Dave Rubin hosts Kelly Carlin to discuss her book and the resurgence of free speech issues championed by her father, George Carlin. They analyze how a New York street naming sparked controversy over his "seven dirty words" and critique the authoritarian tendencies of both the regressive left and conservative norms seeking to control language. The dialogue contrasts modern trigger warnings with Carlin's agnostic rebellion against groupthink, while exploring the internet's dual role in creating distraction versus fostering genuine connection through communities like her "Poly Mind." Ultimately, they argue that conscious digital management is essential to avoid mob mentality and reconnect people with wonder beyond political polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
My guest this week is Kelly Carlin, daughter of the legendary comedian George Carlin.
Kelly is an author and a speaker whose work connects many of the dots her father's life was all about.
I've known Kelly for about four years now after connecting with her on Twitter because of how much I admired her dad.
We've become great friends.
Kelly has welcomed me into her world and the comedy community she's part of here in LA.
I thought Kelly would be the perfect guest this week, not only because of her new book about growing up as a Carlin, but also because of all the issues her father's comedy was about that have become central themes of what we do here on this show.
George Carlin was a relentless defender of free speech, using words and language to push the limits of what society found acceptable at the time.
He railed against political correctness like no other comic before or anybody since.
He dissected the absurdities of life that ultimately bring us together rather than rip
us apart.
I can't tell you how often I'm watching some campaign nonsense or some ridiculous
politically correct crusade and think, "Man, I wish George Carlin was still alive to tackle
this."
Not only do I want you to see George Carlin in a new way by sitting down with Kelly, but
I also want to use our chat as a living, breathing example of something else that's going on
As I mentioned, Kelly and I met on Twitter.
All I was to her was another person tweeting at her and 140 characters who had some connection to her father like millions of other people.
But through social media, we met, we became friends, and now we share so much of our lives and our passions together.
To me, that's what's so cool about what's happening here with you guys.
The reaction to what we're doing has gotten to a whole new level.
I've been getting emails from literally all over the world, from Denmark to Saudi Arabia to Mexico.
We're connecting because of the same ideas that George believed in, which I believe in, and which you believe in.
By the way, that doesn't mean that we agree on everything.
Actually, in almost every email I get that's heaping praise on me, you guys manage to tell me something that we disagree on.
I love that.
That's what this is all about, and it's precisely what the far right and the regressive left fear.
If the rest of us can wake up and realize that we can come together despite differences, then they can't control us.
It's really as simple as that.
The authoritarians that exist on both sides want control, and the best way to do that is to keep everyone hating on each other all the time.
For all the things that Milo Yiannopoulos and I disagreed on, this is one spot we had total agreement.
The Rise of the Cultural Libertarians is here, and it contains people from all over the cultural map, from Chris Rock to Bill Maher, from Maajid Nawaz to Sam Harris.
If George Carlin was still around, I think he would fit right in there, but would have also been sure to make fun of any group that would have accepted him as part of it.
The point of all this is that every week, actually every day that I've been doing this show, I see this movement getting stronger.
You guys are not only connecting with me, but with each other.
And now when I see the usual regressives spout off their nonsense, there's an army of people calling them out on it.
That is literally as important as anything that I do.
George Carlin's most famous routine was the seven dirty words you can't say on TV.
We live in a time that's getting dangerously close to the several dirty ideas that you can't challenge publicly.
Let's honor the trailblazers before us like George Carlin by relentlessly challenging and ruthlessly mocking those who would attempt to silence us.
Alright, let's do a show.
My guest this week is an author, a speaker, and a one-woman show-er.
That's something, right?
Her new book, A Carlin Home Companion, tells her journey growing up as the daughter of George and Brenda Carlin.
She's also my friend and throws a hell of a party.
So this picture, I know we're blowing the illusion of television, but that is a picture, it's not an actual window, that is the Upper West Side, that's 89th Street, facing North, and just a little bit past where this picture ends is actually, just in the last year, a street that is now named after your father.
This isn't where I was intending to start with, but let's start there.
Well, he was kicked out of the school and then he was allowed to come back to graduate for 8th grade, but he had to write the play in order to get back in, which they were great.
It was actually a very progressive school for a Catholic school.
But the irony is, is that once we wanted to name the street, the church, Also, not a huge fan of religion.
about it worried, well they claimed that they were worried about kids coming out
of school and looking up and seeing the name and then googling it and finding
out about the seven dirty words that was their concern.
So, as I said in my intro, one of the things that I love about having you here—and we've been doing this kind of stuff forever—but one of the reasons that I think it's particularly apropos now, beyond just your book, is that all of the things that your dad stood for, I think, are really coming to fruition right now.
Yeah, he was one of those comics, which really didn't come to me until he died, really, but
that who really did focus on, I mean, he focused on, he talked about three things he focused
The little things that we all share, so that was the observational humor stuff and the refrigerator man and the airline announcements and things like that.
He focused on language, which is another thing that we all share as a culture.
And then he, like, would go after the big subjects.
Death, religion, children, things like that.
But he never, he mentioned me once in a routine in like 1971.
It was one of the earlier albums where I was very excited.
He was talking about euphemisms for shit.
You know, we call it number two and P is number one and how once I figured that out I made funny combinations up and things like that.
Because he so got into the mind, he so got into the very bit of us that we all share, and yet that part he did—was that out of respect, maybe, to your mom or to your family?
And so—and it was kind of weird, because I would—growing up, I would see other comedians talking about their families.
And it did hit me a few times, especially in, like, teenage years.
Why doesn't he ever talk about us on, like, the Tonight Show?
I mean, I remember one time he went on the Tonight Show with Carson as the host, and Carson asked about his family, and he had these funny made-up sons that he talked about.
Dark Canyon was one of them, which, I mean, it was a great bit.
Therefore, I felt even a little more invisible at that time.
And yet, I think I'm happy about it because my life wasn't fodder for his comedy, whereas my poor dad, our life together has become fodder for my art.
Sure.
Uh, which was a bone of contention for us, and I do talk about that in the book, and not so much as artists, but that there were some things that we had never talked about as a family that I really was willing to talk about on stage, like people like Spaulding Gray and uh... you know uh... sanderson lowe and said these other
solo artists did uh... you know they go and comedians yeah i mean i think a
lot of comedians are way more comfortable going on stage
talking about their life there than having to go home and having a serious
conversation with their loved ones. Sure, yeah, we'll get to the sad clown thing in a little bit.
But you do address that.
You do address that in your one-woman show that was sort of a lead-up to the book, that there's a sort of beautiful moment where you and your dad are talking, and he sort of—there was like a little bit of sense of betrayal or a sense that he was going to be exposed in a way that he hadn't done.
Yeah, and I think ultimately—I mean, what happened was I wrote a solo show, and I sent him the script, and inside the script I talked about having some feelings, some negative feelings, about when my mother was dying and he had to go on the road.
And it was a conversation my dad and I had never had, and we didn't have any real healthy conversation closure around it.
And looking back on it now, I think sending him that script was my way of saying, hey, I have these feelings.
But this was one of the themes I wanted to work on in the book was that here's this man who is the truth teller, like you said opening in the show.
I mean, this is the man who conquered everything and was fearless and would talk about all the big stuff that our culture does not want to talk about on stage.
And yet when it came to our family, we were very much the textbook dysfunctional, Alcoholic family that did a lot of walking on eggshells, didn't do a lot of intimate talking about the issues, and we all pretended that we were fine.
How much of that, were you conscious, especially in your early years, that your dad really was this legend?
I mean, when there's the Mount Rushmore comedy, it's, you know, half the people say it's your dad, half the people say it's Pryor, and then maybe there's 1% that gets split amongst Lenny Bruce and a couple others.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think The legend kind of Mount Rushmore thing really happened more when I was in my 20s.
And I was at an English class at UCLA, and my professor says, you know, we're going to study compare and contrast essays today, and I have a perfect example of how you should go about this.
And he pushes the play button on a boom box, and my dad's baseball football routine comes out.
And I'm sitting there in this class of like 25 people looking around going, Um, is anyone else having this weird experience?
Yeah, I mean, that's when you realize, oh, yeah, big dent in the culture has happened here.
So, you know, I think it was from that point on that I knew, like, legend.
But even before that, I knew that he was obviously famous and people worshipped him and all that kind of stuff, and was around for, you know, an arrest or two of his also.
Because, you know, I say to you all the time, as I said in the intro, I'm watching the news constantly and I either text you sometimes or I'll call you and be like, God, I wish your dad was around because I can't do it that way.
I mean, certainly.
And I don't know anyone else that can skewer stuff in that way.
So let's just hit a couple of them.
So the religion one.
So you already mentioned a little bit about his history with religion.
You know, lately, I've been introduced to what they call the humanist, you know, kind of community, which is something I relate to a lot more.
I think he would have felt better about that.
Sounds like they're not going to have as many meetings and armbands and things like that, which he used to talk about groups, because there's less Kool-Aid, I think.
Yeah, he felt any group, you know, any group of people, you get groupthink.
And then, where does the individual thinking, you know, happen in that situation?
So that always worried him.
I think he self-named himself mostly as an agnostic.
Obviously, he didn't believe in the man in the sky with the beard thing.
It's not like he was thinking that was a possibility.
But he had a deep sense of oneness with the universe.
He loved astronomy.
He loved that idea of looking up.
You know, that feeling you get when you look at them like, Jesus, we're just a speck here.
And yet there's something about that being a speck that...
expands us at the same time so there was something around that uh... he was a man who dropped acid in the sixties and had some transcendent experiences about that and it talked to me about uh... being uh... high and having an experience where he realized that he really was at one with everything including the old tennis shoe in the gutter and that he realized that if he was that everything was him and he was everything.
And from that moment on he said he felt safe because he knew that no matter what he encountered in life,
Do you think a lot of his sort of, because when I think of it, I think of this sort of anti-religion, the rants that he would go on about the church and religion.
How much of it was just not even about religion specifically, but just about authoritarianism?
Well, I can't—I won't speak for him, and I don't really know at all what motivated him to do those bits.
I never was privy to that part of his process.
He would sit me down during the HBO taping and let me see it just the way everyone else saw it.
I never knew his process.
But, sure, I mean, I think if you looked at all of his— material and sifted through it and analyzed it, I think authoritarianism would be a huge aspect to it all, that anyone—I mean, he—my dad never made it through a single institution he encountered.
He got kicked out of everything—elementary school, junior high, high school, did not finish high school, ninth grade, dropout, then joined the Air Force early.
promoted and demoted. I've got a little piece of paper of his that has all the
listings of the promotions and the demotions that he had in the Air Force.
So, got kicked out of that and then ultimately, you know, became this
straight-suit, clean-cut comic and even that conservative form that he had to be
in in order to be a successful comic because his dream was to be in the
movies eventually.
That felt, you know, too restrictive and authoritarian for him.
He was always looking—I mean, he talked about the line.
He always—you know, a comic's job is to find the line and to cross it.
And I think that's what that's about, is anyone telling you you can't do something, all right, let's cross it and really see what we can do on the other side of that.
Yeah, so let's just back up for a second because you mentioned that at one time your dad was this sort of, he wasn't conservative comic, but he was buttoned down, kind of, he was that generic, whatever that was, but then had a moment that it all changed.
Do you know what it was personally at that moment?
You can say it, and we don't really absorb what that means, but your dad, even before his transformation, opening for the Supremes, it seemed so bizarre.
I think he would make what he's always made of it.
I mean, in the early 90s this was going on in colleges, too.
I was at UCLA and actually did a forum on political correctness and invited my dad to come and do that.
That was coming out of the Reagan era, you know, so there was a lot of that.
But if you really think about it, like political correctness, there's something about like polite society, like we're not allowed to talk about certain things, you know.
I think it kind of grows out of that.
But, you know, for him, he was always bothered by the fact that it comes from a place of people wanting Respect for tolerance, you know, of each other and our identities.
Well, for you it is, for some other people it isn't, you know, but this is the great thing about a democracy is, and the way we work this stuff out is by having free speech and a marketplace of ideas.
So, therefore, if you're trying to control people's speech, then are you really having a marketplace of ideas?
And we're not talking about people bullying people and insult comics and comics who want to hurt feelings or, you know, the whole rape thing that went down.
I mean, there is obviously— Right, we're not talking about hate speech.
Right, we're not talking about hate speech, exactly.
But the thing is, you know, my dad did talk about is that stand-up comedy is a monologue.
He used to say, I'm here for me, and the audience is here for me.
He wasn't here for them.
He's not there to do a seminar.
Even though he was professorial, he was not there to change the world in some way.
He was there to get shit off of his chest.
And he did it in a certain way.
And so I would love to know his new take on all this college stuff and all this stuff going down, but I think it would be built on a lot of this stuff.
You wrote an interesting piece about this on your Facebook page that was related to comedy and all of this and a little bit, it was sort of about your dad, but it jumped off because of Jerry Seinfeld making a comment.
Yeah, and Todd Glass had written a reply to a piece in the L.A.
Times, and he felt—you know, he was kind of on the other side of it, of respecting people's, you know, rights to define themselves more.
And, you know, and I just kind of—I'd finally, after, I think, you know, about a year and a half or two years of trying to think about all this, had pulled all my thoughts together.
Uh, so yeah, I would, yeah, I, I, yeah, I, I do, like you, I miss him too.
There are certain things that come up where I, where I do, I'm like, I wish Dad was here, and then I'm like, okay, so we're gonna have to figure this out on my own, like, or on our own, like, without Dad, how to walk through this, you know, and there's some comics out there who I think definitely help with this, absolutely.
There's a need to control everything in order for the world to be comfortable.
And hey, you know what?
I get it.
That generation is facing a planet that's dying.
An economy that doesn't look very good, politics that have stopped working—our democracy has stopped working.
Yeah.
I, too, would want to control things.
And so maybe if you can control people's language and create a sense of safety, I mean, maybe that's what this is about on a psychological level.
I don't know.
I get it.
But yeah, I think it is our job to at least Bring some history up and educate them about the fights we've had in this country, and to understand what the purpose of free speech is.
And it's not like—and our government is no longer censoring it.
But, yeah, I mean, he would have a lot to say about that.
And he—I mean, it's not like, you know, 10 years ago, corporations weren't— I mean, advertising dollars shape everything on television.
I mean, now with the Internet, it's interesting because we have a lot more freedom, you know?
And I look at the bigger picture of it, and you think of the expansion of the freedom that the Internet's given us, so it's not strange that some other part of our culture wants to shut something down.
It is a balance like this all the time, whether it's in our own individual psyches or the collective psyches.
It's fascinating.
And ultimately, you know, what I tell people, when people say, oh, your dad, I wish, you know, and I'm like, yes, I get it.
But I remind people, I say, look, no matter what, we can remember this.
Dad said, When you're born, you get a ticket to the Freak Show.
And when you're born in America, you get a front row seat.
So, we're at the Freak Show.
And then he added later on another thing which I love, which is, and some of us get to sit on the side and take notes and talk about it, which is what we get to do.
So, the political situation we have going on right now, this pathetic, really pathetic group of candidates, pretty much on all fronts, in my opinion, with Bernie being the one exception.
I agree.
What do you think he would make of this?
Now, he obviously was socially liberal, but he didn't identify as a Democrat, did he?
I mean, Bill Maher literally gave an Obama Super PAC He did.
And it was sort of brilliant what he said, because he was like, he's like, I know this sounds like I'm doing this for Obama, but I'm doing this for me, because I don't want the other guy to become president.
But do you think as a comic there's a risk in that, because then you've shown your cards too much, and that what your dad did in a way, by holding a little closer I think every comic has their own approach.
Everyone's got their own approach to it in their own way.
My dad liked being not part of it all.
He liked not having no stake in it, so that he could emotionally detach from it.
I think that's how he personally protected himself from all of it, too.
I personally don't think that's a healthy way to go through life.
Love my dad dearly.
You know, my dad was like, I gave up on the species, I gave up on the planet, and I was in my late 30s, early 40s at the time, and I was like, YG, I hope to have 30 to 40 more years on the planet.
Yeah, and there's probably something to be said for that, that we all in life, and I'm not just talking about comics, but everybody sort of picks very little role about how they're going to go about things, and some people are going to, you know, have kids and try to teach them the right thing, and some people, like your dad, will have one child but then teach a generation.
Well, it does seem that something in comedy has changed where counterculture doesn't seem to be very cool anymore.
Your dad, part of the coolness was he was counterculture.
And right now, if you were counterculture, it really means you're sort of against the administration, so somehow you're against Obama.
And I think maybe because of all this political correctness stuff, There's a sense that that's not cool, so it's sort of like the death of comedy in a way.
Well, we could talk about your dad and all this stuff forever, but I want to shift a little bit to sort of how we know each other for the past couple of years and some of the things that we talk about all the time.
So you have these parties every couple of weeks at your house where you bring basically What I would describe as sort of the wackiest mix of comedians and actors and writers and philosophers and what other professions are there.
I mean, behind the camera people, musicians, really this wild crew of people and it's always changing and coming and going.
So I first want you to explain what The Polly Mind means to you, but the reason I love it so much is because it's so become part of how I've treated this show, that I want my audience to be part of what we're talking about.
I want it to be a conversation.
So now explain what The Polly Mind is.
And most of the people that you've had at your parties, by the way, I've had on previous incarnations of my show.
I mean, you really opened up a zillion friends to me and the comedy community and all that.
I think being an only child, I was a loner and a bit lonely, so community has always been important to me.
And especially in the last 20 years, I've really felt that.
And part of what happened and how this came to be was, when my dad died, I became part of the comedy community, which I was not a part of before, and met Paul Provenza.
Like, him and my worlds kind of merged in this thing called the—what I call the polymind commune emerged.
And for me, the polymind is—comes from my roots of studying Carl Jung's psychology, the collective unconscious, that we have all these archetypes inside of us.
We have all these voices in our head, and they all have a right to have a voice.
You know, from the most staunch conservative voice in our head to the most liberal voice to the most immature to the most mature.
We all—everything gets a voice and gets a seat at the table at some point, because every voice ultimately is important.
And I think the way, the reason we do that in public is because we have such intolerance for the voices inside of our heads.
Also, I think what is inner is outer.
I mean, that's part of what I do.
So part of, I just love that word.
And so I just came up with this word poly mind because I really feel like we all are Individually a poly mind, but community in itself is a poly mind, that we each have our own perspectives and our own way of seeing it, and we can agree on ten things, and then there's four things that we totally disagree on, and that's okay!
It would be boring, and there's no learning and expanding, and there's no, you know, there's no juice in life at all then, you know. So yeah, so this, so I
just, you know, playfully call it the poly mind commune, you know, because ultimately I'm a hippie,
And then there's like suddenly they're collaborating on a thing.
Three months later I hear they're collaborating on a thing.
There's a lot of collaboration going on and that, I don't know, that just brings me such joy to know that I can create a space for that stuff to happen.
Yeah, and I can give you a living, breathing example of that, as you know, because Roseanne and I became good friends and we've been working together and doing things.
One of the more interesting ones that happened at your place was, I guess it was probably about a year ago, I met Taylor Negron, who, for those that don't know him, was a Brilliant comic actor and stand-up really in the 80s, into the 90s.
Storyteller.
Brilliant, brilliant guy who I loved without knowing him and then I met him one night at the fire pit at your place and we were talking and you know I could tell like he thought I was funny that I got it kind of thing And we were talking, talking, and then I told him about my
show and he said he would do my show.
And then literally two months later, I found out he was dead.
And I assume he knew he was sick.
I don't know a lot about the story.
But those types of things are what's going on there.
Yeah. And people feel comfortable to be themselves there.
I mean, that's why Roseanne will come to my house.
And I don't—it's not like I have, as you know—there's not, like, all these A-list celebrities sitting around my fire pit.
It's not like that, actually.
But every once in a while, Roseanne will come by, and she feels comfortable there because no one's, like, gawking at her or whatever.
And—but it was like—I mean, the first time she came to my house, it was one of those moments, because even though I grow up being my dad's daughter and everything, These people are icons to me.
And I'll never forget the first night she was there, her and Rick Overton and Paul Provenza
were sitting around the fire pit, and I'm walking by with some friends,
and I'm like going, "Oh my God, "look what's going on in my backyard."
And I think that's the hope of our species, is that, you know, we can have a safe space for conversation.
And, you know, one of the things about the Internet, which is fabulous because we met on Twitter and all of that, is great, but there doesn't feel like there's a lot of safe space.
You know, you have to really filter through a lot of anger and rage.
Lonely people who are trying to make a dent in the world and not do it in a nice way.
Not conducive to conversation or listening.
There's very little listening going on on the internet.
There's a lot of talking going on.
So yes, in our lives we are trying to create space where we can hear each other.
Yeah, I think for me what's really, I mean we've talked about this before, but even on a new level, just in the last month or so, I really am starting to get sick of the intrusiveness of it.
How dare it?
And I say it like it's some sort of autonomous thing and I haven't invited it in.
But as you know, when you and I do our little retreats, our electronic retreats, and we turn off for a week or ten days, or sometimes a weekend, yeah, you don't really miss that much.
But I actually, I genuinely felt my brain resetting.
I felt, I've described to you before as like, you know when you used to turn on an old desktop computer and there'd be some whirring and some bing bing?
I felt that.
I actually felt that in my head.
And then when I got back I was like, wow, everyone's just up to the same old shit.
I think, so it really is, like everything else, it's neutral, so it can be used for good or evil, and like everything else, you have to be conscious about it.
You have to really decide what are you using this for in your life, and in your career, and how much of it You know, there may be an overall net good, but how much of it is a net negative in your life, in your personal life, and in your process, in your creative process?
You know, I've been finding lately that I'm doing much better away from it all because I'm going deep down to try to figure out what my next book is.
I can't do that when I'm online and I'm looking out into the world.
I have to go inside of myself to figure that stuff out and do some research and some things,
but I have to be very conscious about what I'm doing.
And that's my process, and I'm figuring that out.
And I think the longer we have this technology--I mean you have to think about it.
In 2008 was the first smartphone, the first iPhone came out.
And yet there's something like exciting about, you know, that if we were really to become a collective, a conscious collective mind on some level where we could really solve the really big problems that we need to solve, We need many voices to do that.
I mean, that's what democracy is about, this marketplace of ideas.
And so it invites that.
You know, there's this other level of connection that, you know—there's a Pakistani hip-hop artist, Adil Omar, who I met also on Twitter.
Yeah, and so therefore, we're not really having the real conversations we should be having.
But dammit, we are, because you're here, you're doing this, there's a lot of real good conversation going on in the world now, but we have to be the grown-ups.
And say, no more clickbait, sorry.
I'm not doing it, you know, and the ones who are distracted by it, well, there's always going to be mob mentality.
And I think after this, you know, this internet explosion, we all had fun being distracted for the last seven to ten years.
It's all fun to be distracted.
But now it's also like, oh, it's the hottest year again.
Oh, it's crazy weather.
Oh, this shit's really going down.
Oh, there's no one going to fucking be swooping out of the sky and rescuing us.
Oh, maybe we do need to get our shit together.
Maybe we do need to just I mean, it doesn't have to be these serious, heaviest conversations all the time.
But where are the grownups?
I want to go hang out with the grown-ups, and yes, smoke some pot, and have a nice drink, and laugh, and be silly too, but yeah, I want to be hanging out with the people that are kind of trying to think straight about things.
Yeah, well that's what we're trying to build here.
I almost feel that that should be the ending of the show, but I'm going to give you one more, I'm going to give you one bonus question, which is what's next?
What's next?
What's next after all this?
Because I know how much of you you had to pour into this book.
I saw the copies before.
I saw the manuscript when it was just printed from your printer and all that.
And how much you had to put yourself into this and go into talking about things that are scary to talk about and expose not only your dad, but your mom.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's been kind of two me's the last ten years.
The one that's had this book in me and knew that it was unfinished business and that I had to That, in some ways, it was going to give me permission to have a bigger conversation in the world.
And on a personal level, it was unfinished business just around my psychological healing.
I mean, I am a person who studied psychology, and I do focus more on the inner life than the cultural life on some levels, although I'm pretty 50-50 these days.
So, really, I think my next thing is really pointing my mind Slightly more outwards, you know, that it'll always be interested in our personal process and how do we get from A to B and B to C and C to D. But I think they're really connected.
I think how we do this on the inside, the micro is connected to the macro and how we treat ourselves is ultimately how we treat each other and how we treat the planet.
And so I'm interested in connecting all of those dots.
I don't know exactly what it looks like right now.
I think I'm going to start up my podcast again.
I'm looking to create something at a little more elevated level around the podcast, maybe with video or something and finding a new format.
I've suddenly become the humanist girl.
I did a keynote speech at the American Humanist Association conference last summer.
I'm speaking at the Reason Rally, and I've been hired to do another one in May in Vancouver, and I'm suddenly like, I'm the spiritual humanist girl!
You know, it's very interesting, but there's something about soul and meaning and the inner life that I think is important, and it's an important part of the conversation, and doesn't have to be thrown out just because we don't believe The whole church bullshit and religion bullshit.
There's still a way to find meaning in wonder.
I think wonder is a really important aspect.
If we could get reconnected to the wonder of being alive, we'd all appreciate people a little bit more.