Katee Sackhoff: American actress best known for playing Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica and Bo-Katan Kryze in The Mandalorian. She also hosts The Sackoff Show podcast.
What this episode covers
Sackhoff and Rogan open on her career-defining role as the gender-swapped Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica and how the reboot elevated sci-fi as serious, topical art. The conversation pivots into a long, anxious discussion of AI: AI-generated music, the synthetic actress 'Tilly,' deepfake podcasts, and Sackhoff's fear that AI will hollow out human creativity and her own profession. They get personal and political around her daughter's rare childhood cancer, using it to indict the underfunding of pediatric medicine, the loss of the Give Kids A Chance Act, and a broken healthcare and political system. The back half drifts into homelessness, the value of physical fitness, the universe and infinity, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, and a long riff on how terrifyingly lethal praying mantises are.
Recommended on this episode
Battlestar Galactica (2004 reboot)
Ronald D. Moore
“If you're a fan of sci-fi, it's one of the best ever. give it three hours of your time. love it”— Joe Rogan
K-pop Demon Hunters
Netflix
“And so we sit down and we watch it. It's phenomenal. We've seen it three times. It's so good.”— Katee Sackhoff
Alien (1979)
Ridley Scott
“This is one of probably in my opinion one of the best movies of all time. It was a perfect movie.”— Katee Sackhoff
Contact
Robert Zemeckis
“It's from the movie with Jodie Foster. Contact. Beautiful movie. It's a great movie.”— Katee Sackhoff
Becky
Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion
“but it's like that's the female John Wick. Fun ass movie. It's a fun ass movie.”— Joe Rogan
The Coddling of the American Mind
Jonathan Haidt
“There's a great book about that from Jonathan hate called the coddling of the American mind”— Joe Rogan
The guest's own work
Another Life
Katee Sackhoff
“for my show Another Life, my character wakes up from cryo. I wanted her to look like dehydrated and senuey”— Katee Sackhoff
The Mandalorian
Jon Favreau
“I had a line from Mandalorian that I couldn't remember for the life of me.”— Katee Sackhoff
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Aliens
James Cameron
“Number number two, possibly better even. Look, they're both great movies. I really loved Aliens”— Joe Rogan
The Wrath of Becky
Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote
“Isn't there there was a there's a second one though, right? The Wrath of Becky also came out.”— Joe Rogan
300
Zack Snyder
“Like when they all got in insane shape for that movie 300.”— Katee Sackhoff
The Terminator
James Cameron
“like Linda Hamilton and Terminator. how many girls started doing chin-ups after they saw Linda Hamilton in the Terminator”— Joe Rogan
Hoarders
A&E
“it's like, you ever watch that show Hoarders? Certain point in time, you got to burn the house down.”— Joe Rogan
Trigonometry
Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin
“you know the show Trigonometry. It's a very popular podcast, but my friend Francis and Constantine, they're the hosts of it”— Katee Sackhoff
Neuralink
Neuralink
“We had the guy was the first Neuralink patient on. It's amazing. He was talking to me about how he could play video games now”— Joe Rogan
Big reveals from this episode
- Sackhoff was booed at San Diego Comic-Con for playing a role originally written for a man.
- Reveals her young daughter has a very rare form of cancer with a genetic mutation no other US patient is known to have.
- Argues Elon Musk's tweet against a bloated bill led to the Give Kids A Chance Act being cut, killing incentives for pediatric drug development.
- Claims pediatric oncologists earn roughly 50% less than adult oncologists across the board.
- Says Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told her politicians deliberately keep problems unsolved so they can keep campaigning on them.
- Sackhoff voices deep fear that AI 'actresses' will worsen body-image and suicide rates among young girls.
- Joe reveals a fan lost over 80 pounds doing Sackhoff's COVID-era YouTube workouts.
- Sackhoff says podcasting helped her realize she has ADHD because she couldn't stop talking over guests.
Worth remembering
- The National Cancer Institute allocates only about 4% of its budget to pediatrics.
- The Give Kids A Chance voucher program has spurred over 60 drugs for life-threatening childhood illnesses since 2012.
- The 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act ran 5,593 pages, bundling 12 appropriations bills plus unrelated provisions.
- The number-one cause of debt in America is a medical diagnosis.
- California spent about $24 billion on homelessness and the crisis grew larger.
- The WOW! signal was a 72-second narrowband radio burst detected August 15, 1977 by Ohio State's Big Ear telescope.
- Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS reportedly shows strong nickel emission with no iron, a pattern normally tied to industrial nickel alloys.
- The 'awful waste of space' line about aliens comes from Contact, based on Carl Sagan's novel.
- Praying mantises can snatch and eat hummingbirds, lizards and other prey many times harder to subdue than expected.
- To play her cryo-waking character in Another Life, Sackhoff cut to such low body fat (around 1,450-1,550 calories a day) that her menstruation stopped.