The Jurgen Experience: My dad eats a lot of salmon. He's big into salmon. Yeah, but your dad's like a hundred years old.
He's doing great. 91! 91 yesterday.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, how badass is he? He's born on Memorial Day, I know, I know. He- you know he almost- Oh my gosh, this is a crazy story.
I don't know if you know the story, but he was about two seconds from being deployed to the Korean War and he was in a plane crash off San Francisco when he was 21 years old. Wow, he was in the army and he was doing a flight somewhere. He had done some like a training flight or something.
They said, "Oh, hop on this thing," and he said, "Okay, cool, last minute, I'll go do it. " He was in a plane crash, the crash landed in San Fran, outside of San Francisco Bay. And because he ultimately ended up there, I think one person died, him and the pilot or co-pilot, I can't remember, had to swim to shore like at night over two miles, I want to say, something crazy.
And you know there's tons of sharks, tons of stuff out there in San Francisco, and this was, you know, 1950. So at the time my grandmother, they had told him, they had told my grandmother that he had gone down in a plane crash. I thought, she thought he was dead.
And there was no cell phones, there was no social media, there was no anything. It took a week for him, by the time he got back and got back to the thing to be able to call her after, I don't get made to go to the hospital, I can't remember, for him to be able to call his mother and say, "Hey, I'm alive. " Wow.
And that is what kept him from going to the Korean War because he was supposed to be deployed. But because he was in this plane crash, he had to stay and testify and do the whole do this whole thing and that they had just deployed without him. Wow, isn't that crazy how one moment in time can change the whole course of someone's life?
Yeah, and a moment that's completely out of your control, there's these weird sort of pathways that you come to in life, gateways and you go left and you're okay, you go right and the trip ends, the trip's over. Yeah, my dad was born in 1930, that's great. Before World War II, that's crazy.
Which is nuts, what is it like talking to him? First of all, what is it like being Clint Eastwood's son and also being a movie star yourself? That's gotta be weird.
It's, well look, I'm stumbling through it just like anyone else in life, you know, you're just trying to, you're taking the information you have, trying to make the best decisions at the time. Speaking to my dad, it's like there's a wealth of knowledge and anecdotes and you're trying to just like pull little slivers out when you speak to him because he'll just say things casually like, yeah, and everyone shuts the hell up like at dinner, you know, oh, finally, you'll know he's about to say something and then he'll say, yeah, well, that was, you know, back in the '60s, I was with Frank Sinatra at that place at the time and, oh, yeah, we met her and the thing and you go, wait, what did you just say? You were with Frank Sinatra, like, wait, hold on, let's stop, stop, like more and more, give us more, and then he'll be on to something else and, you know, you can't get it out of him, but it's like, he's just lived this incredible life, incredible, incredible.
So I'm trying to, right now, I'm trying to just soak up every piece of knowledge I can from him, listen to him, sit with him as much as possible because I know he's not gonna be around forever and that's terrifying, you know, to think about, but it's, um, it's like, oh, man, this is, I gotta, like, spend every moment I can. Does he exercise? Yeah, he's super active.
Obviously, he's 91, so how old are you? 35. So he had you way late in life, but he had three kids after me.
Whoa, what's the youngest? The youngest is 20. 20?
20. He had some younger wives. He has a 20-year-old kid.
Yeah, 20. Holy [ __ ]! Yeah, shooting live rounds deep, deep, deep into the 60s.
Machine gun rounds. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, that was that newscaster lady, right?
Was that her? It was good. Yeah, she's great, actually.
She was great. But yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, he had a few younger ladies around. He's such a throwback.
Yeah, he really is. You know, and what's interesting, though, is like what people think about him. They see this bigger-than-life character, but he's so much more complex than what you see in the movies he's in.
There's a lot of nuance. It's like humans, you know? It's like, I'm sure, all humans, people would think about you just because of whatever, and they're like, "Oh, well, he's just this thing.
" They don't know about your personal life. They don't know how you are with your kids. How you are, you know, how you think, you know, esoterically about things, and, you know, when you're speaking to your wife, like, he's like, much different than just that.
He's got a lot of shades. He's very I think middle of the road in a lot of things. He looks at issues and says, "Well, this is that and it's that, and maybe there's a middle ground.
" "And I don't know, you know. " "Well, there's always this urge to dismiss people. " "Any person, you have this reductionist perspective of who that person is.
" "And it's hard to just be curious. " "And it's just to say, 'Huh,' like abandon all your preconceived notions, and go, 'Uh, imagine being that guy. '" "Like imagine being Clint Eastwood.
" "Yeah, imagine being. " "Lived a lot of lives, lived like a lot of lives, lived a lot of lives. " "Did you ever talk to him about what it was like to be the mayor of Carmel?
" "He was the mayor when I was, uh, when I was a young kid. " "I was, uh, you know, a few years old. " "I think he had his fill of politics, that was it.
" "Because they asked him, they were kind of like, 'Well, you know, you've been the mayor, now why don't you, you know, go for governor? ' You know. " "And he's like, 'Nah, this [__] ain't for me, let's just give it a shot.
' Yeah, it was, you know, I think it was good, it was, he did what he did, but you know, you can never please everybody. " "Everyone's, there's always someone pissed off, there's always some conflicting point of view. " "Ever talk to him about that time that he uh, pretended Obama was sitting next to him?
" "That was bizarre, it was, it's like impromptu, you know, like he just, like, was winging it, he's winging it, yeah, yeah, he's doing a bit, crazy thing to do, well, TV live, I mean, you do the same thing more or less, like, yeah, but I do it in comedy clubs. " "But what's the difference, right? " "It's like, you go out, you practice material, you're working material out, right?
" "It's like, you know, there's, you're getting up in front of people doing something, it's, it's, it's like, we call it different because it's like, 'Oh, that was that thing. '" "But, but, I guarantee you, Obama would not have said the things that he thought Obama would have said, Obama would have probably had some pretty nuanced perspectives himself, sure, you know, like, again, same sort of thing that people wanted to do to him or want to do to other folks, like he was kind of doing it to Obama, look, maybe he didn't work out his material, you know? " "No, I'm sure he didn't, but it was a bold choice, I was like, 'Wow, how badass is Clint Eastwood?
'" "And Richard Pryor did that too. " "If you go back and listen to Richard Pryor's old cassettes, there's some of them that are available from the Red Fox Comedy Club, and you can find them online, but I bought them from a gas station one day in like the 90s, these cassette tapes, and they were all like him at Red Fox's Comedy Club, and it was just him, you could hear drinks clinking, you could hear things in the background, and ice and [__], and you could hear people talking, and it was just like this small crowd where he was just messing around, and that's where a lot of his most brilliant bits came from. " "Interesting, so it's similar to what your dad was doing, but different.
" "[Laughter] Hey look, I don't pretend to speak for him, that's, you know, listening, he can do whatever the [__] he wants, he's Clint Eastwood, you know. " "And you know, one of the things I love your dad did, Unforgiven, because like, he went back and made like this, I mean he did obviously, he did all those great Spaghetti Westerns, all those amazing and they called them Spaghetti Westerns for people who don't know because they did them in Italy, they just, yeah. " "And so, he did all these American Western films, but they were all done in Italy, and they were all like people didn't think those are going to be like real successful at the time, right?
" "Yeah, he was coming off a show called Rawhide, if you remember that. " "Yeah, and he was actually sick of doing Westerns at the time because he was like been known for seven years, and he got an offer to do this Spaghetti Western, it was like in Italy, he was like, 'I don't know, you know, what should I do, the guy, I want to go to Italy, never been there, okay, pretty good. '" "He goes out there and he works with Sergio Leone, and crazy story, he comes back, actually, I think he might have done all three, or he came back and did one, and he came back and did one, people started talking about this movie, but it was the movie he had done, he'd known was an Italian, so it was like, you know.
" "And so he was like, people were saying, you know, this is great movie out, you know, Fistful of Dollars, whatever it was, and he's like, 'Oh, that's cool, I want to go check it out, no, no, no, no, no, no, he didn't even know, he didn't know he didn't know it was his movie that it caught fire and it was an overnight sensation, and then yeah, he just kind of fell into doing those movies, did a few of them, and then he started directing and doing his own Westerns. " "But, bringing it back to Unforgiven, what's really i. " I think the most interesting thing about that film is that it's an amalgamation of the whole history of his westerns.
But really, looking back, it's like, what would it be like to be an older man and have regret for the things he did wrong, you know? Looking back, it's kind of using the history that he had created. And talking about what it's like to look back at life and have one last ride to do things differently for his family, so there's a lot going into that movie.
You know what I mean? Well, it was a much more sober and realistic depiction of a killer in the West. William Money being paid, you know, probably not that much money.
But like, "Hey, we need this person dead, and you're the man to go do it. " There was also a much more realistic depiction of the way some people react to the idea that they're about to be killed or that they're gonna have to kill someone. They're gonna be in a gun fight where they might die.
That's a great movie, man. It was almost like he wanted, in my mind, the way I felt, to me it's like he had all these amazing westerns that he did, but then there was this one, it's like, "Yeah, you know what, let me do a real one. Let me go back and make this thing where he sat on that script for almost 10 years.
Wow, before he made it. " Yeah, he was like, "This is amazing. I don't think I'm old enough yet.
" Oh, wisdom, wow. Yeah, wow. You know what else I love?
"High Plains Drfter. " Yep, I watch that one every couple of years. That's a good one.
That's a great one. I like "Outlaw Josie Wales. " Oh my god, yeah, loved that movie.
That's a great one. Yeah, that's a great one. But there's something about "High Plains Drfter" that's like a ghost movie.
You don't realize it until you do. You don't realize there's a supernatural element to it. Yeah, what's happening here?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, about that one, it's one of my favorites. Your dad made some goddamn classics, and then he also made some comedies, you know, like "Every Which Way But Loose.
" I mean, what a crazy career. That's one I think they should remake, haha. With who?
How about you, maybe? Would you do it? That would be weird.
Why not? Could you imagine, though? You know, yeah, big old orangutan.
I don't want to mess around with orangutans, bro. You just piss it off for the wrong reason, it rips your hand, stuffs it up your ass. They're dangerous.
They're so dangerous. Catch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free, only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips.
Easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on Spotify. You can listen to the JRE in the background by using other apps, and can download episodes to save on data costs. All for free.
Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app.
Go to Spotify now to get the full episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.
