442 The Soul of Strategy: Why Healing Our Leadership is the Next Frontier of Capitalism with Raj Sisodia

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

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Mahan Tavakoli: Raj Odio. Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

Raj Sisodia: wonderful to be with you Mahan, , which in India, Mahan means great. And it probably has a similar meaning in Persian. So wonderful to be with the great Mahan.

Mahan Tavakoli: Raj, what an honor it is for me to have you on. As I was mentioning to you, my dear friend David Gardner, who I had first back in episode 11 of this podcast in December, 2020, and then episode four 11 talking about his new book, rule Breaker Investing

Talks very highly of you and invited me to the launch of Conscious Capitalism at Georgetown about six or seven years ago here in dc.

So it's an absolute joy and honor having you on. Raj, can't wait to talk about Healing Leaders, which is your newest book. But before we do that, we'd love to know a little bit [00:01:00] more about you, Raj. Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing help contribute to who you've become?

Raj Sisodia: Yeah. It's it's interesting you connect the dots looking back, when you get a little older and try to make sense of this seemingly random series of experiences that we've had. So I had a unusual background by most standards, I would say I lived in India until I was seven, and that too, in a village.

Without electricity or running water. My grandfather was the overload of the village. You had hundreds of acres of land and hundreds of people working very futile environment. They all had titles and in her hereditary kind of status. So I came from that very futile, the warrior class in India.

There's a caste system, so this is the warrior cast, but my father was able to escape that whole world because he was a brilliant student. So he left for Canada when I was about two years old and came back when I was a [00:02:00] seven to get his PhD. So he was always away. So I didn't know my father until I was seven years old because he was away getting his bachelor's and then master's and then PhD.

And then he came back to India in 1965 when I was seven. And we soon after moved to Barbados in the Caribbean. Where he was a, his degree was in agriculture science, in plant genetics. So he became a plant breeder working on sugarcane in, in Barbados. And then after two years there, we moved to California where he worked on wheat research for two years, and then we moved to Canada for a year to the university where he got his PhD.

And then they decided, so by now it's the end of 1969, and they decided that they would like to go back to India. His father was putting a lot of pressure on him to come back as well. They saw us growing up in a very alien environment. Unlike today where the world feels a lot more connected in those days, fewer that far away from home, you were completely disconnected.

You could not travel [00:03:00] that frequently. There was, it was almost impossible to even make a phone call. Most people did not have phones in India, in their homes anyway. And so they just saw us growing up as these Americanized Canadian, little kids. With no understanding of our own heritage and culture.

So they decided we, that we are moving back. So from seven to 12 I was out in the west, and then from 12 onwards back in India, which was a big readjustment, and I was plunged back into that kind of almost 19th century culture that existed in our village, in our family, and many parts of India. And finished my high school there.

Then did my engineering because in those days, unlike now where India, there's a lot of dy dynamism. The economy in those days, it was a dead economy. It was a socialist minded government. Government controlled everything, more or less, so I ended up doing engineering because that was the option.

If you were good in math and science and you got into one of the six, there were literally six really good engineering schools in the country. Seven, [00:04:00] maybe I got into one of those, but I, that wasn't really my passion. I became that just by default. And then I learned that if you do this thing called an MBA, that your salary would double compared to an engineer and you would work in an air conditioned office.

And in India in those days, that was a big luxury. Okay. This having air conditioning is oh my god. So I worked only for 29 days as an engineer. Meanwhile, I applied to, at that time, I think there were about five business schools in India, that were considered the really good ones.

So I got into one of those and then the next two years I'm getting my MBA in Bombay. And sure enough, I had a job lined up, which was two and a half times my salary from as an engineer, which by the way, in those days, $150 a month okay. Was my engineering salary. This would be like $400 a month. I was gonna be rich, and but then I come down for breakfast one day in our graduate dorm in Mumbai, and seven of my friends were all dressed up in going somewhere. On a Monday when we didn't have any classes for Mondays. I said, where are you guys going? They said, we are going [00:05:00] to the US Information Agency to get GA applications.

I said, why do you need that? We're already getting our MBA said, oh, we wanna apply for a PhD in business. Oh, I didn't know that you can get a PhD in business. Give me five minutes, I'll come with you. I was still in my pajamas, so I literally ran upstairs and changed that into my clothes and went with them.

And the irony that from that group of eight of us, I'm the only one who ended up coming here to get a PhD. Right? And that's how life suddenly takes a turn, right? A door opens and you walk through it and suddenly, six months later, I'm standing in Times Square in New York. I got I got admission with full scholarship to Columbia and Michigan and Cornell and North Carolina.

I ended up in New York at Columbia University. This is fall of 1981. So I was as you can see, there was no plan. It's not like I grew up with a passion to be whatever. My father grew up with something, but I didn't have that. I just knew that whatever I was being shown or didn't turn, nothing [00:06:00] ignited anything in me.

And so I end up with a PhD in marketing. Now, why marketing? Because I thought finance was boring. And therefore, marketing, those were the two big choices, in in business marketing at least seemed a little more interesting, but and then I came from a country like that. As I said, India was a semi-socialist government controlled economy, and there was only one television station in black and white, and only 15 minutes of ads, okay?

That ran from 6 45 to 7:00 PM or something. So you could completely avoid all the advertising, right? And so I come from there to New York City. Which was like a tsunami of marketing, tsunami of advertising, right? The estimates were that the average American gets exposed to 3000 messages a day, and everywhere you look, I mean there's ads on TV, on the radio, and the little airplanes are pulling signs on above your head and stand at the urinal and there's a message and you walk up the stairs and there's a message and it's oh my God.

What are we, I know this. It's like crazy [00:07:00] how much we are spending and what are we getting? That became my question in my research. I had this inherent idealism inside me. I was a particular kind of critic. I was very trusting. I was very peace loving. I was very idealistic growing up, and now I get plugged into the, one of the most cynical professions I think, which is marketing, right?

Where there's a lot of manipulation, there's no connection to the truth really, for the most part. It's just trying to convince people to do something that may not be in their interest but is in your interest. And so it violated my sense of idealism in a way. And my inner dialogue was my father got a PhD in agriculture science.

'cause he literally, his dream was to cure world hunger. 'cause in the 1960s people were dying of starvation in India and Africa. Many places, not enough food, but he was part of that green revolution. And I got a PhD in marketing. I'm just out here selling more junk, to people who don't need it and can't afford it and it's not good for [00:08:00] them.

And my father, he used to say he got a mu, you've got amuse. When said I'm getting a PhD, he used to say, my son is a professor of marketing like that, with these air quotes. So he was amused about the whole thing. But I had this innate sense of. Something missing and in a way, even a sense of shame that I'm not doing something that is inherently noble and worthwhile in the world.

Yeah. The world needs more doctors and more teachers and more, many things, right? But does the world need more marketers doing what we do generally? And so without even realizing it, because in those days, people didn't talk about purpose and meaning in those, that wasn't part of the conversation that much.

But I was hungry for something like that. My idealistic soul craved something deeper than just selling crap, right? And lying about it. And so in that inquiry of searching for a better way, I did a lot of research showing that marketing, the way we practice it, is completely broken. That every year we spend more and [00:09:00] more on marketing, on ads and coupons and junk mail and sale after sale.

I estimated in 2004, we did a study. The image of marketing. We estimated that the US spent $1 trillion a year that year on ad coupons and junk mail. And another trillion dollars on selling. This is just the marketing, right? And the GDP of India that year was $700 billion. So the US was spending considerably more than that for a population of less than 300 million, right on ad coupons and junk mail.

And over a billion people in India were living on much less than that. So I said, wow, what are we getting for this, for customers, for companies and society? And all my research led me to conclude that actually we're not really creating value for any of them customers. We will get them to over consume and we get obesity and diabetes and we use women's bodies to sell products.

And that leads to eating disorders and body dysmorphia and depression. And we get kids hooked on junk and [00:10:00] we do all kinds of things right? So there's a negative consequence. And customers do not trust marketing. If it's marketing, that means it's not real. People use the phrase, oh, that's not true.

That's just marketing, right? And companies were getting very low returns and society is being hurt through all of the public health problems and all of the other environmental degradation that's going on. So I asked a very simple, but I think profound question. Is there a better way, this was not handed down by, through Moses, right?

That this is the way it must be. This is something manmade or created by humans. This idea that business only exists to make money and our job is to maximize profit. I said, there must be a better way to think about all of this. And that question I think is a very important one because the answer to that question is always yes.

Is there a better way? Yes. Doesn't matter what you're talking about, you could be talking about nirvana. There's still a better way, right? There's no limit to better. And so that then turned my focus away from what is wrong with marketing. [00:11:00] And I actually started a book called The Shame of Marketing.

And my mentor said, Raj, people wanna hear about the solution, not the problem. We've been writing about the problem for 10, 15 years now let's think about the solution. So I turned it around and I, is there a better way to think about marketing? Can we do marketing in a way? We don't spend all this money and yet customer loyalty is falling and customer trust is plummeting.

Can we do it in a way that customers love the company without spending all this money on ads and coupons? And so it, I called it in search of marketing excellence and I started to find those companies, but I soon discovered a bigger story there. Not just customers, but employees love these companies too.

And suppliers were loyal to these companies and communities embraced them. And loved having them in, in, in their in their neighborhoods. And so there was a different approach to business that I discovered, which was a stakeholder mindset. And what really connected all these stakeholders together was a sense of purpose, higher purpose, shared purpose, and noble purpose and core values.

This is what we hold to be sacred. [00:12:00] We believe in this, right? So I discovered ultimately what we call the four tenets of conscious capitalism. Through this research companies that are loved not only by employees, but by our customers, but by employees and everybody. They have the higher purpose. They've got a stakeholder mindset.

They have conscious leaders who care about people, care about the purpose and a caring culture where there's high levels of trust and authenticity and love and care in the culture of these companies. And so the book became firms of endearment world class companies, profit from passion and purpose.

Remember, there was a movie called Terms of Endearment. So this was a takeoff on that and. And then at the end when we did our financial analysis, that was the proverbial icing on the cake because I fully expected that these companies are not trying to maximize profit. They're trying to fulfill a purpose and they're trying to take care of their people and they're, operating efficient businesses.

So they're probably doing well, but not, they're not making same kind of money that others who are probably focused on that. [00:13:00] And what I actually found is that these companies that I had identified as fitting this profile had outperformed the market by a nine to one ratio over 10 years, the s and p 500 for the public companies.

So that was a bit of a shock, and we spent a lot of time then trying to decipher that and understand why, how can that be possible? How can you pay your people double like Walmart, Costco was paying double of Walmart, right? And providing lots of great benefits and investing in the customers and investing in your communities and the environment, and even paying taxes at a higher rate and still have more.

Higher shareholder returns and profits. So we realize that business can create so much more value than what we allow it to when we constrain it by saying, we only can focus on profit maximization. When you focus on something deeper, richer, more noble, you connect to people at a deeper level. And what I realized in retrospect is that all my business education and my career up to that point had been all about the head and the wallet, right?

We learned the [00:14:00] theories and the frameworks and everything has to go to the bottom line, but we completely bypassed the heart and the spirit, the soul. So I was never inspired in my business education and I was never emotionally engaged. And while writing forms of India, I was literally crying. And I knew this is a signal from my body that this really matters.

And if it matters to me it's, I'm sure it's gonna matter to some other people as well. So that was the turning point in my life. 2005, I discovered my purpose in the process of writing firms of Endearment. And the book came out in 2007. I met John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, one of the companies that we had featured as a poster child of Conscious Capitalism.

And he invited me to spend a day with him in Austin. And at the end of the day, at our dinner, I shared my vision for what I was following, the Institute for New Capitalism or Ink. I have a fetish for acronyms. And he looked at it and he said, oh, that's my vision as well. But I like the phrase Conscious Capitalism, which was actually coined by [00:15:00] Mohammad Unos, the creator of the micro lending concept, Gramin Bank in Bangladesh.

But he was using it more to define what we call a social business today, where, so society is the only stakeholder you're trying to achieve a social purpose, and we are using it more broadly. So that's how John and I decided to launch the movement in 2008. And here we are in 2000, oh, 26 now. So almost 18 years later. It's an idea that has grown and it has more and more proponents and adherence around the world.

Mahan Tavakoli: First of all, what a beautiful origin story. The different elements, whether your dad's sense of purpose or in some instances, being in a place at the right time

So a combination of directionality along with Chance in life, that led you to helping co-found conscious capitalism. I love , is there a better way? Because you [00:16:00] weren't willing to accept the world, whether the marketing world or the business world as it was handed to you,

Raj Sisodia: Yeah.

Mahan Tavakoli: for that better way. Unconscious capitalism became a way of looking at that. Now, the idea. Has taken hold over time. I do want to understand your perspectives on some retrenching that at least I see now in that even back in 2019, Raj, the Business Roundtable had a pretty public statement about a shift in their language prioritizing key stakeholders. Now, very recently, this past year, they pulled back a little bit on it, talking about ideological shareholder proposals, especially around proxy reform. [00:17:00] How do you read that and do you think that organizations for a while found prioritizing stakeholders to sell well to their employees and others? Now they're saying, no, that's not important anymore.

We're moving on to the new terminology of the day.

Raj Sisodia: There are people who latch onto things because they seem to be the fashionable thing to do, or, it's greenwashing or ESG or consciousness washing you might call it. So they never actually believed it or they never, they were not, it really, they were just using the language.

We feel that we are living through, as you said, retention or we call it a backlash moment. I think a lot of it has to do with the Trump phenomenon and there's a reassertion of the old way of doing things because it served certain people quite well for quite a long time. And I liken it somewhat jokingly [00:18:00] to star Wars.

If you look at the first three Star Wars movies, first one was called a New Beginning, which is a force awakes. The awakening of consciousness has been a story in our world for the last 30, 40 years in a significant way. 1989 was a big turning point. The Berlin Wall coming down. The end of that version of of dictatorships and communism and so forth, right?

Like a domino. Many countries moved and moving towards freedom. We also had, 1989 was the year that the worldwide web was invented, and that fundamentally transformed, we became more and better informed that we've ever been. It was also the year of the Exxon Aldi oil spill that awakened environmental consciousness in a significant way.

And many things, many other things happened. It was the first year that women outnumbered men cumulatively as college graduates in this country. There were more women college graduates than there were men. And every year it's been increasing the gap. 'cause about 60% of college students are women now. [00:19:00] So the rise of feminine values, feminine energy, which is love, compassion, caring, empathy, those kinds of things, right?

We've had a world that has been dominated by masculine energy and men or Len. That's why we've had, and when you don't have the counter counterbalancing feminine, then the healthy masculine, which is strength and courage and focus and resilience, it becomes the unhealthy, becomes domination, aggression, hyper competition, everything becomes a damn war.

The human history is one war after another, right? And so we had all of this happening, we called it in my book, forms of Endearment, we called it The Age of Transcendence, began in 1990. 'cause so many things shifted rights for gay people, so much environmental, all of those things. And so that's when we also came along, right?

Conscious capitalism, many other ESG. And it was CSR and it was inclusive capitalism. And just all kinds of movements and ideas have been [00:20:00] flourishing. Integral thinking as well. And then what happens when you have a lot of change in a relatively short amount of time. The prevailing structures start to, at some point notice that and then they start to rebel against it, or they wanna curb it and suppress it, because now it starts to feel like a threat.

So the power and privilege that people have enjoyed you, capitalism has done a lot overall for humanity. We start with that premise over the last 200 years, right? Per capita incomes have gone up six thou, 3000%, and life expectancy at lower double. All of that is true. But in the last 50 years, we've seen the rise of income inequality in dramatic ways, right?

We've seen, of course, the environmental issues, climate change, but also species extinction, loss of soil, all of all kinds of things, which are the consequences of the way we do business. That is resulting in these externalities, which are now threatening to overwhelm us, and we cannot afford that anymore.

And so we have to take into account all of [00:21:00] that. That capitalism has done a lot, but there's a lot of unrealized potential. Of capitalism to do even more if we apply higher consciousness to it. So our movement has been about doing that. And now episode two of Star Wars is the Empire strikes back. The empire strikes back seeing this now as a threat.

And what we cannot do is fold up our 10 and go home and say, okay, we lost that one. This is not a nice to have. This is an existential imperative. We don't have a future on this planet. We have children or to grandchildren. What kind of a life are they going to live? Our children are literally depressed about the future.

Children are killing themselves. Okay? It is a shocking thing when they don't want to have my children say they don't want to have children of their own, but they do not wanna bring children into this world that what it looks like is going to be. And so all of that is telling us something is dramatically wrong and we have a sacred responsibility in this time [00:22:00] with this backlash to double down.

To stay true to what we are about because this is, as I said, it's not a, an optional thing. We have to change these things. Otherwise, the amount of suffering on this planet will be unbearable. And so episode three is the Return of the Jedi. And I think that's what we can think about ourselves. We have, we are still here, we're training, we're working, we're, we are not going anywhere.

And all of this nonsense, as you can see through it. So clearly it is self-serving. It is egotistical, it is the people who are greedy for power and money and they have no consciousness. It is cruel. We are living through a moral recession in the world right now, and we need conscious leadership. We have to be it, be the change.

Gandhi said, be the change you wish to see in the world. We have to be that and continue to work as hard as we ever have to [00:23:00] bring about this change. Because like I said, it's our duty to the future. We were here at this time and we could make a difference. And if we don't do it, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

So I'm a believer that we will go through this. This is a, these empire strikes back is always a short term phenomenon. Fundamentally, as Martin Luther King said the moral arc of the universe bench towards justice, towards what is right towards love, towards togetherness, towards higher planes of consciousness.

That is our journey on this planet of gradually waking up. Now, once in a while you wake up and you go back to sleep. I think we're in one of those phases right now. We're reversing a lot of that, but I believe this is a weird and temporary chapter in human history ultimately.

Mahan Tavakoli: I share your hope, Raj, that said, I love the transition you've also made with your new book, Raj, focusing [00:24:00] on the individual.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah. It has been a trajectory for me. As you've said, I've gone from the macro. Looking at system and then companies and the business in general and capitalism towards this idea of healing. So I have a book called The Healing Organization that came out in 2019 where I had observed the amount of suffering in our world.

First of all, there's still a lot of it. We have made a lot of progress with capitalism and yeah, 90% of people used to live in extreme poverty, and that's now below 9%. So that's a huge thing and many other such indicators. And yet at the same time, there's still tremendous suffering in the world. Still a billion people living without clean water.

3 billion people living on less than $5 a day. Tens of thousands of children buying every day of preventable causes, tens of billions of animals being killed. After living tortured existences in factory farms and so much more that is even [00:25:00] invisible. The bees and the, insects and all kinds of things.

So we are creating a lot of suffering on this planet as a consequence of the way we do business, not intentionally so with it's, it's not that you wake up and say, let me cause some suffering in the world, but it is the outcome. It's one of the biggest outcomes, the biggest cost of doing business is the suffering.

120,000 Americans die every year from too much stress. Heart attacks are 20% higher on Mondays, 600,000 Chinese die from overwork. Too much work. So that's the biggest cost we have. And my question was, is that necessary? Do we have to hurt people to make money? If so, then I will resign and I don't wanna be part of this institution.

Systematically we must hurt people to make money. So I set out to explore the question, can businesses actually do the opposite where people are burning out and stressed out and getting heart attacks? Can we actually have businesses where the opposite happens? You [00:26:00] become physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually stronger at the end of the workday.

Then you came in that morning and I found 25 such companies where that was the case, to show that yeah, not only is this possible, but here are these companies doing it. Here are some very practical things you can take away from them. And by the way, they're all much more successful in their industry than their competitors are.

'cause they're tapping into something fundamental and deep. And so the idea of healing organizations was in the back of my mind. And I wrote that book when I was turning 60 in 2018 and 60. Felt like a big milestone. . But I'm 67 now, so that year 60 felt like a big deal. I didn't have the same reaction to 40 or 50, but 60. Wow, it's the end of the second act of your life in the beginning of the final act. And it's what have I learned and how do I make sense of life going forward?

So I was thinking those things, and yet I was still in my normal mode of all full steam ahead and, [00:27:00] working on the book. And I had set aside the entire summer for writing retreats to finish the book, the Healing Organization book. And then four women stopped me in my tracks. And I've learned to listen to Wise women, and they have a lot to offer.

So they basically all ask me a version of the same question. Oh, you're writing a book about healing. That's great. What about your own healing?

And I said I don't have time for that. I've got a book deadline October 5th. This book is due. So I've got the whole summer blocked out. They said, you better make time for that. You cannot write a book about healing if you don't work on your own on your own healing, right? And I said I think I'm okay.

I don't think I need to do that. I said, no, we know you. We know you. We know your life story. There's a lot that needs to be healed, which you haven't acknowledged. And so I had the good sense to delay that book by five months, and I said yes to a variety of experiences that I had already declined. So my co-author on this book and on a previous book called Shakti [00:28:00] Leadership, which is about the embracing the feminine and masculine together, she organizes spiritual journeys around the world, Shakti spiritual tours.

And so she was planning one that summer to the high Himalayas in a region called Laak, which is on the border with Tibet. Literally you have mountain passes that you cross at 22,000 feet elevation, okay? And it is the seat of some of the deepest Buddhist wisdom in the world. You have all this Tibetan Buddhism, and you have Kashmiri Buddhism, right?

And all these amazing monasteries and so forth. So that's where I had my 60th birthday. I called Nima. I said, okay, I'm coming on the trip. So I learned a lot about suffering in the process of going through those monasteries and so forth. I said yes to a silent retreat in upstate New York, which for your listeners if you've never experienced a silent retreat, I strongly encourage you to do so because we have so much noise in our lives at all times that we never actually get [00:29:00] the luxury of tuning in as well as tuning into some source.

And, for me, in those three days of total silent three and a half days, I walked around with a journal and a pen and in nature, and I had 42 pages of notes. By the time I, I was done and I had so many insights about my life and about life in general. And basically the outline for healing Leaders was in a way, I know I received that in those four days.

I also worked with a coach for the first time, and that's also something I recommend to people, to give you a different perspective and get you to look at your life in a different way. And she heard the story of my life, my professional life, which was unhappy and unfulfilling for the first 20 years.

And then I found my, and then my relationship with my father, which was very difficult, very distant, and I had lots of traumatic things between him and me. And yet, I come from this patriarchal culture, right? So Father is God, right? You're supposed to, think, [00:30:00] oh, how would my father think about this?

Or how, what would Papa say? So she heard my story and I was 60 that year. She said, you realize that you spent 45 years of your life trying to impress your. With all the worldly success, right? He's about power and money and status and all of that. And now you have spent the last 15 years honoring your mother with your work that everything you've done, starting with terms of endearment and conscious capitalism and all these other books, is bringing your mother's energy into the world of leadership and business.

Compassion, caring, empathy, inclusion, forgiveness, nurturing, that this is what is missing in the world. So you've been honoring your mother with your work, and then she insisted that I call my mother and tell her that, which I said, oh, come on. We don't talk like that in my family, right? You talk about the weather and you talk about how your niece feeling, and you might talk a little politics, but not, she said, no, you must call her and tell her.

I told her I did call her the next day, and it turned into the most healing conversation of [00:31:00] my life because she had no idea that her way of being had even mattered or registered. And I said, mommy, everything I've done that has made a difference because of you. She in 62 years, Mahan, she never once raised her voice to me.

All she did was love us and to any of her three children, pure unconditional love. This is extraordinary actually. And so that was pretty profound to, to have that realization that this is part of what my journey, because I'm much more like my mother. My nature is more like her than my father who's this warrior.

He is more a prototypical warrior cast, energy. And then I went to the Amazon Rainforest as well with a group called the Hamama Alliance and Lynn Twist who's on our conscious capitalism board actually, so she takes groups of people into the Amazon rainforest. We live with the indigenous people there.

We learn about how we are part of nature. We come from nature. We come out of this world, not into this world, and yet we've disconnected ourselves. And so I had a lot of profound healing experiences there with the shamans, [00:32:00] including an ayahuasca. Experience as well, which I'm happy to go into if you want.

All of this was the backdrop for a turning point in my life. And this began my healing journey for myself because until then I had found my purpose way back in 2005. And you think that, oh, you find your purpose and you're able to live your purpose, starting conscious capitalism that you're gonna live happily ever after.

But actually, that wasn't the end of the journey. That was the beginning of that phase of my life purpose. But then I also needed to find happiness and inner peace, and I needed to heal. So in the last few years, then I wrote my memoir called Awaken a Path to Purpose, inner Peace and Healing, which is my journey in my life and how I've been able to do those and all the challenges and the traumas.

It's all in the book. I really put everything in there. And then, so then the realization that ultimately. What is in here gets amplified into the world. [00:33:00] If you're, especially if you're a leader, the microcosm impacts the macrocosm. And if what's in here is unhealed, incomplete, trauma ridden, et cetera, et cetera, you're gonna end up inflicting that a thousand times a million times into the world.

So you have a duty, an obligation to actually work on your own healing, especially if you're in a leadership position, but for everybody. And what does that look like? For me, for those seven steps that came to me at that Peace Village silent retreat, and that to me, the fact that I didn't sit down and brainstorm these steps, but actually receive them in a way from the source, however we choose to think about that, tells me that there's something deeper there.

That there's a message that is coming through me, not from me by any means. And the seven steps are, many of these things people have heard about. You have to know yourself. You cannot be an authentic human being or an authentic leader. If you don't know who you are, then you're just doing some cookie cutter thing that you learned.

It's not going to [00:34:00] impact people in any positive way if it's not authentic to who you are. So you have to know yourself. Every person is unique. There, what is it? 8 billion of us here now, but 109 billion human beings have already lived and died, and no two are alike, quite significantly different from each other, right?

So you have to know who you are at a deep level, and not just your identities on this religion and on this nationality and this profession, and all those are just tags. That's not who you are at your essence. Love yourself. Most people on this planet do not love themselves. Bruce Lipton says, 80 to 90% of people don't love themselves.

And what does that mean? Then you end up sabotaging yourself. You are your own worst enemy, as Edit ever said, the greatest Nazis inside us, okay? You end up not taking care of your body. You end up certainly not being able to be in relationship because you cannot receive the love of others. 'cause you, if you don't think yourself as lovable [00:35:00] and other people claim to love you, then you basically are waiting for them to realize that you're not lovable.

So there's a lot of ways in which we create this prison by not loving ourselves and accepting, not only accepting that who I am is unique. These qualities were a gift to me. I didn't make myself, none of us have any idea how to make anything right. But we received this gift from 4.8. We have billion years of evolution, and this is what it is produced, right?

So we have to respect and honor that and then manifest what it's capable of being, right? So know yourself, love yourself, and be yourself. Most of us are acting. We have all these different masks, right? We are one way with our superiors and one way with the people who report to us, and one way with our siblings, and one way with our parents, and one way with our children, and.

Another way with our friends, and we have all of these personas. Can't you just be who you are at all times? Once you know yourself and love yourself, you can then rest comfortably in your presence. Create, cultivate that sense of presence, and [00:36:00] then choose yourself. Which I think for many of us, especially I, in, I was in that case category, I was a victim of my own life.

Or I framed my own story that way. I had a father who never picked me up and never hugged me and never said, I love you. And I was distant from him. And so why did I have such a harsh and unloving father and other people? Why was I born into this incredibly feudal, abusive patriarchal culture that pus in India?

I could not, it been more loving and nurturing, et cetera and so forth, right? So you end up being a victim. Why did I have a special needs son? And, wo is me. As opposed to saying, you know what? I don't understand some of these things, but every one of them. At some level is a gift, and it's shaping me into who I'm supposed to be.

If I did not have that experience as a child growing up in that hyper-masculine environment, then I would never have written a book about the feminine. And that's a significant part of my work, is bringing that wholeness and that feminine energy in [00:37:00] harmony with masculine energy. So everything that happened to me and every person who came into my life was there to teach me something.

So you choose your life, you cannot change it. You choose your past. So when we were served our meals at that silent retreat, because we were in silence, we were not allowed to point and say, I want this, but not that no communication allowed, right? So you just had a tray and they plop food into your tray.

And it occurred to me that is a metaphor for life because this life doesn't come with a, it's not a buffet and it doesn't come with a menu. You can't say, I'll have this kind of father and this kind of mother and I'll be born into this religion and this country and this time in history and I'll, none of it, right?

You're given a tray full of stuff. This is your curriculum for this life, and you need it in order to evolve yourself and then do the work that you're here to do, the impact that you're here to make. So choose your past. Choose your present. Live in gratitude. Choose your future, which is embrace your hero's journey.

Find your purpose, right? And so that goes into the next step also of [00:38:00] express yourself. You're not just here to be, you're here to, and then manifest into the world the gift of what you are here to deliver, right? And then complete yourself, which is, don't be a half a person or a quarter of a person.

Don't just say, okay, I'm, I'm a young man, so that's all I can be. You can be all of the energies. I call them four energies, elder, child, masculine, and feminine. All four are present inside you. Your higher self, your child self. That's where your playfulness, your laughter, creativity, joy come from.

The elder self is where wisdom and meaning and transcendence come from. The masculine, the strength, courage, focus, and the feminine. Love, compassion, empathy. Put them all together. Be a whole person. We call it the wise fool of tough love. You can be a wise fool of tough love, the wisdom of the elder, the foolishness of a child, the toughness of the masculine.

And so if you look at people like the Dalai Lama, for example, or [00:39:00] Gandhi or many kher of South Australia, very much wise, fools of tough love. And every one of us can be that. And then the last one is heal yourself, which is not only to heal your body, but heal your wounds and traumas. And all of us are walking around with these wounds, psychic wounds that we have never acknowledged, let alone try to heal.

And therefore we become extremely reactive in the world. We don't know why we say and do certain things. We have these amygdala hijacks, and it's like, who's driving your car? It's not you. So you have to face up to that. As James Baldwin said, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

You have to face up to the reality of your own traumas and then not only acknowledge them, but you have to then start to, as we say, you, you reveal it and feel it so that you can start to heal it. And once you heal it, you can experience what is called post-traumatic growth. You are stronger now because you had a trauma and you healed it then [00:40:00] if you never had a trauma in the first place.

So it's like the Japanese metaphor of Kintsugi. I don't know if you've seen that, or a piece of pottery breaks. They put it back together using gold, dust and glue. Now it is a work of art and it is stronger than the original piece of poetry because you strengthened it along its fault lines. That's what we can become as well.

And now we become a source of healing in the world for others. So that's the journey of healing leaders.

Mahan Tavakoli: What an absolutely beautiful description of that journey. Raj,

You also write in the book and you alluded to it as you were describing it, you say Hurt people, hurt people, I couldn't agree with you more.

That said, my audience is a business audience and I do welcome people, challenging my thoughts every once in a while. One of the things that people sometimes ask about is that if you look at, I'm sure you've heard of or read Walter Isaacson's [00:41:00] brilliant biography of Elon Musk and how,

Raj Sisodia: I have not read that one. I did read the Steve Jobs one, but I have not read the Musk one.

Mahan Tavakoli: It is brilliantly done to make a very long book very short for a specific point, Elon had a brutal upbringing with a very abusive father. And if at some of how he treats people around him, it would go to the statement that you also share, hurt people, hurt people.

On the other end of the spectrum, he's probably seen as one of the most successful entrepreneurs and business people worldwide. is it that hurt people, hurt people, and therefore that blocks them from doing positive things in success? is it that, or. What you are [00:42:00] talking about is the right way to be, regardless of the level of success that comes from it.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah, , it's an interesting question. There are people who have a huge impact in the world and they could be coming from a very unhealthy place. Or you can go all the way to a Hitler. He's no denying that he had a massive impact in the world. He completely changed the trajectory and could have changed the trajectory for a very long time.

So just the fact that you're capable of having impact in the world is separate from what kind of impact and how ultimately the long-term consequences of what you are, what you're trying to do and why you're doing it. I think the Elon story is not complete yet. It's a work in progress. He has obviously a lot of brilliance as an engineering mind.

He also has a lot of blind spots and a lot of ways in which he has exaggerated his own role in many things. Tesla, for example, he was not a founder of Tesla, although later on he [00:43:00] starts to claim that he was right. But he has the ability to make things happen. So that is, I think, separate from.

The childhood that he may have had, et cetera. There's some innate, qualities that people have that they're able to manifest certain things in the world, but ultimately, what is going to be the legacy? As I said, that story is not complete yet, so we don't know by some measures, specialized overvalued by a thousand percent.

Okay. It's like maybe 10 x what it should be, right? Based upon fundamentals. So there's a lot of hype and hoopla and so forth. And so we don't know, ultimately, and I would not say that it is a necessary condition by any means that you have to have that kind of orientation and that kind of harshness to achieve things.

I think there are plenty of people who achieve great things without that kind of harshness, or they have to be tough. As Martin Luther King said, we must be tough-minded and tenderhearted at the same time. [00:44:00] And so you could also point to a Steve Jobs, right? He was also brilliant and he had a vision and he was relentless, and he did set apple up, in the long term, but on, on the people side, it was a very tough place to work.

It was a very low level of trust and a high level of stress and burnout and so forth. And I don't think that we have to take one with the other. I think that ultimately the greatest conscious leaders are the ones who are able to bring about fundamental change, elevate people to perform at their highest possible level, right?

Help them realize even beyond what they think they can do, and do it in a way that does not destroy their soul or destroy their wellbeing or their peace of mind. So I don't think we have to have this kind of almost psychotic, focus on just outcomes and numbers and wealth, and the fact that he wants to be a trillionaire.

And the fact that he is, you. It's a kind of sickness, it is a kind of sickness for somebody to, to say [00:45:00] 400 billion is not enough. I need a trillion, right? So you have to wonder about that, right? It is some kind of a trauma response. And there's a very good movie I think that illustrates this.

It's called All the Money in the World. It's about Jay Paul Getty, who was the richest man in the world in the seventies. He's part of the Getty Oil fortune. What drove him his entire life? So he was the richest man in the world, and probably the most miserable man in the world, and the most miserably man in the world.

Like he had country estates outside of London. When people came to visit him at the country estate, if they needed to make a phone call, there was a payphone. He installed a payphone booth and the butler will give you change. If you don't have the coins, Butler will make change for you. Okay? And when his own son got kidnapped.

He refused to pay even the small amount, whatever it was right now. Why? Because when he was growing up, his father basically said to him, I don't think you have what [00:46:00] it takes. I don't think you're gonna amount to anything. That's that one sentence he spent his entire life trying to prove to his father that he was worthy of something.

He's trying to fill a hole that came from that parental message, lack of love, lack of being seen, and of course what he is trying to fill it with money and power. Now there's no amount of money in the world that is gonna fill that hole. And likewise, I think with Elon, until he gets to the root of his traumas and his experience with his father and all the rest of it, and, all the drugs and the ketamine and whatever else he's doing, none of that is gonna heal it.

And yeah, in the process. Of him striving so hard to prove himself worthy in this world, that maybe he's creating some things that are going to make a difference, have made a difference. Yes. I'm acknowledging that without his way efforts, electric cars [00:47:00] probably would not be as mainstream as they are today.

The idea of self-driving cars, which seemed ridiculous and now is a reality, again, there's a megalomaniac aspect to it. He claims more credit than it's usually the case. There are many other brilliant people. The person who designed the Tesla was actually the guy who now runs lucid. So many people who don't get credit in that world of those kinds of leaders, so I think, yeah, you can still have all of the extraordinary things and you can start to work on your own healing, and then you won't inflict that much suffering on others as I think he has done.

The glee that he took when he was trying to. Reduce the government, fish, a dog, whatever it was, right? Running around with a chainsaw. They know the inhumanity of it. The brutality of it, almost reveling in it. I don't think that's what we aspire to as role models.

Mahan Tavakoli: , As you are saying, when some of those things aren't healed within the [00:48:00] leader, the ways they exhibit themselves, in some instances it could be the Elon's of the world. In other instances I see it in leadership, CEOs and executives, throughout organizations. Raj. So one of the things that I wonder though is, in many instances still our systems within organizations and the way we get reinforcements. Are skewed away from some of what you talk about is important in healing leaders. How can we rejigger in order to prioritize our own healing as leaders in an environment where it doesn't fully yet align with the way a lot of organizations and society at large might be incentivizing as [00:49:00] leaders?

Raj Sisodia: I think that's the hallmark of consciousness as a company and as a leader to recognize that the consciousness of the leader places an upper limit on the consciousness of the organization. The organization cannot rise above that level. And so continually evolving yourself and working in your consciousness, which what, which is what this is part of, being leaders is part of that journey.

So just the fact that most people don't recognize it doesn't mean that it's not something that is important that we must do it. We have to be in the vanguard. Conscious capitalism is still a minority domain in terms of practice. It's like organic real food is the ultra process. Normal food is ultra process and organic is a niche, right?

Ultimately, that has to flip. Today, conscious companies are the niche and, traditional profit driven, shareholder centric companies are the norm. But that doesn't mean that's how it has to be. And we have to continue to expand that segment of, ultimately reach a tipping point.[00:50:00] 

Where this becomes a default and this becomes received a conventional wisdom. At some point people will say, wow, how can you think of a company and not think about the wellbeing of all of its stakeholders? How can you start anything significant without a sense of purpose? Yeah, we need money. Everybody needs money.

That's not, it's like saying, I need red blood cells to live, therefore, I should produce billions of tons of red blood cells and store them in massive tankers somewhere, right? We need profits to, to survive and grow as a business, but that's the outcome. It's one of the outcomes. It's not the reason why we are here.

So I think all of this is the reason our movement exists, right? We have to awaken people to say there's a bigger and deeper story here. We don't recognize that business can be the greatest force for spreading love and healing in the world that we humans are here to give and to grow. That's our default purpose.

Business is [00:51:00] a way we can do that at scale. We can amplify that dramatically. We can have such a huge impact out there. And so all of these are the kinds of mindset changes that we have to have. And as you mentioned earlier, I've had the gift, I suppose of partly because of my upbringing of being an outsider and an insider simultaneously, right?

So I was in India until seven, and then when we moved to Barbe, et cetera, I was looking at that experience through Indian eyes, being able to see it somewhat objectively. And then five years later, I had this more Americanized view and we'll go back to India. Now I'm looking at that through a little more westernized, and then I come back at age 23 and now I'm looking at it again.

So I, I think we all should try to cultivate that sense of detached involvement, where you're part of it, but you're not defined by it and be able to see it's. Strengths and its beauty, but also it's flaws and what is missing, so I think we cannot become captive [00:52:00] to the normal way or stranded way of doing anything.

So I've not been a typical professor. I have not been a typical member of my cast in India. I'm not a warrior cast, whatever. So I've rejected all of the stereotypes. I'm not probably a typical man in, in Indian terms. Because I think we have to define those things for ourselves.

We cannot just follow the crowd and just do what mindlessly what does it mean to be conscious is to do everything consciously, to speak consciously, to eat consciously, to walk consciously, to dress consciously to everything. Not compulsively, not instinctively. And that's what defines us and separates us as human beings from every other life form.

We have consciousness every other life who lives out. Its life according to its programming, right? And as one of my spiritual teachers, sub guru says, for every other creature [00:53:00] on this planet, nature has gone two lines, right? You don't fall. If you're a tiger, you're gonna always be a tiger, and maybe you can become a bigger tiger.

That's your range for a human being. There are no lines, there's no limit to what you can become and who you can become in this world. What, and there's also no limit to how low you can fall. There's a Hitler down there and there's a Gandhi up there, right? And so that's the difference is consciousness.

And if you use that and cultivate it, and not only awaken, but stay awake that's the path I think for us. We have to choose.

Mahan Tavakoli: And that consciousness. Raj, I love Yuval Noah Harare's work, and he's been talking a lot about AI and its potential implications. One of the things he says, as a fun aside by the way, he goes on a month long silent retreat, which I look forward to doing a [00:54:00] few days. I imagine that is

Raj Sisodia: Yeah.

Mahan Tavakoli: hard, let alone

Raj Sisodia: Yeah,

Mahan Tavakoli: long one. But one of the things he also mentions is that our world ends up including a lot of different AI forms. It will require for us to get to know ourselves better and become more conscious in order for us to determine our own paths. Otherwise, the AI or ais will determine our paths.

Raj Sisodia: Yeah. Yeah.

Mahan Tavakoli: to get your thoughts on that as well, because we are living in a moment we are interacting now with chatbots.

Pretty soon it's gonna be all around us through glasses, robots, you name it, they get a chance to get to know us, our likes, our dislikes, our emotions really well. role do you think healing ourselves and this consciousness will play this world that we are entering [00:55:00] into?

Raj Sisodia: Like all of us, I'm just watching and experiencing and wondering and speculating. What does it mean? It's a unique moment in history that we are living through, and I think you and I have lived through quite a few. They remember the invention of the worldwide web. That was a mind blowing moment itself, right?

And then the whole advent of these devices in the early two thousands. And yeah, we've lived through massive world changing innovations technologies. And what will this one do? I don't know, but I do know that consciousness becomes even more important in this moment. If you look at, human history and you look at one of the biggest things that we have invented, I would say capitalism is probably one of the greatest things that we've invented that then gave rise to all those other things that we mentioned, including now ai.

Right? [00:56:00] And the impact that it's going to have is going to depend on the level of consciousness that we bring to it. Just like with capitalism, low consciousness means a lot of money and destroying everything else, the planet in the process. Same thing with ai. AI can be deployed in a way to help us become more conscious, more loving, more purposeful, more mindful, all those things, it is, as they say of the mind.

It's a great servant, but a terrible master. We can ask it and have it help us access the wisdom of the millennia, of tens of millennia and have it available for every decision that we make. And I've created a version of AI myself. It's called the conscious business oracle. It's like an oracle sitting there that has the highest aspirations and values and all the knowledge and wisdom that we have identified and say, okay, help me now address this situation [00:57:00] through that lens.

And using that, all of that wisdom. We also have kind of a Jedi council that sits alongside the Oracle, and one of them looks at it from a strategy standpoint, and one of them looks at it from a values and culture standpoint, and one of them looks at it. So we have all of the different perspectives also being captured, right?

And every situation that we have been able to pose to it, we end up with a deeper, richer analysis and better outcome because of that, right? So I think it can do extraordinary things for us when it is used with that mindset of as, help me elevate to my highest sense self, the better angel, angels of my nature, all of that, right?

Help me always be in tune with that. I even call it the soul of the corporation. How can I have something that represents the soul, the undying soul of what this enterprise is ultimately about when it's at its [00:58:00] highest level of being. AI can help us with that, right? But we also have to realize that it operates within the parameters of the known and what has been experienced historically.

But the great thing about human beings is we're always creating outside of that. And so I think the danger is that we put on autopilot to such a degree that we stop actually disconnecting and thinking independently of it, because it is seductive to right away go to it, right? I find what is more useful is you spend a number of hours and somehow you brainstorm and think, and and do all of that separate of it, and then work with it as a brilliant assistant or a PhD student or whatever you wanna think about it as.

Then you can go deeper and nature. But if you just go too quickly there, then I think it dehumanizes. So keeping that human [00:59:00] element front and center and recognizing that, yeah, we, it doesn't matter how advanced it gets, we will always have something. It cannot have your consciousness and we have a soul, right?

And so we have to make sure that we are playing our part as the technology plays its part. And then I think it can become a beautiful symphony between the two, 

you know?

Mahan Tavakoli: I Now, one other thought about that, Raj, is that you beautifully described the process you had to go through, the silent retreat travel to Amazon, the Himalayas. In some of what it took both in you reflecting on healing yourself and in writing this book. I wonder is, in addition to reading the book, would you recommend for leaders to do in order for them to start on this journey [01:00:00] for themselves? , 

Raj Sisodia: So I think leaders have to open themselves up to what we call dise equilibrating experiences, which is putting yourself in a completely different situation environment. So when you go to the Amazon Rainforest and you're living there with the WAN and Aara people, and you're getting up at 4:00 AM for dream interpretation, and you're swimming with the pink dolphins and you're having an ayahuasca ceremony on the banks of a river, and with the shaman and the headdress, these are things that then they shake loose something inside you, and they give you access to levels of consciousness that you don't normally have in your day to day.

And that's when you grow. That's when, not just incremental, significant growth can happen and a different perspective can emerge. So I think what a awakes consciousness in leaders is this equilibrating experiences and then having a guide or a mentor or a teacher or a coach, a great coach, not any regular [01:01:00] coach.

And I think, there are some teachers in the world and we have access to books by those who have died or even those who are alive. But for example, and in India has many like that. The one I just came back from in India, there's one called sad guru. S-A-D-H-G-U-R-U is probably the most impactful spiritual teacher out of India is what, 17, 19 million volunteers worldwide.

5 billion views on YouTube just in the last year. And there's tremendous insight and clarity there. And it's not at all religious, it's all basic wisdom accessible to anybody. So I think opening yourself up to learn from living masters and even dead masters 'cause they're left behind. Yeah, I can help with that and books, all of that.

So I think reading not just the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review or the bestselling business books, but going way outside of that and reading these [01:02:00] spiritual masters or reading, of course, man, search for Meaning or Synchronicity by Joseph Jaworski or the Soul of Money, violin Twist, or those kinds of things.

So I think you have to open yourself up and know that what you do not know exceeds by thousands of times what you do know. And don't just stay in your bubble of what you think. Constantly be challenging yourself so that you can grow in ways that are ultimately gonna deepen your experience of life.

And then, of course, all the people you love and lead will be impacted by that. Set aside time, you know this body and this mind that we all receive as a gift. This is our house, right? We are living inside this thing, and most of us, when we actually own a physical house, we have to maintain it and upkeep and change the roof and do all these things to it, right?

There's a lot We invest in our house, in our homes, and yet we don't, most of us don't invest much [01:03:00] here. I've come to the point where now I say 10% of my year is dedicated to my own personal healing and growth. So in 52 weeks, that means five weeks. I go three weeks to an a weather retreat in India every December, which is really about physical healing, rejuvenation, et cetera.

I go to the sub guru retreat, I go to other retreats. There was a Bohi retreat in the Red Forest in California. I went to a heartland gathering in Nebraska, and many other things like that. So I think we must do that. We have to get out and we have to invest that time. And it's not a selfish thing to do.

It's not an indulgent thing to do. It is a very self full thing to do because when you work on yourself, the beneficiaries are yourself, but also everybody, your family, and you know all the people you lead. And so I think that is a sacred duty. So I spend 10% of the year and 10% of every day. Okay. So the [01:04:00] first two hours plus is about yoga, is about, practices, meditation and whatnot.

So I think those are important, contemplative practices

Mahan Tavakoli: What an outstanding commitment you have made to your own learning and growth, and what a joy it is for us and for me, Raj, learn from a living master.

That the audience has had a joy of hearing and can learn from as well. So for them to find your book and your work, where would you recommend for them to go to Raj?

Raj Sisodia: This is the book, I dunno if you have time, video, this podcast. But my website, raia.com has all the information. There's a special page dedicated to this book, but all the other books as well, and also to Conscious Capitalism, the movement conscious capitalism.org as well.

So 

Mahan Tavakoli: It has been such an incredible joy and I feel like we could have spent hours on each and every [01:05:00] one of even your trips, whether the Amazon Ayahuasca what that experience was like.

Raj Sisodia: Maybe since you mentioned that, I'll just share one nugget from the Amazon trip. Okay.

The Ayahuasca experience for those of your listeners who most people have heard of it now. This is a brew that has been used for maybe 10,000 years by the indigenous people. When something significant happens in their lives or in the world, they figured out that the roots of one, one, tens of thousands of different trees in the forest, but they figured out the roots of one and the leaves of another.

You boil them together and you've got this road that they say connects them to grandmother energy. Connect them to planet Earth. This is our mother. This is, we came out of this world, right? We are made of soil ultimately, and then gives you access to wisdom that you need to hear or you need to know. So I had gone there to learn about healing, and that was the whole purpose why I went.

All of those experiences, my own healing, but healing generally in the world. And then one of my visions, I had many that night, but one of my [01:06:00] visions is I'm lying there under the it was a lunar eclipse night. You could see seven planets lined up from horizon to horizon. It was a very surreal setting.

We're lying on these banana leaves on the banks of this massive river with this shaman, doing all these things. One of the visions I got was this word floated into my field of vision. It's called the list and the voice, there's always a voice that's talking to you. And the voice said, here's what the world needs in order to heal.

Here's what individuals need. Leaders need, companies need, and the world, countries need everybody. This is, here's the list. And I said, oh, great. I don't have to make an acronym. It already came as an acronym, and the list stands for, L stands for love. That every single thing we do in life should come from a place of love, not anger, not fear, not greed, not jealousy.

So many of the other emotions that cause us to act, especially in business, many decisions [01:07:00] come from fear and greed. Fear of the competition of going out of business and greed for more. Can you make those same decisions from a place of love you, we have, if you have to let somebody go, you're deciding whether to enter a market.

If you're whatever it is, can you do it from a place of love? As there are many ways we can hurt each other. There's only one way to heal, and that is through love. I is for innocence. We all come into this life innocent. We are these pristine divine beings, and then we get corrupted by the ways of the world, by our culture, sometimes our own families, by media.

We learn to use our intelligence to get what we want to climb over each other, to lie and cheat, if that's what it takes. Right now, we don't have a choice. You're born innocent and then you get corrupted as a child. You can't say, oh, I refuse to get corrupted. You're you're subject to those forces.

As an adult, you do [01:08:00] have a choice and therefore you must choose. Will I choose to remain in that corrupted state for the rest of my life or am I going to return to innocence? What does that mean? Not knowingly being the cause of unnecessary harm or suffering in the world towards another, even towards yourself.

My mother died at 82. She lived as an innocent all her life. I do not know of any instance in which she knowingly. Caused harm or suffering to another. Okay, can you live as an innocent? Now, that doesn't mean a helpless weak, it means the chosen principled innocence of a strong adult, as is for simplicity life, where we make it too complicated.

We got these incredible brains, but then we get mired in the mud of complexity. The fundamental things in life are simple. Remember what they are, and look for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. As Oliver went Rome said, he said, I would go, I would not give a fig for the simplicity on [01:09:00] this side of complexity, but I'd give my life for the simplicity.

On the other side of complexity, when you understand things that are deep level, it becomes simple again, strive for that, and then the T is for truth. What is our commitment to the truth? We have lost all connection to the truth. Truth is fundamental. Truth matters even more than peace Without truth, there can be no peace.

Which is why in South Africa at the end of apartheid, they had the truth and Reconciliation commission without the truth of what had happened on the apartheid and the incredible suffering that was inflicted on the black people of South Africa. If they did not acknowledge that truth, then they would not have been able to move on in harmony.

They would've been a revenge fueled violence for decades. So we have to acknowledge the truth and we seem to have lost connection to the truth in our world. Gandhi's autobiography was my experiments with truth. It is so fundamental. So we have to recommit to the truth, being truthful with ourselves, with each other about what's happening in the world.

And I think we've lost that in this time. So that is the list. It [01:10:00] came again. It came through me, not from me. And I feel it's a gift to be shared and to be understood at a deeper and deeper level.

Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful gift. To wrap up our conversation on Raj, really appreciated the entire conversation has been a gift, including you passing on the gift you received in the list. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Raj Sisodia: Well, Mahan, thank you. This is one of the more delightful conversations I've had. So , you are wonderful interviewer and conversationalist, so it's been a joy.