Mikki Willis: How Our Modern Age Is Severing the Human Connection to the Divine

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, I sit down with Mikki Willis, an award-winning filmmaker and producer of the Plandemic Series. His new film, “Follow the Silenced,” tells the stories, over the course of three years, of individuals injured by the COVID-19 genetic vaccine.

“We followed the science, we got harmed, and now Facebook won’t even let us have a group where we can talk to each other? What is happening here in this country? And so, we have made this film to give them a voice, and to make sure that their story and their sacrifice doesn’t go unnoticed,” says Willis. “The game we’re playing as citizens is a very different game than is being played by the policy makers.”

We also discuss his views on spirituality and how human beings have become disconnected from the brilliance of nature and their divine intelligence.

“We have the fables of the devil in the crossroads or meeting the devil and signing away for fame and fortune or whatever it might be—giving a piece of your soul. After 30-some odd years working in Hollywood, I saw a lot of people that I will say most definitely came in with a soul and left without one, incrementally giving away a little piece of themselves,” says Willis.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Mickey Willis, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Mikki Willis:

Thanks. Nice to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Mickey, we live in a very divided society. It’s incredibly obvious. You have a pretty unique way of looking at this that you’ve recently written about. Tell us about that.

Mr. Willis:

This being the crisis that we’re all in together here? I think one thing that most people know me as a filmmaker, and really my life’s work has just been a fascination with people and really through anthropology and ontological studies of just really discovering what really makes us tick and why we do what we do. That was all just out of a curiosity to figure out who and what the heck I am. What I noticed, though, is that a lot of the stuff that’s occurring in the world is going to continue to occur as long as we resist taking responsibility for the ways that we’ve participated in it. And there is, as we’ve all seen, a real concerted effort to divide the people. 

Because united we stand and divided we fall. Those words were spoken 2,600 years ago, and they stand just as powerful today as they did then. And the people that want us divided know that that’s the case. That if they can keep us fighting with ideological warfare, with just these new social trends, if they can keep all this stuff in the media to where we’re obsessing on all of these things, they matter, but they don’t matter as much as the energetics that are keeping us in the cycle. And what I mean by that is the core agenda is to, in some way, disempower the human soul, this thing we call our soul. I use it interchangeably with spirit. 

In 2008, I had a profound experience. I was driving down a single-lane country road, and there was a dead bird in the road, flat, and I had to drive around it. And as I drove down the road, this voice spoke to me. And this voice has spoken to me many times. Today, I will call it God. But for many, many years, I resisted even considering that that’s what it could be. But this voice said to me, the bird’s not dead. And I said, oh, the bird was clearly dead. Flat on the road, it’s dead. 

I kept driving, and it just kept saying the bird is not dead. So I got so frustrated, put my brakes on, backed up, and I looked at the bird and sure enough, it was alive. It’s lying there flattened out on the ground, but looking up at me with this little black eye. It amazed me because I thought, what was that intelligence that knew something that was contrary to what I believed? 

So I took this bird off to the side of the road. Because of that mystical experience that I just had, I felt this unexpected affinity towards this bird. So I said, I’m going to say a prayer for this little bird, Blue Jay. As I was saying a prayer for this bird, I knew it was in its last moments. There were power lines above, and I figured, “Okay, that’s what happened. It got electrocuted.” My eyes started to tunnel onto this little bird’s glossy black eye, and the physical world disappeared.

It reminded me very much later when I saw the movie, The Matrix, when they stood in that white room and Morpheous explained all the truth of the universe to Neo. Everything disappeared and it was just white, and this bird is kind of floating in this white void. I couldn’t look away from it, and I couldn’t blink. My eyes were watering, but it was just this tunnel vision. 

I knew I had to maintain my focus on this bird. In a moment, this glossy animated window into the soul of this bird just went flat. I knew at that moment that I’d actually seen the life force of this bird leave. It changed me in such a way to realize there really is something there that animates this bird.

In that moment that eye went flat, hundreds, if not thousands of ants charged in and enveloped this bird. Not one of them approached this bird until its life force left. I just stood there and I looked at this and I was amazed. I’m fascinated by the brilliance of nature and how this orchestrated itself with these little ants that we just write off as these meaningless little insects. But they were so aware of the life force of this bird and in some way waited almost honorably until it was time to approach it. 

Since then, I’ve been pondering on this idea of this thing we call our soul. Then Covid showed up and I thought, what is the push here? Why are they pushing so hard to put something into the bloodstream of humans? It felt like an experiment of some sort. 

It’s one of the reasons we acted so fast to release Plandemic One on May 4th of 2020, because I knew I could feel it in my heart. I knew Anthony Fauci’s history. Bad things happen when bad people are in charge, so something bad is about to happen. 

We’ve heard the fables. As a storyteller who’s studied mythologies for 35 years and the work of Joseph Campbell, there’s always some kind of underlying message about the life force of the hero, the soul of the hero. That’s what the dragon was ultimately trying to capture. Not just trying to kill the physical body, but it’s the soul. Anything that has to do with the supernatural or the devil, it’s always about the human soul. 

Then we have the fables of the devil and the crossroads of meeting the devil and signing away for fame and fortune or whatever it might be, giving a piece of your soul. After 30-odd years working in Hollywood, I saw a lot of people that I will say most definitely came in with a soul and left without one, incrementally giving away a little piece of themselves. Not their physical body, they’re all intact. But when we say that they’re giving a piece of yourself away, what is it that you’re really giving away? 

The technocrats are trying so hard to bring us into this stage of transhumanism, and they’ve succeeded in outpacing the human mind already. AI is far more intelligent than we’ll ever be, but they cannot measure, duplicate, or emulate in any way the human soul. It’s become a real problem. I believe more and more that the reason, the value of this thing we call soul, spirit, is that in some way is our umbilical cord, our connection to divine intelligence. 

All of the birds and everything outside this building right now, all the insects, the birds chirp in the morning. Few people even really stop to listen to that anymore. Like why do the birds chirp in the morning? Do you know they actually trigger the plant life to open up and to pollinate, and it triggers the insects to come in and spread that pollination? There’s a whole orchestration that happens every single day right outside our bedroom windows. 

What is it that’s informing the birds? What informs the birds when they’re in that murmuration stage of flying thousands, moving on a dime as one body? How is it? It’s not an audible cue that they’re following. They’re tapped into something that us humans have been severed from that leaves us unable to flow with such grace with each other. Instead, we’re bumping into each other and harming each other. That’s kind of the core of what I’m interested in right now. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You think that the root of the division among people is just politics. Some people would like to have less government and some people are perfectly happy to have a lot of government and want to put their trust there. 

Mr. Willis:

We wouldn’t need government if we were connected with this divine intelligence that I’m talking about. It’s only when we’re severed from that, then we suddenly need someone to lead us. I would say the metaphor I like to use is once upon a time, we all received. their first PCs, and they sat on our desk, and they could only do whatever was programmed on the hard drive. You might be able to put a little floppy in and give it a new word program or whatever. But other than that, it was limited. It was a closed circuit. 

I believe a lot of our inventions, maybe all of our inventions, are us trying to figure out ourselves, our deeper purpose, on how these bodies actually engage with this universe and this world that we live on and live in. And so I believe we create something like the internet to understand what we’re capable of. We created the internet, and now that little useless paperweight on our desk becomes a supercomputer. Because it doesn’t matter what’s on it, it just has to be received now, so it dials up. 

In the beginning, the dial-up was slow and crazy. We look back on it now, and it would take forever just to get that online connection. But I think that over time, we’ve perfected that now that our little phones and everything are just these supercomputers with infinite intelligence that we can pick up. We’re about to learn what we’ve been severed from. 

If we go back in time and we look at the ancients and their ancestors and the indigenous cultures, we always look upon them as realizing they were somehow connected to nature more than we were. They could hear when the buffalo were coming or they listened to the ground and the water and the trees, and they were in communication with nature. And we have systematically and by design been severed from our nature.

Mr. Jekielek:

What I was expecting you to say was that this connectivity of the phone and the whole online ecosystem is almost like a replacement for that connection. 

Mr. Willis:

I wouldn’t disagree. I wouldn’t disagree because in the sense that it’s a distraction, it keeps us from that, so it does replace that. It’s almost like a pacifier. We get this little kind of connectedness, and we can dial in AI now and get whatever information that we want, but it’ll still never match the immeasurable brilliance of nature. It won’t, and it can’t. 

We have been conditioned for generations to see ourselves as a failed experiment, like humans are a failed experiment. All we’ve done is mess up this planet. e have done a lot of damage to the planet, but it’s only because we’re not informed by nature itself. We’re informed by what we were programmed with, what our teachers taught us, what daddy left us with, with our social environment. 

However, it conditions us nowadays; it’s gotten even worse because it’s this really demoralized social media, the kind of window into the most demoralized behavior ever, and now our kids start to emulate that as if that’s natural, but it’s not. That is one of the key issues to examine: the difference between what’s natural and what’s normal. 

I’m a father and my oldest is 13-years-old. We’ve been looking at this since our kids were very young. And we would hear all this advice coming at us from parents that had already had children, and we were new parents. And they would say, “Just wait till the terrible twos come.” My wife and I said, “Why don’t we call it the terrific twos and see what happens?” What actually happened was one of the greatest periods of our kids’ development ever. We realized it’s not terrible. 

People think, “Oh, that’s just natural; the kids just become tyrants.” No, they’re actually coming into being two years outside the womb, and that’s about the gestation period where they start to realize, “Oh, I’m not in the womb anymore; I’m not my mom,” and so let me make decisions counter to what my mom would make or what my dad would make to prove to myself that I’m an individual. That’s really all it is. 

If you can support that, it’s no longer terrible. If we start to really look deeply at all the ways that we’ve been conditioned to see behavior as natural and understand that most of it has just been normalized, then we can start to really look at them: what would it be like? Who would I be if I were to behave naturally, and what is that? What is that? 

Mr. Jekielek:

But there’s a few things happening here all at once. I’m wondering if there’s a connection to nature that’s been subsumed by this technology and everything. But also there’s a connection to God or the divine. Those things are not necessarily the same. Maybe you can elucidate on that.

Mr. Willis:

I think that they’re intrinsically connected. There’s a reason that it’s even hard to talk about the subject of God. We’ve been conditioned that we’re super happy to sit and listen to somebody self-deprecating all day long. We love that when someone just talks about how this, “I’m not good at that.” We love to see comedians ripping on how dumb they are and all the mistakes they make. 

But to hear someone say, “I’m actually really good at this,” we immediately judge them. Like, what is it? What is it? Why have we been so conditioned to be repulsed by somebody who is confident and courageous and knows they are? I don’t mean in an egotistical way, because we also praise people that are egotistical. But one of the only areas that we’ve allowed people to actually say, “I’m great,” is with professional boxers.

But otherwise, we don’t want to hear anyone say, “Well, I’m great,” and it’s all part of this agenda to keep us in this place of looking at ourselves as being this flawed thing because when we, yeah, here’s another subject that I’m looking at: we are flawed, and that’s the thing that the mind has a hard time holding that duality of we’re perfectly imperfect, and so it’s when we get stuck on just the imperfect part. What determines imperfection? What does it mean that we have room to grow, we have something to learn, we make mistakes? 

Mr. Jekielek:

We are imperfect, but made in God’s image.

Mr. Willis:

Yes, that’s another way of looking at it. But it’s when we get stuck on, “I am just not worthy.” So many people have that deeply rooted within them. And a lot of it has to do with the commercialization of our world. For generations, we’ve all been bombarded with advertising, you know, billboards and commercials that say, “These are the right people. You got to look like this and live like this.” And then you look at yourself and you go, “Oh, I guess I’m not there yet.” 

But there is no there. It’s just, it’s coming back into, and that’s one of the things that keeps us suffering is this feeling that I have to get somewhere. We’ve taken the beingness out of the human being. How do I be a good dad? How about I just be with them, like really with them, not with an agenda, not with other things on my mind or whatever? But that’s one of the most generous things that we can do is to just really give people our attention to be with them, not with judgment or thought or analysis or any other kind of hidden covert agenda.

We are flawed, but how do we relate to our flaws? Do we relate to it as let’s hide those because it’s bad, or, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” That’s the challenge. It’s like we’re climbing a mountain, and we reach a point where it’s like, “This is a really tricky part here. We need to strategize how we’re going to get past the most treacherous part of this climb.” If we take ourselves on like that, living through the filter of that disconnectedness from everyone else, that drives all people, particularly men, to a self-destructive way of being. 

One of the things that has kept me from becoming bitter, because there was a point in 2020 when the hometown that I lived in became so vile that they actually started a petition to make my family move. No one understood what I was revealing through Plandemic, the first film that I made, and it was released at a very dangerous time. And I knew that. 

I knew there was a lot of hysteria, and I knew that I’m about to hit send on something that’s going to be a juggernaut of information that is going to bring a lot of pushback. I didn’t know that it would be as extreme as it was. I didn’t know that I would be on the cover of major magazines, and nothing good was being said about me or Judy Mikovits, the main virologist that was featured in Plandemic. All I knew was the information was thoroughly researched, and I knew that we were telling the truth. That’s all that mattered to me. And I was willing to let the chips fall where they fall. 

But there was a period when I found myself getting really angry at people, not just because of what they were saying about me online, but because no matter what I showed them, they did not want to see the truth. They should say, “Oh, I was wrong. Thank you for that.” But instead, they say, “You’re a Nazi. Get out of here. You’re a grandma killer.” So I spent some time really looking at this, and I found myself just getting really frustrated with people. 

Typically, one of the problems is that we stop there. We stop with the emotional experience, and then we label it for what it feels. They feel stupid to me. That feels wrong. That feels hateful. And we just stop at the surface judgment. But I went deeper, and I started to really look at it. I said, what is going on here? Why? Carl Jung would often talk about the real crisis within our world, the crisis of meaning, that not enough people are leading a meaningful life. 

So we have manufactured a society such that so few people are living and engaged in their life purpose, that the controllers of these narratives, the more we can suck meaning out of their lives, the more we can distract them with a bunch of stuff so they don’t have any time to meditate, to relax, to go in nature, to spend time with their children, to have dinner with their families anymore, to work out, to be healthy, and they’re just rats in a maze. 

Then when we convince them that there’s this, you know, astronomical boogeyman that’s going to kill everyone called Covid, and that there’s this group of people that are the bad ones because they don’t listen to the science and they are so selfish that they’re threatening your life, your children’s life, your parents’ life, all life. And all you have to do is put on a mask and be part of this meaningful tribe. 

The moment I got that, I realized, oh, okay, so when I show somebody irrefutable proof, what they’re really saying to me is, that is so believable, that is so clear that I don’t like you because I finally just found a connection with a community that I needed my whole life. And now if I believe that, if I take that in, I can no longer feel good about this newfound connection that I need. It’s intrinsic. I need this connection. 

This is what changed things for me, Jan. At the core, they’re operating from love. Their love for life, their love for their children, for their parents, for everything that they were told that I was a threat to. They’re doing exactly what they should be doing. They’ve just been misguided, misled, and they’ve chosen the wrong enemy. And the moment I saw that from that perspective, I realized I would see this person not as a nuisance, but as a future ally. 

Because I realized now all we have to do is let enough time pass, let enough truth be exposed, that this person, I’m actually proud of them for standing up so fiercely against me because now I see the warrior. And now if we can get them to just turn that strength, that fight towards actual enemies, then we’re going to make progress on this planet. And that’s what’s kept me from kind of hanging on to any resentment for the people that were definitely not nice over the last few years. 

Mr. Jekielek:

There are many people who have had their families fractured through all of this. I have heard stories about people who were very antagonistic and behaving as if nothing had ever happened. How do you view that?

Mr. Willis:

I’ve had a lot of friends that were very vocal and went out online to make sure that everyone knew that they no longer were my friend. They distanced themselves from me. Then three, four years later, it’s, “Hey buddy, happy birthday, how are you doing?” I’m like, is this the same person? I have to go back and remember. I’d go back and look at old posts. 

Yes, they are the ones who were smearing me in 2021. And they’re back like, as if nothing happened. It’s okay with me. It’s fine. I get it. And I accept it because  a lot of the most important things are said without saying. I have a friend who told me, “My dad never told me he loved me once,” but then he told me all these things his dad did. I said, “That’s the way he told you he loved you. We don’t always say it in clear English.” 

So for me, I hear that as, “I’m sorry, I was wrong. I couldn’t see it.” You’re wishing me a happy birthday. You’re saying, “Hey, I’m coming through Texas and I know you guys live there now. I want to stop by.” I had one very good friend, and this was one of the most hurtful ones because we actually had our birthdays together. I always call him my blue-eyed brother. He’s much younger than I am, but I just love him with all my heart. 

It turns out his PR firm wrote a really detailed letter because I was on his advisory board of his company. He had to let everyone know and they removed my photo. I’m no longer on that advisory board. They said, “We do not support this person at all.” When I read this, I was like, from him? That was one of the ones that hurt. 

About two years ago, he got a hold of me, and he said, “Passing through Texas, can I talk to you?” I said, “Sure, come over.” He walked in, and he had no other business except to say, “Can we have a private talk, please?” We went on my back patio. Within three seconds, he’s bawling, and he’s telling me, “I didn’t write it. The PR firm wrote that. I just hope you can forgive me.” 

It was so sincere. It was so deep. And he was just bawling. And I just sat there and listened to him. And I said, “Of course. I commend you for coming here. You’re one of the only ones that had the guts to come here and to make it right.” Now, we’re doing several projects together. 

Actually, we bought some property together. We’re doing a big farming project together. So it’s possible. But it does require a sense of humility. He was humble enough, and that’s who I always knew him to be. That’s why it hurt so bad, because I expected it from a lot of other people, but not from this person. And so that was beautiful. 

Every now and then, every week or so, I get a note from someone online. I joined social media again, so I’m back in touch with the people. I was off for like three years. It was actually really nice. But I’m getting notes from people, private messages of people saying, “Man, I was one of the ones attacking you in 2020, and now myself and my husband were both vaccine injured, and I just want to say sorry. Now I understand what you were trying to do. You were warning us.” Also, some of them have asked, “I know that you’re connected with a lot of good doctors. Can you help us because we’re not in good shape?” 

Mr. Jekielek:

Tell us about your movie, Follow the Silenced. 

Mr. Willis:

Over four years ago, Steve Kirsch, who has become very well known in the freedom vaccine movement because he was a very wealthy entrepreneur who invented things like the optical mouse. He’s known as a legend for innovation. He was fiercely pro-vaccine. The way he tells the story is his carpet cleaner didn’t show up, and that was rare for this particular carpet cleaner. 

When he finally did show up, he said, “I’m really sorry.” I guess his face was ticking or whatever, and he’s like, “We have this condition going on.” He said, “What? How is it that you both could have a new condition? Was this predatory or did you—?” “No, it just happened to both of us.” He said, “That’s not common. What have you done recently?” He said, “Well, it was right after the vaccine.” 

That’s when Steve went, “What?” He’s fully vaccinated, and he started to dig into it. Then he called me a little over four years ago and he said, “Are you tracking all the injuries that are happening here? Because they’re being buried. No one will listen to them.” 

Apparently, there’s a bunch of people who did all the trials, AstraZeneca and Moderna and Pfizer, and they know that they’re injured. They had all the people that were doing the trials, and some of them are in wheelchairs and breathing through tracheotomy instruments. I said, “Yes, I’m getting a lot of those messages too. I don’t know what’s going on there.” He said, “I’ll kick in a little bit of money if you want to investigate this.” So I said, “Okay, let’s go.” 

So we started that four years ago and we’ve been on this film without stopping for four years. We thought it would be released in one year, but it’s perfect that it’s coming out right now. Because, quite honestly, I don’t think people would even have paid attention to it three years ago. It would have been written off as just another conspiracy theory. But there are too many people now and people in powerful positions who have experienced their own myocarditis or whatever it is. 

So we took the film on. I hired one of my top directors in my company because I was already committed at the time I was making The Great Awakening. I said, “I’m pretty tapped out as a director. The Great Awakening is very complex and I have a lot of research to do. But I will oversee it as an executive director and I’ll bring in Matthew Guthrie, my top guy, and we’ll do this thing justice.” So here we are four years later. 

It’s a beautiful, powerful documentary. Tragic, but also very inspiring because it turns out to be a story of this group that formed that now calls themselves React19. It was hard to imagine being so trusting that they were excited to be the first in line, and then they’re confined to a wheelchair and they’re having spasms and seizures and nonverbal whatever it is. And then, when they speak out about it, then the establishment tells everyone they’re just a bunch of crazy people. It’s all in their head. That’s pretty much what all of them were told. They have the same exact story that everyone just said, “It’s in your head, you’re crazy.” 

And so they found each other, hundreds of them, thousands of them came together. And then those Facebook groups and everything they formed would be shut down, and they couldn’t understand it. Like, “We’re victims of this situation. We followed the science, we got harmed, and now Facebook won’t even let us have a group where we can talk to each other? What is happening here in this country?” And so we have made this film to give them a voice and to make sure that their story and their sacrifice doesn’t go unnoticed and that it’s serious and that we understand moving forward as a people that it’s probably not a good idea to ever succumb to anything experimental that could do us permanent damage. 

I don’t know when this interview is going to air, so I don’t want to date it, but I just want to express gratitude to the Santa Monica Film Festival, which has been very supportive of our work. The Great Awakening won last year, and they’ve asked us to come back with the film this year. It premieres real soon in Hollywood on March 15th. They chose to premiere it at the Directors Guild of America, which is pretty amazing because it’s right in the belly of the beast in Hollywood, West Hollywood. We needed a bigger theater than they could find in Santa Monica because there’s such anticipation for this film. 

Mr. Jekielek:

React 19 has helped so many people that have these injuries, and it’s fully volunteer-driven. It’s quite a remarkable organization.

Mr. Willis:

It is, yes, with really truly incredible people in the way that they’ve supported each other. I tell you, I think many of them wouldn’t be here with us today if it weren’t for this organization. I think 80% of them said in their interviews that at some point they had all reached a point where they felt that death was an easier life than dealing with the injuries that they were dealing with. But when they met each other, that all changed. They talked each other off the ledge and said, “No, life is worth fighting for.” Some of them have improved, and some of them have not. 

Some of them have gotten worse and probably will continue to do so and probably have a reduced lifespan as a result of this. Not everyone has been injured, but that’s the danger of when we start treating medicine as a one-size-fits-all situation. It’s got to be very personalized, and we have to understand how everybody responds particularly to new technologies that have never been injected into the bloodstream in this way before. It was very, very reckless. One of my dear friends, Robert Malone, as one of the inventors of mRNA technology, will say that that’s something that he never imagined they would have done with this thing that he was one of the inventors of. It shouldn’t have been done.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. At the level of development that it existed at.

Mr. Willis:

Yes, that’s right. Let’s go back to this crisis of meaning that you’ve been outlining, and  that we’ve been dancing around in this discussion. I think one of the things that was common to many of the people that I talked to that, you know, came through these last few years whole, was that they had this type of connection with God, but they found newfound meaning. Many of them found newfound meaning through, you know, the difficult circumstances that they were placed in along the way. I want to make it clear that everyone has a different purpose. And that purpose might be just raising children. And that purpose can also take place wherever you are. 

I met a woman who worked in a bank and she goes, “I just can’t do anything until I get out of this bank.” So what do you want to do? She goes, “I want to make people happy.” Start doing it right there at your job. Like, don’t just treat it as, “I’m just going to take their transaction, give it to them, boom, boom, and then they’re gone.” And it’s just another person moving through. Make that human connection with them. 

Let’s come back to that natural way of being where we actually look into each other’s eyes and give each other a moment, and sometimes do things we don’t want to do. Like I always tell my boys, “Okay, I’ve had 12 hours of editing today. It’s 8:30 at night. I’m going to the gym. Do you think I want to go to the gym?” They go, “No.” 

But that’s the difference. I don’t let my life be ruled just by what I want and don’t want. It is very uncomfortable for me right now. The thought of driving 20 minutes to the gym and lifting heavy weights is the opposite of what I want to do right now. But I’m disciplined in my commitment to being healthy. So that overrides my addiction to making excuses to find a backdoor to my commitments. And so when you make those personal commitments, live by them, stay strong, but particularly to yourself, because that then becomes strength. 

In 2008, I was building a digital distribution platform for independent movies, and I was studying user interface and user experience. And I was very fascinated by it, where all the buttons go and what colors they are and what causes people to click and to be engaged and what loses them. Too many clicks and they go away, and right during that time Facebook changed their awesome button to a like button. 

I remember thinking that is so counter to everything I’m learning right now. What an odd choice that the biggest platform in the world would make. I think it’s a bad choice. Why would they do that? I could never understand it until 2020 because the thing that got me was I was this guy that was really liked by people, and suddenly my likes are going, and I went, they know how to manipulate. 

We are all addicted to likes now. All these creators are self-censoring because they’re looking like, oh, when I talk about that subject, I get downvoted. When I talk about that, I get upvoted. So they start to self-censor based upon how much they’re liked. And what was really driving the pain that I was experiencing, my fear of telling the truth, was I may not be liked anymore. There’s going to be half this world, half this country for sure, that’s not going to like me. 

As a man who spends way too much time trying to be liked, that was a painful thought. The moment I let that go, I just realized that’s part of the mind control. That’s part of the trick where now that’s the dopamine hit. I got to like dopamine. I care about the amount of views our films get because I see it as impacting more people, but it’s not about self-worth. 

This modern world is conditioned to make us care so much about what others think about it.  While we should be good people and moral people and kind people and loving people and courteous and all these good things, not to the point of where it’s now shaping, pulling us away from being honest and saying what needs to be said. 

I’m the friend that will say things to my friends. Everyone’s talking behind their back, saying, “I think Bill’s drinking too much. Everyone’s saying that. I notice at every party he gets drunk.” And I’m the one that says, “Bill, I think you’re drinking too much. Let’s talk.” And it’s not that hard. Some people get mad, they get defensive, but they come back later and go, “Hey, you’re the first one actually called me on that. Yeah, you’re right. I’m in AA right now. I had a problem. I didn’t want to see it. Thank you.” 

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s go back to this idea of how to deal with people that have dramatically different views. 

Mr. Willis:

What makes a good movie, a good story, is conflict. And you could also call it contrast. Contrast is a part of life. Scientifically, they say that we live in the third dimension. This world is a third dimension reality. As a digital artist, I’ll tell you that the difference between original, very beginning stages of animation, what they call 2D and 3D, was one element: shadow.

Shadow is what has an image jump off a page and make it 3D. And when I look at that as kind of a metaphor for this life, I realize the shadow is always going to be here. This is a third dimension reality. We’re always going to have the shadow. The problem is when the shadow attempts to take over the entire image in darkness. And so instead of crying about that, I see it as a calling for us to shine brighter. And there really is something to say about this light we carry within us. 

Every sacred text, scripture talks about the light, about being the light. And people say we’re in dark times. And I would say, yeah, we are in many ways in very dark times, very curious times, but also very wonderful. I think it’s an extraordinary time to be alive, but it all depends on how we relate to it. Are we going to just see it as darkness and run from the darkness or join the darkness? Or are we going to take it on in the way we would in extreme sports, a challenge, and say, let’s step it up? And it’s humility. 

It’s kind of like that old fable. I will not do it justice to try to recite it, but that old fable, I’ve heard it told from a Chinese point of view and an Indian point of view of the farmer’s son who’s called off to war, but then he breaks his leg and he isn’t able to fight the war. And then they get a cow and the cow dies and whatever, the whole thing, right? And the whole answer to all this good news and bad news is the neighbor says, “I see that your son broke his leg.” It turns out the broken leg prevents him from going to the war and getting killed. It turns out to be a blessing. This is about let’s step back a little bit and not react so suddenly. 

I say that about everything. Maybe you know someone that would say, “Oh, this is a really great thing that Trump just did,” or, “It’s a really horrible thing Trump just did.” The game we’re playing as citizens is a very different game than is being played by the policymaker. Let that be a lesson for us to know that we’re constantly evolving and changing, and let’s give each other the space to respond.

Mr. Jekielek:

One of your themes is to be ready to forgive. Without that, it would be very difficult to overcome these divisions that are a reality right now.

Mr. Willis:

Yes, it’s important. There’s even a stage beyond forgiveness of really understanding that in some mysterious way. They said, “God works in mysterious ways.” In some mysterious way, we’re all playing exactly the part that we came here to play. At times, maybe forgiveness is the right course of action. Maybe sometimes it’s just acknowledging, “I don’t really have anything to forgive you for. You were playing your part, and your part has now forced us to look at a situation deeper than we were before.” The result of that is saying, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” 

I know a lot of people that are a lot stronger today than they were in 2020. In 21 and 22, I was always dismayed because the audiences were at least 80 to 85% women. I would always ask them, “Where are your husbands? And we call them the mama bears, right? Like the mama bears rose up because there was something about protecting the child that was there, but, “Where are the husbands?” A lot of times, they would have a good reason, “He’s working. He’s just not into this stuff. He’s at home watching football or basketball. 

And then gradually, as I sort of kind of gazed out at the audiences, they were changing. It was becoming equal. The men were there now. They showed up. I saw that as a very positive trend for the men. I realized that it kind of rooted out of my role as the hunter, the gatherer, the protector of the family. I was told that it was toxic. 

Every time the real me comes out, I’m told to quiet down or it’s too manly, too masculine. I didn’t know what my part was anymore, but we’ve reached a point now where it’s so serious, where we now understand that we are fighting a really big Goliath that I’m left with no other choice than to stand up for my family.

That’s a beautiful thing because it’s kind of reinvigorating that primal, intrinsic purpose of men to realize that’s our role. And so you see them now finally stand up. I was like, “Where were you when there was this big push to have biological men harm women in contact sports?” Why weren’t the daddies standing up? There was a mom speaking out for the most part. Where were the dads protecting their daughters? 

Now they are, and they’re speaking out fiercely. When you look at that, the trajectory of all the different ways that we’ve kind of been forced out of our comfort zone, then you see the value of this tragedy. I don’t find myself needing to forgive people anymore. I usually just thank them for playing their role, their divine purpose role, being the agitator that forced me to look at myself. So the ones that were the harshest towards me were the ones that forced me to look at myself. The ones that were the harshest towards me were the ones that forced me to identify my weaknesses. 

I thought I was a smart man until 2020, and then I realized that I’m so fragile that if somebody says something mean about me, it matters. Like it’s somebody on a keyboard typing 200 words, and that suddenly now has affected the way I’m feeling today and the way I’m treating my children. I had to really look at that and think, “That is weak.” I was a strong man. And so those people have forced me to reanalyze who I really am. And so, in a very strange way, I don’t forgive them; I thank them. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Mikki Willis, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Mr. Willis:

Thank you. Always great to be here.