On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and writer joins me to discuss his new film, The Hurt Locker. We talk about how he got into journalism, why he wanted to make a movie about the Iraq War, and why he decided to make it a war movie. We also talk about what it's like being a journalist and writing a movie at the same time, and what it means to be an actor in Hollywood. And we talk about why it's important to be authentic in your writing and how important it is to be able to be yourself in order to come across as authentic in a world where there's a lot of other people trying to make you feel like you're not authentic. This is a great episode, and I hope you enjoy listening to it with your friends, family, and co-workers! Thank you so much for listening to this episode, it was a pleasure to record it and I appreciate it very much. Joe and I look forward to seeing you in the future episodes. -Joe Rogan -The Joe Rogans Experience Logo by Courtney DeKorte Music by Ian Dorsch Credits Music by Jeff Kaale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 42, 47, 44, 45 , 45, 47 , 47, 48, 49, 45 , 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 58, 51, , 56, Theme by , Theme Music by & , 1, 1, 1, 6 , 6, 6, 1 , 6 , 7, 5, 7 , 8, 8, 8 , 5 , , 9, 9, 8 , 7 1 (2, 2, & 9, 9 , 2 , 8 We hope you like it, 3, We'll see you next week! -Jonestown, 4, 10, Alyssa & 6 5 4
00:01:18.000People should just be able to be themselves.
00:01:21.000I mean, there's big commercial interests in it not being.
00:01:25.000There'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.
00:01:38.000You 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,
00:02:04.000I mean, the temptation when you're doing media is to sell something.
00:02:07.000So 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.
00:02:15.000Do you have those considerations when you're putting together, like The Hurt Locker, for instance, which is one of my all-time favorite movies?
00:03:21.000I had seen some of what's depicted in the film.
00:03:25.000And so I had witnessed the bomb squad going out and defusing bombs.
00:03:30.000And I wrote an article about it, and then the idea came along for a screenplay.
00:03:38.000I had the idea to write a screenplay, put it that way.
00:03:40.000And 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.
00:03:55.000So to do that, there was a lot of craft and whatnot involved in creating that, that I had to learn.
00:04:02.000But 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.
00:04:15.000Like one, for example, is that most war movies are organized around a mission.
00:04:22.000It'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.
00:04:30.000When I was in Baghdad, one of the things I was struck by Was this ceaseless hamster wheel repetition of the war.
00:04:43.000That it wasn't organized around a single mission.
00:04:45.000It was this futile attempt to try to find all these bombs that had been dispersed throughout the country by the counterinsurgency.
00:04:55.000So I couldn't organize it around a mission, at least in my mind, to keep it authentic.
00:05:03.000Similar enough to the reality, which was like everyday new mission, like a kind of, you know, episodic structure, they call it.
00:05:14.000So 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.
00:05:32.000Then 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,
00:05:51.000And then there's another point at which you kind of put yourself into the piece too.
00:05:56.000And 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.
00:06:12.000And 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.
00:06:32.000And it's not just that it's boring, it's that it's so meaningless compared to what he'd just been doing.
00:07:12.000But that actual thing had happened to me coming back.
00:07:18.000I 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.
00:07:42.000And I remember putting it in and thinking, this is one of the rare things in the movie that I didn't get from reporting.
00:07:50.000And it actually turned out to be one of the things that translated the most to other people.
00:07:56.000And 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.
00:08:14.000Even if you think they're super hyper fucking specific to you.
00:08:53.000And you do relate to it, because I think all of us are aware that you kind of get accustomed to whatever you're around.
00:09:03.000You know, you get accustomed to a chaotic home life or a peaceful home life.
00:09:08.000You get a very busy workplace where people are yelling at each other and everything's constantly moving fast or boring droning cubicle life.
00:09:18.000Like, people understand that there's like certain ways of living and existing that you can get accustomed to.
00:09:25.000And they kind of make sense when you've adjusted and adapted to them.
00:09:29.000But then to have such a clear difference between being in a war zone and being in a supermarket, it was perfect.
00:09:43.000It'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.
00:09:57.000It'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.
00:10:07.000And I remember calling him up and being like, near-perfect?
00:10:41.000Whether 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.
00:11:17.000But there's so much of our cultural production, the corporate production that is, in my view, irresponsible.
00:11:27.000I take the responsibility seriously just because I know in that case there are people that were still downrange and in harm's way.
00:11:39.000So 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?
00:11:47.000Nobody should get hurt because you burn some classified thing.
00:11:51.000So like in terms of like tactics that are used?
00:11:54.000Tactics 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.
00:12:09.000Of these IEDs, electronic jamming systems, and I didn't depict that at all.
00:12:16.000And then after the movie came out, a bunch of army guys were like, that wasn't realistic.
00:12:20.000I'm like, yeah, I mean, it is super realistic, but yes, I left some things out.
00:12:42.000When you talk about irresponsible depictions, what do you mean by that?
00:12:52.000I mean, I think that media is really important to our culture, to our civilization.
00:13:04.000And one way to think about it is like There's more responsibility now around, let's say, portraying diversity.
00:13:15.000We'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.
00:13:27.000But there's other areas where I don't see that same level of responsibility.
00:13:34.000One 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...
00:13:44.000And I mean, I have violence in this show.
00:14:28.000People 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,
00:14:45.000here 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.
00:14:52.000It's like making them dumber in a certain way that...
00:14:54.000I mean, it would take me a while to explain, but these are the kinds of things that I think about sometimes.
00:15:36.000You know, I think that's irresponsible.
00:15:37.000Not 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.
00:15:51.000Managing 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?
00:16:04.000You're really trying to make it authentic?
00:17:21.000But she made a lot on Zero Dark Thirty.
00:17:24.000Yeah, it's interesting what catches and what doesn't catch in the movie world.
00:17:29.000We 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.
00:17:41.000There's no traditional, normal, modern-day superhero-type people.
00:17:48.000Everyone is this chaotic person from history.
00:18:08.000I mean, sometimes it comes down to scale.
00:18:10.000I don't know what the budget of that movie was, but I know that it was big.
00:18:15.000So sometimes it's like, I think about this a lot.
00:18:18.000It's like, you want to be able to get back what you spent.
00:18:23.000And the temptation is always to go bigger, but then that puts a higher expectation on the movie's performance.
00:18:29.000When 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?
00:18:51.000I 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.
00:19:04.000They pay you by the week or two weeks.
00:19:07.000Can you, like, give the bad guys some different lines of dialogue or something like that?
00:20:36.000And those systems, I mean, they're factories.
00:20:41.000You know, so I had a hard enough time just making this at Apple, so I don't...
00:20:46.000I 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.
00:21:25.000They're both entertainment, but it's just like...
00:21:27.000It 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?
00:21:39.000And 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.
00:22:20.000It'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...
00:22:30.000Yeah, that'll ruin the final experience for the people that are listening to it.
00:22:34.000The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the more influence, the more different ideas, the more commercialized it becomes.
00:22:41.000The beautiful thing about this show is that no one has any influence.
00:22:58.000Well, 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.
00:23:13.000I don't think you can, because people know it.
00:23:52.000But 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?
00:26:01.000So 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.
00:26:12.000And what I like about movies is it's just one thing.
00:26:17.000So the idea here was maybe audiences are ready for Something where in the first hour, you're getting into the story.
00:28:12.000How would she go through that in real life?
00:28:14.000Like 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.
00:28:22.000How would she move through that experience and what would the experience be like for her?
00:28:26.000And then what would happen if the two people closest to her, her brother and her husband were both in special forces?
00:28:40.000And how would they deal with it in real life?
00:28:47.000But how would they actually deal with it?
00:28:49.000And 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.
00:29:07.000All 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.
00:29:45.000It's a story about how couples lie to each other and what the price of lying is.
00:29:52.000It's a story about men and how men relate to each other.
00:29:59.000In 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.
00:30:09.000And 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.
00:31:01.000You always need a bad guy, particularly in a kidnapping story.
00:31:04.000The bad guys are obviously going to be the kidnappers.
00:31:06.000But, you know, I think a little bit about kind of trying to, when we talked about responsibility, trying to, like...
00:31:17.000Get rid of some of that black and white thinking and give people something that has a little more gray in it.
00:31:22.000And 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.
00:31:30.000I want you to understand who they are and where they're coming from.
00:31:36.000Because just making them like mustache twirly bad guys isn't really...
00:31:39.000It's not really going to be that helpful...
00:31:45.000To 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,
00:32:26.000That's some of the shit I've been thinking about.
00:32:28.000What is the difference in the challenge of putting together a 10-hour film, essentially, that's broken into one-hour increments?
00:32:36.000versus 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,
00:32:51.000I 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.
00:33:02.000I mean, the biggest thing is the delivery system, I would say.
00:33:05.000I don't know that my process changes that much, but see, in a movie, I have you.
00:33:10.000If 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.
00:33:21.000You'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.
00:33:29.000Now 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.
00:33:40.000I 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.
00:33:49.000When it's TV, I don't fucking have anything of your attention, right?
00:33:53.000You could be streaming it in the kitchen, making eggs.
00:33:59.000I 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.
00:34:11.000In 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.
00:34:21.000And it's guys fighting in the snow, which we really haven't seen that much of.
00:34:26.000And there's Black Hawk helicopters and.50 caliber machine guns.
00:34:30.000And it's beautifully shot, the best sound mixing in the world, like the sound of the bullets ricocheting off the mountains are sick.
00:34:39.000And 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.
00:34:49.000If you're watching that shit on your phone, it's just like, you're just gonna be like, oh, what's this?
00:34:55.000How frustrating is that, that that's how people consume films?
00:35:00.000So to me, it's like, I work the same way, but the audience is like...
00:35:06.000Like 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...
00:35:16.000It's not like you have somebody for two hours.
00:35:19.000You have somebody for two minutes before they decide to get up and go to the fridge.
00:35:33.000I 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.
00:36:05.000What did you mean when you were talking about masculinity?
00:36:09.000When you were talking about depictions of masculinity?
00:36:16.000It's just something that I was thinking about because the characters in this...
00:36:22.000I mean, I've been interested in that for a long time.
00:36:24.000I mean, the character in The Hurt Locker is very...
00:36:32.000Has a lot of, like, very classically masculine traits.
00:36:35.000Sergeant James, you know, he's very, like, incredibly brave and stoic.
00:36:44.000And 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.
00:36:52.000Because in the end, he, like, leaves his wife and child to go back to fight.
00:36:57.000And then Sierra Dark Thirty was a little different because that had a very strong female lead.
00:37:02.000But this show has these two guys who are hyper-masculine because they're meant to be in CAG and Delta.
00:37:12.000They're meant to be among the best of the best of America's fighting force.
00:37:17.000So as an opener, most people will look at that and be like, these are real fucking men.
00:37:23.000And then the question is, you probably know this because it seems like you have some team guys in your life or around the office.
00:37:34.000Usually depictions of soldiers or operators are often pretty cartoony.
00:37:44.000And I think that right now, in the culture, there's a lot of talk about a crisis of masculinity.
00:37:55.000I 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...
00:38:15.000Feminist environment where they feel like they can't be themselves.
00:38:25.000And we can talk about whether or not that's true and how big of a problem that is.
00:38:29.000But 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,
00:39:47.000It's sort of what I think is part of why you're...
00:39:51.000Again, 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.
00:40:02.000I don't know that it's rare in the world, But it's rare in the media culture in that you're very...
00:40:12.000I think men and women, by the way, are more the same than they are different.
00:40:20.000What makes a good man and what makes a good woman are the same things.
00:40:24.000We want men and women to be kind and compassionate and curious and responsible.
00:40:44.000And 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.
00:40:55.000But 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.
00:41:20.000Violence is something that's kind of a part of your public persona, within the context of a sport, obviously.
00:41:29.000And it's just rare that you see that coupled with vulnerability, coupled with intelligence.
00:41:41.000Or any kind of imagination, let's say.
00:41:45.000Again, I'm talking about portraits in the media.
00:41:49.000So 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.
00:41:56.000It 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?
00:42:05.000How would they actually talk to each other?
00:42:34.000You 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.
00:42:52.000I 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.
00:45:11.000I mean, everyone's already so up in my shit.
00:45:13.000I 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.
00:45:25.000What was the Chinese can have what they want?
00:45:28.000There's nothing in there anyway What was that like you spent two years?
00:45:33.000Yeah, 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.
00:45:58.000I have the most cursory understanding of Trump and Ukraine and Russia and the Biden laptop and Burisma and all that shit.
00:46:08.000I just watch a few YouTube commentators talking about it.
00:46:12.000I'll read a few articles in The Atlantic and I don't know what's real.
00:46:15.000Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody really got it right.
00:46:24.000I mean, it's kind of the problem with the media today.
00:46:27.000The 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.
00:47:07.000Well, 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.
00:47:53.000But, you know, Russia isn't going anywhere.
00:47:57.000Obviously 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.
00:48:14.000That's not going to change anytime soon.
00:49:06.000I don't think he's very good at it, but he's good at security.
00:49:09.000So he puts a lot of energy into military, military, intelligence, propaganda, security, fucking with other people's elections, which they are pretty good at.
00:49:36.000And they consistently go into all of these places where people communicate and debate ideas and they do it with bots.
00:49:46.000And they make some points outrageous because they connect them to preposterous points.
00:49:53.000They do something where they undermine our trust.
00:49:57.000And that's the overall long game goal is to undermine democracy.
00:50:02.000It's not simply to get a puppet in office.
00:50:05.000Like that was the simplistic version of what they're trying to do.
00:50:08.000But 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.
00:50:25.000So 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.
00:50:44.000It's like a consistent effort to undermine our faith in the way our democracy works.
00:50:51.000Yeah, and they would argue that it's pretty easy to do because we're already at each other's throats.
00:50:55.000And it's all accentuated by things like TikTok and Facebook and social media and the algorithms.
00:51:01.000I mean, so far my TikTok is pretty innocent.
00:51:31.000And 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,
00:52:33.000And you don't go out there and hunt and gather anymore.
00:52:36.000So I was like, oh, that's really concerning because it's going to diminish our ability to have diverse opinions.
00:52:45.000But 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.
00:52:55.000And 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.
00:53:04.000At least the young ladies I see on TikTok.
00:53:09.000And 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.
00:53:22.000And that is kind of unprecedented in human history.
00:54:27.000There'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,
00:54:46.000And capture, audience capture, which is you're being molded and influenced constantly by the people that you interact with.
00:54:55.000And 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.
00:55:12.000And they've maintained some sort of personal sovereignty through it all.
00:55:15.000You see a very different trajectory in the way their content goes.
00:55:23.000And the people that are constantly interacting and constantly reading comments and responding to comments and taking in those comments, they become more homogenized.
00:55:33.000You become more in line with whatever the zeitgeist is telling you.
00:55:38.000It's very difficult to have Independent, individual perspectives that are unique.
00:56:02.000I 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.
00:56:11.000You'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.
00:56:21.000So how are we going to grow out of that?
00:56:23.000Well that's what's crazy because it's also being influenced by China.
00:56:26.000It's being influenced by these Russian troll farms and also I guarantee the United States is doing as well.
00:56:34.000Like we know they do because there's a bunch of bots that retreated and reposted rather without reposting it by just posting it individually.
00:56:43.000The very same message about Elon Musk when he took over Twitter.
00:56:49.000And 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.
00:57:46.000The 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.
00:58:12.000Largest 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.
00:58:24.000The 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.
00:58:30.000The more effective version is either trolls or bots or people that are paid to say certain things where they look like normal people.
00:58:38.000And this dovetails in with what you were saying about the mistrust.
00:58:45.000Of authority, the mistrust of information, the mistrust of government.
00:58:49.000It 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.
00:59:05.000Well, there's no real Walter Cronkite anymore.
00:59:07.000There's no real objective source of information where you can watch them and say that that is what's going on in the world.
00:59:23.000I 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.
01:00:52.000And people can't even agree on, like, the facts of that, which is just so...
01:00:58.000It just makes you wonder, like, where...
01:01:03.000I 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.
01:01:17.000I just don't think it necessarily has to end terribly.
01:01:21.000I'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.
01:02:17.000You know, like, well, there's certain things that cannot be questioned.
01:02:20.000There'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.
01:02:29.000And then people go, well, what about children?
01:02:31.000Well, you were talking about queer issues.
01:02:32.000Okay, we've got to leave it alone because this is in the woke world.
01:02:37.000Everything LBGTQ is, you know, beyond reproach and you have to leave it alone.
01:02:42.000In the right-wing world, you have preposterous notions about a woman's right to choose.
01:02:46.000You have radical control over people's bodies that is based on religious ideology.
01:02:53.000Life begins at the moment of conception.
01:02:56.000And even in cases of rape, abortion should be illegal.
01:03:00.000So 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.
01:03:20.000It's the mechanisms involved are so inherent to the human condition.
01:03:24.000That 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.
01:03:36.000Yeah, and there's a lot of enforcement on both sides.
01:03:51.000And 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.
01:04:26.000You know, it doesn't work, but yet it's like almost people can't help but say it.
01:04:31.000Or 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.
01:04:39.000I'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.
01:04:54.000You're gonna look at them in a higher class of human being now.
01:05:43.000Yeah, which means it works on some level.
01:05:45.000What I'm saying is like the motivation for it is to create a benefit for the person that is doing the canceling.
01:05:54.000And 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.
01:06:48.000Because you can sell more tickets with a fight than you can with people agreeing.
01:06:54.000So there's this commercial interest in that.
01:06:56.000If you're talking about CNN and Fox, there's no...
01:07:00.000There's really no upside for either of those places to be like, we really agreed with what they said the other night.
01:07:05.000That's like bad and dumb business-wise.
01:07:07.000But there's this rush for like a single narrative.
01:07:10.000And 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.
01:07:53.000Saying one thing, there's a word for that.
01:07:56.000Like 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.
01:08:06.000Like if I'm trying to just convince you of something.
01:08:09.000But 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.
01:08:28.000It's possible for more than one thing to be true at the same time.
01:09:18.000It's always just like, how can we fuck this guy and get the narrative?
01:09:21.000But that's all, like, a simplification thing.
01:09:23.000And 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.
01:09:36.000I 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.
01:10:22.000I mean, except for like, you know, maybe like a scientific law.
01:10:27.000But 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.
01:10:38.000Where I think this is going, I mean, this is all technologically driven.
01:10:43.000The 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.
01:11:23.000Whether 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.
01:11:35.000Just the sheer, raw amount of information that is being distributed and the communication that's going back and forth between human beings is unprecedented.
01:11:46.000Like 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.
01:12:02.000You 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.
01:12:10.000But if you were really looking for the conceptual framework that would ground you and orient you, you'd probably wait until...
01:12:22.000The 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.
01:12:34.000And all your friends would read that too and then they would know.
01:13:03.000That'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.
01:13:13.000I think it's very hard now, but I think maybe it might be easier now if you're objective.
01:13:19.000I think back then it was just as hard.
01:13:22.000During the Vietnam War, have you ever seen William F. Buckley debate Noam Chomsky?
01:13:36.000It's an amazing conversation watching them go back and forth.
01:13:39.000And 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.
01:15:14.000Or, like, just some random dude on TikTok is talking about the way the world works?
01:15:18.000Oh, if you go to Fox News or if you go to...
01:15:22.000MSNBC 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.
01:15:47.000Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley, those are two rock-solid intellectuals.
01:15:57.000Oh yeah, Chomsky like invented new kinds of, new lines of thought in linguistics.
01:16:10.000I 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.
01:16:24.000But what I think is going to happen, and this is neither good nor bad, because I think it's inevitable.
01:16:30.000I 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.
01:16:42.000And I think most likely it's going to be human-neural interfaces.
01:16:59.000They'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.
01:17:13.000But I think, ultimately, it's going to remap the way people communicate with each other.
01:17:17.000And in Elon's words on this podcast, he said, you're going to be able to talk without using words.
01:17:50.000And it will be because it will be better than not having it in there.
01:17:53.000When 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,
01:18:10.000or socially, from using that, you're going to use it.
01:18:14.000Well, maybe there'll be like a whole tribe of people that are like...
01:18:19.000Primitives that just reject this shit and just continue to hunt and, like, not get the neural link.
01:18:26.000I 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.
01:18:36.000It'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.
01:18:51.000And this is like what caused the end of the Ice Age.
01:18:53.000There's actually like legitimate scientific inquiry into this called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
01:19:00.000Actual 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.
01:19:15.000And that's very common in space and very rare on Earth.
01:19:19.000And it also coincides with when Earth was passing through these comet storms.
01:19:25.000And 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...
01:19:53.000Advanced 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.
01:20:11.000What they believe is that at one point in time, whether, you know, if...
01:20:16.000Anatomically 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.
01:20:25.000Now they've taken that way back to almost a million years.
01:20:27.000So that gives so much more time for people to evolve and for technology to advance.
01:20:34.000And the concept is that there was an advanced human culture that existed thousands and thousands of years before we thought it did.
01:20:45.000So 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.
01:20:54.000And that these people had reached a very high level of sophistication and then massive natural disasters all over the world.
01:21:01.000Knocked people down to almost the Stone Age and then they rebuilt again.
01:21:05.000And that's what we're experiencing now.
01:21:07.000But one of his points is they talk about like these ancient hunter-gatherer tribes that existed for thousands and thousands of years.
01:21:15.000How could it be possible that they existed as well as these advanced cultures?
01:23:42.000I 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.
01:24:29.000Because 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 we know it basically murdered all of these other I think?
01:25:41.000We've certainly done a lot of killing.
01:25:43.000And 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.
01:25:51.000There's also theories about biological integration that we mated the Neanderthals out of existence.
01:25:58.000And there's some substantiation of that and the fact that a lot of people, particularly people of European descent, have Neanderthal genetics.
01:26:06.000So there was some sort of interbreeding with people.
01:26:09.000Yeah, I think both of those things could be true.
01:26:11.000I mean, to deny the idea that human beings committed genocide or were violent towards others is ridiculous.
01:26:40.000Oh, 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,
01:26:55.000but it's not a homo sapien like modern humans the way we are today.
01:27:00.000They think there was probably quite a few, like there was some parallel evolution going on.
01:27:05.000And, you know, this competition, just like there is in other primates, right?
01:27:09.000There's the bonobos and there's traditional chimpanzees.
01:29:12.000And they're a totally different kind of person.
01:29:14.000Don't you think our ethics should be farther along if we've been around for that many hundreds of thousands of years?
01:29:20.000I think that's the part of this theory, the ancient catastrophe theory, is that we had to reboot.
01:29:29.000And 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.
01:29:39.000The way to describe it is like this is an instantaneous ending of the Ice Age due to impacts all over the earth.
01:29:45.000And there's evidence of this in the form of...
01:29:49.000Nanodiamonds 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,
01:30:06.000which 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.
01:30:21.000But has there been the same evolution in our ethics?
01:30:26.000Well, 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.
01:30:40.000If 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.
01:31:01.000If 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.
01:31:10.000And I think it will continue to get less and less and less.
01:31:55.000Look, 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.
01:32:04.000Sure, you get a cold, you fucking die, probably.
01:32:06.000Yeah, 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.
01:32:19.000It's less common now and will be less common in the future.
01:32:22.000But 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.
01:32:37.000I think it's more satisfying to our actual...
01:32:43.000Our intellectual and physical bodies, the way we exist with Earth and nature.
01:32:48.000People find great peace in living in the country and fishing for their food.
01:33:08.000And we don't experience the extremes of temperature on our skin that we would normally have been going through for thousands of years.
01:33:15.000You'd have no idea right now if it's August or January or we're in this...
01:33:19.000Yeah, 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...
01:33:30.000Have 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,
01:33:50.000I 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.
01:34:00.000And they're the least connected to weather because every day is beautiful.
01:35:34.000But I'm just saying that I just think that...
01:35:38.000You know, we are a part of nature, and I think we're set up to experience like that.
01:35:44.000We'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.
01:35:52.000You know, there's a thing that happens with people.
01:35:55.000There's looting and crazy things that happens when chaos happens.
01:35:58.000But 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.
01:38:25.000I read about it last night when I was looking around for stuff that had been on your show.
01:38:29.000I used to cover psychedelic drugs for Rolling Stone, and so I used to write about them.
01:38:36.000I had not read that particular theory, but I used to think a lot about psychedelics, and I was part of a little bit...
01:38:49.000A 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.
01:39:19.000Your main protagonist in Echo 3, isn't she researching psychedelics to help soldiers with PTSD? Isn't that part of what she's doing?
01:39:27.000Yeah, she's researching psychedelics to help with addiction, which is, although PTSD is another illness that people are exploring with psychedelics.
01:39:41.000I mean, psychedelics started as a At least in this country, as a therapeutic.
01:40:19.000Yeah, when they were initially creating LSD, I think part of the research was about coming up with drugs that induce labor.
01:40:28.000And 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.
01:40:46.000And then the CIA got a hold of it and they said, well, what can we do with this?
01:40:49.000And they didn't really know because it was a fairly new compound in terms of modern human use.
01:40:55.000Although 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.
01:41:05.000But they started doing all kinds of wild stuff.
01:41:08.000I'm sure you've seen some of those experiments they did with soldiers.
01:41:12.000I mean, I'm much more interested in the idea that it has...
01:41:16.000I 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...
01:41:34.000I think that that's really interesting.
01:41:38.000And 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.
01:41:56.000You 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,
01:42:15.000the 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.
01:42:39.000But MDMA is less so because it doesn't ask as much of you.
01:42:46.000And MDMA, I just know this because I wrote about this guy Shulgin who I mentioned...
01:42:53.000What 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,
01:43:11.000you know, LSD was like kind of like popular in the 50s and then in the 60s, popular in like a very elite circle.
01:43:48.000I 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.
01:43:57.000And 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.
01:44:10.000The character in the TV show is all in on that type of research.
01:44:15.000And so at the beginning of the show, she's going down to Columbia to find the next MDMA, if you will.
01:44:23.000Because as you know, there's all these compounds in Amazon.
01:44:27.000That have not yet been really analyzed, and the idea is there's still things to be discovered there.
01:44:34.000That'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.
01:44:50.000It's very common and very commonly discussed.
01:44:53.000Use of psilocybin therapies for veterans with PTSD, MDMA therapy, ayahuasca therapy, Ibogaine for people with addiction problems.
01:45:04.000All 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.
01:45:16.000Guys like Michael Pollan, journalists.
01:45:19.000Who 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.
01:45:32.000When 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.
01:46:27.000There's legitimate applications for that.
01:46:29.000But the way I describe it is that psychedelics, all psychedelics, I think, are like a tool.
01:46:34.000You 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.
01:46:49.000And 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.
01:47:01.000You know, when you want to go full tinfoil hat, wacky conspiracy, or whether you want to look at it like from a reductionist perspective.
01:47:09.000At the end of the day, these things are so available.
01:47:29.000It is the most profound psychedelic experience by far that I've ever had ever.
01:47:34.000happened 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
01:48:20.000If 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.
01:49:51.000Because it does, I'm sure you would agree, it's not something to do casually.
01:49:59.000It'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.
01:50:07.000I wouldn't just be like, oh shit, I have four hours to kill.
01:50:11.000Let me go roll over here and grab some LSD and see what happens.
01:50:15.000So I think the fact that you have to...
01:50:19.000I'm not saying we should be throwing people in jail.
01:50:41.000Probably 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.
01:50:48.000But it's not for me about the question isn't about government control or not or a pencil pusher controlling my mind.
01:50:56.000It'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.
01:51:13.000I'd be hesitant to be the guy that's like, yeah, let's just throw it in every convenience store and see what happens.
01:51:17.000Well, I think it's a matter of education and personal responsibility, just like alcohol, just like many things that are available readily right now.
01:51:26.000And out of all the drugs that I would make readily available, I don't think alcohol would be the big one.
01:51:32.000I don't think I'd make it so convenient and easy to get if you had to pick one drug.
01:51:58.000And 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.
01:52:08.000But the thing is that people that have kept them from us are not people who have consumed them.
01:52:13.000They'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.
01:52:24.000It'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.
01:52:38.000I 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.
01:53:48.000I think it's personal responsibility and education.
01:53:50.000And I think Treatment centers and counseling and having it distributed by trained professionals that know what it is, know what the dosage is.
01:54:01.000That 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.
01:54:08.000This is pure pharmaceutical grade MDMA in this dose.
01:54:13.000Depending upon your body weight, this is what you should take.
01:54:17.000And 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.
01:54:28.000Which 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?
01:54:42.000See, I would think the latter is a bigger issue.
01:54:45.000I'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.
01:55:00.000And I think through psychedelics you have an understanding of the impact of things.
01:55:05.000And the way it affects your consciousness, including the kind of media that you consume.
01:55:11.000And I think maybe that would be better for everybody to just have a reset in your perspective of how you view things.
01:55:26.000My 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.
01:55:36.000And people do it through social media.
01:55:54.000And the idea is that the whole, you know, all the people that are in on it are doing it together.
01:55:58.000And 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.
01:56:06.000I mean, that's the concept of Brian Mirorescu's book where we're talking about ancient Greece.
01:56:11.000Brian 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.
01:56:24.000And they found physical evidence in the ceramic vessels that they used to hold the wine.
01:56:30.000They found evidence of ergot and other psychedelics.
01:56:40.000That 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.
01:56:53.000It's such an interesting subject to come from an actual – and he's hardcore, intellectual, straight-laced.
01:57:01.000He doesn't do drugs, never done anything, hasn't had experience before.
01:57:05.000He's just relaying this in terms of like human history and that it seems like that was the birth of democracy.
01:57:11.000That 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.
01:57:39.000Because he was obsessed with it for over a decade.
01:57:42.000And initially, his initial obsession with it was ridiculed.
01:57:46.000People were like, what the fuck are you doing?
01:57:47.000And then ultimately, upon physical evidence and proof of this, and then also the proof that this was...
01:57:54.000This 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.
01:58:10.000So they escaped from Greece and they went to other places to try to continue these rituals while they were being persecuted.
01:58:20.000This just makes me feel like we're in the most stoner conversation ever.
01:58:26.000In this case, he's a legitimate academic.
01:58:29.000By the way, that doesn't make it not true.
01:58:30.000It's just a pretty stoner conversation.
01:58:32.000Well, the real stoner conversation is the stoned ape theory.
01:58:36.000That 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.
01:59:05.000So the way he describes it is like he's an actual scientist.
01:59:09.000And so when you listen to him describe it, you're like, whoa.
01:59:11.000I know there's a video of that out there from him on the podcast.
01:59:15.000But 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.
01:59:32.000And as they did, human beings experimented with different food sources.
01:59:37.000And one of the things they did is they found where undulates would leave their manure, these mushrooms would grow out of them.
01:59:44.000And they would flip those manure patties over and find beetles and food.
01:59:48.000And the mushrooms that grew on them, they would experiment with them.
01:59:52.000This is an animation, but it says that he...
02:00:00.000In the late 1970s, Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis McKenna were the first that proposed the Stone debate hypothesis.
02:00:08.000It is known now that 22 primates, 23 including us, consume mushrooms.
02:00:29.000One thing that mushrooms and other psychedelics do reliably is they induce a synesthesia.
02:00:37.000Synesthesia is the perception of one sensory Music.
02:00:57.000You have these profound experiences and you have to put yourself in their place and imagine what they The
02:01:29.000fact 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.
02:01:52.000It was like a software to program this neurologically modern hardware to think, to have cognition, to have language, because language is essentially synesthesia.
02:02:21.000Those neural structures are not found in our ancestors.
02:02:25.000That'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.
02:02:43.000So, 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.
02:02:53.000And 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.
02:03:59.000At all, like, what made us grow a million years ago.
02:04:02.000Like, 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.
02:04:39.000Because it's changed us so much from the 1920s.
02:04:42.000If 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.
02:05:07.000And I'm so curious as to where it goes.
02:05:10.000And I'm so curious as to how we got here.
02:05:13.000And 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.
02:05:24.000And do you think you're interested in all of that because you feel like there's something essential to be learned from that history?
02:05:34.000That and because I smoke a lot of weed and it's a fun thing to think about when you're high.
02:06:34.000Like 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.
02:06:49.000And then at the same time, I don't know what the connection is, but it's notable.
02:06:54.000At the same time, like On your other life outside of this, like your involvement with UFC, which is like a very evolved,
02:07:10.000but still has a very atavistic aspects to it.
02:07:17.000I don't know what it is, and if I was to do that article, I would come to it with total...
02:07:24.000With no bias to try to figure it out, because I don't have a point of view about it.
02:07:30.000But 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.
02:07:43.000I don't think that's a total accident.
02:07:45.000Well, my fascination with martial arts is that martial arts is a vehicle for developing your human potential.
02:07:55.000And 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.
02:08:04.000And those people, especially champions, are extraordinary human beings.
02:08:11.000Because what they're doing is what I call high-level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
02:08:17.000And 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.
02:08:33.000Those people, the great ones, they're some of the most extraordinary people that you'll ever meet.
02:08:40.000So that's an evolutionary thing too, in a way.
02:09:19.000That's a rare one in X amount of million kind of people that can do what he does.
02:09:26.000Talk 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,
02:09:41.000this 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
02:10:12.000the 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.
02:10:27.000So he's created the ultimate emotional pressure cooker and Aldo Is overwhelmed by the moment.
02:10:36.000And in those extreme moments of conflict, people either rise to the occasion or they're overwhelmed by the moment.
02:10:43.000The kind of person who's like a Conor McGregor who can rise to the occasion is truly an extraordinary person.
02:10:50.000And it's best embodied by this one fight.
02:10:53.000So if you watch this one fight, it's quick.
02:11:53.000He's making the money thing, like he's shuffling off money.
02:11:57.000And 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.
02:12:10.000There's very, very, very few of them that have ever walked the face of the earth.
02:12:14.000that 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,
02:13:25.000Not only was it a bad fight move, but Conor anticipated it.
02:13:29.000So 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.
02:13:42.000It's like he knew he was going to do that.
02:17:28.000I 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.
02:20:47.000You have to play it for the people that have the appreciation, and you also have to...
02:20:54.000I 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.
02:21:55.000Because if it was just strictly speaking, hey, I just want to hit this really arty crowd, I think that's limiting.
02:22:02.000I'm not trying to just talk to the people that like Battle of Algiers, like some fucking random cinema that I like.
02:22:10.000Well, isn't that the benefit of having 10 hours to do it, too?
02:22:14.000I 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.
02:26:33.000So they're like, in your show, here the screen's on for 10 seconds.
02:26:37.000It's supposed to go off after whatever it is.
02:26:39.000Or 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?
02:26:50.000Or like the shade of blue that you have on that text message is not the correct shade of blue.
02:28:04.000I 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.
02:28:14.000So we didn't really have a lot of nudity.
02:29:58.000Like, 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.
02:30:13.000So you can watch it from a safe perspective and not feel like you're implicated in it.
02:32:03.000In this case, it's like what it would be like to be kidnapped.
02:32:07.000So then I like read books about that and talk to people who've been kidnapped and so forth.
02:32:13.000And 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.
02:32:23.000And 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.
02:32:36.000But some writers get inspiration just from their own personal lives, which I do too.
02:32:42.000Obviously we all like come to something from our own like personal experiences, but I very much depend on like the outside world.
02:32:49.000I'm not just like sitting in my head like being like, oh, well, how would it be real?
02:32:54.000I'm never like, oh, it'd be really cool if then this happened.
02:32:57.000I'm much more like, hey, how would this really happen?
02:32:59.000And 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.
02:33:08.000You know, like, You can call up a special forces guy and be like, how would you deal with this situation?
02:33:16.000You can call up 30 of them and have all these different conversations and then meld it down into something that seems...
02:33:24.000Like, that crystallizes the heart of it all.
02:33:27.000How 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...
02:34:13.000Some of that is up to the director, but a lot of it is governed by the screenwriter too.
02:34:17.000So you're really writing like a series of images, right?
02:34:22.000And then there's dialogue in addition to that.
02:34:25.000And the dialogue is how the characters speak.
02:34:27.000And 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.
02:34:36.000If 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.
02:34:52.000But if it's a movie, like the only way I can get access to your brain is either through your behavior, right?
02:35:01.000Because there's no like thought bubble over your head.
02:35:02.000So 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.
02:35:13.000Like 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.
02:35:25.000So 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.
02:35:34.000What 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?
02:36:02.000A lot of times you're like, oh my god, this is so much better than I thought it was.
02:36:07.000If it's a good actor, if it's a great actor like Jeremy is, you're like, wow, I must be really fucking good.
02:36:15.000You're like, nah, it's just like he's bringing so much to it.
02:36:19.000He's putting so much intensity into it.
02:36:24.000If you have an actor that's not as skilled, it can go the other way and you're like, God, this stuff sucks.
02:36:30.000So it all depends on the intelligence and talent of the actor usually.
02:36:34.000That's got to be tricky in the casting process to try to figure out who's who.
02:36:38.000Yeah, I mean that's kind of the big thing about directing is you try to cast it right.
02:36:44.000It's kind of the big decision and everything else follows it.
02:36:47.000But it's a hugely collaborative thing that's unique to...
02:36:52.000The performing arts where you don't have total control, like as a novelist or as a journalist or whatever, prose, you have total control.
02:36:59.000It's a collaboration and that's like, can be amazing.
02:38:35.000This was like in 2000. The thing happened in 2002. There was a series of events in the beginning of it.
02:38:41.000And a friend of mine who had been on...
02:38:46.000He 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.
02:38:54.000He 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.
02:39:08.000It didn't fit like what I was doing exactly.
02:39:10.000But 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.
02:39:24.000Basically, a guy got shot and he was presumed to be dead.
02:39:40.000All 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,
02:39:58.000and then leave because you had to for your own safety, and then later find out that maybe he was, maybe he wasn't.
02:41:47.000I 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.
02:41:57.000And then when I have enough of those, I start writing.
02:42:03.000So you just sort of like let it build in your mind until it's something you kind of have to get out?
02:42:08.000Yeah, and it's like a delicate moment.
02:42:10.000Like how do you know when you have too much?
02:42:13.000And 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.
02:42:21.000And you're like, ah, I'll do it like next month or in two months.
02:42:27.000There's just this moment in time where I have enough.
02:42:30.000If I learn one more thing, I'm going to get overwhelmed.
02:42:35.000And that's the moment when you have to say, okay, I'm going to put it all down.
02:42:38.000I'm going to now go into a place which is not...
02:42:41.000Because I can intellectualize about all this stuff a lot and talk about the different theoretical pieces of it.
02:42:48.000But where you just let that go and you follow your instincts and you're hoping that...
02:42:53.000Your sense of truth or my sense of truth is like what's guiding it.
02:42:57.000I don't mean truth like this shit really happened.
02:43:00.000I 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.
02:43:09.000And you just hope that you have like...
02:43:12.000For 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...
02:43:23.000You know, succumb to anxiety about, like, getting it done quickly or whatever it is.
02:43:29.000And 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.
02:43:39.000And, 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.
02:44:26.000And 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.
02:44:36.000And 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.
02:44:46.000Where 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.
02:45:25.000But I think that that process before you start typing is also writing.
02:45:29.000That process of thinking about it, even though you're not physically putting words in order, it's part of the whole imaginative enterprise.
02:45:37.000And it's an important part for me to sift out the...
02:45:46.000I hesitate to keep using this word truth, but to sift out whatever might be authentic from all the other influences.
02:45:51.000And 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.
02:46:00.000I mean, there's one or two instances where I rip somebody off in this show.
02:46:05.000But by and large, if it felt like I was ripping somebody off, I won't allow myself to do it.
02:47:05.000I 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.
02:47:26.000And I remember sitting there and being like, this is a pretty hard scene to write because I got to do it.
02:47:33.000The conversation has to happen pretty quickly.
02:47:36.000Just because of the needs of the plot.
02:47:38.000Like I don't have a lot of time for this.
02:49:32.000And 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.
02:49:46.000Well, you're constantly cultivating your gardens of thought and creativity, too, right?