And we're here with our show Front and Center , Writing Our New Story Together. The reason Steve and I are doing this interview video here is so that you have an opportunity to get to know a little bit more intimately, Steve's path, his journey to here, what brought us together and mine, so that you'll hopefully appreciate these journeys and resonate with your own journey. Our show front and center, we'll have guests that we will introduce to you that will that will range across the board, trying to spark curiosity within yourself, to help us write this new story together so that we can get off of the battlefield and onto a new playing field of cooperation and communion so that we can move beyond this to a world that our hearts known is possible. But before we get into that, I want to ask Steve, Hey, Steve, tell people a little bit about your family background and your political background. And what led you to here?
Thanks, Mike. Well, I like to say I spent my D formative years in New York City. A housing project in Brooklyn, I grew up in a fairly non religious Jewish household, very open minded, very tolerant, a very mixed neighborhood, racially mixed, etc, etc. In this housing project. And an event that I remember when I was 12 years old, I was taking Bar Mitzvah lessons, as my parents wanted me to have some kind of religious education. And I was going along very well, I was really enjoying it. And then the, then the teacher said, we should only associate with our own kind. And I stood up in class. And I said, That's not what I learned in my family. And it just kind of stopped the conversation there. And that's when I started to recognize that perhaps I had a less conventional view than most people and maybe a more ecumenical view. My major in high school and in college, was political science. And even though I never got quite so far in the field as to actually dissect a politician, I did learn some would like you to dissect now. Yeah, well, you know, we were lacking remain, we may not find guts, we may not find heart, we may not find brains, that's a problem. But anyway, I did learn some distinctions and political science that really helped me see bigger than the elephant and donkey show that's going on, and look a little bit behind the curtain. And above the scenes. My first year teaching in Washington, DC, I was part of something called the Urban Teaching Core. And I was given a unit to teach this is 1967. And the unit was about alternative views of the Kennedy assassination. And after looking at this material and teaching it to my students, I went wow, this makes more sense than the Warren report. So you know, at the age of 20, and just four years after the actual event, I already had a different view than than most Americans. Same year, another of my fellow students, a conservative libertarian, introduced me to the Bilderberg. And for those who don't know, the Bilderberg, it's kind of like Davos, it's kind of like the World Economic Forum. And it's a place where the elites of the world and those who think they run the world, get together every year and meet and discuss policy and decide on how things are going to be so again, for my entire adult lifetime, I've had a sense that there is something going on above and beyond the ordinary, what we're being told. I was of course part of the student movement in Washington, DC I was involved with the Institute for Policy Studies, I met people like Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman. And I also met Carl Hess and Carl Hess was a libertarian. He was a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater. And I learned a lot from him he and a progressive Dave Morris started one of the first we're going to talk a little more more about trans partisan one of the first trans partisan endeavors in Washington DC, something called the Institute for Local Self Reliance, which helped people grow their own food, rooftop gardens and trout in their basement. So I had a very good background in watching people work together. Gather across political boundaries. I thought I had a career teaching at Wayne State University. I was teaching labor history and ethnic studies. But then a funny thing happened. And sometimes when a funny thing happens, it ain't that funny. And the funny thing that happened was I got laid off from my dream job. I loved this job. I was really good at it. But because they needed to place their tenured professors I got laid off, the only job I could get was working for the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan. operating heavy equipment. I had lived on a farm for a couple of years. I knew how to operate equipment, so I was qualified. And while I was at this job, another funny thing happened. I fellow worker and I a brilliant psychologist, disguised as a truck driver, my friend Larry Kelso, he and I started a humorous publication for the guys that we work that with at the shop. And it totally transformed the workplace because we created a sense of playfulness. And also we could tell truths that couldn't be told through the language of humor. And that project got me started on my career path, which for the last 35 years, I've mainly been writing and performing what I call cosmic comedy, in the guise of Swami Beyondananda, the cosmic comic, Swami looks to really bring people together if you humor, it's open hearted. It's a lot of wordplay, it's kind, I work cleaned, and the design is actually to get people to move beyond their differences. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, if we don't laugh together, we're surely going to cry separately. So we definitely want to have that. In the course of my work. In 2005, I met Bruce Lipton, who was a very well known cellular biologist, whose book Biology of Belief was a best seller. And in the book, he talked about how our beliefs and perceptions impact the quality of our lives, our health, and the out picturing of what we create in the world. And Bruce and I, we both really were admirers of the founders of this country, we wanted to write a book called The American Evolution, we changed it to Spontaneous Evolution, because we were really looking at a worldwide audience. And this book talks about how our beliefs and perceptions impact our collective beliefs and perceptions impact the world around us. And to give you a punch line for the book, our basic contention is that we would we would end up as a next phase of human evolution is recognizing that we're all cells in the same body, and much of what we're doing is really auto immune dysfunction. And so that's when I began to get very interested in trans partisan endeavors that is, above and beyond the partisan divide, not pretending that we don't have any differences. But actually using those differences. As a dynamic to actually get through to break through perceptions. I was introduced to Joseph McCormick, a trans partisan pioneer from the conservative side. And he and I wrote a little ebook called Reuniting America. And through the process of working with Joseph, I got connected with the Bridge Alliance. And that's how I met Michael, some 10 years ago or so. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Michael, talk about your background. And then let's talk about how we account we've come together to create this podcast.
Thanks, Steve, by the way, well, for another conversation, but basically, my family was kind of the opposite. I was on a South Bay guy here in the West Coast, born and raised in California. My father was a son of immigrant parents from Italy. Unfortunately, he was orphaned at five and raised in a with a couple of immigrant uncles, and that's where we've had very little religious influence. Despite the fact my father was Italian, everybody assumed must be Catholic. But because of his circumstances, he was not raised in a religious family. And my mom, she didn't even meet her father till she's in her 40s and her step father was a Greek immigrant, one of the founders of the largest Greek church in Los Angeles. So her influence was Greek Orthodox. When when I was growing up, they decided to let my brother I had a brother, who was two years older than me decide what church resonated with our hearts. So they took us to a number of different churches. We would go to a church for maybe six months, nine months, and then we'd switch with a Baptist Lutheran Catholic, Episcopalian, Protestant. And then when when I was I think about 12, my brother was 14, they said, Okay, does anyone in particular feel strongly to you, and both my brother and I really resonated with the Episcopalian Church. So we went, were baptized in Episcopalian Church. We went through their classes for confirmation, and were confirmed in the Episcopalian Church. But religion wasn't a major part of our family. And it didn't become much more significant in my life until many years later. But I was a good student and a good athlete. I was in student leadership from the time I was in middle school, I was class president there, I was class president, my junior and senior year in high school. I played three sports, football, baseball and basketball in high school, I started surfing at 11 years old, distinguished myself a little bit in football, becoming a all conference cornerback and then had the opportunity to go to San Diego State to play football down there. And so I went to San Diego State. I started off as a political science major until my senior year going into my senior year when I realized I had to have this foreign language requirement. And I could never roll an R. Both of my kids are bilingual in Spanish, but I couldn't roll an R. So I quickly changed to a public administration, they didn't have a foreign language requirement, and kept Poli Sci as my minor. After finishing four years of school there, I was on a path to always everybody thought I was going to become an attorney. That was my career path, if you will. And after I washed out in football, religion, I was never going to play pro football. But I didn't have the money to go right directly into law school. So a gentleman I met doing my senior thesis working on the Chief Administrative Officer of San Diego county staff as a speech writer and researcher for the chief administrative officer. He offered me a job of a new startup company in the graphic arts and the opportunity to move to San Francisco, which I said immediately, yes, because I wanted to go to law school, either Bolt Law school, or to at Berkeley School of Law. And so I moved to San Francisco and got into the graphic arts. And I'm so fascinated with it. And despite my parents and everybody else's wishes, I decided not to quit and go back into law school, I decided to stay in the graphic arts, I was in that business for 20 years. I became the youngest salesperson in the in one of the three finest printing companies in the Western United States, I rose up to be the youngest vice president and then president of the company. A division of American Standard Corporation, by the time I was 30. They changed hands got sold, I ended up getting hired on a national search to be the chief operating officer for a joint venture between Nissan and the highest quality printing company in Japan called Mura Graphics. And I did that for two years. And then became a a father late in life. But my political journey kind of started happening during 2006-2007, when the recession was just starting to take hold that our standard of living been cut in half. When I was back in high school. And Steve, you'll probably remember this reason to laugh and go, Wow. You know, by the time we're our parents age, we'll only have to work 20-30 hours a week, because when we were kids, they had the first washing machines, vacuum cleaners, man, it was like, Whoa, all these great conveniences will hell, the neighborhood that I was raised in, where every single household had one parent working, that supported a brand new track home two miles from the beach. Today, that same neighborhood, has both parents working, maybe one or two kids in every few houses. When I was a kid we had with two kids with a smallest number of kids in the neighborhood. Most families have four to six kids. But that same neighborhood 50 years later, takes two incomes, and no children. So our standard of living I've watched been cut in half. And then as we got into the deep recession, and and then we were leading up to the Affordable Care Act. As you'll remember Steve and most of the people I would assume were many in the audience. That was a very acrimonious time in American politics, not as acrimonious as we are right now, but very close to it. And I was over at an at a dinner party with some of my friends. And my son was there and it was right in May, on May 10, 2010. And I we got into Some heated discussions over the Affordable Care Act and got in the car and I said to my then fiance, and now wife, I've learned three things tonight: first don't have a political discussion after more than one glass of wine. I had been a Poli Sci major, I'd studied politics and thought about it. I thought I really could articulate and I become a conservative. Even though in college, I was an SDS card carrying member of the Students for Democratic Society. I marched with Jane Fonda against the war in Vietnam, I did all those things. But now after going to business for 20 years, I had become this Reagan, Reagan Republican. And everybody thought I was a lifetime conservative, lifelong conservative. But I got to kind of see something's wrong here. Why can't people who love each other, who respect each other can't talk to each other about these political differences. And that has only gotten far worse in the times we're at. And they're the people in the trans partisan. So in that was in May 10, of 2010. Next month, a few weeks later, a young author, a writer, an employee of mine, and his father, a friend of over 30 years, was in my office, and he'd asked something about my son, and I said, Ah, yeah, he went off to this left wing seminary. And it was like a little match under under Chris. And he just went off on me about how America's corrupted the world and polluted this, and I just let him go off for a minute. I said, Chris, that's enough. If you want to talk politics, you can do so out of the office, to his credit. Oh, and well, to his credit that now to get an email, can we meet for lunch tomorrow, and he was living up in LA, he was only 22. He just finished graduate school at UCLA and winning all kinds of awards nationally for his writing. And so the next day, we started a conversation that came down we met for lunch and and that one conversation led to every Friday a conversation, we moved into the weekends. And by the end of the year, oh, by the way, that that first lunch, he reveals to me after me telling him that I'm a conservative, Ronald Reagan Republican, that he's an anarchist, one of the founders of the Bruin Anarchist at UCLA. So, starting from that point of he a 22 year old anarchist, and me being a a Reagan Republican. That was the starting point for our conversations. We agreed to exchange information, but not talk. Just listen and read what the other one sent until we met each time. And that really begin to open my eyes and peel things back. first weekend in January 2011, Chris and I committed to each other to co-found a nonprofit called Rebellious Truth, which you can see some of our things over our shoulders, and rebellious truce, our mission statement. And it has been my mission statement ever since then, is to "galvanize educate, organize and activate the millennial generation and others to lead a responsible, the key word there being responsible, revolution to reform our political system." Because we recognize that if we do not get government on the side of people, out of the hands of the special interests, I have referred to now, as those people who were part of the Hunger Games, society elites. If we don't get our government on the side of the people, we will not be able to successfully deal with these significant issues and challenges of our times. So Rebellious Truths led me on a journey to with David M. Walker, the former Comptroller General of the United States who became a major ally. He was in three of our videos. We produced 17 videos. They collectively, between our website and YouTube, had over 5 million views. We had 42,000 Millennials on our Facebook as followers. But that led me on this amazing journey to meet people like Mark Gerzon and John Steiner and others who founded the Bridge Alliance. And those were the individuals who introduced me to Steve, way back about 10 years ago. And that's what led us to where we are today. And so we could both go on at length about that. But that will come out more in our shows. There is a bio of a little more details of each of our backgrounds on on the the platform here for LOCALS. But it's we want to share with you more now about the show itself. But before we do I want to first interject how excited we are to be on the LOCALS platform. The Locals platform gives us really two major things: first and foremost, we're asking you to subscribe, whatever you can afford $5 or more a month is great because I would first and foremost, help Steve and I pay our rent, and allows us to continue to do this work that we will bring forth to you. But it also most importantly, right now is most important, equally as important keeps the trolls off, so that you don't have people who who are there interfering in our conversations. And on LOCALS, we don't have to worry about censorship, you can be open, honest and candid at all times, the only thing we ask is that everybody treat each other with respect, because we're here to write our new story together. And to come up get off of that Battlefield and onto a playing field. And last thing I want to say about about Locals is that when you subscribe to Locals, it'll give you the ability to post up on on the the website, it will give you the ability to share information, post up your events, so that we can really expand and amplify the messages and of those people that we're going to bring to you. So front and center, the name stands for what we believe is important right now, front and center means it is time, come forward, come front and center, get involved. And because the collective impact of our efforts will change the course of our nation and ultimately the world. But it's only when we do this together. So that's kind of the basis of our show. Steve, would you describe for our audience, the kind of categories, if you will, that we have for the guests that will be invited?
Sure, you know, and the overview is that there's really, there's really two aspects of what we're doing. There's two missing pieces that I think have led us to the new word, shituation that we're in right now. And first of all, first of all, it's there hasn't been what we're calling a sane and sacred center at our community. In other words, there hasn't been a an agreed upon idea of what's valuable above and beyond our ourselves above and beyond, you know, our, our, our smaller world. And so consequently the power of money has stepped into the vacuum. We all wonder why, 'why is it that that's what rules?' It's because we the people of this country haven't gotten together in a coherent way to point at what we really want in this world. And that's the second part, our tagline, Front and Center, Writing Our New Story Together. In other words, we want to focus not so much on the device of narratives, plenty of attention being paid to that we want to focus on. Where we're going together, we like using Charles Eisenstein's great phrase, "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible." And so we're going to be having several different kinds of guests on the show. First of all, we're going to be having what we're calling the connectors. Nice are the people who've been working behind the scenes, in getting people together to talk and listen to one another respectively, to rehumanize one another, so that we can have breakthrough solutions, rather than just the arguments that we have. The second group A we're calling visionaries, and the vision, the visionaries are people like Charles Eisenstein, those who are setting out a vision for where we might want to go as a country and as a species. The Bible says, "where there's no vision, the people perish." We want the people to thrive. So we want to help everybody. If they don't like the current programming, turn off your TV, tel-a-vision instead, okay? Then we're also going to have we call solutionaries. These are people who've been working on their own what we're calling work of heart, something that they have been working on. That is a new way of doing something that if more people knew about it, they go, Wow, let's do that instead. And then finally, we're going to have what we call 'heroes of the heart.' And, Mike, why don't you tell us about what is 'heroes of the heart?' What does that name?
Well, 'heroes of the heart' means. These are individuals who have given significantly of themselves for the betterment of our nation or the world. We will bring you examples that will hopefully inspire you. That will spark your desire to help get involved. And, one of the things I've been asked for many years is: 'what can I do?' People think the problems are overwhelming. And I say take an inventory of what resources you have. You may have a lot of time. You may be retired. You may have time on your hands. You may have money. You may have contacts. You may have a particular skill. Take an inventory of what it is that you have. Then look for a program a project out here. In the grassroots that will need your help. And you want to you resonate with its mission. Because no matter people think that they have to do something of real significance, though, and it's like, my contribution will be insignificant. No, it's not. Everyone's contribution is important. You never know, what your actions are that may be seemingly insignificant, the impact they have on another individual, that inspires them. And they might be able to do something incredibly great beyond our imagination. But they wouldn't have been been inspired to do that if they hadn't seen your act of kindness or of, of, of cooperation or compassion to somebody else. So don't worry about the significance of your contribution. Just get involved and jump in. Because it is the collective impact of our intentions, and our efforts, that will change the course of this nation. So the heroes of the heart, we will bring you people like Zen Honeycutt, and many, many others, who will, hopefully spark of a fire inside of you to say, You know what, I can contribute. And I'm going to get involved. We can do this. And we will do this. One thing I want to back up on a little bit, to add to this issue of vision. Everyone filters their facts through their own beliefs, it's so important to recognize that the only way people change beliefs. No matter what you say on on a matter to somebody, they're not going to change their beliefs. Only a strong personal experience, or a strong vision have something they want to do, some desire they want to attain, will they begin to change their beliefs. You can't change their belief for them. Only they can change it. But that's what writing our new story together to create a vision of where we want to go as a species, where do we want to go? Where do we want to go first and foremost as a nation, and then ultimately for all of humanity, so that we will know, and to start making decisions that will move us towards that vision. But if we don't have a vision of where we want to go, you're floundering and the cross winds and the cross currents, you don't know where you're going. So having a vision will give us that opportunity to move forward beyond this battlefield and onto that playing field. And so that I want to say and basically that kind of from my end, and wraps all's I think we can share at this moment about the show. I really hope you you tune in, subscribe so you can share, help support us and our work. And I can't thank you enough for being here. Hopefully you'll join the journey with us and help write our new story together. Steve, would you close us out?
Yes, participation is key. Joseph McCormick and I in our Reuniting America book, we came up with this idea called the evolution of revolution. And what that means is that in these times, it's not really about one leader, or even a couple of leaders. It's really about a growing awareness inside the body politic, of a maturing, of recognizing that we are actually responsible. And if we want self governance, we have to show up in a way that indicates we're capable of it. So we're creating a community of of mature and yet playful individuals who want to create this more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, who want to meet together who want to actually spark this evolutionary up wising where we wake up, wise up, grow up and show up on a new playing field ready to play a new game. So thank you for joining us, and we'll see you soon.