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Evan Gary Hirsch and Kip Baldwin of Soul Twin Messiah
65 Plays1 month ago
Joe and Mark are joined by Evan Gary Hirsch and Kip Baldwin, who make up the duo Soul Twin Messiah (STM).
Evan Gary Hirsch, AKA The Blue Rocker, gets his aesthetic from his blue eyes and glitzy clothes. A California boy, he's into many different forms of music -- classic rock, new wave, punk and psychedelic rock.
Kip Baldwin, AKA Oshalla, is a farm kid from Washington State, where his family raised racehorses. When he was young, he had an experience of infinity that changed his perspective on everything. He moved to the Bay area in 1985 specifically for a musical community. He spent a lot of years doing "hair metal" music, which was popular at the time.
Evan jokes that Senator Bernie Sanders brought the two together. In 2016 he was looking for a producer to help him document his support of the politician and that's how Evan and Kip met.
Both artists have a central message, which is the importance of love and selflessness.
That informs their choice of media. Kip champions the classic John Lennon song Imagine (1971). Evan makes the case for why we should give Construction Time Again (1983) by Depeche Mode another listen.
An inspiring and hopeful conversation!
For more information, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at [email protected]
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Transcript
Favorite Rappers and Influences
00:00:08
Speaker
Joe, how you doing? Very well, as usual. Yourself? I'm good, except I'm still reeling from the question that I got asked last week, which I'm going to pose to you. So okay in my journalism class, we had a big discussion about the ah Drake and Kendrick.
00:00:25
Speaker
beef. And afterwards, a student came up and asked me who my favorite rap singer was. And I had no answer because I couldn't i I mean, I could say Kendrick, I could say Drake, but I'd be really lying because I don't listen to enough rap to say I have a favorite. So how about you? Do you have a favorite rapper? Oh, man.
00:00:47
Speaker
can i's going to get you on this one yeah my two square white guys right now But I mean, there is some rap songs that I like, you know, but I couldn't tell you a single Drake song. Okay. I thought our guests might have an answer to this.
00:01:03
Speaker
I definitely am a fan of Eminem and he just blew me away. When I saw the real Slim Shady video, it just blew my mind and I watched it over and over and over and and then I did his whole back catalog and everything. And I, being a white boy too, I like kind of like white rappers. And one outfit I love actually from Canada is called Sweatshot Union. And they have like multiple MCs. But what I really love is live hip hop music. Okay. That was Evan, Gary Hirsch. Welcome to the podcast, Evan. That was your answer to the question and, uh, kept all doing welcome as well. And what, what do you say? I agree with Evan. It's like having live musicians doing rap is really cool. Like Dela soul arrested development was really cool. Um, but I gotta say right now, I think my favorite rapper without a doubt is P Diddy. Um, because he is exposed how dirty the entertainment businesses
00:02:09
Speaker
which is something that I've been trying to help people understand for a long time. So it's really hard for me to with a straight face to say I support any rapper. I do, I think Eminem's on the right side of stuff. He appears to be, but who knows?
Introduction to Evan Gary Hirsch
00:02:23
Speaker
The thing is to get that to any level of success, like a lot of these people, maybe not Kendrick, but most of these people, it's like the stuff you have to do to sell your soul to get that kind of fame is now getting exposed. And for that reason, I'm kind of taking P Diddy right now.
00:02:38
Speaker
Okay, Kip Baldwin. I do like Snoop Dogg's wine. Does that count, Mark? A hundred percent. So Evan, Gary, Hirsch and Kip Baldwin, welcome to the podcast, Recreative. I think we'd like to hear about exactly who you guys are and where you come from.
00:02:54
Speaker
So I'm Evan Gary Hirsch, The Blue Rocker. The name doesn't come from blues music or rock music. i'll go I guess the rocker part does. It comes from my blue eyes and the persona that I've created, the the shtick, the um aesthetic of my my rocker persona being all blue and really glitzy, fun, wild blue outfits, and a little bit of Elton John, but all blue. And I come from Mountain View, California, home of Google. I'm definitely a California man, all kind of through and through, and and all that entails. I'm representing the LGBT and all the pluses community. I do live with a male partner. I've always lived with a male partner and sometimes had a female girlfriend. Maybe more significantly, though, I represent the ultra rare gerontophile community.
Evan's Musical Journey and Egoscue Method
00:03:41
Speaker
I am exclusively attracted to senior citizens, and I've been that way my entire mature life.
00:03:48
Speaker
Okay. Thank you for introducing to me a ah new word. Gerontophile. Gerontology is the study of the elderly and like a Francophile loves all things French. I love all things elderly. So, um, um yeah yeah you know, I'm into so many different kinds of music. I started out in classic rock. I got into harder rock. Then they got me into new wave. Then I discovered punk and I realized this is my music. I am a punk rocker. I love punk rock. And then I got into some of the metal and then, uh, Ultimately, I got into Grateful Dead and then all the hippie psychedelic rock that went along with that. And when I was like 21, I looked back and I said, well, I don't hate Duran Duran now just because I listened to Grateful Dead and Sons of Champlain. I still love them all. So I love all that music. I'm definitely versatile in that respect. I traded in my
00:04:38
Speaker
wakeboard for a yoga mat at one point. I did yoga really really dove in really heavy for nine years. I was even in the teacher training somewhat and I led some classes but ultimately I realized that was not the best thing for my body because they teach you how to calm your mind and sort of accept the pain of the pretzel positions you're forcing your body into that doesn't necessarily want to go that way. And I had an injury actually that I created partly from doing yoga. It's a torn labrum in my hip.
00:05:08
Speaker
And then I kept doing the yoga, which kind of exacerbated. So ultimately, it was thankfully my yoga instructor who led me to Egoscue. My main modality of exercise is called the Egoscue method. E-G-O-E. Another new word. S-C-U-E. And that's a guy's name. Pete Egoscue came up with these exercises. Some of them are a little bit yoga based. Most of them are very much physical therapy based. They are all postural training exercises He was working with amputees, obviously, especially leg amputees of veterans. You know, people coming back from the war losing a limb and teaching them how to use their body either with a prosthetic or without and how to balance. It's all about balance and posture and just realigning the muscles so that they support you with whatever deficit you have. And that has been
00:05:58
Speaker
an absolute miracle worker for me, healing back pain and just healing everything. And and I really love the exercises, their menus. You put a ear plug in your ear and you can hear and and the voice leads you through the exercises and they're timed or they're by repetitions and they're <unk> really, really potent and powerful. And you do them and then you're in great posture and you feel great. And then you go out and do whatever your other sports are.
00:06:25
Speaker
And so that's been a real blessing for me. So that's kind of my physical world there.
Kip Baldwin's Origins and Experiences
00:06:29
Speaker
You got my music world, my physical world. I've got two older brothers sitting down in LA. We're running the gamut here. What about Patch? Do you have any? No, wait. No, before you answer that question, we're going to go to our fellow guest, Kit Baldwin. so Well, um I'm from Washington state originally. I grew up, we raised thoroughbred race horses. And um so i'm I'm a farm boy.
00:06:53
Speaker
at heart and actually even had the experience of My grandparents lived up in Golden, BC and had a bunch of land on Mount Mobley, like 36,000 acres or something. There's a lot. And so anyway, we literally built their log cabin from scratch. We cut down the trees. We peeled the logs, ah treated the logs for the foundation, all of it. And we did it that whole summer with just a gas generator. And I'm so appreciative of having that experience in life, especially
00:07:24
Speaker
moving down to the Bay Area in 1985, really at the you know the beginnings of the tech movement in earnest. And that's when the internet was really starting to get going, which really launched in like 82. So to be able to have that for you know both ends of the perspective, OK, are we better off? Aren't we better off? I've found very valuable. I think it'd be a good time to share because it's going to be a large part of what what I end up talking about with Imagine.
00:07:54
Speaker
is I had a really unusual experience when I was 12. And again, Farm Boy, we didn't talk about astral projection, out-of-body experience. I knew nothing about Buddhism, Hinduism, non-duality, any of this stuff. And my dad and I had gone to see the Seahawks playing. It was like 78-79.
00:08:13
Speaker
And they were playing the Raiders. And it's about a five and a half hour round trip from where we lived on the Columbia up to Seattle. So dad and I had a good day, which is rare, still rare to this day to have a good day. He's just in a lot of pain, I feel for him. I hope i hope someday he finds some peace. so But anyway, so we got home and being 12, wow, full day with dad, exciting, ah long road trips, sporting event. I was exhausted. I laid down in my bed. I left my body.
00:08:44
Speaker
I hovered over my body. Nope, that's not me not in there. Then out of the house, off the planet, out of the solar system, out of the galaxy, across the universe. And then I got outside the universe and my awareness was turned to face the universe. And I could see how everything was interconnected and flowed and how everything was one and everything had a had a specific role that was no lesser or greater than anything else.
00:09:13
Speaker
Then it turned my awareness out to the blackness of infinity. And that became my point of seeking for the rest of my life, although 12 years old, you don't know that at all. And having no reference point for any of this, I was just going, wow, this is wow. you know I mean, it literally was such a profound experience that it was so much for me to take in. I literally got up and started vomiting. And what being faced with infinity did, one, it made me aware there can't be a beginning or end to anything.
00:09:43
Speaker
larger, smaller edges of universes, dimensions, everything is infinite. And it gave me one of the most profound gifts of overcoming my fear of the unknown, which we are largely all controlled by. And instead of going, oh my God, what's going to happen to him after I
Entertainment Industry Insights
00:10:01
Speaker
die? And will I keep going on? And oh my God, am I going to go to heaven, and hell, whatever? I realized I could be for a trillion existences or not.
00:10:10
Speaker
And I'm going to be no closer to an ultimate answer or final destination than I am right now. And that really all I am is a story being told by my source self. All of these are just stories. We we come from this nothingness.
00:10:26
Speaker
And that experience made me, like when I have ran across, you know say, a song like Imagine or a thinker like Joseph Campbell, instead of going, wow, this has inspired me, it's confirmed things that somehow I already knew. So I didn't feel nearly as crazy for having these thoughts about religion and how none of this really worked and how none of it made a lot of sense. And um then I moved down here to the Bay Area In 1985, I loaded 65,000 pounds of frozen strawberries onto a semi truck. I got into San Francisco with 25 cents in my pocket. I knew nobody. I came down here with a friend of mine and i I had a quarter literally and I called one girl that I thought I might know that lived here from high school and it turned out to be a wrong number.
00:11:17
Speaker
And, uh, and the, and the journey began dot, dot, dot, but I moved down here specifically, um, rather than going to LA for music. Cause that's why I came down here. Cause I was looking for community. I was looking for the sixties. I make the joke. I was looking for the sixties, uh, 20 years too late, but turns out maybe I was like 30 years too early. And. That wasn't what was going on in LA at that time. It was the whole hairband scene. And that just wasn't what I was looking for.
00:11:45
Speaker
Unfortunately, that's what was going on here too. So I spent a lot of years in in that world doing, um you know, the whole hair metal band scene that was going on in the Bay Area. I ah used to write, there used to be a magazine that tied the whole Bay Area music scene together called BAM, and I had a regular column in that for a long time. I've managed artists, I've worked with like Linda Perry, you know, from For Non Blounts, now songwriter extraordinaire, I would never have,
00:12:14
Speaker
believe that was going to be her career trajectory when I knew her here. Not that I didn't think she was incredibly talented, but it just like, wow. It's like writing songs for Christina Aguilera and Jeep Trek and on and on and on and being in the songwriter hall of fame. It's like.
00:12:28
Speaker
pretty cool to have gotten to work with her. And I then got into the visual side of the entertainment world, really through computer animation and special effects. I started working with a company in San Jose called Metropolis Digital. They randomly met a guy who was, we were playing pool at a bar called The Agenda, and I overheard him talking about what his company did, and I went, oh, music video.
00:12:53
Speaker
And ah that turned into, you know, in addition to my career where I, like I did election graphics for ABC, nationally, the 2000 election graphics, um and then that business sort of dried up because they brought a lot of the business in house when the economy tanked then. So I switched my focus away from the entertainment industry and into local and sustainable foods because my passion, and I have a creative history to show this, has always been to say, hey, what we're doing isn't working.
00:13:22
Speaker
What we're doing isn't working and not just complain about it, but actually try to find solutions for it. So I started to work in the local and sustainable foods community here in the Bay Area and was the forefront of the grass fed beef movement. And then I felt a calling to get back in the entertainment business. And sort of my very background ultimately led me to being a producer. And one of the main things that I had a part in creating was a show called Weed Country for Discovery. In fact, it was one of the main creators of it.
00:13:51
Speaker
And that was about the medical marijuana industry here in California just before legalization. Everyone was getting raided. The guy that was the star of the show that's still a good friend of of both of ours, um he was one of the guys that got just wiped out. and Because local municipalities were taking money from the feds to raid these businesses that were legal here in California. Nothing ever happened. Nobody ever got convicted of anything. But their lives were were kind of decimated.
00:14:19
Speaker
And so that we had it been legal and had advertisers not been so jittery, I would probably still be on the air because we came out of the gate as on the Hollywood reported top 25 heat list and um had 1.7 million viewers the first week.
00:14:38
Speaker
and did it turned into a miniseries. And then I produced films with about counterfeit olive oil before then Evan and I hooked up to do Soul Documentary about eight years ago. And with this shared vision of finding people with solutions, pointing out, hey, this isn't working, helping people understand you know that we we have to make some radical change, not to communism, socialism, as a hero of ours says, you know, when ask ah Jock Fresco went and asked, well, it sounds like you're talking communism or socialism. He said, no, communism and socialism aren't radical enough. And so we've been doing our work first in making videos, doing a documentary on Jock.
00:15:20
Speaker
And then we spent three years in the studio with Joel Joffee at Studio D and also recording three albums of music all about the same subject matter. Can I ask ah Evan then how did this ah this current duo come about?
Collaborations and Projects
00:15:37
Speaker
Well, it was actually Bernie Sanders caused the whole thing. so i'd never done you your mittens I had never done anything anything political in my life and something in 2016 about him inspired me you know that it seemed like there was a point at which he was actually a viable candidate for the president of the United States and For me, someone who could get that close to that significant a position who was anti-war and anti-capitalism and anti-business and and you know quote for the people could actually you know maybe stand a chance of changing the world. And at that time, you know before you know he got eclipsed by Hillary and it was like, okay, it it could be Bernie and Trump. And it was almost like you had the love president and the hate president. I mean, so literally. yeah And just something, I felt a calling, something inspired me. um I was looking for a way to channel my philanthropy. And so I just kind of went all in on the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016. And that's when I was looking, I had this outlandish plot that I set out to pursue, and I was looking for a producer to work with me and help document it.
00:16:47
Speaker
that we would video and document our journey of pursuing Bernie Sanders. And that's what led me to meet Kip through the gentleman who ran the Producing Department. I graduated from Academy of Art University in 2009, actually, with a degree. It's a motion picture and television degree. My concentrations were acting and screenwriting. So I was learning about storytelling, how to embody it, how to write it. It said how to create characters, tell stories, et cetera.
00:17:14
Speaker
And yet I did have an affinity for for real life stories. you know i was like I almost had more of a journalistic ah streak in me and and not necessarily creating characters, but be my own character in how I express what I share about what I witnessed in the world and seeking out things that are worthy of finding.
00:17:33
Speaker
and sharing. And so that's what we set out to do. And Curran Engel was the guy who was running the Producing Department and Academy of Art. And he basically he just said two things. I said, i was I wanted to make a documentary about it. And he said, well, number one, why don't you make just like 10 minute videos as you go instead of waiting till all things done and then make a movie. Just release stuff as you go in real time, little 10 minute viral videos on YouTube.
00:17:58
Speaker
Great idea. Then number two, contact Kip Baldwin. like That's all I said, contact Kip Baldwin. He knew that i I was into the love message of Bernie and that I wanted to bring more love into the world and my writing was the secret powers of love. And he knew that Kip was the love guy and he's done reality television and he just you know felt there was a match there. And he actually introducing us was one of the last great things that he did in his life as he died just two months later. Was it two months later, brother?
00:18:25
Speaker
I just put together the fact that current angle introduced us exactly two months before he died. And Jacque Fresco, we interviewed exactly two months before he died. So you guys better watch where you stand. Look, both. ways Holy shit, man. Remember, it's remember, don't share that. You know, two months from today. yeah it's It's not dying this time. It's famousness or something else. Yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker
It's the viral, but going viral part. So that's literally just how I met and and became you know aware of and then introduced to and familiar with Kip Baldwin. And we just immediately started working together. We had some meetings and we talked about the Bernie campaign. He actually sent me to go meet a couple of friends of his who run the Love Foundation. And they were giving us consulting and tons of ideas about how to approach Bernie and how to build our own campaign and bring his campaign to ah you know get his attention with what we were doing. We designed this Bernie bus. It was this coach. They actually literally designed a potential, um you know, rap for a coach that we could take out on the road. So, but the thing is, is the timing. it it Fortunately, I think,
00:19:32
Speaker
It stretched out. i really I literally went to Orlando, Florida to meet these guys with the Love Foundation for a week, and then it turned into two, then it turned into three weeks. I literally had to buy a guitar out there because I was like away from my guitar for too long, you know. So my third week I bought another guitar so that I was starting to play out there. and And I wrote a theme song, Bernie loves us. and But were you officially associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign or was this like? just I was a contributor to it and a supporter of it, you know, vocally on social. I ran a I created a Facebook page called Bernie loves us. It still exists. We we amassed about fourteen thousand followers.
00:20:09
Speaker
And it was just a ah venue, a place to post inspiring content, et cetera. That was the capacity. Again, we were creating our own campaign. you know What I learned at that time is anyone can campaign for anything, anytime. You yeah make your sign and go walk down the street, you know or you make your bus and you wrap it and you drive around the country, and or you make a podcast or a Facebook page.
00:20:32
Speaker
And was it during this time that you guys discovered you had some musical things in common that you want to do? Not at all. Not at all. right Like I wrote the Bernie theme song and everything. Bernie loves us. Yes he does. Knows our future is love. So that was like the thing. but I came back from that, and we we were still regrouping and formulating, and okay, how are we going to approach this? Where do we go next? But time was getting away from us. this I spent the month of, I think, April of there, and then we had the month of May. We were working things out, and by mid-June, he was out. They had the Democratic Democratic Convention. Hillary won the nomination, and he was done. So thankfully, we didn't, you know,
00:21:14
Speaker
waste more money and time and everything. Wait, you didn't switch it to Hillary loves us. us. No, she don't. You know, yeah I do want to make a point about that. What I think people missed about what was going on in 2016, and I just wrote ah an open letter to Kamala and Tim, and I did the same thing when Obama got elected. You know, I said, don't try to, you know, we've already gone far enough as far as meeting these people in the middle.
00:21:43
Speaker
They hate you. They're telling you they hate you. They're telling you they're not going to work with you. You have the House, the Senate, and the White House. You can actually affect some really radical change, but it has to be systemic. Otherwise, we're going to end up and know in a worse place than we are now. Well, we ended up with Trump.
00:22:00
Speaker
And I really honestly believe with all my heart what Trump was was a vote for radical change. I think had it been Bernie, I have no doubt he would have won on the landslide. Yeah, i I mean, I'm going to get burned for this, but I believe that, yeah, he got screwed. And I love that, you know, <unk> it's such a great irony that politics of all things is what brought Kip and me together because like I said, that was the first and last political thing I ever did. And um and we we just, we turned our focus completely, did a 180 after we realized, okay, he's out. Well, there we're not there's nothing left to support there. It was about that guy who, you know, Hillary wasn't anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-business, pro people, pro love.
00:22:44
Speaker
you know she was She was more of the same. Yeah, more of the same. So anyway, we realized that we time was not on our side with regard to supporting Bernie and and carrying out my mission, my my original idea. And so we were looking for something a little farther away in the offing to give us time to campaign for something. And we realized that the next summer was the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco 2017.
00:23:16
Speaker
we decided to focus our efforts on that. Let's campaign to make the Summer of Love 50th Anniversary a real resurgence, call it a 50-year cultural cycle, which is ah is a significant thing, that we bring this back, that the the feelings of peace and love and unity and collaboration and changing the world, and that we now have time to devote to this and to build it and make the Bay Area a hub for change and bring change makers from all over the world to start the conversations and get the ball rolling for how we're going to actually make change that that you know circumvents governments and and politics and system you know business as usual system and status quo and all that and so ah we embarked on that endeavor and it started with our short film An Invitation to Action which was sort of a
00:24:06
Speaker
our homage to the freaks as they called themselves in the 60s who literally wrote a letter. We went to an exhibition at the um Jewish Museum of Art of all places. It was ah on Bill Graham. Bill Graham was a music promoter in San Francisco and he put on all of the big rock shows back in the day, Grateful Dead Santana, just all of it, and then all through the years, all 60s, 70s, 80s. He was a Jewish rock empresario, they called him, just a producer of big concerts. He put on this series called The Day on the Green at at Oakland Coliseum, where the the football stadium, where they would have like multiple huge headlines. The biggest concert I ever missed in my life was just before I was old enough to start going to concerts. It was ACDC,
00:24:53
Speaker
Aerosmith and Ted Nugent, we'd like three support bands, all in one venue. And so there've been over the years so many where you just had three or four big, big headliners. And so it was an exhibition on Bill Graham in the Jewish Museum representing him as a successful Jewish man. and at this exhibition they had ah the original a copy of the original letter of invitation that was written to the Summer of Love. We proclaim a Summer of Love and gathering the world to come here and converge and express your love and and you know rethink everything for the world. and It was a beautiful thing and
00:25:33
Speaker
essentially we used it as the opening for our film and invitation to action. And that was our invitation, you know, kind of harkening back to their invitation and now we're giving you our invitation. Wait, i so I got to stop you there. So I wasn't actually aware that that that whole thing started with an invitation.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, the summer of there was an invitation to the Summer of Love. And it was all about having multiple free events. And first event of that year, 1967, was January 14th, the Human Be-In. And that's where the Beatnik poet generation passed the proverbial cultural torch on to the younger hippie freak generation.
00:26:13
Speaker
And ah you had Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary and they were doing speeches. i and And then you had the Grateful Dead playing and you had the younger crowd. And so they were inspiring the younger crowd. Hey, we've done it. We've been doing our beat poetry in North Beach for X number of years through the fifties and early sixties. Now it's time for you to take it over. We need the next generation. So we were doing the same thing with our fiftieth anniversary summer of love.
00:26:39
Speaker
as well and re-energizing the people who were still alive and around from back then. And we know so many of those people. I was there. I was asked this one. We went to the 50th anniversary of the human being and um in January 2017 to start our our interviewing and our man on the scene, you know, journalism. And we interviewed many people. I was very there in the Summer of Love and it was amazing and we danced and we loved and it we thought we were going to change the world. They felt like they failed and that they didn't change the world but the fact is they did because we're still talking about them today. We're still ah carrying forward their agenda and pursuing the type of transformation for our world, the people's world, the ah world of our human family, eight billion strong and growing, the world over on this
00:27:29
Speaker
big beautiful blue ball that's so precious and so conducive to life, to maintaining our lives. You know, now we want to colonize another planet that's totally inhospitable to life. Are you kidding me? Like, we have one right here. This is the wake-up call that we're we're we're offering. And so that was our first big project together.
00:27:50
Speaker
Okay, so and so that was your ah your first project and is it still your main project? Because I know that you're working on an album, you've been working on an album for for a few years now and you've got several tracks in. Three or four albums, I think. Yeah. so They're recorded. We're releasing them now. What what is your main focus right now? yeah Our main focus right now is releasing is <unk>ing our music and you know putting as much time and energy as we can into that. it's it's It's a challenge with the messaging that we do because the algorithms do not work towards non-divisive content. And when you're an anti-capitalistic content, and it's it's a fact. I mean, I know I have friends that you you saw when they changed an algorithm. The algorithm at a certain point, in fact, our friends at the Love Foundation, their activity went from like 20,000 like supposed to like zero overnight.
00:28:45
Speaker
And so I think that the subject matter is a challenge, plus the music business itself has always been really, really ugly.
00:28:56
Speaker
It's the only art form I know of where the artists have never made money off the art that they create. They make money off their merchandise. They make money off touring. And that's so they can you know keep from being perpetually in debt to the record labels. And it's always been like that. And it's it's even worse now. and But what I recently watched a three-part documentary on disco, of all things. And having grown up during that era, and yeah I love to dance and stuff. I didn't really think of it as anything more than, wow, I'm out dancing, having a good time, and Saturday Night Fever, and whatever. It turned out disco was a really revolutionary art form ah for a variety of reasons. It brought together the African American community, Latino community, and the LGBTQ community all through dance and music. it But it wasn't played on the radio.
00:29:49
Speaker
which was the main way that music was discovered. In fact, it was the only way really music was discovered. But it became so popular through the underground that eventually radio had to start playing, the and industry had to start taking notice of it because the there was a community that needed it. There was a community that needed to feel they belonged and and brought people together.
00:30:12
Speaker
And I think that with what we're doing is the same thing, hopefully, that there'll be gradually a growing community that will say, well, no, we're not two guys that are trying to be rock stars. We have that's the furthest thing from either of our agenda. But we do have a lot to say. And we found that documentaries are great for reaching the choir and music hopefully will reach some people who maybe never thought about some of the things and wow, might be inspired to go watch Invitation to Action or A World Worth Imagining. So that's where we're at. But we after hiring and and spending the last year and having spent a lot of money on marketing and social media gurus and
00:30:56
Speaker
And we were having a meeting with um them a few weeks ago, and there were certain posts that we were putting up like, who's your, you know, like your five favorite Led Zeppelin songs? How did so-and-so influence you? And she goes, those are really good responses. We should be doing more of that. And I'm like, yeah, but that's not what we're doing.
00:31:15
Speaker
That's not what this is about. we've we've spent a lot we we have been shared i'm not even say we've spent a lot of time We have been shared some of the most profound materials and got to do some of the most amazing things, meet some of the most amazing people.
00:31:31
Speaker
and And to turn it into like, okay, we're going to trivialize it by getting away from our message just so we can get likes, I don't think that's the way it's going to work out for us ultimately. I think that gradually more and more people are going to hear what we're saying because it's not about us. Yes, you guys are not just about the music, you're about the message that the music is is delivering.
00:31:57
Speaker
We're all about the message. It's just we're trying any medium possible. We started with a short film. Then we went on to multiple well multiple interview videos and little short videos about people. We were meeting solutionaries and people involved in ah nonprofit organizations and scenesters who were in the scene trying to make change happen.
00:32:17
Speaker
and making change happen and putting on events that brought people together, built community, connected minds together. And ultimately we had an opportunity to interview Jacque Fresco, whom I felt was the most brilliant man on earth. He and his partner Roxanne Meadows co-founded the Venus Project, which is some of the most vast and detailed ah transformational plans for operating society the world over. And so it's just the most fair and advanced and intelligent thinking and planning that you've ever heard of that no one's ever heard of but the funny thing is and what's really and important is that all of this all of the thinking and all the plans as brilliant as they are
00:33:00
Speaker
what's What's amazing about everything that Jock has to say, it's pure common sense. It just makes sense. It's like looking at the world and going, what are we doing? like he In our film, he says, we are so ignorant. These are our dark ages. These times will not be remembered.
00:33:18
Speaker
That's how, you know, off the rails we've gone. So a lot of his ideas that we're going, wow, they're so brilliant. They're really, it's just the most basic common sense and it's getting your ego out of the way and not doing stuff for profit. As a science fiction writer, I'm really interested in what these ideas are and what you would say would like, what are some of the main points of this idea?
Fresco's Vision and AI-Managed Future
00:33:42
Speaker
Start with our film, A World Worth Imagining, Jacque Fresco, The Man with the Plan. That's the documentary film that we made based off of the interview that we had with him at age 101, two months before he died in 2017. We released our film in November 11, 11, 2019. And essentially what he's saying is our problems are mainly solved by allocation of resources, right? I mean, there, I like to look at like there's seven basic things that all humans need, you know, clothing, shelter, food, water, energy, transportation, and medical care. You know, the rest, yeah, you can throw in education too, but it's, these are what we need to survive and to run our world. And so he's talking about
00:34:28
Speaker
a world of such abundance where once we realize, oh, we have all these resources. We have machines to make machines and AI to create blueprints to make better machines that are then 3D printed and can be made in mass at scale. And we could repurpose things we already have instead. you know the The basic tenets of the Venus Project are a world beyond, first of all, their little motto is beyond politics, poverty, and war. But really what they're saying is a world beyond money.
00:34:58
Speaker
beyond borders and nations and beyond governments and so it's basically the human family taking care of one another by utilizing all these vast resources on this big beautiful blue ball to take care of everyone and not hoarding things over here and that guy's starving over there and when you start to go on the thought experiment When you're so in the current status quo mindset that we've all been programmed that this is what society is, this is what's possible, this is what's not possible, these are the boundaries, the confines of what you're allowed to think. Now, as a science fiction writer, you probably expand beyond those traditional boundaries. You're basically describing Gene Roddenberry's version of history in Star Trek. So he definitely had those ideas. But the the thing is, is that when you allow your mind to go beyond those boundaries and you take the thought of an experiment of, okay, well, what if we didn't have money? and What if we didn't have the government? So what if he used intelligence and intelligent computers to simply
00:35:55
Speaker
determine resources, extract resources, assemble and produce what we need. you know our Our issues are basically extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and then the handling of the waste. That's the cycle of everything that we would use in life. And so it's an intelligent way of doing that where they aren't hoarded. So if you go on the thought experiment of a a world beyond money, you realize, first of all,
00:36:19
Speaker
We have ah like 80% of people in the world are using their time, energy, effort, brain power and contribution factor toward the machinations of the money machine and capitalism and business itself. Just towards survival. 80% of humans and you take all the people who can't seem to get a job right now are are are underemployed or unemployed. And they can all make a contribution now because we haven't limited it by competition and who looks but the more the part and who do we feel is right for that we can all just
00:36:55
Speaker
Learn our own selves and our own capacity to contribute and we contribute what we do and what we can a You know another brilliant man who who had some influence on jock as well Buckminster Fuller said way back in the in the 50s that if every human on earth worked to their capacity a 40-hour workweek We literally wouldn't be able to move. there would We're so productive. We would produce so much stuff. there just It would be way more than we ever need. We don't need everyone to work their butts off 40 hours a week. People could contribute very little time. I want to hear what I see that Kip's trying to get in there. Yeah, Kip's trying to jump in. and this And this is what Evan's touching on is so important.
00:37:39
Speaker
is we don't have a resource shortage issue. We have a resource sharing issue. We have a resource using our resources efficiently issue, whether it's how we're currently using our technology because we live in this competitive, constant competitive environment, which the lie is it innovates. No, it stagnates because what it's done now is most of the people want to try to hold on to their market share.
00:38:03
Speaker
So, what Jock's idea basically was, it's called a resource-based economy, where essentially you would use AI to manage all of the world's resources and do everything that Evan was talking about, production, distribution, on and on and on. The idea of what Buckminster Fuller said is so dead on, because how many videos, go right now on YouTube, see how many videos you can can find of thousands of cars, Lamborghinis, Porsches, sitting in the Saudi Arabia and just riding away. All the materials are made out of. Or, same thing here. there's In the Midwest, there's parking lots filled with cars that no one will ever drive. All the resources that went into making all these. We waste 46% of our food in this country. So it's not a matter of, you don't even have to change your lifestyle. You just have to say, move from an ownership mentality to more of a library mentality.
00:38:53
Speaker
where you would check out, because like Jacques would say, people don't want money, they want access to things. The problem right now is we have four individuals that have the equivalent wealth of $4 billion.
00:39:05
Speaker
that's never worked ever in any system ever in history. You can't have four individuals clotting out what, for this current system, money is causing us to stroke out. And the way Jock would describe it, imagine if your body worked like that, and your brain said, you know what, I think I'm going to know the thinking, so heart, liver, lungs, rest of the body, you don't get anything.
00:39:29
Speaker
Well, you would die. Well, the collective body of humanity is dying. And we're not addressing the most important issues, which are our planet. And it's not because people can't live the lives they would love to live. In fact, they could have everything we do now, except everybody could have everything, instead of just a few. And we could eliminate this delusion of an unlimited growth economy and whatever the hell that means.
00:39:55
Speaker
Okay so you you two guys are like among the two ah least cynical people i think that i've ever met and which is great i just love you guys so much because you are you're speaking to me in the most elemental way i i actually believe everything you're saying in the sense that.
00:40:12
Speaker
Yeah, our system is insane. It's actually insane. Literally. OK, that being said, how do you deal with the problem of a greedy, selfish, corrupt people who exist? How do you talk them into this? How do we you know, get them on board or work around them. You go much further than than their heart and and getting them to see their grandchildren and what kind of world they're leaving. I mean, it's our only option now to colonize Mars. It just doesn't sound that practical. if Again, like Kip said, it's it's it's common sense. You have to be a fool to to dig your heels into that mindset and not be open enough to consider that, wait a second,
00:40:56
Speaker
we you know Just to complete my thought about the 80% of people who are doing jobs just to keep the system going, once those people don't have to work, you know again, when you take your mind on the thought experiment, okay, what if we woke up tomorrow morning and they had turned off all the computers with all the money? so Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have zero, you have zero, I have zero, the homeless guy still has zero. And now what? We wake up tomorrow, what do we do? What does every one of 8 billion people do that next day, right? And so you realize that all these jobs that only help the money in the system from lawyers and accountants to bankers and stockbrokers and advertising agencies, just on and on agents and on and on and on and on, they're unnecessary.
Personal Responsibility and Societal Change
00:41:38
Speaker
All of a sudden, boom. So that means every office that they occupy becomes available to house people who don't have housing. All of their brain power, creativity, energy, effort, and time is available to devote to to evolving our world to something much, much, much better, much safer, more comfortable, healthier, more vital, more fair, more loving, more compassionate, more connected. I have a devastating question for this. How does that get organized?
00:42:09
Speaker
That's the problem. First of all, it's like everyone always wants to put it out there. How do we affect those people? Start by affecting yourself. Start by truly going out, making your intention to be different, your intention to go out every day and not be afraid. Be as efficient as you can. I'm not saying, oh gosh, some people will take it to the extreme as far as recycling or whatever. I think I do that already. Just start making effort. Yeah, and start by making the effort to be different yourself. Gandhi was right. You have to be the change. It's got to start with us. We are the system.
00:42:43
Speaker
ah We are the system. Without us, there is no Elon Musk. There is no Donald Trump. We're the ones that keep them alive. We're the ones that keep the whole system alive. In fact, one of the best anti-money quotes comes not from Gandhi, John Lennon, Martin Luther King. It comes from a Marine general war hero named Smedley Butler, who said, so long as there's money, there will always be war in his book. War is a racket.
00:43:11
Speaker
We bought into this idea that this is our nature, but like Jock would say, every culture that you're a part of, that it becomes your nature, and you're perfectly suited for that culture that you're a part of, no matter what it is.
00:43:27
Speaker
As we said, how many with three billion years are there and how many of the rest of us are there, right? yeah And i I love this meme right here. yeah All we got to do is stand up and it's game over. right yeah Okay, so there's there's an answer. There's an answer. There's an answer. One of the answers is revolution. That's a possibility that you have a revolution. and Not a violent revolution, a consciousness revolution. That'd be fabulous if it was. That would be great. I'm not coming to your party anymore, revolution.
00:43:55
Speaker
When I was working in local sustainable foods, they did a study in Michigan State or University of Michigan where they, you know, overpopulation, it's that's the main problem. No, it's not. the pra if If we went to small local sustainable food supplies,
00:44:11
Speaker
and manufacturing, and whatever else. which That's part of how Jock designed the city. Everything is self-contained like a cell. The planet could easily support about 11 billion people. There's a really great documentary called um The Economics of Happiness. It's about what happened in Bhutan after they opened their borders 40 years ago to capitalism.
00:44:32
Speaker
They measure their country's success by gross national happiness. They did not have the problems that we do. They did not have yeah mental illness. They did not have drug addiction. Now they've got everything. Now their entire populace feels lesser than. Why? Simply because now they've been programmed, i God, I've got to have the new iPad too. I've got to wait outside for the new iPhone.
00:44:54
Speaker
it's It's really, I don't know what else to tell people except I'm not doing this for me. I'm doing this. I would gladly like, tomorrow if I can keep story of Kip over, fine. I feel tremendous responsibility for all the generations coming up after me. They deserve a chance. They deserve more than what they're being given. There's a reason people hate the boomers. They hate the boomers because it's the first time in history a generation has done better than their children. It's the first time so much wealth has moved up while everyone else is struggling.
00:45:27
Speaker
meanwhile theever page is going down in america you guys got to remember that it's it's different in america from other places And we're the most influential, arguably the most culturally. influenced yeah No, no, I agree with that. I grew with that a hundred percent. Like it's important what what you're saying, but yeah, it's not the same thing in every place. But totalitarianism is spreading everywhere around the world. And it's because everywhere around the world, no matter where you're at, it's not working for the masses.
00:46:08
Speaker
agree with that too. That is the message that you guys are working on and it's ah obviously a laudable message that that Mark and I you know can absolutely get behind. 100%. Tell us more about how you're doing it, what what you're doing too. because you're you're making ah You've done documentaries, you're making records, you've hired publicists um a publicist, reached out to us to get you guys on this podcast. so what What is the scope of what you're doing around this message?
00:46:35
Speaker
Well, I mean, it everything we do is clearly about the message. Again, we made the short film and invitation to action, which breaks down like eight different areas of society, culture and life that we think we need to rethink and re-address. And then we have our our incredibly powerful, I think the most important documentary ever made, a world worth imagining. Like if you could imagine the world being anything, what would be worth your imagination?
00:47:02
Speaker
There it is. Jock and Roxanne have done a lot of the work for us. And then all of our interviews, everything on our Soul Documentary YouTube channel is valuable content, having these conversations with people, opening minds, getting additional input and impressions and ideas. And then now we've parlayed that into our music. When we were producing events during the 50th anniversary of Summer of Love, we ended up collaborating with the Brahma Kumaris, putting on an event called Peace in the Park.
00:47:29
Speaker
and we did the the Summer of Love edition, and we ended up headlining. We played the bandshell in Golden Gate Park there as Soul Twin Messiah. This was our debut gig under that name. We had already started doing some music together. We had played a couple gigs together, but we didn't really have a a name and a band identity formulated, and we're really not a band. We're really a duo, a musical duo.
00:47:51
Speaker
and um I think Simon and Garfunkel, Tears for Fears, you know, to admit the two main guys doing all the writing and and, you know, composing and then bringing in other musicians as needed to fill out the musicianship of music. And so that's when we started writing original music. It was our dear friend Mona Lisa Wallace who co-produced the event with us and brought us into the fold. And she suggested that so we don't have any copyright issues with any of the videos that are going to go up on YouTube instead of playing cover songs.
00:48:22
Speaker
which we snuck one in, we played Imagine, which Kip will get to. But he played original songs that we wrote, and that's what got us writing original music. Of course, with our all caps love message and our message of kind of acknowledging how things actually are in the world. Again, we're not cynical, we're realists. And the reality is, as our our dear Annie Sampson said in the interview from the human being, the world is cold. going in a low way. And we have a song called Everyone Knows That Something Needs to Change. It's actually our most recent single. It just came out. So go check it out on all your streaming platforms. Everyone knows that somebody needs to change. It's our reggae vibe feel song. And but there's it's a t-shirt that we made quite some time ago. that you know the The slogan came long before the song. and How many people do you know this? say Oh, life's working great. Everyone in my family is happy and well-employed and happy with what they're doing and make enough money and satisfy with life and have great relationships with people and good partnerships and feel a part of community and feel they're contributing to something bigger than themselves that they're proud of.
00:49:32
Speaker
ha are you sure everyone you know are you sure so we have this feeling that everyone knows something needs to change and so it's a matter of okay well how do we do that and so our songs all represent the spirit of the message of either here's what's really wrong here's the the deep-seated fundamental societal systemic issues that are at play it's not his fault or her fault or this religion or that country or No, it's fundamental. It's how our brains are programmed to accept the, quote, norms of society that are harming us so deeply, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physically, and our planet as we watch more and more species get decimated by our human actions. And so it's about the realities of what's going on, not hating and blaming or resenting, but acknowledging them because they're real,
00:50:25
Speaker
and then talking about how the solutions are all based on love. Can I ask Kip, then how do you feel it's going? Like, how how is the message going? You know, it's starting last November, just because we've we've been trying to make, you know, a financial go of this.
Music, Love, and Systemic Change
00:50:42
Speaker
And Evans really, you know, put a lot of money into making this happen for the last few years. And it got to a place where it was he was stressing out. I was stressing out because I you know, we we had this wasn't heading in a direction where and it was never and we realized it was never about making money.
00:51:01
Speaker
So I've been out driving ah Uber since last November. I've had the opportunity to talk to 700 people about the same stuff we're talking about. During that time when I, cause I drove Uber a lot, like when I, long, long time ago I drove over and so the last time I drove my rating was like 4.79. My rating is now 4.99. I've talked to 700 people. I haven't had one confrontational conversation. I found two main things in common. One, everyone knows something needs to change.
00:51:32
Speaker
Two, the system has done an extremely good job of isolating us, of making everyone feel separate and apart and unsupported and lonely and terrified. They don't know what's coming. Everyone's scared. So their most important thing, whether you're rich or you're poor, is making sure my bubble survives. Because for the wealthy people, losing their wealth and becoming poor and having to deal with those problems are every bit as real as the real problems of people who can't pay their rent tomorrow. And so when I'm talking to them,
00:51:59
Speaker
I find that commonality. I'm not trying to be right. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to share. I'm trying to get to know you. So we can communicate, one, which has been the beautiful part of that, and two, just really really realizing that You know, we're all we're all so desperate for change, but we don't know what to do. And most often people say, well, they're never going to stop doing what they're doing. I'm like, yeah, you're right, because as long as we keep feeding the beast, the beast is going to keep eating. That's so true. That is so true. And actually, there's another level, too. Even the billionaires have the same worry because they're trying to build their little enclaves or they want to go to Mars and they're having bunkers in New Zealand and stuff. They're worried about the same thing. Yep.
00:52:44
Speaker
Yep. And it's not a choice between this and utopia, which is I think one of the worst things they do. Oh, you're talking about utopia. No, I'm talking about doing better because we can't. Right now we live in a culture and it's largely Western civilization that's founded in fear and ego. yeah And until that switches to love and selflessness, we're going to continue to get the same outcome. One of my favorite quotes is from Frank Herbert, fear is the mind killer.
00:53:11
Speaker
Our minds are not working right. The Native Americans knew we came with the disease. They called it Whittigo. And the disease of greed and profit, they looked at it as a mental illness, and they knew we were infected with it. And it's hard to argue with that.
00:53:25
Speaker
So I'm not gonna let go of the the conceit of the of the podcast, and but I think it's actually fitting that we kind of wrap it up with your guys' choices. Evan, why don't we, but let's start with you. Okay, the album Construction Time Again by Depeche Mode from 1983.
00:53:45
Speaker
is a super profound album in lyrics. It was a breakthrough album for them in terms of their popularity for their their brand their brand of synth pop from England. And um I was lucky enough to discover this album about a year after it came out. I was 13 years old.
00:54:01
Speaker
And I already liked them and I had the next album, People Are People, which is kind of a greatest hits that actually included um one, two, three, like four of these nine songs already I was familiar with. So I got five new tracks when I bought this cassette on ah a Christmas shopping trip up to Union Square in San Francisco. I immediately popped the cassette into my little Walkman and I was just in absolute heaven walking around listening to it. And how could I have possibly known how profound and how impactful these lyrics and themes were and and the impact it would have on my life and resonate today. And when we were charged with, you know, deciding, okay, what one piece of work do we want to bring up on this podcast? I have been listening to a bunch of music and a song from this came on randomly and I said, oh,
00:54:48
Speaker
I'm going to talk about construction time again, because the entire album is about changing society, it's about reprogramming, reformatting, about thinking differently, approaching differently, and changing everything. It's about the problems and the reality of how sad and bad they are, and the fact that the future is in our hands, and we are we do have the opportunity to change at any time.
00:55:09
Speaker
And so the the first song, Love in Itself, you know he's saying that love isn't enough. you know there was There was a time when all on my mind was love. Now I find that most of the time, love's not enough in itself. He's talking about the lowercase love, the fleeting, eros love that you have for another human to whom you're physically attracted, the intimate kind of love.
00:55:31
Speaker
and that is fleeting and subject to the whims of society and the other person and distraction and Dave Grohl having a baby with another woman and you know all the stuff that love entails, right? How many hormones and how many marriage marriage is supposed to be so sacred and blessed by God himself but How many of the men have been divorced? how many How many people in the world are married because it was a arranged? Because the family wanted a connection with another family. And those people weren't even attracted or compatible in any way, but they were forced to marry. And that woman was forced to submit to that man's desires. It's insane. But all caps love, on the other hand, what we're singing about, again, we're talking about making the connection between this music in 1983 and our music in 2023, 40 years later, but
00:56:16
Speaker
is that we're singing about the all caps love, the ultimate motivating drive, the life force, the protector, the comfort and survival mechanism, especially emotionally, because that includes acceptance, peace, harmony, and unity.
00:56:32
Speaker
and these are the things that we're lacking when we have problems and we're blaming and it's his fault or her fault or their fault or that religion or that country, we're not accepting, we're not in unity and when we're not in harmony with them. So the all caps love is what we're talking about. And you know he he talks about all of these absurdities that lay before us, all of the doubts and the certainties that lay in store for us. Kip has a quote about what our absurdities will one day do Oh yeah, Terrence McKenna just before he passed, he did an interview and he said, at some point earlier our absurdities and our hypocrisies will become too great for us to ignore.
00:57:08
Speaker
I thought when Donald Trump got elected, that was our point. That was it? I'm getting to wonder if Terrence was right about that. I'm not sure we can... you guys are us You're fundamentally under underestimating the depths of the human imagination. I think he was. And human resilience, look, it's really about resilience. I just did a ah ah text our um interview recently and I talked about resilience and resilience is one of of humanity's big strengths and one of our big pitfalls because we allow so many things to happen. I saw something so brilliant and so sad last night. There was evidently a study done. They put up this graph where there was a bar and then three other bars of different sizes, A, B, and C. And A was obviously shorter, B was obviously taller, and C was obviously the exact same size.
00:57:57
Speaker
And when it turned out they had tests that they had like plans in the group, right? So they had the one guy who was really trying to be honest about what he considered the the equivalent size bar and all these other people who were plans. And they were told, okay, at first you're going to say C and then they're going to ask you again. And now everyone but the guy, the control group are going to say A, the obviously wrong answer. It's clearly shorter.
00:58:23
Speaker
And 72% of people ended up a agreeing, even knowing it was wrong and made them look stupid, but they wanted to go along with the crowd. It was so important to go along with the crowd. You do understand what that what that's about though, right? So we evolved as human beings as parts of groups and we could not survive without the group.
00:58:49
Speaker
And we have evolved that way. And the people that survived passed that gene along. And so we're all hobbled by that problem, which is we want to be part of the group. It's more important than even our own beliefs. yeah And that is the central problem that you guys are fighting against, which is, I think, this idea that we have to belong to the group.
00:59:17
Speaker
So first of all, we don't fight against anything. That's not our MO. We work towards creating and we're free-forming and ah presenting ideas and offering alternatives and offering support and uniting people and uniting ideas. And the idea is that, okay, let's get everyone to agree with, but see, not the wrong, let's agree, get everyone to agree with the common sense. Exactly.
00:59:41
Speaker
Exactly, that's right. That's the way to do it. The male God with the big gray beard in the sky on the cloud being the heaven we all want to get to and that we're all going to agree because that's the common consensus opinion. With regards to the group, it's it comes back that connection. and And when I brought up Bhutan, the loss of the sense of community, the loss of sense of tribe, the loss of sense of belonging,
01:00:09
Speaker
We've literally had that twisted. It's been twisted upside down. On one hand, you're an individual, but on the other hand, you better follow along with the group consensus because you're still looking for that group. That's why all these Trump supporters get together and stuff that doesn't make any sense at all. That's why 50,000 people in the world believe that the earth is flat because they just want to be long. They feel left out. They feel alone. the No matter how crazy it is, well, hey, these people, they're going to be my friends. They're going to be my family. They're going to be here when I need someone. That's what that underlying thing that kept us alive was, was supporting one another. It's been twisted and manipulated by propaganda into something entirely different.
01:00:50
Speaker
And what's ironic is this is what we're talking about on the biggest scale is supporting one another, i know supporting the best ideas on earth. That's all we're talking about doing. Let's be wise, awaken to what the harm we're causing and the ineffectiveness of our ways. And let's all work toward evolving our thinking toward one that is more collaborative, is more successful, is more thriving for the the maximum number of people and life on the planet as we can.
01:01:15
Speaker
That's a good segue then for for Kip to talk about his pic. It's a perfect segue, I think. Imagine that. Imagine that. You know, I was when I was looking at the lyrics again today.
01:01:30
Speaker
Like I mentioned in the ah beginning of the interview, i because of that what I've now come to call a spontaneous awakening I had when I was 12, and I learned that from Ramana Maharishi, who had a similar experience when he was 16. I'm like, oh, that's what that was, where you were confronted with the beyond, the beyond, the beyond, the beyond, and you get to the point of Brahman, and you get to that point of nothingness. Well, for some reason, that just happened, and I guess that's what they call these things. so When I was looking at the um lyrics again today, I thought, if you can imagine the first lyric, then all the rest of the song becomes kind of irrelevant. Because now you've imagined there's no heaven. You've imagined there's no hell. You've imagined there's no anything. And you're just now, you're being part of whatever this story of you is right now. All the rest of it then goes into, okay, now you've imagined that. Now you can imagine anything.
01:02:23
Speaker
You can imagine a world without war. You can imagine a world without possessions. You can imagine all of these things. Once you allow you go you allow yourself to go to that source and recognize that foundationally, we are the stories we're telling ourselves. This is what quantum's telling us. In fact, in 2022, three physicists won the Nobel Prize for proving there is no objective reality.
01:02:48
Speaker
We are the stories we're telling ourselves, and everyone's story is different based on their perceptions. So we're we we all think we're right in one way or another. Now, if you come from love, you go, cool. Wow, that's a cool way to look at things instead of judging her. No, that's not how I look at things, or you're wrong.
01:03:06
Speaker
Instead of realizing it's all these differences, it's all it's all the colors of the rainbow that make life so beautiful. And this is another real disservice they've done to humanity with the idea of globalization, which on a corporate level has already happened. Corporations are globalized a long time ago. They don't want the rest of us to come together to share in the benefits of helping one another out and having connectivity in that way.
01:03:30
Speaker
Because people believe that it's going to take away from their individuality. They believe it's going to take away from their culture, their religion, their language, their history. It doesn't have to. It just means no more borders. It just means we can share without judging one another. I mean, I shouldn't tell you, if you want to be a Muslim and um and and that's your choice right now until you move beyond that or whatever, that's your choice. I'm not going to judge you, but you shouldn't judge me either.
01:03:57
Speaker
and we get to ah allow and accept, and this is how we learn and grow. Right now, we're stifling our evolution through segregation, and they're trying to convince us that if we unify, that will be the very worst thing that can happen to us. Our minds will be controlled. No, your minds are already being controlled. Watch Century of the Self. Watch what Bernays and Wilson did in utilizing Freud's ah you know work to manipulate the masses, because that's what's been going on for a long time. So this story that If we become a one connected and on one world level and we move to one government, oh that's where the manipulation, that's where our control will start. It's already it's already happened. We're already being controlled. so you know When I listen to Imagine the first time, it took me to that experience of like, wow, I'm not crazy.
01:04:46
Speaker
I'm not crazy having this idea, this experience I have, other people have obviously connected with it. And by the way, I'd like to give some props to Yoko for her contribution to that song, which you know doesn't happen nearly often enough.
Imagination, Wisdom, and Kindness
01:05:00
Speaker
But when I was reading it today, I thought, God, if you could break down each part of that, each lyric of that song and really help people understand what it's saying, because I think it speaks to another thing.
01:05:11
Speaker
I was watching Bill Maher a while ago, and he said, most Christians are fans of Christianity. And I thought that's a really brilliant statement, except I wanted to take it one step further. Most people are fans of wisdom. They're not really great at wanting to practice it. Like, we're all fans of Imagine, but how many people are really imagining that? How many people are really doing the thought experiment that that song is asking us to go into?
01:05:35
Speaker
And this is where you know it it became so important to me because I don't know of any other song that's ever been written like this. That in three short verses conveys so much truth and tries to ground us in so much reality.
01:05:51
Speaker
And I think a lot of our songs and lyrics in the songs try to take people to that same place. And I give a lot of credit to Imagine for allowing me to feel like, okay, this these are things I can write about, although In truth, I don't really feel I've had much of a choice in doing this when I was doing the whole hair metal band thing. I was still writing these top types of songs when I was writing Shock the System and The Chosen Few. Yes, it's you, The Chosen Few, who breaks our backs with all the games you play. I've been saying this my whole life. So, you know, I don't feel I've had a lot of choice in because it certainly wasn't because it's made my life easier, but I definitely
01:06:32
Speaker
believe that things like Imagine and Joseph Campbell and other wisdom teachers, what they've made me feel is I'm part of a community where I feel supported, even though I don't know any of them. Their ideas, what they've shared make me feel like, okay, I'm not a crazy person. These people that I admire and would aspire to be like share some of the same ideas and thoughts. And I think it does ask us to do a thought experiment, like Evan said, of imagine that world. Just imagine. We won't even allow ourselves to imagine it.
01:07:03
Speaker
Now you guys have been working together now for a while. Have you always got along all that time? Has there been any friction, conflict, or? we' We've had an amazing relationship because we are definitely both coming from that place of love. And and we're both flexible and open and willing to you know pivot where necessary. you know the The only thing that's ever become an awkward dynamic, I guess for the most part, is that I've been funding this entire this entire project as a philanthropy.
01:07:30
Speaker
And it's been way, way, way, way more than I ever expected or wanted to get into. And so that's been a stressor for me. If any any type of you know negative know feelings of concern have come into play, it's basically been that.
01:07:49
Speaker
We have had very few disagreements or you know arguments. And any time we have, we work through them because we're not trying to be right. And we realize when the ego starts to get in the way, and we realize when the fear starts to get in the way, and we and we and we really quickly step back from it. We have a good friend of ours. In fact, I didn't tell you, brother. I ran i was walking out at the little store. I went and took the mail the other day. Hey, hey, brother.
01:08:16
Speaker
And it's Pritchard, and he was always in disguise. A good friend of ours, a comedian named Michael Pritchard, who's right he was Robin Williams' best friend. And he actually spoke at Peace in the Park for us. And he had a great quote. He said, any anger that lasts longer than 30 seconds as he go.
01:08:33
Speaker
And I think that's a really good thing. Oh, I love that. That's great. Isn't that powerful? I've gotten to a point where I can see my life and the more I stay in this mindset, it's how I can stay positive and get through everything. Because I really do look at my life as a Buddhist journey. And in a Buddhist journey, you go out in the world and you know that you'll be provided for. Have I got everything I've wanted in my life? No. But have I needed everything I wanted? No. Have I always got everything I needed?
01:09:03
Speaker
Absolutely. And have I always had enough to also still be there to help other people? Absolutely. And Evan brought up, you know, something about us. you know, helping each other and being there. And like this morning I had an experience. I went to the store and there was this woman on the street corner in a wheelchair and she was just screaming in agony. She was like, somebody, please, please help me. People just drove by. Nobody said anything. Nobody reached out to her. And I stopped my car. I went over and I wanted to, you know, first gauge. Is this a crazy person? What's going on? No, she had a broken leg.
01:09:37
Speaker
And her name was Penny, and she just wanted someone to acknowledge her and call an ambulance for her. And nobody stopped. And she had just broken her leg? She'd had a broken leg, and it was giving her more problems, and she couldn't do anything about it. But anyway, the fire engines came and stuff, but people just kept passing her by and not even trying to help. It's the little things we can do to help each other.
01:10:02
Speaker
So guys, we could talk to you all night long and it's been a fascinating conversation. That was a ah good message to to partially end on. I want to give Evan the last word if we could. Any thoughts from you then to sum up what we've been talking about? Recognize that we are all coming from a programmed state of mind and that we don't have free will. But yet we can make the choice to immerse ourselves in an environment filled with information that will help us consciously evolve.
01:10:31
Speaker
just think about what you're putting in your mind. Garbage in, garbage out. And read people that study Robert Sapolsky and Charles Eisenstein and Barbara Marx Hubbard and and even um Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle. And people that help you calm the mind, extricate yourself from the fear-based program, ego-driven program that you're in, so that you can blossom into the human that you already are underneath. This is what keeps saying, the love is there all along, no matter what. It's who we are, but it's been masked. when In my writing, Secret Powers of Love, which will come out eventually, I talk about the fact that our hearts are pure love, and it's that it's that same love that goes, oh, a kitty or a baby, right? It's always there.
01:11:16
Speaker
and And, but there's a cloud of fear that gets around it and we can't, we lose contact with our, between our brain and our heart. And, and all we need to do is blow that cloud of fear around our heart away. And then we'll have access and clarity to who we really are at our core and we can change the world. No doubt in my mind, we can change the world. Mark thoughts. I love you guys.
01:11:44
Speaker
But we love you guys and we really, really appreciate you being on, having us on. And definitely go and check out Soul Documentary on YouTube. Check out all Soul Twin Messiah's music. And before, real quickly, before anyone in your audience after goes and listens to our stuff and sees our video goes, you guys are a little old to want to be rock stars. We're not trying to be rock stars. We're very aware of who we are. But thank you. Yeah, Kip Baldwin, Evan Gary Hurst, thank you very much for being on our podcast, Recreative. Thanks for having us. It's been a wonderful, encouraging, inspiring conversation.
01:12:43
Speaker
You've been listening to Recreative, a podcast about creativity and the works that inspire it. Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney for Donovan Street Press, Inc., in association with Monkey Joy Press. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web design by Mark Rainer.
01:13:01
Speaker
You can support this podcast by checking out our guests' work, listening to their music, purchasing their books, watching their shows, and so on. You can find out more about each guest in all of our past episodes by visiting recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. You can contact us by emailing joe mohoney at donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.