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April 7, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:02:01
“THIS Changed My LIFE!” | Rainn Wilson Interview - #108 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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**birds chirping** **music**
Brought to you by Pfizer **music**
video.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
As you know, every Friday we do an in-depth interview with a radical thinker, a fantastic entertainer, a brilliant philosopher, able to take us beyond establishment narratives and into the netherworld of the constant imagination.
And today is an extraordinary and special day.
The first 10 minutes of this you can watch wherever you're watching it now, but after that it will be only live on Rumble.
That we may speak freely.
Not in order to create division, but in order to create unity.
If you're not a member of our Locals community yet, join now by pressing that red button and you can join the chat and ask us questions as some people will be doing later.
Thank you for joining us, and now it's time for me to introduce our very special, beautiful, magnificent guest.
It's Rainn Wilson.
Rainn Wilson is, as you know, this person.
I mean, he's from the office.
He's been in a bunch of movies.
Transformers.
That one where he was a rocker.
The rocker?
You remember the rocker?
Yeah, the one where you were a rocker.
Yeah, yeah.
You didn't see it, though.
Yes, I did.
No one saw it.
I was on a plane.
Oh, OK.
Fair enough.
We are Baha'is, we're a member of the Baha'i faith, not Baha'ists necessarily, but you were very close.
Can I point out at this early juncture that weren't Saddam Hussein in that faith?
Saddam Hussein was not in that faith.
What was he though?
I feel like he was a Baha'ist, you're just trying to extract him.
I don't know what he was.
I'm sure he was a Muslim.
And he was like a Middle Eastern Sufist type thing.
It's close.
Yeah, Baha'i faith started in the mid-1800s in that area in Persia.
So there's a lot of Persian Baha'is.
Omid Jalili?
Yeah, Omid!
I love Omid!
From the comedy world.
He'll be watching this.
I'm sure he will.
He's a Baha'i.
Yeah, but I don't think any heads of state are Baha'is from the Middle East.
No.
In fact, they're greatly persecuted.
You would know, wouldn't you?
I do a little bit.
It's your faith.
I can't... Baha'is are routinely locked up and executed in that part of the world.
Not this one though.
No.
And not in this part of the world.
No, not at all.
No.
Yeah.
So, Rainn, this conversation will be formulated around a number of things, but ultimately what we want to explore is you and your unique brilliance.
I want to talk about the new book that you've written.
I know it's the first conversation that you've had about your book, and I'm very excited.
I'm a little scared.
I'm a little nervy about it.
So I brought my book, because I was driving here, and put it on auto drive, and then I was like, wait, what did I say here again?
So.
It seems dangerous.
It was dangerous, yeah.
I risked life and limb.
Just to be here.
The book is called Soul Boom and even in that title I'm able to evaluate that likely you approach the subject of spirituality with a kind of congeniality and accessibility because I suppose spirituality has come to be regarded as either esoteric or divisive or phatic and imitative.
Part of the challenge I think of, let's call them for the sake of simplicity, new age takes on spirituality is they sometimes feel Traditionless, rootless, individualistic and selfish.
What is it about the Baha'i faith and the manner of discussion of spirituality in your book, Soul Boom, that prevents it from being just another tool to help us fit in with systemic thinking and just individualism?
That is such a perfectly formulated question.
I can't even believe it.
And you're so fucking articulate.
It makes me sick.
I made the question up.
I know.
That hits it exactly on the head.
So again, essentially my thesis is that in humanity's current distaste for organized
religion, we have thrown the spiritual baby out with the kind of religious bathwater.
So at the center of all great religious thought are a couple of key essential points that
humanity has lost track of, and these are some essential elements of any spiritual tradition,
universal spiritual tradition, it doesn't matter, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, that humanity
needs to move forward because we're on the verge of destruction.
So you talk a lot about revolution in the book in the subtitle on your pod and and online and the subtitle of the book is like why we need
a spiritual revolution because and you've been a honestly you've been a great inspiration
to me over the years and I watch all of your stuff I've listened to so many of your
interviews and I because I feel like we're kindred spirits me perhaps in a somewhat smaller gentler
way.
my narcissism is not quite as unchecked as yours.
I'm not checking mine.
Good.
I didn't even know it was there.
Let it flow.
I don't even know, really, what you mean.
I was looking at my reflection while you were saying that and thinking, soon I'm going to say some things that are going to be really brilliant.
This noise coming from this man will soon stop.
It'll be back to where things are meant to be.
And I will be able to hold forth.
But in all seriousness, like, Because you posit your arguments, your beliefs, your discussions around this idea that we need to not just tweak extremely broken systems.
We need to rethink the entire system itself.
And so my thesis is that we can do that and we need to do that by using spiritual tools.
Maybe a little bit more than I hate to say political tools, because politics is really about the balance of power, so really good, solid spiritual tools will correct the balance of power, but not through partisanship.
Yeah.
There's a lot more to it than that.
That sounds like a beautiful and necessary and important book.
I was thinking in a way, Rain, that politics is functional, rudimentary, and about organisation and logistics, at least it ought to be, but you need to underwrite your vision with some sort of ideology, and even in a secular culture, You still require recourse to ideas that legitimize the direction that you as a political movement or one as a political individual is claiming to be the correct direction for the society that you're claiming the right to organize.
Who is in our house?
Because there shouldn't be anybody upstairs.
I'm the only person here.
My children are out.
That was like a heavy-footed individual.
It was Fauci.
That's Fauci.
He's up there.
He's claiming royalties for something he'd probably never even come up with himself.
Fauci!
Get down from there.
You're time-wasting.
I think it's interesting that you say that the tools that are required are spiritual ones.
I agree with you entirely because Materialism and rationalism, I think, have taken us as far as they can take us.
Like, this is the way we can organize our resources on this planet if we extract ourselves from our true nature.
All of us know that within us there's a sensation of the body, there's the awareness of the thoughts, but there is something else which you might regard as your spirit.
Your spirit requires nurture.
And when I try to organize my own life simply around logistics, relationships, objectives, I come unstuck pretty quick.
That's where I found spirituality.
Was your introduction to a spiritual way of life similarly desperate, or how did you find your path spiritually, Ray?
Well, you said so many really beautiful things there.
I just want to I just want to point out one thing that you said, which is our spiritual reality.
You introduced me and you're like, this is Rainn Wilson, and it's true.
This is the body I'm currently inhabiting.
I've spent 57 years in it so far.
Maybe I'll hit 90, maybe 95 if I'm lucky.
I really don't know.
I don't have any control over that.
But this isn't me.
So what is my reality is that I'm a spiritual being inhabiting a human body for a very limited period of time.
So for me, I grew up a member of the Baha'i Faith.
My parents were Baha'is.
The Baha'i Faith is a very beautiful religion.
I'm not here to convert anyone, but I do want to say that the central ideas are about unity and building community at the grassroots and being of service to one another.
And those elements, like I said earlier, are universalities that belong in every spiritual tradition and every religious tradition.
If you dig deep enough, if you look at their source, if you look at what Jesus actually did and not kind of what rose up in Jesus' name hundreds of years thereafter.
So, I grew up a member of the Baha'i Faith.
It was a beautiful faith tradition.
I needed to leave it because, much like yourself, I wanted to go explore the wide, wonderful world of drugs and alcohol and sex.
In New York City when I was 20 years old and went off to acting school.
So we share that as well.
I love your recovery book too.
I'm in recovery myself and a very important part of my spiritual journey comes from that 12-step tradition.
And yeah, so I left the Baha'i Faith.
I jettisoned everything and anything having to do with spirituality.
It seemed Old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy, limiting, moralistic, and just not relevant to my daily life.
And then as I got more and more depressed and dealt with alcoholism, depression, What we call mental health issues now, but in the 90s we didn't have words for it.
I was just fucked up.
I was just generally fucked up and really unhappy.
Even though I was working as an actor, I had a beautiful girlfriend, now my wife, and I'm like, what the fuck is going on?
Why am I so unhappy?
And that led me on a spiritual journey.
Ultimately, I went back to the Baha'i Faith, but during that time, which I'm really grateful for, where I was very lost, I was very hurting, I had a lot of pain, There were times where I felt suicidal, deeply suicidal.
I got to explore all the religious faiths of the world.
I'm sure there's some, you know, pygmy religions that I didn't get to study, but I read the Bhagavad Gita, and I read the writings of the Buddha, I read the Koran and the Bible, and I went on a many, many year soul-searching for personal meaning, and that led me ultimately back to the Baha'i Faith, and I decided that that was my spiritual path.
And those kind of ideas, what I found along the way, have inspired Soul Boom.
The World Is Not Enough may be the title of a James Bond movie, but it is also true that The World Is Not Enough.
I find that your story resonates with me in a number of ways, and is perhaps to a degree archetypal.
That laying at your feet in early life were a set of spiritual tools that were, for whatever reason, inaccessible to you, and then after suffering and exploration, you find your way back to that grail as it's offered.
Yeah, that's sort of like a really useful way, I think, to look at it, isn't it?
To sort of find that there are coordinates that are recognizable, particularly when we live in a culture that seems to be about identitarianism and divisiveness, not that people don't have the obvious right to celebrate their individuality and express it in the Myriad ways that one might, but that it's important to acknowledge, I believe at least, the kind of universality in the same way that we might accept that we all have skeletons, that there are certain psychic archetypes that we are all able to access.
And me, in all reign, it was like desperation that sort of made me consider a different way of life.
And to be honest, it still is.
venture into the world thinking maybe this is the thing that will make me happy some little task that I can fulfill or not fulfill and then when it doesn't work inevitably I return to this point of acceptance because as a 12-step person I know you must be aware that the principle of message as well as aligning with the broad paradigm that
exists in the triangle of service and unity and community. There is also the idea of total surrender.
And because 12 Steps and people that come to it via addiction are ordinarily dealing with crisis, a particular crisis, the crisis of addiction most obviously, I wonder if it's understood that what that folk, that new folk religion is telling you is that yourself Your identity, your whole persona is temporary, and you can't organize your life around that successfully.
You have to live absolutely in the service of a higher idea.
And I think it's impossible to mobilize that resource in a human being without Some kind of spiritual, without a spiritual conversation and without spiritual principles.
People aren't, are they, after the last century going to rally for socialism or free market capitalism or fascism ultimately?
Only in so much as those things allude to either unity or prosperity or solidarity.
There's nothing there.
In material.
Like, as is true physically, it's mostly space between the molecules, between the occasional nodes of apparently only present when observed phenomena.
It's mostly nothing.
It's mostly nothing.
So, I wonder how you reconcile your life as an individual, as a, you know, you've taken, like, you're meant to be doing a film right now, as I understand, it's only some sort of Serendipity, that means that you can travel up here, that you're not in your movie right now.
How do you reconcile your requirements as an actor, as a father, as a husband, as an author, with this knowledge that, you know, as you said a moment ago, really you're not here at all?
Again, beautifully said.
So, one of the chapters in the book I talk about two of my favorite television shows from the 1970s, which was Kung Fu and Star Trek.
So, and I use these as analogies of our spiritual journey.
So, Kung Fu, for those Millennials and Gen Z folks that haven't seen it, is about this guy, Kwai Chang Kane, very racially played by David Carradine.
Although the concept was invented by Bruce Lee, it should have been an actual Chinese person, but he's Chinese or half Chinese.
He grew up in a Shaolin monastery fighting Kung Fu, and he goes to the Old West looking for his brother.
Every episode is about a spiritual journey.
So, Kwai-Chan Kane is seeking to bring his Eastern wisdom and perspective to these rough-and-tumble racist cowboys that he bumps up against in every episode, and then it ends with a flurry of kicks and fistfights and And whatnot.
And I use that as an analogy of our personal spiritual journey.
So that's our meditation, our going out into the world seeking to be kinder, seeking to be wiser, to be more compassionate, to cultivate those divine spiritual qualities that we all have inside of us.
Some qualities more than others.
And that's part of our journey.
The Star Trek side of it is that humanity itself is on a spiritual journey.
And one of the things that we've thrown out is the possibility that we need to think of ourselves as global citizens, as world citizens, as human citizens rather, that we are all 7 billion of us inhabiting this planet, and how do we move forward?
And how do we help make the world a better place?
How do we solve racism?
How do we solve income inequality?
How do we solve these essential questions because they're not going to be solvable, Russell, through politics.
It doesn't matter what candidate.
We can get Biden out of there.
We can get Trump out of there.
We'll get, you know, I remember back in the day when Barack Obama was elected, all of my liberal secular friends were like, Oh my God, thank God racism has been solved.
Barack Obama is the president.
And in a lot of ways, he was a very good president in a lot of ways.
It was just business as usual, and a lot of big business, and a lot of drone strikes, illegal drone strikes, and a lot of, you know, monitoring, and it was just the same old, same old, and racism actually spiked and got worse after he was... So, the system itself is broken.
So, when we talk about the spiritual journey, that you talked about New Ageism earlier, and it's something that really rankles me, because there is an essential selfishness at the center of kind of New Age It's a spiritual path which is like I like this yoga class, I like this crystal, I like this meditation app, I like this Instagram of the day, this roomy quote that hangs on my wall and this makes me feel peace and this makes me feel serenity and I'm going to lead it at that.
No, peace, personal peace and serenity is important.
The yoga class is important.
Meditation, a nice roomy quote, those are all important.
But if it stops there, it's narcissism.
If it stops there, it's self-serving.
So how do we take that, this dance between the Kung Fu and the Star Trek, this dance between our personal spiritual journey and then we take that out into the world We're of service to others.
We seek to heal, to transform, to build community at the grassroots.
Again, it doesn't really matter who... If... Russell!
Yes?
Listen to me.
I was listening anyway.
I know you were listening.
You were wrapped.
Listen.
Our entire system, both political and economic, is based on the worst aspects of humanity.
It's based on contest, competition, and aggression, and one-upsmanship, and individuality.
They're all based on that.
That's how capitalism is based.
And that's how partisan Politics is also based.
So as long as we're in that system, we're headed toward a self-destructive end.
We're headed towards climate disaster and all kinds of, I talk about all the different global pandemics in the book besides, besides COVID.
But, you know, racism, materialism, you mentioned, there's so many other nationalism.
Militarism.
These are all the real global pandemics.
But if we want to really cure them, if we want to address them, we have to go to the roots.
So, and the roots of that is our, is our, our personal transformation as a, as a, I'm sorry to go back to this stupid analogy, but going back to our inner Kwai Chang Cain.
And, and then how do we spread that in the world?
How do we build something new?
Because if we just keep protesting, It's not going to lead to anything.
And we're in a culture of protest right now, where we see injustice.
We're like, injustice!
And we see a terrible politician.
We're like, that politician sucks!
And we see this terrible bill that's been passed.
Like, this legislation is terrible!
What are we building?
That's a wonderful way of framing it.
In a sense, what needs to be rejected is the entire perspective that we're presented with and the successive administrations in your country, America, that you've described.
are enough to illustrate the futility of a system that ultimately serves the same, what we generally call elite interests, regardless of what set of politicians claim to be representing what particular ideology.
And the quantitative easing measures that took place in 2008 and the bailing out of the banks and the failure to prosecute anyone for the financial travesties in that era demonstrated that ultimately when it came to it, what you were left with was rhetoric and aesthetics.
And I feel that the Amplification of the culture at war is to mask the fact that the distinctions when it comes to the maneuvering and administering of power are too similar to warrant debate.
So the necessary amplification of the small differences is a requirement to legitimize the entire conversation. When you said about it from a cosmic
perspective, I suppose one might say, and it's certainly an analogy that's used a lot in
spirituality, that we're seven billion inhabitants of a single cosmic craft. It's a
metaphor that Buckminster Fuller used to continually use. That's accurate and rudimentary.
That's not abstract, metaphysical and spiritual in a kind of ephemeral way.
That is the reality.
We are living on this planet.
We do have these resources.
This is why the solution must be spiritual.
Because if you regard things solely rationally, then all that's left is how do you distribute resources?
And therefore, the most potent ideological drives become those that are unwritten primarily, underwritten rather, underwritten by primary forces, i.e.
survival, competition.
This is the palette that will operate well when you're dealing with 70 people in a tribe that have to use their resources pre-agriculturally when they have to hunt and gather.
You need that energy or a species doesn't survive.
Of course what's happened is our systems haven't Our evolution has not adjusted to the systems within which we live.
And with the preclusion of spiritual solutions, we cannot envisage that there might be different resources within us to underwrite and fuel our vision.
I liked it that you said that.
That we fetishize the aesthetic.
We fetishize superficial ideological components.
Not that cultural or racial issues are not important.
Of course they do.
They lead back to great, great exploitation.
That's evident and plain.
But I like it.
But when the choice is so reductive, I'm reminded of that.
Bill Hicks used to do a bit of saying, like, when there was a debate about whether or not to have women priests, he said, yeah, have women priests.
Have one with eight titties and two dicks.
I might go see that one.
He goes, but I prefer to deal with the voice of limitless love that's accessible to all of us.
Gotta run, there's a voice calling me.
Why are we accepting that paradigm?
And the only way out of that is through spirituality, even if you use the David Carradine and the Captain Kirk way through it.
Because I will be, at some point in this conversation, analyze and articulate some of the archetypes in the world from which most people will know you.
The archetypes of the office and who are those heroes and villains, what are those tropes, what are those relationships set, albeit in a mundane and provincial paper mill.
But I can see that you are, as is often the case, reaching for your tone, presumably with some direction-changing insight, which I am Nothing but ears and erection waiting to hear those chapters.
I'm sorry.
I saw you eyeing as I was grabbing my tome.
Oh, here's a good quote.
What do you mean?
You're just pulling them out at random.
Yeah.
Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, we are watching the birth more than the death of a world.
That's nice.
You quoted Buckminster Fuller, and I had a great Buckminster Fuller quote, which I can paraphrase.
Grotesquely, which is like you don't change things by fixing an existing broken system.
The way to change things is to create a new system that makes the existing system obsolete.
And that just reminded me of what you were saying.
Even though Dwight is a really, really peculiar character and you are Evidently a peculiar man.
I am.
You're peculiar in a very different way than Dwight is.
Yeah, and I'm very curious about how you captured that sort of... He's a very American character, Dwight, I feel, like sort of the patriotism, the individualism, the libertarianism, and then there's sort of the oddly repressed strangeness.
And how close it was to Mackenzie Crook's rendering of Gareth initially and how quickly you... Because it's one of the most significant departures is the difference between those two characters.
Mackenzie Crook was absolutely brilliant and his performance and his characterization was...
Tickled me to the core.
I think he is absolutely magnificent.
He doesn't get enough credit for the incredible Gareth.
I stole all his best bits.
The fact that he went and gave himself the most unflattering haircut possible, which I did for Dwight.
The self-seriousness.
There's a kind of a hoo-ha, rah-rah kind of vein of militarism underneath those two characters.
So the toady bully, like the two sides of the coin, I'm a toady and I'm a bully at the same time, which I thought was really interesting.
But, you know, in pondering Dwight and the creation of Dwight, I really went back to my roots in suburban Seattle.
I had a friend named Chris Cole, and we played Dungeons and Dragons together.
Total nerd.
He joined the army to play the coronet in the army, and he was a fencing fanatic.
He got into fencing because he loved Dungeons and Dragons and wanted to play with swords.
You know what I mean?
So you see, like, in the roots of someone like that, you see some blight.
My uncle, my family were farmers on both sides of my family in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, and Minnesota and there's a particular kind of like Scandinavian kind of spectrum-y muscle car farmer that is also kind of in the wheelhouse of Dwight and that's one of the things I will really applaud you know so many people create television shows and they and you have like
No offense, but like Big Bang Theory, like the idea of nerds and what a nerd is.
But Dwight, you can't type him.
Like, is he a nerd?
Yeah.
Is he a successful businessman?
Yeah.
Is he the worst salesman ever?
Yeah.
Is he a bully?
Yes.
Is he all about his independence?
Certainly.
Does he long for community?
Yes.
Is he... You know what I mean?
Like, it goes on and on and on.
He has so many different facets and it's very rare on a television show that you would allow a comedic character to kind of have those kind of reverberations.
Yeah, because a lot of real character comes from contradiction.
I feel like comedy comes from a sort of a continual awareness
that the reality we operate within is secondary and that there is another ulterior reality,
that that's what we allude to.
What I feel that one of the things that defines comedy for me, Rain, is that it is the ability to continually go,
I've been taking my life seriously.
I'm worried about my children.
I'm worried about my future.
I'm worried about my job and people.
But in comedy, you connect with a deeper truth.
Somewhere in this aperture between the nihilism that the infinite and the eternal suggest, and a deep, profound, yet somehow ineffable meaning that can only be felt in love.
To avoid the piety that that could induce, you can approach it with comedy, that there is a playful beauty.
I mean, you talk about reading the Bhagavad Gita, and the characterization of Krishna versus a character like, not character, Jesus Christ!
Like, you know, Christ's real.
Not coming on here to say there ain't a Jesus.
I like Jesus, I love Jesus.
I'm trying to be him for a while, but there's some demands.
You've got the hair, right?
That's as far as I've got really, because self-sacrifice and being a living manifestation of a divide.
You've washed the feet of many a prostitute.
Sometimes it's part of the contract.
There's a playfulness in the character of Krishna, and sometimes evident in the voluptuousness and abundance of the Vedas and Hinduism, the faith derived from it, that sometimes you feel, hmm, is that where New Ageism is right?
This is the country where many of those relationships began, where Yogananda and Vivekananda, they came to this country a century ago, a couple of centuries ago, and impacted and altered The direction of American spiritual life, where the kind of frontierism of the American spirit can meet with an adventurousness, a spiritual adventurousness, perhaps as encapsulated by your Star Trek adventurous spirit, within a sort of hermeneutics and ecclesiastical quest in.
I guess what am I saying here?
I'm saying here, like, how do you see your role as a comic being part of the service of your spirituality?
That's one aspect of the question I want to ask.
And then also, I want you to fold into it if you can.
After being in something like The Office for a very, very long while, which must entirely dominate your life and mean a lot to everybody that you meet all the while, how do you move past it and beyond it?
And, you know, how do you locate it now?
I'm going to risk a lot of people rolling their eyes right now, but I want to say that I believe that being an artist is a mystical journey because essentially we're living in a mystery.
You know, the Lakota word for God is Wakantanka, which means the great mystery.
And when I view God, when I view the divine as the great mystery, that's when I sink in.
And the role of an artist is to have a blank page and create something beautiful, to have a silent room and create a beautiful symphony.
To have words on a page that say Dwight and have some lines and to bring those to life.
To have a blank page and write a beautiful poem that's just a sequence of words, but somehow it touches our heart and opens up something for us.
There is a mystical and beautiful, mysterious journey in being an artist.
And I feel like I at a very young age knew that I was able to just do silly voices and play characters and I love to make people laugh and I was this big weird looking goofball with a giant head and a little belly and I made people laugh and that's how I got the girls.
All of a sudden I started doing acting and all of a sudden girls wanted me to sit at their lunch table.
So I was like, I'm in.
I'm done with Dungeons and Dragons.
I'm going down this path and I feel like when you're as profoundly blessed to be a part of a show like The
Office, that you have this kind of convocation
of these beautiful artist, actor, mystics, bringing Jim and Pam and especially Michael
and so many of the other great characters to life and Dwight.
And they're creating a family.
It's got a warm heart at the center that there is a spiritual vibration to doing something like The Office.
And I think going back to the America question, and here's the other thing I'll say.
We talked about the Star Trek journey, the Kung Fu journey.
I believe that part of my spiritual journey is to find my way to be of maximum service to the world.
What is my way?
What is your way?
What is his way?
What was Leon's way to be a maximum.
Forget Leon.
Fuck Leon.
It's too late for him.
It's too late.
But what is our way to use the gifts that this divine great mystery, I won't say God, but that the great mystery Wakan Tanka has given each of us, to put into service to help transform this very difficult and confusing and unjust planet into some kind of earthly paradise, which Um, again, I'm risking a lot of eye rolls.
Uh, you know, you may say that I'm a dreamer.
I'm not the only one.
I do think that there are there.
We have to visualize.
We've become so cynical.
We have to visualize the possibility of transforming this planet and transforming the way that human beings interact with each other.
And so, for me, part of that is, yeah, I wrote a book, and, you know, I'm a member of my faith community, and I do service work, and my wife and I have a non-profit, and I do stuff like that, but I also, for me, for whatever reason, the great mystery instilled in me the possibility of playing these weird, delightful characters, like Arlechino the Clown, and I get paid handsomely for it, and if that And I have heard time and time again, like, like it has brought, the office has brought so much joy to people.
It's uplifted their hearts.
It's, it's connected families.
People have been suffering and they have tearfully, time and time again, told me how much the show has meant to them.
Like that's a service in itself.
So, um, if we, if we, if we move away again from the worst qualities of humanity, which are self-seeking and we move in toward Instead of self-ishness, other-ishness, then that's the very feeble step one in the eventual transformation of the planet.
Well, it's nice that inversion.
I feel like it might be a significant step, that flip might be more significant than you implied at the end of your statement.
When things seem only spatial and temporal, contained within that framing, there can be a dull flatness to it.
It seems like that when I'm able, when I live my life, Rain, and my unspoken yet somehow explicit agenda is self-fulfillment, I want this for me.
When my religion is Russell, Like, you know, what he wants.
His preferences become my, they are my stone tablet, my tabernacle.
Russell's preferences is what I live for.
I sort of feel myself, like, draining and atrophying as I go.
But, like, I heard today that someone told me, like, oh, that I'd just done some very small, kind thing for them and how they'd remember.
They go, I don't remember anything else that happened that month except that thing you did.
And it reminded me of this idea that how can eternity, like the Great Mystery, be anything other than continually present?
How can God be elsewhere?
How can God be anywhere but here in this moment if God is absolute?
And I feel like The first page, and God knows if it wasn't on the first page I wouldn't have read it, of George Orwell's homage to Catalonia.
He talks about queuing up to sign up to PUM, you know, to fight there.
That he sort of saw this, in front of him to sign up was this red-haired Italian, Bella, and he said that even without knowing him, he knew that he could love him.
Like he sort of thought, this guy, I like this guy a lot.
There was something about him.
And sometimes there are, like, you know, in early life love affairs that last, you know, God a day, an afternoon, or brief moments, connections with people.
And if you've been held like that, if you've experienced that moment, the timeless, the eternal, what does he say, Wittgenstein?
He says, if we consider eternity not to be an unlimited temporal duration, but the quality of timelessness, Then eternity belongs to those that live in the present, forever in the present, able to return to this place.
And so even if it's a cultural artifact, like The Office, which no doubt was sort of the congregation of many geniuses present in that, from the delivering, the conception, all sorts of aspects of it.
You know, like, you know, one feels, oh, it's being rebooted, like football, like music, like everything, just into commodity, all things commodity, all things commodity.
If they have in them that spirit, if they have love in them, that we will feel the resonance of that.
This is why I think it is no small thing to posit that the solution to our problems must of course be spiritual, that it's not going to be organisational.
There are great tomes, great genres of political writing about this is how we organise it economically, this is how we organise it geopolitically, militarily.
But unless there is a shift in the consciousness of our kind, then it will reorganize like iron filings back to that template, the way it's reiterated itself through empire, successive empires that conform to the same paradigm.
You could take Marxism as an example, like essentially at the root of Marxism is how do we heal this incredible income inequality that is holding billions of people back and causing them to suffer?
Well, let's create an organization in which the resources are spread out among humanity but if that isn't if there isn't the need in the human heart to share then having an administration say you must give up this beautiful Hollywood Hills house and this couch and you must give it to him and you must work as a janitor then if that's coming from above then that's
You're not going to feel connected to that.
So, Marxism at its heart, seeking to remedy a big problem in the world is fantastic.
It has so many great ideas inherent in it.
But, again, this has to bubble up from the ground up.
Oh man, that's a real beautiful metaphor.
I feel that.
You know, like, you know, Marxism starts with the idea of sharing and like ends up with We're gonna kill all these people!
You know, like Christianity is.
We are all one!
Then it ends up with... We're building this cathedral and killing... And killing all these people, yeah.
Stop getting to kill all these people as the outcome.
You know that there's some invisible...
Impremature keeps imposing.
When I was in London recently with all of the developments, in Tottenham Court Road, which is a sort of a hub within London, there was something that as if dropped from the sky, some new development at the epicentre of that town, some unlovely Kubla Khan, nothing but edifice and shine.
And when I walked near it, what I felt was, London for all its flaws, like any entity that exists within a commercial framing with that kind of utility, with that kind of telos, it always had the sense that the culture has come from the ground.
You know, when you're in a place, you want to feel that this is the expression of grandmothers and grandfathers and ancestors that built this place.
Many ideas to be in Rome.
To see the eternity of Rome in its layers.
That you are placed in the present.
The past is there looking at you.
The Colosseum is there looking at you.
The Forum is there.
Julius Caesar died there.
It's happening now.
It's happening now.
It's not, this is not, you know like that sometimes.
And that's the beautiful thing about Rome too, is then you fast forward to the Renaissance.
And you see the beautiful churches and the Michelangelo and the incredible paintings, and it's all part of that unfolding history of Rome.
But London, and I think London is the new Rome in a way, and it has that layer upon layer of beautiful kind of human evolution.
Yes, I suppose, but it feels to me very much that what we are witnessing now is a sort of an ongoing centralizing entity imposing from above this time Masked in globalism, this time using the rhetoric of equality, fairness... Yeah, but I want to challenge you on that a little bit because I understand and I've heard a lot of your talking about like the World Economic Forum and whatnot and I certainly am not a big fan of billionaires getting together and coming up with policies that supposedly benefit the little man.
That's not what I'm talking about.
But we have to be careful when saying that globalism is the enemy because Ultimately we do want to be global.
Ultimately we do want, and that doesn't mean like A one world government that's authoritarianism.
That's not what we're talking about.
But ultimately, we have to be one human species on a planet.
And that's going to take us away from nationalism.
We're like, I was born in Ecuador.
Ecuador is amazing.
Ecuador forever.
God bless Ecuador.
I will die for Ecuador or Belgium or Mongolia or insert whatever country you want.
So how do we, because this Like everything, these conversations have become so like black and white and so simplistic, and you have like globalists versus anti-globalists versus like, how do we have a global transformation on
on this heart level here, but also with 7 billion of us, so that we are global.
And that's a different kind of globalism.
So if we're shouting anti-globalist epithets from every belfry, then we're kind of neglecting
our greater work.
I believe this, that as with your earlier janitor metaphor, if someone wants me to clean for service, for love,
I will claim it.
Someone tells me to do something.
Like Jesus did.
Like our Lord before us.
Another similarity.
That's weird.
They're clocking up.
If someone tries to make me clean, I'm not doing it.
I feel that the agenda of globalism Is centralization authoritarianism the ability to manipulate and control markets and to generate dominion?
Now like the love of Ecuador is a not only a metaphor but an evolved tendency towards tribalism, ancestor worship, a celebration of individual culture.
Their love of Ecuador or Belgium needn't mean hatred of the other. It needn't mean that, but I feel that
if you start to take away people's right to be Ecuadorian, they're not going to like
it. And I feel that the kind of globalism, the kind of confederacy that you are alluding
to can only be brought about democratically. The problem is with the WAF, WHO, IMF, is
that they're leveraging undemocratic globalist measures without consultation of the people that
will be affected by those And telling us that it's because of some sort of project to save the planet.
But when here is a continue... This I can continually observe.
They never make suggestions or push edicts that will impact the agenda of the powerful.
Never.
They never say, we're trying to save the planet because of climate change, here's what we're doing.
Energy companies will now not benefit What's that word I can never remember?
Supplementations.
Thank you.
They will not benefit from subsidies.
They will not be entitled to profit.
We're going to regulate and control their profiteering.
In order to meet climate change objectives, We're going to fuck the lives of ordinary people.
70% of global pollution comes from corporations.
Start with them, then.
Start with them, then.
Demonopolise big tech companies.
Let's start breaking them down.
So I feel that what they use is rhetorical and manipulative.
They talk about, you know, this is for the preservation and conservation of our planet.
We have to acknowledge this.
Because of course, as we have said spiritually, we need to be able to hold in our consciousness This is one planet, but as they say in some of the great gifts we've had on here, like Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, they talk about, and Gandhi himself, localism.
Your community must be self-governing.
Your community must use its own resources.
Your community must be empowered.
The fact that that becomes fueled somehow by hating another community, you can see that that's an evolutionary quirk.
We know that strangers were the most likely people to bring disease, 10,000 years ago, which is nothing, just 50 ancestors that way or whatever it is, you know, when you line them up, it's no time of go at all.
What I feel like is that these bureaucracies masking anodyne language, nefarious ideals that were evident in the great ideologies of the last century, the fascism, the communism, how the Marxism ended up emulating the czarism that preceded it, created a new class of serfs.
They say of English socialism that it owes as much to Methodism as Marx, it had within it Christianity, it had in it fairness, love, and you can sort of feel that in English socialism such as it is, even to this day.
So what I suppose I feel like is As well, there cannot be autocracy, there cannot be technocracy, there cannot be a cadre of aristocrats of any kind telling ordinary people this is how to live.
Some say democracy is the only game in town.
You have to just persuade people, like I would persuade them, I think.
Look, I think we should allow this amount of immigration.
But you vote for if in your community you want to take in immigrants.
This is why I think you should do it.
But it's up to you.
Because maybe you know shit I don't know.
I think people have gotten sick of being told what to think and how to feel by people who don't have their best interests at heart.
And I think that globalism has become a great example of that.
So I'm going to start a channel on Rumble where I tell people what to think and how to vote.
I only suggest how to think and how to vote.
So, let me change gears a little bit.
Very well said.
I don't disagree with anything.
Because it's got to be loving.
Love is everything.
Love is all you need.
I have a chapter on that.
I'm sorry to keep going back to the book, but I will say that in Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, I bring up an example from the Baha'i Faith.
Let me share this with you.
Go on.
Tell me what you think.
I talk about one of the great evils of the world being partisanship.
Do you know how much money are spent on political ads?
I don't have the figure in front of me, but in the United States, it's in the billions and billions of dollars just in advertising for candidates.
Think about what... You had a little bit of a burp and it was a little bit foul.
What did you have this morning?
It was a little foul.
I've just been eating my own cum all morning.
It's the only thing I can keep down.
I hope that's your second strike.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Um, that wasn't cum, it was more like tuna.
I don't eat, I'm a vegan.
I had tofu, scramble, and then, of course, the cum.
The cum.
I chew it!
I'm not an animal!
Do you eat it with a tiny spoon?
Like a caviar?
Like a blini?
Takes ages though, because there's plenty of cum.
Vegan blini.
So anyways, so I talk about the... Spending money on... The corruption of partisan politics, and partisan politics are based on like, I can insult you better at the podium, I can spend more money than you, I can make myself seem better and greater than you, it's really moved away from From policy differences and respectful debate and moderation.
Not that it ever really was that way.
We've just seen where it has headed.
But in the Baha'i Faith, I'm just using this as an example.
The Baha'i Faith is democratically elected.
So here we are in the city of Los Angeles.
There's no clergy in the Baha'i Faith.
There's no priests or monks or gurus or anything like that.
So it's all democratically elected.
So every year the Baha'is of Los Angeles gather together and they vote for nine people called the Local Spiritual Assembly that will govern the affairs of the Baha'is of Los Angeles.
It's very much like a 12-step meeting.
It's like loving servants of the community.
How do we do this?
Is there campaigning?
No, not allowed.
There's no yard signs.
There's no, you should vote for Bob.
He's the best and wisest Baha'i.
It is prayerful and meditative.
And you are asked, you get a list of everyone who lives in Los Angeles, and you're asked to write down the nine names of those who you think bring the best service-oriented outlook, the best spiritual maturity to their jobs, to be humble servants of the Baha'is and the communities of Los Angeles.
Now this goes on also on a national level, this also goes on on a global level.
So, there's no money spent, there's no narcissism, there's no one-upsmanship, there's none of the worst qualities of humanity expended, and you simply have servants.
Servants of the community.
What do they call it in the Twelve Traditions?
Our leaders are trusted servants.
program in the 12 traditions.
Our leaders are trusted servants.
They do not govern.
They're trusted servants.
They do not govern.
So could you do that in a town?
Could you do that in Waco, Texas?
Could the people of Waco, Texas... Well, if we start there, after their history... Well, we need to rebrand a town that has no negative connotations for new expressions of government and power.
Forget Waco, Texas.
Can you lighten these lenses?
Right, I'm in charge.
Women, your bedroom's here.
Give me some fucking rifles.
I love God better than all of you.
Call in the feds!
Okay, Omaha, Nebraska decides that it's had enough of partisanship, bickering, backstabbing, backroom deals, moneyed interests clawing their way to the top, and they say, let's do the same thing.
We're all going to gather at the local Omaha Stadium, and we're going to elect nine trusted servants, or 11, or 7, or 5, or 27, or however many, From the town itself that will devote a year or two years or five years to the service of the community And we're going to do this
Maybe not prayerfully, but meditatively.
And could you not do that?
Could that happen in a small town?
When you think about it in a very small town, a town of 500, you think like, oh, that might be able to happen.
And then, well, could it happen in a town of 5,000?
Could it happen in a town of 50,000?
And maybe something like that might start to shift to what you're talking about, that grassroots-ish-ness.
That we need to achieve a globalism through a grassroots kind of path.
Maybe something like that?
I agree with that.
Well, I think that is a type of anarchic principle, the idea of self-governance.
But it's organized.
It has an organizational structure to it.
It's not a loose bunch of unwashed people at a farm talking about sharing their genes.
That's racist against anarchists!
The anarchists are organized, they just reject domination.
The principles of anarchy are self-organized.
Anarchist?
Can you have a globalist anarchist community?
What I feel, Rain, if we're going to reorganize civilization, is that you should emulate anthropology.
Typically a primate tribe will split around 70 to 100 chimps.
They split and form two tribes.
They can't create hierarchies and organization at that number.
So it feels like there is nothing in our evolutionary history that would suggest that a good idea would be to centralize power to the tune of 300 million people.
And in fact, the only people that benefit from aggregation on that scale, I would contest, are the top strata of that society.
Now people make the free market trickle-down economics argument continually.
That is what was underwritten in late capitalism for at least the last 50 years.
But my feeling is that people that benefit mostly from the aggregation of populations are the people that are the top of those populations.
That tends to be how it works.
What I reckon is that what you described is quite beautiful in the Baha'i faith.
The position of leadership itself is stripped of its glamour, is stripped of its prestige.
They're not necessarily of honour.
Honour is a necessity, I might argue.
And in this case, in the local spiritual assembly of the Baha'is, and let's say the local governing assembly of Omaha, individually they don't have power.
They only collectively have power.
When they gather and they make a decision, they have a quorum, that has power.
So it's not like someone who's elected in Omaha walks down the street and has any power over anyone else, just like in a 12-step meeting.
It's very peaceful, I think.
I know it's idealistic.
I know there's a lot of eye rolls.
I get it.
But you know what?
We're blowing ourselves up and we're fucking up the planet, so let's try something different!
Yes, and also we're not striving for perfection, we're striving for improvement.
Generally I have found that people that say that no other way is possible are invested in this way, staying the same.
This system is, look let's give the... And they want you to feel that way, they want I, you know, the great theater teacher and director Andre Gregory from My Dinner With Andre.
Oh, right.
You know that guy, right?
Brilliant.
I did a workshop with him when I was a young actor in New York and I'll never forget it.
We had tea together.
He would have tea with his students and he said, so how are you doing, Rain?
What do you, what do you think in these days?
And I was like, Oh, you know, I just can't help but just be cynical.
I just feel like the world's going to shit, and I just feel like the acting industry is shit, and I'm just cynical.
And this is what he did.
He grabbed my arm as hard as it's ever been grabbed, pulled me close, and he was like, don't do it.
They want you to be cynical.
They want you to be cynical.
You have to keep hope alive in everything that you do.
If you are cynical, they've won.
My arm!
My fucking arm!
Get me to the hospital!
My arm!
And then he drew back.
My teeth!
My jaw!
Yeah, you're quite right that we mustn't fall into sallow cynicism.
And That the optimism is part of the fuel of this change.
And I feel that if you have a template that rewards crisis for the most powerful, i.e.
in a medical crisis, the pharmaceutical companies benefit.
In a military crisis or a war, the military-industrial complex benefit.
The people, the energy companies benefit even when there is a fuel crisis.
Record profits of Big Pharma, record profits for Big Tech, wealth transfer of 5 trillion during the pandemic period.
If what is crisis to most people is beneficial to the elite, and by the elite I mean the most powerful, what set of circumstances do you imagine might continue to emerge?
If the most beneficial circumstances for the most powerful people are deleterious for the people with least power, that that template will continue to repeat itself.
What kind of template do you imagine might continue to reiterate itself if a situation that is deleterious to ordinary people is beneficial to the most powerful interest?
So I feel that this is a time to consider radical solutions, and I think it's going to be about more democracy, more control, assemblies, localism, collectivism, and there will be sturm und drang and opposition to these ideas because finally ideas are being put forth that will affect I think it's important to understand that a lot of people on the political left view social change as not being organized.
And I'm not saying that you're saying this, but that it's small groups You know, on a farm somewhere and just doing what they like.
And the fact is, is that we need organization as well.
Organization gets a bad name, and I'm not talking about authoritarianism.
You can be organized and not authoritarian.
but we do need to, the other side is very, very, very well organized.
And to think that we're going to affect some kind of global change
in the inequalities and the systems that you're talking about
by being kind of loose coalition, loose disorganized coalitions, that's a fairy tale that I roll my eyes at.
So how do we do that?
I don't have the answer, but I do know that in seeking these kind of changes
that you're talking about, you're talking about anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-socialism, what is it?
Anarcho-syndicalism.
Syndicalism, yeah.
Anarchy.
That we have to think in a larger sense to have a systematic organization behind that that spreads virally and is transformative because Otherwise they will just keep winning because they're so much better organized than we are.
And you talked about tribalism before and I'll say also too that we just need to, you know, at first we started with a family in a cave and then it was like a couple of families in a valley and then it was like 27 families in a little town and and our tribes grew and then it's like Ecuador and Belgium and our tribes grew to that.
We have to view our tribe in a much larger context as well.
So I'm not sure how to do that.
But we are a human tribe sharing a planet that's hurtling through space like Buckminster Fuller said.
And so whatever happens in this grassroots, systematic, organized way has to include the beautiful, loving, our beautiful human being tribe on this planet.
That is a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation.
Thank you, Rain.
Let us know in the chat how you think we should reorganise the planet and its resources.
What new systems should be introduced?
Is it Baha'ism?
Is it the kind of anarchic principles as exemplified within 12-step programmes?
How do you ever confront globalist corporate power without the support of the state?
How do you remilitarize?
How do you demilitarize?
How do you confront corruption and hypocrisy in all its many forms?
So many questions.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Remember you can join our locals community and put questions to us directly.
I'm pointing to something there.
I don't even know what I'm pointing.
If you press Rainn Wilson's penis, it's just $40 per year to press it.
It's very small.
But you can dab it.
You'll find it.
Nevertheless, it's in there somewhere amidst the shrubbery.
You're very well groomed, speaking of shrubbery.
Do you think so?
How does that happen?
I trim my chest hair once in a while.
Do you take a buzzer and do that?
What happens if you don't?
Is it really... It's not like... I'm not like sort of incredibly hairy.
Is it virulent?
Yeah.
But it is like a sort of what you might call a gentle... I'm a bit grimace at it.
Like a suit?
Yeah, like it's a manageable... I'd say it's a sexy amount of hair.
I guess because I'm a... What's the issue?
I'm a child of the 70s and I guess I've never really... My son makes fun of me because I don't know that I've ever even trimmed my pubic hairs.
Do you want me to do that now?
Yes.
Is that how we have to end this interview?
With me gnawing at your pubic hair with my- I didn't say with your teeth!
I assumed that you meant with the incisors!
Now, while I nibble through Rainn Wilson's pubic mound, I will say goodbye to you while I still have the use of my facial orifice.
Thank you for joining us.
Join us next... Oh yeah, get Rainn's book!
There's a link in the description where you can acquire this book.
Let me read a passage at random just to show you what a good book it is.
This is by W.H.
Auden, so we can't give the credit to you for... Of all of my sentences in this book, you pick an Auden quote?
It's the best bit.
Alright.
It is true.
We are all here on Earth to help others.
What on Earth the others are here for?
I don't know.
Having a spark of consciousness in this mysterious, difficult and gorgeous universe fills us with questions.
Who are we?
What makes the sun and the stars move?
How can I feel happier?
What happens when we die?
What does it all mean?
The mythologies of religious writings and traditions offer us potential answers to these timeless, persistent inquiries, many of which are to be found here within Solburn, but many more are found within Rainn Wilson's pubic mound, which I will be gnawing down to a barely visible stubble.
In just a matter of moments.
And I do this because I love you.
Join us next week.
Yes, continue to do that.
Join us next week, not for more of the same.
Who needs that?
But for more of the different.
Until then, stay free.
It's like an acorn.
Many switching, switch on, switch off.
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