American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Why Jonah Hill Made A Documentary About My Family

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Secure your privacy with Surfshark! Enter coupon code AMERICANALCHEMY for an extra 3 months free at https://surfshark.deals/americanalchemy Phil Stutz graduated from City College in New York and received his MD from New York University. He worked as a prison psychiatrist on Rikers Island and then in private practice in New York before moving his practice to Los Angeles in 1982. Barry Michels has a BA from Harvard, a law degree from University of California, Berkeley, and an MSW from the University of Southern California. He has been in private practice as a psychotherapist since 1986. The two are the authors of the New York Times bestselling book, The Tools. *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shelf will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. What's going on now, everything's falling apart. Every institution can't be trusted.

Every official is corruptible. It would be quite a conspiracy. You have rivers that are on fire. It's going fucking crazy. So the question is, do those things have anything to do with each other? Or is it just coincidental? That's my godfather, Phil Stutz. If you recognize him, it might be because Jonah Hill made a Netflix documentary about him a year ago,

called Stutz. But why did Jonah Hill make a movie about my godfather? Well, Phil is an alien, specifically he's a gray from Zeta Reticuli, and it's time that the public know the hard truth about my family and its origins. Just kidding, ha ha, but Phil does have an almost clairvoyant ability to size anybody up instantaneously, tell them where they're blocked, and give them some viable routes forward in life. Most people don't know he was also the Rikers Island Prison Psychiatrist for five years, So evaluating and helping people was almost a matter of life or death from the start. What are some words you'd use to describe? Right.

Hell. In his early 30s, Phil became afflicted with a mysterious condition called chronic fatigue syndrome. The condition involves extreme and constant exhaustion. He could barely get out of bed when it first hit. But this breakdown was bizarrely generative. He found a turn-of-the-century Austrian philosopher named Rudolf Steiner, who came to define his worldview and influence his practice. And he also started to attract some of the most impressive people in the world as patients. If you're a fan of this channel, you know I'm interested in some pretty out-there

topics, frame science, UFOs, and the mysterious nature of our reality. Here, I wanted to give you a glimpse of my biggest childhood influences that opened me up to the prospect that life is a little more trippy than we realize in the first place. Not only am I talking about Phil, I'm also talking about my dad, Barry Michaels, Bill's longtime business partner who helped develop Phil's ideas and communicate them to the world. I'm so lucky to have my dad as a father. He's one of the hardest working and most inspiring people I know, and he's turned around the lives of countless people, CEOs of billion-dollar companies, actors, producers, directors, some of whom were on the verge of self-destruction before seeing him. A lot of this is outlined in a great New Yorker

profile on him called Hollywood Shadows. Together, Phil and my dad wrote a New York Times bestselling book called The Tools and a follow-up called Coming Alive. Their practice involves mental visualizations they give their patience for facing daunting everyday situations. Unlike traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, these visualizations incorporate archetypal Jungian symbology. If all of this sounds a little wacky or insane or like a ridiculous L.A. cliche, it does to me too. But whatever Phil and my dad are doing empirically seems to work. Due to confidentiality, we can't get into their patient's identities. But Phil and my dad are paid homage to in a few popular movies and shows that you might be familiar with.

In this interview, I wanted to get a little deeper with both of them, on the laws of human nature, what motivates people, what to do when faced with the most desperate and dark situations, and how to reconcile the sometimes very disparate and conflicted sides of oneself. We also get into their favorite philosophers and some of the esoteric inspiration for a lot of their work. We taped this a year ago, but it feels all the more relevant as the world seems to be going absolutely nuts with social isolation, geopolitical turmoil, and late-stage capitalist decadence. It also felt important for me to put this out now and not just sit on it because both my dad and Phil are facing some not-super-fun health challenges. But this episode is a celebration

of their work and legacy. So without further ado, please welcome this week's amazing American alchemists, Phil Stutz, and my father, Barry Michaels. Before we get started, I wanted to give a huge shout out to today's sponsor, Surf Shark VPN. If you're into this show

and like researching crazy and sometimes dangerous topics like UFOs and anti-gravity, you probably care about keeping your identity anonymous while surfing the web. You also probably want uncensored access to the best sources of information on all of these edgy controversial topics. And you want this uncensored access wherever you happen to be in the world. Surfshark keeps your online identity hidden by encrypting all of the information sent between

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like all of your favorite Netflix libraries while you're on the road. Again, this allows you to bypass censorship and keep your data safe. One of the decision-making frameworks I learned from my dad and Phil is a concept called regret minimization. Do the thing that you're least likely to regret in the future. So do your future self a favor and protect yourself from data harvesting, hacking, and tracking with Surfshark. Don't wait around for somebody to steal your information. Use good web hygiene. and use code American Alchemy to get an extra whole three months for free.

You can also just click the link in the description below. Surf Shark also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there's literally no risk in trying this out. And now, back to my dad and Phil. So the Netflix documentary was pretty crazy. I feel like it's gotten a lot of acclaim. Like, it's really a... It's really blown things up.

Yeah. Your voicemail is now, if you're calling about the Netflix documentary, or calling about therapy because you saw the Netflix documentary, please, you know. It's a referral to our website, you know, where they can get a tools trained therapist. Deflection, yeah.

It's calmed down a little bit. I would say I'm getting maybe seven to ten calls a week. Okay. They leave messages despite the fact that I'm telling them not to leave messages. Oh, that's funny. How do they get your number? Do you think like Google or something? I have no idea.

It's so strange. I guess people's numbers are pretty findable. Yeah. How do you think you, do you think you were sort of faded to become a psychotherapist? Do you think like your childhood, you know, within that were the seeds of your profession? Definitely, but not quite as directly as you just described it. I knew really from a pretty early age that I really wanted to and felt bound to have us positive an effect as I could on people's lives. For a long time, I thought that was going to take the form of going into politics, actually. It never occurred to me to be a therapist. And then gradually it morphed into, well, maybe this is the most direct one-on-one way that I can affect people in their lives. And the more I did it, the more I realized without being a modest, I'm really good at that. I'm really good at that. So it became one of those things that I think I knew. knew from the beginning I was meant to do and then realized, oh, I'm good at it, you know. Why do you think you're good at it?

I think partly I grew up in a family that was disposed toward self-examination and analysis, probably a little too much so, frankly. Yeah. Like, one of the lessons I had to learn in life was, excuse the language, shut the fuck up and just enjoy life. Yeah. You know, a little bit. You don't have to examine every single thing that you do or say. Right, right.

But yeah, I think it partly was that. Partly, I think I was always very self-examining, like not self-questioning, but just like, why am I thinking that thought, or why am I having those urges or, you know, whatever it is? Because I had a natural curiosity about myself. And I don't think it veered into narcissism or anything, but it did dispose me toward the,

thinking of what are the unconscious motivations that are operating right now in, you know, in yourself? I didn't often find an answer, but at least I was disposed to questioning. Yeah. And at what point does self-examination become narcissistic? Because I look at a lot of the coastal bourgeois class or whatever, and it feels like this sort of bottomless soup, smorgasbord of like... Just masturbatory. Yeah, you have like a... Yeah, you have like a menu of like eight things that you do for yourself and like none of them quite work and you're still unhappy and you kind of consume them on, you know, unconsciously. So what, yeah, what's the difference between that and meaningful progress?

To me, it becomes masturbatory when the purpose is no longer to have a positive impact on the people around you or on the world around you. In other words, when it's just self-examination for its own sake, that to me is kind of, kind of a bad sign. It's really disguised narcissism, frankly. And I think that what prevents it from doing that is that you adhere to a specific goal. Am I trying to get myself to do something that I typically avoid? Am I trying to get myself to stop losing my temper? Am I trying to get myself to stop putting myself down in my head?

Even small goals like that can root or anchor the work in reality and in something that's actually achievable. Yeah. There's also, I think there are a lot of people that like, it's like they want to stop everything and heal themselves or something. So before they can like are ready to do anything, they feel some like primordial childhood pain that they have to like get over before they do something in the real world. And I think it's probably more complicated than that where it's like you solve the pain partially by like trying to do something in the real world and and by working on it and self-examining. If you don't have the self-examining, if you don't have the self-examining, you don't have the self-examination. I think that's probably pretty unhealthy. But you know what I mean? Like where people are like, you know, I'm going to heal myself. And then you go to South America, they do ayahuasca, like 10 times in a month or something. Right.

I don't really believe in removing yourself from real life to work on something and then returning an improved person. I'm not saying that that can't be helpful in certain kind of extreme cases. Like, for example, if you have somebody who's a severe drug addict or a severe drug addict or a severe alcoholic, it's actually good for them to go on retreat, a sober retreat, where they learn the rules of sobriety and practice 12 steps, you know, et cetera, et cetera, before they return to society. But mostly, mostly for most of us, I think, problems get solved in the real world as the problems occur and you use new tools in addressing those problems.

Yeah. I think for me, something that's been challenging has been like growing up with you and having, being privy to a lot of kind of more interesting kind of esoteric knowledge or whatever, and then thinking that that exonerates me from like the trials and tribulations of like everyday life, which is really like the reality itself is set up in a way to challenge you to become your best self. And that's like the most sacred, interesting thing there is, the banal challenge of like the small stuff. Not like some esoteric, knowledge. Yes, yes. Or maybe the, to put it differently, any esoteric, true esoteric knowledge you get comes from like day-to-day behavior or something. Yeah. A lot of mystical traditions would not

even allow you to study, you know, the esoterica that they propagated until you were like in well into your 30s. Yeah, Kabbalah, you're not supposed to do it until you're 35. Great example. Yeah. They wanted you rooted in the material world. They wanted you dealing with You're supposed to have like a spouse and be ground. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, it's like I live alone in Laurel Canyon, read about conspiracies all day,

and it's not exactly like the best ingredients for like mental health. Exactly. I love there's a Nietzsche quote, which is like the measure of a man is, or a man is measured by how much truth he can accommodate without descending into madness. Wow. And there's something about. you know, like developing sort of a higher spiritual sense or clairvoyance or something, which is like two steps forward, one step back, and you're almost responsibly moving into a state of psychosis or something.

You know, that's particularly moving in Nietzsche's case because he did descend into that. That's right, yeah. I think syphilis aided in that descent. Maybe, but also from a psychological or spiritual point of view, he told a lot of truths that no one was willing to look at it at the time. Yeah, academia shunned him. Who knows that didn't send him over the edge? Yeah, he was a genius. He was a genius and totally not socialized in a way that I think geniuses often are. You know the story of his madness?

Are you talking about looking at the cows leaping in the fields? No, what do you tell? He was already beginning to descend into madness, but there was a particular incident where he was living in Vienna at the time, and he looked out his window and watched a coachman. There were no cars at that time. Coachman was flogging his horse, just mercilessly flogging his horse. Nietzsche ran downstairs, ran out to the coachman,

threw his arms around the horse. That's right. And then never recovered. Being mad at that point. So it's almost like he was so overtaken with his compassion for this animal. That's wild. He couldn't take it.

I don't know why that reminded me of this, but at the end of his life, Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon. He lived in this apartment near Bryant Park, and he would write love letters to this pigeon and, like, thought that the pigeon was, you know, in love with him. And he was also, you know, totally antisocial character who was ripped off by everybody around him. Right.

That's amazing. Yeah. It is. Yeah. I think there is something on the, you know, on the edge of madness. And I am by no means advocating madness or anything like that. Go crazy. But there's something about the deep empathy that you can feel toward another living being.

Yeah. particularly not of your own species that comes to encompass a kind of, I don't know, kind of beauty in the world. It's hard to bear in a certain way. Yeah, totally. Yeah, and I guess the challenge, or the goal is to, like, properly reintegrate as you move towards that greater worldly empathy or whatever. Exactly. Because I think if you do too much all at once, I don't think that that's, really healthy. And there's a whole strain of our culture, in fact, that I think romanticizes

that romantic madness, you know, of Nietzsche's and of Teslas or whatever. And, you know, the important thing is if you're going to skate on that edge, you have to be very strong, strongly rooted in reality, or you can actually lose your mind. Yeah, totally. I mean, some of my favorite people are sort of considered, were considered crazy in their time or even are considered a little crazy now. It's interesting. But I think that vertical tether, where you get these interesting downloads

often comes from not being as horizontally tethered to the social matrix or whatever. And it's just this, I don't know, trade-off. By the way, your use of that as a metaphor, I think is really important. The horizontal tether is in the here and now, what am I doing to move myself through time? words, I'm moving horizontally.

The vertical tether is there's something much greater than me going on here at all times. And I have no idea whether this has any relevance or not, but if you think about it, that's the cross. The horizontal and the vertical. In a certain way, I don't know that Christians actually believe this, but this is my interpretation of it, and I'm not a Christian. My interpretation of that is that we're responsible for two dimensions. The dimension in which we move forward willfully through time. Yeah.

And yet constantly in each present moment, stay tethered to something greater than ourselves. That's really cool. Then you become a living cross in a certain way. I love that. I love that. And that's kind of, there's just a philosopher René Gerard. And he talks about, you know, the horizontal tether would be like mimesis, like the inherently imitative nature of human beings.

and the vertical tether would be the kingdom of heaven sort of residing within you or you know god the divine or the holy spirit or something and yeah I don't know I think the more I actually descend into my own madness and think about the nature of reality I think that you know I'm getting interested in like a lot of the quantum spooky or whatever, like entanglement and stuff like that. The more I think about it, my model of reality is like sort of probable futures and probable path. The present is like a handshake between the future and the past or something in a weird way. And it's like the present is somehow like a collapsing function of those things.

And their dimensions... What do you mean collapsing? It's a... I think there are dimensions beyond this one word, time is happened time isn't really a factor where it's sort of happening simultaneously and so I think and I think when you get to certain levels of subatomic scale the time factor starts to break down and so like things like entanglement can actually be explained by like retro causality and and

sudden the classic double-slid experiment can be like I think John Archibald Wheeler's famous mid-century physicist figured out that if you you know detect the electron mid-flight, it actually retro causally changes the electron from the start of it being shot towards the double slit or whatever. And I think things sort of break down time-wise on a subatomic scale in a very small scale. And so I think there's a dimension beyond ours that is time agnostic, maybe. And then the present is like a, it's sort of a product of our epistemology as humans. And, you know, it's like almost like the

instantiation of the Demiurge metaphor is like time. And the way we perceive it. Now I sound like a schizo. I have no idea what you're talking about, but it doesn't sound schizophrenic to me. Okay, thanks. The one association I have with what you're seeing

is that that handshake coming from the past, the handshape coming from the future, they meet in the eternal present. And to me, that's where human free will has some relevance. It doesn't have complete control, but it has some relevance as to how I take what's coming from the past and use it to move into the future. And I believe that if you're conscious of that,

you get more of a sense of ongoing coherence, ongoing purpose. Yes. How do you develop that? Because I'm not going to lie. So I obviously adhere to the tools and think that, you know, that's very empowering. Having like these mental regimens you can go through in situations that you typically face in your life that might set you off in certain ways. But then I'm also somewhat sympathetic to the law of attraction. I just don't like the way it's written about. I think it's written about in a sort of escapist like you just can think your way into things or whatever. If I think this, then I'll attract this.

But I've experienced it before. I've experienced like the ability to sort of quote unquote manifest stuff. The question I have is like sometimes I feel a thing and I'm like, this is I feel, this feels good and right. This feels like the right version of the future for me. And I kind of like, I know I'm going to like hit this. And then things start to go well and cohere. you're mentioning. And then there are other times where I'm like, I just want to like commit to a thing. But there's the motivations are sort of negative or like my there's too much internal decoherence

in terms of my like ability to like really be self-aligned towards that goal where the law of attraction or whatever the thing isn't working. And so maybe you reject the premise and you think that you can't think in a way that affects matter that, you know, brings things into your life. I think that. But, yeah, what is that? Like, I think there's some way in which your internal orientation and the purity with which you want a thing really affects getting the thing. And then, so there's some layer beyond the just like Law of Attraction, create a vision board

and, like, get the thing that actually involves, like, your orientation towards, what you want and that being like pure. I'm not sure I'm answering your question, so stop me if I'm missing it. But to me, there's one gigantic problem with the law of attraction, at least as I've heard it as espoused, and admittedly my knowledge of this is not comprehensive.

But the one real problem with it is that it just does not acknowledge the existence of each. evil. I don't care how many Jews in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, you know, created a vision board or asked for what they wanted, et cetera, et cetera. I don't care what they did. They were going to get slaughtered if they stayed there, you know, kind of thing. And I think there's a certain danger. Thankfully, we're not in such, you know, exigent circumstances, but I think there's a certain, almost like hidden arrogance to the idea that what you want even matters that much in the larger scheme of the universe.

I think it's important to want things. Don't get me wrong. I think it's important to work toward them. But sometimes when I hear that stuff, there seems to be sort of a comforting but to me entirely false assumption. that if I want it enough, it'll happen. It'll come to me. I will attract it to me.

Right. When I really think that misses a big part of life, which is there are certain things that are going to happen to me. Some of them may be good fortune. Others may be bad fortune. Yeah. I have nothing to do with them. Yeah, I agree.

I also think the way a lot of people treat the law of attraction and things of that variety are, of the occult variety where it's kind of like a witchy seance you know I'm gonna I'm gonna like say the thing over and over again until it happens

and that feels weird and like it's almost like you don't have enough faith in the delightful randomness of life where like you know it's actually might bring you something that's like better than you can even conceive of and like more interesting or that you might initially think is awful

but turns out to be a great lesson totally you've told me before that obsession is portable and you've also told me that deprivation creates motivation and so is there something to kind of cutting off your lower kind of limbic desires

that creates space for something higher? 100%. So if you're getting into what's real, what's the truth, what are you real? I just read this quote by this guy He says, you know how you find out if something is really who you are as a person, what you really believe in?

He says, are you willing to do something that it costs you money to do, but do it anyway, which means you lose money every. It's like I'm losing money every second I'm talking to them. So I thought that was, because, see, the scientists think that they're going to work out some kind of an algorithm or something to do this, and that's exactly wrong. In other words, this is like stepping off the edge of a cliff. But the thing is, if you're willing to at least entertain the possibility that there's a higher level here of wisdom and of, how would you say it,

and of a higher standard for how you conduct yourself, if you're willing to entertain that as at least a possibility, then you at least you have a little bit of a step towards freedom. And the driving, excuse me, the driving force for that is, this, I quote the light and the darkness, is going right into the darkness where you can't possibly know what the answer is and you go there anyway and you go there on specs, so to speak. Do you think human beings have kind of a death drive?

Well, to me the death drive is the same thing as the death instinct. You know, so it was, you know, when Freud was 65 years old, he said, oh shit, this doesn't work. He was pretty verbal about it. But he had to make it into a theory. He had to make it into a theory, or an instinct, he called it the death instinct. So, and what he said was, it's so interesting. He says the death instinct is the unstoppable, irrational, unarguable entropy in the human race.

So basically he says, you have an instinct to destroy yourself, or not even to destroy, you have an instinct to repeat over and and over and over again, something that erodes your identity and blocks your ability to move forward, because you can't ever win. He was also a very pessimistic guy. He got famous by being, did you know by the way that in Europe until I think,

1940 or something, he was a laughing star. It was when he came over here, I think, in, I don't know when it was, 19th, because the Americans were always looking for the next the thing. The Europeans are looking for the last thing. Do you think there's, there are negatives about therapy? Like I think of therapy in some ways is like, so many negatives. I think of it as like a very boomer concept or something. And I, you know, I think like the divorce rate has shot up and everybody just wants like this perfect

life. And there's something about the boomer vibe, which is very like, I can have whatever I want, like this sort of endless frontier feeling. And so, yeah, is there something, and then is there some way in which, like, it replaces, like, what should be a traditional family role? Like, maybe you should just speak to your significant other about these things. I mean, it's hard to answer because it so depends on the therapy. The context, I agree. Anybody that says it's, you know, only bad is wrong.

And then anybody that says it's only good is also wrong. I mean, the thing that... I think 99% of the time in practice, it's pretty bad. Right. It's pretty like Freudian talk therapy is pretty ineffective and stupid or whatever. But even then, like certain people, you can get hope by just voicing your things. And you feel repressed in your local environment. Right.

So that can be helpful. Yeah. To me, the most common problem of most talk therapy is that it's just masturbatory. Right. It doesn't go anywhere. There's no articulated goal. There's no roadmap to get to. the goal, it's just sit, talk, pay your money, and come back next week.

Yeah. To me is a complete waste of time. Totally. Yeah. It's a total waste of time. How do you feel about that? And you're like, you tell me what you think about what I'm saying right now because I just spoke for 10 minutes.

Right. You don't, it's absurd. My goal, I mean, I'm not saying that I necessarily reach it every single time, but my goal is for every patient to leave every session feeling like, I have my marching orders. I'm going to do this this week, whether it's something in the outside world or something with their shadow or whatever.

And then I'm going to report back next week. It's how it went. You know, how it went. You know, in monetization of anything, always involves sucking the soul out of it because you want to sell it. And the more generic it is, the easier it is to sell. That pissed me off.

One thing about me, I think, I'm not saying I'm better than any other strings or anything like that, but I do get pissed off at this stuff and when they don't get pissed. Not loving your AT&T or T mobile bill. Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news.

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bill in the name of the person reguing me the deal additional terms conditions and restrictions apply so i get even more press off well you just said something really interesting which is that um more fungible something is or the more interoperable it is that easier it is to scale and monetize which seems to be the whole ethos of our modern medical system where the healing is not this idiosyncratic one-to-one process maybe the healer sort of learns it in this sort of hermetical interesting way, they're called to it. Instead, if you think about the FDA and the protocol there, the person doling out the medication has to be interoperable inherently

because it's all about scalability and how much you can sort of replicate the experiment across different practitioners. And so the practitioner is merely a cog in a machine who has a menu of treatments to dole out to patient. That's evil, man. I'm going to tell you. He gets me so pissed off. I mean, you're talking about medicine and psychiatry.

Yeah, yeah. But you're probably right. It probably applies to both, you know, in slightly different ways. And that's what the tools came in. So number one, I knew there was a gap, and we had nothing, we had no dog in the fight, no tools, no nothing to fill in that gap. Which made me think that everybody was either an idiot or corrupt. I was thinking about how in traditional therapy,

you're paying this person, and you save all of your problems for them, and they just listen. And your friends, who are idiots, give you advice, unsolicited. Yes. And you want your friends just to listen, and you want your therapist to give you advice.

So that's why I got the idea of tools. And what really, how would you say it? What really inspired me was the idea not to, I was into making money. There was nothing extraordinary about me, except for one thing. I couldn't let somebody leave my fucking office without something. If I had to make it up on the spot, whatever, if I had to give him a pair of my underpants from junior high school. But you have to give them something, whether it's conceptual or physical or something. They have to walk out with something.

Yeah. And the shrinks tried to say there's something wrong with that. You're demanding immediate gratification. Right. You're immature. And, you know, very respectful, my response to that is you are a fucking liar, idiot. Idiot. So you have, if you're, see, because it's funny, you know, in some ways the, the,

these psychoanalysts were the beginning of marketing. I think that's actually true, by the way. There was some history of that. Well, it was Edward Bernays, who I think was Freud's nephew, sort of brought in actually a lot of ideas that the Nazis sort of based their propaganda off of to America and created kind of modern consumerism, which I'm sure is an oversimplified narrative.

No, I don't think it's that over. I think that's right. See, the idea, whether you want to call it psychoanalysis or Riftzano, it doesn't matter what you call it, it means there's something going on in the human psyche that isn't quite clear, but it's influential. Not clear, but influential. Now, the guy who's marketing-oriented, he's going to have a wet dream. Right. Because no one can contradict what he's saying, because no one can characterize it in any kind of order. consistent way.

So I could tell you, hey, I know I told you I do this for free, but you didn't realize you had a dream last night, and when you told me the dream today, I knew that you wanted me to charge you for my services. Right. It can't be disproven.

Right. So you think there's almost, to characterize what you're saying, you're saying there's almost a fault line in modern therapy, self-referenced, help, maybe even the medical profession, where you have one side that's sort of state power and consumerist, and then the other side that's sort of empowering the patient in a way that's almost probably subversive incidentally to any power structure.

Yeah. The one thing I want to be careful about is making it like a one-size-fits-all type model. Because look, there's somebody... Most of them, these guys that I meet, most of them don't know shit, but they still, some of them still have goodwill. And the reason, the only reason anybody gets help by that is by the goodwill of the therapist. What do you think is the most ubiquitously applicable and powerful tool that you and Phil have developed? You know, I would answer that differently over the many years that I've worked with Phil, but I would say that for the past five, years or so I would say it's not one particular tool but it would be working with your shadow

that has gone the farthest as I've gained the most mileage out of it both working on myself as well as working with my patients there's something about just in case people don't know the shadow is sort of like the unwanted inferior side of your own personality whatever it is you feel ashamed about or embarrassed of that's your shadow you explained to me the idea of a shadow It's a version of yourself that you want to hide from the world the most. And this is what I pictured that day. Me at 14. And typically you hide it from the outside world because you're a little ashamed of it and embarrassed by it.

But as you establish a relationship with it, and by a relationship I literally mean, as you alluded to earlier, talking to it, you know, on a regular basis daily and having it talk back to you. and learning that it actually knows things that you don't know. Yeah. That, to me, I've gotten the most mileage out of that because you never know what someone's shadow is going to say to them. I can give somebody a tool like the reversal of desire, and I can pretty much guarantee that if they use it, they'll get themselves to do things that they have a hard time doing.

Yeah. But with the shadow work, it's anyone's guess as to what the shadow is going to tell them and where it's going to lead them. And so it's a more exciting journey for me to follow with a patient because I'm sort of watching as they are watching it unfold in unpredictable directions.

Yeah, it is so unpredictable. It kind of reminds me of that Donnie Dark. Have you ever seen the movie Donnie Darko? No. Well, at one point he says, the main character, he goes, he's like, I'm fulfilling the God program. And when he does that, he's able sort of travel back and forth in time or whatever.

And I think there's something to experiencing synchronicities or like Kismet or whatever that comes from listening to that internal voice that often tells you to do stuff that's seemingly inane and actually crazy. Like if sometimes you listen to your shadow and it's like, you know, run around the block or like go to this random part of L.A. or whatever. And then you do it and then you like meet a person that's like somehow instrumental and like a thing and like a thing that you're supposed to do or you get some insight while you're there.

And I think, you know, the sort of like butterfly effect where if you like change one little thing, it has this like massive multiplicative effect down the line. If you like listen to that voice, it somehow can get you back on track. My question to you would be, how do you reconcile a tool like that

with like reversal of desire, which is really coming more from a place of like, I need to like achieve some sort of external output? and I need to kind of flog myself into submission to do that. That seems like it would cut against listening to like some internal voice that you've kind of repressed. I just think for most people both are necessary. They need some way of getting themselves to do the things that they're not doing. And they need that because they need to experience themselves as having some sort of positive

agency in the world. Like I can get myself to get up and do this difficult task, return this email, make this phone call, et cetera, et cetera. And I've never met anyone that doesn't need some of that, you know, kind of thing. The other side of... Can't you end up with the shadow revolting a ton if you end up being this crazy sort of taskmaster? That's exactly why I think it's very important to do shadow work and to have a program with the shadow simultaneously because the shadow can be the one to say, you know what,

don't do the reversal of desire today. Take a walk around the block, smell the breeze, smell the breeze. smell the roses. Yeah. You know, et cetera, you smell the breeze. But the shadow will see things in the world that you don't see.

One of my favorite stories of this is, this was early on when I had just learned about the shadow. And I used to use him in sessions with patients. Yeah. Whenever I felt stumped. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. So I had this patient.

He was a kind of a very, varied by the book. He was an accountant. Yeah. Not a very emotional guy at all. I was having trouble getting him to even talk. Like he just wasn't talking very much. It was like the first session with the guy.

Yeah. And in sort of exasperation, I turned to my shadow and I said, tell me what to do. Like, what am I supposed to do here? Yeah. And he said, look at his eyes. I looked into his eyes and I saw a tear. It was not a real tear,

but it was like the vision of a vision of a, a tear coming out of an eye. And so I took a deep breath and I said, you know, sitting with you, I'm getting the strangest feeling of just immense sadness. And he burst into tears and opened up completely and we had a great session after that. Now I never would have said anything like that if it hadn't been for my shadow. I never would have even perceived him as sad, you know. It was the shadow that saw something that I couldn't see.

And that's why I don't really see these as competing things, working on the reversal of desire and doing the shadow work. The shadow work can enhance. Yeah. I think a Silla and Charybdis of a young person in the country who is trying to face adversity is how to listen to your kind of inner voice systematically. And how do you differentiate between, you know, like you talk about the Jungian shadow, the part of you that you want to kind of repress or compartmentalize

and not show to other people, which could be a really great source of wisdom, how do you differentiate between that and some demonic inner voice? You know, like you have the proverbial angel and the devil, and people definitely get internal messages all the time that are just satiating their most low kind of hedonic needs. Here's the thing. It's weird. I was thinking about all these things yesterday. Here it is. And no one's going to like this. You have to go on instinct. And you have to create your own value system. It doesn't matter what anybody else tells you, your own, and it can't be based on proof. If it's based on proof, it isn't worth shit. So the most important things have to be, I call it faith, you know, that pyramid. Did I ever

show you that? Yes, yes. Birthday cake? Yes. So the bottom line, the foundation of a healthy view of both an individual and political ideology, is that you choose to believe it. You choose to believe it. And that's what we call faith. And it was faith is an act of choice. And it's not based on being right.

If you can do that, then the next level of this thing is action. not because you're guaranteeing any result at all, but because faith gives you the ability to take action even if there's absolutely no proof at all. And then go ahead. Well, I think what you're sort of suggesting is trusting your own experience in a way, which is a kind of subversive idea

because, you know, we've had organized religion for thousands of years, and is there not something that's super? adaptive about that and is, you know, the reason people seem to be going crazy and maybe this ends in sort of a war of all against all or something is because of a breakdown of religion which is actually very socially adaptive and it keeps people kind of in order in many ways. Yeah, look, I mean, I understand everything you're saying, but it's not, I don't think that's

tenable or viable over long periods of time. One reason is people's awareness of themselves is changing, and it's not necessarily for the good, but the top of that birthday cake is confidence. So whether you're right or wrong, whether you're a Republican or Democrat, however you look at it, you're going to have to be honest with yourself.

You're going to end up making decisions and valuing things based on the gut. There's no way around that. Now, but there are aspects of this that are subject. There's a healthy part of your guts, your instincts. That's the best way to say it. But you can't get it by thinking about it, figuring it out. One time you do get it is when you have to make a big decision.

Because then you have to make the decision anyway, and then it's going to affect you anyway. Then you get serious with your. self about that. Now just to go back to the other thing we were saying, I view the highest species of the highest species of courage is the ability to walk right into the unknown without any guarantees of anything and keep going. You don't have to get a good result. You just have to keep going. It's like walking right into the darkness. And that if you're honest with yourself, you can find out what you really want, who you really are, I guess.

I remember towards the end of my time at Google, I was like very depressed and like I didn't know why I was there. It was like this very, this abstract job that I had no sort of, you know, real feeling towards a relationship with. And, you know, I was, I felt very lost. and from that feeling of, you know, being kind of lost at sea and not knowing how I was going to, like, fulfill my ultimate purpose, I just let go entirely and was like, I'm going to, I'm going to have fun and I'm going to, like, do what I feel like doing on a day-to-day basis. And I would listen to what you would call, like, the shadow, you know, the inside of, inside part of me that I had been kind of, like, caging up and saying, like, you know, repressing. And it would say, you know, go. to this movie or walk to this point in San Francisco or go, you know, like random stuff. And that was like very generative for me in a way that led me down like a whole string of events that I never would have predicted to where I am today, where I'm really grateful. And then it's interesting. I feel it's somewhat happening again where I'm like, I know there's like a next version of what I'm

supposed to be doing. And I feel a little trapped in some of these old patterns and loops. And like, trying to get out of that feels like a challenge. But yeah, it's not really a question. Well, one thing I can say about that is I just, that's one of the things that I have so admired about you always. I never had the courage to just consult my shadow and do something. You really have that courage to just go with whatever it tells you and let it lead you wherever it wants to take you.

And I think that that courage doesn't guarantee that you get what you want. Yeah. But it really pays off in terms of just the level of satisfaction you have in life because a life that's lived courageously is more satisfying than one that isn't. I think so too. And it's interesting. Some of these self-help authors that talk about like doing the same thing every day or whatever, I look at them in their life and I'm like,

you ended up kind of in like a mid tier of success. Like Stephen Pressfield's like a great writer. And I actually love his book, so I don't want to pick on him. But like, you know, I don't know. They're like, you know, he wrote the War of Art or whatever. So you just sit down and it's a great book. But like, he's not the best writer. The best writers are like listening to like these weird spirits or something.

And like really tapped in in a way that like the mid-day. tier like more conventional people are not. I remember I read this but I think there's a book called um God what is it how artists live or life of an artist or something it outlines this way no no not the I like that book but no there's a book about rituals of of artists mm hmm I got to find it just yeah and it's like and it talks about and it's what I always found interesting is there's like no pattern like there's one mathematician who slept for like 16 hours a day. And like, I don't, and like,

Schopenauer, like, lived with his mom till like, he was like, you know, he was like this. There was a bunch of stuff. Nietzsche was like an in-cell, you know. And, and, uh, I just, I find that very interesting that, that convention in some ways has a limit on how effective it is. And then,

and then, in fact, you sort of have to, like, submit to some, like, higher spirit life force thing. that's just like flowing through you and you have to like tap into it. And I feel like the most successful people I know have tapped into that and have kind of opted out of the convention.

But I don't know. Would you agree you work with some of the most successful people in the world? The most successful people I treat have only one thing in common and that is they do more before breakfast than the rest of us do in three months. But see,

they just take so many acts. action steps. By the way, they don't all pay off. Yeah. It's just they're taking so many. I generally I think that correlates. And they're not, by the way, they're not the deepest people. Totally. Those are the most successful. No, I agree. The people I know who are most successful, I mean, like, it's like the Trump-style cockroach junk energy or whatever. But I agree with that. But you have counter examples to that. Like Jeff Bezos gets his day started at like 10 a.m. or something. Right. He talks about it. He's like, I putter around and drink my coffee till like 10.

Was that true? Maybe that was like a way to throw competitors off. And maybe it probably wasn't true right after he left Dee Shaw to start Amazon or something. Yeah, that's what has happened. I'm sure there's some, you know, glossing over of, you know, just like Warren Buffett's the super apple pie grandpa or whatever. He's probably not. He's probably not. And I should probably also add a footnote here, which is that I'm not sure that it matters that much.

I'm not sure that we should be studying the richest or the most successful. people and using them as templates for for they all feel lost to me too it's wild these are not people whose mental health I would necessarily you know envy or want to emulate I agree with that I also think the scapegoating of the ultra rich is stupid and beside the point and like a lot of these people are super impressive and I'm glad they exist and they've created a lot of value But I think they, yeah, I think they are not the paradigm of happiness or mental health. And then are often, they don't know what to do with the money. Exactly.

Which is because it's this treadmill where you're like, it's the sodonic, you know, I made a billion and then, you know, then I have to make 10 now. If money was the point, then eventually you sort of like, well, so what am I just going to accumulate more for the rest of my life? Totally. Yeah. and you can't. There's not a whole lot of meaning in that. No, definitely not. There is a lot of influence you can have

and a lot of things you can do. Yes. But then there are all these like social limitations to that. Like if you really want to do something meaningful, like, you know, they're like regulations and they're like social coordination issues. And those are probably harder to solve than the, like, you know,

you can't just throw money at those things. Right. It's like I don't know whether Elon Musk is going to succeed with Twitter, but I think he's learning now that it's not just like, you know, you can't just feature your way out. It's not a technocratic solution. Maybe you have to do something interesting culturally there or something. I don't know.

I mean, he's definitely also has this relentless cockroach energy or whatever. But, no, I admire him. I think he's awesome. But, but, oh, I just think that's a great description. He doesn't die. I mean, like, think about it. His career is crazy. His SpaceX, I think the first launch attempt was 2006.

And they failed three times, either two times or three times. So either on the third or fourth attempt, they succeeded. And they were, if that had blown up, the whole thing would have failed. And now it's like over $100 billion company. But it would have been over for him. And he sank all of his own money into that company. And then Tesla, when they went public, everybody shorted it. and everybody hated on him.

He's fought a lot of... Yeah, yeah. He's fought against a lot of headwinds. He's super impressive. I get the vibe that his... I remember I read his biography by this guy, Ashley Vance. And, like, his dad was abusive. And he just took so much, like, beating as a kid

that you get the vibe that, like, his pain tolerance was just, like, way higher than anybody else's. Even by the time he started his first company, which was called Zip 2, which is, like, a white pages online, which, you know. Yeah, that's interesting. He does have the quality of a person who learned early on to just be impervious. Yeah. Impervous to anything that was coming out. Yeah, and it's interesting, too, because he's, I think he's a combo of, like, hypersensitive and impervious. Right. Which is, which is really wild. Right. Like, he's tapped into some sort of

mystical thing, and then he's also, like, super tough and, like, just will not stop and, like, you know, can get beaten over the head by where. But I think like, I was actually talking to a SpaceX employee like a week ago and he was like, I joined SpaceX because I saw Elon Musk get very emotional when Neil Armstrong criticized SpaceX because that was his hero. He was like, he wanted to like recreate the space program privately and like reboot it. And SpaceX's done an amazing job. It's a really impressive company. And like, you know, in a kind of hand-wavy way, Neil Armstrong just dismissed it. And so my friend was Like that humanized him for me. They inspired you to do this, didn't they?

Yes. And to see them casting stones in your direction. It's difficult. Well, you were just talking about how you think humanity. We were discussing Graham Hancock, the last guest I had on the show. And you said that you agreed that humanity goes back way longer than we think it might have. So why do you think that? I'm just a blind follower of Ruehstine.

That's what he says. So. But, you know, ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. If you look at the history of this, I was, I don't know what the, I'm not an anthropologist or anything, but it seems like maybe every 30 years they say the Earth is older than what they thought. And I've never heard anybody really say,

hey, isn't this weird we underestimate it every fucking time? I don't understand how that works. Yeah. So why are you a blind follower of Rudolph Stein? I was just kidding, but I found him to be very, his predictions, I found to be very accurate. And also, besides being accurate, they make sense. He looks at life in history.

as a almost not rational that's not the right word but as a connected set of events all of which all of which connect to his view of the world in an abstract sense like you want me to go into this yeah let's do it so like why don't we set up for the audience who he is so he was turn in the century Austrian philosopher who kind of came out of the theosophical world, but created an offshoot called Anthroposophy. And the whole idea is sort of spiritual science. And so empirical inquiry into sort of spiritual or formally thought of as purely psychological phenomena. And he was also the father of organic farming.

So he was clearly sort of rigorous in a kind of skeptical scientific sense as well. Yeah. What he said, I think was right. He was the first one to really actively apply the vision of science and the idea of cause and effect and the idea of experimental. He actually did that. The thing is most of the, let's say, information is not provable because the experience is not like, well, this thing fell three feet. You can use the law of gravity. It didn't work like that because everything was internal.

So you had to accept what he was telling you because there was not. no physical evidence, but that's the whole point. The whole idea of what he was doing is you can have evidence and the evidence can be tested, but it's all internal. But he would say you can internally test out some of the stuff and it may not work out. Why do you think Steiner, or how does Steiner break down human nature in a kind of a more precise or interesting way than other people? I think what really separates Steiner from the rest of the pack is that he takes a psychological view of the human being, but he embeds it in a larger epistemology that includes spiritual

forces that are surrounding the human being. And he's the only philosopher slash, you know, psychologist. that I've ever studied, that really studies the interplay between the spirits surrounding us and what goes on, you know, internally. He was very fascinated with bees. He considered a beehive as one organism. It's not a conglomeration of, you know, a thousand bees. The bees are all at one.

Together, they look like a single superorganism. It really does make them appear. as one. And it had something to do with the queen bee and it compared it to the wasps. With a wasp, every little waspish thing was separate and had a life of its own. So the bees became a model for exactly what we don't have now, which is a holistic, connected, almost organistic model for really for everything. I think like a hundred, 10 years ago or something, he was born in 1860. The guy says, there's going to be two things in a hundred years.

So we're wondering about now. There'll be two things that will be very difficult, bordering on the impossible. One, education. He said it'll be almost impossible to really educate kids. And two, it would be very hard to have strong leaders. You have pseudo-strong leaders, but that's not the same thing. But it's very hard for him. In his eyes, it would be very hard to have really strongly.

And the reason for both of those things is narcissism is going to get so out of control. And everybody's me, me, me, me, and no one will listen to anybody else. Yeah. A hundred percent, it's right. I read this article once where this is only a moment in time, but the, what was, I think it was Penn, was doing an analysis on what type of graduate school, what subject is when they graduated from undergrad. And 60% of them said they wanted to be investment bankers.

Yeah, yeah. Think about that. Yeah, well, there's something about the baby boomers where they realized that there were a lot of scraps to go around and they could sort of picket the scraps, and that became the model of success for younger generations. And it's just horrible. Like the whole reason we're here is because of an industrial base

and a sense of sort of industriousness and hard work and value creation for other people. And then when value extraction becomes the model, I think it's a pretty dark place to be in. That creates a sense of unfairness in the thing. And this is the mediocre road anyway. See, this kind of stuff hurts people that are, whose goals are prosaic and basically what they want is security.

Now, now the other guy, and I call that the power system. It's like a, you know, like on the grass, somebody walks along a certain track and that everybody follows. So that's like, go to, go to, go to, Brown, go to Harvard Law School, join this law firm. I mean, it's an extreme example, but it creates an elite that thinks it knows something. And that group of people, you can see when everybody was paying

to get their kids into private school? Yeah. They didn't think there was anything wrong with that. It didn't even occur to them. No, it feels like the modern quote unquote elites are just praying on a kind of an over-financialization and a loss in any intrinsic value in sort of labor and basic hard work.

Correct. And it's really horrible. And if you're a true capitalist, which, you know, I don't think capitalism is a perfect system, but I'd love to, I like it better than Marxism, then I think this needs to, we need to rein this in. And if we don't, I think we're in big, big trouble. Actually, Karl Marx wrote, before. Before he wrote the Communist Manifesto, which I think was 1848, he wrote a book called

His Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. And he talks about all this stuff. He talks about alienation, but also the idea that animal life activity is basically all around subsistence. It's around food, survival, and shelter. And there's something about the modern capitalist system, which literally the exact same. And everything that's sort of unique about the human being, which is that we're self-referential, we can write poetry and create beautiful kind of aesthetic beauty, is kind of shot immediately

by this. And so you combine that with the idea that you can't actually move up and that the game is rigged and you end up in a really bad revolution. And on top of that, people don't seem to understand economics at all. And that seems to be like the most important issue. You have all these other hot button issues that are basically distractions. We're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or something. So.

Let me tell you about Karl Marx. Well, let me talk about Ruder Stiner. Rutherstiner said, I think it was 1840. I don't know. Carl Marx was in the British Museum. I don't know why he goes every day to write. And Rueh Starner says the devil was dictating to him what to put in these books, especially, you know, know, das capitol, whatever it was.

Yeah. So listen very carefully to this. He understood the creation of value through work. However, he couldn't, he thought, this is something, another thing, I have so much,

whatever the fuck I have about it. I don't believe in self-regulation at all. Self-regulation says the the failing will be automatically and almost mindlessly corrected because it's a self-regulating system. The only problem with that is aren't any self-regulating systems. So Carl Marx thought, once he had explained to the workers, so to speak, what was actually going on, they were automatically corrected. That's self-regulation. But there's no such thing as that. So once the

concept came out of the, however we're going to describe it as the value of labor, what really happened was the bad guy said, oh shit, here's some real value, and we're going to slurp it up. Yeah. Well, it's always the most altruistic seeming philosophies are the most evil, because it seems like you can implement them at mass scale. So there's something about utilitarianism and then Marxism as well. Marx was so diagnostically hard-headed in terms of the current situation and then in his prognostication of what would happen,

which is that, yeah, the workers would rebel and take over the state and the means of production and then everything would somehow dissolve. That's literally as fantastical as it gets and completely cuts against, you know, any basic understanding of human nature. Yeah. So to go back to something you said a long time ago, the acid test, the standard for any idea, any ideology, has to be, it has to have a plan where it recognizes

human evil and has some set of metrics, not metrics, some set of mechanisms to deal with that. If you think it's just going to happen by yourself, you're nuts. There's something about the human being that's both ultimately very depraved and animal-like and then also kind of divine and inspired. What's your sort of model of humans? My model, I would agree with that. There's a lower and a higher part. But the key thing is the...

Okay, so this is nice. this is murderous selfishness. But the key is up here, which is basically free will practiced all the time. So I don't agree that that's all the human being is. That's what Rural Stuner says evil is bipolar. In other words, this is what he calls aramanic evil, and then Luciferic evil.

Luciferic Evil is very like performance-oriented, manic, self-referential, a good time until he crashes. That's the, anyway, that's the one poll. The other poll, which is called Aramanic, that's Luciferic. Aramatic, it's like the Politburo. It's like one of those officers with all accountants in there. Yeah. And there's a dullness to the thinking. Bureaucratic tyranny or something.

So those are the two polarities. What he calls Christ is a third figure. But you can have an operational version of Christ. He was Jewish, or you could maybe pick a Jewish name for yourself. But the point of it is the third factor. It's why, you know, in the actually in the old and new, but mostly in the New Testament, there would be

allusions to the number three. What? I didn't say anything. Oh, okay. The allusions to the number. Well, he died at the age of 33, right? The root of signer? No, Christ.

Oh, yes, he did. Yeah. I always find it interesting these things, whether you believe they happened or they didn't happen. Just the symbology of it is is fascinating. Do you think Christ has sort of a symbolic or metaphorical bloodline and that in kind of a neoplatonic sense, other people can reach that state of consciousness and that

he's more kind of symbolic and maybe even pagan traditions prior to Christ had, you know, versions of Christ that Christianity sort of shored up in some way? Here's what he says. It's very interesting. He said, we'd like to think of Christ as a great teacher. He said he wasn't a teacher at all. That's a misunderstanding. Because if I'm teaching you something, I'm at a distance. Do this, do that, buy these cookies.

He says, Christ was, how does he put it? Christ was a man of action, basically is what he says. And the idea of crucifixion was action. And again, talking about this thing about freely will, he didn't have to, in a karmic sense, he didn't have to go through the crucifixion.

But it had to do with the karma. It's not like Christ forgives all your sins. That's bullshit. But what he does, what he does, what's the word? Forget. Yeah. But he does forgive the karma of the whole human race, which is a very different thing.

One is an individual. One is everything. And by doing that, he became, he was in the middle between the two polarities. You know, if you go to Basel, you know what Basel is, it's like in the, it's like in western, it's, yes, it's in Western Switzerland. Switzerland, yeah. So there's like a Rudolf Steiner, like a museum or something. And there's a wooden sculptor that he did himself, sculpture that he did himself.

And in it, he has Aramon, which is the one pole, and Lucifer, which is the other pole. And Christ is just there in the middle, and he's killed him both of them. He's not doing anything. It's just they need, he basically, he was keeping them from interacting with each other. And this is a good thing for you to learn about. Hey, you know, my lawyer's coming over here. Maybe you can interview him too. He's deep into all this stuff.

Is he? Deep. What do you think are my biggest strengths and weaknesses and how should I best spend my time in 2023? Well, your greatest strengths are you're unbelievably intelligent. Thank you. Just beyond. Beyond. No, really.

I don't think. I don't know if that's true. No, it's true. But anyway, your mind is unlike any I've ever seen before. It's incredibly powerful. You've got to expand your circle. I don't know. A lot of really smart people.

No, there's very few people who have the breadth of knowledge that you have and the incisive ability to think rationally as you do. And that's, to me, that's like the masculine, you know, where your week is on the feminine. Yeah, yeah. It's to do with emotion, tenderness, a sense of the aesthetics. I think you have it. I have a sense of the aesthetics. You have it.

Yeah. The emotion and tenderness. You're right. Yeah. It doesn't, it's like you haven't allowed that part of you to flourish. And it probably feels a little threatening because it's something. not as, you know, with intellect you can master things. Yes.

This other feminine side isn't about mastery. No. I have trouble being taken care of or like receiving love or gifts or stuff like that. So, yeah, it's interesting. Like I, yeah, I think you're right. And then what do you think is the, yeah, how should I best spend my time in 2023? How should you best spend your time? How do you mean?

Do you want to narrow that down? What should I work on? And what should it be about? And maybe the working on some quality involves like travel or staying here or, you know, I don't know. I think I've told you this before, but I've never said it on camera. You can say it on camera. I think your best use of time is to conjure up an image of the most vulnerable side of you. That is the part that's capable of awe and reverence.

It is the counter-masculine side of you. And make it a goal to develop as strong a relationship as you possibly can. and with that side of your personality. Developing a relationship includes talking to it every day. It includes letting it make decisions for you, not all the time, but at least from time to time, you know, kind of thing. And it means seizing a hold of the moments where you feel vulnerable and instead of like pushing them away, go for it, go into it.

Totally. You know what's something I find interesting too is I think your body, knows often better than your mind does, like what's good for you and bad for you. Like, I think for a long time I was not in touch with, like, how I felt about certain situations, and I would, like, override the way I felt on a visceral level to, like, make a business deal happen or because I was supposed to show up at a thing or whatever. But there's something, too, like, like, it's like, you know, reflexology, this idea, like, muscle testing. Like it's like you put like a vitamin, you know, you take a vitamin, then you test how strong you are or whatever.

Like I think that's, there's actually something to that. And I don't think we understand the causal mechanism. I think there's something like that around life too where like you feel strong. You're like, this feels really good for me. And then other things you're like, this really feels weak and I feel like I'm being attacked and I don't know why. And I feel like I'm tensing up. It's like, oh, because that person's kind of repressed and acting weird. But like the thing, your body articulates it before you even.

do kind of intellectually. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. It's like when I walk into a situation and suddenly feel myself tensing, it's like my body is sensing something in the room that I'm not even aware of. Yeah, you know the energy is kind of off or something. But, yeah, it's interesting. I guess, what?

I'm sorry. I just flashed on probably my worst memory of that was going on Dr. Oz. On Dr. Oz? Yeah, it was just like. You were like freaked out. I don't belong here. Well, it's kind of awkward. It's like, get me.

On those shows, I think those shows, like Joe Rogan talks about this, he's like, those shows where it's like you have this like five minute like pre-packaged, like, we're going to walk over here now and you're going to say like one sentence or like, you know, the late night talk show things where it's like the producers talk to you ahead of time and like give you like four stories that they're going to touch on. They're so fucking lame and like not real or extemporaneous. And now that you have, like, podcasting, which is more real, like, people don't really want that shit anymore. And why would they? It's so canned.

It's so canned, yeah. It's just dumb. Yeah. It's very uncomfortable as an interviewee also. Of course. Because there's nothing natural about it. No, you can't just be cool in yourself. Yeah. And I think it's gotten worse, too. You watch, like, Johnny Carson or Dick Cavett or whatever. Yeah, it was great.

They just seemed a little more natural. And then the guys now are like, I'm sure they're walking on eggshells, you know, times 10 because of the PC culture we live in or whatever. So maybe it's that. But it feels like it's gotten worse as podcasting and other sort of longer form, better formats have, you know, grown. But I don't know. So uncomfortable. I agree. I agree.

But I think it's interesting. I mean, I think media in many ways is transforming itself. and the old thing's dying. Like you watch these news anchors and it's like, what are you talking about? You don't believe anything you're fucking saying. You got the voice though. Yeah, well, it's like they do, they're, no one,

you don't talk like that. That's not normal. Right. The person talked to me like that in a normal situation, I'd be like, fuck off, you know, get out of here. With that BS, yeah. And it's just artificially combative. and it's just annoying.

Right. But I think we live in a wild time where... The one great thing about the Internet is that it has opened all of that up. It's sort of like anybody can interview anybody, you know, anywhere. Totally. And it can be the most natural thing in the world. And you can make money off of it. And, you know, outside of a lot of these platforms censoring you based on purely arbitrary reasons

because some bureaucrat like flagged your thing for, God knows why. Outside of that, it's amazing. It's so empowering that you can just do that. You just start your own thing. You don't have to have crazy overhead. It's really more about the substance. You don't have to like spend a ton of money. It's really come a long way.

I remember when I was in high school, I sort of led a drive to eliminate corporal punishment. Yeah. You know, in junior high and high school in those days, if you did something wrong, they could take you into the boys vice principal or whatever and have you drop your pants and they would swat you. With a paddle.

And I just tried to do it. And I think back and I think, God, if I could have had a YouTube channel, I mean, I could have reached so many. I mean, the hardest thing was just to get the message out. Yeah, yeah. It was crazy. No, now you can really get anything out. It's funny.

I, last year was like considering maybe working on like a more official, like UFO disclosure project, like documentary. And then I came to the conclusion, like, you know, I liked some of the people attached to it and I wasn't as much of a fan as some of the other people and I was like, I could just do what I want on my own terms and I don't know maybe

as much as they do but like I can figure certain stuff out. I can get, I have good access and I can get interviews with some of these amazing people. So like, why don't I just fucking do it? And like I don't need to like spend ton, you don't need to spend all this overhead and then you have all these people taking massive fees. Right.

It's stupid. Just create, just make the thing. And I think like the lower latency, you know, just creating something quickly, like there's value in that. Obviously, they're great autores who put YouTube to shame, you know, in their works. But I think even they often started, you know, look at Stanley Kubrick. Yeah. That guy taught himself how to, or I was just watching a documentary on Richard Link later, and he's like, I went to the Stanley Kubrick film school that taught myself. I just picked up a camera. I think there's a lot of value in that. And having creative control at the start, at the jump,

and then that sort of turns into, your skills grow. And then you get, you financeers come to you, but it's on your terms, you know? That's amazing. That's great. Yeah, I don't know. Well, I'm proud of you. It takes courage to do it. Thank you.

Yeah. Well, it took courage for me to not, like, I always can start new things. That's easy for me. Yeah. What's really hard for me is like putting myself out there. Like that was really, it felt really cringeworthy, to be honest. I hate social media. I didn't have social media until a year ago or whatever.

And, um... Listen, I'll tell you something, you cannot, cannot, under any circumstances, fulfill your potential without doing cringeworthy things. I fully agree. You just have to. You gotta just go for it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And in the beginning, it was like so embarrassing. I was like, ugh, what am I doing? And it even, I look. look back on it. And like some of the stuff was actually embarrassing. Like it wasn't really like the perfect reflection of me. But I think you have to go through that phase. I think Ira Glass is like a really good quote about this. But it's like when you see like an early artist, you can you pick up that like there's like a germ or like a kernel of like real truth. And you have to like carve that

out of the marble that is and that takes just doing the thing over and over again um but in the beginning you kind of you get a little glimmers of like okay there's some magic here but like the person's just really not that good and then yeah I don't know I don't know just more you do it yeah that goes back to the shadow by the way which is what what is ultimately cringe worthy about certain things is that you're revealing parts of yourself you've never really revealed before yeah that's one of the reasons why it's so fulfilling in the long run, actually even regardless of whether you succeed or fail, because by revealing these parts of yourself, you accept them.

Yes. And then the part that I struggle with is like, there are ways in which I can make this show or whatever, way more vulnerable, actually, and less about, like, heady ideas, more about, like, myself and whatever. But then I sort of hate the garden variety, you know, millennial narcissist,

just like, it's so hard and this has happened and that. And it's like, shut up. Your life is good. You know, my life's very good. Like, I'm very grateful for a lot of it, even though I go through a lot of hard. See, this happens back to a part of the discussion we had earlier, which is for you reaching that level of vulnerability, regardless whatever judgments you have. Yeah.

That's an unequivocal good. So you think I should make it more vulnerable. A thousand percent. Yeah, you're probably right. But then I'm like, you know, I just don't want to be like, because like, this. There's days where, like, I have hard days, but do I go, like, I'm, guys, I'm struggling. You know, it's like, shut up. I don't know.

I don't want to say that. Well, I'll tell you what, just as an interim step, record it. Yeah. And don't put it out. Okay. But just record it and see, what is the vulnerable part of you feel like when it's given a venue, when it's given a microphone, it's given a chance to speak? Does it really actually feel cringeworthy?

Or does it actually feel like, that's a relief to get that off my chest? Totally. Well, you brought up the artist's way. Who wrote that book, Julia Cameron? Yeah. And I used to do like the morning pages, you know, like the vomit drafts of like just what's on your mind. And that, there's a way in which doing that gets you into a flow. Because you're just like, you're accessing like the truest part of yourself.

Yeah. And then I- Your ego out. 100%. And I notice with the show and stuff, it's not the breaking down of abstract concepts that, like, other people already know. It's like the expressing my take on it is the thing that people like. 100%. And that's what people want.

People don't watch, like, Joe Rogan or any, people don't watch any show for the content. They watch to see a person's reaction to or how they open up or deal with the thing. And it's really, it's almost a cult of personality. They want, because the stuff, all these podcasts have the same people on. So why do you listen to like a person, one person exploring that and not the other? There's something about them. Right. And their openness to it and their, you know, interviewing style or whatever.

Yeah. And you're watching somebody sort of skate on the edge, you know. Yeah. In your case, it's skating on the edge of vulnerability. Yeah. And the better you get at skating on that edge and sometimes going over the edge, you know, the more fulfilling. it'll be for you. That's the main thing,

but also I think the more popular it'll be. Totally. Well, being vulnerable, I guess where I feel kind of hopeless is like I don't want to be like a personal content creator for the rest of my life. I do want to make an impact and like having like a million

subscribers on YouTube, which I think is very possible for our channel. Isn't that exciting to me. I really want to like change society for the better and like expose them to really cool ideas and bring in wacky, interesting thinkers and inventors and people who can like push things forward and, you know, maybe invest in them and maybe, you know, create

a center around this or something. And so I guess being vulnerable is like I sometimes look at where I am now and like that. And I'm like, I don't know how I get there or what that looks like. And I honestly feel a little burned out from all the work I've done on other things in the past where I'm like, I just don't feel like I'm in the right head space to do it. think about LA, which is probably the place I'd want to set this up. And I'm like, it just feels like some of the worst people and culture and the worst people get attention here. And so I'm like, how am I going to pull that off, you know? What I tell my patience is, um, take your shadow, which in your case is the most vulnerable part of you. And give it a venue every day, regularly,

consistently. By the end of it, you should feel as if you've exposed yourself in a way that does not feel good. And just do that every day for six months or so. Yeah. See what happens. With you, I guarantee you, number one, it's going to feel good. Number two, I mean, it'll feel scary as all hell in the way, but it'll feel good eventually. And number two, people will really, it'll really appeal to people.

Awesome. People will love that. Well, thank you. I feel more and more drawn to, like, doing kind of like a Hunter S. Thompson style, traveling across the U.S. and, like, seeing strange out there things and documenting them. That would be fascinating. Yeah, I think it would be good for both me and then also good to expose for other people or whatever.

Oh, that would be fascinating. I want to do more of that. I'm going to do a mini version of it, I think, coming up, going to a couple places, but then I think I might want to take a road trip. Yeah. Yeah, just see like... People would love that. It would be like a travel log, but a deeper...

A little deeper, yeah. Like, you know, like we're traveling across the country, but we're also traveling the landscape of your soul. Oh, that's a good pitch. Cool. Is there anything else you want to talk about? No, this has been great. Yeah, you're good at this.

I don't know if I'm good. Thank you. I think it'll be good. I think we can cut together some really cool stuff. I can never tell how I'm coming across. No, you were awesome. Yeah, it was really cool. And it was natural, which I like.

I don't like the... Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I like that Charlie Rose interview. Oh, God. You was an asshole? Yeah, not only that, you know... Why was he an asshole?

Oh, he got kind of uncomfortable when you guys gave him therapy or something. Yeah, he would not go there at all. Yeah. That's okay. I don't usually expect people to go there, but, no, the thing that really bugged me about it was that what he was most interested in. Yeah. Was that you had been an intern there. Uh-huh.

And he was in the middle of being sued by a bunch of interns for some sort of sexual harassment. Ah. Well, he ended up getting me-tude. And he wanted your name and number so that he could contact you. Really? And you would absolve him. You know, you would say, I didn't see anything like that when I was there. I didn't know that.

He wanted my contact so he could. Yeah. I didn't know that. Because I came with you guys, the green room and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It just was sleazy. There was something sleazy.

Yeah, he was a sleazy. I mean, he was one of the best interviewers, in my opinion, just not an objective. basis of all time. Without question. And I feel grateful because, you know, maybe I, I do think I want to do a lot more interviewing for the rest of my life. Really cool experience. Really awesome.

It was amazing. I mean, I would, because I would, my job was to like, you know, tend to people's needs in the green room. Right. And that green room was like, it was like, I would be stuck in a room with Henry Kissinger for an hour. Literally, that's a real example. Like, he was like, Henry Kissinger, Charlie Rose was late for Henry.

and I remember he was like on the phone with his like assistant and he was like sloppiness like we know he's always late like why are I and then he started Kisinger started asking me about Arab migration patterns he was like you studied history I go yeah and then he starts asking me about Arab migration patterns in like the 12th century as if like some history you know history major encapsulates like you have to know that and it was like something about like the formation of the Ottoman Empire something and I was like it was interesting it was wild and I asked him a bunch of questions too about you know mid-century foreign policy stuff it was wow but like

that's priceless I'm fucking I could never despite him probably being a kind of evil figure yeah he's a dark figure yeah that's great he kind of had like he was a dark figure he was when I was at Harvard he and this other professor Stanley Hoffman Stanley Hoffman yeah where the sort of like the two who luminaries of the history department. And Kissinger was the dark, dark force. And Hoffman was like this force of light. Not necessarily like innocent optimism or anything,

but just he was so friendly and so nice. And he was such a great guy to learn from you. It was one of the few classes where I wanted to go to class because I loved hearing him speak, you know, kind of thing. And Kissinger was the darkest figure. He was a power-hungry dude. Yeah. And I don't love what he's done with, clearly with China.

Because he obviously takes credit for the Sino-Soviet split in 1973 and the ping-pong diplomacy or whatever. And I think he's been a big advocate for investment in China. And he wrote that book on China. And I think he's funded a little by China. And China, the CCP, is not a good regime, especially. especially right now. No, it's terrible. And I think that he's kind of...

Is he an apologist for the... I think so, yeah. And I think he's become a little bit of a mouthpiece for them. And that's kind of sad to me. And you could honestly say that in many ways that was a huge foreign policy blunder. Like, I'm... Opening the door to China.

Yeah. Because here's a telling story, actually. His foreign minister, Zhao Enlai, was speaking with one of Kissinger's emissaries who had gone to China before Kissinger actually showed up and they were talking and he goes America is the Ba. Zhao says this to the American diplomat

and the American diplomat the translator says oh America is the preeminent power that's what Bob is supposed to mean in fact Ba is a reference to the warring states period, which was, you know, I think it was like 4th century BC to 2nd century

AD, and you had like a bunch of these sort of factious regimes in China kind of rising and falling constantly, and that was when you had Sun Su, you know, writing philosophy of war and stuff. And Ba actually was the current hegemon that

was bound to fall because it sort of overstayed its welcome and was like too predatory. And there's like, there are There's a guy named Michael Pillsbury who wrote a whole book called the 100-year Marathon. And it's all about this sort of double speak that runs throughout U.S.-China relations, where China's kind of, you know, it's all the Sun Tsu using our force against us, enriching itself by using the U.S., whether it be Goldman Sachs, IPOing their companies or, you know,

attracting foreign investment or, you know, whatever. and then sort of in a tongue-in-cheek way actually insulting the U.S. or like showing that it actually long-term would love the U.S. to fall. Right, of course. And I think that's been the story of a lot of, you know,

and it's something that Trump, as bad as he was, was instinctively right on. Right. And it ended up in the super incoherent. Always more suspicious in a way that, where he was right. And maybe it took actually that kind of Queens, you know, street-style business quality to like to actually pick up on what was going on. Interesting.

And like the neoliberal's really got it wrong in that place. Is there something about the way the Western world lives that is, do you think the Western world in some ways is committing suicide or kind of burning up? You know, you had all these gestalt, big history thinkers who were kind of into esoterrorism, like Oswald Spangler or Renee Gannon or Julius Savola, people like that who all said, you know, the West is inevitably going to decline, you know, in the coming few hundred years.

You know, I don't know. I think about like people in L.A., for example, and they all seem to have anxiety, and they talk about their microbiome or whatever. You go to like an uncontacted tribe in Papua New Guinea, and they probably have great microcontacted. but they never talk about it. Right.

And none of them probably suffer from existential angst. And so what do you think is going on and how does this, can this transmute into something positive in the future? It definitely can. But everybody's got to face death and feel it in their guts first before they can. Otherwise it's not credible what they have to do. But this is exactly where you get into the two. In other words, the purpose of the tools is not to tell you the universe is this way or that way.

The purpose of the tools is to take adversity, take obstacles, even just your thought processes or fuck, whatever it is, and try to transcend them and get something out of them. If someone's feeling really hopeless and like they just don't know what to do, like, they see no future, what would be the first thing? And obviously, it can't be one size fits all, but if you were to give out some generic advice for a category of people like that. You know, it really depends on their circumstances. If they're feeling hopeless about something specific, maybe a project that they got heavily invested in that doesn't seem to be going well or whatever, then what I would want to do is give them tools to enable them to let go of the results.

result of the project. By the way, it might turn out to be positive. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to be negative, but they're putting too much of their hopes in getting the result that they want, and therefore they're feeling hopeless because they don't have any control over the result. So there has to be some procedure for letting go of results and valuing your effort, irrespective of results. And the tool there is called loss processing. You can use it even before you get a result to let go of your investment in the result, or you can use it after the result, doesn't turn out the way you wanted it to,

to let go and keep moving forward. Mostly human beings get too invested in getting results. They want to get results. And that hurts us because we don't try as hard as we can. We hedge our bets because we're too afraid of not getting a result that we want. And then when we do get the result, it's never as satisfying as you thought it was going to be anyway. Yeah.

totally how does somebody truly know themselves on a deeper level so it feels like a lot of modern self-help or therapy is around it's around porting addictions from bad things to good things and you feel this sort of crazy void or trauma around being alive or something that's happened to you in your childhood and all you have to do is move it from like drugs and alcohol and you know other ways of pacifying yourself towards fitness and your job and all these other things. But that still feels like it feels like you're doing the thing out of a deep sense of despair and darkness. And it's sort of you're just moving addictions over.

So is there a layer you can get to that's lower than that? that's even better and more healthy? Yes, but it's not... See, this is where it's hard for people to grasp. There's a difference between a fait accompli, almost object. It's a solution that will stand for all times. First is the solution is process. Are you going to look at something in process,

which means it's incumbent on you to... move forward without stop, or you're going to look at it as a final solution. There's only one final solution, and that's Hitler. Jesus Christ. So evil presents itself like that. Sure. As like an ultimate solution to... Well, yeah, any...

You could say that the 20th century was the age of ideologies, big ideologies. And you could say it was sort of a big reputation, referendum on all the ideologies. because empirically they all seem to not actually scale and work out, which means our whole public conversation is sort of futile in a sense because it's all about these sort of, you go to these like bourgeois dinner parties, and everybody always said, you know, it's the funniest question. So what's the solution, you know,

as if you're going to draw it out on a cocktail napkin and, you know, come up with some technocratic solution to our social maladies? And it's, we need to focus on ourselves and on a local level, But even that feels somewhat trite as well. Like, you know, the whole Jordan Peterson, just make your bed or whatever. Like that feels sort of lame too. Well, in those terms it is lame. But if you think of it as a metaphor for endless effort, then it starts to make more sense.

So most people can't extrapolate and jump around and see how all these things fit together. There's a certain sort of humble position that I think really helps. which is I visualize myself in the basement floor of a gigantic skyscraper. This is one huge corporation. All of the decisions are made on the top floor. I don't even get elevator access to the top floor. I just work on the bottom floor. Taking a paper, stamping it, and moving it on to the next desk.

So the philosophy is, I work here. I'm a worker among workers. That's it. Yeah. And there's enormous relief in that. Totally. And timing is different for everyone. You know, you just don't know when things are going to finally click.

And often I look at some of the most successful people or people I admired throughout history. And it took a while for it to click, usually, if I really admire the person. Like, it's looking like a Winston Churchill. Like that guy was like kind of a joke before he like, you know, assumed the position he did. I think he was stationed in Calcutta or something, and he would write letters to his mom about his, like, war experience in World War I or something. And this might have even been pre-World War I,

but it might have been like colonial. And his mom would, like, kind of embellish them for, like, the local paper or whatever. And he had, like, a stutter, and he was this, like, pale, awkward guy. I don't know. There are a lot of cases. that. And I think often the more failure precede success, the more durable the success is.

Like that. Yeah. You sometimes sort of channel Rudolph Steiner. I wanted to know if you can do that around what I should do with the show. Oh, that's interesting. The show is a aberration in the game plan of someone who was born very ambitious, perhaps too ambitiously for his own good. This tendency had to be not destroyed, it just had to be worn down, corrected, reworked, revamped, and taking you through everything that by nature you would find out you would consider it to be a loss or a failure, but actually it's those events specifically that will give you what you want, which is an independent ability to judge both facts and suppositions and a pleasure in bringing that to the public. You've lost your

most annoying quality, which is a kind of holier than now attitude and Now you understand the secret, and the secret is you don't know shit, number one. And number two, nobody can make these decisions for you. So the pathway is good for the show. Now, what you really mean to ask me is, what's the future of the show in terms of cultural and spiritual impact or power? And the answer to that is if you continue to work as you have, to weaken or even nullify your own ego,

then the answer to that question will become apparent. It'll come from inside you, not through any over-conscious thought process. So your future is bright if you don't use drugs or alcohol or maybe just use them. No, I don't want to tell you more jokes. All right, that's it. Thank you, Phil.

I appreciate it, man. All right. We'd come back after dinner and get to the second half of this. If you want to do that. As much as you want to do, I'll do. Okay, that's a zero. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to stay here.

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