[Laughs] You and Yvon Chouinard together!
It’s incredible that you can remember those moments.
As you were speaking, I was thinking that we are birthed
into the world somewhat unconditioned and then become
conditioned and then get to a point where we need to begin
the unconditioning process to feel free from convention or
the status quo. And I’m interested that you had these very
early moments of the anti-slavery movement filling your
heart with grief and acting perhaps as a trigger for you to
seek a better path. Have you always been having to unlearn
the stuff that’s plugged into us to get back to that point?as such a zero-sum game where I can only get ahead if I step on you and hold you down.
That competitive urge, that’s what’s killing us. Because after all, one of the things that the
woman on the interview yesterday said, “I don’t think there should be any billionaires in
the world. I mean who needs a billion dollars?” And I couldn’t agree more. I don’t even
think having a billion dollars is fulfilling or generates happiness.[Laughs]. But I didn’t!Yeah, yeah, yeah! So I love that you harkened me back to Dumbo
’cause I hadn’t thought about that story for a long time. One of
the charming aspects of the story is that the child is the hero. It’s the baby elephant who’s the
hero. And that to me is deeply resonant because you’re not messed up at that point. Nobody’s
had a chance to mess you up when you’re a really little kid. They haven’t taught you the
wrong things or treated you badly, hopefully, you’re still this pretty pure little love machine.
I was born into the advent of the television, which was an incredible thing if you think about
so many millions of people watching the same thing at the same time. It was treated with
a fair amount of gravitas. Unlike now where we think of television as being the way you get
all sorts of terrible information. At that time it was treated with this weird reverence. So I
remember that my brother and I were allowed to watch important televised events but we
had to be quiet, it was like being in church or something, because everybody would hang
on every word. And one of the very first things I saw was the funeral of JFK in 1963 which
would have made me just five. For some reason I remembered all of the funerals that were
televised at that time, Robert Kennedy and then Martin Luther King, I remembered them as
the civil rights funerals. And they deeply, deeply affected me because it was concurrent to my
learning in school about slavery. Later in life I learned about native genocide and less-than-
personhood for women and persecution of refugees and a whole list of the horribles that the
United States is founded upon. But slavery was the one that first and foremost filled my heart
with sorrow. Like, how could anybody do that?Yeah. So there are two pathways, one which
I know because I lived it personally and the
other I’m just learning. I do believe with
small children, they know what’s right and
what’s wrong and they take it to heart. And
it’s a question of, “Can you carry that into
your adulthood and not let it be tainted by
your experiences?” As I grew up, I had a
disenchanting moment, I can’t really be totally
forthcoming about this. But in spite of loving
parents, I definitely was not treated right as
a child. That was an important element in my upbringing and I think it made me a natural
advocate for underdogs. The parallel, which I only am learning to understand through
others, is because of work I’ve been exposed to with prisoners inside San Quentin and anti-
violence campaigns. A lot of males in our society are subjected, very early on, to enormousAll I was tempted to say is, “Well the one reason
you might need a billion dollars is if you’re trying
to impeach a dangerous president.”
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