Stay Free - Russel Brand - Rainn Wilson (Spirituality and Creativity)

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:02.000 As you know, every Friday we do an in-depth interview with a radical thinker, a fantastic entertainer, a brilliant philosopher, able to take us beyond establishment narratives and into the netherworld of the constant imagination.

00:00:16.000 And today is an extraordinary and special day.

00:00:18.000 The first 10 minutes of this you can watch wherever you're watching it now, but after that it will be only live on Rumble.

00:00:24.000 That we may speak freely.

00:00:26.000 Not in order to create division, but in order to create unity.

00:00:29.000 If you're not a member of our Locals community yet, join now by pressing that red button and you can join the chat.

00:00:34.000 And ask us questions, as some people will be doing later.

00:00:38.000 Thank you for joining us.

00:00:40.000 And now it's time for me to introduce our very special, beautiful, magnificent guest.

00:00:46.000 It's Rainn Wilson.

00:00:47.000 Rainn Wilson is, as you know, this person.

00:00:49.000 I mean, he's from the office.

00:00:51.000 He's been in a bunch of movies.

00:00:52.000 Transformers.

00:00:54.000 That one where he was a rocker.

00:00:56.000 The rocker?

00:00:57.000 You remember the rocker?

00:00:58.000 Yeah, the one where you were a rocker.

00:00:59.000 Yeah, you didn't see it though.

00:01:00.000 Of course I did.

00:01:01.000 No one saw it.

00:01:01.000 I was on a plane.

00:01:05.000 We are Baha'is, we're a member of the Baha'i faith, not Baha'ists necessarily, but you were very close.

00:01:12.000 Can I point out at this early juncture that weren't Saddam Hussein in that faith? 0.68

00:01:17.000 Saddam Hussein was not in that faith.

00:01:19.000 What was he though?

00:01:19.000 I feel like he was a Baha'i, you're just trying to extract him.

00:01:26.000 I don't know what he was.

00:01:27.000 I'm sure he was a Muslim.

00:01:28.000 He was like a Middle Eastern Sufist type thing.

00:01:31.000 Yeah, Baha'i faith started in the mid-1800s in that area in Persia.

00:01:31.000 It's close.

00:01:38.000 So there's a lot of Persian Baha'is. 0.99

00:01:41.000 Omid Jalili?

00:01:42.000 Yeah, Omid!

00:01:42.000 I love Omid!

00:01:43.000 He's from the comedy world.

00:01:44.000 He'll be watching this.

00:01:45.000 I'm sure he will.

00:01:46.000 He's a Baha'i, but yeah, but I don't think any heads of state are Baha'is from the Middle East.

00:01:51.000 No, in fact, they're greatly persecuted.

00:01:53.000 You would know, wouldn't you?

00:01:55.000 It's your faith.

00:01:55.000 I do.

00:01:56.000 Baha'is are routinely locked up and executed in that part of the world.

00:02:00.000 Not this one though.

00:02:01.000 No, I'm not in this part of the world.

00:02:03.000 No, not at all.

00:02:04.000 No.

00:02:05.000 So Rain, this conversation will be formulated around a number of things, but ultimately what we want to explore is you and your unique brilliance.

00:02:05.000 Yeah.

00:02:13.000 I want to talk about the new book that you've written.

00:02:15.000 I know it's the first conversation that you've had about your book and I'm very excited.

00:02:18.000 I'm a little scared.

00:02:19.000 I'm a little nervy about it.

00:02:20.000 So I brought my book because I was driving here and put it on auto drive.

00:02:24.000 And then I was like, wait, what did I say here again?

00:02:27.000 So this seems dangerous.

00:02:29.000 It was dangerous.

00:02:29.000 Yeah.

00:02:30.000 I risked life and limb.

00:02:32.000 Just to be here.

00:02:33.000 The book is called Soul Boom and even in that title I'm able to evaluate that likely you approach the subject of spirituality with a kind of congeniality and accessibility because I suppose spirituality has come to be regarded as either esoteric or divisive or phatic and imitative.

00:02:53.000 Part of the challenge I think of, let's call them for the sake of simplicity, new age takes on spirituality is they sometimes feel Traditionalist, rootless, individualistic and selfish.

00:03:05.000 What is it about the Baha'i faith and the manner of discussion of spirituality in your book, Soul Boom, that prevents it from being just another tool to help us fit in with systemic thinking and just individualism?

00:03:18.000 That is such a perfectly formulated question.

00:03:22.000 I can't even believe it. 0.96

00:03:23.000 And you're so fucking articulate. 1.00

00:03:25.000 You're sick. 1.00

00:03:25.000 Thanks. 1.00

00:03:26.000 I made the question up.

00:03:28.000 I know.

00:03:30.000 That hits it exactly on the head.

00:03:33.000 Essentially, my thesis is that in humanity's current distaste for organized religion, we have thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater.

00:03:47.000 At the center of all great religious thought are a couple of key essential points that humanity has lost track of.

00:03:57.000 These are some essential elements of any spiritual tradition, universal spiritual tradition, it doesn't matter Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, that humanity needs to move forward because we're on the verge of destruction. 0.61

00:04:10.000 So you talk a lot about revolution in the book and the subtitle on your pod and online and the subtitle of the book is like why we need a spiritual revolution because and you've been a Honestly, you've been a great inspiration to me over the years and I watch all of your stuff.

00:04:26.000 I've listened to so many of your interviews and because I feel like we're kindred spirits, me perhaps in a somewhat smaller, gentler way, i.e.

00:04:37.000 my narcissism is not quite as unchecked as yours.

00:04:40.000 I'm not checking mine.

00:04:41.000 Good.

00:04:42.000 I didn't even know it was there.

00:04:44.000 I don't even know really what you mean.

00:04:46.000 I was looking at my reflection while you were saying that and thinking, soon I'm going to say some things that are going to be really brilliant.

00:04:52.000 This noise coming from this man will soon stop.

00:04:55.000 It'll be back to where things are meant to be.

00:04:57.000 And I will be able to hold forth.

00:04:58.000 But in all seriousness, because you posit your arguments, your beliefs, your discussions around this idea that we need to not just tweak Extremely broken systems, we need to rethink the entire system itself.

00:05:17.000 And so my thesis is that we can do that.

00:05:20.000 And we need to do that by using spiritual tools, maybe a little bit more than I hate to say political tools, because I don't because politics is really about the balance of power.

00:05:32.000 So really, a Good solid spiritual tools will correct the balance of power, but not through partisanship.

00:05:40.000 So there's a lot more to it than that.

00:05:41.000 That sounds like a beautiful and necessary and important book.

00:05:45.000 I was thinking in a way, Rain, that politics is functional, rudimentary, and about ...organization and logistics.

00:05:54.000 At least it ought to be.

00:05:55.000 But you need to underwrite your vision with some sort of ideology.

00:06:00.000 And even in a secular culture, you still require recourse to ideas that legitimize the direction that you as a political movement, or one as a political individual, is claiming to be the correct direction for the society that you're claiming the right to organize.

00:06:18.000 Who is in our house?

00:06:19.000 Because there shouldn't be anybody Upstairs.

00:06:22.000 I'm the only person here.

00:06:23.000 My children are out.

00:06:24.000 That was like a heavy-footed individual.

00:06:27.000 That's Fauci.

00:06:28.000 He's up there.

00:06:29.000 He's claiming royalties for something he'd probably never even come up with himself.

00:06:32.000 Fauci! 0.94

00:06:33.000 Get down from there.

00:06:34.000 You're time-wasting.

00:06:37.000 I think it's interesting that you say that the tools that are required are spiritual ones.

00:06:43.000 I agree with you entirely because Materialism and rationalism, I think, have taken us as far as they can take us.

00:06:51.000 Like, this is the way we can organize our resources on this planet if we extract ourselves from our true nature.

00:06:58.000 All of us know that within us there's the sensation of the body, there's the awareness of the thoughts, but there is something else which you might regard as your spirit.

00:07:06.000 Your spirit requires nurture.

00:07:08.000 And when I try to organize my own life simply around logistics, relationships, objectives, I come unstuck pretty quick.

00:07:17.000 That's where I found spirituality.

00:07:19.000 Was your introduction to a spiritual way of life similarly desperate?

00:07:24.000 Or how did you find your path spiritually, Ray?

00:07:28.000 Well, you said so many really beautiful things there.

00:07:32.000 I just want to I just want to point out one thing that you said, which is our spiritual reality.

00:07:38.000 You introduced me and you're like, this is Rainn Wilson, and it's true.

00:07:42.000 This is the body I'm currently inhabiting.

00:07:44.000 I've spent 57 years in it so far.

00:07:47.000 Maybe I'll hit 90, maybe 95 if I'm lucky.

00:07:51.000 I really don't know.

00:07:52.000 I don't have any control over that.

00:07:53.000 But this isn't me.

00:07:55.000 So what is my reality is that I'm a spiritual being inhabiting a human body for a very limited period of time.

00:08:02.000 So for me, I grew up a member of the Baha'i Faith.

00:08:05.000 My parents were Baha'i.

00:08:06.000 The Baha'i Faith is a very beautiful religion.

00:08:09.000 I'm not here to convert anyone, but I do want to say that, you know, the central ideas are about unity and building community at the grassroots and being of service to one another.

00:08:20.000 And those elements, like I said earlier, are universalities that belong in every spiritual tradition and every religious tradition.

00:08:28.000 If you dig deep enough, if you look at their source, if you look at what Jesus actually did and not kind of what rose up in Jesus's name hundreds of years thereafter.

00:08:37.000 So I grew up a member of the Baha'i Faith.

00:08:39.000 It was a beautiful faith tradition.

00:08:42.000 I needed to leave it because, much like yourself, I wanted to go explore the wide, wonderful world of drugs and alcohol and sex.

00:08:49.000 In New York City when I was 20 years old and went off to acting school.

00:08:52.000 So we share that as well.

00:08:53.000 I love your recovery book too.

00:08:55.000 I'm in recovery myself and a very important part of my spiritual journey comes from that 12-step tradition.

00:09:02.000 And yeah, so I left the Baha'i Faith. 1.00

00:09:05.000 I jettisoned everything and anything having to do with spirituality.

00:09:09.000 It seemed old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy.

00:09:12.000 Limiting, moralistic, and just not relevant to my daily life.

00:09:18.000 And then as I got more and more depressed and dealt with alcoholism, depression, What we call mental health issues now, but in the 90s, we didn't have words for it. 0.99

00:09:32.000 I was just fucked up. 0.99

00:09:33.000 I was just generally fucked up and really unhappy. 1.00

00:09:36.000 Even though I was working as an actor, I had a beautiful girlfriend, now my wife, and I'm like, what the fuck is going on? 0.99

00:09:42.000 Why am I so unhappy? 0.91

00:09:43.000 And that led me on a spiritual journey.

00:09:45.000 Ultimately, I went back to the Baha'i Faith, but during that time, which I'm really grateful for, where I was very lost, I was very hurting, I had a lot of pain, There were times when I felt suicidal, deeply suicidal.

00:10:00.000 I got to explore all the religious faiths of the world.

00:10:03.000 I'm sure there's some, you know, pygmy religions that I didn't get to study. 1.00

00:10:08.000 But I read the Bhagavad Gita and I read the writings of the Buddha.

00:10:12.000 I read the Koran and the Bible.

00:10:13.000 And I went on a many, many year soul searching.

00:10:20.000 For personal meaning and that led me ultimately back to the Baha'i Faith and I decided that that was my spiritual path.

00:10:29.000 And those kind of ideas, what I found along the way, have inspired Soul Boom.

00:10:36.000 The World Is Not Enough may be the title of a James Bond movie, but it is also true that the world is not enough.

00:10:45.000 I find that your story resonates with me in a number of ways, and is perhaps to a degree archetypal.

00:10:52.000 That laying at your feet in early life were a set of spiritual tools that were, for whatever reason, inaccessible to you.

00:11:00.000 And then after suffering and exploration, you find your way back to that grail as it's offering.

00:11:08.000 Yeah, that's sort of like a really useful way, I think, to look at it, isn't it?

00:11:12.000 To sort of find that there are coordinates that are recognizable, particularly when we live in a culture that seems to be about identitarianism and divisiveness, not that people don't have the obvious right to celebrate their individuality and express it in the Myriad ways that one might.

00:11:28.000 But that is important to acknowledge, I believe at least, the kind of universality in the same way that we might accept that we all have skeletons, that there are certain psychic archetypes that we are all able to access.

00:11:40.000 And me, in all reign, it was like desperation that sort of made me consider a different way of life.

00:11:47.000 And to be honest, it still is.

00:11:49.000 That I venture into the world thinking maybe this is the thing that will make me happy, some little task that I can fulfill or not fulfill and then when it doesn't work inevitably I return to this point of acceptance because as a 12-step person I know you must be aware that the principal message as well as aligning with the broad paradigm that exists in the triangle of service and unity and community

00:12:22.000 There is also the idea of total surrender.

00:12:25.000 And because Twelve Steps and people that come to it via addiction are ordinarily dealing with crisis, a particular crisis, the crisis of addiction most obviously, I wonder if it's understood that what that folk, that new folk religion is telling you is that yourself Your identity, your whole persona is temporary.

00:12:51.000 And that's not what you can or you can't organize your life around that successfully.

00:12:54.000 You have to live absolutely in the service of a higher idea.

00:12:58.000 And I think it's impossible to mobilize that resource in a human being Without some kind of spiritual, without a spiritual conversation and without spiritual principles.

00:13:09.000 People aren't, are they after the last century going to rally for socialism or free market capitalism or fascism ultimately?

00:13:16.000 Only in so much as those things allude to either unity or prosperity or solidarity.

00:13:24.000 There's nothing there in material.

00:13:26.000 As is true physically, it's mostly space between the molecules, between the occasional nodes of apparently only present when observed phenomena.

00:13:36.000 It's mostly nothing.

00:13:37.000 It's mostly nothing.

00:13:38.000 So I wonder how you reconcile your life as an individual.

00:13:45.000 You've taken, like you're going to be doing a film right now, as I understand, it's only some sort of Serendipity, that means that you can trundle up here that you're not in your movie right now.

00:13:54.000 How do you reconcile your requirements as an actor, as a father, as a husband, as an author, with this knowledge that, you know, as you said a moment ago, really you're not here at all?

00:14:04.000 Again, beautifully said.

00:14:06.000 So, one of the chapters in the book I talk about two of my favorite television shows from the 1970s, which was Kung Fu and Star Trek.

00:14:18.000 So, and I use these as analogies of our spiritual journey.

00:14:21.000 So, Kung Fu, for those Millennials and Gen Z folks that haven't seen it, is about this guy, Y. Chang Cain, very racially played by David Carradine.

00:14:32.000 Although the concept was invented by Bruce Lee, it should have been an actual Chinese person, but he's Chinese or half Chinese, he grew up in a Shaolin monastery fighting Kung Fu and he goes to the Old West looking for his brother.

00:14:44.000 Every episode is about a spiritual journey.

00:14:46.000 So, Kuai Cheng Kane is seeking to bring his Eastern wisdom and perspective to these rough-and-tumble racist cowboys that he bumps up against in every episode, and then it ends with a flurry of kicks and Fist fights and whatnot.

00:15:00.000 And I use that as an analogy of our personal spiritual journey.

00:15:05.000 So that's our meditation, our going out into the world seeking to be kinder, seeking to be wiser, to be more compassionate, to cultivate those divine spiritual qualities that we all have inside of us.

00:15:17.000 Some qualities more than others.

00:15:20.000 And that's part of our journey.

00:15:22.000 The Star Trek side of it is that humanity itself is on a spiritual journey.

00:15:28.000 And one of the things that we've thrown out is the possibility that we need to think of ourselves as global citizens, as world citizens, as human citizens rather, that we are all 7 billion of us inhabiting this planet.

00:15:46.000 And how do we move forward?

00:15:48.000 And how do we help make the world a better place?

00:15:51.000 How do we solve racism?

00:15:54.000 How do we solve income inequality?

00:15:56.000 How do we solve these essential questions?

00:15:58.000 Because they're not gonna be solvable, Russell, through politics.

00:16:03.000 It doesn't matter what candidate.

00:16:05.000 We can get Biden out of there.

00:16:07.000 We can get Trump out of there.

00:16:08.000 We'll get, you know, I remember back in the day when Barack Obama was elected, all of my liberal, secular friends were like, oh my God, thank God racism has been solved.

00:16:17.000 Barack Obama is the president and in a lot of ways he was a very good president.

00:16:21.000 In a lot of ways it was just business as usual and a lot of big business.

00:16:26.000 And a lot of drone strikes, illegal drone strikes, and a lot of, you know, monitoring.

00:16:31.000 And it was just the same old, same old.

00:16:34.000 And racism actually spiked and got worse after he was... So the system itself is broken.

00:16:40.000 So when we talk about the spiritual journey, that you talked about new ageism earlier, and it's something that really rankles me because there is an essential selfishness at the center of kind of new age, treacly, It's a spiritual path which is like I like this yoga class, I like this crystal, I like this meditation app, I like this Instagram of the day, this roomy quote that hangs on my wall and this makes me feel peace and this makes me feel serenity and I'm gonna leave it at that.

00:17:12.000 No, peace, personal peace and serenity is important.

00:17:15.000 The yoga class is important.

00:17:16.000 Meditation, a nice roomy quote, those are all important.

00:17:19.000 But if it stops there, it's narcissism.

00:17:22.000 If it stops there, it's self-serving.

00:17:24.000 So how do we take that, this dance between the Kung Fu and the Star Trek, this dance between our personal spiritual journey And then we take that out into the world.

00:17:34.000 We're of service to others.

00:17:36.000 We seek to heal, to transform, to build community at the grassroots.

00:17:43.000 Again, it doesn't really matter who... If... Russell.

00:17:48.000 Yes, listen to me.

00:17:49.000 I was listening anyway.

00:17:50.000 I know you were listening.

00:17:51.000 You were wrapped.

00:17:52.000 Listen.

00:17:54.000 Our entire system, both political and economic, is based on the worst aspects of humanity.

00:17:59.000 It's based on contest, competition, and aggression, and one-upsmanship, and individuality.

00:18:07.000 They're all based on that.

00:18:09.000 That's how capitalism is based.

00:18:10.000 And that's how partisan Politics is also based.

00:18:14.000 So as long as we're in that system, we're headed toward a self-destructive end.

00:18:19.000 We're headed towards climate disaster and all kinds of, I talk about all the different global pandemics in the book besides, besides COVID.

00:18:28.000 But, you know, racism, materialism, you mentioned, there's so many other nationalism, Militarism.

00:18:36.000 These are all the real global pandemics.

00:18:38.000 But if we want to really cure them, if we want to address them, we have to go to the roots.

00:18:45.000 And the roots of that is our personal transformation as a... I'm sorry to go back to this stupid analogy, but going back to our inner Kwai Chang Cain, and then how do we spread that in the world?

00:18:59.000 How do we build something new? 0.94

00:19:01.000 Because if we just keep protesting, It's not going to lead to anything.

00:19:06.000 And we're in a culture of protest right now where we see injustice.

00:19:10.000 We're like, injustice!

00:19:11.000 And we see a terrible politician. 1.00

00:19:14.000 We're like, that politician sucks. 0.99

00:19:15.000 And we see this terrible bill that's been passed. 1.00

00:19:19.000 Like this legislation is terrible.

00:19:21.000 What are we building?

00:19:24.000 Yeah, that's a wonderful way of framing it.

00:19:27.000 In a sense, what needs to be rejected is the entire perspective that we're presented with and the successive administrations in your country, America, that you've described.

00:19:39.000 are enough to illustrate the futility of a system that ultimately serves the same, what we generally call elite interests, regardless of what set of politicians claim to be representing what particular ideology.

00:19:52.000 And the quantitative easing measures that took place in 2008 and the bailing out of the banks and the failure to prosecute anyone for the financial travesties in that era demonstrated that ultimately when it came to it, what you were left with was rhetoric and aesthetics.

00:20:06.000 And I feel that the Amplification of the culture at war is to mask the fact that the distinctions when it comes to the maneuvering and administering of power are too similar to warrant debate.

00:20:21.000 So the necessary amplification of the small differences is a requirement.

00:20:26.000 to legitimize the entire conversation. What he said about it from a cosmic perspective,

00:20:32.000 I suppose one might say, and it's certainly an analogy that's used a lot in spirituality,

00:20:36.000 that we're seven billion inhabitants of a single cosmic craft. It was a metaphor that Buckminster

00:20:42.000 Fuller used to continually use. That's accurate and rudimentary.

00:20:47.000 That's not abstract, metaphysical and spiritual in a kind of ephemeral way.

00:20:52.000 That is the reality.

00:20:53.000 We are living on this planet.

00:20:55.000 We do have these resources.

00:20:57.000 This is why the solution must be spiritual.

00:20:59.000 Because if you regard things solely rationally, then all that's left is how do you distribute resources?

00:21:06.000 And therefore, the most potent ideological drives become those that are unwritten primarily, underwritten rather, underwritten by primary forces, i.e.

00:21:18.000 survival, competition.

00:21:20.000 This is the palette that will operate well when you're dealing with 70 people in a tribe that have to use their resources pre-agriculturally when they have to hunt and gather.

00:21:30.000 You need that energy or a species doesn't survive.

00:21:32.000 Of course what's happened is our systems haven't... our evolution has not adjusted to the systems within which we live.

00:21:40.000 And with the preclusion of spiritual solutions, we cannot envisage that there might be different resources within us to underwrite and fuel our vision.

00:21:54.000 I liked it that you said that, that we fetishize the aesthetic, we fetishize superficial ideological components, not that cultural or racial issues are not important.

00:22:03.000 Of course they do, they lead back to great, great exploitation, that's evident and plain.

00:22:08.000 But I like it, but when the choice is so reductive, I'm reminded of that. 0.99

00:22:11.000 Bill Hicks used to do a bit of saying, like, when there was a debate about whether or not to have women priests, he said, yeah, have women priests, have one with He's got two dicks, I might go see that one. 0.98

00:22:21.000 He goes, but I prefer to deal with the voice of limitless love that's accessible to all of us, gotta run, there's a voice calling me. 0.98

00:22:31.000 Why are we accepting that paradigm?

00:22:35.000 And the only way out of that is through spirituality, even if you use the David Carradine and the Captain Kirk way through it.

00:22:44.000 Because I will be, at some point in this conversation, I'm keen to ...analyse and articulate some of the archetypes in the world from which most people will know you.

00:22:57.000 The archetypes of the office and who are those heroes and villains, what are those tropes, what are those relationships set, albeit in a mundane and provincial paper mill.

00:23:07.000 But I can see that you are, as is often the case, reaching for your tone, presumably with some direction-changing insight, which I am Nothing but ears and erection waiting to hear.

00:23:20.000 I'm sorry.

00:23:22.000 I saw you as I was grabbing my tome.

00:23:27.000 Oh, here's a good quote.

00:23:28.000 What do you mean?

00:23:29.000 You're just pulling them out at random.

00:23:30.000 Yeah.

00:23:30.000 Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, we are watching the birth more than the death of a world.

00:23:37.000 I wanted to, you quoted Buckminster Fuller, and I had a great Buckminster Fuller quote,

00:23:43.000 which I can paraphrase grotesquely, which is like, you don't change things

00:23:49.000 by fixing an existing broken system.

00:23:52.000 The way to change things is to create a new system that makes the existing system obsolete.

00:23:58.000 And that just reminded me of what you were saying.

00:24:01.000 Like, even though Dwight is a really, really peculiar character, and you are evidently a peculiar man.

00:24:07.000 You're peculiar in a very different way than Dwight is.

00:24:11.000 I'm very curious about how you captured that.

00:24:16.000 He's a very American character, Dwight, I feel.

00:24:18.000 The patriotism, the individualism, the libertarianism.

00:24:24.000 Oddly repressed strangeness and how close you were to how close it was to Mackenzie Crook's rendering of Gareth initially and how quickly you because it's one of the most significant departures is the difference between those two those two characters Mackenzie Crook is was absolutely brilliant and his performance and his characterization was it just Tickled me to the core.

00:24:49.000 I think he is absolutely magnificent.

00:24:52.000 He doesn't get enough credit for the incredible Gareth.

00:24:55.000 I stole all his best bits.

00:24:58.000 The fact that he went and gave himself the most unflattering haircut possible, which I did for Dwight.

00:25:05.000 The self-seriousness.

00:25:07.000 There's a kind of a hoo-ha, rah-rah kind of A vein of militarism underneath those two characters.

00:25:18.000 So the toady bully, like the two sides of the coin are like, I'm a toady and I'm a bully at the same time, which I thought was really interesting.

00:25:28.000 But you know, in pondering Dwight and the creation of Dwight, I really went back to my roots in suburban Seattle.

00:25:37.000 I had a friend named Chris Cole, and we played Dungeons and Dragons together.

00:25:40.000 Total nerd.

00:25:43.000 He joined the army to play the coronet in the army, and he was a fencing fanatic.

00:25:51.000 He got into fencing because he loved Dungeons and Dragons and wanted to play with swords.

00:25:55.000 You know what I mean?

00:25:55.000 So you see, like, in the roots of someone like that, you see some blight.

00:26:00.000 My uncle, my family were farmers on both sides of my family in the Midwest, in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

00:26:07.000 And there's a particular kind of like Scandinavian kind of spectrum-y muscle car farmer that is also kind of in the wheelhouse of Dwight.

00:26:24.000 And that's one of the things I will really applaud.

00:26:27.000 You know, so many people create television shows and they have like And no offense, but like Big Bang Theory, like the idea of nerds and what a nerd is.

00:26:36.000 But Dwight, you can't type in like, is he a nerd?

00:26:39.000 Yeah.

00:26:40.000 Is he a successful businessman?

00:26:42.000 Is he the worst salesman ever?

00:26:42.000 Yeah.

00:26:45.000 Yeah.

00:26:45.000 Is he a bully?

00:26:46.000 Yes.

00:26:47.000 Is he all about his independence?

00:26:51.000 Certainly.

00:26:51.000 Does he long for community?

00:26:53.000 Yes.

00:26:54.000 Is he, you know what I mean?

00:26:56.000 Like it goes on and on and on.

00:27:00.000 He has so many different facets and it's very rare on a television show that you would allow a comedic character to kind of have those kind of reverberations.

00:27:09.000 Yeah, because a lot of real character comes from contradiction.

00:27:13.000 I feel like that comedy comes from a sort of a continual awareness that the reality we operate within is secondary and that there is another ulterior reality, but that's what we allude to.

00:27:26.000 What I feel, one of the things that defines comedy for me, Rain, is the ability to continually go, this isn't real.

00:27:34.000 I've been taking my life seriously.

00:27:36.000 I'm worried about my children.

00:27:37.000 I'm worried about my future.

00:27:38.000 I'm worried about my job and people.

00:27:40.000 But in comedy, you connect with a deeper truth somewhere in this aperture between the nihilism that the infinite and the eternal suggest and a deep, profound, yet somehow ineffable meaning that can only be felt in love.

00:27:57.000 To avoid the piety that that could induce, you can approach it with comedy, that there is a playful beauty, and you talk about reading the Bhagavad Gita, and the characterization of Krishna versus a character, Like, in the character, Jesus Christ, like, you know, Christ is real.

00:28:16.000 I'm not coming on here to say there ain't a Jesus.

00:28:18.000 I like Jesus.

00:28:19.000 I love Jesus.

00:28:21.000 I've been trying to be Him for a while, but there's some demands.

00:28:25.000 You've got the hair, right?

00:28:26.000 That's as far as I've got, really, because self-sacrifice and being a living manifestation of what you've devised. 0.98

00:28:32.000 The feet of many a prostitute. 0.71

00:28:34.000 Sometimes as part of the contract. 0.98

00:28:37.000 As a matter of fact, right?

00:28:39.000 Yeah, there's a playfulness in the character of Krishna and sometimes evident in the voluptuousness and abundance of like the Vedas and Hinduism, the faith derived from it.

00:28:50.000 That sometimes you feel, is that where New Ageism is right?

00:28:54.000 This is the country where many of those relationships began, where Yogananda and Vivekananda, they came to this country a century ago, a couple of centuries ago, and impacted and altered The direction of American spiritual life, where the kind of frontierism of the American spirit can meet with an adventurousness, a spiritual adventurousness, perhaps as encapsulated by your Star Trek adventurous spirit, within this sort of hermeneutics and ecclesiastical quest in.

00:29:26.000 I guess, what am I saying here?

00:29:28.000 I'm saying here, like, how do you see your role as a comic being part of the service of your spirituality?

00:29:34.000 That's one aspect of the question I want to ask.

00:29:36.000 And then also I want you to fold into it, if you can, after being in something like the office for a very, very long while, which must entirely dominate your life and mean a lot to everybody that you meet all the while.

00:29:45.000 How do you move past it and beyond it?

00:29:48.000 And how do you locate it now?

00:29:51.000 I'm going to risk a lot of people rolling their eyes right now, but I want to say that I believe that being an artist is a mystical journey because essentially we're living in a mystery.

00:30:04.000 The Lakota word for God is wakantanka, which means the great mystery.

00:30:10.000 And when I view God, when I view the divine as the great mystery, that's when I sink in.

00:30:17.000 And the role of an artist is to have a blank page and create something beautiful, to have a silent room and create a beautiful symphony, to have words on a page that say Dwight and have some lines and to bring those to life, to have a blank page and write a beautiful poem that's just a sequence of words, but somehow it touches our heart and opens up something for us.

00:30:39.000 There is a mystical and beautiful, mysterious journey in being an artist.

00:30:46.000 And Uh, and I feel like I, at a very young age, knew that I was able to just do silly voices and play characters.

00:30:54.000 And I, and I love to make people laugh. 0.81

00:30:56.000 And I was this big, weird looking goofball with a giant head and a little belly. 0.58

00:31:01.000 And, uh, and I made people laugh and that's how I got the girls. 1.00

00:31:05.000 All of a sudden I started doing acting and all of a sudden girls wanted me to sit at their lunch table. 0.84

00:31:11.000 So I was like, I'm in, I'm done with Dungeons and Dragons.

00:31:14.000 I'm going down this path.

00:31:16.000 And I feel like when you're as profoundly blessed to be a part of a show like The Office, that you have this kind of convocation of these beautiful artist, actor, mystics, bringing Jim and Pam and especially Michael and so many of the other great characters to life and Dwight.

00:31:37.000 And they're creating a family.

00:31:39.000 It's got a warm heart at the center.

00:31:42.000 That there is a spiritual vibration to doing something like The Office.

00:31:48.000 And I think going back to the America question, and here's the other thing I'll say.

00:31:53.000 We talked about the Star Trek journey and the Kung Fu journey.

00:31:58.000 I believe that part of my spiritual journey is to find my way to be of maximum service to the world.

00:32:04.000 What is my way?

00:32:05.000 What is your way?

00:32:05.000 What is his way?

00:32:07.000 Leon's way to be a maximum.

00:32:09.000 Forget Leon. 1.00

00:32:10.000 Fuck Leon. 1.00

00:32:11.000 It's too late for him. 1.00

00:32:12.000 It's too late.

00:32:13.000 Yeah.

00:32:13.000 But what is our way to use the gifts that this divine great mystery, I won't say God, but that the great mystery Wakan Tanka has given each of us to put into service to help transform this very difficult and confusing and unjust planet into some kind of earthly paradise, which Um, again, I'm risking a lot of eye rolls.

00:32:40.000 Um, you know, you may say that I'm a dreamer.

00:32:43.000 I'm not the only one.

00:32:44.000 I do think that there are there, we have to visualize, we've become so cynical.

00:32:50.000 We have to visualize the possibility of transforming this planet and transforming the way that human beings interact with each other.

00:32:58.000 And so, for me, part of that is, yeah, I wrote a book, and, you know, I'm a member of my faith community, and I do service work, and my wife and I have a non-profit, and I do stuff like that, but I also, for me, for whatever reason, the great mystery instilled in me the possibility of playing these weird, delightful characters, like Alekina the Clown, And I get paid handsomely for it.

00:33:26.000 And I have heard time and time again, the office has brought so much joy to people.

00:33:33.000 It's uplifted their hearts.

00:33:35.000 It's connected families.

00:33:37.000 People have been suffering and they have tearfully, time and time again, told me how much the show has meant to them.

00:33:44.000 That's a service In itself.

00:33:46.000 So, if we move away, again, from the worst qualities of humanity, which are self-seeking, and we move in toward, instead of self-ishness, other-ishness, then that's the very feeble step one in the eventual transformation of the planet.

00:34:06.000 Well, it's nice that inversion.

00:34:07.000 I feel like it might be a significant step, that flip might be more significant than you implied at the end of your statement.

00:34:17.000 When things seem only spatial and temporal, contained within that framing, there can be a dull flatness to it.

00:34:26.000 It seems like that when I'm able, when I live my life, Rain, and my unspoken, yet somehow explicit agenda is self-fulfillment, I want this for me.

00:34:35.000 When my religion is Russell, Like, you know, like, what he wants.

00:34:39.000 His preferences become my, they are my stone tablet, my tabernacle.

00:34:45.000 Russell's preferences is what I live for.

00:34:48.000 I sort of feel myself, like, draining and atrophying as I go.

00:34:53.000 But, like, I heard today that someone told me, like, oh, that I'd just done some very small, kind thing for them and how they'd remember.

00:35:00.000 They go, I don't remember anything else that happened that month except that thing you did.

00:35:03.000 And it reminded me of this idea that how can eternity, like the great mystery, be anything other than continually present?

00:35:14.000 How can God be elsewhere?

00:35:16.000 How can God be anywhere but here in this moment if God is absolute?

00:35:21.000 And I feel like The first page, and God knows if it wasn't on the first page I wouldn't have read it, of George Orwell's homage to Catalonia.

00:35:30.000 He talks about queuing up to sign up to PUM, you know, it's a fight there, that he sort of saw this in front of him to sign up was this red-haired Italian bella.

00:35:39.000 And he said that even without knowing him, he knew that he could love him.

00:35:42.000 Like, he sort of thought, like, this guy, I like this guy a lot.

00:35:44.000 There's something about him.

00:35:46.000 And sometimes there are, like, you know, in early life love affairs that last, you know, God, a day, an afternoon, or brief moments, connections with people.

00:35:54.000 And if you've been held like that, if you've experienced that moment, the timeless, the eternal, what does he say, Wittgenstein?

00:36:01.000 He says, if we consider eternity not to be an unlimited temporal duration, but the quality of timelessness, then eternity belongs to those that live in the present, wherever in the present, able to return to this place.

00:36:16.000 And so even if it's a cultural artifact, like the office, which no doubt was a sort of the congregation of many geniuses present in that, from the delivering, the conception, all sorts of aspects of it.

00:36:28.000 You know, one feels it's being rebooted like football, like music, like everything, just into commodity, all things commodity, all things commodity.

00:36:37.000 If they have in them that spirit, if they have love in them, that we will feel the resonance of that.

00:36:43.000 This is why I think it is no small thing to posit that the solution to our problems must of course be spiritual, that it's not going to be organisational.

00:36:50.000 There are great tomes, great genres of political writing about this is how we organise it economically, this is how we organise it geopolitically, militarily.

00:37:00.000 But unless there is a shift in the consciousness of our kind, Then it will reorganize like iron filings back to that template, the way it's reiterated itself through empire, successive empires have conformed to the same paradigm.

00:37:15.000 You could take Marxism as an example, like essentially at the root of Marxism is how do we heal these incredible income inequality that is holding billions of people back and causing them to suffer?

00:37:27.000 Well, let's create an organization in which the resources are spread out among humanity, but If there isn't the need in the human heart to share, then having an administration say, you must give up this beautiful Hollywood Hills house and this couch and you must give it to him and you must work as a

00:37:52.000 Yeah.

00:37:52.000 you know, as a janitor, then if that's coming from above, then

00:37:56.000 that's, you're not going to feel connected to that. So Marxism at

00:38:00.000 its heart, seeking to remedy a big problem in the world is fantastic, has so many great ideas inherent in it. But

00:38:09.000 again, it is has to bubble up from the ground up.

00:38:13.000 Oh man, that's a real beautiful metaphor, I feel that. 0.98

00:38:15.000 You know, Marxism starts with the idea of sharing, and ends up with, we're going to kill all these people! 0.97

00:38:23.000 And like Christianity is, we are all one! 0.99

00:38:26.000 And ends up with, we're building this cathedral and killing all these people! 0.99

00:38:30.000 Stop getting to kill all these people as the outcome! 0.90

00:38:34.000 You know, that there's some invisible imprimatur keeps imposing.

00:38:39.000 When I was in London recently with all of the developments, in Tottenham Court Road, which is a sort of a hub within London, there was something that as if dropped from the sky, some new development at the epicentre of that town.

00:38:54.000 Some unlovely Kubla Khan, nothing but edifice and shine. 0.90

00:38:59.000 And when I walked near it, what I felt was, you know, London for all its flaws, like any entity that exists within a commercial framing with that kind of utility, with that kind of telos, it always had the sense that the culture has come from the ground.

00:39:14.000 You know, when you're in a place, you want to feel that this is the expression of grandmothers and grandfathers and ancestors have built this place, many ideas to be in Rome, to see the eternity of Rome in its layers, that you are placed in the present, that the past is there looking at you, that the Colosseum is there looking at you, the Forum is there.

00:39:33.000 Julius Caesar died there.

00:39:35.000 It's happening now.

00:39:36.000 It's happening now.

00:39:37.000 It's not, this is not, you know like that sometimes.

00:39:39.000 And that's the beautiful thing about Rome too, is then you fast forward to the Renaissance and you see the beautiful churches and the Michelangelo and the incredible paintings and it's all part of that unfolding history of Rome.

00:39:51.000 But London, I think London is the new Rome in a way and it has that layer upon layer of beautiful kind of human evolution.

00:40:01.000 Yes, I suppose, but it feels to me very much that what we are witnessing now is sort of an ongoing centralizing entity imposing from above, this time masked in globalism, this time using the rhetoric of equality, fairness.

00:40:16.000 Yeah, but I want to challenge you on that a little bit, because I understand and I've heard a lot of your talking about the World Economic Forum and whatnot.

00:40:24.000 And I certainly am not a big fan of billionaires getting together and coming up with policies that supposedly benefit the little man.

00:40:30.000 That's not what I'm talking about.

00:40:32.000 But we have to be careful when saying that globalism is the enemy because ultimately we do want to be global.

00:40:39.000 Ultimately we do want and that doesn't mean like Well, a one world government that's authoritarianism.

00:40:47.000 That's not what we're talking about.

00:40:48.000 But ultimately, we have to be one human species on a planet.

00:40:53.000 And that's going to take us away from nationalism.

00:40:56.000 We're like, I was born in Ecuador.

00:40:58.000 Ecuador is amazing.

00:41:00.000 Ecuador forever.

00:41:02.000 God bless Ecuador. 0.94

00:41:03.000 I will die Ecuador or Belgium or Mongolia or insert whatever country you want.

00:41:08.000 So how do we because this, like everything, these conversations have become so like black and white and so simplistic.

00:41:17.000 And you have like, globalists versus anti globalists versus like, how do we have a global transformation on on this heart level here, but also with 7 billion of us, so

00:41:31.000 that we are global.

00:41:32.000 And that's a different kind of globalism. So if we're shouting anti-globalist epithets from every

00:41:39.000 belfry, then we're kind of neglecting our greater work.

00:41:44.000 I believe this, that as with your earlier janitor metaphor, if someone wants me to clean

00:41:54.000 for service, for love, I will cling.

00:41:58.000 Someone tells me to do something... Like Jesus did.

00:42:01.000 Like our Lord before us.

00:42:02.000 Another similarity.

00:42:03.000 That's weird.

00:42:03.000 They're clocking up.

00:42:04.000 If someone tries to make me clean, I'm not doing it.

00:42:09.000 I feel that the agenda of globalism Is centralization, authoritarianism, the ability to manipulate and control markets and to generate dominion?

00:42:18.000 Now, the love of Ecuador is not only a metaphor, but an evolved tendency towards tribalism, ancestor worship, a celebration of individual culture.

00:42:29.000 The love of Ecuador or Belgium needn't mean hatred of the other. It needn't mean that. But I feel that

00:42:35.000 if you start to take away people's right to be Ecuadorian, they're not going to like it. And I feel

00:42:41.000 that the kind of globalism, the kind of confederacy that you are alluding to can only

00:42:46.000 be brought about democratically.

00:42:48.000 The problem is with the WAF, WHO, IMF is that they're leveraging undemocratic globalist measures

00:42:54.000 without consultation of the people that will be affected by those measures, right? And telling us

00:42:59.000 that it's because of some sort of project to save the planet. But when here is a continued,

00:43:04.000 this I can continually observe, they never make suggestions or push edicts that will impact

00:43:12.000 the agenda of the powerful. Never. They never say, we're trying to save the planet because

00:43:17.000 Here's what we're doing.

00:43:18.000 Energy companies will now not benefit from, what's that word I can never remember?

00:43:23.000 Supplementations.

00:43:26.000 Thank you.

00:43:27.000 They will not benefit from subsidies.

00:43:29.000 They will not be entitled to profit.

00:43:31.000 We're going to regulate and control their profiteering. 0.99

00:43:33.000 We're not going to say, in order to meet climate change objectives, we're going to fuck the lives of ordinary people. 0.93

00:43:42.000 70% of global pollution comes from corporations. 0.98

00:43:45.000 Start with them then.

00:43:47.000 Start with them then.

00:43:48.000 The monopolized big tech companies.

00:43:49.000 Let's start breaking them down. 0.88

00:43:51.000 So I feel that what they use is rhetorical and manipulative.

00:43:56.000 They talk about, you know, this is for the preservation and conservation of our planet.

00:43:59.000 We have to acknowledge this.

00:44:00.000 Because of course, as we have said spiritually, Like, we need to be able to hold in our consciousness.

00:44:05.000 This is one planet.

00:44:06.000 But as they say, and this is some of the greatness we've had on here, like Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, they talk about, and Gandhi himself, localism.

00:44:15.000 Your community must be self-governing.

00:44:17.000 Your community must use its own resources.

00:44:19.000 Your community must be empowered.

00:44:20.000 The fact that that becomes fueled somehow by hating another community, you can see that that's an evolutionary quirk.

00:44:27.000 We know that strangers were the most likely people to bring disease, to say, you know, 10,000 years ago, which is nothing, just 50 ancestors that way, or whatever it is, you know, when you line them up, it's no time of go at all.

00:44:39.000 What I feel like is that these bureaucracies masking anodyne language, nefarious ideals that were evident in the great ideologies of the last century, the fascism, the communism, How the Marxism ended up emulating the czarism that preceded it.

00:44:55.000 It created a new class of serfs.

00:44:58.000 They say of English socialism that it owes as much to Methodism as Marx.

00:45:03.000 It had within it Christianity.

00:45:05.000 It had in it fairness, love.

00:45:07.000 And you can sort of feel that in English socialism such as it is, even to this day.

00:45:13.000 So what I suppose I feel like is...

00:45:17.000 As well, there cannot be autocracy, there cannot be technocracy, there cannot be a cadre of aristocrats of any kind telling ordinary people this is how to live.

00:45:28.000 Some say democracy is the only game in town.

00:45:30.000 You have to just persuade people, like I would persuade them, I think.

00:45:35.000 Look, I think we should allow this amount of immigration.

00:45:39.000 But you vote for if in your community you want to take in immigrants. 0.98

00:45:43.000 This is why I think you should do it.

00:45:45.000 But it's up to you. 0.99

00:45:46.000 Because maybe you know shit I don't know. 0.99

00:45:49.000 I think people have gotten sick of being told what to think and how to feel by people who don't have their best interests at heart. 0.99

00:45:54.000 I think that globalism has become a great example of that.

00:45:56.000 So I'm going to start a channel on Rumble where I tell people what to think and how to vote.

00:46:01.000 I only suggest how to think and that's about it.

00:46:06.000 So let me change gears a little bit.

00:46:10.000 Very well said.

00:46:10.000 I don't disagree with anything.

00:46:13.000 Because it's got to be loving.

00:46:14.000 Love is everything.

00:46:15.000 Love is all you need.

00:46:17.000 I have a chapter on that.

00:46:18.000 I'm sorry to keep going back to the book, but I will say that in Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, I bring up an example from the Baha'i Faith.

00:46:28.000 Let me share this with you.

00:46:29.000 Tell me what you think.

00:46:29.000 Go on.

00:46:31.000 I talk about one of the great evils of the world being partisanship.

00:46:34.000 Do you know how much money are spent on political ads?

00:46:37.000 I don't have the figure in front of me, but in the United States, it's in the billions and billions of dollars, just in advertising for candidates.

00:46:46.000 Think about what... You had a little bit of a burp, and it was a little bit foul.

00:46:51.000 What did you have this morning?

00:46:53.000 It was a little foul. 0.99

00:46:54.000 I've just been eating my own cum all morning. 0.99

00:46:58.000 It's the only thing I can keep down. 0.99

00:47:00.000 I hope that's your second strike.

00:47:02.000 Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. 0.89

00:47:06.000 Um, that wasn't cum, it was more like tuna. 0.56

00:47:11.000 I don't eat, I'm a vegan. 0.97

00:47:13.000 I had tofu, scramble, and then, of course, the cum. 0.99

00:47:17.000 I chew it. 0.98

00:47:20.000 I'm not an animal!

00:47:21.000 I joke!

00:47:22.000 Do you eat it with a tiny spoon?

00:47:24.000 No, a tiny little spoon.

00:47:26.000 Like a caviar?

00:47:26.000 Like a blini?

00:47:27.000 It takes ages, though.

00:47:28.000 There's plenty of come vegan blini.

00:47:31.000 So anyways, so I talk about the spending money on the corruption of partisan politics and partisan politics are based on like, I can insult you better at the podium.

00:47:42.000 I can spend more money than you.

00:47:44.000 I can make myself seem better and greater than you.

00:47:47.000 It's really moved away from From policy differences and respectful debate and moderation.

00:47:54.000 Not that it ever really was that way.

00:47:56.000 We've just seen where it has headed.

00:48:00.000 But in the Baha'i Faith, okay, I'm just using this as an example. 0.81

00:48:05.000 The Baha'i Faith is democratically elected.

00:48:06.000 So here we are in the city of Los Angeles.

00:48:08.000 There's no clergy in the Baha'i Faith.

00:48:10.000 There's no priests or monks or gurus or anything like that.

00:48:12.000 So it's all democratically elected.

00:48:14.000 So every year, the Baha'is of Los Angeles gather together and they vote for nine people called the Local Spiritual Assembly that will govern the affairs of the Baha'is of Los Angeles.

00:48:24.000 It's very much like a 12-step meeting.

00:48:25.000 It's like loving servants and community.

00:48:28.000 So how do we do this?

00:48:30.000 Is there campaigning?

00:48:31.000 No, not allowed.

00:48:32.000 There's no yard signs.

00:48:33.000 There's no, you should vote for Bob.

00:48:35.000 He's the best and wisest Baha'i.

00:48:38.000 It is prayerful and meditative.

00:48:42.000 And you are asked, you get a list of everyone who lives in Los Angeles, and you're asked to write down the nine names of those who you think bring the best service-oriented outlook, the best spiritual maturity to their jobs, to be humble servants of the Baha'is and the communities of Los Angeles.

00:49:00.000 Now this goes on also on a national level.

00:49:02.000 This also goes on on a global level.

00:49:04.000 So there's no money spent, there's no narcissism, there's no one-upsmanship, there's none of the worst qualities of humanity expended, and you simply have servants, you know, servants of the community.

00:49:25.000 What do they call it in the 12-step program, in the 12 traditions?

00:49:29.000 Our leaders are trusted servants, they do not govern.

00:49:34.000 Could you do that in a town?

00:49:38.000 Could you do that in Waco, Texas?

00:49:40.000 Could the people of Waco, Texas... Well, we could start there, after their history.

00:49:44.000 Well, we need a rebranded town that has no negative connotations for new expressions of government about it.

00:49:52.000 Forget Waco, Texas.

00:49:55.000 Can you light these lenses?

00:49:57.000 Right, I'm in charge.

00:49:58.000 Women, your bedroom's here. 1.00

00:50:00.000 Give me some fucking rifles. 1.00

00:50:02.000 I love God better than all of you. 1.00

00:50:04.000 Call in the feds!

00:50:07.000 Okay, Omaha, Nebraska decides that it's had enough of partisanship, bickering, backstabbing, backroom deals, moneyed interests clawing their way to the top, and they say, let's do the same thing.

00:50:20.000 We're all going to gather at the local Omaha Stadium, and we're going to elect nine trusted servants, or 11, or 7, or 5, or 27, or however many, from the town itself that will devote a year or two years

00:50:34.000 or five years to the service of the community.

00:50:37.000 And we're going to do this, maybe not prayerfully, but meditatively.

00:50:43.000 And could you not do that?

00:50:45.000 Could that happen in a small town?

00:50:48.000 When you think about it in a very small town, a town of 500, you think like, oh, it might be able to happen.

00:50:53.000 And then, well, could it happen in a town of 5,000?

00:50:55.000 Could it happen in a town of 50,000?

00:50:57.000 And maybe something like that might start to shift to what you're talking about, that grassroots-ish-ness.

00:51:05.000 That we need to achieve a globalism through a grassroots kind of path.

00:51:12.000 Maybe something like that?

00:51:13.000 I agree with that.

00:51:14.000 Well, I think that is a type of anarchic principle, the idea of self-governance.

00:51:21.000 But it's organized.

00:51:22.000 It has an organizational structure to it.

00:51:24.000 It's not a loose bunch of unwashed people at a farm.

00:51:28.000 That's racist against anarchists!

00:51:33.000 The anarchists are organized, they just reject domination.

00:51:37.000 The principles of anarchy are self-organized.

00:51:40.000 Can you have a globalist anarchist?

00:51:46.000 What I feel, Rain, if we're going to reorganize civilization, is that you should emulate anthropology.

00:51:52.000 Typically, a primate tribe will split at around 70 to 100 chimps.

00:51:58.000 They split and form two tribes.

00:51:59.000 They can't create hierarchies and organization at that number.

00:52:03.000 So it feels like there is nothing in our evolutionary history that would suggest that a good idea would be to centralise power to the tune of 300 million people.

00:52:12.000 And in fact, the only people that benefit from aggregation on that scale, I would contest, are the top strata of that society.

00:52:20.000 Now people make the free market trickle-down economics argument continually.

00:52:23.000 That's what was underwritten in late capitalism.

00:52:25.000 For the, you know, at least the last 50 years.

00:52:28.000 But my feeling is that people that benefit mostly from the aggregation of populations are the people that are the top of those populations.

00:52:34.000 That tends to be how it works.

00:52:35.000 What I reckon is that what you described is quite beautiful in the Baha'i faith.

00:52:39.000 The position of leadership itself is stripped of its glamour, is stripped of its prestige.

00:52:44.000 They're not necessarily of honour.

00:52:47.000 Honour is a necessity, I might argue.

00:52:50.000 And in this case, in the local spiritual assembly of the Baha'is, and let's say the local governing assembly of Omaha, individually they don't have power.

00:52:59.000 They only collectively have power.

00:53:01.000 When they gather and they make a decision, they have a quorum, that has power.

00:53:05.000 So it's not like someone who's elected in Omaha walks down the street and has any power over anyone else, just like in a 12-step meeting.

00:53:11.000 It's very beautiful, I think.

00:53:13.000 I know it's idealistic.

00:53:15.000 I know there's a lot of eye rolls.

00:53:16.000 I get it.

00:53:17.000 But you know what? 0.95

00:53:18.000 We're blowing ourselves up and we're fucking up the planet. 0.80

00:53:23.000 So let's try something different. 0.89

00:53:25.000 Yes.

00:53:25.000 And also, we're not striving for perfection.

00:53:27.000 We're striving for improvement.

00:53:30.000 Generally, I have found that people that say that no other way is possible are invested in this way, staying the same.

00:53:38.000 This system is... Look, let's give the... And they want you to feel that way.

00:53:42.000 They want... You know the great theatre teacher and director Andre Gregory from My Dinner with Andre?

00:53:48.000 Oh, right.

00:53:49.000 Of course.

00:53:50.000 Brilliant.

00:53:51.000 I did a workshop with him when I was a young actor in New York and I'll never forget it.

00:53:57.000 We had tea together.

00:53:59.000 He would have tea with his students and he said, so how are you doing Rain?

00:54:03.000 What do you, what do you think in these days?

00:54:05.000 And I was like, Oh, you know, I just can't help it.

00:54:07.000 Just be cynical. 1.00

00:54:08.000 I just feel like the world's going to shit. 1.00

00:54:10.000 And I just feel like the acting industry is shit. 1.00

00:54:13.000 And I just, I'm just cynical. 0.99

00:54:15.000 And this is what he did.

00:54:16.000 He grabbed my arm as hard as it's ever been grabbed, pulled me close.

00:54:21.000 And he's like, don't do it.

00:54:22.000 They want you to be cynical.

00:54:24.000 They want you to be cynical.

00:54:25.000 You have to keep hope alive in everything that you do.

00:54:29.000 If you are cynical, they want.

00:54:33.000 My arm! 1.00

00:54:33.000 My fucking arm! 1.00

00:54:34.000 Get me to the hospital! 1.00

00:54:35.000 My arm!

00:54:36.000 And then he drew back.

00:54:38.000 My teeth!

00:54:41.000 My jaw!

00:54:42.000 Yeah, you're quite right that we mustn't fall into sallow cynicism and that the optimism is part of the fuel of this change.

00:54:51.000 And I feel that if you have a template that rewards crisis for the most powerful, i.e.

00:54:58.000 in a medical crisis, the pharmaceutical companies benefit.

00:55:02.000 In a military crisis or a war, the military-industrial complex benefit.

00:55:06.000 The people, the energy companies benefit even when there is a fuel crisis.

00:55:11.000 Record profits for big pharma, record profits for big tech, wealth transfer of 5 trillion during the pandemic period.

00:55:16.000 If what is crisis to most people is beneficial to the elites, And by the least, I mean the most powerful.

00:55:22.000 What set of circumstances do you imagine might continue to emerge if the most beneficial circumstances for the most powerful people are deleterious for the people with least power, that that template will continue to repeat itself?

00:55:36.000 What kind of template do you imagine might continue to reiterate itself if a situation that is deleterious to ordinary people is beneficial to the most powerful interest?

00:55:46.000 So I feel that this is a time to consider radical solutions, and I think it's going to be about more democracy, more control, assemblies, localism, collectivism, and there will be sturm und drang and opposition to these ideas because finally ideas are being put forth that will affect The intentions and capacities.

00:56:05.000 I think it's important to understand that a lot of people on the political left view social change as has not being organized.

00:56:17.000 It needs and I'm not saying that you're saying this, but that that that it's small groups.

00:56:23.000 You know, on a farm somewhere and just doing what they like.

00:56:28.000 And the fact is, is that we need organization as well.

00:56:33.000 Organization gets a bad name and I'm not talking about authoritarianism.

00:56:36.000 You could be organized and not authoritarian.

00:56:39.000 But we do need to the other side is very, very, very well organized.

00:56:44.000 And to think that we're going to affect some kind of global change in the inequalities and the systems that you're talking about, by being kind of loose coalition, loose, disorganized coalitions.

00:56:56.000 That's, that's a fairy tale that I roll my eyes at.

00:56:58.000 So how, how do we do that?

00:57:00.000 I don't have the answer.

00:57:02.000 But I do know that In seeking these kind of changes that you're talking about, you're talking about anarcho-capitalism?

00:57:09.000 Anarcho-socialism?

00:57:10.000 What is it?

00:57:11.000 Anarcho-syndicalism?

00:57:12.000 Syndicalism!

00:57:14.000 Anarchy?

00:57:15.000 That we have to think in a larger sense to have a systematic organization behind that that spreads virally and is transformative because Otherwise, they will just keep winning because they're so

00:57:35.000 much better organized than we are.

00:57:37.000 And you talked about tribalism before and I'll say also too that we just need to, you know,

00:57:42.000 at first we started with a family in a cave and then it was like a couple of families in a valley

00:57:46.000 and then it was like 27 families in a little town and and our tribes grew and then it's like Ecuador

00:57:52.000 and Belgium and our tribes grew to that.

00:57:55.000 We have to view our tribe in a much larger context as well.

00:57:59.000 So I'm not sure how to do that, but we're a human tribe sharing a planet that's hurtling through space like Buckminster Fuller said.

00:58:07.000 And so whatever happens on this in this Grassroots, systematic, organized way has to include the beautiful, loving, our beautiful human being tribe on this planet.

00:58:22.000 That is a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation.

00:58:26.000 Thank you, Ray.

00:58:27.000 Let us know in the chat how you think we should reorganize the planet and its resources.

00:58:30.000 What new systems should be introduced?

00:58:32.000 Is it Baha'ism? 1.00

00:58:33.000 Is it the kind of anarchic principles as exemplified within 12-step programs?

00:58:37.000 How do you ever confront globalist corporate power without the support of the state?

00:58:41.000 How do you remilitarize?

00:58:43.000 How do you demilitarize?

00:58:44.000 How do you confront corruption and hypocrisy in all its many forms?

00:58:48.000 So many questions.

00:58:49.000 Thank you very much for joining us.

00:58:51.000 Remember, you can join our locals community and put questions to us directly.

00:58:54.000 I'm pointing to something there.

00:58:56.000 I don't even know what I'm pointing. 0.99

00:58:58.000 If you press Wayne Wilson's penis, it's just $40 per year. 0.99

00:59:03.000 It's very small. 1.00

00:59:04.000 But you can dab it.

00:59:05.000 You'll find it.

00:59:06.000 Nevertheless, it's in there somewhere amidst the shrubbery.

00:59:11.000 How does that happen?

00:59:18.000 Once in a while.

00:59:18.000 Do you take out a buzzer and do that?

00:59:20.000 What happens if you don't?

00:59:22.000 It's not like I'm not like so incredibly virulent.

00:59:26.000 Yeah, but it is like a sort of what you might call a gentle, kind of a grimy side.

00:59:31.000 No, look, it's unmanageable.

00:59:32.000 What I'll say is a sexy mouth.

00:59:34.000 I guess because I'm a... What's the issue?

00:59:36.000 I'm a child of the 70s and I guess I've never really... My son makes fun of me because I don't know that I've ever even trimmed my pubic hairs.

00:59:44.000 Do you want me to do that now?

00:59:45.000 Yes.

00:59:45.000 Is that how we have to end this interview?

00:59:47.000 With me gnawing at your pubic hair with my... I hate to say it with your teeth! 0.99

00:59:53.000 I assume that you meant with the incisors! 0.67

00:59:56.000 Now, while I nibble through Rainn Wilson's pubic mound, I will say goodbye to you while I still have the use of my facial orifice.

01:00:05.000 Thank you for joining us.

01:00:06.000 Join us next time.

01:00:07.000 Oh yeah, get Rainn's book.

01:00:08.000 There's a link in the description where you can acquire this book.

01:00:11.000 Let me read a passage at random just to show you what a good book it is.

01:00:15.000 This is by W.A.

01:00:16.000 Jordan, so we can't give the credit to you.

01:00:18.000 Of all of my sentences in this book, you pick an odd one.

01:00:21.000 It's the best bit.

01:00:22.000 Hi.

01:00:22.000 It's true.

01:00:24.000 We are all here on Earth to help others.

01:00:25.000 What on Earth the others are here for, I don't know.

01:00:28.000 Having a spark of consciousness in this mysterious, difficult,

01:00:31.000 and gorgeous universe fills us with questions.

01:00:34.000 Who are we?

01:00:35.000 What makes the sun and the stars move?

01:00:36.000 How can I feel happier?

01:00:38.000 What happens when we die?

01:00:39.000 What does it all mean?

01:00:40.000 The mythologies of religious writings and traditions offer us potential answers to these timeless, persistent

01:00:45.000 inquiries, many of which are to be found here within Solburn, but many more are found within Rainn Wilson's pubic mouth,

01:00:53.000 which I will be gnawing down to a barely visible stubble in just a matter of moments.

01:00:58.000 And I do this because I love you.

01:01:00.000 Join us next week.

01:01:01.000 Yes, continue to do that.

01:01:03.000 Join us next week, not for more of the same.

01:01:05.000 Who needs that, but for more of the different?

01:01:07.000 Until then, stay free.

01:01:08.000 It's like an acorn.

01:01:10.000 Many switching, switching, switching.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - April 29, 2023

Rainn Wilson (Spirituality and Creativity)

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