Soul Boom - Bryan Cranston (Part 2): Is 'Breaking Bad' a Mirror to Modern Morality?

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Actor Bryan Cranston (Your Honor, Breaking Bad) and Rainn Wilson explore the complexities of Walter White’s character in Breaking Bad. Cranston delves into the evolution of the anti-hero in modern storytelling, the moral dilemmas that define Breaking Bad, and the seductive power of ego. The episode also touches on how these themes resonate in today's world, reflecting our society’s challenges and ethical struggles. This discussion is a must-watch for fans of Breaking Bad and those intrigued by the darker side of human nature. Thank you to our sponsors! Squarespace (10% off!): https://squarespace.com/soulboom Factor (50% off!): www.factormeals.com/soulboom50 Waking Up app (1st month FREE!): https://wakingup.com/soulboom Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Spring Green Films Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Please subscribe. Go to Soulboom. ubstack.com. Thank you. You're listening to So Boo. Looking at someone who does something extraordinarily well, like a painter or a musician or a dancer or a redwood, you can't help but think,

how did this all happen? This is stunning. There has to be a God. There has to be. How could this be created without thought? just by pure accident and have that accident so attractive to those of us who are here. It's like, is that a coincidence? I don't think so.

Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. You played kind of the quintessential anti-hero, and you've talked about how James Gandalfini kind of led the way in that line of storytelling. Are we an anti-hero burnout in storytelling these days? I'm not to watch television shows. It's like every show needs to have an anti-hero.

Is it possible to even have heroes anymore in 2024 storytelling, do you think? Yeah. Yeah, I think everything is. cyclical anyway. But when you saw Tony Soprano or Vic Mackie, Michael Chickles' role in the Shield, those two characters played brilliantly, I thought, really kind of let that door open that it was okay to step in, providing that everything else was written really well and justifiable. And basically the story of Walter White and Breaking Bad is that he

had a skill set that allowed him to do one thing really, really well. But that was it. If he was a mathematician, let's say, in order to provide money for his family for after he died, he probably would have tried to figure out how to count cards at a casino know, or something dealing with math. Just so happens, it was chemistry. So his, the story of Breaking Bad really is about decision making. And that's where character, the person, a person's character is always determined when,

when decisions are made under pressure. If, right, if I found a wallet with $200 in it, it's nothing to me. I don't mean, it sounds terrible, but I don't need it. And so I would go, oh, geez, this belongs to Rain Wilson. I'll just take the 200 out and say, I just found his wallet. No problem. No, I would return it. Sure.

But if I just had an eviction notice put on my door and I found the wallet with $200, that creates a whole new situation. And it's the latter scenario that creates more dramatic appeal because it's challenging, morally challenging. And that's what Breaking Bad and any good drama narrative is out. And I guess in a way that was very missing from storytelling for the decades previous. Because oftentimes the protagonist, it was thought by the writer, producer, director, studio that, oh, no, they find the wallet with $200 on it. our hero would return it. John Wayne would return it.

Of course he would. Jim Rockford would return it. You know, like the, you know, whoever the hero is, insert your hero of choice. So in a way, it was a much, much needed and necessary adjustment to the storytelling process to have deeply flawed characters that somehow you still can identify with. Well, for example, I think what you saw in Walter White in the beginning was that he, was human, that he wanted to do things to protect his family, to have them taken care of after

he's gone. And everybody's going, I would, yeah, that's what I would do. I would want to do too. And then all of a sudden, you make those decisions. And it puts you on a pathway that the longer you stay on that pathway, the harder it is for you to get off of it. And Walter White couldn't get off it. And then after a while didn't want to get off it. He was allowing himself to experience the infusion of ego that he's never been able to have. And that kind of power to a man who's susceptible to that, who's never had that in his life, was seductive. And he was seduced by that power. I have a lot of questions about the character. And I know you've talked about him at infinite. I've done the same with Dwight. So apologies, but I... Again, it's fantastic.

We're lucky. We're blessed. We are so lucky. We got to, we got to buy houses from pretending to be other people. Yes. Brian, how amazing is that? It is. It's incredible. We should never, ever forget that or take it for granted. We're lucky. It's the same thing I feel when, when I hear someone go, oh, he was a one-hit wonder. And I go, he had a hit. He had a hit song. How many hit songs have you had? Yeah. You know?

And that is what he's known for or she's known for. Great. I think of that. I'm a big tennis fan. I think of that in terms of like winning a major. Like to win one major is there's a hundred people that have won. In the history of the world, in 10 billion, 12 billion people that have lived over the last century. And now there's like a hundred people that have won one major.

Right. And it's so hard. And they, again, should be in the pantheon for winning one major. And you'll still hear people go, oh, they only had. He only won one major. Yeah. I wouldn't. He only won one.

And then you went four. And then, you know, like Warinka or Andy Murray. And then you win 12, 20, like Djokovic, Nadal. Like, I mean, give me a break. Williams. Yeah. Yeah. But Walter White made, one of the things.

that the showrunner did so well was create a character that had made a lot of dubious decisions pre his cancer diagnosis or his tumor diagnosis. It feels like to me, that his ego, when they have the flashbacks

of the other guy who won the awards and stuff like that, his ego did get in his way in a lot of ways, I wonder, that took him to that place where he hadn't previously provided for his family.

What had he, what could he have done in the five to ten years previous to the cancer diagnosis to make better choices for his family? So, which is, I think is great storytelling because he had a character flaw baked in. Yeah. And it's an interesting thing with the, with the ego that sometimes like I've worked a lot of shitty jobs and I've worked in, you know, restaurants and I've worked at, I mean, I've worked in warehouses. And it's incredible to me how much like working I worked in Ballard Marine Supply and Hardware Warehouse.

And the ego battles among people who were making $8.50 an hour was really the same as the ego battles in Hollywood. There's ego battles wherever you go. Right. So Walter White was wrestling with this character defect. Right. Before his cancer diagnosis. And then, um, and then,

it won and who would have thunk that he had an ability to be a crime lord right it took him by surprise uh but you know like any good um novelist or creator of a show screenwriter um you want to take your main characters and do some forensic research and go back and you're you're playing god you're a human being. So make, you know, so it's delicate. And if Walter White didn't have any character flaws prior to this moment, would he be that believable?

No. I mean, we all have those moments that we're not proud of that we went, I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said that or whatever. I made that. That was a mistake. I shouldn't have married that person or whatever. Or the one that got away.

I missed her, you know. And it's like, we always have those, those little regrets along the way. And those are the, those are the seeds that plant, planted in him to put him to that position where the, where the story starts. Yeah. And then the mistakes that he makes from there. And I think about how resentful he was in the pilot, just of his life, how he was treated, the disrespect.

He had that kind of, and then we get to see that blossom in seasons, five and six. Yeah. And I think about the phone call with Skyler in season five when he's like, you never believed in me, which he's doing partly as a show

because he knows like the FBI's listening, right? Right. But he's like, you never believe to me. You never trusted me. I told you to stay out. And he's, it's part act, but it's part really, really true.

Like, he is a resentful motherfucker. He did everything based out of this. Like, no one fucking respects me. And he went to his grave, like, no one respects me. And then the third element of that is to protect her to say, you were, you never believed to me, you were never part of this, you know, to say, you will not be hounded for this. But I also loved how much truth there was in it, too, because he also.

That's how clever he was. It was a clever guy. Yeah. And the writing is so clever because lesser writing would have not allowed both of those realities to be true. it would have been all an act. Like, I'm responsible for everything, Skyler. You can blame me.

Well, I learned about Vince Gilligan's style of writing 10 years before that. X-Files. On X-Files. I did an episode of X-Files where I played a character in the backseat of a car who was a total asshole. And he said, Billy Sue, what are we going to do now? You're going to do now. who was, now, Mulder gets in the front seat, and it's like a takeoff on drive.

It was called drive, but it was on speed, where I have to be heading in a western direction at 80 miles an hour. If not, if it slows down, the clock starts ticking and my head will explode. Oh, damn. Just like it happened to my wife. So somehow Mulder gets in the car

and we're driving west at 80 miles. an hour and that gives us time. We're in Nevada and pretty soon we're going to hit the coast of California. There's no more West and I, you know, and so what many writers would do, especially what you were referring to, the dramatic narrative of the 80s, 70s and 80s was hero, good guy, does the right thing. Well, if this was the 70s or 80s, they would have written my character very empathetic. So that, yes, I want our guy to save him. Come on,

Mulder, save the guy. Yay! Save him. Oh, he didn't. Oh, he's sad. You know, it was very predictable. But instead, Vince Gilligan made my character a complete prick that I was reprehensible and I was a repugnant example of his head to explode. Yes.

In fact, that's what he wanted. his main character to feel, there's nothing I would want more than to pull over and just have your head just completely explode. You're an anti-Semitic, you're a, you're a, you're a hater. You're an awful, awful human being.

By doing so, it puts the moral dilemma in the center of his main character. Do I continue on, and I must continue on, because he is a human being. even though despite what I really want to do is to pull over and let him die, I can't do it. So it informs the audience of the inner struggle.

Whereas if he was a nice guy, then I'm just trying, I'm trying to help you. And that's the dilemma. So what Vince Gilligan exposed to me at that time was like, oh my God, he's working at a much deeper level than you would ever read before. And so that's what he did in every twist and turn of Breaking Bad. We're reading these things like gifts every episode. It's like, oh, my God. And surprising even me reading this going, oh, my God, oh, my God, you're kidding.

Like when I poisoned the kid, the week before we're doing a scene where I go to Aaron Paul, Jesse, and I put the gun to his head and I say, You think I could do this and pull the trigger? How could I do this? What are you talking about? I could not do it. Well, I didn't know I did do it. So I'm just going by what I thought.

And then I read the next script two days later. And I'm reading it and I'm going, oops, I did poison a kid. Oops, my bet. And it's interesting because you might, had you have known, even if you had played a 10% different. It might have allowed the audience to wonder. In, in a way

that it allowed you the total commitment, righteousness. Yeah. And, yeah. Whether it's with your besties or date night, get to all the hottest concerts with GoTransit. Go connects to all the biggest entertainment venues

and makes it affordable with special e-ticket fairs. A weekend pass offers unlimited travel across the network on any weekend day or holiday for just $10. A weekday group pass offers the same weekday travel flexibility from $30 for two people up to $60 for five. So no matter what day of the week, Goz got you covered. Find out more at go-transit.com slash tickets. Tragedy seems to me to be the unraveling of a story where there is ultimately no redemption, where the characters make choices where there's not redemption.

Comedy kind of allows for some redemption. It kind of heals and kind of closes. and why am I bringing this up? I guess I was wondering about, I was thinking about Walter White in terms of what we do on Soul Boom and I was thinking about morality and right from wrong

and like, oh, I'm going to provide for my family by creating drugs is this kind of like really morally dubious choice from the get-go that, you know, snowballs into tragedy. But to me, it also reflects a kind of a vision of the modern world where we have done this

as a species to our planet time and time again. This is a species of Walter whites where oil companies knew in the 70s and 80s that the burning of fossil fuels was going to create global warming and extreme weather events and have all kinds of deleterious effects and are just like, well, the need is there, but they keep advertising it, they bury the science, then they create folks,

they create, like, advertising collectives to, you know, to counteract the science and put doubt into the science, the science that their own scientists uncovered in the 70s. That's a very Walter White kind of way of being in the world. And you can look at the kind of like,

the justification for a wall street traders that come in and buy companies and gut them and fire all the employees and take them down to the bare minimum, try and make them as profitable as possible, and either resell them or just gut them entirely. You know, time and time again, we see that capitalism allows for this really morally dubious set of decisions to be made that has brought us to this point right now where, yes, there's a great deal of technological and scientific progress and we're living richer and longer lives than humans ever have. But at the same time, all of these companies, these CEOs have been making all of these

Walter White kind of decisions. For me, it comes down to God, because it comes down to a morality that exists of above and beyond any current circumstances of the world. And I'm not talking about tacking up the Ten Commandments in Louisiana schools. And I'm not talking about the Bible morality. It's hard to talk about morality. People like recoil from the word morality and say,

well, that doesn't exist. I'm just going to do the right thing as I feel it in the moment. I kind of know, we all kind of know what the right thing is and stuff like that. But we have been, you know, like William Butler Gates talks about, you know, in the second coming, you know, the center cannot hold. The falcon no longer hears the falconer, this kind of unraveling of the moral spiral

that has taken us to this point with climate change, with income inequality, with a broken health care system, with epidemics, with mental health issues. And this is another reason why I think Breaking Bad is so brilliant, is it is a very specifically modern and western, Western way of living. I'm wondering what you think about that and about morality and where morality comes from.

And if I keep thinking, like, if Walter White had just a little bit of God, like a little bit of God and conscience, like, maybe he would have been like, no, like, I'm going to cash out now. He would have, it would have allowed him to keep his ego in check maybe and realize that he's part of something kind of larger than himself. Maybe. Maybe, but it's so, it's so individual because there's certainly scores of examples of apparently pious people who have done wrong, who had God in their lives, and then it escaped or they were seduced by, sure, power, women, whatever, money.

Hypocrisy is just as big a part of the modern story as, as ego and lust. I mean, I think what made what made breaking bad work from a standpoint of just the observation of it. And only now am I able really to step aside from the subjectivity of it and look at it more objectivity. And I think it's just that you have a construct of a very real situation. He was an every man. it was relatable. He's a high school teacher. He's got a wife and a son of special needs.

Not uncommon. A baby on the way. And he's got two years to live. And it just became this moral dilemma. What do you do in that situation? Right. And... But where does that morality come from?

Or lack thereof? I don't... I think there is... Again, it gets down to the wallet that you find. It depends on the person that finds that wallet. What is happening in that person's life at that moment? So I don't think Walter White had the luxury of morality when he had the blinders on going,

oh my God, in two years' time, my family will be kicked out of this house. My kid may not have his special needs training. my unborn child. And so he's, he can't, he doesn't have the luxury of thinking, but what's the moral decision here? I think he went, I need to do something right now. Yeah, but why didn't, why didn't he rob a bank? Because he's a chemist.

But he has a brilliant mind. And what is, what difference does it make? Well, there's a big difference because you're making a drug and people are taking it and overdosing in the streets of Albuquerque is a little bit different than robbing a bank that's protected by the FDIC, and it doesn't ultimately hurt anyone. I would take umbrage with that because... How dare you take umbrage with me?

Good sir. I say, umbrage have been taken. Well? I say. How do you rob a bank? Well, you get a gun and you go in and you point the gun and you're like, give me your fucking money. And you've got to be willing to use that gun.

What if the security guard says, hey, don't do that and points a gun at you, and you kill that man. So you kill the security guard. You make a batch of a blue crystal meth. How many people in the streets is that going to kill? So let me see if I understand your question correctly. You're trying to evaluate the level of demented activity.

Like, robbing a bank is actually a lesser crime than to... I'm saying if he's going to commit a crime to support his family, there are other crimes he could have chosen, which would have made a far less interesting television show, but we're just speaking hypothetically. No, and actually it turned into copycats. There were Walter White types out there. Chemistry teachers who actually followed suit and tried to make...

No kidding. Yep. And tried to make crystal meth and sell it. I always say, like, Breaking Bad wasn't a story that promulgated drug use or drug dealing. It was a story of bad decision-making. It was the story of broken character. At the moment that he needed that moral support, it failed him.

Because equally, he was at that stage of finding that wallet with $200 in it when he was being kicked out of his house. That's where he was emotionally. He kept the $200. He kept it. And he said, I don't have the luxury of being able to be generous at this time. And what happened then once people realize, I don't blame him. I don't blame him.

I'm with him. I don't blame him. Oh, oh, no, he's starting to hurt people. Well, you're on that spiral. Rob a bank, make crystal meth. You're putting, you're trying to become someone you are not. And by doing so, you are creating situations that would not have occurred in the natural universe for yourself.

And you are out of your element. And when you are out of your element, bad things. things can happen. Let's go rob a bank. We should. Are you willing to use squirt guns? Orange, bright orange or bright green squirt guns. Yeah. Let's do it. Filled with acid. So in my faith tradition, there's all kinds of incredibly beautiful writings about how art is the same as prayer. that the creation of art is the same as worship. So there's a blank page and there's a beautiful painting that you put on it. There's a poem that you write on it.

There's a blank stage and there's a dance piece or a play that you put on it. There's an empty, quiet room and there's a symphony you create or a jazz riff that you create or a hip-hop rhyme that you create that is an emulation of the divine impulse toward constant. creation, plants, flowers, birds, star systems, black holes, the Big Bang, this constant kind of creativity of the universe is an emulation of that divine spark. And I, and it's funny because when I was a kid, I read Frannie and Zui by J.D. Salinger and that, they talk about that in there. Zui tells Franny, like, be God's acting. like do it for God, do it for the fat lady.

And this kind of idea that there can be a kind of spiritual impulse toward being an artist. And I love the idea that prayer isn't necessarily like, oh God, please protect me, blah, blah, blah, but that painting something beautiful, it also is a service, right? Like, I'm sure you hear it all the time. I hear people like, oh, my God, the office meant so much to me.

I watched it over and over. It made me laugh. mom was having cancer and blah, blah, blah. You hear that same thing from people. You paint something beautiful. You hang it on the wall. There's a service, like, the beauty for the eyes. There's a service component in art too, which has a divine component to it.

And I'm just wondering if you've ever felt that connection. I don't mean it in an arrogant way. Like, I'm doing God's work as an actor. But is there a transcendent mystery in the act of creation where for an actor there is piece of paper with some words on it. And here's my lines as Otto the Baker. You know, and I've got to make these three lines come to life in some way. And there's something kind of mysterious and miraculous about that.

Suspension of belief or allowing the belief system to go off on its own. The first time I ever had that experience, I was doing a soap opera in New York called Loving. And I didn't have a... Although I was 25 years old and I was working as a series regular on this show. And I didn't have the greatest respect for the medium. It seemed kind of, it was definitely redundant by nature, but also just kind of boring.

And it didn't really, it wasn't really stimulating. And I took the job because I needed a job. and I found it very challenging, but to speak to your question, around Christmas time, some of the cast members and I, we went to retirement homes, these assisted living facilities, and to say, you know, have a happy holiday and sing a song or two, Christmas Carol or whatever. and I was so surprised this was our this was the the perfect audience for us I mean it was our wheelhouse

and they are there watching this is in the day in 1983 when there is no VCRs you watch it live or you don't watch it and soap operas were a big thing and I actually had people commenting oh

you're Doug oh I love watching you, it makes my day and all these things. And it dawned on me at that moment. Oh, so there is some intrinsic value to just telling a story. It doesn't even have to be a great story. But taking the time to tell it is enough. And to try and tell it well. And to try to tell it the best you can. Yeah, it's sweet. Have you ever felt some kind of muse? or divine wind in the creation of a character, a moment on stage?

I felt wind within a character, but it wasn't divine. Breaking wind. Yeah. It was, I, I, I don't know. I think I, I'm willing to have those experiences. Have you had those experiences with other pieces of art that you've witnessed? Because I have.

Yeah. You mean listening to a piece of, of, of music? and being transcendent. I remember seeing, oh man, the boating party. Can you look up the boating party? Yeah, Renoir. Oh, it's Renoir.

Is it called the boating party? Luncheon of the boating party. So now. So now you go, it's the boating party by Renoir, and I believe I thought. Let's see how you're... You get how that.

You know how that works. It makes me look way smarter. Although sometimes in the edits, they won't do it. I'll be like, what's the thing? And they'll leave that in. No, you're just to cut that out and make me look smarter. I remember one time walking through a museum in Washington, D.C. And I, like, walked past a hallway, and I turned, and I literally did a double take, like, the old, you know, Mark's brothers.

Really? I was like, and at the end of this hallway was luncheon of the boating party by Renoir. It was sitting at the end of this hallway about 25 feet away. and it's a French impressionist. It's a bunch of people having wine and cheese and by the lake and whatnot. And it stopped me in my tracks. And I like to think that it was more than just the beauty

of the painting itself. Like it was luminous. It was radiant. It spoke to me. It reached out. And I was just like drawn in. It's almost like I had never seen a painting before. I was just like,

and I just walked down the hallway and just stood in awe of it. For some, how can a painter take a bunch of like dabs of, you know, oil and put it here and then make it seem like a scene, like as if you're in it.

It's like a frame from a movie still. Give it dimension. And then not only that, and dimension and life and personality, every character had a personality, but then make it glow? How does light come out of a bunch of paint? blobs on a canvas. And I had a profound spiritual transcendent experience seeing that painting.

And I'll never forget. But what did it make, did you put that into action? Or was it just a sense of calm and peace? It was more than that. It was, it was, I was utterly transported. It was, it was, it was wonder. It was awe. It was curiosity. It was, I was, um, I was, is stunned by beauty. Sometimes we'll have that in nature. I know everyone can relate to seeing the Grand Canyon or being in the Redwoods or whatever it is. And I was 15 minutes in front of that painting

and I'll never forget that those 15 minutes. If you had anything remotely resembling that, and if you answer no, that means that you're an idiot. I have those feelings a lot. With art? With art, whether it's, I go to, you know, in New York, I'm an apartment in New York and we go to the museums all the time there. And I like, impressionism is really, really speaks to me, as you were saying about Renoir and Monet and Manet. And there's so, and Pizarro, and there's so many that, then that was the first where it's like, it's sort of, they're kind of, they're

carrying a valise, I think, but I don't really know, because I didn't really know. But you never... You know, it's really being honest. But you never draw this thread to something kind of beyond the physical realm, something beyond the material world of molecules and... I do. It does make you one... No, I mean, looking at someone who does something extraordinarily well, like a painter, or a musician or a dancer, or a redwood, you can't have...

help but think, how did this all happen? This is stunning. There has to be a God. There has to be. How could this be created without thought just by pure accident and have that accident so attractive to those of us who are here? It's like, is that a coincidence? I don't think so. So how does that, how does your belief in this idea of God, does it impact your life at all? Does it influence you at all? I am not a religious person. I think the moment I sense man-made thoughts and comments, you're out. I'm done.

My God is better than your God. My God did this and all the tales. and, you know, and the morality tales and the cautionary tales that are taught. But once they use religion as a weapon for power, for one-upsman, for whatever, for gaining wealth, you lose me. Religion is kind of like Walter White, isn't it?

Maybe it starts with some pure intentions. We're going to save our flock, and then it can, it, becomes kind of a corrupt institution. It doesn't have to be. And it's always up to that flock. It seems, though, that the larger the flock, the more weakened the chain gets,

and it could break at any moment. And, you know, I believe in inclusiveness, and anything that's not like let people be who people want to be and love who they want to love and be around who they want to be. And if someone's intolerant of that, I'm not a part of their conversation or their religion. You ever struggle with the, you know, the idea of shut up and dribble, which is like, you know, when they had NBA players or athletes talking about Black Lives Matter or social justice issues, I often get this a lot.

I get this a ton on social media because I speak up about issues that are really important to me. It sounds like racism, like climate change, income inequality, like corruption in the U.S. political system, et cetera. And it's like, shut up Dwight.

You know, it's shut up sitcom actor. And it's like, well, I'm more than a sitcom actor. And guess what? In my belief, everyone gets to have an opinion. You're a bus driver. You get to have an opinion about God and life and sex and morality and politics and, uh, and those same people would probably tell the bus driver to shut up.

Yeah, shut up and drive a bus. What do you know, you know? It's just that you have a soapbox. We're only supposed to listen to, uh, people that have advanced degrees or something, but then those people are hated for being elitist because they got degree. So who, who do you listen to? So the, the cure to that, just like not reading reviews. Don't read social media.

Never do. Don't read the comments. I never do. So I'll put out. Have you had troubles around that? Yeah, because publicists would, my publicist would tell me, ooh, they're kind of coming after you for it. And I go, what?

What have they come after you for? I would make comments like the, I made a comment, I had an interview with Chris Wallace, and he was talking about race relations and things. And I said, I thought that critical race theory should be taught in schools. I think it's essential that we become honest as a country and look at our race relations historically. Yeah.

And equivocal. I mean, you cannot deny that this had an immense influence on industry and banking and government and social services and real estate and jobs. and then doing research to play LBJ in play on Broadway and then a movie, doing all that research in 1865, Emancipation Proclamation, a hundred years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yeah. They finally made it a lot.

You cannot do this. You have to allow people to eat where they want. to sleep where they want. To vote. To vote. Yeah. It was a year before I was born. Yeah. It's insane that it took so long. In my lifetime, my parents, I was born in 56, and we were taking a family trip to visit some relatives in Texas in, I think it was 64.

I think it was 63 or 64. Before I was born. Yes, you were a child. Before I was born. Yes. Was it before? 66 born. Oh, wow.

So, okay. Yeah. So I remember my mother telling my brother and I, now listen, we're going to be in Texas and I. And I want to just say that if you see a water fountain, drinking fountain, that says colored, don't drink out of it. In my lifetime. Yeah.

My mother is telling me this. Yeah. Of course, I was seven. or so. And I'm thinking, are you kidding? Of course I'm going to drink out of it. Is it like rainbow color?

Is it flavor? Is it, you know, the innocence. Is it the innocence of a boy going, colored, colored, why didn't I think?

Why don't they have that in California? They should have that everywhere. I want to, you know, it's like, yeah. And, but it didn't dawn on me until late,

I went, oh, wait a minute, I remember my mother telling. So it's like, we haven't come to to recognize the importance and embrace our past in a way that allows us to step forward into a brighter future. And until we do, we're always... Yeah, well, emancipation proclamation was 1865. Get over it. Slavery is in the distant,

distant past. Like, will you just get over it? And I've talked about on the show before, but you're absolutely right that the reverberations went well through the 20th century and exist to this day. I don't know about critical race theory specifically, which has become this kind of straw man, boogeyman, and it's a very specific way

of teaching race inequality on a graduate level to a certain set of people, but it's become this kind of, like I say, this kind of boogeyman, but to teach America the reality of the fact that we've been, stole this land from a whole bunch of people that were living here before us. And then we imported millions of people that didn't want to be brought here to do all the work to build this great nation.

That's just part of our reality. And we live with that right now. And what are we going to do to rectify it? How do we learn from the past? Not repeat it. And seek to create ever greater ripples of justice. The first step is to acknowledge it. You know, how far that could be.

So what do you say to a white guy? He's like, well, it's not my fault. I didn't have slaves. But white people did. And it's our country. And that's the thing. You have to, if you take pride in your country, you can't look at your country as,

as the greatest ever when it has this severe bruise on it. And will always wear that scar. And that scar will never heal unless we, start to say, wow, what did we do? Can you imagine the comments that are happening popping up right now as people are listening to this conversation? I don't know. I don't read them. And that's okay. Yeah. You know, they may not read mine and that's okay too. And people are entitled to disagree. And if they think that's the most, that's the most important thing is to be able to disagree without being disagreeable. And we've lost that. Arthur Brooks talks about how

do we disagree better? Can we just learn to disagree better? Yeah. And unfortunately, social media has become this, like, toxic kerosene-infused way of disagreeing where the, I hate to use the word civility. We always come back to the word civility, but just decent humanity is, is stripped of the discourse, because you would never say to a person face-to-face what you say them in the comment section on YouTube or on Twitter. Yeah. The bravery of anonymity. Mm-hmm.

It's like, keyboard warriors. Oh, boy. Yeah. I find it, I find largely mostly social media to be detrimental in a sense. There's tremendous power in new technology. But it's a tool. And just like television is a tool And every other

A hammer is a tool You can There's nothing better than a hammer To drive in a nail Into a piece of wood But if I take that hammer And hit you over the head I've misused the tool

So don't misuse television Don't just have it on And watch whatever You're misusing the tool Stop binge watching our shows Stop it Enough already And the same thing with the smartphone

It's a brilliant brilliant tool. It's incredible. Incredible. I've got Spotify. I can listen to any song that's ever been written. I've got Google Maps. I can get directions to anywhere on the planet.

It's unbelievable. And it's in this microcomputer in my pocket. Yeah. And it's your Rolodex. It's your phone. It's your camera. It's your compass. It's your calculator.

It's your memo taking. It's your book. It's everything. It's everything. And we are so addicted to it. I'm so addicted to my family. phone, Brian. What do I do? Well, there's panic. When you leave the house and you go, oh, oh my God, oh my God. And literally your hands do this over your pockets like every three minutes. Oh my God.

What happened to my phone? What happened to my phone? And then you realize, I can't call the person I'm supposed to meet because I don't know their phone number. Yeah. How do I? I know my wife's phone number. that's about it. I know your wife's phone number. Yes, and that's about it. Those two. Who is your favorite actor on The Office? Maybe Creed or... Brian, thank you so much for coming on Soul Boom. It's been fun.

You are my hero and I love your work so much. And the fact that we have our feeble connection means so much to me. It's not a feeble connection. Oh. It's a lovely connection. I said that picture I sent of you sitting on my lap. I'm sitting on your lap. Yeah.

We should show that. Let's show that. That's a cute one. Put that up there. It's good. And then we got to work together on Jerry and Marge goes large. Jerry and Marge go large was actually a really fine film. I love that film.

And I think it shows America in exactly the light that America needs to be shown. It was kind of, yeah. It's wholesome and funny and edgy. at the same time. Yeah. It was great. Jerry and Marge go large. Check it out at Paramount Plus.

A Life in Parts by Brian Cranston. Look at that handsome devil. Star of Loving. How many episodes did you do of Loving? Two years. I don't know. Yeah. I have no idea.

They do five days a week. That's nuts. Terrific book, amazing stories. And what are you working on now? What's coming out soon? What do you got cooking? You're always working. This is always something

happening. I'm writing a sequel to a movie that I did. So that's, we can't really talk about that too much. But I have a, I did a cameo in a Seth Rogen show called The Studio, which will come out in January or February or something, where I play a mogul of a film studio, like a Robert Evans kind of character. And that's fun, crazy fun. So I constantly look for ways to Are there more episodes of Your Honor coming out? That we don't know. My God, Your Honor. And that's taken off on Netflix.

It's done incredibly well on Netflix, yeah. I love like, you know, you do it for Showtime. Yeah. And it's a little bit buried. People don't know how to access it. It's a very small subscriber base. And all of a sudden it's on the front page of Showtime. And it's fantastic.

Yeah. Netflix is really, it's the Netflix effect. Yeah. And I had that once before with Breaking Bad. Right. Where I think we both did with the Office too. The office kind of disappeared into almost nothing into a vague memory.

Oh, sure. Oh, sure. And then it was 2016, 17 when it was playing on there, even before COVID. And all of a sudden, I was being recognized by 12-year-olds all over the country. I'm like, what the hell is going on? They watching NBC reruns?

What the hell? And it was the Netflix effect and billions, billions of minutes watched. Billions. So, yeah, Your Honor, is doing it. What was the last year of the office? Was that 13? 13 to 14.

13. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I directed in the last season of it. Yeah. It's unbelievable to think that you stopped production 10 years ago. Yeah. 11 years ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Time goes by fast. Let's make bread together. I don't, I don't trust you. I would never eat a piece of bread that you bake. Come on, you know. Again.

You know why I said Otto. Otto was my. grandfather and he was a baker. No way. Yeah. And he killed several people. That was a total lie. Get out of here. Cut. Thank you. The Soul Boom Podcast.

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