The Rich Roll Podcast - Guru Singh On Building Emotional Infrastructure, New Educational Modalities & The Impact of Diet Beyond The Physical

Episode Date: December 4, 2017

As we approach the year's end, I thought it appropriate to reconvene with the great and vast consciousness that helped us usher in 2017 – kundalini yoga & meditation master Guru Singh (@gurusinghyogi). Long-time listeners will well recall our initial conversation from January (RRP #267), one of my most popular and impactful episodes in the history of this podcast. For those new to the show, imagine a modern-day rock star Gandalf dropping mad guitar licks between pearls of timeless wisdom that beautifully fuse Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism and you start to get the picture. Named Best Guru in LA by Los Angeles magazine, Guru Singh is a celebrated third-generation Sikh yogi, master spiritual teacher, author, and musician. For the past 40 years he has been studying and teaching Kundalini Yoga – a 5,000 year old ancient science and school of yoga focused on awakening the primal energy known as shakti for the purpose of spiritual enlightenment. He is the author of several books (enumerated below) and a powerful lecturer uplifting thousands worldwide. An extraordinary teacher, he also serves as a behind-the-scenes guide to many a luminary, including Fortune 500 CEOs, athletes, artists and even Tony Robbins. A peer of rock legends like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, Guru Singh is also a supremely talented musician who began his recording career on Warner Bros' Sire label in the 1960s. When he isn't recording tracks with people like Seal, he's bringing down the house on the daily at Yoga West, his Los Angeles home base. Over the past year, I have become close with Guru Singh — a beautiful and highly relatable consciousness I'm proud to call a good friend and valuable mentor. Today we discuss everything from the benefits of cold-water therapy to the implications of artificial intelligence. We examine the why behind all the recent mass shootings and explore strategies for navigating the treacherous minefields of our deeply divided culture. We envision new educational modalities for future generations. We investigate the effects of diet beyond the physical level. And we consider the importance of maturing the social infantilism of our emotional infrastructure as a cultural imperative. It’s aways an honor to spend time with Guru Singh and it's a privilege to share more of his powerful wisdom with you today. My hope is that this conversation will empower you to more mindfully navigate our volatile world and encourage you to more deeply invest in the development of your conscious awareness, personal boundaries, and spiritual growth. To rise up, you gotta lie down. So let's lie down with Guru Singh. For the visually inclined, the video version of the podcast is also available on YouTube I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

We train kids throughout school to do their work on their own, to hide their answers, to do it privately, don't share anything. And the moment they get out in the world, everything is about the need to share. And the people that are the most resistant to sharing are the ones that isolate themselves. They're the ones that end up being emotionally unstable. They're the ones that end up being emotionally unstable. And then you have things like what's going on with mass shootings and all of this violence that's being created. These are people with unfulfilled gut and unfulfilled heart. They may be able to analyze things perfectly with their head,

but the other parts of their being are just not in function. That's Guru Singh, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? What is happening? My name is Rich Roll.. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What is happening? My name is Rich Roll.

I am your host. This is my podcast. Welcome to it. The show where each week I go places no man has gone before with some of the most interesting people I can find on planet Earth, thought leaders and paradigm breakers across all categories of health, wellness, fitness, elite athletics, nutrition, medicine, social entrepreneurship, activism, what else, environmentalism, entertainment, and in the case of today's guest, spirituality. As we approach the year's end,

I thought it would be really cool to reconvene with the great and vast consciousness that helped us usher in 2017 kundalini yogi and meditation master guru singh long-time listeners of the show will well recall our first conversation that was episode 267 from january of this year one of my most popular episodes to date please go back and listen to that if you haven't already. And since that time, I have spent a considerable amount of time with this man. In many ways, he has become not only a good friend, but also very much a personal mentor, somebody from whom I have learned a tremendous amount. And it just seemed natural to sort of from whom I have learned a tremendous amount. And it just seemed natural to sort of bookend the year the way that we began it by sharing more of this beautiful man's powerful wisdom.

For those new to the show, Guru Singh is a celebrated third-generation yogi. He is a master spiritual teacher, author, and musician with a very unique talent for translating ancient spiritual wisdom and practices and philosophies into what I think is a very understandable, modern, and accessible language. It's sort of a fusing of Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism. And he does all of this with quite a bit of wit and humor and humility and, of course, humanity. 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. at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it.

Plus, you can read reviews from former patients 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 and 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 and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. 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 the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage,

location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients 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. 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. Okay, let's hard pivot again away from the material and back to the ethereal with Guru Singh, three times softer than your average guru, right? I love this guy. I don't know what to say. In addition to being an extraordinary teacher behind the scenes, Guru Singh is a guy who is counseled to many luminaries, many CEOs, executives, athletes, artists, including people

like Tony Robbins. And also a lot of people I know you've heard of that are just kind of off the record. But he's just a huge, beautiful beautiful consciousness he is like a gift to humanity but he's also a guy who's amazingly relatable and just honestly one of the coolest people i have ever met if you ever find yourself in los angeles i strongly suggest that you check out one of his classes at yoga west that's his studio you can go yogawestla.com to find out more about that. And all of his classes are broadcast live on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash Guru Singh Yogi. And you can learn more about him, take one of his online classes or sign up for

his daily email, which I strongly suggest and love at gurusingh.com. In any event, today's conversation is, well, it's pretty wide-ranging. We talk about a lot of stuff. We talk about everything from cold water therapy to the advent of AI, artificial intelligence, to how to navigate our increasingly divided culture. We discuss the importance of maturing into what he calls our emotional infrastructure and the real need for new educational modalities for the younger generation, one that fosters the development of the heart and the gut brains as much as the analytical mind. We go into the why behind all the recent mass shootings. And we explore the effects of diet on not just the

cellular level, but also the emotional and spiritual level, plus so much more. It's always an honor to spend time with Guru Singh, and it's a privilege to share his wisdom with you, especially during this divided, volatile time, a time in which I think it's fair to say it's become more important than ever to really invest in the development of your own awareness, your own consciousness and boundaries, and ultimately your personal evolution and growth. And so now, without further ado,

I give you my conversation with the great Guru Singh. Guru Singh, my friend, it's good to see you. Really good to see you. Super nice to be back in the inner sanctum, the sanctuary. This is my third podcast in this room. I know, I know, man. You're getting to be a regular. I know.

I'm just going to – I should just call you up when I'm on this side of town and I need a place to do a podcast. I need somebody, I need some place to do a podcast and we'll go, okay, we got it. Well, the energy is so good in here. And originally we had talked about you coming out to the house, but the studio space that I have still isn't quite right. And when I started to think about it, I realized like, well, this is an amazing place to do this.

Like, what am I, what am I fighting here? Let's go over here. So here we are. This is like a man cave of light. Yeah, this is a very specific type of man cave, populated with lots of spiritual artifacts and many, many frogs. Yeah, frogs are, you know, frogs are what we all are. We're born as one thing and then we evolve into who we are. We're born as what we are and we evolve into who we are. And that's what a frog is.

It's born as a fish and it then evolves into an amphibian that's able to breathe air. Yeah. Well, I'm part amphibian, so I relate to that. I saw those photos, man. You had to run across an island, then jump in the water and swim to the next island. Yeah, it was a crazy race in cold water. With your shoes on. With your shoes on the whole time, all day long, 10 hours in the Baltic.

Yeah. whole time all day long 10 hours in the baltic and yeah and so then running in wet shoes is kind of blister territory isn't it it is i i was lucky i didn't get any blisters but my shoes filled up with like sand and little pebbles and things like that and you're kind of running on that you just have to get comfortable with that discomfort because you could stop and empty them but they're just going to fill up again the next time you jump in the water and run up the coastline or whatever. So it was an experience for sure. Wow.

Yeah, it was cool. And you guys did it in what, how many hours? 10 hours and 40-some-odd minutes. And how many of those, how much of that time were you actually in the cold water and what was the temperature of the water? That was my biggest fear was how cold the water was going to be because all you need is one cold front, one storm to blow in because you're so close to the Arctic Circle

and it can completely change everything. But the water ended up being like, I don't know, 56 or something, somewhere around there. So it was cold, but not bone chillingly cold. So, you know, you're in and out enough and then you're running and you're warming up. And just when you warm up, you jump back in the water again. But actually on the longer runs, it felt good to jump in the cold water. So the temperature wasn't the limiting factor.

The most difficult part for me was just the technical terrain of the land because it was so rocky and slippery. I mean, you're on all fours climbing up these granite slabs and kind of trudging through marshes where the water is almost up to your knees. And it was more like the Amazing Race or something like that than it was running. There wasn't that much actual running. A lot of it was bushwhacking, and that really took its toll. You know, of course, you know this really well, that you spend three minutes or more in water under 60 degrees, and you reset your metabolism.

You reset your glands and organs. It's really, really healthy. Yeah, have you followed the work of wim hof yes he is yes the ice man yeah so i had him on the podcast talking all about that kind of stuff man yeah he's totally devoted yeah well he's a i mean at his core he's he's an ancient yogi that guy and he studied the practices of pranayama i mean it's with him what's interesting is it's much more about breath work than it is about the cold. The cold is what gets a lot of attention,

all the kind of stunts that he does. And what he can do in cold water is amazing. But the breath work is really rooted in the ancient traditions of the yogis. He's found a vernacular to talk about it and teach it in a modern context where people can actually hear what he's saying. And he's had a huge impact. And he's cool. He's got great energy. I mean, he's an amazing guy.

Totally. The yogis of the South Asian subcontinent in the South were doing hot yoga year-round, right, because southern India is hot all the time. And so they were doing what would be in the modern-day vernacular would be hot yoga. And the yogis that were in the Himalayas, you know, they were doing it on snow sometimes, right? They would even have moments when they would sit and melt snow with their body. when they would sit and melt snow with their body. And so, yeah, cold water is a big part, even a big part of our lives,

because we do cold shower every morning to flush. What happens is cold water, you know, the largest organ in your body is your skin. And so when you get in cold water, it contracts all the capillaries in your skin, forcing massive amounts of blood inside the body. If you leave it in there for three minutes, that has completely flushed your glands and organs, and now you're ready to go. Literally ready to go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, anybody who does it knows you have this amazing, you know, rejuvenating feeling after you've experienced that. And yet, you know, it's still so hard to do. But there's an old saying that no matter how long you wait, the cold water never warms up. No, it definitely doesn't. It's that thing of playing in your head, you know, it's like waiting around for jumping in, doing the plunge.

Well, you hear all these stories, you know, I don't know what's real and what's apocryphal about the ancient yogis going into the caves and not eating for, you know, however, you know, extraordinary periods of time and just going into these, you know, breatharian fugue states for, you know, eons on end. And yet the Iceman, Wim, is really kind of doing this in front of cameras and with doctors. And he injected himself with some kind of endotoxin and it had no effect on him. So it's cool that he's able to kind of carry that practice forward in a way that is visible for a mainstream audience. And you know that you and I and others, including him,

and many others, your wife, my wife, etc., are all, you know, reincarnations from ancient yogis anyway. So, you know, we're just here from the future, trying to get this planet up to date. Yeah. And I'm learning a few lessons along the way. I know. Imperfectly. Let me just ask you one specific question about that race. What did you start, running or swimming? The first leg was like a kilometer run.

Okay. And then a long swim and then a bunch of short little swims and runs. And then it kind of opens up later in the race. There's a longer swim and a 13-mile run like late in the race, but a lot of in and 13 mile run like late in the race but a lot of a lot of in and out um yeah what was the longest swim uh 1.4 kilometers i think yeah so all told it was about six miles of swimming and 40 miles of running 75 well that's a lot of time spent in 56 degree water yeah that was exuberating. Trust me, I was tired when it was done.

But, you know, the Northern Europeans, these guys are Vikings, and you should see how they dance on these slippery rocks. I was falling all over the place and landing on my butt and cursing and, you know, all of that. And these guys are just dancing on these rocks with incredible grace. So I have a learning curve. If I decide to go back to that race, I have plenty to go back to the drawing board on to improve. Do they do it yearly?

Yeah, I mean, the guys that won are Swedish Armed Forces guys. And from what I can tell, a big part of their job is training for this race. They're training on the course. They know exactly what rock to climb out on. And they know it like the back of their hand. It's called an advantage. Yeah, a little bit.

But it's a really cool subculture. And the race directors have injected this event and this sport which is growing with a really beautiful ethos of preservation and sustainability like they have a they have a like a uh a no litter policy if you drop you know any kind of like a gel or anything like that on the course and you get caught doing it you'requalified. Like it's all about respecting the beauty of this incredibly challenging and natural terrain. So it's cool. Are the islands inhabited? They are, but the population is very low. And during the winter months, like almost no one's

out there. Like the island that we finished on, I think it has a population of 40 or something like that, you know, and they're tiny little islands. So there's little cabins there and people have small farms. And I think it's like a very insulated community where people are living really simple lives. And there's something really amazing about that. Yeah. And you know that it was that part of the world and a bit further south that created the lifestyle that neither you nor i have any part of being vegan um but when you know the early migrations of of pre-humans and humans were adventuring through the the lands of what's now Europe and Russia and have you. And the Ice Ages struck.

Food was destroyed. And humans, who are biologically plant-based beings, all of a sudden had to eat all these flesh foods. So those are the areas, they're really pristine, they're really beautiful. But if we were to be in a sustainable situation year round, it probably wouldn't work out. Yeah, humans are incredibly adaptable, though. You know, we know how to survive. there's plenty of things that we can eat to make it work but one thing i took away from that experience was noticing the happiness quotient in that part of the world and people who are living these simple lives are incredibly fulfilled and content and in contrast to you know los Los Angeles or the way that we live,

like do live amazingly sustainable by comparison. And that's something that I wanted to get into with you. We've moved so far away from that biological imperative of living communally and connected with our neighbors. And as you wrote recently in one of your morning prayers, we're at what, 7.3 billion people on the planet now? Actually 7.5 now. 7.5 now. It changed that much since our last check. It goes so quickly. Yeah, and quickly approaching 10 billion. And with that, we've been very good at creating physical infrastructure to support us through factory farms and superhighways and megacities and the like.

But we have not been so good at maturing our emotional infrastructure. Can you imagine a child in kindergarten, first grade, having a course in courage, having a course in confidence, and then going out through second, third, fourth grade with those kinds of courses. How about a course in mid-teens of dispute reconciliation? I mean, and actually have those courses equally as important as science, math, and all of the other things which are giving us our advanced technologies and cultures. But we've advanced to such a degree in all those levels that you spoke of, but our emotional body is still very primitive. We're still reacting to each other, and we still feel a threat in the difference that we perceive. Look at how many people across the world still actually believe that the paint job on our body

means something, right? The color of our skin. And how many people feel that their lives and their lifestyles are threatened by the difference of someone else's lifestyle. And these are just emotional opportunities for us to really enable that which you said was 10 billion people on this planet, you know, to live in harmony. Because if we have problems with the numbers that we have today, we're not going to get anywhere close to 10 billion before we pull the plug on it. Yeah, as optimistic as I am by nature, there's a bleakness, this veneer of bleakness that kind of covers everything and and

definitely infuses my perspective of it uh and informed by you know the unbelievably divisive uh society that we find ourselves in right now you know it seems as if we should have matured past our differences over our paint jobs and, that seems to be coming up as one of the biggest issues once again. How can we not have overcome this by this point? Well, I look at it as that people like us, you and I, and our families and our circles, and our families and our circles are the ones that are in need of showing up. And to me, this world is like a one-room schoolhouse, or as I've now started to call it, a one-room daycare center.

You know, I've downsized the metaphor, or downgraded the metaphor. If we are that one-room schoolhouse, we look across the planet and we see people that are all seemingly physical adults, and many of whom are emotionally not mature. The consideration of skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc. is all just an immaturity of the emotional body when we find that being a fabric of judgment. And when you have that, what you're looking at is,

okay, everybody is showing up, but it's kind of like Lord of the Flies where it's all haphazard, and people like us need to turn it into a more appropriate setting in a in a gentle way i look at it as that we've got about you know 30 35 years before the bell curve starts to slide down the um the backside and in those 30 to 35 years we will need to you you know, that gives us enough time, but we will need to multiply ourselves, not in reproduction, but in actual information dissemination, where people are understanding that it's their fulfillment that gives us a sense of, that gives them a sense of being able to sit in the presence of something that is completely

different than they are and not feel threatened. When you have, Chinese call it chi, in yoga we call it prana, in English it's called life force. You have it all the time. When you have that sensation that you have at the end of a race, not that you're completely exhausted from, but that you're really exhilarated from, that is a life force that is moving in you and that is really fulfilling you. And when you walk in that state of grace and any of these differentiating factors are in front of you,

you see them as all similars, all similarities. And that's what we need to teach people to do is how to not just pacify themselves with food, not just pacify themselves with comfort, but to really activate, you know, right down to the cellular structure and open up their mental capacities so that this emotional body can fulfill itself in a presence that is so profound that no amount of difference is a differentiation. But we're in a zero-sum game. You know, that's the game most people are playing. Like, there's only so much going around and now this sense of lack and urgency seems to be heightened, right? So if you have, then I have

not, or you're a threat to what I potentially can have, or he has more and I want what he has. So there's a lot of, uh, a lot of mental, um, barriers that we have to overcome to reframe the paradigm about how we're sort of living our lives on a daily basis, right? I mean, we're being stoked by fear everywhere we turn, even the billboards when we drive down the streets here. The messaging is diffuse and everywhere. messaging is diffuse and everywhere. And it becomes almost impossible to kind of escape the clutches of the culture that wants to hold us in this place of being afraid, of judging ourselves by what we have and don't have in comparison to our neighbors. And I think this is, you know, wedging this divide that is being stoked by our government and people who are lining up on both sides to fight this battle that is just pushing us further and further apart from the solution. There's a great study and a series of books.

It's called M-Brain, and the M stands for multi. There's, and doctors are talking about the brain in your gut, and they have neurology in the heart, and they're talking about the brain in your heart. And then there's the brain in your head. Well, the brain in your gut is what connects. It either connects you with nourishment, it's how you digest food. The brain in the heart has a unique quality because it actually encompasses both the heart and the lungs.

And both the heart and the lungs exert to give and then have to completely relax to receive. The brain in the head is all we educate. And the brain and the head is analysis, differentiation. It's very two-dimensional. It's very right, wrong, good, bad, yes, no. So if all I'm doing is walking around with the brain and my head educated, and I'm a bit ignoring all of the other brains, then I am unfulfilled. I am seeing that what you have, I want.

I am seeing that you having it means that I can't have it. And there's a limited zero-sum factor involved. But if I'm connected with my gut, if you and I are connecting at the gut level, which is where you get your gut sensation, then what you have, I have. And your happiness is actually my happiness. Think about the heart-brain, which is one of the most interesting factors. And that is that in order to receive,

I have to completely relax. Most people are in this world and they're getting. In other words, they're striving to get, striving to get, striving to get. Well, if you're always in that striving to get, striving to get, striving to get. Well, if you're always in that hyper tense striving to get, you never receive. And so if I never receive what I've gotten, then I'm always going to need to get more. And this is where greed comes from. This is where overconsumption comes from. This is why we're deforesting the entire planet. I like that analogy of the heart and the lungs

because that's true. The exertion is in the giving. Like if you're by extension in a place of using your willpower, your energy, your chi, your prana, your life force and channeling that into providing for others, giving of yourself, then when you relax, that's when it comes back to you, right? Your lungs are naturally open.

A collapsed lung is a big, serious event. But when you're running, your effort in breathing is on the exhale. And your inhale, it actually happens naturally. And the same thing happens in your heart. The effort is in the pumping the blood into the body. And then when it completely relaxes, that swell of blood that's been pushed out into the body comes rushing back into the heart. I like the idea of focusing on these different brains, the heart brain. Education. But our education system is about the head brain.

The head brain only. That's it. And what I've experienced and what I've seen other people experience is when you lead your life by your head brain and you're ignoring the other brains, you end up with some form of disease, either mental, emotional, or physical. Think about the kids that are no longer able to cope with school. And the numbers are rising. And these are the kids that go out into the world and they have great relationships and they have great this and great that.

They innovate. They're entrepreneurs. I mean, look at the biggest corporations in the world right now are all being CEO'd by college dropouts. And the bottom line here is that kids these days need that education on all three brains in order for them to experience fulfillment. When we educate the gut brain, the gut brain is all about connection. So we would have courses in school about connecting with each other.

And what we would also do is we would have collective testing. In other words, we train kids throughout school to do their work on their own, to hide their answers, to do it privately, don't share anything. And the moment they get out in the world, everything is about the need to share. And the people that are the most resistant to sharing are the ones that isolate themselves. They're the ones that end up being emotionally unstable.

And then you have things like what's going on with mass shootings and all of this violence that's being created. These are people with unfulfilled gut and unfulfilled heart. They may be able to analyze things perfectly with their head, but the other parts of their being are just not in function. They're not in balance. Yeah, I mean, I want to get into the mass shooting thing. But before we get into that, like a couple observations. You know, I think that we have an education system that has essentially remained unchanged since the Victorian era.

Totally. It predates the, or sort of, you know, the way we teach kids now kind of came out of the Industrial Revolution. And it was about training young people to prepare themselves for the job market at that time. And it's kind of stayed stuck in that. Despite everything we've learned about psychology and education and motivation and all of these things, like we have not been able to evolve how we are raising our children in the classroom. And we pay the teachers the least. So we get those who are not necessarily striving to be extremely successful. But they say that if you took professionals from 200 years ago, including teachers and dropped them in the world of today, like lawyers, doctors,

engineers, what have you, the only one that would recognize their job is the teacher because nothing's changed in education, but everything else has. So we're educating children for a world that doesn't exist anymore. The world has definitely changed dramatically. And that's a huge problem. And it is interesting that so many innovators are people that had the audacity, the gall to step one step to the left or three steps to the left and opt out of that system, which has allowed them to think more

freely and unrestrained. Yeah, Microsoft was started by a dropout. Apple was started by a dropout. All of these other major corporations were started by dropouts. And the end result is that they figured something out that wasn't going to be taught in that educational system. Right. My daughters go to a very progressive school that in certain respects is innovating in certain ways and trying different and new things. And yet the other day, my 10-year-old came home and said that they ran a drill at her school where they had to prepare for what would happen if there was a mass shooting.

And it just crushed me. It broke my heart that my 10-year-old daughter had to think about that as a possibility and prepare for it. And put that into her brain because all of a sudden fear factor is going to be dominant my our son went to a school that you would take everybody graduated with straight a's and here's how they did it it was not about testing was about teaching so if

you took a test first of all you only took one course other than English and PE. PE was every day. Physical exercise was a mandatory event. And you took English and then you took one other course. You would finish a course in a month or six weeks because you were really focused on it. You take a test, you get 60% on the test. Well most people that would be a flunk. Set aside the 60%, you start studying the 40%.

Take the test again. Whatever you pass, you set it aside, take the test again, until you're down to what you know, every single piece on that original test. And not only that, but you were twinning. You were twinning with somebody else, and being able to bounce ideas off of them, so that they were training you to work together, and to never accept failure. Right, cooperation and teamwork.

That seems like a much better way of doing it. You know, the idea of depth over breadth, but now it's just we got to, you know, it's like a rock skipping across the surface of water. Like they're moving so quickly through so many subject matters so rapidly, but only dipping, you know, a centimeter beneath the surface on every single thing so that, you know, the child takes the test and they're onto the next thing and they've forgotten what they, you know, did. Like, I don't remember anything that i studied in high school i took ap calculus i don't know what calculus is you know can you imagine if as a if as a professional from 9 to 10 you were one career and from 10 to 11 you were a different career and from 11 to 12 you were another career and then you went to lunch and then you did three different careers after lunch not a good idea yeah there's a school in russia i forget what it's called there was a documentary

made about it and i think it's called the school if i could be wrong about that but it's this experimental school where all the kids irrespective of age and grade are kind of cohabitating and and in the same classroom where the younger students are helped by the older students. And they do just that. They pick one subject and they go super deep into it and they all cooperate and help each other until everybody's mastered it and they don't move on until they've kind of conquered that and then they go on to the next thing.

So it's very focused on one specific thing. And group effort, collective effort. You know, they say that if you want to learn something, read about it or listen to it, which is good for these podcasts. If you want to know something, write about it. And if you want to master something, teach about it. And so a system such as that one you just described

would have all of those things. It would have reading, writing and teaching because the younger would teach the older, the older would teach the younger, and the mastery would be phenomenal. Let's get back to the mass shooting thing. So there was this shooting in Texas just the other day, and this is the second one in two weeks

or a week and a half or something like that. The rapidity, the frequency of these tragic, unbelievably violent acts is accelerating. And this is unprecedented. I think those were, like the last two, were two of the most devastating violence in the last 35 or something like that. What is happening in our culture? Why is this going on? And what is the malaise, the sickness that lies at the core, the locus of what's going on in our culture that's leading to this? And why is it happening now? If you look around the world and you see industrialized, and I use quotations, civilized nations,

the only one that is having this kind, that isn't at war, that there isn't an actual war being fought on their soil. So that takes away Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and those places that are, you know, there's serious combat taking place. But you think of the United States and Canada and Mexico and Brazil and Russia and UK and France and Germany and all of the other countries around the world. countries around the world. There is only one country in which this is happening at this level. And you got to realize that America is more than a nation, is a commercial organization. And so commerce will take precedence over health. We're the only major nation that has created an industry out of healthcare in which there's profit in a company

when a person gets sick. And so that really changes the game. We're the only country that has this free form of weapons that can just be sold in shows and unregulated circumstances. And somebody supposedly has a database that checks, background checks are run through. But then it was an oops. We forgot to register this guy's violent nature with the database. And the oops is always on the side of commerce.

Because anytime there's a mass shooting, the sale of weapons and the sale of bullets and the sale of all of these things goes skyrocketing. And the stock prices of the publicly traded weapons companies goes skyrocketing. capitalist, and I'm not saying there's something wrong with capitalism, but there's something wrong with having capitalistic needs over human needs of health and actual safety. So we have a country that is focused on the marketplace, more so than any other country on earth. Therefore, it demonstrates its ability. You said something about the happiness factor of the people where you were running is much higher.

The happiness factor in America is very, very low because we are focused on capital markets rather than collective health, collective well-being, family unity, etc. Yeah, I think that all of that is correct and right, and I would agree with that. And I think also, you know, beneath the surface of that, or as you dig deeper, it is about the disconnection. You know, this is an illness, not just of the human beings that are perpetrating these acts, but an illness of our culture. It is a dis-ease that I think is being driven by dissatisfaction and depression and disconnection because of the way that we lead our lives. Like if we were living in a communal, you know, village-based society where there is

accountability and there's joint purpose and there is a collective understanding about how every, and each and every person is contributing, then I don't think that you see these things. Because even in these war-torn parts of the world where firearms proliferate and there's plenty of guns around, they're not going into their own communities and decimating people. That's just not happening. example of a larger malaise that I think is a chronic condition and an indicator of where we are at as a culture. If we were educating children as an emotional creature as well as a mental creature, we do a little bit of physical education, very little. of physical education, very little. The diet is terrible across the board, but if

we were to check out the physical education, check out the emotional education, as much as we focus on the mental education, then what you're saying wouldn't be taking place because connection would be paramount. My connection with my friends would be graded as high as my observation of mathematics calculus like that you can't remember calculus and yet

you were an AP calculus that means you were an advanced placement calculus right you know I can't remember things that I studied either. And most of those things were crammed the night before because you were having too much fun doing the other things that should have been covered in education to just spend all of your time studying. The idea that we could educate children to be able to, you know, when the pressure builds up inside, because these guys are explosive, and that's why they're shooting. The guy that's shooting from Las Vegas, he's exploding. That's why he's shooting. It's an expression of who he is.

If we could create an opportunity so that we could see the explosion beginning to rise in each other, and do the things that comrades, that fellow human beings do for each other, be like grazing animals rather than by territorial carnivores. And I take it back to our diet again. The only creatures on the planet that are territorial are carnivores. They mark their territory. They protect their territory. are carnivores. They mark their territory, they protect their territory. Herbivores share their territory and they love it when they are grazing together. So taking it from the physical level of diet, moving that into the emotional level,

because when you eat blood food you become aggressive. The blood is forced between your teeth and your gum and there's sensitive nerves in there that when you get blood forced up in there you feel like you're dominating your environment and this is just something we're not prepared for as herbivores. The human being is a plant-based biology and it is not prepared to feast on blood. It is not prepared to have those kinds of aggressive attitudes and then put that together with complete lack of emotional education, you have this brilliant creature

who's super aggressive, emotionally unstable, and now he can go to the corner store and buy a gun? This is an absolute mess. And nothing has it more advanced than this country, the U.S. Oh, it's been completely systematized. And it's a display of utter desperation on these people who are in tremendous pain, who feel like they've been passed over and they're not being heard. And the only way to be heard is to perpetrate an act so horrible. And the amount of pain that that person must be carrying in order to do that. And then the way the media covers it just perpetuates the cycle because it plants the seed in the next person who's coming down

the assembly line, who's feeling the same way and sees that as the only way to get some level of public validation on the way out. Recognition. Yeah, it's crazy. Become a superstar. On the subject of taking in, you know, eating animals and what that does to us spiritually and emotionally. Julie always says, if you're eating the animal, you're taking that violence into your body. There's no way that that can't be impacting you on not just a cellular level, but an emotional, unconscious level. I was just at this conference in Austin the other month. It was like the Conscious

Capitalism Conference. And all these amazing CEOs there who are socially minded, who are trying to do good in the world. It was really inspiring. And I met this one guy, this doctor, Dr. Zach Bush, who is an epidemiologist by trade. And he's done all these incredible studies. And I got into this, this is a guy I've gotta get on the podcast. He was just like, he was blowing my mind. But he was telling me about studies that he's conducted, in-depth, detailed analysis of what happens to you physiologically when you eat meat.

And taking in like the, when they kill these animals, and they're terrified, of course, when they're being killed, they're in a hyper in this hyper acute emotional state where the hormones are raging. And so that in turn, when you take that into your body, you're taking in those hormones. And he's been able to gauge the impact of that

on your own endocrine system in the human body and how that translates into errant behavior. It was wild. I mean, he can say it much more intelligently than I, but. It's chemicals. And those chemicals don't die. Those chemicals aren't even cooked out of the food. So you were just saying the animal

is in a heightened state of terror, heightened state of rage. Now you're eating terror and rage and some protein. And that's all the meat is. And we don't need to be eating this because there is, as you know, I mean, we're obviously talking to the audience here, not to each other. But the fact is, is that when our bodies are trained, you can't do this overnight, but when your body is trained to break down vegetable protein into its individual aminos

and then reassemble it into an animal-based protein, it's actually working out. It's like lifting weights. It's like your spleen is lifting weights, your kidneys are lifting weights, your liver is lifting weights. Everything is exercising. When you just put in already made protein, already produced protein, and with it you're putting in those chemistry components of fear and rage and terror and betrayal. I mean, we're raising these animals. They're like pets. Well, they're pets in captivity in a very cruel state, but they're being taken care of. And then all of a sudden we come in and we slaughter them. Yogis throughout history have said that killing an animal out of necessity and killing it

with respect has a certain validity. But raising an animal and then slaughtering it has such an effect upon the human psyche that it actually turns you into a murderer. Even if you're not the one that has been murdering all these animals, you're letting slaughterhouses do it, you're eating the chemistry of murder. So you're becoming a murderer. Mahatma Gandhi was once in jail, many times he was in jail. And suddenly he started to have these murderous thoughts.

And so he sat with them in deep meditation, and it came to him that, well, perhaps there was somebody that was involved with his food that had some of these kinds of thoughts. And he found out that the guy that was the main cook in the kitchen was in jail for murder. So all of these components are very subtle. You talked about Dr. Bush at the conference. The endocrine system is a ductless system.

In other words, the transmission between the endocrine glands is happening on an electromagnetic basis as well as on a chemical basis. And so there's radio waves going in our systems, radio waves going between our systems. And if I'm preparing food, I've got radio waves from my attitude going into the food. In the Buddhist tradition, they always had the highest monk being the cook. And then everybody was eating the highest food that could be prepared. Yeah, Julie always tells a funny story about a yoga retreat that we went on when we had first met. And we would go to the center, and it was this place nearby, and it would be all vegan food. And the food looked delicious, but everybody got sick,

or everybody just felt terrible after eating this food. And it turned out that the person who was preparing this food was just a very unhappy, angry person. And so, you know, she was injecting the meal with all of that angst and energy. And it seems like, okay, well, this is a crazy, hippie idea or whatever. No, it's totally real. But I think that there's truth in that. And so Julie's always like, you know, look, you can prepare the most beautiful plant-based meal. But if you don't prepare it with the right mindfulness and spirit and approach, then you're missing the point. And what was great about Dr. Bush is, like, look, you're a guru sing.

You're a Sikh yogi, you know, musician guy. I guess I'm a hippie. I don't know. But, like, this Zach Bush guy, he's, like, legit'm a hippie i don't know but like this zach bush guy he's like legit not a hippie at all like not a he's not a vegan activist or anything like that like he's just like this is what the science is showing me yeah well that's what we're going to need to convince the convincible and not everybody is convincible you know it's a one-room schoolhouse once again and we go through many lifetimes

and many incarnations and some of those incarnations are on this earth and some of them are on other planets that are like this earth and those of us

that have been into the future which means we've come from planets that are 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000,

a million years more advanced than this one and we come back to this planet, we are actually from the future. And we're the ones that are actually the ones that are responsible for this one-room schoolhouse, this one-room daycare center. We're the ones that need to show up. I feel that we're the ones that are responsible for the mess because we're the ones that are responsible for cleaning up the mess.

And we're the ones that have to show up in big numbers. I mean big numbers in terms of what it's possible is somewhere in the neighborhood of, you know, 22 million right now, 22, 23 million. But with our awareness we could shift this planet so remarkably. Think about it. The iPhone has now been around for 10 years and everyone on the planet is totally screen fixated. Think about what it would be like if we were a hundred years in the future and what we would have advanced to. We may have already gone through the crises that we're going through here on Earth. We might have already gone through

the collapse of society that we may be experiencing in the near future on Earth. And we've come out the other side. So we've lived on those planets. We know the secrets of how to get through it. We've been sent back to here in another incarnation

to kind of cross-pollinate that awareness. Now it's our job to awaken that awareness inside of us. And we do awaken it by going on crazy races in the Baltic Sea. We do awaken it by in deep meditation. We do awaken it by doing yoga. We awaken it through all these methods. We're the ones that need to show up because we have to then take, like an adult would in a daycare center when two kids are squabbling,

only in this world they're squabbling with weapons, and throw our arms around both of them and say, okay, we're going to take a time out. We're going to go walk out in the fields. them and say, okay, we're going to take a timeout. We're going to go walk out in the fields. And however we end up doing that, we may not even know. Just like 50 years ago, a touch screen was unthought of. And now a touch screen is in everyone's pocket. So the technology of how we will emotionally take care of that move, we may not know yet, but if we really force ourselves into a corner, we're going to discover that means. And that's what I'm working for. I'm working for discovering the means of creating the impossible,

the ability to go into really, really high- tense situations and find peace and find calm and so how does one comport themselves if we take a case study let's take the the shooting at the church the other day right and given the fact that we're all screen obsessed and everyone's staring at their iphone you know what i spend a lot of time thinking about is how do I leverage the platform that I have and the audience that I have to communicate in a way that can sort of elevate the conversation and raise the frequency beyond thoughts and prayers

or by taking a side and pushing back and fighting. And so what happens to me is I don't really know how to navigate that in the best way. And so often I end up remaining silent on issues that I have an opinion on, or perhaps I could provide a perspective that would be helpful, but I'm not sure the best strategy for approaching that and and being an agent like sort of trying to be that that that agent of positive change well i think being silent is sometimes very helpful because another opinion isn't necessarily the answer and so i i'm i'm with you on that i look at it in these kinds of realistic terms and some of it seems realistic

to the listener and some of it will seem a little bit of a stretch but a bee is leaving the hive and it's in need of a flower and so it flies into the air and it has there's pheromones in the air there's fragrances in the air, there's colors in the air, there's all of this that are coming from around its environment. The environment can be a few miles away but the bee is still sensitive enough to be able to pick up on those messages, the fragrance messages and the color messages. And it follows those tracks because the color from the light that's coming from the flower

is in the air, is in the track that the bee is going to be following. The pheromones from the flower, just like a dog can smell a lot more than we can, the bee can smell that. So it follows those pathways

and it finds the flower. What if many of us were so aware, so acute, just like the bee, that we could smell an unresolved violent temperament arising in some location nearby and we would then be attracted to that circumstance, which is in this case a person that is starting to stockpile guns because they're not resolving their angst, they're not resolving their anger and their rage and their fear and their separation within themselves. And so all of a sudden these millions of people, I call it millions of avatars, millions of messiahs throughout the planet,

and I'm saying the next several decades are going to be used to build that, and that we can actually sense who in our community is feeling this way, and we could go up to them and be an answer. go up to them and be an answer. There was a great story about a school in the Mid-South, somewhere like Tennessee, Kentucky, a few years back. And a lady was working the front desk. And this lady working the front desk suddenly sees this guy with a couple of weapons standing in front of her and she went into a state of shock and a state of shock is the literally you out-of-body experience and the reason they call it an out-of-body experience is because you actually go into an etheric consciousness you go into a precursive consciousness like a

precog from the movie Minority Report. And you all of a sudden, you are in that precognition of realizing that there is a condition that you're working with. And she said that when she started talking, she didn't know who was talking inside of her. talking inside of her. But she started to communicate words to the gunman that were very soothing to him, very understanding for him, and in about three to five minutes the gunman was setting down the guns and saying, I want you to call the police. I've just about done something that I would have terribly regretted. So she went into this altered state and literally engulfed this person in what love that we've never kind of experienced and she brought him down. She brought him down

from that heightened state of anxiety, that heightened state of disconnection, to where he just said, call in the authorities because I want to be controlled now. And this is what I'm talking about, that we would become aware of where those situations are happening. They could be happening three miles away but we would be called to it. We would then be able to be in that state of really a state of a channeling kind of bringing in the love, bringing in the understanding. The Buddha had a great prayer,

Places I am to go, I shall go. People I am to meet, I shall meet. Things I am to say, I shall say. That which I am to achieve, I shall achieve. And to be in that state of just that pure channel of love, being able to assist somebody that, as you've said prior, they're in desperate need. The perpetrator of these crimes is in desperate need. And if somebody could get to them before they got to their act, that would be the state of grace.

And that requires a level of connectivity, I think, that we're lacking right now. You know, I think Los Angeles is perhaps the greatest example of, you know, dispersed individuality because we're all in our cars and we, you know, it's such a sprawling, you know, place where it's very difficult to connect with other people, you know, and to not know what your neighbor is doing or even know their names. And bridging that gap, I think, requires not only, you know, going back to what you said earlier about really connecting with that, you know, that gut and that heart brain in order to develop that awareness. Because I're if you're really present with an individual and you can get past your thinking brain and you're just with them and you're looking at them their

eyes are telling you you know that everything is there like we were in julie and i were in miami the other day and we had a dinner with a bunch of people and we sat next to this guy who was sort of jokingly saying that that could, like, you know, read minds or that he was empathic in a certain way. And he started to say, this is, you know, who you think you are, but this is what's really going on with you. And he was very accurate, like, and he did it with a couple people. But, you know, he was just sort of being a mentalist because he was paying attention.

And I think we're all wearing that on our face. The signals are there, but instead we're gazing at our phones and we're in our cars and we're, you know, on Twitter or we're doing what we're doing. And that disconnection is only widening rather than shortening. Every power that any human being has ever had here on earth power that any human being has ever had here on earth is in every single one of us waiting to be activated. It's like you have almost the identical genealogy that I do, as the identical genealogy as everybody does. We're like within micrometers of our DNA, and yet which one is activated? In you it's brown eyes, in me it's blue eyes, etc.

Which one is activated in our, let's call it superpowers? The superpowers of the Buddha, the superpowers of Lord Krishna, the superpowers of Muhammad, the superpowers of Jesus, the superpowers of Zoroaster, of all of these

incredible human beings that have walked the planet at one time or another, exist within every one of us, every one of those superpowers. And therefore, it's time not for another great leader, it's time for great leadership. And that means that all of us who have an inclination to sort of question the current way things are going and not try to get on to it, right, and get ahead of it, but actually to get under it and stand under it and understand it and support it, you could develop, I can develop all of these superpowers. And I'm not talking about we need to walk on water, which would have been very helpful in your race. That would have been good.

Maybe if I spent a little more time with you before the race. We got it. But what I'm talking about is the superpower of compassion, the superpower of empathy. compassion, the superpower of empathy. Let me not necessarily read your mind in a kind of in a small way, but let me read your being and let me find out, is there anything that I can do for you? Being of service. This is what is going to have to take place on earth. It's time for a superhuman race, which is going to have to take place on earth. It's time for a superhuman race which is going to

arise out of the existing human race. The kids that are graduate students in the game of life, in the school of life, are going to have to rise to the occasion and really set the pace. Right now those of us that are in these kinds of podcasts or thought of as you call yourself a hippie or they say woo-woo and all of this, I don't think of any of this stuff as woo-woo. I think of it as all just pure science and technology. Well, the science is always present

in all of your lectures and sermons and in your daily prayers. You're always talking about physics and biochemistry. It's interesting. I think that's important, right? You're super into science. I am. There's one that's going to come out.

As a matter of fact, I was working on it this morning, so it's coming out in a few days. They have discovered a crystal out in deep space that's actually a quantum crystal. It's like so tiny it's not even nano. A nano is six carbon atoms. This thing is below the atomic structure. Quantum crystals that do not apply themselves to Newton's third law of motion, which is for every action there's an equal reaction, and that which is in motion tends to stay in motion.

This thing, the moment an action takes place on it, it multiplies the action, you know, like in multiples of thousands. And so an action has a reaction of phenomenon. This is the exact same quantum crystal that is in our spinal fluid. And the fluid around all of our ganglia, our nerve centers, which is our brain, our spine, the gut and the heart. And this is that, these are those nano you're in the zone that you get into, when you're running, when you've passed through hitting the wall in a marathon, that sensation. Or remember Sleepy Floyd of the Golden State Warriors?

His average points per night was, this was like decades ago. It was a long time ago. 13 points a night was his average, decades ago it was a long time ago 13 points a night was his average and one night he hit 55 points and they said to him so what happened he said i don't know he said i dribbled down the court and the bat the basket was as wide as the whole court no matter where i threw it it went through and that's literally being in the zone where the conditions of your sensory system alter so that they're in complete control of your muscles well you're transcending the thinking mind exactly overcome that brain exactly right where time kind of fades away and space gets distorted and well yeah and it

gets distorted in the way of your intention his intention was to make baskets our intention is to you know calm people down well in a macro sense i just got bleeped you can say whatever you want here it's a podcast there's no there's no network here there's no middleman or intermediary it's just us say whatever you want here. It's a podcast. There's no network here. There's no middleman or intermediary. It's just us. Say whatever you want. I think that as trite as it sounds, in the most macro sense, it is, look, we've all been told this, and intellectually perhaps we understand it, that we walk around with blinders thinking about ourselves. We're self-obsessed. We're focused on me and my path

and what I'm trying to get and achieve, when in reality there is no disconnection between any of us. And we truly are one. We're one living, breathing organism on this spinning globe that's spiraling through space as a spaceship. You know what I mean? That's the truth of the matter, right? And we have such difficulty as human beings, like recognizing that fundamental aspect of our shared destiny, right? And the more that we can connect with that, that gives space to develop and breed that level of empathy with our fellow humans.

But there's something about the way that we're wired and perhaps it's about the culture in which we're raised where we not only forget about that, we deny that very essential truth, right? So if we can cultivate a greater awareness around that, then I think we can be more empathetic, more connected, and perhaps more able to sense that person who is in pain and needs that help. But how do we overcome the massive forces of our culture that want to keep us in that space of me, me, me, and what am I going to get, etc. You know, we feed ourself. We breathe ourself. And these are the functions that we have made important. We have made it important that I have my air, that I have my food, that I have my house, that I have my car, that I have my life, that I have my job and all of these... And my problems.

And my problems. And all of these my orientations have become what we educate the head brain to achieve the answers to. But in fact, when you sit in a consciousness that is expanded, when you sit in a consciousness that is expanded, when you sit in a consciousness that has an awareness of what you were just talking about, that we are in fact one being on this planet, the spaceship sailing through the stars, you break that down

what we are is we are an electromagnetic event. You're an electromagnetic event, I'm an electromagnetic event. And what you have done is you have gathered the density of body around your electromagnetics. I have gathered the density of body around my electromagnetics. What we have gathered that density from is the ocean of potential matter in which we live. So we are all bringing our body from the same ocean of potential matter. And in that, we are all one. It's almost as if there's this fluid that then becomes a gel, that then becomes ice, and it gets more and more solid as it becomes rich, as it becomes gurusing. And so we are sharing matter, and we are looking out from the center of our conscious awareness in this vehicle that appears to be me and appears to be you.

But in fact, it's we. And that we're just two perspectives. I looked at a joke the other day, a cartoon, and it was a big nine to one side and a big six to the other side. And the title under the cartoon was Matter of Perspective. And that's what, when you say mine, right, and you're referring to yours, if I was in your perspective, if I put myself in your shoes, it would serve me and vice versa. And so here we are, we're these electromagnetic beings that have consolidated the matter around our center core, but that matter that we have consolidated is mutual.

And so your health is going to improve my health. Your well-being improves my well-being. This is the awareness that we have to teach kids from the age of three, four, five, and so that throughout their lives, they're working for each other and with each other, not competing at each other. Right. That was the subject of one of your other daily prayers, right? It was like cooperation.

Cooperation. Over competition. Well, I understand that there can be friendly competition just to make you better at what you do, but that's, you know, the most unfriendly of all competitions is war, you know, but every other competition could just make you better at what you do, make your body better, make your mind better, make your emotions better. Well, I mean, sports is a vehicle for teaching cooperation and teamwork through competition. So they're not necessarily, you know, mutually exclusive in a binary way.

Correct. And the key here is that we are all one. And, you know, philosophically speaking, it's a nice phrase. Oh, yeah, we're all one, you know. But if you break it down to where it's actual science, we are all one. We are, I mean, think of it in terms of the way the cells came together. Right? The one-celled animals came together

and the first multi-celled animals were called colonies. They all ate for their cell. They all shit for their cell. They all lived and died for their cell. And then pretty soon what they did was they started forming specialties. And so some became the eaters, some became the blood circulators, some became the respirators, and that became a multi-celled animal. Well, right now we're at a place where we're so numerous as single individuals that we're going to have to start working with and for each other. Otherwise, we can't continue to be at each other. But in certain respects, we are, as human beings,

almost like the red blood cells of these larger organisms that we call cities and societies. I mean, if you're flying on an airplane and you look down on Los Angeles, it's like a giant virus on the planet that's being fueled and fed by human beings running around, moving things around for us.

Isn't it crazy to see that? It's like insane. It's like you're going, I'm landing in that? And we are innovating our replacement through technology. The advent of artificial intelligence is starting to come online here, and that presents a very interesting conundrum for the human condition. I think we are literally creating the next evolution of the human beings that perhaps will render us irrelevant. And maybe that's a good thing. I don't know. But this is happening. Did you see where Saudi Arabia just granted citizenship to the robot?

Yeah, I did. And these robots are basically domestic servants. They're the ones that will take care of your house, but they have a vote. And they have that citizenship, that autonomy as a citizen of the country. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting, I mean, that's a bit of a stunt, especially in a part of the world that still has a lot of challenges with human rights and equality and all of that. But, you know, even beyond that, just the idea that we are creating sentience in a way that we don't consider life because it's not based on organ systems as we understand it,

but perhaps is just a new form of life that we have never conceptualized before, like the tadpole turning into the frog. Do you know that that particular, yes, and out of intense request, which is the nature of crisis. Crisis is an intense request for some kind of change. So yes, in some of those countries where they are quite backward in their relationship between the gender, right, between men and women, quite backward in their relationship to sexual gender, right? Between men and women, quite backward in their relationship to sexual orientation, quite backward in their relationship to who does the heavy

lifting in the society. Wouldn't it stand to reason that they might have the most extreme anomaly that would take place, like granting citizenship to something that doesn't have an actual beating heart. And what happened all those billion years ago when the single-celled creature started to team up with another one and then all the single-celled creatures of consciousness around it went, hey, that's not real. That's just two things teaming up. But it kept progressing and it kept progressing. You know, the doctors now are saying, okay, well you have an artificial lung or you have an artificial this or you have a kidney transplant. So who are you? If you've had all your organs transplanted from somebody else, who are you? Are you the

transplanter or are you the transplantee? And who is existing in and what is consciousness? And so what we have to now realize is that, okay, there may be intelligence in an artificial way. Is there consciousness? And that's what we have to realize, is that an intelligent being may not be a conscious being, and an unconscious being may not have the empathy. So we could be creating intelligence that has the ability to function in an outstanding way. I mean, they've created soldiers that can't be destroyed,

you know, like the Terminator kind of thing. But if it doesn't have consciousness, if it doesn't have empathy, if it doesn't have compassion, if it doesn't have any of these things stopping its activities, what will we end up with? And that's what happened, by the way, to those cultures throughout the stellar systems

that have destroyed their planets. As a thought experiment, though, similar to the old one about the boat, if you replace it plank by plank, at what point is it still your boat or is it a different boat? Similarly, if you take AI and it continues to iterate and it continues to human being and mimic empathy and happiness and sadness and depression that it becomes so indistinguishable from a human being, at what point, if it continues to iterate and iterate, can we say that on some level it does have consciousness and how does that make you think about what consciousness is and is not? That was a heavy one. It reminded me of Monty Python.

Yeah. Guy comes ashore, sticks a stick in the ground with a piece of cloth waving on it. He says, I hereby claim this land as far as it travels for the emperor. A little voice comes out of the bushes. Yeah, but what about us? We've been here for 10,000 years. And he kind of looks around dumbfound and he says, yes, but do you have a flag? Uh-huh, right.

So, what is consciousness? Right? What is that? And can that creature reproduce itself? Or does it have to be produced? Can it rebuild itself? Let's presume that it can and that it becomes so adept at it that it becomes self-improving and when you apply Moore's law to that it continues

to replicate and improve and produce at rates so quick that before a blink of an eye it's you know ten thousand times better than it was 10 minutes ago and there are planets throughout space because this is not just a single universe i think we spoke about that before but it's just divots in a megaverse and every universe thinks it's the only one because it can't see anywhere beyond itself but there are ancient, ancient universes that have already gone through what you just described. And it will be interesting to travel in our conscious awareness to those places to get the answer to your question. Because there is that going on. Because if it can be thought of here, it's been thought of in many places.

You know, I always look at this place that you know they call it infinity right and it's got to be infinite because if it's not it's got to stop someplace and if it stops someplace then there's got to be something on the other side of the stop and so it just has to keep stopping and starting and keep going and stopping and starting and keep going so it's infinite no matter how you break it down. In some place in this infinite event, what you just described is taking place full force. And the only way to know the answer to your question,

specifically, is to go visit those places. And the only way to visit those places currently is to visit them in your meditative consciousness in a deep deep deep way then it would take some effort but I'm sure that we could come up with the answer to that yeah you haven't visited there yet not that specific one okay you saw the expression on my face I loved where you were going with that I just that was fascinating because you know who's ever who's ever i mean obviously scientists are thinking along those lines and and you've

probably had conversations with some of those people that are extending themselves in that direction it's it's real it's very real it's converse it's a conversation we need to be having because as much as our you know human condition is to you know biologically reproduce it's a conversation we need to be having because as much as our, you know, human condition is to, you know, biologically reproduce, it's become just as much about continuing to technologically innovate. Right. And no matter how many stop gaps or, you know, conversations we have about, is this the right thing to do or not, or not to do it's happening like it's just we can't stop it whether it's gene sequencing and what's going on with crisper and

all this craziness like it's going to get really weird pretty soon i mean it's already getting weird but like when my little girls are you know 40 and 50 years old i can't even begin to fathom what the world is going to look like right still. Still, we're talking the iPhone 10 years old, and now you've just multiplied that times four or five, and the advances that will take place. And by the way, when we're talking about what you were just saying in the AI and the betterment and the self-betterment and the mimicry of compassion and empathy and all of those things, we're not just talking about something being made out of non-organic matter. We could be reproducing these things out of biomatter and we could be producing

these things out of waste matter. And this could then become a full-fledged biological entity that's able to reproduce itself kind of germ-free. I don't even know if it matters whether it's biological or inorganic. I think we have to expand our thinking about what we contemplate as life. And inorganics could sure eliminate the problem with virus and bacteria. Yeah, well, it's perhaps a more perfect system. We shall see, right? But here's the thing.

This is a doorway, man. We've taken the listeners to a doorway. We're saying, okay, stay tuned. There's no mushrooms involved. Just a lot of frogs around here. Right, we're just filled with frogs. But shifting gears a little bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about boundaries. We talked earlier a little bit about shouldering the responsibility to carry a positive frequency and be an agent of positive change through empathy and connection and things

like that. But there also is, it's also important to have discernment about this just because it's not like, oh, I'm all love and it's a free for all and you can come invade my space. And I know that this has come up for you in a personal way. Recently, you had to like eject somebody from your classroom or who was somebody who was not behaving appropriately. So I think boundaries are important. And I wanted to kind of explore that a little bit with you in terms of how you comport yourself as somebody who wants to be of service, but also is not somebody who is there to be taken advantage of? I look at it as the sage warrior. You're the sage first, and when necessary, you're the warrior.

That nonviolence is actually a term that means non-aggression, and that you're not looking to be aggressive, but you're also not looking to be overrun. Because it's important for us to, well, like the whole thing with sexual predators that is taking place and exposed in the world today. I said to the class the other day, I said, okay, everybody has to make a promise. Raise your right hand. I had everybody raise their right hand and then I will learn

two really swift moves that can deck somebody instantly. In other words, if somebody is a predator and they're approaching you, you need to be able to take a very swift action to put them into a place where they're not going to be a problem. Because we are not here to be taken advantage of.

We are here to be an advantage for everyone. So we have to learn. We have to learn how to have that ability to take someone's aggression down in an instant. Yes, we also have to learn the art of eminence, of supreme eminence, of being able to dominate a space to such a degree like the Buddha that if you came within, you know, a hundred feet of the Buddha, you had nothing but peaceful thoughts. But what if you have a rifle that is capable of traveling far more than a hundred feet in today's world?

You know, you could shoot a person from a great distance, from three thousand feet or something like that. What we have to do is we have to have multi-levels to our being. One, know that if there's anything in the visual area that has harm for you, that has thoughts of harm for you, this is an awareness, like I was saying

about the bee finding the flower. This is the reverse of going out and finding that person who is out of harmony. This is the reverse of going out and finding that person who is out of harmony. This is to actually know that there's someone in your area. This is a highly intuitive power and you've got to be able to have that power. Secondly, you've got to be able to control the frequencies within the close rank, within a few hundred feet, so that nobody can have that violent attitude or that obnoxious attitude or that aggressive attitude or that predator's attitude within a few hundred feet. And then if both of those

things have failed and there's somebody right in your face, you have to be able to take care of business. And that's why the sage warrior is the answer. And we're not going to get there overnight. We have to get there, you know, it's years and years and years of practice, but this is exactly what we have to know. For example, let's talk about the sexual predators that are so much in the news these days. They're victims of their own inadequacy. They're victims of what we've been talking about,

their disconnection. What everybody longs for is their source code. We're all programmed to long for our source code. And the source code is the womb from where we came and the breast from where we were first nurtured. And so this whole obsession with the womb, with the vagina, with the breast is all about our sourcing. We want to get back to that place where we were either completely held and safe or we were completely nurtured and safe. And the only thing that's going to change that or alter that, no matter how sophisticated

we become, is if we raise our conscious awareness so that we know that we've been there, done that, and don't need that anymore. And we are here to provide that sanctuary for others. So we don't invade somebody else's space. We don't require sexual favors to kind of satisfy that need of ours to go there. This is, again, an educational, this is a biophysical education whereby we are nurtured to come up from that very basic. I mean sexual predators are just babies looking for the nipple. Sexual predators are just babies looking for the womb. And the reality is that we need to educate everybody so that they

can understand that's what's happening. And until we've educated everyone so that that isn't happening, either through AI or whatever it's going to be, we need to be able to take care of ourselves. We need to be able to set up boundaries. We need to be able to not be taken advantage of. Because this is, I mean, we're getting crowded, right? As we said, seven and a half billion people. I mean, LA, I don't know when you came to L.A., but it was in the mid-60s when I first came down here. This place is crazy bigger than it ever was. You used to have some distance where you had some land.

Now there's nothing. And everybody is in their armored vehicle, driving around. And as we get more and more crowded, we have to set up more and more boundaries that are boundaries of understanding rather than just boundaries of walls and and um and lines of demarcation yeah we've set up the wrong boundaries yeah you know and the the the sexual predator thing is super interesting in the sense that it's coming up now. It's not, you know, the behavior has been there. It's not that suddenly there's a rise in the behavior.

It's a rise in awareness around the behavior and the outing. You know, it's like the pimple has finally been popped, right? And when you have, you know, Ronan Farrow writes these articles and The New Yorker and this all comes out and it creates this cascading effect that is amplified by social media and the Me Too campaign and suddenly all these women finally feel safe to relate their stories. Safety in numbers.

Yeah, which then sort of amplifies the waterfall of this narrative becoming outed. And why do you think that's happening now? The juxtaposition of that against the mass shooting thing is very interesting to me. Like the timing of it, like why is this happening now? Exposure, what you just said is true. The amount of ways in which something can be exposed, the amount of ways in which people can connect are doing two things. They are allowing people to connect more deeply, more closely, more prevalently, but they are also causing people to feel disconnected to

a greater degree. So all of the women on the Me Too campaign are feeling connected, they are feeling a kindred spirit. But as that kindred spirit rises, the ones that have no means of connecting at all are feeling more and more estranged. So the ones that are feeling more estranged become more violent. The ones that are feeling more connected become more powerful and less vulnerable to the predator, the sexual predator. And so these two things are happening simultaneously because of a third element. And that third element is that ability of information to travel instantaneously across the world.

And now, I mean, let's face it, back in the centuries, sexual predators were called successful people. You know, they weren't even considered to be inappropriate. You've just dominated, you've conquered, you've done whatever you've done. In today's world, that law has all changed. I mean, you even heard from one of the predator's own mouths saying, well, know I was just raised in the 60s when all this behavior seemed to be okay. Well you know sorry for the you know lack of education but even then that behavior of unwillingness you know forcing yourself against

unwillingness wasn't okay. That was not okay and the misinterpretation of willingness and unwillingness is another factor too because the unwillingness and yet the temptation of furthering a career, these are all of these really absurd and gross distractions that are being exposed in today's world by media, by social media. Yeah, it goes back to tribes as well. You're talking about the empowerment that this community of women or people who have been victims of this are feeling,

and they can cohere and create this tribe that's oriented not geographically but around an idea. And the cohesion of that tribe is amplified and quickened in the presence of an enemy that everyone can kind of counterpoint against, right? The enemy being the predator. When the enemy goes away, the cohesion of the tribe becomes lessened, I think, right? So it brings up this issue of the necessity of the other, right, to cohere the group. And so I'm wondering, is it possible to create these tribes without the

necessity of that enemy? And I think what I'm getting at really... You're really on to something. I like it. What I'm getting at in a broader sense is, you know, I think it applies to the way that I kind of think about our political climate right now. And as somebody who I'm on social media, you know, my career is kind of, you know, plays itself out there. And I go on Twitter, and it's just, it's the tribes of, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans and how this battle, the battle lines that are being drawn and those boundaries are dictated by, you know, the parameters of policy and perspective that these two groups have, right? So they cohere in opposition to each other.

And it goes back again also to kind of take it a step even further to, you know, how do we as conscious beings who are trying to raise the vibration approach these sorts of issues, whether it's the Me Too campaign and the sexual predator issue or our political climate and do it in a way that is of a higher vibration than just casting aspersions and shooting bows and arrows across the bow. One of the things that human beings are moving toward is a social crisis. You know, we've had physical crises before. We're now entering the world of social crisis because we have so many connections across societies. Before it was a village here and a village here and a village here. And what was

going on in the village could be either a crisis or a benevolent circumstance. But now with this cross-pollination of people throughout the world, the boundaries in political nature are completely dissolving. There's this thing called, what are they called, net countries. what are they called, net countries. The fact that Facebook is a country, that Google is a country, and that they have no normal physical boundaries, but people are functioning in them across these boundaries. Human beings have a destiny to come together, ultimately. And in order to get together, to come together, we have to dissolve our differences. What we're looking at now is, you know, in that Newton's third law of motion again, for every action there's a reaction, for every dilemma there is an accompanying solution. And it's right there. But because our brain is fixated on danger from our survival, you know, decades and centuries and millennia,

we are focused on the danger. We're focused on the difference. We're focused on how can I keep myself safe from what you might do. Right there with that, there is just as much similarity. There is just as much calm, there is just as much peace. So if those of us that are focused in these ways, that are more inclined towards the peaceful nature, the coalition nature, we can shift the dynamic so that it's not a mutual enemy that gathers us together, but it's a mutual aspiration as opposed to a desperation that gathers us together. And that is sustainable.

That mutual aspiration is like everybody training for the race. Right. I immediately am thinking of like a sports analogy. Yes. Yes. And that's why these things are so important, that's why I follow your career is because I love what you get out of it, I love how you get it out of it, I love the way in which it all takes place because that is us looking at our similarities, what does he do that I can do? What is he achieving that I can achieve in that same way? Rather than our differences, which is,

oh, he's achieved it means I haven't achieved it. Or I'm comparing myself and I become jealous. Now, jealousy can be a positive because I can become jealous of what you've achieved and then strive to achieve it myself. And so I turn everything into that positive. And what will be happening in the future, if we have something to say about it,

is that we will be able to sustain those tribes that were created out of mutual enemy by introducing a mutual similarity. Okay, now that we've done the Me Too, I'm just acting as if I'm a sexually assaulted person, man or woman, doesn't matter. And I'm a Me Too participant. And so as the inertia of that campaign begins to die down,

let's maintain our connection because that connection is powerful. And let's introduce something into that connection. And this is something that people like you and I can do in our work is that we can come up with the ideas of what to introduce into it that becomes the next meal. That becomes the next meal that gathers the Me Too campaign around a table to be able to consume that. Okay, so we've accomplished this and we've exposed sexual predators and now we're doing this and that. And now let's use this same coalition of forces in a cooperation to achieve something else and this is what

we're going to use to do it. And all of a sudden we start replacing stimulus of negative, the stimulus of a mutual enemy, with the stimulus of a mutual aspiration. I like that. I'm trying to think of a practical example of that other than sports. Well, immediately I think back to the first part of our conversation, which is education. What about all the women in the Me Too and all the men in the me too um would sort of combine you know almost like group funding right what is it called crowdfunding i love that i love the new phrasing don't you the the way there so what if everybody was decided to crowdfund uh educational um emphasis on

training children from the age of you know early education whenever that is in not being available if there's a predator present and there's no meal available for the predator what is the predator going to do predator leaves a predator leaves or the predator has to dissolve its nature it's like the old saying in the 60s, what if they threw a war and no one showed up, right? There would be no war. I always thought when, you know, 200,000 Americans invaded Iraq, there was in the early stages, there was 25 million Iraqis. What if they all just decided that, hey, let's all get together on Sunday and surround the green zone. And just surround it, right?

And just surround it with love, not with weapons. And we'll put the ones in the very front who are going to get killed, the ones who, you know, are willing to die for their cause. And then the women and children are, you know, in the way back. But you could have just cut it off you truly are a 60 a child of the 60s thinking outside that box yeah but i but i i'm a child of the 60s that remembers the 60s because i wasn't a i wasn't a druggie no but i mean you were we talked about this the last time on the podcast i mean you were very much of that oh yeah that time oh yeah and it's coming back because what you just well that's

what i was going to ask you like what is that when you kind of take the temperature of the culture like what is the difference between what that felt like at that time at like you know peak 60s peak 60s versus the kind of activism that you're seeing now? You got to watch an HBO special that's taking place in two parts right now. It's called Rolling Stone, Stories from the Edge. And it's about Rolling Stone magazine and how it got started and everything that influenced it, right? And what it says in that is what really influenced the 60s was group consciousness, was the fact that people realized that together they could achieve anything. Together they could

bring down the bad, together they could lift up the good. And that's what's happening here with social media, with the Me Too campaign. The Me Too makes somebody that's sitting in some place, maybe they were in Hollywood or in New York striving to be in the industry and they got raped or they got assaulted in some way and it just freaked them out and they left the industry and now they're sitting in some small town in some state somewhere and all of a sudden this Me Too thing comes on and it's in social media. So it comes on their phone and they realize, wow, Me Too. And they're now connected

with thousands of other people. And they have been feeling completely lost for a couple of decades because their entire dreams and aspirations got cut short by some predator, right? I just bleeped myself. Yeah, you bleeped yourself. That was good, though. It'll show up on the video. It'll show up on the video. And you probably heard a little bit in the audio track.

But yeah, because of some dumb predator, all of a sudden their career is shattered. And all of a sudden it's reignited in some way where they're feeling a part of a sudden their career is shattered and all of a sudden it's reignited ignited in some way where they're feeling a part of a group that was what went on in the 60s and it was a much different setting because we didn't have any of the media support that is there today but group consciousness is really really important and it's what's going to save humanity if we get it going fast enough. Well, crisis provokes that. You know, I think that the heightened sort of, you know, everything from people who are physically protesting in the streets to, you know, what you're seeing online is unprecedented in my lifetime.

Yeah. And look at what happened in Houston and Florida and in Puerto Rico, where, you know, people just, you know, crowdfunded and flew down there. And when Haiti got hit by the earthquake, crowdfunded and flew down there and when Haiti got hit by the earthquake, you know, people went down there to help. I mean, the ability to respond to crisis is human nature and the ability to have compassion in crisis is human nature. I remember you do too and right after 9-11, you know, the world was saying we are all Americans and it was an interesting floaty kind of sensation for a few weeks until that died down and other things started to occur it's interesting how crisis is the one thing that allows people to transcend what we were talking about earlier that sense of separation and that that uh you know zero-sum mentality to be able to understand the wholeness and the oneness of all of us

where status suddenly doesn't mean anything. It's what you're actually doing. The guy who shows up wherever the hurricane was to pull people out of their homes, and we see these heroes, and we can celebrate the human spirit in the midst of these tragedies that unite us yeah i loved it i and so i wish we could you know bottle that and find a way to you know maintain that outside the you know the temporal boundaries of a crisis well i think one of the things that would be good is that people like Dr. Bush that you spoke about that was very much into measuring the results of certain things in the endocrine

system. We could measure the technologies that take place within the psycho-emotional and somatic bodies of what happens in a crisis and where you know a millionaire takes his yacht and literally he he drives it down the street that's now flooded in 10 feet of water to save people out of his out of their homes so he's like the common man now even though he's got a you know a beautiful very very expensive Okay, crisis causes that to happen. What other kinds of circumstances? We should do studies and find out what other kinds of circumstances are going to produce the same biochemical consequence so that we

can then, okay well let's produce some of those. Let's create some of those opportunities rather and have opportunity produce the collective consciousness rather than just crisis. Because we have that ability. We have the ability to measure today. I think the thread that runs through it is connectivity. Like when a crisis happens, people are able to let go of their bullshit and connect for a greater good um and and they come together

unified over a central you know heightened scenario to collectively overcome it right and they they have done studies i mean they have we know that depression rates and suicide rates went down in new york city in the aftermath of 9-11. And it makes you, because there was a sense of community and connectivity that obviously took place. You just fed me with a new piece of data. Well, I mean, I think it's... I love it.

And I'm sure there's a lot more on that. But I think it, when I think about that, it makes me think that we need to rethink how we conceptualize happiness altogether. You know, I've had Dan Buettner on my podcast a couple times. He just came on and talked about happiness and studied all the cultures that are the most happy and the sort of thematic things that these cultures share. And it's not about the things that we prioritize in our culture. It is about that connectivity. It's about how we're honoring our elders.

It's about the small, simple things that we tend to overlook as frivolous. Well, diet is important because if we were to clarify our diets, we would be a lot more susceptible to those endocrine chemistries that would make us joyful. And, for example, you were talking sports and how sports is a great unifier. You know, in the World Cup, in the Women's World Cup of soccer, the American team for a couple of series over the last couple of decades has come out on top. And it has really turned the entire country into a soccer fan, which is something unusual. Because, number one, women's sports have never been as big a draw as men's sports,

and soccer has never been as big a draw as football, baseball, and basketball in America. And so achievement is another mechanism by which we can unify, not just crisis. So we have crisis, we have achievement, we have diet, we have all of these things. And if we were to create a program, a campaign that is revolving around connection, achievement, compassionate competition, avoidance of crisis, and all of these things, and know that we're going to get heavy pushback from the capital side, which is going to want to have something else take place that will create crisis or what have you,

and not spend our energies reacting to the capital side of things that are going to try to create division, but stay focused on our game, we might have a 20-year plan here. That sounds good. Well, given that we, according to you, we only have 35.

A 20 will be good. If we can execute on the 20-year plan, we're in good shape, right? Yeah. And I actually don't use the word execute. I use the word implement because to me, execute is like a killing verb.

Yeah, I get that yeah i'll be more mindful about that yeah it's fun um well we gotta let's see oh man we gotta shut this down in a little bit but uh i thought like a good way to kind of end this uh would be to ask you a question a version of a question that i often ask doctors uh medical doctors that i've had on the show and one of the questions I always ask them at the end is, if you found yourself transported to a parallel universe and you were named to be the surgeon general, what kind of changes would you attempt to implement in our culture? So I thought a good question for you would be, if you woke up in a parallel

universe, which I have, or another dimension, which is, I don't know, this is a daily experience for you. Maybe you're in a, I don't know, maybe you're in a different dimension. I've rehearsed this answer many times. But if you were named to be the guru general, the spiritual master general of, of, you know, Western society at large, maybe not just the United States, but, you know, kind at large maybe not just the united states but you know kind of culture as we live it uh what would you like to what what would be the changes that you

would try to implement well i would look at a i would look at a 20 30 40 year plan um starting from children at the ages very young two two, three, four years old. And I would look to achieve measurable results in 15-20 years when the children are coming into their adulthood. Rather than trying to fix the adults that are already there, I would like them to be inspired by watching the children that are growing up in a new way. And that way would be one of educating the emotional body through the gut brain and the heart brain as strongly as we educate the intelligent body through the head brain.

And have courses such as confidence and courage and compassion and all of these self-identity self-valuation instead of just having service of others in a 12-step program when people have reached the place of desperate need and trying to step themselves back into equilibrium let's take the 12 steps and install them actually in all of education at a very early age. I love that. They don't have to experience addiction in order to go to the 12 steps. Prophylactically taking the 12 steps. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And find all of the things that have worked throughout those elements, the 12-step programs, the spirit-based programs, the athletic programs, the team-building programs, and have those be as much of a mandatory course, not just an elective, but a mandatory course, and then learn them through what, like that Russian school that you were talking about, through group effort, where everybody is working on the same thing and everybody is building towards a common goal so what we end up with in 15 and 20 years is adults entering the system that the idea of me my my i me mine is is quite foreign to them funny yeah but

the idea of how to collectively collaborate to solve a problem is second nature. It's absolutely second nature. Have a funny story quickly, and that is that we have a school in India, and I came out of our morning daily practice, which starts before the rise of the sun when we do yoga and meditation, and I start looking around for my sandals, which in India are called chappals and I can't find my can't find my chappals and a little kid comes walking up to me says can I help you and you know because there's like been a hundred and fifty people in the room and there's just a massive trouble I said

yeah I can't find my I can't find my sandals he says doesn't matter just take any pair that fits I said really he really? He said, that's what everybody does. He says, you got chappeled. He said, somebody just took your shoes. Yeah. You got chappeled because somebody just took your shoes because they fit. So I did. I took somebody else's shoes, which for the first 10 steps felt really weird because you know, somebody else's shoes have been on somebody else's foot and been molded. We're all one. We are all one. So the funny thing is, about three or four days later, as I'm coming in, I see my shoes. And they have a story to tell me because they've been on three or four different kids' feet. Right.

And that's the group conscience. If yours doesn't work, have mine. And you literally get to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. In someone else's shoes. I like that. That's beautiful. I do, too. Yeah, and I think that brings this whole thing full circle to where we began.

And in terms of the education system, look, when every person is walking around with a supercomputer in their pocket that can answer every question and every fact is available only as quickly as you can type it or say it into this computer, that has to impact the way that we're educating our kids because it's not about memorizing facts anymore. When they can find that whenever they need to. It needs to be about how to think. Automatic spell check.

We don't have smelling tests anymore. Right. I mean, is it necessary? And are we talking enough about how we're gonna modernize and update how we're indoctrinating our kids to you know inherit this planet uh from us that is in survival mode and in desperate condition so i like that expression how we're indoctrinating rather than how we're educating how we're indoctrinating our kids to save a planet that's in survival mode. Ooh.

Good one-liner. That's a good way to end it. It is. I should let you get the last word, though. I think I did, but then you just one-upped me and it was perfect. Not at all. It was perfect. I love it. Well, anyway, we'll pick it up again.

You should come on like every month. Oh, let's do it. You want to come back on the podcast? Yeah, I do. I do a coach's corner with my coach where we talk about like sports stuff, but we could have like a guru corner. Yeah, and we can have courses like what we were talking about. I know.

I was going to hold this up, actually. So Guru Singh and I are talking about perhaps doing a course together. We're actually not talking about perhaps. We're talking about doing a course together. Yes, we are. And I come here, and he greets me, and he goes, here, I woke up this morning, and I had this idea. So you can see it on the video.

But it says, extreme awareness, elite fitness, the mental and physical muscles of greatness with Guru Singh and Rich Roll. That sounds like a cool course. It is. I'd like to take it. I would too. So let's take it together

and let other people take it with us. What are we gonna tell people? I guess we gotta figure that part out, right? We will work that out. Cool, so yeah, I'm looking forward to figuring this out with you i think it'd be really fun it will be cool and monthlies i'm i'm good with coaches gurus corners gurus corner all right well i'll put some thought into that as well excellent man all right my brother uh this is really really a pleasure i would tell you um just from the first time that we met you know two people that live life on the top rather than on the bottom is really important my father always said and here's

the last word right yeah good i need you stuck it in my father always told me he said if you never want to run out of gas realize that it's just as easy to keep the top half of the tank full as it is the bottom half and so for two people that keep the top half of the tank full as it is the bottom half and so for two people that keep the top half of our tanks full i love working with you feelings mutual bless you all right bless you peace peace and satna plants namaste namaste satnam plant-based that's right all right cool we did it. Good job, man. Awesome. Come on.

Are you serious? I mean, I don't even know what to say other than the fact that Batman is just a beautiful, amazing gift to humanity. Am I right? I think I'm right. I really hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Please let us know on social media what you thought of the conversation. And also, if you would be keen on a

more regular Guru Corner edition of the show, I think that could be really cool and really fun. And also what you think about the idea of us creating an online class or program together, because I think that could be really great as well. I should say that our conversation is also on video and available on YouTube. You can check that out at youtube.com forward slash richroll. Also, please subscribe to my channel there. And I would encourage all of you to sign up for Guru Singh's daily email. It's a great way to help set your intention each morning. You can sign up for that on his website at gurusingh.com.

Also, check out his memoir, buried treasures. It's an amazing read. Follow him on Instagram at gurusingyogi. I got links to all this stuff, everything in the show notes, plus tons of other resources to dive deeper into his world. Uh, again, on the episode page at richroll.com. If you would like to support my work, please make a point of subscribing to the show on Apple podcasts. It only takes a second and it really does help us out a lot with the show's visibility. It helps with extending reach and growing the audience, which in turn will make it easier for me to book the very best people for future shows and bring you

guys the best content. Other things you can do to support my work, you can share this show with your friends and on social media, leave a review on iTunes, Apple podcasts. Again, subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash rich roll. And we also have a Patreon account set up. If you would like to support us financially, you can find the banner ad for Patreon on any episode page at richroll.com. I also have a weekly email that I send out. At least I send it out most weeks. It's called roll call five or six things I came across over the course of the week that I found inspiring or interesting. No spam, no affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you anything, just good stuff. You can sign up for that on my website as well by just entering your email address and any of those email capture windows.

As I mentioned in the last two episodes, I'm on the hunt for a new filmmaker, photographer, editor, collaborative partner to join me to help bring a more visual aesthetic to the work that I do for a rundown on the exact details and qualifications for this gig. Please see the and qualifications for this gig, please see the blog post for this episode at richroll.com. And finally, if you're struggling with your diet and you're looking for a very helpful, all-inclusive solution to dial up your

plate, please check out our Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. It will provide you with customized access to thousands of plant-based recipes, grocery lists, customer support, and even grocery delivery in most metropolitan cities in the U.S., all for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. Again, that's meals.richroll.com, or click on Meal Planner on the upper right-hand corner on any page on my website. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, for production, for help on the show notes, for the interstitial music.

Sean Patterson for graphics and Anna Lemma for theme music and David Zamet for videoing this podcast and for his portraits, which are amazing. See you guys back here in a few days. Until then, make it great. Be well, be kind, be grateful, be of service days. Until then, make it great. Be well. Be kind. Be grateful. Be of service.

Peace, plants, and namaste. Thank you.