Mark Marin (5:47)
It sort of. He speaks in the same world that I speak in about this stuff, but he's much more thorough and a true free thinker. So I would do that if I were you. As for me, I'm starting to have some realizations about the monster we carry with us at all times, that being the phone. And I don't think there's anything trivial or trite or not necessary to talk about the impact of the constant pummeling that we put our brains through with information. And I've talked about this many times before, but I'm starting. I've sort of been hung up on this idea that our sense of time, or at least mine kind of has changed since COVID And outside of ptsd, being that that was a three year period where. Where there was true terror in the minds of most of us about a disease and how to handle it. But there's something else that I started to realize about the nature of time in. In relation to it feels like it's moving fast or it's not kind of connected to days anymore, that everything just becomes one long sort of experience that happens at different paces. But as I've been saying lately that I don't generally feel time flies by, but I do all of a sudden realize I'm 61 years old and I'm going to be 62. And I started to think more about the impact of COVID but I realized it's the impact of zoom and it's the impact of our phones and the impact jamming our brain with information technology of one kind or another, either for distraction or a need for connection or a need for information. And the way time works on your phone is much different than the way time works in life or when you're disconnected from all your devices. It's a completely different time zone. I think it's many different time zones, but I think our brain processes that in a different way. People talking in videos on TikTok or on Instagram or on YouTube. Having done radio in my life and knowing the type of mania one has to kind of get themselves into to drive a show of any kind to broadcast on microphones, even this one, to sort of move through it without pausing too much, unless you're doing it for dramatic effect, takes a slightly heightened way of engagement. And I would say that's definitely in the mania spectrum, that there is an intensity of tone of the way you kind of talk, the speed you talk, the intensity of the talk. I do feel it's a heightened type of engagement. And it's not necessarily that spontaneous. It's usually driving at something I know I am right now and I know that my tone right now is different than how I might be be when I talk to somebody else or I think. So if you're kind of engaging with the phone all the time, with any number of hundreds of reels or bits and pieces of what they call content coming at you, it's going to be at this heightened tone and your brain's going to receive it like that. So I think that in itself is sort of an exhausting thing and it doesn't happen in real time, but just on a practical level in terms of time getting away from me or maybe you, I don't know if they still have that thing on the phone which, how much screen time you spend there, but you might not know that it's hours a day and that's hours a day. That is not moving at the pace of life. It's moving at the pace that your brain is taking in all this heightened pounding that you're putting it through, you know, shifting time zones, you know, every minute, every 30 seconds, you know, your brain just kind of locks into whatever the tone of whatever is happening and it's completely inhuman. And I do think on some level it's eating our time. Is that possible? Does that seem like a logical interpretation? This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. 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Yeah, I have to make some conscious decisions. I'm going to have time. I'm excited to have the time. But I'm really. I think I've said this before, but the years ago, Dennis Miller at the beginning of the Internet, said something that I never forget. There are certain things that stick in your head that he said that the Internet is going to make crack look like Sanka. And that didn't really make sense until now, until the idea of detaching from the phone in a very real way becomes something that I'm going to have to figure out how to do that, because you do look to it for news, for distraction, for emotional engagement, for validation, whatever it is. And it's a powerful drug, probably the most powerful one existing today. I will stand by that 100%, because everyone is on it. Some people don't know that their life has become unmanageable because of it. Certainly the people that are feeding it every day, because that's their job, but the detachment from it, I don't know. It's going to be something I'm thinking about because I think I need to engage in real time again. And my real time is. Is not without excitement. As you know, I. I have an ongoing cat issue with Charlie, Beans, Roscoe. And where we're at with that right now, I can tell you, is that after engaging with the vet, you know, he was on the Prozac for two and a half weeks, and it fucked him up. It made him different. And I was waiting to wait it out, but it did not deal. Like, it totally had an effect on him, but it did not affect his aggression towards the other cat, Buster. So I kept talking to the vet and telling her this, and, you know, I was willing to wait, but it really just wasn't. It was definitely doing something. He was a different cat, and I didn't love it, but it was not doing anything about the aggression. And I kept telling her about that, and I decided. We decided to take him off it. And also, you know, alongside of that, we put Buster on the same drug I'm on. So me and Buster are both on Buspirone, and we'll see how that goes for both of us. And Charlie is now just readjusting to his insanity, but on top of that, I'm trying to do something. I do not want to have to give this cat away because I do love this cat. And. And Jackson Galaxy, who I talked to here, has been in touch with me and he thinks he can solve it. So the approach now is with the vet and with Jackson, and I've engaged another cat behavioralist is to. Is to separate them at different times during the day, to switch them out so that they each have time in the bigger part of the house where they can both feel like kings. So that's the project now, is getting Charlie off the Prozac, putting Buster on the Buspirone, and. And switching them out during the day so they can both feel like they've got ownership of the house and me, I guess. And the hilarious thing is Sam, the stupid Sam, who is probably turning out to be the best cat I have, is in the middle of all this and he still minds his own fucking business. He operates at his own pace, and he's become more connected to me in the midst of all this separating the two alpha idiots, you know, at different intervals, he's kind of locked into me a little more. So that's a benefit. So this is the life of real time. And, you know, I can project and engage and be just as distracted and worked up as I am if I'm on my phone flipping through garbage and also just sitting on the porch. There's something about real life time that I think we gotta get used to. Again, it's not that compelling sometimes when you're just alone, it's not. Doesn't fill the hole, per se. But maybe it's okay to live in the hole for a little while, don't you think? I think so. Hey, with school starting again and schedules filling fast, preparing dinner for the family can feel overwhelming. 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And you must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. I want to thank all the people who came out last night to the American Cinema tech screening of McCabe and Mrs. Miller at the Arrow Theater, which I hosted and did a short intro. As many of you know, I've been obsessed with that movie since I was a teenager because it was really the first movie that made me realize, holy shit, there's a lot going on in these movies. And the naturalism and the lighting and the Leonard Cohen music and the Vilmos Zygmund cinematography and Altman's direction and all the great acting. It's a naturalism that you don't see in films anymore. And it's a period piece, and there's a lot of themes going on there. I think at the core, it's probably about a guy just going through the difficulties of starting a small business and he's up against corporate interests. But it is a revisionist Western, and there's such an intimacy to it. And there's such an interesting take on gender roles and on the myth of the west and individualism. And I would say that McCabe is most definitely a tragic comic figure. And I'm obsessed with his jacket and his hat for different reasons. I think they imply something. The hat is a bowler hat, which to me in film signifies Charlie Chaplin. And the coat is this massive bearskin coat. So he's sort of a clown in bear's clothing, a tragic clown. But I can watch that movie anytime. And the print was just spectacular. Thank you, American Cinema Tech, for having me. So look, Jeremy Allen White is an actor. He's very popular right now. He's kind of hard to read, I think, and you can kind of project onto who he is with the different roles he plays. He's nominated at the Emmys this year for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy series for the Bear. The Bruce Springsteen film Deliver Me From Nowhere, which I am in as well, opens in October, but it makes its world premiere this weekend at Telluride Film Festival. And this is me talking to Jeremy Allen White.
