Upgrading Our Collective Consciousness – Matthew Modine

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that magnetic coils could break down microplastic pollution. It turns out that our water treatment plants aren't set up to filter out microplastics. These are those little exfoliating beads that you shouldn't be buying. Or flakes that get broken off. Larger pieces of plastic like water bottles, shoes, tires, things like that. And those particles take decades to break down. But there are some new nanomaterials that produce plastic degrading chemicals that can break it down way more quickly. In fact, those nanomaterials cleaned water of about half their microplastic in hours. And this is based on research out of Australia in order for us to practice biohacking, which is you change the environment around you and inside of you to have full control of your own biology. Water is a major part of the environment around you, but inside of you, it's around 70% of you. So having some clean water, because you are, after all, a bag of mostly water, you might want to get on top of that. This water purification method uses nitrogen coated carbon nanotubes. And when they mix them with a certain compound containing sulfate, they generate reactive oxygen species, which just crumble microplastics into their basic chemicals. And if the water's warm, it works better. And then manganese is embedded in each nanotube and it makes a magnetic, which means you can just fish them out of the water when you're done with them. That is awesome and amazing and interesting to me, and I hope it is to you too. Because if you ever find yourself feeling like, you know what, we've got too much pollution, we've got too much garbage, there's no hope. It turns out there's a lot of cool tech, like way more than you could possibly imagine coming online to solve these problems. And a huge number of people really motivated to help fix those problems. So I'm more helpful than I've ever been about our ability to take control of the environment around us and to help it do what it's supposed to do naturally. Today's guest almost doesn't need an introduction. He's really well known from his acting roles in tv, film, theater. He's a film producer, director, screenwriter for nearly four decades. In fact, he was called one of the best, most adaptable film actors of his generation by legendary New York Times film critic Vincent Canby. He's worked with Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, and a long list of the most famous directors, including guys like Spike Lee. You might have seen him in Full Metal Jacket, most recently in Stranger Things. I'm talking about none other than Matthew Modine, who actually turned down the role of Maverick in Top Gun because I didn't think it was the right movie for him to be in. He's kind of well known for doing that. What you might not know about Matthew Modine, though, is that he's a tireless activist and environmentalist. And in the interview today, we're going to talk about consciousness, his own evolution of consciousness. We're going to talk about what's happening in Hollywood around men and women. We're going to talk about Plastic and the Ocean, which is a major thing that he's doing, and his own path of consciousness and spirituality and how that is relevant to you. This is a fantastic interview and a chance to talk to one of the more influential people in Hollywood about what's worked, what hasn't worked. You'll get to go behind the scenes, know what goes on inside his mind when he's acting and all the weird stuff you never thought would happen in a sex scene in a movie. But he's going to tell you, I appreciate you coming on the show today, Matthew. It's an honor to have you on, and it's an honor that you come to upgrade labs and all that stuff. And so I'm not here to plug any of that stuff. I wanted to talk about what you're doing with microplastics and plastic and just general consciousness and sort of your evolution as a human being is what I'd like to share with guests. Is there something you want me to highlight in particular that will help in one of the charitable things you're working on? At the end of the show, I'm like, hey, you've probably heard of Matthew Modine, but where would you go to learn more about.

Well, I'm not raising any money for any charity. There is an organization that we set up called do1do1.org and the idea behind that was, you know, my father was a drive in theater manager and I'm the youngest of seven. And so you work your way up the ladder. So the worst job that we all had was cleaning the bathrooms, picking up garbage at the drive in that people threw out the windows of their cars. So I began there. And then as you work up the ladder, you become a lot boy, or you work in the snack bar, you know, a less dirty job. But one night in my dad's drive in the ladies Room toilets were overflowing. Somebody had flushed something down the toilet, caused them to back up. And there was. There was horror all over the floor and it was about an inch deep. And I had the bucket and mop and I was staring at it. I didn't know where to begin to begin cleaning this mess up. And my father came up from behind me, put his hand on my shoulder and he said, I know it's horrible. He said, you can get angry about it, you can go try to find the person responsible for it, but it's not going to clean it up. And I don't know if I was conscious of it at the time, but I knew that there was a great metaphor in what my father had told me, is that when there's a mess, we all have a responsibility to do something to clean it up. So as we were children, we kept moving from drive in to drive in to drive in. And I thought my father was this kind of rehabilitator of drive ins because we'd always fix the drive ins up and then we'd move. But what I learned was that we were moving because they were tearing the drive ins down. That the land was worth more than the drive in. And it wasn't just the drive ins that disappeared. It was what surrounded the drive ins. Because drive ins were always out, away from where people lived, away from subdivisions and industry. So it would be quiet and dark. So we were. When I was born in California, we were surrounded by cherry trees and watermelons and cantaloupes and tomato fields. And when we moved to Utah, it was a lot of fruit trees, apricots and apples and pears. And when you'd walk to school in the morning and in those fall days, all the smell of rotting fruit, it was so sensuous. And in the springtime, the blossoms that came from those trees. And when I went back to visit a friend and discovered that the drive in that my father had rehabilitated had been torn down, and not just the drive in, but all of the orchards that surrounded it, I began to. And it was. It was coincidentally around the time of that song that paved paradise and put up a parking lot that this became a reality in my life that we were losing. We were losing nature and we were losing our connection to the earth. And that's when my journey of consciousness began that I started wondering what consciousness was that Those trees that were torn down and the earth that was covered up with blacktop, did the earth have a consciousness? Did those trees have a consciousness? Was it a coincidence? That a tree looks like a trachea and lungs when you turn it upside down? That exchange of gases between a plant and a human, is that a spiritual and sacred thing? That my exhalation is a tree's inhalation and the plants inhalation or its exhalation provides me with the oxygen to breathe and it sequesters carbon. That you begin to understand that this chain of life, the intimacy of relationships between all of the species of the planets has a kind of consciousness, a collective consciousness. And I've spent, you know, 30 years trying to understand it. And when I was at the convention that you had in Los Angeles and listening to all the incredible speakers that you brought to share information with all of us, it was this kind of consciousness, although it wasn't mentioned by the name of consciousness, was a collective consciousness that existed in that amazing seminar in Los Angeles.

There's something you mentioned there around a spiritual thing. And a lot of times when you get into academia, you get into neuroscience, or you get into any of the, heck, real estate development sort of thing, it seems like there is a question of is there such a thing as spiritual? And if so, how do you define it? You spent 30 years looking at this. How do you draw the line between what is spiritual versus what is not spiritual?

Well, none of us know where we, we came from, and we don't really have any idea where we go when, at the end of the day, when, when. When our lives come to an end. I received what I believe is great spiritual counsel from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius through his book Meditations. Marcus Aurelius was a stoic, and.

He.

Talked about a leaf on a tree that in the spring the bud pushes forth and a leaf is born. And in the fall, the leaf falls off and falls to the earth, decomposes and becomes something that nurtures the trees that will come in the following spring. And that he questions that. Are our lives any more significant than that leaf on a tree? Is our consciousness different? As I said before, does that leaf have a consciousness? But spirituality, I don't know what it is. I think that spirituality is a kind of connectedness to all of the life that exists on the planet. The primitive cultures that were pagans that worshiped the earth, and the animals that they surrounded themselves that surrounded them, and whose lives they would take. Whenever the life of an animal that they killed in order to nurture their bodies, there was always a kind of respect and ceremony that was an acknowledgement of taking that life in order for you to have life. I Believe it was Tolstory who said, as long as there are abattoirs, slaughterhouses, places where people do the killing for you, there'll be wars because we lose that. Let's call it a spiritual connection to those animals that we're eating. It becomes something that we're just consuming. Rather than acknowledging that you took that egg from. From a. From a chicken, that. Whose intention was to bring forth a life. And. And we've taken that life and consumed that life. And we. We have to acknowledge and respect the life of the animals that we take in order for us to. To have our life. Even when you watch a lion who takes down another animal, there seems to.

Be.

The acknowledgment of surrender by the animal. The deer, the antelope that's dying, and the mountain lion or the lion or the cougar that's taking that life. There seems to be a respect in that moment of death.

Yeah, you can tell the predator knows what it's doing, but it isn't done with hate or anger or anything like that. It's just that I share what you're saying there. It's one of the reasons that I live on a small organic farm. We have eight pigs and 10 sheep right now. And we had a conversation with my two kids yesterday about which of the sheep we're going to eat. They're not at all traumatized by. They know, like, they feed the sheep every day. And they also are saying, well, we should keep that sheep because that sheep has a really good personality and really good wool, and we should breed that sheep. And these other sheeps, those sheep are. They're standoffish. They're kind of jerks. So let's eat those ones. But there's no hate or badness. And it's actually just. It sounds a little bit dark. Say it tastes better if you honored the animal and you actually fed it and you actually took care of it, and you know that it had a good life, you know, that even had a good death. And I go to those links in everything that I do, to the extent that I know how to do it. And I don't think that it's respectful of my own biology to say, oh, I'm never eating an animal again, because that whole cycle of life, if the sheep don't poop on the ground, I can't grow good vegetables to eat.

Right.

I don't think you can break that cycle effectively. Do you worry about that? I know you've done enormous things environmentally, particularly around plastics and all that stuff. But I mean, have you decided to become a vegan or a vegetarian or something like that because of those principles?

Well, I live with a vegan. My wife is about, I don't know, more than 25 years vegan, before that.

Vegetarian. She did it for health reasons. She discovered that there were certain things, things that when she ate she'd have a reaction in her body. And so through the process of elimination, she found a diet that worked for her, good for her. I don't think that the diet necessarily works for everybody, but it works for her. And because she doesn't want me to cook animals in the house, let alone an egg in the house, I have to honor her. So when I get hungry, I go to bulletproof coffee and get something nutritious for my body. And it's more importantly not to just plug the. I guess we can call it a restaurant.

Yeah, it's a cafe. Yeah, the Bull Cafe. In Santa Monica, right?

Yeah, in Santa Monica. But it's, you know that the food that you're eating is organic and that the animals have eaten food that they're supposed to be eating and not full of antibiotics. And, you know, they're grass fed animals and they're hopefully living wonderful lives before they go to slaughter.

I do my best in the coffee shop, but it's interesting. A lot of the small family farmers, the ranchers, my original vision there was, hey, every month I'm going to feature beef or lamb from a small local farm. And maybe it's only one or two animals, but it's going to be an extra three bucks. But you can get the, the steak from, from somewhere special, sort of like you'd have wine. But then you find out that unless they're slaughtered in USDA certified things, restaurants aren't allowed to serve them even if you can buy them at home. So I was blocked by regulations from doing that, which was sad because a rancher who's connected to the animals will actually say, you know what, I don't want to go to an industrial slaughterhouse for my precious animals because they don't treat the animals well. So they'll go to a local butcher who gives the animal a good death and butchers the animal in an appropriate, proper way. But then they can't sell it at a restaurant and that stymied me. How do you solve this problem? Unfortunately, there are some good commercial grade, they'll mail beef to you and things like that. But even some of that you can buy, but you can't serve in a restaurant. But that said, everything Is grass fed organic to the very highest standards that I can legally do. But isn't it surprising that we have a regulatory system that prevents good stuff?

Yeah, it's kind of shocking.

I mean, does that mean that if.

I went out and caught a fish that I couldn't bring it in and.

Serve it in the restaurant?

If I went up to Alaska and caught some salmon and brought them in.

And said, hey, here you go, you.

If you caught it and you ran the restaurant, you could. But the restaurant probably couldn't buy salmon from someone who caught the salmon unless they had a commercial fishing license and unless the salmon was packed in a USDA certified facility.

Wow, that's kind of crazy.

That's crazy.

It is crazy. And I could see the FDA has done a great job of increasing food safety. Unfortunately, it also increases food waste beyond belief.

Yeah.

So you asked me about plastic When I was in college, I was studying astronomy and oceanography, and astronomy was going to crush me because of the math. And emotionally I couldn't handle it because the vastness of the universe was too great. You know, we'd hear as children that there are more grains of sand on the earth than there are, or there's more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on the beach. And anybody who's ever sat on a beach, you just think that's impossible. That look at all the grains of sand that it couldn't be. And the Hubble Space Telescope has shown us that. The possibilities real. It's just so big. I sat at my great grandmother's knee who crossed the United States. She was born in 1890 and she'd crossed the country in a wagon. So I was sitting at her knee in 1969 when we landed on the moon. And she talked to me about all the things that she'd seen in her life, you know, with television and radio and the First World War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, commercial air flight, television, you know, it was just extraordinary. She said, and here I sit watching man go where humans had never gone before, walking on the surface of the moon. And that look back, I think they call it earthrise. The really famous photograph. It was one of those things that altered my consciousness again was the fragility of our planet. And what you saw when you looked from the moon at the Earth was that there was really only one ocean, that we're the ones that divided it up into different things. But the circulatory system of the ocean, it's like our bodies, it's flowing and there are five gyres in the ocean where the ocean mixes and meets each other. And maybe information is shared and mixed together, but one of those things that's mixed together in those gyres is plastic. Yeah, plastic. We now live in what we call the anthropomorph. Anthropomorphic. I don't know how to say that word. It's the period of human beings. So to have an epoch named after you or something, an event like the meteorite hitting the earth and wiping out the dinosaurs, that for something to receive a name, it has to have an impact of something like a million years. That in a million years time there will be plastics and ceramics and concrete. If, you know, if we're no longer here, that will be our footprint that we left upon the earth. And the plastics that, you know, we use 500 million straws a day in the United States. And I commend you, and I congratulate you for removing them from the. The bulletproof coffee cup shops.

You did that, Matthew, because I insisted when we opened everything be biodegradable. So all of the plastic cups and all that stuff, they're all corn based. And by the way, I am opposed to corn agriculture. It's just the best I could do. At least they were biodegradable. And then you came along at upgrade labs there when we met, and you're like, hey, Dave, you still have plastic straws? I'm like, they're biodegradable. And you're like, yeah, but they take 30 years, buddy. You could do better. So we replaced them with paper. But it was seriously, because you told me to do it and I hadn't thought of it, so.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Should have been. Should have been paper the whole time.

So as you start to study this problem of plastics that when we see all the bottles on the beach and stuff, that. That is a problem. That is a great gigantic problem. But the greater problem is the decomposing of those plastics. So as they stay out in the sea in all kinds of different plastic that's been dumped in the ocean for decades now, the sun and the salt water start to degrade the plastic and it comes apart, but it doesn't disappear. It just becomes smaller and smaller and becomes what we call microplastics. And in those gyres that you've heard about, the great Pacific Garbage Patch out in the Pacific Ocean that's up toward Alaska and off the coast of Canada, there's one of those gyres where the ocean is spinning like an eddy in A stream. And it sorts out the plastic. And on different parts of the shores, different kinds of plastics appear on the, on the. It sorts it. You know, it sorts it out. But where did the. Besides breaking down, where are these microplastics coming from? A large part of it is synthetic clothing. It's shoes made out of plastic that as we walk, our shoes wear out. We don't think, we're not conscious of the fact that the shoes wear out and become microplastics. They become dust, like tires going down the road. The millions and millions and millions of cars around the world, as their tires wear down, it becomes a dust. And if you go out, especially in Los Angeles, and wipe the surface of anything on any busy street, you'll see your hands covered in black dust. That's mostly, mostly tires. It's mostly tire dust. And that ends up in the ocean when it rains. It goes down in the gutters, it goes down in the streams and ends up in our oceans. And the bad thing about plastics, the really bad thing about plastics is they mimic estrogen. And so what we're starting to see from the. As the food chain goes up, the microorganisms that are eating the plastic that can mistakenly consume it for something that they think is food. And then it goes up the food chain that we're starting to see fish that are hermaphrodites, that there's more and more female fish and less and less male fish. And the. I don't have to paint a picture of what that, that future of the ocean could look like because of these microplastics.

A recent study, too, just found a very strong association between high levels of estrogen in the first trimester and autism. So it's affecting human brains as well. I wanted to go deep with you on ocean plastic. I've been thinking about this. Last year I helped to fund one of the X prizes that they're creating around carbon capture to pull carbon out of the air and do something useful with it. One of the things might actually be to make building blocks or something like that. But I've been thinking about this ocean plastic thing, and you look at harm minimization, and I'm a hacker engineering guy, it seems to me that I would rather burn plastic and then capture the toxic fumes because we can scrub smoke really effectively. Sweden figured out how to do that in car, in coal plants a long time ago. So what if you just had a barge out there in the middle of the gyre, just picking up the plastic, burning it, maybe generating some extra Electricity if you really wanted to. But who needs electricity in the middle of the ocean? Literally just dumping the heat into the ocean because the micro particles won't form if you just burn it all. And yes, you'll get carbon in the air. If you wanted to, you could use all that electricity to capture the carbon. But regardless, wouldn't just burned plastic be less bad for the environment than unburned plastic floating in the ocean?

It's an interesting question. The cold water in the ocean creates a layer that sequesters carbon on the bottom of the ocean. As the oceans heat up, that carbon could be released and make the air.

Unbreathable if we heated up the ocean that much. But burning all the plastic in the ocean wouldn't change its temperature in a meaningful way.

I don't know. It's a scary thing, playing God.

It is. But I mean, we're doing it anyway. It's sort of like if you're going to eat something, like your wife, she figured out, I don't eat this because it makes me feel bad. And I certainly have foods where I know if I eat that, my joints hurt, so I don't eat that. And it's an idea.

I think the better solution is trying to figure out ways to make shoes or tires out of a different material. How difficult would that be?

Oh, the long term solution, no doubt. We've got to change how we manufacture stuff. The thing is, we got to clean up the mess we already made because I'm planning to be here for at least another 150or so years, so I don't want to wallow in that stuff. So step one, right away, start figuring out the tech to replace things that aren't sustainable. And step two, clean up the garbage. And maybe someday I'll be in an economic position to just fund the barge with smoke cleanup stuff and just go out there and instead of trying to haul it back to the land to recycle it. And guess what? Newsflash, Most places don't recycle plastic. You separate it out and you feel like a good person. You wash it. All you're doing is wasting water because they throw it in the dump anyway, right? Like, what do we do? I'm stymied with where we are now.

It's bad. I just worked in Mississippi and they had no recycling facilities at all. Coming from New York or Los Angeles, where there's an effort. And as you say that the efforts that we make are often futile because they will separate the garbage in New York City and the garbage may Come and it all goes in the back of the same truck. And it was just, it was just all a waste of time. But in Mississippi, there was not even an effort to recycle anything.

I don't know what they do with.

It, if they just take it out and bury it or if they're burning the garbage. You know, burning, as you say, it's wonderful to know. I never thought that you could safely burn plastic and scrub it and keep those, I guess, the dioxins, right, that burning plastic from entering into the atmosphere. If there's a way to prevent that happening, that could be a good solution. But I thought it was so wonderful when, you know, big clothing manufacturers, like, not North Face, but, you know, they were Patagonia, they were making clothing out of recycled plastic bottles. How terrific that they. But again, those plastic clothing materials and yoga pants and things with synthetic fabrics, when, when they wash, they degrade and they create another kind of microplastic. So. So finding a solution to the garment. I mean, the garment industry is probably the second greatest polluter on the planet. A pair of blue jeans, I heard. I mean, it's an extraordinary, frightening number. I think it's like 16,500 gallons of waters or more go into the manufacturing. From growing the cotton to making the pair of jeans is consumed in a pair of denim pants. That's unacceptable.

And those are cotton denim pants, right?

Yes.

At least it's biodegradable. I'm not perfect from a clothing perspective by a long shot, but if I can get wool. Wool is awesome because it doesn't get body odor and it will not make micro particles in the ocean. It's fully biodegradable. And if you fed the sheep. Right. It's actually building soil as it's growing wool. And soil is the greatest carbon capture technology we have.

Absolutely.

That said, it's not exactly vegan. Then again, I'm not vegan either, so I'm okay with that. You got wool, you got cotton and you've got hemp. And hemp is clearly the most efficacious way to make clothes. So hopefully as we move forward, we'll have, you know, more clothing made out of those things. But when it comes to the good old fashioned what are we going to drink out of thing, do you have any thoughts about what's the best thing other than obviously having filtered water available with good filters, which has never happened in most places. What are your thoughts? What do you do when you want to get a bottle of something?

Yeah, that's. I mean, you know, what would be the solution? The greatest, the greatest solution is to make the water supply safe. And like in Los Angeles, they say when you drink water from the tap, you're getting hormones, you're getting from, you know, birth control. Birth control. You know, the drugs that people that are, that are taking drugs and when they urine, the urinate, it gets into the. They're not able to filter these things really successfully out of the public utility water. So I have here in Los Angeles, I have a whole house water filtration system to remove as much of the crap as I can. Lucky me that I'm able to afford something like that. But how unfortunate that. That the citizens of Los Angeles are drinking water that's compromised, that has too much chlorine in it. And we know what the effects of drinking, consuming and bathing in chlorine is.

So wouldn't it be.

The biggest, best solution would be to eliminate bottled water altogether because the water that comes out of the tap is actually safe and not full of chemicals and drugs.

Yeah, I would love that day. It's really irritating to me because you go to a restaurant and say, oh, our water is filtered. And then you drink it. Well, if by filtered you mean you did something so it smells a little bit less like chlorine, but it still is chlorine. So you can check the box that says filtered. But we put pretty extensive filtration stuff in the bulletproof coffee shop because you can't make good coffee without properly filtered water. And it has to actually be drinkable water. So you go to a restaurant and you say, I want a glass of water. If they say filtered, even if they bring it in a fancy bottle, it doesn't smell filtered and it's not filtered. And they didn't get the hormones and drugs. But if you go to a restaurant that has a $5,000 filtering system and the water is totally drinkable, there's no way for you to know you're stuck with. It's kind of a Russian roulette thing where I don't know what I'm getting or I'm going to order a bottle of some, you know, some kind of water, because I know that's filtered. Hopefully a glass bottle is even ideal there. But we have to fix that. So you can say filtered with levels one through five.

Yeah.

So if you're going to provide water, at least we have some standards. And all of this stuff is so much work to do. And there's no real big profitable industry that's going to fund that. And that's that's one of those conscious things. I think a lot of the consciousness that we're dealing with is. It's an emergent behavior where it appears that there's this grand intelligence. But what happens is you follow these small rules, infinite numbers of times, and these complex things happen. It's like, how do we build our system so that we would naturally have proper filtration in restaurants? So you could just go to anywhere you want and just, oh, I know the water's clean. That's the big challenge. How do we change our environment that way? Have you thought about that in your quest for consciousness over the last 30 years?

Yes.

It's unconscionable and it's unsustainable to think that it makes sense to bring water from France to the United States or.

Bubble mountain water from any place and ship it thousands of miles. When you think of the carbon footprint.

Oh, it's stupid, it's insane.

But so maybe there's a way. I don't know how many million people in Los Angeles, if all of them, and they spend $20 a month, $30 a month purchasing filtered water that they feel is safe. If you could say, rather than doing purchasing that water, I'm going to contribute my $30, so $3,600 or 360. What is it a year?

If it was $30 a year times 12, that. 360, yeah.

360. $360 a year to the Department of Water to put in a proper water filtration system that guarantees that I'm going to be drinking water that's as good as artisanal water that's coming from Northern California or from some artesian well in some other country that I would pay that. And I would pay $360 for somebody who couldn't afford it, you know, I would contribute on their behalf. And if a million people did that, I think that in a city of, I don't know, tens of millions of people, you can see that that would be a very successful system.

I would love to see more landlords. So many people now in LA and other places are moving into shared apartment situations or you just have your own apartment, but the building owners are in a really unique situation to say, you know what, rent is going to be $30 a month higher here, but your water is free and drinkable. And I think that's where we're going. I'm pretty excited about that.

And one WI fi. Why do we all pay individual WI Fi when, you know, here in Venice, you Know, the houses are so close together that you could have one WI fi that would take care of four houses. I mean, I don't think any of us are doing anything on our WI fi that would create so much activity that it would slow the Internet down.

Oh, yeah. In fact, you could have a lot less WI fi antennas, which would probably increase human health anyway. There's really good evidence sleeping on top of a WI fi antenna reduces your sleep quality. And there's probably. Probably some other negative effects as well.

Yeah.

Now, when I drink clean water, when I eat clean stuff, my ability to meditate goes up. I feel like I am a more spiritual person when my hardware is running relatively well. Do you notice an effect when you take better care of your meat than that? Your spiritual awareness, your ability to be conscious goes up?

Well, there's no question. There's no question that I studied acting with a wonderful woman named Stella Adler. And she said to begin every day looking at something that was bigger than you and that could be a tree. You know, something that's been in the ground for maybe two lifetimes before you came into the world. Touch that tree. Look at the tree. Look how the tree has had to contort its trunk in order to be able to find the nurturing light from the sun. And when you look at that contortion, when you see the bends in the tree, that can help you to understand how to play someone like Richard iii, who's been, you know, who's deformed by the sheer fact that he was born into a family of royalty and the complications that come with being in a famous family of royalty. If you look at the mountains, look up at the sky and the vastness of it and the oxygen that it provides you to be able to wake up and take a deep breath, that realizing, you know, where our conversation begin began, that you're part of this great cycle of life, you know, that you're not bigger or more important than it. You're maybe a keystone character in it, you know, an important part of the chain, but you're not bigger or more important than the least of us.

Yeah.

And that helps me to sleep, that helps me to keep. Keep me humble and to sleep well at night.

There's this notion of the gyres, these big eddies in the ocean that are filtering plastic. One of the things that blew my mind as I started studying spirituality and all was this idea that you're kind of a hollow tube. You have matter that comes in stuff you eat and breathe and light, actually, and then stuff that goes out and stuff. That goes out. Obviously there's going to the bathroom, but you're shedding your skin, your cells are turning over. So the body that you have two years from now is 50% of the cell membranes are new over the last year. And it takes seven years to turn over half your collagen in your body. And so really, you and I are just an eddy moving through matter, but the body itself doesn't. It doesn't really exist. And that means, though, what you take in and what you take out and the effect that you have on others energetically with how full of anger or hate or love or compassion are you, that it probably affects other people's eddying in some way or another. What I want to know from you is I am no actor. When you play someone in Full Metal Jacket or you play someone who's highly elevated, does it. I mean, does it affect you at a soul level? Like, do you take on that energy of a character that. So, you know, you're. If you play someone dark, does it make you dark? If you play someone light, does it make you light?

Yes, it does, yeah. And it's difficult. You know, I imagine when I got to this stage of my life that I'd be speaking truth to power, that I would be playing Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper kind of roles. But there's a transition, there's a pivot in our culture now, and those roles are given to other people and to hear their strength, their personal strength and their personal stories that they're part of the fabric of life and they're an important thread and, you know, like a pair of ladies nylon stockings, that it only takes bumping into something sharp that causes the fabric to come, you know, undone and run. Now what am I trying to say is that within our DNA, now that we understand what death is, you know, and Yuval Hariri. Hariri in his book Homo Deus and. And what was the other book? Sapiens. Now that we understand what death and dying is, we have the opportunity to reverse engineer because we've looked into the DNA and we understand life in a way that perhaps we scientifically didn't know. If you go back and you look at drawings from hundreds of years ago, sometimes thousands of years ago, you find that something that people saw through meditation, through spiritual practice, you see the DNA drawn into yoga drawings explaining how to do meditation. When they draw the chakras, they show a person in. I don't know what that's called. When you sit in meditation with your Legs folded and your arms out, like the Buddha, a lotus position. And there's those points of the chakra points. And I saw a drawing from thousands of years ago, and they showed that person sitting in the lotus position, the chakra points, and drawn in front of him was a helix, a double helix. You find the double helix in Egyptian art, in South American art. So those people perhaps intuitively knew through their spiritual practice or just they saw it because their lives were simpler, that we were connected by something that looked like a double helix. And there, thousands of years later, you know, we make an electron microscope and we're able to look into life and discover what exists at the basic core level of not just human existence, but life. And the thing that's different between a tree or another animal is just a couple bars in that. In that. That we're all related, that all forms of life have shared that kind of strand of DNA.

And that's, that's a beautiful thing.

But so to get back to acting now, if I'm going to play a hateful person or a murderer, and that's not who I am, I think that if I go searching back in my DNA, I'm going to find somebody who was a hateful person or somebody that was a murderer, somebody that did things that were inappropriate. It has to. That mean the millions of years of evolution, there has to have been somebody in my, in my strand of DNA that did, did those kind of things that. The characteristics that I have physically in this body that I live in, my nose, my eyes, my hair, the texture of my skin, those things are inherited through my DNA, through my ancestors. So just as those characteristics are manifested physically, the, the, the characters that I need to play exist in my DNA. Absolutely. You know, there's no question. So, for instance, I made a movie called Birdie, and I auditioned for the role of Al Columbada, which Nicolas Cage ended up playing. And I was, I was working up in Toronto, Canada, on a movie with Mel Gibson and Diane Keaton and, And Alan Parker, the director of Bertie called me and said, you know, congratulations, you're going to be in the movie. And I said, oh, great. Are you going to change the character's name? And he said, what do you mean? I said, am I going to play Italian American? Are you going to change the character's name? And he said, what are you talking about? He says, you're going to play Bertie. You're not playing Al Columbado? I said, no, no, no, I can't play. I can't play Bertie. Bertie is. He's a. He's such a fragile, beautiful, broken person. That's not who I am. He goes, well, you better figure it out because that's who you're playing. And I'm not kidding. I got down on my hands and knees and I begged anybody that had ever been hurt, anybody that ever been misunderstood, anybody that ever suffered from post traumatic stress to please come and help me to play this role. And I'm not kidding you, man, it was like a rush of souls filled me up and lifted me and guided me through that experience of playing that role. Daniel Day Lewis is a friend. He's not a close friend, but he's a friend because I'm friends with Liam Neeson and they're both Irish and he's a lovely man. But when Daniel Day finishes movies, I've never talked to him about it, but I always noticed he shaves his head. And I think that that's a cleansing thing that he's trying to do because he goes so deep into the roles that he plays that he doesn't just come home and take a shower and wash the character off. He wants to scrape it off his body. So he takes it down to the hair follicle and shaves it off.

That's fascinating. I've noticed that throughout my life. When there's a big change, I'll just magically get a haircut that's different, which I almost never do. But maybe there's something to it. I was never aware of that. But you said something really interesting. You talked about souls in there, but earlier you talked about how all of the bad things that you might have done are all in your DNA from your ancestors. So are you a past life guy or are you a DNA guy? Or are you both?

Well, I think our past life is tied up in our DNA. When we talk about reincarnation, I think that's what it is. You and I are fathers and we've kind of reincarnated. We've passed our genetic code onto a next generation. And the interesting thing about that is our genetic code gets mixed up and stirred up like that gyre, like that Pacific gyre, those five gyres around the world with our wives, with their DNA and their information, and we create a different kind of human being. The important thing for us to learn in this life is that while we're passing on that genetic information is to do everything that we can not to repeat the mistakes that our parents made. You know, that this journey, this incredible journey that we're on is an opportunity for us to improve the next generation through wisdom and sharing information about the mistakes that we made in our lives and preventing. Passing that information on. And sometimes it's very difficult. And I remember one time I was very tense.

I was.

Maybe I wasn't working or I was getting ready to work, and my son spilled my coffee on the dining room table. And I turned and I snapped. And I saw my son look at me. And I know he peed in his pants a little bit because I was looking at myself. I saw myself as a little boy. And I felt words come out of my mouth that weren't me, that weren't. They were my father. And I had recreated a moment from my own childhood in that moment. And it was. Was horrible. But the good thing was because maybe because I was on this journey of trying to understand what consciousness is, that I was conscious in that moment to understand that I had made a mistake. And where my father didn't embrace me and say, I'm sorry, I embraced my son and said, I'm sorry that it's just coffee. I can clean it up. It's not a big deal. And so that's an evolution of love, an evolution of forgiveness, an evolution of positivity that we can pass on to our children. You know, our country is in that process now. We're going through a great, great trial of what our conscious, our collective consciousness is as a nation that who are we? What are we willing to accept? What kind of behavior are we willing to accept? You know, And I was reading a book the other night about free will and what is free will? Because I'm running for the president of the Screen Actors Guild of my union that I happen to be a member of. And they.