#2532 - Tim Robbins

Tim Robbins and Joe Rogan covered a wide range of topics across film, politics, health, and philosophy, with Robbins drawing on his career and personal life to make broader arguments about conformity, creative risk, and the cost of dissent.

On Shawshank Redemption, Robbins explained that the film underperformed theatrically in 1994 against Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, and Ace Ventura despite seven Oscar nominations. Ted Turner sold the TV rights to his own channel at the lowest possible cost and aired it repeatedly, which drove home video sales and built the audience that has kept it ranked number one on IMDb for roughly 15 years. Robbins argues a film like it could not get made today because studios have abandoned adult-oriented drama in favor of multi-platform action formats aimed at teenagers. Independent filmmakers are asking for 4 to 5 million dollars per film with total costs around 14 million including advertising, and studios will not take the risk, while Marvel films costing 150 to 200 million dollars get greenlit as near-certain returns.

Robbins credits his career longevity partly to saying no at financially difficult moments. He turned down a million-dollar comedy called Folks when he had his first child and needed money, waited for Robert Altman's The Player, and credits that film with shifting his entire career. He was later offered the role of head of FIFA in a film produced by FIFA to portray itself favorably, and the role of head of a Chilean mining company in a film that portrayed the company favorably despite a major disaster, and declined both on moral grounds, calling them oligarchical cinema. He acknowledged he had the luxury to refuse and that many people do not.

Robbins was one of roughly five famous people who publicly opposed the Iraq War before it began. His scheduled Baseball Hall of Fame appearance for a Bull Durham anniversary was canceled because of his anti-war stance. He wrote and performed a play called Embedded three weeks after Bush's Mission Accomplished appearance in 2003, and a publication he believes was The New Republic called him a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite while the play was still in previews. Rogan noted it is now universally accepted that there were no weapons of mass destruction, while Robbins observed that media figures who got the war wrong received promotions rather than consequences. He drew a parallel to current coverage of Gaza, noting Roger Waters faced significant backlash for describing events there as genocide in real time, and that Susan Sarandon lost her agent after speaking out about Israel.

On COVID, Robbins described the period as mass formation psychosis and said ordinary people did enforcement work on behalf of government and pharmaceutical companies because they wanted to feel correct and virtuous. He noted researchers from MIT and Harvard were removed from Twitter for arguing lockdowns were bad for children. His nonprofit theater program in Los Angeles observed children entering classes after lockdown who would not make eye contact and appeared desocialized and traumatized. His theater refused to check vaccine passports and waited an additional six months after being permitted to reopen so all people regardless of vaccination status could attend. He argued Broadway effectively told roughly a third of its audience they were not welcome, while London's West End rebounded immediately because it accepted either a vaccine passport or a negative test. He noted vaccine uptake in Romania was approximately 40 percent, and that Eastern Europeans who lived under Soviet rule compared cancel culture to Soviet practices of publicly destroying dissidents to deter others.

Robbins has been running a prison theater program for approximately 20 years, now operating in 18 California prisons. The program uses Commedia dell'arte stock characters and improv to help prisoners access emotions beyond anger, which he describes as the dominant survival emotion in prison. It deliberately places rival gang members together to build bonds across gang and racial lines. He is also editing a documentary about four World War II soldiers who became great writers, featuring Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Howard Zinn, filmed years ago and now in final completion, to be released through a new website launching September 1st.

Robbins described a DMT experience in which his deceased mother appeared and told him he was an injured warrior who needed rest but that the fight was not over. He argues that whether such an experience is a hallucination or genuine contact with another plane is irrelevant because the tangible effect on perspective is identical either way. He recounted his grandfather, dead for two months, appearing in a dream saying do not worry, I will take care of it, followed fifteen minutes later by a call that his six-year-old son had run into Seventh Avenue and narrowly avoided being struck by cars. He believes his grandfather's energy intervened. He connects human electromagnetic connection to a cardiologist's argument that the heart communicates through an electromagnetic field and contains more neurons than parts of the brain, and argues this is why isolation causes serious harm and why the COVID lockdowns were particularly cruel for people already struggling with anxiety or social difficulties.