Why We Crave Gurus: A Skeptic's Reckoning With Belief, Bitcoin, and Burning Man | Vikram Gandhi

What a fake guru discovered about genuine connection, why ancient wisdom survives even the most rigorous skepticism, and the real reason humans crave spiritual authority.
Vikram Gandhi is an award-winning and boundary-pushing director of fiction and non-fiction film and television. Vikram most recently co-directed The Man Will Burn — a five-part HBO Original Documentary Series on the full arc of Burning Man, from its countercultural roots in San Francisco to the 80,000-person desert event it's become.
In this episode we talk about:
Why an experiment built to reject capitalism ended up swimming in it
What playing a fake guru taught him about how belief actually works
Why people are often more comfortable opening up to a stranger than to those closest to them
What religion, cryptocurrency, and Burning Man all have in common
How to find meaning in ancient wisdom without needing to belong to anything
And much more
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