Good Life Project - Roundtable: Susan Piver & Lodro Rinzler – Part 1

Episode Date: March 30, 2016

Today's Good Life Project Roundtable™ features guests-in-residence Susan Piver and Lodro Rinzler. This is session 1 in their three-week residency.Susan is a New York Times bestselling author, teacher, and founder of the international mindfulness community, The Open Heart Project. Working to create a good human world, one breath at a time.Lodro is a teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, the author of five books on meditation, and the founder of M N D F L, a new studio making meditation accessible to all New Yorkers, and the Institute for Compassionate Leadership. They'll be our guests-in-residence for the next three weeks, so buckle up.Our three topics in this episode:When women get emotional, do you secretly think they're crazy?Do we have to love the people we hate?Fame for fame's sake, what gives?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.

My guests for this week's Good Life Project Roundtable are Susan Piver, meditation teacher, New York Times bestselling author of a number of different books and founder of the Open Heart Project, which is the world's largest online meditation community. And Lojo Rinsler, also a many-time author and the founder of a really cool new center in New York City, which is a drop-in meditation center called Mindful, which is actually spelled without the vowels. I will drop links so that you guys can find them in all sorts of different places into the show notes. So be sure to check them out. Conversation this week and for three weeks, because they'll be in residence now for three weeks, as we do with the roundtable, is deep, is wide-ranging, is, I will tell you in advance, at times provocative and raw.

But I think it's really going to get you thinking about some very important things in life. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. So hanging out today with my friends, Susan Piver and Lodro Rinzer. And we're hanging out, going to go around the table and jam on some fun, interesting topics as we always do in the roundtable. Shall we start with you, Piver? Okay. You guys can't see, but that was like an instant donut. What's the thing?

Okay. It's like, me? What? I'm going to start with my favorite one. And when I was thinking of topics, I was sort of thinking of what I wanted to interview you guys about. And this was the first thing that came to mind. And we can skip it, you know, if you think it's stupid. But anyway, when women talk to you about their emotions, perhaps your significant other, and get very emotional, do you secretly or not so secretly inside think they're crazy? Wow. Jonathan, you go first. I'm sorry, what was the question? You're

actually turning pink. It's the reflection of the orange table. That's all it is. So pointed. You go first, for real. No, I do not. Probably my first question goes, and this is interesting probably because this is definitely not the way I was originally wired.

My sense is it's more trained myself. My first question when I'm having some sort of deeply emotional conversation with a woman is very likely, where's this coming from? It's more like compassion. Can I actually understand? Can I some way put myself in her place for the moment and see if I can just understand what's the genesis of the emotion, the conversation, like the incident, you know, whatever she may have moved through in her life to come to that place. And interestingly, like I said, I don't actually think that probably came naturally to me because I'm somebody who's very direct. And the classic stereotypes of women want to be heard and men want to solve the problem. I don't know if that's legit or not, but that would definitely be me.

So I'm just kind of like, my default would have been for the better part of my life, I think I'm filtering for data points so that until I have enough information that I can come up with and articulate a solution to the problem, and then I just want to spit it out and say, okay, are we good? Exactly. And I've realized over the years that that is not a functional way to have a conversation. Right. So I get that you realize that and, you know, on behalf of humanity, I express my gratitude. But the reason I ask is, as someone who is a woman and has a lot of emotions, I often get the feeling, and I don't mean to stereotype either but in my relationships let's

just say which have been heterosexual so that's why it's um men and women is i i feel like the person may listen to me and really try to even understand what i'm saying but also inside is like whiskey tango foxtrot. How do I get away from this? And this is actually kind of crazy. And why does it have to be this way? Okay, I get that it is this way. Let me go in with my, you know, miner's light or whatever and try to see what's happening. But it's not, that's why I said,

do you actually think we're crazy? Secretly. Lojo. Don't hang me out alone here. What you said was awesome. Okay, thanks. I think I have a less diplomatic answer. I had my initial like, no, of course not.

And then I was like, okay, let me honestly think about this. And you know, my father was a psychiatrist. And I watched as I grew up his whole profession change. It used to be a profession that you would come in and you would just talk to someone. And at some point maybe there was a diagnosis. But, I mean, it was talk. You would actually talk through this. And then it became pills within his professional career.

And it was about as quickly as possible diagnosing that person and saying, putting them in a box of what type of crazy are you? Here's your pill. And I think because of this, I think everyone's crazy. So, I mean, I think I believe fully, you know, coming from a Buddhist tradition that we all possess basic goodness, the sense of like inherently we're whole and complete and totally sane. But we have a gazillion forms of neurosis that plays out all day, every day. I think we all have that. So if I'm sitting there and I'm thinking about my romantic relationship, she has a lot of emotions. And I think one of the pieces of feedback I've heard from her is like, don't try to fix anything, right? Because that's where my mind often goes.

Okay, so what do I do? Once I have those data points, what do I do about them to change the situation, right? And just be there with it. So I feel like a lot of my path in my romantic relationship is just hanging in that space of, okay, I'm just receiving, and maybe nothing happens as a result of me getting this feedback and seeing these emotions and just resting in that space. So I don't think that my romantic partner is crazy. I think we're all crazy. And I think emotions don't mean that we is crazy. I think we're all crazy. And I think emotions don't mean that we're crazy.

I think it's the storylines that make them crazy. So that's my own experience of crazy. So not even a male-female thing. I think when I get hooked by a strong storyline, I make myself go bonkers. Because it's like, that's all I can think about. And it becomes very solid and real. And then I'm not actually looking at reality. I'm looking at my lens of what I think reality is does that make sense it totally makes sense and i want to try to delineate between neurosis and emotion yeah and please as buddhist practitioners

which we both are in the same lineage there is emphasis put on emotion as a source of wisdom, as the genuine heart of sadness and the power that comes from emotion, not emotionality, but the actual raw, beyond verbal, felt sense of being a human walking through earth and responding to things, that that is a source of wisdom and i find it interesting that it's difficult for everyone men and women and men or women men and or women to just delineate feelings from neurosis and they would really like to that not to be true yeah and anyway as dudes i don't you don't need to stereotype you or you don't have to speak for all dudes well i can't but lojo pretty much can't i can't and i'll ask you. He's all dude.

How does that work for you? I mean, again, I know this is very stereotypical, and so I apologize for that. Nonetheless, I notice in the people I know, let's say, and myself, the wisdom component of emotion is confusing. Yeah, well, I mean, it kind of comes out of both of your tradition, right? Sort of like the Tibetan notion of crazy wisdom, where it's almost like there's, and obviously I'm the neophyte in the room, you know, but just from, it seems like there's been a tradition, and not just in Tibetan Buddhism, but across almost every theological tradition, where there's a certain allowance that's made for teachers and characters throughout the lineage that permits what you might view from the outside looking in as massively aberrant behavior because the wisdom that flows from that person's like pen or mouth is so transformative that people just say that that's just part of like them and the way that they need

to exist for that to come out um i i don't i've always struggled with that uh to be honest with you because to a certain extent i wonder if if that also is permission to behave badly because somebody is so exalted within a path. Can be. And that concerns me. To me, there's wisdom and state of mind are not necessarily conjoined in any way, shape, or form. How do you mean? Meaning I don't think you have to be, quote, crazy or neurotic or profoundly emotional

to experience astonishing inner illumination that you can then turn around and share and teach and live. I think you can live a very sort of stayed, focused, deeply contemplative and even life and have the amazing wisdom arise from that. And I also think that sometimes when people push themselves to the absolute extremes where they step into the biggest voids, that's for that individual. That's the thing that triggers this giant release in, you know,

in what we might call wisdom. But I also, again, it's like, I wonder sometimes we just, we all, I'm not, I'm drama avoiding, not drama seeking. Me too.

So, you know, but I think there are a lot of people who are drama seeking. I agree. You know, whether it's a dopamine hit or whether you're just, whatever it is, you're know, if you're kind of drama seeking, you're drawn towards the people where you want to link aberrant behavior with wisdom. Yeah. I think, you know, to be clear, I think crazy is such a big word. Like, I don't think I sit in front of people and be like, oh, Susan, you're heartbroken. That must mean you're bipolar. Like, I don't, like, that's very different coming out of, like, the medical tradition. For me, it's, there's stuck emotion, stuck storyline.

It's like, this is very big and it feels, it's coming out in erratic ways, one could say. And then there's what you're talking about crazy wisdom which is free-flowing emotion and wisdom in my opinion that cuts against the grain of society and it's crazy because it's something other than what we normally see yeah so if we talk about you know chogyam trungparimbhase crazy wisdom i mean literally a book called crazy wisdom but that's what we're talking about we're talking about like wisdom that is saying this is different than what we've normally done so it's going against the grain which is you know and then we have his son who's you know susan i study with suck young me pomeranian who you've spent time with as well jonathan and there i think his students were

so disappointed like chugam chungkros chugam chungkram students i think we're disappointed that he was not erratic. Or that there wasn't, like, big statements going against the society. He's like, oh, I'm actually a very normal guy who has a lot of wisdom and kindness. I'm going to get married and I'm going to have kids. It's like very normal wisdom behavior. On the outside. On the outside. But then we saw him well two things first crazy wisdom being the complete

open channel of continual emotion and perception as you say exactly thank you but without reference point yes and that is the difference between us and him and i'd say until you examine your own experience without reference point just Just stick with normal wisdom. But take me into what you mean by reference point. Like, know me, know you, just is-ness. And that's all I can say because I don't know what it means. What I just said is the extent of what I mean. It's a little bit like you're pointing at a cloud instead of someone looking at a cloud.

That's right. Once Trungpa Rinpoche showed his students a picture of a cloud. And he said, what is this a picture of? And they said, a cloud? He said, no, it's a picture of the sky. So there's the context, the container, the environment, the background is what you align with rather than the data points in the foreground. And you do that permanently. I don't know how.

But so I think until one can cop to no reference point, just stay with normal wisdom. Yeah, I think it's actually, it's about it's a coffee thing. The more coffee you drink, the more you get to that place. That could be true. I'm pretty sure. That could be true. So why don't we circle around to your topic for the day, Lodra. Okay. So

let's go with the topic of it feels very intense to me right now. Just this political arena that we're in. And it feels like every day it's harder and harder to ignore. And I run this thing called Mindful, which is a drop-in meditation studio here in New York. And it's short. It's 30 and 45-minute drop-in meditation classes.

And once a day, either one of the students or one of the teachers is bringing up that difficult political candidate that you might have a hard time with. So it's like it's all of a sudden infiltrated even the spiritual world. So Susan was interviewed recently for a piece in, what was the article on Mr. Donald Trump? Oh, I wrote it. I wrote it for my own blog and I published it on Huffington Post. Yeah, I saw that. It's called Loving the People You Hate Slash Donald Trump. good, bad, Bernie, Clinton, Trump, whatever. Like, with all these people who, one of whom may end up running this United States of America, do we actually have to love them?

Do we have to open our heart to them? Or can we just unequivocally be like, this is bad? All right. So, Susan, since you literally just wrote the article on this. Sure. Yeah, I can feel like the bile rising in my belly. Literally, I think. Do we have to love the people we hate, basically?

And I would say N to the friggin' O. N-O. No. How could you do that? Even if you thought it was a good idea, how could you do that without being just a completely phony? So, I feel that turning toward what is arising is the only option. Seymour. You feel this hatred.

You feel this anger. You feel this frustration. See more. with. Not how do I circumvent that or leap over that to feel something prissy and nice for people I think are dangerous. So what I tried to say in this piece that I wrote was, you can hate Donald Trump. You can hate his guts. You can revile him, you can fight him, and if you think he's wrong and dangerous, you should. You do not have to change any of those things. The only thing that you can't do is think that you are any different than him. Because maybe if you were born in his world, raised by him with a stupid hairdo, you would be exactly like him. So, you know, of course, we don't think we would ever be Donald Trump. But if you stop for one moment to think, well, maybe if I had been in those circumstances, I would be Donald Trump, I would be Osama bin Laden,

I would be this or that other thing that I think is horrible. Okay, I'm not. But when you think, oh, this person is subhuman, non-human, has to be just decimated, eradicated in order for the rest of us to be okay, that will only create more hatred. And if you can experience for a moment, we're not different. Then you can find some sense of, okay, I need to solve this for us, not for me and Donald Trump, but for our world, as opposed to I am drawing this line between people who I think are okay and people I think

are not, and all of those people we need to somehow push into the ocean. You know, that has been attempted. A, it's not practical because it just causes an equal and opposite reaction. The ocean's full enough. Exactly. And it just causes polarization. And B, it is not true that he is any different than we are. Are you different from Donald Trump?

I have less hair, actually. Okay, well, let me ask you this. If you say there's one thing we hate about him, let's say I could pick from any number of things, he's a liar. Have you ever lied? Have you ever lied to try to impress someone? Have you ever lied to try to impress someone have you ever lied to try to get your way yeah okay it's on a different scale well jonathan's not nodding so maybe he has no i have okay okay i have it's so so they're that seed of what he's doing you also possess. So start there. Keep hating. No problem.

Seriously. But make this about we are in this together. Not there's a them that has to go. So keep hating or start from a place of acknowledging the fact that in this moment, at this time, you do feel deep hatred. But is the goal to stay in that place and just acknowledge it, or is the goal to actually start from that place and then start to acknowledge the seed of him and you,

or her, whoever that person, we're using Trump as an example here, but the truth is, it could be any of the candidates, it could be a boss that person, you know, we're using Trump as an example here, but the truth is it could be any of the candidates. It could be a boss that you've worked with. It could be anybody, you know, this is there. We've all run into people I've worked like, you know, there's somebody who popped into my head who I've worked with who I just like years and years and years ago. What's interesting is I think like what you're saying is like, you know, like the, I think

pop pop culture approach is hate is bad. You know, we like just love hate is bad, just love. And would the world be awesome if that was a switch that we could all just flip? Sure. But last I checked, we had pulse, we had brains, we had spirits, we were human. And you know, like we, you know know as a general it's been my experience that you have to meet people where they are you know and it's like you start where you are and rather than just saying like okay i don't feel this or let me just you know immediately like start repeating a whole bunch of things to try and feel only love you know just

like susan i love the idea of just like simmer, man, because it's real and you're feeling it and it's going on. And, not but, and at the same time, the permission to simmer in that is also the acceptance of the idea that in that person, who's the focus of these deep emotions, is a seed of myself and that we are not any different. So like, but so then the question is how, how is it then possible to stay in that place? The moment that you truly acknowledge the, the, that you are not separate from them. That's the result of practice, I would say of mindfulness practice, meditation practice. And I wanted to just amend something you were saying of, or starting to say, not amend, but address,

that is the goal in feeling hate to get to love, I would say no. There is no goal. I'm not trying to be all Buddhist-y, but if you approach any of these emotional states with an agenda, then you're trying to game it, and you can't do it. And you're hurting yourself. But if you approach what you're feeling with the intention to simply contain it, experience it, be with it,

it will invoke a process that leads to healing. That's my experience. But if you try to game it through some intellectual presumption, it won't work. No, I think what you said is spot on. And I was also just thinking like, okay, so from a Buddhist point of view, we've got these three lenses that we see the world through, passion, aggression, ignorance. I want this. I want that thing to get away. I'm going to ignore the vast majority of everything else. So I don't know if I hate Donald Trump because I don't know if I've taken the energy to actually look at my emotional state when it comes to this particular election cycle.

So I pose this question because I think it's such, I'm seeing it. I'm seeing the strong, I want Bernie. I want Clinton. I don't want Trump, whatever it is. I'm seeing that play out. And I've actually, I mean, I spent months out in Columbus, Ohio, working as a field organizer for Barack Obama. I really believed in him, and there's lots of things going on around that. Here, I'm maybe for the first time

pleading ignorance. It's like, I'll wait till this shakes out. And then when there's a candidate that I believe in, or even if it's the least harmful option, I will go out and do work for that person and get involved. But right now, I'm pleading ignorance. And is ignorance at this stage, just as harmful as hate? Maybe in a different way. I mean, the reason I don't, I haven't experienced any hatred for anybody in this election. And it's not just because I don't experience emotions. Some have said that. Nothing rattles a dude. Yes, I was ice from, no.

I mean, just where I am in my life, I have a limited amount of emotional bandwidth. You know, and some of that goes towards my relationships. You know, my daughter, my wife, my friends, my family. Some of that necessarily goes towards big creative destruction and new creative things in my professional life. And each one of those can consume the vast majority of that emotional bandwidth at any given moment in time and if i add hatred to the things that could consume you know like that finite amount i'm i'm gutted i'm absolutely empty so it's almost like a deliberate decision and you know it's like i'm not choosing ignorance so much as I'm just choosing not to devote any of my cognitive and emotional bandwidth to the process of hating because I don't want to use it up that way. I have other awesome things and scary things and things that I have to navigate in my life right now that will require it all.

So I just like, I choose not to allocate any energy to that right now. Am I concerned? Am I keeping my finger on the pulse of what's happening with the election? Sure. But I'm like very consciously just kind of like tripping the circuit and saying, I'm not at a place like I need to conserve. I have a reservoir and I need to invest it in the way that's going to be most constructive in my life right now. I think that's so smart. And I'm guessing that's what you mean by ignoring. Yeah, it is. Like I said, I'm figuring it out for myself.

Is this a bad thing that I'm taking a backseat at this time? I don't think so. I think, and I feel the same, by the way. I just happen to catch things on little snippets of things that just I can't I then I walk around in a in a hissy fit in a in a snit and I can't do anything about it normally I just try to okay you know focus on the things that you love to do and but through this on the occasion of this particular post I couldn't and and by the way it was predicated on I was by I was sitting in meditation you you know, the practice of compassion, the practice of loving kindness. And I was found myself thinking, I wish someone would kill Donald Trump.

While I was meditating, I'm like, okay, something's wrong here. Anyway. Note yourself, see Ludo's dad exactly i think waiting until this is shaken out you're going to cast your vote in the primaries whatever then we'll have a situation and then you can start to pay attention i think that's just smart okay good yeah because that's that's what i'm hoping for it's like i'm also hoping that i see clear platform i say that particular issue that particular statement on that particular issue, that's what I need to see in this country. And then I will go, I'll put in effort.

You know, I'll go campaign. You're great at that. And I'll get involved and write about it and knock doors and all of those things. But right now it feels like, as you said, it's the question of, is it forced ignorance or is it drawing a clear line boundary so that we put the energy

that we think is allocated to being of benefit to society into ways that is more useful yeah exactly so why don't we uh wrap come full circle so i'll throw out my final topic and um weirdly related but unrelated there's a recent study that i first discovered when I was reading David Brooks' book, The Road to Character. And then I had to actually go and find the study and looked it up. And it's about youth and fame. And some 650 teens in Rochester, New York were asked a whole bunch of interesting questions about how they feel about being famous. And some of the answers that came out were that people would, as a general rule, rather be famous than intelligent.

Ranked in popularity, Jesus was number two, beat by the number one spot by Jennifer Lopez. What? President Bush and Einstein were like way down towards the bottom and uh actually paris hilton and 50 cent were were pretty high behind jesus i can guess the year of this i can guess the year jennifer lopez when was this research with all due respect to jennifer when asked to uh whether you'd rather be the president of harvard Harvard or a personal assistant to a celebrity. Personal assistant to a celebrity.

Was that a really high percentage? I'm actually looking at the numbers right now. It was pretty high, yeah. Something like 80%. So it concerns me. Really? That as a culture, we become so obsessed. And as a father, I imagine. As a father, too. Yeah. Because I see the Instagram accounts and the Snapchat accounts that my daughter and her friends all

follow. And so you're wondering, what is it that people are aspiring to? What is it that's getting triggered inside of not just kids but grown-ups um that are leading them to so exalt fame over what so many of us who come up in our generation um would have maybe felt would be sort of like this is more of what really matters in life. It's such a curiosity for me because it, you know, is it connected to mass proliferation of social media? Is it, you know, just like it's so much easier to access fame? Is it, but even then,

it's like, what drives somebody to seek as their primary goal in life, not to matter, but to be famous, or to be associated with fame as like the ultimate metric of success. I think that's the word success. Like, how do we define success these days? Because I think, you know, the president of Harvard was successful and famous. Like people used to know who the president of Harvard was. That was a significant role because that was a major institution in shaping our whole education system.

And the person who was the president of it would be known. So I think it might not be like, are we pursuing fame differently? But maybe like the parameter of success. So that here, okay, we've got the first lady of the United States of America, which is a very well-known title. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who does not know that that person is currently Michelle Obama.

People also know Kim Kardashian. If Kanye West runs for president and Kim Kardashian is the first lady, she will be the first person who went from executive assistant to a celebrity to that title with a sex tape in between. Right? So there's something really interesting. Like what is the parameter of success? Is just being known success?

Because that is what launched that particular person's career, right? Like works under, became friends with a celebrity, which then led to a scandal that was led to fame, that led to reality show, that led to products and all these other things going on. So what is just being known? Success? It's my question. Yeah, it's like, is it fame? I think that's maybe that's thanks for drilling down. That's probably what's troubling me more. It's like fame for fame's sake. Yes, thank you. And

as you were doing that, I just pulled up the Instagram accounts of our first lady and Kim Kardashian. And apparently, Michelle Obama has 3.8 million followers and Kim Kardashian has 63.2 million followers. So it is that idea of like fame for fame's sake as the, not as a means to help you achieve something, but just like that's it. Because it is it. And how did it get to be that way? That the people who are the most famous, that the people who are able to get the most famous are the people who are able to get the most money. For just because.

I mean, I don't know why. However, I have. It hurts my heart. It kills me. And this is my personal opinion based on nothing but my personal opinion. But I feel like sort of aspiring to fame is almost the only thing we have left when we are in a culture that has divorced itself from valuing the inner life in any way. How and why? i don't know but you know even my parents or grandparents generation lived in a place in a family within a tradition

that had roots in a neighborhood surrounded by other people in their families with the same traditions the same roots there was some kind of earthy factor that has just been annihilated. And I feel that it's because we, the primary values in our culture are consumerist. We live in a transactional world where you want to get some, give something and then get something at least commensurate in return. And the reason that you might want to do that is irrelevant. But any kind of training in how to be introspective, how to value your inner experience, how to have sense perceptions,

that is decimated. And honestly, I feel like our education system is really, sadly, a part of that. I mean, I heard, this was just a few weeks ago, there was some video going around, this woman went to a college campus in Virginia. I can't remember which one, but it was a property university. And she was interviewing, and I don't mean to just slam on our country here, but she was interviewing students who won the Civil War. And nobody knew. I'm not exaggerating. You should Google this and find it. Who won the Civil War? Who was in the Civil War?

These were black students, white students. People didn't know. I mean, maybe she asked the people that did know, but they weren't in the video. But then she asked the same people, who is Brad Pitt married to? And they all said Angelina Jolie. Who was he married to before that? They all said Jennifer Aniston. So what's happening in our education system that becoming cultured beyond and educated is just not a part of the way most people are raised. And I probably sound like a snob. But anyway, I'll just sum it up by saying, somehow, we have entered into a world where we

suffer from vast image poisoning, where we think that the way things look is the way they are because we've lost touch with the underneath. And that's a sad thing. I mean, I think your comment about devaluing, exploring, and spending time in our inner world, you know, it's interesting. On the one hand, I think that's absolutely true. And on the other hand, I also see this deep yearning to reconnect with that. I think people a little bit further into life are now running towards meditation and mindfulness

in a way that, you know know is almost sort of like diagnostic of what you were just talking about i don't think it's trickled down to us or like i sound like a grumpy old man like the younger generation those kids get out of my arm well how about your daughter how about you i mean i don't mean to pick on but your parent and do you see this i do yeah and and you're like i I try and have conversations on a regular basis. And I'm not like a Luddite in any way, shape, or form. I embrace technology, but at the same time. What's interesting also is that, yes, a lot of people in their teens and 20s are following and spending a vast majority of time tracking of tracking and sometimes trying to emulate celebrities

and trying to go for fame for fame's sake. I wonder if it really is the problem. Does it really signify a shift in anything? Or is it just the fact that technology has made it so much more on the surface than it ever was before? That like the same psychodynamic has we had the exact same yearning when we were that age we just didn't have access to the technology and to the constant exposure to media and and that would allow us to manifest it

so aggressively and publicly so like i wonder sometimes if this really doesn't signal at all any meaningful shift in the human condition or focus, it just signals that identical phenomenon bubbling up to the surface. And does then the very fact that it's become so pervasive and so public, now is that almost starting to create a bit of a backlash where people actually want to start exploring the inner world more because we're so much more overtly barraged by, you know, this sort of like surface level fame that it's starting to actually get old to a certain extent. And maybe it's just a natural cycle, but it's the thing, you know, I wonder if it's sort of like a similar to what a lot of people are saying about autism and being, uh, Nan Asperger's being on the spectrum where there's a whole group of people that say it's actually not nearly as more prevalent as it was. It's just diagnostic tools.

And sort of like the ability to actually identify kids has become so much more sensitive that a lot more kids are actually being diagnosed and getting help. So I wonder if that's in part what's going on here too. I agree. I have many thoughts. One of which is, you know, I think Jennifer Aniston is still fantastic. And I think she's my celebrity crush. Jennifer, call him. The other is, yeah, I mean, our education system, I don't know if it's gotten worse or stayed the same, but I think you're onto something, Jonathan. One of the stories that just came to mind, which is why I pulled this up, people want to be first.

They want to be the first. They want to be the biggest. And I think it gets to what you're saying in terms of consumerism, the first to the market. So there is an interesting thing that happened a couple of years ago. There's this show called Dance Moms. My sister is out in L.A. Her daughter, my niece, takes dance. And there was a photo snapped and posted on social media of the cast of Dance Moms, which is all these young girls dancers.

And my niece was in that photo and tagged in the photo. And that led to this. Can you just say how many followers my niece have without actually saying her name, please? I'll say her name. 184,000 followers on Instagram. I think this one thing may have actually had a seismic shift in how she views social media and how she views social media, in how she views... I would like to think this is not the case, but I imagine it might shift how she views herself.

Because there's some sense of, oh, I have more followers than my friend down the road. I have more attention, more of a platform, more whatever. And then, I mean, I can't imagine at that age teenage years at this point having 184 people that are in conversation with much less 184 000 what does what sort of like handing that sort of power to someone what does that do i know but i i don't think it's instagram that caused that power because why i think it's the way we use it. And why do we use it in that way?

Why doesn't a person who teaches dance to handicapped children out of the love of dance, why doesn't that person have 184,000 followers? Because we don't value that. We value celebrity. So I don't think we value celebrity because we have social media i think we somehow have put social media in service of celebrity and to be clear the reason that there were so many followers because people thought oh she's going to be on the next season of this show right so i'm going to be the first person

who likes that now she's my favorite dancer. Right? Right? On the show. Even though, of course, she's not on the show. There's not reality. There's no basis in reality on this. Right? Which is so interesting to me. So celebrity for

potential celebrities. So you're telling me I should unfollow her actually? Yeah, I just followed her while we were sitting here. So kind of coming full circle on the topic. I mean, it's interesting

because we now run a program called The Art of Becoming Known. But we also make it really clear that I'm not interested in sort of like spending a long amount of time with people where, you know, like we're training you in how to become known for because you just want to be famous. It's like I'm interested in helping people figure out how to become known so that they can then take that leverage and do some meaningful work in the world. Like do the thing that they're here to do. And I think that's the shift for me. So awesome hanging out with you guys. You will be in residence for another two weeks after that.

So for you listening in, we got more juicy conversations. Susan, where can people find you? On my website, susanpiver.com. And Lodra? I live in a shack down by the river. Or in lodrarinsler.com. We moved up from the van, actually. Exactly.

Wait, what was the- Lodrarinsler.com. It's L-O-D-R-O. Yeah. Great. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening.

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