the veneer of civilized society is much thinner than many people maybe think it is I think that was actually one of the larger takeways of Apocalypse Now is like you put anyone in these conditions like they are capable of massacring that ship of VI enames moral injury is basically what happens when people uh
violate their ownc conscience PTSD it's not necessarily something that happened to them that that triggered this but it's something they did that they sort of act out of their own conception of their moral character Sul niton right he's like the the line between good and evil runs between every human if you
make a movie that condemn something if you make it too cool you actually have like this backfire effect what's interesting about all these films is they're all from American directors the Vietnamese people have almost no talking Parts in any of these films even if some of the films are quite anti-war the only
Vietnamese speaking part is when they Massacre a boat the bargain is I'll pay my taxes I'll be a good citizen now you got to protect me and a lot of these movies even Apocalypse Now was kind of a collective breakdown of the social contract why are you letting all of this violence run a [Music] up well hello everyone it's jimos shy
with another infinite loops with two of my favorite people trun fan Rob h today's episode believe it or not we gave Rob some HW workk assignment on our last chat because Trung and I were like frankly flabbergasted that he had never seen Apocalypse Now possibly one of the greatest movies about war and doesn't
have to be the Vietnam War it's about it's actually based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness very different War uh but then we also added for extra credit and of course Rob being Rob did all of the extra credit the even better in my opinion documentary of the making of Apocalypse Now because basically Jed McKinna who I love to quote uh
extensively devoted a big section of one of his books to doing an analysis of uh cop's own art of dark and all of the horrible things that actually happened to him when he was trying to make that great movie but I'm going to first trun do you want to get a word in before Rob gives his dissertation for our viewers for
listeners to add context to uh Jim's uh very nice introduction there was so Rob has written extensively on the TV shows he watches and like the films he watches and there's always like he always brings in the psychology element the human Psych element and I'm just like man this dude is going to love Apocalypse Now so
like I'm ready for him to cook for the next hour like if you don't hear me again for the next hour which is typically a rarity in podcast like I can just motor on you know a lot of really really empty thoughts verbal diarrhea but I'm ready this time just to hear Rob's thoughts and I I do have quite a few thoughts about uh uh apocalypse now
but I'd love to get the human psychology element from uh from Rob here well I should because you guys are uh you know you're you're you're setting the expectations too high um you know you guys have told you know you told me to watch this movie uh was it almost a year ago I think when we when we last spoke
um and you gave me this assignment watch Watch Apocalypse Now watch Heart of Darkness so I watched Apocalypse Now pretty much right away and then it took me a while to find uh Heart of Darkness Jim Jim sent me the the link and and then I I read uh the Jed McKenna essay uh in this book here that Jim Jim was uh
uh very kind to send and yeah I mean like the all of the piece I mean I don't know if I was particularly it all made sense everything in that documentary made sense to me I mean even the the trajectory of the the main character uh Captain Willard you know he he sort of starts out the movie uh sort of in a
vouch of of what PTSD or shell shock or whatever they call it during that era right like they're they're having to clean him up and wipe him down and shower him because he's just in like a a state of dis prepare and it's only through sort of giving him this mission to find Colonel Curts that he suddenly is able to clean up his act and become
focused into DET turn Ben once again and sort of return to this mission of you know I think Jed McKenna describes it as sort of a journey into the interior and through that process of of discovering the darkness of the Jungle and I guess in a way this is sort of a um an allegory of him confronting his own
darkness that he's able to sort of piece himself together again I guess that was that was sort of one way way one way of reading it um and then yeah to to see you know the the documentary where Coba like from the outset he's like this is going to be a horrible movie I already know it's going to suck like this is the
end of me and you know the longer this at one point of the in the documentary he even saids something like everyone says you know oh kop is gonna come through he works best in a crisis he's like they're all wrong this is going to be terrible and uh yeah it was really like to see it all come together so I
watched the um the the director's cut like the uncut it was like three Plus hours that's the one that I watched and my understanding is that there there are two different I don't know if there two different endings but there are two different scenes near the end where one version of the ending the one that I
watched is after Willard kills Colonel CTS uh and sort of observes this kind of uh this cult that he created he just sort of sails away and leaves them be but then in another version was this the theatrical cut my understanding is that he actually bombs it like Willard orders that whole like cult area like all of
the natives who have were were adherence of Colonel kurts he just has the the whole like area destroyed as like a way to sort of remove this this sort of uh uh yeah this cult-like uh settlement uh maybe as a way to sort of eliminate it from himself as well I guess that's sort of one reading of the sort of psychological reading so in the
one one reading of it is he sort of he found this darkness and now he he killed Curts and he can leave and then the other is he's so horrified by that he has to destroy it I I can give context on that so that second ending you described so I'd like to do two things here I'll address that context and also
give more uh context around the entire project and why we were interested in in you looking at it so that second so he had filmed Apocalypse Now famously in the Philippines because the conditions were comparable to Vietnam obviously uh uh the the filming took place between I think 76 and 78 so the fallson was in 75
and uh what was interesting is that in the 60s the US government that started the Vietnam War so when they really started escalating troops into the country around the mid-60s the US government had actually even allowed John Wayne to use US military ships and bases for his them film The Green Beret but by obviously the mid-70s the tenure
and emotion of Vietnam was much different and the US government did not want to be involved in this film and so uh so Copa who in 75 as we've talked about before and while we're kind of shot like he had come off one of the greatest runs in film history he had made a Godfather The Godfather 1972 in 1974 he made the conversation and The
Godfather too uh and then prior to the Godfather he wrote uh actually the script for the movie Patton so he was on just incredible five-year run had all the cashier in the world all the all the financial uh political and creative Capital to make a film like apocalypse now so the US government wasn't going to
help him make this film they suspected that it was going to be anti-war so he went to Ferdinand Marcus the dictator of the Philippines but a US Ally a lot of troops were station in the Philippines uh during the Vietnam War uh I visited a couple of them my wife's from the Philippines so they're all Manila they
got these air bases but basically to your point about that second ending so ferand Marcus basically said you got to blow up all these sets so the blowing up of the set had to happen for logistical reasons and he actually filmed the blowing of it the blowing up of it and then later said actually wasn't meant to
be an ending so that kind of gives more ideas like his initial ending that he talked about whereas uh they kind of use those the out clips and maybe a bit of promotion but uh uh but it is interesting because that has been a big controversy for three decades because it spoke to how he thought about the film
and the the other thing I will add about uh just the making of it and before I pass over to jym to opine on what Rob said was uh so the making of Apocalypse Now is supposed to be uh six weeks so what is that 100 100 days six weeks I 42 days Days ended up being 236 ended up being 236 days uh copala again he had all this financial
and creative Capital blew it literally blew it all to make a PO now had to mortgage his house halfway through the film gave up a royalties on The Godfather to finance it um there Martin Sheen had a heart attack on set almost died oh yeah um uh Morin Brando was paid a million dollars a week for three weeks showed up grossly Beast never read the
heart of dark so he's the opposite of Rob who not only watched the movie watched the documentary and then read the essay Marlin Browner showed up never having read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness it's like a 90 page book and this guy couldn't be bothered to show so he he's the star of the world and in the
heart of darks do documentary this's this amazing scene right where uh where copel is losing his mind he's like all right if Brando's not gonna do it I can call Pacino or Nicholson or Redford I just love how he's just throwing out the most famous actors ever like I'll get wanted them to do it uh so he basically
risked everything and his familiar life he brought his wife Elanor who filmed the footage for the documentary so the lines that you had mentioned Rob where he was saying like this is going to be a failure she had filmed that without his knowledge like she filmed that for diary purposes so some of the the the audio
that ended up in this documentary which came out in 1991 so 12 years after the original film it showed how he how much he had put into it but uh well I'll end with this before we can pass baton around is uh the the controversy at the time of the film's release was that at the can film festival he was able to
finally finish this movie it was one of the biggest running jokes in Hollywood the the headlines were apocalypse when right like instead of Apocalypse Now like is this fil come out he goes so this is 1979 four years after the fall is Ion after 60,000 people died Americans died in Vietnam two to three
million cambodians Vietnamese and Lans had died and he goes um uh this movie isn't about Vietnam this movie is Vietnam right and then he's like people like whoa hold on a second it's like we understand that the filming was difficult but like you you're you're comparing you're he was like I am the god of this like and he talks about it
in the documentary actually he's like when you were in his position you do feel like Curts right he like I am essentially the God of this project and he's like being a director of a film is one of the last places where you have full dictatorial powers and so I guess Curts that character was channeling a
bit of him but yeah so I want to share that context and ask Jim if you had any thoughts on Rob's original thoughts on the Heart of Darkness Apocalypse Now connection and uh and then I can pass it along from there so absolutely I do uh first off just some some notes that I find really interesting you guys know
that uh Michael uh Liberty on Twitter is my uh head of infate media and he has really great taste and he offered me the uh TV series called the offer in which he said like no one has ever seen this and so I watched it with my wife we loved it and it's all about uh them trying to get the godfather made and and
if you watch the thing what the funniest sort of thing here is my because Brando shows up back having not read the thing and it was Copa who restored his career nobody wanted him for The Godfather like the the head of Paramount Studios everyone was like [ __ ] no that guy is a primadana we will not work with him and
all of the stuff that Copa went through to get Brando as The Godfather and so Brando thanks him by showing up you know fat drunk and and having zero research zero zero research but you know if you look at a brand life but he was really kind of just playing himself in that particular role and and that's the other interesting thing to me
is that you know the whole into the darkness that's Yung right you've got you you're the doctor of psychology here Rob so I will defer to you but um you know I I Rec call a Yung quote which is if you do not confront your own shadow right you you will forever let things happen to you and call it fate and so
obviously a lot of this is about the captain confronting his own shadow right but I had a little different impression and I haven't watched it recently this is maybe good because this is what I'm remembering and we all know our memories are unreliable narrators but I for a brief minute when you were talking there
when when he emerged after killing Kurt and they all bowed down to him I briefly thought oh my God he's just going to take cts's place did you ever did you did you ever get that okay I had the exact same thought I'm like oh so this is just a sort of a cycle where you know the whoever can kill the leader becomes
the leader and it's yeah it's I thought it was almost consistent with the way that it opened with Captain Willard um yeah just just sort of uh experiencing this intense trauma and now he becomes the leader and this is sort of how he heals himself but no no no yeah yeah I was actually yeah a little surprised that he ended up leaving but I guess you
know that's that's in a way that's a happier it's a happier ending if he had become the the sort of the new leader of this cult that would have been a like a much darker ending I think if that's how to concluded but I agree but also wouldn't that have been in your opinion a far more authentic ending because of
what you've written about extensively social hierarchy uh all of that type of stuff you know I was reading Howard Bloom's uh one of his books um in which he looks at that a lot hierarchies and whatnot I think I might have brought it up on our previous podcast but literally when one Shimp challenges the alpha male and the alpha
male goes down in defeat the chimp who and I I sourced this because I didn't believe it when I read the first time the chimp who deposes him and becomes the alpha male literally his posture changes he stands far more straight and his balls descend I was about to say the dick must get bigger right like there's
just something like russan T Jos through the body it'sall all right rob you got to address this now man you've been writing a lot about dating and on like let's hear the whole uh yeah I mean I've uh I haven't seen yeah well that that that research makes sense to me um but but then when I think about um you know like in in a way
Willard is following a different hierarchy right like he so so so kurts went rogue right like he he he um strayed from the chain of command in the military and then um you know he sort of went his own way whereas with uh with Captain Willard he he adhere to it right so there's this sort of invisible hierarchy that we're not really seeing
or we don't really see as much of whereas with um you know with with with with Colonel kurts right like we see the hierarchy it's very direct it's very immediate it's very visceral so I guess in a way you know like there's just sort of which hierarchies are you following um and then I also you know I think that
in a way that sort of journey into the interior and the confrontation of the Shadow like Willer didn't want to become the shadow he just wanted to overcome his own shadow right like I think there's sort of a different like different different interpretations there um yeah would it have been more on
yeah I don't I don't know if it would have been it would have I guess there's different kinds of honesty that would have been honest yeah it could have been seen as an authentic ending in a certain sense um you know yeah it's funny though like this this idea of like like like sort of status and authenticity and high
so so one point on on um on Marlin Brando and his weight was that in the The Heart of Darkness documentary when they talked about how they had to like film at certain angles and certain lighting just so that they could conceal yeah so that they could conceal his his face and his body and yeah that was really yeah and uh yeah like like when I
went back because I watched some of the clips again I I felt like like cts's um and Brando cts's um speech uh that he he's sort of describing what he saw when they tried to inoculate the children and how uh the the the Viet Kong the cadr cut off their arms and like that was such a like an Inc that was like a very
Nichi and like very dark speech um but I watched it again I'm like yeah you can kind of tell like maybe he wasn't in the best physical shape of his life for that role um but then in that in that documentary too something else that I found interesting was that um you know uh Coba was talking about how there were
like a lot of young young college students and a lot of young people who wanted to join the film crew who wanted to like they were willing to go to Vietnam because originally they wanted to shoot it in Vietnam right like they actually wanted to go to the war and film it as it was unfolding uh and so there were a lot of
young people who wanted to join and and help and I felt like this is so interesting because you know this is like the era of of accusations of young people being draft Dodgers and being cowards and not wanting to go fight in the war but they were apparently many of them willing to go and and and work on a
film crew which is arguably more dangerous because you don't have a weapon uh you know you're actually perhaps even in more danger uh doing that but my reading of that was that um if you're like at that point in American history my my understanding was that you know to to join the military was actually like a very sort of
dishonorable thing because this was like aad bad War and the general sort of public sentiment especially among the educated public was like you shouldn't do this this is awful and so they weren't willing to to to do that but then when it comes to like filming this war or filming filming this this film that showed the um the sort of Horrors
of War they were willing to to go into this Danger Zone in order to to capture that and so it makes me wonder like where a lot of these young people they weren't necessarily cowards in the sort of the physical sense they weren't afraid of of dying they were more afraid of sort of being shunned by societ
right like if you if you join the military that's bad but if you go and film this movie Shing the horrors of War that's good so they were willing to put themselves in physical danger as long as the cause was justified that was sort of my my reading of that just uh status element yeah I just want to say timeline
wise just uh that was around because he originally wanted to do in 60 the late 60s so to your point is like that was uh it wasn't like when he was filming 76 the war was already over you KN 69 was actually the the peak of like the protest and uh and people realizing that this was a true Quagmire and no that
that's a great point I I never again I didn't think about that that's awesome and and the other the other thing that I love about this film is that there are so it's a it's really a multifaceted lens right because you see so many different versions of America in quotes right the the America as brutal Killers
right that's guy who I love the smell of Napal in the morning he knew the world wasn't going to touch him right like uh you know break it up over here so we can surf right that and and again from a kind of a European point of view they still kind of add that attitude that America was you know running around the world just breaking things and and you
know doing it for superflous or trivial reasons I.E surfing but then there's also uh um Marlon Brando's character uh who is considerably of a different kind of America and then finally the scene where they uh have the Playboy Bunnings come in and uh you know a the I I thought that scene was particularly effective because it
underlined that you know the America in quotes Empire wasn't an empire in any traditional sense like the British Empire or the empires that preceded it it was literally an Empire of the mind it was an Empire culture yeah right and and in a way I I don't think a lot has changed in terms of the America as an
Empire of culture an Empire of the mind you guys agree yeah what do you guys think I just want I just want the listeners to uh remind them that Jim said his favorite part of the movie was the Playboy Bunny so just let you know where his mind is at best part like oh let me uh you know what part let me let
me talk about one I uh I'll tell you what actually watch prepare that was actually the only scene that uh that yeah Rob Rob watched three hour no like six hours of footage and like read all the Roder reviews and then Jim just watches that no I'll tell you what what is kind of fortus the timing wise actually is like I don't know if you
guys follow the ringer podcast the big picture they're doing a podcast Series right now called do we get to win this time and they're basically looking at the entire history of Vietnam War uh films which is fascinating so highly recommend uh listening to that which is just it just happened to drop when we
set the recording all these months later but something that's interesting in so the name do we get to win this time actually uh is a Rambo line so in uh in First Blood Rambo number two uh John Rambo is played by Sylvester Stallone is a Vietnam vet and in the film he basically says do we get to win this time as in the Vietnam War and in the
80s Reagan was president after Jimmy Carter so he was president from 80 to 88 and Reagan long believed that Vietnam was a winnable War but it was at the bureaucracy in the government didn't give the soldiers the chance or that's what he campaigned on right you know kind of his Macho image and what's uh to
your point uh Jim about the soft power what I want to bring up and why this podcast I mention is super interesting at this moment is so vieten win who wrote the book The sympathizer so I don't know if you guys remember that he wrote the book The sympathizer it wanted put peiter he's a Vietnamese American Professor I think at
UC Davis um but uh the point of that book and is actually about the making of apocalpse now it's like a fictional version of it and he he spoken Ry writes for the times has these opinion pieces but he says something very interesting he says that uh there's become a memory industry around the Vietnam War as in
he looks at Wars in two parts there's the war itself and then there's you know the famous lion from church the victors write the history there's a writing of the history afterwards and how we remember it and uh uh this isn't directly related to Jim's Bo it's about the culture and the soft power and you can actually trace the type of Vietnam
movies that are made from the 60s to the 70s to the 80s 80s 80s is much more about the vets that came back you know you had films like patoon born on the 4th of July uh Dear Hunter was in the late 70s it came around the same time as Apocalypse Now actually and what's interesting about all these films is
they're all from American directors the Vietnamese people have almost no talking Parts in any of these films they're seen as uh the way the vieten win describes it they're seen as just objects to be killed raped or uh shuttled aside and um so it does speak to this sof power that Jim is alluding to though right like
even just the creation of all these films it's just like it's it's just told from the American perspective and you know I I've been asked about this a lot because you know I've fil making Ambitions and I love I I I think these are great pieces of Art and there's always this this but there's always this
other side of it is like you know how do I feel that there's almost zero Vietnamese representation I'll be very honest with you like I've never I never even thought about that until I guess these culture wars in the last couple years and I think part of it has to do with the fact that my family has quite a quotequote revolutionary history in
Vietnam my great-grandfather was the anti-f French nationalist one of the most revered writer so like in my in my household there was never this question oh Vietnam's getting written out of the history because we were like oh no no I have a history I know what it is but I think for a lot of Vietnamese overseas
Vietnamese that especially the refugees that maybe didn't have the same Heritage you know this is depiction of your culture and uh you know it does speak to the soft powers like you it's being completely narrated and dictated by the US uh uh cultural uh apparatus even if some of the films are quite anti-war
because Apocalypse Now is quotequote anti-war but you're watching it and you're just kind of like there's zero Vietnamese literally the only Vietnamese speaking part is when they Massacre a boat Vietnamese people and yeah you know I mean it's like so there is that part of it and I I think that just is to
address Jim's Point specifically about the sofp power there's like layers to it not only does the film depict sof power but even just the entire uh complex of these films just speaks to the soft power they dictate everything around the Vietnam War even on the ju just jumping in there because I am of that era right so I saw that as a
teenager I grew up in that time I actually went to a school that was a military school and uh like the everyone loved the noncoms and everyone hated the colonel of the students right and that attitude was incredibly pers pervasive in a in a military now much more of a prep school with military but still and
and my reaction from to those scenes was different than yours uh because mine was it was depicting Americans as so [ __ ] brutal that they treat these human beings like just like animals they they they don't inquire they just like machine gun them all the de and I I so it's really interesting hearing your perspective as well no I think your time
is the is probably the more uh accurate assessment in the sense of like even though uh it's supposed to be I know but is perceived it is actually perceived the way it was men right it was an anti-war film and I guess for your segment certainly there was another segment being like you know the pom poms are out or they're like oh you know
we're winning that's how they're reviewing those scenes but uh it is you know quite nice to hear that from where you grew up and your experience of it was like oh no these these individuals are savages yeah it's interesting so so I was reading I was reading some um I think it was on Reddit or one of these
message boards of people sort of reactions to this movie just sort of collecting different opinions and and sort of seeing how people watch this some of the some of the posts reminded me of our last conversation of how you can watch a show like The Sopranos at at different points in your life and Come
Away with sort of different readings of it how you know if you're very young you watch The Sopranos and you think it's this you know Tony sopran is a badass and it's so cool to be you know this Italian gangster and then you watch it later you're like oh there are laters to this and it's actually uh a condemnation
of that lifestyle and the the sort of the the detrimental effects of the criminal life and all that and so you know I'm reading these these Reddit posts and you know someone said you know when I was when I was a kid I was a teenager and I watched this movie and I'm like man how cool it would it be to be Colonel Curts like you know to be
like you know like the king of the Savages to just like do whatever you want kill whoever you want just like be this badass monster and he's like and then I watched it later as an adult and I'm like oh this is horrifying like every part of this movie is just like a um you know it's basically like a a very
strong and powerful anti-war film but there is that there there's some kind of a I I read this there's this law or something of like uh like if if you make a movie that condemns something if you make it too cool you actually have like this backfire effect oh it's like Wall Street right Wall Street or The Social
Network like Wall Street supposed to be anti Finance but Gordon is like the coolest guy in the world or the stre right the more recent yeah D I know guys who work in I I know guys right now in their 20s who who work there because of the wolf stre that's why they're in like that's not that was not the message of the movie
this like well you know what like kilgore's characters so like Jim mentioned is like he basically took out this entire Village the famous uh uh uh smell of Napal in the morning smells like Victory It's like because he want to surf right and there's a there's a line that I'm allowed to say because I'm
Vietnamese he says Charlie don't surf so Charlie was the uh the the the slur to Vietnamese because the call sign was Victor Charlie VC so they called him charlies's and um but there's actually a scene there that I exactly to your point Rob even I wash or like oh man this goore guy is like neck level he's like
he wants to serf so bad that he's ordering like all the resources of the military to take out the surf but there's like a line there that I watched like when I was much older he has a he has this it's a chilling line he's like right after Napal line he just goes one day this war is gonna be over and then just walks away it
just he just looks at his Cham like one day this war is gonna be over that's it and he just walks and you tell that he's choked that it's going to be over and then I didn't realize that until like 20 years later I'm like okay this guy is like totally a Savage a human being War makes everyone Sav I think that's the
larger lesson I'd actually love to ask you guys about this I know Rob that you spoken with Jordan Peterson before but he always he regularly quotes uh uh Sul niton right he's like the the line between good and evil runs between every human and I think that's the I think that was actually one of the larger
takeways of Apocalypse Now is like you put anyone in these conditions like they are capable of what Lawrence Fishburn who's 15 years old when he did this movie massacring that ship of Vietnamese or or Willard who supposed to be cut and dry got his tie on but you know take out with extreme prejudice and he he's able
to get himself to that and and actually just to uh continue with that uh Jed McKenna wrote like an incredibly chilling passage in one of his books where he is invited to this dinner party of you know uh spiritually enlightened people who he he looks at as total fakes right and and they are trying to like
poke the bear uh with Jed and literally what he does is he he narrates the end of civilization for them and he goes how quickly are you going to love that little you know wonderful wine that you're sniffing right now and the electricity goes out and your neighbors are no longer your neighbors they're Savages coming into your house for the
food and you know for your resources and like if it's like wild and it and when you hearing you say that trun like that's the underlying theme here too right the the the veneer of civilized society is much thinner than many people maybe think it is what Pim Burns had that line right Kim Burns did the Vietnam
documentary in N 2017 do you guys ever watch that the 10 part VI the Vietnam so I actually watched out my parents they couldn't watch it so that's how good it is in the sense of like how true to form it was uh but he actually that line frequently came up in that documentary is like there is just a tiny veneer of civilization that as soon as a real
conflict happens or as soon as the uh you know the rubber hits the road it just instantly goes away right and this is always my like personally this is my personal kind of grown up stories like and I I know robs had a very challenged upbringing and went through many things like this is when I look at uh you know
the a lot of these cultural words are just completely useless as in imagine being in that situation right it's like you don't you you're not thinking about what someone's pronouns are right you're just like you're just trying to survive right it's like that mentality just been completely lost as we as we move up a
haslo a maso's hierarchy and just have everything taken care for us but like in the guts of it and when when there's this darkness and this the veneer civilization tiny is like the reality of what really matters comes out Rob what you think I think we had it taste yeah well we had it taste that I thought in
early 2020 like before we knew what Co was and how it was going to unfold I think there was that period of like that's all people talked about was like what are we going to do during this pandemic um and yeah like all of the the culture wars and all of the you know these kind of silly conflicts were put on pause for a while um that was like
really interesting to see that play out in real time from you say February February to maybe April um yeah I mean that that you know the that that um Soldier nson quote about the the line of Good and Evil and yeah thinking about like the the way that this movie depicted the horrors of War you there's
there's some really interesting research um on this uh this idea of moral injury uh and so moral injury is basically uh this what what happens when people uh violate their own conscience essentially and you know different psychologists uh and different researchers have have described this you know a lot of the a
lot of their patients and a lot of the people that they see uh who are suffering from PTSD it's not necessarily um something that happened to them that that triggered this but it's something they did that they sort of acted out of their their own conception of their moral character maybe you know they
massacred some innocent people or or killed some civilians whether intentional or otherwise and they didn't realize that that was within them that they were capable of this and this actually trigger something so this is an interesting sort of uh perspective on human psychology too that often what what what triggers trauma is like oh I
didn't know that I could do something like that um and I think like you know it's it's not really clear exactly what was going on with Willard at the beginning of the movie uh when he's in his underwear and he's punching the walls and he's losing his mind and he's drinking and you know one possibility is
like he maybe had committed some you know atrocities and he was sort of working through it in in in that way and he wasn't able to sort of overcome it until he sort of killed a greater monster than himself right like once he meets kurts and CTS had probably committed many well you can kind of see the atrocities right like when he's when
he's in the ship and he goes up to to the that um that settlement you can see like like bodies hanging in the trees and like severed heads floating in the in the river and it's like this is this is like hell on Earth essentially and so he enters you know basically hell and and kills kills the you know kills the
leader of this and you know this sort of another maybe psychological reading is sort of overcoming his own moral injuries by killing a greater monster than himself um so yeah I mean that that that whole like concept of moral injury I remember being very fascinated about it a few years ago um and I think this
sort of this captures that sort of idea of of that veneer of moral of civilization too that you know it's not just what could happen to you or what could happen to your family but also like who you'll become in that situation that often surprises and shocks people as well you know one of the things I I would uh often asked like could you ever
be a pacifist right and and back then uh my answer is pretty much similar to what it is today which is I don't think think so because like if someone was came into my home and threatened when I was answering and I was still living with my parents so the answer was like if somebody came into my home armed and
threatened my parents like I'm gonna kill them and there and I said so I don't know how that squares with this idea of pacifism but and then I would turn the question around I'd say would you just let them kill your parents and like the answer almost always from people who were from you know professing that they were
pacifists all the way through was like yeah no I guess maybe I'm not a pacifist yeah exactly yeah yeah this is uh so so I have a a story about this actually so a friend of mine um and I can talk about this was this was in the media here in the UK a few years ago so a good friend of mine here um he's from like a pretty
pretty well-to-do family and so basic basically so he has two sisters so he's you know young guy he was at this point he was still I think in college and he was visiting his parents they were in their very nice house uh on the in the outskirts uh uh hear kingbridge UK London area and uh there was a there was um a ring
at the door and you know it's it's a gated area so you know the the his father uh checked the camera and saw a police car and uh you he a bit bit unexpected but you know he said what's going on and the police officer uh said you know hey we've been hearing some calls uh some suspicious activity in the
area and we just need to come in and ask you a few questions and so you know naturally you know it's a police car the his father lets these These Guys in and as soon as he opens the door uh the door is kicked in and it's I think four guys like four you know two really big guys basically four Dudes really big one guy
has a saw of shotgun puts it right in his face and he's like you know take me to your safe we want all your valuables and his wife uh is you know behind him and screams and she's running up the stairs one of these guys starts chasing her um and his so my friend he's he's upstairs studying he has no idea any of
this is going on they live in a big house he's not hearing this the commotion and his two sisters are in the home gym and you know they got the the music blaring so they have no idea what is happening this is almost like a movie right like this is like you know all this stuff going on and so you know his
dad you know he takes him you know down downstairs and takes him to the safe and the mom is like running like frantically running upstairs and then she manages to hit um a panic button uh that they have in their master bedroom and as soon as this goes off you know this the guys get spooked and and immediately uh go away
and B basically what happened is they they somehow stole a police car and then just like bought some uniforms online and managed to essentially they sort of impersonate police officers and they were just going to rob these people and who knows what else and so so I'm talking to them and it's quite like they're kind of you know I don't know if
they're their pacifist but I think this like this whole situation radicalized them and they were like when I spoke to them when they told me this story last year they're like we're going to get a gun like there's no question like we are going to like arm this place to the teeth we're going to get a gun all this
so yeah it was um yeah like this is you know as soon as you sort of have contact with like that part of reality um I think like any any um Notions of pacifism go out the window like once your family's lives are in danger right yeah and you know it it as you were speaking it reminds me of the movie A
Clockwork Orange right where you know a bit of the old ultraviolet and that was coming for for context you guys like so the 60s in America at least what worldwide really uh were such a massive departure from the world before right I'm fascinated by listening to music from the 50s and comparing it to the 60s because literally it's
like almost different centuries and and so this came on so quickly and a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now say for example in San Francisco and parts of uh the Seattle area Portland where uh people kind of felt they made a bargain right the bargain is I'll pay my taxes I'll be a good citizen now you got to
protect me right and and a lot of these movies the war even Apocalypse Now all kind of made the same period was kind of a elective breakdown of the social contract that people felt they're like what the [ __ ] you know why are you letting all of this violence run a muck and you know the movies seem to come
online to really underline that point am I being too dramatic bro I don't I don't think it's it's necessarily too I mean that's like one of the the uh uses or sort of uh benefits I think of art is there sort of captures parts of life that you wouldn't necessarily be exposed to and so you can see like you know that's that's part of
what what uh Apocalypse Now is about right the horror horrors of War a lot of people can romanticize it if they don't know what it is and sort of when you see it play out in front of you and suddenly you realize like oh this is you know this isn't some um it's not a fantasy or a video game or something uh to to be
excited about and it it can either attract monsters you know so sort of unclear because you don't get much backstory on Kilgore you get a bit of backstory on Colonel CTS um but it's unclear if they started out as monsters or if war made them into monsters but either way right like war is not uh uh something to just sort of glorify um so
so yeah I think like that that that like Wars are like the the depictions of war in movies they're almost sort of inherently uh like a commentary on on the the sort of the brutality of human nature do you uh no I was just goingon to ask Rob and you Jim like were the other films of this ilk that you thought
demonstrated the brutalities of war or you know a movie like Patton which is has a legendary opening line which lionizes war right it's like we're you know uh what what a Lon has there is like um no one's ever won a war dying like you win a war by killing the other son of a [ __ ] right like yeah no no no
the line is basically uh don't die for your country don't don't die for your country make the other poor [ __ ] dumb bastard die on his Hill for his country right so that that much more uh you know uh I'm gonna call romanticized but it's not a negative you or do you guys have any other ones that kind of when you
watch like oh that's uh that's all good yeah it's hard to say I mean I'm thinking about like I mean just my own experiences so I was never I deployed but I was you know I was in the Air Force you know like that you know one of the jokes that that would be because I I worked as a technician that the joke was
like you know if the technicians are fighting on the front lines then we've already lost and uh so I didn't see I didn't see any like I didn't see any combat what I did see was when I was stationed um in in alied uh in in Qatar so that was like a sort of a was station on the way to the US or the UK from
Afghanistan and Iraq and so I would see the caskets like draped in American flags on the way from uh Baghdad or on their way back from Kandahar and uh and so I would see that and then on occasion you know we'd have like these medivac you know these helicopters the these airplanes sort of emergency um vessels
where you would see uh you know young guys with their limbs blown off or um you know under like severe sort of medical injuries and so yeah I mean to to see something like that up close it's like you know sort of a reminder that like you know it's war is not like yeah it's it shouldn't be it shouldn't be romanticized right and as far as like
yeah war movies I think they have like they sort of have to walk that TI between sort of being entertaining enough to get an audience and not so Grim that people walk away feeling completely bummed out um but yeah like I I don't know of any other um oh well well full metal jacket right I think everyone remembers the the boot camp
scenes a full metal jacket but actually the second half of that movie is pretty brutal as well um yeah what do you think Jim uh I I the the movie that sprung to mind which was kind of a a crossover in in parts of it did in fact make people glorify war in quotes but also showed the the nastiness and and horror of it
would be Saving Private Ryan uh that opening scene in Saving Private Ryan is like to my mind still one of like the most brutally honest uh this is what it was actually like you know I I grew up uh my my father was of that generation in World War II and unlike in Vietnam uh he did everything he could to
enlist and he had some health problems that were minor but they excluded him he was for ref and my grandfather was a very prominent successful business guy who happened to like know the president and so he literally asked FDR whether she would let my father into the military because my father felt like a failure right like I'm all all of my
friends are there and and yet he they never let him in uh because FDR said if we take him he's ours for life and like no we're not We're not gonna do this kind of particular favor but as a kid my dad's friends who did serve used to come over for dinner and I would just like sit there transfixed at the stories I remember
John o'e was on the Baton Death March and literally like whenever my mom said the oeps are coming for dinner I I kind of weirdly was like oh okay because like these were firsthand stories that just made you shudder and and yet I also think you know with all the people like video game so violent that's going to
make people violent I I don't really concur with that because if you've ever seen an actual human being killed in real life the difference is profound I remember the first time I ever saw a real human being killed in real life I was at Georgetown and I was watching I it was uh the El Salvador Civil War or the Nicaragua Civil War and
this was shot live on TV news they took the report put him on the ground and shot him in the head wow and they filmed it and I almost threw up watching this like my entire body just was like I I literally felt myself heing and like couldn't believe what I had just seen and and so that was when I thought
man we do know the difference between real violence and pretend and and make believe violence and yet like Apocalypse Now if it doesn't make you think man we should do our very very best to not do this the future they um in in Apocalypse Now they did kill that uh that cow right they killed they kill they slaughtered a
bunch of animals right weren't there some like animal rights violations or something in this movie totally that was that was the tribe right that's something the tribe itself did right I think that in a doc tribe oh that's a good uh that's a good thing we should add to the film nice lole if the tribe it yeah yeah well
I but but Rob I think I think trunk's right I think they were doing it the indigenous people that he was filming for the thing they were actually doing it and he's like let's let's get that on film yeah I think I could be I could be corrected there well I was just gonna say they starve that tiger too didn't they they they starve the tiger for a
few days for that scene where they're in the where they're in the jungle and they have the because they wanted him to be extra aggressive extra bous and so they they kept the Tiger in a cage no food just so they could get that could have ended this film like he could have saved cobala 200 days of filming just like
this is not gonna happen but but let's get back to like uh the the connection between um what happened to Copa himself right and and that's where Jed McKinnon's pie becomes I think really relevant uh because I I remember the first time that I read that uh Jed piece and I was like wow okay so it it completely changed my prum of reference
for the movie itself which I had really liked um uh you know and it got its job done it was like holy [ __ ] the horrors of War uh but but then when McKenna wrote uh that extensive piece on it and one of the things he says in that piece is kind of like be careful what you wish for because if you're sincere the
universe is going to turn you into the tool that can accomplish that goal man rob GFF a little bit on on on that can you give it I I haven't read this essay yes so Rob could you also give a bit of context for uh what what the essay is about yeah well so so well I think Jim could maybe describe more about Jed
McKenna's background but the essay itself yeah it's it's it's sort of disc describes um koba's Journey it's almost a a commentary in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now in itself and how yeah essentially in order to make that that uh the movie uh Copa had to sort of fashion himself into the conduit through
which that movie could be made and I mean there's some there's some interesting sort of union or M sort of Union elements to it mystical elements to it that it's a sort of commentary in the creative process overall it almost reminds me a bit of like Steven pressfield in the war of art Where You Are not actually making this product you
are just the The Vessel through which the creative energies of the world are uh have chosen you to to produce this thing and so for Copa you know there's there was a great um you know there was a great I I saved one of the quotes here where yeah he bit off more than he could shoot with this project the universe
reforged him into a tool that could do the job and then another great quote shooting a movie about the descent into madness became became itself a descent into madness and how there sort of these parallel between the movie itself and then the making of the movie um and so my my sort of takeaway from from that
essay was that uh you you have to you have to be so one of the things that that McKenna says in this this uh this essay which you know I don't think I necessarily agree was that uh copel is a great artist but Godfather one and two are you know like they they don't hold a candle to Apocalypse Now like they don't
even come close to the artistic achievement of Apocalypse Now uh which I think for a lot of people would would be upsetting to them because Godfather one and two are like those are the movies that of copas that people remember but McKenna says you know those two movies you know those did not prepare him for
the greatness of Apocalypse Now you have to be a great artist to make this movie Copa wasn't actually a great artist when he started the project but in the process of trying to make the film he fulfilled the steps required for greatness and through that process became the artist that could make such a
film uh and so yeah I thought that was a really interesting essay because like as a as a yeah well as a writer I think like and I know you both write like I think you can sort of connect with that in a way because at least for me I I never learned my lesson where I I don't I don't often I don't like the discipline part of writing we're like
okay I gotta write I got to sit down and I got to write something and like I dread that every time but then once I sit down and I'm in that flow State I don't know where that's coming from and maybe you two can sort of vibe with this or connect with it where you have an idea and you don't really it's sort of
messy in your mind and you sit down and suddenly these ideas come out and you're sort of coming making these connections and you're like where's all this coming from you don't really know and I think that's the kind of energy that Jed McKenna is is is alluding to here but uh Jim could you talk talk about like who
who is Jed McKenna who like what is his um yeah yeah I ATT easily uh but first I I'm reminded of the Dorothy Parker who was the AL got one round table wit um and she had a great quote which is I hate writing I love having written that's that's a good that's a good line and and and I always kind of use that as my Mantra uh because like I
hate writing but I do love having written yeah uh now as far as Jed McKinna so I got Jed killed by a good friend of mine Dan Jeff who's a AI Tech Guy brilliant systems architect Etc and he he wrote a an article for I think hacker whatever news and it was uh it was called Rick and Morty explain the universe and it was
literally not about Rick and Morty at all he did use them as examples but it was all about he had discovered Jed McKenna right and and so I was intrigued enough to buy all of Jed's books and and start reading them and he intrigued me for a couple of reasons first off he is the opposite even though he's in the
spiritual section of of your bookstore he is kind of like the the anti-spiritual guy he he maintains that uh most of the so-called gurus and whatnot who say oh you know Enlightenment is love and and all of these things he thinks they're totally full of [ __ ] and and that uh that they really are instruments of Maya the
goddess of Illusion right to to keep you soundly asleep right and and so he he Advocates a uh position of atosis which is basically eating yourself and and he says you got to do that with writing so you gotta write down who am I you know why am I here what can I prove and and essentially he he he's brutal on most of
the things people think about as spiritual uh ISM and and yet he holds out this candle that look we're all in the dream state together so it ties in really close to the Matrix that kind of thing uh the or Plato and the allegory of the cave because they're same story Matrix is more fun to watch but same
deal um and and and essentially the reason I get intrigued with him is because it a lot of what he writes really resonates with me about my own thoughts and and whatnot like uh I've been reading the dowy Jing since I was 18 years old and I I joked a few years ago you know now I'm 50 whatever when I was making the joke and I think I'm
finally beginning to understand what it means and and so he he the thing I love about Jed is he's incredibly funny he's arod like his he he's extremely well read yeah if you read uh his piece on Melville's Moby Dick you you you're going to not be able to see that book in the same light ever ever again um and I
don't know it was one of those I actually reread it after reading the jet essay and I gotta tell you like it it was it read as a completely different book after reading uh Jed's take on it right and I had to read it in high school and I was like everyone else I got to clip notes and you know yeah this
is a very important book and like so boring but it's it's like really not so the the final takeaway about Jed is that he he seems like the real deal to me because where is he right his his following is big enough so that he could be making bank he could be making so much money on spiritual courses on
YouTube channels on a substack on all of these ways and monetizing this and he doesn't do it where is he yeah he who knows there's all sorts of theories about him but I think that's a joke on his part I I you know the joke on his part is you guys are looking at the finger not the moon at which it is pointing at he would in my opinion be
the first to say who gives a [ __ ] who the hell I am as a person right it's like when when when people Lau the supposed author of the dowy J Lau if you dig into it it actually mean it's an honorific means old Master right and my guess is that dowy Jing was written over Centuries by many many people and then
and then they attributed all to this lso character right and and there was a brief period where like people who knew I was in the jet they're like would you be willing to go in on a private eye to find out who this guy really is and I'm like you're missing the point and and that's I I took briefly to calling him my favorite fictional character who
tells you that you're a fictional character because essentially his his gig is is uh you know not not two but one uh that that all all the universe is one thing and and we're I'm I'm you TR I'm I'm Rob we're all each other uh and and it it fits very much with a lot of the um the thinking in the babita and
the Dai ching and other areas so in that respect he's he's I wouldn't call him mainstream uh but but he's he's fun to read because it's not you don't like feel like cringe like after reading him and and and and he seems to be brutally honest about a lot of things even though he he here's what I love about He he'll start a book
saying I am about to lie to you and then he'll he'll do the thing you'll think wow that doesn't sound like a lie but he let me do the disclaimer here he is the first step is a doozy with Jed you you you like you don't want to read Jed if you don't like if if you wouldn't like be willingly slapped by
The Zed Master with the stick right endlessly um Jed might might play with your head a little like if you if you a newbie to films and someone's like hey man do you have a recommendation for like a jungle film like yeah yeah yeah just go to the fast forward to the end of Apocalypse Now and Then like watch the last 20 minutes man
like you want to get eased into it right oh what well is there is Jed Satoshi Nakamoto is is that is that in the cards same guy uh yeah same guy same guy yeah no I'm definely buying that book Jed talks yeah so I got number two I I was gonna say so this is Jed talk 2 so this for me the this essay about um
Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness from from Jed McKenna I think for me it was a good it was a good entry point uh from Jim it was a sort of a good Bridge into Jed McKenna's work because you know when I when when you because I've heard you Jim on your podast and other other uh Avenues you've discussed his work and I I looked him up
once and I'm like this guy seems like you know some spiritual clap trap nonsense like you know I'm I'm a you know I'm I'm a serious you know I'm a serious social scientist I don't need to be reading this this not and this was like I don't know this is probably like a year and a half ago when I first heard
you talk about it and then it's interesting like since then this is sort of my you know shifting perspective where and and it almost sort of mirrors a bit like a reversal of what happened in Psychology overall where psychology sort of started with it's sort of sorted out as a branch of philosophy and then
you know it sort of went you know this is a very potted history of sort of Freud and Yung and Alfred Adler and all these guys and then in the mid 20th century you know Psy psychology wanted to suddenly become taken seriously as a real science and then there was the shift toward behaviorism and you know
now we want statistics and we want standard deviation we want you know we want all these things to like prove that we're an actual science and we want experimental methods and control groups and randomized trials and so you know then that's the that's the kind of psychology that that is you know pervasive in Academia now is like you
have to be pretty well versed in statistics especially like post-replication Crisis all this stuff like psychology became very sort of you know very sort of into it turned into more and more into a scientific field and then once I received my PhD last year and and you know I read jeed M Kenna know I'm reading like I'm reading
Yung I'm reading Freud like I'm reading all these guys that no one ever reads in Psychology anymore like if you if you mention Freud to a psychologist today like unless there's some kind of like old school psychoanalyst if you talk to like a psychology professor they would say like no one like no one talks about
fruit anymore like it's kind of an embarrassment in modern psychology um but I'm reading it now you know after reading M Kenna reading these guys I'm like yeah there's something there's something to this I know it's not science I know it's not you know they they didn't carry out a study this isn't like peer-reviewed research but they're
they're tapping into something else right it's a sort of a deeper spiritual philosophical it's something else beyond the sort of empirical that I think they're getting at and that's sort of what I got from this this essay too and then I just want to the I found the quote uh from J kind of on on Godfather
where he calls it thematically banal little more than an overproduced soap opera and then you know both of the movies says sure they're great movies but they're they're not about anything and don't deserve to be considered alongside films like Apocalypse Now they're not about anything like that is that you know tough critic right you
said tough critic earlier trun that's like that is very tough critic and then uh on on the creative process which I I sort of alluded to earlier where he says the quote is I I may see what goes into the black box and I may see what what comes out of the black box but I have no idea what's going on inside the Black
Box I think like that's a nice sort of uh uh summary of like sort of his at least in this essay maybe he has other thoughts and other but in that essay that's sort of my understanding of his view of the creative process is like there's something else that takes hold of you when you're writing when you're
trying to be a good artist and uh yeah so overall like that was a good for me like a good starting point for for Makenna stuff yeah he's he's uh the black box is really interesting to me because I actually took a lot out of that I I had kind of independently uh because I read a lot about like Tesla the the man um and like
he was way out there man if you if you read about his life um and uh the things he believed and and whatnot he one of the things that really took me with him that McKenna makes a big point of is that at best we are co-creators and of course of course this has anant in in Greek and Roman mythology the muses
right a muse is someone is what they're really talking about and and so if you open up yourself to the idea that hey maybe I'm just the co-creator here maybe maybe I'm G to just leave myself open to like these ideas I love to experiment on myself right and so whenever I started something with that as my beginning lot
I am totally open I'm only the co-creator here this isn't mine this isn't me thinking this up I got to tell you the ideas are a lot better and and I don't know it I because I always hesitate to talk about it because it sounds so [ __ ] woo woo but like I I I think it would be great if we could have a scientific method that could actually
test this that could replicate and you know do all that kind of stuff but absent that you know don't worry too much about meaning look for youth I think that's wienstein uh but that's a great quote that you know don't don't forever be worried about meaning is it useful and right that's Henry James and
uh not Henry William James uh or no it is it which which James is that Rob yeah I don't yeah I don't know that one I don't know that quote um yeah one thing I wanted to ask since we're talking about creativity and this ched McKenna essay and I mentioned Stephen pressfield earlier is like because I I I know you
both ride and you both uh you know you you you Jim I you're podcasting and sort of all these creative domains but like how do you like do you have a routine like how do you so so one thing that I liked in the war of art I I read that book A couple of years ago in preparation when I was trying to write my book and one of the things that he
says in that book is um and I you know this was like you know it's such a simple idea but it was really helpful for me is like you're you don't have to wait for the Muse your job is to like get your ass in the seat and and and you have to find the Muse yourself right like you have to open up the blank
document and just get to work and you know if you if you do the steps correctly if you show up every day eventually The Muse will appear like okay so that's how you have to do you can't just like oh well I feel like writing now if you try to do that you'll never actually write because at least for me I never actually I seldom feel
like writing uh but like for both of you how do you do you have like an approach for this do you just go through that sort of mechanistically of you know this time during this day I'm going to write I'm going to podcast I'm going to record how do you think about it TR how how do you how do you do it I just want to say
like everything that you've said over the past 20 minutes 100% Echoes like my experience particularly when you said when I sit down and then you just start writing and then suddenly just it just all this Rush of stuff that you weren't even thinking about just kind of Flows In is uh it's 100% my experience um I do
try to have some consistency of like I want to try to block off 90 minutes here and just just sit if nothing happens whatever [ __ ] life goes on but yeah 100% similar to your experience and I actually say the I know Jim you're like if we could just prove this scientifically it'd be amazing but this is why I actually think Rick rubin's
book the creative act is such a service to humanity great book great book right it's like it's short he doesn't talk about his music career doesn't talk about any of the music he's created he's just like this is my experience over four Decades of making some of the most important music ever and it basically is
woooo he's like there is there is something out there and your job is exactly what you said Rob about McKenna describing Copa your job is to be a vessel for whatever that creative energy is and he speaks specifically around how he gets people into the Right Moves like he'll talk to an artist and he'll be
like okay today I want you to pretend your Paul McCartney just pretend you're Paul McCartney now just do whatever Paul McCartney would do and he's basically asking the artist to become a vessel and you're combining whatever you think Paul McCartney is with yourself and then that now is a vessel for all the experience
you've had or whatever you're feeling that day and then it comes out this is why those documentaries like if you watch Rick rubben stuff or any clips of him recording it's hysterical he's just like he's like lying on a coach he's like doing nothing right and he's just jamming with these artists and he's just
whatever doing this thing and then they realize that something's hitting something's happening and then they're all just there to bring It Whatever the energy is at that moment they know it's there and they're just going to stay up as long as they have to and put in as much work as they have to to get it to the Finish line he actually has a
incredible podcast for gruben and he had John May on recently and they talk about it specifically around this energy so John May is just like yeah my job is like I'm just trying to I'll be practicing or I'll be writing songs with some of my bandmates or people I collaborate with and then when we realize that that moment's come like
there's something there there we will work we're batting down the hatches we'll be there for the next 7 two hours just to channel it out and uh Echoes what you say is like you don't know when you sit down there something Good's gonna come out but what you do know is if you don't sit down nothing's gonna
come out yeah and uh your job is to I mean talk this isn't you right you go any of the great writers like any of the prolific writers what who are the best selling authors ever like Michael Kayon Stephen King James Patterson uh who's the female one that just crushes I mean there all JK Roland they're all the same
right there's like I write my job is to write Stephen King's like I have to write five pages a day that's my job however long that takes that's my job and some of it's trash some of it isn't but that's my job is to sit down in that seat so yeah I think uh I don't even think it's just about writing like Steve
Jobs says something very similar like my job is to be a vessel for ideas and ideas many ideas that come before me I'm hoping to leave ideas for people to borrow and build upon for the future so 100% the entire time you're talking I was just like I was just nodding I'm like oh this is exactly how it feels for me what's the Rick Rubin book uh the
creative act the creative the creative act oh you will raw based on everything you've said in the last 20 minutes you'll love it you'll love it because he literally just like he's just like he talks about the collecting of ideas and then just being in the mindset to Usher them to comp yeah I what's so funny is
uh serendipitously I was just talking about him and that book with somebody who hadn't read it and he's like who who is this guy and I said you would never believe it but he and then I gave him his CV right and he's like wait a minute and so I pulled up a picture of and he's like he was just like so this is the guy
respond and I went yeah he doesn't read music he doesn't play an instrument it's like your idea he is this vessel for these creative ideas I think though what Rob was saying earlier also applies here you it's like I I had this little formula that I wrote out when I was young it was like energy of uh mind or
thought uh times energy of action times energy of random events squared and and basically it was trying to get to the you can think all the greatest things of the world but if if that is equals 100 right and and energy of action equals zero 100 times Z equals zero and so and and I threw the random stuff in there
because like I have this theory that you can you can be luckier than other people if you're paying attention and and the reason I squared it was because lots of random [ __ ] happens and if you're paying attention you could say o that's looks like a lucky situation right if you're not paying attention
you're not going to see it right we don't see things if we're if we're not looking for them right specifically but the other thing there is the if you multiply by zero you get zero and so I think that you Rob you're right you do have to sit down and say well Muse or not I'm I I hope that by just in in
engaging in this exercise the muses will indulge me but I I definitely think there is something to this idea of being open to you know that idea that that that that exists external maybe it's you know in the cloud who knows uh Jung's Collective unconscious right and and we always seem to improve our or not improve change our analogies and
metaphor to whatever the tech of that day is right so now instead of a collective unconscious we've got shell Drake's morphogenic field which people get because they everybody knows about the cloud right yeah um and and so the the the thinking becomes more abstracted but ultimately you got to put a pet in
your hand or open the computer or if you dictate whatever but you you you got to start and that takes action and so like I don't care how many great ideas that you have if you don't take action against them they're just Day Dreams I just want to add to exactly what you're saying Jim about uh uh how important it
is to notice because Rick ruin actually talks about that extensively in his book he's like he says it's particularly difficult to in in the smartphone age with the distractions to Lally just notice just to even be able like like if all if you have nothing else distracting you like you could marinate on like an elevator
song like you you be an elevator but forgot your phone you're like oh this song is kind of dope but like you literally just distractions all the time right you you don't even have the opportunity to marinate on all these things that are happening around you and he talks extensively he like just when he says be a vessel he like like it's
already happening you just have to pay attention but most people can't and are easily distracted I mean I'm one of these people right I'm very easily distracted and uh man we might have to do another the cocaine phone yeah there you go right I read that that was a good piece George so our friend George Mack
uh uh made this great piece about the limiting distraction you know what actually I I think we have to do another one in the next 12 months after Rob's read the creative act because I would love his thoughts on that and and your book will be coming out soon by that timeo yeah right it's in promotion yeah exactly right always be selling
yeah always be closing I love that right always be closing always be I actually I want to bring uh I know that we're running up on timer so I wanted I want to mention one thing I'd be remiss about it's kind of related to what you're just talking about Jim and what we all talk about is like being the receptacle so
this is more of a fun fact I'll pass it on Rob after is uh so George Lucas was originally supposed to do Apocalypse Now like it was he was he was going to do it but uh uh the timing wasn't right and it kind of goes into this idea of like were you the right receptacle at the right time for this idea and if you weren't it
passed along and and I can imagine a George Lucas film would have been a lot less dark based on you right it's like based on Indiana Jones and Star Wars it would have been a much much different movie so yeah those are my kind but George Lucas is also he's another one of these guys who sort of know one for for the Star Wars movies the the heroes
Journey idea right where like Apocalypse Now it's almost like sort of a darker Twist on the hero's journey of of Willard and and confronting uh the the Shadow and and you know that that movie was a sort of hero's journey too but it was just a much Grimmer R Willard is not you know he's not quite the same kind of
sympathetic protagonist as like a Luke Skywalker type no exactly but yeah that's yeah that's how interesting that would have been a very different kind of movie actually hold on there's one more thing I'll mention about uh what you're saying uh Rob about the film about the journey so uh you mentioned earlier that
there is a director's cut 3 hours and 30 minutes version so the the mo the famous scene that was cut from it was a film a scene at a a French Plantation it's in the documentary yes it is so this is super this is super interesting because uh the the the French were colonized Vietnam obviously or French Indochina as
it was called Los Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1860s they ultimately left uh in 1954 after DM Ben Fu the famous battle uh Viet I listen I get PR my country people like they did some crazy [ __ ] back then they were walking artillery all the way up these mountains like surrounding this French uh this French
army but anyways the point being uh he described that scene I found fascinating is that so they cut that scene out from the original but if you actually watch that movie he's like it's actually going America going back in time so you'll see the French colony and then by the time get the Curts it's like tribal like pre-
Civilization yeah so like it's like uh so the history of Vietnam between between 1945 and 1975 Vietnam beat uh three world four actually no called three if you go to 79 it's four World superpowers basically so they took out the Japanese I mean I'm saying this it's took out like they got J Japan out of Vietnam Imperial Japan
then they beat uh they got France to leave and then America obviously left and then 1979 the last land War China's ever had was 1979 they sent 200,000 troops uh down uh across the Hanoi so the northern Vietnamese border and then that was basically I mean they took a pretty big punch in the nose and they
haven't done a land War since but the tldr is like the going through the river was like basically going back in time so interesting so I I love that and and like uh uh I was talking to a young person who uh had hadn't seen the movie hadn't read any of the books and he's like hey can you just like th it all up
for me and I'm like well no I I really can't he goes come on and I went okay here's here's my summation do not [ __ ] with the Vietnamese yeah colonel kurs was right remember that so so in in Colonel cts's speech near the end where he says like the the genius to do like basically these people are willing to do anything
to win and if I had 10 what is if I had 10 battalions of men like that this war would be over tomorrow and he this is sort of like why he decided to jump ship he was like you know like the they're better than us basically they ofn and the defense like they had everything going for right like there's
a famous line from hoi Min which is famous for all the wrong reasons he's like I'm willing to lose 10 of my people for one of yours right that's like if you stay here that's what's going to happen and uh and I guess more Infamous is a right line but to your point I guess C recognized like this is unwinable yeah all right guys as as
usual these could what what what are like the longest podcast how long do they go this could be one of those we could have gone Lex Freedman D bage eight hours four hour marathon oh all right all right so uh the the next time up I I I maybe want to do a mashup because I just rewatched madm Rob oh yeah uh and like and all I'm
doing is quoting you to my wife because she's like who who is this guy and I'm like you know oh okay uh but I'd I'd love to do about one like where we mash up all of these uh but I also Trung is right yeah we've got to get you to read the Rick Ruben I love I would love and and and and maybe we'll make that our
our last one so you know you know the drill guyses you you get to be Emperors of the world yet again you get two new inceptions uh trun I'm going to start with you remember you can't kill anybody you can't put them in re-education camps but you can whisper into the magic microphone and you will incept two
things of the world's population they're all going to wake up and think I just had the two best ideas in the world and I'm going to act against both of those what are you gonna what are you gonna accept the world's you know I was really gonna say that I was gonna say you should watch Apocalypse Now than a Heart
of Darkness but that's a bit of a call so I'll say this I'll say you should read I should you abely should internalize read Rick Ruben's creative act I think uh I think having and just talking to you guys having someone uh specifically when Jim said there's no science around this idea that we're vessels for creativity it sounds all
sounds like woo woo but like when a guy like G Ruben with his track record which like he did Beasty Boys he did Johnny Cash he did Jay-Z Eminem Like Nine Inch Nails you you name it across the entire Spectrum right if this guy is saying this is the way I'm not saying this is like the wor word and you have to follow
everything I'm saying if he's saying that this is what he believes I'm like there's something there's a there there this might be even better than science so uh I would say internalize the idea that uh we are creative vessels and uh I think the more time we can spend at being creative vessels and and bringing
something which is whether new or recombinate something old to the world it'll make it World richer Place love it ah I have to follow that oh man you do rob you do yeah I had to I mean okay so so my idea yeah it's sort of similar which is which is you reiterating something I said earlier which is um to understand that uh that
you shouldn't wait for creativity to strike you you just have to show up and and do the work and through the process right this is I think this was one of the takeaways from jeed McKenna's essay is like through the process that creative force will come out through through you know doing doing the work
you you you're not an artist yet until you start doing the work um you don't get to decide oh I'll be an artist now and then do it um it doesn't work that way so sort of I would like developing or strengthening that understanding that discipline would be one uh it would definitely would have been useful for me
uh when I was you know when I was for sort of first starting out in writing and then the second speaking of writing is just just to sign up for my substack I'll incept everyone to just keep it's a it's a fantastic fantastic substack it is I need more people to Market my book to later thank yeah that's right well I
will certainly have you on to talk about your book uh cuz you know I read it I think it's great um and uh it's tough book but it's it's it uh is really really good so I will yeah I will I will be your show Rob uh for for that particular book all right guys always have so much fun with you guys thank you for taking time out of your day