Good Life Project - Casey Gerald: There Will Be No Miracles Here.

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

On the surface, Casey Gerald (http://www.caseygerald.com/), was living the dream.Growing up in Oak Cliff, Texas, he broke from the binds of an addicted, imprisoned dad and mentally-ill mom to become a star athlete, scholar, then a student at Yale, where he majored in political science and played varsity football.Heading next to Harvard Business School, while pursuing his MBA, he co-founded a foundation, MBAs Across America, that landed him on MSNBC, at TED and SXSW, on the cover of Fast Company, and in The New York Times, Financial Times, and The Guardian, among others.But, when you scratch the surface, things weren't as they seemed. As he shared in this week's conversation, everyone wants to make you into a nugget, a simplified soundbite. Gerald was anything but. Struggling with everything from his sexuality and faith, to his fierce desire to carve his own unique path, to live his own life, Casey, decided to walk away from it all, begin to write, and follow a path of self-discovery and revelation. His journey is laid bare in a stirring new memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here (https://amzn.to/2QHjyvE)-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Growing up in Oak Hill, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, in the late 80s and 90s, my guest today, Casey Gerald, was the son of a local football star who eventually ended up having problems with addiction, a mom who was incredibly present and alive and vibrant in Casey's life, and also struggled deeply with mental illness, And the grandson of a well-known pastor who founded a very large and revered church, through his own exploration of all of these different relationships, he awakened to a lot of truths about himself. Part of it came to a head when he turned 12 years old, when on December 31st, 1999, at exactly midnight, something that he was told would happen didn't happen. And he's kind of been reckoning with that. That set him on a journey

that eventually led him to find his way in the world, attend Yale, Harvard, go out into the world, do big things in business, start a nonprofit. And one day he realized that this dream that he was living both for himself and for others was not in fact what he wanted out of his life. And he started to question everything and re-explore his most fundamental assumptions about why we're here and what this thing called life is really all about. That has laid bare any beautiful new memoir called There Will Be No Miracles Here. Really excited to share this conversation with Casey Gerald.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. I was raised in sort of the ISIS of Christianity.

We were a lot less violent, at least physically, but I guess there were many ways of violence. Anyway, one of the key beliefs was that there would be a second coming of Jesus in a very material form. And it so happened that there was a date that was assigned for this event, which was midnight, December 31st, 1999. There's also in the Christian tradition, I think it's in Judaism as well, this idea that you're innocent until you turn 12. You can't be held accountable for what you do until you turn 12. So just so happened I turned 12 in 1999. So all the shit I had done now, you know, the chickens were coming home to roost.

I'd say, uh-oh. Yeah, yeah. So we used to have this thing called watch night service. So on December 31st, 1999, we all gathered at our church to wait for the return of Christ. And at midnight, those of us who had lived would be left behind. My understanding is that we'd be left behind for a certain period of time during which the Antichrist would be unleashed on the world, and you could either sort of surrender to the Antichrist and be protected in that time but still go to hell, or you could resist the Antichrist and sort of be punished, but then Jesus would give you a second shot.

I mean, this is the rough outline of what was going to happen. So I had prepared all year for this. I got baptized a second time. I started reading these really traumatic novels in the Left Behind series. You know, I tried to pray a lot more and sin a lot less, neither of which were particularly successful. And then I went to church with my grandmother in 1150. The pastor said, come down to the altar. We want to pray.

We want to be praying when midnight comes. And I'm going and it's hot and it's packed. And, you know, there's a clock in the back room of the church and I'm holding my grandmother's hand. My idea was that I knew she was going to heaven. And I felt that maybe if I held her hand tight enough that when she went, I could just sort of buy the transitive property or just, you know, and we're praying and we're praying and we're praying and we're praying and we're praying and the time is running and then the prayer ends and I look around and we're still there.

And it was very confusing to me. I mean, it was shocking, actually, and in a way really disappointing because it wasn't so much, to some degree it was a relief, sure, both not to vanish but also not to be, at least at that time, sent to hell. It wasn't so much a theological question actually that night. You know, my world had ended, my earthly world in a lot of ways. My father had relapsed into drug use and had gone to jail. My mother, who suffered from mental illness, had started disappearing. I had no

certainty except the certainty of betrayal, in a way, from the people on this planet that were supposed to take care of me. So in a way, I wanted to be rescued that night. I write in the book that I did not want the world to end. I wanted to be rescued, you see. And so I use that as the entry point for this book because I think in a lot of ways, we are living through personally and politically, if not spiritually, somewhat of a similar moment in that the world we were born into is ending in a way. And I think there are many people, unfortunately, who are turning to some very dangerous quick fixes for rescue. But that doesn't change the fact that I do believe we're in the very early days of a sort of beautiful and dangerous revolution as it pertains to the ways that we're in the very early days of a sort of beautiful and dangerous revolution

as it pertains to the ways that we live in the world, what life looks like, what politics looks like, what love and work and success look like. So I say all of that to say that I find in this one moment of terror, of uncertainty, of a deep yearning desire to be saved and rescued. A lot of relation with the very earthly experience that we're going through. Yeah, I can definitely see that in a lot of ways. And I want to kind of put a pin in that and actually circle back to this idea of we are in this moment now, which is deeply reflective of where you are. So we can fill in a little bit of the story along the way too. And also maybe even use this as a jumping off point backwards and then maybe a little bit forwards. Because at 12, so you're growing up

in a town outside of Dallas, Texas, as you shared, your dad, former athlete who had challenges with drugs, incarceration, your mom was, it sounded like it was, she was eventually diagnosed with bipolar, I guess. But at that point, when in your sort of first 12 years, were you start starting to become aware of her and her presence, her struggles with her own mental illness. That's so funny. I mean, I was aware of her presence, I suppose, before I was aware of my own presence. I mean, as we all are, you know, our mother is the first presence that we have, of course. My mother, I tell people, sort of reminds me of Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire. I mean, she's just a real star, man. A very strange,

beautiful, peculiar, bizarre person. I write in the book that I go on to describe her when I was very small and she would laugh a lot, even when nobody had told a joke. And sometimes she might cry when nothing was particularly sad. And she you know, she didn't eat her vegetables and, you know, she didn't wear clothes around the house because she sort of stood in the mirror and put on makeup all day. You know, she made this thing up called sugar cheese toast. So instead of making like toast with jelly, she'd put cheese and sugar in the oven and like give this to me. I mean, she was just, and so I say in the book that I don't mean that she was perfect. All I'm saying is that I benefited from her imperfections. Maybe that's what magic is, a useful mistake. So I was very aware of my mother's presence immediately and how her

strangeness provided a lot of safety for me because I was a very strange kid, you know, and she was my protector in a lot of ways. When I was five, my sister and I were sent to Dallas. The auspices were, we were told that she was going to a beauty convention for, you know, and we had to go to Dallas. We were living in Columbus at the time. And this made sense to me, one, because I was five and dumb, but also because my mother was a very beautiful person. So I said, hey, you know, I guess maybe she would need a year to talk about beauty. I don't know. When I was to capture the absurdity of that actual experience in the book at a very practical level. You know, it takes everybody who's read this scene in the book, they say, I had to go back two or three times to understand what was happening because all the

punctuation was gone. And so they just didn't understand. And I actually wanted that. I wanted the reader to have that experience of being disoriented, to capture the disorientation that I felt as an eight-year-old, you know, and my mother having a seizure, but I thought she was dead. I'd never seen anybody have a seizure. But even after that, nobody talked to me about it, you see. So when she disappears when I was 13, you know, there is never a direct conversation

had about it with me. So much so, I write in the book that if ever your mother asks you to choose between her death and disappearance, have her die always, though not immediately, of course. So one of the things that I'm trying to point out and live by writing this book and sharing it is that you can't heal from anything if you don't face it. And I think the way that I was raised was, well, you know, the way we're going to get through this is to act like it never happened. You know what I mean? But all that stuff you ignore comes chasing after you, you know? And that's true for my mother and our relationship.

Yeah. When did you actually realize, looking back, that your mom actually was living with mental illness, that there was something else going on? Was there ever a conversation that eventually was had in your family that brought you to it or how did that come out? There was never a conversation. We were taken around the time I was 11 or 12 to the psychiatric hospitals to visit her. And I don't think the phrase mental illness, I don't know that I even ever heard that. I mean, it was interesting. This book transgresses so many of the things that are sort of standards of writing, one of which is show, don't tell. And I write in the book and I'm very serious about it. I'm not going to tell you what I saw inside the psychiatric ward. I'm not going to tell you what was done to and not done to my mother and the other patients that we saw in there.

What I do know is that it didn't seem to be particularly helpful. So the language was not mental illness or treatment or blah, blah, blah. It was these people are crazy. And you go in there and you see people in catatonic state or whatever it is, you know, and you hear the screams and all this kind of stuff. You know something is going on and you know that whatever is being done to fix it doesn't seem to be too successful. I got to imagine for, I mean, for any age, but for that age especially, it's so formative and you're so close to your mom. That had to be just tough to deal with, seeing your mom in that setting.

Yeah. But, you know, kids are very resilient, you know. Resilient, I don't like that word. Kids can endure some really awful shit. That's not to say we should subject them to it. When I was writing this book, my mother started disappearing again. She came back, just to fill in the plot she disappeared when I was 13 she was gone for five years she came back when I was 18 kind of a

resurrection you know because I had assumed she she was dead so when I was writing this book she started disappearing again and my niece was 12 and it was so interesting slash heartbreaking to see her experience the same things that I did when I was that age. And what was so useful about the book, and I hope it can do this for other young people who are going through traumatic situations, is that it helped me understand an alternative way of being with my niece than people were with me when I was her age, one of which was very simply just to tell the truth to her and allow her to tell the truth from her perspective, which was sort of opening up the space where she could be very honest about the anger that she felt toward my mother, I'm from Texas. I still have a sort of terror about speaking back to adults.

You know, I'm almost 32 years old, and it's like, you know, yes, sir, yes, ma'am, you know, kind of thing. So it was so important for me to give her space, and I think it's so important to give children space to say, you know what? I hate my Nana. I mean, I would have been slapped into the 29th century if I had said something like that as a kid. So I thought that was very important, one. Two, I thought it was very important, and I was able to do it because of the work that I was doing through this book, to say, hey, you're not alone. So important. And third, equally important, I was able to help her see, because I had to do the work to see for myself, that I couldn't just see it from my perspective. I had to actually work through my own pain to see my mother as a human being, not as my employee.

And when I did that, I was able to see that the worst thing that ever happened to me was perhaps the most important thing that ever happened that she ever did for herself. The worst thing that ever happened to me was perhaps the most important thing she ever did for herself. And that's really, that's real life. And so much of what I've had to do as a person and what I try to do on the page is let the language reflect the complexity of the truth. Yeah. It's not buttoned up. This is the simple thing and here's the lesson. Here's the way. It's not life. A lot of people initially were worried that the book was too messy, too chaotic. I had a friend who's a very respected writer.

I love him a great deal. He saw some early chapters. He said, what in the hell is this, man? You've been hired to write an autobiography. It's a straightforward exercise. It's got a beginning, middle, and end. It's grounded in the facts of your life. It's a great tradition of autobiography in this country of people on the margins who write to assert that they exist. Go out and read those books, man, and learn how they do it. Well, I was so grateful for that intervention

because it helped me realize early on that that wasn't going to be the kind of book I wanted to write. I thought about Kendrick Lamar on section 80. He says, I'm not on the outside looking in. I'm not on the inside looking out. I'm in the dead fucking center looking around. You see, that's the perspective I wanted. I it to bring language to the raw strangeness of the human experience. I think that's what literature ought to do. Otherwise, it's kind of fraudulent, I think. Yeah. I think it's designed to make you feel.

It's always so interesting to me when we reach out for help in some way, shape, or form when we're working on something where it's like, you know, a raw, pure expression of our heart. But there's a tradition out there of how this type of thing is to be done. And there's a formula and there's a methodology. And this is what a quote, successful version of this looks like. And then you go out and you look at that and you're like, but that's not what I'm being called to do right now. Like, how do I navigate that? Because I got to be true to myself, but that means I have to basically reject everything that's come before this. That's just microcosm of life in this society, you see.

Somebody asked me, hey, what's the one nugget? I was enraged when I, oh God. What's the one nugget? It's like, distill your life down to one talking point. Hey, gosh, what's the one nugget. I was enraged when I, oh God, what's the one nugget? It's like, distill your life down to one talking point. Hey, gosh, what's the one nugget? I said, my one nugget is that the world wants to turn you into a nugget, a small little piece of something that's easily digestible, wants you to be a stranger to yourself so that you're recognizable to others, wants you to be a stranger to yourself so that you're recognizable to others, wants you to mutilate yourself so that you're acceptable to others, so that you'll be invited

to the right parties and accepted in the right schools and hired for the right jobs, you see, liked by the right friends at the right parties and, you know, welcomed by the right God to the right heaven so you can bow down to him forever and ever in submission. I mean, this is the reward for your submission to be a well-liked holy nugget. I mean, what kind of life is that, man? But from a very early age, we're conditioned to cut off little old pieces of ourselves so that the thing of us that remains makes sense and is normal and is right and fits into a tradition of death. Those last two words kind of really seal the story right there. If you haven't noticed, I'm very dramatic.

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I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. When listening to you speak and having seen your TED Talk and stuff like this, it's, you know, part of what we haven't talked about, but I think you can probably, you know, it's implied to a certain extent by the opening story was you were brought up in a house in a community built deeply around faith.

In fact, your grandfather was a well-known pastor. And it sounds like it was very much a part of your upbringing, both the tradition and the culture. And it was interesting because watching you at TED and just hearing you talk, I wonder if there is this influence. There is a preaching element. There is a cadence. There's a rhythm. There's a sing-song sort of energy to the way that you deliver your message, the way that you think, the way that you communicate with your voice. That is strong and poetic. And so as I was watching your TED Talk, I was like really curious.

I'm like, I wonder how much of that actually came either directly in, directly through being around your grandfather and that community when you were a kid. So much. So much. I mean, my grandfather is really probably the only genius I've ever seen. You know, his grandmother had been a slave. My family's been in Texas since before the Civil War. His grandmother had been a slave. He was born in a little town, Dawson, Texas. Grew up in a house with dirt floors. Started preaching at 16. He was paid in canned goods.

I don't know that, I'm sure he knew how to read to some degree, but I don't know how well or what kind of education he got and all that kind of stuff. He went up to Dallas in the 50s. He started this little church. Before long, he and my grandmother integrated our neighborhood, Oak Cliff. Before long, he had one of the most prominent churches in the area. Less than a decade later, he was one of the first pastors to shepherd two locations in Dallas, which is now sort of the megachurch capital of the world. But beyond all that, I mean, what he did with language was always, to me, just sort of out of sight. I mean, it was genius is the only word I have for it. He'd make up these stories.

He used to tell this great deal when he was preaching about the meeting between death and the grave and before Jesus' crucifixion. And he said, death called a meeting with the grave. And he said, grave, if I catch him, can you hold him? And he said, the grave said, well, I think I can hold him. I've been holding men like Samson and women like Sarah and men like Moses, and I'm sure I can hold a little Nazarene boy down. So then he says, death goes and calls a meeting with Jesus. Said, Jesus, when can we meet? I mean, really? And this is brilliant.

How so much I think of what I aspire to in this book and I aspire to with language in general is to bring new words, new language, new possibilities, new visions to the same old material. That's the, oh God, I could never be a preacher, partially because I'm too simple. But aside from that, it's a real hard challenge. He used to say, I never preach a sermon without taking Jesus to the cross, and I don't leave him there. I got to put him in the grave, but I don't leave him in the grave. I got to get him up. I mean, to do that for 40 years, every Sunday, sometimes two or three times a Sunday, you got to be very goddamn creative to bring new language and new possibility to a 2,000- what he did with language is something that I'm not even close to, but it's very inspiring. Is it something you aspire to get closer to? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think this is not a literary criticism, or I guess it is technically a literary criticism, but I'm not a literary critic. I don't think, I mean, listen, we have in the leadership of this country right now an individual who is more willing than perhaps anybody in the history of this society to let language loose for the most base and toxic and destructive and nasty purposes.

I don't think the response to that is to, I don't think the right response to that is to button language up, just make it seem like we're nobler people or politically correct or whatever. I think the response, the right response, is to let language loose for the right reasons. This is one of the reasons that if you take black culture, for example, I think the rappers have a lot more to say than many of the writers because the rappers are talking about real life and the writers are sort of looking up their asses and if we could bring to the literature some willingness to aspire to higher heights with the language which is actually aspiring to deeper depths of humanity,

I think we'd be in better shape. Yeah, love that. So through all of this, you're growing up surrounded by what's going on with your dad, your mom, in this culture with your grandfather. You mentioned he could never be a pastor because you got too much sin in your life. So one of the things that I know starts to bubble up is you starting to inquire into your own sexuality, growing up in the setting that you're growing up in at that time. Talk me through sort of like how that exploration is unfolding in your head. Well, there are a couple of pieces to it that are very important to me.

I was at TED a few years ago, and I was having dinner with a friend of mine who's some years older than I am, and he had recently been knighted. So he goes, you know, you get knighted, you go to Buckingham Palace. Very special, obviously. It was going to be the first time his parents were going to meet his boyfriend. His parents were very conservative, especially his father, who still has had a very hard time with, I mean, how did this happen? It's kind of strange.

And this has been kind of the thread of their conversations. You know, so much of this sort of question that we often get from straight people, well, when did you know you were gay, is very peculiar because every time I ask a straight person, when did you know you were straight, They've never thought of the question. So I found this sort of inability of my friend's father to really see, well, can you just explain to me when this happened and how it happened? I asked my friend, I said, listen, let me ask you something. I bet somebody called you a faggot before you ever liked a boy. And he thought about it.

And he said, you know what, you're right. And I've asked many other queer friends of mine the same question, and it's true. So I say that to say that the context, before you get to any young person, any individual exploring their sexuality, you find yourself in a context in the society that hates faggots and teaches us to hate ourselves before we ever have any feeling whatsoever of a romantic nature toward any sex, I think that's something we ought to think about as a society. That's one piece. The second piece is for sure a religious piece. My uncle died of AIDS in 1994. Over 32,000 people that we know of died of AIDS in 1994 in America. You know, they wouldn't let him in the kitchen.

People wouldn't eat after him. People wouldn't hug him. I mean, it was, we all should know of or know someone personally who died in this plague. And yet, the belief in his own father's heart was that he was going to hell. And so in a lot of ways, this religious question is very important to work through. And for me, I had to let go of the God that I was given to find the God I needed. And the greatest gift in that was being homosexual because there was no way to reconcile it. And I did so much work as a young person to try to eradicate this gift, to try to throw it away, to try to act like it wasn't there.

And it took such a toll that I didn't want to be alive. And there's so many queer people, queer children who reach that point where they just don't see their way out. And when I reached that point, what I decided was that I was not going to die in this life to avoid hell in the next life. I was not going to mutilate myself for God's love. I couldn't get to the point, which some people get to, I don't think it is totally sincere, of saying, well, God would not send me to hell for being gay. I don't know what, I don't know who God is, and I don't know what he would send anybody to hell for. All I know is I'm going to live my life on my terms in the best way I can.

And if at the end of it, he says, well, hey, kid, I respect your decisions, but here are the consequences. I'm going to live with that. Over time, I was able to reconnect with what I call God in a way that did not require me to kill parts of myself. And that's a much longer journey, much longer conversation, but a very important one that I think so many gay young people feel that they have to choose between themselves and God. And as hard as that journey is, and I think as few as the solutions are that we're given, I have found for myself that on the other side of wrestling with it, there is a way not to choose or to choose both, actually. But it takes some creativity. The third piece, and this from a literary standpoint, I think is most important for me,

is that I wasn't interested in writing a book that was sort of a sociological study of the oppression of gay people. You know? I mean, gosh, you know, you read some of these quote-unquote classics. You read something like The City and the Pillar, you know, Gore Vidal. It's like, Jesus, Gore, you know, you read some of these quote unquote classics, you read something like The City and the Pillar, you know, Gore Vidal. It's like, Jesus, Gore, you know, I mean, why don't you just, you know, go and do the conversion therapy with a book like this? I mean, gosh, you know, what I want you to do is bring worthy language to the intimate human experience of that, beyond the religious questions, beyond the, well, the society hates faggots. You know, yeah, we're going to account for that.

That's true. But even in that seemingly impossible context, there's a question of loving somebody. And all the quotidian, pedestrian, petty stuff that's involved in that. And I hope I captured that as much as the other two aspects. My answers are so long. That's all good. I just talk on and on and on.

No, it's all good because it just, it shares deeper insight into sort of where this is all coming from. I love it because I feel like you're planting seeds. You know, there's a lot of provocation, which I think is really good for us to have. So you get to a point where you're kind of moving on and you end up moving through high school. You're bouncing between different homes,

different parts of the family, but you're making your way. You're doing what you can. You find yourself going to college at Yale. What's it like when you were sort of deciding, okay, I want to choose somewhere. What were you looking for out of that next leg of the journey for like? And then when you actually get there, is this remotely what you thought it was going to be and what you were hoping it might be?

I'd love to read a little section of the book. Yeah, please, please do. Every journey is really two journeys, a going to and a going away. And it's not until the journey is over that you can see what's what, because you can't get away from nothing if you're looking at it all the time. And you can't go towards something you see too clearly, because if you saw exactly what it was, you'd have enough sense not to chase it. So you stand there at the shoreline of decision. Maybe you are more desperate to get away than to go anywhere,

or more eager to find someplace new than to leave the place you know, but you need both impulses or else you're in trouble. If all you've got is a going away, you might end up lost since the only thing on your mind is running. And if all you've got is a going to, you might end up sad because what you find is rarely as good as you thought it would be, unless it's different from what you imagined. So it helps to remember how awful the thing was that you left. It's a simple equation, really. And the stranger the journey, the better the math works. Just plug in what you were trying to get to and multiply it

by what you were trying to get away from. And you'll understand a hell of a lot more precisely why you did what you did. At least this works for me. I read that because in the moment of decision, at least for me of going to Yale, I say I'd paid my dues on the outskirts of the world. My whole childhood, especially once my parents sort of left, was basically trying to prove to people that I was worth their time, trying to be worthy of a place to live, trying to be worthy of some dinner. I mean, you know, there were some times I lived so many places I couldn't even tell you where I was, you know, and all of it was conditional. I still, to this day, don't believe and I don't understand the concept of unconditional love. I don't know that I've ever experienced it. And then my mother returned and I hated her. And I wanted to get away from all my troubles. I was going to take on

nice troubles, new troubles, you know, like curing disease and being president and all this other stuff. So I was getting away from that. My going to was a kind of representative going to. We had signing day in Texas and there was an old groundskeeper at the stadium that we had this event. And he came up to me and he was crying and he said, go all the way, son, go all the way. these, here was this community of poor black people, and they were sending this kid on this journey, not just for himself, but for them. And if he made it all the way, then they, in some small way, would make it all the way. And that meant a lot to me at that time. But that changed. Well, I wouldn't say it changed. I'd say it was a dead end.

Fair enough. Fair enough. You know, that kind of gets to why I wrote this book. You know, I had lived myself into a dead end. And so I tried to write my way out. You know, I had achieved everything a kid is supposed to achieve in this society. I had gone, quote unquote, all the way. I had run away from all my troubles. I had tried to represent for my people and make good. But I was really cracked up.

I mean, I wouldn't say necessarily I was having a nervous breakdown just because I was never diagnosed. But I wasn't too far off, and I was awful sad either way. And a lot of my friends were cracked up, and obviously the world was cracked up too. So I set out with this book just to trace the cracks. My own self. Before I finished, one of my friends who I had helped recruit to Yale, who had gone on a very similar representative journey from St. Louis. So one of these Horatio Alger things. He committed suicide.

He came to me in a dream a few months later, and he said, you know, Casey, we did a lot of things that we wouldn't advise anybody we love to do. So my job with this book became to make plain those things, to make clear that the ways in which we're taught to live in this society, not just those who don't quote unquote make it, but even and especially those who are seen to have made it. Many of those ways are actually killing us. And I wanted to try to imagine what it would look like to live for real, you know, to be whole and to be free and to be a better person, to be a better brother, better lover, to know God for real. This really is an intervention in the way we live today,

part of which is an intervention about this sort of delusional American dream, which is costing so many lives, not just those who don't achieve it because the structures are not designed for many people to achieve it, but even and especially those who do, quote unquote, achieve it. How do we account for the cost of this American dream that is prescribed to so many people at the cost of themselves. I should say also, because that sounded very depressing, that it's a very funny book. And I have so much joy. I really do. No, seriously. No, seriously. Gosh. And, you know, there is so, so, so much joy in this book and in my life. But there is sadness and hopefully the full range of human emotions, something that I can embrace. I mean, but let's talk about that, right?

Because so if you, how do you go from that place where you were to a place where you're either, you're creating so much joy and so much happiness and so much connection, or is it that you're actually going from that place to now create it? Or are you going from the place you were to a process of stripping away and seeing that part that's already there? Yeah, a friend of mine described it this way, and I like it. It's a bit like being in the grocery store, and you've got your basket. And the question is, where are you going to put in your basket,

and where are you going to take out of your basket? I was running a very successful, quote-unquote, nonprofit at the time that I started this book, and I put it out of business. And I left New York, and I went and rented a house in Austin where I knew hardly nobody. And I sat by myself and I stopped checking email before I meditated. And I started reading the Gospels and I started praying and I stopped talking to all my friends who didn't feed, who didn't nourish my soul. And I stopped trying to, you know, I started turning down opportunities to speak places because I didn't feel like they actually were good for me.

So every day, the muscle I'm trying to build is the muscle of discipline, of taking the wrong stuff out of my basket and putting the right stuff in my basket. And that's very, very, very, very, very practical. It's very practical. You know, when we were, you were plugging these microphones in, you know, I was trying to decide whether I was going to read sections of this book or whether i was going to read sections of this book or whether i was going to pray to prepare i decided to pray who knows whether it'll be worth the damn but but you see what i'm saying it can't hurt right yeah yeah man so, people try to criticize this work, what I'm saying by saying, oh, well, you don't have any solutions. You don't have any alternatives. Actually, that's not true at all.

I have a line at the end of the book that says, I have a radio. It only plays two stations, life and death. I turn the death off now that I know the sound, the diddy bop of death. I sit in silence if I have to. It's not complicated, but it is hard. And every day I am trying to make the very material and hard decisions to turn the death off, turn the anxiety about the book awards, turn the anxiety about the reviews, turn the anxiety about the book sales, turn the anxiety about the book awards. Turn the anxiety about the reviews. Turn the anxiety about the book sales. Turn the anxiety about, oh my God, I'm not at this event, that event.

Turn all of that off and turn the life on. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. And turning on that voice that actually asks of yourself, why am I here?

Who am I? What matters genuinely to me? And how can I live that into every day to a certain extent? Yeah, yeah. And being in touch with how you actually feel. You know, the way I write through a sexual awakening in this book is so specific. I write it when I was 13. D'Angelo came out with a video for his second single from his second album.

The video was untitled, How Does It Feel? And he's standing there in the video alone, and it seems like he's butt naked. And I write the first sort of explicit grappling with sexuality in this book is not, oh, hey, I woke up the morning of November 7th, 2000, blah, blah, blah, and realized I was a homosexual. I mean, who the hell lives like that? It was, holy shit, this video came on and something happened. And just so happens, very fittingly, the refrain in the song is, how does it feel? Man, you know when you're miserable. You know when that relationship is killing you. You know when that job, when you get up every morning. I was working at McKinsey a few summers ago, many summers ago when I was in business school. And I was so miserable. I mean, I would wake up and we were staying in the St. Regis Hotel. I mean, you know a job is bad when you're miserable staying in St. Regis. And I'd get up and I said, oh God, I can't get through this meeting. I'd get these little wino bottles of vodka, you know, and go in the bathroom where we were working. And I'd drink that vodka, man. And I'd go in those meetings

half drunk just to get through it. And I said, holy shit, man, this ain't living. You see what I'm saying? You know, you know. You know more than you do about how you feel. So some of it is making it a lot less sort of intellectual, philosophical. You know what I mean? My mother called me. This is going to what you were saying about external expectations. It's also disconnecting from external measures of self-worth. My mother called a few weeks years, and I've never met a single faggot, starting with myself, who survived without finding another place, real or imagined, to call home, which is very true as I see it. So my mother calls, and she says, hey, I saw your C-SPAN interview, and I keep up with you. And I just have to tell you, you are a man. You're not a faggot.

You're not a punk. And let me tell you what the difference is. You are prominent. You speak well. You dress well. You're educated. People like you. You're not a vagabond on the street.

You don't walk around doing your hands like that. You're an upstanding person who just happens to be gay. Don't put yourself over there when you're over here. I was so, after I got over, you know, sort of the shock and rage, I was very grateful for my mother's call because it's very rare that you get that kind of material in my line of work. It's very rare. And it was so important because that is the essence of the intervention I'm trying to make here. You see, what she was saying in so many words was that, hey, I accept you on condition. As long as you're an upstanding person, that's one thing. Yeah, you sleep with whoever you want to. But as soon as you're a vagabond in the street, you're walking around like prison and stuff. I mean, once you turn into a faggot,

that's not even, that's just a part. We can't do that, you see. And it was interesting because I haven't always been prominent. I'm not prominent now. I haven't always been educated. I haven't always, didn't always speak well, dress well. I was a very effeminate little kid, you know, and it's funny. I never got this talk then, you see. And so many young people don't get that talk. And more importantly, her way of seeing me and seeing the world and seeing this dichotomy is in and of itself an act of violence. It's an act of violence to some degree on me in that it says, hey, cut all the pieces of yourself that I don't like out.

And I like the rest of it a lot. But it also is, more importantly perhaps, an act of violence against all those kids who don't fit her standard of what an upstanding person is. It is an act of violence that leads to the rates of murder against transgender'm suggesting in this book for the way we live in this society. And hopefully that comes through. Yeah, which brings us to a certain extent full circle to your revolution or quote the revolution, the need for change, which is and will be hard. And it's got to start on the inside, man. Yeah. Tell me more about that. As I say, I put this organization out of business.

MBAs Across America started. It was kind of like a Peace Corps for the MBAs. Three classmates and I, my first year at Harvard Business School, decided to drive across the country and see what was happening and go to places like Detroit, New Orleans, rural Montana. Try to see if we can use our skills to make a difference. It worked. We were changed. We decided to turn it into a larger thing.

It was very successful. We got a lot of donors, and that's where my TED Talk came from. So when we decided to put out a business, people were really enraged at me, especially a lot of our donors. And I met with one of them for dinner when I was writing this book. And he said, hey, man, this is all cute and stuff, but like I invested in you because you're supposed to be a leader solving the big problems the country faces. I mean, what is this whole book stuff? And you're focusing on yourself and all this other crap? I mean, like, you got to get back out there. And I said, well, that's strange.

I think I am out there, actually. What does it matter if I can build a successful nonprofit and I can't help my mother or I can't love my partner or I can't be there for my friend, or I have to drink half a bottle of wine to go to sleep at night, or I feel that I don't deserve God or deserve the conception of God that has been fed to me, or I feel that I have to accept all of these conditions for 30 years just to match somebody's vision of success. What does it matter that I can solve these political problems if I'm experiencing a personal death? I mean, it's just kind of strange to me. So what I'm saying when I say that all of this stuff has to happen on the inside, that's not saying it has to happen at the expense of our political commitments. We are always, everything we do, especially in a time

like this is political. But you can go off and pass universal healthcare in two or three or four months. Being a whole free person takes a hell of a lot more work and a longer time. So yeah, I think this book, you know, I was at Lehman Brothers in 2008. I was in D.C. in the early years of the Obama administration. I spent three years driving across the country trying to solve these big problems. You know, I've had dinner with George Bush. I opened for Barack Obama at South by Southwest. You know, I was in a Stasi prison in Berlin, you know, a few years ago. I've seen America from the very bottom to the very top. And there is a great part of this book that is a report back on how this country actually works and a political history and all that other stuff that's in there, but the book goes beyond that and hopefully gets to the core of the reality that

aside from and above and enmeshed in this political experience is the experience of living a life. And I hope I have probably more to say about that than who should be president in 2020. We might not have a country in 2020, but this is the other thing. This is what's so interesting. I tend to believe that we're sort of in the twilight of the like, say, Cicero or whatever, you know, sitting toward the end of the Republic, worried about this great experiment that, you know, they've given their lives to that's about to end. And I got real, I was like, dang, that really sucks, man, you know, to be sitting at the end of a very important empire. And then I thought, I said, but wait a minute. The day after the Roman Empire fell, there were still people living. There were still Roman people trying to figure out how to live. I'm not convinced that America's

going to survive a hell of a lot longer in its current form. I have mixed emotions about that. I am convinced that people are still going to be living and still have to figure out a way to do that successfully, regardless of what happens at the political level. So that's sort of the weight that I give to that stuff. Yeah. No, I hear you. We are in a moment on many levels, many levels. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle too.

So as we hang out in here at Good Life Project, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life for us to come full circle too so as we hang out in here good life project if i offer out the phrase to live a good life what comes up for you joy peace There's a life that is well, that is grounded in something deep inside and deep above, and that is bearing fruit that spreads that wellness to other people. That fruit could be a book. That fruit could be a podcast. That fruit could be a clean hallway that you sweep as the school janitor. If you are well, your fruits will be well. And I think that's the good life. Thank you. Thank you.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me andman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what's the difference between me and you you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk