Stay Free - Russel Brand - The Covid Redemption with Tim Robbins - #048 - Stay Free with Russell Brand

00:00:00.000 you you

00:00:38.000 you brought to you by Pfizer

00:00:58.000 I'm sorry, sir.

00:00:59.000 In this video, you're going to see the team circle.

00:01:10.000 Let's go.

00:01:11.000 Alright, let's go.

00:01:12.000 We've got a live back there.

00:01:16.000 Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:01:20.000 Today's episode is subcutaneous, which means we get under the skin and dive deep with great minds and free thinkers.

00:01:28.000 Previously on the show, we've had Jordan Peterson, Eckhart Tolle, Maya, Jocko Willink, Vandana Shiva.

00:01:33.000 All of those interviews are available in full on Rumble.

00:01:38.000 And my guest today is the Oscar-winning actor, Tim Robbins, the Shawshank Redeemer himself, the player, Oscar, Goes to Tim Robbins.

00:01:56.000 It was a protest, an anti-lockdown protest.

00:01:58.000 And I went out to join the protest because I was curious about what was going on.

00:02:02.000 And I saw the way that they were being described in the press and it wasn't true. 1.00

00:02:08.000 It's a belligerent idiocy. 0.98

00:02:13.000 We were told it was a unique health emergency and that the measures undertaken were necessary. 0.99

00:02:18.000 But as this has unfolded, the position has to be amended. 0.99

00:02:21.000 It turned into you should fucking die because you have not complied. 0.99

00:02:28.000 Tim Robbins represents a particular strain of American politics, notably liberalism. 0.99

00:02:35.000 But the time that Tim Robbins has been a vocal advocate for what most people understand as liberalism, social liberalism, inclusivity, tolerance, Love of diversity, opposition to war.

00:02:48.000 The entire political sphere has changed.

00:02:50.000 Tim Robbins straddles this change.

00:02:52.000 What does liberalism mean now?

00:02:55.000 Has liberalism become the new authoritarianism?

00:02:57.000 When Tim Robbins spoke out during the pandemic against public health measures, the manner in which they were being spoken, the way that unvaccinated people were being condemned, Tim Robbins, I think, came to symbolize a transition that was taking place both in media and in politics.

00:03:13.000 And today we can talk about what does liberalism mean now?

00:03:17.000 What is authoritarianism now?

00:03:20.000 Is it possible to have a difficult conversation?

00:03:23.000 Is it possible to confront establishment power?

00:03:26.000 We're going to be talking about censorship, we're going to be talking about the pandemic, we're going to be talking about the Ukraine war, and we're going to be talking mostly about the new authoritarianism and the ways in which it prevents conversation and therefore ultimately democracy.

00:03:40.000 Let's meet Tim Robbins in what I'm calling the Covid Redemption.

00:03:47.000 Tim, thanks so much for joining me on Subcutaneous.

00:03:50.000 Pleasure to be here in the snow.

00:03:52.000 Yeah, here we are in this cabin, surrounded by festivity and joy, entering into a potentially complex conversation, because I feel that many of the things you said during the pandemic amounted to a kind of liberal apostasy, a disavowalment of an accepted ideology, while somehow simultaneously demonstrating the principles that I'd long believed to be at the heart of that ideology.

00:04:16.000 Why did you feel it necessary to speak out against some of the measures that took place socially during the period of the pandemic?

00:04:24.000 What was important and significant about it for you?

00:04:26.000 Well, first let me say that I didn't at first.

00:04:30.000 I bought into it.

00:04:31.000 I was someone that, you know, I went through a pretty unique experience in Los Angeles.

00:04:40.000 You know, I was locked down there.

00:04:41.000 I have a non-profit theatre company that had to shutter and we started doing our work online and I was masking everywhere, I was keeping my social distance, I was adhering to the requests made of me and I felt, you know, angry at people that didn't.

00:05:03.000 Do that.

00:05:04.000 I felt angry.

00:05:05.000 There was a protest in Orange County.

00:05:08.000 I remember people that didn't want to put masks on.

00:05:10.000 They're very angry about that.

00:05:13.000 And as time progressed, I eventually got out of Los Angeles.

00:05:18.000 I drove cross country and saw areas of the country that We're not adhering to the policies.

00:05:25.000 And eventually wound up isolating myself in New York State for a good seven months.

00:05:32.000 And it wasn't until I came to the UK in January of 2021 that I started to have questions.

00:05:42.000 And I was here on a job and I noticed that people this was in the midst of the worst part of the lockdown here.

00:05:51.000 And I noticed a lot of people were not adhering again to these requests made by their government.

00:05:57.000 And I thought, well, they're going to have a hard day coming up, you know, that there'll be some serious death here.

00:06:04.000 And, you know, I kept my mask on and I kept adhering to the policies.

00:06:12.000 But it wasn't until much later that I started to have questions.

00:06:19.000 And when I saw that there wasn't a huge death rate here after I'd witnessed personally what was happening, I started to wonder more and more about what we were being told and whether it was true or not.

00:06:38.000 And so it took a while for me to speak about it.

00:06:48.000 I was staying in Soho and I was there one Saturday morning and I heard a lot of noise outside.

00:06:59.000 And it was a protest, an anti-lockdown protest.

00:07:02.000 And I went out.

00:07:03.000 I had a bicycle and I went out.

00:07:07.000 Join the protest, not because I was joining the protest, because I was curious about what was going on.

00:07:13.000 And I started talking to people.

00:07:15.000 And I saw the way that they were being described in the press, and it wasn't true.

00:07:20.000 These were not, you know, National Front.

00:07:24.000 Nazis, these were liberals and lefties and people that believed in personal freedom.

00:07:32.000 And I began to educate myself and I began to open my mind to what was going on.

00:07:42.000 It was a very different political environment in the United States, very divisive, very much based on politics.

00:07:51.000 Uh, if you were, well, it changed.

00:07:53.000 At first, if you were a Democrat when Trump was president.

00:07:58.000 Well, you aren't going to take that vaccine because it was Trump's vaccine.

00:08:01.000 And then that seemed to somehow change.

00:08:03.000 It was kind of Orwellian.

00:08:04.000 It was like we are no longer at war with East Asia.

00:08:08.000 It was it was now we were thinking about a different way.

00:08:11.000 And if you didn't take the vaccine, you were a Republican.

00:08:14.000 And it wasn't that way here in England.

00:08:16.000 It was a much more tolerant attitude towards towards the diversity of opinion.

00:08:25.000 And so I was really grateful to have been in this experience so that I could get a different perspective.

00:08:32.000 Perhaps part of your perspective was born of a kind of Swiftian travel, and you would be a good Gulliver because you are a giant in numerous contexts, but like because I would say that that kind of authoritarianism and the certainty that necessarily accompanies it was present in the media and the state dictates in this country also.

00:08:55.000 What I find interesting and again laudable in what you've done is that you've undertaken your own journey from what was a de facto position of like we were told it was a unique health emergency and that the measures undertaken were necessary in order to protect human life what more noble goal Could there be?

00:09:13.000 But as this has unfolded, the position has to be amended.

00:09:17.000 It's become clear that many of the original measures were not as rigidly undergirded as was first claimed.

00:09:24.000 And, in fact, as you've explained, there is a lot more political ideology at play than is perhaps wise, prudent, or even honest, when the claim that's being made is that we are following science.

00:09:37.000 That's irrefutable, evidence-based measures.

00:09:43.000 So, Tim, if something like a pandemic becomes politicised to this degree, if conversation becomes shut down, if condemnation of unvaccinated people becomes as sanctioned, like on CNN when Don Lemon was saying that these people are idiots and we should shame them, when certain people were saying that they should be denied healthcare, When Joe Rogan was condemned for sort of having a conversation, it indicates that the climate that we're living in is radically altered.

00:10:20.000 And one of the things that I like to continually reiterate is that nobody here is saying that the vaccines don't have a positive impact or that we oughtn't do everything in our power to protect human life.

00:10:31.000 It's simply that if you have authoritarianism where conversation is shut down, you are losing One of the great treasures, perhaps the primary treasure, of democracy.

00:10:44.000 Do you feel, Tim, that the pandemic revealed something about the nature of establishment power, the aesthetics of establishment power, and perhaps the way that liberalism itself is changing?

00:10:56.000 Well, I think it started to reveal itself when we became aware of the idea that the vaccinated could spread it and catch it like the unvaccinated.

00:11:13.000 To continue the policy of lockdowns or mandates after that didn't seem to be following the science.

00:11:23.000 It seemed to be following a political agenda.

00:11:26.000 And so that's where I really started to have problems with it.

00:11:31.000 There were a few instances that were really disturbing to me.

00:11:37.000 One was when the, I believe it was the CDC or the FDA, changed the definition of a vaccine on their website.

00:11:48.000 Another was that when they denied that natural immunity was something.

00:11:55.000 So there was an awful lot of people that got COVID early on.

00:11:58.000 I believe I did in February of 2020.

00:12:05.000 I was in Seattle on tour with a play with the actors gang, and I got very sick.

00:12:11.000 And In the past, natural immunity is one of the building blocks to moving forward.

00:12:21.000 Some people get vaccinated, some people have natural immunity, and eventually we have, what do they call that?

00:12:27.000 Herd immunity.

00:12:28.000 Herd immunity.

00:12:29.000 So the fact that there were these Change of definitions was something that my, you know, my alarm bells went off.

00:12:42.000 And so I wondered what is going on, what is beyond the very real idea of taking care of people and making sure that we don't have a terrible death rate.

00:12:57.000 But then we also became aware that The most people at risk were either immunocompromised or elderly.

00:13:06.000 And then when you consider that the WHO, the World Health Organization, changed its protocol on virus outbreaks, which in the past had been you lock down the vulnerable, you take care of them, you make sure they're taken care of, but you let society go on so that it can build its herd immunity.

00:13:30.000 This was changed as well.

00:13:32.000 We went into lockdown with healthy people with children and that didn't seem to be wise to me.

00:13:39.000 So I'm not a scientist.

00:13:42.000 I'm not a doctor.

00:13:44.000 I don't know the intricacies of data on this.

00:13:50.000 All I can respond to is as someone that is concerned about what The result of those doctrines that policy had on us as human beings.

00:14:06.000 And it's not good.

00:14:08.000 We turned into tribal, angry, vengeful people. 0.98

00:14:15.000 And I don't think that's something that is sustainable for the Earth.

00:14:21.000 that we start demonizing people that don't agree with our particular health policies

00:14:29.000 and turn them into monsters, turn them into pariahs, say that they don't deserve hospital bed.

00:14:39.000 I think about people that have made bad mistakes in their lives where they take too many drugs

00:14:49.000 and they overdose and that's totally their choice.

00:14:53.000 That's totally their responsibility.

00:14:56.000 Yet we take care of them.

00:14:58.000 Yet we bring them to the hospital.

00:15:00.000 Yet we save their lives because we're compassionate, because we want to make sure that people live.

00:15:09.000 And this turned. 1.00

00:15:11.000 It turned into, you should fucking die because you have not complied. 1.00

00:15:16.000 That's incredibly dangerous. 1.00

00:15:19.000 Yeah, it's also a terrifying revelation of a previously sublimated but evidently present vengeful tendency.

00:15:28.000 Because of course, yeah, as you're saying, you could apply that mentality of, you created this situation for yourself, therefore we're gonna deny you compassion to obese people, people that have 0.95

00:15:38.000 cancer, people that smoke, people that drink.

00:15:40.000 There is an endless litany and of course the reason we don't do that is because when you look at the

00:15:44.000 cultural conditions that might lead to obesity, smoking and addiction you have to acknowledge a

00:15:49.000 kind of cultural conditioning that leads to those kind of outcomes. I like your point too Tim that

00:15:55.000 whenever we note a change in the meaning of words it's likely that something foul is afoot.

00:16:02.000 I'm a person, of course, that believes that inclusivity and individuals' rights to identify however they want to, to express themselves without harming others, of course, is paramount.

00:16:11.000 That's what libertarianism or individual freedom has to mean.

00:16:16.000 But when we reach a point where Conversation is being shut down.

00:16:20.000 We're being invited to forget the events of a couple of months or a couple of years ago.

00:16:24.000 Our media had the unbelievable disingenuity and cojones, shall we say, to laud the protests in China while forgetting that lockdowns were condemned a matter of months before.

00:16:38.000 It's clear that their actions and their words are not underwritten by any principles.

00:16:44.000 What, like you've evidently undertaken, is a personal journey of discovery based on actual principles and learning.

00:16:52.000 And what I feel like is that this is precisely what's required.

00:16:56.000 Not to increase polarity, not to increase polemicism, which even the words themselves in their purest form indicate would create intransigence.

00:17:04.000 Once something's magnetized to a particular position, there is no possibility of fluidity, there is no possibility of change.

00:17:12.000 I would say That we ought to see more culpability from Big Pharma and from the media saying, this is what we thought at first, we were wrong.

00:17:21.000 This is what we should have said.

00:17:23.000 We ought to have continued that conversation a little more openly.

00:17:26.000 Use the data.

00:17:27.000 And their inability to do that, I think, is an indication of something significant.

00:17:31.000 That we're being moved to a new type of authoritarianism.

00:17:34.000 In within your most recent musings and answer, let's call it, to my latest outburst, you talked about the WHO and their ability to set decrees.

00:17:44.000 Even on certain media platforms, the WHO's edicts are what determines policy, for example, specifically on YouTube.

00:17:52.000 And this is an unelected body.

00:17:53.000 We don't know where they're getting their information from.

00:17:55.000 We do know where they're getting their funding from.

00:17:57.000 And it's, at best, undemocratic, and at worst, a kind of monopolization of truth.

00:18:04.000 We're seeing, I think, with a new aesthetic, that the politics that, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, liberalism meant we care about vulnerable people, conversation is necessary.

00:18:15.000 Freedom, literally, is ...of speech, freedom of movement, like these things... Movement, yes.

00:18:21.000 ...freedom now has become like a right-wing trope, so do you... How about anti-war?

00:18:24.000 Right, anti-war, like between the Iraq war and the Ukraine war, we've moved from a position where like, it would be a liberal position to oppose a war, to if you oppose a war now you're like a pastuge of Putin.

00:18:37.000 This makes me feel that there are no real values or principles underwriting that entire, what we might call, establishment liberalism.

00:18:46.000 And I wonder, where do you find yourself feeling like a vagrant?

00:18:51.000 How do you align yourself, albeit a well-groomed vagrant, how do you position yourself when these transitions indicate a complete lack of real values?

00:19:04.000 It disturbs me.

00:19:05.000 I feel that people I know and trust and love are acting in ways that I don't recognize.

00:19:17.000 I see people that I marched with against the Iraq war supporting this endless flow of money into the Ukraine.

00:19:27.000 I don't know to what purpose.

00:19:29.000 I don't know why.

00:19:32.000 I see people that have always been staunchly for bodily autonomy, supporting a forced or coerced vaccination.

00:19:47.000 I, quite frankly, I don't know.

00:19:51.000 I don't want to judge.

00:19:54.000 I want to believe this is a chapter and that when we get to the next chapter that people might return to certain values.

00:20:04.000 I don't know if that's possible for some people because I think it's very difficult to, if people are without the information and without the data to support it, I don't know whether they are going to be able.

00:20:20.000 To change their opinions?

00:20:25.000 I guess I've been mostly concentrating inward, concentrating on the people that I love in my life, protecting my non-profit so that it survives.

00:20:40.000 But not, I don't want to judge, I don't want to condemn People that I love.

00:20:48.000 I just want to try to appeal to reason and to compassion and to empathy.

00:20:56.000 And I want to remind people that this isn't a political thing.

00:21:03.000 The people's decisions that they make for their own health are their own decisions to make.

00:21:12.000 And to condemn them is a dangerous thing.

00:21:16.000 I think we have less and less ability to reach across our political differences to talk to each other.

00:21:24.000 I try in my own life to do that.

00:21:27.000 I play hockey every week with people that I know don't agree with everything I say, and I love them and support them.

00:21:35.000 I have friends that are What some people might consider the enemies of the state, you know, people that are police officers.

00:21:47.000 And I believe that what we're dealing with here is kind of an extension of what happens when your political discourse and your communal experience is here.

00:22:06.000 In an online forum.

00:22:08.000 It's very easy to be hateful and divisive when you're in your dark room typing missives at people you disagree with.

00:22:18.000 It's very difficult to do that in person.

00:22:21.000 Eye to eye with a human being next to you.

00:22:24.000 Hatred is very difficult for human beings.

00:22:30.000 It's a lot easier here, because it's abstracted.

00:22:33.000 It's part of this, you know, I'll just blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah. And no, but you can't do that in person.

00:22:42.000 And I discovered this during the Iraq war when I was being vilified online as, you know, a terrorist supporter and a Saddam lover and all these terrible things, because I wanted to know whether there were weapons of mass destruction before we invaded, right?

00:23:01.000 I was, if you went online, you would, I would, you could, I could make the conclusion that my life's not safe.

00:23:08.000 I can't go out.

00:23:09.000 But yet I was living in New York City at the time.

00:23:12.000 I was walking my kids to school every day and not one person, not one person on the street said anything like that.

00:23:20.000 And it made me realize this is an abstraction.

00:23:23.000 This is something that's not real.

00:23:26.000 It's something that stirs up hatred, stirs up division.

00:23:31.000 And serves someone or some entity that benefits from our division.

00:23:39.000 Yes.

00:23:40.000 It seems that a dehumanizing discourse where we can easily condemn one another, where extreme voices are amplified in order to generate more extreme emotions, somehow enhances the ability of powerful centralized interests to fulfill their agenda.

00:23:57.000 It's somehow beneficial for us to be lost in inhumane condemnation and criticism.

00:24:02.000 It's divide and conquer.

00:24:04.000 It's as old as the hills.

00:24:05.000 Yeah.

00:24:06.000 You know, the first colony in the United States, Jamestown, 1609 I believe it was, the first law they passed in Jamestown was that the indentured servants, it was a crime for the indentured servants to so much as talk to one of the indigenous population.

00:24:29.000 Wow.

00:24:31.000 Hey, wait a minute, we've got quite a lot in common.

00:24:33.000 What if we were to unite?

00:24:35.000 Because they knew the aristocracy, or what is listed on the Boat Manifest as gentlemen, knew that the indentured servants would have far more in common with the indigenous than the aristocracy.

00:24:49.000 One of the second laws, or a few years later, another law that was passed when the first African slaves arrived, was that it was illegal for the white indentured to speak with the black Africans.

00:25:08.000 Yeah, you see more and more that what is being prevented actually are sort of natural human traits.

00:25:13.000 Our tendency to trust, our tendency to form alliances, our love of freedom.

00:25:20.000 Once it becomes easy to condemn people either as conspiracy theorists, as right-wing extremists, what you're essentially saying is we no longer need to engage in discourse with those people.

00:25:31.000 They are inhuman.

00:25:32.000 They can be condemned.

00:25:34.000 One of the things that surprised me most, I suppose, Tim, is that I felt that I would know what fascism and authoritarianism would look like because of the misadventures of the last century.

00:25:46.000 I didn't realize how useful ideals of civil rights would be in separating people.

00:25:55.000 The necessary debate around people being able to identify how they want to be able to identify, the inclusion of Diverse races and religious groups, inclusivity as a principle, all very powerful ideas.

00:26:10.000 I didn't realise that ultimately that that would be used to condemn swathes of an entire population.

00:26:16.000 I think from Trump onward it seems like your country became absolutely bewildered and willing to just life off and condemn like 50% of its population as basket of deplorables, as people that can't be included in the conversation.

00:26:31.000 And that there's been the continual amplification And I'm astonished, when I consume the kind of media that I've always watched, at how easy it is to criticize Trump supporters.

00:26:41.000 And again, what's difficult for me is, I'm not a pro-Republican person.

00:26:45.000 I don't look to Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis for answers.

00:26:49.000 Where I am is, I feel like I'm now in a new territory.

00:26:53.000 Now, we had a great conversation with Glenn Greenwald, who now is ludicrously condemned as being a right-wing fascist, in spite of the fact that he's Out gay, married man, married to a left-wing politician in Brazil and broke perhaps one of the most significant stories in revealing the nature of the military-industrial complex and the way that they, in collusion with the state, are able to pursue their agenda in the very war that you're talking about protesting against.

00:27:15.000 I said, how is it that we have found ourselves in this position where establishment liberalism,

00:27:21.000 neo-liberalism and authoritarianism has lost its function, its commitment to making the

00:27:29.000 lives of ordinary people better?

00:27:31.000 When did this happen?

00:27:32.000 And Greenwald explained that with the advent of Blair, with the advent of Clinton, the

00:27:36.000 economic changes were made to the way that those parties were funded that meant that

00:27:40.000 their interests now align with the financial industry and with the military-industrial

00:27:45.000 complex and the over-support of civil rights issues amounts to little more than window

00:27:51.000 dressing again at best and at worst is a convenient tool in dividing people because like your

00:27:58.000 experience of, oh where is all this hatred when I'm strolling around New York, most people

00:28:02.000 I feel want to just get on with it.

00:28:04.000 on with their lives. They're not governed by, I hate people so much I'm going to

00:28:08.000 determine, I'm going to spend all my time hating on people that are different than me.

00:28:11.000 I think we expect and accept that people have different values and ideals and as

00:28:16.000 long as we are allowed our own freedom most people are pretty happy to leave

00:28:20.000 that alone. And I suppose that, how do you, as a question Tim, because this after

00:28:25.000 all this is an interview.

00:28:27.000 How do you feel when it's left to Ron DeSantis to be the person that says we're going to have a statewide investigation into the efficacy of vaccines?

00:28:37.000 Or when it's Floridians that are the people that are most...

00:28:42.000 vocal in supporting free speech.

00:28:45.000 How do you feel as someone that's always had that kind of metropolitan alliance with liberalism?

00:28:49.000 What does this tell us?

00:28:51.000 And if the only dissenting voices are right-wing voices, which I would imagine at some point are not underwritten by the values of real freedom for ordinary people, but their own political ends, what do you do with that?

00:29:03.000 Well, I don't believe that's true, actually.

00:29:05.000 I believe there's an awful lot of people that would have considered themselves to be left that are For personal freedom, and it's the fact that DeSantis is the one that's saying it, you know, that's unfortunate for the Democratic Party, but because they seem to have excluded that voice from their own

00:29:29.000 I mean, listen, there is an awful lot of people that don't want to speak.

00:29:36.000 They feel a certain way.

00:29:37.000 I've talked to people that I agree with you, but I can't say anything, you know.

00:29:42.000 I know people in the film industry that That use fake vax cards.

00:29:53.000 I would never out them because I'm not that kind of person.

00:29:58.000 I grew up in a mafia neighborhood and you don't do that kind of thing.

00:30:01.000 You're not a rat. 0.97

00:30:04.000 You can't be a rat. 0.58

00:30:07.000 I feel that the tide is shifting.

00:30:10.000 I think more and more people feel empowered to speak.

00:30:13.000 I hope that continues.

00:30:16.000 I think that there's a good case to be made for a change of policy in progressive circles.

00:30:27.000 I know it's not easy to do because it may make people angry.

00:30:35.000 But ultimately, everyone has to follow their own heart and their own idea of what will make them safe.

00:30:45.000 And I don't condemn people or judge them for not speaking.

00:30:48.000 I just feel it's reductive to say it's a left-right thing.

00:30:56.000 I don't believe it is.

00:30:59.000 I know, personally, people that have voted for Trump and I don't I talk to them.

00:31:06.000 They're not evil people.

00:31:08.000 They just feel a different way.

00:31:11.000 And we used to live in a country where if our neighbor got sick, we'd bring soup over to them.

00:31:16.000 We wouldn't give them a political litmus test before we brought soup over to them.

00:31:22.000 This was one of the big challenges in reopening my theater in Los Angeles.

00:31:28.000 It took us a year to reopen because It would have been possible four or five months before, but we would have had to have a litmus test at the door.

00:31:37.000 We would have had to say, are you vaccinated or not vaccinated, right?

00:31:41.000 And those that weren't vaccinated wouldn't be allowed in the theater.

00:31:43.000 And I just felt that betrayed the whole concept of community, of the whole idea of theater is that it's different people from different opinions coming into a communal space.

00:31:55.000 And the actors take them through a story and raise important questions.

00:31:59.000 And the audience has to deal with it.

00:32:01.000 But they share emotion together.

00:32:04.000 They share laughter.

00:32:05.000 They share tears.

00:32:06.000 They are brought to a communal experience by the actors.

00:32:09.000 It's not a political meeting.

00:32:13.000 If you don't comply with our way of thinking, you cannot come in this theater.

00:32:18.000 That ruins the whole spirit.

00:32:20.000 All right, back to the Greeks. 0.96

00:32:22.000 That is a betrayal of what theater is supposed to be.

00:32:26.000 And this is another thing I found very refreshing about being in London, was that the West End didn't have the restrictions that Broadway did.

00:32:37.000 The West End said, you know what?

00:32:39.000 If you're vaccinated, show us your card.

00:32:41.000 If you're not, show us a negative test.

00:32:43.000 We're all you all can come in.

00:32:45.000 Yeah, it was still the idea of theater is a community, right?

00:32:50.000 And we all might have different opinions on various things.

00:32:54.000 We all might have different immune systems.

00:32:57.000 Some of you might be immunocompromised.

00:32:59.000 Some of you might not be able to take this thing, but we're not going to exclude you for that.

00:33:03.000 Yes, I think that Again, in what you're saying, Tim, I can feel that the commodification of entertainment means that seldom does theatre or film or television aspire to the kind of goals that you've just described, that the point of us having a communal experience where we're confronted with a moral quandary, where we're given a narrative that invites us to consider

00:33:27.000 Where we stand ethically, once the entertainment has become commercialized, once everything has become a subset of a dominant ideology that masks itself, and I'm talking just of corporatism of an extreme form of late capitalism that's been sort of financially bailed out, propped up through quantitative easing that can't even survive in its own modality that's protecting itself and preventing its own failure through measures that are antithetical to its own ideology.

00:33:56.000 That it becomes impossible to have the kind of community that you're describing.

00:34:01.000 When you talk about the unwillingness of people that you know to speak out as you have done, I imagine that that's ultimately financially motivated, that they know that they will be at risk of cancellation or certain financial interests being immediately foreclosed.

00:34:18.000 And I feel that then, that what we have is a culture that has lost its values.

00:34:24.000 And when I say like that it's left to like, in my view, Trump became a kind of a berserker, kind of like that he was willing to attack the establishment in a way that felt like Extraordinary.

00:34:36.000 Whilst what I would contest, and I know a lot of people watching this will disagree with me, that in government he was unable to deliver on those promises in pretty much the way that any ordinary politician wouldn't be able to deliver on those promises, in the same way that Biden hasn't delivered on those promises, in the same way that even a figure like Bernie, who a lot of people look to, and I know that you personally were a fan, has ultimately sort of kowtowed when it comes to sort of military action and foreign policy.

00:34:58.000 That the system itself has a way of stripping away ethics.

00:35:01.000 That we're living in a culture now that doesn't have what just used to be considered ordinary community values.

00:35:06.000 That we share, we communicate, we tolerate that people have differences.

00:35:10.000 And I relate this too to what you said about the stripping off humanity that becomes available through online communication.

00:35:18.000 That we lose things that are fundamental.

00:35:21.000 That the rate of change through technology, the ability to turn everything into data points, means that we're losing something that amounts, in my view, To spirit.

00:35:28.000 That all of the values that used to underwrite, you know, Western democracy were drawn one way or another from Christianity and perhaps ideals that preceded it.

00:35:36.000 That solidarity, the brotherhood and sisterhood, service of one another, these values were sort of cherished and treasured and were not perfectly executed and had inbuilt biases that are sort of ordinary among human beings.

00:35:47.000 But now it seems that they're being absolutely deracinated from any real value, only used if they can

00:35:56.000 advance an agenda.

00:35:57.000 It feels like the agenda is becoming everything.

00:36:00.000 So the role of art, I think, becomes a little more significant, but less likely to be able

00:36:04.000 to have an impact because we're only allowed to listen to voices within our own little

00:36:08.000 silos.

00:36:09.000 And I feel, and again I was talking with Glenn about this yesterday, that there is a nullified,

00:36:18.000 castrated and co-opted Democrat party and a Republican party that ultimately I feel

00:36:24.000 that won't deliver for ordinary Americans, or like our right-wing parties similarly ultimately

00:36:30.000 operate on behalf of corporate interests, is my opinion, means that there is a necessity

00:36:35.000 for a kind of new humanism, a political movement that from the beginning is truly inclusive

00:36:43.000 and is about individual freedom and therefore accepts at its heart.

00:36:46.000 Other people's right to live differently, whether that's around medications, or culture, or sexuality, or, you know, all of the old, what would have once regarded as the old liberal issues, as well as some new ideas around progressivism and traditionalism.

00:37:00.000 It seems that the system itself has been utterly co-opted.

00:37:02.000 There's no place for someone like you or I, old school lefties, establishment liberals, artsy liberal, but that's gone now.

00:37:12.000 So it seems like we, by default, have to become kind of radical.

00:37:16.000 Because what else is there to do, Tim?

00:37:18.000 The disenfranchised left.

00:37:20.000 Yeah.

00:37:23.000 Well, you know, yes, I agree.

00:37:26.000 That is where we are.

00:37:30.000 What do we do about it?

00:37:31.000 Well, we just continue.

00:37:33.000 We just continue with love.

00:37:34.000 You know, we continue with tolerance of, of even that.

00:37:40.000 And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's the big challenges.

00:37:46.000 When you're when you're trying to resist that or, or oppose that, how not to become your enemy. 0.98

00:37:58.000 Yeah, and I think that's part of what happened to what you, I won't even call it the left, what happened to the Democrats is that I think Trump drove them batshit fucking crazy, you know? 0.99

00:38:12.000 And drove me fucking crazy. 0.98

00:38:14.000 I didn't want to hear him anymore. 0.98

00:38:16.000 I was like, God, you know?

00:38:18.000 And at first, when he got off Twitter, I was like, God, that's a really... I don't know if that's a good idea, but I'm really glad that he's not living in my head, right?

00:38:27.000 I could have easily just turned the damn thing off. 0.65

00:38:33.000 I don't know if it's wise to de-platform people. 0.98

00:38:39.000 I think you have to win in the court of public opinion.

00:38:42.000 I think you have to make your case as best you can and debate it as best you can and try to win over hearts and minds that way.

00:38:54.000 Censoring people historically just doesn't work.

00:38:58.000 It prolongs the problem.

00:39:01.000 And I don't know what the answer is.

00:39:04.000 I don't know how we go forward.

00:39:06.000 All I do know is that it's absolutely essential to, if we believe in inclusivity, if we believe in democracy, if we believe in free speech, it's going to get messy at times.

00:39:24.000 Yeah.

00:39:25.000 And it's going to get uncomfortable at times.

00:39:30.000 We have to have an absolutism about those freedoms.

00:39:35.000 If you start making compromises, it will dissemble.

00:39:42.000 I've seen some beautiful comments going through.

00:39:43.000 People saying that leading with love is necessary.

00:39:48.000 A lot of people liked it.

00:39:49.000 Ashela saying that they love the batshit crazy thing about Trump there.

00:39:54.000 And I was very interested to see the way that the template that appeared to be put in place

00:39:58.000 during the pandemic was easily placed almost in the same way over the reporting around

00:40:05.000 Ukraine and Russia.

00:40:06.000 A couple of days ago we pulled up some writing from The Guardian in 2014 where they were

00:40:11.000 openly saying NATO's infringement on Russian territory is contrary to the agreements that

00:40:17.000 were made with Gorbachev in the 1990s.

00:40:20.000 We're essentially supporting a coup in 2014.

00:40:23.000 This is unwise.

00:40:24.000 There are elements within Ukraine that are destabilizing it.

00:40:28.000 All of this stuff was in The Guardian like six years ago and now that would be entirely censored.

00:40:33.000 It's a real good time to reread 1984.

00:40:35.000 It really is.

00:40:38.000 It's all in 1984.

00:40:38.000 It really is.

00:40:40.000 All of it.

00:40:43.000 Everything from what Winston Smith's job is, is to rewrite history, is to go into the archives and change what had been said before so that it matches with what is said now.

00:40:57.000 Even when O'Brien, who Winston thought was the rebel leader, No, sorry, who O'Brien thought was with the rebel leader Goldstein, or sympathetic towards him.

00:41:15.000 When he says to Winston, the best way to control a rebellion is to start it yourself.

00:41:21.000 Wow.

00:41:22.000 That's here now.

00:41:25.000 What is controlled opposition?

00:41:28.000 What does that mean?

00:41:30.000 When people are fighting for a change, And there's infiltration within that mindset or that movement.

00:41:40.000 And someone says something, again, batshit crazy, that completely discredits the movement.

00:41:49.000 That's something to be aware of as well.

00:41:51.000 We are seeing increasingly through Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi's releases of the Twitter files how deep and insidious the censorship was during the last election and how deep that censorship continues to be.

00:42:09.000 Let's just go, like, okay, for example, Andrew Dice Clyde was a comedian I didn't particularly care for, right?

00:42:15.000 Yeah.

00:42:16.000 And I found him offensive, right?

00:42:19.000 But I never had the thought, well, we should exclude him from culture.

00:42:23.000 I just didn't listen.

00:42:24.000 I didn't go to his shows.

00:42:25.000 I didn't buy his thing. 0.74

00:42:27.000 That was my way of like, okay, You're crazy in a way that I don't appreciate. 0.81

00:42:27.000 Right. 0.81

00:42:34.000 I think it's insensitive to women and I think, you know, but I never had the thought, let's cancel him from, you know, he shouldn't have a platform.

00:42:44.000 He had a platform and a lot of people liked it and appreciated it.

00:42:48.000 And it's not for me to say that he shouldn't have that platform.

00:42:53.000 I think that what you're talking about is an important conversation to have about Our proclivity to cancel people.

00:43:01.000 I think that's, you know, it's bad for comedy.

00:43:05.000 I think we know that.

00:43:07.000 And, you know, would George Carlin have been cancelled?

00:43:11.000 Would Richard Pryor have been cancelled?

00:43:14.000 It's like, no, we have to allow for different ways of being.

00:43:20.000 And if someone is offensive to you, you just don't need to listen to it.

00:43:27.000 The idea that there are a set of values and ways that we treat each other and that we aren't racist and we're not knee-jerk condemnatory and we don't treat people appallingly, all of these ideas and values ought be in place in the culture but it can't be used as a way of extracting people from the culture at will because where does that certainty come from and ultimately who does that authority rest with?

00:43:50.000 Where does it stop?

00:43:52.000 Here's the dangerous part of it.

00:43:55.000 If you support it now, if the tides shift, it could be you that's in the crosshairs.

00:44:01.000 That's precisely the argument.

00:44:03.000 When you're granting authoritarianism, you don't know where the lens will next fall.

00:44:08.000 Well, James Baldwin said famously that what kind of culture needs to create the category of the Negro?

00:44:15.000 What is the culture incapable of owning about itself?

00:44:19.000 That it creates a separate, distinct, shadow self upon which it places blame and aspects of I think we're witnessing a kind of mass unconsciousness, or at least a requirement, I should perhaps clarify, for a new consciousness that is not being born.

00:44:42.000 I think that we are starting to experience what happens with overt secularism, a reliance on materialism and rationalism.

00:44:50.000 When you talk about the experience that can happen in a sort of secular culture, congregationally, in a theatre. It's something

00:44:56.000 that most people don't have a version of. I know that there are a lot of people that have a

00:45:01.000 religious faith, certainly in America, but it feels to me that we don't have a shared set

00:45:06.000 of values anymore that allow us to have inclusivity.

00:45:11.000 Allow us to acknowledge that human beings are, by default, fallible.

00:45:16.000 The salts and its and the line between good and evil runs not between nations and creeds and races, but through every human heart.

00:45:22.000 The possibility for redemption, the possibility for failure, the possibility for growth, Even if we take where we started this conversation, moving from a position of broadly accepting the measures were necessary in order to countenance a new and novel threat, to hang on, we've given too much authority to people, they're not even playing by the rules of science that they laid out for us as being the reason for these measures.

00:45:48.000 But that conversation isn't possible anymore.

00:45:50.000 We're not being afforded the right to have that conversation.

00:45:53.000 And the same thing's playing out around Russia.

00:45:55.000 The same thing's playing out around conversations around gender and identity.

00:45:59.000 That censorship and the granting of this paternal authority to a state that always offers us safety, to a corporate sector that always offers us convenience, All the while, I think, banalizing the human experience, turning us into data, extracting the possibility for wild and organic connections between one another and a connection to the planet.

00:46:23.000 It seems to me that unless this conversation really broadens out and allows a little polarity and allows a little bit of mud in, that we're going to end up somewhere sort of sanitary but very ugly. 0.91

00:46:35.000 Could it be that this is a new religion?

00:46:40.000 This is acting like a religion.

00:46:43.000 Yeah.

00:46:43.000 It's dogmatic.

00:46:44.000 It's absolute.

00:46:46.000 It's, if you do not believe in it, you are condemned to hell.

00:46:50.000 It's, you know, maybe this is, I mean, it's maybe this is a new religion.

00:46:55.000 Do you think that it's being posed as politics, but it's behaving like a religion?

00:47:02.000 Seems like it.

00:47:03.000 It seems like it has some of those aspects, at least.

00:47:07.000 I think it's worth thinking about.

00:47:09.000 Did you know that I used the word apostasy at the very beginning?

00:47:12.000 I did.

00:47:12.000 I was very impressed.

00:47:13.000 Thank you.

00:47:14.000 You know, to see apostasy in front of a Christmas tree is... 0.76

00:47:19.000 That's the kind of visual paradoxes, Tim, that we're looking to create here.

00:47:24.000 Yeah, it's extraordinary, isn't it?

00:47:26.000 I suppose, look, there was a time where people didn't like entertainers even to, like, have opinions. 0.99

00:47:31.000 Oh, who are you to, like, an actor, like a decorated actor, but nonetheless, who gives a shit what you think? 0.99

00:47:36.000 And now... I still think that. 0.99

00:47:37.000 That's still part of the conversation.

00:47:40.000 That's all good.

00:47:41.000 But now it's becoming increasingly necessary that it's more likely to be entertainers and comedians that raise anti-authoritarian points, because the dominant culture has become so sanitized.

00:47:52.000 Well, most won't, right?

00:47:54.000 I mean, most... Listen, I don't blame them.

00:47:57.000 It's, you know... I'm at an age, a stage in my career where I, you know, I'm not that concerned with that, you know.

00:48:06.000 I like the idea of, you know, remember when we were young, if you were really successful, you retired when you were 60.

00:48:20.000 And then, you know, you could retire at 65.

00:48:24.000 And now it seems like nobody retires anymore.

00:48:27.000 The idea that We could, you know, you work your life to gain something and then you just retire, right?

00:48:36.000 Nobody wants to retire.

00:48:38.000 Yeah.

00:48:39.000 And what is that all about?

00:48:40.000 I suppose it's like the purpose has become work.

00:48:42.000 Your purpose is your ability to participate in the system.

00:48:46.000 And also, now that attention is mind, I don't even just mean data mining, but your attention is co-opted and continually owned.

00:48:52.000 That your work doesn't finish when you go home, you're continually available for work on screen.

00:48:58.000 That your value as a human being is your value to the system, and that's what affords us the ability to have true vacancy.

00:49:03.000 Your value to the system last week.

00:49:06.000 Not in total.

00:49:06.000 Right?

00:49:09.000 That's another thing about show business that's a little weird is that you're only successful if you're recently successful.

00:49:18.000 And so we're kind of programmed to think that we always must reinvent or do better than we've done before in order to be

00:49:29.000 considered significant.

00:49:30.000 There's no respect for what you've done, right?

00:49:35.000 And I've been so, so lucky to have been in a movie that is considered to be like most people's favorite movie, right?

00:49:45.000 The Shawshank Redemption.

00:49:47.000 It's constantly on IMDb.

00:49:48.000 It's like the top choice of their favorite movie, right?

00:49:52.000 And I can now, I can say, well, I can't, I can't up on that.

00:49:57.000 I can't get better than that.

00:49:59.000 So I don't put the pressure on myself to try to continue to outdo my previous success, which I think is a fool's game as an artist because you should be able to be content with, or any profession for that matter, you should be content with your achievements and not feel less about yourself because you can't do another Uh, Shawshank Redemption, right?

00:50:30.000 It's true!

00:50:31.000 This time it's personal!

00:50:32.000 This time it's personal!

00:50:34.000 And in red!

00:50:36.000 See what's new!

00:50:37.000 Girls gone wild! 1.00

00:50:41.000 What happened on that beach?

00:50:42.000 You can only decorate that boat for a couple of months, once it's seaworthy!

00:50:46.000 Spring break!

00:50:48.000 It's hard to annihilate the legacy of that.

00:50:51.000 I was just thinking there while you were talking about it, there is a story about like innocence and how it is irrelevant that you are innocent if you are condemned.

00:50:59.000 That's sort of kind of a Kafkaesque idea.

00:51:02.000 And then I was thinking about what is the redemption that we're talking about?

00:51:04.000 The redemption is that Morgan Freeman's character recovers spirit as a result of the love between the two protagonists.

00:51:10.000 Yes, and I deal with this all the time in prison, you know, when we have a...

00:51:14.000 Yeah, they do!

00:51:14.000 into prison. They must like to see you there. Yeah they do.

00:51:18.000 Have you got a teaspoon and a poster of Hay-Davis? But what I'm constantly

00:51:23.000 reminded of in those environments. What is your prison work by the way just for

00:51:28.000 people that don't know? Okay so well we go into we're in 14 yards in 12 prisons in the state of

00:51:34.000 California. We have a rehabilitative program.

00:51:38.000 We go in and we take a disparate group of people from different gangs, different races, and we take them through theater exercises, theater games, and then we teach them about the characters of the Commedia dell'arte.

00:51:53.000 And through these characters, This character being the buffer, it's not them expressing the emotion, it's the character of the pantalone or the arlechino expressing the emotion.

00:52:04.000 We allow them to express emotions that are inaccessible, for the most part, in prison.

00:52:12.000 Or at least emotions that can compromise them or their safety in prison.

00:52:19.000 Like?

00:52:20.000 Like fear.

00:52:21.000 You don't show fear in prison.

00:52:23.000 You don't show happiness.

00:52:24.000 You don't show sadness.

00:52:26.000 You'll be trounced.

00:52:28.000 Your only fear, as they say, our mask, is anger.

00:52:34.000 And what these exercises allow are this liberation of, hey, I am worth more than just being an angry person.

00:52:45.000 I have these other emotions.

00:52:46.000 And when they are expressing them with each other in a room, It becomes liberating for them and rehabilitative for them.

00:52:55.000 One particular exercise that we take them through is we take them to a funeral of one of the characters.

00:53:01.000 And they all have to put a flower down on the grave and say something under their breath, words of goodbye to this person they either loved or didn't love.

00:53:11.000 And then they stand around the grave.

00:53:14.000 And then the facilitator says, now look at each other.

00:53:19.000 And that's a moment where change happens.

00:53:22.000 Because they see in the eyes of their former enemy a human being with empathy and sadness.

00:53:30.000 And they have a shared sadness together.

00:53:32.000 They see the humanity in that person.

00:53:35.000 And it's a moment that changes people.

00:53:40.000 And the whole exercise, all the exercises, change people.

00:53:43.000 So that they create these bonds with each other that are deep.

00:53:48.000 That happened in this room.

00:53:51.000 And, you know, one of them told me once that, you know, occasionally they'll be told there's going to be a fight on the yard tomorrow, right?

00:53:59.000 And they all have to be tribal. 0.93

00:54:02.000 They have to be in their own racial group or their gang, and they have to fight against other racial groups or gangs. 0.82

00:54:12.000 And a couple of them came up and said, you know, we did, you know, this is a two people that were in separate gangs.

00:54:18.000 I said, what we did was we found each other during the fight and we rolled around the ground, pretended to fight.

00:54:24.000 Oh, that's adorable.

00:54:25.000 Yes.

00:54:26.000 And this, this is what I, what, what reason I brought it up is because I am totally convinced and I've witnessed personal transformations.

00:54:37.000 People are capable of change.

00:54:39.000 Yeah.

00:54:40.000 And to condemn someone for something that they did, yes, they are serving their time.

00:54:46.000 They are, they are, that's what society has prescribed for them.

00:54:51.000 That is their punishment.

00:54:52.000 They accept the punishment.

00:54:54.000 They do the time.

00:54:56.000 But when they get out, must they continue to be defined as someone that did something 30, 40 years ago?

00:55:06.000 Or can they take this new liberation and make something of their life?

00:55:12.000 And I've seen them do it again and again and again.

00:55:15.000 I know it's possible.

00:55:16.000 I've seen transformation in children that we work with.

00:55:19.000 Going from introverted, you know, staring at the floor, into sentient leaders.

00:55:27.000 It's possible through art.

00:55:29.000 And it's possible, every human being is possible of change.

00:55:34.000 I suppose the difference between art and craft is the element of mystery that is difficult to discern and the allusion to beauty.

00:55:41.000 Seems that what you're doing there in the prisons is creating ritualized space that grant access to emotions or states that wouldn't be ordinarily accessible in the highly controlled environments that they operate within,

00:55:56.000 whether they are controlled by the penitentiary or by the cultures that seem

00:56:01.000 similarly turgid.

00:56:04.000 I wonder what is being accessed through ritual. I wonder what is being lost

00:56:09.000 through our loss of ritual by living in cultures that do not afford the value of 1.00

00:56:14.000 the anonymity of the mask or the access to the elder or the ways that seem to

00:56:21.000 have been inhered in us for potentially hundreds of thousands of years, all now

00:56:28.000 replaced by commercialized ritual space.

00:56:34.000 Symbols that do not refer to anything other than themselves, not symbols that allude to a connection, a deep and profound connection.

00:56:43.000 I'm very interested in that type of work that you're doing.

00:56:45.000 Are they literally wearing masks and in their moments of connection, because it reminds me of, have you ever seen that documentary called The Work, in which they go into Folsom Prison, I think, and this is around like Because of my connection to addiction and in particular 12-step recovery, I'm interested in men's work where men are, through role-playing stuff, able to confront abusers from their past or catharsise their own experiences of, for example, violence.

00:57:11.000 And in that environment, similarly, you see men from rival fractions being able to come together and deal with one another differently.

00:57:19.000 And I suppose one of the messages of optimism that can be found in that is the acceptance

00:57:23.000 that your identity is temporal, that change and redemption are all possible.

00:57:29.000 And the foreclosing on those ideas that our culture seems to be willfully instantiating,

00:57:34.000 that everything is separate, everything is polarized, everything is absolute, everything

00:57:38.000 – that they're using science as a dogma, when science itself is fluid and progressive

00:57:43.000 and discursive and conversational and alive.

00:57:46.000 And when I've spoken to sort of like what I'll call the scientists that are devotees,

00:57:52.000 devout, that's one of the things that appears to be most important to them.

00:57:56.000 That you don't approach from a position of dogma, you approach from a position of inclusion and uncertainty, and the revelations that are made within science continually draw reference to, oh my God, we know nothing!

00:58:10.000 We know nothing!

00:58:11.000 And even our potential for knowledge within our limitations is so liminal that we're going to have to have faith of some kind, we're going to have to deal with ritual, we're going to have to deal with uncertainty, and that's something best faced together.

00:58:24.000 Communally, rather than in isolation.

00:58:27.000 This is what's essential as an artist, to have a sense of, well, I don't know.

00:58:36.000 It's an important thing.

00:58:37.000 Never trust the expert.

00:58:41.000 Never trust the virtuous expert.

00:58:45.000 I got this.

00:58:46.000 I tell my actors when I'm working with them, if you ever have that feeling, just let it go.

00:58:50.000 You don't got this.

00:58:52.000 Every new audience is a new experience.

00:58:55.000 The actor that comes out with arrogance is going to have a bad show.

00:58:59.000 You have to know that this is a new chemistry out there.

00:59:04.000 The Friday night show, if you do it again on Saturday night, they're not going to like it because you're not doing a show for them.

00:59:12.000 And I had the great fortune to talk with Peter Brook before he died.

00:59:19.000 And he talks a lot about this in his books, about the essence of acting and what it is to go out on the stage with this sense of unknowing, not knowing, as would happen if you were in this story.

00:59:36.000 You don't know what you're going to say.

00:59:38.000 Yes, of course, you learn your lines.

00:59:41.000 But if to create reality, you don't know what you're going to say.

00:59:46.000 Like, you know, the person that's all angry and, you know, he wants to go and talk to his girlfriend and say, this is what I want to say to you.

00:59:53.000 And he's cooking it over his brain over and over again.

00:59:55.000 And then He walks in and she's gorgeous and she says, I'm so sorry

00:59:59.000 and everything changes.

01:00:00.000 The whole dialogue changes.

01:00:02.000 All that stuff that was written in the head isn't there anymore and it becomes a new dialogue.

01:00:07.000 And that's the brilliance of great writers is that they're able to know that part of

01:00:12.000 what the dialogue is, is the unknown, the surprise or the lie.

01:00:20.000 I'm going to tell you something, but I'm not going to tell you directly.

01:00:27.000 But as an artist, or any human being, to feel this arrogance of knowledge, is very dangerous for growth. You'll never grow, you'll

01:00:39.000 never learn if you know everything and you walk into every social

01:00:44.000 situation like I got this, I know everything, right? No,

01:00:47.000 I want to go with mystery, I want to go, I don't know what is going to happen. I don't know everything about

01:00:54.000 even my craft, I don't know. I've done it for a long time but I still am, I love the

01:00:54.000 my, even my craft, I don't know. Yeah.

01:00:57.000 I've done it for a long time but I still am, I love the mystery of it, I don't know what I'm gonna

01:01:02.000 mystery of it, I don't know what I'm going to do.

01:01:04.000 It seems you're talking about something quite sacred here, like in that moment of spontaneity

01:01:04.000 do.

01:01:04.000 It seems you're talking about something quite sacred here, like in that moment of spontaneity

01:01:09.000 there is alchemy, there is the real creation and yet you deny yourself that, even speaking

01:01:15.000 as a performer, if you arrive with this is how I deliver that line, this is what that's

01:01:20.000 about.

01:01:21.000 Peter Brook talks about watching Paul Scofield do King Lear and he says I never saw him do

01:01:24.000 the same performance twice.

01:01:26.000 He's present all the time, he's like feeling it.

01:01:29.000 Yeah.

01:01:30.000 Oh no, the weather's changed.

01:01:31.000 Oh, my kids!

01:01:32.000 Yeah, he's in there, he's in there.

01:01:34.000 But that's extraordinary, and I suppose that does map onto the human experience.

01:01:38.000 I've been thinking of this a lot lately, that energy requires polarity.

01:01:43.000 You cannot have motion without polarity.

01:01:45.000 You need positive and negative.

01:01:49.000 That art has got something to offer us.

01:01:52.000 It is in this sacredness, in this spontaneity.

01:01:55.000 I'm trying to think about what I try and do as a performer, that it amounts to staying present, and how significant that is in spirituality, that the presence is all you have, that you have to absolutely commit to being present.

01:02:07.000 And how do you apply that to walking into a room with people that might not agree with you?

01:02:14.000 How do you apply this sense of humility To a conversation where you can walk out of the conversation changed.

01:02:24.000 You're denying your own, like, what I think is you deny your own fallibility. 0.95

01:02:27.000 When you talked about that virtuous expert idea, like, I know, and I'm virtuous, I know what a fucking human being is, so I know they're fallible. 0.88

01:02:34.000 I know that on some level they must have doubt. 0.87

01:02:38.000 I mean, one of the things that made me sort of infatuated, shall we say, with Trump, infatuated from a comedic perspective rather than a political one, to be honest, is like, My God, this guy, I don't have no doubt, it's sort of amazing to watch someone behave like that, like, because me, I don't know what fucking shoes to put on, I don't know how to deal with the day, you know, but like, he's such a grotesque and wonderfully caricatured example, but like, you see it everywhere, because now it's sort of like this sterile, puritanical certainty, and I think, you're a human being, like me, you're living in the moment like me, and this order is resting upon chaos,

01:03:12.000 And I think that that's why, yeah, that there is a deliberate kind of... I want to sort of say like a kind of a fascist imposition on spirit itself, because where is it going to come from?

01:03:23.000 The reason for all this censorship, the reason for all this control, is that in human beings there is this very febrile potential for human beings just to change in the manner of the man that's going to go home to confront his girlfriend and just whose heart may melt.

01:03:39.000 That we may melt into love with one another.

01:03:41.000 At any moment we might realize who we really are and who we are not, and they have to continually sort of apply the kind of astringency to that, to stop the vitality.

01:03:50.000 And aren't the most moving stories the story of someone's transformation from one way of being into another way of being?

01:03:58.000 Yeah.

01:03:59.000 The revelatory journey.

01:04:02.000 It's in myth.

01:04:05.000 It's in every creation myth, and every story about how we got here, and the relationship between us and God, and our own hubris in that, and our own unknowing in that, and how essential that is, and how moving that is.

01:04:26.000 When you witness a character's transformation.

01:04:29.000 Yeah.

01:04:30.000 And shouldn't we all be applying that to our lives, you know?

01:04:34.000 Shouldn't we all be entering into the next phase with humility and knowing that, you know, I just don't know.

01:04:44.000 I want to talk to you so that I can I want to grow.

01:04:50.000 I want to be challenged.

01:04:51.000 I see you're a human being. 1.00

01:04:54.000 I want to find our shared humanity, rather than you suck. 1.00

01:05:01.000 He says I suck. 1.00

01:05:02.000 Fuck you. 1.00

01:05:03.000 And the conversation's over. 1.00

01:05:05.000 And that's what we're living in right now.

01:05:07.000 We're living in this constant conflict.

01:05:10.000 And it's madness.

01:05:13.000 Complete madness.

01:05:14.000 We should be suspicious of a regime that is offering us such bland fare, that is saying that we cannot be involved in potentially contentious discourse, because that contentious discourse is what will lead to change.

01:05:26.000 It's like that authoritarianism suggests to me they think they've got the future sewn up, that this is how it's going to be.

01:05:32.000 They want to foreclose on possibility.

01:05:33.000 The virtuous expert.

01:05:35.000 Yeah, the virtuous expert wants globalism, wants no democracy, wants the appearance of inclusivity, but absolutely centralised.

01:05:42.000 Because I know and you don't.

01:05:43.000 Yeah.

01:05:44.000 Because I know, based on what I've studied, and based on my You know, my way, I'm doing this for your own good.

01:05:53.000 Yeah.

01:05:54.000 Yeah, no, no.

01:05:56.000 Yeah, I think that perhaps this is a place that there can be a unification of these apparently

01:06:01.000 bifurcated political spaces, because surely, whether you're traditional left or traditional

01:06:08.000 right, the idea of freedom, your freedom to be who you are, the uncertainty, the possibility

01:06:16.000 that together something new can be created is the adventure that we can all embark on

01:06:21.000 rather than settling into trenches of condemnation.

01:06:24.000 Where do we learn this?

01:06:26.000 We learn this from farmers.

01:06:30.000 Farmers, they know a certain way, right?

01:06:33.000 But the weather changes, so they have to adapt.

01:06:38.000 It's not a hard and fast formula.

01:06:40.000 It has to adapt.

01:06:43.000 There's no sun, so you water less.

01:06:48.000 You adapt.

01:06:50.000 You're in the unknowing, and you're in a relationship, communal relationship, with what you're trying to grow out of the earth.

01:06:57.000 And to try to manifest an expertise on that and a technology on that.

01:07:03.000 It's very dangerous because it's not adaptable.

01:07:06.000 Yes.

01:07:07.000 You can apply it to every profession.

01:07:11.000 Humility is a virtue that we really should look at as something that can truly affect change.

01:07:19.000 Not expertise.

01:07:20.000 Expertise is dangerous.

01:07:23.000 Tim, thank you so much for this beautiful conversation about redemption, inclusion, change, the possibility of new futures, the necessity for conversation, the power of art, the necessary suspicion of anybody who claims to have both virtue, expertise, and answers in what has to be an ongoing discourse to new discoveries together.

01:07:46.000 Thanks so much, Tim.

01:07:47.000 My pleasure.

01:07:51.000 Thank you for joining us this week.

01:07:52.000 Next week, I'll be talking to Barry Weiss about the latest Twitterphile revelations, and comedian Duncan Trussell will be joining us for rasping revelation.

01:08:00.000 He coined the phrase, from Q to woo.

01:08:03.000 No, from woo to Q, like the hippie people might go all sort of like Q-Anon.

01:08:07.000 I like that phrase, from woo to queer, from woo to queer. 1.00

01:08:10.000 Fuck it, I'm not gonna do that anymore. 1.00

01:08:13.000 Join us next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different. 0.99

01:08:16.000 See you next week.

01:08:17.000 Stay free.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - December 16, 2022

The Covid Redemption with Tim Robbins - #048 - Stay Free with Russell Brand

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