The Rich Roll Podcast - Faith Provocateur Rob Bell On God, Divinity & Why Love Always Wins

Episode Date: October 17, 2016

Religion was never for me. Despite many a youthful hour spent kneeling on hardwood church pews, it just never connected. What do all those stained glass windows, depressing organ dirges, and uptight people have to do with art and beauty and meaning and love and purpose and mystery and ultimately what it means to be human? Nothing as far as I could tell. So I searched for answers elsewhere. In the bottom of a bottle. Prowling underground after parties in lower Manhattan. In a mental institution called rehab. In midnight conversations with skid row junkies. In the sound of my breath, lost on a mountain trail run at dawn. During afternoons spent undulating with dolphins in Hawaii. In the overwhelming love I feel simply watching my children sleep. My search didn't lead back to religion. But it did lead to faith. A deep faith of my own design. Faith in an undefined, unlimited power greater than myself. A faith that quite literally saved my life when I was utterly lost, completely broken and unconditionally beyond repair. A faith that has since infused my journey with meaning, purpose and satisfaction beyond my wildest imagination. Some call my version of faith God. Call it whatever you like. I don't care. What I do care about is what it really means to be a spiritual being having a human experience. This week's guest has a few thoughts on the subject — an anti-establishment pastor provocateur making an indelible cultural impact on how we think and practice divinity, faith, and religion in the modern world. Named one of 2011's 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine, Rob Bell has presided over mega congregations, toured with Oprah and been profiled in The New Yorker. iTunes named his podcast, The RobCast, one of the Best of 2015 and he has penned more than a handful of New York Times bestsellers, including Love Wins, the Oprah book of the month What We Talk About When We Talk about God*, and his most recent book, How To Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living*. To me, what makes Rob so undeniably captivating is his independent-minded, radically inclusive — almost punk rock — perspective on faith. Breaking ranks with entrenched, pedantic notions of antiquated Christian church doctrine, his message upends the divisive aspects of religious ideology, recontextualizing the canon as a highly relatable, welcome pallium for all — a comprehensive fiat that boils down to one central premise: Love wins. Always. Enjoy! Rich

I begin by celebrating and affirming movement wherever you see it. And the idea that there would be truth, or truth with a capital T, and only these people over here in the corner would have access to it is completely absurd to me. And if there is a God source to being glue, energy, thread that holds it all together, that would have to be accessible to everybody. Or you're not talking about love. That's Rob Bell, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. All right, everybody, how are you guys doing?

What's going on? My name is Rich Roll. Welcome or welcome back to the podcast where I have the great fortune of going deep, going wide, going long form with some of the most inspiring thought leaders, positive paradigm breaking change makers all across the globe, people who have devoted their lives to making the world a better place. And Rob Bell, this week's guest, is definitely one such person. He's a guy who's making a huge impact, a huge cultural impact on how we think about and practice faith, which is the predominant subject matter of today's conversation.

subject matter of today's conversation. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find

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to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Rob Bell. I gotta say, this is one of the coolest conversations I've ever had with anyone about faith and religion and spirituality and God and what it means to be human. It's sort of new terrain for me.

I'm not a religious person, so it was interesting to sit down with somebody who comes from that sort of tradition to talk about these issues. So it made for a very dynamic and interesting discussion that I think you guys are going to really enjoy. If Rob Bell is new to you, he is a husband and a father of three kids. He's a multiple New York Times bestselling author of an avalanche of books that include Love Wins, which I absolutely love, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, which was an Oprah Book of the Month selection, and his most recent book called How to Be Here.

Rob has been profiled in The New Yorker. He's toured with Oprah. iTunes named his podcast The Robcast, which you should definitely check out, one of the best of 2015. In 2011, Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The accolades and the accomplishments go on and on and on. And I've never met anyone like Rob before. This is a guy, once again, who comes from the church. He spent years as a pastor pontificating before huge congregations

of people. But distinct from his peers, he's a guy who really broke ranks with entrenched traditional notions of Christian church doctrine. He's a guy who has sort of upended and redefined and placed into modern context what it means to be a spiritual being having a human experience. And what distinguishes Rob is this real independent spirit that he brings to faith. It's almost punk rock. It's very cool. And this really incredibly relatable approach to confounding issues that historically have divided us much more than they have united us. And you're unlikely to find Rob doing this thing in a church. He's usually found in places like comedy clubs, improv clubs, and larger auditoriums and venues,

including a standing appointment at Largo, which is this really cool alternative music and comedy space in LA that's known much more for acts like musician John Bryan or somebody like Zach Galifianakis than a guy ruminating on God and man's place in the universe. I spent the afternoon with Rob a couple weeks ago, and I really connected with him. And by the time he left my home,

which was several hours later, because we spent a bunch of time together, both before and after recording the podcast, I really knew I'd found somebody special and a guy who I feel like is going to be a new friend of mine. And we're already talking about doing some future things together, which is really exciting for me. In any event, he's just an incredibly warm, charismatic, and approachable

human being. He's very inviting. And I think you guys are going to really dig this conversation. It's a conversation about storytelling. It's about humility. It's about faith. It's about spirituality. It's about religious traditions and what they mean. And it's about redefining the meaning of church and what it means to be a person of faith. So, without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with the great Rob Bell. So psyched to be with you today, man. Really great to meet you. I've been following you for quite some time. We have some mutual friends. We do.

Here you are. We're going to talk about God. We're going to talk about faith. We're going to talk about religion and resentment and anger and wars and culture, and we're going to solve it all. Nice. Great. That's why I'm here. Excellent. Awesome, man. I don't even know where to begin with that but like you know just small little issues um but before we get into it i have one like thing i gotta ask you so you're from michigan right i grew up in michigan yes yeah so am i from michigan are you really from uh like the gross point area which my parents went to high school in Grosse Pointe. We moved to Washington, D.C. when I was like seven.

But all my extended family lives throughout Michigan. Everybody went to University of Michigan, blah, blah, blah. But I have tons of cousins who grew up in Grand Rapids, which is close to where you grew up, right? I grew up in Lansing. Oh, you grew up in Lansing. Yeah, Okemos, actually. But Mars Hill. And then ended up in Grand Rapids.

Yeah, so you lived in Grand Rapids. Okay, so you didn't go to high school in Grand Rapids or anything like that. No, I graduated from Okemos High School. Only like probably an hour from this point. Right, right, right. Yeah. Michigan, all right. America's high five.

Yeah, and my cousins, like a bunch of my cousins still live there. My cousin Jenny is the principal of east grand rapids high school now like they're all wait really yeah my kids went to east grand rapids did they uh year when they were really young right before we moved to california oh yeah that's where we lived do you know the spindles or the fries that's i know the fries yeah i know that name. So David Fry. So my aunt, her husband, who was my mom's brother, was a prominent lawyer in Grand Rapids. He died in a car accident when I was quite young. And they built a memorial, like a sculpture, in front of the courthouse in Grand Rapids. It's like this copper little low-lying pyramid thing. You might have seen

it. Oh, really? Yeah. So, that's in honor of my uncle who passed away. And then my aunt married this guy, David Fry, who's a big mucky-muck banker in town, right? So, there's like, you know, prominent people. You have East Grand Rapids connections. That's true. That is amazing. And growing up, we used to go and spend summers in Grand Haven. Like we'd rent some tiny little cottage on those bluffs where they always fall down into the lake. And I can remember as a kid exploring, you know, we'd go down, like my cousin David and I would go, we'd go walk down the beach and we'd try to find one of those houses that had fallen in

and like try to find stuff in it, you know have to know michigan to know that image like people building houses on sand dunes and then surprised when it falls down the dune right and building your house on sand has been like something for thousands of years people have been like don't build your house on sand right well that's as old as it gets Yeah. So that brings up a good kind of subject that we could explore perhaps, which is humility, right? Like human beings are not long on humility generally. And the lack of humility tends to make us myopic and get us in all kinds of trouble, right? So it's a lack of humility to think that you're gonna build a house on a sand dune and you're not gonna suffer the consequences of that.

And I think that humility dovetails well with subjects of faith and spirituality. And one of the things that I thought was really beautiful in your tour film, Everything is Spiritual, is beyond the kind of timeline of taking us all the way through the evolution of the universe, was this discourse on particle physics, right? And how stuff gets super crazy when you get down to the subatomic particle level. And for a lot of people, science and faith are irreconcilable ah yeah these things

live in on different planets and for me i think there's nothing more uh there's nothing that inspires faith more than science because of those very reasons that that you get into and it's a it's a it's a lack of humility on the part of humanity, this idea that we can understand all and, you know, create an algorithm and an equation to everything that I think blocks us from the beauty and the power of, you know, embracing what it means to, you know, inject your life with a little faith. Absolutely. And when you think about, like, the best scientists, when you hear them talk, there's a wonder and awe in their voice. Like, I heard Lisa Randall speak recently, like this very, very famous scientist, and

it was so interesting how much of the Q&A her answer, the first half of her answer would be this really complicated, mind-blowing riff, and then she'd pause and say, but the rest, we just don't know. And it was, if you would just, you could edit together her I don't knows, and it was like this, it was like a dialogue between what she did know and what she didn't know. And the best theologians are the ones going filled with wonder and awe. I actually think what's happening now is so many people have seen faith and science as like headed the other direction. But if you and I get in a fight and we turn around and walk away from each other, if we walk away from each other long enough, we're going to circle the globe. We're going to end up running into each other. So in some senses, if they move away from each other, I think what's happening is they've rounded the bend,

and they're now facing each other. Well, I think where it gets into trouble, where it becomes problematic, is when ideas of science get distorted and ideas of faith get distorted, right? So there's this sense that, well, if you're a person of faith, then you believe that evolution doesn't exist, and all these sorts of truisms that we accept as scientific fact get thrown out the window, right? But, you know, breakdown—I love, like, how you kind of describe this, you know, this sort of particle physics, subatomic thing, and how you draw, you know, you draw from that

inspiration and wonder. Yeah, like, if you you just begin with how did we get here, the majority scientific opinion is that about 13.8 billion years, which, by the way, I love 13.8 billion, and not 13.7 billion and not 13.9. The precision in that is... Is that a level of certainty about that? Well, you have to laugh that we as human beings are like no it's pretty well you think it was 13.8 you know what i mean so that got that that knucklehead over

there who was like 13.2 is way off it seems like 0.8 seems like a small thing to quibble about but that's what is that 800 million years you can make a career out of quibbling over that decimal so this idea which i think is so, say essentially 13.8 billion years ago, there was a singularity. There was this point of infinite density crammed with stupendous fecundity, as the great Desjardins said, and that there was some sort of banger explosion. And out of that, you had the first subatomic particles, essentially little bits and pieces of energy. Then those began to form with each other, bond with each other and form atoms. And then atoms began to bond with each other,

that the whole thing has been moving into greater and greater complexity, which, and then atoms begin to form molecules and the molecules eventually form cells and cells form systems. And then somehow somewhere in the 13 billion year range, you then begin to have animals and eventually you have sentient human beings and then hope of sapiens emerge out of that and then you and i can now have a talk and record it and put it all over the world where we stand at a distance and reflect on this right which is new in the history of the

universe human consciousness and self-awareness arrive at you know the last point zero zero zero really late in the game in this 13.8 billion year journey and yet we arrive with a sense that we get it and we understand all of this right and right and uh you know we can reduce it all into you know a notebook or yes and then there's also the interesting belief among you'll find people who say well we don't understand it yet, but we will, which often is seen as the strength of science, but if it's, which is beautiful, but if we don't understand it, but we will, we're now talking about hope and faith and something that will come in the future. Yeah, that's its own form of faith.

Everything now is just merged into one giant soup. Right. But behind that idea that we will understand it someday is a sense of, not omnipotence is the wrong word. Yeah, omniscience, all-knowing. An all-powerful mind. We think we are the ultimate pinnacle of evolution. We're on a spectrum that's continuing, right? Yes. just you know we're on a spectrum that's continuing right so yes so as is you know your dog and the lizard that's outside like you could spend all day trying to you know get your pet snake to

understand what you're telling it and it's just not going to get there yeah my dog is not going to do math lacking you know the appropriate frontal lobe or whatever it needs to do that so why do we think that we have the capacity to understand everything i'm sure we're lacking a few lobes that if they were installed if we were upgraded to you know os whatever newest software yeah that we would suddenly be able to see light spectrums and multiple dimensions and understand you know uh certain things as elementary that are just simply beyond our grasp until we develop, you know, AI where we can outsource our intellect to help us understand things better.

And you think about the, well, then we'll know everything, which is the definition of boredom. So, you think about literature, you think about art, you think about science, you think about landscaping, you think about everything people do from simply manipulating the physical environment to what we're learning about biochemistry. It's the hunt, the search, the discovery, the exploration, which is actually where the joy is. That, look at what we've just discovered. A friend of mine just sent me the study that there's now these programs in France where they're sending people who are severely depressed on these surfing programs.

And they're now getting back data that surfing, they have now all this data that surfing actually combats depression quite well. Which is just, that's the thing you pass around to your friends and you laugh at, you kind of know that, but you kind of, you know, like we get data, but we already know. Right, these studies that are like self-evident right exactly but the endless it's it's the exploration where the joy is um it's it's even when we were talking before we turned on the recorder your path and how you never could have planned this you never could have made the rich role like abcd um that's where the joy has been. Right. And that's what's beautiful about it. And that's what sort of continues to empower, you know, my sense of faith.

Because everything that kind of occurred to get me to this point was not by my doing. I can assure you of that, you know. There was, you know, the machinations of the universe or whatever verbiage you want to attach to it, but it certainly wasn't by design or self-will. You wouldn't have come up with something this good. No, there's no way that I could. And at the time, you know, I was trapped in a life that was making me very unhappy, you know, and I couldn't see, as we were talking about, I't see you know the the escape hatch out of it yeah and it was literally by um by sort of you know burning in the flames of dismantling and trusting and learning

to have faith that if i follow this thread of inspiration that was coming from some place i couldn't identify deep in my subconscious yeah something would come of that. You know, it wasn't about business. It wasn't about a profession. It was about a search for trying to find greater meaning and contentment and purpose and happiness in my life, right? So the fact that it was not by, you know, it's like, what's your five-year plan? And what is your one-year goal? It's like, I've never done that because i feel like that is

selling myself short you know because you have no idea what you're truly capable of if you sort of surrender yourself to the greater forces at bay and and channel that energy inward to connecting with yourself in in the most deep and profound way that you can to get to a place where your instincts are so finely honed that you can trust them and that they will lead you despite whatever society tells you or your family or your parents or whoever that you will be taken care of. And that has been my experience and the experience of plenty of other people that I know

time and time and time again. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's not about a canon of, you know, it's not a scripture-based thing. It's not reduced to any singular book or anything that I can specifically define, you know, which gets into, you know, we talk about like my history with religion and I want to get into, of course, your background and kind of what led you to this place. But it's been kind of an a la carte spiritual tapestry. Did you grow up with a specific tradition?

So yeah, I know what you're doing right now. You're turning the interview on. Look what I just did. I know what you're doing, but I will answer this question. Yeah, I grew up in Michigan, and my parents weren't—I think my dad went through a little bit. They grew up in the Presbyterian church, and then my dad had kind of an atheist phase when he was in college. He went to Amherst, but then he kind of, I don't know, started to grow out of that. And so as a kid, we would go to Sunday services in Michigan at this Presbyterian church, and I did Sunday school and all of that.

And I don't remember much about that other than that I couldn't really emotionally connect with it. I was neutral on it. It wasn't bad. It wasn't good. I didn't have a viscerally strong reaction either way, but I just't really it didn't it didn't really do anything for me right and then moving to washington dc i went to an episcopalian uh elementary school and that was interesting because there was lots of guys dressed up in crazy costumes that look like they could be on a float in the gay pride parade in West Hollywood,

swinging the incense things on the rope, that they would have that really potent smell that to this day I can remember and never understand. Just the trappings and the costuming and the traditions of a bygone era that me at age, whatever I was, 13 or whatever, just looked at and just in confusion right you know as much as anything else and again i think that was a barrier that prevented me from

being able to tap into you know anything positive for myself and i think the language you know the the language around all of it was very difficult to penetrate intellectually yeah and so that was my experience and so then it's just been a gradual you know just that was it you know i was like kind of done with it like of course you know you go to church on my parents have gotten very involved in their church in washington dc and you know so on holidays or whatever we do the ceremonial thing where you show up or a wedding or what have you. But beyond that, I have no relationship with any church or any kind of formalized religious tradition. But I consider

myself to be a spiritual being having a human experience. And I've explored and read and practiced many traditions. As you can see, there's pictures of, you know, that picture over there on the, that's Bhagavan Das who married my wife and I, who is from the sort of be here now tradition. Yeah. That is a great photo by the way. We've had lots of interesting, you know, spiritual minds pass through this house and impart their version of, you know, wisdom and enlightenment. And that photo was amazing amazing i know it's incredible right so so i love it you know i love god i'm totally down with you know jesus as a dude and everything that he stood for because he was super righteous you know and like he rocked it out and that's awesome but of course you know no surprise when it comes into kind of creating structures around that, problems arise. And that's always sort of prevented me from taking it any further.

Yeah. So that's my big story. Yeah. I asked you one question and you were like, oh, I see what you're doing. But it's important because it provides context for everything that we're going to talk about now. Yeah. Right. So tell me your, you tell me your version of that.

In Michigan, my parents would take us to church, and I found the Jesus stories utterly compelling. I loved the idea that when there was an in-group that was marginalizing or oppressing somebody, Jesus always went to the edges. I love that whenever he's asked a question, he responds with a question. Like at a young age, that resonated. You know, how do you think about it? There's only maybe two places in all the Gospels where Jesus is asked a question and he actually answers it. Right.

In good rabbinic fashion. And at a young age, I intuitively understood. That's kind of like a Zen thing. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you have to own this for yourself. Like, you actually have to think about it for yourself. What he's saying is, I can answer this all sorts of ways, but how do you read it? How do you think about it? How do you interpret it? And I loved that the first will be last and last will be first, something about the fact that there is this dominant system around you that says this is how it works.

And that at the heart of the Jesus stories were you challenge and subvert that thing. There's some other way. There's some other way to do it. So you just, you tapped in immediately. Well, it, it. But your parents, your parents were down with this, right? Well, they were, I would call them intellectually restless.

So they were always reading, always asking questions. Your dad was like a judge? My dad is a federal district judge, yeah. And for him, faith was you doing good work in the world. It was this, it was a personal thing, but it was, uh, you go help people and whatever your job is. So, as he's like, my job is to be a good judge, not to preach sermons from the bench. Like he was like, no, you, you go and be fair and be a great judge. That's what, that's what faith looks like. So, it was this very sort of, uh, in the dirt and sweat of life. Faith in action. Yeah, yeah. And it was, and so it's, so to me, the Jesus stories were never about this giant thing

that, like religion, there wasn't a catechism or like a, it was just these stories that moved me. So I didn't come in through a denomination or through, you know, some people are like, well, there's the 11 things or the 13 things or the class you have to take. I just, I kind of came in with this, there's this way to be in the world. And deeply suspicious of the movement that had started surrounding Jesus. Because I remember thinking, sitting there on a Sunday thinking, these ideas are like the help and liberation for the oppressed, forgiving people who have betrayed and wronged you, living with less, being content. He turns water into wine.

This is like good, this is good stuff. Why is the gathering in his name so boring? It was like a, it was like a deep well beyond and beyond boring yeah boring let alone nasty and oppressive exactly yeah and and completely divorced with those themes that you just articulated so i think sometimes it's like later in your life you look back and realize that the seeds of what you've become, you know, were planted all along. So I went away to college and was in a band, and we thought we were going to be the next R.E.M., which dates me.

That was my favorite band growing up. The next Violet Femmes, the next Midnight Oil. But you went to like a Christian college, right? I did. My parents went there. And so that thing when you're like five or six or seven and your parents take you to college and so it gets in your head, oh, someday I'm going to go there. And what was interesting when I got there is my friends and I started this band, but there was like this scene of people. One of my roommates had an improv comedy group called Seafood Rodeo, and there was this country singer named Claire, and there was

this opera singer named Claris, and there was this folk duo that went on to actually play for a number of years. So, there were all these musicians and artists and sculptors who came from some sort of faith tradition, but faith simply meant you make cool stuff in the world so it was it was it was a very free thinking exchange of ideas let's all make stuff everybody was going to everybody else's shows and supporting each other so it's not it wasn't like of course the stereotypical idea of what a college like that right right it would be very strict and like sort of. Yeah, no, it was like we were playing, we would be playing at a club in Chicago and we were underage. So we would literally run in, set up, sound check, leave.

And then right before we were playing, come back on, play. It was like adventure. Right. And. So you loved it. I did love it. And it shaped me in some profound ways. So I didn't have like a, ooh, you can't do this.

It was never about like, I've heard people talk about religious colleges where it was all about the rules and you're sort of it for me it was about this group of people who were like let's let's create stuff there's a guy named charlie who did these massive oil paintings of monsters heads and so we would see how could we cover all the walls in our apartment and his paint was all this sort of thing and then the band broke up senior year of college like bands do because everybody has to get a job yeah and somewhere in there i was like because i was the front man of the band and i loved i loved writing the lyrics and then you'd have a show and it was like my job to take everybody from the back of the room to the front like let's let's go somewhere we have 45 minutes set let's take people somewhere um and the crafting of the lyrics and saying

something and then hearing people sing it back was like it was the first time in my life when i wasn't because there was always a better student i didn't do very well in school it was always a better athlete there was always somebody more popular i was always on always felt like on the outside but there was this playing in like a alternative was that like that back then it was alternative music which basically meant not bon jovi um there it it on it it unleashed it grounded it centered it did something to me like oh and then the idea of idea of moving an audience of people emotionally. Having something to say and connecting with people and going somewhere together.

It always felt like a very tribal, almost like the village shaman. Like, we're going to give you some songs, we're going to go somewhere. Right, so it's almost a natural evolution that you would be delivering sermons and music to almost a call and response. And then that summer after college,

I volunteered to give a sermon. I was teaching barefoot water skiing at a camp and I volunteered because they had like this Sunday faith service and I volunteered to give a sermon. It was one of those things where you say something and then you're like, what am I doing? What is a sermon? What do you call it? But what do you mean? You were in Bible college. Like, what are they teaching you in Bible college?

I studied psychology. Yeah? But they have, like, there's, like, scripture classes, right? Like, how does it work? That was, I think you had to take a class in the Bible, but it was not, it was people, it was pre-med, economics. My friends were studying communications. It was, um, I've heard, like, a Bible college, I think everybody is going to go be a pastor.

The college I went to, Wheaton, that was not what it was like. It was like, this guy's a pre-med, she's economics, he's going on to get a social work. Right, gotcha. It was much more of an intellectual tradition. And, yeah, so no, so giving sermons wasn't a normal thing. But I got up to give this sermon, and it was like, I was wearing Birkenstocks. I took off the sandals because I was like, this sense of holiness, like this sense of sacred, like, oh, this is what you're here to do. It was like that.

It was that sort of strong. You knew immediately. Yeah. Was it like, it was in a church when you got there? No, it was out in a woods oh it was like a bunch of logs that somebody had arranged in the round like uh you could sit on these logs and somebody could stand in the middle of these bench log things and talk it was did you prepare something or did you just yeah i did prepare something and channel the lord the first

the uh no i i remember walking around that, I remember walking around that week. I remember walking around that week thinking, what do you say? Like, I guess you want to inspire people? You want to give them? And my opening story was about a kid whose counselor had gotten so angry with him, he'd hung him in a tree by his underwear. That was like the opening story. So that was like the bar had been set. But actually, I talked about rhythm of life.

I have the notes. I found the notes. I've kept them for 25 years. I talked about a rhythm of life and that there are these rhythms. In the ancient Hebrew tradition, they have Sabbath, a six-in-one rhythm of life. But it was, if you violate, if you don't care for yourself, you'll probably lose your mind in some way. If you just work every day, all day, you'll burn out. And it was, there was some sense like this was an art form. I felt like I was tapping into an art form that I'd never seen somebody treat

as an art form. I'd seen people do sermons that were basically, here's who you should vote for. I had seen sermons that were basically, here's what you're supposed to believe, and if you don't believe, something horrible's gonna happen to you when you die. I had seen sermons which were, here's how you raise money to build a bigger building, edifice complex. I had seen sermons that were doing these other things.

These templates that are kind of culled from a tradition of political campaigns. Yeah, exactly. Here's how we're going to take back America. We're always taking back something. We're taking back the Constitution. We're taking back something. And I had seen the sermon as a belief affirmation device,

which is just tell people what they've heard every Sunday all their life, and then all of you have a great warm feeling that you're in and everybody else is out, that you're right and everybody else is wrong. I'd seen this, but I had some sense, like I was like, no, this is an art form. And it's actually, when you think about Martin Luther King, I have a dream. That's a sermon. But nobody heard that and then said, I don't know, he was funnier last week. You know what I mean?

That wasn't like you sit there and just sort of, that was an event. It was a happening. It was somewhere between performance art and guerrilla theater. It was a vision of a new kind of world, but it was provocative and comforting and healing, and you learned something, but it also shook you up. And I had this sense, I was probably 21 or 22, oh, this is an art form. I'm going to reclaim this as the art form that it actually is. And not just how you build a particular religion. This is about what it means to be human.

You know, the word that comes to mind when it comes to you and the work that you do is inclusivity, right? You're an actualized three-dimensional human being, you know, which is something I'm not sure I could say about other pastors and deliverers of sermons that I have seen either in person or on television. I'm like, you're a dude, you know, like I feel like you're sitting here and I ask you a question and you're actually trying to honestly answer it. And I get a sense that you're a guy. There's not this wall of separation that says, I am pious and I will now deliver upon you this wisdom.

I've got a magic bullet. Just be quiet while I... I am the conduit to God. And in order to connect with God, you have to connect with me and that is the only path. And all of this sort of separation and all of that and you have very consciously cultivated and developed this way of communicating in a very populist way that draws its traditions

not from campaign, you know, political type speech or the traditions of oration that you find in the church, but more from performance art and stand-up comedy. I mean, the fact that you, like, do this thing at Largo. Oh, yeah. You should come to the one in October. The people room is, like, that's so cool and different and new that it's, like, it's almost mind blowing.

I mean, like nobody else is doing that. So do you still have like a standing like date at the, at Largo? Yeah. I'll put you on the guest list for the next one. There's one in October. I'm going to do something on the,

uh, yeah, yeah. I'll, it's, it's, I love that. Yeah.

To me, it was always this thing that I'm doing is for everybody. This is about what it means to be human. And then later, I came to realize, actually, the roots of the Jesus tradition are about what it means to be human. And that for most people, it was like, oh, it's Christian, which means it's for those people over there, which is actually a complete misunderstanding of, no, it's love your neighbor. Your neighbor could be anybody. It is about giving a gift to the world,

whoever that is. So, I don't even, the labels and categories over the years started to mean less and less because I encountered people who used the word Jesus a lot who didn't seem to be doing anything like what he was talking about. And then I met people who would never call themselves a Christian who were so deeply tuned in to what Jesus talked about doing that even those labels and categories just started to mean less and less over the years. And yet at the same time, those words are so potent and powerful. Absolutely. You know, like they carry such heavy you know connotation yeah i mean just for me like even with my kind of neutral you know experience still when i hear the word christian or i hear the word jesus oh yeah right or church right i almost physically recoil oh for

sure and it's difficult for me to even say the word Jesus. Right, right, right. Because then I'm like, people think I'm a crazy person. Or that by virtue of discussing this individual, that makes me a member of some organization that I don't identify with. And I come on your podcast and say that. I'm like, I know there's a number of people who are like, who did Rich bring on? This is crazy. No, this is why it's so great. Because actually, there's a contingent of the audience that is Christian. And I love you guys.

And there's a contingent of the audience that are into yoga and more of a Hindu, sort of that tradition. But I think it would be fair to say that most people that have tapped into this, to what I'm doing here, are spiritual seekers of some form or another. So maybe before we even go any further, you could just canvas your basic perspective on all of this so people understand where you're coming from. Oh, man, I begin by celebrating and affirming movement wherever you see it. And the idea that there would be truth, or truth with a capital T,

and only these people over here in the corner would have access to it is completely absurd to me. And if there is a God source to being glue, energy, thread that holds it all together, that would have to be accessible to everybody. Or you're not talking about love. So I begin there, and that you begin with inclusion, and that we all, at some level, we are all searching for the same things. And I just keep saying God has all sorts of kids. I just start there. And that you will find, if your eyes are open, you'll find brothers and sisters all across the spectrum. And you'll find resonance with people who would seemingly come from all sorts of different backgrounds,

but you'll start talking. And when you love your neighbor, you'll discover all these threads and commonalities. And so I celebrate all that. And then I would say also, the number of my friends who are atheists who when they talk about the God they don't believe in, I don't believe in that God either.

And the number of my friends who are atheists who when you say, well, what do you mean when you talk about God? And they describe that God, maybe an image that they were handed growing up. I'm always like, atheism is the only healthy response to that image. Right. And in kind of taking a look at the Bible, you know, the text,

you have an interesting perspective on how you interpret these stories. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the ideas that are being conveyed by that. Because, you know, look, I mean, come on. Like, there's pictures of Jesus. He's a white man. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. science and how we live our lives today and the inherent contradictions that we find in these texts, but you have a way of kind of grappling with these ideas and reconciling them in a way that creates like a cohesive, you know, sort of spiritual worldview. Pete Absolutely. You have to, the Bible's a library of books written by real people in real places at real times. So, they're being shaped by economics, politics. Most of the Bible is written by a small minority of Jewish writers who were living under the boot of a global military superpower.

The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Greeks. So they are fundamentally suspicious of military power. suspicious of military power. They have a serious critique of global military superpowers that charge in and crush everybody in their path. So, you have to read this book as coming out of real places in real times. And then, of course, in that part, they said that they slaughtered everybody in the village in the name of God. That's how people talked at that time. that they slaughtered everybody in the village in the name of God. That's how people talked at that time. So, if you read it and you do just a little tiny bit of work on what the world was like at that time, it's a very, very, very human book. But then what you do is you find again and again these really radical ideas about, so the book of Leviticus, which is like as Old Testament,

seemingly violent and archaic as it gets, in the book of Leviticus, which is like as Old Testament, seemingly violent and archaic as it gets, in the book of Leviticus, in among all this blood and guts and all that, you have leave a corner of your field when you harvest it. Don't harvest a corner of your field. Leave it for the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant among you. Always remember the poor. always remember the poor so in among all of this ancient primitive barbaric what would look like thinking that we think thank god we left behind that are these really fresh radical ideas that start appearing as somebody who is the furthest thing from a bible scholar you know other than knowing kind of like the stories that we all know uh it's inescapable that there is this idea of a very, you know, vengeful god that comes out of this book.

Right, right, right. And so, you know, where do you take that? I would begin with people for thousands of years have been asking questions about the nature of the universe. We're still asking questions about the nature of the universe. In the ancient world, the way that they talked about these questions was in terms of the gods and the goddesses. So, for example, like think the story of Noah and the flood is not a unique story. There were lots of flood stories in the ancient world. So, then you realize in that part of the world

at that time, there were often flash floods. So, you and your wife and kids have a little thing set up, and then all of a sudden, you have a little life, you have some animals, you have some plants, and then all of a sudden, the flood comes through and wipes everything out, maybe even your beloved family members. You would probably, 3,000 years ago, somebody must be pissed at me. You know what I mean? Right, and the earth is flat, and all of this water is going to wash off the side of the earth. Right, right, right, right. So you can see how people were trying to explain why did everything that I love get wiped away. And so people were telling stories to try to explain the world kind of exactly like we're doing now. So what's really interesting to me is there were lots of flood stories,

and in the flood stories, the way they told the flood story is the gods are angry, and they're judging us, and they're going to wipe us out. The Noah and the flood story starts like all the other flood stories, violent, and God is angry and vengeful. It ends with this God saying, I'm never going to do that again. So, if you read it in context… Which is a radical idea that the heart of the universe is not against you, but for you, was a really brand new idea. But did God learn something? Since I did it, like, well, I made a mistake with that, so I'm not going to do that anymore.

Well, if you begin with a human book, then you don't have to do the, did God believe this or that? You begin with, this is, human beings were writing about their understandings. So, you, you, you, because when people say, why did God do that? Wait, wait, wait, wait. It's people trying to figure out why certain things happen to them. Don't blame, if there even is a God, don't blame God. Just read it as their explanations. Then suddenly, these were brand new ideas. These were really progressive for their time ideas. Pete The idea of a loving God. Jared The idea that the universe is not aligned against you in one more step and you will be destroyed was a new idea. So, then all the

violence and all the vengefulness, that's how people thought then. You don't have to do this blind sort of religious, well, you know, there was a reason for that sort of, no, it was how people talked then. Right. And whether it's the story of Noah or Adam and Eve or any- Which I think is a poem, by the way. Yeah. So that's what I'm getting at, this idea that it's not a literal analysis of the you know point a to point b the facts of the story but what is the wisdom behind this what is the idea that's actually you know trying to surface through these polemics yes and you think about the modern world the way that you build a hospital or an airport or you put 10,000 songs in your pocket

Is you study things under a microscope? And you figure out how things work and you use very literal language So if your car is broken and you go to get it fixed You don't want them to say your carburetor is just in a bad mood You want literal technical language about what's wrong with my car. But if I ask you Um, tell me about falling's wrong with my car. But if I ask you, tell me about falling in love with your wife, you don't say, well, you know, she was five foot nine. She likes pasta. You know what I mean? You'd probably shift into, I feel like I met my other half.

Tell me how you feel about your kids. You wouldn't say, well, procreation with my progeny has been very fruitful to move the human thing forward. You'd probably shift into, well, procreation with my progeny has been very fruitful to move the human thing forward. You'd probably shift into, oh, they're like little, they're like four little stars orbiting that, you know what I mean? We would shift into a different kind of language when we talk about the deep themes and desires of our life. So, what happens is you have lots of people who take a very modern, literal, mechanistic, technical language and understanding, and they say, why is the Bible not scientifically accurate? Because it's a book about loss, death, family, tribe, doubt. You know what I mean? And generally, when you write about those things,

I'm about a 7.3 on the doubt scale today. You know what I mean? You just don't think about it that way. So you think about 9-11. You could tell me that two planes flew into the towers. You could tell me the names of the pilots. You could tell me that a plane went down in Pennsylvania, a plane hit the, you can give me all the details of 9-11

and be technically accurate and you might have nothing interesting to say about why. Why were these people angry with America? What does this say about America's presence in the world? You could be technically accurate and not have any insight into 9-11 and the causes of 9-11 and what it's, how we're still sort of sorting it through. So oftentimes what happens is modern people read the Bible with this particular framework and completely miss that these writers, they're not playing that game. In their time and their place, they're playing a different game.

In the same way that you would read the Bhagavad Gita. And immerse yourself in these incredible stories of these characters. And try to divine the wisdom that is in the white between the letters on the line. Exactly. So you read, even in high school in Shakespeare, it took like three weeks to figure out how to read Shakespeare.

But then people go, oh, it's a flood. That's a dumbass. Only three weeks? I'm still trying to figure out how to read Shakespeare. But you start thinking about, oh, there were a bunch of flood stories. Flood stories were how people tried to explain suffering. And one of the dominant explanation of the day was somebody somewhere is really, really pissed and is going to wipe you off the face of the planet. And there was this tribe of

people who began to circulate a story that was similar to those stories, and yet it had a vastly different, this was a much higher consciousness idea. This was actually, when you have that view, it makes you miserable. And here's a better way to think about it. This was very, this is radical stuff. So, it's a much more subversive book than anybody lets on so when you think of jesus then do you do you uh conceptualize him as like the literal son of god or do you think of him as this enlightened dude who was definitely channeling some serious you know enlightened wisdom from wherever but one such a good question one of you, many people that have walked the planet over various, you know, epochs in the evolution of the human race. I love that question.

Okay, can we talk about Son of God for a second? Of course. Okay. Like, what does that even mean? I still don't know what the Holy Trinity means, by the way. Oh, we should talk about that, too, because that's a really, really, you would love this idea, by the way. about that too because that's a really really you would love this idea by the way see so many of these ideas got like they were microwaved they were left on the they they they became like stale we hear the name of the father and the son yeah yeah holy ghost and we you say that wrote and

then but i'm like i have no idea what that means okay so so son of god at the time of jesus the world is ruled by the caesars, the succession of Roman Caesars. Now, this was the greatest military machine the world had ever seen. And the Roman Caesars had all of this military propaganda. Because if you're building an empire, you gotta have propaganda. You gotta put some flags on some football fields.

You gotta fly some F-14s overhead. You gotta have some sort of... So, one of the lines was, Caesar is the Son of God sent to earth by the gods to bring about a universal reign of peace and prosperity. That was Roman military propaganda, that Caesar is a son of God. He comes from the gods and he's here to bring about peace. Now, how did Caesar do that? He came into your province with a sword and said, confess Caesar as Lord. If you said, oh, okay, then you became Roman citizens. You became a Roman province. You paid taxes,

which helped him build a bigger army to conquer more lands. If you didn't, then they had this thing called a crucifixion stake, also called a cross, where they would publicly torture you and kill you as a way of saying, this is what happens if you defy Caesar. So, yeah, he's bringing peace pretty much because it's a particular kind of peace. It depends on which end of the sword you're on. Yeah, it's like when you, sorry to interrupt, but it just occurred to me, when you travel throughout Europe and you see all these incredible basilicas

and this amazing architecture everywhere you turn and you think, why can't we continue to build such beautiful structures of art that allow our consciousness to sing and soar until you realize that they were built under despotic reign by legions of slaves. Right, there's like bodies. You can do that when you control the people. There's bodies in that cement. Yeah, exactly. So, if you were one of these minority groups of people who the Roman Empire had come in and totally transformed life as you know

it, and you've had, I mean, there's evidence that the city of Magdala, they crucified 2,000 people at once. So, this is just, this is like peace, but it's everybody who didn't think it was peace is dead. And so, son of God was a loaded political term. So, when these, so when Jesus comes along and they're talking about son of God, the question, it's actually a question, is there another way to be in the world than coercive military violence? So, the fact that he's killed, as the story goes, by this machine, and they call him the son of God, essentially, in the first century, this was, is there another way to be in the world? And the Jesus movement was, yeah, the world is not made better through coercive military violence. It's made better

through sacrificial love. When you stand with the poor and the oppressed, when you feed those who are hungry. So, when you get to 2016 and people are like, well, do you literally believe he's the son of God? In the first place, it wasn't a literal litmus test. It was a way of, he comes, he's essentially saying there's another way. It's a way of saying, it's standing in contradiction to this MO, this idea that reigned the day. Is there another way to be human? And the reason why I think it's so interesting is take the presidential primary debates, where in response to ISIS and terrorism, every single candidate is like, I'll tell you the answer.

We need to bomb them. No, we need to bomb them and their kids. No, we need to make our military stronger. Even though we're 5% of the world's population, we have 43% of its weapons, which is, and then we build, you know, this is a Christian nation. Don't say it's a Christian nation and then talk in the language of Caesar. It's literally comical. Yes. Upside. Upside down it is, yes. That the party of, you know, of quote-unquote Christianity in the way that that is commonly understood in our current culture and political climate, every word, every action, every idea that emanates from that camp is completely diametrically opposed to the philosophy and the actions and the ideas of Jesus.

Right, right, right. It's so... And it's more, you know, it's like, what Gandhi did was Jesus-like. Absolutely. And there hasn't been a more, you know, sort of recent example of that kind of sacrifice. Gandhi, Mandela, Martin, yeah. How did this movement become so divorced from its... So how did it?

What happened? Probably, I mean, there's all sorts of interesting theories. Some say it's in the 400s when the Roman Emperor Constantine realized, hey, if I take a cross into battle, all these Jesus followers will be with me. There's all sorts of different theories. Was that the beginning of the iconography around the cross? Because that didn't happen right away. Well, you know, some people say that the first icons

and jewelry of the cross were in the 400s, which is when the last people who had actually seen a crucifixion died. Nobody who saw a crucifixion was like, dude, that makes some great earrings for my girlfriend. Right. Your association with that was just horrible. It was shame and humiliation and the utter degradation of resistance to the empire. And it would be like, like having like a little electric chair around your neck or something. Oh my, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like if

you had just like an AK-47 necklace, you know, like with a guy with like a black hood on and a shooting line, a firing line. Yeah, it was absolute. And it was better to die like that than to just keep the same violence in circulation that was the question of 2000 years ago. It's the question of today. Is it just, oh, you bomb us, we bomb you, you bomb us, we drone strike you. It's just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Yeah, so that's why I think it's so interesting is how I don't think he came so that there would be, you know, they think he's the son of God. I think he came to introduce people to a way of being in the world. And so if he was alive today, what would his perspective on, not just the Christian church, but kind of our current, you know,

cultural and political climate? Oh, man. I'm not asking you to put words in his mouth, but knowing what you know and what you've studied and what you understand of who this person was? There's a couple of things I think he would do right away. I think he would point out that when there's such a massive gap between the rich and poor and the haves and have-nots,

there's now actually this new research about the greater the gap between the rich and the poor, richer and poor in a country, I talk about it in that Everything is Spiritual film, the longevity of the rich and the poor and richer and poor in a country the um i talk about it in that everything spiritual film the longevity of the rich goes down that we really are we really are all connected i think he would talk about that i think he would talk about like it's this disease this disease of culture that negatively impacts all of us even the people that think right winning right even the people who are winning,

it is eroding everything. He would talk about that. I think he would talk about the weaponizing of everything. I think he would have a lot to say about the Second Amendment. And I actually don't think he'd have a problem. Oh, okay, I understand. Because he doesn't,

I don't think he'd have a problem with somebody owning a gun. I think he'd have the problem with this obsessive guns at all costs. And I think that he would have great joy in science. He'd be like, no way, that's awesome. I think he'd be as filled with wonder and awe as anybody. I think he would talk a lot about the integration of body, soul, spirit, you're one.

So I think he would look at childhood obesity. I think he'd bring up stuff like that and say, what are you doing to your kids? Like, what are you feeding them? What are you doing? You're out of, because one of the central themes of the Bible is a proper relationship with the soil,

which you all have been so inspiring about. But I think it's one of the central themes of the Bible is when you are off in your relation to the soil, all kinds of things fall apart. I think you talk about animals. I think you talk about the whole thing. And so this institution has arisen around this man and his ideas.

Yeah. And I would imagine it's a story about power and control. But what's your perspective on that? Yeah, two thoughts. It is healthy sometimes and easy and appropriate to point out the church as an institution. But if you look at our culture, Wall Street, our financial institutions have made a bit of a mess of things. Our educational institutions have made a mess of things. That institutions losing their way, the church deserves all of that proper critique.

But that's not unusual for institutions that have lost their way. Oh, no, it's the most predictable thing, right? Yes, exactly. Exactly. What makes it, you know, as a sober person and somebody who's, you know, basically gotten a lot out of Alcoholics Anonymous, which we're not really supposed to talk about too much because of the reasons, the fundamental reason why that, it's not even an organization, but this sort of inculcation of ideas has been able to survive and thrive affect and ultimately create the downfall of almost every human man-made institution that has ever existed throughout mankind, right? Yeah. So, although I would say the real mystery, I have some friends in London who had a non-profit organization that I think it actually started as a church and the British government offered them a failing urban school that was they're

going to have to shut down and said would you all take it over so they took over this school that like had a full-on drug network in the hallways in between class. It was one of the worst schools in England. They took it over, helped get the teachers better training, turned the school around, and then realized a bunch of these kids, their parents are in horrible debt, so we should start a debt, a center where we can help parents get out of debt. Then they were like, these people are eating horrible food. Let's plant a garden and teach them how to grow their own food

so they can eat better food. So they called the organization Oasis. Then they realized a bunch of people have been involved and have been the victims of violent crime. Let's start a support group for people who have been assaulted or robbed or carjacked. And they now, and then they're like, well, maybe we should meet on Sundays just so people can meet each other.

And I guess it'd be a church service, but it'd be more like, they've now started 44 of these centers around England, around the world. They just started a farm around the corner from Parliament. It's the only livestock they know of in central London. And they call that church. But what they say is our job, we believe if Jesus was here in England, what he would want us to do is help bring good news to however people need it. People need to get out of debt. People need to eat more nutritiously. People need... So, there are... The mystery to me is with all of the injustice and abuse, and there are people doing unbelievably fresh, interesting things, and they would call it church.

Right, I get that. You know, I get that. But it's still, you hear the word church, you immediately, you know, have an idea of what that means. Yep, yep. Right? So I gather from this that part of, you know, part of what drives you is helping to redefine what these words mean. You know, when my wife Kristen and I were 28, we started a church. And I was like, let's not call it a church, because that word is so loaded. Let's just call it a community of students. Let's call it a... And so I tried that.

I was on this huge kick. And let's not use the word Christian, because that word is so loaded. Let's just call it a community of students. Let's call it a, and so I tried that. I was on this huge kick and let's not use the word Christian because that word is so loaded. Let's just say we're students of the way of Jesus and we have a community where we're learning together what it looks like to whatever. And people would always be like, so you mean a church? So is that what became Mars Hill? Yeah. And it was in like, you had like a space in a mall, right? But it wasn't, I had the sense like there's got to be some better way to do this whole thing so a guy had a building he just built and he let us rent it for a dollar a year and we it was like a warehouse school kind of building and then we outgrew that about a year and a half in and somebody gave us a mall so i think we bought the parking lot and then

they gave us the actual building with like the main hallway and the stores and all that. And that's what we did for a while. And did you have like a mission statement for that? Like what was the main idea? The main idea was at the heart of any healthy understanding of spirituality is that you are a student and you are learning how to be in the world. So we would think of it as we thought of as a Christian church. So we're students of Jesus. We're trying to learn this way of being in the world, nonviolent, generous, non-anxious. So we're students.

And so we're trying to help people be better students and we're learning ourselves. So built into the whole thing was the humility of we're learning as well so do you feel like you're i guess what i'm getting from this is your your sort of evolution as as a preacher as a as a deliverer of sermons like what's the right word preacher oh what do i say i love it i don't know you know my wife says there's so many associations with these words and my wife says my wife Kristen says don't introduce yourself as a pastor she's like because people immediately have a whole bunch of ideas right that aren't what you do but then I was um my friend Elizabeth Gilbert and I do events together and she's always like hey um pastor

she's so she's like that's the coolest she's like that's the coolest thing going and but then if i said probably the best term would be spiritual teacher but then that's immediately like then there's a whole other thing with that you have like a white robe in the car and are you gonna like make us you know what i mean there's just like all this weird stuff there is no there is no word for it really i usually say connotation for if i'm at a party, I would say author, because that's the, that's like the, and then you sort of backtrack from, you know, explain from there. But you had never been affiliated with any traditional church organization? Like this kind of, did you, was this a reaction to? I was.

How did you evolve into this perspective? I know. I went to seminary. I went and got a master's of divinity. And then I got a job in a church. And for three years, there was a pastor I really respected, and I followed him around for three years and just watched. And one of the first sermons I ever gave at that, when I had left seminary and was actually working in a church full-time, a dude comes up to me afterwards and he says, you need to go to AA. And I said, I'm not aware that I have an alcohol problem. I'm probably 25 or 26. And he says, no, everything you

need to know about being a pastor, you'll learn in AA. Oh, wow. So he says, go to AA, because this church had all these AA programs. So he says, go, and when it comes to you, just say, my name is Rob, and I pass. So I was probably 25. I started going to AA meetings and just sitting there, and they'd come to me, and I'd just say, I am Rob, I pass. I know there are people who have this meetings who are like, that dude was hard.

That dude was tough. He was unbreakable. And I remember the first couple meetings, I couldn't figure out why, it was like the molecules were vibrating differently. I remember looking around like, why is this so different than any space I've ever been in? It took me a while of going to realize,

oh, this is like a bullshit free zone. There's nobody's pretending. And it was like this went it was like a reverse image most of the environments i'm in people are spending a tremendous amount of energy pretending everything's fine we're doing great this space you just are what you are or if you are bullshitting it gets rooted out because you can't you can't survive it's like a heat that just burns it up and and the idea behind that is you you can either save face or save your ass so what's it going to be right you know what i mean if you want to save your ass which is why you're there because

your life ain't working and it's broken and the stakes are high then you're gonna have to get real yeah and that and there's that's it's it's beautifully human. That, that was a defining experience in my life. So in terms of informing how you become a better pastor, I mean, what are the ideas that came out of that that informed that? That any authentic spirituality will have room for the full spectrum of human experience. You feel like a failure, doubt, fear, worry, insecurity, rage, betrayal. All of it has to belong because it's all part of being human. And that any, like, well, we bring, we sort of dress up a little bit to come into this space. No, the space, and as a spiritual leader, you're

essentially creating a space. The space has to be, has to have room for everything. So, I, right after, we'd only been in the new church that we'd started a little while. I had, like, I would sponsor, like, a doubt night and just invite people to come and bring their doubts. Just write down everything they have doubts about, and then I would just read them up front. And would you share your own doubt? Sure. Oh, yeah. I remember the first time I said, I go to a therapist, and this is what I learned. And in West Michigan at that time, that was something.

But I remember like those experiences, which were all sort of like, oh yeah, everybody's moving, everybody's on a path. And I also remember going back to what you said about the divine leader who sort of gives to people. I realized quickly, because the church got really big really fast, oh, there's like a game face. Because I noticed it in other pastors, oh, this is now an institution, it needs money to run, and there are things that you say that

keep everybody like, okay, good, good. We're good and stable and we're going to make rent. When you pass the buck. And then there was what I was learning and growing and evolving and seeing. And I remember noticing, this is like early 30s, in other pastors that they would tell me, you know, I'm reading this so-and-so and it's blowing my mind. I just went, I was traveling out of the

States and I had an experience that like totally scrambled all my categories, but I couldn't say that. Because there was like the thing that you say to keep the thing. And I remember realizing I either have this game face, which keeps the institution stable and running and all that, or I go on a journey in public and I just go where it takes me. And my wife and I had this recurring joke. Just being vulnerable in who you are and being honest and transparent. And then realizing, like I did a whole series of sermons questioning the war in Iraq at Christmastime.

The timing was a little... But like, you have to talk about this. So it was just this sense, you have to go where it goes. And if you stop, and you're like, well, that might... So, this thing that is desperate for stability is going to have like a... As a friend of mine said, there's always a thousand people coming and a thousand people going. Yeah. And so, as you embark upon this experiment, I'm sure there's people in church communities

across the land who are having interesting reactions to this, right? And I suppose it goes back to what your aspirations were at the time. Like, are you going to be Joel Osteen? Are you going to be Billy Graham? Or are you going to be something different and new and unique and ultimately very Rob Bell? Yeah, those are exactly the questions. ultimately very Rob Bell? Yeah, those are exactly the questions. And I had seen, I had heard people talking about, like, this perspective on the Jesus tradition,

but I had, I'd seen it with 150 people in a basement. I hadn't seen it on a big scale. And so how big, I mean, how big was it getting? By two or three years in so i'd have been 31 32 it's like 10 000 people on a sunday my god i know you're 31 yeah how are you it was totally surreal like sort of managing you know as a human being you know i had to do the sermon i had to do the sermon three times on sundays so there was like a, there were three services throughout the day just to fit all the people. The thing about the ego is all of these people were coming, when all these people are coming to hear you say something that will help them, when it gets that ridiculously big and you're that young, it works the other way from ego like this is it felt like a pile of a shelf of books that's about to fall over on top of you right like even though

when is the other shoe going to drop and also like clearly this isn't me something's working through me to make this right right and i'm just trying to keep up with the what this does because then there are people who assume that there's some sort of circle of power and you must be in the center of it. So people, you walk into a room and people want access to you for reasons other than you. So you're going through all that sort of basic stuff.

And then I didn't really have any tools for, I was trained by a pastor who kind of just, you just go all the time. Not a lot of boundaries, not a lot of, if you care for yourself, that kind of was a lot of boundaries, not a lot of... If you care for yourself, that kind of was a little bit selfish, let's be honest, because you know there are people you could help. And when you have that many people and the kinds of needs that people are bringing,

it's like a fire hose. It never lets up. Yeah, I wasn't prepared for all that. I had a really bad burnout. Western Michigan is not Beverly Hills. I mean, it was. There's some really poor counties around there. So you had this, this is really difficult, but then you had these, like I would, I bought tons of scissors and would do a sermon on living more simply and then invite anybody with massive credit card debt to come down at the end of the sermon and cut up the credit cards that have them

like essentially a form of bondage or enslavement. And so like we'd have it, we wrote a lot of our own music. The band would start playing a song and people would come down and get scissors and cut up credit cards and like be weeping. So that kind of stuff, it's just, what is that? Just, it was this, it was somewhere between like group therapy and performance art

and you know what I mean there were these things that we were doing on a on a big scale to help set people free and so it felt like this giant experiment and all these you had all these unbelievable things the stories happening and then you also had this is taking everything I have and I don't know if this is sustainable because you just giving like that I had a really bad burnout in 04 oh you did is that why you ended up walking away from it

no that was I think 04 I left the church we left in 2011 okay so and partly I left because it had this overwhelming sense like this was a great season and generally people stay too long. And I had this sense like... You want to jump the shark with it?

Yeah, it had this sense like I took it as far as I could take it and I needed to keep going. And what I discovered, what had happened is more and more I was talking about things that weren't... I just more and more was convicted the way this is for everybody building a Christian institution isn't the goal here the goal is to help everybody be more human so and what you were doing is a react was a reaction against that so the the irony of ultimately it becoming you know yeah yeah yeah yeah there was there was some of that and it was like no we um in some ways I'm telling a story, so where do people tell stories? Well, L.A.

We'd lived in L.A. before when we were first married. Let's go farther. Let's have discussions. What if all your time was spent creating these books and tours and engaging with people? Let's go do that. And Mars Hill still exists, though. Yeah, yeah. these books and tours and engaging with people. Let's go do that. And Mars Hill still exists though. Yeah, yeah.

And after I left a friend of mine, the heart of a friend of mine who did it. It sounds like basically a Christian version of Agape. Have you been to Agape? Yes, how do I know that name? I've heard that name. Reverend Michael Beckwith. Oh yeah, I did an event with him. I did an event with him one time, yeah. So you've been to the center. Michael Beckwith. Oh, yeah. I did an event with him.

I did an event with him one time. Yeah. So you've been to the center. I haven't been to the center. We did an event. It's pretty cool. You should go check it out. Yeah.

I mean, it's very non-denominational, but he's a beautiful presence. He is a beautiful presence. And brings in all kinds of interesting people. Yeah. So, all right. So where does this sort of begin to take off? I mean, you hit like a stride and got into this groove where suddenly Oprah's involved in Time Magazine, 100 Most Influential People, and television shows,

and Deepak Chopra, and suddenly you're kind of orbiting in a very interesting circle of people. So how does that, what's going on? You know, there was never a grand plan. I actually very, very much relate to your, you kind of do the next thing. Whenever people would ask me, like when I was at the church, what's the five-year plan?

I was just blank. Because the only thing I knew how to do was make the next sermon, make the next book. Then I would have an idea about quantum physics and Hebrew poetry, and that became the Everything is Spiritual Tourist. But you had an impulse that in order to continue to evolve and grow, you needed to move on. Yeah. And then what if I was in an environment where people were making things? Would there just be, what would happen?

What would that look like? And it turned out that it's been amazing. It's been about five years and it's been amazing. It was kind of a lark then to move here. I mean, there was no... It almost felt like a long, slow evolution in the same direction. Kristen and I had like, oh yeah, this is the next step for sure. Um, it, Kristen and I had like, oh yeah, this is the next step for sure.

It, it, it felt less like a lark and more like the next step. Um, and that every step generally involves some element of risk, some element of this could really not work out. Yeah. Which you always know now we're onto something. We could fail miserably. Let's do it. LA is a weird place to move to. It's very weird and unique.

And for me personally, I've lived in lots of cities and it took me a really long time I mean, LA is a weird place to move to. It's very weird and unique. And for me personally, I've lived in lots of cities, and it took me a really long time to get roots here and feel comfortable and sort of establish. It's disorienting, and it's very alienating because everybody's in cars, and the distances between people is so great that it's easy to feel alone. Right, and my mom grew up in L.A.

And so when I grew up in Michigan, we would visit every other year at Christmas time. And I have these visceral memories of like 9, 11 years old being in L.A. And the grass, the like trees being like, oh, I love it here. Like this is like home in some way. like trees being like oh i love it here like this is like home in some way and so it was very surreal to move and then as soon as i got done with college i moved to la to do graduate school so moving it actually felt strangely like coming home and it's odd to see my kids at home in la how do they like it they love love it. They love it. Like we all kids. Yeah. 15, 18, 16 boys. And then a girl, seven and LA feels like home. So yeah, there are all these elements where I just

paid $14 to park at the dentist. And you're like, this is completely insane. But oddly, my family, not oddly, I guess it feels like we all came home. Like my kids, it's like flipping a switch. My kids are thriving like never before. When you sit down to, you know, whether it's write a book or produce a sermon or like this, you know, event, everything is, I guess it was a tour, right? A speaking tour, like everything is spiritual. What is the, you know, what is the process? Like how much of that is spontaneously improvised and how much of it is well thought out ahead of time and kind of plotted, you know, point by point?

Yeah, all the talks are all lots and lots and lots of work to get like an internal structure point, sub point. All that is just the work of, and the podcast talks are all, that's just the creating of content, and I'm not just like chatting. Right, so when you sit down and you do these podcasts, do you have like an outline in front of you?

Oh, absolutely. I feel so much better. And I've, and lots and lots of, lots and lots of work to make it sound like you're just talking. Right. Or like everything is spiritual. I remember the first Everything is Spiritual tour, it was 102 ideas and each idea was on a three by five card. And I arranged three by five cards on the, moved the furniture out.

And I remember the, my book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, was 600 3x5 cards. So that was a whole living room floor. Yeah. Sliding them around, looking for larger patterns and arcs and trajectories. So all that stuff is just, yeah, where does it begin? Where does it end? Where does it go next? Where does it go?

So like the Largo show in October, generally two ideas bang into each other that I wouldn't. And there's like a friction between them. So that's like the principle behind how all these things come together. Yeah, so here's an example. Somewhere recently, I stumbled upon flowers developed. This is how it starts. The books come to be because of this. Somewhere I was reading something on biology. I try to read about things I know nothing about because you begin to like pattern recognition. Flowers developed their

colors to attract bees to pollinate them and they need the bees to pollinate them to keep going. So, flowers, the colors in a flower are kind of like the flower going, hey, over here, big boy. The colors in a flower are kind of like the flower going, hey, over here, big boy. So, there's an element. And so, we give, the person we're trying to seduce, we give her flowers. But the colors, which are what she delights in, are there because of the flower trying to seduce the bee. Right, in this weird meta thing. So, seduction. So, the survival of the flower at some level is based on its ability to seduce.

So, that to me is really interesting when you start... It's a literal spreading of the legs. Abs... Yes. So, you can see... So, then you sit with that. So, generally, the book, The Talker Ever, I've been sitting with it for a long time, just that one thing, and then I started thinking about,

oh, wow, its beauty is integral to its survival. It's not tacked on at the end. So then you start thinking about, oh, for a lot of people, the things they do that are beautiful, that feed their soul are what they do after the work is done. You know, you go to your work, you're a lawyer, doctor, school teacher, fire person, you do the work and so you can survive so you can pay the bills and then maybe if you have some time over you do something that like feeds your soul or spirit you're bifurcating and compartmentalizing these right because you know there's survival and then there's the luxuries of it but for a flower its beauty and design and color is integral

to its survival so now you're just so that takes you into architecture that takes you into spirituality so that's an example of where just an idea like that by the middle by the end of october that will be something and then other ideas begin to attach itself to that and all of a sudden i think that that dovetails nicely that's as rough as the process gets right there yeah no, no, but I like that. No, and that was very, you know, tactile and specific. But I think it brings up some interesting things that you've talked about and written about and spoken about with respect to heaven

and this idea like, okay, you know, heaven isn't the, forget about the pearly gates. Like, let's, there's an, there's a, there's an argument to be had that a lot of the writings in the Bible are really about trying to establish heaven in your life. Now, this idea of trying to bring beauty and gratitude and service and happiness and purpose and all of these ideas that we associate with living, you know, sort of optimizing, you know, our sort of happiness quotient in our life, the more that we can incorporate them into the now, into the very fabric, like the flower, you know,

the more that we can create that, like, integrated system, then we're creating heaven in our own lives in the present moment. Yeah, and that heaven on earth becoming the same place, always at the heart of many spiritual decisions was not, you're kind of just waiting. This is like the waiting room, and then you'll die, and it'll get better. Even the Jesus prayer, your will be done on earth

as it is in heaven. It's a serious incentive problem with that protocol. But your will be done on earth as it is in heaven was, may you live in such a way that earth and heaven become more and more the same place. And yeah, I mean, you think about every great tradition, all of the mystics who climbed up on the mountain and lived in the cave for 10 years and came back down, they all pretty much came down and said the same thing, which was, here, now. You just find that across every,'s like the the note that everybody hits which is here now right and and an atheist's response to that would be that um these are just like whether it's you know do not kill or whatever commandment or spiritual edict about how to

structure and live your life, these are really evolutionary parameters, evolutionary imperatives that have evolved over time for the purpose of the survival of the human race. But if we look beyond that, there are things that don't exactly mesh up with that perspective, right? Do you know what I'm talking about? Like you've spoken about this. The idea that if that was truly the case, then what about X? Oh, right. If everything is simply an adaptation to survive,

then, man, the new Sigur Rós album, what is that? Right. And why do I see people giving of themselves for no reason other than the well-being of another? And maybe it makes them feel good and that has some evolutionary value, fine. But the universe just seems too mysterious to reduce it all to adaptation, even though that's obviously integral to the whole thing.

Yeah, it seems that when the spirit soars, that seems to be an unnecessary extension if you were just focused on trying to perpetuate the race. Right, right. There is so much about life that cannot be accessed with the five senses. That is actually the place you live from. And it goes back to humility and understanding that we are limited by these five, you know, these five sensory perception, you know, organs and abilities, and that's pretty limited.

Yes. And you think about the earth is covered with 70, 71% of the earth is covered with ocean and we have explored 5% of the ocean. So everything we know about the ocean is from 5%. Like what else? There's this interesting video on YouTube about after the tsunami in 2004 in Thailand,

all these fish and sea creatures that washed up that they didn't know existed. It's just pictures of weird stuff. To me, I always go back these fish and sea creatures that washed up that they didn't know existed. It's just pictures of weird stuff. To me, I always go back to those weird sea creatures from the tsunami and think, mystery is like baked into the whole thing. And that's okay. That's a rudimentary example as compared to talking about subatomic particles. That's why I talk about the fish, because I get my mind around that.

That are not attached to each other but vibrating simultaneously in San Francisco and New York. Yes. All this craziness about infinite ways of traversing time and space and how they can be in different places at the same time

without traveling time and space. Right, right, right. It gets super crazy. Right, right, right, right. Right. Simultaneous duality. This particular subatomic particle can be in two different places at the same time. Then you have non-signal communication.

This particle and this particle are communicating with no signal traveling between them. They're now saying that there are subatomic particles that come into existence for a millionth of a second and then disappear. And they don't know where they come from and they don't know where they go to right so if you can't tap into some sense of wonder and humility yeah when when when you hear that then i don't know what to say like we're in this crazy time where honestly like tech technology is advancing so quickly that it's becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between an onion headline and like real news and read this stuff and you'll be like absolutely that can't be true and then and we become unfazed by it like oh yeah like you know cars are driving around without

people right right right i still i still am, the Trump thing is a TV show. They're filming it, right? Yeah, of course. It's a TV show. You cannot... We're being punked. Because we're so in it, and we have such a micro perspective on the moment-to-moment evolution of this,

it's hard to take a 10,000-foot view and look down on it and go, this is more insane than any South Park episode you could ever conceptualize. Like, how is this happening? Yes. I was just touring in England and Ireland and France, and I would begin the talk with, hi, I'm Rob Bell. I live in Los Angeles, which is in America. And do you all think that we've completely lost our minds? And every crowd would immediately begin cheering. We have lost our minds in certain ways. It's insane what's happening right now.

And so things are moving in multiple directions at the same time, positive and negative. And it seems like everything is accelerating. Yes. Way faster than ever. There's this historian named Phyllis Tickle, real name Phyllis Tickle, who passed away recently. Brilliant woman. She had a 500-year theory of history, and she traced how every 500 years there's a new technological invention that disrupts everything. So you take, what, 1427, the printing press, and out of that

you get the Reformation, you get education, government, everything gets turned upside down. And her argument is that we're in one of those 500 year cycles and that the internet has disrupted everything and then she says the two questions that every major technological breakthrough asks when it disrupts is what does it mean to be human and where does authority come from which is what everybody's talking about which i think is really interesting because if you were to go back 500 years to the invention of the printing press, so what was it, 1427? Let's take 15 years after the invention

of the printing press, you and I, 1442, and I say, hey, Rich, I think this book thing, it might really catch on. We laugh now because we see the creation of a book and how an idea could travel as fast as horses. And that disintegrates issues around control. Right. Because the dissemination of ideas.

Are we 15 years into the internet going, hey, I think this internet thing is going to change everything? Yeah. I think we're in one of those. It's crazy that it's only been 15 years. Right, hey, I think this internet thing is going to change everything. Yeah. I think we're in one of those. It's crazy that it's only been 15 years. Right, right, right. We are in the infancy of this thing. And when we finally figure out artificial intelligence and, you know, self-perpetuating, self-learning machines, stuff's going to get super crazy. Super crazy. And I think the question many people have is, is this just like a generational, like every generation's like, wow, those kids are listening to loud music. Is this just every generation or is this something else? And I would just argue, no, this is something, this is historic. I think it is something else. pretty quickly you have Galileo, you have Copernicus,

you have the end of the view of the earth as the center of the universe. And I don't, we can't begin to comprehend what it was like to be told the earth is not the center of the universe because that was a very stacked view. They're the gods, they're the planets, then there are angels, then there are humans, then there are animals.

And to be, everybody had that baked into their neural pathways and to be told that's not how it is has to be as jarring maybe i mean maybe artificial intelligence will be here and we'll all go whoa but human beings have been here before where the whole thing the rug gets pulled out from underneath. It's exciting, isn't it? Now we're getting interesting. Yeah. Now. Let's get in that. So humans were here before.

Like, I haven't thought about that. Like, human beings have been here before. Culture advanced to a certain extent. Oh, absolutely. By virtue of natural disaster or a comet or self-destructive behavior patterns have been wiped out and have become a strata below the earth's core at some point right yeah yeah yeah and here we are again so you believe that i well i mean you look at what happened when things shifted from hunter gatherers to agriculture

you look at homo sapien leaving homo neanderthal behind um those were massive massive massive shifts they're now saying that the reason why homo sapiens sort of emerged and left neanderthal behind is homo sapiens developed the ability to tell stories and myths that you cannot organize they were unlikely to succeed right right they were kind of the underdog. But they, at this point, was it 70,000 years ago? They, a group of people were able to tell a story that everybody could rally behind. So you no longer needed 150 of your closest tribe folks, but you now, if you could tell a story and you could conceive of a larger myth that held everything together. An organizing principle.

Then you could destroy everybody in your path. I mean, that would have been, ugh. So human beings have been in places where the whole thing shifted in a relatively quick period of time. Right. We just have iPhones, so we're reading about it every day. It's just all happening so fast. Well, it's becoming harder and harder to be undistracted, you know,

and to be able to kind of tap into what it means to be human, which is to wonder and to, you know, sort of escape into your imagination. It's really hard now because we're just bombarded with information everywhere we go, and we always have a supercomputer in our hands i love it that when our family goes on a car trip my daughter has an ipad and she's and she's like and i also hate it because she's not looking out the window yeah and yeah but it's not going away either no you want your child to be uh you know sort of adept with these things that are part of our daily lives and yet not lose what it means to sort of right you

know be in your mind right and be connected with everything i know so i got one more question oh nice what do you have to be somewhere no i just going all day this is i love it no i was hoping you would say you had more another question and not that we were wrapping up yeah no no no that was a good how do we here's something that confuses me i mean we could talk i could ask you a million questions about the bible and jesus and all that kind of stuff i mean we could just go on forever there but how did we get to this weird cultural place that we're in where we celebrate these holidays that are anchored in biblical traditions, yet are adorned with the costuming of these strange pagan rituals? Like, where does Santa Claus,

what does Santa Claus have anything to do with Jesus and bunnies and eggs? It's such a mashup. All this weird stuff, like, where does that come, like how do, what is even going on? It doesn't even make any sense. Yeah, like the chocolate is brown and the cross was made of wood that was brown.

So Eddie Izzard, this comedian, has a whole thing on that. It's so fantastic. I think it happened because people were trying to connect their tradition with a larger culture, and they went, oh, you do have a fertility spring festival for the goddess Ishtar. Well, maybe we could like kind of, I think you have people attaching a bunch of different things to other things it's amazing that it's survived you have a christmas you have a winter solstice thing and that's when it's the darkest but then after the dark comes the light so maybe we could do the

birth of light coming into the world i think that people were trying to keep their traditions alive i think they were duct taping together, appropriating different traditions. Oh, you have a sun day. Oh, interesting, which is in honor of the sun. Well, maybe we could, yeah, there's another sun. Yeah. We'll make that the day of rest.

Yeah. Yeah, you go into anybody's garage and you ask them, how did you arrange your garage this way? They're like, well, stuff accumulated over 11 years. There was no grand. And that's how history is. You just look, oh, that thing was kind of like that thing, so they appropriated it.

And then that seemed to work well at getting to register voters. And then that seemed to attract these folks. Yeah. And it's like, yeah,ter is all about searching for eggs and like you know it's just weirdest thing it is totally weird it's totally bizarre and and i mean i've often when i was uh giving sermons in the church there was one sun there was one easter sunday when i didn't use the word Easter, just out of this very thing, defiance.

And the number of people who were like, you didn't use the word Easter on Easter Sunday. That's kind of weird. But I would have this like, let's get the true essence and let's get rid of all the other stuff surrounding it. And what it really means. And then people would be like, wait. I would always think everybody'd be like oh good fresh air but people would be like wait i don't understand we didn't huh yeah confusing yeah yeah how does the traditional christian community perceive you and what you do um oh my goodness i'm i mean you're a you're a controversial polarizing sometimes when

i go speak places there are protesters out front uh-huh that happens pretty regularly yeah um i mean you're challenging a pretty entrenched status quo i think a lot of people they just know that the jesus message hasn't he's had terrible PR. So lots of people will, like, at an airport or wherever, will just say thank you. People are very, very kind and grateful. And the Episcopals are like, hey, we all think you're Episcopal. And the Anglicans are like, hey, we all think you're Anglican. And the Eastern Orthodox are like, hey, we actually think you're Eastern Orthodox. And the Pentecostals are like, hey, we actually think you're Pentecostal. That's what actually happens among religious people.

But you don't have a term for who you are. And actually, to also answer your question, like when I'm on tour, it's a regular thing for people to say, hey, can we take a picture together? And then we'll post it on Instagram. And I just want you to know that when I post this, I'll probably get fired. My family may not speak to me. And then they'll stand there. to post it on Instagram, and I just want you to know that when I post this, I'll probably get fired.

My family may not speak to me. And then they'll stand there. And I always laugh, but lately I realized, oh, that person is actually saying something really significant. That's a pretty bold thing to do. They're saying, I'm growing and expanding, and the world is getting bigger and better than it was. expanding and the world is getting bigger and better than it was. And that means I may be at odds with my tribe, but I'd rather be alive and growing than back there. Because once you taste, you can't untaste. Once you see, you can't unsee. So that happens quite a bit.

That takes a lot of courage. Yeah. And I stopped, it took me a while to realize, oh, wait, this is, I mean, it's funny, yeah and I stopped it took me a while to realize oh wait this I mean it's funny but then oh wait there's another there's a bass note under that which is about courage and growth and expansion and maturing and

that's a beautiful thing there's a price that has to be paid to step up to that sometimes yeah yeah yeah and it's always felt like a like a like this extraordinary discovery. So, just keep going. Just keep going and who knows what will be around the corner. But this is no turning back. Are you optimistic? The categories of optimism and pessimism imply how do you think about things? But there's some really interesting ancient commentary on how hope is a different category. And hope is when you've

been knocked down, but you got back up. When you've been bloody and you have a scar, but you can still walk. So, optimism to me is when people are like, hey, I think we're going to be okay. that, so optimism to me is when people are like, hey, I think we're going to be okay. Hope is, we've had the shit kicked out of us and we're still here. So, it's like an earned optimism. So, I always, I like to think of hope more than optimism. I have great hope. That's an interesting perspective. I've never heard it articulated like that. Yeah, because what happens is you, things that would have finished you off earlier, because what happens is you things that would have finished you off earlier things that would have left you for dead by the side of the road somehow you kept going and so over time then when that thing that would have finished you off earlier comes your way again you're like oh i've seen this

and so over so there's a perseverance and it begins to shape a character and then you begin to have hope that at a totally different level. What's the most surprising thing that's happened to you as a result of this journey or something you wouldn't have anticipated, whether it's like a worldview or an experience that you have

or how your kind of faith has evolved? It's become way more internal than external. When I was young, you start a church and you grow it and then you sell books and then you're going here and then you're going there and it's the top of the mountain. That's building something big, having a microphone, talking to all these people. But my daughter was sick yesterday and sitting on the couch with her is like better than all of it. So I never knew that the actual greatest moments would be in like the warp and woof of everyday life with my kids, meeting you, talking like this. in like the warp and woof of everyday life with my kids, meeting you, talking like this.

I think when I was starting out, especially when you're young, early ego is like, I'm gonna change the world. I'm gonna go here, I'm gonna do this. And this book is gonna, and now it's like, I'm gonna sit down and work on this paragraph because this is what I'm here to do. And it might be received well, it might not.

But I do have this day and this moment and these friends and these new friends and this family. And the joy is actually right here. Right. So I think young me would have been like, dude, you're not like obsessed with success. You're like really just fine at some deep level. I'd be like, yeah yeah I didn't see that coming you thought you were just running and gunning building and growing

yeah exactly and now I actually will be meeting with somebody who's in I'm sure you have this in running gun mode I want to run 100 miles and you're like wait wait wait why? tell me about your marriage tell me like you're much more interested

in the deep stream. Maybe we'll end up running a hundred miles. Maybe you will start that thing. Fine. But, but that it's, where is that coming from? And let's talk about that place. Cause that's actually where the joy is. Yeah. Most people don't want to go there. Yeah. You have to. Yeah. Yeah. Not everyone wants to go there. That's beautiful, man. What are you working on right now? You just got, you have to. Yeah. Yeah, not everybody wants to go there. That's beautiful, man. What are you working on right now? You were in Iceland recently, right? Yeah.

What are you doing there? Speaking to a group of people. That's cool. Yeah, Iceland's amazing. I haven't been. Julie wants to go there. Yeah, you'd love it. They say it's the heart chakra of the world.

Oh, yeah. I swear. Kristen and I have this adjective, Stonehenge. It's Stonehenge. It's like it's a thin place. There's something in the air. Yeah. In the world. Oh, yeah. I swear. Kristen and I have this adjective, stonehenge-y. You know, it's stonehenge-y. It's like it's a thin place. There's something in the air. Yeah. In the soil.

And then there's a book coming out in May, and then there's always Largo shows, and there's always, right now I'm doing this podcast series on the wisdom tradition, which is essentially about the non-dual nature of the heart so there's always some next thing I'm making that's cool man well you are definitely a multi-hyphenate you got the podcast how many books you've written? 5 books? you wrote a novel too

I think the 10th one is going to come out next year I don't even know where to begin I have plenty of reading ahead of me but I love Love Wins I think that's a great place for a lot of people to start. It's beautiful. Thank you. That means a lot.

And certainly watching Everything Spiritual. That was beautiful. Oh, thank you. I just so thoroughly enjoyed that. Fantastic. And then you'll commit publicly to be on my podcast. Oh, absolutely. Okay, good.

The Robcast. I love it, man. Yes, excellent. So you've been doing that for how long? A year and half yeah yeah you're enjoying it love it yeah it's cool right it's powerful medium i i cannot believe that like we can have this conversation that it's it's everywhere right it's unbelievable and there's something very intimate about it yes you know that's you're in people's headphones watching a video i don't know what it is but yeah i think it's just when you go long form and it's like these are who these people are because you know right you can't get away with that and like my kids will come in my

kids will come in and be like dad you know where the broom is or whatever and i just leave all that and i'll be somewhere and someone be like hey when your kid came in and needed to whatever need the car keys, that was awesome. It's like the microphone's just on. Right, you want it to be perfect or whatever, and you don't realize that it's the humanity that makes it special and unique. And I thought, like, I listen to Love Wins, your audio book, and you kind of did that reading your audio book.

Like, usually when you listen to an audio book, it's kind of like the pastor in the sermon. Like it's very, there are rules about how you read an audio book, you know, with these actors and all of that. And you're like, oh, yeah, okay, we're at chapter seven. How are you guys doing? Are we okay? I remember telling the. Two thirds of the way through.

Right. I remember telling the, I always, the audio book producer, I'm always like, I'm going to read this like I'm reading this to my friends. So if we go off the thing, that's all on purpose. And just let it run. Yeah. Just keep recording. And that's kind of, you know,

coming full circle to what I started out saying about you is that you're like a real, you're a three-dimensional human being. You know what I mean? And I think that comes across in all the work that you do. There's an integrity and a humanity that infuses it

and allows people to emotionally connect with these ideas that can be very polarizing. And I think, you know, the inclusivity that you have created, this environment of allowing people a welcome mat to be introduced to these ideas or perhaps reintroduced to them in a new and different way is very powerful work that you're doing. And I applaud you for it. It's

really cool. It's really cool to see what you're doing. And as somebody who's not a member of a church and not somebody who would be expected to kind of tap into what you're doing like i just i find it to be very powerful and beautiful awesome so that's that's great thank you yeah so uh for everyone out there check out the rob cast read his books watch his videos and go see him speak and hopefully i will be able to come and see you speak at Largo. Yes. Cool, man. Good. We did it. How are you feeling? I love it. Is it all right?

So good. Anything else you want to say? So good. Will you come and do this with me again? Because we can talk about this. Let's do a part two. So many other stuff. I'll come back for a part two.

I'll talk to you. Yeah. Cool, man. All right. Thanks. Fantastic. Peace. Plants.

We did it. What did you guys think? I think it's pretty awesome that was really special i thought it was really cool i hope you guys enjoyed it as always please make a point of checking out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com we got tons of links and resources to learn more about rob and his work and take your infotainment, your education beyond the earbuds. As always, thank you so much for sharing the show with your friends and your co-workers and your colleagues and your family members around the water cooler, all that good stuff. If you haven't done so already, please take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. That really does help us out a lot. Hit that subscribe button while you're at it if you haven't done so already. That also helps us out a lot.

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at the very minimum. All right, make it great. Peace. Plants. Later. Thank you. Thank you.