Tim Robbins

The conversation opens with Rogan telling Tim Robbins that producer Jamie counts The Shawshank Redemption as his all-time favorite movie and was "kind of freaking out" on meeting him. Rogan calls it easily one of the greatest movies ever made. Robbins calls the film's reputation a gift and says the people who bring it up with him tend to mean it seriously.

when people come up and say something about it, It usually is coming from a pretty deep place.

Rogan, half joking, says anyone who didn't like the movie should see a doctor. He then turns to Stephen King, whom he calls arguably one of the most prolific fiction writers in history. In Rogan's retelling, King published so many books that he began writing under a fake name and "just started killing it" with that one too. The pen name itself is never given in the conversation.

Robbins says he met King only once, around the time of the premiere. The next stretch of the transcript is fragmentary. There is a passing remark that "Coojo sucks," and an anecdote, told only in part, about King nearly throwing away one of his early manuscripts, which the hosts identify as Carrie, until an unnamed woman reacted with "are you out of your fucking mind? Like, this is incredible." The source doesn't make clear who tells the story or who the woman is.

The two compare the novel of The Shining with Stanley Kubrick's film. In the book, the main character's possession by the hotel property is a slower, more drawn-out process. Jack Nicholson's version seems "kind of kooky already, like right away," and the speaker accepts this as Kubrick's interpretation. Rogan then speculates about King's state of mind while writing. He says King changed once he got clean, and adds the hedged claim "I don't think he got sober until it was decades after his career began." Neither speaker knows whether Shawshank came from that period ("I don't know. It must have been"). Rogan also believes, again with "I think," that The Stand was written in those years. This part of the discussion is impressionistic, and no dates are checked.

In the same exchange, they note that King's work pairs madness with "a tenderness" and "great humanity." It also shows "a true understanding of the darkest nature" of people, along with supernatural material such as demonic possession and Salem's Lot. One of them comes back to Shawshank and singles out the idea "that the library can be the liberation."

Rogan says he has just started Silo, Robbins's series, which he notes has run for three seasons. He watched the first two episodes the night before and found it "very original and interesting." The show reminded him of Derinkuyu (rendered in the transcript as "Darren Kuyu"), an underground city in Turkey. He first estimates it could hold 20,000 people and calls it "something nutty like that," signaling that he isn't sure of the figure.

His account of the discovery is anecdotal. A man lost a chicken that went through a hole in a wall and never came back, and when he broke down the wall he found the city underneath the town. Rogan says no one knows who built it and that there is no historical record. To explain why the date is so hard to pin down, he offers an analogy about carbon dating. If humanity died out and people examined the pyramids 100,000 years later, organic material left behind, like a leather-bound book or a piece of wood, could date when people were there. It "wouldn't say the time that the actual structure was made."

Facts looked up during the show sharpen the picture. The site was "rediscovered in 1963," and only 10% of it is accessible to tourists today, with the rest still being explored. Rogan restates the capacity as "something like 20,000 people," plus livestock and food stores. The details read out include 18 levels reaching 85 meters (about 280 feet) deep, ventilation shafts, wells, stables, wine and oil presses, storage rooms, chapels, school rooms, and half-ton circular stone doors "that could be rolled shut from the inside only." On how anyone farmed down there, Rogan admits: "Who fucking knows? I don't know."

The two speculate about why it was built. One suggests a hostile force, and the other adds that the threat could have been environmental. Rogan concludes that the builders were "either fighting off some sort of an army or the outside air was hostile." He brings up the Younger Dryas Impact Theory (transcribed as "Younger Drys"), describing evidence of large impacts around 11,800 years ago that "they think" was "probably a reset of civilization." He offers Derinkuyu only as something that "could have been post that." The connection is speculation, not an established finding, and the conversation doesn't weigh any evidence against it.

Robbins takes this as a way into Silo, calling the show "a modern version" of the underground city. He got the scripts in the middle of lockdown and says the premise felt "all too familiar metaphorically."

This is about a controlled society where information is censored and where compliance is necessary. And if you don't comply, you get sent out into the hostile environment.

Both note that the source material was written "many years ago," before the pandemic, so the timing was luck. Robbins calls it "synchronicity" and says he has "been blessed that way" in his career. Rogan then asks why he thinks he has been so lucky, given that many talented people never break through.

I think it comes down to the ability to say no.

Robbins's first example comes from the time his first child was born. He was broke and was offered a million dollars for a comedy he thought was dumb, called Folks. At the same time, Robert Altman was trying to put together The Player. When Robbins flew to L.A. for a meeting, Alan Arkin, who was going to play his father, asked him why he was doing the script. Robbins said he needed the money, and Arkin said he wasn't sure he wanted to do it either. Robbins took that as confirmation of his own doubts and turned the comedy down. The Player then came through and "shifted my whole career." Rogan frames this as following "the instinct" even when "all sorts of influence" pull the other way.

Robbins goes on to describe a pattern of offers he rejected. About 10 to 15 years ago, he says, he was offered the role of head of the CIA three times in seven months, which he can't explain ("I have no idea"). He says he turned them down even though he was looking at his bills and mortgages. A couple of years later, within a couple of months, he was offered two more roles. One was the head of FIFA, which he calls "a corrupt organization" but which the film portrayed as "the best people in the world." He says it was basically "FIFA producing a movie about itself" and that "they were offering a ton of money." He also mentions that the real head of FIFA was Brazilian, though the sentence trails off. The other was the head of the company behind the Chilean mine disaster, in a script where the company were "really nice people" and the disaster wasn't caused by bad management.

So I realized that the oligarchs are starting to make movie about themselves.

Robbins calls this "oligarchical cinema": wealthy organizations producing films that make themselves look good. Rogan replies that they can get away with it because "Nobody knows. Nobody cares." Robbins adds that "they think they can buy anybody. And they almost bought me," and says he refuses when something is "not right in my heart." He also admits that his position is a privilege.

It's great that I had the luxury to do that. Oftentimes people don't have that luxury.

Rogan notes the risk on the other side, that "one bad decision can pigeonhole you in a bad direction." Asked whether the CIA projects were ever made, Robbins says they became TV shows and movies. Asked whether any were good, he answers simply "No." The projects aren't named, so the claims about them can't be checked from this conversation.

Robbins contrasts the CIA-critical films of an earlier era, citing Three Days of the Condor (transcribed as "the day of the Condor"), with current portrayals in which "the rogue CIA agents" are "actually good guys." He adds that "nobody really knows the extent of what they do" but that the agency gets "a lot of good portrayals in the media." Rogan pushes back somewhat. He says there are good people in the CIA and that it is "necessary," but that it has "unchecked power" and has done "some really fucking shady shit," including "selling drugs." These are Rogan's own characterizations, and no sources are cited.

That leads them to Iran-Contra. Rogan first says Oliver Stone, then corrects himself to Oliver North, and recalls a joke by Boston comedian Jimmy Tingle. In the joke, Reagan is asked about selling arms to people who hate us and says he doesn't remember, so he's told to put a Post-it on his refrigerator: "Today, I sold arms to Iran." Robbins says he wrote a play about the affair in the 80s and performed it with the Actors' Gang.

Rogan describes a recent meme showing North during the Iran-Contra trials and later as a war analyst on Fox News. In his version, "they got caught selling drugs in Los Angeles to fund the contras" against the Sandinistas (transcribed as "San Dinas") in Nicaragua, and North then went to jail. These are Rogan's claims and aren't examined in the conversation. One of them calls this "a deep connection that goes back years." The discussion widens to the Iraq War, where the speaker says anyone who "got it wrong got promotions," no one was fired, and people in the media who promoted the war got better jobs.

Rogan argues that this is "the only time in our lifetimes" with real independent media. He means journalists not connected to major corporations, working on Substack, YouTube or X. He credits them with exposing connections among the media, the Central Intelligence Agency and other government bodies, which he describes as "spinning narratives on TV." He uses the Iraq War's weapons-of-mass-destruction case as his example: none were found, "No one gets in trouble," and the same people return to TV. He gives no specific outlets or reports as evidence.

The conversation then breaks for a sponsor read for Chime, a fintech company. The ad claims Chime was ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in a recent survey, offers no monthly or overdraft fees, gives 5% cashback on a self-chosen category with the Chime card, and has a savings rate it calls nine times the national average. It includes the disclaimer that Chime is "a fintech, not a bank." These are advertising claims, not part of the interview.

Back in the conversation, Robbins corrects the idea that no one faces consequences. He says the people who suffer are the ones "that come out against it," and that there are never any apologies.

I risked a lot to do it. And, you know, wound up being right. But no one ever said, hey, you were right.

Robbins describes himself as "one of maybe five people that were famous" who opposed the war. He spoke on various television shows and gave a couple of speeches. As a result, he says, his appearance at the Baseball Hall of Fame for Bull Durham's "15th anniversary or something like" that was canceled by the Hall's head, Dale Petroskey (transcribed as "Petrosky"). The cancellation was already in print before he could finish a response. For the first time in his life he hired a crisis PR person, and he got his letter to Petroskey out to the press. He describes the Hall's move as an ambush meant to "call me a traitor." His publicist sent the letter to sports writers, and Robbins says it was the sports writers who wrote articles defending freedom of speech. He dates this to 2003, "when we were cooking up the war."

He also wrote a play, Embedded, which was first performed three weeks after Bush landed on the aircraft carrier under the "mission accomplished" banner. It toured the country and played at New York's Public Theater and in London. In New York, he says, someone who wasn't a theater critic attacked it while it was still in previews, in a piece published in what he thinks was the New Republic. The piece called him a conspiracy theorist and an anti-Semite. When Rogan asks how the anti-Semitism charge came about, Robbins says "it doesn't matter. That's what they throw out," calling it a common way to discredit people. His account is the only one given here, and the piece itself isn't quoted.

There was nothing anti-Semitic about the play.

This part of the interview ends on an open question. Rogan asks what compelled Robbins to come out against the war, and his answer falls outside this excerpt.

Robbins describes how he formed his opposition to the 2003 Iraq war. He was reading foreign press, especially European coverage of the weapons-of-mass-destruction claims. He says that coverage reported there wasn't any evidence, and that it was "more open, more transparent" than American reporting. He relied on sources he had trusted in the past. He then treated the intensity of the response to his questioning as evidence in itself.

the attacks were vociferous, so usually is a tell, like in poker.

He supports this heuristic with a comparison between two wars. When he opposed the first Iraq war in 1991, he recalls, the elder Bush answered that in a democracy people have the right to oppose it. In 2003 he was called a traitor, a Saddam supporter and a terrorist sympathizer. To him, that difference "told me that it was probably over the target." The heuristic is worth noting for what it is: it infers that a position is correct from how hostile the reaction is, not from direct evidence about the question.