Russell Brand sits down with writer and comedian Rainn Wilson to discuss his new book, Soul Boom, and why we need a spiritual revolution. Russell and Rainn discuss the Baha'i faith and its impact on the modern world, and how it has influenced his life and career. They also discuss why religion should not be seen as something separate from the rest of humanity, and what it really means to be a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Buddhist. Russell Brand is a stand-up comedian, writer, and philosopher. He is also the creator of the podcast Stay Free With Russell Brand, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Huffington Post, and the New Republic. His new book Soul Boom is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you're not a member of our community yet, join now by pressing the red button and ask us questions! You can join the chat and ask questions as some people will be doing later, as well! Thank you for joining us, and stay free! Stay Free, Stay Free! - Your Hosted by: and - Russell Brand Music: "Stay Free" by: "Goodbye Outer Space" by Jeff Kaale ( ) and "Outer Space Traveler ( ) "Space Junk" by Ian McKellen ( ) "Good Morning America" by Kevin McLeod ( ), and "Good Omens" by & "Space Traveler" by , and "Space Talk ( ) to talk about spirituality and religion ( ) in this special bonus episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand's new book "Soul Boom" (Soul Boom ( ) by . and "Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution" by RainnWilson ( ) . in this episode is a book that's out now! and it's available for purchase on Amazon and Good Omens ( is out on the Kindle and Good Morning, Good Life , Good Life, Good Morning Goodness and Good Luck Good Luck, Good Blessings by Good Life and Good Life by Good Luck! by You Can Have a Happy Holidays by The Good Life & Good Luck by by David Sedaris ( , ) and Good Day, Good Night, Good Luck & Good Success Can't Wait To See You Soon, Good Love & Good Night
00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:02.000As 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.
00:00:16.000And today is an extraordinary and special day.
00:00:18.000The first 10 minutes of this you can watch wherever you're watching it now, but after that it will be only live on Rumble.
00:02:05.000So Rain, this conversation will be formulated around a number of things, but ultimately what we want to explore is you and your unique brilliance.
00:02:33.000The 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.
00:02:53.000Part of the challenge I think of, let's call them for the sake of simplicity, new age takes on spirituality is they sometimes feel Traditionalist, rootless, individualistic and selfish.
00:03:05.000What 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?
00:03:18.000That is such a perfectly formulated question.
00:03:33.000Essentially, my thesis is that in humanity's current distaste for organized religion, we have thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater.
00:03:47.000At the center of all great religious thought are a couple of key essential points that humanity has lost track of.
00:03:57.000These 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.
00:04:10.000So you talk a lot about revolution in the book and the subtitle on your pod 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.
00:04:26.000I've listened to so many of your interviews and because I feel like we're kindred spirits, me perhaps in a somewhat smaller, gentler way, i.e.
00:04:37.000my narcissism is not quite as unchecked as yours.
00:04:44.000I don't even know really what you mean.
00:04:46.000I 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.
00:04:52.000This noise coming from this man will soon stop.
00:04:55.000It'll be back to where things are meant to be.
00:04:58.000But in all seriousness, 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.
00:05:17.000And so my thesis is that we can do that.
00:05:20.000And we need to do that by using spiritual tools, maybe a little bit more than I hate to say political tools, because I don't because politics is really about the balance of power.
00:05:32.000So really, a Good solid spiritual tools will correct the balance of power, but not through partisanship.
00:05:40.000So there's a lot more to it than that.
00:05:41.000That sounds like a beautiful and necessary and important book.
00:05:45.000I was thinking in a way, Rain, that politics is functional, rudimentary, and about ...organization and logistics.
00:05:55.000But you need to underwrite your vision with some sort of ideology.
00:06:00.000And 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.
00:06:37.000I think it's interesting that you say that the tools that are required are spiritual ones.
00:06:43.000I agree with you entirely because Materialism and rationalism, I think, have taken us as far as they can take us.
00:06:51.000Like, this is the way we can organize our resources on this planet if we extract ourselves from our true nature.
00:06:58.000All of us know that within us there's the sensation of the body, there's the awareness of the thoughts, but there is something else which you might regard as your spirit.
00:08:06.000The Baha'i Faith is a very beautiful religion.
00:08:09.000I'm not here to convert anyone, but I do want to say that, you know, the central ideas are about unity and building community at the grassroots and being of service to one another.
00:08:20.000And those elements, like I said earlier, are universalities that belong in every spiritual tradition and every religious tradition.
00:08:28.000If 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's name hundreds of years thereafter.
00:08:37.000So I grew up a member of the Baha'i Faith.
00:09:12.000Limiting, moralistic, and just not relevant to my daily life.
00:09:18.000And 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.
00:09:43.000And that led me on a spiritual journey.
00:09:45.000Ultimately, 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 when I felt suicidal, deeply suicidal.
00:10:00.000I got to explore all the religious faiths of the world.
00:10:03.000I'm sure there's some, you know, pygmy religions that I didn't get to study.
00:10:08.000But I read the Bhagavad Gita and I read the writings of the Buddha.
00:10:13.000And I went on a many, many year soul searching.
00:10:20.000For personal meaning and that led me ultimately back to the Baha'i Faith and I decided that that was my spiritual path.
00:10:29.000And those kind of ideas, what I found along the way, have inspired Soul Boom.
00:10:36.000The World Is Not Enough may be the title of a James Bond movie, but it is also true that the world is not enough.
00:10:45.000I find that your story resonates with me in a number of ways, and is perhaps to a degree archetypal.
00:10:52.000That laying at your feet in early life were a set of spiritual tools that were, for whatever reason, inaccessible to you.
00:11:00.000And then after suffering and exploration, you find your way back to that grail as it's offering.
00:11:08.000Yeah, that's sort of like a really useful way, I think, to look at it, isn't it?
00:11:12.000To 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.
00:11:28.000But that is 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.
00:11:40.000And me, in all reign, it was like desperation that sort of made me consider a different way of life.
00:11:49.000That I 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 principal message as well as aligning with the broad paradigm that exists in the triangle of service and unity and community
00:12:22.000There is also the idea of total surrender.
00:12:25.000And because Twelve 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.
00:12:51.000And that's not what you can or you can't organize your life around that successfully.
00:12:54.000You have to live absolutely in the service of a higher idea.
00:12:58.000And 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.
00:13:09.000People aren't, are they after the last century going to rally for socialism or free market capitalism or fascism ultimately?
00:13:16.000Only in so much as those things allude to either unity or prosperity or solidarity.
00:13:26.000As is true physically, it's mostly space between the molecules, between the occasional nodes of apparently only present when observed phenomena.
00:13:38.000So I wonder how you reconcile your life as an individual.
00:13:45.000You've taken, like you're going to be doing a film right now, as I understand, it's only some sort of Serendipity, that means that you can trundle up here that you're not in your movie right now.
00:13:54.000How 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?
00:14:06.000So, 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.
00:14:18.000So, and I use these as analogies of our spiritual journey.
00:14:21.000So, Kung Fu, for those Millennials and Gen Z folks that haven't seen it, is about this guy, Y. Chang Cain, very racially played by David Carradine.
00:14:32.000Although 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.
00:14:44.000Every episode is about a spiritual journey.
00:14:46.000So, Kuai Cheng 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 Fist fights and whatnot.
00:15:00.000And I use that as an analogy of our personal spiritual journey.
00:15:05.000So 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.
00:15:22.000The Star Trek side of it is that humanity itself is on a spiritual journey.
00:15:28.000And 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.
00:16:08.000We'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.
00:16:17.000Barack Obama is the president and in a lot of ways he was a very good president.
00:16:21.000In a lot of ways it was just business as usual and a lot of big business.
00:16:26.000And a lot of drone strikes, illegal drone strikes, and a lot of, you know, monitoring.
00:16:31.000And it was just the same old, same old.
00:16:34.000And racism actually spiked and got worse after he was... So the system itself is broken.
00:16:40.000So 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, treacly, 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 gonna leave it at that.
00:17:12.000No, peace, personal peace and serenity is important.
00:17:24.000So 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.
00:18:10.000And that's how partisan Politics is also based.
00:18:14.000So as long as we're in that system, we're headed toward a self-destructive end.
00:18:19.000We're headed towards climate disaster and all kinds of, I talk about all the different global pandemics in the book besides, besides COVID.
00:18:28.000But, you know, racism, materialism, you mentioned, there's so many other nationalism, Militarism.
00:18:36.000These are all the real global pandemics.
00:18:38.000But if we want to really cure them, if we want to address them, we have to go to the roots.
00:18:45.000And the roots of that is our personal transformation as a... I'm sorry to go back to this stupid analogy, but going back to our inner Kwai Chang Cain, and then how do we spread that in the world?
00:19:24.000Yeah, that's a wonderful way of framing it.
00:19:27.000In 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.
00:19:39.000are 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.
00:19:52.000And 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.
00:20:06.000And 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.
00:20:21.000So the necessary amplification of the small differences is a requirement.
00:20:26.000to legitimize the entire conversation. What he said about it from a cosmic perspective,
00:20:32.000I suppose one might say, and it's certainly an analogy that's used a lot in spirituality,
00:20:36.000that we're seven billion inhabitants of a single cosmic craft. It was a metaphor that Buckminster
00:20:42.000Fuller used to continually use. That's accurate and rudimentary.
00:20:47.000That's not abstract, metaphysical and spiritual in a kind of ephemeral way.
00:20:57.000This is why the solution must be spiritual.
00:20:59.000Because if you regard things solely rationally, then all that's left is how do you distribute resources?
00:21:06.000And therefore, the most potent ideological drives become those that are unwritten primarily, underwritten rather, underwritten by primary forces, i.e.
00:21:20.000This 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.
00:21:30.000You need that energy or a species doesn't survive.
00:21:32.000Of course what's happened is our systems haven't... our evolution has not adjusted to the systems within which we live.
00:21:40.000And with the preclusion of spiritual solutions, we cannot envisage that there might be different resources within us to underwrite and fuel our vision.
00:21:54.000I 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.
00:22:03.000Of course they do, they lead back to great, great exploitation, that's evident and plain.
00:22:08.000But I like it, but when the choice is so reductive, I'm reminded of that.
00:22:11.000Bill 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 He's got two dicks, I might go see that one.
00:22:21.000He 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.
00:22:35.000And the only way out of that is through spirituality, even if you use the David Carradine and the Captain Kirk way through it.
00:22:44.000Because I will be, at some point in this conversation, I'm keen to ...analyse and articulate some of the archetypes in the world from which most people will know you.
00:22:57.000The 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.
00:23:07.000But 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.
00:23:52.000The way to change things is to create a new system that makes the existing system obsolete.
00:23:58.000And that just reminded me of what you were saying.
00:24:01.000Like, even though Dwight is a really, really peculiar character, and you are evidently a peculiar man.
00:24:07.000You're peculiar in a very different way than Dwight is.
00:24:11.000I'm very curious about how you captured that.
00:24:16.000He's a very American character, Dwight, I feel.
00:24:18.000The patriotism, the individualism, the libertarianism.
00:24:24.000Oddly repressed strangeness and how close you were to 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 those two characters Mackenzie Crook is was absolutely brilliant and his performance and his characterization was it just Tickled me to the core.
00:25:07.000There's a kind of a hoo-ha, rah-rah kind of A vein of militarism underneath those two characters.
00:25:18.000So the toady bully, like the two sides of the coin are like, I'm a toady and I'm a bully at the same time, which I thought was really interesting.
00:25:28.000But you know, in pondering Dwight and the creation of Dwight, I really went back to my roots in suburban Seattle.
00:25:37.000I had a friend named Chris Cole, and we played Dungeons and Dragons together.
00:25:55.000So you see, like, in the roots of someone like that, you see some blight.
00:26:00.000My uncle, my family were farmers on both sides of my family in the Midwest, in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
00:26:07.000And 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.
00:26:24.000And that's one of the things I will really applaud.
00:26:27.000You know, so many people create television shows and they have like And no offense, but like Big Bang Theory, like the idea of nerds and what a nerd is.
00:26:36.000But Dwight, you can't type in like, is he a nerd?
00:27:00.000He 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.
00:27:09.000Yeah, because a lot of real character comes from contradiction.
00:27:13.000I feel like that comedy comes from a sort of a continual awareness that the reality we operate within is secondary and that there is another ulterior reality, but that's what we allude to.
00:27:26.000What I feel, one of the things that defines comedy for me, Rain, is the ability to continually go, this isn't real.
00:27:40.000But 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.
00:27:57.000To avoid the piety that that could induce, you can approach it with comedy, that there is a playful beauty, and you talk about reading the Bhagavad Gita, and the characterization of Krishna versus a character, Like, in the character, Jesus Christ, like, you know, Christ is real.
00:28:16.000I'm not coming on here to say there ain't a Jesus.
00:28:39.000Yeah, there's a playfulness in the character of Krishna and sometimes evident in the voluptuousness and abundance of like the Vedas and Hinduism, the faith derived from it.
00:28:50.000That sometimes you feel, is that where New Ageism is right?
00:28:54.000This 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 this sort of hermeneutics and ecclesiastical quest in.
00:29:28.000I'm saying here, like, how do you see your role as a comic being part of the service of your spirituality?
00:29:34.000That's one aspect of the question I want to ask.
00:29:36.000And 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.
00:29:45.000How do you move past it and beyond it?
00:29:51.000I'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.
00:30:04.000The Lakota word for God is wakantanka, which means the great mystery.
00:30:10.000And when I view God, when I view the divine as the great mystery, that's when I sink in.
00:30:17.000And 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.
00:30:39.000There is a mystical and beautiful, mysterious journey in being an artist.
00:30:46.000And Uh, and I feel like I, at a very young age, knew that I was able to just do silly voices and play characters.
00:30:54.000And I, and I love to make people laugh.
00:30:56.000And I was this big, weird looking goofball with a giant head and a little belly.
00:31:01.000And, uh, and I made people laugh and that's how I got the girls.
00:31:05.000All of a sudden I started doing acting and all of a sudden girls wanted me to sit at their lunch table.
00:31:11.000So I was like, I'm in, I'm done with Dungeons and Dragons.
00:31:16.000And 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.
00:32:13.000But 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.
00:32:40.000Um, you know, you may say that I'm a dreamer.
00:32:44.000I do think that there are there, we have to visualize, we've become so cynical.
00:32:50.000We have to visualize the possibility of transforming this planet and transforming the way that human beings interact with each other.
00:32:58.000And 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 Alekina the Clown, And I get paid handsomely for it.
00:33:26.000And I have heard time and time again, the office has brought so much joy to people.
00:33:46.000So, 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.
00:34:07.000I feel like it might be a significant step, that flip might be more significant than you implied at the end of your statement.
00:34:17.000When things seem only spatial and temporal, contained within that framing, there can be a dull flatness to it.
00:34:26.000It 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.
00:34:35.000When my religion is Russell, Like, you know, like, what he wants.
00:34:39.000His preferences become my, they are my stone tablet, my tabernacle.
00:34:45.000Russell's preferences is what I live for.
00:34:48.000I sort of feel myself, like, draining and atrophying as I go.
00:34:53.000But, 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.
00:35:00.000They go, I don't remember anything else that happened that month except that thing you did.
00:35:03.000And it reminded me of this idea that how can eternity, like the great mystery, be anything other than continually present?
00:35:16.000How can God be anywhere but here in this moment if God is absolute?
00:35:21.000And 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.
00:35:30.000He talks about queuing up to sign up to PUM, you know, it's a fight there, that he sort of saw this in front of him to sign up was this red-haired Italian bella.
00:35:39.000And he said that even without knowing him, he knew that he could love him.
00:35:42.000Like, he sort of thought, like, this guy, I like this guy a lot.
00:35:46.000And 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.
00:35:54.000And if you've been held like that, if you've experienced that moment, the timeless, the eternal, what does he say, Wittgenstein?
00:36:01.000He 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, wherever in the present, able to return to this place.
00:36:16.000And so even if it's a cultural artifact, like the office, which no doubt was a sort of the congregation of many geniuses present in that, from the delivering, the conception, all sorts of aspects of it.
00:36:28.000You know, one feels it's being rebooted like football, like music, like everything, just into commodity, all things commodity, all things commodity.
00:36:37.000If they have in them that spirit, if they have love in them, that we will feel the resonance of that.
00:36:43.000This 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.
00:36:50.000There are great tomes, great genres of political writing about this is how we organise it economically, this is how we organise it geopolitically, militarily.
00:37:00.000But 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 have conformed to the same paradigm.
00:37:15.000You could take Marxism as an example, like essentially at the root of Marxism is how do we heal these incredible income inequality that is holding billions of people back and causing them to suffer?
00:37:27.000Well, let's create an organization in which the resources are spread out among humanity, but 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
00:37:52.000you know, as a janitor, then if that's coming from above, then
00:37:56.000that's, you're not going to feel connected to that. So Marxism at
00:38:00.000its heart, seeking to remedy a big problem in the world is fantastic, has so many great ideas inherent in it. But
00:38:09.000again, it is has to bubble up from the ground up.
00:38:13.000Oh man, that's a real beautiful metaphor, I feel that.
00:38:15.000You know, Marxism starts with the idea of sharing, and ends up with, we're going to kill all these people!
00:38:23.000And like Christianity is, we are all one!
00:38:26.000And ends up with, we're building this cathedral and killing all these people!
00:38:30.000Stop getting to kill all these people as the outcome!
00:38:34.000You know, that there's some invisible imprimatur keeps imposing.
00:38:39.000When 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.
00:38:54.000Some unlovely Kubla Khan, nothing but edifice and shine.
00:38:59.000And when I walked near it, what I felt was, you know, 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.
00:39:14.000You know, when you're in a place, you want to feel that this is the expression of grandmothers and grandfathers and ancestors have 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, that the past is there looking at you, that the Colosseum is there looking at you, the Forum is there.
00:39:37.000It's not, this is not, you know like that sometimes.
00:39:39.000And 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.
00:39:51.000But London, I think London is the new Rome in a way and it has that layer upon layer of beautiful kind of human evolution.
00:40:01.000Yes, I suppose, but it feels to me very much that what we are witnessing now is sort of an ongoing centralizing entity imposing from above, this time masked in globalism, this time using the rhetoric of equality, fairness.
00:40:16.000Yeah, but I want to challenge you on that a little bit, because I understand and I've heard a lot of your talking about the World Economic Forum and whatnot.
00:40:24.000And I certainly am not a big fan of billionaires getting together and coming up with policies that supposedly benefit the little man.
00:41:03.000I will die Ecuador or Belgium or Mongolia or insert whatever country you want.
00:41:08.000So how do we because this, like everything, these conversations have become so like black and white and so simplistic.
00:41:17.000And 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
00:42:04.000If someone tries to make me clean, I'm not doing it.
00:42:09.000I feel that the agenda of globalism Is centralization, authoritarianism, the ability to manipulate and control markets and to generate dominion?
00:42:18.000Now, the love of Ecuador is not only a metaphor, but an evolved tendency towards tribalism, ancestor worship, a celebration of individual culture.
00:42:29.000The love of Ecuador or Belgium needn't mean hatred of the other. It needn't mean that. But I feel that
00:42:35.000if you start to take away people's right to be Ecuadorian, they're not going to like it. And I feel
00:42:41.000that the kind of globalism, the kind of confederacy that you are alluding to can only
00:44:06.000But as they say, and this is some of the greatness we've had on here, like Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva, they talk about, and Gandhi himself, localism.
00:44:15.000Your community must be self-governing.
00:44:17.000Your community must use its own resources.
00:44:20.000The fact that that becomes fueled somehow by hating another community, you can see that that's an evolutionary quirk.
00:44:27.000We know that strangers were the most likely people to bring disease, to say, you know, 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.
00:44:39.000What 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.
00:45:17.000As 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.
00:45:28.000Some say democracy is the only game in town.
00:45:30.000You have to just persuade people, like I would persuade them, I think.
00:45:35.000Look, I think we should allow this amount of immigration.
00:45:39.000But you vote for if in your community you want to take in immigrants.
00:46:18.000I'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.
00:46:31.000I talk about one of the great evils of the world being partisanship.
00:46:34.000Do you know how much money are spent on political ads?
00:46:37.000I 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.
00:46:46.000Think about what... You had a little bit of a burp, and it was a little bit foul.
00:47:31.000So 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.
00:48:14.000So 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.
00:48:24.000It's very much like a 12-step meeting.
00:48:25.000It's like loving servants and community.
00:48:42.000And 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.
00:49:00.000Now this goes on also on a national level.
00:49:04.000So 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, you know, servants of the community.
00:49:25.000What do they call it in the 12-step program, in the 12 traditions?
00:49:29.000Our leaders are trusted servants, they do not govern.
00:50:07.000Okay, 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.
00:50:20.000We'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
00:50:34.000or five years to the service of the community.
00:50:37.000And we're going to do this, maybe not prayerfully, but meditatively.
00:51:59.000They can't create hierarchies and organization at that number.
00:52:03.000So it feels like there is nothing in our evolutionary history that would suggest that a good idea would be to centralise power to the tune of 300 million people.
00:52:12.000And in fact, the only people that benefit from aggregation on that scale, I would contest, are the top strata of that society.
00:52:20.000Now people make the free market trickle-down economics argument continually.
00:52:23.000That's what was underwritten in late capitalism.
00:52:25.000For the, you know, at least the last 50 years.
00:52:28.000But my feeling is that people that benefit mostly from the aggregation of populations are the people that are the top of those populations.
00:52:50.000And 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.
00:54:42.000Yeah, you're quite right that we mustn't fall into sallow cynicism and that the optimism is part of the fuel of this change.
00:54:51.000And I feel that if you have a template that rewards crisis for the most powerful, i.e.
00:54:58.000in a medical crisis, the pharmaceutical companies benefit.
00:55:02.000In a military crisis or a war, the military-industrial complex benefit.
00:55:06.000The people, the energy companies benefit even when there is a fuel crisis.
00:55:11.000Record profits for big pharma, record profits for big tech, wealth transfer of 5 trillion during the pandemic period.
00:55:16.000If what is crisis to most people is beneficial to the elites, And by the least, I mean the most powerful.
00:55:22.000What 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?
00:55:36.000What 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?
00:55:46.000So 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 The intentions and capacities.
00:56:05.000I think it's important to understand that a lot of people on the political left view social change as has not being organized.
00:56:17.000It needs and I'm not saying that you're saying this, but that that that it's small groups.
00:56:23.000You know, on a farm somewhere and just doing what they like.
00:56:28.000And the fact is, is that we need organization as well.
00:56:33.000Organization gets a bad name and I'm not talking about authoritarianism.
00:56:36.000You could be organized and not authoritarian.
00:56:39.000But we do need to the other side is very, very, very well organized.
00:56:44.000And 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.
00:56:56.000That's, that's a fairy tale that I roll my eyes at.
00:57:15.000That 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
00:57:37.000And you talked about tribalism before and I'll say also too that we just need to, you know,
00:57:42.000at first we started with a family in a cave and then it was like a couple of families in a valley
00:57:46.000and then it was like 27 families in a little town and and our tribes grew and then it's like Ecuador
00:57:52.000and Belgium and our tribes grew to that.
00:57:55.000We have to view our tribe in a much larger context as well.
00:57:59.000So I'm not sure how to do that, but we're a human tribe sharing a planet that's hurtling through space like Buckminster Fuller said.
00:58:07.000And so whatever happens on this in this Grassroots, systematic, organized way has to include the beautiful, loving, our beautiful human being tribe on this planet.
00:58:22.000That is a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation.
00:59:34.000I guess because I'm a... What's the issue?
00:59:36.000I'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.