Soul Boom - Ezra Klein: Jesus Was Weaponized for World War

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

SPONSORS!👇 🛒 NOCD 👉 https://nocd.org 🛒 Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code SOULBOOM at https://cowboycolostrum.com/soulboom 🛒 Taking care of your health just got easier – start here with Zocdoc: https://zocdoc.com/SOULBOOM #sponsored 🙏 Fetzer 👉 https://fetzer.org 🛒 Quince 👉 https://quince.com/soulboom NYT columnist Ezra Klein joins Rainn Wilson to explore politics as a spiritual practice, OCD & meditation and why modern life is making us anxious. The New York Times podcaster also confronts Christian hypocrisy and animal suffering. MERCH OUT NOW! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://soulboom.com/store⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for our newsletter! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://soulboom.substack.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW US! Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://instagram.com/soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tiktok.com/@soulboom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Executive Produced by: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kartik Chainani⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Wayfair, every style, every home. Whenever I watch these attacks, I think you all would have hated Jesus Christ. The most. Mambi, Pambi, woozy. The poor and the lepers are sick and sad. Grow up hair, Jesus. Just watch. a bunch of people whose politics is rooted in their Christianity treat vulnerability as weakness.

Whatever you think about the way nations should be constructed and what stories permit cooperation and how we would do world governance, politics is a spiritual practice. This is probably the least popular thing I say on the podcast today. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. A quick thanks to our sponsors, NoCD, Cowboy Colostrum, Zokdoch, Fetzer, and Quince.

Links and promo codes on screen and in the description. Now enjoy the show. Ezra Klein, welcome to Soul Boom. Thank you. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled is the understatement of the century. I am the biggest fanboy of you as a podcaster for years since the get-go. I'm talking about like the Sam Harris debate like 10 years ago.

I just love what you do. I love the way you will talk about politics or culture, spirituality, and meditation is a passion of yours, mental health and kind of big ideas. I just think you're the OG. Oh, right. And you're like the OG, the OG An Anobie, who won the Nick game last night in the last 1.2.8 seconds. Thank you, OG, Ananovi, if you happen to be watching this podcast. Imagine how that must feel. And he's so chill and so mellow. And they asked him at the

press conference, they're like, oh, gee, you know, you're the hero, you blocked the shot, and then you made the bathroom. And he's like, yeah, I'm happy. We're all very happy. And they were like, and then he goes, and he smiled. And he's, he's, he's a hero, man. I mean, it was, it was an insane game last night. Never paid for a drink in this town again. Never, never. He's going to literally have a statue of himself in front of Madison Square Garden. They're already raising money for it. They're literally raising. Yeah, because he tipped it in and won the game. It was nuts. And you're the OG, OG Ananovi of podcasting. In fact, I wanted to start this podcast by saying you're a far better podcaster than I am. So if you were hosting the Soul Boom podcast and you were interviewing Ezra Klein, what would you ask him? Oh, you can't do that. This is, that's lazy, man. You got to, you got to do your job here. I'm not letting you off like that.

I wanted to start about talking about anxiety. And I love the way that I've listened to your Mark Epstein, your Stephen Batchelor, your Pema Chodron. We were just talking about before I love, I've loved her work when things fall apart. I read like 20 years ago. And I was just reading the one on uncertainty that came out. And I just love her work so much. And you've talked about your own battle and journey with anxiety.

And why are we so anxious today? Ooh, that's such a good question. I don't think our nervous systems are built for modernity. I think we have the nervous systems of an animal. And we have created a world for a highly conceptual semi-machine. And I think, look, it's not that the world, world that the human being evolved in was a less frightening world. You died younger. Everybody you knew could be eaten. Every time I read any book about another period, it's the rapidity in which people

will lose their whole family to infection. It'll just like happen in a page. Yeah. And infant mortality. I mean, for most of human history, half of people died before 13, a quarter before. were one. Right? That whenever people get primitivist, whenever they get to, we need to return to our stodic about the caveman. Yeah. You don't want to go there. There's no amount of money you could pay me to live before antibiotics. There's no like you'd be the king. No, king dies from a scratch on the toe. Right. So, and the kings have dysentery too, right? You don't want it. It is worse for everybody to die from infection than for what we usually have here. We're just not built for this. We're not built for the amount of information we have coming into us at all times. We're not built for

globe-spanning media organizations, including mine telling us the worst thing in the world at all times. We're not built in the algorithmic and social media age to have this bunch of feedback on ourselves or hear the most intense things anyone anywhere has said or done at every moment. We don't eat in a way that makes sense. There's no natural dark. Wow. The idea that we would feel normal in the conditions in which we live. Would be such a reach. Would be such a reach.

That doesn't make now bad, but I think it is a good baseline for thinking about you often feel weird because this is fucking weird. Right. There's no antecedent for it in human history. And we are in a period of incredibly just rapid change. Again, you read things. And I don't want to understand. day, the reality that the past had changed in transformation, but the rapidity of technological change in our era is like nothing that has happened.

I didn't leave New York that long ago, and I left New York in the era when AOL was sending compact disks to your mail address to urge you to get AOL.com. And that was 20 some years ago. In that amount of time, now people are marrying their AI chatbots. We and bless them. But the other thing that I was just thinking about while you were saying that, it was we train our brains to work really differently. I mean, from a young age, literacy retrains the mind. We are not born symbolic and conceptual thinkers. We are trained into that.

There is a great book by Walter Ong called Orality and Literacy that people sometimes talk about now and it's all about this. That, you know, oral culture is very different. It's built on memory. it is when you there were studies done and I don't know how much I trust these but they were sort of in areas of Eastern Europe that literacy was spreading in and so they would sort of bring in people who were pre-literate and people became literate and the people became literate would answer questions very differently they would categorize things very differently they're much more conceptual much less practical and you know for those of us and maybe this gets into things like

pema children and mark Epstein and stephen bachelor and meditation and but if you feel like you are living in your head, if you feel, at least I will say I often feel, like it is hard for me to turn my thinking off or down. I think a space maybe of compassion or at least understanding is recognizing that society spent a lot of time and many of us individuals spent a lot of time training our minds to hyper-specialize in a certain kind of thinking. that you did not need as much if you were like living in a forest. You know, we know our memory is worse. We know our sense of direction is crap, right?

Like you dissolve or at least degrade many functions of the mind to think the way we do, to hold abstract concepts the way we do. And of course there's going to be strange, even torturous byproducts of that. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. And when you're speaking about geography, I, It's so true. When I was a kid and was learning to drive before the advent of smartphones, I knew how to get everywhere. Like I was a delivery truck driver from Ballard Marine Supply and

hardware in Seattle. And I could get anywhere in Seattle. I just told me where to go. And I knew which bridge to take and which exit. And now I couldn't function there without Google Maps on my dashboard as we've taken that mode of thinking out of our brains and put it into our. And some people think that the smartphone is essentially like an extra brain that lives outside of our body, but what damages it doing to our interior brain? One of the things I loved in your interview with Yuval Noah Hariri was his wonderful analogy about snakes and that our caveman ancestors, you know, mostly they were hunting, mostly they were gathering, mostly they were telling stories, drying fruits and stuff.

Occasionally there's a snake. Occasionally there's a snake that pops out that, you know, triggers that amygdala, instinctual fear and anxiety impulse. And there's always a low level of anxiety. Like, oh, there might be a snake. But that was a rare thing. And what he was talking about is so similar to what, how you're positing it, which is, you know, not just our phones, but our drives into a Trader Joe's parking lot and trying to get a parking spot.

but the constant alerts and the wars and the ongoing threat of climate and whatnot that our amygdalas are lit up like a Christmas tree. Robert Sapolsky, who's this behavioral neuroscientist, I think it is, at Stanford. You would love having him on the show. He's like a true genius polymath kind of figure. But I did a show with him back in the box days about his book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Not as best known book, as best known is probably behaved and he did one more recently about free will or the absence of it.

But why zebras don't get ulcers is about stress. And his basic argument is that, and this is a fairly, I think, common argument, is that for most forms of stress, there's a cycle that completes. You see a snake that you run. And so, like, there was a surge of activity and various hormones and chemicals, adrenaline. then you do something. And your body works it off. And your body works it off. And that is not how chronic stress works.

It is not how worrying about bills works. That is not how thinking about your relationship with your mom works. That is not how marital stress works, right? And so we end up in this space of intense chronic stress. Now, look, I always want to be a little careful. We weren't cavemen. And maybe cavemen worried all the time about would there be enough food that way. Yeah.

You know, every time you hear these just so evil bio stories, it's always a snake, a saber-toothed tiger, human beings die from infection. Right. That is the main thing that kills us, right? And that killed us historically, if my understanding is correct. And so was it the case that we only ever worried about a big animal? Because the world was full of drought and the world was full of all kinds of terrors. And, you know, they had much a, even though their mental, I don't love these metaphors, hardworms, machinery, their minds were trained differently than ours. They were the same power as ours. And so I'm

sure they worried about the spectrum of things. I always think we collapse the complexity of our forebears existence down to like human and bear. Right. And there was more going on for them than bears. Right. So, hey, folks, if you've listened to the show recently, you know that I recently got diagnosed with OCD. And one thing I've noticed when I tell people that is they generally think it's no big deal, just some, I don't know, over-enthusiasm for color-coding my closet or being a neat freak. Thankfully, no CD is helping clear up what OCD actually is. For me, it can feel like my mind is latching onto a frightening thought and demanding absolute certainty about what it means. But there is real hope. OCD needs ERP or exposure and response prevention, which is proven to be the most effective

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your health matters and taking care of yourself, it shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with Zockdoc. Head to Zockdoch.com slash soul boom to get started and check that appointment off of your to-do list. That's ZOC, do-com slash soul boom. I recently have been dealing with OCD and it really just came on over this last year. I've always had what was diagnosed as a generalized anxiety disorder. I'm an active meditator, as are you. Anxiety, you know, according to the research, and there's a wonderful author named Dr. Judd Brewer. Do you know him? Yeah. Unwinding Anxiety is a great book, and he has an app that has, you know, data-backed science about how anxiety works in the best way to literally unravel it, not conquer it, not overcome it, not suppress it, et cetera.

I've gotten a lot out of that, but fear plus uncertainty creates anxiety. And I love that definition, fear plus uncertainty. And OCD is something that thrives in uncertainty. And people really must understand OCD. And it's often painted in TV shows like Monk is a cute little, quirky little fun thing that people do. And they wash their hands a lot. And they're kind of fastidious. And people, you know, they throw that phrase around all the time, like, oh, I've got

OCD, I need to make sure my bathroom is really clean all the time. And it's like, that's, that's really not what it is. It's a mental trap. It creates a great deal of suffering and angst. And no one can see it, especially the kinds of OCD, which are most of them, which are called internal OCD, or pure OCD, where it's going on inside your brain, rumination, thought loops, internal reassurances, internal rituals that aren't necessarily visible to the outside eye. And it's a trap of the mind and it's totally debilitating and at the same time you can function. In fact, I was doing some podcasts a few months ago when it was really flaring up bad and I was able to kind of like ask my questions and do my research and have an interact. And in my head, thoughts are looping and ruminating.

It's a really peculiar and grotesque kind of torture. You talked about not physically processing stress. A gazelle gets attacked and almost killed by a line but escapes or they will oftentimes lay down and play dead. And it's a stress response and they'll be even just shaking on the ground and then they'll film them. And then a minute or two later they'll hop up and they're happy as a clam. But their nervous system had to shake it out and process.

it out. So mindfulness, meditation, these were incredibly helpful to me, and I'm trending in the right direction, plus some medications. So first, I'm really sorry you're struggling with that. Thanks. Did you have that when you were a kid or no? I've had some aspects of it that as I have been unraveling this, as I've been unwinding this anxiety, I've learned a lot of it. I've learned a like, oh, wow, I did that a lot as a kid, didn't I? I did that. I had a fairly traumatic childhood home. It was, I mean, I wasn't like chained to a radiator or anything like that, but I, you know, I had, it was, it was a difficult, difficult time and a pretty unhappy home, but I've realized, looking back on the course of my life, times in which I had OCD adjacent kind of thinking that

kind of dominated my life cycle. And it's attached to generalized anxiety disorder. It's just a different kind of version. Addiction is a different kind of version in a way of OCD. So I have OCD as well. I didn't know that. It was quite bad when I was a kid. Oh, wow.

And the way it would manifest for me was a feeling of dread that I could only alleviate by repeating things in force. In fours. Started around when my uncle died, who is the first person, my great uncle, grand uncle, who I knew who I was close with who had died. And for a long time and still as a habitual pattern in my brain, though, you know, less so, when I would say see the number, which was his age when he died, 66, I would have to go, no 66, no 66, no, you know, AIDS, we died of age.

AIDS, no AIDS, no AIDS, no AIDS, no AIDS, death, cancer, anything like that, vomit, vomit, vomit, no vomit, no vomit. Four times. Four times. I mean, anybody who's had this, it takes up a lot of your mental energy. My mind is very ruminative now. I don't do as much of the, I used to call this bedding. I don't know why I called it betting, but I called those fours betting.

There's a time, and I remember this period, crew as a kid, I don't know what started it and I don't really know how I did it. And it's, I don't say this as it cured me because I still think I have some of these same mental pulses at the very least. But I remember like, I'm just going to stop. And it, maybe this is like my first actual, uh, experience of mindfulness. Because what I realized, which I, I didn't quite know was that what was happening was there was a trigger. Yep. seeing the word, something like that.

Then there was a feeling. And the feeling, as I said, the way I've described the feeling is dread. And then there was an effort to make the feeling go away. And what I did as a kid, it's often called a ritual. Ritual, yeah. Was I just stopped answering the feeling.

And over time, it just became less intense. But it was scary because it feels like if I don't do this, something is going to happen. Right. If I, like you're calling down bad luck. And even now I have a lot of that thinking pattern. And maybe this shifts a bit into where my mindfulness practices is. I started, I mean, I had meditated on and off, not very seriously, since college.

And then I started Vox, which was a news organization I co-founded, in 2014-ish. And the stress in that period was so intense and my inability to stop thinking about everything that was going wrong or could go wrong that I really started meditating. But for a very long time, what I was trying to do with meditation was changed the way I was feeling.

I wanted to sit down and when I got up to not feel stress anymore. You wanted to feel better. I wanted to reduce anxiety through an action. A thing I've been in a way I'm very grateful for going through over the last year that has been a space of a lot of growth has been that my relationship to a lot of these feelings has shifted. And it's not that I don't want to feel differently when I meditate, but I think I understand in a way I didn't before that what I am at. actually trying to do is accept the way I'm feeling when I meditate. And the word, like I really, I think meditation, I think all these things, spirituality, any of them, the words don't work.

Until the experience lives in the body, the words don't really carry it. I read Pemma Trojan for a long time. And it was only a series of experiences over the last year that made me realize what it was she was seeing. Right. Because I get about allowing. something, accepting, abiding, loving, welcoming your anxiety, etc. All of this, this terminology is used. Yeah. And so you think, okay, like surrender, let go, accept. What does accept me? What does it feel like to accept an emotion? What does it feel like to accept dread? And I'm not sure I can tell you, even now. And we could talk about non-meditative experiences I've had around this. It has been a pretty big, internal project with me for me to not try to change the feeling, to try to be fully there

with a feeling. Now, I got criticism on the Pama Chorchardin episode where people thought what I was saying that my own spiritual work or meditative work was actually a kind of a hidden politics if we should just sit with things that are negative, which is not what I believe. I was surprised given how many of my episodes are about changing the world. the nature of how all of our systems work to get that criticism. But what I've learned over time is that the space of possible action for me is much wider if I can sit with the way I'm feeling. But if I'm highly reactive to the way I'm feeling and I just don't want to feel that way,

there are places I can't go because I can't bear feeling that way. I had a, oh, fuck it. I had a psychedelic experience at one point, which I won't go. into its deep details, but I was so, I was so profoundly uncomfortable, so nauseous, so overwhelmed. And at some point it became clear to me that like this was the teaching, that this was not the problem, this was the gift, and that what that experience was going to be was just sitting with how uncomfortable I was and trying to self-sue as best I could, but not trying to get away from it for what was a fairly long time.

And learning, like, again, in a sort of embodied way, that you could do that, that you could even in a weird way, be grateful for the difficulty of it because you were, I was deepening my ability to be with emotions that I would have run from, right, or feelings that I would have run from. And by not running from them, I could go through that and then new things could open up for me. But this has been true in my personal life. It's been true in politics for me, which is all to say that I think one of the lessons of mindfulness for me now is that, and this came from Will Kavidsin, who's a meditation teacher I work

with and who's amazing. But he wants it to me, anything you cannot bring into awareness is what you're going to be reacting to. And so the things we don't really realize we're feeling or don't give ourselves time to feel, they drive our reactions very, very strongly. And then you start doing these rituals in your head. And then you start, you know, acting in a certain way with your partner or not being honest or whatever it is because you're afraid of this thing, you're feeling you just wanted to stop. Whereas if you could sit with it, then you can actually sit and think about how you want to respond and respond more skillfully. Yeah. It's interesting. You say that too because that's another aspect of OCD behaviors is you avoid what is going to cause

the triggers. You went back to like triggers and responses and rituals. And oftentimes someone like you as a kid, maybe you decide I'm not going to go outside because if I go outside, I might see a sign that mentions death or has the number six six on it or something like that. So a lot of OCD people become hermits or if they have even a fear of flying they have weighed flying and then they spend the rest of their lives like john madden never flying um really john madden didn't fly yeah yeah he took his he took his bus everywhere he had the insane fear of flying. He had the Madden bus. And if he had to go from the Seahawks to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a week, he would drive the Madden bus across the country. Yeah, he was kind of famous for that. But what I learned through this process, which was strange that it hit me at age 59, thanks, brain, is feeling something that's really uncomfortable. So I would have a lot of feelings of fear and anxiety,

dread, also guilt, and things I just really, really didn't want to feel. And so my brain and my whole wiring was doing everything it could to not feel those feelings. And I would do internal reassurance. If I was afraid about something in the future, oh shit, this is going to happen. I would reassure myself just in my brain, just in my, how we do. People do this. It's okay. I would say like it's not that bad. Don't worry. It's going to be fine. You'll do this, this, and this.

And it's all going to just work out fine. And then that would be great for five minutes, 10 minutes, 50 minutes, three hours, and then it would be back again. What I learned is that one of the things people with OCD will do a lot is seek external reassurance from other people to kind of say, hey, I'm afraid I left the burner on and I need to check on it. I need to knock on the door three times or whatever. And you run that by someone like, don't worry, the burner's not on. The burner's not on. Oh, good. Okay, I feel better.

15 minutes later, I'm sure the burner's on. I'm sure that it actually exacerbates the loop. It actually exacerbates and feeds the feedback loop and makes things worse. So I'll just finish up by saying that what I learned similarly to you, I wasn't able to kind of go just stop. but the transition phase that I'm in right now is a fear will come up of the future or shame or guilt or remorse about the past. And instead of it, my role is to not then go, it's okay, Rain.

It's okay. You're going to be fine. To just be like, yeah, maybe that was a bad thing that I did. Maybe that was wrong. And oh, yeah, maybe things will turn out that way in the future. And to sit with, and I like that Pema, Chodra, said, befriend, that to befriend that anxiety is torture. It's torture.

Yeah, it fucking sucks. It sucks to feel those emotions. There's a reason we don't like to feel those emotions. And sometimes they would just take over me and they'd sit inside of me for an hour. It's like my, because what happens in the brain, I'm sure you know this, Ezra, is your, your brain gets wired in the amygdala, the cerebral, not the cerebral cortex, but the prefrontal Corptax, but down in the ACC, the amygdala, and there's some other part, I don't remember all the names, that these thoughts or the number 6-6 or the word AIDS or something like that is like

you're in danger. It is the same kind of danger as if you are getting attacked by a snake or a saber-toothed tiger. Your brain is not able to differentiate for young Ezra seeing 6-6 is the same as you stumbling upon a rattlesnake. Your brain treats it the same. But if you allow yourself to have those uncomfortable feelings, then your brain settles down. Literally, the physiology of your brain changes. It moves more into your prefrontal cortex, becomes more reasonable. And then your brain goes, oh, it's just an uncomfortable emotion. Oh, that's all that's happening.

You're just feeling an uncomfortable emotion. So it's training oneself to feel uncomfortable emotions, and it literally changes the chemistry and the electrical wiring of your brain. I, when I was a kid and the same period in which I was very, very OCD, I had a terrible fear of throwing up. There's a word for that I always forget. Yeah, there's a phobia around. Yeah, terrible fear of vomiting. And I used to ask my parents every night to promise me that I wouldn't throw up.

Reassurance. And they did for a while until a child psychologist told them they had to stop. Yeah. And I remember the day that he told my mom she had to stop when my dad, got home. Like I ran out to him in hysterics and he didn't know what had happened yet. I was like, give me, I need my promise. I need my promise. Like I have such like compassion for that kid. But you want that validation and you can't really have it. Uncertainty. And this I think is one of the really hard things. I've thought about, you know, what should, what would I say to my kids or

something, right? And what do I say to myself now? Yeah. And often it's like you might throw up. I mean, I don't have that particular fear now. Yeah. But in the places where I am looking for that validation, one of the hard, and I do, I look for validation for my wife, from my friends, right, tell me I'm right in something or, you know, I go to, you know, we look for reassurance so often, and I'm not saying, I'm not saying at all. Yeah, some reassurance is unhealthy. Yeah, you should get some reassurance. But yeah, sometimes, like the answer is, yeah, you might, that might, that might happened that would be really scary if that happened yeah yeah uh you know all the people who talk about the sort of parenting of the self i think there's truth to that but i do think part of

wisdom here is being able to sense what feelings are happening in the body that your brain isn't trying to make sense up to what you were just saying about is it in motion is it a rattle snake well what is it really it's like a tightening in the chest it's a heat in the upper body. It's a buzzing in the arms. And it's taken me a long time to take seriously my body. Like I'm a person who lives in my mind and the need to kind of continuously be sensitively aware of what it is actually feeling that my mind is trying to interpret.

Well, what you're talking about right there is something that Dr. Judd Brewer posits is central to the fight against anxiety, which is curiosity. Because if you are feeling a lot of anxiety, fear of the future, anxiety again, being fear plus uncertainty, when you get curious about it, which is what you did, like, oh, there you are anxiety. How are you affecting me? Oh, I'm tightening in the chest. I feel a tingling in my hands. I feel, how are you working in the body?

Why did you show up right now? You're trying to protect me, aren't you? Where did you come from? I wonder what triggered you. Hi, what's going on with you? Just curiosity. It moves it from the basal ganglia. That's what I was trying to remember.

And the amygdala up into the prefrontal cortex. Curiosity simply moves that anxiety from a primal limbic fear state into a more cerebral cognizance. And then you bring in what Pema and all the monks and all the mindfulness teachers and practitioners say, which is just, compassion and kindness to yourself. Like kindness, like you were able to show yourself as a little boy. It was such a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that. And that I've been seeking to bring to myself over this last year, which is like you've

been through a lot, you've got a lot on your plate. You've had a very interesting and peculiar 59 years on this planet. And so, you know, be good. good to yourself. And that's different than reassurance. It's like self-love, self-compassion is a little bit different than seeking that reassurance. There's also a way of recognizing that the direction can be reversed, right? You were saying a minute ago, oh, what is anxiety doing, right? But it can also be what the brain trying to make sense of things and making sense of them wrongly. So I have two kids. And people told me I would love my kids. I think the thing that

is really underplayed is how interesting it is to watch consciousness develop in front of you. What like a genuine intellectual adventure having children is, I think, is really, is undersold to me. But you are, you are watching consciousness and the mind develop. And I think the thing, of everything that I saw from like the development of language to to everything happening for them now that I think about the most is there's an extended period where their mind is trying to give a story to what they're feeling and it's not good at doing so yet. And so you continuously see them misattribute what's going on. So parents are always like, oh, my kids being a total nightmare, it's tired.

He's hungry, right? They know, right? They know that it's not about the toy. They know it's not about the fact that you're watching Bluey instead of watching, you know, Blaze the Monster Machines, right? The reason your kid is blowing up over something small is that they're tired. They're hungry. They're not feeling good.

my wife and I was talked about how one of the central symptoms of a cold in kids, but you often, the first symptom is you're being a huge asshole. Yeah, yeah. But that's not like, they're not like, I'm being a huge asshole because I'm having a cold, right? Something is going on in their body. And then they're mad. And so I remember, you know, my older son, he was young. And he was really upset.

And I'm like, what's going on? tell me and he's like so and so so bit me and so and so bit him seven weeks ago but when he was bit because he was bit kind of badly we had really like surrounded him with like validation that that was a bad thing that had happened and so now that he was feeling bad he was reaching for that thing that he knew justified feeling as bad as he was feeling that wasn't what was happening I forget what was happening now but I knew what it was at the time and I saw this with kids over and over and over again. And I am not saying that the ways our minds interpret the way we are feeling is never right. I am saying that watching a human being get better and better at closing the seams on what

they are doing makes me realize I am just really good at it. And being really good at something is not the same as always being right. Yeah. And so oftentimes what is happening is actually first in the body. What is happening is first in the hunger. My best friend and I sometimes trade back and forth this old tweet that says I only got three hours of sleep. And coincidentally, everybody's being a huge asshole today. Like the way you will interpret everything, it just changes so much. I mean, the basic ones are sleep. But, you know, stress with your parents, right? It's, I think it is important to sometimes be able to tell the story. And I think it's also important to know that the mind is a storytelling machine.

And that you are always your own best mark. You are always going to be the first one to believe what it is your thinking. And it's worth being, I think it's worth being careful of that. It's funny. The guest I interviewed earlier, Dr. Sheffali, who was talking about conscious parenting. She was saying that same thing about how the mind tells stories. And we are not the victims of circumstances. We are the victims of the stories that we tell about the circumstances.

and she was using the example I thought was wonderful about a wedding that's been unplanned for six months and on the wedding day, it starts to pouring rain out of nowhere. One story is like everything is ruined, my makeup is running, the dresses don't work, it's muddy, this is terrible, we're going to have to eat under a tent, oh, the whole day is ruined, that's one story, or how do you shift it and someone else could tell an entirely different story of like, hey, we're freed from the constraints of what you have been planning. Let's take our shoes off and be barefoot in the mud. Let's just wear our t-shirts and get wet and celebrate in the rain. And this will be the most memorable wedding ever because we celebrated it in the pouring rain. Exact same physical circumstances

and two different stories told about it. I thought that was a wonderful analogy. Now, it's always, I think, very important here to say, and you can also be a victim of circumstance. Sure. When I was, For some reason we're just talking about childhood here. And I was thinking about when you were saying that I was, I believe, in first grade and a fifth grader, I didn't know, came up to me on the playground and just wordlessly kicked me as hard as he could in the balls. That was not just a story I was telling. I got kicked in the balls. Yeah. It sucked. And we all get kicked in the balls.

And parents die unexpectedly or someone gets cancer and a plane crash killed my friend's neighbors. Like terrible, terrible things are always just around the corner. And we can't reason those out with uncertainty. You might throw up and terrible things might happen. Yeah. So it's always to say that both like you do want to do your best to change structure and circumstance. And yeah, the stories we tell are very potent and powerful. And, you know, the first step to changing them at all is being aware of them and being aware of what is triggering them.

that sometimes just terrible, terrible things can happen that can have a positive implant. I had a dear friend of mine, Javier, and he was born with a congenital heart defect. He didn't ask for that. He just had a hole in his heart. He had a surgery when he was an infant. He had to have another surgery on his nine, another surgery on his 40, and he eventually died of heart disease at a tender age of like 52 or something like that. But that experience with his own mortality, growing up facing his own mortality, probably changed his life for the better and the richer.

And he was able to take that story and not live afraid of his heart, but live in a way where he was going to give back as much as possible. And he loved working with youth. And he ran nonprofits and he raised money for them. and he educated young people and inspired them. Never told people about his heart, but you could see it in his action. So even I do think, and I am very privileged, I'm very blessed, and a lot of wonderful things have happened to me

other than this fucking OCD, but I do think that most everything in some way can be reframed where we're not living as a victim to circumstance. And I even hate saying living as a victim because oftentimes that phrase is weaponized, I think. Oh, you're living as a victim like someone is fighting injustice, you know, from race or gender or class or something like that. It's like, oh, stop living as a victim. It's like, no, change circumstances, fight for justice and reframe your story in the best possible way. Yeah.

And to go back to something I was saying earlier that we were talking about earlier, part of the point of. having this attentiveness and being able to hold this totality of what you're actually feeling is to widen the number of responses you can have. That's beautiful. Is to widen the scope of action as large as it can possibly be. Because the, there is, I mean, people talk about this distinction between reacting and responding. And, you know, when my meditation practice is in a deeper period, which is not always, and I'm not a monk or enlightened or anything else, it's a little, it is like a couple milliseconds of buffer between me and my reactions. And that couple milliseconds of buffer is a space of choice.

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They did a study among meditators, and one of the things they found was that compassion was increased. It changes your brain to allow for more compassion to others. They were not expecting to find this. They were not expecting that sitting quietly, being present, breathing, mindful, accepting what is, allowing whatever feelings are there, focusing on your breath, whatever, quieting the mind, being still, that that would lead to compassion for others. And I still don't think that scientists understand or know exactly why that is, but I think it's tied into what you were saying. This will probably be the least popular thing I say on the podcast today. You're reading your own reviews too much. We stay away from the comments.

We spend a lot of time filtering out pain and suffering around us because to feel it is overwhelming. And, you know, the one version of it that I think about a lot, because it is a version that the maximum number of people I know who are ethical and things. think about what it means to be a good person participate in is the industrial meat economy. We know, like, we know for sure that the suffering inflicted in industrial animal raising, chickens, pigs, et cetera, it's on my mind because I'm writing a piece about an effort to overturn laws trying to treat pigs more humanely right now. Like, we know it's unimaginable, right? It's hundreds of millions of creatures, billions of creatures a year, living.

you know, often unable to turn around, right? These pigs that I'm writing about are in gestation crates were for years of their life, they cannot turn around. And I will say even listening to you saying that is, it's so hard to even hear that. Yeah, I went and watched a video from like the National Pork Council or something. It was like a pro-gestation crate propaganda video, but I was like, I should watch this because I should hear all these signs.

And even in their video, like looking at this beautifully lit, shed, farm full of these pigs in a space where they could not turn. In the California law that they're trying to overturn, what it says is that the pigs should be able to turn around and it should be able to lie down. And that if it can't lie down or turn around, it's inhumane. That we have to specify that holding a sensate animal for years in a situation where it cannot turn around or often lie down to say nothing of root. or being a herd or just express the behaviors it has as an animal.

But it's a lot to take that in. And but as you learn, I believe that compassion is a muscle you exercise and it's also a muscle that atrophies. And one reason I can imagine there being some connection with meditation is that it's a practice of allowing yourself to be with what is even if it's uncomfortable. Now, I've also known many meditators who are shitheads, right? There's no, you can spiritually bypass anything you want. Some of the biggest assholes you'll ever meet are people in yoga classes.

Yeah, I've met crappy vegetarians. Yeah. I have a hundred of my own failings, right? There's no, but I think it is worth, it is worth recognizing that the things we block ourselves from feeling, pretty of the things we know we're blocking ourselves from feeling and that's why I bring up animal welfare because we know. That's why. I've never met anybody and I'm vegetarian and in between kind of vegetarian and vegan

depending on when you catch me, but nobody's like, yeah, the factory farms are fine. They just don't want to let in what it would mean to accept how bad they really are because, you know, meat tastes good and so on. And so the enemy of compassion isn't cruelty. Cruelty is a much more specific thing. Cruelty is very active. The enemy of compassion is passivity. It is a not being with, a not doing anything, a letting the thought go by.

Compassion is a form of attention. It's interesting. Here's my least popular thing, okay, that I'm going to say, and I'm going to catch a lot of shit for this, and I don't care. There is an inordinate amount of funding in the nonprofit sector that goes to animal rescue and welfare. ASPCA, kitten rescue, puppy rescue, etc. And we're talking hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, I love puppies and I love kitties and I love the ASPCA. But so much focus goes into these kind of animal rescue nonprofits,

whereas so many of those people are, what did you say? Not indifference? You said passivity. are passive to the suffering of our species, which is human beings. Now, some people would say, well, all species are the same. A slug has the same rights, you know, as a Nobel laureate. Relatively few people would hold that view. Some people really ascribe to that.

There's some people that really say, and I've heard them on podcasts, and more than I think you would think of people like, there is no difference in a human animal. If I had a choice between saving a human or a guinea pig, it's a 50-50. And it's astonishing to me because I think I've never met that person. I'll be honest. Okay. I'll send you some links.

Okay. But I believe that those people have not witnessed the suffering of children in developing nations or seen the ravages of disease. I'm sure they've seen the Sally Struthers commercial occasionally or, you know, something on a news program. But that's my hot take. My unpopular hot take is that. I think in some ways it's easier to feel bad for pigs and puppies than it is for fellow human beings.

Oh, it's so funny. I thought this hot take was going to go in the other direction. I thought the hot take was going to be this, which is that there's way too much funny that goes into kitten rescue, dog rescue, which I agree with. because we have opened our zone our circle of moral concern for these domesticated companion animals. There's like the number of people I have seen raising money for like,

you know, to make sure you have no kill shelters. It's not clear no kill shelters are actually more ethical. Right. Right? You're functionally, you're holding animals in captivity for 15 years in a cage. Like a kill shelters are often the more ethical option.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, it is not my view that you should put all of your money into broad brush animal welfare. And I think people go very far. Like the version of going far that I know of is within the effect of altruism community, people just getting really wrapped around the question of shrimp. And, you know, like, because there are just so many shrimp and, you know, what do you do about wild animals dying?

I have never heard anyone talk about shrimps. See? So we're all learning here. But there is just in general a lot of well-meaning philanthropic given. giving that is giving to a story and not to a cause, right? A story of a dog in a kill shelter is very present for us, whereas a story of how do you modestly alleviate the suffering of chickens in factory farms? It's like those chickens are numbers or statistics or nothing. And you can't even make their lives good anyway. You can make them maybe a little bit better on the margins.

The people I know who do that work, I find them really heroic because they are fighting. a cruelty they will never solve. And so they're making all of these small, like they're just trying to make things a little bit better for all these animals on the margin. And, you know, the other version of that that you get is, you know, being indifferent to the suffering of human beings who aren't near to you. I mean, it's much, it's much easier. I was in a, I was just in a coffee shop this weekend. And you? There was this very, there was actually a moving, go fund me about this, like, person's dog who needed, like, all of this vet care.

It was up on a poster. He was up on a poster and like it was a Venmo and like, I don't know, it kind of touched me. So like looked at it. And the person was trying to raise $2,000 and it raised over $5,000. And so that dog, which had a story and was in the community. And it's not, again, like you should have a kind of a, you know, an expanding outward zone of moral concern. I don't think that the interests of everyone should be equal to you, right? Which is a distinctive thing here, right?

It's not that everybody does not have equal worth. They do. Like we are all, you know, I believe like our soul. is all touch with the same spark. But I do think you should care more about your community than you care about the entire world. I think that is good and natural. And also, you should care some about the entire world. Children dying of malaria in foreign countries that you will never visit.

There's are still children. And so it's like my giving, like that I do every year. It's like it is split between, you know, where will the money do the most good, right? I give to give well, which does very rigorous and analysis. They're terrific. Then some is given to my local community, right? Homelessness right around me, right? I think I have a special obligation to the place I live.

And some goes to like animal welfare in ways I think are effective. I want to push back on that a little bit because I think that, you know, it was interesting in your conversation with Yovall Noah Hariri. He was saying a similar kind of thing where he said this nation, a nation building is a wonderful human experiment. Hey, we're going to take a group of people, some of which may be like us, but many of which are not like us. And we're going to have a far greater identity of a nation, of a nation, like let's say Brazil. Well, there's a lot of different kinds of Brazilians.

Yeah, my dad's Brazilian. Oh, really? Yeah. So I'm half Brazilian. Oh, I didn't even know that. Look at that. So there's some guy with a spear in the Amazon and there's someone working in an 80-story office building in downtown, you know, San Paulo. So what is that identity to be Brazilian, to be proud to be Brazilian? It incorporates

and encapsulates a lot of different things, bustling cities, the Amazon forest, you know, a certain history of the slave trade and mixed race and indigenous folk. And that's wonderful. And Portuguese. But I thought what was missing from that conversation was where do we go next? Because great, we've figured out nations, but we haven't figured out the globe yet. And it's easy to, and this will be another hot take that is, you know, that is shot down by a lot of, a lot of folks on a particular political spectrum. That how it, so I'm a Baha'i and Baha'u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i faith says, let your vision be world embracing. Like we're at a chapter. Did you grow up as Baha'i or did you adopt?

I grew up Baha. Okay. And I left it for a long time, 12 or 13 years. That's when I had a lot of mental health issues and addiction issues and depression and anxiety and stuff like that. And in my spiritual search, I've talked about this a lot and I talk about it in some of my books. Hi. I came back to the Baha'i faith after studying a lot of the world's religions, which is kind of what brought me soul boom. But I like this idea, let your vision be world embracing. Baha'u'llah, one of the many teachings of Baha'u'llah, and something that Baha'is strive to do is to be world citizens. And this was a great experiment of nations. We needed to go from tribes to city-states to nations. We needed to do that. We've done that. We've done it great. It's gotten us also into a lot of problems and a lot of wars as one nation, you know, demonized. another nation and goes to war with another nation. But how can we expand that consciousness? How can we expand that compassion to embrace seven billion people? Now, I live in Ventura County, California. Should I care more about someone in Bangladesh than I do someone, you know, in Oxnard, you know,

next door to me? You know, I don't know, but I do think what we're striving to do is simply increase the circle of what is family. If someone is going to attack someone of my family, I'm going to fight to the death to protect them, right? And then if someone in my neighborhood or cul-de-sac is attacked, like I'm going to stand up and put out the fire at their house or call the police or do something like that. And then in my town and then in my county, and then in Southern California, and then the West Coast, like, how can we grow and expand this? And I do think that this is a spiritual charge to increase the circle of our compassion. And this goes back to puppies and kitties is like it's relatively easy to feel bad for little puppies and kitties. It's a little

hard to feel bad for children in a, you know, a prison camp in the Sudan. That's trickier. That's harder. It requires opening your eyes a little bit wider. It requires doing a little research. It requires some deeper contemplation, but the great spiritual teachers of the world, all of them, this is what we emulate in them. This is what we love about Jesus Christ. This is what we love about Mahatma Gandhi. This is what we love about, you know, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama and the people that really think about suffering at its root and the Buddhist charge, as well as the Baha'i charge, to reduce the suffering of others. I've been thinking about the, this will seem like an odd response to that.

I've been thinking about the, is it a shrimp? It's all about shrimp, okay. I've been thinking about the Texas Senate race where James Tala Rico is running against Ken Paxton and the way that they are attacking Tala riko as low Talley Tala riko, tofu Tala RICO. I was just reading about this. The first transgender candidate. Yeah, the cuck. The Talarico, yeah. And whenever I watch these attacks, I think you all would have hated Jesus Christ.

You would have found him to be the most. Nambi, Pamby, annoying, weepy, weepy, worrying about the wrong people, the outsiders. The outcasts. The poor and the lepers are sick and sad. It is. Grow up hair, Jesus. Yes. And obviously this is like an old note that is in books.

it's in crime and punishment and elsewhere. But just watching a bunch of people whose politics is rooted in their aggressively professed Christianity, treat explicit, constant pulse of compassion and kindness as weakness, as opposed to strength. Vulnerability as weakness. As mockable. And which is only to say that like the great spiritual teacher is whatever you think about the way nations should be constructed and what stories permit cooperation and how we would do world governance and some of the mechanical and technical and also human questions that that all brings up that aspiration. I mean, it just sits there in the book so often untouched.

And there's a line I like in politics because obviously most of my work is in politics. And I've heard versions of from Joe Biden, from Cory Booker. And it's something like, don't tell me what your values are. Show me your budget and I'll tell you what your values are. Because, you know, as I say, right, faith without acts. Faith without works is dead. There are a million ways in which I do not live up to my own ethical hopes. I think being a good person is really demanding.

I think most of us fall short. I fall short of what I would say that requires most of the time. I'm a person who tries, but good. I know where good is, and it's often beyond where I get. But I am often amazed, at least in the political sphere, to watch religions whose demands are so great. clear. Are so clear.

Oh, yeah. Serve the poor. Serve the poor. You know, the meek will inherit the earth. Yeah. Right. It's harder for a rich man to get, harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for rich man to get into heaven.

And then you're cutting taxes on the rich and obsessed with who's fucking whom? Yeah. Jesus didn't talk about who's fucking whom. He really didn't. Yeah, the hypocrisy of contemporary Christianity. is is astonishing. And I wanted to do a show for a long time called the Inconvenient Jesus. Uh-huh.

And it's all the stuff that Jesus taught that we like, we like don't look at. Yeah, you just had David Bentley Hard on. He's good on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is. And he's, I love that guy so much. And was he on your show? He did something in the New York Times.

Ivan, no, the Times did a big interview with him. The day is Pete Wainer, I believe. Yeah, yeah, he's like Grandpa Bible. and he's he's just I just love that guy so much. We've actually become good friends. And but yeah, an inconvenient Jesus. And I was thinking about the Woody Allen movie, Hannah and her sisters where I hope it's okay to quote a Woody Allen movie. But Max von Sidhouse character who plays his famous painter says like, if Jesus Christ came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.

And it's true. And you have said that why is they? there so much attention paid in contemporary Christianity to sexuality when it's barely mentioned and almost nothing paid to greed, which is mentioned over and over and over again. I mean, this could be a very long discussion, and it's an area of interest and study to me about, in fact, I was just reading an essay the other day that was talking about how for Christians, because here's two non-Christians talking about our Christian, and sisters who we love.

And by the way, so many of the most moral, caring, compassionate, beautiful. That's why I frame this around Tala Rico, because Tala Rico is Christian. That's the point. That it is his Christianity they hate. Yeah. His brand of Christianity,

which is so, so achingly close to Jesus's brand of Christianity. You know, I'm not a Christian. I'm Jewish. Our religion has its own complexities. You know, and the old, you know, the Torah a complex book. And I'm a Baha'i, and my religion has potlucks. But, but yeah, it's, I was just doing a podcast about this today, which is why I was on my mind, but it is the way they hate Tala Rico for the expression of his care for the meek and the way they hate his meekness. Yeah. Or what they

perceive, I don't really perceive it this way, but what they perceive to be his meekness. They, that I just find so, it is such a deep telling upon the self. I didn't know that there was a thing called the California Post, but it's the New York Post that's opened up in California. Oh, really? Yeah, it's an online digital magazine. And the woman that was running as a socialist mayor of Los Angeles, I can't remember her name. Is this Nithia Rahman who's running for her mayor? Yeah, yeah. And she lost and had a concession speech with her followers and she was crying. Oh, then not her because she's in the runoff now. Oh, oh. Maybe she thought it was her. Oh, interesting. Maybe she hadn't lost. I didn't see the speech.

There was just an article about her speaking to her supporters after the election. Obviously, she didn't win. She didn't come in like first place with the vote getting. And she was crying with her supporters there in a hotel ballroom or what have you. And the entire article was mocking her for crying. And of course, I looked at the comments. And there's 2,000 comments gloating over like, I'd love to see a crying socialist. Ha ha.

she's crying because she's a socialist, these leftist, kind of, and again, I imagine a majority of those people, even those comments, identify as Christian and are mocking someone crying. And the shortest sentence in the Bible, and one of my favorites is Jesus wept. Like feeling sorrow is a natural thing. And I'm sure that plenty of libertarians and hard right people have struggled in elections and also shed tears. But where are we as a culture where mocking vulnerability is front and center? Also, I guess jokes on them because if it isn't a the Arama, then as more votes came in,

she pulled ahead of Spencer Pratt and is in the runoff. It might be the next mayor, so we'll see. We'll see if Spencer Pratt is crying. But I want to talk a little bit about your work in politics in my book, Soul Boom, why we need a spiritual revolution. I spent a good deal of time kind of taking apart the current political system. And I am a firm believer that partisan politics is so inherently evil at its core and so corrupt to its bones that working in it in any way, shape, or form is just a waste of time. I think that there's a quote here that I love from Buckminster Fuller.

He says, you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And I do really feel like, you know, do I think that one party has is on the right side of more issues than the others? Sure. And at the same time, partisanship itself is pitting two teams against each other. It's the Eagles and the Giants and their fans and they're going at it and they will do anything to win other than.

and really looking at kind of bringing people together and doing what's best for the people. So I feel like it's kind of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to be working in partisan politics at all. That's part one. Part two is the Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.