Food and Wine in Utopia: Interview 1 (Pizza Chef)

Foreword

          In this series of interview about Food and Wine in Utopia, I interviewed a chef in Santa Barbara. The chef recounts his past and identifies themes in our food and dining scene that is debilitating our society’s progress. A book to read along this is one that the chef recommends, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, a novelist who wrote other works such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Another book that I suggest reading along this is Everyday Utopia: what 2000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life by Kristen Ghodsee, a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at University of Pennsylvania.

 

 

We are here to talk about food and wine, what it would look like in a utopian society. The first thing I'm going to ask you is about your experience and how long you've been in the restaurant or food industry. What has kept you in this industry for so long? Why haven't you left?

I’ve been in the restaurant industry for more than 10 years. I’ve always enjoyed cooking. It was a hobby. I married a chef when I was a mechanic and she was always kind of teasing me, “You know, you're doing a better job than the chefs I work with (or whatever)”.

(And my response was) Oh my God, that's sweet.

I'm a nerd, so I just got every book I could. I’d just pick stuff, zero in on it. Nerd out. And like, you know, nail it. Just as a hobby.

Then I quit my job working on cars. I needed a job, and I think I started washing dishes at a catering company just to (make ends meet). Santa Barbara is a very expensive city. You can't really be sitting on your hands, so I was just taking everything I could. And I’m not (prideful). You know, washing dishes, that’s ok. I don’t care. So, I did that. Started prepping for them.

Then (I started working) at Bouchon, in Santa Barbara. It’s a nicer, you know, an anniversary restaurant. That's where you go to propose, or on graduation night or something. It's nice. It's a good place to learn a lot. And then bunch of other places.

That (Bouchon) was very good because that is running the exact classic French brigade of cuisine style. So that's the same way they used to cook 100 years ago, which was fascinating because I went and read George Orwell's book on working in kitchens in Paris in the 1920’s. It's a fantastic book called Down and Out in Paris and London and him describing a workday is exactly the same as my workday in 2014, almost a hundred years later.

The social dynamics, the animosities, the resentments, the economics of the whole thing are exactly the same and hasn't changed at all. All the language and verbiage are the same. It was very funny.

It's definitely worth reading to check in with the restaurant industry scene. Actually once I read that book, I don't ever really agree with even most of the conclusions he gets to. But I respect him immensely as a thinker, he's a very deep thinker. I think he's wise and he's very insightful and he's a wonderful author. But in his essays and his books, he'll go fight wars and write about it. It’s amazing and life changing because I read Down and Out in Paris and London and that first half is him in Paris and he's not even a cook. He's a dishwasher and he's just talking a bunch about being brutalized. He's just trying to capture the essence of being a poor person working to live in Paris, which is funny because that's the same time Picasso and all those guys are all yucking it up, drinking wine and bull fighting and stuff. But he’s just working the dish bit. And writing a better book than you know, Hemmingway wrote. But at the end of that, he kind of comes to the conclusion that restaurants are evil. They're bad for humanity, they're bad for society. That it's just busy work to keep poor people busy and suffering. And barely making ends meet because it doesn't matter if you're conservative or liberal, they're both equally terrified of the mob of people not needing to go to work, not needing to be busy. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, poetry professor at Berkeley or whatever. You're terrified of thousands of people with nothing better to do than to organize.

That’s my second question. It’s about the problems that restaurants face these days. Consider labor shortages, consider economics, consider the problems people have with restaurants these days. In a utopian society and in your idea of a utopian society. Do you think these problems will be addressed and rectified?

In a utopian society? In my utopian society? Oh, sure. Yeah.

Yeah, the whole problem that they face now is kind of predicated on an illusion, that it's an aristocracy simulator. The idea that “a working-class person can come and be treated like an aristocrat and be waited on hand and foot, cleaned up after” is insane, and it's a new idea. The world didn't used to run like that. There were Inns and Taverns.

But you know, you couldn't be a plumber and go out and act like a marquee. Right? And that's what people pay for. Because I've waited tables, and you get about 10% of people who are on a completely insane, neurotic trip. You (referring to the interviewer) pour wine for people, yeah? You meet some real psychos. And they're behaving in a way that I’m embarrassed for their group of friends that they're with. It's like, “do they act like this everywhere? This is crazy, right?”

The thing is, inflation and the more the economy tanks, the more cracks appear in the façade: quality of service is going down. People can spend less, they can tip less, price of ingredients are going through the roof.

Things are just getting a little dingier and smaller. More processed and half assed. There is definitely less care and love put into most things. There are still people doing really good job. Every now and then I'll eat fast food just to check in to see what's going on in the world. I'll try and eat it every, like, six months or something just to see what's going on in the world. It's terrible. It's horrible. I think the last time I tried McDonald's, it was horrible.

For the third question, you don't have to think about logistics or economy. Focus on food. What food should a restaurant in a utopian society serve?

Should it be local? If it's hyper local, super local, that could mean malnutrition in certain parts of the country where they don't have access to all that the necessary goods.

Transportation only accounts for 6% of carbon emission. Is it worth it to truck all this food across state line? But there's also talk about GMO food. Pink grapefruit is one example of a GMO food that was modified so that you would have less of these bitterness in it, but it's more nutritious as well at the same time. Or rice as well[1].

Think there's a guy that invented golden rice that that just has vitamin A in it? That's GMO technically, and he saved millions of lives. Millions of lives.

So what should a restaurant in this society look like? Right here (in Santa Barbara), what is the responsibility of a restaurant in a utopian society? What food should they serve?

Well, ideally it would just check all the boxes. It would be harmonious with the environment. So as local as possible for sure. But as soon as you make it God of any of these things, these techniques, then you’re in trouble.

Techniques of production. (For example), “Oh, it's local”, or “it's vegan”, or “it's heirloom”. As soon as you make an idol of these things, now you’re in a religious situation. Because you've put that thing, you've given that thing more power than it needs or deserves. That can be harmful. That's the big conversation, Confucianism and Daoism mentalism.

Confucianism on paper is a beautiful religion because it's about respect, honor, and dignity. If you investigate it, it's “love your neighbor”, “be kind to people”, “be charitable”. But it's all predicated on the appearance of those things and keeping certain ceremonies; being very uptight. That's the classic cliche of a very uptight, ancient Chinese society.

And then Daoism tells you that sometimes you got to break the rules. In a good way for good reasons. I mean it's the same thing that Jesus of Nazareth said, “is it sinful me for me to heal people on the Sabbath?”

And they say “yeah, you're not supposed to do shit on Saturday”.

“Really? What if it's a good thing?”

“Nope”.

It made them mad enough that they started making moves on him. And so that's the problem of religion. When everybody is like “Oh, this is 99% local”

It’s all right, it’s cool. But there's no way that's harmonious unless all you're doing is catching fish from over there. I mean, you can make salt with our seawater, and you can go pick lemons. That's great, you can go do that for sure.

But if you're going to do a large-scale utopian society of cuisine, for sure, there's going to be a lot of different elements. Ideally, it's going to be nutritious. It's not going to be wasteful. It's going to be in harmony with nature. I mean, with us as mammals that weigh a certain amount and need a certain amount of nutrition.

We also delight in things, and you have to take that into account. It can't just be this gray cafeteria. People want to be amused, right? That's just part of human nature. So you’ve got to account for all that stuff. You just can’t go saying it's going to be Soylent (or) this austere thing. That's not going to go anywhere.

I was trying to learn music theory. I picked Für Elise for that opening, a little couple of bars because it's the most famous. It's really pretty and I wanted to know what those keys look like underneath my fingers. And I wondered what key it was in. My ex had a degree in music theory, and she told me it was so and so. I was learning it and questioned why this note was over here, and she told me, “Oh, well he borrowed it from the next key over”.

“You can do that?”

“Yeah”

It kind of made me mad. I wanted to understand this. I wanted to demystify this. So as I'm learning this piece, and it's not just to see whatever the hell it is. He's borrowing notes. He's stealing notes that have no business being in that song. But it is harmonious. It is one of the most famous music and it’s mind-blowingly beautiful. Just breaking all the rules. I think about that sometimes. I think about people saying “this is how things are”. (But you can respond by saying), “yeah, but this sounds better”.

And if it's harmonious, it’s harmonious. You can’t argue with it.

Now we've talked about food. We're going to talk about labor now. In this utopian society, what do you think labor will look like? Do you think it's going to be guaranteed income, or do you think it's going to be a state program where everybody works at least some job in the food industry to appreciate that? How do we get enough people to want to work? You mentioned your passion for working in the industry and why you never left. How do you want to instill that passion into these people?

Well, I did actually leave for a while. I left for two years because I was fed up and I did not want to be a part of the machine. I realized that in the restaurant industry that it was very low paying, even at the highest of the high-end places. The only time you ever make any money is if you work at a hotel, which is kind of like a death sentence anyway. Unless you’ve got a family, then that's great.

But I was just a landscaper and a gardener for 2 years. (But one thing led to another and we opened this spot) and the reason I did it was because I wanted to try and do things my way, my utopian way. (Do things) the best I could and see if that works. Because I was resentful and against the way things are. And it's been a learning experience for sure. But we started off paying people way more than I ever got paid. We start everybody at the same pay. The washer and everybody's making the same amount of money. All the tips are split evenly.

Do you see that changing in the utopian society? The way you’ve …

That's a good way to do it.

I mean, it's been proven by bigger companies and operations that have made it. That if you just invest in employees, treat them with respect, and pay them enough to where they feel respected. Then you'll have better employees, and they'll stay longer. There’ll be better teamwork. I’ve worked a lot of places where (you wish you could say),

“Hey, everybody. Can we just pause for a second and realize that there's no cameras here. We're not on TV. We’re actually on the same side, we're all trying to work for the same restaurant. It's not a competition. We are not enemies”.

The vibes are pretty bad almost everywhere. And I didn't want to spend all day in a kitchen like that. So it's really important that everybody cares and feels like they're part of the team.

When customers come in here and are rude or offensive (to our staff), they’re gone.

And it didn't take long (for that to stop). When we opened, it happened all the time. I thought it was going to be a thing. But it was like pests for farmers. They got the message. They just started staying away. Don't have many problems now. Everybody's pretty cool.

Planning for this utopian society. What do you think the pay scale is going to look like compared to other industries? Do you think it's going to be comparable?

Other industries like what? Like carpentry or …

Or tech. Or marketing. Who knows? In a utopian society, do we really need to be paying these guys as much as they are now?

Well, a lot of this is all very hazy because you’ve got to sit down and really say what is this utopian society going to look like? I almost never do that because it's too dissimilar to reality, where it doesn't seem profitable to sit on that egg too long.

I think it's, to be honest, soul crushing. Because when you're talking about pay and utopians in the same breath, I mean it probably looks something closer to Star Trek.

How about the people who can dine in (restaurants in the utopian society)? What kind of people? Because right now, restaurants do have a little bit of (filter on who can dine in), with wage scale or class segregation.

Do restaurants still want to accommodate everybody? Does it still want to cater to a certain kind of class?

This is something we've been talking about all week off and on, but the thing about American Society is that we are obsessed with shame, suffering, and fear. Middle-class people or rich people, they don’t want shit that poor people can get.

(Hypothetically), if you went to Eleven Madison Park and they're like, “oh, we give 10% of the tables away to just people we met at the Public Library as a way to even things out economically (in the general sense)”. That would be hilarious, right? They would stop getting bookings. Those people wouldn't want to be seated next to people from the bus stop down the street.

So it's interesting because now we're getting into Star Trek territory because you have got to level the playing field, right? America likes to think it's not a class system, but you know, come on.

Yeah, we have very little love for the lowest rungs of society.

And even here (in this restaurant), you know I have people come in begging for food, and I feed them. But I don't sit them down, set the table for them, and pour a glass of wine. I’ll make them food. I'll make them a sandwich or pizza or whatever and give it to them. But they smell bad, and they’re usually mentally unsound too. We can’t have them bothering anybody. No, they can’t hang.

That’s just real life. There's nothing I can do about that. Maybe that's more than most, but it's also less than some. It's a tricky thing to figure out, because basically the thing that prevents me from just making as much food as I can and just giving it away is money. We all serve that God. That's our taskmaster. Little pieces of paper with paint on it.

That’s what we're driving ourselves insane for and that's the lot we all agreed upon. We all decided that that's worth something. But why? It’s a piece of paper and it's nothing really there. There's no gun to our head that says a picture of George Washington is worth anything. But we all agree that it is. That’s the circus that we’re caught in. The circus that we’re caught in. This is not a new or profound thought but it’s very frustrating because it's not like things that are valuable, like water, food, a weapon, community, people trusting you or giving a shit about you. These are valuable. But a piece of paper is not really (valuable), unless you’re trying to start a fire.

Where we assign value is kind of insane.

It’s not the restaurant’s position to assign values?

Yeah, and I've messed around. I've done investigations into seeing if I have enough leverage to change the conversation. When I was just a pop-up, I stopped charging for the food that I made. Gave it away for free because I was just at a tent and a couple of folding tables. I would make soul food at breweries, and they would invite me because they saw that everybody left at 7:00pm to get dinner. So (the breweries) loved having food there (instead).

That was my niche.  The food was like $10, not expensive. Like fried chicken sandwich. It's a good deal and it was all pretty high quality. The joke was that it was better than anything else you could get in town. Farmer’s market ingredients, sous vide cooking stuff, make it really beautiful but it’s $10 in a parking lot at a bar. It’s just funny to make people go “what the hell?”.

Then my business partner had a baby. I ended up doing it alone and it was driving me crazy because doing something like that with a friend is an adventure. Doing it alone, you're just a crazy person.

So I had the helpers. I had my little brothers come and hang out. After a while I just had these engagements that I could cancel on, but every Friday I made the decision to be (at the breweries). I was making money, so there's no reason not to do it. It was as if it was one of my part-time jobs.

The thing that I hate the most about this is the money interaction. Having people walk up and say,

“what are you doing?”

“I'll make a fried chicken and it's $10”

“Oh, OK yeah, we'll think about it”.

They don't want to take that leap of faith. Yeah, just give me 10 bucks and see if it sucks or not. Usually what would happen is a couple people would get one and everybody sees it, “Damn, that looks good. That smells good”. And then it be a chain reaction. I then questioned myself on why I am having them take the leap of faith?  Why am I handing them the ball? I mean, I'm the one who put myself out here. Maybe I should have the courage to take the leap of faith for them.

So I just gave it away. People were very confused, “how does that work? Why does that work? What's going on?”

I had a tip jar, just a porcelain vase I had at my house. I would tell people that they could tip me but make sure not to until after they eat it. I also told them I wasn’t going to look at them putting anything in the jar if they even did. They laughed and they thought it was funny. Some thought they were on a hidden camera show.

But then my food got better. I was trying even harder because I then committed to this act of trying to see if I had enough artistic, creative, charisma, and technique to overcome the money. I don't know. I ended up making way more money than before, but then I was still caught in that bubble of dollars. I didn't escape it. I just changed the composition of the painting or whatever. Oh, now they're standing over there, fields over there. None of the ingredients really changed. I just changed how I interacted with it, which was very helpful for me. It was very beneficial because it just taught me a lot about what my motivations were. And that I can’t get motivated by money. The more it's involved, the worse I get. Which could explain why rock stars suck after two albums. They get big and get the money. The cliches don’t matter. They’re still miserable weirdos. They flame out.

Right now, Santa Barbara has so and so number of restaurants. In a utopian society, do you think there'll be less or more?

For sure there’ll be a lot less.

Why do you think it’ll be a lot less?

Well, ideally, capitalism is supposed to be this democracy of dollars. So if people are doing a bad or substandard job, they just go out of business and that should work. But a lot of these things are artificially propped up by these big corporations.

So you're targeting big chain restaurants?

Yeah, cause that's most of the bad stuff. I mean, these little taquerias here, these are families. They're people that are passionate. This guy down the street, he's there because he wants to be there, he loves it, right?

I agree with the sentiment too, but when these (chain) restaurants go away, do you think these spaces will get merged with existing local restaurants? Do you think other small or local citizens will want to take over that space and do their take on what cuisine should be served for the community?

Quite possibly. It's a funny thing to think about because there's no way around it. Cooking is a terrible job. It's very, very difficult. It's a lot of cleaning and organizing. It takes a certain level of fastidiousness and attention to detail that is uncommon. That's 80% of the job, 20% of it is being creative, emotional, interacting with customers, and getting that warmth of cooking for your family. That's if you're lucky. For most places, it's like 5% at the most, and that's if you are at a good place.

In a utopian society, it’s not going to be a job that anybody wants.  It’s the argument against communism, where are the janitors and ditch diggers going to come from? Which is ironic because we're running at a breakneck speed to replace all those jobs with AI like self-driving cars. They're trying to train and replace the labor. I get on Instagram every day and see content like the fast-food robot trying to flip a burger. Or the robot ketchup arm trying to make the hot dog.

That's the joke. The capitalists and the communists both have the problem of working-class. They’re like,

“What are you going to do with this guy?”

“We'll replace him with robots.”

 “Alight, then what?”

The argument for robots was always to take over a lot of our jobs so that we can keep the same level of production, the same level of economic growth.  

And our quality of life would go up? That didn't happen.

Now this is going to relate to restaurants surviving or closing. It's about life and death. In this utopian society, do you think restaurants should have sustainability or interminable clauses (or contracts) with the society? Or should society decide on a cap on the number of years that certain restaurants are allowed to exist? Or should it just be natural and let them die out if they’re not getting enough seats filled? Who decides restaurants should close? Or should restaurants decide for themselves? What is the life and death? What is the death going to look like for restaurants in this society?

Like if it was not predicated on actual revenue and it was like some Star Trek-styled-organization. And you tell them,

“Alright well, the community is tired of paying for your weird cafe where you just make blue sour drinks.”

And they're like,

“No, no. This is my dream.”

 “Like dude, it sucks. Nobody's messing with your vision.”

That’s probably going to be the least fun job for the guy that has to go and shut down these restaurants. Go watch those first couple episodes of American Idol. Those people are singing and thinking they’re going to be stars. That's restaurants too.

That's people burning a quesadilla and saying it’s their passion. Or saying “my abuela used to make these all the time”. Like, dude, you don't know how to cook corn, dude. It's got nothing to do with your grandma, you know?

Everybody has this ego narrative that they're projecting, and they get caught up. Most people are completely delusional. That's why most restaurants are pretty bad and weird. You know? You walk into a place and say to yourself, this place is weird. Who designed this?

Do you think it should be a community organized decision? Saying to them, “you had your time. We had fun with it. Now it’s your time to leave”.

Give them the shot?  I would imagine at that point you'd probably do it the same way they run arts programs in wealthy states and countries where there's just a board that you apply for grants.

When I lived in Colorado, I asked why there were so much public art and crazy sculpture. Like that giant cow in front of the library. Way more art than here, where California is supposed to be artsy-fartsy.  I think someone explained to me that they wrote in the state constitution that 2% of the budget has to go to the arts. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass[2].,

But there's very little funding here relative to Denver. Apparently you can just apply for it if you have an artistic idea. Pretty good shot that you can get a grant. Colorado, because they just have too much money to give away, do stuff like that. I knew a guy who might’ve got the money to do black and white, fine art photography documentation of farmers in southern Colorado. That's not anything that anyone’s going to pay for, but maybe it's beautiful and important to preserve that history. And the state paid for it. I'm kind of fine with that. I'd rather that than some bombs.

Some of my favorite recordings growing up were the Library of Congress Recordings. These dorks went and just interviewed people at work farms in the South and they met Leadbelly. That's how Leadbelly became famous. Woody Guthrie, he's got hours of recordings where he’s telling stories about the Dust Bowl and then singing songs. I listened to those hundreds of times, all those old bluesmen and everything. And it wouldn't have made any money at the time. They would have gone bankrupt if that was the plan, but the Library of Congress had the sentiment that the content was important, and that the new recording technology didn’t cost that much.

I do think that's a good model. I think if we messed around with that more, more than just the arts, (it would work). Maybe if the community said, “what's this guy wanting to do? He's got a new style of hot dog he wants to try out? Yeah, why not?”

You’d probably create marketplaces like the one downtown, the SB public market, where there's nine different things in it. It’s pretty easy to just have 1 module of that be someone that gets it for the month. They can make their weird hot dogs and we see what happens.

So, yeah, you could do stuff like that. I mean, we probably should do stuff like that because you look at communities like Portland with the food trucks scene that blew up. That made the tourism dollars, and that’s what Santa Barbara is, tourism dollars. But they're afraid of everything.

My business partner has gone to the City Council meetings. I don't ever have the time, but he goes there, and he was telling me about the stuff that old ladies were pitching for Santa Barbara: “Why Not Santa Barbara?” They were saying, “We’ll do murals and everything. People would want to take pictures in front of these murals that influencers will like.”

And they’re talking about some tens of thousands of dollars on this garbage.

There are certain restaurants here in Santa Barbara that will not even carry any American wines and even sometimes Santa Barbara wines. If you have this substantial economy locally that's dedicated to that, do you think restaurants need to have a certain dedication to promote these industries? For example, strawberries and cauliflowers are the top agricultural crops here in Santa Barbara. Do you think it’s also part of restaurants’ responsibility to support other local economies here that are tied into the food network?

Yeah, it just makes sense. I do it here. This is all natural, local. I got some French stuff but I guess everybody wants a shtick. So, some European restaurants would only want to serve European wines.

And that's just people, like I said, they’re just locked into a certain thing.

What about places like South Dakota, Mississippi, and New Mexico where they’re not close to anything locally where they produce food crops for human. What do you think food should look like in those states or cities? What should the restaurant scene look like?

Is it going to be a blank canvas? Everybody there gets to choose what it should be?

Yeah, like you said, the shipping of food is not the craziest thing happening to the environment right now. You should be able to get everything and everything.

Now that we're talking about it, it really is a good chunk of most people's days and most people's lives. It really affects your mood, your outlook, and your health. And yeah, I've gone through periods where I'll eat junk food every now and then. I never feel good afterwards. I always feel bad. I always feel a little bit depressed. I mean, if you eat at McDonald's too, you get a little angry. You have an animosity with the universe because you just don't feel good.

So yeah, you got to take that into account. Just because someone is living in corn country, you can’t condemn them to eat corn only and maybe a little bit of fruit.

It's not really the world we live in anymore, but a lot of cuisines came out of people being locked into their own region. A lot of Japanese cuisine is amazing because of all that seafood and seaweed. It's not for any other reason besides that they had it right there.

Do you think COVID has been helpful to shape your thought on how restaurants get to this utopian ideal? Do you think it's made it closer to that or do you think they showed the crack of that facade, and those cracks closed as soon as things got back to normal.

I think it’s a little bit of all those things. It's a multivariate situation. The pandemic disrupted the flow of business, and it put a lot of places out of business. It taught those corporations and the small places how vulnerable we are to the economic reality. It also showed what people actually want, what they were willing to pay for. It was interesting that all these high-end places were suffering and crying because the food wasn't worth eating unless you're sitting down, being served, wined and dined, and having the candles lit. You can’t put those food in Styrofoam and charge those prices.

Like, let's say the French laundry is, I would say that's a good example of high-end, local, wholesome. He’s growing the peas. I would probably pay the $700 to eat there but if it were in 30 containers to-go, stayed hot or whatever, I’m not paying that $700.

It's like watching Pink Floyd with that house lights on, without the lasers and everything. Still a great show, still good music, but you'd be kind of, like, weirded out halfway through. Which is kind of good because people shouldn't be completely hypnotized and entranced by the white tablecloths and the service. Because like I said, it's an aristocracy simulator. So you can go out and feel like a princeling and treat waiters like shit, just get served and waited upon, which I think is unnatural. I don't think anybody should be waited on like that.

I think it's just people trying to mitigate fear and loneliness and create some kind of barrier against reality by indulging in the novelties of being served and waited upon. They get to be fed right, they get to roll out of there and they're all drunk and full. They got their shoulders rubbed. But that's a bad form of therapy. Like some people live for that. But the biggest illusion wears off within 24 hours inside of your system.

It's not good work to deal with that fear in this manner because if you're brave and courageous, you're never going to be rude to a waitress. If you're a satisfied, secure, confident person. You know who you are, what you're doing. You're never going to be rude.

What do you think is the biggest obstacle towards your idea for utopian society right now?

Fear.

You talked a little bit about the middle class with their fear of having the things that the lower class could also get. Is that the same fear?

I think if you were to remove that from everyone, I think most people would take the knife away from their brother’s neck. We'd probably get along. People are less afraid.

Do you think our current society is good at perpetuating this fear?

Yeah. We're some of the best. I mean, we spend most of our money on the military industrial complex. A courageous and brave society wouldn't have to do that. We would be enlisted and be happy to help if there were a problem, because we're right.

What would you say to our current society right now about reaching this utopia?

I think nothing's going to change and no one's going to get anywhere unless you look for that golden city in your own heart. You have to start with yourself, you know, city in your own heart. You have got to start with yourself. I think if you get up in the morning, put on your shoes, and start walking towards heaven. And have your thoughts, your language, your intentions, and your actions directed towards heaven or just love. And you go to bed and get up in the morning and do this every day, you’ll probably get closer towards utopia.

And if you're getting up in the morning and walking towards hell, you just have anxiety, fear, and resentment. All you care about is yourself. You’re already there in hell, you’re not going to hell, you’re there right now. You’re just walking deeper and closer within it every day.

If we're going to get to utopia, I think it’s already here. It’s available to us. There’s more than enough for everybody right now. If tomorrow, everybody just decided to fuck it, and make a decision that no kids die of starvation tonight, we could do it within a week.

It's not that big a deal. We got more than enough. It's just that we're all running the breakneck sprint towards hell.

I mean, I've done that most of my life. And now I'm starting to realize that you’ll hit bullseye if you aim for bullseye.