Name: Yellowstone Creator Taylor Sheridan on the History That Inspired 1883
Uploaded: 2024-01-04T18:10:23.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Yellowstone Creator Taylor Sheridan on the History That Inspired 1883' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Yellowstone Creator Taylor Sheridan on the History That Inspired 1883' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-04. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
Well, that's the craziest thing about
1883 is that you don't have to do any dramatic embellishment. There's no doesn't
have to be any any
Fucking with the truth. It's that is literally what went down those people
Literally came here. They do you were telling me on the phone that what
percentage of the people that made the trek across couldn't even speak English,
you know it
Something like 40% you know, they used to come in from they would come into and
of course what what our government was doing
Was we needed people for a multitude of reasons?
After the Civil War, so many of the workforce have been killed, you know
One point something million soldiers died that that we know of we don't know
how many other civilians
So we needed people
We needed people to settle the West because manifest destiny basically said hey,
we you know
there's all this land we bought from
whoever we bought it from France, I guess the Louisiana Purchase and
We can't settle it because every time we we try the Lakota or the Comanche kick
the shit out of us
So we should send a bunch of Central Europeans and Eastern Europeans over there
and let them get in the middle of it
and so in all of these
And you can you can look up if you were to put it into the computer you can
pull up all of these
pamphlets they would put out and ads they would put out in newspapers in
Romania and
Norway, obviously Ireland did it everywhere
Germany and said come free land
Yeah, come get your free land and
When I started researching it, you know, there were people that would come from
areas where it was against the law to swim
They were not allowed to swim Wow, there weren't no one knew how to swim. It
was against the law to swim a lot of swim
What
That seems so and what seems so insane with what really struck me
I mean, I did a lot of thinking about that show last night like it ended it I
did my binge
I ended the binge at like two o'clock in the morning and
You know at nighttime. I do some of my most fucked up thinking because everyone
is asleep in my house
it's just me and I
Generally do most of my writing when everyone's asleep and I was just thinking
that's a hundred and forty years ago. That's nothing
I'm 56 years old when I was in high school. It was in
1983 so that was a hundred years ago. I was a sophomore in high school
So I was a hundred years is nothing hundred years before that you make your way
across the country
On a fucking wagon and you get free land
Yeah, a hundred years. That's so short a period of time. It's so hard for us to
really appreciate
how
recent that is and how how fucking insane the change in this country over such
a short period of time has been
Meteoric meteoric
I just read something in the last day or two that and I'm gonna get it wrong,
but
1937
Is closer to 1984 than 2023 is 84 or something like that. Yeah, if you think
about the gap between
1984 and 2023 and then
What 84 was like I was alive you were alive to now
It doesn't seem like that dramatic a change. Obviously there is internet, but
you still had cars you had phones
You couldn't take them with you, but you had them but
1937
We haven't even we haven't even made penicillin yet, right?
That's just 40 years yeah trench warfare. Yeah, yeah World War one
No, these these they came over here. They didn't speak the language
They knew nothing about the land knew nothing about the water had no it did by
the way
You can be rest assured it did not say in that advertisement in the Romanian
times
There's other people who already live there who will kill you when you show up
and didn't mention any of that
They didn't hear about the Indians till they got to Galveston and you know,
they're buying their supplies
You need a gun. Well, what do you need a gun? Well the Indians the who?
What are you talking about who are Indians?
Well, you're gonna find out. Yeah, that was a part of Empire of the summer moon,
you know that these folks had just
Established these homesteads and had no idea and the Comanches would show up
and just slaughter them. They had no idea
They had no idea that there was even a concern and they had to figure it out
along the way
Yeah, and that you know, and you read it in that book in it in from a military
standpoint
It's such a just an impressive achievement that Nekona
decided he was gonna raid all the way to Galveston and
He marched through burned Austin went all the way to Galveston everybody got in
their boats
Went out on their boats and watched him burn Galveston. So then they went in
and looted all the stores and
found these parasols, you know, you could sit there and block the Sun and
And the committee thought that's the frickin smartest thing. I wish we'd had
fabric to do that with
so all the Braves took these parachutes and
When they rode off there's thousands of Comanche warriors with parasols of all
these different colors blocks is getting the Sun off their shoulders
Running away with umbrellas. Yeah, that's insane. But what what a terrifying
visual. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean I had no idea
Until I read Empire the summer moon and then the author come in. What is his
name again? SG Gwen?
S is that it?
Great great fucking guy and he found out when he moved to Texas like he he
moved here and it was researching Texas history
Seguin and when he moved here and he was researching Texas then he was like, oh
my god, like how do I not know about all this?
How do I not know what this happened?
How do I know not know about the Texas Rangers and how they were established
and why they they needed them and what what went down?
Yeah, it was the it was the Wild West. Yeah. Well, it's one of the reasons why
Texas is such a crazy place
It's like this is kind of the last stand
Yeah, and and Texas was its own nation for you know 14 years 13 years and it
and it's still you know
That independence is still pretty embedded in it. Did they want to put it back
on the ballot every year?
I mean it just decimated I think cholera killed 60% of the Comanche
Yeah, they said that 90% of the people killed in North America were killed by
diseases 90% of the Native Americans. Yeah
Yeah, and that that story hasn't been told properly, you know, and that's what
I really appreciated about 1883
It's like you you talked about I mean, this was like the end of the Native
American Empire
Essentially, this was when there were still a little bit of Buffalo left. They're
still
You know, they're moving Indians to reservations
Then the Indians that were out there were resisting it, you know
and it's just and then these people are trying to make their way in
This fucking wagon train across the kind of whatever what percentage of those
people died
That we're trying to do that. I mean, I don't know that there's any
Anywhere along the Oregon Trail you could you can drive along or you know,
there's markers just everywhere
Everywhere and especially the further up you get into Wyoming and the further
you start getting through like the lander cutoff
and South pass then they're just
And that's the ones that you know that got a marker. Yeah, so it's how do you
know, right? You know the handcart
The Mormon Church brought a lot of people out and they didn't have a lot of
money enough money to give them
Full wagons, even though that's what they promised
So they made these hand carts that people would pull from wherever they took
off from somewhere in Ohio
To try and get to Utah
And so these people pulled them by hand
They put their wife and their gear and their kids or whatever and then they'd
pull them these two wheeled carts like chariots without a horse and
You know one winter they left too late and got caught in the winter and the
whole trick was if you didn't make it to the certain spot in
Wyoming by July 4th, you were not gonna make it you were gonna get caught in
the past and you're gonna die and
Something like twenty-five thousand people died in one year
Just mind-numbing statistics insane
Insane and it's it's so interesting that the the early films on the West
They were they never covered that the early films in the West were like these
really sort of
Shallow surface films that were fun movies, you know Cowboys versus Indians the
spaghetti westerns and that kind of stuff
But no one had any sort of real understanding of what actually went down. No,
you didn't
The notion of getting free land
Uh that you could go farm
Uh with by the way nothing you're gonna go somewhere with nothing
Like there's no stores you're gonna have to make everything you have to figure
it all out on your own
Who would choose that not a successful blacksmith?
Not somebody that's got a nice comfortable home in maryland or wherever and why
why why would you do that?
You have to have no other option, right?
Right all the people that came over from from whatever european nation they
came from
They didn't come for an adventure, right?
They came because they were fucking starving my family came over from ireland
because of the potato famine
They didn't they didn't want to they had to right they were dying
So they had to come so that's why everyone came desperation like desperation is
what settled the west
Fueled by a manifest destiny, which was which was a cruel very cruel
You know insidious idea that a bunch of politicians had that says hey
We can either send the army out there and just go to war and we've been doing
that and we've been getting the shit handed to us
Because the lakota were until the repeating rifle came around the lakota and
the comanche
Yeah, the arapaho even the something that we did not have their skill level on
a horse
Their their arrows were actually more effective than our single shot muskets
Like they were a superior army and and stayed that way
It wasn't until we started sacking villages when the braves were gone when
their soldiers were gone
When that dirty shit started then it started turning the tide and then when we
killed the food source, that was the end of it
Yeah, which is part of the wiping out of the buffalo
I mean it was a commodity for sure, but it was also there was a concerted
effort to cut off their food source
It was but it was also, you know
There was a demand
The buffalo tongue
Was the number one delicacy in new york city and that crazy and hung the tongue
which nobody wants anymore. No
And then they sold all the they sold all the the buffalo skins
To france and they made
Giant massive silly robes. Well at one point in time the richest man one of the
richest men in the world was he dealt in beaver pelts
Yeah, I don't doubt it. There was fucking beaver everywhere. They wiped out
most of the beaver in this country
Yeah, you know, but they've come back. Yeah, they've come back
But not nearly to where they were no, but they've come back
It's pretty I mean, it's pretty impressive how much they've come back
And you know because you'll get what they call the movie flute
Where you just just get run down you just I mean the hours are you know, it's
14 16 hours a day
Yeah, and then you have deadlines and you have a budget and you have to do it
that way. I mean the bud
Yeah, we have a budget but you've seen my shows there
They they they they let me run so I have the cgi in 1883. I was like this is
insane
Because I don't want to give anything away, but there's a scene with a storm
where you're like, oh my god
Like you can do some wild shit. Well, the other thing is
Yes, but the other thing is I waited till a day with 60 mile an hour winds to
shoot that
Oh, perfect. I let I let god do a lot of the cgi. Nice. They're like, there's a
terrible storm coming in and let's go
Let's switch the schedule
Yeah, because there's no way you could ever have done that with their hair and
all the things flying around. Yeah
Yeah, it's it's fucking great man. It's a great show. How about that ending?
It was rough. It was rough
Like I was just walking around my house like two hours afterwards
And the funny thing is I told the audience what was going to happen in the
first scene
Yeah, I know that was a wild thing you did. Yeah
That's it's like you're waiting for it throughout all the episodes, you know,
there's only 10
So you're like when wow does this go down it did it definitely added a layer of
anticipation
It's brilliant, man. It really is
It's one of the best shows i've ever seen and I shot
70% of it 80% of it at the four sixes
How the fuck is tim mcgraw and faith hill so good?
It's crazy, isn't it?
How are they so good at acting did you well?
Let me tell you what every singer can act just like every comedian can act
Um, dude, he's fucking incredible. Did you ever see him in uh in friday night
lights the movie? No. Oh
That film that and I know pete bird came on
The show with you here pete was a big mentor of mine
um
And and that to me is a perfect sports film
It's a fun if you haven't seen that movie you got to see that movie. It's billy
bob thornton
And tim mcgraw plays this abusive dad in it and it is
I mean he's raw, but he is he's the well runs deep with that guy
Hmm
Well, you could tell in that movie man or in your show rather he just 100% buy
that he is a stone-cold killer
Yeah, and faith she hadn't acted before incredible. We were just hoping
incredible and she brought it
Incredible yeah, but also it has to help
That they're a real life married couple, you know, it's like there's like real
like you
There's like layers of chemistry
When they're on the set together and and the subtext and every yeah, it was and
the heavy moments
I don't want to give anything away
But some of the heavy moments between the two of me like oh my god imagine
dealing with that
The fucking shit those people ought to deal with it's insanity
It's heavy dude. It's a heavy show, but it's really good
I think it's a really important thing for people to be aware of that. That's a
pretty act
It's obviously fiction, but it's a pretty accurate representation of how it
went down
Yeah, I mean the circumstances are imaginary but the tools and the things I
mean, that's how they died and that's how they lived

Yellowstone Creator Taylor Sheridan on the History That Inspired 1883

The Joe Rogan Experience
Well, that's the craziest thing about
1883 is that you don't have to do any dramatic embellishment. There's no doesn't
have to be any any
Fucking with the truth. It's that is literally what went down those people
Literally came here. They do you were telling me on the phone that what
percentage of the people that made the trek across couldn't even speak English,
you know it
Something like 40% you know, they used to come in from they would come into and
of course what what our government was doing
Was we needed people for a multitude of reasons?
After the Civil War, so many of the workforce have been killed, you know
One point something million soldiers died that that we know of we don't know
how many other civilians
So we needed people
We needed people to settle the West because manifest destiny basically said hey,
we you know
there's all this land we bought from
whoever we bought it from France, I guess the Louisiana Purchase and
We can't settle it because every time we we try the Lakota or the Comanche kick
the shit out of us
So we should send a bunch of Central Europeans and Eastern Europeans over there
and let them get in the middle of it
and so in all of these
And you can you can look up if you were to put it into the computer you can
pull up all of these
pamphlets they would put out and ads they would put out in newspapers in
Romania and
Norway, obviously Ireland did it everywhere
Germany and said come free land
Yeah, come get your free land and
When I started researching it, you know, there were people that would come from
areas where it was against the law to swim
They were not allowed to swim Wow, there weren't no one knew how to swim. It
was against the law to swim a lot of swim
What
That seems so and what seems so insane with what really struck me
I mean, I did a lot of thinking about that show last night like it ended it I
did my binge
I ended the binge at like two o'clock in the morning and
You know at nighttime. I do some of my most fucked up thinking because everyone
is asleep in my house
it's just me and I
Generally do most of my writing when everyone's asleep and I was just thinking
that's a hundred and forty years ago. That's nothing
I'm 56 years old when I was in high school. It was in
1983 so that was a hundred years ago. I was a sophomore in high school
So I was a hundred years is nothing hundred years before that you make your way
across the country
On a fucking wagon and you get free land
Yeah, a hundred years. That's so short a period of time. It's so hard for us to
really appreciate
how
recent that is and how how fucking insane the change in this country over such
a short period of time has been
Meteoric meteoric
I just read something in the last day or two that and I'm gonna get it wrong,
but
1937
Is closer to 1984 than 2023 is 84 or something like that. Yeah, if you think
about the gap between
1984 and 2023 and then
What 84 was like I was alive you were alive to now
It doesn't seem like that dramatic a change. Obviously there is internet, but
you still had cars you had phones
You couldn't take them with you, but you had them but
1937
We haven't even we haven't even made penicillin yet, right?
That's just 40 years yeah trench warfare. Yeah, yeah World War one
No, these these they came over here. They didn't speak the language
They knew nothing about the land knew nothing about the water had no it did by
the way
You can be rest assured it did not say in that advertisement in the Romanian
times
There's other people who already live there who will kill you when you show up
and didn't mention any of that
They didn't hear about the Indians till they got to Galveston and you know,
they're buying their supplies
You need a gun. Well, what do you need a gun? Well the Indians the who?
What are you talking about who are Indians?
Well, you're gonna find out. Yeah, that was a part of Empire of the summer moon,
you know that these folks had just
Established these homesteads and had no idea and the Comanches would show up
and just slaughter them. They had no idea
They had no idea that there was even a concern and they had to figure it out
along the way
Yeah, and that you know, and you read it in that book in it in from a military
standpoint
It's such a just an impressive achievement that Nekona
decided he was gonna raid all the way to Galveston and
He marched through burned Austin went all the way to Galveston everybody got in
their boats
Went out on their boats and watched him burn Galveston. So then they went in
and looted all the stores and
found these parasols, you know, you could sit there and block the Sun and
And the committee thought that's the frickin smartest thing. I wish we'd had
fabric to do that with
so all the Braves took these parachutes and
When they rode off there's thousands of Comanche warriors with parasols of all
these different colors blocks is getting the Sun off their shoulders
Running away with umbrellas. Yeah, that's insane. But what what a terrifying
visual. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean I had no idea
Until I read Empire the summer moon and then the author come in. What is his
name again? SG Gwen?
S is that it?
Great great fucking guy and he found out when he moved to Texas like he he
moved here and it was researching Texas history
Seguin and when he moved here and he was researching Texas then he was like, oh
my god, like how do I not know about all this?
How do I not know what this happened?
How do I know not know about the Texas Rangers and how they were established
and why they they needed them and what what went down?
Yeah, it was the it was the Wild West. Yeah. Well, it's one of the reasons why
Texas is such a crazy place
It's like this is kind of the last stand
Yeah, and and Texas was its own nation for you know 14 years 13 years and it
and it's still you know
That independence is still pretty embedded in it. Did they want to put it back
on the ballot every year?
I mean it just decimated I think cholera killed 60% of the Comanche
Yeah, they said that 90% of the people killed in North America were killed by
diseases 90% of the Native Americans. Yeah
Yeah, and that that story hasn't been told properly, you know, and that's what
I really appreciated about 1883
It's like you you talked about I mean, this was like the end of the Native
American Empire
Essentially, this was when there were still a little bit of Buffalo left. They're
still
You know, they're moving Indians to reservations
Then the Indians that were out there were resisting it, you know
and it's just and then these people are trying to make their way in
This fucking wagon train across the kind of whatever what percentage of those
people died
That we're trying to do that. I mean, I don't know that there's any
Anywhere along the Oregon Trail you could you can drive along or you know,
there's markers just everywhere
Everywhere and especially the further up you get into Wyoming and the further
you start getting through like the lander cutoff
and South pass then they're just
And that's the ones that you know that got a marker. Yeah, so it's how do you
know, right? You know the handcart
The Mormon Church brought a lot of people out and they didn't have a lot of
money enough money to give them
Full wagons, even though that's what they promised
So they made these hand carts that people would pull from wherever they took
off from somewhere in Ohio
To try and get to Utah
And so these people pulled them by hand
They put their wife and their gear and their kids or whatever and then they'd
pull them these two wheeled carts like chariots without a horse and
You know one winter they left too late and got caught in the winter and the
whole trick was if you didn't make it to the certain spot in
Wyoming by July 4th, you were not gonna make it you were gonna get caught in
the past and you're gonna die and
Something like twenty-five thousand people died in one year
Just mind-numbing statistics insane
Insane and it's it's so interesting that the the early films on the West
They were they never covered that the early films in the West were like these
really sort of
Shallow surface films that were fun movies, you know Cowboys versus Indians the
spaghetti westerns and that kind of stuff
But no one had any sort of real understanding of what actually went down. No,
you didn't
The notion of getting free land
Uh that you could go farm
Uh with by the way nothing you're gonna go somewhere with nothing
Like there's no stores you're gonna have to make everything you have to figure
it all out on your own
Who would choose that not a successful blacksmith?
Not somebody that's got a nice comfortable home in maryland or wherever and why
why why would you do that?
You have to have no other option, right?
Right all the people that came over from from whatever european nation they
came from
They didn't come for an adventure, right?
They came because they were fucking starving my family came over from ireland
because of the potato famine
They didn't they didn't want to they had to right they were dying
So they had to come so that's why everyone came desperation like desperation is
what settled the west
Fueled by a manifest destiny, which was which was a cruel very cruel
You know insidious idea that a bunch of politicians had that says hey
We can either send the army out there and just go to war and we've been doing
that and we've been getting the shit handed to us
Because the lakota were until the repeating rifle came around the lakota and
the comanche
Yeah, the arapaho even the something that we did not have their skill level on
a horse
Their their arrows were actually more effective than our single shot muskets
Like they were a superior army and and stayed that way
It wasn't until we started sacking villages when the braves were gone when
their soldiers were gone
When that dirty shit started then it started turning the tide and then when we
killed the food source, that was the end of it
Yeah, which is part of the wiping out of the buffalo
I mean it was a commodity for sure, but it was also there was a concerted
effort to cut off their food source
It was but it was also, you know
There was a demand
The buffalo tongue
Was the number one delicacy in new york city and that crazy and hung the tongue
which nobody wants anymore. No
And then they sold all the they sold all the the buffalo skins
To france and they made
Giant massive silly robes. Well at one point in time the richest man one of the
richest men in the world was he dealt in beaver pelts
Yeah, I don't doubt it. There was fucking beaver everywhere. They wiped out
most of the beaver in this country
Yeah, you know, but they've come back. Yeah, they've come back
But not nearly to where they were no, but they've come back
It's pretty I mean, it's pretty impressive how much they've come back
And you know because you'll get what they call the movie flute
Where you just just get run down you just I mean the hours are you know, it's
14 16 hours a day
Yeah, and then you have deadlines and you have a budget and you have to do it
that way. I mean the bud
Yeah, we have a budget but you've seen my shows there
They they they they let me run so I have the cgi in 1883. I was like this is
insane
Because I don't want to give anything away, but there's a scene with a storm
where you're like, oh my god
Like you can do some wild shit. Well, the other thing is
Yes, but the other thing is I waited till a day with 60 mile an hour winds to
shoot that
Oh, perfect. I let I let god do a lot of the cgi. Nice. They're like, there's a
terrible storm coming in and let's go
Let's switch the schedule
Yeah, because there's no way you could ever have done that with their hair and
all the things flying around. Yeah
Yeah, it's it's fucking great man. It's a great show. How about that ending?
It was rough. It was rough
Like I was just walking around my house like two hours afterwards
And the funny thing is I told the audience what was going to happen in the
first scene
Yea