Good Life Project - Roundtable: Bad Things, Biased Media and Crazy Cons

Episode Date: March 2, 2016

Today's episode is part 3 of our latest experiment, a new show format we're calling Good Life Project Roundtable™.What is it? A new weekly show that won't replace, but will be added to our long-form conversations and short riffs. Two "guests-in-residence" and I will be hanging out for the better part of a month, usually 3 weeks. This really lets you get to know them and benefit from their deep interests and lens on life.In each Roundtable, we'll go deep into three specific topics. And, the thing is, nobody knows what the other person's topics will be until they hit the conversation.My guests-in-residence for today's episode of Good Life Project Roundtable™ are Playing Big author, Tara Mohr and yoga-educator, Erin Moon.Our three topics in this episode:Can you find the good in everything, or are some things just bad?Money, media and bias, what's the deal (and why do you care)?Crazy cons, has it ever happened to you?It's fast-paced, fun, utterly unscripted and at times a bit raw, but always good-natured and very real. Enjoy! And let us know if you like this format, over on social media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and our new Good Life Project roundtable format. So hope you've enjoyed it. If this is the first time you're catching this format,

we're not replacing our long form conversations or short and sweet riffs. We're running a fun experiment to actually see about adding a third show every week. It's called the Good Life Project roundtable and we'll have

guests in residence. Two other guests will be jamming with us for the better part of a month, so you can really get to know them and go deep into some really cool conversations with each of them. We each throw out a single topic on this roundtable format. Nobody knows what the topic will be beforehand when we sit down to record, and we just take it wherever it feels like it needs to go. Today's guests in their final appearance as guests in residence are Tara Moore, author of Playing Big. You can find her at taramore, M-O-H-R.com

and Erin Moon, yoga teacher, voice artist, philanthropist and world traveler. And we will drop her contact information into the show notes also. The URL is a bit long and windy. So fantastic people, thinkers, soulful, wise, and generous. The topics that we'll be exploring today are, is there such a thing as unbiased media

when money is involved? Have you ever been conned and believing that everything is for the good or deciding that everything can be used for the good. Do things really happen for good reasons or are there just some bad things that happen? So I hope you enjoy these conversations. As I mentioned, this is our final day with Tara and Aaron in residence, really looking forward to the conversation, to sharing it with you,

and then to introducing you to our next round of guests in residence next week. On to the conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. So I was on the phone with a friend of mine this week. She just went through a really hard surgery that had a lot of very unexpected and serious complications. And she was sharing that it has caused a real crisis of faith for her. And we started talking about the difference between believing everything is for the good and deciding that you can use everything for the good. And so you can use everything for the good so that's what i wanted to talk about

i mean yeah and like especially yeah i don't believe that everything happens for a reason i don't believe that the articulation of the first version of it because I can't because I can't I'm not going to say that my my husband passing was for the reason that I can't. So you can kind of take that for what it is. But I do think that I have a choice. And he asked me, essentially, to make the choice to make to, I mean, it kind of comes back to the same thing that I talked about when you interviewed me is like, I have a choice that leads down one road, and the road is my ultimate destruction, meaning my not being here, or I have the choice to live come to making the horror of losing my husband and going through his sickness and him not being in the world, taking the, essentially his legacy or his life gets to be lived well or the goodness of him or the, if anything good can happen in the world from his loss and his and what i learned and what i'm learning about my life then that is living like that's making the choice to live as opposed to die but i don't think it happened for that reason like i don't i don't i yeah i don't believe that there's someone typing out my story and the story was this or that was his. And so for me, I think it's you have the choice.

For me, it's living and making something good out of are the same because I can't live if I'm in the negative place. I can't live always in destruction. So the good, the choice to make a horrible thing or a deep pain good is the choice to take something awful and make it into a good thing. But also to me, it's the choice of life. It's the choice of love. It's the choice of legacy, of taking something and building upon it.

You know, they talk about moving on or letting go. And I'm like, nope, not interested. I'm not interested in moving on, like past, putting something behind me. That's impossible. I am all the pieces that have made me. That's like taking it with you. Yeah. Like how, I'm not going to not love him.

I might get married again someday and, you know, have a life with somebody, but that love is built and predicated on the love that I had or the life that I've had. So, uh, you know, it's the, I don't know. Yeah. I think I would have said it. It's like it builds into the, um, life purpose mythology that really rubs me the wrong way also. And I have, as long-term listeners probably know, I have when you know a child was taken or when this you know you know when i was you know hit with this horrible horrendous disease and made it through

the other side and you know that unlocked my life purpose and i realized then and i was and it's like that presupposes that the only way for you to actually live with that sense of strong purpose in the world is for this circumstance to have this horrible fate to have like hit you. And I'm like, how messed up is that? You know, beyond the fact that I just don't actually buy into the whole idea of a singular life purpose, you know, rather than sort of an evolutionary set of experiences that allow you to feel like you're living on purpose, with a sense of purpose. To me, that's, I can handle that. I'm good with that. You know, I can, that gives me instructions I can greet the day with, rather than just saying, like, I'm just going to sit around until, like, I'm, I'm just going to sit around until like I'm fated to wander without a sense of purpose and meaning and focus until this horrible fate hits me. At which point, the bad news is it may kill me. The good news is if and when I survive, I'm going to know what to do with the rest of my life.

Yay. That doesn't sit well with me. So it kind of wraps into into it triggers me on that level um the idea you know i do feel like we're we are at our best and our happiest when we can find meaning and what meets us at any point along the road but i don't know yeah well because it's kind of you know in a way it's tying in this hero's journey, the kind of discussion that we had too, because, you know, which you could say is our purpose and starting to shift and change the focuses that we had on the way we wanted to live in the world and maybe our potential effect within the world. And, you know, I see now, although I can't live that life because that was our life and

without this knowledge that I have that this can happen there's still those seeds that were planted that are growing and although I'm not wholly clear on like a driven self-life purpose like I'm I don't have that right now I had that as an actor for a long time in New York I was like that is my I didn't know why. I just wanted to do it. I mean, I did, but I didn't. But now I might not have that driving purpose. But I know in all the choices that I'm making, it's coming from the knowledge that I have of the destruction to do a good, to make a solid choice or effect in whatever thing I happen to be involved in. And what's interesting about that, and maybe it's the age I'm at too and been doing things for a while, is that people are coming now to me and going, hey, these old friendships from a long time or this thing from a long time now is is ready fruit. Right. And so regardless of the the horrible thing, you kind of you're never without all of the ticks along the way. Like you you're right. It's not there's not even in the hero's journey

the calling is happening if you're even if you're not listening before the destruction ever hits so the good kind of has to it almost has to be because if not you can't be i don't know yeah it was a it was a little like oh that's a shift because I think it's much more common that people try to find the reason or find the purpose in why something happened or make themselves feel more comfortable you know with their pain or someone else's pain by saying there's a purpose to it and kind of trying to find light there versus, and I hear this so strongly in what you're saying, that the light is in the human decision to find whatever can be of service, of good. And sometimes I think just to endure the choice, the choice to endure.

Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like Viktor Frankl's story, you know, and the whole field of logotherapy and actually, but I think, I wonder if that's more, it's less a matter of making sense of something after the fact, and it's more a matter of, I can't, I, you know, if I can see a purpose for the suffering I'm currently going through, it will allow me to wake up again tomorrow.

While you're, you're in it. There's a certain, I think there is a certain grace to that. Although I don't think it's necessarily an easy thing. So Aaron Moon, take us somewhere light. Okay. Okay. I'm going to kind of bring it back to what you feared. Cardigans, good or bad. Exactly. And if so, plaid. Turtlenecks. So, I'm curious if you guys think there can be any such thing as an unbiased media when money is involved and do we have it now if so where and

and it's particularly the reason why i bring it up is because i've had so many of my canadian friends going no seriously no they're going to they're they're going to um they're going to vote in trump they're going to vote in trump and they're going to vote in Trump. And it's all about this Trump stuff. And in Canada, because they don't understand American, not all, I'm not going to lambast all Canadians, but the idea of American media and what's feeding American media and why the person who yells the loudest gets the greatest feed. And when I described to them, I'm like, you do realize it's entertainment. It's not media you're watching. Like you're watching somebody who is ultimately trying to get ratings because of the commercial slots. So that's the part that I'm kind of interested about what,

because there's a lot of messaging that goes in with growing an entrepreneurial business and all of these things. And also just being ensconced right now and being in New York on top of it or San Francisco. Yeah. And being a New Yorker where apparently I've now learned that being, having like a New York state of mind, being a New Yorker is evil. Oh yeah. Didn't you know? So yeah, having New York sensibility, there's apparently something wrong with me.

Bad. Very. So, yeah, I'm interested in what you guys think. If there is any potential, and I mean even in the blogosphere, because I think maybe that was birthed because of this understanding that our larger media bodies are being so influenced by the dollar and who's yelling the loudest and what's the best entertainment, in what happens

when a blog gets monetized and do you then lose the unbiased media or can that be like can that be a person's writing it so isn't it therefore biased i i'm i have strong thoughts but i'm so i totally jumped the shark because she's actually kind of like had a lot more exposure to traditional media than I have and kind of dealt with it also. Well, I don't think we can have unbiased media. I don't think we have unbiased people anywhere ever at all, you know. And maybe even I'd say when corporate interests were less at play, there were other power structures creating just as much bias, I would say, in what got covered and how. And going to the Trump thing, the level of EQ, emotional intelligence, and emotional awareness that we do not yet have just in where our civilization is, is to me at the source of all of this. People not knowing how to deal with their own fear, deal with their own anger, teach their children how to deal with fear and anger manage our more irrational very old instincts is like what's driving all of this and i think it's very scary

and it's the product of a society that focused on scientific and technological and economic evolution instead of yeah psychological and emotional evolution so now we have a problem we're like our toys are way too smart for us you know like we have the power to do so much destruction without the inner capacity to use that wisely. Yeah. See, I mean, I completely agree with that. I almost wonder whether, number one, you know, I think the idea of media being unbiased is always, you know, you have, there's no such thing as an unbiased, you know, it's like when you pick a jury, going back to my, like, way back to my law desk, you're not actually, you never get an unbiased jury.

You're trying to balance biases as much as possible so that you have enough weight on either side. You know, obviously like if you're representing somebody, you're hoping to bias them a little bit more towards your client. But you know, the idea, I think the idea of unbiased anything, whether it involves living beings, it's just is borders on absurdity so the fact that we ever believed for a moment that there was an unbiased you know like free press is is a little bit weird to me um i do think that you know the media over the last

10 years has gotten has swung pendulum swung way way way way way way way out towards you know like entertainment and hardcore positions i i think you mentioned like i think the emergence of bloggers in the early days as actually having big legitimate voices who were not connected to any form of people kind of paying their bills or like large institutions that where they were beholden to keep within the ethos and the message of that, you know, media institution. They're just like, dude, here's, here's what I'm hearing on the street. Here's what I think, you know, and never professing to be unbiased and if you're poor and they're like, this is opinion,

you know, like you read this, you are reading the opinion page in a newspaper. This is not. And then people reading that and actually being entertained by it. And then that starts to, you know, all of a sudden mainstream media is like, oh, these guys are getting a lot of attention and a lot of traction. And maybe like, and they're taking some of that away from us. So we need to get a little bit more entertaining, a little bit more opinionated and stuff like that. Like granted, this is just my lens on what's sort of like happened. It could be entirely wrong. But I have this thing in my gut right now that's kind of saying that, especially in the last year, it has gotten so utterly theatrical that it's almost good because I think there was a

window in the middle where people actually thought it was still just unbiased, like down the middle, like me, they're like like this is the truth. You know, like they had the talking heads in the evening and telling you that this is the way it is in the world. You know, trust me. I'm telling you the news as it is. Just the fact, only the fact. Right? And people are like, oh, yes, yes.

I'm happy I have somebody who can just tell me straight. And I think now we've swung so far to the bizarre that there's no conceivable way that anybody can now look at the media and say that, like, believe that they're actually getting the news and just the facts. That you kind of have to realize the fact that this is just pure entertainment. Yeah. And there's massive opinion laid into anything and that it's your job as the individual who's consuming to try and like get enough of a cross section of what's being put out there that you can try and come to some sense of what might be the legitimate fact in the middle rather than just assume that any one channel is, you know, like God's honest truth. I would like to believe that that's happening. I think it probably depends

who you are and where you are. But that's the evolution, at least in the way that I see, that I experienced in media. 15 years ago, if I turned on somewhere or read a particular paper, I'd be like, yeah, I'm pretty comfortable. That's the fact. I don't believe that. Now I want to see what's BBC saying? What's CNN saying? what's Fox saying what's and like where's okay so now I know the spectrum and where I fall in the middle. What's real investigative reporting and is that happening and especially is that happening on the television medium. Yeah. Versus like there's no such. And neither.

I mean that I think there also are these real economic changes where the number of stories that a reporter is working on has gone up so high. The lack of sort of full-time a lot of media attention. And so I was getting a lot of media interviews. And there were so many factual errors in the way things were reported on national television and national print. And some of them were, you know, really painful for me, because they were really misrepresenting what I was saying. But you know, these stories are being put together in 10 minutes a lot of the time. Yeah. And a lot of times the compensation also used to be like, you were on staff, here was your salary. And now a lot of the people who are out there, they're creating things, they're actually paid on attention. You know, whatever the metric is, whether it's view count, or downloads, or whatever it is. So there's this massive incentive

to tend towards hyperbole and to use like the headline of that Guardian article that I shared earlier was like the perfect thing. It's like the actual piece itself was really fascinating. It had some really good information and thought-provoking, and it made you think. But the headline told a different story. And what's interesting, so I know a number of people

who write for major outlets, and what they'll tell me is that they actually don't choose the headlines. They submit the piece with a headline that they hope to use. They have no control over what the headline is. And very often it's changed purely for the sake of drawing eyeballs, even if it doesn't quite correlate with the message of what's in the piece. The marketing of headlines. Yeah. Yeah. A little bit crazy. Yeah. Which kind of circles nicely around to my final topic, which is, have you ever been conned?

Oh. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with Marie Konnikova, who's a brilliant, brilliant woman. Really fascinating. She has a book out. And it's all about the long con, which is all about how we as human beings are literally, we're just so wired and observable and in a way where if you know how to do it, you can persuade anybody of anything and sometimes run a con that last years and years and years and years and years and exist as like a completely different person. I mean, the book started out with like a guy who

he was on a like a hospital military ship, and like doing procedures and operating on patients. And he had made up like he'd been like for like four years or something playing this role of the esteemed doctor. Oh, my God. Completely fictional. Right? And he had so convinced himself that he literally like took a, you know, had somebody bring him a medical book. And he was kind of like reading the pages and like cutting people open. But the bigger thing that came to me was just how we like to think we're really smart.

You know, we're three smart people sitting around. People listening, you guys listening are like, you're smart. Right? You wouldn't fall prey to like a con, would you? And the conversation with Maria like really opened my eyes. And I have been conned. I've been conned like small time on the street out of 20 bucks in New York. I've been conned by people who I've interviewed for books and for media. Fabricated stories. Yeah. Stories, backgrounds, facts, accomplishments. There's probably not a human being who hasn't done a teensy bit of conning on their own behalf.

Also known as a resume. Right. I have no idea what you're talking about. I con people for a living. I'm like, please, let nobody ever discover like an old resume of mine posted somewhere, some cash on some employment-like database. But, you know, I'm curious. Have either of you ever been conned small or big? And if so, how has it affected you?

Stone face. I'm thinking I'm like so i'm the only one in the room speech i'm thinking of all the times i yeah probably was being conned but have not yet fully become aware of it good grips with it but i i know we've had some funny like we had a landlord who when we were this is like we were living in the suburbs, you know, the peaceful suburbs of the Bay Area, who said that he happened to be carrying our entire security deposit on his person, which was thousands of dollars and was held up at knife point and had to give it away. And therefore could not return it to us when we were moving out. And we've had, you know, people work for us who it turned out were stealing. And more recently, an interesting one was a couple people wrote to me and said, Tara, that so and so business coach told me that she had worked with you. And I'm wondering,

you know, what your experience was like. And I had never worked with this person. She was saying I had been a client and I was one of her success stories. She was telling other people about it. I've actually seen my image on certain people's sites doing the exact same thing. And people would call me like, so what was your experience with this person? I'm like, with who? Yeah, it's right. And plagiarism is another one too, which I always find just in the coaching space and the spirituality space,

you know, the, yeah, those are some of my experiences and, you know, can laugh about it, but there's also some of them, there's just such a sadness of when you really think about what was the place that that person was in when they decided to cut and paste, you know, someone else's blog post and put it on their blog, like, oh, honey, you know? I think that's a really beautiful and evolved way of dealing and thinking about anytime you get grifted is that. And I think that's the key. I think that's the thing that saves you from the pain of being grifted, like, badly. Because I've been, because I'm just beautifully gullible or I was going to say

horribly, but I thought I'm going to be nice to myself. Throughout my life, throughout my childhood, I had like I had a friend at a camp who really good friends the first year, then the second year came back and told us that he had a brain tumor and he was going to die. And we like sang for him at the end of camp because you're kids and you do that and it's how you deal and everything and i was like visited him that year because i was so worried and all this stuff and then found out the next year that it was all a lie to get popular and all those things and that was like one of the first big grifts of my life and i was probably 12 or 13 maybe and it was far from the last because it was just like, I was just a really open, happy, like, I'll believe I'll take you for what you are kind of kid and kids are like that.

I have a friend who grifted his nephew into saying he was the Incredible Hulk. And he really thought that for like four years. He thought his uncle was the Incredible Hulk. So, you know, and there's the Santa thing, you know. So the first thing. The longest con in all. The longest con in all. The oldest profession and the longest con. By the way, we would like to say there is some, yeah, there's some messages in this podcast that you might not want to expose your children to.

So I think that there's a kind of a mourning and a loss of innocence that comes along with being conned and i really love what you said is like kind of i guess the next evolution of that because i kind of for whatever reason it's part of life and yeah the next evolution of that is like how much am i going to get hurt by it and how much i'm going to kind of hold the space for that person's whatever. Not to say that it's right or you need to hire them or not tell all your friends or not launch the podcast where you're interviewing them or whatever it is that creates the con. But it's like you kind of go, I'm going to suffer. I mean, because you do. At the end of the day, you suffer less when you say, oh, man, God, what made you do that?

I'm sorry. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I mean, for me, the damage, because like the example of like, yeah, I got condatted 20 bucks on the street. I still can't believe it. 20 years ago at this point. It's like, yeah. And that, but the damage done was not the 20 bucks.

Who cares about 20 bucks, right? The damage was done was that it flipped the switch where I now distrust anybody who tells me any story and ask for anything. And if you're genuine need, like you're just, you're scamming me. And so it turns, it's like, it, it turns off the empathy switch and it turns off the trust switch. And that like, that changes your life from that moment forward. It took me years for that switch to get flipped back on. Yeah. And I'm happy it did.

And I kind of made a conscious decision at one point. I said, you know what? I would rather get conned on occasion and live believing that people are like largely innately good and honest than spend my entire life walking through the day believing that people are just like, like believing that like my job is to not be taken by all the people who are wired to just want to take, because that's a horrible way to live, you know? And then, yeah.

And then if, you know, like Tara sort of like evolution of that, I'm not as evolved as you clearly is like, you know, to move towards compassion and like ask, you know, like,

wow, what, what must be going on in their lives to have taken them to a place where that's the way that they feel they have to behave in the world. And that level of disconnection they have from humans to be able to con someone, right? I mean, I love A Course in Miracles' line, everything is either love or a call for love. So conning, not love, so it must be a call for love.

Yeah. So if you could put yourself in a place where the response is to love your way through it. Not easy, though. And you have to set boundaries at the same time, right? I mean, it's hopefully the combination of here's how I take care of myself and love myself in this situation. And, you know, and I always find it helpful to try and find, you know, what's that some space in myself that i can relate to what they did yeah yeah i know that's funny because the conversation with maria when we were talking about is as she was laying out the sequence of tools and strategies that the greatest con

artists in the world use um we had this conversation it's like so you're talking about marketers, right? And entrepreneurs and psychotherapists and people. It's all the system of influence. And you really have to zoom the lens out and understand that the strategies and the ideas and the tactics are neither good nor bad. It's all about the intention of the individual who is leveraging them for a particular outcome. Yeah, on that note, so I have been doing some research on the history of the word coach, because I was quite curious about it. And the, you know, the original coaches were the people who took passengers from point A to point B in horse drawn vehicles. And interestingly, the coach was not the driver who was actually, you know, doing the physical work of getting but this sort of other figure that kind of made the journey a little more pleasant and help make sure people got from A to B and entertain them, which is, you know, not unlike what contemporary coaches do. But what really intrigued me was that from the earliest, like places that coaches show up as characters in literature,

there's always this question of whether you can trust them and whether they're a little bit corrupt. Because the nature of their role of getting people from A to B left a lot of room for dishonesty. And there's sort of these legends of like, the coach said we were gonna get to B, but we didn't actually arrive at B,

but people didn't know that till they were already kind of far on the journey. Or the coach kept saying we're walking to the carriage and eventually just had the people walk all the way to the destination was another one of the legends. And I thought that it was so interesting really thinking about the nature of that role and how there's always been some questions about, you know, it's... And it continues to this day. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

That is really fascinating. So any final thoughts? Can you repeat the quote again from... Everything is either love or a call for love. Yeah. I like that. I like that too. That's a great way to leave it, right?

Tara, where can people find more about you? Taramohr.com. T-A-R-A-M-O-H-R.com. And the book again? And the book is Playing Big, Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead. Awesome. And Erin? So I blog, and it's Ms. Ms. Ms. Ms. Moon Yogi actor dot blogspot dot com.

Speaking of marketing. I suck at marketing. We'll talk after this. Yeah, they're working on me. And Moon Yoga Therapeutics. But if I could send one thing out, I'd say World Spine Care Yoga Program. Help us help some people. Nice. That's awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you Help us help some people. Nice.

That's awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. What fun. Yeah. This is Jonathan Fields signing off. Thanks so much for joining us in this week's Good Life Project Roundtable with special guests in residence, Tara Moore and Erin Moon. I hope you're enjoying this format.

Be sure to tune in next week for our next round of Guests in Residence. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.