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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