Such is our takeaway from a recent appearance Tim Robbins made on what we have somehow collectively allowed to become our society’s Podcast Of Record, for a wide-ranging conversation that ran the gamut from the good (i.e., Robbins talking about the lovely-sounding prison theater program he runs in California) to the weird (he’s apparently writing a sequel to The Player) to the baffling and frustrating (a lot of the rest of it, including the Oscar winner’s lingering anger at the COVID-19 lockdowns, which Rogan was an unsurprisingly receptive audience for.) Having trawled through the entire transcript for the conversation, we’ll tell you this: Tim Robbins will be very happy to tell anybody who asks about his fasting and purging routine—and that’s before he asks Rogan if he’s done ayahuasca, which Robbins apparently took to attempt to battle his cancel culture woes.
Robbins has a lot of thoughts on this particular topic, actually, which he links to both his own experiences getting yelled at for expressing skepticism of vaccine mandates during the heights of the pandemic, as well as the backlash his ex-wife Susan Sarandon has faced over her critiques of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. But that was before ayahuasca took the pain away (although, if we’re being honest, Robbins does still sound pretty annoyed about cancel culture): “I was battling my frustration with the dissolution of society, people being angry at each other over ridiculous things, long friendships being affected, people being canceled for expressing their opinion, all this stuff,” Robbins described of his ayahuasca goals. “And I wanted out. I wanted to be absolved of that. I didn’t want to be engaged in it.”
Robbins reported that the specter of his dead mother came to him during the trip and informed him “You’re injured. You’re a warrior and you’re injured and you need to rest. But the fight’s not over,” and that that apparently eased his misery on the topic. And, sure, that didn’t stop him, in that same interview, from comparing modern online critiques to the repressive tactics of Stalinist Russia, saying he’d recently asked modern Romanians to compare the two. (“They’re going to ruin your family, they’re going to kill your career, and they’re going to make a big public display of it to show other people to stay in line. And they felt like cancel culture was basically operating in the same way as the Soviet Union did.”) But what is he supposed to do? He’s a warrior!
Anyway: Season 3 of Silo is currently running on Apple TV+; the tech giant is presumably thrilled that Robbins is out doing the good promotional work.
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