Rob Lowe talks about the dangers of wearing a mask on set, and why celebrities should wear one too. Plus, the latest on the White House Flu outbreak, and how to get over a cold without getting sick. Plus, Rob talks about why he doesn t wear a mask in public and why he thinks it's a good idea to wear one on set. And, of course, he talks about how he feels about wearing masks on set and why it's better than not going out at all. And, he also talks about what he thinks about the idea of celebrities wearing masks in public, and if they should wear them in public at all, and what it could do to make them feel better about it. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerMedia! Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, and subscribe to our new podcast, The Real Reel, wherever you get your stuff. If you like what you're listening to, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a five star rating and review! We'll be looking out for you in next week's mailbag! Thank you so much for all the love, support, and support the podcast, and we'll get a new episode out there next week with a new ad-free version of the podcast in the next week! Thanks again for listening! Timestamps: 0:00: 00:00 - What's your favorite thing you've listened to so far this week? 1: 2:30 - What do you like about this week's episode? 3: 4:00 5: What are you looking forward to hear from you? 6: What's the worst thing you're watching? 7: what do you'd like to do next? 9:00 +1: what would you want to see me do next week in the future? 8:00-10:00s - What kind of mask you're scared of wearing it? 11:30s - what are you're going to wear on set? 13: what s your biggest superpower? 15:00 szn 16: Is it safe to wear it in public? 17:40s - how do you think it's safe? 18:00 is it better than that? 19:00 | Is it better? 21:00 & 16:00 Is it a good thing? 27:00 -- Is it possible to be a hero?
00:02:14.000The one that you got is an antibody test.
00:02:17.000That takes 10 minutes, and it shows active antibodies, which means you got the disease five, six days ago or whatever, and your body's fighting it off.
00:02:24.000It's currently in your system, and it also shows another indicator whether or not you fought it off a long time ago.
00:07:46.000Again, they make a car called the Apex.
00:07:50.000Essentially, they're right next to the Tesla factory in California, and they'll take your Tesla, they bring it over there, and they soup it up.
00:07:59.000They put a wider track, they widen the fenders, they put better suspension, that's it right there, S-Apex.
00:09:37.000I'm not like a prepper or anything like that, but I'm like, if the shit is the fan- Wait, what's the difference between a prepper- I don't have enough food.
00:10:42.000The base is a very large Ford pickup truck.
00:10:46.000They take like a huge diesel pickup truck.
00:10:50.000And then they put this insane cabin in the back of it and there's a bunch of different levels that they do it.
00:10:56.000You know, you have like a reasonable level for like one person if you like camping and then you could literally bring your whole family and you're living like you're in a private jet.
00:11:34.000The sheriffs came to us to tell us about different evacuation zones, and I said, and I know all these guys really well, so just level with me.
00:11:46.000What's like the worst thing that's going to happen?
00:11:50.000Like the absolute doomsday scenario you guys were worried about, and they're like, well, we're worried about the entire mountain going all the way to the freeway.
00:12:35.000If you said, okay, tomorrow night at midnight, there's going to be a 45-foot wall right here of debris, of homes, of boulders the size of a semi-truck cab, you'd be like,
00:13:53.000Yeah, it's such a beautiful area, Santa Barbara and Montecito.
00:13:57.000It's so gorgeous because of those mountains, but that's also what makes it vulnerable if there's a fire, right?
00:14:01.000Because all the stuff that kind of holds the mountain together and keeps the erosion from happening all gets burnt up and then a strong rain.
00:14:56.000So that's one of the reasons why these massive, massive, massive boulders that you would think would be soldered into the Earth's core were just like, boop, and just washed out.
00:15:08.000It's so hard to imagine because if you drive up the 101 and you see those beautiful hills, you just see beautiful hills.
00:15:14.000But what that is is evidence that the Earth is moving.
00:15:49.000I mean, in the stories, you know, everybody's story is more tragic than, look at that.
00:15:56.000Well, one thing that this pandemic taught a lot of people is that what you think of as being static and unchanging and that the world that we live in is basically pretty stable.
00:16:06.000A small event, and it's not small, but a virus that kills less than 1% of the population can completely obliterate the world as you know it.
00:17:07.000Those caldera supervolcanoes, they've exploded throughout history and killed massive, massive numbers of human beings.
00:17:15.000They think that there was one in Indonesia somewhere around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago that killed off most of the population of the world and left as few as 7,000 human beings.
00:17:39.000Well, they've concentrated on asteroid impacts and particularly the asteroid impacts that are proven now that they believe ended the Ice Age.
00:17:48.000And they also believe restarted civilizations.
00:17:51.000Because they think that there was some incredibly complex civilizations that we're not totally aware of other than some of the structures they left behind, like Gobekli Tepe and some of the ancient Egyptian structures.
00:18:03.000But there's a clear indication that something happened both from an archaeological perspective and also from a geologist's perspective.
00:18:10.000When they do these core samples, they find that Somewhere around between, you know, somewhere in the 12,000 years ago range, there was a massive impact, and all over the world, because they find this tritonite, which is this nuclear glass everywhere.
00:18:27.000They also find iridium, which is really common in space, but not very common.
00:18:32.000And it's a level they see in the core samples.
00:18:41.000That's the same glass like when the Trinity Project, when they first blew up the first nuclear bomb.
00:18:46.000That's one of the things that they found was this nuclear glass.
00:18:50.000And it's just this incredible force that causes the sand to turn into glass.
00:18:55.000And they find this all over the world at around 12,000 years.
00:19:01.000And there's also a lot of awareness today of all the near-Earth objects and when Earth in its orbit comes in contact with these consistent near-Earth objects.
00:19:15.000Something probably hit Earth in multiple places, like more than one object, somewhere in that range, and ended the Ice Age.
00:22:55.000I mean, you know, all of the mistakes that I made, all the things that I learned got me to where I am today and I could not be happier and I needed some fucking comeuppance and I needed some of that humbling and stuff.
00:23:07.000On the other side of it is like, what's the point of being fucking famous today?
00:23:27.000I saw an article written about Leonardo DiCaprio, and it was just about how he dates young girls and how gross it is that he's dating a girl at 25. Like, 25 is a woman, you fuck.
00:24:47.000And you know that whole thing, that theory that however old you are when you get famous, that freezes you in carbonite emotionally and intellectually.
00:24:58.000Well, that makes sense with child stars, right?
00:25:01.000Yes, but anyway, it's also that thing of like, have you ever noticed that before like you get famous, the people who were famous to you then...
00:25:15.000Fast forward a hundred years or whatever, and maybe they haven't done as much, and you have, but when you meet them, you think they're the most famous, crazy, successful person.
00:27:39.000And so there was no – so I had to ad-lib something really, really, really, really quickly.
00:27:45.000It felt like time stretched out and his eyes got huge and I ad-libbed something and it worked and it got a really big laugh.
00:27:51.000And I think that that's what sort of sealed my relationship with Lorne Michaels because I was able to – I came back backstage and was like, hmm, you're really Houdini, aren't you?
00:28:14.000How much preparation do you have to do for that show?
00:28:17.000Like, how many times do you rehearse one of those sketches?
00:28:19.000Well, what people don't really realize about being a host is it's the host show.
00:28:24.000Like, you can take as much control over it as you want, and most people don't.
00:28:28.000I, just being stupid and naive, did, and always did, and sat in on the writers all night, write all night with all the different writers, going from room to room.
00:28:54.000One of my favorite things that got cut and Will Ferrell and I played oncologists who would deliver the bad news that people had stage four cancer, but only with our mouths full of food.
00:29:43.000Phil hated the competitive aspect of the show because he said that people were just mean to each other.
00:29:50.000That's one of the things that he enjoyed about sitcoms is that everybody was kind of working together.
00:29:54.000He said one of the things about when you do SNL, everyone's battling to get their sketch on.
00:29:59.000So they would sort of sabotage each other and there was a lot of backstabby shit going on and he didn't like it.
00:30:07.000He was really hesitant to be friendly with people on the set.
00:30:12.000When he first got on the sitcom, it took a while for him to loosen up and realize this is a different thing because that environment was every man for himself.
00:30:31.000There's an element of teamwork that's intrinsic and you want and it's great and hopefully it's there.
00:30:35.000But then there's that element of, you know, competitiveness even with your sort of band of brothers.
00:30:40.000But, you know, that gets toxic in a hurry with the right – With the wrong culture and and maybe the wrong people in a bit but SNL it's like it is what it is there's only so many slots for sketches and there are only so many people writing and The best is when people try to tank them in the read through like you read all of them on Wednesday a big huge stack of them and People will like laugh really really hard at their own stuff or like roll their eyes It's it's fun to watch Yeah,
00:31:10.000that's basically what he's talking about.
00:31:12.000That always made me really uncomfortable, the fake producer laugh.
00:34:10.000I'm just right there at those thresholds year in and year out.
00:34:13.000You could say that to someone and not say what ranking it was and say, when I was 15, I was on a show that had 19 million people watching it.
00:36:24.000There are people that are making creative decisions that have never been creative in their fucking life, and it's amazing.
00:36:29.000And they're out there pushing buttons and pulling strings.
00:36:33.000Aaron Sorkin tells a great story about the pilot of the West Wing, which is sort of – I mean, he wrote a great script, so it's one of the great pilots.
00:36:41.000And there's a through line of refugees from Cuba braving – All odds on rickety boats to come to America for America's promise.
00:36:52.000And that's sort of a thread that's playing through it.
00:36:54.000And so in the White House, we're talking about it.
00:36:56.000And President Bartlett talks about it in a way to inspire people.
00:38:00.000And my friend Lou Morton, he was one of the writers, and every week he would come in with a new t-shirt on where he would write the number on the shirt.
00:38:06.000Because we moved around like nine times.
00:38:09.000And this was pre-internet, so you had to look at TV Guide to find out when News Radio was on.
00:41:55.000Well, that was a great thing because we – you know, she's Bo Derek and her husband John, famous John Derek, was very protective of her and she hadn't worked in a long time.
00:42:06.000And he made her cut all her hair off the day before she showed up on the set of Tommy Boy.
00:45:15.000You know, we're worked out for you know, but you know, it's some people can't They can't make that leap man.
00:45:21.000The thing about him though is the fucking I always wonder about guys like that that are so powerful Like is it the demons that made him so good?
00:45:32.000He would go apeshit I mean he had the fucking horsepower.
00:45:35.000He had it was so stunning You have these scenes where he would just go fucking crazy.
00:45:41.000It was so fun Would wonder like what is is that same thing what makes him I mean because it was so real Is that what made him just go crazy with coke and go crazy with everything else?
00:45:54.000I mean, I think I think like normal people Like I don't see a lot of normal people drawn but why would any normal person want to be?
00:46:04.000Why would they so I think just by default Damaged people, or more articulately, people with a hole to fill, are drawn to entertainment to fill the hole.
00:46:20.000And some of the people have other damage too, rage, anger, whatever it is.
00:46:26.000But without a question, the more normal someone is, I know.
00:46:32.000Like, unfortunately, less entertaining.
00:46:37.000Like, you're at dinner or whatever, and they're like, I'm this, and they're like, really, really nice and really, really decent, and I go, I wish you were crazy and damaged like me, because then you'd be really...
00:46:46.000Then we could have a fun conversation.
00:48:25.000It's just the script doesn't work in Nutty Professor 2. And then they got rid of Jada Pickett-Smith and replaced her with someone else, too.
00:49:11.000We've talked about it on the podcast before, but there was a thing that he did where he was accepting some award and he was on stage and he did this piece about Bill Cosby.
00:49:59.000They found out what the fuck he was really all about, but...
00:50:01.000So for him to get a phone call from Bill Cosby, instead of saying, you're amazing, I fucking love what you're doing, I'm in your corner, congratulations, go get him.
00:50:11.000Instead, he gets, you should stop saying bad words.
00:50:15.000So anyway, years later, he hasn't done stand-up in forever, and he accepts this award, and talks about, because they took back Bill Cosby's honorary doctorate, and all these different, they took awards away from him.
00:50:27.000And he does this whole routine about Bill getting his awards taken away.
00:52:10.000There's a screening of kindergarten cop that was supposed to be in Portland or somewhere this weekend that was canceled because people said that it was showing cops in a good light or something like that.
00:56:57.000Yeah, and I was like, and I did, and like, you know, in the commercial breaks, the band's playing and people were screaming, you know, Hey, why do you look so good?
00:57:03.000And he's like, I don't eat every other day!
00:57:19.000Honestly, I think at the end of the day, the benefit is just, it's just an easy way to keep the calories down, but I find I'm more focused, and I actually have more energy.
00:59:35.000I'm one of those people that, like, for whatever reason, I knew it was what I was born to do immediately, and I devoted every fucking minute to it and loved it, and it paid off.
00:59:48.000My boys are, you know, Cheryl's a great wife and great partner for me, but I love seeing, like, that kind of time investment.
01:00:14.000You love going through this because mine are 24 and 26. So the notion of going back and having another crack at it kind of sounds kind of cool.
01:01:32.000They feel terrible, so they want you to feel terrible.
01:01:35.000And we were just having this weird conversation about...
01:01:39.000Emotions and about where it comes from and you know and how some people their you know their families broken up and because of that they wish that things were normal so they make up lies or they when other people are doing well they get angry at other people like and we were just just talking through this and in the middle of it I'm talking to her and I'm thinking I remember when You're so small.
01:02:01.000And now here you are, this 12-year-old who's like, we're having this intense conversation about emotions and the development of human beings and how to be more compassionate and how there's this instinct to go, fuck her.
01:02:13.000And I'm like, I know you have that feeling, but you've got to fight that feeling.
01:02:28.000Because you're developing anger instead of developing forgiveness.
01:02:32.000Like you develop this anger towards a person where it's better, it's hard, but it's better to try to understand why they're that way and why they're lashing out at you.
01:02:42.000And when you do that, what I was explaining to her is like, it'll be ineffective.
01:02:46.000Like their mean stuff to you will be ineffective.
01:02:49.000It doesn't work anymore because you know who you are.
01:02:51.000So if you know who you are, it'll bother you that they're trying to do it, but it won't You won't change your feelings about yourself.
01:02:59.000If you don't have a good sense of personal sovereignty, someone can change your feelings about yourself.
01:03:06.000You know, I remember when I was young, someone could insult me and I would think that they were right.
01:03:50.000I always tell my kids that great phrase about bitterness and anger and bitterness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to drop dead.
01:04:36.000You can you could use them as tools to understand people, you know like that feeling that you get It's a tool and that the understanding of like how to manage that is a tool You can you can use it and you could understand people better and then you'll recognize it in yourself better and it'll prevent you from making some catastrophic mistakes and One of the things about angry,
01:05:00.000bitter, spiteful people is that they rarely get anything done.
01:06:13.000That's a weird theory because exercise works, right?
01:06:17.000You get in shape and then you can just decide to eat Twinkies and you get out of shape.
01:06:21.000It doesn't mean that exercise doesn't work.
01:06:23.000Listen, I... There are people that, you know, true traditionalists don't even like people talking with the amount that I talk about recovery publicly for that reason.
01:06:38.000But my thing is, in this world, addiction is such a fucking killer.
01:06:43.000And there are so many families suffering from it.
01:06:47.000And every teenager is going to have to figure out their relationship with drugs and alcohol.
01:06:53.000There isn't one who isn't going to have to.
01:06:55.000And a lot of people are going to fuck that up and some aren't.
01:06:58.000But the more that conversation is out there and that people can… Can talk about it openly is better.
01:07:05.000So I kind of am more public about it just because it's changed my life, saved my life.
01:07:12.000I don't have alcoholism in my family nor personally, but I admire people who talk about recovery.
01:07:19.000I think it's important because I think, especially someone like you, because you're a very famous public figure.
01:07:25.000And when you talk about addiction and your own struggles, people say, well, fucking Rob Lowe?
01:07:42.000I mean, I get a lot out of it because inevitably, you know, I meet people who are earlier on their journey and it reminds me of how bad it can be if you don't keep an eye on it.
01:10:04.000BJ. So BJ, when I met BJ, and I don't know anything really much about the sport, he was like, you know that before every match I watch Youngblood.
01:12:54.000So I had that, which is both a curse and a blessing, because I knew I didn't have to go through the thing that so many people do where they don't really know where they fit in the world and don't know what their gift is.
01:13:05.000I don't know what they want to do with their lives.
01:16:01.000But then the other thing I would get, and this is the other really weird thing, is I'd wake up in the middle of the night and go, oh, my instinct to beat every creative fucking instinct out of my children is now indicted them and sentenced them to a life of a drone in a cubicle.
01:24:03.000And it's in the green room and it's early in the show and there's an older lady in the corner with flaming red hair and I'm kind of looking at her and she sees me and she goes, Young man, I didn't know you were such a good singer.
01:25:34.000See, I think I would have gotten away with it a little bit in terms of history had there not been massive lawsuits the next day over the likeness thing.
01:25:45.000Oh, so then people thought about it again.
01:25:47.000When people went back and went, wait a minute, that fucking sucked way worse than I thought it did.
01:25:54.000What was the next thing you did after that?
01:25:58.000I think, let's see, would it have been...
01:26:02.000I feel like it might have been Bad Influence with James Spader and Kurt.
01:26:06.000One of my favorite movies I got to do.
01:26:28.000And every year, every year I am treated to the honor, the high honor, of being on the list of most embarrassing Oscar moments every fucking year.
01:26:37.000And my thing is this, is I go, hey, wait, guys.
01:26:41.000You couldn't figure out how to announce the best picture two years ago, and I'm the problem!
01:28:08.000It's like they were on coke when they were doing the movie, writing the movie, performing the movie, and their connection with what's realistic or even entertaining or even possible doesn't make any sense.
01:28:19.000Like if you were having sex with a woman and she was flailing around like that and you kept going, you'd be a criminal.
01:29:20.000I mean, there's no nudity in movies anymore, but in the 80s, I had the page 73 rule, because that's always the page the nude seeds were on.
01:30:33.000Yeah, no, page 73, because it's the middle of act two, and any writer out there knows that the middle of the second act is the Sahara of creativity.
01:30:41.000That's when you're alone with your thoughts, and you're like, fuck, we've got to get to the ending.
01:31:41.00017 turning 18, and see Thomas Howell, who played Ponyboy, the lead in the movie, was 15. And when we would finish shooting, we'd get in the vans to get driven back to the hotel, and there would be as much beer as you wanted.
01:36:00.000That's the great thing about – here's the thing I learned about guns that was hilarious is that when I was learning how to shoot properly, I was shooting like an actor because you have to supply the kick.
01:43:01.000But whatever it was, you know, there's so many different versions of that, so many different versions of this, like, spectacular seaport civilization that was destroyed in the flood.
01:43:13.000Like, the flood of the Bible, like Noah's Ark, there's also an ancient story called the Epic of Gilgamesh.
01:43:22.000Yeah, and that story is a very similar story about a flood.
01:43:25.000And this is one of the things that Graham Hancock points to, that there's all these civilizations that talk about It had no interaction with each other in theory, and yet they all have the same oral histories.
01:43:35.000I did a show with my boys called The Low Files, and it was basically an excuse for my boys and I to run around in a souped-up raptor around the country and explore urban legends.
01:46:20.000We had, we had a great time and it's all these, we went with all these guys who are like real legit people.
01:46:25.000They're like regular people and they spend their time out in the woods and they know how many are out there and it's fucking, it was crazy.
01:46:33.000Matthew, my youngest son's through the thermal imaging, saw him hiding by, like doing the thing with a high behind the tree.
01:46:38.000So you really think that Bigfoot's real?
01:47:58.000If you touch something, you get your sweat on it and it could show up as human DNA or animal DNA mixed with human DNA. The problem is the people that are into it, the real problem is they want to believe so fucking bad that they just have this crazy confirmation bias and they only look at the good things.
01:48:16.000My favorite episodes of the Low Files were the ones where we didn't find shit.
01:48:31.000And they don't have names for other mythical creatures.
01:48:35.000And then on top of that, there was an actual animal called the Gigantopithecus, and it was a huge ape-like creature that stood on two legs and walked upright and was probably some sort of...
01:49:03.000In one of the episodes that we did, we talked with some of the elders, and they would say, no, one reached through the window and touched my chest.
01:49:13.000And it's like, you're like, this guy's not crazy.
01:49:36.000As a sober guy, there's part of me that wishes...
01:49:40.000Because I liked mushrooms, but only like once or twice a year because it's so fucking fun and you get, like you said, you get all that stuff going.
01:50:23.000That's different in that, you know, you could call it a drug, but DMT, which is what ayahuasca brings up, it's the active ingredient, you're still you.
01:52:33.000Awakening or vision or I've had a lot of visions on dimethyltryptamine.
01:52:37.000Yeah, it's anything that you could that you once you got Once you were done tripping that didn't seem like the ramblings of a madman or was it something you're like, oh wow I had a I had a revelation.
01:52:49.000It's hard to say They all seem impossible to describe to anybody else other than people that have experienced it But what it does make you realize is that how...
01:53:02.000The thing that I always felt when I came back is like, how is this possible that you could go to a place like this where you could see something that's way more vivid and way more powerful than regular life?
01:53:31.000And whatever is over there seems to know you.
01:53:36.000It seems to be you're communicating with something, something that's far more intelligent than you, far more advanced and not hindered by all of the things that we're hindered by, like our egos and our nonsense and our insecurities and our civilization and culture.
01:53:54.000It's some sort of other kind of consciousness.
01:55:09.000There's a humility that comes from real psychedelic experiences that just because you know that they are possible, it makes you second guess the significance of regular existence.
01:55:23.000Because it seems like that might be where you go when you die.
01:57:11.000And then all of a sudden the voice went, oh, but what about my family?
01:57:15.000I'm here now and they're not here yet because it was sort of the theory was that I had gone to heaven or whatever the fuck it was.
01:57:23.000And here's the freaky part is I realized, no, no, they're already there because time is not linear.
01:57:31.000So my takeaway from this dream, my ramblings of a madman, were we're already there.
01:57:38.000Well, your brain does produce psychedelic chemicals while you're sleeping.
01:57:42.000That's one of the things about DMT that's so closely related to dreams, is that it's really hard to remember after it's over, but so vivid when it's happening.
01:57:49.000This I remembered like, and I remember it now, like I witnessed it.
01:57:53.000And that's what made it different and special.
01:57:55.000Maybe the improvement in the way your brain was working because of the meditation, that you had gotten yourself into a state where you could access it.
01:58:05.000And I physically asked for it before I went to bed.
01:58:24.000I think James Cameron nailed something in that Avatar film that resonates with people in a very strange way.
01:58:32.000Not just that it was an awesome movie, and it was a fucking awesome movie, but...
01:58:36.000That he nailed something that made people want to live like that.
01:58:42.000You know, there was a thing that we're talking about after that movie called Avatar Depression, where people were leaving the film and they were depressed that their life was nothing like Avatar, like Pandora, like living like the Na'vi.
01:59:29.000That's what happens when the executives get a hold of it and they go, hey, you got to go to Cuba and grab the people and put them in the boat.
01:59:56.000People that talk about folks that live a subsistence life, people that have gone to the woods and they just live off the land, they talk about this deep connection to nature that they get from that and how it makes them feel fulfilled.
02:00:15.000He lives in the Arctic and Vice did this whole series on him called the Heine Moe's Arctic Adventure and One of the things that he was saying is he came out there like in the 1970s to work for the forestry department They just lived there for the rest of his life.
02:00:28.000He's up there right now with his family like he's married to this indigenous woman and they live off the land He eats caribou and fish and his whole life is like hunting and gathering But he's like, this is how people are supposed to live.
02:00:38.000And he's a very intelligent man, very articulate.
02:00:40.000So when you hear him talk, he's not some weirdo that lives in the woods.
02:00:44.000He's a guy who recognizes there's something about this that resonates with humans, this life.
02:00:51.000You're connected in the way that you're supposed to be.
02:00:53.000And he thinks that what we've done by creating cities and electricity and electronics and You know social media and all the bullshit that we deal with today that we've disconnected ourselves from the things that that really make us human and that I believe that his his life is more connected to it But there's even a deeper connection and that's how the Navi lived and you know if you read about There's there's many stories about Native Americans where they would especially the Comanche would kidnap People
02:01:23.000they would kidnap like young children.
02:04:35.000I love, I hate to say this because I love movies, and I do love going to the movie theater, but the fucking consequences of going to the movie theater are dealing with people.
02:04:44.000Like, people that are texting or talking.
02:04:46.000That's what drove me out of the movie theaters, was the glow of people's phones.
02:04:52.000Well, people talking, too, is so annoying.
02:04:55.000But when people are not annoying, like, you know, nine out of ten times, it's fucking amazing because you feel the energy of all the other people, especially at comedy.
02:05:03.000Like, I remember I went to see Team America World Police.
02:09:14.000And also, somebody was telling me that we're with emoji culture and text culture, that our language has changed forever, for sure, because now no one cares about punctuation.
02:09:25.000I mean, it's just not— No one cares.
02:09:50.000And what, if you read the letters from the Civil War, right, those great, like, flowery, beautiful, that like the most, you know, like a private in the army would write.
02:10:14.000And you haven't had to go through the time and effort of the other.
02:10:18.000At least that was the theory that somebody was telling you that made me feel better about it.
02:10:21.000I don't know if that theory is correct.
02:10:23.000That's like saying that people who read texts all day and they read tweets and bullshit nonsense on social media, that's better than reading books.
02:10:56.000It's easier to be a moron today and survive.
02:10:59.000Back in the Civil War days, You know, if you're writing a letter back home, I mean, I wonder what education was like back then, too, right?
02:11:10.000But, you know, that famous letter of Sullivan Ballou that ends the first episode of Ken Burns' documentary, The Civil War, that's famous, and they put that beautiful song underneath it.
02:12:35.000I watch things that don't require that much thinking.
02:12:38.000But then, every now and then, I'll watch a lot of space documentaries.
02:12:43.000If there's one thing that I watch a lot, it's documentaries on space, things about space, space travel, exploration, new things they're learning.
02:12:51.000I was reading something today about NASA. They're going to change some of their wording to be more inclusive.
02:12:56.000I'm like, please say they're not going to get rid of black holes.
02:12:58.000Because if NASA decides that black holes are racist, I'm going to give up.
02:13:49.000The term yacht rock does not exist contemporaneously with the music the term describes.
02:13:57.000From about 1975 to 1984, it refers to adult-oriented rock or West Coast sound, which became identified with yacht rock in 2005 when the term was coined in a J.D. Reisner et al.'s online video series of the same name.
02:14:57.000When I get to bar chords, my little fingers were too weak, and I had to move on.
02:15:01.000I think music is one of those things where I'm scared to learn, because if I start getting into it, I'll be obsessed, and then I'll lose all the time that I have.
02:18:10.000Talking to him was so fascinating because he's one of the few guys that's made films about combat, who's actually experienced real combat.
02:18:21.000And, you know, talking about his experiences in Vietnam and then coming back home and making Platoon and how difficult it was to make Platoon.
02:20:04.000I really believe that the notion that getting high makes you a better artist or gives you better access into your art, I think is bullshit.
02:23:36.000He and I had talked a couple times about even getting together with a group of my friends and going over there, and he was going to guide us.
02:23:45.000He's a guy that inspired a lot of Graham Hancock's work, collaborated together on some stuff.
02:24:06.000So I went two years ago, and I thought it would be like that great scene in National Lampoon's Vacation when Chevy Chase sees the Grand Canyon.
02:24:59.000And they don't really understand the civilization that built that.
02:25:02.000No, and what you realize when you get there is there's two civilizations.
02:25:06.000There's that, and then there are parts of that that are even older that look completely different.
02:25:13.000Completely different, like any idiot can tell that that's from a different time.
02:25:18.000Yeah, that's one of the things that Graham Hancock talks about, is that there's a bunch of these spots like there where archaeologists have sort of determined that, well, this is what happened.
02:25:27.000And then upon further examination, other people have said, but wait, I don't know if this is right.
02:28:00.000There's something about going places, I mean, I'm sure that's fascinating, but there's something about going places where people lived a long time ago that's very eerie.
02:28:08.000Like if you go to, like, Pompeii was weird for me, because you're looking around and you realize, like, this is this civilization that, what was it, a thousand years ago or whatever?
02:29:57.000It's supposed to represent the gland in your brain that produces dimethyltryptamine.
02:30:02.000And so there's a lot of that weird shit in ancient Christian art, like mushroom imagery, and a lot of weird stuff that you find.
02:30:11.000In fact, there's a book by this guy, John Marco Allegro, who was a biblical scholar and a linguist, and he was also one of the only people in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the translation commission, the translation group that was...
02:30:27.000That was a sign to try to figure out this Dead Sea Scrolls and translate it back.
02:30:33.000He was an ordained minister, but he was also agnostic.
02:30:36.000Because through his studies of religion, he sort of decided along the way, like, hey, this is all, it seems like there's too many similarities to these things.
02:30:44.000It's not in all these different cultures.
02:30:46.000And he started breaking down the etymology of the languages.
02:30:49.000And he came out with a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross that was bought out by the Catholic Church.
02:30:57.000And the book essentially said the entire religion of Christianity is a giant misunderstanding.
02:31:02.000And what it really was about was about the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
02:31:09.000And that they had all these stories that they hid in parables and all this ancient knowledge that they hid in these tales, but that it all goes back to the consumption of psychedelic drugs.
02:31:20.000And in fact, one of the weirder connections to that was in Israel.
02:31:27.000These scholars at the University of Jerusalem had determined that what Moses was talking about when he saw the burning bush was actually the acacia bush, the acacia tree, which is rich in DMT. And that when we're talking about the burning bush and that it was God appeared to him in the burning bush,
02:31:47.000And that this was why he came down with these commandments for how to live life and how to govern yourself, that he was in communication with God, but what it really was, most likely, was him having a psychedelic experience.
02:32:22.000But he meets this cool girl and he starts smoking pot and then became a pot activist.
02:32:26.000And wrote a book called The Emperor Has No Clothes, and it's all about the origins of marijuana criminalization, and what it really was all about, and that it actually was about industry, and that the real people that started marijuana propaganda, like those movies like Reefer Madness,
02:32:43.000that was Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst.
02:32:46.000And William Randolph Hearst decided that he was going to demonize marijuana to stop the hemp industry.
02:32:53.000That was the original reason why he did it.
02:32:55.000Because the Popular Science magazine had a cover in like 1937 or something like that called Hemp, the New Billion Dollar Crop.
02:33:04.000And it was all because they had come up with a new machine called the decorticator.
02:33:07.000And a decorticator was a new machine that allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber.
02:33:12.000Because before they used to use slaves.
02:33:14.000And then when slavery was outlawed and then Eli Whitney came up with the cotton gin, they switched all their clothing from hemp-based clothing to cotton.
02:33:23.000And so they had done this for years, and then they had switched their paper from canvas, like original canvas, like even the Mona Lisa, was printed on hemp.
02:33:34.000Hemp is a far more durable paper, and it's a far more durable cloth.
02:33:38.000And so people's clothes, like old, really durable clothing, was made out of hemp.
02:33:45.000And so William Randolph Hearst decided the best way to combat this new industry, instead of turning over his gigantic forests and converting them to hemp forests and converting his paper mills to hemp paper, he decided what he was going to do was kill the business.
02:34:00.000And so the way he killed the business was printing these stories about black people and Mexicans raping white women because they were on this new drug called marijuana.
02:34:09.000And what marijuana, the word, was actually a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco.
02:34:15.000Didn't even have anything to do with cannabis.
02:34:18.000So when they made marijuana illegal, Congress didn't even understand that they were making cannabis and hemp illegal.
02:36:51.000I started looking something up about the pigs and this article from the San Francisco Gate says it's a different guy named George Gordon Moore who brought them in the 1920s for hunting.
02:37:03.000I'm sure he did, but William Randolph Hearst most certainly had them at his castle.
02:37:07.000Maybe some of the ones around that area came from William Randolph Hearst's castle.
02:37:12.000Maybe that's where he got them from, that guy.
02:37:14.000But Hearst most certainly had them at his place.
02:37:17.000In fact, Hunter S. Thompson used to hunt William Randolph Hearst's wild pigs.
02:37:21.000The ones that are around Big Sur, apparently.
02:39:19.000I didn't realize that all the bikes that I had on the back were, like, too wide, I guess, and I just destroyed every bike we had just gotten the family for Christmas on that thing.
02:39:28.000I was like Clark Griswold, vacation driving that fucking thing.
02:40:51.000You know, so like I remember my mom, I have such vivid memories of, parents would never do this today, but like, we'd go to the market and she would leave me in the car.
02:41:01.000And she would go to the market and it felt like she was gone for five days.
02:41:06.000She was probably, looking back on it, she was probably gone for 20 minutes.
02:42:39.000If you do have an opinion, there's a million people that disagree and a million people that do agree and they're fighting it out to the death of Yeah.
02:42:46.000It used to be that consensus building or being in the middle of the road was accepted by the warring camps.
02:46:00.000Like, what are we blind to that our children are going to go, remember back then when people streamed their music and streamed their movies?
02:46:08.000Like my dad, I'm like, Dad, have you heard my podcast?
02:46:20.000And he goes, and then, this is my favorite, he goes, and then somebody called me, but I didn't know how to shut it off, and now I can't find it again.
02:47:42.000You know, what's missing in overproduced stuff that executives and a team of people come up with, that you're missing the thing that resonates with people.
02:47:54.000There's a lot of podcasts that I love that are produced, like Radiolab or Wondery.
02:48:10.000They probably feel like they're in the room They're having this conversation too like they're agreeing or they're disagreeing or they're yelling shut the fuck up while they're driving You know that's that's that's what the appeal is is that it's not in like this is a small Crew of people that produces this is basically a Jamie and myself and the video editors.
02:48:29.000I mean, that's it There's no one else so because of that it's not it's not fucked with And I know a lot of people that have podcasts on networks, you know, and then they have to, they have meetings, and I go, you have fucking meetings?
02:48:43.000And then they tell me the nightmare meetings they have, where people are like, well, they tune out when you say this, and they do this, like, here's the stats, you can't talk about that, because if you do, I go, oh my god, no!
02:49:25.000Yeah, I thought it was something that I... Like, it was a natural offshoot from...
02:49:30.000The two memoirs I wrote, and then I built a one-man show off of it, which is really a way of me doing stand-up without calling it stand-up, really.
02:49:41.000And I did a lot of touring, and it was fun, and I loved it.
02:49:45.000And I was thinking, what's the next iteration of it?
02:49:47.000What was the subject of the one-man show?
02:49:49.000It was called Stories I Only Tell My Friends Live, which is the title of my first book.
02:50:19.000There are a lot of actors that are better than me.
02:50:21.000And you try to find out what your special sauce is.
02:50:25.000Like what is it that I think maybe I can do that maybe others can't?
02:50:32.000And I think between the books and the one-man show and the podcast, I think that there's something about – Sharing my experience and then bringing other people into it that people have responded to in now three different mediums.
02:51:05.000When people listen to you, particularly if they listen to you over and over and over again for long periods of time, they know if you're full of shit or if you're just being yourself.
02:51:11.000And if you're just being yourself, they can kind of relax with you.