Ep. 69 - Dark Times with Randy Cohen

What I never liked about this emphasis on being in the present and a rejection of thinking about the past is it seems to me they coexist, not just in the literal sense of physicists might mean, but there's no way to understand one's self or other people without knowing their past. In many ways what we are as a son with everything that just happens is this. This is synchronicity. Welcome to episode 69 of Synchronicity, my guest this week is Randy Cohen. Randy wrote a column in the New York Times magazine called The Ethicist where people would send in ethical questions and dilemmas and he would answer them through philosophical studies and a way of delving into what is the right choice in these situations.

He also, this is how I found out about him, has a wonderful podcast called Personplace Thing where he asks a guest each week to name a thing or talk about something that's important to them, a person, a place and a thing, which he points out in the description of the show is a really, really nice way to get people to talk about things that they really care about and therefore find interesting subjects. I've noticed from doing this show, if you ask someone point blank about themselves out of nothing to just give their life story and I've done that before, it doesn't really work that well, but if you ask them to talk about something they're passionate about or care about, you can get some really cool stuff.

I flipped the script with Randy on the first part of this episode and we talk about basically what's interesting to him and he has some really cool answers there. Before I get into the other part of the conversation here, I wanted to talk about two movies I saw this week that I highly recommend you check out, if you haven't already, I'm sure many of you have, check out Lion, which I just watched, oh man, that is a really, really great movie. It's based on a true story until the end and they show it and that's pretty cool too. I also saw Hidden Figures, another great movie, highly recommend that.

I got some other Oscars ones, Oscar nominees on the docket, but I really do recommend those. I still think Arrival is my favorite movie from this year so far, but those are really good too. Okay, so I want to get back to this conversation with Randy, kind of keep this intro relatively short. A note for people who listen every week, how often do I say I'm going to keep it short and then do not keep it short at all? Every week? Okay, just checking. So this conversation with Randy is very cool because we disagree a lot, like a lot. The first part of this conversation is real nice and not that it's actually nice throughout.

We're very cordial and very polite and I think we're enjoying a healthy debate about some of the things we're talking about, but we disagree a lot. If you've listened to previous episodes in the past few months, you know kind of my thinking about the Donald Trump situation and it's not that I don't think it's a horrible situation. I do. Betsy Davos was appointed secretary of education who thinks that we need guns in schools to protect against grizzly bear attacks. So it's not looking great and I will give anyone who says this is not looking good. Absolutely. I agree. I do think though it is an opportunity for us to kind of work out some other things either outside the realm or paradigm of government and corporations or really start privatizing some systems here.

They're going to help people. That's what I'm interested in. But Randy on the other hand in this episode you'll hear is like, "No, you're totally wrong." There's verbatim. He says at one point, "The no good will come of this, literally no good." I don't know, I mean, I know I don't agree with that, but I understand the sentiment and I understand how a lot of people are looking at this as kind of like the preliminary rise to like a Nazi Germany or some fascist regime. I'm not discounting that in any way, shape or form. I just think that we're in a different time with, and this is a good and bad thing, but the aid of media or the harm of media, however you want to look at it, it's a little bit different than any other point in history.

I'm sure everyone probably thinks that wherever they are in history at the present time, I'm thinking, "Oh yeah, we're not going to do that. We know better." But we'll see. I like this episode because you know from this, I'm not what you would call a confrontational person. I think if something offends my sensibilities, I know how to navigate around that without getting upset because I do think it's important to hear other people's perspectives on things, but I very much enjoy when someone has a different perspective than me and we can discuss it cordially and openly and really respect each other's opinions even if we do disagree because that's kind of the template for what we need to do going forward in the world with everything.

That's it for this week's secret book club. I'm wrong. I'm going to talk about it in the mid-roll. There's a mid-roll now in case you haven't gotten to the episode yet, so you hear about it more about the book club officially kicks off tomorrow, February 9th at 8 p.m. Eastern time we're doing a live discussion. You can join that live discussion if you want by going to the Facebook synchronicity group. All this stuff is on the website, guys, but if you can go there, you can sign up through the that's the pin post, sign that we're doing a whole little live discussion thing. We're going to do those probably, I don't know, every two or three weeks as we read the book.

The book we're reading is Don Miguel Ruiz is the Toltec art of life and death and really interesting so far. Wasn't my choice. I wanted to read Black Elk, but this one got out-voted. It out-voted that one, but I'm enjoying it so far and I'm really interested to hear other people's take on that situation. Another thing, I'm recording this now, it hasn't happened yet, but I'm going on Michael Phillips, Patreon, Google chat for his podcast, Third Eye Drops. I'm sure many of you know about Michael Phillip and Third Eye Drops, but go check it out. Go give it a listen. Great guy, super fun, really, has become one of my very good friends in a very short period of time, so go donate to him on Patreon, get his juices flowing there, don't know why I used that phrase, take it back, don't get his juices flowing, don't know why I said that, but go to his Patreon, contribute a little bit and then you can go in these Google chats and hang out with us.

So, if that's something you would want to do for some reason, so thank you to everyone who subscribes, rates, reviews, everything related to synchronicity, totally appreciate it. Thank you for coming on, I'm incredibly excited about this for several reasons. I was thinking there's a couple of ways we can approach this, I'd actually like to do a quick person place thing with you, kind of flip the script if that's okay and then we can kind of delve into some of the questions and learn a bit. I want to find out about you personally and kind of how your trajectory through the years and how you got to where you are.

I like that you indicate it moving upward, so you feel like that to me, could you wiggle your arm a little bit more and you're really scared to be running grades. To me, it looks like an upward trajectory. So let's start with a person place thing, could you tell me a person who's important to you? Sure. One of the things about a person place thing is I try to remind the guests, it's not supposed to be these three items that sum them up or that somehow define them in an intimate way. I like it if it's as light as possible, but it should just be the three items. They happen to want to talk about that day and if I'd ask them a week later, they pick three different ones.

So with that, wishy washy carry on. Oh, I don't know. I think maybe I would say Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson, the great 18th century moralist and man of letters. He was really the only person who wrote explicitly about ethics, who I quoted in the column and who I read for pleasure before the column and continue to just like, if I could travel back in time, that's who I'd like to hang out with. He seemed to combine these two qualities paradoxically that I admire. One is that he had an incredibly bleak view of life and yet was the most sociable guy you could imagine. He was interested in everything.

He was interested in everyone, he touched life, high and low, happy and tragic. And yet continued to see life as well, what is it? Everywhere life is in such a state as there is much to be endured and little to be enjoyed. And these talk about hope as an insidious force because it gets you out of the present and encourages you to live in the future, generally an imaginary future. You know, haven't, you know, pie in the sky when we die. And Boswell pressed him about this and said, "Well, aren't people ever happy in the present?" And Johnson said, "Never would not drunk." And yet, you know, to us, this would describe a kind of depressive and perhaps Johnson was.

We might diagnose him as clinically depressed, but he was not solitary, he was essentially sociable. Maybe it was fleeing his depression, but he loved to be among other people. What's out of the other one? I consider a day lost in which I did not make a new acquaintance. You know, it's pretty great. And it's weird that someone who is saying something like that would have a bleak view of the world because you would think if you're meeting new people, discovering new things that would enrich your life and kind of give you, I also, before I forget, I don't want to gloss over this. What you said about hope is super incredibly interesting.

I've heard and read in things, in Buddhist scriptures too, that hope is actually looked at something that is not necessarily something to be focusing on because it is kind of a future oriented idea and it prevents you from taking action or being in the present, which, you know, depending on who you're talking to, that's kind of the thing. Rambas is be here now. That's the game. Could you talk a little bit more about that, the hope aspect though? Because that's something. Yeah. Yeah. When I like about this is, yeah, I realize that it kind of resonates. I'm not a Buddhist and I'm very unsophisticated about Buddhism, but I realize it resonates with the Buddhist emphasis on being in your own body in the present.

But I like that the Greeks have this idea too that, remember, do you remember Pandora's box? Yes. I was going to bring that up. I'm so happy you did. So, people who might not remember, you know, when she goes into the box and all the evils of the world are released, only one remains, one thing remains in the box and that's hope. And this is much debated amongst scholars, like, well, why is hope there? The way I learned that as a kid growing up, it's meant to be this last bit of comfort offered to you, the suffering, humanity. Okay, we've now made your lives miserable, but we leave you this one, Cersei's.

But I like to think that hope is itself yet another evil and that's why it was in the box. As in Pandora's box, is evil's well, hope is in the box and that maybe the evil was just, well, it didn't escape into the world except, you know, we're full of hope. Right. And I mean, this is, I thought about that specific thing so many times, whether it is another representation of permutation of evil or whether it is that shiny thing at the bottom that's supposed to, you know, make us feel better that all of this has been released unto the world, I don't know exactly where I stand on hope because I think it can drive people like when you're talking about the present and the future and the past, most wise people will say live in the present.

That's the only thing that actually exists. And then when you start delving into like quantum physics and modern physics, you see the time is kind of this concept that doesn't really hold up as much as we like to think it does in our experience of it. So I go, I oscillate basically between hope because if someone's in a very bleak situation and there's nothing around them that really is there to bring them out of a state that's negative, hope can be something that pulls them out that said it really can prevent you from dealing with what is right there at the time. So it's fascinating. I don't know that I have an answer on what it is.

I mean, what's your inclination on it? Well, I like that it's both and that when I just lost thread, I think it's what I never liked about this emphasis on being in the present and the rejection of thinking about the past is it seems to me, I think as you are alluding to, they coexist, not just in the literal sense that physicists might mean, but there's no way to understand oneself or other people without knowing their past. In many ways, what we are is the sum of everything that has happened to us. So it seems to me to deny that is to deny who we are. How can we possibly have any understanding if we don't embrace the past and examine the past?

It's really interesting. This is something where when you start getting into things like non-dual awareness and duality as opposed to non-dual, this is something that I think trips a lot of people up when talking about some of the Hindu cosmology, the Vedic stuff and Buddhism, because to say that everything is all one defies everything we experience in our waking life. We know there's good and bad. We know there's happy and sad. We know there's hot and cold. Our world is essentially a relative dualistic universe. That said, when you start chunking down, down, down, down, you realize the interconnectedness of all the things.

We are one. There is an actual basis for that. So it's another Rambas quote that I think is very applicable to this is, yes, you are God. You are the universe. You are everything. But don't forget your zip code. You still have to function in reality and use these relative circumstances to maybe understand what is actually going on. And I think to dismiss the past and the future as things that don't exist, there's only just this moment, intellectually and conceptually, I think that makes a lot of sense. But that's not our experience. We haven't broken out of the chains of time at this point. So to dismiss it doesn't maybe have any practical benefit or it doesn't have the amount of practical benefit that we actually need in our day-to-day experiences.

So I think that's important, I mean, I had to offer my totally unsolicited opinion on this. I do think we experience negative emotions, suffering, these things, it is kind of the sandpaper of our incarnation. These things can wake us up to greater things in our lives and that may be their function. It doesn't mean everything is perfect and don't worry about anything. But these experiences can kind of drive us towards deeper understandings and meanings. So I want to shift, because I have a feeling, Randy, that if left unchecked, we could probably talk for five hours. I'm very confident about that, but I want to be mindful of your time and keep this relatively within the confines of an hour-ish.

Could we shift to that? Yes, yes. If there are two things that occur to me, one is that yes, dwell in the present, but contribute to your IRA, I think that's worth doing. The others, I put in mind the Alexander Pope remark, which I also learned, I think falsely, that it's a hope springs eternal in the human breast. I learned that as a kid, and that was meant to be a good thing, but only the first line of a couple, what Pope wrote was, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast, man never is, but always to be blessed," that he was talking about that eerie future, that we're never happy in the present.

It's the same as Dr. Johnson. It's funny that that is, "Hope springs eternal" is probably one of the most popular things to make people feel that everything is going to be okay. Right. The Pope meant it the opposite. Yeah. Hang on one second. There's something I'm going to hit escape for a second, just to make something stop doing something. Sure. No problem. Okay. All right. I'm back. Okay. Sorry. Well, we'll take this as a segue into a place. What is a place that's important to you currently? Okay. All right. Okay. Here's one. It's on my mind, so I like to cycle. I have a group of cycling friends and we'll go do 50 or 60 miles on a set, pretty much every Saturday morning.

You used to live in Manhattan. You'd live in Manhattan, right? Yeah. Yeah. So if you cross the George Washington Bridge and then go south just half a mile, you enter Pal State State Park and then you ride north and it's a two-lane blacktop road. This is not the proper name, but it's what everyone calls it. It's called River Road, and that would be my place. And it is amazing in that it's like being in the country two seconds from the biggest city in America. I mean, when you ride River Road, it's between those clips, the palisades and the Hudson's, which is very narrow strip. So there's cliff steer left, the beautiful Hudson River to your right.

Where you live in the Hudson Valley, so you know, it's just magnificent. Densely wooded, about halfway up, it's about seven and a half miles. And about halfway up on the right, there's a bald eagle's nest that's been there for years. You know, the same nesting pair has been there. The destruction of the economy of the Hudson Valley has made the river very clean. No more industrial waste because no more industry. And that means fish back in the river and that means the eagles eat. But there was this nest of bald eagles that you routinely see. You see them all the time when you're riding there. It just seems uncanny.

Very few cars, just a car to now and then going down to the docks. And it's a, that place embodies, it reminds me that everything one enjoys can be found in New York City. And that two seconds over the bridge, you're in the country. And it's, it's glorious and it's, it's beautiful and serene and also very physically challenging. It's very hilly. It's very up and down, which I like, it feels great. It also reminds me how much I like, this is a phrase I would have had contempt for when I was your age, to regularly scheduled group activity. Everything in that, you know, would, would have seemed awful to me like, yeah, I'm a, I'm a hip guy, even saying hip shows, you know, how I'm not, that, oh, we're spontaneous.

We don't know. We don't want to like regular schedule things. A group activity, that's what could be square. But I, I really value this. There's maybe someone else, a friend started this, it's just an email list of people who want to cycle. There may be 30 people in the list, maybe a dozen who shop regularly, half a dozen on a typical day. They vary in ages from say, my, I'm not the, I'm not the oldest one. There's a, there's a guy, one guy a few years old in the end is early 70s down to people in the 30s, who still kind of descend to ride with us, that how often do I, I very seldom get to spend time among at least a semi diverse group of people, at least diverse by age.

It's, they're people who I mostly see only on the bike, but I'm reminded how much I look forward to seeing them. They have interesting things to say. I feel genuine affection for them. I like to do the same people I've been riding with for, for, I don't know, 15 years now. And that continuity is very valuable. I like that we don't talk about, we don't talk about cycle racing. We don't talk about gear ratios. You know, we talk. We actually talk and it's so wonderful. And I think I associate that with River Road, so that would be my place. I love it and I'm just going to pluck two things out of there that I think are incredibly important, any, at any point, which is a, being in nature and especially living in the city and being able to just quickly get out and experience being in nature outside of the city is incredibly important.

I mean, I know when I started keying in to taking walks like two years ago, it's, it's crazy that I'm 33. I really just started understanding that nature is a great place to be out and like when I was in a negative mindset, even if I had meditated, even if everything was fine, if I just went out, walked around on a trail for an hour, it's, it's incredible how it shifts your consciousness into a different place. And then the other thing that you mentioned, which is equally as important is this community aspect. And this is something, what you said, regular scheduled group activities. Yeah. I mean, I, I'm sorry, I may be younger, but that has the same connotation that it probably had for you back then, like it is something that scheduling, please, I don't need to do that.

I mean, I just literally a year ago realized the benefits of a schedule. That's, that's how long it took me. I, I, it was, I think it was like a perversion of an anti-authoritarian complex, like don't tell me what to do. I'm going to do things when it's right, but I'm realizing like, hey, it's, it's a way to get focused. It's a way to, you know, create some consistency in your life that is actually going to be beneficial, but the, the community aspect of what you're talking about is so important. That to me, and we, we will get into the current political and global climate at some point. It is.

Yeah. It is. It is. Well, we'll get into why I actually think it's a very good thing, which is I know very counterintuitive, but I do. I know it's, I mean, it's not just to be clear, it's, it's not a good thing in a lot of ways, but I do think that this is a necessary thing that had to happen. We'll get into that. But this aspect of community, I think is one of our main buffers against all of this other stuff that's going on externally that, like, quite frankly, we don't have a tremendous amount of control over, like, we don't really control our government at this point in any way. So to pretend that we're going to be able to influence that.

But when you congregate socially, communally on a local and smaller level, that's where some real genuine stuff can come out of that it benefits society and people collectively and individually, so I love that your place encompasses two of those things which, you know, have had such an incredible impact in my life, just even over the past five years, especially. So I love that. You get that. So let's go to the thing. What's the thing? The thing like everyone, like, my guests have the most difficulty coming up with the thing. Yeah. I usually like it to be a physical object that they can bring. They show a tall portion.

Well, I'm not too strict about it. And I might deviate for that just enough to go. Thing is, is my copy of just an ordinary folder edition of Julius Caesar. And it echoes back to place that for the last, geez, I think, 18 years, it's my other regularly scheduled group activity, some friends and I have a Shakespeare group and we get together once a month and we read a play out loud. And I mentioned Julius Caesar for two reasons, one because that's the next play we're reading. The way we choose is we're going through them in chronological order in the order in which they were written in so far as that's knowable, which is pretty knowable, except for the war there is this place, which, you know, from Richard II through the Henry's through Richard's VI.

Those we're doing in the order of events depicted because you want to see, you know, who's gotten his head off. I'm sorry, Richard. Yeah, right. Okay. Never mind. What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say Richard the IV. No, I'm not. I'm trying to say Richard the IV. So, oh, the other thing about Julius Caesar is it kind of gets to the omnipresence of the utterly horrible political moment we find ourselves in. And it's impossible to talk about anything without talking about that. That a week after the election, I went to this Shakespeare lecture that this fellow James Shapiro gave. He teaches at Columbia.

I think he's, you know, the leading Shakespeare scholar in America and what's great about it is he speaks to ordinary knuckleheads like me. I mean, I'm not a scholar. I just like the stuff. And he knows how to talk to an ordinary audience member. And he was meant to talk about what the colleague raised and gender in casting of Shakespeare productions, how we think about that now and how it's been thought about for hundreds of years. Well, they couldn't get away from Trump. And what they ended up talking about for an hour was and how Trump will affect what Shakespeare plays can produce. And it was just brilliant.

It was he goes, well, it's the end of place that deal with integrating the outsider into our culture, like Romeo and Juliet, where there's two families or merchant of Venice, where they're over here. So the Jew is the other. How do we deal with that? And it's going to be all plays about tyranny. It's going to be Julius Caesar and Coriolatus, both because that's what the political climate will encourage. And because that's maybe a response to our moment. So yeah, my battered copy of Julius Caesar. Well, you've provided a tremendous segue into, I mean, just to confirm what you're saying, I mean, I've been doing this podcast for a couple of years, you know, 2016 was the election.

You know, I would say over the past two, three months, it is impossible to do one of these without delving into Trump. It's just, you know, it's omnipresent. Like you said, it's something that is culturally and societally affecting so much that to skirt around or pretend like it's not existing just doesn't really sit with people, especially if we're trying to talk about things that are important. So let's talk about the current political climate. We're sitting here on today's the first, right? Is today the first or the second? Yes, it's the first. Okay, it's the first. So it's the first of February.

We've just been in the middle, I mean, he's signed so many executive orders that have been so crazy to so many people. I said to my friend who was a political operative, I said, listen, I knew it was going to be bad. I didn't think it was going to be this bad this quickly. I didn't think that this was actually going to he was going to rain down and put a Muslim ban in the first week, like that that's blowing my mind. So I want to share with you kind of my perspective of why I think this isn't as horrible as it seems and at the same time say very clearly, it's as horrible as it seems. So it's both things.

I don't want it to dismiss anything. And I also would be remiss and I point this out every time I talk about this. You like me, we're white guys. We're white males in the United States of America. Our day-to-day existence is fundamentally different than someone who's an ethnic minority, a woman, LGBTQ, there's so many things going on here that really can affect people who it doesn't necessarily affect us. That said, it's going to affect everything. So let me tell you why I think this was a necessary needed thing to happen and that I'm actually grateful in some ways that this happened. I describe this, the analogy that I've used is if you have cancer or someone you know has cancer and it's treatable, it's not terminal, there's something that can be done about it, you want to know you have cancer because if you don't, you're not going to be able to take the necessary action to deal with what's going on.

To me, and I think to a lot of other people, well before Trump, well before anything happened, it's clear there's something wrong with this country. I mean, I think it's arguable that when you go back to the inception of the country, you know, slavery, Native Americans, we have some, you know, depending on whether you believe in karma or not, there is some nastiness that we don't like to really directly deal with as a nation and as a society. And not to mention, you know, how we continue to treat black people and minorities in this country. That's still going on. So I would refer to that as the cancer that is in the body of the United States.

I voted for Hillary Clinton, I lived in Maryland, it didn't matter, 93% of people voted for, it was completely irrelevant, my vote didn't count there. I wonder now if Hillary would have won and we wouldn't have been dealing with someone who's looking like he's trying to set up an authoritarian regime, what the state of the country would have been. All of these people who voted for Trump still would have been there. All of these institutional injustices, the corporatization of the United States, all these things still would have existed. My concern would have been would we be able to see all these things as clearly as we do now, if Trump hadn't been elected.

So we're getting it out to the surface. I think, unfortunately, for a lot of people right now in this moment, we're still in the pant like, again, going back to the cancer analogy, someone you know or yourself, you get diagnosed with cancer, you freak out, it's totally normal. No one's like, oh, no big deal, I have cancer, not anything to worry about. You freak out, we're still in the freak out stages. We're still coming to terms that this is a horrible thing that's happened, but we're seeing all of this above the surface or more of it than we have. I won't say all of it because who knows what's going on with Bannon, really.

But we're seeing enough of it that we now have the problem clearly in front of our faces. For those of us who believe this is a problem and needs to be dealt with, you know, compassionately and wisely. So I think this provides a tremendous amount of opportunity for people who recognize we need to deal with this, and then we also have, because of the age of the Internet, which I think is a neutral tool, it can be used for good, it can be used for bad. We have an amazing amount of power to kind of shift where this is going. And I think if we hadn't had this right in front of our faces, where our sensibilities are being attacked day in and day out, I don't know that we would have taken the action collectively or individually.

So that's ultimately why I think this is a terribly scary, horrendous, horrific, we're trying to dial the clock back to God knows when, but I think this had to happen because I would be concerned if this stuff was below the surface simmering and we weren't dealing with it that it would come to a point where we wouldn't be able to take positive action. So that's my ultimately very optimistic, hopefully not to pie in the sky because I clearly see what everyone else is. That's why I think this is a situation that maybe isn't as bleak or as horrible as it seems while also qualifying that it is bleak and horrible.

So I'd be very curious to hear kind of your assessment of what I just said and just what your general feelings, I mean, you will get into it right after this, but you ran a column called The Ephesus where you're dealing with ethical questions from the mundane to the non-bendatal constantly. So I think you have a unique perspective of dealing with a lot of ethical issues and kind of seeing what's going on out there in the world right now. Oh, hello, dear listeners. I am letting you know about something I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, The Synchronicity Book Club. Every few months we're picking a book and by we, I mean, people in the Synchronicity Facebook group, don't know what I'm talking about, go to synchpodcast.com, S-Y-N-C podcast.com.

There are links to everything I'm talking about, we're picking a book, we're discussing it live, we're having fun times, we're talking about other stuff, get involved. It's fun. It's community. We're doing cool stuff. There's other stuff coming on too. One last thing and I'll mention it at the end of this episode, March 18th in Los Angeles, there's a MindPod Network Live event. I will be there. Almost everyone who's part of the MindPod Network will be there. Other cool people will be there. I will let you know more if you're in Los Angeles and want to know more about this or you're thinking of going to Los Angeles, shoot me an email, know@synchpodcast.com and we'll talk about it.

I think I disagree with everything you said, I did write a column called The Ephesus. I don't know, it was entirely mundane. This administration, the unemployment rate went down. The excesses of Wall Street were rained in, incomes went up, he had a justice department that fought for voter rights, but you don't think President Obama understands the way slavery has affected America, we knew all this and we were moving the country in the right direction. Obama was way to the right of me, Donald Trump's administration is going to make everything worse. I think you underestimate how bad it's going to get and that exacerbating our problems is just worse.

It doesn't make anything any better, world, they're going to roll back, labor protections are going to roll, they're going to take away healthcare for millions of people. I found to see how this is, there are any benefits, this is all bad. The arc of history, not only Ben Sully, it doesn't bend toward justice, it gets, sometimes things can get better, sometimes things can get worse, it's going to get worse and worse and worse. Absolutely no good will come of this, not good to anybody's inside into American history or inside into their neighbors. The fact that there are people who have a foolish analysis of and are angry and want a right wing tyrant to come in, look, they lost the popular vote.

Hillary Clinton won the vote by nearly 3 million and the swing states that she lost, it's a few thousand in each of these states and I'll mention that if all states where there was aggressive voter suppression, a few people get to vote, it's completely anti-democratic, where James Comey weighs in, with the head of the FBI's deliberately influencing re-election, where Russian hacking is revealing potentially embarrassing stuff about one candidate, not another. This is completely debased electoral process, not to mention the utterly undemocratic electoral college system, that the majority of voters voted for Hillary Clinton, who would have been, you know, the charge from the right was, "Oh, do you want four more years of Obama, right?"

I seriously did, to me improving the country, Hillary Clinton is, again, way to the right of me, she's doing revengeiness, but would have been, "I can act, that's fine, that's fine, she's smart, she's competent, she's an adult, we have a dangerous balloon running the country now." Without a doubt, and I don't disagree with anything you just said, except for the fact that I do, here's our friend Hope, right, I do have some expectation, maybe not even Hope, and I see this reflected already, that this is a collective wake-up opportunity for people. I was awake before, and all my friends were waiting for the police, trust me, I don't need this to wake me up.

You don't, and I don't, and my friends and my peer group don't, but I can tell you, I know people who didn't know, people... There are gentler ways to wake people up, because they have a piece on the far hand. So there's a chap at that, you don't have to punch them in the face. So there's a great quote from one of my favorite Tibetan teachers, Chogam Trungpa, who said, "May you be bombarded with coconuts of wakefulness?" And this is, I think, us being bombarded, this isn't like a nice, like, "Hey, tap you on the shoulder." People are throwing coconuts at our heads. I'm sorry, I don't buy any of these.

Well, I will give one anecdotal piece of evidence to maybe, and I'm not trying to convince you in any way. This is a break-step fire argument. Yes. In other ways. Well, it's horrible. It is potentially, it is potentially, and I don't think we need to have the death of six million Jews and, you know, ten million people to get to a good place. But what I will say, I don't know if something like the women's march would have happened without someone like Trump getting inaugurated, and while that, we may argue about the merits and how much actually that's going to change, I think a lot of people, under the age of 30, people who really kind of don't even really know what the 60s was, they just kind of have it as kind of like a footnote in history, I think it's important that they see that there is a resistance to what's going on, and that is going to be, you know, coalescing over the next four years, or the next two years, or not, even if it does, but again, this is like, it's really great when everybody rallies round after a big flood, but I hardly think you want to blow up the dam on the edge of town so you can have all the fun of everybody rallying around.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I hear it. I'm finding this argument utterly. I like it. This is clutching it's straws. It's a horrible fire. I'll put it. It'll bring us all together and volunteer fire. Well, it's true. It's true. And that is essentially... I kind of live without the fire. Well, no. And I hear you on that. I think... There are other ways to organize people. There are other ways to bring people. They can ride their bikes. Here's my question. But how do, what conditions created, what were the conditions that allowed this to happen? Because I agree with you. But I don't really correct an electoral process in any other society.

Why? Don't be clippant. She had... No, no, I know that. My father. She won. She's trying to happen if you believe in democracy. I do. And I... And I... Just to be very clear, I 100% agree with the gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter idea laws. That's what turned this election. Not to mention... Not to mention what you mentioned with Comey and all these extra curricular things that were going on that have never been a part of our process, getting down to the Russian potential influence. Not potential influence influence. No, influence. Russian influence. I mean, potential knowing how deep it actually goes.

Or where this actually, where this was accepted, you know, is he actually a mentoring candidate or is he just an idiot who's easily manipulating? I just think... I really do... I don't think... I think there is some aspect of your point to this that undermines or dismisses that there is a cultural aspect of what's going on in this country, that us in New York, on the liberal elites, you know, all these people on the coast, I think we're completely out of touch for how bad some parts of the country are in terms of, listen, and it's not necessarily because of any fiscal policy. Let's be clear. When automation and AI starts kicking in in five to ten years, all those jobs that Donald Trump is bringing back, they're not coming back.

They're going to be less jobs than ever before. And if we're thinking that we're going to pull fossil fuels out of the ground to buffer us against, that's not going to happen. I do think, at least for me, I can only talk about my direct experience. I was blown away that Donald Trump was in any way possible. I mean, the man still got 59, 60 million votes. People decided to vote for this person, regardless of voter suppression across the country. People drink Pepsi, too. People make foolish choices all the time. No, I know. But I think it is our responsibility as people who maybe think we know better or think we want to bend the arc of justice in the correct way.

I think we have to be aware of the people who don't think like we do. People who maybe have radicality. I think we have to address our social problems, our economic problems, provide decent health care, provide a justice society. But my understanding of politics is you allow yourself with people of fellow feeling, right? That people who would identify problems the way you would identify problems, and that's what political organizing is. And that's what Hillary did. And she got 3 million more votes. You don't have to... I think it's very, very difficult to persuade an adult with a fixed idea to change his or her mind.

And that's not what politics is, but the implication of that is, well, yeah, you can ignore those people. You absolutely can't ignore their circumstances, their social problems, their economic problems. But if someone has an idiotic idea, you can absolutely not waste two seconds of your time trying to persuade them. Organize. Organize for political change. I agree that to try to change someone's mind is quite honestly usually a fruitless endeavor. It's not something that people come up with their beliefs and minds. Most people don't even know why they believe what they believe in. It's the truth, whether it's nature, nurture, whatever else, insights.

Most people don't know. Number five. That person is so appealing, I didn't realize, because I like how she smells. So I mean, I think I like that we disagree on this. I think fundamentally where it comes down is I don't think it's our goal to change people's minds. What I do know is through my life, I've been lucky enough to meet people and interact with people who have shared things, their direct experiences, their perspectives, perspectives that of others that have given me some resources and tools to deal with my own issues. One of the reasons, and this is maybe a mistake and maybe a fault on my part, one of the reasons I think I'm not so traumatized by what's happening, and I'm on Twitter a lot, and I see a lot of what's going on in it.

It's bad. It's horrible. It's really horrible. You see a lot of what's going on in it. I mean, that's why I'm tuning in. I see as it's happening. I'm not sure what the implications of that are or if it's a model for the larger world or just the Twitter world. Right. There, and I guess we're going to see as time goes on, but one of the reasons I think I'm not, and again, it's privilege is a part of this, but one of the reasons I'm not totally despondent about this is I have enough problems in my personal life. I am quick to anger. I'm impatient. I sometimes yell at my wife. You know what I mean?

I have issues. I'm afraid I have to hang up. So I am fundamentally looking for tools and resources that can get me to a place where I feel like I'm calm, peaceful, have clarity of thought, and then engage and organize and see what's going on. And I think part of the issue that's come in for me as I continue to calm my mind down slowly, but surely I see just how interconnected all of us are. And I include people who have foolish viewpoints, who think that Muslims shouldn't be allowed in this country, who think that black people are inferior. I am never going to try to convince those people through a logical argument that they're wrong because their beliefs are not based on logic.

Reason and logic is going to bump off of them like anyone who just doesn't get it. But I do think there are ways to kind of open up a dialogue that maybe not with a specific purpose of changing their mind, but give some added perspective. It's like the famous saying that travel cures xenophobia, right? It's hard to be someone who thinks all these other people are so horrible when you actually go out into other cultures in the world. I don't agree with that either. I was very narrow. I'm sure read the history of the great literature, 19th century English travelers. They took their own food and they were completely shoveled.

Oh yeah, that's a good point. Someone who's, you know, they just travel just gave them more evidence of the inferiority of all the people who live in India. Well you know what it is. I love this. If you're inclined to, if you're receptive to new ideas, you'll find them whether you are a man, Dr. Johnson again, but rarely left London. Once he arrived there and had the most expansive mind possible. So I don't know, some people find travel, some people don't. So let me ask you a question. Do you think there are factors or elements or things that are capable of changing people's minds and perspectives?

Do those things? Yes, I do. What would some of the two ways? Yeah. Two points I wanted to make here. I absolutely do. Generally it happens slowly. If I didn't believe in the power of ideas to influence other people, will there be no reason to ever write anything or to have a conversation like this? So that ideas percolate through the culture, people are influenced, that's fantastic. That's what a culture is. That takes place very slowly, not during some election campaign. The other way which I think people can be changed a bit more aggressively is I do believe in political organizing and I think the Democratic Party has done a very, very bad job for the last 30 years, that the job of a political party is to say to people, here is a set of problems I think we have in common, here's a vision of a good society we have in common and you have to be able to persuade people of the second and you have to have a keen analysis of the first and the third step is to say, here are ways I think we can address these problems, that's who politics is.

The Democratic Party has done a very poor job of embracing working-class Americans because they're starting with Ronald Reagan, the Republican rights so aggressively became a kind of cultural right. The people who if they were voting their economic interests had been Democrats and the entire sat split, not because of an economic analysis but because of cultural interests. So yes in the long term ideas change people in the shorter term, savvy political organizing, a much better Democratic Party could have done a better job but during the election itself I don't think you can fault Hillary for too much, I think she ran a perfectly reasonable campaign.

So in your estimation what do you think, is it just voter suppression, is it just, is it just? No it's all those things, it's all those things. I mean I wonder because you know I'm coming, I'm 33, I know people who are younger me who have been voting for two, three terms now, you know I think there's a general sense of disillusionment with the entire political landscape, you know maybe a Bernie Sanders comes along and galvanizes people. Oh I don't think that's a Bernie Sanders. Well it's interesting, you actually share quite a bit of thinking with one of my good friends who's my exact age who was very skeptical, very very skeptical of Bernie Sanders didn't find much in what he was saying was substantive and really was just kind of you know building on emotion and kind of disillusionment and not dissimilar to in some ways so what Trump was doing in terms of the politics- I don't know why I argument against Bernie Sanders, it's that if you believe in political organizing and I do, then it has to take place not just every four years when someone's running for the White House, it has to take place every day, you have to, and this is something the tea part is very savvy about well who's running for school board and who's running for the state assembly and where's this a group of candidates that will rise through the political process and become more insightful and more experienced, if Bernie Sanders were the person he purported to be, he would have established a socialist party in Vermont 30 years ago and started grooming those candidates, I think Bernie Sanders cares about Bernie Sanders, we probably vote the same way almost things, but he really let down the side by failing to do that.

It's funny, I mean that's essentially what my friend was saying, he says that Bernie Sanders is doing this for himself, yeah I mean he was, he was saying that Bernie Sanders is for himself, people who have been around the political, been around him for 30 years know this and this is what's going on. What I wonder though is, and I think what's weird is, is while we may disagree about the outlook and maybe the perspective and some of the conditions that led to this, I think we agree that the grassroots organizing, the community based things that are going on including your bike rides, right, including going and cycling and being out in nature and having discussions with people, I think those are the things that kind of pull us out of this, and it may be that this- We don't agree about that, I don't think we are going to pull out of this, I think it's just- You think it's the death spiral?

I don't know, I'm not sure I'm ready to go quite that far, but I think it's just going to get worse and worse and worse for four years, yeah the country's going to be significantly worse, so why it's true, I'm old, I'm white, I'm male, and I'm as buffered from this as a person can be. I have an IRA, and a fine union health plan, you know I have a union pension, there are two words you're not going to hear much in the future. So I'm a shelter from this, the direct effects of this, this of course it can be a short of a nuclear war, the complete collapse of the climate, which you can live, are very real possible.

Of course don't. I have a kid. I just, I know. Just lead to the utter death of a planet, I can't promise you that, there's no, the easy way out of death, but it's going to get worse and worse and worse for four years and nothing good will come with this. I, and it will echo beyond that, once he starts appointing you the first and the right-wing crackpots to the Supreme Court, that guy's going to serve for 30 years. Yeah, I mean, we can't, yeah, yeah, potential, we could die, he could die, you never know. I mean, this, I know, I wish him, I wish him a happy retirement and flour that's starting like now.

Of course, no, and I don't mean he would die as a good thing, I'm just saying we just, we don't know. No, we're not, no, we're not going to go. Absolutely, not tell that to the NSA. And I'd like to just interject here, I love, love, love, love that you disagree with me on all of this stuff. This is how we sharpen the tools of our particular perspectives or beliefs. So I, I, there's no contentiousness whatsoever, I'm really courteous guys. So I mean, I agree that the chances are 99% over the next four years, however long Trump's presidency is, things are going to get worse. We, I don't disagree with that.

I'm kind of taking the longer term look of how do we look back on this in 20 years when my son is 20 years, I mean, I, I just, I just feel like to think that we were moving towards some utopian slowly, but surely with Obama and some of the policies that were enacted, to think that we were slowly moving there and there wouldn't be, here's what I really think. This is the truth of it. The same thoughts, emotions, experiences that we experience individually, individually through our days, through our years, through our months, through our experiences, our relationships, we now partially because of technology, partially because of, we can see this stuff so much quicker than we can.

We're seeing these oscillations play out in our external reality. We are seeing this connection of what Carl Jung and his, one of his famous disciples, Marie Louise Franz, talked about the interplay of psyche and matter. I think the distance between us experiencing something in here individually and then seeing it played out on the world stage and the global stage, that gap is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And I think since we're in kind of a shadow, let's call it a shadow aspect of society and culture right now, I don't think anyone would deny that anyway, that's what we're seeing and it feels oppressive and like there is no light at the end of the tunnel or things will always, this is the beginning of a spiral down that lasts for however long.

That said, until you shine the light on the shadow, which I think we're in the process of doing and I, and again, I don't think this had to happen. I don't think this is the only way we could have collectively come out better than this. I'm certainly not making that argument like the Reichstag fire had to happen and the Holocaust had to happen and Auschwitz had to happen for us to be like, hmm, that's not a good idea. I don't think that, but I am facing reality in the sense that it's going on now. This is the situation we're in and I'm not ready to completely on either side. I'm not sticking out of position on either side.

I'm leaning towards that this is an opportunity for generations to kind of wake up and see what's going on and maybe shift the collective evolution of this planet. That's where I'm leaning, but I don't know. I really don't. I think it's, I try not, I'm an optimist, obviously, as you can tell. I try not to be idealistic about this. I don't ever want to be like, things are great. This is going to happen. Just a little bump in the road. But I do have immense belief and confidence in the genuine compassion, empathy, and wisdom of a large enough segment of the population of this planet that we will be able to make something good of this.

I just, I don't think we don't elect a state and stay in it forever. That's just not how things work. I wish it worked like that because we'd all elect happiness and peace and we just stay there all the time, but it's not how it works. So I don't view this as a negative situation that just exists as a negative situation on an island, but rather something for us to work with to kind of figure out like how are we going to make this a better planet, maybe in a hundred years and you know, this could be the year. I know. I'm very concerned about having to get through dinner and I'm thinking, you know, maybe Chinese food.

Yeah, Chinese. Pretty good. I don't want to plan too far ahead. I know. And I mean, I, my worldview has necessarily zoomed out. I have a nine month old son. So it's not just me. Congrats. Thanks now. Pretty great, right? Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. It's a great one. It's really boring. And yet the whole package is pretty true. It's incredible. I love to be. Yeah. Oh, it's, it's one of my, I didn't know how much I'd love it and a lot of my friends are just now, you know, their wives are pregnant and they're on their go to. I'm like, oh, you guys are fucked if I'm your go to. You know, truthfully, it is an amazing thing.

But I've zoomed out and tried to think about the future of the planet while staying in the present and crafting solutions. I, you know, I like that we disagree with this. I, I'm not saying I'm going to be happy to see how this plays out because I do agree with you. I think we're going through, at least for very dark years, we're going to see the clock round back in innumerable ways and, you know, I'm not totally confident that he's going to get impeached. Like a lot of people think he is in the first time. We're going to get Mike Pence. Yeah. Right. Oh, someone who actually has beliefs and actually really they're shitty beliefs and like.

Right. They're horrible. Right. He's not, he's not stupid. Right. He's an adult. A horrible, disgusting adult. Right. An adult who that to me, someone with an actual and agenda scares me almost. I mean, you know, truthfully, at this point, my main thing just in the political, I just want Bannon and he just got needs to get out of the inner circle because that's what scares me more than anything else. This guy. I mean, we never. We need to treat my friend. Oh, geez. Let's see. God. Okay. So let's shift. Let's shift. Last one. What are we, what are we sort of regarding is, because we're running a little short on time.

What were we, what were we? 10, 15 minutes. 10 minutes. Perfect. Yeah. That's fine. I just wanted to, to touch on the ethicist. Okay. A little bit. And then I have three rapid fire questions at the end that won't take a lot of time. But I wanted to talk about the ethicist because like I said, you wrote a column where people would write in about ethical issues that they would be dealing with. And I was doing a lot of research on it. You know, a first one to give people an example was there was a patient who was going to get some anesthesia and he were, you know, here the name of the anesthesiologist and it sounded like a black name to him and he didn't, he requested no black people.

And the doctor wrote in to you and said, hey, you know, like what's going on? And you had a very, very astute and what I think correct way of looking at it. This is, this is not something to be considered. This is someone who's asking for help while there are, you know, certain requests that should be granted. This isn't something. And then the update was they did actually replace the person. So I just am giving people what a conception of what your column was about. My question to. To be clear, right. I did not think the anesthesiologist should have recused. I can't imagine. It's a matter. You should just have the right to ask for that.

Correct. Right. Marley or legally, as I understand it, although I'm not a lawyer, I think that's correct legally too. Yeah. There's no hospital really failed. Yeah. And they get complicated because you use an obligation to the patient. That's what made it fun. So I love that this is something you were being faced with these ethical questions. Not as really a thought exercise. These are real life situations that people are dealing with. So my question to you is someone who's dealt with so many of these individual ethical questions. What to you is the biggest ethical question facing, let's say, the nation, the country, people right now who care about making the place where we live, not horrible.

I guess I don't. I ultimately don't see a distinction between ethics and politics. Politics just ethics on a larger scale. But I see the essential problem as a political problem now. We have a horrible, horrible government and how do you both, how do you respond to its immediate predations and how do you change it? How do you get these people out of power? But those seem like political questions, not ethical questions. Well, they are ethical questions though because like you said, politics is, I mean, maybe in the past, I don't know, I wasn't alive, but maybe politics was more policy-based. It's identity now, right?

These are cultural wars, or at least that's how it's presented to us. People at the top, maybe they're making decisions that actually have policy implications. But identity politics has clearly infiltrated our political system where Donald Trump is president based on some of the things he said that aren't policy-based so much. But we do have a kind of, I mean, I take a tiny, tiny bit of comfort from the permanent government, from the staffers in each of these agencies, who, you know, they're people in the department of housing who really know a lot about housing, even if they're politics might be different from mine, these people are very thoughtful people.

Well, Ben Carson doesn't know anything about Ben Carson, but there are people within the department who do, and some of them are to the right of me and some of them are to the left of me. And that's true with things like when Trump says, "Well, we're going to pay for the wall with this 20% tear." Well, that's a policy decision that economists who actually do know a thing or two about economics, unlike the administration, weigh in on right away so that the motivation for that decision might have been just screwball xenophobia. But there are immediate policy implications, and they were admirably addressed.

So, I love it, okay, I want to get to the end of what we're talking about. I mean, hopefully, maybe sometime in the future, you can come back on and we can kind of take a look and see what's going on. I love these conversations. I think I actually enjoy conversations where people disagree with me more than they do. Well, there's nothing to say. So I can search it out of name calling. Yeah, we're disagreeing and shaking our seats. Don't mock my appearance. I have my own. I wish I had a different nose. What can I do? It's my nose. Oh, man. I'm going to ask you three relatively quick questions that probably won't seem that important and then one question at the end, and then we're done.

Well, that one seemed important. Yeah. Okay. So maybe you will. Maybe you will. What's your favorite color? I don't have one. No absence of color or just no preference whatsoever? Oh, I don't. I don't. I doubt it's even hard doing person place thing because, you know, some days I go, oh, the red, the cover of the dictionary I use, Mary and Webster. I like that color red, you know, because I'm looking at it right this second, but I don't really have a favorite. That's okay. I mean, this doesn't have to be your lifelong. Your current favorite color is okay. I can. I'm saying it's red. You said red.

So even if it's not fine. You're on record. What's your favorite number? Again, I don't really think that way. Think of. Well, okay. There is a number, I do use 66 and I refer to it from time to time. There's the famous root. There is. That's the area I graduated from high school. I don't know. It just looks pretty as a bit of graphics, so I'm slowly putting out. I'm not. We're not holding to is your favorite. Right. No, I understand. If you're not. No tattooing will be involved. Exactly. Well, they're in red. All right. Last one. And it doesn't have to be your favorite. What's an animal you enjoy?

Well, that one's a little easier. I'm very sympathetic to our fellow primates and I don't know. For a number of years, I wrote for The Letterman Show and one of the most satisfying things about it was I got to work with some really talented monkeys. I find monkeys endlessly appealing. My most intimate relationship, this is a chimp named Zippy because I believe they were all named Zippy for several years. It was like the Jason and the Max of Simey in life for a while. We did this piece Monkey Cam where we put a camera on this chimp and allowed it to run free in the studio during the show and it was such a pleasure to work with that monkey.

It was great. Yeah, you look at the, do you know that movie more again? Look it up. It also made great use of monkey images. Yeah, monkeys have some. All right. I love it. That's right. I do a Vedic chant to Hanuman who is a monkey guy. So interesting fact about Hanuman too. Barack Obama keeps three things in his pockets at all times and one of them is a small Hanuman that his grandfather gave him. Cool. It was very cool. All right. Last question. Probably a little more important than this. What's a practical tip that you could share with people listening that has helped you in your life? This could be lofty, mundane, whatever, just a practical tip that has helped you.

That lightweight down, they make those little jackets with that lightweight down. That's great. They're great. You can look right. You don't have to have a heavy coat. It's nothing. You can put it under a coat. All right. That's a pretty great thing. I'm like that. I don't know. I mean, is it too abstract to say we can go back to regularly scheduled group activities? Doesn't matter. You don't have to like Shakespeare. It doesn't have to be a Shakespeare group. You know, if you like to play Scrabble, if you have people you like to go out and eat with once a week, engage with other people that will improve your happiness.

I love it. Randy, thank you so much for doing this. I know we scheduled it quickly. We got set up with FaceTime. Well, I appreciate you giving me all the walking me through all this a lot of technology for geezers. You're a great, sweet patient. Well, now you're set up. You're good to go. I'd love to do this again sometime. Sure. Really. I had a blast and I'll be tuning in to First of Place. Thank you so much. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] It is possible to disagree with people and still be cordial and we'll see what happens.

Who knows if Randy or me is right or somewhere in between is probably the likely answer. Go check out Randy's podcast, "Personplace Thing," really great. Really, really, really, really, really awesome. Go check out the episode with Sharon Salzburg if you need a place to start. Speaking of Sharon Salzburg, there's a real meditation challenge that's going on right now. Get involved. There's still time if this is February of 2017 for this year. It's really awesome. It's one of the few things that consistently gets me to meditate. The accountability factor is great. Plus Lily Cushman, who is a guest on this podcast, has made it tremendously awesome, more and more awesome every year.

Really, really great stuff. That's it. Thank you. Listen, here's the deal. I'm going to break it down to you people at the end who are actually listening to this. If you could take the time, go on iTunes. I know it's a nightmare. I know iTunes is a nightmare. You don't have to tell me. It's horrible. I don't know. We're being forced to use it. But if you can go to iTunes, search for synchronicity, this podcast, go there, rate it. Just put -- you don't even have to put five stars. Put one star. I just want to see that people hear this and actually can take this action doing it. That would be tremendous.

Because I check every now and then, and by every now and then, I mean obsessively, and I see, like, no one's rating anymore, and I know you guys are listening to this, and I know you care because my numbers, they're going up. I know people are into it. So if you could do that, this is my desperate plea for help, please rate and review synchronicity. If you donate, you're super cool. You can do that. I got a mortgage now. So not above taking donations. Thank you, as always, for listening, and I will see you next week.