Speaker 1: Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing my day, Joe Rogan Podcast, my night, all day.

Speaker 2: Wow, we're rolling. What's cracking?

Speaker 3: Oh man, my back just now.

Speaker 2: It's fantastic. What is going on with your back? You've had back issues in the past, right? We talked about that the last time you came on.

Speaker 3: Well, I was born scoliotic, you know? I just bought my own panelong so I could click the shit. Here, take all the vices away from me. I can't believe you remember.

Speaker 4: You remember clicking on the pen? That's hilarious.

Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'm a fidget, you know? Let me take everything off. It's not good. Born slightly scoliotic. And then of course I banged myself up over the years, you know?

Speaker 2: Of course. Do they do anything other than surgery for people with scoliosis? They do, because I don't want to do surgery.

Speaker 3: Once you start opening stuff up and fooling with it, there's no going back.

Speaker 2: Especially the back. Yeah. Back's a rough, I've never met anybody that had like fusions or anything where it turned out good.

Speaker 3: No, and like Hippocrates, you know, the father of medicine. He said, in any ailment, look first to the spine. And it was like, he's kind of right. It emanates from the core.

Speaker 2: Well, if your back is fucked up, everything's fucked up. Yeah. No matter how strong your arms and legs are, if your back is fucked up, you're in trouble. Yeah, that's true. Your brain, everything. Everything goes to hell. Well, you're in pain all the time. Yeah. People with back problems, like, they can't think straight, because you're always like... You know, it's always... There's a gift to not thinking straight. Tell me. Tell me more. I want to know.

Speaker 3: Well, it actually takes you down some pretty weird paths, you know. If you're happy all the time, I don't know. You don't have to strive to find thoughts to make yourself happy. Right. So it's like, it's a good predisposition, I think.

Speaker 2: I agree to that. Yeah, I think being happy all the time is, it's kind of an unlikely scenario.

Speaker 3: No, nobody is.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: But we all want it. You notice we all yearn for it. That's the only thing we all want, right? Right. Just happiness.

Speaker 2: A little peace. Well, it's also we're shown it, like, in, you know, television, movies. Sure. We're shown happiness as this goal. Like, seek happiness. Sure. Should be happy all the time. Happy. Should never be upset. Yeah, well... It's not realistic.

Speaker 3: It's completely unrealistic. However, it's nice to have those little journeys through art where you can actually explore those things. You can explore your ids. You can explore happiness. And so you can experience the opposite. I look at situations around me and I generally feel pretty grateful from what some people go through. I'm grateful. And everybody's got their crap, you know. Like, this morning, for example, I would be surprised if my home is still there.

Speaker 2: Yeah, we were just talking about that. The Palisades is on fire. Yeah. My friend Tom, Tom Segura, his house is gone. Yeah.

Speaker 3: It's where he used to live. He sold it, luckily. Yeah, I have a son. He's in a sort of volunteer fire brigade, Milo. I call him the mayor of Malibu. And he's running around. I asked him, how's things looking there, Milo? He says, not good, Pops. He says, your neighborhood. And he sent me a video of my neighborhood. And it's in flames. It looks like an inferno.

Speaker 2: Do you think this will get you out of California, finally? Yeah, maybe. Where are you going to go?

Speaker 3: Oh, I don't know. I got a place in Costa Rica. I love it there. Ooh, Costa Rica's nice. Yeah, I bought there many years ago. Yeah? It's in a real nice spot. It's not too touristy. You know, dirt roads. Oh, nice. Off the beaten. Does it feel safe out there? Pretty safe. I think, look, no place is safe. I mean, you've got the Dariang down there. What's that? It's kind of in the, what's the next country down? Panama. And there's this no man's land where the Colombians come through. And it's like, you know, all kinds of dirty dealings in the jungle with, you know, who knows? You know, drugs and mules. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it can be dangerous. And I've heard of danger happening there. You know, you hear about somebody getting chopped up by a machete. And Costa Rica, it's actually a cool place because it never had a culture of death. Like a lot of the Central American countries did. They have a culture of death, you know. Even Mexico, I mean, they used to, you know, tear people's hearts out and pyramids. Aztecs. All that sort of stuff. Aztecs were like the Romans. The Mayans were like the Greeks. But they all sort of dabbled in some stuff. Costa Rica always had a policy where they, it was like the Switzerland of Central America. They emphasized education and health. And everybody's literate. And it's kind of interesting in that way. But it deals with its own little troubles.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Like every country, you know.

Speaker 2: It's better anywhere down in that part of the world. It's just like there's so much sketchy shit going on all around you.

Speaker 3: Yeah, there can be. Yeah. Yeah, one has to be forewarned, forearmed, all that. So I have a nice place down there.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I have some friends that have a place in Mexico. And I'm always like, don't you ever worry.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I worked in Mexico a couple of times. I was down there and it was in Veracruz. And apparently, you know, people were rolling heads into bars and stuff like that, you know, rival gangs and stuff. And they said, I'd go for a walk, you know. And they'd say, you're crazy going for a walk. You'll get kidnapped. I said, I'm not going to get kidnapped. I'm the guy that pays. You're going to get kidnapped. And I'm not going to pay your ransom. So it's like I never felt insecure in that way.

Speaker 5: And, you know, if something's going to happen, it's going to happen.

Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, if your number's up. I know. I used to watch guys who do what I do for a living and they'd have a phalanx of bodyguards around them, you know, and like for security and stuff. And I used to have that stuff for a little while. But it doesn't make any difference. You're going to be OK. Or not. Or not. Right. Until you're not. Until you're not. And everybody's going to be OK until they're not. Yeah. I had a situation one night and I acted crazy.

Speaker 2: Yeah?

Speaker 3: Yeah. What happened? If you act crazy, everybody leaves you alone. Especially if you are a little crazy. You know? You're in a stress mode. So you actually get angry. If I feel like I'm threatened, I get angry, which is what happens. And then you get really in people's faces and they think, this guy's crazy. But all the old cultures thought that. When there were people traveling across the Great Plains to go west, you know, if you acted nuts, they'd leave you alone because they didn't want your evil spirits.

Speaker 2: Oh. So what happened with you? Oh, nothing.

Speaker 3: They left me alone. But where was this? Oh, man. I was in a bad neighborhood. It was when I first got into L.A. And I was to go to dinner with Costa Gavras. He was a Greek director. I went the wrong way. And it was before they had, you know, phones with like, you know, all that stuff. The Thomas Guide. It was the Thomas Guide. Anyway, I wasn't guided well by Thomas. I ended up in the wrong place. And then my muffler fell off. And I was driving a Mercedes, you know, pretty nice sporty car, you know. And I thought, oh, and I had the wife in the car. I pulled into a side street. The sun was going down. And as I got out of the car, I thought, oh, I got to fix this muffler. I can't just drag it. People started coming from houses. And they came up to me. And I saw them coming in the rearview mirror. And I jumped out of the car and got in their face. And I said, what the fuck do you want? Because I thought I felt threatened. And the guy said, man, I'm just looking for some money. You got any money? So I was being mugged. And it was like I thought I'll think about it when I'm fucking finished, you know. I opened the trunk. And this is the weird part, Joe. I will never quite understand this. I opened the trunk to see what I could find to help me put the muffler back on. And sitting there, the only two things in the back of the trunk was a pair of wire cutters and a coat hanger. It's exactly what I needed. And I don't know why it was there. That's weird, isn't it? That's very weird.

Speaker 2: So you used the coat hanger to wire up your muffler? Yep.

Speaker 3: I cut a piece of wire, wired the muffler up. The whole time, more guys are coming. Jesus Christ. And they're standing behind me. And I'm feeling like, oh. And anyway, I get up. I finish the muffler, slam. And I'm acting mad and crazy the whole time. And I think, this guy's nuts. And I get back to the car. And my wife gives me a handful of cash. And I thought, what's this? She says, it's just wives and ones. Give it to them. So I threw it and drove off. But it was looking hairy for a minute. And you never know. What year was this? Oh, my god. Back in the 90s.

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Speaker 3: Zero. Zip. Zip. And in 2019, I think Newsom said, you know, I'm going to take care of the forest and maintain the forest and do all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: He didn't do anything. Didn't do anything. And then on top of that, they cut the water off. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's all funny. I think all our tax dollars probably went for Gavin's hair gel. I don't know. But it's like, you know, it's sad. It's like the place is just on fire.

Speaker 2: Well, the whole state is just so poorly managed. It's so frustrating and confusing. And then he gets on TV and pretends like everything's great. And California is the best. We have the best state. We have the most amazing economy. And, like, you're out of your fucking mind, dude. You've ruined the state.

Speaker 3: Personally ruined it. Well, it's the same team that was up in San Francisco. They came down to L.A. and they're doing what they did in San Francisco. Yeah. San Francisco is kind of like apocalyptic now, you know. Yeah. I went there and it's just like people, you know, homeless. You know, it's just a mess. It's just unbelievable that society can crumble that quickly. It really is unbelievable. It doesn't take long.

Speaker 2: No.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I read a book once by Jared Diamond called Collapse. You ever read that book?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: Crazy, right? All the things you need for a civilization to cave in and collapse. And a lot of the things are present. All those earmarks, the precursors of a collapse, they're present in our time. So it's an interesting observation. Yeah. And we're no smarter than our grandparents, I don't think.

Speaker 2: Well, that brings me to one of my favorite movies of yours is Apocalypto.

Speaker 6: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2: You know, when the Mayans were running things, like, who could have ever thought when they had such an incredibly sophisticated society, unbelievable construction, like the stuff that they had built that one day you would just walk through there and there's nothing. Nothing. Nothing and nobody.

Speaker 3: In fact, there's something because it's interesting. Somebody was flying by what they thought was a volcano in the 30s, some buzz boy. And he thought, hey, somebody built that. Wait a minute, there's four by eight foot bricks. That's man-made. And it is literally the biggest pyramid in the world. It's bigger than the ones in Egypt. And it's in Guatemala. Yeah, we talked about that the other day. Yeah, it's a recent discovery, right? Well, not that recent. I was maybe 20 years ago I visited. I went down there with the archaeologist, the guy named Richard Hansen, who's from Idaho or someplace. And he's down there with his family. He's been working tirelessly for like 30 years trying to extract this pre-classic city from the jungle. And there's not a bunch of tourists. All the pyramids in Tikal would fit inside the one big pyramid in El Mirador.

Speaker 5: Really? Yeah.

Speaker 3: It's a monster. And so that tells you that the pre-classic civilization was bigger and grander and more sophisticated than the civilizations that came after it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Pretty interesting. Well, it is unbelievable how when the accounts of people that visited Mexico and visited the Aztecs, like what the markets looked like and how insane it was and how gorgeous it was.

Speaker 3: And then just disease. Yeah, disease. I don't know if it was disease or what. I think the people were pretty dissatisfied. It would have been hard for Cortes with his limited numbers to actually take over a civilization like that unless they kind of happened upon a civilization that was pretty dissatisfied with the way things were going. So I think they had people to help them sort of rebel.

Speaker 2: When you're making a movie like Apocalypto, that's a crazy undertaking. You're making an entire movie where there's no English in it at all, and it's a blockbuster.

Speaker 3: Yeah, it's cool.

Speaker 2: It was fun. That's one of the best movies, man. It's a fucking great movie.

Speaker 3: Well, because I think it's scary because nobody's speaking your language. And you're looking at indigenous peoples, and because they're not speaking the language, you totally kind of buy it. And you can buy the horror and the primal nature of the story you want to tell. And really it's just a series of fears one after the other, being chased by scary guys or eaten by wild animals or hit by blowguns. It's all like a series of these things. But I think basically what I was doing was trying to talk about our time now and the civilization that we live in and how close are we to collapse and what are the things that lead to collapse. It's environmental stuff. It's human sacrifice.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: I mean, we do that.

Speaker 2: Kind of. We do. Yeah. Yeah, we do. We just dress it up. When you find out medications are killing people and they keep prescribing them and they do it for money, that's kind of sacrifice. When you find out that wars are irresponsible. They're not just wars. Not just. No.

Speaker 3: They're for money. We send our young people over there to die, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not. I mean, I love the warrior. I do. I love the warrior, but I hate the war. Yeah.

Speaker 2: We hate an unjust war.

Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely. Anyway, it's a mess. But the human sacrifice aspect is alive and well in our society, I think.

Speaker 2: It really is. It's just dressed up in a different way.

Speaker 3: Yeah, rhetoric around it. But they've always been able to justify it. Like in Apocalypto, it was like, yeah, so the crops will be better. Hey, we'll just, you know. Yeah, kill a few people. Yeah, and then I had all these people come out of the woodwork. We're archaeologists and scientists, and that never happened. So there's this revisionism about it, too, that it didn't happen. But there are accounts from the time where, yes, people did witness these things. And, of course, I had a bunch of battery of archaeologists and scientists and professors on my own that say, yeah, well, this stuff did happen, and here's the depictions of it in paintings and images. So it did happen.

Speaker 2: When you set out to make a movie like that, first of all, what brings you to that? Did you get the script first? Was it an idea that you had in your head?

Speaker 3: It just came from in here, and I was working on something, and a buddy of mine said, so what do you want to do next?

Speaker 5: I said, ah, man, I want to direct something.

Speaker 3: I always want to direct a chase film. He said, what kind of chase? I said, a foot chase. He said, what? I said, yeah, people chasing you. I mean, there's something kind of primal and scary about a foot chase. And I think in order to have a foot chase, you can't have a society where there's any kind of cars or anything like that. Otherwise, you have a car chase. But I want to film a foot chase like it's a car chase. And he said, oh. I said, what are you thinking? I said, well, I'm thinking if you go back before Columbus discovered America. And it's like people assume that Columbus discovered America, and then life began. I said, I want to know what was happening right before he got there, before he got there. And I said, so I had this idea that you see all this stuff going on, and there's no time period on it, and then all of a sudden you date it by the arrival of Europeans. And I thought, it's kind of like the Rod Serling, you know, Planet of the Apes. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a cool ending. And he said, oh, wow. And he said, where do you think Columbus landed? I said, well, let's look. And I looked up, and the first peoples he encountered were Mayan trading canoes off the coast of Honduras. And I thought, cool. What was happening in Honduras? And you look at these towns and pyramids and temples and stuff at that time. And then the story was born from there. And, of course, then we read the book by Jared Diamond, Collapse. I read the Mayan Bible, the Popol Vuh, and tried to delve into what they believed and what their civilization was like. And they had concepts, as we do, of heaven and hell, of punishment or reward. It was a little different, quite a bit different, actually. In fact, when I went down to the archaeological sites at El Mirador, they dug something up. And it was like, well, what is it?

Speaker 5: And I said, we don't know.

Speaker 3: There was this carved image in the stone of this Mayan warrior drinking. And he had an ear spool. And it was like, hmm. So they dug further and further, and it went like 26 meters down. And it was the entire story of the Popol Vuh, of the twins going into hell and getting their father's head and swimming back. And it's this crazy story. And it kind of dated that book because I think it was almost 3,000 years old, this mural, this carving. So it tells you the story is pretty old. And they thought initially it was probably back in the 1300s, but this confirmed that it was at least 2,600 years old, something like that. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's pretty cool. To be there when they're digging that stuff up is mind-blowing.

Speaker 2: Well, they're missing so much of the Mayan history. It's very interesting. You want some coffee? I want some water. That's water in there. Water. They're missing so much of the Mayan history because everybody's gone. Do you ever see the very bizarre carving where it looks like there's a guy who's sitting in a cockpit of a spaceship looking through some sort of an eye thing?

Speaker 3: Yeah, they've got some weird stuff. Weird? Yeah. Where there's fire underneath the chair? What is that? They've got dudes that look like Europeans. They have these guys with red beards and helmets and stuff. Yeah. It's like these Phoenician guys who probably traveled over there early on. Yeah. Probably maybe in the 6th century or something like that. It wasn't that long a boat ride, so they probably went over there and made contact and they thought they were gods or something, and then they went away again, and they said, well, wait for them to come back. And, of course, they did come back, but it didn't work out the same.

Speaker 2: No. No. No. Well, there's so many accounts of people visiting, especially when you get into the Amazon. Sure. Oh, I don't know about the Amazon. Oh, my God. Tell me about that. Well, first of all, the Amazon used to be filled with people, and most of the Amazon is man-made. The jungle in the Amazon is agriculture.

Speaker 3: I didn't know that.

Speaker 2: Yeah, wow. Yeah. Okay. The jungle in the Amazon, they didn't even know this until fairly recently, and they now know from flying over. They use LIDAR, which is this light emitting radar. Yes, I know that. So when they use this laser radar shit, when they fly over it, they're finding all these grids and pathways and cities in the jungle. So the jungle had consumed all these cities. I think there was millions and millions of people living in the Amazon. Yeah. And that Europeans came over, diseases, everybody dies, jungle consumes the city. People come back 200 years later looking for it, like the lost city of Z, like that story. Right. They go back to look, and there's nothing left.

Speaker 3: Yeah, guns, germs, and steel.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Great. Yeah. Wow. That's fascinating.

Speaker 2: I'll have to look into that. And we're going through all those things right now, guns, germs, and steel.

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Germs. Yeah. Oh, God, the germs. I'm just on the tail end of some hideous flu that was going. I don't know if you got it.

Speaker 2: Did you get the H5N1 or whatever the fuck it is?

Speaker 3: No. I don't know what the hell. Yeah, I've had that. That was the swine thing. I had swine flu one time. Did you have that in 2009?

Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. It was around then. Yeah. Yeah, it was an epidemic, a pandemic, whatever you want to call it. But it didn't have the same sort of press releases that COVID did. Sure.

Speaker 3: I got the swine flu. I acted more like a pig. It was terrible. Terrible. Wallowing in my own mud. So I like Flight Risk. It's a fun movie. Oh, it's a hoot. It's a hoot. I mean, I think the first thing you got to do with any film, and I think it's incumbent upon all directors, artists to entertain first in some fashion. Even if it's a heavy story, you have to find some aspect of it that entertains. And I think this, for entertainment's sake, is just fun. And it's quick. I'm not subjecting you to four hours of watching autism dry. Right. It's like, you know, it's 85, 90 minutes and you're out. Yeah, it's a good time. Yeah. And Mark is insane. Yeah, he's great in it. He plays a good psycho. Oh, he's a psychopath. Mark's got a good dark side. There's some dark stuff there that he was able to draw from. And every now and then he'd let it out. I can't even repeat some of the stuff he'd say. In fact, we had to cut most of it out. It was, like, really sick. But we hint at it.

Speaker 2: Anyway. When you make a movie now, I mean, you've had such a career. When you make a movie now, like what motivates you at this point in your life? How do you decide, let's hit the green light on this one?

Speaker 3: Yeah, there are things that speak to me. And they speak for a long time. It's a – I remember when I was a kid in high school, I was studying English. And they, well, where did the English language come from? And they talked about, wow, it came from this old guttural German, old Norse that the Vikings brought across. And I was thinking, well, that's cool, the Vikings, you know. And then immediately I start thinking, man, somebody should make – I want to make a film about Vikings and they only speak in old Norse. Because if they say, you know, if they speak English all of a sudden,

Speaker 5: you're not buying it. But if they speak in some guttural language,

Speaker 3: you're sort of scared by them. And it's like, that's scary to me. And then I said to myself, I'm 17 years old. Why am I thinking about making films about Vikings? I don't know anything about making films and not much about Vikings. So why the hell am I even thinking about that? But that was something that was early on was like a drive, I guess, to sort of depict things like that. So I did films in other languages, in Mayan and in Aramaic and in Latin. And there's a power to that. I noticed when I was young I used to go and watch a lot of foreign films. And I watched French movies, right, or German or whatever they were, Spanish. I'd watch them and I'd think, wow, the acting is great in those. And it seemed better because of the subtitles, because they're more believable somehow.

Speaker 2: I don't know. Right, because you're not hearing insincerity in their voice because you don't even understand what they're saying. You just feel the emotions in the words.

Speaker 3: And also it has to take your attention because you have to do another function. You have to read, which is another thing that sort of maybe blinds you to the flaws in the filmmaking perhaps. So, you know, hey, it's a great trick. It's obfuscation.

Speaker 2: There's a thing about reading it while you're watching that's like an added element of concentration. You know, like subtitled movies, you feel like you're a smarter person watching a movie where you're reading it as well.

Speaker 3: Yeah, and there's something about the written word that's a pretty interesting thing to throw into the mix. I know when I first started it was kind of confusing, but then I got really good at it. And I think, especially with something like The Passion that I did, the written word was very important because it was, you know, you got all those books, the Bible, you know, you've got the different gospels and stuff that people are quite familiar with. Half the time they didn't even need to read the subtitles. They could look at it and know what was going on.

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Speaker 1: The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. In New York, call 877-8-HOPE-N-Y or text HOPENY467369. In Connecticut, help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. Please play responsibly. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Resort in Kansas, 21 and over, age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction, void in Ontario. Bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.co.au. That was a crazy movie because it was a great movie,

Speaker 2: but it seemed like there was resistance to that movie. Oh, yeah. No, there was. Which I thought was very strange. There was like Hollywood resistance to that movie. Like people didn't like that you were making it, it seemed like.

Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a lot of opposition to it. I don't know. I think if you ever hit on that subject matter, you're going to get people going because... Of course. It's big subject matter, and it's like, you know. And my contention is, you know, when I was making it, it was like you're making this film, and the idea was that we're all responsible for this, that his sacrifice was for all mankind and that for all our ills and all the things in our fallen nature. It was a redemption. So, you know, and I believe that, you know. I actually am, you know, I was born into a Catholic family. I'm very Christian in my beliefs, you know. So I do actually believe this stuff to the full. So depicting that was an honor, but it was also, yeah, you got the daylights beat out of you for it.

Speaker 2: Yeah, because there's resistance, first of all, from secular Hollywood, where for whatever reason, Christianity is the one religion that you're allowed to disparage. Yeah. Christianity is the one religion where people, all these progressive, open-minded, leftist people, they'll embrace all these different religions until it comes to Christianity. And for whatever reason, that represents like white male, you know, whatever it represents, colonialism, you know, whatever it represents that's negative. Yeah, sure. It's gotten a bad rap.

Speaker 3: And people do feel free to beat up on it. Even I do when I see it's like, you know, when it's not fair, when I think it's off. Right. Like, you know, when they appoint some cardinal in some diocese and he's been covering up for like people who are child molesters, you know, like Theodore McCarrick or Cardinal Wuerl or those kind of guys. Or the Pope. Yes, absolutely. Benedict. Not Benedict. Well, he was covering up, but so is the guy now. Is he really? Well, yeah. It's not great.

Speaker 2: I thought he was like the more progressive Pope.

Speaker 3: Oh, he's very progressive, yes.

Speaker 2: But he's covering up for stuff as well. Well, they all are. I mean, it's a dark institution in a lot of ways because it's history, you know.

Speaker 3: Well, you know, the institution, it was instituted by Christ, you know, but that doesn't mean that it can't be flawed. And there's a school of thought that says it isn't what it purports to be anymore. It's moved away from what it was intended to be and what it is. Almost there's a guy called Bishop V, you know, who says it's a counterfeit parallel church. And it's running an entirely different religion. I actually don't adhere to a post-conciliar church. Can you define what that means? Okay. There was an event that happened in the 60s. First, there was an event in the Vatican where they elected John XXIII Pope, right, in 1958. I was two years old, right. He was elected, and it was a very funny thing that happened in the conclave. You know, usually there's white and black smoke that goes out of the chimneys to tell you, we have a pope, you know, habemus papam, you know. And the white smoke came out. And everybody cheered, and they went crazy. And then about a half an hour later, black smoke came out. That never in history has that happened, that the white smoke came out, and then the black smoke came out.

Speaker 2: White smoke means we found a new pope. Black smoke means no pope.

Speaker 3: That's right. They'd have votes, or there'd be one reason or another they'd have a round in the conclave, and black smoke would come out many times, many times maybe. Maybe it would take two weeks. But never was it known that white smoke came out, then black smoke came out.

Speaker 2: So what was the scenario?

Speaker 3: That somebody was elected, and that maybe something else happened, and he was pushed aside and someone else was put in. So it was power struggle, some kind of power struggle. And, of course, the man who came out was a man called Angelo Roncalli, and he was John XXIII. Now it's interesting to note that never had a pope taken the name of another pope ever before in history. But this man took the name of a known anti-pope from the 15th century that Cosimo de' Medici put in there as his own man. I'll get you in the chair, and then everything will be rosy. Everything will go good for business. Whatever he was putting him in there for, some corrupt reason. And there have been corrupt men in that place before. I mean, there's Alexander VI and Julius II and Sixtus IV. I mean, some of these guys are not saints. So he took the name of a known anti-pope from the 5th century who actually said, yes, I'm an anti-pope. Sorry, I'm not the right guy, because there was more than one. And he confessed to being, and he wanted to square things with the almighty, I guess. So he confessed to being an anti-pope. And so he took the same name as that guy, John XXIII. So it's interesting, don't you think?

Speaker 2: I mean, why would he do that? Well, whenever you have that kind of power, like I'm sure you've been to the Vatican, right? Yeah. It's stunning. Yes, it's huge. It's so great. Walking around, you see just the massive, just the dollar value in the art that they possess. Yeah. It's fucking insane.

Speaker 3: It's crazy, yeah. And, you know, it's a very small country.

Speaker 2: It's a country, I guess. Yeah, it's a country inside of a small city. Yeah. Because Rome's not the biggest city. No. And then it's got a country inside the city? Yeah. With walls around it? Sure. And you can't extradite people? Pretty weird. How convenient.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Even Ratzinger, he didn't drive from the Vatican to the other place. He flew. Ooh. And it was only a little while, because who knows why? I don't know.

Speaker 2: Well, he was wanted. Yes. Yeah. I mean, he had done, one of the things that he had done was he had moved a priest that had molested a hundred kids, and he moved him to some new place where he molested deaf kids. Yeah, yeah. Boy. Yeah. Yeah, I know. That's the dirtiest, most evil practice that the Catholic Church has been accused of. I think so.

Speaker 3: And many institutions as well. But that is a very bad one. And I think it's all part and parcel of the same corruption they crept in. And when you asked, what's the difference between pre-Vatican II? So Vatican II happened. And of course, they took the church, and they reformed it, and they changed things in it. And it didn't necessarily agree with everything that went before it. And up to that point, yeah, you could find it agreed with itself. But all of a sudden, you got something else, to the point where now, I mean, we got a pope that brought a South American idol into the church to worship. Really? He did. The Pachamama. He brought the South American, and he got that. I don't know what that is. It's kind of like a South American god, Pachamama. Why would he do that? Good question. But he did. Did he have an explanation for why he did it? Yeah, it's kind of a weasel-worded thing of like, oh, all religions are just as good as one another. But if that's his contention. You shouldn't be the pope. No. How can you be the pope if you say all religions are just as good? Yeah, we all worship. So, yeah, that's the Pachamama. There you go.

Speaker 2: So he brought that in.

Speaker 3: Yeah, into the Vatican. Then the hierarchy even worshiped it. They had a ceremony around it outside. What? Well, that constitutes apostasy. Yeah. That's an apostasy move, all right? Worshiping false gods. Yeah. That's number one on the Mosaic hit list. Yeah. Moses goes up on the mountain. He comes back down. People are worshiping him on a golden calf. Yeah. It's that. Yeah. So you can't do that. And for me, that's a departure from what we—you know, that's called apostasy. Right. That's a falling away from it. And the very nature of apostasy means that you have to be part of it to fall away from it.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3: So it's an inside job.

Speaker 2: Oh. So what—do you think there's a motive behind these things?

Speaker 3: I don't think—well, probably. What do you think it is?

Speaker 5: I don't know.

Speaker 3: But it isn't good. I think—look, I think we're looking at a world where—and this is the—in the next film I'm going to do, I'm going to try and tackle this question, that there are big realms, spiritual realms. There's good, there's evil, and they are slugging it out for the souls of mankind. And my question is, why are we even important? Little old flawed humanity, why are we important in that process where the big realms are slugging it out over us? And I think there's bigger things at play here. And institutions that purport to touch on the divine are necessarily going to be affected by that slugfest that's going on between good and evil.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 3: And—

Speaker 2: And sometimes good gives up ground.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And maybe not on purpose. Yeah. Maybe there's some deception involved or self-deception. Right. Co-opted. When I wake up, I actually pray that I don't deceive myself, you know, because it's like, you know, your mind is a very funny place. I mean, there's—I've always said, you know, it's your second thought and your first action that you're responsible for. Your first thought, throw it away, you know.

Speaker 2: Right. But upon consideration, the second thought is what you're responsible for. Yeah. That's the difference between first degree and second degree murder. There you go. Right? Right? There you go. First degree, you're like, I'm plotting this out. And we take that into consideration when we sentence people. Sure. Like, if you're a person who just—all of a sudden you're in a fight with a guy, you didn't expect it, and you stab him and kill him, second degree murder. Yeah. But if you're like, I'm going to kill this motherfucker. I'm going to find out where he is, and I'm going to go get him, first degree. Sure.

Speaker 3: I planned a lot of murders in my life, you know.

Speaker 2: Yeah, in your head.

Speaker 3: Yeah, we all have. Yeah, in your head, you plan the murder, and you think, well, that's not a very good idea, but I think I could get away with it.

Speaker 5: Right.

Speaker 2: There's the second thought. Yeah. That is interesting that we take that into consideration. Yeah. That we do. Like, if you've had time to think about it, you're a different kind of person. The person acts in the act. Sure. You're in your animal brain. Act of passion.

Speaker 3: Yes. And I found this out. I actually spent a long time in my animal brain, which is a very horrible place to be. And—

Speaker 2: When you say that, what do you mean by you spent a long time in your animal brain? You're in flight or fight.

Speaker 3: Right. All the time. You don't even sleep. It's, like, really not a good place to be. And if anybody looks at you the wrong way, you want to bite them. Yeah. And sometimes you say and do things that are socially unacceptable. And, you know, I went and got a brain scan by this guy called Daniel Ahmed, who's this brain guy. He's against all psych meds and stuff, but he thinks, like, let me have a look at your brain. And he put a radioactive tracer in me. Whoa. And to photograph my brain. He works with a lot of— MRI, right? Yeah. He works with a lot of football players and guys who have brain injuries. Man, it's thirsty in here. But—so he looked at my brain, and he was, like—and he opens the file, and I'm in there with the guy. And he looks up, and he goes, are you okay? And he goes—no, first he went like this. And I said, what? And he went, are you okay? Like that. And I said, yeah, I think so. And he came over, and he sat next to me, but very slowly and cautiously. And he says, no, you're not. And I said, what do you mean? He says, you've got the worst case of PTSD I have ever seen. And I said, you mean, like, even worse than guys in war and shit like that? And he goes, yeah. And he says, you're not okay. Jesus Christ. And I was like—and I started to well up, you know, like, no, no, I'm not. Oh, boy. And it was—he had a very miraculous and great remedy for it, which was to eat a bunch of fish oil, vitamin B complex, and get into a hyperbaric chamber for 40 sessions. But make sure you do at least two or three a week. Oh. It fixed my head. Really? Yeah, it got me out of that wacky place, you know?

Speaker 2: So it was something to do with nutrition and oxygen and—

Speaker 3: Yeah. And your brain is neuroplasticity. He explained neuroplasticity to me and how, okay, you could get brain damage and, like, holes in your head and, you know, concussion. I used to play rugby. Oh. I've been knocked out on the field a couple of times, you know.

Speaker 2: That explains a lot.

Speaker 3: You know? Yeah. And so it actually—you can actually heal the holes in your head. It looked like Swiss cheese in there. It was, like, horrible. A lot of these football players get like that, too. The poor guys, I mean, they get depressed and they— Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2: You know? Oh, yeah. Hormonal imbalance, pituitary glands fucked up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, not producing testosterone or human growth hormone correctly. That's correct. Yeah, depression, low energy.

Speaker 3: Yep. Irritability. Irritability, you want to kill somebody. Mm-hmm. Terrible thing, you know? Yeah. And it's just not socially acceptable. Plus, I don't want to go to prison. Yeah. Well, the rugby, I bet that's a giant factor. Yeah. I played from, like, 13 to probably my late teens. And you get knocked around a little bit.

Speaker 2: A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, there's no if, ands, or buts about that. No helmet, no—you know? A lot of people don't realize, like, even shots to the chest cause brain damage. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's what people are realizing now. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 3: I mean, you know, and like I'm addicted to the UFC, right? I love it. But I know that these guys are— I feel kind of sorry for them. I do as well, yeah. And one of the guys, I knew one of the guys fairly well. And usually I'm pretty immune to, like— but, like, he was in there and he was fighting against Volonovsky. It was Brian Ortega. And he was getting his ass handed to him in one fight. He almost got him a couple of times, but like—

Speaker 2: Yeah, he almost submitted him twice.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I know. But because I knew Brian, it was like my son was in there. Right. And I almost started crying. Yeah. And it got to me. I was like, I should probably feel like this about all these guys, but I don't know them as well.

Speaker 2: It becomes a problem for me when I'm friends with a guy. Yeah. And then also I see when they're on the tail end of their career and they can't take shots anymore. And then when you talk to them, you recognize the speech patterns are slurring. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I met Muhammad Ali when he was in a chair, you know. Oof. And I don't know if I could even tell this story. What he said was so funny. But he was still in there and he was still a little devil. And he was like—and he was still fucking with people. Of course. But it was like—I can't tell this story. You can't?

Speaker 2: No, man. Okay. Footnote it.

Speaker 3: Tell me later. I'll tell you later. It is funny. But it was my assistant, you know. It was what he said to my assistant. It was like so funny. And then he said it and we all were like, whoa. And then I looked at him and he was just laughing. He was laughing his ass off. So he was still all in there, but it was hard. I guess he had the damage of being punched. Yeah, it's trauma-related Parkinson's disease. Yes. Very common for fighters. Oh, my God. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. It's not good. No. I got knocked out in a fight when I was like 20. And it was like knockout. Like out. And it was—you know, I woke up in the hospital. Not good.

Speaker 2: No. Well, a few of those will explain a lot. Yes, it does. Yeah. And we didn't know that, you know, back then. That's why it always drives me crazy in a movie when someone gets hit over the head with a gun and knocked out and then five minutes later they're fighting and they're fine.

Speaker 3: Or shot in the arm, you know. Because they kill you, you know. That always makes me laugh, too. But we used to do it, you know.

Speaker 2: Well, you kind of have to, right? Yeah. It's like part of the whole thing of telling a movie. You've got to— Sure.

Speaker 3: Suspension of disbelief. You know, he brains Mark Wahlberg with a fire extinguisher at one point. Yeah.

Speaker 2: He's back, you know.

Speaker 3: Brains him, shoots him. Oh, yeah. He's a cockroach. You can't kill him. It takes a lot more. You'll find out.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But we're—you know, people used to think that concussions are just something you recover from. Like no big deal. You get a concussion, take a break for a little while, you'll be fine. You might not be fine. No, you're not.

Speaker 3: I got a concussion at my daughter's wedding. This is really weird, okay? So she's getting married. Married a great guy. They've got a great family. And a buddy of mine from Australia comes to the wedding. And he goes, hi.

Speaker 5: He comes up, and I go to hug him.

Speaker 3: And he ducks down, and he comes up, and he puts his shoulder into the point of my chin. The guy weighs 240. And he puts his shoulder into the point of my chin and knocks me the fuck out. Jesus Christ. I'm like, ah. And, like, for the next four months, I'm messed up. I have to get, like, a guy to work cranial, sacral, you know, fix me up and stuff like that. It really messed me up.

Speaker 2: Fucking Australians.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Wild folk. Worse than Germans, yeah. Wild ex-prisoners. Yeah, yeah. Wild prisoner of mother England. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Anyway. So this story that you want to tell about good and evil, like, do you have a script? Oh, yeah. Do you have a thing in your head?

Speaker 3: What is it? Yeah, it's the resurrection story. Ah. But it's not just linear because you can't really – it's hard to understand. So it's got to be put in a framework where you answer a few other questions as well, and you have to juxtapose the event itself against everything else so that it makes some kind of sense in a bigger picture, which is a hard thing to do. And it took my brother and I about – a guy called Randall Wallace plus my brother and I took us six, seven years to write it.

Speaker 2: So are you doing this with historians as well? Are you trying to make it –

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, historical stuff. Well, I regard the Gospels as history. It's a verifiable history. Some people say, oh, it's a fairy tale. He never existed, but he did. And there are other accounts, verifiable historical accounts outside the biblical ones that also bear this up that, yes, he did exist. And the other aspect of that is that all the evangelists, the apostles who went out there, every single one of those guys died rather than deny their belief. And nobody dies for a lie. Nobody. Right. So that's part of what I'm doing. It's like showing nobody dies for a lie.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the resurrection is the one that is the most difficult for people to swallow. Yes. That's the one that requires the most faith. The most faith and the most belief, yeah, resurrection.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Who gets back up three days later after he gets murdered in public? Who gets back up under his own power? Buddha didn't do that shit. Right.

Speaker 2: You know, so. You believe that was a real event?

Speaker 3: Yeah, I do.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What brought you to that belief? Is this something that you've always had or is it something you studied it and you've come to this conclusion because of the historical accounts? Yes.

Speaker 3: I think as a child, you know, one accepts things on faith because, you know, you're raised by people who are nice to you and they believe it. And my dad was a pretty smart guy. He was like Mensa smart, you know, like real smart. Like back in 1968, he won Jeopardy, right? Really? And then they brought all the Jeopardy winners back and he played all the winners and he beat all of them too. So he had a mind like a steel trap. And his memory was practically photographic. My memory is pornographic, but it's like his was like, I don't have that kind of mind. Right. But I'm more like he did math and, you know, I can't add. But so as a child, you learn these things and you accept them on faith. And I still have that faith. But as I got older, I came to it through intellect and through reading and putting things together and accounts and then occurrences like in my own life. I mean, just recently, they verified the Shroud of Turin.

Speaker 2: Have you seen that? I've been reading about it. And I know that there's some contention. There's some discussion and debate about it. But they used to think that it was only a couple hundred years old. And now they've changed that. Yeah, they said no, it's back then. They also don't understand how it was made, which to me is very fascinating because it's not paint. They don't know what caused the image itself and how that technology would have even been available a couple thousand years ago.

Speaker 3: An intense light, I mean atomic, to leave almost like a photographic imprint on a piece of cloth.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's wild. Pull that up. Pull the Shroud of Turin up. Oh, yeah. It's wild to look at because it's so interesting. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3: And you can see it that it depicts a first century Hebrew male because the hairstyle was from the first century and a Hebrew hairstyle that he was about six feet tall, that he was completely scourged all over his body. He was crucified.

Speaker 2: That's it there. The one on the right is just like an artistic rendition. That's the face. Yeah, click on that one, the face. Yeah, that's good enough. Get that large. That's fucking crazy.

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. Scourged, beaten. The wounds on the thorns, the hands, the feet, and the scourging. And the hairstyle was from the first century. And the pollens that they found in the cloth were from that region.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Also the weave was a first century weave that was typical. And another guy, an archaeologist who I knew who actually translated the Passion in Aramaic, he told me that if you look close, you can see the image of a Tiberius coin marks on the eyes. Now, I don't know if that's real or not. I've never actually checked that, but that there's images of Tiberius on the coin. So they would put the coins over the eyes? Yeah. So that would date it. But they have now verified that it does actually go back to that time period. For a while they were testing pieces that had been repaired in the 13th century. Right.

Speaker 2: What is the latest on that, Jamie?

Speaker 7: Can you see? I was trying to get that. I have two different articles from within the last six months saying the opposite thing. Yeah, of course. Digging into which one sounded the most accurate.

Speaker 2: Well, it's such a crazy thing to even try to verify. What are you saying? Are you saying that this is really the shroud that Jesus was covered in? So you're saying Jesus historically absolutely did exist, and we think that this is the shroud that covered him. Just that alone. Incredulity. People immediately, their hackles raised. Like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Instead of looking at it objectively, they almost always want to look at it from a point of view of disproving it immediately, dismissing it immediately.

Speaker 3: But that's science, isn't it? You have to sort of play the devil's advocate. And that's okay. Go for it.

Speaker 2: Are you aware of Graham Hancock? Oh, no. Graham Hancock is sort of a historian that has a very—he's got a series on Netflix. He's a fascinating guy. And his career started because he was investigating these accounts in Ethiopia of the Ark of the Covenant, and that they believe the Ark of the Covenant is in this one church that's protected by all these monks that wind up getting cataracts and radiation disease and sickness, and they think that it's because they're protecting this Ark of the Covenant, this actual thing, that it's an actual physical thing that's there.

Speaker 3: And if you touch it, you get zapped.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and that even being in its presence fucks these people up.

Speaker 3: Maybe, maybe. Who knows? I mean, it's got to be someplace, right? They buried it. They lost track of it. Yeah. But, man, it used to be. And all the stories are if you even touch it, you fall over because it was constructed electrically somehow.

Speaker 2: Yeah, like what is that? What's in there? Why is it giving people cancer if they're really protecting it?

Speaker 3: I think it's the actual structure of the container it's in that is the problem. That's my thought on it. I could be wrong. But I think inside it they have things from like when Moses was like manna and, you know, stuff like that, that they managed to keep from like, for example, they say that Golgotha, the place where the crucifixion happened, is called Golgotha, the place of the skull, because that's where Adam's head is buried. Really? Yes. And that it's also perhaps the same place. And it tells you it's kind of in the same area where Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac. Oh. So it's interesting. Yeah. And the cross, in any artistic depiction, at the foot of the cross, underneath it is the skull, representing the skull of Adam. Huh. So it's interesting.

Speaker 2: Yeah, there it is. That's the skull of Adam, huh? Yep. Wow.

Speaker 3: Place of the skull, memory, myth, and the chapel of Adam.

Speaker 2: What did you find in the Shroud of Turin, Jamie?

Speaker 7: Both those articles, Jed, just asked like one person, like one researcher thought it was, another researcher, based off of their research, said it wasn't.

Speaker 2: Can you put it to the one that thought it was?

Speaker 7: So the one who thought it was is like a nuclear researcher. A nuclear researcher? Jesus Christ. The other one was like an AI artist from Brazil. Yeah. So I don't know who has the most.

Speaker 2: So it says, Oh. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I think, isn't the Smithsonian guy all for it? I don't know. Maybe that's him, I don't know. But, yeah. There's for and against, there's always been.

Speaker 2: Yeah, always.

Speaker 3: But the image is like, come on.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Yeah. Whatever it is, it's pretty crazy. And the fact that they don't know how they made it is also pretty crazy. Yeah. It's not a painting. Nope. I'm not sure how it even came about. Yeah.

Speaker 3: It had to have been some kind of intense light.

Speaker 2: Well, the thought was that even trying to replicate something like that today would be incredibly difficult to do. Sure.

Speaker 3: It's like an x-ray vision. Yeah. It's like an x-ray. You really see it in the negative only. Right. It's like a negative. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Hmm. Hey. I buy it. But that's not the only reason I buy it. I mean, I think there's other logical reasons why I believe.

Speaker 2: Like what are those?

Speaker 3: Oh, okay. Stuff that happens in your own life. The results you get from actually appealing to a power greater than yourself. And I mean, I don't think it's any secret. I am flawed in the fact that I am by nature born an alcoholic. Right. I did drugs. I did alcohol. So and there was nothing that could stop me from doing that. Nothing. So I was really kind of on you're on a downhill run. So I regard the fact that I was able to appeal to something greater than myself to help me and actually stop me doing that. I think that's a miracle. Hmm. It is. For me, it is. And for many. You know, so.

Speaker 2: Well, that is the thing about AA, right? It's a part of the whole process is appealing to a higher power. Sure.

Speaker 3: It's a spiritual program. Yeah. Because you're suffering your spiritual malady. Yeah. So it's a spiritual cure. And that's the essence, I think, of why it works. Because you can't explain it otherwise. I mean, it's you.

Speaker 5: Well, you kind of can.

Speaker 3: But. I think what you're being asked to do is to think about other people and other things more than yourself, because it's kind of an ego disease. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So if you. That is the problem with addiction, right? It's very narcissistic. Very narcissistic. Because you're constantly thinking about yourself and what you need. I need a drink. I need a bump. I need a lot. I need something. Sure.

Speaker 3: And no matter what you need, it's never going to be enough. Right. Right. So you actually have to appeal to something outside that you consider bigger and better than yourself, which instantly kind of pushes you more in the direction of humility. Yes. Because you're not the center of the universe anymore. Right. And that you can't do it. And the first step in any of that sort of stuff is accepting that you are powerless over it. That's the most powerful step you can do is that you're powerless. When you realize that, you're like, okay. Yeah. There's fuck all I can do about this. I have to appeal to something better than me. And that to me is a miracle.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a very uniquely human thing, the ability to course correct and also just the concept of addiction in the first place. Sure. It's a very uniquely human thing that we all know there's dark roads our mind can go down. And then we wonder, like, what is the purpose of these dark thoughts? What is the purpose of this destructive behavior that we're all prone to in some way, shape or form?

Speaker 3: What is the purpose of everything?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Right. I mean, why am I here? What's the meaning of this? Yeah. I'm looking for purpose and what is it we're here for? I think, you know, we have to leave some stuff. But you have to leave some good stuff. You can leave plenty of bad stuff, you know? And we're all prone that way. I often think about, you know, the human race as a whole. You know, you think about guys like, you know, Stalin or Hitler or Chairman Mao. And I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be sharing a cell in the afterlife with those guys. Right. I don't know where I'll be on the ladder. Depends on how you end up, right? Well, that's it.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 3: It really is. It's like, you know, and we're allowed to make mistakes. And we do. We are so flawed. And I'm more flawed than anyone, you know. But it's something that you, I think, and it's pretty safe to say I'm in the third act now. You're in act two, right? Gesundheit. But I'm like, I'm in the third act, man.

Speaker 5: So you have to think about the other side.

Speaker 3: Yeah. You have to think about what comes next. Is there a next? Yes, there is. I believe there is. And I think it depends on how you live now. And the beauty of believing is that even for your transgressions, you can be forgiven. And you can be redeemed. But it's all up here.

Speaker 2: Right. You know. Is the true acceptance and understanding of what you've done and what you should do. Sure. You have to look at yourself honestly. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely honestly. You have to be able to accuse yourself and understand that there is, it's a great deal of mercy involved in the fact that I believe that God sent his son down to tell us, okay, I'm going to ransom you people from your fallen nature. And I'll give you a road map on how to do it. And people do it. There's even people that do it that have never even heard of it. Some guy in the jungle someplace I'm sure. Right. You know. Because the creator is above the law. It's an interesting fact to note that the first canonized saint, you know who it was? No. The first ever confirmed canonization as a saint was Dismas. You know who Dismas was? No. He was the thief on the cross next to Jesus.

Speaker 6: Oh.

Speaker 3: And he says to him, you're going to be okay. This day, you'll be with me. Unbaptized, criminal, all that stuff. So. Wow. The lawmaker is above the law. So there's a lot of mercy.

Speaker 2: What about people that never experienced Christianity? What about the uncontacted people?

Speaker 3: That's right. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2: Some guy in the jungle.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's been known that it's called invincible ignorance because they don't know what the truth is.

Speaker 6: You know.

Speaker 3: It's possible that they can be saved as well.

Speaker 2: So what are your thoughts on evolution? Wow.

Speaker 3: The Darwin thing? Yeah. I don't really go for it. No? Yeah. Ice age dinosaurs, you know. What did they turn into? I mean, things became extinct at some point. I don't think I was some kind of like, you know, legless thing that crawled out of the ocean. I don't think I came from that. I think I was created.

Speaker 2: Do you think other things were legless things that came out of the ocean? Do you think like multi-celled organisms came out of single-celled organisms and there was some sort of a natural selection and random mutation and it led to everything else but us?

Speaker 3: Sure. Look at gain of function. Right. You can like, you can make stuff happen. I'm sure stuff did happen. But I think it's all part of creation. I think it's all ordered. I think anything left to itself without some kind of intelligence behind it will devolve into chaos. And so that there has to be some big intelligence that orchestrates everything. Not that we don't have chaos in the world but I think that's our own making.

Speaker 2: But what do you think separates us from all the other creatures? Wow.

Speaker 3: I think we have a soul. We're created with a soul. And, you know, I went to a restaurant last night. It was a steakhouse in Austin. And it was interesting because all the pictures on the wall are pictures of animals that look resentful like cows and steers staring at you looking angry as you rip into a steak. But I just believe we are higher than those creatures because we have a soul. We have an intellect above theirs. And we aspire to higher things. We have aspirations. Right. And, you know, this is part of why people drink and smoke and do dope and all this kind of stuff is because they're looking for a spiritual experience. They're looking for – like they actually call alcohol spirits. Right. They're looking for something higher. And I think we all have that yearning in that we want to be happy and we want to be at peace and we want everything to be hunky-dory. So there's this yearning in building all of us for that to aspire to something greater. And that's why we're inspired by stories, I think, because it's like, you know, hero stories. You know, Joseph Campbell's stuff, The Hero with a Thousand Faces and stuff. It's like these stories inspire us. I met – I was at a party the other day in Tennessee. And you think, Tennessee, what's going to happen there? It's going to be squeal like a pig? No. Man, there's some people that live in Tennessee. Sure. But like amazing people. And I found myself in a conversation with four tier one dudes, all of who did something extraordinary. And it was that Tom Slattersley guy. It was the Blackhawk Down guy. There was Sean Ryan who's – he's got – you probably heard of this guy.

Speaker 2: Yeah, friend of his.

Speaker 3: Yeah, right? Yeah. There was a guy called Christian Craighead. You know who that guy is? No. Whoa. And then there was Eddie – they wrote a book about him. Eddie Gallagher? Gallagher. Yeah. Eddie Gallagher. I was talking to four of these guys at the same time. And I didn't know who to – who do you even talk to. But their stories are amazing, especially – and the one guy I ended up talking to was an SAS guy, British SAS. And he just looks like a bank teller. But he did something extraordinary and incredibly brave and with no regard for himself, only regard for other people. And it was like, whoa, you hear these stories and it's sort of just like it pumps you up. You think, would I – could I do that? Could I be that person? I don't know if I could. I don't – in a way I don't even want to ever find out because you have to be in an extreme situation.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 3: But hearing about other people and how they behave in situations that are difficult is very inspiring. So, you know, it's – yeah, there's so many of those stories around and through history.

Speaker 2: Well, that's another unique thing about human beings is that we learn from others in a very extraordinary way. And that's one of the reasons why we like stories. Yeah. Why we like myths and fables because there's lessons you can apply to your own life without having to actually go through those things.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, that's right. I made a film about that guy Desmond Doss. I don't know if you saw it. It was like Hacksaw Ridge. It was this film and it was about a medic who figured so much killing going on, he's going to go into the battlefield and save lives. And he didn't have a weapon. And he was in the worst place on earth. And he got a congressional medal of honor because he kept going in to the worst place possible and dragging wounded guys out with no regard for himself. I mean, who does that kind of stuff? Right. And over and over again. He didn't just do it once. He did it hundreds of times. He finally got hit with shrapnel and a bunch of other stuff. But he lived to be an old man. But wow. And it was just pure faith. So, you know, those guys, those kind of stories inspire the hell out of me.

Speaker 2: Anyway. So, back to this idea of evolution. So, do you believe that evolution exists in animals? Do you think there's some sort of a natural selection process or do you think that it is all intelligent design?

Speaker 3: Well, I think everything was created. Right. And maybe things do move on and adapt and change through time. But I think that that's a function of an intelligence also. And, I mean, look at the fires in L.A., you know. I mean, what's that going to do? It's going to give me a new house, you know. Maybe. Maybe.

Speaker 2: Or a new place to live.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Something. Yeah, I'm just not totally convinced. I feel it. And I can't really. I'm sorry. I can't intellectually tell you why I don't believe in evolution, but I don't. It's just a feeling. I don't think I was some ape or I don't think my ancestors were. I think they had to be pretty smart to survive.

Speaker 2: So what do you think all these pre-human hominids are that they keep discovering?

Speaker 3: Like, tell me what a pre-human hominid is.

Speaker 2: Like Australopithecus. All right. Or some of the other human-like creatures that never made it like Denisovans, Neanderthals.

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that. Okay, well, they've got something called Zinjanthropus. You remember him?

Speaker 6: No.

Speaker 3: Zinjanthropus man. And he was like, hmm. He looked kind of like this. But it was like they looked at it and they did some core samples on it. And it was put out there by people advocating evolution. And they discovered that it was a human skull attached to the jaw of an ape.

Speaker 2: Oh, I do remember this. So it was a hoax. Yeah, there's been some hoaxes. Yeah. Yeah. But there's also been real stuff. Really? Yeah. You don't think so? Well, maybe. Well, you know. Like, I don't know. Tell me. Well, what was that one that we looked at the other day that was one of the first pre-humans that buried their young or buried their dead, rather? Was it Homo ninaldi? What was it? You remember that? Yeah. I can't remember how to say it, but. Naledi. Naledi. Yeah. Pre-human hominid, very small creature that buried their young or buried their dead, rather. I keep saying buried their young. They buried their dead. You know, Australopithecus. There's a bunch of different, you know, the Lucy skeleton. There's a bunch of different pre-human hominids. Yeah. Maybe they were monkeys.

Speaker 6: I don't know.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, they're similar to us, just not where we are. Yeah. They're on the road to becoming what it means to be a human being. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 3: What do you think those are? I don't know. They could be animals. Or they could be like, look at today. I mean, you can get some mosquito can bite you, and your kid can be born with a malformed skull or something. It's like, you know, they have those, you know.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but this is like a genetic thing. Like, they've mapped the genome of these creatures. Oh, they have? They're different. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know how to explain those, Joe. I don't know. Yeah. But you do think that human beings were created by God?

Speaker 3: Sure.

Speaker 2: I do, yeah. When do you think that happened?

Speaker 3: When? Oh, probably not that long ago.

Speaker 2: Really?

Speaker 3: No, not really.

Speaker 2: Like, what do you mean by not that long ago?

Speaker 3: Probably only about 8,000 years ago.

Speaker 2: Really? Yeah. So what do you think things like Gobekli Tepe are when they find these constructions that are dated, carbon dated to 11,000 plus years old? I question carbon dating. Really?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, that makes things a lot simpler. Well, yeah. There's a lot of money in, you know, claims. Really?

Speaker 2: Water's there. Yeah. Well, carbon dating seems to be pretty rock solid studies. Yeah. I mean, the science behind radiocarbon dating and detecting carbon isotopes, it's like, that's pretty legit. Yeah.

Speaker 3: I don't know. I can't square it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you don't have to.

Speaker 3: And I don't have to. And what difference is it going to make to me?

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the thing. It doesn't make a difference in terms of your experience in this life on Earth. No. Like, you can have your faith and your ideas and live a great life from beginning to end, and it might not suit you to really ponder evolution and all the puzzles and problems. No.

Speaker 3: It doesn't.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: And I just, like, you know, I look at all sorts of stuff like that, like, you know, the icebergs melting and the water overflowing.

Speaker 2: It's not.

Speaker 3: Ever have a glass full of ice and watch it melt? Did you ever see the glass flow over?

Speaker 2: No. Takes up less room, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 3: You know, the hot greenhouse, whatever.

Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot of horseshit that's involved in climate change for sure. I've studied that, and I've had many discussions over the last four years. The problem with anything is that once a narrative gets established, there's a profit attached to the solution to that narrative. Yes. And that's green energy and green energy bills, and there's businesses that are wrapped around there. And then there's also this fear that they love to pump into people about climate change, that, you know, they terrify the shit out of young people, that we're going to destroy the world. And then climate change, you must act now. And then you become beholden to the political party that is espousing these ideas. And then your enemy is the deniers of this science, even though you don't even understand the science.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And did you see the Washington Post article that they published recently about temperature change on Earth? No. Well, there's a down – like what they've realized is over the last, you know, X amount of thousands of years that the temperature on Earth is plummeting. Yeah. And it's dropping. And then when they look at the dips – this is the most important thing for anybody that's really freaked out about climate change. There's no static temperature of Earth ever. There's never been a time where it maintains a temperature until human beings came along and fucked it all up. That is just not real. Before human beings ever existed, if you trust these core samples, there's been a giant rise and fall and this constant dip.

Speaker 3: There it is.

Speaker 2: Scientists have captured Earth's climate over the last 485 million years. Here's a surprising place we stand now. Look at the dip at the end. Whoa. That's where we are. That's reality. And then if you look at the course of history, you look at the rise and fall. Like it's never a straight line. Way before human beings ever existed, if you believe these silly people. Way before human beings had ever existed. There's always this rise and fall. And this idea that the whole thing is based on carbon emissions from human beings is total bullshit. It's not true. We might be having an effect. But we're having a small effect, a very small effect. And the other things are completely outside of our control, including solar activity, the distance between the Earth and the sun. There's a lot of factors. There's all sorts of factors involving natural activities like volcanic emissions, which devastate. The entire human race was knocked down to a few thousand people at one point in time because of the Toba volcano. Oh, my God. Yeah. No light. Yeah. No light for years. Good luck. Good luck. And the people that survive are fucking barbarians. The most savage. And then it takes a long time before they can figure out civilization again after that. It's like dinosaurs.

Speaker 6: They just stop.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. So what did they evolve into? Chickens. I guess. Birds, raptors. Well, they think a lot of dinosaurs had feathers now. Yeah. That's the newest thing. Yeah. Maybe. You don't think so? I don't know.

Speaker 3: I need to take a pee.

Speaker 2: I'm so desperate. Okay. Let's take a pee. Let's take a pee.

Speaker 3: We'll take a break. We'll be right back. I need to take a piddle.

Speaker 2: That's got to be a moment in your head where you just like every now and then just go, fuck. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: It is funny.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: But it was a good picture. The only thing that was going through my head was, okay, I just can't look bad. And I didn't have anything, no grooming implements, so I just tried my best to not look too bad. There you go.

Speaker 2: Yeah. You talk about humility. Like, what gives you more humility than being publicly humiliated? Yeah.

Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah. Public humiliation. And you know what? For most people, it is their number one fear. Sure. Is public humiliation.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Public speaking and because of that, public humiliation. Sure. Yeah. Happens all the time. Because we're so concerned about other people's opinions of us. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Because we're not sure of our own opinions. Well, you've been through a lot. Well, so have you.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I remember, you know, I think they were giving you a grilling once for taking horseworm medicine. Yeah. Funny. Yeah. Funny how that works. Yeah, funny how that works.

Speaker 2: Funny how that does work. Yeah. What's really funny is how that was a part of the demise of mainstream media. Because people were like, well, this is crazy. Are you guys really the news? Like, what is this? What is this? Yes, I know.

Speaker 3: They seem to be complicit with a...

Speaker 2: 100%. Hmm.

Speaker 3: And, you know, you think, well, why?

Speaker 5: Well, why?

Speaker 2: Because of money. I guess. I think this is what we were talking about before, that there is good and evil. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it manifests itself in a very clear and obvious way. Mm-hmm. And I think that's what that was. That was evil. That was putting people's lives second and putting money first. Well, I don't know why Fauci's still walking around. How is that guy still walking around? I don't get it. Just people understand the history of the AIDS crisis and what that guy did back then. Did you read that book? Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I read the book. I listened to it. Yeah, I did, too. I drove up to San Francisco, and I listened to it, and I had road rage. Oh, yeah. And it was like, whoa. How is he still there?

Speaker 5: How is...

Speaker 2: First of all, people that don't believe it, how come RFK Jr. didn't get sued? Yeah. How come there's no lawsuits? Mm-hmm. If there was lies, there would be lawsuits. No, but that's right. You'd be publicly humiliated. Instead, they kept that book off bestseller lists. That book sold millions of copies. I know. They hid it. That's when you find out that bestseller lists are actually curated. It's not really bestseller. Yeah. It's censored. It's all censored. Yeah. Everything's censored. But that book is an accurate depiction of what Anthony Fauci did during the AIDS crisis, which probably was an AZT crisis more than it was an AIDS crisis.

Speaker 3: I mean, it's fairly incontrovertible now that he was fooling with gain of function. 100%.

Speaker 5: I mean, you know, why is he still around?

Speaker 3: Right. Or at least free. Right. Right. And no repercussions. Yeah. Whatever happened to that story where the wombat and the weasel got together and they were horsing around and a bat pissed on them with a golden shower. Yeah. And all of a sudden, it was in a wet market. Yeah. Very wet market.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Complete total horse shit. Totally. The scientists that we're supposed to trust were pitching that horse shit.

Speaker 3: It was like the AIDS thing. Some green monkey bit of Qantas Stewart on the ass. Then he went around the world and got everybody sick. And it was like, you know, ridiculous.

Speaker 2: If you want to go to the AIDS rabbit hole, look up a guy named Peter Duesberg. Oh, yes. I know. Yeah. I read that book. Yeah. That is crazy. He's telling the truth. This is the fucking COVID crisis times a thousand. Yeah. I had him on the podcast way back in the day. It was one of the earlier guests that I had. It was like way back in like 2010. And it was one of the first times I got openly attacked for someone being on the podcast. There was like blood is on your hands. I'm like, first of all, no, it's not. It's 2010. Who's dying of AIDS? Zero people. So stop. It's not blood's on your hand. Like if this guy's correct, he's a tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is like his work on cancer is, you know, everybody thinks it's groundbreaking work, brilliant doctor, but he was a heretic. He was a guy who stood outside of Fauci's doctrine and the narrative. And he said, I don't believe that HIV is what's causing this. When all these people that are having these immune systems are all heavy drug users. Yeah, that's right. He's like, I think this is a disease of a decimation of the immune system due to heavy drug use. And then on top of that, you're prescribing this chemical, this AZT that kills people. Yeah. They stopped using it for chemotherapy because it was killing them quicker than cancer was.

Speaker 3: I was in the Sydney Theater Company in the 90s and I was going to a funeral once a month of friends. They were all dying. It's crazy. And in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 2: And they were all getting AZT. Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I don't know. Well, the ones that were getting AZT, even the ones that were asymptomatic, like Magic Johnson, they were giving Magic Johnson AZT. He had to stop taking it. Yeah. Because he was making him sick. It was killing him.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I read it. And it's even with RFK's book. And he's an amazing guy. People say, oh, he's kooky. He's crazy. He's not crazy. He's not. He's one of the most erudite. They say, he's an anti-vaxxer. He's not. He's not. He's a very shrewd. He's never lost a case, I don't think, when he brings something to suit. I don't think he's ever been defeated. But that book is not just him. It's him and about 1,000 highly qualified scientists and physicians commenting on the whole situation. So when you read it, it's a pretty convincing document. And you're right. Nobody sued him for it. It's pretty scary.

Speaker 2: Well, not only did they not sue him, their response is to try to ignore it. They don't want to debate him on it. They don't want to do anything. No. They want to just ignore it and hope it goes away. But it doesn't go away. And the more people talk about it, the more people read it. And when you do read it, and you go, if this is true, what the fuck is going on? And how is that monster still loose? Yeah. I don't know. And he seems like a monster, the way he talks about things. He just seems. But first of all, there's so many instances of him lying. There's so many, like, where he said one thing, two years later, it turns out to be a lie. Said one, like, whether it is the natural. The mask thing. Yeah. The mask thing, whether it's the natural spillover. You know, the lies about gain of function to Congress, you know. Sure. When he was lying to Rand Paul about whether or not they did gain of function research. Like, how is that not perjury? How is he not in trouble?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, hey, other mysteries, you know.

Speaker 2: Well, then the Biden administration is now talking about taking that guy and giving him a full pardon. It's, like, fucking crazy.

Speaker 3: Yeah, they might, you know. He gave Hunter a pardon.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Hunter didn't need a pardon.

Speaker 2: Was he indicted? Well, I mean, he was in trouble for tax evasion. Oh, I see. There's a lot of tax problems. He definitely did some uncool things. And then there's the Burisma thing. But the crazy thing about his pardon is it starts at the time of him being involved in Burisma. So it's from 2011 all the way to today. Right. He pardoned him. It's the biggest sweeping pardon that anyone's ever received ever. And Biden's pardoned more people than anybody ever, too. Yeah. He was already over 8,000 people pardoned. Yeah.

Speaker 3: A lot of criminals on death row and stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, there's that. But then there's also people that like the kids for cash judges, you know, where they were locking up kids and putting them in child detention centers because they wanted money. And they were doing it for kickbacks. Yeah. I saw that. It was a documentary. Yeah. Evil. Again, what we're talking about, good and evil. Yeah. These are real things. And rational people that profess themselves to be intelligent and secular, they don't want to believe in good and evil. They don't think that they're—they just think people do bad things. People have motivations. They do bad things. But they don't want to believe in the concept of good and evil because these are biblical concepts. They are.

Speaker 3: Right? Yeah. And they've been around since the beginning.

Speaker 2: And people want to pretend they're smarter than the people that sort of embrace these biblical concepts.

Speaker 5: Right.

Speaker 2: Or, yeah, I think that goes into evolution.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Are we smarter than our grandparents, you know?

Speaker 2: I don't know. Well, we are about some things, but we can't survive the way they did. Nope. They are obviously intelligent. Yeah. It's just they didn't have access to information the way we do. But there's a difference between information and intelligence. Sure.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't have many devices for information. I read books. I read mostly history books. Yeah? Yeah. Oh, I got to recommend a book to you. Okay. It's fascinating. And it's called The Frontiersman. And it's about a guy called Simon Kenton. You ever hear of this guy? No. Whoa. And it was written by a guy who's now deceased. His name is Alan Eckert. And it is really about opening up Ohio and Kentucky and places like that with this guy Simon Kenton, who was just an Irish immigrant. He wasn't much for farming and stuff, but he thought he killed a guy. And so he ran away because he thought he'd be indicted for some crime or something, and he ended up being this frontiersman. It's a very interesting document because you get the history of what was going on at the time when the country was opening up between the settlers and the Indians, you know, the Shawnee. One of the most brutal books I've ever read. Really? Oh, it's very well done. And it has a narrative, but it's reconstructed from all kinds of historical documents and letters and diaries and all this kind of stuff. So I think the guy took about 15 years to sort of compile all this stuff and write it. And the first half of the book is about this guy Simon Kenton, and the second half is about Tecumseh, you know, the chief. Really great book. One of the most fascinating books I've read. You can't put it down. Really? Yeah, because it's just like little chapters.

Speaker 2: I'm going to get that right now. Have you ever read The Empire of the Summer Moon? No. The Empire of the Summer Moon is about the Comanche. Oh, yeah. And it's all about the settling of this area. Right. It's fucking incredible. Right. Again, one of the most brutal books ever. So this is The Frontiersman.

Speaker 3: The Frontiersman by Alan Eckert.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm going to get that right now just so that I make sure that I have it.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And it's all in little bite-sized chunks. And it actually, for a history book, it has this incredible narrative with heroes and villains and all the players. Very interesting document.

Speaker 2: I'm getting it right now.

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Don't read it before bed. No? No, it gets pretty dark.

Speaker 2: Why are you so drawn to history?

Speaker 3: I don't know. I think because maybe I'm trying to learn something. It's been about 80 years since the last big war.

Speaker 2: Alan Eckert, got it.

Speaker 3: I think I just want to learn. I mean, my dad went to World War II. He went to Guadalcanal, right? He got bit by mosquitoes. He had malaria, which is interesting to note that he used to take hydroxychloroquine when you get a malaria attack. Isn't that crazy? And then when my doctor recommended I get it when I had COVID, they gouged me 800. It used to cost him $30. They wanted $800 for that. They were gouging.

Speaker 2: Well, not only that. When Trump talked about it, then all of a sudden they demonized it.

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: They laughed. Yeah, which is crazy because it's an antiviral. It works. Yeah, it works on malaria. Yeah.

Speaker 3: And people have been taking it forever. Sure. I mean, anyone can take it if they have the flu and it doesn't hurt the baby. It's pretty safe.

Speaker 2: It's like ivermectin. But that's what's so bizarre about the time that we just went through because there's more information now available to people instantaneously than ever before. You look it up on your phone, instantly know, oh, ivermectin, the guy who created it, won the Nobel Prize.

Speaker 3: Yeah, 2014 or something.

Speaker 2: Yeah. 15. Yeah, for use in human beings. Yeah, yeah. So what the fuck is going on? Yeah. Like, who's running this thing? And it's harmless. And it wasn't made for horses. It was made for people. And then they used it for horses. Right. Right. Well, it's like saying penicillin is for horses because they use that on horses, too. Like, that's stupid.

Speaker 3: They told me it was for moldy bread.

Speaker 2: That's what it was from, yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, there's a lot of medication that's used on animals, too. You can't say it's a veterinary medication just because it's also used on animals. No, that's true. It's been used on literally prescribed billions of times on human beings.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It's like the stem cell stuff. They started using it on horses with emphysematic lung conditions, racehorses, because they would bleed. And they got the stem cells from the umbilical cords of their offspring, injected it into them, and it healed their lungs, which is part of my story. Mm-hmm. Because I smoked for 45 years, and I couldn't stop. And I read this silly book by Alan Carr, not the little guy who, you know, managed the village people and the caftan, the little fat guy. But, no, this other guy, Alan Carr. And he wrote this book, and it's the only thing that made me stop. It worked like crazy. The book made you stop? The book made me stop. What was in the book? I read this book. It was the book called The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. And it's a silly title, right? And it was sad, and my son gave it to me. He said, stop smoking, Dad. Here's this book. I left it on. I used to walk past the bookshelf and go, dumb book, dumb title, you know. And then I finally, my doctor said, you have first-stage emphysema. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. He said, yeah, you've got to kit the smut. I said, eh, I better read this book. So I read the book, and I stopped. Right? So it was, I think it was like neurolinguistic programming or something like that. You read it, and you kind of self-hypnotize yourself. But it worked. What did the book tell you? It said, it didn't tell you you're bad, you're going to die. It didn't tell you all that sort of stuff. It was like, I mean, they had things like, maybe I'm blowing it, but they had a chapter where it says, okay, we focused on the negative aspects of smoking. Now we're going to talk about the good aspects of smoking in the next chapter. And then you turn the page, and the page is empty, you know. And it's just a trick. It's a mind trick. The whole thing was a mind trick, but it worked. And I don't know why it worked. But it was sort of like self-hypnosis while you're reading the book. And it wasn't a negative thing like, I've got to stop this, it's bad, it's bad, I'm scared. It wasn't even that. In fact, if I hadn't had the stem cells afterwards, my lungs completely healed from that, by the way. Did it do it intravenously? Yeah, intravenous. And it gets stuck in your lungs. Was this Dr. Reardon?

Speaker 2: It was Reardon. Yeah. Yeah, we talked. Yeah. It worked. The fact that you can't get them the way they can get them in overseas, the way you can get it in Panama where Reardon has his clinic and Tijuana. They're getting better here. They're getting better, but there's so much resistance because of the FDA. Yeah, sure. And the resistance is purely because of money. Again, it's an evil thing. It's not because they're not effective. It's not because they're dangerous. It's just because of money.

Speaker 3: I think so. Yeah. And, you know, there's an agenda. I think, you know, pharma wants to keep you on stuff. Yeah. They want to sell you something. So if there's a surefire cure for something, it's not necessarily hailed.

Speaker 2: No. Well, and then there's also the problem of the media. The media is lockstep in with these businesses that are promoting these things. Yes. And they're not giving you information. They're giving you propaganda before they're giving you information. Propaganda is more important to them than information. Yeah. And that's what's crazy. It's like we're counting on you guys, and you fucked us. You fucked us for four years with this COVID thing, and now you expect us to listen to you about the fucking swine flu or the bird flu or whatever other thing you're trying to freak us out about, which always coincides with some sort of a political event. Like here it is, the inauguration of the new president, and oh, look at this. There's a new disease. What do we got now?

Speaker 3: What is it? Do you think there will be? Well, there is.

Speaker 2: There's this fucking swine flu, H5N1, whatever it is. I thought it was bird flu.

Speaker 3: Bird flu.

Speaker 2: Bird flu. One person died. One person in America, first person died, 65 years old with a bunch of comorbidities. Yeah, okay. Which is usually what it is. But by the way, 65 people with a bunch of comorbidities die all the time of nothing. They die of anything. I mean, this is like a car that's falling apart, and you run over a nail, and oh, the nail killed the car. That car was falling the fuck apart. Yeah. Like the nail you ran over was the last nail in the coffin, but the thing was falling apart. I got COVID from my gardener, and he had it first, and then I got it.

Speaker 3: I was like, ah, did I grab the hose or what? You know, I don't know. But I knew the guy for 20 years, and we both went to the same hospital, and he died and I didn't. Jesus. I think we both got remdesivir, which is not good.

Speaker 2: Not good. Not good. Causes kidney failure.

Speaker 3: I know. Really? Because it kills you. I found out afterwards it kills you, and that's why I wonder about Fauci.

Speaker 2: Oh, you should wonder about that guy. Meanwhile, they were trying to stop people from getting monoclonal antibodies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They've restricted monoclonal antibodies, which is fucking insane because they wanted to promote that vaccine because they wanted a profit off of it, which brings us back again to evil. Evil's real. It's real. Putting money over human lives is evil. I agree. It's a real thing, and there's a temptation to do it too, which is even more crazy.

Speaker 3: I don't believe that there is anything that can afflict mankind that hasn't got a natural cure for it. I think that there has to be. It just makes sense to me. Now, I couldn't prove that, but I just believe that, that there's got to be something that cures things. And I'll tell you a good story. Okay. I have three friends. All three of them had stage 4 cancer. All three of them don't have cancer right now at all. And they had some serious stuff going on.

Speaker 2: And what did they take?

Speaker 3: Jesus. They took some, what you've heard they've taken.

Speaker 2: Ivermectin.

Speaker 3: Phenbendazole.

Speaker 2: Phenbendazole, yeah. That stuff. Yeah, I'm hearing that a lot.

Speaker 3: They drank hydrochloride something or other.

Speaker 2: There's studies on that now where people have proven that they've...

Speaker 3: People drinking methylene blue and stuff like that.

Speaker 2: Yeah, methylene blue, which was a fabric dye. Yeah. Yeah, it was a textile dye. Now they find it has profound effects on your mitochondria. Yep.

Speaker 5: Yeah. This stuff works, man.

Speaker 2: There's a lot of stuff that does work, which is very strange. Because, again, it's profit. When you hear about things that are demonized and that turn out to be effective, you always wonder, well, what is going on here? How is our medical institutions, how have they failed us so that things that do cure you are not promoted because they're not profitable? That they can't control it, they don't have a patent on it. Whether it's vitamin D, K2, and magnesium. Yep.

Speaker 3: You know.

Speaker 2: Well, yeah.

Speaker 3: Zinc and quercetin. I do all that stuff. I do all that stuff. Did you do the BRCA thing? Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's phenomenal. It's incredible. Incredible. I gotta get back in there. Oh. I feel like I got more holes in my head. It's phenomenal for just overall recovery for everything. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also been shown to lengthen telomeres. Oh, yeah. with oxygen. Most diseases, a lot of them, come from a lack of oxygen. You know, your body not having enough oxygen is very bad for you.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I used to have a qigong master. This is what kind of blows my mind about medicine and about ancient stuff. This guy was from Shanghai. He didn't speak much English, right? A little bit. His wife would translate for him and he'd come in and he could like point at you, right, from this far away and you'd feel it. But like feel it like to the, as palpable as someone pushing you around. It's like, ugh, ugh. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not kidding. What year was this when this was happening? Oh shit, I met him when I was like 40. Yeah? He only just passed away. Damn, too bad. I'd like to meet that guy. Oh no, there's people like him. There are others like him. Oh yeah, he's not the only one. He learned it from somebody and I think he imparted some knowledge. But, you know, he would get you and he could like point at you and stuff like that. It makes you wonder like how did they build the pyramids, you know? I mean, if he can use his mind and kind of get into quantum physics and move shit around with thought and with energy, there's actual energy coming out of his fingers, they could have built the pyramids like that. I don't know. Maybe somebody had that down somewhere. Well, I'd like to hear a better explanation. Me too. Well, it was really weird. One time he was working on me and he was working on my liver. He said, your liver's blocked because he looks at you. And if you look at him, he looks away. And his wife engages you while he checks you out. And then he gives you a little body map and he puts X's all over it and you go, yeah, that's right. I got a pain here and a thing there. You know, he knows where everything is. He knows exactly what's going on. Did you ask him, is he seeing your aura? Like, what is he seeing? Everything. He sees everything. He was an allopathic doctor first. He went to medical school. He could write you a prescription. He could do all that stuff. He was a doctor. And then he saw a qigong master, this old guy, and people were lining up getting cured and he thought, that's really interesting. And he learned that on top of being an allopathic doctor. So one day he's at me on my back and he's pushing, and I can feel my back and I'm at the wall and there's a poster of a film on the wall, you know, my office. And

Speaker 5: I'm looking at it and I can see him in the background and he's like down like this, like

Speaker 3: kung fu pointing, pointing rays of energy at me. And he hit me, he started yelling at my organ, at my liver, like, you know, whatever. And I, I went up the wall and there was like eight inches of air under my heels. And I was up the wall and I was like, whoa. And I came back down and he freaked me out. And he, I looked at him and he just went, ah, he said, don't die. It's just science like that. Just science. Okay. Just science. Yeah. Just science. And I was so freaked out. I went to a priest. I said, is this guy demonic or something? Cause he's lifting me off the wall. And the priest was like, he was an old Jesuit, right? A traditional old guy. And he was, he was a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Elmer Fudd, you know, that's, that's the way he sounded. And I said, is this anything like demonic about this guy? Like putting, he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, did he heal you? Like that. And I said, why? Yes, he did. And he said, that's all right then. And he says, I have no trouble with something like that because it was, it was within the realm of possibility that somebody had power like that. And then it's inexplicable, but that

Speaker 2: it works and it did work. He, yeah, he just passed away. He was pretty old. There was a place that, you know, I bought a comedy club out here and before, uh, the building that we bought was the Ritz theater on sixth street. But before that I was under contract to another building. And then this other building was owned by a cult. And this is a crazy story. The cult was awful, horrible. There's a documentary on it. It's called holy hell. And this guy who was a gay porn star and a hypnotist, he was a yoga instructor, got a bunch of people in West Hollywood and then eventually moved them all out here to Austin. But what this guy was doing, one of the things that he would do to his disciples is he would do a thing called the knowing and they had to be chosen for it. They had to earn it. And when he would get them and bestow the knowing upon them, he would touch their head and they would have this incredible experience where they said they contacted God. Now all these people denounced him eventually. They left the cult. They all said he was a con man and this and that. But they all talked about that experience and they said it was the most profound experience of their life, that they really do feel like they came in contact with God. And it's like, what can a person, if a person truly believes and this other person truly believes that they can do this to them and they have this moment and something does happen, like what is, is that all inside of us? Do people have ways of pulling that out of you that we've lost track of that we don't know? And even an evil person who's running a cult and manipulating people and exploiting people still has this thing that he was able to do to them that even after they've admitted that this guy exploited them, they say that was the most profound moment of their life.

Speaker 3: That's interesting, isn't it? Because I think, yeah, there are party tricks that you can get.

Speaker 2: Right. But is that that party trick, if it really is a pathway to connect you, at least temporarily with God, that there is a thing inside of us? Well, that's why I went to the priest because I thought, right, because I'm off the floor.

Speaker 3: So I thought, I got to check this out because this is too weird. And he said, did he heal you? And I said, he did. And he said, that's all right then. Because the guy wasn't trying to get anything out of me. In fact, he never charged me. The first time I went to see him, he charged me. And it was like, okay. And then he never charged me again. And he used to call me when I was sick. I wouldn't call him. He knew when I was sick, he'd call me. He says, I need to come see you. I'm like, okay. So he had like some sort of a direct line with your energy. Something. Pretty amazing. And he could, oh, this is the other thing. He could teach you martial arts like quickly without you having to know what to do. It was a weird thing. He did it firstly with my son, who he got him for a couple of weeks. And like he said, I'm going to show you something. And I went out there and he blindfolded me. He had these two swords and he was doing all this crazy stuff. I'm like, what? I said, how did he learn that so fast? He said, it was in him. I'm like, whoa. And then he started to do a thing where he taught me how to harness this energy and to actually begin what seemed to be almost like involuntary movement. And depending on the hand mode you took, it would create a style of kata or self-defense. I mean, I used to do like some, I used to do a crude martial art, not crude, but like a hard martial art. What was it? Kyokushinkai. Okay. Yeah. Way back. Kyokushinkarate. Yeah. I think it's Korean. It's Japanese. It is? Yeah. I can't remember, but it's like, you know, I didn't stick with it, but it was, but he, he, he got this whole other approach of breathing and visualizations that would actually draw energy into your lower chakras. And then you, you know, you'd release the energy and it would create this kind of movement. And I showed it to a friend of mine who was a martial artist. And I said, tell me about the footwork I'm doing here and what I'm doing. And he looked at me and he says, that looks really good to me. I said, it's, it was kind of like a, what's that really soft kind of martial art? Tai Chi. It was like that. I was doing stuff like that. It was crazy. And it was really a great release, but it was about visualization and breath and the release of those, that energy that you pent up from all around that you visualized coming, manifesting itself in you. There's gotta be something

Speaker 2: to all that stuff. People have been practicing Tai Chi for a long time. They wouldn't be practicing the same movements for all these years if it didn't do something. Yeah. Pretty

Speaker 3: interesting. Yeah. It keeps people young and healthy. They do it in China. You see groups of people out in Asia, sort of out there in groups doing it all in unison. It's like,

Speaker 2: it's a good thing. Exercise. Yeah. What do you do now for exercise? Oh gosh, I'm terrible.

Speaker 3: I've been, I've come off, I'm falling apart. I got this, I got dead, dead guy's parts in my shoulder. I've got, you know, cadaver parts. This shoulder fell apart. This shoulder fell apart. A hip, a foot. It was terrible. I couldn't walk for about a year almost. Really? And so, you know, you fall down. That's partially why I had to go and see Breckett to sort of get the couch potato stuff off. But, you know, I, I lift weights and I do some, you know, walking and stuff like that. Like really get your heart rate up and stuff like that. So, you know, I'm trying, hey, I'm, I'm, uh, you know, I'm 69 years old. So it's like, it's getting to be like seven decades or so, you know? Yeah. But I want to stay fit if I can. And I bang myself up a little too much in my early life. So I'm paying for it now. And like in your sixties, man, you're not there yet, but stuff starts like giving up

Speaker 2: on you. Yep. It's like, no, I feel it in my fifties. Oh yeah. How old are you? Fifty-seven.

Speaker 3: Fifty-eight is when it starts, man. Oh Jesus. Yeah. That's when I, that's when I first noticed it was like, oh, what's going on with this here? The shoulder. And I went down to Reardon of course. We shot it up with stem cells and it was good for like two years, you know? You just got to keep going back. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't go back often enough. That's the

Speaker 2: thing. I think it's just, your body's just not going to heal the way it did when you were younger, unless you consistently get therapy for that. Yeah. Yeah. You're in good

Speaker 3: shape though. Yeah. I mean, so I was in reasonable shape at 58 and uh, I think I'm in reasonable shape now, but I'm, I'm just, uh, you know, it's just trying to push the old man off and

Speaker 2: various methods to do it, you know? Yeah. That's what it is. Keep the body as young as you possibly can. Yeah. Yeah. And demand a lot from it. That's what I do. I just demand a lot and make sure I recover. I think a lot of it's about meditation too. You know,

Speaker 3: you can actually, um, get into a good headspace that kind of cools you out and stops the stress even no matter what's going on. I'm going to have to do it tonight when I find out whether

Speaker 2: I still have a home or not. Yeah. So, well, if anything looks demonic, it's the fires in Los Angeles. Yeah. I remember, uh, one time we were filming fear factor and we had to drive home. We had to cancel a shoot or ended early and drive home because the fires had hit. And this was like, uh, uh, we were off the five and driving home for 50 minutes on the highway. The right side of the highway was in flames. Yeah. Like Lord of the Rings, like Sauron is coming over the top. It looked fucking insane. It looked, it's biblical. Yeah.

Speaker 3: It looks insane. And you gotta be careful too, cause you could die. Oh, 100%. If you can't

Speaker 2: breathe or if the cars in front of you catch fire and the wind blows this way and all the cars catch fire and you can't get off the road cause the, to the right of you is on fire to the left is on fire and the fire is coming up the highway. Oh yeah. Yeah. People have died that

Speaker 3: way and it can happen in an instant. Yep. I got, I got hung once by mistake. I, I, and it was, I was on a film set and I was, I had my neck in a noose and I, and I was directing the film. So I was, I'm on a ladder and I'm like, so I'll just be hanging here like this. And then the next thing I knew I was waking up, I was on the floor, you know, and there were all these people standing over looking at me and I'm saying, what are you people doing? Get to work. You know, it was like, and they said, well, you hung yourself. I said, whoa, you kidding me? It happens in an instant and you don't know it. It wasn't painful. Nothing. I was just gone. Well, you probably got choked out. Yeah. Choked out by the, by the noose. And then they grabbed me by the legs and got the rope off and Jesus like during Braveheart, it was like, Oh really? Oh wow. It was funny. So I've, I found out what it was like to sort of go into the next realm. But of course, uh, we, we did, uh, uh, I was fortunate enough to work with, uh, with Horian Gracie 39 years ago. Yeah. You know,

Speaker 2: he'd just come from Brazil. Well, I remember when you were doing lethal weapon, it was the first

Speaker 3: time I'd ever seen jujitsu in a movie, a leg choke on film. He taught, yeah. Horian taught me the leg show. He said, now you grab your foot and you're like, okay. And it was, uh, it was cool, but it was, uh, uh, now my girlfriend does it and she's like a purple belt. So I've learned. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I've learned not to talk. She's legit. She's legit. Purple belts. Purple belt is basically a black belt. You just need a little bit more time. Yep. If you can get, I always tell all jujitsu students, if you can get to purple belt, you are a black belt. You're going to be a black

Speaker 3: belt. Oh, she will. You just got to stay on that path. No, she is. She's obsessed with it. Yeah. And she's, you know, as I say, I don't talk back to her. I think the purple belt is the hardest

Speaker 2: belt to get to. It is because it's just like in the beginning, you're just getting crushed. That's jujitsu, especially for women. It's so difficult for women because they don't have the physical strength that the men have. Yeah. It's because you can kind of get away with a lot. If you're a big, strong guy, you can get away with a lot of shit. But then by the time you get to purple belt, like man, you have to have real technique and you have to have a real understanding of what's going on. She's got a good mind and I think she's like a chess player. It is like that.

Speaker 3: Because I know from fighting with her, she wins arguments when she's wrong.

Speaker 2: Sometimes you let them win though, right? You have to. It's just like, you got to walk away. Oh yeah.

Speaker 3: Sometimes it's like, oh, you got to go. Okay. It's my second thought in my first action. Yes,

Speaker 2: yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. But she got the purple belt. That's amazing. Good for her. It's good for her. Yeah. Yeah. A woman black belt. That's an unbelievably exceptional woman. They can get to that because they have to roll with men and it's just this disadvantage. Big

Speaker 3: dudes and stuff. And she's like, you know, she, she's done some exceptional things I've heard. So it's like, uh, yeah, it's pretty good. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't follow it up. You can still do it. No, I'm a more baseball bat gun kind of guy. I'm in trouble. I just like,

Speaker 2: you know, that kind of stuff. Well, be careful with that in California. You could wind up being in jail. Yeah, that's true. You wind up using it to protect yourself and the lock you up.

Speaker 3: Yes. It's, uh, which is also evil. Yeah. That happens a bit. Yeah. Oh, well it's, yeah. There's a perverse nature in, in our society right now with the law.

Speaker 2: You know, when you look at your life now and you're on your third act, as you were saying, like what, what do you look forward to these days? Is it creating things?

Speaker 3: It's creation. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is. It's about creation. And, uh,

Speaker 5: I figure, ah, I'm not, I'm, I'm pretty average at most things. Uh, but I'm good at a couple of

Speaker 3: things. You know, I know how to tell a story on film. I know how to do that. I don't know what, that's a weird place to be, but I think, um, a lot can be achieved by art and image, and you can convey a lot without actually having to say it. You can do things to affect people emotionally or spiritually, even without being overt. I always, I always like to reference, uh, um, just a shot that, and it's in a Ridley Scott movie, right? And you don't know why it works, but, or why it's effective on some level, but it's, it's kind of a profound, effective shot. And it's that first shot in the gladiator movie where he's running his hand over the wheat, right? With that music and stuff. Why does that work? I don't know. You can't explain

Speaker 2: it, but it works. Well, Ridley Scott is a master. Yeah. That's a, that's a visionary human being.

Speaker 3: He sees things. He knows how to shoot. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that is, that's really good. It's, it's a valid pursuit, I think, in storytelling. If you can do that, everything, every time he goes out there, it's a, it's eye candy. It's a feast for the eyes, you know? Do you have different

Speaker 2: goals with like different projects? Like obviously flight risk is entertainment. It's fun. It's

Speaker 3: entertaining. Yeah. And, uh, yes, different goals. And it was the other thing too, is it's like, we're living in a different time now in the film world. I mean, everything's upside down and you have to compete in a medium where you have less time, less money, do it fast, do it now. And it's like, wow, can I do that? I always had the luxury of like, you know, big budget and 3000 people on horses and all this kind of stuff or, you know, and, and was able to take my time with stuff, but I had 22 days and here, here you got to tell this story in 22 days. So I felt the challenge of being able to do that and being able to make something that really got people like they could watch it and enjoy it, you know? And I'm glad you saw it. I'm glad you liked it. Um, and that's all I want. I just want people to have a nice little ride, a fun ride, entertainment, but yes, you have different goals with things. I mean, the next thing I'm going to tackle is more profound for me. That's going to take more out of me. This is the resurrection story. Yeah. And I even had to change my entire life to do it. How so? You can't go into a project as profound in nature as that without somehow preparing yourself for it. It's like, it's like preparing for a fight, you know, it's like you have to be fit for the fight. And yeah, so you have to spiritually prepare yourself for that. And, um, and that's, that's going to take some sacrifice. And, um, because, you know, well, you know, I profess this and I profess that I'm not a great example of Christianity, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm flawed and I make a lot of mistakes, but I have to try and be better somehow in order to go in and make that film. So what does that mean? I think I know what it means, you know?

Speaker 2: Well, one of the things that I thought was fascinating was reading, uh, and listening to Jim Caviezel talk about his experience playing Christ in your film. Yeah. It just truly changed that guy's, the course of his whole life.

Speaker 3: Well, it was fascinating to watch him work actually. And most of the time I just like backed away because he was doing something that, and I've seen a lot of people portray Jesus in films, right? And I never buy it. You can't quite buy it. Something creeps in the color that's not something, something's not right or discordant. And some of them are pretty good, but you never quite believe it all the way. What was the Willem Dafoe movie? Oh, uh, that was a Scorsese film.

Speaker 2: Right. What was that? Um, called The Last Temptation. That's right. That's right. Which

Speaker 3: interestingly enough, I was in a hotel in the Savoy and I had food poisoning. I was near dead from, I ate a bad oyster in London and I was dying in a hotel room and I couldn't even leave. It was the worst. I think it was like salmonella or something. And I saw this cord on the side of the bed and I pulled it and all of a sudden a door opened up and a butler like Jeeves came in. He says, yes. And I'm like, Whoa. And I said, I'm really sick. I said, what do you think I should eat? Might I suggest some warm consummate and a cup of tea. I said, okay. So this butler took care of me in this hotel. But while I was there, Scorsese calls the room and she says, come here. I want to talk to you. So I go in and talk to Martin and he's in his room and all the windows, the screens are drawn. He's got 18 different TVs going on at the same time in this dark room. And he's talking to me about the last temptation of Christ and he wants me to play Jesus. And I said, Whoa, I'm not doing it. And I sort of got out of there. And then I went back to my room and they changed my room. Now this is really weird. They had changed my room and move my stuff and they told me they were going to do it, but I forgot. So I'm using a key to get into my room and it won't work. And the door opens up all of a sudden and it's Keith Richards in his underpants standing there staring through me like, like any, and there's a girl in a mink coat walking around it, mink coat and nothing else walking in the background. And, and Keith Richards standing there in his underpants with a spliff. And I'm like, I tried to explain that. I thought it was my room, but it wasn't. And you know, it was ridiculous. I'm 26 years old. And he just looks at me like shuts the door in my face. I thought, well, that was my, that was my meeting with Keith Richards. He slammed the door in my face. So it was like, it's fantastic. Anyway, but what were you talking about? He did something I think that nobody else did. And I think he pulled it off because I totally believed it. I believed it too. And it was like, what did he do? He emptied himself out and he invited something else in and he left it. He just, he didn't try anything. He just, he emptied himself out and he meditated and he let Christ in. And that role seemed to have had

Speaker 2: a profound effect on him as a human being. Oh, absolutely. And kind of fucked him up in his career a little bit because people associated him entirely with that film. And then they associated him with Christianity and then they associated him with right-wing politics and yeah. And then,

Speaker 3: you know, he got sidetracked by a few guys. I mean, there's some people out there who like, they get in your ear and it's like Cassius, you know, talking and they get you to just make a speech somewhere. And next thing you know, it's like, you know, people throwing eggs at you. And you wonder, you know, should I even be saying this? And so he stepped on a bunch of landmines, but yeah, it did have a profound effect on him. But I think he was already mostly there anyway. And I noticed that because when I was trying to cast it, I thought, who could play this? And I saw the opening shot from Terry Malick's film, which was the Thin Red Line. And it was just a big closeup of Grafizel. And there was something otherworldly and childlike going on there in the closeup. And I thought, who's that guy? He's amazing. Of course, you couldn't keep the blue eyes. You had to trade them out. So I changed the color of his eyes to brown and all that stuff. So it looked like he came from the region. But amazing what he already had a quality, an ethereal kind of otherworldliness, space cadet quality. And he's

Speaker 2: still kind of like that. He's still like, wow. I wish I had met him, or I haven't met him still, but I wish I'd seen him before and then after. Did that role change him? Because it seemed to

Speaker 3: have strengthened his faith. Sure, it did. Yeah, yeah. He got in real tight with it. And I think he had some experiences while he was doing it. He suffered a little. Didn't he get struck by lightning? Well, there's two times there was these lightning strikes happening on the set. And there was this guy with him. He was a young fella, one of the assistants on the film. His name was Jan. And old Jan was like, he's like six foot two Italian, northern Italian guy. If he tripped in the street, women would slide under him. It was that kind of stuff. The guy was like a babe magnet. And I think he was taking full advantage of the gifts he had. But he got hit by lightning the first time getting people. We were out on the hill and there was a lightning storm, like with the crosses and stuff. Oh, Jesus. And this guy called Chieppo, he was a grip and he never spoke a word to me the whole time. He's just a quiet kind of guy. And I figured, oh, he doesn't know English. But he came up to me and in perfect English, he said, you know, I think you should get all the people off the hill. We could be struck by lightning. And I thought, oh, that's a good idea. Let's get off the hill. So we're moving off the hill. Everybody's getting off. And this kid gets hit through the umbrella, this yawn guy. He gets zapped by lightning. Right. But he's 22. And he goes to the disco all night and dance. You know, he's doing the whole, you know, 22 experience. And he comes back the next day. He's like, yeah, it was great. And then he was with Jim the second time it happened. But this time I found him in a Fiat Bambino with his knees up around his ears, like waiting for the third strike. He was like this. This just doesn't happen twice in the third strike. And he says, I have to change my life. So it was pretty filming that movie must have had

Speaker 2: a profound effect on a lot of people. Right. Because you were you were doing something that wasn't just a film. It was a verite kind of. Yeah. And it was strengthening people's faith that film was, I mean, profound success. And a lot of people dismiss the idea of it even. Yeah. You know, especially in Hollywood. I mean, you had to self-fund all that, right?

Speaker 3: Yes, it was self-funded. And and it was a very strange experience. That one goes like and I put the money and I thought, well, maybe I'll break even. And it was then I got these messages back. All the majors wouldn't distribute it. So I think nobody will distribute it. OK, I guess I've lost, you know, the money, but it was worth the experience. And so one guy was left in the room at the end when the when the dust settled. It was some guy. He's I'll distribute. And he had a little company called New Market and they distributed like one or two films before. And I think it was a Charlize Theron movie called a monster about that horrible serial. And and he said, I'll do it. And, you know, it was just really basics. I went and I met the exhibitors and, you know, and this guy was like the distributor. This little company was just him and a toothless dog and a fax and an assistant. And it was like, OK, what's all the smoke and mirrors about this with between the distribution exhibition? I met I made handshake deals with all the exhibitors. Yeah, we'll show this. OK. And then we put it out there and it went out. Nobody expected it to do much, but it did phenomenally well. And and there was this kind of thing in town in the town. They said, did anyone just see that? And we'll just see what that guy did. Can't let that guy do that again. And, you know, we don't want anyone doing that, you know, because it sort of walked around the entire system. Yes. And scored. Right. So there was two

Speaker 2: things. There was resistance to the Christianity aspect of it and promotion of Christianity. And then there was resistance to the fact that you went outside the system. Was that big? Well,

Speaker 3: I had no alternative. Right. Because no major would back it because of the Christianity aspect of it. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Rupert Murdoch said, you know, he wanted to. And then he said and then somebody advised him and said he'd be out of business in five years. Rupert Murdoch. Wow. In five years, if he distributed that, if he. Yeah. And I was like, wow, if he's scared, what I'm like, I'm going to I'm going to crash and burn here. But it actually did all right. It did phenomenal. Yeah. And then again, I tried to. Then I went I went with the studio on Apocalypto, but and it didn't work out so well. It didn't. In what way? Well, it was interesting. The film was a film with it had no stars. It was in another language and it came out on a weekend with another film that had Leo Leo in it and another film that had Cameron Diaz in it. And so those three films came out on the same weekend and the one with no stars and without the language won the weekend monetarily. It won the box office won the box office by a narrow margin on the other two. And the second week out, Disney pulled the screens. Really? Yeah. So I thought, oh, that's funny. Well, screens are gone. I guess there's another agenda because that was another self-funded one.

Speaker 2: Did they pull the screens because they had movies that they had already made deals with?

Speaker 3: I think so. But, you know, it's just it's just politics. And, you know, and I think perhaps the distribution deal on that wasn't as good as. Right. Something else or, you know. So it's, you know, it's all business. It's a phenomenal movie, though. It's a great film. Yeah. And it

Speaker 2: did better afterwards in DVD and streaming and all that. Yeah. Yeah. It did well. Yeah. Yeah. I watched it again like two years ago. Yeah. I hadn't seen it in a while and I watched it again and forgot a bunch of aspects of it. God damn, it's a good movie. It's just primal. Yes. And I

Speaker 3: think I love primitive stuff, you know, and primal emotions. I mean, basically, it's a guy just trying to get back home to save his wife and kid. And and he's got a lot of obstacles in the way, like Jaguars and bad guys chasing him and trying to skin him and trying to rip his heart. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And I sat in a room with my assistant. So what do you want to do next? Chase movie, I said. He said, well, so we found out where the Mayan canoes and Columbus and all that. And then we just started making the story up in the room and we wrote it. Wow. Yeah. Some assistant, man. He actually wrote. He actually tapped it out. Crazy.

Speaker 2: So when you're making this resurrection movie now, you also have this obligation. There's this you're doing a very similar thing that you were doing with The Passion of the Christ, where this is this is a profound story. Yes. When you put something like that together, how do you choose who's going to be the next Jesus? You use him again. Caviezel. Yeah,

Speaker 3: I know. It's 20 years later. It's 20 years later. But yeah, but it's the right guy. Yeah. But it's it's supposed to be three days later, but he got 20 years older. And I think I have to use a few techniques that they've started to get really good with the CGI.

Speaker 2: And yeah, oh, they can do amazing things now. You can actually. Yeah. Get some of the same people. By the time you film, it'll be even better. Yeah. When are you going to start filming?

Speaker 3: I'm hoping next year sometime. It's there's a lot required because it is I'll just tell you this. It's an acid trip when we wrote it. It is like I've never read anything like it. And my brother and I and Randall all sort of congregated on this. So there's some good heads put together, but there's some crazy stuff. And I think in order to really tell the story properly, you have to start with the fall of the angels. Right. Yeah. Which is you're in another place. You're in another realm. You know, you need to go to hell. You need to go to shield.

Speaker 2: So you're going to have hell. You're going to have Satan, all that. Yeah. Whoa. Sure. You got to. Yeah. Right. You got to have his origin. How do you how do you depict that?

Speaker 3: This is a good question. And I think I have ideas about how to do that and ideas about how to evoke things and emotions in people from the way you depict it and the way you shoot it. So I've been thinking about it for a long time. So it's it's it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be easy and it's going to require a lot of planning. And and I'm not wholly sure I can pull it off, to tell you the truth. It's really super ambitious, but I'll take a crack at it because that's what you got to do. Right. Well, you know, the plate. Right. So I think I can get it. But it's not about me. You know, it's about something else. Well, if anybody can do it, you can do it. Well, I hope so. Yeah. It's it's it's trying to find the way in. That's not like cheesy or obvious, but that actually it's almost like a magic trick in a sense. It's diversion. It's obfuscate this show that look over here. Yeah. It's do you have a title? Yeah. It's just like the resurrection of the Christ. It's like. So that's a title. And yeah, it's a. It's very ambitious. That's all I'll say. It just took a long time to write. It's really ambitious and it goes from like the fall of the angels to the death of the last apostle. Do you have a start date? I don't have a start date. I just have to begin pre-production and see what happens. And it's just going to roll in its own time. It's taken its own time. I thought it was late. I've taken too long. It's taken too long, but it's probably just right. Yeah, it's when it's supposed

Speaker 2: to be. Yeah. Well, if you believe that, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I hope you're right. I think my instincts are that I'm right. Yeah. And if I was going to trust anybody with

Speaker 3: that story, it would be you. Yeah. I don't know. It's a massive thing. And theologically, it's it's something that you have to really look at and make correlations that. That.

Speaker 2: That ring true because it's not all written. Do you consult with someone like a biblical scholar?

Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, you know, there's your own thing that comes into it from having read the book a few times. You read the book a few times and it's amazing how your memory, how there's these recessive files somewhere in the background, how you can correlate this piece to that piece over there. And that's important because juxtaposition is everything with this story and what it means in a bigger picture. Yeah. So it's hard to explain, but it's quite involved. Yeah. Well, I can only imagine. Yeah. And I don't know that you can do it in a foreign language because the concepts are too difficult now so that you may have to resort to the vernacular so that that at least is clear. Is that up for debate right now with you? Yeah, it is. I'm thinking like, yeah, but look, have you seen these apps now where they have this stuff where the guy's talking German and then he switches to French and Spanish and then Chinese? Yeah. Have you seen that? Yeah. And his mouth moves. It's the same voice. I mean, it's crazy what they do. So. So you're going to use that

Speaker 2: kind of a tool, you think? You could. Will you begin it in Aramaic or in Hebrew? Maybe. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Aramaic is really the kick, isn't it? But, you know, I think I think I've written it in English, but I wrote the last one in English, too, and translated it. But and then the people had to learn to speak it because there was I think there's only about 400 people that actually speak Aramaic still. Wow. And apparently they understood it. So I was happy about that. Wow. So that was good. Yeah. Four hundred thousand people. Sorry. Oh, in the world. That makes more sense. Yeah. Sorry. 400 people. I've like preserved those 400 people. Yeah. Not many people speaking Latin still, but but that's quite well known. Well, I can't wait to see it,

Speaker 2: man. And I just want to say I appreciate you very much. All the stuff that you've done, you've made some really awesome pieces in your life. You really have. Thank you. Yeah.

Speaker 3: That's great stuff. Yeah. I'm blown away by where you got to with this, which is like, didn't you start off just smoking a spliff on a couch with a guy? Yeah. OK. Yeah. It's amazing.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's pretty bizarre. Yeah. I'm not exactly sure how it happened. No, that's good. I just kind of kept doing it. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a fan. Thank you. I watch it all the time. Thank you. There was no plan to it. I'll tell you that. No, there still kind of isn't. I still kind of do it the same way. OK. Every day you wake up. Yeah. I just look at my phone. I go online. I say, who do I want to talk to? Yeah. This guy might be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. OK. That's really it.

Speaker 3: Who's next? You get some pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I was amazed at that. I can't remember his name now. Terrence. What? He's all into Terrence Howard. Yeah. Yeah. The actor. Yeah. He had a bunch of stuff going on. I was like, whoa. Yeah. Oh, he's out there. Yeah.

Speaker 2: He's out there. But I mean, you have to be to be one of those guys. You do. Well, listen, brother, thank you very much for everything. Appreciate you coming in here. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Your new movie's great. And all your stuff's great. I'm a big fan. So tickets on sale today. Yeah. When does it come out? Oh, God. On the 25th, 24th, 25th, 24th. OK. So soon. Yeah. It's fun. It is fun. Yeah. I enjoyed it. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much. Joe. Bye, everybody.