Actor Tim Robbins joins Russell Brand on the show to talk about the spread of the Global Flu Pandemic, the Ukraine War, and the new authoritarianism that has swept the country since 2011, and why it s important to have a difficult conversation about it. Russell Brand is a comedian, actor, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. He is the host of the podcast Subcutaneous, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, NPR, and NPR Worldwide. He is also the co-host of the radio show The Covid Redemption, and he is a frequent guest host on the BBC Radio 4 show The View From The Top, which is hosted by Alex Blumberg. In this episode, Russell speaks with Tim Robbins about his experience in the wake of the pandemic, and how he fought back against the government's efforts to quash the "anti-vaxxers." He also talks about why he chose not to wear a mask during the crisis and why he felt compelled to speak out against the policies that were being pushed by the government. The antivaccination campaign. This episode is sponsored by Pfizer. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We are looking for the CEO. Want to sponsor Stay Free With Russell Brand? Check out our sponsor, Stay Free with Russell Brand! Stay Free: to get 10% off your first month with discount code: SUCCESSFUL at checkout. at stayfreewithruss@russbrand.co.org/RUMBLE at checkout to save $10, and save 10% on your total of $50 or more than $100 or more over the course of a month, and get 20% off the entire month, including shipping and shipping at $99, plus free shipping throughout the world, plus two-day shipping, shipping on all major U.S. shipping plans, plus 2 VIP packages, and an additional 3 months, plus a free shipping plan, and 2 VIP memberships, and VIP membership, and a free course at RMS VIP membership for two months, including VIP membership at RUSA, and all other VIP access to the RMSI discount, plus VIP membership and VIP re-locations throughout the UK, plus the use of the R&A service, plus an additional $5/place that includes VIP pricing.
00:01:24.000We were told it was a unique health emergency and that the measures undertaken were necessary.
00:01:28.000But as this has unfolded, the position has to be amended.
00:01:31.000It turned into you should fucking die because you have not complied.
00:01:39.000Tim Robbins represents a particular strain of American politics, notably liberalism.
00:01:45.000But 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.
00:01:58.000The entire political sphere has changed.
00:02:05.000Has liberalism become the new authoritarianism?
00:02:08.000When 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 symbolise a transition that was taking place both in media and in politics.
00:02:23.000And today we can talk about what does liberalism mean now?
00:02:30.000Is it possible to have a difficult conversation Is it possible to confront establishment power?
00:02:37.000We'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.
00:02:51.000Let's meet Tim Robbins in what I'm calling the Covid Redemption.
00:02:55.000Tim, thanks so much for joining me on Subcutaneous.
00:03:00.000Yeah, 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.
00:03:24.000Why did you feel it necessary to speak out against some of the measures that took place socially during the period of the pandemic?
00:03:31.000What was important and significant about it for you?
00:03:33.000Well, first let me say that I didn't at first.
00:04:20.000And as time progressed, I eventually got out of Los Angeles.
00:04:25.000I drove cross country and saw areas of the country that We're not adhering to the policies and eventually wound up isolating myself in New York State for a good seven months and it wasn't until I came to the UK in January of 2021 that I started to have questions 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,
00:04:59.000And I noticed a lot of people were not adhering again to these requests made by their government and I thought, well, they're going to have a hard day coming up, you know, that there'll be some serious death here.
00:05:15.000I kept my mask on and I kept adhering to the policies.
00:05:20.000But it wasn't until much later that I started to have questions.
00:05:26.000And when I saw that there wasn't a huge death rate here, after I had witnessed personally what was happening, I started to wonder more and more about what we were being told.
00:07:12.000It was like we are no longer at war with East Asia.
00:07:16.000It was now we were thinking about it a different way.
00:07:19.000And if you didn't take the vaccine, you were a Republican.
00:07:21.000And it wasn't that way here in England.
00:07:24.000It was a much more tolerant attitude towards the diversity of opinion.
00:07:32.000And so I was really grateful to have been in this experience so that I could get a different perspective.
00:07:40.000Perhaps 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.
00:08:03.000What I find interesting and again, laudable in what you've done is that you've undertaken your own journey from what
00:08:10.000was a de facto position of like, we were told it was a unique health emergency and that the measures undertaken
00:08:16.000were necessary in order to protect human life, what more noble goal could there be?
00:08:21.000But as this has unfolded, the position has to be amended.
00:08:24.000It's become clear that many of the original measures were not as rigidly undergirded as was first claimed.
00:08:32.000And in fact, as you've explained, there is a lot more political ideology at play than is perhaps wise, prudent or
00:08:40.000even honest when the claim that's being made is that we are following science, that's irrefutable evidence-based
00:08:54.000Something like a pandemic becomes politicized to this degree.
00:08:58.000If conversation becomes shut down, if condemnation of unvaccinated people becomes as sanctioned, like, you know, on CNN when Don Lemon was saying that, you know, these people are idiots and we should shame them, when certain people were saying that they should be denied health care, when Joe Rogan was condemned for sort of having a conversation, It indicates that the climate that we're living in is radically altered.
00:09:27.000One 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.
00:09:39.000It'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.
00:09:51.000Do 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?
00:10:04.000Well, 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.
00:10:21.000To continue the policy of lockdowns or mandates after that didn't seem to be following the science.
00:10:30.000It seemed to be following a political agenda.
00:10:34.000And so that's where I really started to have problems with it.
00:10:39.000There were a few instances that were Really disturbing to me.
00:10:44.000One was when the, I believe it was the CDC or the FDA, changed the definition of a vaccine on their website.
00:10:56.000Another was that when they denied that natural immunity was something.
00:11:02.000So there was an awful lot of people that got COVID early on.
00:11:37.000So, the fact that there were these Change of definitions was something that my, you know, my alarm bells went off.
00:11:49.000And 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.
00:12:04.000But then we also became aware that The most people at risk were either immunocompromised or elderly.
00:12:14.000And 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.
00:14:27.000Yeah, it's also a terrifying revelation of a previously sublimated but evidently present vengeful tendency.
00:14:35.000Because 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 cancer, people that smoke, people that drink, There is an endless litany and of course the reason we don't do that is because when you look at the cultural conditions that might lead to obesity smoking and addiction you have to acknowledge a kind of cultural conditioning that leads to those kind of outcomes.
00:15:01.000I like your point too Tim that whenever we know a change in the meaning of words it's likely that something foul is afoot.
00:15:10.000I'm a person of course that believes that inclusivity and individuals' rights to identify
00:15:14.000however they want to, to express themselves without harming others of course, is paramount.
00:15:19.000That's what libertarianism or individual freedom has to mean.
00:15:23.000But when we reach a point where conversation is being shut down, where we're being invited
00:15:28.000to forget the events of a couple of months or a couple of years ago, our media had the
00:15:34.000unbelievable disingenuity and cojones, shall we say, to lord the protests in China while
00:15:43.000forgetting that lockdowns were condemned a matter of months before.
00:15:46.000It's clear that their actions and their words are not underwritten by any principles.
00:15:52.000What you've evidently undertaken is a personal journey of discovery based on actual principles
00:16:00.000And what I feel like is that this is precisely what's required.
00:16:03.000Not to increase polarity, not to increase polemicism, which even the words themselves in their purest form indicate would create intransigence.
00:16:12.000Once something's magnetized to a particular position, there is no possibility of fluidity, there is no possibility of change.
00:16:19.000I 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.
00:17:12.000We'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, freedom literally is...
00:17:33.000Between the Iraq war and the Ukraine war, we've moved from a position where it would be a liberal position to oppose a war, to if you oppose a war now you're like a stooge of Putin.
00:17:45.000Like, this makes me feel that there are no real values or principles underwriting that entire, what we might call, establishment liberalism.
00:17:54.000And I wonder, where do you find yourself feeling like a vagrant?
00:19:01.000I want to believe this is a chapter and that when we get to the next chapter that people might return to certain values.
00:19:11.000I don't know if that's possible for some people because I think it's very difficult If people are without the information and without the data to support it, I don't know whether they are going to be able to change their opinions.
00:19:32.000I guess I've been mostly concentrating inward, concentrating on the people that I love in my life.
00:19:42.000Protecting my non-profit so that it survives.
00:20:35.000I play hockey every week with people that I know don't agree with everything I say, and I love them and support them.
00:20:43.000I have friends that are What some people might consider the enemies of the state, you know, people that are police officers, and I believe that.
00:20:59.000What we're dealing with here is is kind of an extension of.
00:21:05.000What happens when your political discourse and your communal experience is here in an online forum?
00:21:16.000It's very easy to be hateful and divisive when you're in your dark room.
00:21:22.000Typing missives at people you disagree with.
00:21:26.000It's very difficult to do that in person.
00:21:29.000Eye to eye with a human being next to you.
00:21:32.000Hatred is very difficult for human beings.
00:21:37.000It's a lot easier here, because it's abstracted.
00:21:41.000It's part of this, you know, I'll just... No, but you can't do that in person.
00:21:50.000And 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?
00:22:07.000And I was, if you went online, you would, I would, you could, I could make the conclusion that my life's not safe.
00:22:33.000It's something that stirs up hatred, stirs up division, and serves someone or some entity that benefits from our division.
00:22:47.000It 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.
00:23:13.000You 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.
00:23:42.000Because 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.
00:23:56.000One 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.
00:24:15.000Yeah, you see more and more that what is being prevented actually are sort of natural human traits.
00:24:21.000Our tendency to trust, our tendency to form alliances, our love of freedom.
00:24:27.000Once 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.
00:24:41.000One 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.
00:24:53.000I didn't realize how useful ideals of civil rights would be in separating people.
00:25:03.000The 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.
00:25:17.000I didn't realise that ultimately that that would be used to condemn swathes of an entire population.
00:25:24.000I 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.
00:25:38.000And 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.
00:25:48.000And again, what's difficult for me is, I'm not a pro-Republican person.
00:25:53.000I don't look to Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis for answers.
00:25:57.000Where I am is, I feel like I'm now in a new territory.
00:26:01.000Now, 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.
00:26:22.000I said, how is it that we have found ourselves in this position where establishment liberalism,
00:26:28.000neo-liberalism and authoritarianism has lost its function, its commitment to making the
00:27:58.000And if the only dissent in voices are right-wing voices, which I would imagine at some point are not underwritten by Well, I don't believe that's true actually.
00:28:13.000I believe there's an awful lot of people that would consider themselves to be left that are for personal freedom.
00:28:22.000It'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 world.
00:28:37.000I mean, listen, there is an awful lot of people that don't want to speak.
00:30:18.000And we used to live in a country where if our neighbor got sick, we'd bring soup over to them.
00:30:24.000We wouldn't give them a political litmus test before we brought soup over to them.
00:30:30.000This was one of the big challenges in reopening my theater in Los Angeles.
00:30:35.000It 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.
00:30:45.000We would have had to say, are you vaccinated or not vaccinated?
00:30:48.000And those that weren't vaccinated wouldn't be allowed in the theater.
00:30:51.000And 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.
00:31:03.000And the actors take them through a story and raise important questions.
00:31:29.000That is a betrayal of what theater is supposed to be.
00:31:33.000And 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.
00:31:52.000Yeah, it was still the idea of theater is a community, right?
00:31:57.000And we all might have different opinions on various things.
00:32:02.000We all might have different immune systems.
00:32:05.000Some of you might be immunocompromised.
00:32:07.000Some of you might not be able to take this thing, but we're not going to exclude you for that.
00:32:11.000Yes, 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 where we stand ethically, once the entertainment has become commercialised,
00:32:40.000Once 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.
00:33:04.000That it becomes impossible to have the kind of community that you're describing.
00:33:09.000When you talk about the unwillingness of people that you know to speak out as you have done,
00:33:14.000I imagine that that's ultimately financially motivated, that they know that they will be at risk of cancellation
00:33:20.000or certain financial interests being immediately foreclosed.
00:33:26.000And I feel that then, that what we have is a culture that has lost its values.
00:33:31.000And when I say that it's left to, in my view, Trump became a kind of a berserker,
00:33:37.000kind of like that he was willing to attack the establishment
00:33:40.000in a way that felt like extraordinary.
00:33:43.000Whilst what I would contest, and I know a lot of people watching this
00:33:45.000will disagree with me, that in government he was unable to deliver
00:33:48.000on those promises in pretty much the way that any ordinary politician
00:33:51.000wouldn't be able to deliver on those promises, in the same way that Biden hasn't delivered
00:33:55.000on those promises, in the same way that even a figure like Bernie,
00:33:57.000who a lot of people look to, and I know that you personally were a fan,
00:34:00.000has ultimately sort of kowtowed when it comes to sort of military action and foreign policy.
00:34:05.000But the system itself has a way of stripping away ethics, that we're living in a culture now
00:34:10.000have what just used to be considered ordinary community values that we share, we communicate,
00:34:16.000we tolerate the people, have differences.
00:34:18.000And I relate this too to what you said about the stripping off humanity that becomes available
00:34:36.000That 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.
00:34:44.000of solidarity, the brotherhood and sisterhood, service of one another. These values were
00:34:48.000sort of cherished and treasured and were not perfectly executed and had inbuilt biases
00:34:53.000that are sort of ordinary among human beings. But now it seems that they're being absolutely
00:34:58.000deracinated from any real value, only used if they can advance an agenda. It feels like
00:35:05.000the agenda is becoming everything. So the role of art, I think, becomes a little more
00:35:09.000significant, but less likely to be able to have an impact because we're only allowed
00:35:14.000to listen to voices within our own little silos.
00:35:17.000And I feel, and again I was talking with Glenn about this yesterday, that there is a nullified, castrated and co-opted Democrat party and A Republican Party that ultimately I feel that won't deliver for ordinary Americans, or like, you know, our right-wing parties similarly ultimately operate on behalf of corporate interests, is my opinion, means that there is a necessity for a kind of new humanism, a political movement that from the beginning is truly inclusive and is about individual freedom and therefore accepts at its heart
00:35:54.000Other 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.
00:36:08.000It seems that the system itself has been utterly co-opted.
00:36:10.000There's no place for someone like you or I, old school lefties, establishment liberals, artsy liberals, but that's gone now.
00:36:19.000So it seems like we, by default, have to become kind of radical.
00:36:23.000Because what else is there to do, Tim?
00:36:40.000We just continue with love, you know, we continue with tolerance of even that.
00:36:48.000And, you know, it's the big challenge is when you're trying to resist that or oppose that, how not to become your enemy.
00:37:06.000Yeah, 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?
00:37:26.000And 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?
00:37:35.000I could have easily just turned the damn thing off.
00:37:41.000I don't know if it's wise to de-platform people.
00:37:46.000I think you have to win in the court of public opinion.
00:37:49.000I 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.
00:38:01.000Censoring people historically just doesn't work.
00:38:14.000All 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.
00:39:51.000Everything 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.
00:40:05.000Even 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.
00:40:23.000When he says to Winston, the best way to control a rebellion is to start it yourself.
00:40:37.000When people are fighting for a change, and there's infiltration within that mindset or that movement, and someone says something, again, batshit crazy, that completely discredits the movement.
00:40:56.000That's something to be aware of as well.
00:40:59.000We 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.
00:41:18.000For example, Andrew Dice Clyde was a comedian I didn't particularly care for, and I found him offensive.
00:41:26.000But I never had the thought that we should exclude him from culture.
00:42:52.000I think that's perhaps a distinct case and the cancellation challenge will lead to homogenization.
00:43:00.000The 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.
00:43:09.000All 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?
00:43:21.000And ultimately, who does that authority rest with?
00:44:23.000When you talk about the experience that can happen in a secular culture, congregationally,
00:44:28.000in a theatre, it's something that most people don't have a version of.
00:44:32.000I know that there are a lot of people that have a religious faith, certainly in America, but it feels to me that we don't have a shared set of values anymore.
00:44:44.000Allow us to acknowledge that human beings are, by default, fallible.
00:44:49.000The salts and nits and line between good and evil runs not between nations and creeds and races, but through every human heart.
00:44:55.000The possibility for redemption, the possibility for failure, the possibility for growth, Like, 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.
00:45:21.000That conversation isn't possible anymore.
00:45:23.000We're not being afforded the right to have that conversation.
00:45:26.000And the same thing's playing out around Russia.
00:45:28.000The same thing's playing out around conversations around gender and identity.
00:45:32.000That 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.
00:45:56.000It 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.
00:46:08.000Could it be that this is a new religion?
00:47:14.000But 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.
00:49:32.000So I don't, 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 Shawshank Redemption, right?
00:50:21.000It's hard to annihilate the legacy of that.
00:50:24.000I was just thinking that while you were talking about it, there is a story about innocence and how it is irrelevant that you are innocent if you are condemned.
00:51:11.000We 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.
00:51:26.000And 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.
00:51:37.000We allow them to express emotions that are inaccessible, for the most part, in prison.
00:51:45.000Or at least emotions that can compromise them or their safety in prison.
00:53:24.000And, 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?
00:54:49.000I've seen transformation in children that we work with.
00:54:52.000Going from introverted, you know, staring at the floor, into sentient leaders.
00:55:00.000It's possible through art and it's possible every human being is possible of change.
00:55:07.000I suppose the difference between art and craft is the element of mystery that is difficult to discern and the allusion to beauty.
00:55:13.000It seems that what you're doing there in them prisons is creating ritualized space that grant access to emotions or states that wouldn't be ordinarily accessible in the I wonder what is being accessed through ritual.
00:55:29.000within, whether they are controlled by the penitentiary or by the cultures that seem
00:55:34.000similarly turgid. I wonder what is being accessed through ritual. I wonder what is being lost
00:55:42.000through our loss of ritual by living in cultures that do not afford the value of the anonymity
00:55:48.000of the mosque or the access to the elder or the ways that seem to have been inhered in
00:55:56.000us for potentially hundreds of thousands of years, all now replaced by commercialized
00:56:04.000ritual space, symbols that do not refer to anything other than themselves, not symbols
00:56:12.000that allude to a connection, a deep and profound connection.
00:56:16.000I'm very interested in that type of work that you're doing.
00:56:18.000Are 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 play and stuff, able to confront abusers from their past or catharsise their own experiences of, for example, violence.
00:56:44.000In that environment, similarly, you see men from rival fractions being able to come together and deal with one another differently.
00:56:52.000I suppose one of the messages of optimism that can be found in that is the acceptance that That your identity is temporal, that change and redemption are all possible, and that the foreclosing on those ideas, that our culture seems to be sort of willfully instantiating that everything is separate, everything is polarised, everything is absolute, everything, but that they're using science as a dogma, when science itself is fluid and progressive and discursive and conversational and live.
00:57:20.000And when I've spoken to what I'll call the scientists that are devotees, devout, that's one of the things that appears to be most important to them, 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!
00:58:25.000Every new audience is a new experience.
00:58:28.000The actor that comes out with arrogance is going to have a bad show.
00:58:32.000You have to know that this is a new chemistry out there.
00:58:37.000The 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.
00:58:45.000And I had the great fortune to talk with Peter Brook before he died, 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.
00:59:09.000You don't know what you're going to say.
00:59:11.000Yes, of course you learn your lines, but if to create reality, you don't know what you're going to say.
00:59:19.000Like, 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.
00:59:25.000And he's cooking it over his brain over and over again.
00:59:28.000And then he walks in and she's gorgeous.
00:59:53.000I'm going to tell you something, but I'm not going to tell you directly.
01:00:00.000But as an artist, or as any human being, to feel this arrogance of knowledge, It's very dangerous for growth.
01:00:11.000You'll never grow, you'll never learn if you know everything, and you walk into every social situation like, I got this, I know everything, right?
01:01:25.000It is in this sacredness, in this spontaneity.
01:01:28.000I'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.
01:01:40.000And how do you apply that to walking into a room with people that might not agree with you?
01:01:47.000How do you apply this sense of humility To a conversation where you can walk out of the conversation changed.
01:01:57.000You're denying your own, like, what I think is, you deny your own fallibility.
01:02:00.000When you talked about that virtuous expert idea, like, I know, and I'm virtuous, I know what a fucking human being is.
01:02:07.000I know that on some level they must have doubt.
01:02:11.000I mean, one of the things that made me sort of infatuated, shall we say, with Trump, or infatuated from a comedic perspective rather than a political one, to be honest, is like, Oh 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,
01:02:45.000And 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?
01:02:57.000The 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, that we may melt into love with one one another. At any moment we might realize who we really
01:03:37.000It'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.
01:03:59.000When you witness a character's transformation.
01:04:38.000And that's, that's what we're living in right now.
01:04:40.000We're living in this constant conflict and it's, it's, it's, it's madness, complete madness.
01:04:47.000We 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.
01:04:59.000It'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.
01:05:05.000They want to foreclose on possibility.
01:05:29.000Yeah, I think that that's, perhaps this is a place that there can be a unification of these apparently bifurcated political spaces, because surely, whether you're traditional left or traditional right, The idea of freedom, your freedom to be who you are, the uncertainty, the possibility that together something new can be created is the adventure that we can all embark on rather than sort of settling into.
01:06:56.000Tim, 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.
01:07:26.000We could put on some Commedia Della Tema or just Father Christmas.
01:07:31.000I suppose an elf, ultimately, given the dynamic, you would probably take the Papa Noel centre, the Mundus centre figure, the benevolent, giving father, me, Puckish, at least in this relationship.
01:07:45.000Next week, I'll be talking to Barry Weiss about the latest Twitterphile revelations, and comedian Duncan Trussell will be joining us for rasping revelation.