920 or 2020, a fucking completely different world you're living in. 1920, you have Nosferatu. 2026, you have The Odyssey, you know, right? You have Dune, you have these insane films, right?

Not to mention the technology you personally possess. Yes, right, in your pocket, right?

At any moment in time, you could stream a movie.

I could see Nosferatu right now, right?

Yeah, or the Robert Eggers one, the new one. Yeah, it's just fucking fantastic. But it's just instantaneous. Everything's instantaneous and everything's right there for you. For you. So it's great in that sense that you will be entertained. There's something to watch no matter what. But you're missing something on the, like, the specialness of, like, having to go out and go to a place, even go to a video store and go get it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There's something missing.

I think that that's really at the core of it, though, is the, you know, I've decided this is what I'm going to do today. Whole thing, you know, like pre, pre this, like I am going to be an active participant in my life. It's, it's when I first moved to LA that I first understood this in the late '70s. LA, as opposed to New York where I grew up, LA, you have to make a choice to find your fun. New York, it'll drop in your lap, right? If you walk down the street, something will present itself. But in LA, when I first moved out there, I realized you gotta drive there. You gotta drive and find your fun. And you have to be an active participant in your cultural life. And once I understood that about LA, I could understand how to live there. It was, at first, very frustrating because it was very boring. Boring, right? It wasn't happening, you know, when I walked out on the street. There was no street to walk out on. It was just too big. But it's that kind of, I have chosen this weekend to drive 30 minutes in that direction to see this punk rock band, right?

That, and I will be an active participant in that. And once you do that, you're liberated. Then, then you, then you know anything's possible. But now it's like, I want it in my backyard.

Not only that, now that thing interrupts you while you're taking something else in, right? It constantly wants your attention. It's like a puppy. It's like, ruff ruff. You're like, hey, hey, hey, watch the movie. I want to be fed. Yeah, it's constantly demanding your attention, or at least enticing you to take a look at it vibrating in your pocket, you know. Yeah.

Have you ever thought about trashing it?

I've gotten off social media for weeks at a time. I've done that, but I need it for work too much. I need it for emails. I need to— I can't always just be in front of a laptop.

You have a, like, a flip phone? No, no. I'm thinking about getting one.

I have a computer that I write on that's not connected to anything. My writing computer is just a Lenovo ThinkPad. I never use it for anything other than writing. It does— if I go online, it's just to research something, like ask a question, like, what is this? How does this work? Right. It's never— I never surf the web. I don't look at any websites. I don't do anything with it. And that helps a lot for that. But for phones, I have too many friends that are sending me funny things. There's always like some funny thing, and I'm like, alright, I guess I'm back on Instagram.

Check it out.

Like, oh Jesus, this is crazy. There's too much coming at you. And the problem is, if I put it down, which I do often for like the whole day, when I pick it up, I'll get 70 text messages to go through.

I know.

And then I don't respond to some, and some people get mad. And then like, I'm sorry, it's like, it's too much. Yeah, it's too much coming in. And then there's so much, hey, look at this, hey, check this out, have you seen this, what do you think about that, you think this is real? Feel, you know.

And then the people that you don't respond to can oftentimes take the lack of response as basically you saying fuck you, and that's not the case at all. Right. You just don't have the time to do it. Right. And you read it and you liked it and you smiled, but you didn't put a smiley on it. Right.

You have to put a little heart.

You got to double-click it. It's a very strange social dynamic. You know, it's— I'm not sure I I'm very good at it.

No, no, it's probably a good sign. Yeah. Yeah, it demands too much. That's the problem. As much as it is interesting, if you have a wide social circle, it demands too much of your time. If you have, you know, 100 units of attention that you have for use throughout the day, it demands too many units, right? There's just too much coming at you. Yeah, and it'll take away from other things that you do, and that, that's, that's a real problem.

Yeah, yeah, I like sitting in my garden. Is that your thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a really good— I've been gardening. Yeah, that's, that's the real thing. That's my peaceful place. That's a real thing.

It's real. It's dirt. Yeah, real plant grows out, life comes from it. Yep, you can eat stuff from it. Yeah, you need stuff to do, right? You need a thing that can take you away from the other things.

Something to make more beautiful people every day. Something to, you know, something to care for. It's, you know, whether it's the garden— I have a garden in Los Angeles that, you know, I grow herbs. And, you know, to walk down and put those herbs, those fresh herbs in the omelet you're making. You know, it's a small thing, but it's huge. And then, I have, back east, I planted a garden with my son this this year, you know, like vegetable garden. And he's— I haven't been there, but he's been saying the tomatoes are coming like crazy and the cucumbers. And, you know, that's such a view. Yeah, there you go. It's this— it's a— I really love this. I love the idea that we can, you know, the earth has so much to offer us, you know. All it needs is water and sunlight and it'll produce all these beautiful things.

Well, there's built-in human rewards for growing things too. There's a human reward system that we have had in our DNA for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. When you grow things and they produce fruit and they produce vegetables, like, it's exciting. Yeah. Because you're going to eat. Yeah. You're going to survive.

Yeah. And then when you're doing your harvest in the fall, you have an abundance, right?, right? And then I learned how to pickle. Ah, and that's a joy because now you're, now you're set for the winter, right? Now you got a refrigerator full of pickled stuff. And, um, uh, you know, to be able to bite into a crisp pickle that you grew as a cucumber in the summer in December, it's just like, you know, this is how they survived, you know. This is those, you know, the storage of crops crops and how you make them survive through the winter. It's a skill that, you know, that— well, that's why we're still here.

And then you find out that pickling and fermented foods and all these things are fantastic for your body. Incredible. In a way that other foods just aren't. Yeah. And helps your microbiome and helps your gut. Yeah.

And then you can, you know, use the extra pickle juice for a martini. Right. And it's fantastic. Or you can just drink it.

Yeah, I do that too. I have a company that sells you these little packets of pickle juice and you drink it because it's a probiotic beverage.

Yeah, I have, I have many jars of pickles that are— there's no more pickles in, but I keep the juice for drinking. It's, uh, and you know, fermented foods, and you know, I've learned, you know, so much about the gut biome and how to make that healthier and and all these challenges we're up against with all the poisons in our food and how to get around them and how to clean yourself out. And I just did a cleanse, one of those Master Cleanses. I just did 14 days on where you don't eat anything for 14 days, and it's amazing how great you feel at the end of it.

14 whole days, no food at all?

No food at all, no.

Wow. What did you drink, water?

Just lemon juice. You use cayenne pepper and maple syrup. And that'll get you through the day. And then, but every morning you're doing a purge, right? So you're cleaning out, you're cleaning every, all the poisons out. I do that a couple times a year.

14 days is a long time with no food. It is. What's the first thing you eat when it was over?

You gotta ease your way back in. Like clear broth first, then soups, then vegetables, then get to the meats.

How long?

About a week re-entering. Really? Yeah. Whoa. I mean, you're eating, but you're not going for the steak first thing. Right, right, right. And so you have to kind of ease your system back into it.

Do you experience mental clarity when you do that?

Total mental clarity. Interesting. Yeah.

I've never done it. Most I've done is a day.

First 3 days are tough, but then once you get past the 3rd day, it's pretty— your energy level is like constant throughout the day. And you can work, you can play sports with it, you know, it's— around 10 days you should stop doing the physical stuff, too much exertion. I could still take a bike ride and stuff.

But you were working out 3 days of no food?

Yeah. Wow. You have to, you know, everyone's gonna have their own reaction, so, you know, I'm not advocating even to do do it, because, you know, I don't want to be responsible for that. But for me personally, it's really helped because it also— it restarts your system. It basically— you get rid of toxins. You're certainly not drinking. You're not doing any kind of abusive shit to yourself. And basically, your body is thanking you by the clarity it gives you. Like, you're really— like, and the other thing that happens is I'll just start cleaning. Shit, right? So, you know, when I'm on a cleanse, I'm gonna clean a closet because you're not only cleaning yourself, you're cleaning your environment around you. And it's— I, you know, I just, I just did it 2 weeks ago.

So yeah, how do you decide when to do it?

Usually when you've been a little indulgent and you're not feeling too good and, you know, you put on a little weight and just like, I got Yeah, I don't feel good, I wanna, you know, clean out.

You must lose a ton of weight doing that. Yeah. How much have you lost doing 14 days? £25. Whoa! Yeah, about 2 a day. Wow. Yeah. And then, so then your body's running completely on ketones, right? 'Cause your body's running on fat. Yeah. And so your body's burning fat and ketones. When you run on, I've been on ketogenic diets in the past and then I've been on the carnivore diet, which does the exact same thing. Where your mental clarity is just so much better. Like everything just runs smooth. It's just like you're— like you were saying, you have this level, flat energy throughout the day. There's no highs and lows, like crashing after a big meal.

Or caffeine pumps or all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But staying up till, you know, midnight and fine. The energy is fine. And you sleep less too, you need less sleep for some reason, I don't know why.

Also, I think it's probably good to give your digestive system a little break too. Yeah. Let it relax. I mean, it's constantly work, especially if you eat all throughout the day, if you're a snacker and then you have late at night, you have a little bite to eat, wake up in the morning, you have breakfast, like your digestive system's just constantly grinding out this food and digesting everything.

Yeah, the real poison for me is sugar. You know, it manifested in alcohol for a while, but I don't drink that much anymore. But sugar is the big— For everybody. Yeah, it's a tough one. It's very addictive. And, you know, you think, oh, it feels great when you first have it, but then it makes you pay.

Well, it's also with modern diets, like what the kind of sugar that we have available today really never existed in the past before. That's true. You know, for most of human history, if you wanted something sweet, you had to eat fruit, right? You know, and now all of a sudden you've got candy bars, you have stuff that comes to you in this insane form where you have 100 grams of sugar in something that you can eat, right? That's nuts. Yeah. You know, or a drink, you know, you get one of those— what is it, Baskin-Robbins Blizzard? Is that the one?

Oh my God, that thing, those things will mess you up. Oh, you get a headache after you're done. I know, it's like, it's like alcohol. Yeah, that expression, candy's dandy but liquor's quicker. Yeah, yeah, it's just, you know, it's liquor, just concentrated sugar. It's just like, you know, but, you know, I try not to be I don't want to be too much of a zealot about any of this stuff, but I have— like, my mom was introducing us to natural food in the late '60s. So she had read a book called Poisons in Our Food and started taking processed food out of our diet and white bread. This was early on, like 1967. Yeah. So she was a real, you know, you know, she really was a homeopath before it was called a homeopath. And wound up getting cancer and was told she had to have chemo and said, "No, I'm not doing it," and kicked it herself, you know, with changing what she was putting in her body. And so I've always, you know, had her as a kind of guidepost for my health. She used to always say the body is a temple and that the body can heal anything.

And a lot of it has to do with how you approach it in your mind. And if you believe that you can heal yourself, you can heal yourself.

Is she getting this from books?

I think she got it from a combination of books and her faith in, you know, Catholicism. I think every religion has a fasting day for some reason. That seems to be something that is common to all religion, that it's important that you not eat one day a week. She wouldn't do that with us, you know, as kids. She wouldn't starve us for a day, but she did have a whole holistic approach to the way the way that she viewed illness. And I remember her drumming it into our heads that if you ever get told by a doctor anything, you have to challenge it. You go to a different doctor and see if they say the same thing. Always, always, always. She lost her father and her brother within the course of a year to medical malpractice. Oh, wow. In the '50s. And so she had a serious distrust of the medical profession. And back then, it was like, you— there was no one even thought about suing for malpractice. It was like, that's the doctor, he's an authority figure, you can't mess with him, right? So she, she always approached it with a, a healthy level of, uh, questioning whenever she was given advice by doctors.

Wow. And, um, It's interesting. She's always been, you know, I've always kind of wondered how she would have reacted to this recent thing and all that. But I— have you ever done ayahuasca?

No. Yeah. But I've done DMT, which is the— that's the actual compound that's active in ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an orally active version of DMT.

DMT. Yeah, yeah. I was, you know, where they tell you to go in— when I did it, they tell you to go in with an intention. Mm-hmm. And my intention was to, you know, I was frustrated with feeling anger about what was going on in the world, and I said, I want to release that. I don't want to be consumed by that anger. And so I wound up in this, you know, the heavy-duty, you know, um, journey that ayahuasca is. And my mom showed up. Wow. Yeah. And, um, she's— I— it's not like you actually hear a voice, but you hear a voice, right? You basically— if she's there, you know it's her. She's saying something to you. And what she said was It was, "You're injured. You're a warrior and you're injured and you need to rest, but the fight's not over." That's what she told me in response to my intention.

Whoa. What were you battling?

I was battling my frustration with the dissolution of society, people being angry at each other over ridiculous things, long friendships being affected, people being canceled for expressing their opinion, all this stuff. And I wanted out. I wanted to be absolved of that. You want to be engaged in it. And what she told me in the course of this thing, believe it or not, you know, I understand people will be, "Oh, that's woo-woo and you're just tripping," and whatever. But I definitely felt her presence there. It was no doubt it was her. I went through a whole journey with her. I saw things from our lives together. And there was one moment where I was, you know, I was always been curious about something that happened in kindergarten or something, I don't remember. And she, you know, at one point I felt her presence and she said, "You were right about that. I'm sorry we didn't listen to you," you know, and this kind of really profoundly deep experience. But at the end of it, I felt completely lighter and completely, you know, relieved to have been through the experience and a great, great connection with my mom, you know, just like a beautiful, like, ah, she gets it.

She's still around. I've had quite a few experiences in this realm. And my mom, in fact, you know, my father died when he was 80 and my mom was 70 And she wasn't sick, but my dad had been dying for a while, and we all got down to say goodbye to him. They were living in Mexico at the time. And we went to the funeral, and my mom was very stoic and sang very strongly my father's favorite song at the funeral, and she didn't cry, and we were all concerned about her. We hired a couple people for when we left to take care of her. And she was really agitated the last night, and she was— I was there and she said, "You know, I don't trust these people. I don't know if they're gonna talk about you and your fame and all that stuff." I said, "Mom, don't worry about it. They're just here to get you stuff if you need it. Don't worry about it." I go off. She wakes up the next morning. She says to my sisters who are still in the house with her, "Everything I said last night, don't worry about it." And they said, "What happened, Mom?" What was the dream?

She said, I was in my childhood home in Westwood, California, and there was something in my living room and I couldn't look at it. It was this stone figure and I couldn't look at it. It was disturbing me. I didn't want to look at it. But then I look out the bay window and then coming down the street I see, led by my first friend in life, a group of people coming towards the house. And it didn't make any sense. There were people from my childhood, people from my choral society, people from my work, work, but they were all there and they all came to the door. And when they showed up, I realized everything was going to be fine. And I realized, oh my God, that was the departed that had come to say it's going to be okay. Wow. And so, my sisters left. 3 days, 4 days later, we got a phone call, my mom has died. She wasn't sick. And my sister talks to the woman that was taking care of her, and she said it was really strange. You know, the night before she died, she said, "He's here." And they said, "Who's here?" And she said, "Gil, my husband.

He's here. He's come to get me." And they said, "No, Mary, he's not there." And she said, "Oh, no, he most certainly is, and he looks very strong." because he died feeble. Goes to bed that night and passes. Whoa. So even the most cynical person in the world that doesn't believe in afterlife or anything, how do you explain that? How do you explain whatever chemicals were going on in her brain to bring her to that passing where she was going to join the person that she loved for her entire life? That's a beautiful thing, regardless of how you look at it. At it.

I don't think there's any value in being cynical about these experiences. And even the ayahuasca experience, like this idea that you're hallucinating and that that's what this is, doesn't matter. It's the same experience. If you really did make contact with your mother in the afterlife and you really did have this communication versus whatever the fuck hallucination means— I don't know what you, what you mean by that, that, it's the same experience. Yeah. So like there's no value in being cynical about it. Like you get a— you get— there's something that you experience from it that's tangible. It's, it's real. You feel it. It changes your perspective. It changes the way you feel about the world. Yeah. Like that's a real thing.

That's a real—

just because you can't put a measuring tape to it or you can't put it on a scale, don't say it's not real.

There's so many ways of being that we haven't even studied or have no idea idea about, right? How people can communicate over 2,000 miles. Like, a mother wakes up in the middle of the night knowing something's wrong with their child, and 5 minutes later the fucking phone rings, right? What the hell is that? Or twins.

Yeah, twins who have some sort of very strange connection with each other. Yeah. When I was—

uh, my grandfather, who I was very close to, he, uh, he was— had been dead for 2 months, and I had a dream about him, and he— and I woke I woke up, like, startled, and I heard his voice, you know, and he said, basically, "Don't worry. I'll take care of it." And I didn't know what the hell it meant, but it was very clear. It was like, "I'll take care of it." 15 minutes later, I get a phone call from Susan, and my son, Miles, who was 6 years old at the time, had run out into the middle of 7th Avenue, and she said it was the weirdest thing. Something— it was like something stopped him like that. And a car goes behind him and a car goes in front of him. And I was like, I know exactly what just happened. He was— whatever that is, whatever energy he could muster in whatever phase of being he was, he fucking saved my son's life. Heroic. Quickly. I'm no doubt about that. Why would he show up and say that to me? He said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it." Wow. So I totally believe this stuff.

I believe that we— that life, death, there's other planes of existence that we can get to through various means. It doesn't have to be ayahuasca. It doesn't. There are— if you're open to listening in different ways, there are great things available for you. It's like the idea of an accident. Is it an accident that you run into that person that you've been wanting to talk to, and all of a sudden now they're right in front of you? Right. You know, that's not an accident. It's divine whatever, you know, whatever the divine is for you. It's— there's another level of energy that is going around. You know, we haven't even studied how the heart communicates. You know, there's that Spanish or Portuguese cardiologist that talks about the realm of communication in the electromagnetic field of the heart and what that means and how the heart can communicate and has— parts of the heart have more neurons than parts of the brain and like, what is that all about? And it's such that we don't, we don't think that way, you know. We don't want to experience— we have a— it's a heart is a meat pump, and that's— it just runs in your entire life.

Yeah. Uh, but it doesn't— this guy's suggesting, no, it's electromagnetic energy. It's what makes us live longer if we're with someone else or with a pet, you know. The some— that people that are isolated and alone alone are hurting and they're not having that electromagnetic connection with other people. That's why we crave crowds. That's why we want to be in groups of people. It's a natural thing. It keeps us alive. It keeps us activated in a community. But we don't study that. We don't study what that is. And I think it's kind of magical.

That's why solitary confinement is such a cruel punishment. So cruel, yeah. A lot of people that think it's actual torture. Of course it is.

Yeah. Of course it is. You've got nothing to interact with. And it's why that lockdown was cruel. You know, just the scope of that loneliness is just immense, you know, that some people had to deal with.

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

There's magic in the world. I mean, there's this old way of thinking. I became— do you know what the— there's a book called The Nature of Things by a guy named Lucretius, written in 350 BC, and it's Epicureanism. And Epicureanism now is about, you know, you like food, you like wine, whatever. Back then it was like the whole purpose of this philosophy or religion, whatever you want to call it, was that all of life is a miracle. Everything that you're seeing in front of you is the first time it's happening and will never happen again. It's a collision of atoms in a particular way. They don't call them atoms, but they call them the smallest part particles that create unique experiences every moment of your life. And the whole purpose of life is to seek the pleasure of that and avoid pain. And the pain can be either living isolated or without the idea of magic, or indulging in something where it creates pain. Too much pleasure creates pain. But this philosophy in this beautiful long-form The Ode to Joy poem written by Lucretius in 350 BC is all about magic. It's all about this idea that look how lucky we are to wake up in the morning and see that frickin' cactus blooming.

You know, that's like when we get so inured from that, so, you know, anesthetized from the magic and it's all just the doldrum, every day is the same. That's robbing yourself of so much, right? That the idea that what if you just woke up and said, hey, it's fucking magic. It's— this is amazing. First of all, I'm breathing. Second of all, look at that sun coming in the window. And this is going to be an amazing day.

Instead of like, ah shit, I got to get up and, you know, do my fucking thing, you Like, no, it's also relative because if you were dying in a hospital and you had this opportunity, say, okay, I'm— all you have to do is say these magic words and you'll be transported back to health in your home with a completely new perspective and a completely new appreciation for just being healthy and alive. Yeah, it's just hard for people to shift that perspective and think like that all the time. But if you could force yourself just as an exercise to say, "I am so lucky to be above ground. I am so lucky to be healthy and mobile," if I am, "and I can just go do what I want to do and live my life and go say hi to people I love." Yeah. Appreciate it.

And the idea that you can also, even if things are bad, that if you approach life that way, then you— there is a possibility of making everything better. Better, and it has to do with humility. It has to do with being able to say, "I can forgive somebody for something. I can also ask forgiveness for something I've done." It's all about humility. It's all about humility in the face of not only your own personal experience, but in how you view the universe. Like, either I'm lucky to be here, or what a blessing to be able to have this life I've had. I want to give. I had this beautiful experience when I was going through one of my darkest periods. This woman showed up and I'd met her once in my life, this Tibetan woman. She's a great singer. And I said, "Why are you here?" She said, "You're in trouble. I'm going to take care of you." And I didn't even know her. And I said, "All right, okay." And so she did this Reiki healing on me. She sang, she burned incense, and I didn't understand it. I didn't understand why she was there.

She makes me a meal that evening, first evening she's done all this healing. Feeling on me. And she says, you know, she makes the meal I'm eating. I finish eating, I start taking the dishes, right? She says, "What are you doing?" I said, "Well, you cooked, I'll clean." She says, "Sit down. That's the problem with you people in the West. It's all a business deal. I'm doing this for you. Can you just accept that? I'm taking care of you. Can you accept And she said, "You will never know how to give love until you know how to receive love." And it blew my mind. Because at the time, I realized I was engaged in that kind of transactional way of looking at relationships. That the idea that giving completely is so much better you actually get more out of it than you do receiving it. Mm. And once I understood that, it kind of transformed everything for me because— and that was the person that was a total stranger and she showed up just out of nowhere. And I said, finally, at the end of it, I said, "Why are you here?" And she said, "You have done good things for the world.

We need I need you. And she left. And, you know, so I'm— I didn't plan that. I didn't— there was— I had no idea that was going to happen. But it made me realize there are angels in this world. They are manifested as human beings, but there are certain kinds of people that are there for you if you are open for it. If you are closed off and cynical, you will not see your angels. But if you are maybe sometimes just completely wiped and you have no, you know, you just ready to receive it. And maybe the fact that I was able to receive that, I think, really helped me and, and helped me shift everything. It's always a struggle, of course. That lesson doesn't mean that I'm that way forever. Right. But it's a reminder. It's that there is another energy in the world that is actually an energy of good. We are consumed by the bad all the time. Right. There's all these, you know, negative forces that are trying to bring us And I think that sometimes we get so defeated by those things that we are not open to the energy of the angels, the good.

And when I say angels, I don't mean— I know what you mean.

You know, yeah, super positive people, like something, some pure expression of love and compassion and generosity. Yeah, yeah. And this is the real problem with social media and algorithms in particular, is that that it really highlights the things that make you upset. It does. Yeah. And that kind of energy is like, really, is that, is that affecting your everyday life? Well, it is if you dive into the negativity all day long and you're engrossed in social media and getting upset about things rather than experiencing the life that's actually in front of you and in doing it from a positive perspective and not concentrating on all these external things that could be making you angry or making you frustrated or filling you with anxiety. You're actually poisoning yourself with that.

Yeah, you are. And it's a constant battle because that damn thing's buzzing all the time. But I have gotten better with it. I will not look at it first thing in the morning anymore.

Well, it's much like we were talking about, like, film and records being a new thing. This is a really new thing. And this This is very invasive. It's a very new thing and very invasive, and it's going to take a while for people to figure out the right way and the wrong way to use it. Yeah. And what, what are the ramifications and the consequences of using it incorrectly? You know, because no one's teaching that, you know, they're not teaching children that in school. There should be a course on this is the negative aspect of social media. These are, these are the negative aspects of interaction. This is what it's doing to your consciousness. This is what it's doing to your focus. It's stealing your joy. It's stealing your appreciation of the moment. Right.

And it's leading you into conflict constantly. Constantly. And, you know, that's a negative thing. That's a force of evil. Yeah. Strong word, but, you know. It's the right word, though.

You know, it's again, there's these words: good, evil, angel, God. God, they fuck with people because they're like, oh, what is that? It's— I think you gotta kind of abandon that way of thinking and just go, well, this is— there's certainly positive and negative, and there's certainly love and evil. There's— those are real things, and there's good. There's good in the world. And also, the more you concentrate on other things, the more your life is defined by those other things, whether it's good or bad. So if you're constantly thinking about bad things, like, well, you can't have a very loving and amazing life if you're constantly inundated with thoughts about negative things. And on the other side of it, if you're thinking in a positive way and enjoying love and friendship and community and just doing stuff that you actually find value in, well, that's gotta give you better energy in life. And also the way you interact with other people will be different, so you'll affect the way they feel, and that'll have that butterfly effect out into the rest of the people they come in contact with.

Not to mention, it's really good for your health. Yes. Well, you—

like you were saying before, one of the worst things for your health is loneliness.

Yeah, yeah, it'll kill you.

Tim Robbins, you're a cool motherfucker. Thank you, man. I enjoyed talking to you.

I appreciate it. Great. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. My pleasure.