The Rich Roll Podcast - Rainn Wilson & Reza Aslan On Living In The Questions

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Today we’re going take some of life’s biggest questions, toss them into a Vitamix, press hyperblend, and whip up a Metaphysical Milkshake. My sous chefs for this cosmic concoction are Rainn Wilson & Reza Aslan. Do I really need to introduce these two? Star of screens big and small, Rainn is best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on The Office. An OG in the online high-vibe content space, Rainn is also the founder of SoulPancake, a digital platform for people from all walks of life to discuss and question what it means to be human—a place to wrestle with the spiritual, philosophical, and creative journey that is life. Reza is a scholar of religions, a professor of creative writing, a television host, an Emmy-nominated producer, and the author of many bestselling books on religion, faith & spirituality. These two have teamed up on a fantastic new podcast worthy of your attention called (you guessed it) Metaphysical Milkshake. In a mild departure from my typical interview format, the idea for this episode was to tackle some of those big life questions, themes that recur on both of our shows, and have some fun doing it. So I wrote down various queries on a stack of index cards, wadded them up, tossed them in a bowl, and let Rainn and Reza take turns fishing them out for today’s round-table. Among the threads pulled today are: What does it mean to be human? How do you be a good person? Why are humans prone to spirituality? How do you reconcile science & rationality with faith & spirituality? Are we addicted to everything? What is the role of consciousness? To read more click here. You can also watch listen to our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Prepare to have your noodle bent—and have some laughs along the way. Good times! Peace + Plants, Rich

There are these huge questions about life that have been relegated to kind of philosophical academics that you take in undergrad philosophy 101 and that people oftentimes steer away from. So we just felt like there's all these spiritual tools and spiritual perspectives about looking at all of these questions. Not that every episode that we do is spiritual. Some episodes we're just talking about politics and sociology or just feelings. But underneath there's underpinnings of a spiritual connection which has to do with reason and purpose. Why are we here? And how does that guide our approach to asking these deep probing questions? If you are listening to this and saying, okay, fine, everybody has a purpose.

Well, then, you know, am I doing my purpose? How do I know what my purpose is? If you don't know, then you're not doing it. My wife and I have a couple of sort of life mottos, family mottos that we, you know, focus on a lot. And one of them is have a mission, not a job. And I say this to my students all the time, because I think so many of us pursue jobs. I want to be an actor. That's what my passion is. I want to be a writer. That's where my passion is. That's great. But what's your mission? And I think too, for mission, it doesn't have to be grand.

You know, like we don't all have to change the world. Your mission can be, I want to build beautiful things out of wood and I want to have a nice family. The Rich Roll Podcast. Today, we're going to take some of life's biggest questions. We're gonna toss them in a Vitamix. We're gonna press hyper blend, create a metaphysical milkshake. We're gonna drink it down

and we're gonna nourish the soul. My brothers for this mystical journey are none other than Rainn Wilson and Reza Aslan. I doubt either of these guys really need to be formally introduced, but if for some reason you're unfamiliar, Rainn, come on, you know this guy, star of screens big and small, best known for his portrayal of Dwight Schrute on The Office. the office. He's an absolute G in the online high vibe content space as the founder of Soul Pancake, which was, is, I should say, a digital platform for people from all walks of life to discuss and question what it means to be human, a place to wrestle with the spiritual, philosophical, and creative journey that is life, which pretty much sums up the conversation we're gonna have today.

Reza is a scholar of religions, a professor of creative writing, a television host, an Emmy-nominated producer, and the author of many best-selling books on religion, faith, and spirituality. These two have teamed up on a really great new podcast called, you guessed it, Metaphysical Milkshake, which you should all check out. I've wanted to meet both of these guys for quite some time. Meeting them

together was super fun, as is the conversation to come. But before we dive in, a word from our great sponsors who make this show possible. 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. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey.

When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. 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, an 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. 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. 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. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. So the idea here was to tackle some of those big life questions, themes that recur on both of our shows and have a little bit of fun doing it.

Among the frivolous threads today pulled are, what does it mean to be human? How to be a good person? Why are humans prone to spirituality? How do we reconcile science and rationality with faith and spirituality? Are we addicted to everything? What is the role consciousness plays

in solving our biggest problems and sundry other related topics? Life is short, so let us waste no more moments. Prepare to have your noodle bent and enjoy my Vulcan Mind Meld with Reza Aslan and Rainn Wilson. Super nice to meet you guys. I've been wanting to meet both of you for a long time, and it means a lot that you would come out here and do this in person with me. I love the new podcast, it's super cool. We're gonna get into all of it. We're gonna talk about the questions that really matter. But first, before we do that, I have to say,

Rain, I loved you on the Cho Show. I'm obsessed with the Cho Show. Okay. And all things David Cho. I loved how you unboxed the painting the other day. And there's something about that guy who is so magnetizing, like his earnestness and his like childlike nature. How'd you guys become friends?

Oh, Cho and I became friends through mutual friends and met and then this guy I was hosting this kind of retreat, this like men's weekend retreat in Hawaii. And then we hung out for a whole weekend in Hawaii and went snorkeling and exploring and sharing. And he kind of, Cho shares everything about his life. It's all on the sleeve with that guy.

Which is so like refreshing. Yeah. Well, he used to not be, he used to be the opposite of that. So he used to be jaded and cynical and withholding and too cool for school. And the crazy guy who spent months in a Japanese prison. And now he's on this journey of kind of self-discovery and it's really raw. And I really appreciate what he does. And yeah, he's become a good friend

and plus admire his incredible art. I mean, his artistry is astonishing. Yeah, I know. I hope they get a second season of that. Yeah, yeah. Similarly, I watched the Bourdain doc recently, Roadrunner. Have you seen it yet? Not yet, no.

And David plays a big part in that, especially near the end. But in thinking about that documentary and I suspect like the influence that Anthony had, like on your own life and how you conceptualize believer and, you know, how you kind of pursued those stories through that show. I think there seems to be a lot of similarities there. Yeah. And unfortunately I never got a chance to meet Tony, but you know, I mean, his specter is at every part of CNN, at least it used to be. And you know, this was a time in which I think CNN

was trying to get into the entertainment business and they're not as much anymore, I think. It's funny, because like, I think about, you know, what they were doing during that decade. Insofar as, you know, marketing and the entertainment industry goes, they had this very smart plan, which was these Bourdain-like hosts, you know, that would get somebody with strong opinions and strong views, and then they would let them pursue their expertise, their passions. Exactly. But then there was this tension because they were a news outfit and a aggressively, you know, center news outfit. outfit. So there was this constant conflict between let's get people with big opinions and big personalities and let's empower them to go out there and show our viewers the world,

but also they can't say anything newsworthy or political or controversial or anything. I mean, Bourdain had a lot to say, but he was smart enough to say it about British politics. He bit his tongue on American politics. The things this guy would say, you know, about like British politicians would have definitely have gotten him fired. But I think everybody else very clearly got the message.

And now they're just not doing it anymore. Times are different. Yeah, now they're just like, forget about that whole- They have Stanley Tucci going around Italy, sampling pasta. That's what I mean. So it's much more milk toast. It's all milk toast now.

It's like the only, I think the only person who has survived is Kamau Bell. And I think partly he learned very quickly that he should probably just keep his political opinions to himself. I mean, he'll make certain comments here and there, but nothing controversial. No, that kind of programming isn't gonna exist

at a place like CNN anymore. I mean, but there are a multitude of places where you can do that kind of thing, like Netflix or maybe Vice or something like that. Used to be, yeah. I think that's, it's kind of, that whole genre has pretty much gone by the wayside nowadays.

It's hard to find shows like that, like the Bourdain kind of go around the world show. Again, Tucci, you know, it's like an Italian American eating pasta in Italy. There's nothing controversial or on edge about it at all. Bourdain would like go to Palestine. He would go to Iran. Yeah, and Haiti, and he would talk about income inequality.

Exactly, ain't nobody doing that. Yeah, he was in Beirut when all kinds of craziness broke out there. It's just funny, because like it's so, they could have done, they could have just put a wall, like the way Fox News pretends to do, right?

They put a wall between everything after 8 p.m. and everything before 8 p.m. or 7 p.m. or whatever. Here, this is opinion. And everything before 7 p.m. and everything before 8 p.m. or 7 p.m. or whatever. Here, this is opinion. And everything before 7 p.m. is news. Anything that happens after 8 p.m. is entertainment. It's not even opinion, right? It's just entertainment.

And I think that's what CNN tried to do, but they just, they didn't go all in. I'm actually trying to get a show off the ground. We're actually in negotiations right now. I can't really name with who, but me going around the world, it's called the geography of bliss. And it's about what makes people happy around the world.

I love that. So why are people year after year happier in Finland than they are in Romania? Sure. And it's not just income necessarily. What is it culturally or what habits or practices make people culturally have a greater sense of wellbeing?

So I'm sure you're familiar with Dan Buettner then, the blue zones guy. Oh yeah, the blue zones, sure. Yeah, you should have him on your show because he's all about that and like wrote a whole book about that. He has the blue zones of longevity, like where people live the longest, but he's also about that and like wrote a whole book about that. He has the blue zones of longevity, like where people live the longest,

but he's also done a similar study to identify the pockets around the world where people are the happiest. And what makes them happy and it's counterintuitive. It's not the things that we've been taught that is shoved down our throats through marketing and media. Because I was reading this article

about speaking of Finland. And there's a Finnish word that I don't remember, but it basically is a word that is kind of like, essentially translates to keep your expectations relatively low and in check. So why are they happier? Because they're not expecting to live a wildly outrageously happy life.

Whereas we Americans kind of feel like life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And it's kind of like, I've got stuff. I've got cotton candy. I've got video games. I've got 147 apps on my phone. Like, why am I not happy? Like, I want to be fucking happy.

Why am I not happy? And there's this kind of like crazed outrage for happiness. Whereas this, I'm not sure that the Finnish way is the right way, by the way, it's just, but it was an interesting article that had that kind of like this cultural tempered response to life that, so then you're kind of like, when you are happy, you're pleasantly surprised.

Like, wow, I ate some boiled fish and I was a little bit happy. Yay me. As opposed to the expectation that I was a little bit happy. Yay me. As opposed to the expectation that we're meant to be happy all the time. Yeah. Well, I would say even further- And then suffer disappointment. Like baked into the concept of the American dream, right?

Is this idea that you can be more, you can do more. Your children will be better off than you are. Anyone here can rise to the heights of wealth and power with just hard work. None of that is true. None of that is true anywhere in the world, right? You could work as hard as you want to. You could do everything right. And it's just not guaranteed that there will be sort of a steady progress upward on the ladder,

but imagine living and being born in a country in which that's the ethos that you should, there's more, there's something else. That there's something wrong if you haven't achieved it. So if you are not better off than your parents or not better off than your grandparents and not happy or making more money, owning more property, it's your fault. Something has gone off the rails with a light

dusting of entitlement on top of it. But the only reason that this did work in the United States is because we stole a shit ton of land from the natives and we had slave labor to build our infrastructure. So yeah, from the late 1800s to the, let's say 1970s or 1980s, there was unchecked growth because we weren't Finland. We weren't an enclosed land area just trying to subsist in that land. We were just growing and moving and having railroads and having more timber and gold and natural resources. So we were able to kind of sustain this growth through that time period. But now, of course, here we are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And then for the last generation or two, things have been getting worse on kind of every level.

Yeah. And philosophically speaking, a lot of the problems that we have as a country, certainly when it comes to the sort of giant chasm in social incomes, you know, and, you know, the kind of huge gap between the poor and the wealthy, the way that we treat wealthy people, the way that we think about religion and spirituality in the United States, it's all a byproduct of this American dream ethos, right? We look at rich people and assume that they are rich because they deserved to be rich, right? We had this conversation a lot when Trump was running for office, right? It's like, I'm rich, so therefore, I know what I am doing. We actually did a podcast episode on this, this idea that wealth doesn't just equal success. It equals morality.

Like we look at rich people as being more moral. Look at the prosperity gospel, a thing that could really only exist in the United States, right? The whole concept of which is wealth is indicative of your salvation. If you are rich, it's because God has rewarded you. It's a symbol of the fact that you are saved. And so, you should pursue wealth the way that you would pursue, you know, spiritual edification. I mean, name another country in which that is a prevailing view of tens of millions of the citizenship. It's just crazy. Yeah.

I think on top of that also, just the mere statement, the pursuit of happiness is wrongheaded in the sense that happiness is a byproduct of other pursuits, such as trying to find purpose in your life. Like you mentioned the Finnish word in Okinawa, they have a word, ikigai, which is essentially means to live a life that is purposeful to wake up in the morning and feel a sense of purpose and obligation and happiness being a by-product of orienting your life around that type of ethos, rather than the pursuit of accumulation that has led to, you know, and this is what I wanna get into,

like this crisis of consciousness that we find ourselves in. Certainly, you know, religion is a predominant aspect of living in America, but on a spiritual level, I feel like we're bereft of the meaning that is behind the pursuit of a spiritual life. And that's led to so much of our fractured society and our inability to communicate with each other and the way in which we prioritize our lives.

We're all about that. Yeah, I know. I know, this is like your jam. This is our jam. This is why, a big reason why I wanted to have you guys here, like I'm looking at, you know, the people that you've selected to have on your show. There's an overlap with some of my guests

and then you have some upcoming guests or people that I've had on my show. And you know, the big questions of life. We basically looked through your guest lists. We're gonna get that Rabbi Mordecai. Not that either of you would ever have a problem getting, you know, finding any of these people, but whoever you want, yeah, you gotta have Rabbi Mordecai. He's either of you would ever have a problem getting, you know, finding any of these people, but whoever you want, yeah, you gotta have Rabbi Mordecai.

He's amazing. He's the best. Wow. But I'm interested in how all of this came about. I mean, essentially a Baha'i actor and a Sufi Muslim, you know, walk into a bar or a soundstage and say, hey, you've dominated screens big and small, So have I, like, what are we going to do next? Well, I guess we'll do a podcast. So, right. I actually think it was on the stage, not a bar. It was a stage. We met on a stage at USC and we were doing, I was emceeing an event

about the treatment of members of the Baha'i faith in its home country of Iran and how they're being terribly persecuted there by the kind of Muslim theocracy. That's an understatement. And Reza was a speaker and featured speaker there. And that was the first time we met. And then we met at a fellow Baha'i's house who was a producer and funder of media. And Reza had just started his kind of production company working in media and Aslan media. No, what's it? No, it was BoomGen. BoomGen Studios. And then he wrote his book about Jesus. He wrote this little book about Jesus, became a number one bestseller for like eight months in a row

and kind of redefined how so many people kind of look at the Bible. And we did an event where I, you know, got to do a Q and A with him about his book. I was a huge fan. Thank you for that, by the way. Of Zealot. We were in that little church.

Yeah. And- Eight years ago. And yeah, and then, you know, bumped into each other through, and then we're having breakfast one day and I was talking about my spiritual journey in life and what I'm dealing with.

And Reza's talking about his spiritual journey in life and what he's dealing with and his challenges. And, you know, I found our conversations just kind of bouncing around kind of like the way they are this morning. And we're like, this should be a podcast. We really should have a microphone between us and be having this conversation, you know, with, with a listening audience. And at the time, um, this company that I had founded

soul pancake, uh, a digital media company that probes life's biggest questions and is all about uplifting, you know, challenging content. They produced it and we did season one on luminary. Now that season two, season two out in the general podcast O sphere, and that's kind of how it started, but it was essentially a shared love of exactly what you were talking about that. There are these huge questions about life that have been relegated to kind of philosophical academics that you take in undergrad philosophy 101 and that people kind of oftentimes steer away from. I have some stuff to say about that later on,

specifically with the recent death of a friend of mine. So we just felt like there's all these spiritual tools and spiritual perspectives about looking at all of these questions. Not that every episode that we do is spiritual. Some episodes we're just talking about politics and sociology or just feelings, but underneath there's underpinnings

of a spiritual connection, which has to do with reason and purpose. Why are we here? And how does that guide our approach to asking these deep probing questions? And it's not about the answers so much as it is the practice of wrestling with the questions and the practical tools

that we can extract from them because philosophy and spirituality should be a roadmap for how we live. It shouldn't just live in the halls of academia or in conversations behind closed doors. Like there's great practical wisdom packed into all of this, of course.

And I think, you know, we're in a culture that's in desperate need of that kind of mainline injection into how we think and- Absolutely how we think and prioritize our lives. Yeah, Sufism has this concept that it's all about the path and not the destination. I mean, the important thing is to be moving forward stage after stage, evolving at every step, getting closer and closer,

but recognizing that you'll probably never get to the destination and that's okay. And it's the same kind of philosophy that we bring to a lot of these existential questions, which is, you said it right. The question sometimes is more important than the answer. Now, occasionally we'll come up with some pretty good answers, right?

Yeah, we've hit a few jackpots. And surprising too, you know, and also answers- In fact, let me just jump in there. Go ahead, yeah. And Reza, this podcast that was two ago, Mike Schur. I was just gonna say that, go ahead. I'm gonna tee you up because you had,

it was really fun having a conversation with Mike Schur, who was a writer, director on The Office. He's the creator of Parks and Rec and also The Good Place. And we were talking about the show, The Good Place and about being good. And that was our life's big question in the episode. Like, how do we be good? How do we know what that means to be good? And over the course of this conversation, like I saw this like giant, like it was a cartoon, a giant light bulb over Reza's head as he kind of like some things clicked in. You wanna, do you wanna?

Well, so a lot of the questions that- Sorry, have we hijacked your podcast? This is great. I can relax. Can we ask you questions? No, go for it. Have a vegan donut or something, whatever you eat. A lot of the episodes that we do

are based on just questions that Raina and I have, you know? And one of at least my biggest questions has been for a very, very long time, how can you be good? Like, how can you just be a good person? Divorce from, you know, religious obligations and dogma and all of that stuff. And, you know, I went into this conversation as I often do, assuming there's no real answer to this, but let's have fun with the question. And Mike, I think summed it up so well.

He said, the way that you can be good is to try. And it was those simple little things that sometimes happen in the podcast, right? The same thing happened when we talked to the great Krista Tippett about wisdom, like what is wisdom? Well, all right, I've got a couple of answers to that, but none of them are that. How can you be wise? I don't know. I've got, I can wax philosophical about that. But again, she kind of encapsulated it so perfectly. She said, wisdom is found in the impact that you leave on the people around you.

And I thought, well, that's an answer. I mean, that's- Yeah, I've never heard it. That's not just an idea. That's just an answer. And I mean, sometimes there are answers and sometimes those answers hit me like a ton of bricks. Those two have stayed with me for a very, very long time.

That's cool. But we always go into these episodes recognizing that, you know, at the end of this 45, 50 minute conversation, maybe all that we've done is really ask the question in a proper way and gave it the weight that it deserves. And the weight that so often we don't give anymore. Rain said it perfectly. Like, these are the kinds of questions that you used to ask in college. All right.

It's been a long time since I've been in college. It's been a very long time since I think anyone at this table has been in college. And now we have kids and we have jobs and we have mortgages and we have bills to pay. And I don't ask those questions anymore. They still rattle around in the back of my brain, but they're rarely actually things I get to think about. And that's what we get to do with metaphysical milkshake is think about them and hell we get paid to do it. Yeah. A little bit. I mean, a little bit, but but still it's not very much no not compared to an episode of network tv no in its nice i think you need to recalibrate your barometer a little bit right well he's an

academic and yes i don't know he's a professor at the uc system so i know you know um are you still teaching now you teach creative writing yeah i do i do i am uh i'm a professor at the UC system. So I know. Are you still teaching now? You teach creative writing now. I do, I do. I'm a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. I've been there since I guess 2007. Right. Well, I thought what would be fun since this is all about questions big and small

is to do something a little bit different. This is an idea that I got from Rob Bell. You guys know Rob Bell, right? Sure, we love Rob Bell. You guys know Rob Bell, right? Rob Bell, I'm certain is going on your show. He's been on it. He's been on it. I was gonna say the only two-parter ever.

Good, of course. You can't get him to be quiet. No, no, no, yeah. You don't want him to be quiet. You don't want him to be quiet, yeah. But I went to, he did a live podcast at Largo with Liz Gilbert and they did kind of a choose your adventure thing

with what we have here in front of us, which is essentially a fishbowl with a bunch of wadded up pieces of paper. On each piece of paper here, I put one of these big questions. So I thought we could just pick one out. This could go terribly wrong, by the way. This could be awful.

Let's do it. Let's pretend room conversation. Let's pretend we're freshmen. Should I start us? Should I launch us? First time away from our parents. And if we've already talked about it or it's bad, we could just go back to the well.

What do you got there? There's some stupid ones in there too. Does everybody have a purpose? That's a good one. I think that's a great one. Yeah. Let's do that one. Let's do that one.

I believe that everyone a great one. Yeah. Let's do that one. Let's do that one. I believe that everyone has a purpose. I believe this with all of my heart and in a very strong way, because as a member of the Baha'i faith, but not just a Baha'i faith, I think anyone who has, I mean, I think that's an answer that applies to both theists and atheists, but as a member of the Baha'i faith, I believe that we are on an eternal spiritual journey, that this, you know, our, whatever our soul or eternal part of ourselves is encased in this flesh tuxedo for 80 or 90 years, we slough it off and we continue our journey beyond time and space. So while we're here, everyone has a purpose.

Now, it may not be like everyone on planet Earth has a purpose like Oprah has a purpose. I mean, it's about- We can't all be Oprah. We can't have 7 billion Oprahs on the planet. But I do think that this is one of the really exciting tasks is there's a riddle wrapped inside this question, which is our purpose is to find our purpose. And as soon as we found our purpose, we have to be not sure that that's our purpose and we haveel over, hopefully we're all continuously at the very beginning footsteps of this eternal journey toward finding what that purpose is. And it may shift and change. And so whether you call that, you know, God or the great spirit, or just the power of the universe or the

winds of the cosmos or the mystic connection or whatever you wanna call God, which has become a four letter word and is a tough concept to dig into. But the winds, the Holy Spirit, the winds of the cosmic power of the creative force that surrounds us, that's within us, without us, beyond us, beyond the limitations of time and space. This has a, these winds have a very special,

we have a very special relationship with them, I believe. And it's for, it's like when you go sailing, I don't know anything about sailing. I've been sailing like twice, but the whole idea that you tack your sails to try and get the most out of the wind, depending on, you have a vague, I wanna go toward that Island,

but you may not go directly to the Island. You may, the winds may take you off to the left a little bit and then back, or you may have to zigzag the wind stall for a little bit. You turn on your motor, then the winds are pushing you right there, but you, you are trying to align yourself with those, with those winds. And it's, it's really, it's exciting. I think it's a really exciting part of being alive. Maybe the most exciting part of being alive. And this is where I think that young people, especially, I don't know about older people. I mean, older people, we get set in our ways.

And like Reza said, we've got kids and jobs and mortgages and kind of, you know, we have a little bit of stuff figured out, but especially for this mental health crisis that is afflicting kids under 20 or 30. It's astonishingly insidious and toxic and fatal. And, but this connection to this question is a big part of helping to use a spiritual tool

to solve that issue, to solve that problem. Beautifully put. Hard agree. Thanks, can we just end the to solve that problem. Beautifully put. Hard agree. Thanks. Can we just end the podcast? Hard agree. The only thing that I'll just say to people who are listening to this, because I mean, I could have listened to that all day. It's 100% true. I agree with it 100%. And I have like philosophical and theological reasons why I agree with it and experiential reasons why I agree with it. But what I'll just say is that if you're listening to this

and saying, okay, fine, everybody has a purpose. Well then, you know, how do I, am I doing my purpose? How do I know what my purpose is? If you don't know, then you're not doing it. For those people, like, I feel like I am achieving my purpose. I would say probably you too, Rich. Yeah, Rain. I mean, you're doing what your purpose is. I wrestle with it, truth be told, but yes, by and large, I do.

Well, I mean- It's a constant, for me, a constant, a series of the, going back to the sailboat metaphor. That's what I was just gonna say. Yeah, that metaphor is so perfect It gives me a constant, a series of the, going back to the sailboat metaphor. That's what I was just gonna say. Adjusting those sails. Yeah, that metaphor is so perfect because everyone who has had this experience

will tell you that when the wind is right and your sail is exactly where it's supposed to be and you're moving smoothly, and I mean this metaphorically, not actually on the water, but I mean in life, you know it, you know it. And you always know when you're fighting the wind. So pay attention to that feeling. Pay attention to that. If you're sitting there thinking to yourself, well, then how do I know what my purpose is? Are you fighting the wind? Is that what it feels like? Then you're not

pursuing your purpose. And here's another thing I'll say. You ready for this? I'm ready. Okay. The bar is high now. Okay. Fasten your podcast seatbelts, Rich. If people are listening to this and saying,

well, I just don't know, or I can't find mine. And I've tried to be a massage therapist. And then I had a job as this. And I tried to start up a business here. And I went back to school for this. And it's not working out, and blah, blah, blah. Well, I will say, and this is going to sound crazy, it's going to sound crazy, pray. Pray. That doesn't mean you have to go into a Catholic church and cross yourself and look at an icon to pray. It doesn't mean that there's an old white man with a beard on a cloud,

granting wishes like Santa Claus from up above, but we live in a society in LA at least. And I find this really interesting that everyone in LA, not everyone, a lot of people in LA meditate, but don't pray. Cause I have such a hard time with a higher power. And everyone in mid America prays and doesn't meditate. So they don't kind of deeply contemplate

or they're not open to a kind of the receiving the wisdom from the universe, from the act of prayer. But people in LA are just receiving and never asking because another reason why, because it takes humility to pray. And people in LA on the coast don't have a lot of humility. It's in short supply when you pray. And again, I'm just talking about opening your heart to the spirit of the cosmic creative force of the universe. I'm not talking about like crossing

yourself. Oh God, please give me a pony. You know, it's, it's just saying universe, where would you have me go? All loving providence that surrounds me, what would you have me do and how would you have me do it? I'm open to signs. Just be like, I'm open. You can just wake up and you just say, I'm open. And that's a prayer. Yeah, there's an expansiveness

to like broadening your perception and your willingness to just be in that receiving mode and in the asking mode. But I think we all to some extent have this yearning inside of us for some, they're very conscious of it, for others, perhaps it's a little bit more muted, but this sense of there is something for me out there. And I do think there's beauty in pursuing that.

But I think you're right, Reza, like most people don't know what their purpose is. Perhaps they don't spend enough time or very much time at all thinking about it, but I do believe that it is out there for everybody. And I think that part of the beauty of life is the pursuit of finding that. And I would tweak a little bit, Rain, what you said,

this idea that once you find it, then you continue to find it, like you iterate on it, or you remain open to it changing or morphing in certain ways. But I think an important piece also to that is then sharing what you learned in service to other people, like the service piece of it, I think really strengthens that sense of purpose.

And the search for it is, you know, yes, prayer, meditation, and all of that, but ultimately it is an inside job. Like you have to become integrated with who you are. You have to get to know yourself, like know thyself, because otherwise you're not gonna hear that vibration and your boat is gonna be, you know, tacking against the wind.

And it's only when you know yourself well enough that you can determine, okay, I have to course correct. And here's how I get more in alignment with like my energy and paying attention to the way the universe responds to that. So you can make those fine tune adjustments that lead you in that direction that you seek. I mean, I'll use myself as an example,

classic LA narcissist. A praying narcissist. He prays to himself. Yes. He should have mentioned that part. To my bobble head. For most of my life, my purpose was to be an actor. That's all I wanted to do.

I just wanted to learn how to act. I wanted to be a better and better actor. I wanted to learn skills of acting. Then I wanted to learn how to act in front of a camera and I wanted to do comedy and drama and play different kinds of roles and play serial killers and weirdos and slapstick and you name it.

And my whole life from when I was a teenager and I first started acting at like 16, all the way up into my, well into my forties and late forties, I lived, slept and breathed acting. And I saw myself as actor, as storyteller. I didn't just say like, oh, I just want a job so I can buy a house. Although that was nice. But as an actor in the greatest sense, you're part of telling a story and entertaining, and there is a service component to it. And then it's been very interesting for me because over the last six, eight years or so,

it's like it's held much less kind of a draw. I still like doing it sometimes, but I don't, my life isn't based around that next acting job. So it has been like, is this a change in purpose, a shift in purpose in my life? So starting Soul Pancake, writing more stuff, writing books, working with Reza like on this pod and doing more service work, nonprofit work

that I do with my wife in Haiti, et cetera, like finding more meaning from that stuff and because purposes can change. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, you're a G in the whole digital content space. I mean, SoulPancake was 2009. When did you start that? Yeah, I mean, pretty early incake was 2009. When did you start that? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, pretty early in the whole like high vibe,

sharing cool content. Like- We were the first. We literally were the first. Making it cool for young people, creating digestible content. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it was an amazing adventure to start that with some friends and to just be ideating on like, speaking of that service component, like what can we do for young people on the internet that's cool and fun? And that can be a business,

that can be a sustainable business model as well. Wasn't a metaphysical milkshake like in the back of a van or something? Or was that a different name then? Or you were kind of doing this. He used to drive around in a van and ask people to get in and talk about existential issues. Steve-O's doing that now.

Yeah, it was Metaphysical Mugshake was the original name of SoulPancake, the very first name, but we quickly scrapped that because it was so weird. And it became, yeah, it was a talk show in the back of my van, but it was about life's big questions, but I would interview actors and celebrities

and stuff like that. So we just kind of held onto the name. I love the name and moved it into the podcast space. Reza, you were about to say something. Just to put it, you know, close to the conversation about purpose. Yeah, I really liked what Rain was saying. My wife and I have a couple of sort of life

mottos, family mottos that we focus on a lot. And one of them is have a mission, not a job. And I say this to my students all the time, because I think so many of us pursue jobs. I want to be an actor. That's what my passion is. I want to be a writer. That's where my passion is. That's great. But what's your mission? You know, your mission is bigger than the things, you know, writing or service or whatever the thing is. So, you know, if you're sitting there and you're thinking to yourself, what do I want to do with my life? Tweak that question just a little bit. What is your mission in life? Pursue that mission. And I promise you, people will pay you for it, you know? But it's the rare individual who has a grip on that, right? I feel like, especially with young people,

like you have to live some life. Like you have to travel, you have to collect experiences. You have to put yourself out there. How could you possibly, you know, it's not gonna, it's not a thunderbolt thing. I mean, there's always the kid who, you know, at age six knows what he or she wants to do, but that's really the outlier.

Well, this is what I always say to when I, cause I do some speaking at college campuses and stuff too. And I just tell people like, 20s are a waste of time. Like, don't even worry about it. Don't try and get it figured out. Like the point of your 20s is to try 12 different things and fail at nine of them so that you can come out.

But there's all this societal pressure of like, that's not urination, by the way, if you're hearing that in a microphone, that's Reza pouring a glass of water. There's no proof of that. But truthfully in society right now, you talk to so many college kids and they're so depressed at 2021

because they haven't gotten the perfect internship over the summer and they're not pre-enrolled in the perfect grad program. And they don't have their job aligned. Now I know it's hard to make a living out there. It's hard to have a career and make a living. It's much harder than in the 80s and 90s when we were getting our educations.

But nonetheless, if you view the 20s as a workshop stage, then it gives you some, you can relax a little bit. But you gotta do some counter-programming around that. You're asking young people to step off the hamster wheel. And that's pretty scary, especially for a kid who's kind of been on that track where it's like, get into the right college, get the right job.

And then, oh, if I opt out of that, then life's gonna pass me by. But obviously, it's quite the contrary. And I think too, for mission, and we've been on this topic me by, but obviously, you know, it's quite the contrary. And I think too, for mission, and we've been on this topic too long, but- Yeah, we're gonna have to pick another thing. I think, here you go, Reza. I just think in terms of mission too,

it doesn't have to be grand, you know, like we don't all have to change the world. Your mission can be, I wanna build beautiful things out of wood. Yeah, exactly. And I wanna have a nice family. That's exactly what I mean. That's what I mean. I don't mean like, yes,

maybe your mission is change the world. Great. Yeah. Okay. Well done, Greta. But like, yeah, my mission from a very early age was to change the way that people think through stories. I didn't say to myself, I'm gonna be a writer.

I'm gonna be a television producer. I'm gonna be like a podcast host. But all of those are just different ways of telling stories to change the way that people think. So those are the jobs that I do, but the mission is something else. That's great. All right, my turn, my turn, my turn. Here we go, here we go.

All right. What do we got here? Okay. Oh, hey, this is right up my alley. What do people misunderstand about spirituality? Ooh, that's a good one. This is it. We're not gonna get past this question.

We can spend the next four hours. This is it right here. All right. All right, Rainn and I have a lot to say about this. Let me start. First of all, that religion and faith are two different things, right? They're not the same thing.

I think in a lot of thinking, people just assume that they're the same. In fact, they'll say the way that they talk, right? They'll say things like, I believe in Christianity or I believe in the Bible, you know? And I'm like, you believe it exists? I don't understand what you mean by that because these are not ends in themselves.

They're paths to an end. Religion, spirituality, whatever that means, faith, whatever that means, it's individualistic, it's nebulous, it's ineffable, it's undefinable, it's mysterious. It's about, it's experiential more than anything else. It's about how you see yourself and your place in the universe. Religion is the language that you use to express that feeling, right? We have ways of talking about so many of our emotions. We have an entire language dedicated to expressing love. We have an entire language dedicated to expressing anger. What is the language to express this mysterious, ineffable part of human nature? Well, it's religion and that's all it is. And the problem that I think so many people get into is that they forget that their religion,

whatever their religion is, is a means to an end. They confuse it for the end in and of itself. And so I think that's the biggest, to me, that's the biggest problem. So, when people, you know, talk about spirituality, especially people who claim to not be spiritual, what they really mean is I'm not religious. That's what they really mean. When you start to poke at them and ask and probe and try to figure out what do they mean when they say, I don't believe in God or I don't accept religion? What are they actually talking about? You start to recognize that, yeah, they're not talking about spirituality. They're not talking about faith. They're talking

about rules and rituals and belief systems and dogmas and do's and don'ts and institutions and authority structures. What does any of that have to do with faith and with spirituality? So that's, I would say the first thing. The first thing is recognizing the difference between those two things. Well said, and I agree a hundred percent.

And so many people can't differentiate the two. I remember I was doing this movie with this director and he's like, oh, so you're all into spirituality and God and stuff. And we were kind of touring this old church at the time. I was like, yeah, I believe in God. And I love reading about it and studying about it and talking about it and stuff. He's like, oh, I don't believe in God. And I was like, oh, really? You don't? He's like, oh no, my parents dragged me to church every day, not even once a week. I had to go every day and sit for mass and I had to do this. And they made me a choir boy. I'm like, oh, I don't believe in God. So it had been completely fused with his traumatic childhood experience. The fact that, you know, is there a creative force in the universe

that transcends the material has been kind of locked in, you know, zipped in with that childhood experience. But I think that two things come to mind for me. What do people misunderstand about spirituality? One is that, you know, in the Hindu concept of Maya or illusion, it's that not only is it that the material world is an illusory world, it's not even that so much. People kind of misunderstand that from my limited understanding and reading about it. But this concept of Maya is that we are fooled into thinking that there is duality. So it's not that we're fooled by the material world, we're fooled into thinking that there is duality.

So I would say that this constant battle of like religion versus science or spirituality versus science, that they're the same thing. There is one reality, there's two ways of kind of measuring, quantifying, looking at, interacting with this reality. Science is the, you know,

an incredible way of repeating experiments and understanding the material world. And spirituality is, again, it's the science of understanding the other aspects of being alive about love and service and kindness and our journeys and mission and that they both are harmonious. There is not a false duality.

There's not a Maya. There's not an illusion of this versus that. We're very mind, body, spirit. Yeah. I'm just gonna say that the way that I refer to it, there are two modes of knowing. There are two modes of knowing. That's what they are.

Yeah. Yeah. That's perfectly said. I think the other thing that people misunderstand about spirituality is I really like nuts and bolts practical spirituality. I don't think that spirituality has to be really airy-fairy. It doesn't have to be really this kind of nebulous feeling of connectivity, although that's nice, there's nothing wrong with that. There are spiritual tools that can make our lives better, that can actually make us happier and more fulfilled. So there are, and those are found in all the faith traditions.

They're found in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism. And that's a cornerstone of Baha'i, this idea that there's a universality in all these strains of faith. Yeah, so Baha'is believe that all of the world's religions come from the same source. And this God has chosen to educate humanity by sending down these divine teachers throughout time.

We know many of them, Zoroaster, Abraham, to go way back, Krishna, but the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and now Baha'u'llah is the most recent of these divine teachers. And they all, it's like they're teachers in a school. Like the school has a purpose, which is to educate its students, but you have to go through kindergarten

and then first grade and third grade. The teachers all know the same amount. They're all just as professional or just as wise. They have the same amount of knowing, but they're just slowly unfolding this kind of spiritual maturation of the human species so that these spiritual tools can be found throughout history. And they are there to make our lives better both personally and also societally. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to just add one more thing to this and excuse me, I'm just going to get a little academic here because I think it's important. What we call religion, we could probably trace, you know, maybe six, seven, eight, 9,000 years.

What we refer to as institutionalized religion. What I mean by that is it's a cohesive system of beliefs and practices. It's a top-down system. It's institutionalized. There's a priesthood or whatever the case may be. Books with like rules. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, even before there was any writing.

So, writing was invented maybe 3000 BC. And what we call religion, we can go maybe to like 10,000, 12,000 BC. So, that's the oldest temple that we have is around that period between 12 and 10,000 BC, the oldest temple that we have found. What we call spirituality, and I think Rain hit it on the head when he said

what we mean by spirituality, which is recognition and communion with the thing that is beyond the material realm. So this sort of, this urge for transcendence, that which is beyond. We have hard archaeological evidence for the belief in Neanderthals. Not even the human species. Not even in Homo sapiens, exactly. Like we can trace that belief to 100,000 years before there was such a thing as Homo sapiens. And then I would say even further,

there's some material evidence that's a little bit more debatable that goes back all the way to Cro-Magnon. Over the last 30, 40 years or so, there's been this kind of new science in the study of religion. And it's called the cognitive theory of religion. A lot of these great cognitive theorists is people who study

the way that the brain works have started to ask themselves, why is spirituality or the religious impulse, as I like to call it, why is that a universal phenomenon? Why is it something that exists in every culture, in every people, in every part of the world for all of time? Why is it something that predates our species? Why? Because if it predates our species, if it's universal, there must be some evolutionary reason for it, right? There's got to be some kind of adaptive advantage to it.

Long story short, there is no adaptive advantage to it. We've asked every question that we could possibly ask. Well, maybe it's about morality. No, that's not it. Maybe it's about answering questions. That's not it. Maybe it's about social cohesion. Nope, that's not it.

We've answered all of those questions. That's not it. Maybe it's about social cohesion. Nope, that's not it. We've answered all of those questions. And the fact of the matter is that we don't know. We have no idea why what we call spirituality is a universal phenomenon, part of our evolution as a species. What is the purpose of it? We don't know. The best answer that the cognitive scientists that I sort of look to, the best answer that they've given is that it's an accident. It's just like a by-product of some other adaptive advantage that was necessary very early in our evolution, something that helped us survive. And as a accidental echo of that thing came the universal conception of spirituality. That's a good answer.

It's super interesting. I would suspect that part of, would it not be considered an evolutionary advantage to like part of this being this quest to understand things that we don't understand, right? So we look up to the stars, we don't have the scientific tools or the acumen to really understand what that is.

We create myths, we create stories around that, that help us feel better about who we are or feel like our lives have some level of meaning. And in modern times, God know, God is dead. Spirituality, religion has been supplanted by science. Science has become our God. Science is what we look to for all of these answers. And there's a hubris within the human being

that science will ultimately, if we keep doubling down on it, provide everything that we need, which now, you know, makes spirituality and religion an antiquated idea altogether. Yeah. So that was actually, that was one of the first theories about why, why the universal phenomenon of the religious impulse. The problem with that theory is that there's literally no adaptive advantage whatsoever to having airy-fairy answers to the questions of the universe. Quite the contrary.

In fact, what those answers do, why does the sun shine? Because there's a sun god, etc. What those answers end up doing is forcing individuals to exert resources and energy that should be spent on survival. So it's actually the opposite of an adaptive advantage. Because if you're burying your Viking king and you put your swords and jewelry in the tomb because he's going to need them to go on his quest into Valhalla, then you've done a great disservice to your community. That is a disadvantage to your community. Absolutely. I mean, we don't need to get too deeply involved in this, but I mean, I'm sure a lot of people out there are like, well,

what about this? And what about that? What about social cohesion? Doesn't religious belief or spirituality help a community become tighter? And so if a community is tighter, they have a better chance of survival. True. Except that that's not how Neanderthals or Homo sapiens created community. Community was kinship. It wasn't, you didn't create your community because you all believed the same thing. You created your community because you shared the same blood. Honestly, that didn't really happen until Christianity, right? Well, on your survivalended on it. But here's the bottom line of what I'm trying to say here is that we don't know.

Maybe we'll find out one day, but we don't know why the religious impulse, the desire for transcendence, the belief that there is something else beside the material realm. Why is that universal? Why is it part of our evolutionary process? We don't know, but embedded in the question to me is the answer. Embedded in the question is the fact that whatever spirituality is, okay, back to this, to the question, what do we misunderstand about spirituality? Whatever it is, it is the normal functioning of your brain. That's what it is.

Your brain is designed to think that there is a reality beyond the material realm. And we've been thinking this way for 100, 200,000 years. Yes. So you can deny that if you want to. You can say, no, there isn't anything beyond the material realm. Fine. But that's a conscious decision. Your brain is designed to think that there is, and maybe we should take that seriously for a minute. Yeah. We can, we can talk about why we don't know, but the fact that it does, the fact that your brain is meant to think this way should make us stop and think,

well, maybe there's something to it. Yeah. That's fantastic. I thought you said you were tired today. Yeah, I know. I said you were out of it. Then somebody brought up spirituality. And I was like, that's okay.

All right, okay, your turn. Before you do that though, I wanted to follow up on one point that you made, Rain, about dualistic thinking. Reza, you said, many people will say, I'm not spiritual because they're affiliating that with religion. I think in Los Angeles, it's the inverse.

Like people will say they're spiritual, but they're not religious. But on that idea of binary thinking, that science is at the exclusion of spirituality. I mean, for me, the more you delve into spirituality, the more amazing everything becomes. And the deeper you dive into science, the more mystical it becomes.

Like I don't see those as being mutually exclusive pursuits. Like you can be rational and science minded and insist on evidence for your beliefs and be profoundly, deeply spiritual. Randy and I, we actually just were talking about this on a recent episode. The foundation of, let me put it this way. The fundamental law of physics is the preservation of energy and matter.

The belief that everything that exists today has always existed and will always exist as long as the universe exists. Man, Sufis have been saying that for 1500 years. You're right. The more we know about the universe, the more science advances, the more spiritual it starts to sound. You're absolutely right. Yeah.

All right, let's see what we got here. Let's see what you got. I'm gonna pick the dud. See that self-defeating attitude right there? What's up with that? Oh, well, I didn't pick a dud, but I picked what we just talked about. What is faith and how does it differ from religion? And we kind of already traversed that a little bit.

So let's go on to something else. Can you be rational, science-minded and still spiritual? We covered that. Okay, good. We're pretty good at this. You know, we could just ask the questions and then splice in the that. Okay, good. We're pretty good at this. You know, we could just ask the questions and then splice in the answers. Let's see.

How do you be a good person? We touched on that a little bit too with Mike Schur, but we'd be happy to dig in if you want. Maybe elaborate a little bit on that and then we can move on quickly to another one. If there's more to say. What do you think, Rich? How do you be a good person? I don't, you know, I can't say I have the's more to say. What do you think, Rich? How do you be a good person?

I don't, you know, I can't say I have the ultimate answer to that. I think that there is wisdom in philosophical and spiritual strains of thought that have survived for thousands of years from which you can extract principles for how to orient your life. Fundamentally, I think that being a good person is intertwined with that search for purpose. And it always goes back to finding a way to devote that purpose in service to other people. I think fundamentally being good is really about service.

Yeah, yeah. I heard this phrase the other day about being otherish. Someone was talking about it. I forget who was saying that. Like we're selfish and human beings are naturally selfish for a number of reasons, I think, because children need to be selfish to survive. We needed as a species to be selfish to survive. I need it as a species to be selfish to survive.

I'm gonna feed myself this deer carcass and make sure that the people in my cave get the deer carcass. And then my children get the piece of the deer carcass. And there's a kind of a, I sounded like Dwight Schrute just then, but there's a selfishness in this. But then as we grow, mature and progress,

then we can be otherish instead of selfish. And how do we be a good person? We just, when I find myself being good and I haven't always been good and I struggle with being good. It's not like I'm arrived by any stretch of the imagination, ask my wife, but the idea of trying to be otherish instead of selfish

helps me in that path. I like that term otherish, I hadn't heard that before. I'm gonna steal that. Good, you're welcome to it. All right, pick a new one. I think you're up. It's up to me now? Here we go.

A lot of gabbing. What happens after we die? This is one of our chief topics on how to physical milkshake. I love this topic. With Rob Bell. In fact, that was the- Oh, is that where you explored with him?

Two-parter with Rob Bell. Yeah. Yeah, I was obsessed with this idea and we were asking Rob, like, cause he's a Christian who famously kind of disbelieved in hell for lack of a better way of, it's more complicated than that.

But that was, and so he got essentially excommunicated for those who don't, aren't familiar with his work, but he's still a Christian and very devout. So I was like, so you're going to meet Jesus. Like if you get hit by a bus, Rob Bell,

what happens between you getting hit by that bus and you meeting Jesus? Like, like talk me through it. It took two hours. Very specifically, step by step, you're hit by a bus, you'll meet Jesus. Like what? I think we, I think we, we covered maybe like a second of real time in two hours. We didn't even get anywhere close to Jesus. We didn't get to Jesus. We never got there. That asshole. But, um, so what happens after we die?

So I'm writing a book right now about spirituality, which is, this is quite an endeavor. Reza's done it before. It's really hard. And I'm taking these, some of the biggest topics in the universe. Like I have a chapter on death and I have a chapter on God and I have a chapter on religion. I have a chapter on God and I have a chapter on

religion. Just one chapter on God. It's killing me. I'm literally in that chapter right now. I've interviewed Reza about it. It's killing me, dude. It really is. But I'm coming up with some good stuff. But what happens after we die, I've talked about my belief as a Baha'i, in the Baha'i faith, we believe that there's an analogy that the body is not just the Baha'i faith, there's many spiritual traditions that the body is a cage and that our reality is the bird within the cage. And when the cage is broken, the bird goes free.

And that's not something to be mourned, the brokenness of the body or of the cage. It's to be celebrated the glorious journey of the bird flying free of the material and physical limitations. But I will say that I recently had a friend pass away and this has been a big year of death for me. My father passed away about a year ago. The co-founder of our nonprofit in Haiti died of cancer. And then one of my dear friends died of cancer. Sorry to hear that. Thanks, recently.

And, you know, it's such a tricky topic, but there are good ways to die and there's not so good ways to die. And in fact, one of our episodes, I'm sorry, I feel like I'm really plugging the hell out of this podcast. Well, we do ask a lot of these questions. So, you know. But we had a death-

You are here to do that anyway. A little bit. Just lean into it, brain. We had a death doula on the show and she was amazing. And that's like a birth doula. It's exactly what you think it is, yeah. And it's, she helps you transition towards death. And that can be everything from like,

where do you keep all your Facebook passwords? And, you know, and also, you know, how do you want your ceremony to be? How do you want to pass? What do you want your deathbed to look like? Yeah, that was the big question. What do you want your deathbed? So in having these discussions,

we talk a lot about death and, you know, this friend of mine who passed away, like he didn't want to look at death. And I think probably because he was mostly atheist of death, cause he was given stage four stomach cancer was like, I'm gonna fight cancer tooth and nail with every power in my being, which is great. Right. Which is important. But fueled by this terror of death. Fueled by terror and a kind of like, and I would talk, I would be always the voice

to talk to him and say, David, can we talk about this a little bit? Or I would send him like a little writing about from the Dalai Lama or a Buddhist text or something about death. And like, you know, I would encourage him to get some therapy, help process the emotions around it. But we live in the Western culture

in this abject terror of death. We don't talk about death. A friend of mine was telling me that in contemporary society, the Victorians never talked about sex, but talked about death all the time in Victorian England. There were death parties and there would be corpse viewings and seances.

And there was just this thing. And sex was like not talked about. Now we just talk about sex and everything is like reality TV shows are just literally like, Hey, who are these people are going to hook up pretty soon. We're just going to have like shows where it just like people meet and they hook up and we watch them having sex. I think that's called porn. Oh, that's porn. Oh yeah. That's what porn is. I've never checked it out. I'll show you some stuff. Is there any on the internet? No, it's hard to find. Okay. Thanks. Send me a link. But this idea that we are so afraid to talk about death and it is the one thing that we all have in common, everyone on this podcast and everyone listening to this podcast. And if we embrace it as a continuation of the mystery,

and yes, it's scary, we can have a very different relationship to death. Yeah, yeah, I think it is less about what happens when we die. I mean, anybody who answers that question with any level of certitude is somebody I'm probably not going to trust. Right.

But it is about appreciation of death and how to bring death into our daily experience so that we can appreciate the richness of life, you know? Because that is a certitude and a certain duality, you know, that we need to understand. Our culture is so whitewashed of any references to death whatsoever. And despite our, you know, our brains, intellectually-

Look at the mass denial happening in our country right now. It's unbelievable. 650 the mass denial happening in our country right now. It's unbelievable. 650,000 people dead in our country in a year and four months. And we're not talking about it. And they're partying like it's 1999 and there's no one is looking at it.

And so half of the population is going, I'm sorry to say this is going, like what the fuck? And I know that gets- I think it is a reflection of this, like, what the fuck? And I know that gets- I think it is a reflection of this very thing, right? Because we're so afraid of death and we have so little, I mean, like, you know, we don't connect with it in any way.

Like the minute somebody dies, they're removed from our line of sight. And we don't have language for how to talk about it in a healthy way beyond kind of like the traditional structures around funerals, et cetera. And I think intellectually, we all understand that we're gonna die, but I think deep down,

we all think somehow we're gonna figure out and run around it for us personally. And that creates that like low grade fear that we carry with us that forces us to even put it further out of our mind. Well, I think the answer is ultra marathons. Here's what I would say. Yeah, I mean, obviously I have no idea

what the hell happens after we die, but to go back to kind of what I was saying earlier about the scientific fact that we are eternal, right? That the things that make me what I am, I mean, like the cells in my body, the atoms, you know, the sort of most base structure of what has created this body is eternal, is forever. Those things don't just go away, they become something else, right? Matter and energy is forever. So, that means my cells, my atoms, they are forever. They don't just stop being. They just stop being me. But I am more than just this physical body. Whether you believe in a soul or not, you believe in consciousness. A lot of philosophers, a lot of theologians will say, your consciousness is your soul. Stop thinking of them as different things. That your ability to say, I am me, is you recognizing and communing with what is your soul. So, if your consciousness is a real thing, then your consciousness is also the result of-

And let me just jump in, let me just jump in, Yeah. Because I think it's important to understand that people, scientists don't know what consciousness is. No. This is one of the great mysteries, right? And you can't talk about death without talking about consciousness. Exactly. And defining what that means.

Yes, you can have brain scans and you can show kind of some vague areas in brains that light up when you look at a piece of a cherry rhubarb pie versus a lion in the jungle, but we don't know what it is. Exactly. There's neurons and electrons of a cherry rhubarb pie versus a lion in the jungle, but we don't know what it is. There's neurons and electrons and there's cells and there's parts of the brain, but the idea of consciousness, loving, laughing, thinking,

pondering, memories, the unification of all of these different aspects of what it is to be alive and have this quote unquote internal experience. I just wanna say that for the record. And what aspect of that is individuated versus universal, like this idea of panpsychism, that everything on some level is conscious, every accumulation of matter.

And that there is, you know, like bees in a hive that we share some kind of, you know, consciousness like Godhead, right? I actually believe that, but fine. If you don't believe that, you could still follow what I'm saying. And yes, Rain is absolutely right. Whatever consciousness is, and we don't know,

is involved in our biological processes, right? So I guess what I'm saying is when I die, all the things that make up my material self continue forever. That's science. The matter continues forever. The energy continues forever. Well, if my consciousness is in some ways the sum of my matter and my energy, then who's to say my consciousness doesn't continue forever in some way, shape or form? Do you know what I mean? So, when people ask me like, do you believe in life after death? me like, do you believe in life after death? That to me is life after death. That the thing that makes me me continues in some way that like my consciousness doesn't disappear because my consciousness is the result of matter and energy and matter and energy doesn't disappear.

And that's very Sufi. Right. Yeah. So the answer is, I don't know, but that's, that's my kind of prevailing theory. There's a great metaphor in the Baha'i writings that I've talked about in my chapter on death, which is, it's pretty simple. It's kind of like the bird in the cage one. It's, it's a little bit, you might go, that's kind of simple, but it's also profound. And that is that when we're a baby in the womb, we're growing what we need for this physical world.

So we're in floating in this kind of stasis, growing our bones, our eyelashes, our ears and lips and eyebrows and elbows and everything that we're gonna need. And it says the baby has no idea why it's growing elbows. If you ask the baby, interview the baby, what's up with the elbows baby? Like, I have no idea. I'm sitting in this amniotic sack.

I'm fine. I'm connected with my mother. It's all good elbows. I don't need elbows. But then there's this very scary event of like going through the birth canal and like, oh shit, this whole experience is coming to an end. This is terrifying.

There's blood, there's pain, there's discomfort, but what an incredible world we get born into. You get to kind of, you know, you get to see, you know, Picasso paintings and you get to have, you know, parties and you get to fall in love and there's all kinds of new experiences await you. Well, the same thing happens. So I don't know what happens when we die, but I think metaphorically speaking, we are like the death doula might say, we are being born into a new experience.

And what we're growing in this world are not physical arms and legs. We're growing spiritual arms and legs and elbows. We're growing patience and kindness and humility and compassion and legs and elbows. We're growing patience and kindness and humility and compassion and love and honesty. And these qualities that are kind of quote unquote higher qualities, but qualities of light, those are what we take with us

when we're plunged through that painful, difficult, bloody, difficult, painful birth canal of death into this other reality. I love that. There's also something beautiful about wonder and not knowing the answer that I think gives our lives a level of richness. Like if we could know everything,

is that something that we should aspire to? And or is it even possible to know everything? Is it possible to answer that question with certitude what happens after death? And it possible to answer that question with certitude? What happens after death? And if we could answer it, should we? I don't know. Try to pass that ball.

I don't know. Good point. All right, let's see, let's see. Next up. Do we have to do all these questions? No. What is the nature of consciousness? We already did that one.

We just did that. Wow, we just did that. It's crazy. We're ahead. It's crazy. We consciousness? We already did that. We just did that. Wow, we're ahead. It's crazy. We're ahead on, well time. Do we have a soul? What is it to you? I kind of feel like. You were talking about consciousness as a soul.

I mean, that's how I think about it. We just did that. I think the consciousness soul death thing, that's all I wanna say. Maybe we will get through it. We're gonna knock all these out. Look at that. Soul is just a word.

It's just a word. And we, what does it mean to be human? That's good. Damn. Do you have a chapter on that one? That's a good one. Not yet. Rain Wilson.

Okay. Wait, do I have to? Here's another one. Yeah, let's maybe. Can I be on your podcast? Rich, what? Come on. Go ahead, Russ.

Human. Do you even know? I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure. What is it about being human and how being human distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom, the phyla out there,

that we have a sense of self-awareness, that we have this yearning towards spirituality, that we have a level of consciousness that allows us to ponder the nature of consciousness itself. Is this just the evolution in brain capacity or is it something qualitatively different? Pondering mortality. Yeah, maybe part of, I once said that to my friend,

I was like, he was basically, he's an atheist describing us as like, essentially like apes with bigger brains. I'm like, well, we're very different because we get to ponder our mortality and animals don't ponder their mortality. And he's like, oh, that's preposterous, but it's true. It is true.

But is that a brain volume thing or is that something different altogether? I think it's different altogether. But I think one of the things that makes us human is that we get to have this bowl of questions and we get to have this discussion about these questions. That's one thing, but go ahead. Well, so, but the problem with the brain argument about what does it mean to be human, that our brains are just different, is that, well, then that means eventually, eventually we're going to be able to replicate that brain. Eventually we'll be able to put the same neuro processes that make me

think about my mortality into a robot. And so now the robot is thinking about its mortality. Is the robot human now? I watched that movie. And or, yeah, that doesn't necessarily lead to consciousness. And or, yeah, that doesn't necessarily lead to consciousness. That's right. So, you know, pondering, you know, death. I mean, we know that rhesus monkeys and elephants visit graves. They think about, you know, their fellow monkeys and fellow elephants that have died like a long time ago. We assume that's what they're doing

because their behaviors seem to allude to that. We don't know what they're thinking. Are we anthropomorphizing it? Well, I mean, especially with elephants, there's no reason for them years later to revisit burial sites and yet they do. They seem to be mourning. They seem to be mourning. Yeah. So,

we see behavior. So, that's all we can do is theorize based on their behavior, I guess. But the reason that I was stumped by this question is that I'm wary of the brain argument. People ask, going back to what we had said before, oh, that spirituality resides in the brain. It's part of our cognitive processes. So, it must be there for a reason, and you should probably think about that. The question then is, oh, okay, well, then if I figure that out, it's bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. And then I do bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop into a robot. Will the robot believe in God? Yeah.

Yes, it will. So, what does that mean about what is unique about my brain? I just, I don't know. When you were talking about panpsychism and I said, yeah, that's me. That's actually what I believe. I think that's what I mean is that it's hard for me to differentiate myself all that much from the rest of existence simply because my brain's a little bit different. Do you know what I mean?

Like I accept that my brain is different and I rejoice in that, but it's hard for me to feel too supreme about it knowing that whatever my brain is could possibly be replicated. I think what you're getting at Reza is there is a kind of like a Western Christian philosophical supremism that is really

a little bit revolting, which is kind of like, we are superior to the animals and therefore we caretake the animals or we have dominion over the animals, we have dominion over the earth and we're arrived and we have the Holy Spirit in us. And there's this kind of like, and I'm doing that fakey voice accent because there is,

that's our- And it filters into non-religious thinking as well. It's the same, you know, you don't have to be religious to think that way. I think on top of that, there is that hubris extends to this notion that we are capable of understanding everything. It's just a matter of refining our science

and, you know, over time, figuring all of these things out. Yeah, in 57 years, we'll have consciousness completely figured out. Yeah, exactly. years, we'll have consciousness completely figured out. Yeah, exactly. I just don't see that being possible. Like in the same way that, you know, a beetle is never gonna understand the human language, like the brain capacity of that organism just, you know,

prevents it from understanding certain things that are obvious to us, right? So how much, and so the hubris plays into this idea that we are supremely evolved, that there is nothing, there is no truth that eludes our capacity to understand. And I just think that's preposterous. Yeah, especially with our limited senses that we have. We just have these five senses and, you know.

And they're not all that good compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. Yeah. All right, Rich. Yeah. There we go. All right, we have time for like one more of these. Here we go, one more.

Make it a good one. I'm going hot pink. Are all religions fundamentally the same? We kind of covered that a little bit. You know, from a Baha'i standpoint, but also Reza's standpoint then. I would just say, just be, and this is kind of a big deal

over the last 30, 40 years in religious studies. Cause like, you know, a big part of the early 20th century of religious studies was all about, you know, religions are fundamentally all saying the exact same thing, but using different languages. And I agree with that. And then sometime around the 60s and the 70s, there was a backlash to that because people were saying, well, but you're not taking those differences seriously enough, right? That there's a reason why Christianity is different than Islam and Islam is different than Judaism and Judaism is different than Baha'i, et cetera, et cetera.

And that we shouldn't wash away those differences by simply saying, well, they're all pretty much saying the same thing. They are all pretty much saying the same thing. That's actually true. But, you know, let's not devalue those differences is all I will say. Yeah, well put. Sure. Let's get with that. One or two more of these. Oh, I love this one.

Are we addicted to everything? Boom, that's a title of one of our episodes. Literally you stole it from one of our episodes. I did. Dr. Gabor Mate. It hasn't gone up yet though. It has not gone up. But I've had Gabor on my show.

Let me just tell you. This is a subject, you know, that's dear to my heart. Did he blow you away the way that he blew me away? Unbelievable. Because I was-

Did he flip it on you? Oh, he flipped it on me so quickly. Please flip it on me. He dissected Reza in a way. I was so- He broke Reza down. He broke Reza.

I was so down. I was in tears. I was like, you know, I mean, Rain has talked about, he's had some addiction issues and he hasn't, he's been very open about it. And I was so I was in tears. I mean, Rain has talked about he's had some addiction issues and he's been very open

about it. And I was like, listen, look, I'm not an addict. I've never been addicted. I mean, sure, I take part in various vices, but I'm not addicted to anything. And Rain in the middle of the podcast, just kind of

as a joke, was like, well, you're a just kind of as a joke was like, well, you're a workaholic. And I was like, well, you know what? I mean, what does that even mean? A workaholic. And then Dr. Gabor Mate. Just broke me down. You are the children of immigrants and your father and your meaning to your parents

is so important. And you have come to america and what you make of yourself is how you get your complete your self-esteem and it's your family and it's how you i was just like break your family down and what they look to you and you are nothing without your successes because i was like i have six jobs so what that's awesome that makes me great like why is that a bad thing i work 16 hours a day and you know gabber mattes theory is that all addiction stems from trauma and i was like what no trauma what trauma this dude just broke me down and now i realize oh shit i am a workaholic

yeah i have an addiction That comes from some trauma. That comes from the trauma of- Your first generation immigrant. Being a refugee. Refugee. Leaving everything behind, coming to America with like nothing and starting all over again.

In Oklahoma, right? Did you feel the pull to defend your parents? Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I was defending myself. Well, it was really profound in my discussion with him. I don't want to hear what he said to you, totally. And I was defending myself. Well, it was really profound in my discussion with him. I don't wanna hear what he said to you, Rich.

I'll listen to that podcast specifically. But I said, me, I'm like so poly addicted to kind of pretty much anything one can become addicted to. I joked, I'm having my green tea here. I was like, it's the one addiction I allow myself. I don't even have like a quick coffee because it was too hardcore. But I said, the weird thing is that,

and everyone in my family is addicted. My dad wasn't addicted to anything who passed away this last year. And he's like, and Gabor Mate was like, well, what did your father die from? And I was like, well, he died of heart disease. What kind of heart disease? Well, his arteries were completely clogged

and they tried to do a quadruple bypass and they couldn't get in. He was just too clogged and they tried to do a quadruple bypass and they couldn't get in. He was just too clogged and backed up and his aorta wasn't even working. It was like, heart disease comes from trauma. Heart disease is its own kind of addiction. It's a trauma response. They've proven heart disease is a trauma response.

I was like, holy shit, that really blew my mind. I think because my dad had this incredibly traumatic childhood, but he never did drugs, he never drank, he never fucked around, he didn't do any of that stuff. And I was like, why is he superhuman? And yet he died at 78 with his entire chest just clogged with trans fats, I guess.

And that really put a perspective. There's a kind of, there's a heartbreak in that physical condition. Yeah. He has quite the gift of just lasering in on that thing, you know, that you're not even aware was such a big piece that drove your behavior. Well, he, for me, it's like, my parents love me.

They took care of all my needs. They love each other. They're still together. I can't, I'm in, I'm long time sober. I've been in recovery for a long time. And of course, you know, over the years, people, well, why do you think you're an alcoholic? Why, and it's, and one of the things you learn

in 12 step is that's not really a fruitful kind of thought experiment because it doesn't really provide you with the tools to live now. So you focus on the solution and your character defects, et cetera, and like working the steps. So I hadn't spent a lot of time

trying to understand what might have led me down this path, but I was certain that it had nothing to do with family history because I didn't grow up with any alcoholism in the family. I don't know anybody in my extended family that had it. I didn't suffer any trauma growing up that you would point to and say, poor Rich, he had to,

not like typical kid stuff, bullying and the like, but nothing that I could point a finger at my parents and say this, you know, my affliction is attributable in some part to this. But what he did was help me understand that, and I'm very protective of my parents because they blame themselves and I'm constantly saying, it's not your fault.

But I did grow up in a very achievement, education oriented household where, you know, love, you know, corresponded to how well you were doing in school or what you were achieving. Like my achievements were all this quest to, you know, love, you know, corresponded to how well you were doing in school or what you were achieving. Like my achievements were all this quest to, you know, seek approval and acceptance and love on some level, not in a really pernicious way, but definitely in a way that was real. And so he helped me understand that. And I was like, no, I don't want to blame. He's like, it's not about your parents being bad people. They're good people. They did their best or whatever.

But just recognizing that truth, I think has been helpful to me. And yet at the same time, and I'm interested in what you guys think about this. Like I feel that Gabor is sort of a hammer in search of a nail. And I think addiction really is a little bit more complex than just saying,

I think childhood trauma is a big piece in that, but I think it's reductive to say it's because of this. And if you heal this, you will no longer have your addiction problem. I don't think that it works that way. No, I think I agree with that. And it is very complicated. And I think we're obviously simplifying,

I think what Gabor would say about stuff. But I do think that there is, like I would ask the question a little bit differently. And I would, instead of, are we addicted to everything? My question would be, why are we addicted to things? Why do all of us find something that we have addictive behavior towards? that we have addictive behavior towards. And his theory is that because underneath it somewhere,

somewhere underneath it, there's trauma. Well, I think even going further beneath that, there's a spirituality to all of it because addiction is rooted in the search for answers or the search for comfort or making sense of the world or trying to understand, you know, how you belong to this thing. Yeah. So, one thing that he said that I thought was, that I hadn't heard before, because we, you know, addiction's a disease and addiction is this and is this. And his argument was that addiction is the symptom to a problem. Sure.

So maybe the problem isn't trauma. I think you're absolutely right that he will always bring it back to trauma somehow. And Johan Hari will always bring it back to connection. Like, I don't know if you read his book, Lost Connection, like that's his vein, you know. Or spiritual, you know, disconnection. Spiritual malady.

You know, whatever the case may be, but there is something to be said about thinking of addiction as a symptom. Now, what is it a symptom of? That's fine. You can, there's different things to it. And I think that was kind of eye-opening to me to find the thing that you feel like you can't live without

and then ask why, right? Well, the drug or the behavior is the solution to the problem. It's not the problem. Right. Well, to pull the camera back a little bit, there's 7 billion people on the planet. Are we addicted to anything, to everything? And the answer is yes. And I agree with Gabor Mahdi in this sense. And the other author I'm not familiar with, you're talking about connection.

I would agree with that as well. And in terms of looking, if you're an alien looking down at humanity on this planet, you'll be like, yes, there's a trauma. And there's a trauma, which is 10,000 years of wars and 10,000 years of starvation and 10,000 years of droughts and how difficult it is to survive. So we want stuff and comfort and we want security. And so what is that? That means more stuff and more toys and more things and nicer things and softer beds and more choices in mattress foams and smartphones

that can do everything for us. We'll never get lost again. We'll never experience the pain of being lost because we have ways on our phones. And so- Never be bored again. It will never be bored again because we have instant distraction with 147 games on our phones. And so humanity, 7 billion of us

is a traumatized species on a planet, but we keep going to the wrong, just like an addict, we keep going to the wrong well to soothe ourselves. Instead of just like an addict, we'll go to the gin to soothe themselves because that worked for a couple of years out of college. It worked quite effectively until it didn't work anymore. But humanity keeps going to the well of stuff.

So it's status and stuff and safety and comfort instead of connection. And instead of this kind of inevitable spiritual transformation that will happen, whether a billion people need to die of climate change related catastrophe along the way for us to do it. But in some way, shape or form,

we will evolve to a higher level of connectivity and not keep going to oil and materialism and consumerism to soothe this kind of human wound. But short of a revolution of consciousness, can we get there? Because I think it is true that we are addicted to everything. I used to think of addiction just in terms of like drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex,

like the kind of typical laundry list, but really the more time I've spent in recovery, I am utterly convinced that we are all, that addiction lives on this incredibly broad spectrum. And it can be your, you know, capacity for just being in unhealthy relationships all the time, or always seeking out the wrong partner, all the way to our smartphones, of course.

But it's all reinforced by this culture that is shoving down our throats this message that the happiness that we seek and the kind of spiritual union, the yearning that we all share can be sated through consumption and accumulation. And until we have a reformation of our social and cultural priorities, can that ever truly change?

Or do we just delve deeper into this abyss? But that may be what climate change is giving us. Maybe, I hope, yeah. But I mean, it will be horrific if the predictions, the scientific predictions are correct and we go to three degrees, four degrees Celsius change, it will be incredibly dire. And I don't wanna undersell that,

but it may force a kind of global reckoning about how we are in harmony with each other and in harmony with our planet and in harmony with materialism slash consumerism. It is providing us with this opportunity. Yeah. We joke a lot about how, oh man, what we really need is an alien invasion.

If we only had an alien invasion, then we'd all unite together. We have an alien invasion, then we'd all unite together. We have an alien invasion. The planet's on fire. Yeah. You know, it's here. And we've never been more divided and our facility for healthy, productive communication has been so eroded.

It's insane. And I think if we were invaded by aliens, there would be, you know, half the population saying it was a hoax and the other population, you know. That's insane. And I think if we were invaded by aliens, there would be half the population saying it was a hoax and the other populate, can we ever truly agree on a shared version of reality anymore? I don't know. We're running out of time here,

but we can't end on this like apocalyptic note. I know that got so doom and gloom at the end. Oh my goodness. Speaking of the end of the world. Yeah, what are we gonna do? People are probably so depressed out there. We need a U-turn here. All right, here's one for you. Let's go back a page.

And I will say that here, give me those cards again. The ones, you know, I think that these questions, how to be a good person, how can we- Oh, there's more over here. Yeah. What is the nature of consciousness? What does it mean to be human? What it means to be human

is to have these discussions about these questions, to question our lives, to try and be a better person, to ponder what happens after we die. And what do people misunderstand about spirituality? I mean, this is kind of the thesis of my book is that we need a spiritual revolution to transform not only on an individual level, but on a societal level.

And this is, and we can do it, you know? And I really believe even just watching the Olympics and I know it's corny and they, NBC is really good at like, she was up at 4 a.m. every morning before anyone else got awake and doing laps in the pool. And her grandmother drove her and she could only afford Cheetos to eat for breakfast. And now she's the fastest 200 meter butterfly swimmer in the world. And, and you get all invested in that. I'm just a sucker for it, but the teamwork, the camaraderie of these swimming teams, like holding each other and sobbing in each other's arms and how hard they've worked, the ingenuity, the strength, like I believe in us. I mean, this is ultimately what it comes down

to is like, I believe in humanity. I really do. In the bottom of my heart, I believe that we have the ability to connect, to heal, and to use tools from the various spiritual traditions to elevate. And the world is in this rapid, what is it? Disintegration that's happening right now. And we've talked about that climate change and the political disunity, but we're also in a place of integration and there have been tremendous strides forward. Look at the strides forward with like the conversations around race in this country.

No, we have not healed racism. It's not over, long way to go, but we really are at a different place than we were two years ago. Yeah, we're reckoning with it in a way we weren't. Yeah, and the same with the Me Too movement and women in the workplace. And especially we feel this in Hollywood

and I'm sure it's in other businesses as well, but Hollywood was such a sexist and corrupt business. And now there's a reckoning there as well. So there are forces of integration. There are forces that are moving us forward. And I believe that the human beauty, ingenuity, fortitude, and determination we see in the Olympics can be put on to 7 billion of us sharing this planet.

And then I'll just say- You did it, you turned it around. How about that? I'll hand the Olympic baton off, thank you. I can't do this race because I smoke pot, so. And you eat donuts. And I eat donuts. When you narrow your vision to our present moment, then it's impossible to be optimistic. It's impossible to think anything other than we are all screwed.

Yeah, we're fucked. It's over. Try to broaden that view just for a minute. Just open up your vision for a second. Look at this present moment as though it is an instant in a gigantic timeline. I think about the fact that something, you know, one of our guests, Malcolm Gladwell brought up, there was a battle in World War I, one battle in which 1 million people died in one battle, okay? We're not, we are as far away from that experience today as, you know, we are from

mapping consciousness, right? So, broaden your viewpoint a little bit and it infect you with a little bit more optimism. And then the only other thing that I will say- And let me add to that, think about this American Civil War. Think about the fact that, what did people think about in 1867? You know, when-

It's 150 years ago, that was not that long ago. And when, you know, 2- It's 150 years ago. That was not that long ago. And when, you know, 2 million people were dead on battlefields and blood soaked battlefields and the whole country was at each other's throats. People say, oh, it's never been as bad in the United States as it is now. It's like, what about the civil war? What about millions and millions dead?

And it probably seemed like there wasn't a way out of that. I just want to support your thesis. The only other thing that I will say is it's also very easy to listen to all these incredibly loud voices, voices of radicalism and extremism, whether they be religious or political or whatever the case may be, because those loud voices are what get the attention. They're the ones that come up on top. But always remember that any kind of fundamentalism, whether it's religious fundamentalism or political fundamentalism, ethnic, racial, whatever the case may be, is by definition a reactionary phenomenon. The voices of extremism that you hear are not independent phenomena. They are a reaction to what is independent phenomena. So, when you hear someone screaming,

you know, about racism or political extremism or, you know, religious fanaticism, extremism or, you know, religious fanaticism, understand that what that is, is a reaction to progress and secularization and pluralism and, you know, diversity. That it's pluralism, progress, diversity, you know, those are the things, that's the stream. What you are hearing is the response to the stream. So don't freak out. Yeah. Don't freak out. Focus on the stream. Right. And no progress occurs without that resistance or that friction. Right. So the loud voices are the friction, but they're really, you know, the dying voices in the night as culture progresses. Don't confuse it. Just because it's the loudest doesn't mean it's- Yeah, there were those same loud voices

in the civil rights era and the same loud voices defending our role in the Vietnam war. The same thing was happening then. Put your head down and progress. Well, I feel like this was the everything bagel of metaphysical milkshakes. My favorite bagel. And I don't know how it's gonna taste, but we did it.

How do you feel? It was good. It was cool, right? This is what we do. This is what we live for. I dig it. I love the show, Metaphysical Milkshake, available wherever you listen to find podcasts.

And you guys are easy to find on the internet. Other than that, anything coming up or anything you wanna point people towards? More episodes, are you doing this like in seasons or are you just gonna be putting them up? We don't really know. They're like- They just keep telling us.

They are like, we need more episodes. Okay, all right. Who's they? The mysterious they. The podcast gods. Yes. Yeah. I mean, look, we, we enjoy it. I think we, we, we promised that we would do,

I think maybe 40 or 45 of them a year, which seems insane. But you know, we'll just keep doing it as long as it's fun. I think the second it's not fun, both of us will look at each other and be like, you know what? We'll throw in the towel and they'll fun, both of us will look at each other and be like, you know what? We'll throw in the towel.

And they'll live on, the conversations will live on. But yeah, it's a blast. I mean, I love having elevated conversations and what a treat to share this with Reza and you're doing the same thing over here and a big admirer of your podcast and thanks for having us on. Thank you guys.

And when those books are ripe and ready, come back and share with me about them, please. Cool. All right. Peace plants. Namaste. Namaste. Roll out. What is the Baha'i term for namaste? Is there an analog?

There's not really. No, there's not really, no. Yeah, not really. Baha'is are want to say sometimes, Allah wa'abha, which means God is glorious, but that's not really in that same context. Yeah, gotcha. Cool.

Okay. All right. All right. Thanks you guys. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources

related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is

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Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social

media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiette. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.