Dec. 15, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:50:55
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Tell me why. | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| I mean, I can give you some theories. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Just keep this like a fist from your face. | ||
| And we're good to go. | ||
| What's your theory? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do I need these? | ||
| Yeah, they're better. | ||
| Keeps us from talking over each other. | ||
| Locks you in. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| You get used to it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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My... | |
| It's a little trippy. | ||
| Hearing your own voice? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did so many radio shows back in the day. | ||
| It's normal to me. | ||
| I'll get into it. | ||
| But my theory has to do with authenticity and what you represent and how rare that is. | ||
| And it's not that what you're doing isn't covered in other ways. | ||
| In the culture, but you as an individual and what you bring feels, and I think is, it's not like an illusion, very authentic. | ||
| And that's super rare. | ||
| It shouldn't be super rare though, right? | ||
| That's what's confusing. | ||
| People should just be able to be themselves. | ||
| I mean, there's big commercial interests in it not being. | ||
| There's also people who read a lot of social media and they read comments about themselves and they think about what people are saying and then they self-analyze too much and self-censor and self-correct. | ||
| You know, I do all that stuff on my own enough where I'm pretty introspective and I analyze myself and I'm probably my harshest critics I don't need a lot of other people's input on that and when you do get a lot of people's input on that I think people start leaning in certain directions politically and socially and they start saying things because they think it'll gain them favor with certain groups and I Yeah, I mean, the temptation when you're doing media is to sell something. | ||
| So as soon as you're trying to sell something, you're going to get into crafting it a certain way, crafting a persona in order to come across. | ||
| Do you have those considerations when you're putting together, like The Hurt Locker, for instance, which is one of my all-time favorite movies? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's such a good movie. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's so good because it's so, like, you can see how he would be like that. | ||
| You could see how he would be drawn to go back there. | ||
| You could see how the pull of it and the chaos of it all. | ||
| And then there's a scene where he's, I believe he's in a supermarket. | ||
| And it's just fucking boring. | ||
| Life is just the mundane, normal life. | ||
| And he just wants to go back to war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, I buy it all in, you know? | ||
| It's like, it's very rare that, you know, you see them, there's like no suspension of disbelief. | ||
| You buy them, you're watching that film, and you're like, whoa. | ||
| Like, I could see... | ||
| Well, that was a big part of what we were trying to do, was to, was to... | ||
| So I had been in, I had been in Baghdad as a reporter in 2004, I guess. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| I had seen some of what's depicted in the film. | ||
| And so I had witnessed the bomb squad going out and defusing bombs. | ||
| And I wrote an article about it, and then the idea came along for a screenplay. | ||
| I had the idea to write a screenplay, put it that way. | ||
| And my whole thing is, over the course of a year, I didn't know how to write a screenplay, but my whole thing as I was learning how to do it and doing rewrites was to try to replicate the experience that I had, that I felt when I was there. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So to do that, there was a lot of craft and whatnot involved in creating that, that I had to learn. | ||
| But it also meant breaking a lot of rules of narrative and storytelling That you normally would do to make a movie effective, but that in this case would have made it less authentic to the experience. | ||
| Like one, for example, is that most war movies are organized around a mission. | ||
| It's like in the beginning of the movie, you're told, hey, this is what we got to do, and then the rest of the movie plays out, like Saving Private Ryan or what have you. | ||
| When I was in Baghdad, one of the things I was struck by Was this ceaseless hamster wheel repetition of the war. | ||
| That it wasn't organized around a single mission. | ||
| It was this futile attempt to try to find all these bombs that had been dispersed throughout the country by the counterinsurgency. | ||
| So I couldn't organize it around a mission, at least in my mind, to keep it authentic. | ||
| I had to kind of make the story... | ||
| Similar enough to the reality, which was like everyday new mission, like a kind of, you know, episodic structure, they call it. | ||
| So there are all these decisions along the way that get made to create that feeling that you have where you go, oh, I can suspend my disbelief because this feels real. | ||
| And... | ||
| Then there's the point at which, like you do all this research, I did all that research of actually going there, hanging out with these guys, talking to them, witnessing what they were doing, trying to get deep inside of it, learning about IEDs and how they work and really getting inside their mentality, hanging out with them. | ||
| And then there's another point at which you kind of put yourself into the piece too. | ||
| And it's funny that you mentioned the scene at the end And it's been really instructive to me because when I was doing screenings for The Hurt Locker, a lot of times at the end of the screening, a vet would come up. | ||
| And that scene in the grocery store where Sergeant James, that's the character name, was kind of first time back from the war, and he's overwhelmed by the commercialism of the supermarket and all the choices of cereal. | ||
| And it's not just that it's boring, it's that it's so meaningless compared to what he'd just been doing. | ||
| And he can't function. | ||
| And you've seen this guy operate on such a high level for the past, whatever it is, hour and a half. | ||
| Yeah, there's a scene right there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| And you can't choose, you know? | ||
| All this, like, consumer shit. | ||
| It was such a good representation of what these guys have to go through. | ||
| But my... | ||
| And Renner is so good there too. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| But that actual thing had happened to me coming back. | ||
| I felt this sense of dislocation, and I was only there for like a couple of weeks, but I felt this sense of like how surreally grotesque like certain parts of our wealth are after you see this poverty and you see the hardship of the war. | ||
| So that was like my thing. | ||
| That wasn't like a research thing. | ||
| And it's just interesting. | ||
| It was totally from my heart. | ||
| And I remember putting it in and thinking, this is one of the rare things in the movie that I didn't get from reporting. | ||
| And it actually turned out to be one of the things that translated the most to other people. | ||
| And it kind of taught me about, well, sometimes if you just dig deep enough, probably, there's a chance anyway, that your experiences or my experiences, if you're really being honest about them, And this goes back to where we started this conversation, will translate to other people. | ||
| Even if you think they're super hyper fucking specific to you. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It might be hyper specific to you, but it's very relatable. | ||
| It's relatable because... | ||
| It is in retrospect, but at the time I was like, this is just a weird thing that happened to me. | ||
| No, but you nailed it. | ||
| Because in the context of the movie, you see that this guy is... | ||
| I mean, every time he's defusing a bomb, this could be it. | ||
| And he's over there in this chaos-ridden war zone. | ||
| And then he comes back and he's wandering through a supermarket aisle. | ||
| It was perfect. | ||
| It was the perfect juxtaposition. | ||
| And you do relate to it, because I think all of us are aware that you kind of get accustomed to whatever you're around. | ||
| You know, you get accustomed to a chaotic home life or a peaceful home life. | ||
| You get a very busy workplace where people are yelling at each other and everything's constantly moving fast or boring droning cubicle life. | ||
| Like, people understand that there's like certain ways of living and existing that you can get accustomed to. | ||
| And they kind of make sense when you've adjusted and adapted to them. | ||
| But then to have such a clear difference between being in a war zone and being in a supermarket, it was perfect. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| I'll take that. | ||
| Yeah, no, it was really good, man. | ||
| It's like, what does it feel like to have the responsibility of trying to relay one of the most complex aspects of Human life, which is war. | ||
| It's funny when you said perfect, I just flashed on, not to not answer your question, but I remember there was some reviewer at the time that called it a near-perfect movie. | ||
| And I remember calling him up and being like, near-perfect? | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Like, is that near really necessary? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well... | |
| Because I want to put it on the... | ||
| I wanted to put it on the DVD. Anyway, we did. | ||
| We left it on there. | ||
| It's still... | ||
| I mean, you know, it's hard for someone to say something's absolutely perfect. | ||
| No, of course. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| Nothing's perfect. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| When you said perfect... | ||
| What the fuck, bro? | ||
| Near perfect? | ||
| What's near? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What more do you want? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I do feel the sense of responsibility. | ||
| I mean, I think that... | ||
| I think we're all responsible. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Whether you're doing a topic like that where I tend to do real-life stuff, although this most recent thing is fictional, I think that anybody in the media has a huge sense of responsibility. | ||
| It comes with the territory. | ||
| Whether they feel it or not or take it on, I don't know. | ||
| I think it would be nice if we lived in a world where people felt more responsible. | ||
| Because I think a lot of what is put out there is very irresponsible. | ||
| And I'm not even talking about like with true stories of like history where you're distorting history. | ||
| That's obviously irresponsible. | ||
| But there's so much of our cultural production, the corporate production that is, in my view, irresponsible. | ||
| I take the responsibility seriously just because I know in that case there are people that were still downrange and in harm's way. | ||
| So there were all kinds of things that I was careful to not depict because I didn't want to put anybody, like that's the most basic level of responsibility, right? | ||
| Nobody should get hurt because you burn some classified thing. | ||
| So like in terms of like tactics that are used? | ||
| Tactics or like there was at the time in the war there was this like jamming system that was used to help prevent like remote detonation. | ||
| Of these IEDs, electronic jamming systems, and I didn't depict that at all. | ||
| And then after the movie came out, a bunch of army guys were like, that wasn't realistic. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, I mean, it is super realistic, but yes, I left some things out. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| Because people called me and they were like, dude, you can't put that in. | ||
| That would be bad. | ||
| So there's that level of responsibility, but then there's another responsibility to more mystical things like truth and history. | ||
| Which I also feel pretty acutely. | ||
| When you talk about irresponsible depictions, what do you mean by that? | ||
| I mean, I think that media is really important to our culture, to our civilization. | ||
| And one way to think about it is like There's more responsibility now around, let's say, portraying diversity. | ||
| We've gotten a lot better at at least trying to make movies and television shows that are more reflective of what the country really looks like. | ||
| But there's other areas where I don't see that same level of responsibility. | ||
| One is like, the obvious one that the right talks about all the time is like, Depiction of guns and violence where there's just so much... | ||
| And I mean, I have violence in this show. | ||
| I'm not like saying like... | ||
| And I'm not like anti-firearm or anything, but there's so much irresponsible kind of... | ||
| Taking heavy shit that has real consequences and aestheticizing it is irresponsible to me. | ||
| It's fucked. | ||
| And... | ||
| And that's a kind of abuse, I think, of the responsibility that comes with the power of telling stories. | ||
| When you're telling a story, in a way, it's a kind of remote teaching. | ||
| You're kind of putting something out in the world and saying, this is how it is. | ||
| Another one is plot. | ||
| People abuse plot all the time, which kind of bugs me because If I'm telling you a story and the plot is so radically disconnected from how things really work, I'm not talking about science fiction, but even within science fiction, if I posit to you, here are the set of rules of this story and then I break them, I think that's really irresponsible because it's fucking with people's heads. | ||
| It's like making them dumber in a certain way that... | ||
| I mean, it would take me a while to explain, but these are the kinds of things that I think about sometimes. | ||
| No, it makes sense. | ||
| You're trying to do a film that's impactful, but it's also... | ||
| It's easy to follow because you understand that this is how people behave and this is how it really goes down. | ||
| Here's an example. | ||
| Like if I made a movie about Iraq where you ended up feeling like really good about the war. | ||
| Like a feel good movie about the war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I think that's irresponsible. | ||
| Not that there aren't, like, amazing stories of heroism, and not that there aren't moments about that war to feel good about, but the overall gist of it is it, like, was a catastrophe. | ||
| How is it... | ||
| Managing that when you're dealing with studios and executives and all these different people, is it difficult to get people on board with what you're trying to do? | ||
| You're really trying to make it authentic? | ||
| I don't really... | ||
| Typically, I haven't really messed with any of that stuff. | ||
| We made those movies... | ||
| Catherine Bingham and I made those movies independently. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| So we had... | ||
| It was very cowboyish. | ||
| We had financing from a whole bunch of different places. | ||
| We pre-sold the foreign rights, so this is getting inside baseball, but we never had to deal with a Fox or a Universal or a Sony. | ||
| And even when we made Zero Dark Thirty, that was financed by one person, Megan Ellison, who just wrote a check. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| What a gangster. | ||
| I love Megan. | ||
| Shout out to Megan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a crazy move. | ||
| How much did that movie cost? | ||
| It depends if you include the production budget. | ||
| I think it was around $40 million. | ||
| And then promotion, I think she put up another $20 something. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty big money. | ||
| Luckily it worked. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know. | |
| I lost some money. | ||
| I lost a lot of her money on Detroit. | ||
| Oh, did you? | ||
| But she made a lot on Zero Dark Thirty. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting what catches and what doesn't catch in the movie world. | ||
| We were talking the other day about the Northmen, about how it's probably one of the most realistic depictions of what it must have been like to be living as a Viking. | ||
| There's no traditional, normal, modern-day superhero-type people. | ||
| Everyone is this chaotic person from history. | ||
| Filled with flaws. | ||
| It's so realistic, but yet it didn't really do that well. | ||
| It didn't? | ||
| Supposedly. | ||
| That's what I've been told. | ||
| He's a good filmmaker, that guy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He's a serious filmmaker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, sometimes it comes down to scale. | ||
| I don't know what the budget of that movie was, but I know that it was big. | ||
| So sometimes it's like, I think about this a lot. | ||
| It's like, you want to be able to get back what you spent. | ||
| And the temptation is always to go bigger, but then that puts a higher expectation on the movie's performance. | ||
| When you've had a series of successful films, is there ever a moment where they come to you and say, listen, what do you think about doing like a big blockbuster action movie and kind of bringing some of that? | ||
| Nobody ever fucking asked me that. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| They never do. | ||
| I mean, I did some, like, script doctoring for a while, which is kind of the closest I've come to that, which was great because it was crazy good money, where you come in and they're like, okay, you have a week. | ||
| They pay you by the week or two weeks. | ||
| Can you, like, give the bad guys some different lines of dialogue or something like that? | ||
| Or, like, can you fix the third act? | ||
| So I've done that. | ||
| But... | ||
| Nobody's ever said, here's our prized piece of IP. Here's like Spider-Man, whatever. | ||
| We want you to shepherd it through. | ||
| The thing is, that would be a great story for the media. | ||
| We've taken this guy who does these very authentic films and we've applied him to... | ||
| Yeah, it'd be a good story, but they don't need that. | ||
| They don't want that. | ||
| If I'm running one of those companies, I wouldn't hire me. | ||
| You don't want to have that conversation. | ||
| You're just like, dude, here's how we do it. | ||
| We have a playbook. | ||
| Okay, it's worked every fucking time. | ||
| And we're going to do the same playbook again. | ||
| And I'd be like, well, yeah, but can we change it up? | ||
| And what if we made it more realistic? | ||
| And what if we tried to make it more authentic? | ||
| They'd be like, bro, we're selling toys for kids. | ||
| They are, but adults watch it too. | ||
| That would be the temptation. | ||
| Well, every once in a while you get a Chris Nolan or somebody that has the... | ||
| Like insane artistic chops and also like the marketplace power with a number of like to change it up. | ||
| Like The Watchman. | ||
| Yeah, or like The Watchman's a good example too, but like he did it with Dark Knight. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But that's unusual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those systems, I mean, they're factories. | ||
| You know, so I had a hard enough time just making this at Apple, so I don't... | ||
| I mean, not that they weren't great, not to talk any shit about them, but those are really industrial products when you go and watch a Marvel movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And... | ||
| There's a limit to how much any one filmmaker or writer can really change what they're trying to do with their product. | ||
| So it's ultimately... | ||
| I mean, the money is great, but it's ultimately not that... | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| It's not that interesting. | ||
| It's just a totally different thing than what you do. | ||
| Kind of, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It'd be like asking a comedian to write a song. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| They're both entertainment, but it's just like... | ||
| It would be asking you to be like, hey, why don't we just, I'll give you like double what you're making now, triple what you're making now, but we gotta, you gotta just like condense this shit up, right? | ||
| You gotta just get to the good stuff. | ||
| And you're gonna have 15 minutes with each guest, 10 minutes with each guest, we're gonna put you on NBC. You'd be like, I don't know if you could do that. | ||
| You'd be like, how much money? | ||
| You'd be like, I'll do it. | ||
| I might be able to do this. | ||
| You can figure it out. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, it is interesting. | ||
| You might be able to do it, but you might not be as good at it. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| It wouldn't be the same thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a thing that people like at a podcast that it's a hang. | ||
| It's a conversation. | ||
| People that are listening right now, they feel like they're here with you. | ||
| That's what they like about it. | ||
| It's like, if I was in the room, things wouldn't be any different. | ||
| It would be the same sort of thing. | ||
| It's not like there's a lot of people standing by with bated breath, staring at clipboards, making sure notes get hit, and all that kind of shit will... | ||
| Yeah, that'll ruin the final experience for the people that are listening to it. | ||
| The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the more influence, the more different ideas, the more commercialized it becomes. | ||
| The beautiful thing about this show is that no one has any influence. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| So it's just conversations. | ||
| That's what I think resonates with people. | ||
| They're just listening to people talking. | ||
| Just two guys having a conversation about his art. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and it's also because I think you're so comfortable in your skin that you don't modulate to hit a note, which is what is so much of the culture right now. | ||
| I don't think you can, because people know it. | ||
| They know when you're doing that. | ||
| Like, they feel it. | ||
| They feel like, oh, he's kind of bullshitting here. | ||
| But the thing is, that's the format if you're on late night television. | ||
| That's like, you have to do that. | ||
| People love it. | ||
| So it does work. | ||
| It's just unfortunate, I think. | ||
| But it's interesting that there's these new... | ||
| That's one of the things that's interesting about the success of your work. | ||
| It's like there's something about authenticity and something about... | ||
| There's an audience for everything. | ||
| There's an audience for the selling toys, Marvel movies. | ||
| I love those movies. | ||
| They're fun. | ||
| I like to watch the Hulk smash it. | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| But there's a giant difference between the way you feel about that versus Zero Dark Thirty or versus The Hurt Locker or this new thing, Echo 3, which I haven't had a chance to see because it comes out Friday, right? | ||
| It comes out... | ||
| On Friday, the fifth episode will be out. | ||
| It's on Apple TV. So it's out now? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's out on Apple TV. And why did you decide... | |
| You have to actually have Apple TV. Yeah. | ||
| Or you could sign up for a free trial and watch my show. | ||
| Oh, you could do that. | ||
| You could... | ||
| There's a seven-day free... | ||
| It's like six bucks or seven bucks a month. | ||
| I can't believe I'm shilling right now for the Apple Corporation. | ||
| They clearly need me to... | ||
| They need help. | ||
| They do. | ||
| They have two and a half trillion dollars. | ||
| They're not doing that well. | ||
| No. | ||
| They're only in everyone's pocket. | ||
| So if you could just give them six or seven, I think it's $6.99. | ||
| For the trial? | ||
| No, the trial is free. | ||
| For every month it's $6.99. | ||
| I've had it forever. | ||
| It's the best. | ||
| I love Apple TV. I'll chill for them. | ||
| Just fucking sign up for the trial. | ||
| Here's my proposition if you haven't. | ||
| Sign up for the trial. | ||
| You'll watch, you'll get the first six episodes if you signed up today. | ||
| And then you can decide if you want to go pay the $6.99. | ||
| So watch it for six hours and then cancel it? | ||
| No, then pay seven bucks and watch the last four hours. | ||
| Then do whatever the fuck you want. | ||
| There it is right there. | ||
| So tell me how this came about. | ||
| And what are you trying to do with this? | ||
| Well, the biggest thing about this is it's... | ||
| It's 10 hours. | ||
| It's a TV show, but I was trying to think of it more like a movie. | ||
| So it's like everybody says this. | ||
| Everybody says they're making a 10-hour movie. | ||
| It's like a thing right now people say. | ||
| Like Ozark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This really is a 10-hour movie in the sense that the way most TV is structured is it's just designed to get you to click. | ||
| Every hour or half hour is designed to get you to click on the next hour. | ||
| Obviously, right? | ||
| So that entails all kinds of things with plot and with how you have to set things up and resolve them within the hour and then leave other things hanging. | ||
| And what I like about movies is it's just one thing. | ||
| So the idea here was maybe audiences are ready for Something where in the first hour, you're getting into the story. | ||
| I mean, there's crazy action. | ||
| It's not like it's boring, but you're getting into the story. | ||
| It's not like meant to resolve something in that first hour. | ||
| And then in the second hour, you're getting a little bit deeper and you're learning a little bit more. | ||
| And then in the third hour, and it keeps changing over the course. | ||
| And where you end up, I guarantee you where you end up, In the last hour is not where you would have ever imagined in the first hour. | ||
| Even though there's a lot about this that seems like it's about a woman that is kidnapped. | ||
| So it's like a high-pressure situation. | ||
| She's kidnapped. | ||
| And I kind of was thinking, like, how would I tell this story, which is a fictional story? | ||
| I mean, it does happen, right? | ||
| Like, today. | ||
| What's her name? | ||
|
unidentified
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Brittany Griner. | |
| Yeah, Brittany Griner. | ||
| Um... | ||
| But how would that really go down if somebody was held in a foreign country, in this case in Venezuela? | ||
| What would really happen if, as a couple of complicating factors, the woman who is kidnapped... | ||
| Who's a brilliant scientist. | ||
| She's interested in, she does research into psychedelics. | ||
| She's a psychopharmacologist. | ||
| She's down in the Amazon looking for psychoactive compounds for research, for addiction research. | ||
| But she also has this relationship with the CIA, which is a little bit unclear what the depth of the relationship is. | ||
| So that's who gets kidnapped. | ||
| How would she go through that in real life? | ||
| Like if we take that as a hypothesis that something like that could happen, which clearly it could, it's not like every day, but Americans do get rolled up in foreign countries. | ||
| How would she move through that experience and what would the experience be like for her? | ||
| And then what would happen if the two people closest to her, her brother and her husband were both in special forces? | ||
| And how would they deal with it in real life? | ||
| Not in Taken. | ||
| I like Taken, but not that version. | ||
| But how would they actually deal with it? | ||
| And the idea was to make a 10-hour movie with that as the plot engine and then put inside of it Pretty much everything else I've been thinking about for the last 10 years. | ||
| All my other interests slammed into that plot, which is kind of a capacious enough story and a clear enough story because it's obvious what you want to see happen. | ||
| You want them to get her out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| When you say all your other interests, what do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, just whatever else I've been thinking. | ||
| I've been thinking a lot about other shit besides kidnapping. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's a story about family. | ||
| It's a story about their relationship, the relationship between husband and wife. | ||
| It's a story about honesty. | ||
| It's a story about love. | ||
| It's a story about how couples lie to each other and what the price of lying is. | ||
| It's a story about men and how men relate to each other. | ||
| In that, you know, these two guys know each other well because they're in the same unit together, but they also have like a somewhat complicated past. | ||
| And they have this mission that they have to deal with that's not like a mission that has been given to them by the government. | ||
| So it's not like their job. | ||
| So it has a different quality to it because it's their person they love most in the world. | ||
| And so it's about how these two guys interact with each other. | ||
| It's about representations of masculinity, which is something we can talk about. | ||
| It's about how the fucking world works. | ||
| How would the CIA respond to a situation like that? | ||
| One of the things was like, There was always these conversations as I was writing the script, like, who are the bad guys? | ||
| Who are the bad guys? | ||
| You always need a bad guy, particularly in a kidnapping story. | ||
| The bad guys are obviously going to be the kidnappers. | ||
| But, you know, I think a little bit about kind of trying to, when we talked about responsibility, trying to, like... | ||
| Get rid of some of that black and white thinking and give people something that has a little more gray in it. | ||
| And so one of the things we do in the show is like, I'll put you inside the room of the rebels who were involved in the kidnapping. | ||
| I want you to understand who they are and where they're coming from. | ||
| Because just making them like mustache twirly bad guys isn't really... | ||
| It's not really going to be that helpful... | ||
| To my final ultimate goal, which is to put you at the end of this 10 hours in a place that you didn't see coming and give you an experience that you didn't really think you were going to have and a series of thoughts and emotions that probably you haven't had in exactly this way before, right? | ||
| But if I give you the same shit you've always seen and I'm like, oh, here's the bad guy. | ||
| This is how the bad guy behaves. | ||
| You know that. | ||
| You've seen a million bad guys. | ||
| Then it's very hard for me to, like, at the end of it, give you a new emotional response. | ||
| And that's like, or a new thought process. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's all the shit. | ||
| That's some of the shit I've been thinking about. | ||
| What is the difference in the challenge of putting together a 10-hour film, essentially, that's broken into one-hour increments? | ||
| versus a traditional film format like how much different is your process and how much more planning is involved and how much more time it's five times as long obviously and and That's just like, I didn't really know, because when I started, I just thought, oh, it's just five times, but it's like five times as long, but like a hundred times harder. | ||
| And connected. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the biggest thing is the delivery system, I would say. | ||
| I don't know that my process changes that much, but see, in a movie, I have you. | ||
| If you pay the money, if I can get you to pay the money, and you go into a theater, okay, this is dating back before people just stayed home, but let's say back in the day when people still went to theaters. | ||
| I have you. | ||
| You're not likely to walk out unless it's fucking terrible because you pay the money, you've parked your car, you're going to sit. | ||
| Now the fact that I have you somewhat as a captive audience is a huge advantage to me because it means I can like disperse out effects in a much more calibrated way. | ||
| I don't have to give you like a dopamine hit every 30 seconds because I'm not trying to keep you in your seat and I can tell a much more complicated story and challenge you a lot more. | ||
| When it's TV, I don't fucking have anything of your attention, right? | ||
| You could be streaming it in the kitchen, making eggs. | ||
| It could be on your phone. | ||
| I could be spending weeks building the most bitching special effects, realistic action sequence ever committed to television, which I think we've done here and there in terms of the realism of the combat. | ||
| In the beginning of episode one, There's like a 15-minute action sequence that takes place on a snowy mountain, Afghanistan, meant to be Afghanistan. | ||
| And it's guys fighting in the snow, which we really haven't seen that much of. | ||
| And there's Black Hawk helicopters and.50 caliber machine guns. | ||
| And it's beautifully shot, the best sound mixing in the world, like the sound of the bullets ricocheting off the mountains are sick. | ||
| And an enormous amount of energy went into making sure all the snow matched, like the snow that we got on that day matched the visual effects of the fake snow for the days we weren't there. | ||
| If you're watching that shit on your phone, it's just like, you're just gonna be like, oh, what's this? | ||
| How frustrating is that, that that's how people consume films? | ||
| Well, that's the advantage of a film. | ||
| So to me, it's like, I work the same way, but the audience is like... | ||
| Like openness when you're in a movie because it's totally different when you're in TV. So TV tends to be a lot more pushy and salesy in terms of how the storytelling goes because they're like... | ||
| It's not like you have somebody for two hours. | ||
| You have somebody for two minutes before they decide to get up and go to the fridge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or change the channel. | ||
| Like how easy is it just to change the channel? | ||
| Yeah, or stare at your phone while you're at home. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| It's fucked. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I kind of blew all that off, like maybe stupidly, but I kind of was thinking to place the bet that there are audiences out there that want something really dope and that are willing to hang in there and give their attention to it. | ||
| Most certainly. | ||
| And it's also like you can't play to the people that are not going to pay attention, right? | ||
| You have to kind of create it for the person that's going to be deeply embedded in the experience. | ||
| Yeah, you just don't know how big that audience really is until you go out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did you mean when you were talking about masculinity? | ||
| When you were talking about depictions of masculinity? | ||
| It's just something that I was thinking about because the characters in this... | ||
| I mean, I've been interested in that for a long time. | ||
| I mean, the character in The Hurt Locker is very... | ||
| Has a lot of, like, very classically masculine traits. | ||
| Sergeant James, you know, he's very, like, incredibly brave and stoic. | ||
| And in a way, one of the themes of The Hurt Locker was, like, deconstructing that and showing that some of his heroism was, like, a flight from intimacy. | ||
| Because in the end, he, like, leaves his wife and child to go back to fight. | ||
| And then Sierra Dark Thirty was a little different because that had a very strong female lead. | ||
| But this show has these two guys who are hyper-masculine because they're meant to be in CAG and Delta. | ||
| They're meant to be among the best of the best of America's fighting force. | ||
| So as an opener, most people will look at that and be like, these are real fucking men. | ||
| And then the question is, you probably know this because it seems like you have some team guys in your life or around the office. | ||
| Usually depictions of soldiers or operators are often pretty cartoony. | ||
| And I think that right now, in the culture, there's a lot of talk about a crisis of masculinity. | ||
| I don't know if any of your guests have ever talked about that, but there's this idea in the culture right now that post-MeToo men, particularly white men, are kind of adrift in this... | ||
| Feminist environment where they feel like they can't be themselves. | ||
| There's this term toxic masculinity. | ||
| And we can talk about whether or not that's true and how big of a problem that is. | ||
| But what I don't think is really debatable is if you look at the net amount of images in the culture, there really aren't that many portrayals of men right now Where the men both embody classical masculine traits and are also pro-social, like they're not assholes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, they're not mutually exclusive. | ||
| No, but they're not mutually exclusive. | ||
| Right, but they are often in media depictions. | ||
| In media depictions, they are, unless it's like a superhero. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So unless you have blue lightning coming out of your ass. | ||
| It's hard to find, and that wasn't always the case. | ||
| If you look back in the history of movies, you see all kinds of portraits of men who have a more nuanced kind of portrayal. | ||
| So that's something that I was thinking about here. | ||
| These guys, the characters in the show, relate to each other emotionally. | ||
| But they also are very handy with an M4. That's not something you really see very often, and I think that there's an interest in that. | ||
| I think there's a hunger for that. | ||
| It's sort of what I think is part of why you're... | ||
| Again, this is not to take anything away from your intellect or your humor or anything, but I think it's part of why people gravitate to you is because you represent, I think, a certain kind of masculinity, which is rare. | ||
| I don't know that it's rare in the world, But it's rare in the media culture in that you're very... | ||
| I think men and women, by the way, are more the same than they are different. | ||
| What makes a good man and what makes a good woman are the same things. | ||
| We want men and women to be kind and compassionate and curious and responsible. | ||
| Those are all... | ||
| But there are certain traits that are You know, modulated by testosterone that are much more inherently male than female. | ||
| Like violence is one of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, if you look at like any social metric around the world, like 95% of the heavy, heavy, like murder type crimes, they're like committed by men. | ||
| But the other one is like An appetite for risk and danger is also like, I'm not a scientist, but my understanding is also associated with that molecule testosterone that men have that women just don't have as much of. | ||
| It acts on your brain. | ||
| It acts on your behavior. | ||
| So... | ||
| Violence is something that's kind of a part of your public persona, within the context of a sport, obviously. | ||
| And it's just rare that you see that coupled with vulnerability, coupled with intelligence. | ||
| Or any kind of imagination, let's say. | ||
| Again, I'm talking about portraits in the media. | ||
| So for me, as I was thinking about these guys, and I have 10 hours, so there's plenty of time to get them to show them in different ways. | ||
| It was like, what would it be like to show not only what these guys would really do in terms of tactics, but how would they actually behave? | ||
| How would they actually talk to each other? | ||
| So anyway, that was the idea. | ||
| Yeah, that's an interesting dance. | ||
| And I would imagine that you have more room to do that in a 10-hour thing than you would in a 2-hour thing. | ||
| Like, you have more room for nuance. | ||
| You have more room for nuance, and you have more room for... | ||
| I wouldn't say you have more room for nuance. | ||
| I would say... | ||
| You have more room for like more characters too, like in 10 hours, which is great because that, I mean, allows you to present a more complicated picture of the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's cool. | ||
| I can go off and take you inside the CIA. I can go take you behind the scenes of how Venezuelan military intelligence is thinking about XYZ part of the plot. | ||
| And a lot of the show is in Spanish. | ||
| I mean, it takes place in Colombia. | ||
| And I can bring you into these Colombian characters. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Colombian journalist. | ||
| A lot of that stuff would not survive in a two-hour movie. | ||
| So it is nuanced, but I think it's more like scope is the great advantage of TV if you take advantage of it. | ||
| We have so much room. | ||
| You have room. | ||
| For complexity. | ||
| Yeah, for complexity. | ||
| It's like this conversation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's got to be very satisfying in that regard to have that kind of a palette as opposed to the traditional format of a film. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Do you think you'll be doing more of that? | ||
| I mean, I want to do both. | ||
| Hopefully they don't take away my bus pass and fucking make me walk. | ||
| No. | ||
| I want to be able to do both. | ||
| They each have their virtues. | ||
| I mean, in a way, the distinctions are becoming less and less meaningful. | ||
| Because now movies come out and then they go straight to Netflix and vice versa. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's all just a big soup. | ||
| I'm just more focused on what's good, whatever the format is. | ||
| It's a big soup, but I feel like what's good gets discussed. | ||
| And that's one of the great things about today with social media is that things don't even have to get promoted in a traditional sense. | ||
| They get promoted by the people that actually enjoy it. | ||
| People start talking about things on Twitter and Facebook and the next thing you know, people are watching it just by word of mouth. | ||
| Yeah, that's like a whole part of this. | ||
| I don't understand that stuff at all. | ||
| You don't have to. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't understand it either. | |
| No, I mean, I know it exists. | ||
| I'm just like, I don't have that, like, Facebook, Twitter. | ||
| You don't have any of those things? | ||
| No, like, Instagram, too. | ||
| I just went on TikTok recently. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| That's the worst. | ||
| Oh, my God, no, it's amazing. | ||
| That's Chinese spyware. | ||
| I know it is. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| I know it really is. | ||
| Like, it really should be illegal. | ||
| I mean, everyone's already so up in my shit. | ||
| I spent two years investigating Preparing a piece on Trump and Russia where I like went to the Ukraine like my my my that's that That horse left the barn a while ago. | ||
| What was the Chinese can have what they want? | ||
|
unidentified
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There's nothing in there anyway What was that like you spent two years? | |
| Yeah, I was trying to make I wanted to after 2016 after Trump was elected I I did I didn't get made but I did a lot of research into like his whole the whole Russia story and I And then wrote a script and sold it to Showtime and at the last minute they killed it when Showtime got bought by Viacom. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| What was your take on that? | ||
| I have the most cursory understanding of Trump and Ukraine and Russia and the Biden laptop and Burisma and all that shit. | ||
| I just watch a few YouTube commentators talking about it. | ||
| I'll read a few articles in The Atlantic and I don't know what's real. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody really got it right. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of the problem with the media today. | ||
| The narrative that started about collusion, that the left just like fucking doubled down on and tripled down on, was kind of not really right in the beginning. | ||
| And then when... | ||
| When the evidence didn't bear fruit to what they had been proposing, people said, well, then there's like nothing here. | ||
| So it's a super complicated story, but it hasn't really been told. | ||
| I mean, that's definitely for sure. | ||
| Why did they kill that? | ||
| That seems like a fascinating take. | ||
| I would love to see your take on it. | ||
| I think that they thought it was like probably bad business. | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Well, I thought it would be cool to like, you know, fuck with the sitting president on TV. You know, I was like, television's never done this before. | ||
| This can be like a... | ||
| And they were like, yeah, that's not a smart idea. | ||
| Bad for regulation. | ||
| Just like you're a multinational company with business before the fucking government. | ||
| Just no. | ||
| Have you thought about doing that independently? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I should have done it independently. | ||
| I should have done it independently. | ||
| Maybe it'd be good now because time has passed. | ||
| The thing is that every day something else crazier happens on that story, on the Trump story. | ||
| Like every week he's doing something else where we're just like, that's even fucking crazier than the shit I wrote down. | ||
| So it's hard to keep up with it. | ||
| But, you know, Russia isn't going anywhere. | ||
| Obviously they're People are starting to realize now some of the stuff that was even pretty obvious in 2016 about how much they're committed to security and adventurism and pushing out. | ||
| That's not going to change anytime soon. | ||
| Adventurism? | ||
| I just mean military-like... | ||
| Trying to use their military to get shit. | ||
| It's like a historical term, but that's what Putin has been. | ||
| I'm by no means an expert, so I'm really talking out of my ass right now. | ||
| What I understand is that Putin has basically failed at a lot of other typical things that people do. | ||
| Russia has not been able to build a technology sector. | ||
| We don't have one. | ||
| We're not driving Russian cars. | ||
| We're not rushing computers. | ||
| The energy sector is good, but he hasn't really been able to build that much. | ||
| What do you attribute that to? | ||
| I don't think he's very good at it, but he's good at security. | ||
| So he puts a lot of energy into military, military, intelligence, propaganda, security, fucking with other people's elections, which they are pretty good at. | ||
| Yeah, they're really good at it. | ||
| They kind of are the best in the world at it. | ||
| That's the most fascinating aspect. | ||
| I mean, they fucked with ours pretty heavily, especially on social media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people are like, oh, they're in Trump's pocket. | ||
| Well, this is what they do. | ||
| They undermine democracy. | ||
| They get people fighting. | ||
| And they consistently go into all of these places where people communicate and debate ideas and they do it with bots. | ||
| And they make some points outrageous because they connect them to preposterous points. | ||
| They do something where they undermine our trust. | ||
| And that's the overall long game goal is to undermine democracy. | ||
| It's not simply to get a puppet in office. | ||
| Like that was the simplistic version of what they're trying to do. | ||
| But when you, you know, we did a story, we covered a story recently where they found out that 19 of the top 20 Facebook Christian pages were run by troll farms in Russia. | ||
| And it's like, wow, that's crazy. | ||
| So they're just trying to get people radicalized and trying to get people to be polarized to the opposite side and trying to divide us as much as possible and undermine any faith that we might have in the way we have our elections and the way the government is run. | ||
| It's like a consistent effort to undermine our faith in the way our democracy works. | ||
| Yeah, and they would argue that it's pretty easy to do because we're already at each other's throats. | ||
| And it's all accentuated by things like TikTok and Facebook and social media and the algorithms. | ||
| I mean, so far my TikTok is pretty innocent. | ||
| What do you get? | ||
| Well, you know, I clicked on the stupidest shit. | ||
| But are you comfortable with them, like, fully having access to all of your passwords and every keystroke you make on your phone? | ||
| No, that freaks me out. | ||
| I mean, I was... | ||
| One of my earliest interests as a journalist was privacy. | ||
| I was writing about internet privacy in like 1999. Like seven. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I realized that this whole thing that was coming for our convenience was going to be a giant system that really, in the name of convenience, took away our privacy. | ||
| You can go through the internet without giving away your privacy. | ||
| It's just a hugely inconvenient thing to do. | ||
| And that troubles me a lot. | ||
| I mean, I think privacy is really, really important. | ||
| But it's weird because I, at that time I was really concerned about like corporations spying on people, pulling, gathering people's information and using that to, to target them with products. | ||
| And the reason that's bad, it's not that I care if like you get targeted with a product, but the reason that's bad, I think just socially is like, it leads to this winnowing of like what your like worldview is. | ||
| Cause you're always just getting pumped the same shit you already believe in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you don't go out there and hunt and gather anymore. | ||
| So I was like, oh, that's really concerning because it's going to diminish our ability to have diverse opinions. | ||
| But then what I didn't really anticipate, I don't think anybody really anticipated this, was how many people were willing to just give their privacy away, like just throw it away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so it's like, yeah, it's fucked to be spied on, but the truth is, most people are dying to have their lives shared with the world. | ||
| At least the young ladies I see on TikTok. | ||
| And there's this tremendous amount of exhibitionism and this tremendous desire to share every aspect of the self or at least a persona of the self. | ||
| And that is kind of unprecedented in human history. | ||
| That's never happened before. | ||
| It's like a giant social experiment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I guess I'll sound old by saying that I think it probably might not end well. | ||
| But I don't think anybody really saw that piece of it coming. | ||
| The exhibitionism. | ||
| My hope is that... | ||
| It does have negative aspects to it. | ||
| It does lead to a lot of mental health problems. | ||
| It does lead to rampant narcissism. | ||
| It does lead to a distortion of what is actually important in life. | ||
| But that will adjust. | ||
| And that people will recognize it for what it is. | ||
| And it'll become a thing where people understand the pitfalls of it. | ||
| Like we understand the pitfalls of alcohol and drugs and all sorts of other things. | ||
| It's like we'll kind of get a sense of what it is and what it does. | ||
| And I think it kind of snuck up on people. | ||
| Where it didn't exist before, there's no playbook, right? | ||
| It's like in all of human history. | ||
| There's never been a time where you could be a TikTok star or a YouTube star or whatever and have all of your life exposed to the world and also reap tremendous financial benefit from that and maybe even more significantly, tremendous amounts of attention. | ||
| And capture, audience capture, which is you're being molded and influenced constantly by the people that you interact with. | ||
| And I've been able to see that from the difference between people who read comments and interact with fans and are deeply embedded in their own, you know, air quotes, community, versus people that are just kind of independent and they just do, they just are interested in what they're interested in and they just talk. | ||
| And they've maintained some sort of personal sovereignty through it all. | ||
| You see a very different trajectory in the way their content goes. | ||
| And the people that are constantly interacting and constantly reading comments and responding to comments and taking in those comments, they become more homogenized. | ||
| You become more in line with whatever the zeitgeist is telling you. | ||
| It's very difficult to have Independent, individual perspectives that are unique. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's one of the obvious downsides. | ||
| But what about the people who are not even making it? | ||
| I mean, I think you're talking about people that are, like, successful and that have, like, careers. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| But even people that have, like, minor communities. | ||
| What about just someone that has, like, yeah, like, 2,000, whatever. | ||
| It's all the same. | ||
| I really think it's the same because even someone who has 2,000 followers, it's like you're interacting with 200 people in the comments versus 20,000. | ||
| But it's the same thing. | ||
| You're interacting with all these people that are also connected to this web of people that are thinking and behaving a certain way because there's reward for that. | ||
| So how are we going to grow out of that? | ||
| Well that's what's crazy because it's also being influenced by China. | ||
| It's being influenced by these Russian troll farms and also I guarantee the United States is doing as well. | ||
| Why would they not? | ||
| Like we know they do because there's a bunch of bots that retreated and reposted rather without reposting it by just posting it individually. | ||
| The very same message about Elon Musk when he took over Twitter. | ||
| Should one man have all this power? | ||
| And it was like the same exact quote over and over and over and over and over and over in these accounts that looked like they were just regular people. | ||
| But they clearly weren't. | ||
| They were bots. | ||
| And, you know, that was one of the big points of contention when Elon purchased Twitter. | ||
| Tell me how you know how many bots you have. | ||
| And they were saying it's probably 5% or less. | ||
| And he was like, there's people that have analyzed and say it might be 80%. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| That was some guy from the FBI, correct? | ||
| That's a high number. | ||
| The guy who formerly worked for the FBI. Do you remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is a guy, I believe he's a data analyst, who was looking over the numbers and how this works. | ||
| And it's obviously effective. | ||
| And it's something that we know the other countries are doing. | ||
| Why wouldn't we do it? | ||
| Well, there's the voice of America. | ||
| Which is our version of propaganda, but I think that's directed outwards. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| The Voice of America is this giant, I think it comes out of the State Department, and it's this giant broadcasting system that the U.S. government owns that's available all around the world that puts out our propaganda. | ||
| I'm not even aware of that. | ||
| Yeah, like if you... | ||
|
unidentified
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Because they don't play it here. | |
| The state-owned international radio broadcaster in the United States. | ||
| It's really big. | ||
| Largest and oldest U.S.-funded international broadcaster, Voice of America produces digital TV and radio content in 48 languages, which it distributes to affiliate stations around the globe. | ||
| The problem with that is like if you know that it's coming from the Voice of America, you can kind of interpret that with a filter. | ||
| The more effective version is either trolls or bots or people that are paid to say certain things where they look like normal people. | ||
| And this dovetails in with what you were saying about the mistrust. | ||
| Of authority, the mistrust of information, the mistrust of government. | ||
| It all kind of is in the same – part of the same phenomenon of like this breakdown of the older hierarchies of this is true and this is false and you know it because it's on the news. | ||
| Well, there's no real Walter Cronkite anymore. | ||
| There's no real objective source of information where you can watch them and say that that is what's going on in the world. | ||
| Dude, the job is open. | ||
| I don't want that fucking job. | ||
| No. | ||
| You can take it. | ||
| I think there's people that are doing that work, the Matt Taibbi's of the world, the people that are independent journalists who are actual journalists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| There's a few of them out there, but there's just not that many. | ||
| It's very difficult to be successful independent of a system. | ||
| Yeah, they're also talking to a very specific slice of the population. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not that there aren't truth tellers out there. | ||
| There are a lot of them. | ||
| But nobody has that kind of fatherly position anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That a lot of people are listening to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, I don't know how many people read Taibbi's stuff. | ||
| He's good. | ||
| But it's not like America. | ||
| It's not Walter Cronkite. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's a big change. | ||
| Yeah, it is a big change. | ||
| That's a big change. | ||
| And nobody has the answer for that or that I've ever talked to. | ||
| That fracturing of social consensus. | ||
| We can't agree on anything. | ||
| That's a fucking problem. | ||
| It is a problem. | ||
| It's a really big problem because it means that you need some level of cohesion and agreement to problem solve. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially when the problems are intricate. | ||
| You also need some trust in the facts that are being distributed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, global warming is like an issue. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
| And it's like a real problem. | ||
| And people can't even agree on, like, the facts of that, which is just so... | ||
| It just makes you wonder, like, where... | ||
| I don't know that I'm as optimistic as you are, like where all this goes, because to me it looks like some of these indicators look like what happens when a culture is like in decay. | ||
| Oh, we're in decay. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| I just don't think it necessarily has to end terribly. | ||
| I'm very optimistic about human beings because I think ultimately, even things that I disagree with, like woke ideology, I think ultimately what they're trying to do is make the world a better place. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What is woke ideology to you? | ||
| Woke ideology? | ||
| I think we need to define it because before I jump in and... | ||
| Well, I think one of the best ways to describe it is a group of ideas that are also attached to ideas that are ridiculous. | ||
| And I think that's the case with right-wing ideology as well. | ||
| I think we have an inherent problem where we're very tribal and we're looking for a team. | ||
| And ultimately, in this country, there's only two teams. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| There's team right and team left. | ||
| I have a whole bit about... | ||
| It's like the Crips and the Bloods. | ||
| It is! | ||
| You know, and if you're not on one, the other one... | ||
| Yeah, it's hard not to be on one. | ||
| And things get captivated. | ||
| You know, like, well, there's certain things that cannot be questioned. | ||
| There's certain things like a man can be pregnant and, you know, you should have drag queen shows in kindergarten because it's not a problem. | ||
| And then people go, well, what about children? | ||
| What about that? | ||
| Well, you were talking about queer issues. | ||
| Okay, we've got to leave it alone because this is in the woke world. | ||
| Everything LBGTQ is, you know, beyond reproach and you have to leave it alone. | ||
| In the right-wing world, you have preposterous notions about a woman's right to choose. | ||
| You have radical control over people's bodies that is based on religious ideology. | ||
| Life begins at the moment of conception. | ||
| And even in cases of rape, abortion should be illegal. | ||
| So we're so polarized with preposterous ideas on both the right and on the left where you can't question things because if you do, it's against the tribe and then you'll be a person without a country or a person without a group to be a part of. | ||
| That's what gets me. | ||
| It's not even the ideology. | ||
| It's the mechanisms involved are so inherent to the human condition. | ||
| That we will adopt a predetermined pattern of thinking and behavior because it's more convenient than formulating our own ideas and thinking about things on their own. | ||
| Yeah, and there's a lot of enforcement on both sides. | ||
| There's a lot of police work. | ||
| I mean, I think people have always been into their opinions, but what's really new is how... | ||
| How policed it all is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And attacking people who differ from the convention. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And also virtue signaling, which is a completely new thing, where you can publicly display your disdain for someone who steps outside the lines and therefore you supposedly boost your social cred. | ||
| But it doesn't really work that well. | ||
| It's kind of akin to name dropping. | ||
| Like, people think, oh, I was at Leonardo DiCaprio's, and it was amazing. | ||
| People think, wow, they're gonna think I'm amazing. | ||
| I was at Leonardo DiCaprio's. | ||
| But really, they're thinking, look at this fucking idiot name-dropping. | ||
| Like, it's so obvious to everyone else, but yet name-dropping is still a thing. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| You know, it doesn't work, but yet it's like almost people can't help but say it. | ||
| Or when people brag about something that they've done or brag about how much money they have or brag about their accomplishments, you know, they think, well, I'm not even bragging. | ||
| I'm just saying what I've been able to do, you know, and they just rattle off facts that may or may not be important to what they're talking about because they want you to know that they've got this thing and they think that that's going to help them socially with you. | ||
| You're gonna look at them in a higher class of human being now. | ||
| But it doesn't work. | ||
| I think that's the same thing with cancel culture and with virtue signaling. | ||
| It doesn't really work. | ||
| Even if people repeat it and chime in, cancel culture works. | ||
| I don't know what you mean, like it doesn't work. | ||
| I mean it doesn't work in the sense of it doesn't elevate the person who thinks it's elevating them. | ||
| You know, the person who virtue signals and, you know, attacks It does within that group, though, probably. | ||
| I mean, this is way outside my pay grade, but I think it's working. | ||
| To me, when you say it doesn't work, that means it would be failing. | ||
| It's clearly working on some level because it's so big, all of it. | ||
| We're so at each other's throats. | ||
| It's definitely happening. | ||
| Yeah, which means it works on some level. | ||
| What I'm saying is like the motivation for it is to create a benefit for the person that is doing the canceling. | ||
| And a person that's doing the virtue signaling and a person that is espousing these beliefs that are in line with the ideology regardless of facts. | ||
| I don't think that works. | ||
| And I think there's an inclination to do that. | ||
| And that's why I relate it to name dropping. | ||
| I think it's one of those things that everybody knows what you're doing when you do it, but yet people still do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, to me, it's just like, it's all part of the same rush to get a single narrative. | ||
| And like... | ||
| Got to find out what the deal with this thing is. | ||
| Got to come to your opinion on it. | ||
| Got to have your story on it. | ||
| Got to come to that narrative. | ||
| And then usually there's two, like one narrative on each side. | ||
| And then they're in conflict, obviously. | ||
| Designed to be that way. | ||
| Because you can sell more tickets with a fight than you can with people agreeing. | ||
| So there's this commercial interest in that. | ||
| If you're talking about CNN and Fox, there's no... | ||
| There's really no upside for either of those places to be like, we really agreed with what they said the other night. | ||
| That's like bad and dumb business-wise. | ||
| But there's this rush for like a single narrative. | ||
| And you see it in, just to take it back to entertainment too, you see it in entertainment all the time where it's like, let's make this as simple as possible. | ||
| Let's tie it up nice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the world doesn't really work that way, but our world is increasingly working that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's, like, a concept that I think about a lot is ambiguity in my, like, when I'm making a work of art. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Ambiguity just means something that has more than one meaning. | ||
| People say, like, well, what do you mean? | ||
| What were you trying to say? | ||
| It's like, well, not one thing, for starters. | ||
| Not one thing. | ||
| Saying one thing, there's a word for that. | ||
| Like if I'm making a movie and I'm trying to tell you one thing, one idea, like about how the war works or something, we usually call that propaganda. | ||
| Like if I'm trying to just convince you of something. | ||
| But ambiguity is like I'm trying to show you a couple of different things that can all coexist that in some ways might seem on the surface to be mutually exclusive like a guy who's a killer but also has like an emotional life or a woman who's like deeply dishonest but also has this like tremendous sense of integrity. | ||
| It's possible for more than one thing to be true at the same time. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But that is what's being lost in everything that you're talking about. | ||
| That sense of multiple explanations, multiple factors. | ||
| And that is... | ||
| It's part of the politics, which is very black and white. | ||
| It's part of all this online stuff that I don't know anything about that's also super black and white. | ||
| It's what you're talking about with the virtue signaling. | ||
| It's good or bad. | ||
| It's never like... | ||
| Hey, how can we step back and have a more nuanced view? | ||
| And how can we find a synthesis that includes all of it? | ||
| And how can we come to this conversation from a place of love? | ||
| And a place of, like, humility. | ||
| It's always just like, how can we fuck this guy and get the narrative? | ||
| But that's all, like, a simplification thing. | ||
| And I think that's why I said, like, culture and decay because the simpler shit gets and the less, like, nuanced it gets, the harder it is to see, like, the bogeys behind the trees. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think human beings have a natural inclination to try to tie things up nice so they make sense, so they don't have to think about it as much anymore. | ||
| They could define it in their head. | ||
| Now I know what it is. | ||
| But in this world, there's such a massive influx of information. | ||
| There's so much data to take in. | ||
| There's so many opinions. | ||
| There's so many perspectives. | ||
| There's so many facts. | ||
| It's so hard to find where the facts are coming from, whether they've been filtered or distorted. | ||
| I think people get real scared by that. | ||
| And then they really try to adhere towards an ideological perspective. | ||
| They really try to adhere towards whatever the rules of their tribe are. | ||
| Yeah, but you got to resist that. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| Because when you do that, you're going to be missing out. | ||
| Like there's no ideology that can cover everything. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I mean, except for like, you know, maybe like a scientific law. | ||
| But like once you get past like the laws of gravity and some of the more basic stuff, Any ideology that seeks to explain how the world works is going to be missing all kinds of things on the edges of it. | ||
| Where I think this is going, I mean, this is all technologically driven. | ||
| The access to this information, the ability to distribute this information, the way people are communicating and the fact that there's so much data out there that you have to go through is all because of technology. | ||
| It's all because of social media. | ||
| It's all because of the Internet. | ||
| It's all because anyone at any point in time can put something on their phone or put them on a computer and put it out there in the world. | ||
| And you're dealing with more data on a daily basis than the human race has accumulated over the entire course of written history. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| It's just constant, mass amounts of data. | ||
| And you don't know what's right and what's wrong. | ||
| And you want to be a good person. | ||
| What's all the data you're talking about? | ||
| Well, just communication. | ||
| Whether it's Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you're dealing with videos, you're dealing with text, you're dealing with people writing paragraphs and stories and blogs. | ||
| Just the sheer, raw amount of information that is being distributed and the communication that's going back and forth between human beings is unprecedented. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like in the old days, if you were, let's say if it was 1970, You were 72 and you were 22 years old and you hadn't been drafted into Vietnam and you wanted to know what was going on in Vietnam. | ||
| You were curious, right? | ||
| You would see it on the news because back then the press corps had a lot more freedom and they were actually allowed to go where they wanted to in the war. | ||
| But if you were really looking for the conceptual framework that would ground you and orient you, you'd probably wait until... | ||
| The December issue of Esquire magazine came out and you'd read this like giant 15,000 word article by Michael Hare or something and then you'd know. | ||
| And all your friends would read that too and then they would know. | ||
| And that's what I'm talking about. | ||
| That sort of like centralization of... | ||
| Of opinion is what has been kind of blown into a million. | ||
| Not just the quantity of information. | ||
| It's the fact that there's no hierarchy of like... | ||
| I mean, there is. | ||
| You can still select what you want, but... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's very different from today, where if you were trying to figure out what was really going on in the Ukraine, for example, and unless you really knew which journals to dig into, it'd be kind of hard. | ||
| I think it's very hard now, but I think maybe it might be easier now if you're objective. | ||
| I think back then it was just as hard. | ||
| During the Vietnam War, have you ever seen William F. Buckley debate Noam Chomsky? | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| I mean, that's something that's gone too, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where's that level of public intellectual discourse? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those guys were like, yeah. | ||
| It's an amazing conversation watching them go back and forth. | ||
| And then there's, you know, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley and those classic series of debates they did on television, which is that great book, or great film, rather. | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Something Enemies? | ||
| Best of Enemies or something like that? | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| The doc you're talking about? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| About that series of debates that they did on television. | ||
| They were trying to, you know, display both the left and the right and have them have some sort of a discourse about it on television. | ||
| It turned out to be riveting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they did it just because they were failing. | ||
| They're like, fucking throw anything up there. | ||
| Let's get these guys to talk. | ||
| And it turned out to work very, very well. | ||
| It's always been hard to figure out who's right and who's wrong. | ||
| And when there's these compelling speakers that are great orators and they're saying things with such eloquence and such articulation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But my point is not that it – I'm not saying it used to be easier. | ||
| But I'm saying that the level of thought, of complexity, the amount of ambiguity in their statements – That's also changed, right? | ||
| Like you don't have that level of thought or that level of complexity in the public discourse today. | ||
| Well, I think it was much more difficult to be a public intellectual back then. | ||
| You had to really have proven your mettle. | ||
| It was a different... | ||
| It wouldn't just let any fucking kid off of TikTok on, you know, ABC News to talk about the way the world works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But now we're getting that. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Or, like, just some random dude on TikTok is talking about the way the world works? | ||
| Oh, if you go to Fox News or if you go to... | ||
| MSNBC there there will be on a regular basis very young people that are talking about very important issues right and they may be YouTube influencer they may be a person who Recently graduated from a university and has some information about things. | ||
| Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley, those are two rock-solid intellectuals. | ||
| Oh yeah, Chomsky like invented new kinds of, new lines of thought in linguistics. | ||
| He's like a legit... | ||
| He's a legit linguist. | ||
| Genius. | ||
| Yes, no doubt. | ||
| And Buckley too, like in his own way. | ||
| Yeah, well Buckley's, yeah. | ||
| I mean, he was a little bit more problematic, but it's, they're very, very intelligent people that have sort of earned their right to get to that position to debate things. | ||
| Whereas today, it's just, wah! | ||
| But what I think is going to happen, and this is neither good nor bad, because I think it's inevitable. | ||
| I think technology is going to – there's going to be a new technology that emerges, that changes things as radically, if not more, than what the internet has done. | ||
| And I think most likely it's going to be human-neural interfaces. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And those are around the corner. | ||
| And they're going to be here before you know it. | ||
| And they're going to sneak up on us just like the Internet snuck up on us. | ||
| What is that exactly? | ||
| A chip in your head or something? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're going to use it initially for people with ALS. Various injuries and diseases and where they can't control their muscles anymore and it's going to rewire the way the human mind interacts with the physical body. | ||
| But I think, ultimately, it's going to remap the way people communicate with each other. | ||
| And in Elon's words on this podcast, he said, you're going to be able to talk without using words. | ||
| Are we going to miss this? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm happy to miss it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| We're going to be old. | ||
| They're going to drill into our head. | ||
| We're going to be like late adopters like when grandpa got email. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Grandpa got the Neuralink. | ||
| Eight years old. | ||
| I think it's going to be... | ||
| I'm happy to miss it. | ||
| That doesn't sound... | ||
| Well, in Elon's perspective, we're already cyborgs, right? | ||
| Because we already have these things in our pockets. | ||
| It's just not physically embedded into your actual body. | ||
| But one day it will be. | ||
| And it will be because it will be better than not having it in there. | ||
| When the technology sufficiently advances to the point where you know it's safe, you know it's everywhere, you know everyone has it, you're missing out, and all these people are gaining some sort of an advantage either in the workplace or in industry or whatever it is, or socially, from using that, you're going to use it. | ||
| Well, maybe there'll be like a whole tribe of people that are like... | ||
| Primitives that just reject this shit and just continue to hunt and, like, not get the neural link. | ||
| That's always been the case. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the things that Graham Hancock points out when, you know, he has this amazing show, Ancient Catastrophe, or Ancient Apocalypse. | ||
| Ancient Apocalypse. | ||
| That's on Netflix. | ||
| It's talking about evidence that there's a very advanced human civilization that lived a long time ago that was destroyed by impacts, by comet impacts when we went through a comet storm. | ||
| And this is like what caused the end of the Ice Age. | ||
| There's actually like legitimate scientific inquiry into this called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. | ||
| And it's based on... | ||
| Actual real data that they get from soil, like when they do core samples of the Earth, they can find out that at this point when the Ice Age ended, around 12,800 years ago, there's a lot of iridium in the soil. | ||
| And that's very common in space and very rare on Earth. | ||
| And it also coincides with when Earth was passing through these comet storms. | ||
| And they think that this is probably why there's all these ancient structures that are unexplained, like Gobekli Tepe and some of the stuff in... | ||
| Is this like a UFO thing? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, it's not a UFO thing. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| No, it's... | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| It's a catastrophe. | ||
| A natural catastrophe. | ||
| A civilization... | ||
| Pre-Babylonia. | ||
| Pre-Babylonia that was advanced. | ||
| Advanced to the point where they could build things like the pyramids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Advanced to the point where they could build these immense structures that are unexplainable today, like things in Lebanon where they have these enormous stone blocks that were carved, or thousands of tons. | ||
| They have zero idea how they did it. | ||
| Like, what are they doing with it? | ||
| How are they going to move it? | ||
| They did this so long ago, no one even knows who did it or why they did it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What they believe is that at one point in time, whether, you know, if... | ||
| Anatomically similar human beings, they used to think, like when I was in high school, they thought human beings like us have only been around for like 50,000 years, 100,000 years. | ||
| Now they've taken that way back to almost a million years. | ||
| So that gives so much more time for people to evolve and for technology to advance. | ||
| And the concept is that there was an advanced human culture that existed thousands and thousands of years before we thought it did. | ||
| So instead of 6,000 years ago being the birth of civilization, agriculture, written language, they think it was way before that, like maybe even 30,000 years ago. | ||
| And that these people had reached a very high level of sophistication and then massive natural disasters all over the world. | ||
| Knocked people down to almost the Stone Age and then they rebuilt again. | ||
| And that's what we're experiencing now. | ||
| But one of his points is they talk about like these ancient hunter-gatherer tribes that existed for thousands and thousands of years. | ||
| How could it be possible that they existed as well as these advanced cultures? | ||
| He's like, but that happens now. | ||
| Like, you could go to New Guinea and you could see people that are hunter-gatherers right now while you have an iPhone. | ||
| You can film them with your space device. | ||
| You could go to the Amazon and see uncontacted tribes. | ||
| You can go to North Sentinel Island. | ||
| There's uncontacted people. | ||
| Less and less, but yeah. | ||
| Less and less. | ||
| But the idea is that people have always coexisted that are at various stages of technological superiority and efficiency. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And that there will be people that are fucking tribal people. | ||
| But they'll basically be like... | ||
| They'll be like they are now. | ||
| That's how bad it'll be. | ||
| They might just stay the way they are now. | ||
| If you opt out, you're basically going to be like a guy with a bow and arrow in the jungle. | ||
| It'll be that bad. | ||
| I was thinking more like I want to get most of the advantages of contemporary civilization. | ||
| Like I'd still like the car that drives itself and the cool toaster. | ||
| I just don't want the fucking thing in my brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| I don't want to be... | ||
| You can get it in your brain or you wear it as a hat. | ||
| Yeah, I'll do that. | ||
| Maybe the hat one is like a flip phone. | ||
| Yeah, I'll take the hat. | ||
| But I don't want to have to go to a reservation and be in the jungle by myself. | ||
| Well, I don't necessarily think it even has to be that different, but it could be like homesteading. | ||
| It could be like people that make their own bullets. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because there's a lot of that. | ||
| There is a lot of that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it could be people that just prefer subsistence living, which people really do. | ||
| That's like Life Below Zero and all those people that live in modern times that subsistence hunt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of people that do that because they have no choice. | ||
| There is. | ||
| But there's also a lot of people who do it because they have a choice. | ||
| Because they've lived the other way and they don't like it. | ||
| Well, I'm talking about like Third World. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, there's so much poverty out there. | ||
| It's hard to keep that in mind because America is like the wealthiest country in the world. | ||
| Also the most guns, and also the most religious. | ||
| Are we the most religious? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| More than, say, like, Iran? | ||
| I don't know if we're more than Iran. | ||
| I didn't look at the map that closely, but there was a map I saw, and it had, like, belief in God in red, and it was just the U.S. looked like the reddest country to me. | ||
| I could find the map for you. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I'd like to know. | ||
| What is the difference in belief in God? | ||
| Compared to... | ||
| Let me put it to you this way. | ||
| Compared to every other English-speaking country. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Western world. | ||
| Like England has a very different system than we do in terms of belief in... | ||
| So most God-fearing, wealthiest, and most guns. | ||
| Yeehaw. | ||
| We win. | ||
| And biggest military. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you read that book? | ||
| I think it was called Sapiens. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because when you were talking about the ancient man, it made me think of that because one of the things I remember from that book was that the homo sapien, I could be misremembering this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but one of his ideas was that people as but one of his ideas was that people as we know it basically murdered all of these other Neanderthals and different species of human beings. | ||
| Or whatever the correct term is, and that that's how we spread, that there was like a mass genocide because that at one time, and I don't know if this conflicts with what you're talking about or not, but that at one time, this may have been post the environmental event that wiped out the more advanced civilization. this may have been post the environmental event that wiped At one time, there were all these different types on the planet, and obviously we won and the Neanderthals are not here anymore. | ||
| And if I remember correctly, his thesis was that we did that with killing, and that there's something very innately violent in our DNA. | ||
| Well, it's certainly plausible. | ||
| We've certainly done a lot of killing. | ||
| And it makes sense that if there was something that was similar to us but not quite us and somehow posed a threat or was in competition with us, that we would kill it. | ||
| There's also theories about biological integration that we mated the Neanderthals out of existence. | ||
| And there's some substantiation of that and the fact that a lot of people, particularly people of European descent, have Neanderthal genetics. | ||
| So there was some sort of interbreeding with people. | ||
| Yeah, I think both of those things could be true. | ||
| I mean, to deny the idea that human beings committed genocide or were violent towards others is ridiculous. | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Nothing but evidence of that. | ||
| Of us doing it to us. | ||
| So the idea that we wouldn't do it to like the hobbit people that live in the island of Flores. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm sure we killed everybody. | ||
| They keep finding new humans that don't exist anymore, like the Denisovans, which is fairly recent. | ||
| I don't know about that one. | ||
| Oh, the Denisovans that was in Russia, and I believe that was one of the first examples they found of it, but it's a completely new strain of human being that shares some of our biology, but it's not a homo sapien like modern humans the way we are today. | ||
| They think there was probably quite a few, like there was some parallel evolution going on. | ||
| And, you know, this competition, just like there is in other primates, right? | ||
| There's the bonobos and there's traditional chimpanzees. | ||
| And yeah, so here's the Denisovans. | ||
| They're just like, there's differences in the anatomy that are innate. | ||
| They were almost, they were, it looks like they're thicker, they got larger heads. | ||
| It's a totally different kind of a thing. | ||
| And I feel like this was fairly recently, Jamie. | ||
| Did they say, like, when they found the... | ||
| They look much... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a cave. | |
| It's a cave, right? | ||
| The Denisovan cave is what they found, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so it's a... | ||
| So what's the difference? | ||
| The lungs are different. | ||
| No, it's just... | ||
| They look bigger. | ||
| They look thicker and more stout. | ||
| And there's a bunch of differences in the femoral length and the shape of the heads and... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's an anthology. | ||
| But just Google Denisovan history and so we get a time frame instead of just images. | ||
| Because why is that only showing you images? | ||
| Just go to all. | ||
| Go to all, not images. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There. | ||
| So Denisovans are a distinct species of humanoid, a close... | ||
| What'd you do? | ||
| Oh, I was looking at the other left-hand corner. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Distinct subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the lower and middle Paleolithic period. | ||
| Denisovas are known for from few physical remains and consequently most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. | ||
| And I think that was like what year? | ||
| 2010. Yeah, so 12 years ago. | ||
| What is the Paleolithic? | ||
| How long ago was that? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| What's the Paleolithic, Jamie? | ||
| I used to know this kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| From around 3 million to around 300,000 years ago. | ||
| That's the lower. | ||
| The middle Paleolithic period which followed would last from 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. | ||
| So they lived alongside of us. | ||
| And they're a totally different kind of person. | ||
| Don't you think our ethics should be farther along if we've been around for that many hundreds of thousands of years? | ||
| I think that's the part of this theory, the ancient catastrophe theory, is that we had to reboot. | ||
| And this is the idea about it that, you know, we did get knocked back into chaos and like a severely harsh primal way of living. | ||
| The way to describe it is like this is an instantaneous ending of the Ice Age due to impacts all over the earth. | ||
| And there's evidence of this in the form of... | ||
| Nanodiamonds which they call it's called trinitite which Exist at the Trinity explosion when they first detonated a nuclear bomb They found that the impact created these micro diamonds these nano diamonds Well, they find that all over the earth at around 12,800 years ago, | ||
| which would indicate that the impact was so substantial That it created these things, but I'm saying since then we've developed a lot of really Advanced technology. | ||
| But has there been the same evolution in our ethics? | ||
| Well, there's most certainly, if you study Steven Pinker's work, this is the safest, most understanding, least racist, least violent, least rapey time in human history. | ||
| If you go back and think of all the horrific crimes that have been committed since the beginning of time, And you look at them on a scale, even though we say, oh, there's so much chaos in the world today, there's so much horror. | ||
| And that's absolutely true. | ||
| But there's less than there's ever been before. | ||
| It's better. | ||
| And, you know, they call Pinker an apologist for just talking about data. | ||
| But it's, like, very clear. | ||
| If you just look at the sheer numbers of murders, the sheer numbers of all the horrific things that people have been known for forever, there's less of them now than ever before. | ||
| And I think it will continue to get less and less and less. | ||
| But it's not perfect. | ||
| Well, the dentistry is better too, right? | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot better. | ||
| Imagine going to a dentist. | ||
| Imagine getting an ACL surgery 500 years ago. | ||
| There's none. | ||
| You're fucked. | ||
| You blow your knee out, you're dead. | ||
| Just use a fucking piece of stone. | ||
| Use a weird fucking knee brace made with goat skins and shit. | ||
| Yeah, use a cane. | ||
| And twigs. | ||
| Yeah, it's better now. | ||
| And it will continue to get more complex. | ||
| Whether or not it's... | ||
| Whether or not it's preferable is what's interesting. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I would never go there. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I don't mean in terms of ethics. | ||
| I mean in terms of technology, like the medical technology and the advances, whether it's like the way we live now. | ||
| Look, if you were a person who lived in the days of Genghis Khan and you got invaded, like, yeah, it's way better today than then. | ||
| Sure, you get a cold, you fucking die, probably. | ||
| Yeah, well, not only that, the amount of violence, the sheer amount of horrific violence from hordes of raiders coming into your village and butchering everybody and lighting everything on fire, that was a commonplace occurrence. | ||
| It's less common now and will be less common in the future. | ||
| But what I'm saying is that I think that human beings, as we are biologically today, are more suited in the way we interface with the world, with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. | ||
| I think it's more satisfying to our actual... | ||
| Our intellectual and physical bodies, the way we exist with Earth and nature. | ||
| People find great peace in living in the country and fishing for their food. | ||
| I totally buy into that. | ||
| I don't think we've evolved physically the same way technology has evolved. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it even comes down to something like this room, which has a conditioned... | ||
| Air temperature. | ||
| And we don't experience the extremes of temperature on our skin that we would normally have been going through for thousands of years. | ||
| You'd have no idea right now if it's August or January or we're in this... | ||
| Yeah, and you can live in 72 degrees like year-round or whatever you like, 69. Nobody knows what that does, but maybe that's part of why people are so... | ||
| Have a certain amount of feeling of cognitive dissonance and overload because they're not getting the same amount of sensory input that you would have felt had you been living in nature with Genghis Khan as your Well, I mean, if you just look at in terms of what's available in the United States in terms of environments, what people would say arguably is the most disconnected part of the world is California. | ||
| And they're the least connected to weather because every day is beautiful. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| They don't have to worry about huddling up for the winter. | ||
| They don't have to worry about storms coming. | ||
| You lost me on a turn there. | ||
| I'm down with California being the most... | ||
| Artificial. | ||
| What do you mean disconnected? | ||
| Disconnected to nature. | ||
| Oh, to nature. | ||
| Oh yeah, because it's a fucking desert. | ||
| LA is a desert. | ||
| It's a stable all year round. | ||
| It never rains. | ||
| It's never too cold. | ||
| It's what I don't like about LA. You could exist as a homeless person so easily. | ||
| Yeah, it's what I don't like. | ||
| One of the things I don't like about LA. One of the many things. | ||
| It's not good for you. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I need the weather to kind of remind me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that I can change. | ||
| Because the world's changing. | ||
| It denotes time. | ||
| It lets you know that things are happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think that's one of the weirdest things about California. | ||
| And it just adds to the weirdness of what it's like to live in a city that's dominated by show business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Also, you don't have to deal with weather. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not going to defend LA. No, I mean, I live there forever. | |
| I love lots of aspects of LA. Really? | ||
| Yeah, it's a tough place to live, I think. | ||
| It's a weird place. | ||
| That's the point, is that it's just weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I don't think people are... | ||
| I mean, you could certainly be a nuanced, very evolved... | ||
| You want some coffee? | ||
| Yeah, I'll try some. | ||
| You could be... | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| By the way, thank you for taking such good care of me and the hospitality. | ||
| Oh, my pleasure. | ||
| It's really nice. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| I'm a fan. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| But I'm just saying that I just think that... | ||
| You know, we are a part of nature, and I think we're set up to experience like that. | ||
| We're set up to experience cold weather, and I think it enhances the sense of community when you have to bundle up together because a hurricane's coming. | ||
| You know, there's a thing that happens with people. | ||
| There's negative things. | ||
| There's looting and crazy things that happens when chaos happens. | ||
| But I think that, ultimately, human beings are better off when we deal with weather and we deal with the fact that nature is a real factor that you have to take into consideration. | ||
| And you are, ultimately, powerless. | ||
| And you just have to do your best to prepare and get ready for it. | ||
| But it's happening, whether you like it or not. | ||
| If you live in Boston and it's January and a blizzard's coming, there's not a fucking goddamn thing you can do to turn that off. | ||
| There's not a button you can switch. | ||
| There's not a fan they can blow that sends it out into the ocean. | ||
| You're dealing with that fucking snow. | ||
| It's coming in, and everybody's got to prepare. | ||
| And you get food, and you get candles, and you get firewood, and you ride that bitch out. | ||
| And I think that's good for people. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| I think being in nature, at least for me, I don't know about other people, but it's very important for me. | ||
| Like the wilderness, contact with environments that aren't man-made. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's the key. | ||
| It's environments that exist outside of us. | ||
| Yeah, I think so too. | ||
| And there's just something very humbling about that and very – there's something about it that just centers me. | ||
| I mean I'm not alone in that. | ||
| I'm not saying anything that radically interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think it's something that it's harder and harder to find. | ||
| You have to go seek it out. | ||
| You have to intentionally be like, hey, in two weeks I'm going to go camping. | ||
| I'm going to go on a backpacking trip. | ||
| Whereas at a different time in our lives, it would just hit you in the face because you wake up in the morning and you're in quarantine. | ||
| You know, you're in it. | ||
| Not only that, I think human beings have evolved to deal with those sort of complex factors of nature. | ||
| It's like an inherent part of what we are as a human being. | ||
| It's the way the mind is structured, the way the human consciousness is structured. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think that's like we evolved this way. | ||
| And I think when that is absent, there's like this like sort of confusion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't think that's good for us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Do you link up drugs with nature? | ||
| Well, I think drugs are certainly a part of nature, especially some drugs, especially things like psilocybin. | ||
| Have you listened to the stone ape theory? | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| I actually read about it last night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I read about it last night when I was looking around for stuff that had been on your show. | ||
| I used to cover psychedelic drugs for Rolling Stone, and so I used to write about them. | ||
| I had not read that particular theory, but I used to think a lot about psychedelics, and I was part of a little bit... | ||
| A group of people that knew Alexander Shulgin, who was like the godfather of MDMA. But actually, the stone ape theory, I literally just read about it. | ||
| It's really fascinating. | ||
| I'll buy it. | ||
| I'm happy to buy into it. | ||
| I don't know how controversial or accepted it is, but it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility to me. | ||
| I don't think it is either, but it's very controversial. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| Yeah, very. | ||
| Your main protagonist in Echo 3, isn't she researching psychedelics to help soldiers with PTSD? Isn't that part of what she's doing? | ||
| Yeah, she's researching psychedelics to help with addiction, which is, although PTSD is another illness that people are exploring with psychedelics. | ||
| I mean, psychedelics started as a At least in this country, as a therapeutic. | ||
| Which ones? | ||
| LSD. Well, they tried it as a lot of things. | ||
| They tried it as a mind experiment. | ||
| You know, they tried it as mind control. | ||
| The CIA famously used it. | ||
| Yeah, but I just mean it came out of the idea of being therapeutic. | ||
| Yeah, the CIA does everything. | ||
| Well, you know where it came out of? | ||
| It came out of the idea of women's fertility drugs. | ||
| It was to induce labor. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, when they were initially creating LSD, I think part of the research was about coming up with drugs that induce labor. | ||
| And Hoffman, when he was working on synthesizing LSD, got it in his hands and then went on that famous bike ride because he was tripping balls because through his skin, he had absorbed all this acid and he was just tripping balls and trying to figure things out. | ||
| And then the CIA got a hold of it and they said, well, what can we do with this? | ||
| And they didn't really know because it was a fairly new compound in terms of modern human use. | ||
| Although there is some real clear evidence that even back in ancient Greece, they were using it in the form of ergot, which is a very similar effect. | ||
| But they started doing all kinds of wild stuff. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen some of those experiments they did with soldiers. | ||
| I mean, I'm much more interested in the idea that it has... | ||
| I mean, not to take anything away from the whole topic of the CIA doing crazy shit, but I'm much more interested in the notion that they have therapeutic, practical... | ||
| That's even in my own life. | ||
| I think that that's really interesting. | ||
| And MDMA... Which as you know is – I mean first of all, all of these drugs are not to be taken lightly and they're not for everybody in my opinion. | ||
| I mean especially LSD. Yes. | ||
| You know, there's a huge amount of danger associated with them if you have – Tendency schizophrenia or also just like if you have repressed shit that you're not in touch with, the last thing you want to do is like find that out when you're on an acid trip because it could be a really bad experience. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| But I just mean they're dangerous. | ||
| I just want to say like it's not... | ||
| I just wanted to... | ||
| It's fraught with peril. | ||
| Yeah, it's fraught with peril. | ||
| It's not for everybody before I go off extolling their virtues. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Just because I think that, you know, especially for kids and stuff. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But MDMA is less so because it doesn't ask as much of you. | ||
| And MDMA, I just know this because I wrote about this guy Shulgin who I mentioned... | ||
| What initially was used before it became a popular street drug or a club drug was, I mean, it was discovered at the turn of the century in like 19, I don't remember, 13 or 17 or something, but then in the 60s after the crackdown, you know, LSD was like kind of like popular in the 50s and then in the 60s, popular in like a very elite circle. | ||
| Then in the 60s, it broke out wide. | ||
| And then you had the Golden Gate suicides and the government clamped down. | ||
| And after the 60s, there was a very strong policing of any research into psychedelics. | ||
| But while that was going on, MDMA was being used very quietly as a therapeutic drug for couples in California among couples therapists. | ||
| And it has this kind of ability to... | ||
| I don't know if you've ever done it, but it creates a feeling of empathy for yourself and vulnerability and empathy for other people. | ||
| And that's fucking amazing that there's a molecule out there that can fit inside the receptors in your head and make you feel that way. | ||
| The character in the TV show is all in on that type of research. | ||
| And so at the beginning of the show, she's going down to Columbia to find the next MDMA, if you will. | ||
| Because as you know, there's all these compounds in Amazon. | ||
| That have not yet been really analyzed, and the idea is there's still things to be discovered there. | ||
| That's a really interesting perspective, and that is one that's uniquely available today in terms of human history, or the history at least in the United States. | ||
| It's very common and very commonly discussed. | ||
| Use of psilocybin therapies for veterans with PTSD, MDMA therapy, ayahuasca therapy, Ibogaine for people with addiction problems. | ||
| All those things, there's so many anecdotal reports and so many people that have experienced it and have had positive experiences, including a lot of legitimate intellectuals and academics who discuss this openly now. | ||
| Guys like Michael Pollan, journalists. | ||
| Who were very respected who discuss this openly now as opposed to it was ridiculed particularly during the 1970s when they passed that sweeping schedule one psychedelics act where they made everything the most illegal category. | ||
| When they did that they sort of stigmatized it in the public's eye as well because it became you know against the law and negative and You know, this is your brain on drugs. | ||
| Any questions? | ||
| You know, all that shit? | ||
| Yeah, I remember. | ||
| Yeah, that sort of really flavored the way people view things. | ||
| If you tried to do psychedelic therapy for veterans during the Nancy Reagan era, there's not a chance in hell it would stick. | ||
| No, you're going to jail. | ||
| Right, but today it's openly discussed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's also, like, interesting to think about them not simply for people that are ill. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not to take anything away from that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because I think we should do everything we can for our veterans. | ||
| And I think we owe them a huge debt. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Whatever works. | ||
| Like, let's try it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's interesting to think of them just for people that are interested in self-exploration. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And personal development. | ||
| There's legitimate applications for that. | ||
| But the way I describe it is that psychedelics, all psychedelics, I think, are like a tool. | ||
| You could do a good job with them and build something beautiful if you know what the parameters and what the restrictions and the abilities of these tools are. | ||
| Or you could fuck up everything. | ||
| What's your favorite part of it? | ||
| Loss of ego, that's a big one. | ||
| And also, the fact that these realms, whatever you're doing, whether it's completely inside your own mind and a hallucination, or whether or not it is an actual chemical gateway to another dimension. | ||
| You know, when you want to go full tinfoil hat, wacky conspiracy, or whether you want to look at it like from a reductionist perspective. | ||
| At the end of the day, these things are so available. | ||
| It's so easy to get there. | ||
| Particularly something like dimethyltryptamine. | ||
| 15 seconds after you take it, you're in another dimension. | ||
| There's a doorway. | ||
| I've never done that. | ||
| It's like mushrooms times a million plus aliens. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It is the most profound psychedelic experience by far that I've ever had ever. | ||
| happened to me and I think most people would agree that it's the most potent of all psychedelics but it's also the most transient because your body produces it your your your brain knows what it is and so your body brings it back to baseline very quickly as opposed to things like LSD which takes hours and hours to bring back to baseline you when you do dimethyltryptamine you're back to normal in a half an hour you're totally sober right the length is part of the is part of the thing of Of those longer-acting drugs because you have to go | ||
| deeper into yourself. | ||
| And process it. | ||
| Process it, survive it, get through it. | ||
| It's more involving. | ||
| It's also more of a relinquishing of the ego because you had to let it go for so long. | ||
| It just takes it away from you. | ||
| It's like your phone. | ||
| If you had a phone and you're like, we're going to have a conversation, but I'm going to put my phone right here and I'll just get back to it in a few minutes. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Let me text this guy back real quick. | ||
| You're not thinking. | ||
| Because you're distracted. | ||
| One of the things that people do, whether it's DMT or mushrooms, they make a conscious decision that this is what they're doing now. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Set and setting. | ||
| This is what we're going to do. | ||
| We're going to sit here. | ||
| I think that has a factor in it as well, because you're making a conscious decision to try to explore your mind properly. | ||
| And to try to have this experience that you think will be educational, evolutionary, you're going to evolve from this. | ||
| You're going to change and grow. | ||
| It should be available to everybody. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it should be used by everybody, but I don't think it should be restricted. | ||
| I don't think it should be something that the government, people that have never had any of these experiences on their own, can regulate. | ||
| Because I think it's foolish. | ||
| It's like you're talking about something you have no experience in. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You don't know what? | ||
| You think it should be legal or illegal? | ||
| Think about all the benefits you just described. | ||
| Who should be deciding whether or not those people get to experience those benefits? | ||
| Should it be a bunch of pencil pushers in the fucking Pentagon? | ||
| Should it be the people that get elected to Capitol Hill? | ||
| The fuck out of here. | ||
| Those people, they have no experiences in it. | ||
| I think there's some... | ||
| I think there's some value in it being hard to get. | ||
| Hard to get, yes. | ||
| Because it does, I'm sure you would agree, it's not something to do casually. | ||
| It's not something you should just like, I don't think, and this is like me, like somebody else could have a totally different opinion, but like, I wouldn't do it casually. | ||
| I wouldn't just be like, oh shit, I have four hours to kill. | ||
| Let me go roll over here and grab some LSD and see what happens. | ||
| So I think the fact that you have to... | ||
| I'm not saying we should be throwing people in jail. | ||
| That's a different story. | ||
| Let's just put that aside for a second in terms of punishment. | ||
| But I think having these things hard to acquire... | ||
| It's probably not a bad thing because it definitely separates the wheat from the chaff in the sense of like casual use. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Probably what I'm saying makes no sense because like anybody that wants to get it, Molly can get it and go to a club, which is also insane to me. | ||
| But it's not for me about the question isn't about government control or not or a pencil pusher controlling my mind. | ||
| It's more just like Until we get to the place where the culture understands what they are and how their potential for sacred experiences, until we get to that place and there's a place of respect. | ||
| I'd be hesitant to be the guy that's like, yeah, let's just throw it in every convenience store and see what happens. | ||
| Well, I think it's a matter of education and personal responsibility, just like alcohol, just like many things that are available readily right now. | ||
| And out of all the drugs that I would make readily available, I don't think alcohol would be the big one. | ||
| I don't think I'd make it so convenient and easy to get if you had to pick one drug. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why would I say that one? | ||
| That one's like so destructive. | ||
| It fucks with your ability to use your motor skills. | ||
| People drive on it. | ||
| They commit violence on it. | ||
| It's not a smart drug to have available. | ||
| But I think we understand it culturally. | ||
| And there's enough education and awareness. | ||
| That's the key to psychedelics. | ||
| We need cultural awareness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And right now we've been in the dark and infantilized by our government's lockdown on these sacred substances and they've kept them from us. | ||
| But the thing is that people that have kept them from us are not people who have consumed them. | ||
| They're not people that are users where they use them in a sacred setting and understand what the benefits and the powerful impact these things can have on your mind. | ||
| It's being done by people that don't have the experience, and they're the ones that, well, I don't think we should have it. | ||
| It's giving people brain damage. | ||
| We gotta make missiles. | ||
| We're busy here. | ||
| I don't think they're the people. | ||
| I don't think grown adults should be able to tell other grown adults what they can and can't do with their body and their consciousness, particularly when they haven't experienced it themselves. | ||
| And there's a lot of that going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I think there's a distinction between telling somebody what to do and just availability. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, I think there's the thing with alcohol. | ||
| Alcohol is readily available, but you have to be 21 to be able to buy in a liquor store. | ||
| It's readily available because you can make money on it, right? | ||
| That's the big thing. | ||
| Well, also because people enjoy it and they want to have the freedom to be able to have a cocktail. | ||
| Like, if you and I right now, we just busted out a couple glasses, had a little whiskey, it's nice. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Is that what's going to happen, by the way? | ||
| We can. | ||
| Do you want to? | ||
| I wouldn't say no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Let's get some ice and some glasses. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| We've been talking about all this shit. | ||
| I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, right? | ||
| It's like, but you're a grown adult, a very mature person. | ||
| You know how to handle it. | ||
| I am the same way. | ||
| I know how to handle it. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| Some people are not. | ||
| Some people are not good at it and they don't know how to handle it. | ||
| And what do we do about those? | ||
| Do we make it illegal because some people are just inherently alcoholics? | ||
| Like, I don't think so. | ||
| I think it's personal responsibility and education. | ||
| And I think Treatment centers and counseling and having it distributed by trained professionals that know what it is, know what the dosage is. | ||
| That way it will be regularly, like if you were going to buy MDMA. This is pure MDMA. This is not something that came from the cartel. | ||
| It's cut with fentanyl. | ||
| This is pure pharmaceutical grade MDMA in this dose. | ||
| Depending upon your body weight, this is what you should take. | ||
| And I think that is something that unfortunately we don't have because we've been restricted for so long, it's been a normal part of our society to not have access to these things. | ||
| Which is more urgent, educating people about these drugs or educating them with media literacy about how to navigate a world where there's all this data and you can't tell right from wrong? | ||
| That's a very good question. | ||
| See, I would think the latter is a bigger issue. | ||
| I'm more worried about kids who are glued to their phones for 10 hours a day than I am about someone's inability to find some really good MDMA. I'm worried about both things, but I think one can enhance the other. | ||
| And I think through psychedelics you have an understanding of the impact of things. | ||
| And the way it affects your consciousness, including the kind of media that you consume. | ||
| And I think maybe that would be better for everybody to just have a reset in your perspective of how you view things. | ||
| Like a holiday. | ||
| A psychedelic holiday. | ||
| A little psychedelic holiday. | ||
| We call it the Joe Rogan Day. | ||
| Just have a day. | ||
| It's like a day. | ||
| Once a year. | ||
| My friend Ari does this thing called Shroom Fest every year where like all over the world in July, he encourages people to take shrooms for like X amount of days. | ||
| And people do it through social media. | ||
| They talk about it. | ||
| They get psyched up for it. | ||
| They get the set and setting correct. | ||
| And it's his own personal thing. | ||
| Repeatedly over several days? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Repeatedly. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Or not. | ||
| Or do it once. | ||
| Just do it during that time period. | ||
| He calls it shroomfest. | ||
| And the idea is that the whole, you know, all the people that are in on it are doing it together. | ||
| And so there's sort of a sense of community involved in that, which I think was a big part of how psychedelics were consumed throughout history. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I mean, that's the concept of Brian Mirorescu's book where we're talking about ancient Greece. | ||
| Brian Mirorescu, who's a scholar who did all this work on Ulyssidian mysteries, And that during ancient Greece, what these people were drinking when they were drinking wine, they were drinking wine mixed with psychedelics. | ||
| And they found physical evidence in the ceramic vessels that they used to hold the wine. | ||
| They found evidence of ergot and other psychedelics. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That this has actually now become a field of study at Harvard because of his work and his book and when he came on the podcast and talked about it. | ||
| Cheers to you, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| It's such an interesting subject to come from an actual – and he's hardcore, intellectual, straight-laced. | ||
| He doesn't do drugs, never done anything, hasn't had experience before. | ||
| He's just relaying this in terms of like human history and that it seems like that was the birth of democracy. | ||
| That was the birth of – All these different complex societal structures that we still enjoy today, which came out of ancient Greece, most likely came out because of these psychedelic rituals. | ||
| And he's never tried them? | ||
| No. | ||
| He wants to, and he will eventually, but he wanted to make sure that he wrote this book as a very straight-laced academic. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And he's brilliant. | ||
| He's the perfect guy to relay it. | ||
| Because he was obsessed with it for over a decade. | ||
| And initially, his initial obsession with it was ridiculed. | ||
| People were like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| And then ultimately, upon physical evidence and proof of this, and then also the proof that this was... | ||
| This was forbidden by the Romans and then they chased it out and that you can see how these people escaped and brought it to other parts of Europe where they find very similar artifacts and very similar vessels and these things in France and Spain. | ||
| So they escaped from Greece and they went to other places to try to continue these rituals while they were being persecuted. | ||
| This just makes me feel like we're in the most stoner conversation ever. | ||
| It is, but it's by a guy. | ||
| In this case, he's a legitimate academic. | ||
| By the way, that doesn't make it not true. | ||
| It's just a pretty stoner conversation. | ||
| Well, the real stoner conversation is the stoned ape theory. | ||
| That one's not right lay it on me because I well Terrence McKenna came up with this theory and his brother Dennis who's a brilliant scientist Is the best at describing it see if you can find Dennis McKenna explains the stoned ape theory because he explained it on this podcast He'll do a far better job of explaining it than me because he can tell it to you In a way where he understands how the psilocybin and the psychedelic compounds impact the human neurochemistry. | ||
| So the way he describes it is like he's an actual scientist. | ||
| And so when you listen to him describe it, you're like, whoa. | ||
| I know there's a video of that out there from him on the podcast. | ||
| But his brother came up with the idea that When human beings existed in the rainforest when we were, you know, ancient primates, That the rainforest receded into grasslands. | ||
| And as they did, human beings experimented with different food sources. | ||
| And one of the things they did is they found where undulates would leave their manure, these mushrooms would grow out of them. | ||
| And they would flip those manure patties over and find beetles and food. | ||
| And the mushrooms that grew on them, they would experiment with them. | ||
| This is an animation, but it says that he... | ||
| Okay, play this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, hold on. | |
| This might not actually be him. | ||
| Well, that's Dennis and Terrence. | ||
|
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In the late 1970s, Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis McKenna were the first that proposed the Stone debate hypothesis. | |
| It is known now that 22 primaries, 23 including us, consume mushrooms. | ||
| And the idea is our ancestors, they came out of the trees and one across the savannah would be tracking animals that were pooping. | ||
| Well, in the subtropics, the most common mushroom coming out of those cow patties is phyloxencomensis, a potent magic mushroom. | ||
| One thing that mushrooms and other psychedelics do reliably is they induce a synesthesia. | ||
| Synesthesia is the perception of one sensory modality in another. | ||
| Hearing colors, for example, or seeing music. | ||
| You have these profound experiences, and you have to put yourself in their place. | ||
| And imagine what the impact of such an experience must have been on an early hominid. | ||
| These magic mushrooms open up the floodgates of information you receive. | ||
| Basically, you can think of it as a contact fluid between the synapses within the brain. | ||
| Wow, what a competitive advantage, especially if you're working with a geometry of weapons, or having to put together something that will give you a better chance of survival. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The fact that this happened not once, not twice, but millions upon millions of times over millions of years is a very plausible explanation for the trickling of the brain two million years ago. | ||
| It's not so simple to say that they ate psilocybin mushrooms and suddenly the brain mutated. | ||
| I think it's more complex than that, but I think it was a factor. | ||
| It was like a software to program this neurologically modern hardware to think, to have condition, to have language, because language is essentially synesthesia. | ||
| The language is an association with inherently meaningless sound, except that it's associated with the complex of meaning. | ||
| A great deal of the brain's real estate, you might say, is devoted to the generation and/or the comprehension of language. | ||
| Those neural structures are not found in our ancestors, That's the human trait to have so much physiology devoted to generating an understanding language and that's a reflection of evolutionary events that made us what we are. | ||
| Yeah, that's Dennis. | ||
| So, the idea is that the human brain more than doubled in size over a period of two million years, which is the greatest mystery in the entire fossil record. | ||
| And they don't know why. | ||
| And it coincides with the same time the climate was shifting from rainforest to grasslands, which would allow these animals, these early hominids, to start to move around and experiment with different food sources. | ||
| And we know that they ate mushrooms. | ||
| So why do you think you're so into all of this like early, early man, like how it all came to be? | ||
| Because I've noticed this and some of the other things we've been talking about, they all have that in common. | ||
| I'm pretty fascinated by primates. | ||
| We are one. | ||
| Why are we like this right now? | ||
| I'm just curious what about it is fascinating to you. | ||
| Because I'm down for it. | ||
| I think it's interesting. | ||
| But you fucking love it. | ||
| And I'm just like, wow, why is he so... | ||
| Because to me, I don't really... | ||
| This will sound... | ||
| I'm not shitting on it in any way. | ||
| But I don't know that I care what... | ||
| At all, like, what made us grow a million years ago. | ||
| Like, I think it's interesting and I'm cool to talk about, but, like, I feel like you have, like, a thirst for it and a desire to unpack something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Well, I think, first of all, I'm fascinated by human history. | ||
| And then I'm fascinated by biological history. | ||
| I'm fascinated by the concept of evolution and the scope of time. | ||
| How long it took for us to become what we are today. | ||
| And where's it going? | ||
| That's what I think about all the time. | ||
| That's what I think about human neural interfaces and complex technology and innovation. | ||
| Where is that going to lead us? | ||
| Because it's changed us so much from the 1920s. | ||
| If you go to 1922 to 2022, that is one of the, if not the biggest change in all of human history in terms of the way people interact with each other, behave, access to services and goods. | ||
| And just information in general. | ||
| It's fascinating to me. | ||
| It's what we are now. | ||
| Just how much our culture has changed since the invention of social media. | ||
| It's changed so much. | ||
| And I'm so curious as to where it goes. | ||
| And I'm so curious as to how we got here. | ||
| And that there are some primary factors that, like psilocybin, that might have been ignored by mainstream academics when they discuss how we got here and what we are. | ||
| And do you think you're interested in all of that because you feel like there's something essential to be learned from that history? | ||
| That and because I smoke a lot of weed and it's a fun thing to think about when you're high. | ||
| It is! | ||
| It's so fascinating! | ||
| But yeah, I mean there's definitely something to be learned from it. | ||
| If you don't know how you got here, It's very difficult to extrapolate. | ||
| It's so long ago, man. | ||
| I mean, it's not how you and I got here. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| But we are here, and we are a part of that chain of evolution. | ||
| I know, but the time period is so big, it's like I can't even wrap my head around it. | ||
| Nor can I. I don't think anyone can. | ||
| I think you just try. | ||
| You just try to look at it. | ||
| It's like when you're thinking about the scope of space. | ||
| It's like, can you really wrap your head around it? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, but I'm fascinated by it. | ||
| James Webb Telescope. | ||
| I'm like, tell me more, Neil deGrasse Tyson. | ||
| Tell me more. | ||
| But you don't really grab it all. | ||
| But it's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I mean, I think it's like interesting how it links up to social issues too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like if I was to write an article about you, I think it's interesting that you have this one part of you that's very like down to discover what these primal pieces of our history are. | ||
| And then at the same time, I don't know what the connection is, but it's notable. | ||
| At the same time, like On your other life outside of this, like your involvement with UFC, which is like a very evolved, but still has a very atavistic aspects to it. | ||
| You see where I'm going? | ||
| I don't know what it is, and if I was to do that article, I would come to it with total... | ||
| With no bias to try to figure it out, because I don't have a point of view about it. | ||
| But it's interesting that that same, and not to put you on the spot, but I'd rather talk about you than talk about me, that those things coexist in the same person. | ||
| I don't think that's a total accident. | ||
| Well, my fascination with martial arts is that martial arts is a vehicle for developing your human potential. | ||
| And outside of war and outside of being a police officer or a firefighter, it's one of the most difficult things that a person can navigate. | ||
| And those people, especially champions, are extraordinary human beings. | ||
| Because what they're doing is what I call high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences. | ||
| And they're choosing to do that against people that are their same weight, That are equally skilled and equally prepared, and they've managed to find a solution to better all the people that are around them. | ||
| Those people, the great ones, they're some of the most extraordinary people that you'll ever meet. | ||
| So that's an evolutionary thing too, in a way. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| But yes, and it's also, it's like they're choosing To be uncomfortable. | ||
| They're choosing to do something insanely difficult. | ||
| It's a total choice. | ||
| When you get into the octagon, you decide to let them shut that gate behind you. | ||
| You can quit at any moment. | ||
| Any moment. | ||
| But yet, the real great ones, I've got nothing but profound respect for. | ||
| You know, even people that you would think on the surface Are a guy like Conor McGregor. | ||
| You would think, on the surface, he's so crazy, he talks so much shit. | ||
| That's an extraordinary human being. | ||
| That's a rare one in X amount of million kind of people that can do what he does. | ||
| Talk the kind of shit he does and then get into an octagon and fuck people up, but you mean mentally you don't mentally you don't control of the mind well extraordinarily physically obviously yeah, but extraordinarily mentally Did you ever do you a fan of MMA? No, | ||
| this is I'm gonna show you this fight between Conor McGregor and Jose Aldo Now Conor McGregor at the time was this incredibly brash shit-talking Irish guy from Dublin who has beaten all these people up and He gets a shot of the title and he gets a shot of the title against this guy Jose Aldo and Aldo is a fucking legend and everyone respects Aldo and everyone's terrified of Aldo and all Conor does through the entire Training camp and | ||
| the entire all the press conferences is just talk mad shit about hold on talks mad shit about the entire time months of press conferences talks takes his belt from a meta press conference and screams at him and is like Inside this guy's head. | ||
| So he's created the ultimate emotional pressure cooker and Aldo Is overwhelmed by the moment. | ||
| And in those extreme moments of conflict, people either rise to the occasion or they're overwhelmed by the moment. | ||
| The kind of person who's like a Conor McGregor who can rise to the occasion is truly an extraordinary person. | ||
| And it's best embodied by this one fight. | ||
| So if you watch this one fight, it's quick. | ||
| This is Conor coming out. | ||
| Big smile, super loose, to the biggest fight by far of his career. | ||
| The biggest fight in all of martial arts history. | ||
| So he gets into the octagon. | ||
| This is Jose Aldo, world champion, legend, but overwhelmed by the moment. | ||
| And Conor's talking to him. | ||
| He's talking to him. | ||
| It's like, let's go, boy. | ||
| Let's go, boy. | ||
| And he's on his knees. | ||
| He's super loose. | ||
| And you see Aldo, nervous, right? | ||
| And this is a guy, Aldo's a destroyer. | ||
| He's wiped out everybody. | ||
| And the two of them are going at it. | ||
| And Aldo just can't wait to hit him. | ||
|
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So he makes a critical error. | |
| And he slept him. | ||
| He slept him with one shot. | ||
| And look at that. | ||
| He climbs on top, and look what he does. | ||
| Just climbs on top of the octagon. | ||
| He's like, look at that. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| He's making the money thing, like he's shuffling off money. | ||
| And now he's become the richest MMA fighter of all time, and he's a huge business with proper 12, but to be a person that can do that under that kind of pressure, that's an extraordinary human being. | ||
| There's very, very, very few of them that have ever walked the face of the earth. | ||
| that can do that in front of that many people in that moment which is built up over months and months and months really years of taunting him but months and months and months and to get to that one moment when you look at each other in the octagon and he looks at me and goes let's go boy let's go boy and you see all those like holy shit this is really happening but Connor couldn't be more relaxed That's mind management, that's confidence, preparation, intelligence, emotional intelligence. | ||
| There's so many factors. | ||
| Like, look how relaxed. | ||
| He's like, let's go boy, let's go boy. | ||
| And look how relaxed he is. | ||
| He's like he's fucking around. | ||
| Like, he doesn't even feel the pressure at the moment. | ||
| He's just eating that pressure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he goes out there and just lights him up. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| That's, to me, part of what I love about this. | ||
| It's like seeing, like, how does someone handle this pressure? | ||
| How does someone handle this moment? | ||
| How do you handle this guy in Jose Aldo who's a fucking assassin? | ||
| An assassin. | ||
| And get him so in his head that he charges forward and gets clipped with a perfect left hand. | ||
| Out of character! | ||
| He's usually a more clever fighter. | ||
| That was a bad fight move that he made. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Not only was it a bad fight move, but Conor anticipated it. | ||
| So if you watch Conor warming up in the green room, in the dressing room, before the fight, he's practicing that very move and he imitates Jose Aldo's movement and behavior. | ||
| It's like he knew he was going to do that. | ||
| So he's so far ahead of this game. | ||
| That's why it's so interesting to me. | ||
| See, look at him. | ||
| Look at him in the dressing room on the left-hand side. | ||
| See, he's mimicking his movement and what he's going to do. | ||
| And he even mimicked the way Aldo moves around. | ||
| It's not in this particular clip, but he mimics how Aldo is kind of stiff. | ||
| And he likes to really load up on his shots because he's got big power. | ||
| And he wants to move forward. | ||
| He wants to crack Connor so bad that he just moves forward and he leaves an opening. | ||
| And he gets fucked up. | ||
| See, that's why it's so fascinating to me. | ||
| People don't understand what it is because they look at it from the outside. | ||
| It's violence and it's horrible and it's like... | ||
| High-level problem solving with dire physical consequences. | ||
| And it's the craziest game you can play. | ||
| The wildest game you can play. | ||
| You can play football. | ||
| Football's amazing, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's a lot of people helping you. | ||
| There's a ball. | ||
| There's timeouts. | ||
| There's none of that in this. | ||
| This is the wildest game a person can play. | ||
| Football's a game. | ||
| This is like a sport. | ||
| It's combat sports. | ||
| Combat sports are what all sports aspire to. | ||
| If someone wins a basketball game, they can always say, yeah, well, I could have kicked your ass. | ||
| You might have beat me at basketball, but I could kick your ass. | ||
| Nobody gets their ass kicked and goes, yeah, well, I'll fuck you up at basketball. | ||
| Because no one cares. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| You just got fucked up. | ||
| Yeah, and this is not like a bullying thing. | ||
| This is not someone who's bigger or stronger, who picks on someone who's defenseless. | ||
| This is two people that are champions, the elite of the elite, and they choose to meet and they prepare for each other. | ||
| To me, it's the most exciting thing in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you give a great explanation for it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You really brought it to life for me. | ||
| And you made me appreciate it. | ||
| And it's not just men. | ||
| One of my favorite fighters ever is Rose Namajunas, this female MMA fighter who's like a peace-loving hippie. | ||
| And she won the title, and then in her title speech, she was telling everybody, we just got to be better people. | ||
| We got to get along better. | ||
| But I think without that narrative that you put on it, it's hard for people to understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's one of those things. | ||
| That's like the story of it as a storyteller that I see you doing. | ||
| Like you created a whole way of understanding the experience that if I didn't have that, I just look at it. | ||
| I'm like, okay, that's a dude that missed his right hand, another dude that connected with the right. | ||
| So that's why the story of it is so important. | ||
| There's so much to that story. | ||
| That is a crazy story. | ||
| And that was the rise of Conor. | ||
| And then Conor went on to beat Eddie Alvarez to become a concurrent two-division champion. | ||
| He was the first double champ. | ||
| So he held both the lightweight and the featherweight title at the same time, which is crazy. | ||
| And then he abandoned the featherweight title and kept the lightweight title. | ||
| I mean, those types of people that are the elite of the elite in combat sports athletes, they could do anything. | ||
| That's what they interfaced with. | ||
| That's what they chose to succeed at. | ||
| They would have succeeded as a special forces operator. | ||
| They would succeed as a fighter jet pilot. | ||
| They would have succeeded as anything that's very difficult to do if they if they were Obsessed with it and they they chose to give themselves to it. | ||
| So you admire excellence. | ||
| Yes Yes. | ||
| Because I do too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean anybody that's really good at something. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It doesn't matter to me what it is. | ||
| You could be like the best bricklayer in the world. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that's just so interesting and I want to learn about like how did you do that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I admire excellence and I admire people that are obsessed with things, that are just really focused on just trying to do their very best with this thing, whether it's cabinetry or literature. | ||
| I admire focus and dedication. | ||
| And I admire what a human being is able to do with creativity. | ||
| And fighting is creativity. | ||
| There's creativity involved in fighting. | ||
| Because you're setting things up. | ||
| It's totally up to you in that moment. | ||
| You don't think of it as creativity because we think of a painting or a piece of music. | ||
| No, I think of it as, I don't know if it's like purely creative, but there's certainly creativity involved. | ||
| There has to be. | ||
| There is. | ||
| There most certainly is. | ||
| Some of the best fighters are super, super creative. | ||
| You know, they make things happen in these moments. | ||
| Yeah, because there's a level where it's past skill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's past training and it's past, like, muscle force reaction time and shit like that. | ||
| Yeah, it's a martial art is what it is. | ||
| It's an art. | ||
| That's the word art, yeah. | ||
| That's why, like, when I see that, when I see, like, Conor knocking out all, to me, that's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is a work of art. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a fascinating work of art. | ||
| Yeah, I think half the country would think it's scary. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| More than half the country would think it's scary. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| You know 20 people, 10 of them are pussies. | ||
| People are scared of everything. | ||
| So many people have never had to overcome difficult things in their lives, so they never developed a character. | ||
| But you know what it is also? | ||
| You see it as a work of art because I think you have the background and the understanding of all that went into it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I would argue that you're not the only guy like that. | ||
| Obviously, anyone that's a fan probably has some of that. | ||
| But that's also true of what you would normally consider a work of art. | ||
| That's also true of a movie or a play or a musician. | ||
| The deeper your background is in understanding what they're doing The more you can the more you can appreciate yeah And if you don't have any background at all and you're just raised on just to pick on tick-tock because it's easy And you're just raised on tick-tock videos. | ||
| You might not appreciate something. | ||
| That's like really high level for sure You know sure I mean if you grew up today and you don't have any background in music You can't appreciate with it what a concert pianist has to do right to get to a position to play Mozart, right? | ||
| I Yeah. | ||
| But if you are a musician and you watch some brilliant pianist just nail it. | ||
| You're like, oh my god! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you can appreciate the art form. | ||
| You understand the effort that's involved. | ||
| You have a comprehensive understanding of this expression. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think it's like we were talking about responsibility earlier a little bit. | ||
| I think it's like a little bit up to the artist to assume that Audiences want to have that appreciation, want to do that work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because some people do. | ||
| Some people do. | ||
| And if they don't, they should. | ||
| Well, you have to play for the people that do. | ||
| Really, you have to kind of make it for yourself. | ||
| Well, you have to do both. | ||
| You have to make it for people like yourself. | ||
| You have to do both. | ||
| You have to play it for the people that have the appreciation, and you also have to... | ||
| I mean, you don't have to, but I think of it for me like I want to bring people in that aren't necessarily looking for the experience that I'm trying to give them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You open the door for them to appreciate it. | ||
| I want to get them in. | ||
| I want to almost trick them in the door. | ||
| I want to give them shit that makes them feel like I can appreciate this. | ||
| This is gonna be easy for me. | ||
| I'm gonna give you, in the first 10 minutes, a really cool action sequence. | ||
| This is gonna be an easy ride for you. | ||
| I'm gonna show you all the tropes that make you feel comfortable with guns, guys being heroic. | ||
| And then I may then take you someplace four hours later that you weren't necessarily looking to go. | ||
| And that's the beauty of it. | ||
| But that's like... | ||
| Yeah, you're luring them in. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Because if it was just strictly speaking, hey, I just want to hit this really arty crowd, I think that's limiting. | ||
| I'm not trying to just talk to the people that like Battle of Algiers, like some fucking random cinema that I like. | ||
| Well, isn't that the benefit of having 10 hours to do it, too? | ||
| I think that's – I don't think – yeah, it's the benefit of like – it's the benefit of being in the – of having this kind of like really privileged position that I have to try shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And the thing that's different about it is when you make a movie, it's like it involves, or a television show, it involves money. | ||
| I mean, it's not like writing a poem where I can just do it. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I need money. | ||
| And like, in this case, it's like a lot of money. | ||
| It's like close to a hundred million dollars. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Thank God Apple's rich. | ||
| I don't even think they know where that money is. | ||
| They have more money than most countries. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
|
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They just make computers and phones and they fucking run and shit. | |
| They're also a health company. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because of the watches? | ||
| Yeah, because I had a scene in the beginning. | ||
| There's this wedding scene in the pilot and one of the characters is smoking. | ||
| This woman smoking a cigarette. | ||
| And they were like, you can't do that. | ||
| Because no tobacco use, Apple wouldn't promote... | ||
| But it's not promoting it. | ||
| Well, it's depicting it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I was like, so I'm on this call with this lawyer and she's like, yeah, you can't do that. | ||
| Sort of saying, well, that's really too bad because it is like part of the character, this woman's character. | ||
| And she said, well, you just cannot depict smoking tobacco, this lawyer. | ||
| And I'm like, I cannot depict smoking tobacco. | ||
| She's like, correct. | ||
| Something that millions of people do. | ||
| But then I go, but I can depict smoking another substance. | ||
| And she's like, our policy is you cannot depict smoking tobacco. | ||
| And I'm like, what about marijuana? | ||
| She's like, our policy is you cannot depict smoking tobacco. | ||
| So I'm like, okay. | ||
| According to this lawyer, I'm good with marriage. | ||
| So she rolls up a joint. | ||
| And there's no issue with that whatsoever. | ||
| It's a Schedule I substance. | ||
| It's against the law federally. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| But you can have them drinking whiskey like we're doing. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| And smoking a joint. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| The idea is that... | ||
| So she rolls a joint. | ||
| Cigarette is the great demon that cannot be discussed. | ||
| There she goes. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nice. | |
| Yeah, there she is. | ||
| Good for her. | ||
| That's a good compromise. | ||
| Yeah, I was totally down with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just unfortunate. | ||
| I mean, the reason why I was talking is like Columbia, people smoke. | ||
| It's not like the U.S. where... | ||
| Where we've kind of moved away from cigarettes. | ||
| There's still a lot of smoking down there. | ||
| It just seems ridiculous creatively. | ||
| Because you're making characters and there are human beings that smoke. | ||
| Just like there's human beings that have gambling addictions. | ||
| There's human beings that have bad personal hygiene. | ||
| It's all real. | ||
| You can have flawed human beings that have drinking problems. | ||
| Like why is that? | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| They let me get away with so much. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And the only other thing that they were very, very hyper-vigilant about was any depiction. | ||
| I'm going to get in so much trouble for talking about this. | ||
| This is so dumb of me. | ||
| See, I haven't had a drink in like two weeks because my liver values were high. | ||
| So my doctor was like, don't drink. | ||
| So now I've had a drink. | ||
| So I'm going to talk about this. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Any Apple products had to be depicted like perfectly, which sounds easy, but it's not. | ||
| So you couldn't have like a cracked screen on someone who's like an Explorer? | ||
| It's not even that. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| You probably couldn't do that. | ||
| That didn't even occur to me. | ||
| I just mean like you have a scene in which someone picks up the phone and because you're filming, they're not actually talking, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're not having an actual conversation with somebody on the other end. | ||
| So whatever, like the phone has like a screen on. | ||
| But on the Apple product, the screen goes off after X number of seconds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they're like, in your show, here the screen's on for 10 seconds. | ||
| It's supposed to go off after whatever it is. | ||
| Or that ringtone that you have, that you put in the sound mix, is for iOS 7. The phone is like 8. And you're just like, how does anybody even know that? | ||
| Or like the shade of blue that you have on that text message is not the correct shade of blue. | ||
| I'm like, it looks right to me. | ||
| I kind of can appreciate that. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| We spent a lot of money fixing mistakes like that. | ||
| Because I remember I was watching a film once, I think it was Jumanji, where they're texting each other on Sony phones. | ||
| But it's showing an ellipsis, like iMessage, where you know that the person is responding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, hey! | ||
| Like, you're fucking with me. | ||
| You caught that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| Sneeze. | ||
| Yeah, I caught it. | ||
| It's like, I don't like fuckery. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like that they did that. | ||
| Anybody can say whatever they want about the plot or the charactering of the show, characterizations in the show. | ||
| I guarantee you all the Apple shit is correct. | ||
| You can't have it freezing on you. | ||
| There's nothing wrong. | ||
| There's no mistakes in the portrayal of any. | ||
| That makes sense, though. | ||
| I mean, you know, there are, in some ways at least, if not promoting Apple products, they want them to be used accurately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was a fair trade. | ||
| It was a fair trade. | ||
| It was just funny. | ||
| And the fact that you let her smoke a joint, that's okay. | ||
| Yeah, the joint's okay. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| There's all kinds of things. | ||
| You know, really no restrictions. | ||
| I mean, I guess some, but I don't really trade in gratuitous violence or nudity, which is a big thing, obviously, on TV that helps you get viewers. | ||
| So we didn't really have a lot of nudity. | ||
| Actually, there's no nudity. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| And the violence is all very realistic in the sense that I believe in like trying to put you in the audience, like in the situation of whatever is being depicted to see what it would feel like to be in that. | ||
| If you were in a shootout, what it would really feel like, which means the camera work is very realistic. | ||
| As opposed to using close ups to kind of like distort and fuck with your perception and make the violence look more beautiful or more exciting or more safe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| You know, like I hate in movies when the bad guy shoots like 50 times and doesn't hit anybody. | ||
| And you never have a big shot that shows the geographical relationship between the two people that are shooting each other. | ||
| And it's all just like... | ||
| Selling a gun, selling a close-up of a gun, selling the bullet flying out. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And you're never actually like showing the audience how it would really go down. | ||
| Yeah, that's the difference between the suspension of disbelief involved in a lot of action films. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which I like. | ||
| John Wick is amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not taking anything. | ||
| And there's a time and a place for it. | ||
| Like with two gummies on a Saturday afternoon. | ||
| Yeah, it's fun. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's also this other idea of like, hey, let's put the audience in the situation. | ||
| As opposed to having the audience... | ||
| Like, let's put the audience at eye level with our characters, where they really feel what the characters would be feeling, or what they would feel if they were in the room, as opposed to, like, most movies, like the audience, it's sort of, like, put above the action. | ||
| So you can watch it from a safe perspective and not feel like you're implicated in it. | ||
| And you're embedded. | ||
| Yeah, and you can enjoy it. | ||
| So in your show, you're embedded. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that I can then, like... | ||
| Hopefully, after the violence, track you into a psychological and emotional place. | ||
| It's not just about showing you how it would be to be in a firefight. | ||
| It's also about the scenes that follow it so that I can keep you feeling things that I want you to be feeling. | ||
| Who are your favorite filmmakers? | ||
| Who do you draw inspiration from? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I think that... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think, like, There Will Be Blood is probably the best movie that I've seen, like, current... | ||
| It's not current, but like in my adult life. | ||
| Some of Quentin's early work too. - Yeah. | ||
| And then I like a lot of movies that people haven't really heard of. | ||
| Like I mentioned, like Battle of Algiers. | ||
| There's a movie called Army of Shadows. | ||
| It's a French movie. | ||
| But I don't really get inspiration from other movies. | ||
| What do you get inspiration from? | ||
| I get inspiration from... | ||
| I don't know, but it's not movies. | ||
| I get inspiration from things that I see in the world. | ||
| And then I kind of like... | ||
| Something clicks and I'm curious. | ||
| It's really I just follow my curiosity. | ||
| And then I go and do a lot of research into whatever that thing is. | ||
| If it's... | ||
| In this case, it's like what it would be like to be kidnapped. | ||
| So then I like read books about that and talk to people who've been kidnapped and so forth. | ||
| And I... I don't know exactly the mechanism of what it is about the situation that ignites some curiosity, but then I just sort of follow my curiosity. | ||
| And then after all the research is done, I somehow try to take that and shape it into a story that I think can have meaning for other people. | ||
| But some writers get inspiration just from their own personal lives, which I do too. | ||
| Obviously we all like come to something from our own like personal experiences, but I very much depend on like the outside world. | ||
| I'm not just like sitting in my head like being like, oh, well, how would it be real? | ||
| I'm never like, oh, it'd be really cool if then this happened. | ||
| I'm much more like, hey, how would this really happen? | ||
| And that's like a question that you can, I mean, there's a lot of answers to it, but it's like if you can answer that question by talking to people. | ||
| You know, like, You can call up a special forces guy and be like, how would you deal with this situation? | ||
| You can call up 30 of them and have all these different conversations and then meld it down into something that seems... | ||
| Like, that crystallizes the heart of it all. | ||
| How difficult is that process of, like, trying to take someone's depictions and descriptions and personal experiences and trying to put that into dialogue with fictitional characters and just... | ||
| I mean, it's not just dialogue. | ||
| I mean, I don't... | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's not just dialogue, though. | ||
| Like, a lot of people think of screenwriting as dialogue, which is not really right. | ||
| Although a lot... | ||
| It's not just dialogue. | ||
| You're also writing like the image, which is in a lot of ways way more important than what people are saying in a movie. | ||
| It's like a motion picture, right? | ||
| It's like an image that you're seeing. | ||
| So there's words being spoken, but it's really like, how do people look? | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| How are they moving through space? | ||
| Some of that is up to the director, but a lot of it is governed by the screenwriter too. | ||
| So you're really writing like a series of images, right? | ||
| And then there's dialogue in addition to that. | ||
| And the dialogue is how the characters speak. | ||
| And then there's some things that that dialogue is good for, and there's some things that are really fucking hard to do with dialogue, as opposed to the written word. | ||
| If I was to write a story about anything, like you, for example, just to take an example, in prose, it'd be really easy to write about what you're thinking about. | ||
| Just like he thought. | ||
| You just like write it out. | ||
| But if it's a movie, like the only way I can get access to your brain is either through your behavior, right? | ||
| Because there's no like thought bubble over your head. | ||
| So I either have to like describe what you're doing in such a way that it reveals who you are or I have to have you say some shit that's really revealing about who you are. | ||
| That's pretty hard. | ||
| Like depicting people's inner states and then You don't have total control over it because an actor or another human being is taking your work and bringing it to life. | ||
| So they bring a whole other level of inspiration and artistry and interpretation and meaning on top of whatever it is you were originally starting with. | ||
| What is that feeling like when you're seeing someone like Jeremy Renner like taking your words and bringing them to life and you have to you have expectations of what it's gonna be like and then you see this artist interpretation of it and you're what is that feeling like when you're watching it all come to life it can be like a great a great pleasure you know it can be amazing a lot of times it's better Really? | ||
| A lot of times you're like, oh my god, this is so much better than I thought it was. | ||
| If it's a good actor, if it's a great actor like Jeremy is, you're like, wow, I must be really fucking good. | ||
| You're like, nah, it's just like he's bringing so much to it. | ||
| He's putting so much intensity into it. | ||
| If you have an actor that's not as skilled, it can go the other way and you're like, God, this stuff sucks. | ||
| So it all depends on the intelligence and talent of the actor usually. | ||
| That's got to be tricky in the casting process to try to figure out who's who. | ||
| Yeah, I mean that's kind of the big thing about directing is you try to cast it right. | ||
| It's kind of the big decision and everything else follows it. | ||
| But it's a hugely collaborative thing that's unique to... | ||
| The performing arts where you don't have total control, like as a novelist or as a journalist or whatever, prose, you have total control. | ||
| It's a collaboration and that's like, can be amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is your creative process like? | |
| Like if you have, if you decide you're going to make a film, What is it like from the moment you sit down? | ||
| Do you have a concept in your head? | ||
| Are you driving around in your car and you're thinking about some guy who defuses bombs? | ||
| Where does it come from and how do you set about bringing it to life? | ||
| I don't know that I have the same process every time. | ||
| Like I said, there's usually some experience that either I'm told about or happens to me. | ||
| Like, for example, the action sequence that starts I'll give you a very specific example that starts this show. | ||
| I knew I needed an action sequence somewhere in the beginning of it because that's just like a demand of the form. | ||
| Like you're selling a thriller. | ||
| You need to have some action in the beginning. | ||
| And it's also a way of like introducing people to the fact that this is a story with danger and stakes. | ||
| And it's something I do well. | ||
| So I knew that I had to have something like that. | ||
| And then I was kind of casting around until I was reading about an operation in Afghanistan, Operation Anaconda. | ||
| And there was a series of events. | ||
| This was like in 2000. The thing happened in 2002. There was a series of events in the beginning of it. | ||
| And a friend of mine who had been on... | ||
| He wasn't on that op, but he knew about it because I think he overlapped with some of the team guys that were on it. | ||
| He started talking to me about this very specific thing that happened on a mountain in Afghanistan in 2002. And I heard the story from somebody that had pretty good knowledge of it. | ||
| And it wasn't like my story. | ||
| It didn't fit like what I was doing exactly. | ||
| But there were some pieces of that story Of the way that one Navy SEAL commando thought that somebody that was on his team was dead and he wasn't really sure. | ||
| Basically, a guy got shot and he was presumed to be dead. | ||
| And he got left. | ||
| And then there was a controversy about whether he was actually really dead or not. | ||
| And I know that... | ||
| All the particulars of that story didn't make it over into what I ended up writing, but just that idea that you could be in combat, under fire, see one of your buddies go down, be reasonably sure that he was dead, and then leave because you had to for your own safety, and then later find out that maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. | ||
| That, like, is, like, stuck in me. | ||
| You know, like, I couldn't get it. | ||
| I couldn't. | ||
| It just, like, stuck. | ||
| So it's when things like that stick that they become inspiration in a certain way. | ||
| Or, like, I remember talking to... | ||
| I know this was actually in a book I read about somebody that had been kidnapped in Colombia. | ||
| And she was a... | ||
| She was, like, a political... | ||
| She was working on a political campaign and she got kidnapped by a rebel group. | ||
| And then she was held for a really long time, wrote a book about it. | ||
| One of the things that she talked about in her book was that like a week into her kidnapping, she met a very senior guy in the rebel camp. | ||
| And she lost her temper with him. | ||
| She like unloaded on him. | ||
| Because she was fucking pissed because she was being held captive. | ||
| And she was rude to him. | ||
| And she regretted it for the next 10 years of her life. | ||
| And I thought, that stuck in me. | ||
| How you could be kidnapped and be so fucking desperate to get out and at the same time angry that you're kidnapped. | ||
| And then here you have the one opportunity. | ||
| You're now talking to the guy who controls your fate. | ||
| And you can't control your emotions and you, like, you know, let loose on them. | ||
| And that's just, like, a very human thing, right? | ||
| So, like, it's just accumulating... | ||
| I kind of, like, scour out there and accumulate all these moments that seem real to me and that seem, like, illuminative of something else bigger. | ||
| And then when I have enough of those, I start writing. | ||
| So you just sort of like let it build in your mind until it's something you kind of have to get out? | ||
| Yeah, and it's like a delicate moment. | ||
| Like how do you know when you have too much? | ||
| And there's also times on projects where I fucked that process up and I've gotten so much information and didn't write it out and it's like you miss that window. | ||
| And you're like, ah, I'll do it like next month or in two months. | ||
| And then it's like it's gone. | ||
| There's just this moment in time where I have enough. | ||
| If I learn one more thing, I'm going to get overwhelmed. | ||
| And that's the moment when you have to say, okay, I'm going to put it all down. | ||
| I'm going to now go into a place which is not... | ||
| Because I can intellectualize about all this stuff a lot and talk about the different theoretical pieces of it. | ||
| But where you just let that go and you follow your instincts and you're hoping that... | ||
| Your sense of truth or my sense of truth is like what's guiding it. | ||
| I don't mean truth like this shit really happened. | ||
| I don't mean like truth like a set of facts, but I mean like a artistic truth, like a meaningful depiction of human life truth. | ||
| And you just hope that you have like... | ||
| For me, if I stay quiet enough in myself and like don't take an easy out and don't copy some shit I've seen before and don't... | ||
| You know, succumb to anxiety about, like, getting it done quickly or whatever it is. | ||
| And I just follow, like, hey, there was something about that moment when I heard that story, or read that story about the woman who, like, lost it on her captor. | ||
| And, like, I just need to stay with that curiosity and really try to honor it and not try to come to it with, like, a whole bunch of ideological fucking suppositions, because those are always wrong. | ||
| And not try to, like... | ||
| Really slap myself on top of it, but just try to follow the truth of that moment, which is a hard thing to do. | ||
| You have to be very relaxed and have a lot of faith in yourself and stuff. | ||
| And then you just got to do that over and over and over again. | ||
| And if it's 10 hours, it's like, oh my God, it's 600 pages of fucking scripts. | ||
| I mean, I had a writer's room and writers helping me, but ultimately I ended up rewriting a lot of it. | ||
| So that's kind of the process. | ||
| And sometimes it's better to be at home and totally comfortable in my setup and I have everything really how I need it to be. | ||
| And sometimes the stuff I write like in the back of a pickup truck bouncing on a jungle road on the way to set is like just as good if not better. | ||
| Where there's like a gun to my head and someone saying like, we're going to be on set in five minutes and you need to finish the scene. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| You know, sometimes the pressure creates like a kind of like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like a kind of like force... | ||
| A window of creation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sure it's the same way with all writers. | ||
| I don't know how other people work. | ||
| I grew up having to write for money as a journalist. | ||
| You get paid by the word. | ||
| So I learned to write on a fucking subway. | ||
| You do it wherever you have to do it. | ||
| But I think that that process before you start typing is also writing. | ||
| That process of thinking about it, even though you're not physically putting words in order, it's part of the whole imaginative enterprise. | ||
| And it's an important part for me to sift out the... | ||
| I hesitate to keep using this word truth, but to sift out whatever might be authentic from all the other influences. | ||
| And if I find myself doing something that feels like, hey, I'm really just doing this because I copied somebody, because I saw a scene like this in another movie. | ||
| I mean, there's one or two instances where I rip somebody off in this show. | ||
| But by and large, if it felt like I was ripping somebody off, I won't allow myself to do it. | ||
| That doesn't mean it's better. | ||
| Because people have done amazing shit and there's like nothing wrong with copying them, but I try to not do that. | ||
| So when you have these moments, like when you're thinking about this woman who screamed at her captor, Do you have a way that you... | ||
| Do you just immediately try to write them down so you don't forget them? | ||
| Do you try to capture when it hits you and resonates with you? | ||
| Just try to... | ||
| Just like, I gotta go somewhere real quick and just sit down and write that out. | ||
| How do you make sure that it doesn't slip away from you? | ||
| Sometimes it does slip away, man. | ||
| I mean, a lot of times I like... | ||
| Because I'll have a notebook or whatever and write it down. | ||
| But sometimes shit slips away and you lose it. | ||
| But then it comes back later. | ||
| I mean things come back in the most magical ways. | ||
| That's the best part of it. | ||
| I mean I remember writing – there's a scene in episode four where one of the characters who's a special forces guy is talking to a friend of his in the CIA. And he's asking for help with this like problem of getting his sister out. | ||
| And I remember sitting there and being like, this is a pretty hard scene to write because I got to do it. | ||
| The conversation has to happen pretty quickly. | ||
| Just because of the needs of the plot. | ||
| Like I don't have a lot of time for this. | ||
| And they're on the phone. | ||
| So the dialogue is really going to be the only thing that lives. | ||
| Like there's no image that's going to be interesting. | ||
| It's two fucking guys talking on a phone. | ||
| It's like the most boring thing to look at. | ||
| So the dialogue has to be really elevated in that case. | ||
| You see what I mean? | ||
| So I was like, oh, this is actually pretty hard. | ||
| And for whatever reason, it was like coming down to the wire. | ||
| And I was trying to imagine... | ||
| I knew what the Special Forces guy was going to say because it was obvious what he was going to say. | ||
| And all of a sudden, as I was writing this CIA guy, I wrote this line where he goes, not every problem has a solution. | ||
| Which I was like, oh, that's a really good fucking line. | ||
| And I was like, oh, wow, I was kind of happy about it. | ||
| And I was talking to a friend of mine, like... | ||
| Four or five days ago, who worked on the show, who was the sound mixer, this guy Paul Otteson, who's amazing. | ||
| And he was telling me, I really liked that line. | ||
| That was so good. | ||
| It really made me think about my life, that sometimes there are problems and we don't... | ||
| We just have to accept that they exist. | ||
| You know, we have to live with the consequences of them. | ||
| There's not a solution to every problem. | ||
| I was like, thanks, Paul. | ||
| And then I got on the phone, hung up, and I remembered, oh, fuck. | ||
| Like 15 years ago, in a bar in D.C., there was a CIA guy who fucking told me that. | ||
| Talking about Syria. | ||
| And so, you know, like the providence of it had kind of been lost in like the neural network of my brain or whatever. | ||
| But so things, you do like drop things, but I feel like if they're meaningful... | ||
| They kind of come back sometime. | ||
| And when you have like 10 hours to fill, there's just like so many times where like something will come back in that you might have left on the wayside a long time ago. | ||
| Well, you're constantly cultivating your gardens of thought and creativity, too, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I try to... | ||
| I mean, that's a nice way of putting it, as a garden. | ||
| But, yeah, I try to, like... | ||
| You know, I try to, like, stay open to other people is the biggest thing. | ||
| And stay open to other experiences so that I'm not always, like... | ||
| Just like riffing on myself, which is a little bit limiting. | ||
| But listen, man, the process, whatever it is, the result is amazing. | ||
| I'm a big fan. | ||
| You do some really awesome shit. | ||
| And I can't wait. | ||
| Check this out. | ||
| Echo 3 on Amazon. | ||
| Or excuse me, on Apple. | ||
| Not Amazon. | ||
| Sorry, Apple. | ||
| And it's available now, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's available now. | ||
| Are all the episodes available now? | ||
| No, one through five will be available right now. | ||
| Then it's like an episode every week. | ||
| There's a new episode that drops every Friday. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Up until you get to ten. | ||
| So you gotta consume them one at a time. | ||
| Exciting. | ||
| I'm looking forward to it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, man. | |
| I really enjoyed this conversation. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thanks for everything you do. | ||
| Really appreciate it. |
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