As I "won," I didn't feel the fruits of that. I felt the fruits when I served others, when I gave myself away. . . . I've always seen my life as an experiment. I just want to go to what works. As I felt the charity aspect in my life, the giving aspect, I felt a power and I've walked more into that.
Tom ShadyacI love Frank Capra. He believed in the goodness of people and one man's ability to fight and often triumph.
Tom ShadyacOur own economy tells us to take as much as we can get, right? Our own economy says, you're going to be the most successful graduate if you go into the business world and take as much you can get. That's not how nature works. Nature has a much simpler economy. Everything in nature takes what it needs. That's it. You don't see an oak tree gathering up all the resources. An oak tree takes what it needs to be the authentic oak tree it is.
Tom ShadyacTheres one fundamental law that all of nature obeys that mankind breaks every day. Now, this is a law thats evolved over billions of years, and the law is this: Nothing in nature takes more than it needs.
Tom ShadyacWe're a young species; We're only 175,000 years old. On the evolutionary scale, life on this planet is 4 billion years old. We're 175,000 years old. So we're trying something out. Who wouldn't think it would be better to have the most stuff to take as much as you could? As we do that, we see why the moral prophets come along and say, don't even store into barns, right? It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We've seen we plunder nature. We plunder our neighbor. We create enemies because we're against each other.
Tom Shadyac