Soul Boom - Ezra Klein Names Great (and Terrible) Politicians

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

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Hello, mid-sized business. We see your big ambitions, but how do you achieve the wins you want when your technology is holding you back? SAP Grow is built to grow with your business, no matter its size, with AI embedded at its core, working across every system, all ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud, ERP for any size business. One issue with political parties in our system is that our system is not built for them because the founding fathers thought what you thought, which is that we shouldn't have them.

And then they formed a bunch of political parties immediately. Immediately, right. And the system was not built to balance that. The way spirituality should inform politics is spirituality is a difficult, demanding path. And you can fall off of it in dangerous ways in all direction. I'm going to jump in right here, because politics literally means the pursuit of power. Are you sure that you think politics is spirituality? I mean, I was talking to a guy running for office in Texas recently.

He is running because of what ICE was doing. community. It is an act of sacrifice, I would call it almost a spiritual act on his part. He has the possibility of being able to get into Congress and voting to protect the people he grew up with. Now, there are terrible politicians I've met them. They're out there. I could name some. 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. I recently was a part of a panel with Arthur Brooks and some other great thinkers of Vive Mertie. And it was about a letter that was sent out by the American Baha'i community called A Common Endeavor. And it's for the July 4th, it's for the 250th birthday of America. And this document is really powerful and I think very well written. And it's talking about how can we have a spiritual renewal? Like the United States was founded on some civic ideals of like life, liberty, in the pursuit of happiness, out of many, you know, one, you know, some really great ideas that we didn't have at the beginning of our country.

And we certainly don't have now. But they're not just civic and ethical ideals. There's also spiritual underpinnings to that to unity and diversity out of many one. and providing a structural foundation so that everyone can thrive and flourish. There's a spiritual reality to that. So the toxicity of partisanship and this letter having to do with, can we look at America through a spiritual lens? What would that look like?

What would that be like? Is that something that can bring us together and unite us? and allow us to grow and mature in surprising ways because it's, it's often seen as like a separation of church and state. And, you know, the idea, and there's probably a lot of people listening right now, they're like, wait, spiritual ideas brought into, you know, civic government. And no, that's, that these two should remain separate. But I'm wondering what that sparks to you. Do you think it's possible to be bringing kind of larger spiritual concepts? having to do with commonality and empathy, mutual service, consultation and consultative properties,

greater compassion. Is it possible to bring kind of an injustice framed as we are all children of God and all worthy of dignity and respect? And is that possible to be brought into a conversation around politics? That was a lot I just threw out. you. Let me start here. I think it is it is to do a violence to spirituality to suggest that it is not rooted in the world in which we actually live, that ideas like compassion and conversation and how we treat the poor and spirituality is worth very little if it's just a promise about an

unknowable after. And all the spirituality that I have been blessed to touch in others or touching myself is ultimately about how to live in this world. I believe politics is a profoundly spiritual practice. Like my spirituality expresses itself most fundamentally in the political work I do, not on the meditation question. I'm going to jump in right here because politics literally means the pursuit of power. Like, politics is literally about, it's about power. Now, I would say,

healthy civic governance can be spiritualized, but are you sure that you think politics is spirituality? I'm not saying everybody does it well. But as we were just talking about with Christian nationalists, I don't think everybody does spirituality well either. So you can do many things under the same word. I am a liberal, right? And liberalism is an old tradition. You know, a couple hundred years is a political ideology much longer than that as a set of values. And at its core, at the pulsing core of what made liberalism vital and different is its fundamental acceptance of difference in disagreement as ongoing and eternal features of a society. And so liberalism and liberals, what is supposed to distinguish them and what has distinguished

them at our best at different times is that the practice is not about ending disagreement and finding a unity that does not exist and will not. It is about finding ways to disagree constructively, finding ways to even fight with each other that are productive. Good marriages, good relationships, good cities, good societies are riven by disagreement. So within that, political parties emerge in every democracy we know of, there is not a single democracy that I am aware of. that has not naturally seen the emergence of political parties. Our founding fathers did not want political parties, did not plan for them. George Washington condemned them in his farewell address.

In an address it was functionally favoring one political party over another, political parties are a way of organizing disagreement in a democracy. There are too many people here who disagree with you to not have some way of organizing those disagreements. Now, is our party system well constructed? No. Does it, do I have ways? I mean, I would like to see proportional representation, rank choice voting, campaign finance, amendments to the Constitution. What about election days being on a weekend instead of on a workday? That's great too. I would do that too. But there are a million ways I would like to make the system work better.

But your feeling, I want to say strongly, I do not share. And I don't think you would want to live in the world that you're ultimately describing here because we disagree like deeply right you know like I got a lot of disagreements with Ken Paxton who we were just talking about but he is part of my country too and so is Donald Trump and so is J.D. Vance and so are the people who believe they are right about everything and those people and me we disagree about too much for us to not have ways to organize our disagreements this country is too big to not have ways to scale the ways we work together. So call them factions, call them parties, whatever it is.

We need ways to be indifference together. The danger is when those ways begin to break down. And instead of handling disagreement through politics, which I don't agree is best understood is simply the pursuit of power. That's literally the definition. I know, but there are different definitions, that have emerged throughout history. And I don't think it is the way, when I say, for instance, when I say I have a politics, I don't think the way to understand that sentence would be,

I have a pursuit of power. And when I say you have a politics, the way to understand it is not that you have a pursuit of power. It's a set of ideas and ideals. And so I think you are always dealing with a hard work in a society of organizing both agreement and disagreement. So maybe there are better ways than political parties, but there is not a way that offers unity because we are not unified. Well, I want to be very clear. I want to be very clear that when I say unity, that doesn't mean that everyone has the same opinion.

That's preposterous. I'm talking about unity in diversity. I'm talking about diverse opinions being united for the common good. And I do think that if you look at the amount of money that politicians have to raise and the way that money works in politics. And the fact that there are these two parties that are kind of, they're split like 49% to 49% and they're doing everything in their power to tip over to the 51% and to kind of lure whomever it is. It can be the, you know, the young professional women voters in the exurbs or whatever it is that they're trying to bring over Latino males over

50 or whatever that they're trying to bring over on their side through certain policy positions. I mean, I think we agree more than we disagree, which is I think that there has to be a way for a large society of 350 million people to, you know, to have big disagreements on something like health care, let's say, and should that be publicly funded or privately funded? And how do we come to some kind of decision that best benefits the nation? but it's not simply the way that it's not simply the way the two-party system is working. And by the way, most people agree with me, especially people under 25 who think the system is so broken. And they view both parties with great distrust and rancor that, again, to go back to Buckminster Fuller, like, I think we need to, it's hard. We have to kind of repair the plane while we're flying at 20,000 feet. but we have to somehow change the system.

Well, I guess this is where maybe I want to make sure I understand what you're saying. Because I am fine to say we should have a multi-party system. I just did a whole episode of the show with Lee Drummond on the case for multi-party political system. Now, do I think that would solve all our problems? Probably not. Do I think it would be better? Yeah. If I could waive my want tomorrow, I would make a multi-party system.

I would amend the Constitution to regulate money spent on politics. as not speech, right? So it is not protected under the First Amendment. And that corporations are not individuals. Yeah. So we, on a lot of those things, we probably agree. But I think people very quickly move into the space of wanting a consensus it is not there. And so then being angry at the institutions that channel the absence of consensus. So my first book is called Why We're Polarized. So it's a book about the emergence in American life of highly differentiated political parties. So you said you're 59. I remember the Blue Dog Democrats who remember the Blue Dogs. Who were very different in their beliefs than the Minnesota Democrats in the early 70s. Yeah. And prior to that, we had functionally a

four-party system, right? You had Southern Democrats, Dixie Crats, who were built on maintaining white supremacy in the South. You had sort of more liberal Democrats, sort of like we think about them now, though more diverse than they are now. You had more conservative Republicans and you had more liberal Republicans, people like George Romney or John Lindsay. One of the big points that book makes is that you have to be very careful yearning for unity because unity often comes at the cost of suppression. So in periods of American life, when the political parties were less polarized, when, I mean, you can measure polarization how often the two sides vote with each other, that kind of thing. Oftentimes they maintain that unity by pushing the issues that divided them out.

So the Southern Democrats held a hammerlock over the important committees in Congress because they had such seniority because it was functionally an authoritarian political system in the South. And they just made it impossible to consider any bills on civil rights. And when that hammerlock broke, when they began to. to break the power of the political South in Congress, it kicked off in the civil rights era, much as it did in the Civil War era, a period of incredible disunity. And the country began to feel like it was fracturing. And that incredible, I mean, literal violence, right? Not just political disagreement, but violence was we had to go through it.

And we can always go through things better or worse, but we had to go through some version of it to get to the Civil Rights Act and the voting rights act and for that matter, Medicare and Medicaid, which is all to say that you can have a false peace. You can have a unity that is an act of suppression. And so I am as worried about systems in which disagreement is a thing we fear as systems where we have too much disagreement. Again, I certainly don't believe in a system where there's no disagreement because I think you're 100% right about that. Going back to the spirituality of America and a possibility of some kind of spiritual renewal, one of the aspects of partisan politics that makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit is the people that run for office are not the people

I want to vote for because they're people who want on some level. These are not like selfless public servants. These are people that want a certain measure of power and are happy to raise the money, the tens of millions of dollars that are needed to be a part of that. They're happy to kind of play in that game. 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

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I want to increase your compassion for these people a little bit. You work in television and film, right? Can I, hold, hold, let me, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me this one little bit of license. Presumably to raise money for films, you have to go out into the, and have been around, people go out into the slightly backbiting grubby world. Yes, you've got to pitch the film to producers and have money. People get money from the Gulf states I've seen, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Do they do it because they like raising money? No, they do it because they believe in the film. Yes. No, there are terrible politicians I've met them, right? They're out there. I could name some. They have blocked campaign finance reforms. And there are people.

I mean, I was talking to a guy running for office in Texas recently. And he is spending hours and hours a day. It is not Telariko, someone else, calling people for money. Yeah. He is running for office in Texas because of what ICE was doing to his community. He hates every second he spends raising money. he is doing that. It is an act of sacrifice.

I would call it almost a spiritual act on his part in my conception of spirituality because that is the way he has the possibility of being able to get into Congress and voting to protect the people he grew up with. Now, they're not all like that, but there are many people who participate in a broken system because they are trying to rebuild the plane while you fly it. and to rebuild the plane while you fly it, you need to get a ticket and get on the plane. And that's tough. But you shouldn't dismiss what they're doing so quick. I'm very sure that there are some great politicians and I've met some that have a good deal of public service in their DNA. And I hope this guy wins.

And he's going to spend, you know, 10 hours a day raising money and two hours a day working on policy. And that's part of the system. And then there's someone else who's going to spend 11 hours a day raising money and one hour a day doing policy. and they're going to beat him the next four years. And then there's going to be some other guy who spends 12 hours a day raising money and half an hour a day, you know, on policy. Or his neighbors will like him and will vote for him. I mean, incumbents don't lose that often. Now, that's for good and for bad. Yeah.

But it's not just a question of money. Tom Steyer, who I actually like quite a bit, but he just spent a bazillion dollars trying to win the California governance race and he didn't. Right. Money is not the sole causal input into politics. It's one of them. It's too much of one. Who do you like? Have you, you said you've not politicians you admire.

I wanted to get to this point. I wanted to get to this point. So, you know, going back to this, the spiritual kind of underpinnings of the United States and the possibility of a spiritual renewal looking at the next 250 years. Amanda Ripley, the journalist, do you know, are you familiar with her? I'm a bit familiar with her work. Yeah, yeah. She has a book called High Conflict.

And in that book, she talks about the Baha'is. So I'm going to put the Baha'is from the center. So when the Baha'is have an election, there's no clergy in the Baha'i faith. So here we are sitting in Manhattan. In New York City, there is every year elected what's called a local spiritual assembly. So there's nine Baha'is that are elected by all the Baha'is that are the most wise, kind, mature to kind of govern the affairs, not just of the Baha'i community, but that outward facing as well and kind of service to the greater needs of the New York metropolitan area. So this election process, in this election process, it is forbidden to campaign. It's forbidden to have like yard signs or say, you know, Joe Smith for local spiritual

assembly of the Baha'is. When we have the election every year in the spring, there is the community gathers together. You can vote if you're not gathered, but the community gathers together. There's prayers and meditation. maybe on the wall might be listed all the Baha'is who live in the greater New York metropolitan area. And out of great contemplation, you write down the nine members that you think would be best serve the city of New York. And do you secret ballot, you put them into a hat. No one is campaigning.

No one has said, I think you should vote for Joe Smith. I think you should vote for Ezra Klein. and then the names are drawn and the nine top vote getters are then the local spiritual assembly. And every year, if you kind of don't like the direction, the Baha'i faith is going in or whatever, like you can vote, you get to vote for new people. And those people elected have no power over anyone else. They only have a power as an institution when they meet. When they come up with a decision, that's the decision we try and follow.

And you can always meet with them. you can contest it, et cetera. And Amanda Ripley was talking about using the, she's not a Baha'i, she was using the Baha'i faith as an example of like, hey, what would this be like? What would this be like in politics to have an electoral system that was based on wisdom and contemplation and public service? Because on that local spiritual assembly, there's no one who like, I want to be on the local spiritual assembly. It's like, it's the plumber or it's the accountant or it's the really kind

person that does work for the poor or whomever it is are supposedly elected on onto this body. And one of the things I said in Soul Boom is I said, couldn't you do this in the United States? I know this would be a crazy social experiment. It may not work on a national scale. But what if on a local scale? What if there's a town like Pancake Flats, Iowa? And they are tired of all of the fighting and bickering of partisanship and all the money raising and corruption and filibusters and gerrymandering and all of this nonsense. And they're like, let's get together at the football field. And there's 2,000 of us and let's do silent ballot and maybe we'll elect, you know, Bill the mechanic and Bob the town lawyer and the woman who runs the daycare who everyone adores to be a

council to help run the affairs of pancake flats. And, you know, you can roll your eyes and say, well, that's, that's never going to work and here's why. And, you know, I mean, sometimes town councils work relatively close to that. And you say, well, that could never work on a state level or on a national level. But that's one small way of reconfiguring, like Buckminster Fuller says, like building a better system instead of working within the existing system that might really benefit us. So what I would say is that we do not lack for good ideas that are at least worth trying. What we lack for is the power or consensus to change the system in any one way. So in order to change the system going, you know, the Constitution is extraordinary.

But that's not true because gerrymandering has just been radically changed over the last year for the worse. But it has been changed. The entire system has been changed. Well, no, actually. I mean, the Supreme Court has put out a ruling that got to part of the Voting Rights Act. So that did change the system. But we don't have the ability to make decisions through the Supreme Court democratically. the gerrymanders that have happened have all been legal within the existing system.

So I was just mentioning this proportional representation piece I did, which is with Lee Drummond and people can go listen to it on my show. And that's all about how you would end gerrymandering forever, right? Proportional representation is one way that both you can in one fell swoop. The way proportional representation works is functionally be for the house in this case. So California, right, where you live. I forget the exact number. it's currently about 54 members of the House. Instead, you would have something like, you know,

call it 10-ish multi-member districts. And, you know, you would be voting for a candidate, but it would be like the top five vote getters in a place, right? And what would ultimately happen in these things is you would get representation that was proportionate to the share. So instead of like how it works right now, where it's like if the Democrats win 51 percent and the Republicans will win 49% the Democrats get everything, the Republicans get nothing. In that case, they would get a near equal number of seats, right? So you can change things. Proportional representation is one of the easier changes to make in our system. Does not require constitutional amendment. But you would still need to pass it to the House and the Senate. And nobody's been able to get enough support to do that.

So the problem in your Buckminster-Fuller quote actually isn't to me, like I think we all want to try new systems. The problem is you have to amend the laws or amend the constitution in order to try it. And then you're back to working through politics unless you want to try armed revolution, which you should probably not try. So like this goes all the way up to campaign finance is actually the hardest of them because the Supreme Court going back to the 70s. People think about Citizens United. No, that's a bad. That's a bad fucking set of rulings right there. But the real sin is the case in the 70s called Buckley v. Vallejo where they decided that money spent on politics counts as speech. And so it has First Amendment protection. Right. And so the way to do something

about that is to amend the Constitution. And that is a hell of a lot harder. We've not amended the Constitution now in decades. And so the problem with a lot of the, not the problem, just the thing that I think has to be wrestled with when you think about why don't we change a system is that The central finger trap of a broken system is that the things that make it broken are the things that make it hard to change. You would think that the system being broken would generate force for change. Right. Sometimes in certain conditions. But often the way money interacts with the political system is the most broken thing.

And the way the hardest thing to change. And the way partisanship interacts with the system makes it very hard to change. The way incumbency acts makes it very hard to change. So you were in immediately this question. You might be right. I'm skeptical that the model you described for the Baha'i can work nationally with 350 million people. But there are other things you have said here that I think could. The problem is always the same.

It's very, very, very hard to get Congress to pass laws, which is why people like me spend all our time yelling or, let's say, speaking carefully crafted sentences in the microphones and publishing them in the paper of record in order to persuade people of things we should do. but we don't lack for ideas. We lack for the power to do them. I'll just note one other thing. I mean, this is all what my first book is about functionally. Because it's worth noting that one issue with political parties in our system is that our system was not built for them because the founding fathers thought what you thought. Right. Which is that we shouldn't have them.

This episode is brought to you by Fetzer. You know, there's this tendency in modern life to believe that every problem has a material solution. More technology, more productivity, more money, more apps reminding you to bring. breathes while you ignore the fact that your soul feels like a raisin. But the folks at the Fetzer Institute believe something deeper. They believe that behind humanity's biggest challenges are spiritual ones. Loneliness, division, disconnection, our inability to see each other, the planet, or even ourselves as sacred.

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Instead, competition and ambition are structured between political parties, which cooperate and compete across branches. And the system was not built to balance. that. It was built to balance a thing that did not end up being the locus of competition. Oh, wow. That's so low-place. I really go differently than you do is that if I were rebuilding system from the beginning, what I would do is put political parties at the center of it, which nobody likes to hear. I agree. This would not be- I don't like to hear that. I can tell, right? You can see. But political parties are how we organize political competition.

It's giving me a lot of anxiety, Ezra. And so you need to balance them. And so, for instance, I would say you want to do something on Supreme Court that gives both sides high levels of constant representation there and a high level of predictability about when retirement should happen. Like a very simple thing about the court. You should not be able to strategically time your retirement. So it happens when your co-partisan are in power. Yeah, yeah. That is a deformation of our system, right?

It should be a 12-year term, a 16-year term, and then, you know, retirements come up in a clockwork regular way. Or 80, you're- I want it to be regular, right? But yes, you could do that, you know, you could have a lot of ways of doing that kind of thing. But all these things, the other problem, and this is a big part of my book, is it the filibuster in the Senate, which any rule like this would go through. No party almost ever now has more than 60 votes in the Senate. Sure.

Right. In my lifetime, I believe it has happened one time for less than a year. And the filibuster was not in the Constitution. it was not something we used a lot of for most of American history, and now it is omnipresent. And one party or the other always feels like it'll be disadvantaged by a change. And so, like for instance, Democrats in the Obama era tried very, very hard to pass a series of bills that would have forced, at the very least, huge amounts of disclosure after Citizens United and Republicans filibustered those laws, right? So you just end up with this problem, which is not that we cannot imagine. imagine a better way to do it, but that we are having trouble gathering enough political power

to do it a better way. And that does go to parties. That does go to power competition. It's just a very hard problem to solve. That's really well said. I need to check out that book. And you're really fucking brilliant. Why were polarized? You can buy it wherever you buy fine books. I love it. I love it. Speaking about why we're polarized, you talked a lot about like being a liberal. Part of what I see has gone hand in hand with liberalism. And liberalism is a great thing, right? It's like it's debate and it's democracy and it's like.

Well, it's not democracy, but we'll take it. They co-hauls maybe. Yeah. But there did seem to be arising throughout the 70s and 80s, this idea of kind of secular materialist humanism that has kind of shown itself to not really be working. And especially a lot of young people under 25 are questioning a lot of its kind of underpinnings and looking more toward a spiritual path forward. And you've mentioned before and it's very interesting and I'd love to and the little time that I have with you, I'd love to hear a little bit about where you are

spiritually right now in your personal life. You have mentioned before in podcasts. You have hinted before that the way that religious groups and churches work is something to perhaps be emulated, that there is a community of people who are seeking something that has transcendence and mutuality in service and is inclusive and centers love theoretically. Obviously, you have to look at the bank statements. You have to look at the actual actions that are happening by the practitioners. It appears to me that your spiritual curiosity through the years has grown. And what you're spiritually interested in has also grown, both on a personal level. And I imagine having children has something to do with that. And I'm wondering if that has any ramifications on the idea of

faith and how it interacts with society. Can we learn something from faith that can make the world a better place? Yeah, there's a lot there. I was rambling a lot. No, I think these things are complex. Yeah, well, I'm trying to think about how to organize this in my own head. Let me start with me, right? And I'll ladder up to society, maybe. I have for many, many years, been agnostic, but oriented towards the belief in mystery. I'm not a materialist. I'm not an atheist. I think it is an extraordinary level of human hubris to believe that we have figured out what is going on here. I would have told you that sentence for a very long time. Right. Basically, my whole adult life. I would say in the past 10-ish years, I have moved more from being

an agnostic without really belief to an agnostic who does believe there are spiritual realities. But I don't believe those realities reliably accessed or understood through organized religion. I'm more skeptical of churches, synagogues, large institutions than the way I think maybe you understand me to be. I think that whatever spirituality is there is very unruly and neither coexist well with our understandings nor with institutions that seek and wield power and coherence over time. Which is not to say those institutions have nothing to offer, I think. They can be beautiful. I'm a member of a synagogue. I think the current pope and the previous pope were wonderful. There have also been horrible popes. Yeah. Right? Nazi loving popes.

There's been all kinds of popes. Obviously, the Jewish community is in a place of deep schism right now. And there are people of deep faith who have found themselves supporting every conceivable position and there has been institutional power spiritual institutional power wielded behind actions and ways of seeing others that I find abhorrent right so I believe that like I have a spiritual path I have a lot of spiritual practice it is not always as much as I wish it were just for reasons of time and parenting and all the other things but it's important to me whether my meditation practice is spiritual, I'm not even sure exactly. But I do have a view.

Something Pema Chodrin said, I forgot what I had asked her, but she turned the conversation immediately to back pain. And she said, people don't think of back pain is very spiritual, but it is. And I actually believe that that's true. I think a lot of great spiritual insight pulls mystics of different kinds further into the violent immediacy of the present moment. And so sometimes the most spiritual thing to do is it be really, really, really right here. Yeah, honestly, psychedelics have probably reenchanted parts of the world for me.

I try to be relatively private about those experiences, but that I've had those experiences. I love the use of the word reinchantment having to do with that. That has been a dimension of things for me. But where I think it should bring you and where I think it is meaningful for society is Not so much, I think, where you move towards organization. But for me, it is closer to questions of ethics and presence. There are not that many spiritual organizations that I think have a very good record over long periods of time. I don't know that much about the Baha'i.

I do feel the Quakers got a lot right. And I actually, to say some about organization, I don't think the fact that they have gotten so much right. They were very early on abolition, very early on expanding the vote. They have been pacifist when it was hard, not when it was easy. There are a number of things I think the Quakers have really, they've put up a good record. And I think it is related to the fact that they sit in silence as a way of making decisions, right? that ideas emerge out of quiet, not out of, at least not always out of hidden debate. I've been, I've done some studying of that.

I think it's a lesson worth at least thinking about. But, you know, to the extent we're talking about spirituality as a question of what is beneath or beyond this world, my view and the moments of mystic experience I have touched, I feel that that is a lot of that is illegible to the human mind. That I think that like I do believe like a kind of life force. And but that life force is alien to us. I mean, it is in us, but alien to us. And so, you know, I do my best to respect it.

In the moments I've had that were mystically informed to try to pour that energy into this reality would be to make some kind of error in category. And so my spirituality and my politics in the way it operates in my dated A life as opposed to a view about, you know, other realms is, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, right? There's a, I mean, you know, Jesus says to love thy neighbor as thyself. I think it was Rabbi Akiva in the Jewish tradition who said something very similar. He said, I think I'll mangle it from memory, but to love thy neighbor is sort of the whole of the Torah, everything else is commentary.

I have that a little bit wrong from memory. I know I do, but it's not far from it. You see the golden rule emerge again and again and again. In every religious tradition. You see things like a Sabbath, which I think is a very, very profound and important spiritual practice. And I think in politics, we would be better off if we created and in society, if we created more structured space for communal rest. I think time is a very holy thing

and should be treated more as a gift than as instrumentally as we treat it. And you can sort of move like that. But it is things that take me closer to here and to sort of the basic kind of wisdom your grandmother would have given you, not further. Right. Right.

Most of the things that a kid thinks are unfair are. I talk to my kids a lot about politics, as you can imagine. And, Daddy, tell us more about Tala Rica. Yeah, they don't. I once asked my son what he thought I did. He said, you write boring books without pictures. That's it, pretty much. I'm always struck by how straightforward a lot of politics is to explain.

You know, they're like, why do you vote for that person? And it's like, well, he wants to give more money to people who don't have enough money. And he wants to give health care to people who don't have health care. They can't see a doctor and they should be able to. And he's nice. And that's why I voted for him. You know, it's not that. The rest is commentary.

Yeah. Yeah. I went to the Knicks game last night. It was the stunner victory, Ninobe. You heard a big one. It was a big one. And then going out into the streets, the streets were flooded with Knicks fans. cheering, celebrating beside themselves, saluting Ananoi.

And it was young and older were old men. And there was a man crying. 53 years I've been waiting for this. He was sobbing. And young kids, you know, being little Helians and black and white and Puerto Rican and Asian and all different types. And I thought, wow, this is a religious experience. Oh, yeah.

An ecstatic experience. This is an ecstatic experience. And I belong to something. Yeah. I belong to something larger than myself. And to me, that's why the organization of a religious idea is really important to me, because I think we're a communal species. And I think we organize around ideas in a good way and oftentimes in a bad way.

I think you might want to mistrust that feeling. Well, but I also think that that feeling has done tremendous amount of good for the world that we don't pay a lot of attention to. We look at the Pulpots and the Naziisms, you know, a lot. And we should. But I also think that people coming together seeking joy, seeking transcendence, seeking something larger than themselves, being a part of something larger than themselves, and belonging to that, I think there's something really beautiful about that.

And when I'm engaging with my faith and we're singing and we're praying and we're talking about making the world a better place and there's black folks and Native Americans. folks and Persian folks and and and all kinds of folks and I see and witness kind of humility and mutuality and community. It feeds my soul and I think it's part of the spiritual experience beyond the just the private spiritual mystical experience. So that's how it works a little bit for me. There's a meditation instruction I like, which is practice method, not results. And I think there's a lot of wisdom for that in everything, in parenting, in politics, in meditation, in spirituality. One thing you're saying is that you practice spiritually method. You go to a place. There are other people

go to that place. You guys show up, I don't know if it's every week or every month, whatever you do. When you're there, you say the same prayers. Sometimes you may have a big ecstatic experience. Sometimes, as a Knicks fan, you get that game. Yeah. And most of the time, you don't get that game. Sometimes you don't. Yeah. And if you are practicing good method over time you get good results. But if you are always chasing the ecstasy, if you are only there for the big hit of nosis, if you are practicing bad method, if your church, your organization is seeking power. for poor means, right?

If it is not confronting you with the places where your selfishness, your greed, your ego, your ego, your ignorance are blinding you, then showing up there week after week can be terribly damaging, right? Churches, synagogues, mosques have been both seeds of peace and launching paths of violence. So it requires a constant discernment, a constant presence. And the reason I say mistrust at night, right, is because, one, you got to be careful when, you know, people spill out as a mall, right? There's a lot of cities have burned down after sports games. It's weirdly another thing. And some Spurs fans apparently last week were beat up after. Yeah, nothing is more like politics and sports.

I actually have a whole, again, section in why we're polarized, again, in bookstores wherever you may look. and studies in what sports brings out in people, right? But, you know, the question is, are you practicing good or bad method? And to go a little bit back to liberalism, just for a minute, one of liberalism's deep ideas has to do with toleration and tolerance. And, you know, it's sort of initial version of this is religious tolerance at a time when Protestants and Catholics kill each other in mass numbers.

And as a Jewish person from the outside, I'm like, over what? But, you know, to them, that really matter. There's a great story by a guy traveling in Ireland, you know, during the troubles. And somebody says, hey, are you, you're a Catholic or you're Protestant? He says, no, I'm an atheist. He says, yeah, yeah, yeah. But are you a Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist? So you've got to be careful about things where a lot of your identity and your ego come into these rigid, you know, formulations and rigid attachments.

But like toleration, tolerance, which, you know, emerges in, you know, as a religious idea or an idea of how to have religions live together and ultimately as a part of politics too and protections from the gut, right? Like, you're always balancing this ability for people to have difference and their need to have unity, right? For the need for there to be solidarity between a community. Well said. And the need for the people in that community to express different capacities and individualities. And you are over time just trying to think about and endlessly balancing what is the best way to channel passion and belief and commitment and difference and agreement into society in a way where it doesn't get completely out of

control negatively. Right. And in a way where you don't fall into stasis because you're so afraid of passion that you have clogged it in an institutional glue. And then it stagnates. Right. That's kind of what my second book. abundance is about. And so there's no escape in, I think, religion in politics or anywhere else,

from the constant balancing of being alive, of being in the moment and planning for the future, of, you know, allowing rain to hear passions and also, you know, finding discipline. And, like, it's all there, right? To me, the way spirituality should inform politics is spirituality is a difficult, demanding path. And you can fall off of it in dangerous ways in all directions. And you're constantly like too much, too little, too much, too little, right? Too far away from here, you know, too much in here. And like I do think of politics and liberalism, particularly as an endless balancing act, right? You are trying to make sure people are uncoerced by power.

And you are trying to make sure the government has a power to push society forward, right? You're trying to live indifference. You're also trying to make sure that people's differences cannot be in full. inflicted on each other to harm them, right? It is, and you don't get one answer. You don't get the ease of it's just this way. And I always think, spiritually, politically, you should be very, very, very skeptical of anybody who says, we have the answer. This is how you do the system.

You do it my way and it'll all work. You give power to my people and it will all be fine, right? It is constant the work. One quick thing. We have every guest define the word soul. What does the word soul mean to you? You hear the word soul. It's a tricky one.

It's the spark that makes life conscious. There you have it. That's beautifully said. I could go on and on. We could go on and on as if so much I want to talk to you about. But unfortunately, we are being kicked out of this podcast studio. And thank you for your time. And Ezra, honestly, like I have loved your podcast for years.

Your interview with Richard Powers, the author from years, from years ago was one of the most powerful conversations I've ever witnessed. And it's just a gift in a dream to have you on Soul Boom and to hear how your mind works, your articulation, how your thoughts unfold, just to be sitting here at this table is an honor. Thanks for engaging with me. Thank you. It's an incredible pleasure and thank you for not challenging me to an acting contest right at the beginning. Yes, no act off because I would kick your ass and you know it. Yeah. A podcast off, I think you got me beat. You've been listening to Soul Please purchase products from our sponsors.

Thanks, Ezra. The Soul Boom podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts. Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me, it's Jean-Jean-Cabouchard on the Upside Ticker Talk. We dive into what's moving markets with timely analysis, trends, and answers to ETF questions you've actually been thinking about. Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ.