Rambo Van Halen: Why a Hollywood Producer Walked Away

0:00 – Intro — who is Rambo Van Halen?
1:40 – What a producer actually does (it's mostly administration)
3:50 – Building a bubble around the creatives — and what it does to them
6:20 – Film is a business, not a public service — and film school gets this wrong
7:25 – Jim Carrey, Michael Jackson, and what happens when nobody says no
10:55 – Plastic surgery, masculinity, and actors who should leave their faces alone
12:46 – Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, and the men who used to be on screen
16:25 – How Hollywood got feminized — and why straight guys couldn't do their jobs anymore
19:06 – Military guys on film sets — why they beat film school graduates every time
21:32 – Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog, and Klaus Kinski's on-set meltdown
25:04 – Why he made his lateral move out of LA in 2019
27:30 – White male shit libs coming at him on Facebook
30:56 – Comedy as a masculine art form — why wokeness couldn't kill it
35:00 – George Floyd, Memorial Day, and saying what you actually think
37:25 – The unwritten rule: the black guy can't be the butt of the joke
43:28 – Roy Price, MeToo, and the careers that got destroyed
45:01 – John Lasseter, Aziz Ansari, and Joe Gatt — three very different MeToo stories
50:37 – The sushi bar incident — actress hits on producer, ignores her date
54:24 – Bikini casting, auditions, and what actresses will do for a role
58:12 – Who is Rambo Van Halen — and why the pseudonym?
1:01:16 – Why he wrote Hollywood Samizdat as a journaling exercise
1:03:08 – On publicist spam, bad podcast guests, and only booking people worth talking to
1:04:01 – Outro — where to find Rambo Van Halen