Modern Wisdom - #968 - Dr Rick Hanson - The Psychology of Obsession, Rumination & Letting Go

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Dr. Rick Hanson is a psychologist, speaker, and an author. How often do you find yourself stuck replaying a situation you wish you could just forget? No matter how much you want to move on, your mind keeps circling back. So what are the practical strategies to break free from rumination, quiet the mental noise, and finally reclaim control of your thoughts? Expect to learn how you can develop more self-compassion, why its so hard for people to let go of obsessive thinking and why we tend to ruminate a lot, how to move on from a breakup, insult, slight or a regret, how to “let go” of of emotionally charged memories, Dr Hanson’s favourite techniques to interrupt repetitive thought spirals, how people can consciously reframe the narrative after rejection, and much more… Sponsors: See me on tour in America: https://chriswilliamson.live See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% off Echo’s Hydrogen Flask at https://echowater.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Buddhism, there's this view in early Buddhism, especially that life is very unsatisfactory because everything keeps ending. Well, wait a second. First of all, if you're not attached to what's happening, the fact that it's endlessly changing is not itself a problem. And meanwhile, there's the endless arising. And so there's some physics about that. Why is there time at all? And one of the leading

theories comes from this professor, Muller, M-U-L-L-E-R at UC Berkeley, that the Big Bang universe is a four dimensional space time universe. Space is expanding, there's evidence for that. And we don't notice it because it's so big. We're continually being stretched, just a tiny, tiny wee bit. But time is the other dimension of the expanding bubble of the Big Bang universe. So maybe the next moment is simply what's occurring as the temporal expansion of the universe proceeds. So we are always in creation at the leading edge of now in the temporal expansion of the big bang universe.

Wow. And so things are ending because there's the endless expanding into the next moment. And isn't that the coolest way to kind of relate to what up? It's so funny that you decided to start your soliloquy with that, because I wanted to talk about change. I wanted to talk about letting go today. And there's a, I think a lot of people like the idea of being someone who can deal with change well, and I think a lot of people probably are, you know, if they were to look at their past, they actually probably did deal with change well when the change happened, but maybe not so well in advance of it occurring.

Fear of change is a real source of pain for a lot of people. And it's interesting that, you know, you're right. The perfect cocktail is going to be drained at some point. The dinner is going to finish, the friends are going to move to a different country, the parents are going to pass away, the career is going to end, the passions are going to become less enthusing than they were in the past.

With that, needs two things. You need to be prepared to let go and I think the techniques of letting go, what that means, whether it's letting go of something that you still aren't a hundred percent certain about a relationship, a friendship, a career, or something that's completely ended. This is, you know, a person who's passed. This is a situation which no longer exists. That's one side. And then the other side is, okay, how do we step into the future more hopefully?

So I think, uh, lots of fertile ground for us to get into here. It's nice that we, we came in and our astral minds had yet had been linked before we even started talking. That's fantastic. I had no idea that would be our topic. And, um, so much to say about it. Uh, I've read off the top, I'm just reflecting on this kind of statement from Ajahn Chah. Ajahn is an honorific like minister or rabbi. Anyway, in Thailand, no longer alive,

major teacher in the lineage of Western Buddhism, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, so forth, really a wonderful teacher, lived in rural settings and was really down to earth. He said, if you let go a little, you'll have a lot of happiness. If you let go a little, you'll have a little happiness. If you let go a lot, you'll have a lot of happiness. And if you let go completely, you will be completely happy. That's kind of a good frame here right? That's pretty cool. Yeah very very cool. Well I'll say another little thing about it which is you know I'm a long-time therapist and

understandably people are dealing with fear, fear of change let let's say, and feeling unsupported. And in Buddhist meditative practice that gets mature, sometimes people are so aware of the endless ending of the moment that it is terrifying and it's very important whether it's an everyday life or in deep meditative practice to feel buttressed and supported and buoyed and lived by the ongoingness of all rightness that is actually true to the extent it's true amidst the crud and crap. There's so much that's already okay continuously

and bringing that foregrounding that into awareness with a brain that tends to tune out what it habituates to is really important. Right. We notice the things that are bad or that are ending. We don't notice what is continually booing us and living us, you know, our own bodies, our friends, the goodness in our own heart, the things in the world that are supportive. And anyway, just bringing attention to those parts of the truth, amidst

other parts that are concerning. Then we need to do something about bringing attention to those parts of the truth amidst other parts that are concerning, then we need to do something about bringing attention to those parts of the truth as a regular practice and developing the habit of that is really useful. Why is it so hard to let go? Why is that not a set point, a natural state? Well, just think about our ancestors going back, you know, right? Humans, hominids, monkeys, squirrel-like, rat-like creatures in Jurassic Park. The creatures that maybe by genetic design were really super chill. Chomp! They got eaten.

They were like, I'm letting go, man. Yeah, you can have my banana. Yeah, you can have my banana. Yeah, you can have my girlfriend. Like, they did not pass on their genes. The ones that were crinky and possessive and grasping, my precious. You know, they passed on their genes and we're their great, great, great, great grandchildren on top of the food chain right now. Right, so that's, I think part of it. Gosh, we have a culture, you've really spoken well about this that is very acquisitive.

Again, hunter gatherer times, you know, our biology is to not be able to possess very much because you can only own quote unquote what you carry with you. And in many native cultures, there's no sense of ownership particularly. It's the group, the band, or it's, you don't really own it.

Mother nature gave it to you for a little time, right? So there's that. So our modern culture, that's very much about ownership and property and accumulating wealth. And in a sense, the properties of status, including in a very status-seeking culture, your reputational property, the amount of likes, including in a very status-seeking culture, your reputational property, the amount of likes you get or followers, more. And you know, people write about the molecule

more and dopamine and it's more complicated than that, of course, but that's a good part of it. So I think that's another reason why it's hard for people to let go. for people to let go. It's the weird thing is it's not only letting go of things that exist. It's even letting go of thought patterns. You know, we have this sort of obsessive ruminative thinking, these well trodden paths that we go through. Oh, and now I'm here and I'll think this thing and then I'll think that. And, oh, that really got to me and da da da da da.

Like how many times do you want to replay the same insult that that person threw your way at the water cooler two months ago? And then this weird fantasy comes in, if only, if they, I would have said this and then they would have said that, but I would have said this thing and then that would have happened. And yeah, we are oddly even possessive over our own thoughts, even the ones that are mean to us. Wow. There's so many, that's so cool. I'm tuning into the way that when we ruminate, you know, we feel identified with. That's another extremely difficult thing to let go

of is identity. And yet in some ways it's one of the most useful things to let go of because then you can let in. You know, there's this whole dynamic obviously of releasing and receiving. We can't, you know, the old, it's a true story, you know, proverb, you may know it, I'll say it quickly. A great scholar of Buddhism in Japan and the history of Japan went to go see a great Zen master for a conversation and they sat down and they had tea and it was very elegant and the Zen master was preparing it. You can imagine the movie of this.

And they began chatting and the scholar asked the teacher a little question and the teacher started to talk and then the scholar would jump in and propound and expound for a while. And then pause, they ask another question, the Zen Master would start to talk a little bit and the scholar would say so many things. And ah, meanwhile, the Zen Master was preparing tea. And so he started pouring it into the cup, beautiful cup, lacquer table, thousand year old mug, something, starts pouring it in, tea starts to rise. And the scholar's watching the slow rising of the tea in the cup gets closer and closer to the lip. And then he's just thinking, what?

And this master keeps pouring. All the tea starts flowing over on this beautiful table. And the scholar says, wait, wait, wait, you can't put any more into a cup that's already full. Zemmester puts down the cup and says, exactly. So we tend to get so involved with our stuff, right, in our own minds. That's part of it. And then another part, I'm just reflecting on you and me as people who, to put it kind of bluntly, are paid to be right, to be paid to know in a way, we get valued and paid in praise, not just in money and so forth. And so then what do we do with our attachment to view? One of the three major things that Buddha talked about that people get

attached to is their view. The other is sense, pleasure and identity, but view. How do you deal with that? You form a view, you think it's right, I'm the same way. And yet that attachment to our view about politics or sports or people we're with or even ourself. We have a lot of view about ourself. We've got attached to it. How do we let go of these views, including our righteous case? I'm very aware of that myself about this or that. How do you work with that?

I think I have a little bit of a get out of jail free card at least publicly, because no one typically is coming to me as the expert. Mercifully sort of made a career out of being the most stupid person in every conversation that I've had. So brilliant strategy. It is. So there's something called jester's privilege, which is kind of what all of the comedians have at the moment. You know, from medieval times, the gesture, being able to say the thing, to call out to the courtesans and maybe even to the king or the queen themselves, to be able to say the unspeakable thing. And they had a particular privilege.

Now, I imagine that, uh, if you push it too far, the jester's privilege, it, it turns out that there's only so many times that you can do that or there's a limit to it too, um, and they may need a new jester who takes his privilege slightly less, uh, seriously, but there is a holding opinions lightly and sort of being prepared to change your mind. Um, at least for me publicly, uh, is, is not that hard. I don't find it too hard. Um, largely again, because curiosity is quite a nice salve to this. It's a really lovely antidote.

If you're curious about stuff, you just want to find out. You want to know as opposed to, I suppose it's the difference between, uh, proselytizing or giving some sort of a sermon and interviewing or asking questions. Um, because on one side I just want to know. Because on one side, I just want to know. And on the other side, I want to tell. And for the most part, I'm pretty good at wanting to know. And the telling thing is cool, but slightly less so for me. However, when it comes to my own sense of self, the level of attachment I have to how I know me about what I

am, even in its positive and negative aspects, you know, we're attached to the negative stories that we tell ourselves about things because it's a safety blanket. Oh, no, I don't do that. I don't dance. I don't public speak. I don't, you know, I, I, I'm not built for big crowds or whatever it might be. I'm not a racist. Rick, you've betrayed yourself. You've betrayed yourself in the first sentence. Um, it's, it's very, that is an area, I think you're that identity. How do I see myself? That is something that's very, very is an area, I think that identity, how do I see myself?

That is something that's very, very difficult to let go of. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. Uh, looking back, it's, I think it's useful to note turning points in your life, key moments that were good, maybe somebody opened a door for you or you realized something in particular yourself. And a key moment for me was in the middle of my twenties, I realized in terms of thoughts about identity that growing up, I had been a nerd, but not a wimp.

I don't know if that translates to British slang. I don't know. I understand entirely. Yeah. Someone interested in quirky intellectual pursuits, but not someone who was a coward. That's exactly right. I was president of the dork club. I was very young going through school and introverted and kind of shy. My parents didn't really help me with social skills, so that led to a lot of feelings of being an outsider. And I thought of myself as a wimp. I felt cowardly.

I felt inadequate as a male, in terms of male identity, in terms of physicality and all the rest of that. And yet I had this kind of moment where it's almost like, you know, your life passes before your eyes where episode after episode after episode, retrospectively in, you know, some major episodes, I realized, no way. I, you know, I fought back. I stood up for myself. I was assertive. And I was a nerd, but not a wimp. Anyway, that was a shift of identity. And I think that's helpful for people to reflect on times when things were a big shift for you so you could appreciate that and learn from them.

It's interesting. I think a problem people have letting go can often feel like giving up. Correct. And this is, this is very painful to feel, oh, this is me admitting defeat here. That's funny. Um, I guess I'm in story mode a little bit. Hope it's okay. I'm, um, a little sleep deprived because of all the things I've been doing lately.

Anyway, so you're reminding me. So I have a dear friend. I'll spare his name. Uh, many years ago we were talking and he was on the're reminding me. So I have a dear friend, I'll spare his name. Many years ago, we were talking and he was very attached to a particular woman. He was pursuing her, he was chasing her. She was kind of interested, but she wasn't that into him.

He's really suffering, you know, just going into it. And by the way, for the record, men talk about their relationships too. You know, guys do this as well. So I remember we were walking out and we had gone to a restaurant and we were walking home and we were half drunk, not fully drunk, but half drunk. He was probably more than half drunk going on and on and on. And I said to him, I said to him, at some point, well, oh man, maybe you just need to surrender here. And he turned to me angrily, said, I don't do surrender.

I'm like, Whoa. And he was kind of reflective on that, but I don't do surrender. And then a little later he threw up all over my feet, but, you know, that was part of it all. Well, your stomach has just surrendered your dinner all over the pavement. I know, but he did, he, he had enough insight. We were both involved in kind of a personal growth world at the time and back in my twenties actually. And he came to realize what I was talking about, but you're exactly right. It was part of his male identity and as a person,

hyper self-reliant libertarian kind of person, I don't do surrender. But yeah, we have to surrender. Yeah. Before we continue, here's something that people don't usually think about. Fatigue, brain fog, slow recovery. That's not just life. That's your cells waving the white flag. And if your cells are under stress, no amount of kale, cold plunges or forced gratitude journaling is going to fix it. The Eco Flask actually helps at the root by infusing your water with molecular hydrogen. It's one of the smallest, most bioavailable molecules out there, and it helps your body repair itself from the inside out. It's backed by over

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Plus, right now you can get 10% off the Echo Flask by going to the link in the description below or heading to EchoWater.com slash Modern Wisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout. That's EchoWater.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. I think the chasing of a partner or the getting over of a breakup, I think is a probably pretty fertile ground to use as an example for this emotionally charged sense of accomplishment or defeat. Attachment to self worth.

What does this say about me? What does it mean about my place? You know, it's a, probably a good, a good sandbox to, to keep going here. So it feels to me like, um, rumination. What are we getting out of rumination? Like what, why is the brain so tuned to ruminate in that way? What are we getting out of rumination? Like why is the brain so tuned to ruminate in that way? Wanting to stay in this beautiful sandbox. Um, well, it is really interesting because our closest genetic relatives,

chimpanzees say and bonobos, they don't ruminate. Uh, it's possible that the cetaceans, you know, big brains, we're not quite know what's going on there, but they don't certainly chimps don't ruminate because they don't do metal time travel. They don't have the neurological basis for it in their cortex to systematically envision a future. You know, if I do X, will she like me? If I do Y, will she like me? You know, they don't do affective forecasting on the one hand, nor do they reflect a lot on the past. Why did I do that? How could I have done that better next time? Why did they treat me that way? Yuck, yuck, yuck. They just don't do that. And one of the great advantages in human cortical evolution as the brain tripled in its size

over the last several million years was the development of the neural substrates for mental time travel and the ruminator in which we simulate different potential futures and we generate little mini movies about the past. So on the one hand, when you think about trying to survive in Stone Age times, it's really useful to be able to systematically learn lessons from your past or systematically anticipate or project different futures.

So on the one hand, we have this incredible thing. What a great piece of hardware. And it's really saturated as well with the sense of self, which again seems much more elaborated and developed in humans compared again to our closest primate relatives. And so on the one hand, thank you Mother Nature, we're blessed by this. On the other hand, it's really easy to get lost in it. And what I notice about it is that there's a lot of anticipatory reward embedded in the reminator. If we just solve the problem that we're anxious about, there will be a reward. Or if we just revisit the past and work it through, there will be some realization around it or some release around it where we will get the reward of establishing that,

yeah, I was right all along and they're assholes for having done that to me. You know, there's a kind of a subtle, I think of it as like the inner ad agency in which these reward systems that are quite ancient are exaggerating how good it will be to have figured this out finally after looping around the ruminator track several dozen times. And no, because once you loop around the track a few dozen times for one, it's painful to loop the track. And even if you do eventually kind of sort of resolve something, like how great did that feel? How great was that benefit compared to the cost of running

around the rim and inner track? And then the other thing, so you're asking kind of why we do it, and part of the why is because it also tends to reinforce and reify the sense of self, the me, you know, both the witness of the little mini movies of future and past, and that's the sort of I, the subjective point of view. And then there's the character, me, in those movies, what they did to me, that me, or what could happen for that me in the future. So there's a lot of that.

That's very rewarding, you can get in that. Especially if you feel beleaguered in your sense of self, if you feel attacked or a lot of the content of rumination is negative, it's around resentment or hurt or guilt. And it kind of shores us up weirdly as self to do that. But it's- How does that mean, it shows us up as a self? Can you dig into that a little bit for me? Yeah. It's sort of, it's useful to observe what's implicit, what's the ground distinct from figure. So the figure, what I mean is the story, the event, like let's go back. Something happened in a restaurant, maybe with a person you were interested in romantically. So you had this conversation,

didn't go quite well, you felt misunderstood, you reacted a little bit. They seemed to overreact. Maybe you were missing something. So that's the figure. That's the content. But what's the frame in which you're ruminating about that content in that frame? There tends to be an implicit background, strong sense of self, including the somatic sense of self, which again, because it's in the frame, we don't tend to notice it. It's the sky. We notice the cloud, the figure, the content, but the sky is what's really important

because also neurologically, we are reinforcing the frame by going through it again and again and again. Why is reinforcing the frame in relation to the self a bad idea? Great question. I think sometimes it's good if you're reinforcing a frame of a sense of your own innate goodness and that you're a nerd, but not a wimp. That's good. But from a wisdom standpoint, to the extent we get attached to self and

identified with it, that tends to lead fairly quickly into forms of craving like self wants things, or it tends to lead quickly into a pretty developed sense of, you know, me, myself, and I that others are not treating well. We tend to take things more personally. That's a good way to summarize that. So self is a, we want to use the sense of self, but we don't want to be used by it. That's a deep topic. I'm interested to learn more about that. I think this relationship between taking things personally, because I don't understand really how you can ruminate without taking things personally. They seem to be intrinsically linked.

That's exactly right. And that's part of the problem. they seem to be intrinsically linked. That's exactly right. And that's part of the problem. So when you ruminate, so what are the problems with rumination? One, it's affectively unpleasant. It's not an enjoyable experience to be in the ruminator.

A. B, whatever you're ruminating on, which tends to be emotionally negative, things like resentments or deep guilt, feelings of hurt, that gets reinforced. Neurons that fire together, wire together in the riminators, you're reinforcing it. You're reinforcing reactivity and you're sensitizing your brain to reactivity because little bits of cortisol are released. You know, they go into your brain and sensitize the alarm bell, the amygdala there and make it more reactive distress.

So it's not good to do laps around the rumination track. Also functionally, rumination often has the function of keeping at bay softer, more vulnerable feelings. You know, while we're rehashing that argument in the restaurant with this, let's say a woman we were pursuing, you know, and we're kind of right about it and we're going through the movie and we're having new repetitive thoughts about it in our case and then we're thinking about how other people would think about it and why haven't they thought about it the right way and been a better friend to me about it. While we're doing all that, what's underneath it all? That's being avoided as an experience, softer feelings of hurt, despair, feeling like a failure,

feeling defeated, what you're saying, projecting that sense of defeat into the future. I will always be defeated. I will never find love. Those deep, even younger, going all the way back to, oh, I never got a good girlfriend when I was in high school, going all the way back. Ruminations functions as a defense, often against deeper experiences, which we need to open to, to get a complete release and move on to the next

good thing. That's not good either. Ruminations feels stiff, tight, this sort of obsessive, it's very, you're right, it's got structure to it. It's not free flowing. And it seems to me like And it seems to me like going back to your hominids chimps, when did we get the ruminator room installed into all of our brains? It feels like ruminations kind of a survival mechanism gone rogue. It feels like it's a useful tool, the effective forecasting. What should I have learned from that thing that just happened? What's the lesson to take away have learned from that thing that just happened? What's the lesson to take away?

Well, that thing was emotionally salient to me. That thing was really, that thing made me feel something. I should pay attention to it. Maybe I should think about it. Maybe I should think about it a lot. I should mine this well deep. There must be insights and gems and treasure deep down in there. So yeah, it seems to me that rumination is hijacking the brain's desire to do

problem solving whilst usually probably not solving a problem. Yeah, I love the fact that you, deep in practice, tuned into the feeling in your body of ruminating, you know, as you put it tight, contracted, right? And, you know, and even there can be a kind of, depending on our temperament, a certain aggressiveness and attack mode in the rumination. Other people maybe by temperament are more fearful in their nature and they would be more like withdrawal mode. Others might be more centered in a kind of anxious insecure attachment style in which there's a beseechingness. I'm speaking to the frame of the rumination, the backstory in which the plot is unfolding of what we're talking about. So yeah, you're very alert to that in the bodily sense. And I agree that what we're seeking and

the brain is seeking in the rumination is some kind of result, except the way it's going about it is preventing a result. We don't get to clarity. We don't get to, okay, I sorted it out, you know, effective problem solving. You work it through, okay, I know exactly, I have felt this fully. I have clarified the facts. I have clarified my values here. I know what my plan is going forward. I know what the lesson is going forward. And I'm released. I'm free. Ruminations were bound. A true traditional metaphor is a dog chained to a stick. You know, it can orbit the stick, but it doesn't get released. It's not free. It's not truly autonomous. We're captured by our ruminations. They seem so beguiling, right? They're seductive. We get caught up in them and we're captured by

them. That's not good. So yeah, think productively about things and feel the feelings along the way. I'll say for me that there are a couple of keys that can be really helpful. So when you find yourself starting to ruminate about something, be aware of it. And what you can do is to continue to reflect on whatever that was or let that movie play, but go wide. Try to get a sense of your whole body, your whole mind, because when we ruminate, we're locked onto that particular tile in the mosaic of consciousness. Other stuff's happening, but we're more sucked in to that part. And so it's good to kind of go wide because when you go wider you don't suffer so much and you take more into account. And what that does technically, rumination typically involves a lot of activity in the

midline cortex including the rearward portions, the default mode. And so when we go wide, that tends to engage networks on the sides of the brain, especially right hemisphere for right-handed people, because that's gestalt processing, holistic processing. And that tends to quiet activity in midline cortices. Wow. So go wide and including go wide to all the many things that were involved in that conversation at dinner that didn't go well. You know, this where she was coming from, where you were coming from, the other people, the stuff that was happening, big picture, going wide really helps. And then also, especially as you can try to feel below the surface.

What's really going on here that's being kept at bay by the hamster wheel of ruminating? What's underneath the surface? And then third, try to come to a conclusion. What's the takeaway? What's the wisdom from here? How are you going to operate from now on? What have you realized? So those three things, going wide, feeling below the surface, and going after the takeaway,

then that makes rumination productive. And you're using this incredible neurological hardware for its best purposes. Not being trapped by it. Yeah. Why is repetition and compulsion weirdly comfortable in a woman? What, you know what I mean?

It's like putting on an old leather pair of shoes. You know exactly how they squeak. They've sort of molded around that weird big toe you've got from when you kicked a football wrong in the eight year. So funny. Well, another story. Sorry. I was talking, I was hanging out with a friend who was talking to a buddy.

And let's see. I was hanging out with a friend who was talking to a buddy. And let's see, my friend was saying, oh man, I've had my head up my ass lately talking about mistakes he's been making and so forth. And his buddy replied on the volley just really quickly, yeah, but it's great to be home again. There's Freud called it the repetition compulsion, familiarity. We're drawn to familiarity because it's safer. You know, again, from an evolutionary standpoint, the known is safe, even if it's the known bad thing, the devil you know, right? That's known. And what's not yet known, that's where threats could lurk back in the Stone Age or Jurassic Park. And so I think that's one part of it, certainly. I think in the background as well,

it's sort of, there's this reassuring continuity of selfing. Even though the content is being, when the content is familiar, the frame in which the content is known or experienced is familiar as well. And I think that gives us a comfort. Then of course, biology, some people are a little more tilted toward OCD or compulsion or other people. And then there's another element, which is really interesting. I hope it's okay that I'm just kind of going through a lot of stuff fast. Well, you're familiar with the big five theory of personality factors. Great. So acronym, OCEAN, O-C-E-A-N. The first one is openness. And people vary on a range, both by genetics and then acquired tendencies and how open they are.

And people who tend to be more toward the rigid end of the range, they will be trotting more familiar paths in their own mind stream again and again and again. So I think that's part of it too. This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night. And this is where 8Sleep comes in. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. Plus, it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HRV, your snoring, your heart rate, all with 99% accuracy.

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8Sleep.com slash Modern Wisdom, using modern wisdom at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I'm intrigued about why not only with rumination but with sort of planning for the future, we're so prepared to keep ourselves trapped inside of something that we don't enjoy. We've been here before. Yeah. We've, we've, we've been across this terrain and we know that it's filled

with upturned tacks and we keep stepping on them and all of them are painful. And you go, yeah, I know, but it feels, it feels familiar. And I wonder whether, I wonder whether there's a relationship here between And I wonder whether there's a relationship here between the fear of a lack of control. That uncertainty is so abhorrent to us, to our brain, not knowing that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty. That's super brilliant. And do you think that's particularly common in people who have a career or a life history in which they've been rewarded a lot for being in control and having control and directing things in particular ways.

Certainly, I think for people who have been rewarded for being right, for performing, there is a particular sort of free flowingness that you have around the friends that, ah, I don't know what I'm gonna do tomorrow. Ah, you know, I don't have the thing. And in some ways ways their outcomes in life can be a little bit more high variance, you might say diplomatically.

Um, because they don't plan for the future in the same sort of way. And they don't necessarily foresee all of the potential pitfalls and, um, they don't have the, the structure that at least in the modern world for most people bears a lot of fruit, right? Being able to know what tomorrow looks like, iterating on habits, compounding interest of saving money and knowing when you're going away and knowing what time you need to wake up in order to be able to make it to work on time so you don't get fired.

You know, all of these things are really, really important. So you say, okay, the more control I have, the better my life gets. Including about many of the things you talk about, you know, your own optimization, your own physical fitness, your own workout routines, your vitamin intake and all the rest of that. Yeah. You know, or for me a lot more around the mind, you know, the more control I have over my own consciousness, you know, the better it goes. Right. So yeah, we, and those of us who, uh, yeah. And I think also just to go into it, there was a lot about my childhood that was, it was fine. And I just felt like, whoa,

It was fine. And I just felt like, whoa, I got dropped in to a stream in which there wasn't that much control. They were bigger than I was, right? They had more power. They were doing all these things. They were upset about this and that. They were like, yeah. And so, yeah, then internally for me,

a refuge was to develop a growing sense of autonomy where I did have control and I would increasingly create little domains in which I was in charge, including what I was thinking about or paying attention to. So maybe in part, if people have a turbulent, um, dysregulated childhood or youth, then they're going to be more particularly appreciative in healthy ways even that can then hijack us in not so healthy ways to have to be in control, have to know. Yeah. And I think it's such an ironic tragedy that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe way worse than anything that could reasonably happen in the real world, I guess, was sort of going into forecasting as opposed to ruminating. Yeah.

That's a kind of ruminating where you're caught up in imagining a future and- Right. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it just, I had this, I read this sentence, which it's kind of funny. I'm such an addict to memes or aphorisms that I'll happily take something that didn't mean what the author meant and then repurpose it into my own. It's kind of like when I first read Harry Potter when I was a kid and I'd

never heard the name Hermione read out loud. I'd only ever seen it written down. So I went four and a half books of Harry Potter convinced that it was Hermione read out loud, I'd only ever seen it written down. So I went four and a half books of Harry Potter, convinced that it was Hermione. And then they released the movie and they called her Hermione. And I sort of rejected their interpretation of the authors, like a word that, you know, a name that's relatively common or whatever,

but that I'd never heard. And I was like, no, no, no, this is the way that, this is the way that I do it. This is the way that I'm going to see it. And, uh, it's kind of the same, it's kind of the same with this, that we have our, we have our perspective on things. This is, this is the way that this thing is going to be. And, uh, for me, I saw this sentence written and, uh, it was this, this author

talking about thinking in super positions. sentence written and it was this author talking about thinking in super positions. You know, you have this Schrodinger's, there's a degree of uncertainty. We don't know whether the cat is dead or alive. And then he was talking about how most people abhor the uncertainty so much. They need to collapse the superposition down into an answer. And this is what we do when we fantasize catastrophe, we are collapsing the superposition of uncertainty. So yeah, the idea of thinking in superpositions,

I think is a nice, it's also cool. I love that. Yeah, thinking in superpositions is- Oh, I'm gonna take that away. Feel free, feel free. It's bastardized from someone that didn't mean it to mean what I meant it to mean. Oh, I'll be quoting you. You know, respect your sources. It's bastardized from someone that didn't mean it to mean what I meant it to mean. I'll be quoting you. Respect your sources. Let's go. It's like the human centipede of plagiarism.

So this is so cool. So in the sandbox of relationships, let's say, and hurts about you know, the normal range. How can not knowing be helpful? Long pause here. It's a good question. Don't know mind. Yeah, don't know mind. Beginner's mind, don't know mind. Receiving the next moment as it arises, not knowing. I had a friend, a very deep in practice, long time teacher say to me quite a while ago, I certainly was asking him, what's your core practice these days? That's a really useful question, I think,

for people that engage in practice. What's a primary focus for you? He said, living with absolutely no expectations and to really track what absolutely no means that's really something because the brain is an expectation generator. It wants to know, it freaks when it doesn't know. You know about people in these century deprivation tanks who would start to hallucinate because the brain needs content. It wants content. It's quite a deep thing to just not know. So I think back on people that I've been in Wrangles with,

let's say of one kind or another, who let's say have truly mistreated me, or I have myself felt sad and remorseful about something and I did a mistake I made, or there's some tangle, or I can't believe they did that. I did not see that coming. I have found it really helpful to when I can to say, okay, all that and don't know.

What's it feel like to don't know? Don't know, not without labels, don't know the meaning, the implication, just don't know. Suddenly it feels freer and looser. It's kind of not knowing, it's like a kind of solvent that dissolves, that congeals the crud of rumination. Being comfortable with that. Yeah.

To cultivate don't know mind. I mean, that's a major practice in some traditions, cultivate don't know mind. And I think it's, for me, it's really fun because I'm a kind of scruffy, autonomous type person, you know, and I don't want my brain to control me. I don't want the program. I want autonomy even from myself.

That's right. I want to be the ghost in the machine. I don't want the machine to control me. I'm living in the machine, I'm my inner being, whatever. And so I like disrupting. It's disruptive to not know. Maybe so. Or another way of putting it is maybe so. Don't know. Maybe so.

And I just wonder how for you, for example, if we apply this to relationship issues, don't know. Don't know what the future will be. Don't know what the past has meant. Just so much I don't know. To me, that feels like unpacking and opening. It's very expansive. Yeah, it feels that way.

Yeah, it's very open. It's... The resistance can really only be generated once you've planted a stake in the ground somewhere, once you've made a position, right? And then you've dug this thing in. This is, this is what I think was right. This is what I think happened. This is what I think will occur. And then everything begins to exist in relation to that.

You know, and that's where the resistance comes from because there's something to resist against, you know, like the dog running around the pole. Um, but if you don't, it's, it's total free flowing. Yeah, exactly. That's really nice. Do you, do you write poetry? Any chance? I've actually started. I did it for the first time a couple of months ago.

I really enjoyed it. That was just an intuitive sense of how your mindstream unfolds. Yeah. I, uh, I've been hanging around with musicians a lot more, uh, over the last few months, and I always had this sense. I, maybe everybody has this, that they assumed that their particular mode of communicating or their particular art form is the one that sort of maximally allows for, you know, effective communication. And I knew that, I knew that music was able to say things that words can't.

Because there is sort of emotion and there is tension and release and there is swelling and there is harmony and there is rhythm and there is all of this stuff. But I don't think I'd ever considered fully that lyrics can say something that prose can't. That words, you know, that in absence of words, you're actually able to say more than if you need to be more explicit, that vagaries can be sort of more educating and insightful than precision can. And yeah, that, that I guess, if you're not musically minded, which I'm not, the closest approximation that you can get to doing that is poetry. Hmm.

That's really lovely. Yeah. I, I, uh, don't think, well, I wrote a paper in college. There was an epic poem that was the closest I ever got to ever doing poetry. And I'm not sure it was any good. Uh, yeah, the, the best poetry is like what we're talking about. It stops your mind. You know, like, humor's the same way, the jester.

I'm thinking of Lear's Fool, King Lear's Fool, right? The jester who has privilege. You have that moment where your mind stops and in that space is possibility, right? And the best poetry does that for us. What about letting go of emotionally charged memories, you know, stuff that has happened a good while ago and yet when we're at our, when we're sleep deprived, when we're feeling scared, when we're a little bit more vulnerable or we're a bit more agitated or whatever, this is the sort of thing that keeps coming back up.

How do you come to think about letting go of emotionally charged memories from the past? Yeah, well, that's been personally important to me and it's also professionally come squirrely in my wheelhouse. And the short version for me here would be, we can't let go until we let in fully. And so very often when we go back to things is because there is some non-experienced experience that has been trapped in the neural nets of memory that needs to be released. And so the revisiting of that material, sometimes in the frame of a kind of doomed quest, like if only I could do this or that, I'd get finally the blood from the stone. Redemption. Seeking, yeah. That's right. Or redemption, absolution, etc. Exactly. So we tend to go back to it again and

again and again. And so therefore to truly let go, we have to really open and then resource ourselves so we can feel it most fully. But what typically happens when you feel it most fully is it moves through you. You have to be a little careful with the white hot core of trauma. So what I'm saying here is not necessarily true for that because there are certain experiences that once they do get into emotional memory, they are not going to go.

Um, what's around them can change over time, the context, the understanding, the sense of self related to that terrible trauma, the context, the understanding, the sense of self related to that terrible trauma, let's say, you know, can shift and you can become more regulated about not being so hijacked by that memory. But I think realistically for people, sometimes you can get a complete release,

but just sometimes we have to live with it. And then how do we live with it? Well, that's a whole topic, which I think a lot involves letting ourselves turn a corner from it after we've really worked it through. You know, every time we recall that episode, we feel like crap. So we deliberately help ourselves to turn a corner so we don't keep revisiting that episode. That's a piece of truth. But I think so that's, it's hard won wisdom, you know, version of this, another story. So I was a kind of fearful kid and lying there in bed, very active imagination.

As an adult, I was prepping for the psychology license in America where they grill you on things and you have to know about the Rorschach, the ink plots. And so I took a Rorschach to prep for the license exam. I'll reveal something that I hope will not come back to haunt me, which is, so I did the Rorschach with someone who knew me well as a grad student grinding away, parenting young kids, getting a lot of stuff done, late thirties at the time. And then she came to me with the results. She said, are you feeling okay, Rick? Well, I'm busy. I'm doing my dissertation.

I'm trying to get licensed. I got two young kids and I'm the sole provider of my family, but yeah, I'm feeling okay. She said, well, there are some kind of psychotic features here. I was like, what? And she said, well, this is why, because when you looked at the inkblot,

you would give like six different possible images and you could elaborate a lot of why you saw it and all the rest. And that sometimes happens with people who are crazy. And I said, huh, I'm not, she said it also happens with people who have a very rich imagination and are kind of creative and have a lot of access.

At that point I'd done a lot of psychedelics, a lot of inner work, you know, and I'm a performance kind of guy. I'm like, hey, how much can I see? I'm going to see a lot of things. I want to get a high score. So my point is I have a good imagination. So there I was 10 years old in bed scared to death because I was convinced there was a monster under my bed and I could hear little sounds and I was alone and I finally did one of the most the bravest things I've ever done. I kind of screwed up my courage. I said, okay, I'm sick of this. If you're under there, eat my face. And I tucked my head, I leaned over the bed to what was underneath it knowing I could eat my face and just a bunch of dust bunnies under there.

But I had to enter into it. You had to be brave enough to go into it. And I think that's what we have to do sometimes to get a full release from some of our deep material. Mm-hmm. To face it. And I imagine that the experiences that you had in psychedelics probably reinforced that as well. Yeah, exactly right. Some of this is quite intimate to myself. I'd kind of leave it alone

a little bit, but I had a lot of early experiences in psychedelics in which I'd look at a, oh, I don't mind talking about it actually. I'd look at a kind of a screen like a ceiling, a white ceiling and very quickly there would be these demonic devouring faces, bloody teeth, just like, whoa, I didn't like that, you know, and that was fairly recurring. And I mean, And then a year or two or three of that passed with probably half, maybe five to 10 trips during that time, closer to 10. Finally, I was in the desert in California, a place I actually love, Joshua Tree National Park. Highly recommended if you make it to California. And I was staring at a bush with thorns, you know, in the desert there's a lot of thorny bushes. And every thorn was a devouring face coming at me.

And at that point, I just had had enough of it. And I said, okay. And I dove into the face, dove into the devouring faces, demonic devouring, kind of feminine, witchy, bloody, sharp teeth, jagged. And then in that moment, I got a release and realized that that was well, that was where these disowned, pushed down and away parts of myself that were witchy, kind of the opposite of my masculinized logical, Spock-like, top-down, leading with intellect, M.O.

It was like the wild witchy and nice. I was very nice. I'm a nice boy. And this was this disowned part of me. I can feel the shivery in my body right now as I talk about it. And it was disowned, set away. And there was an integration of it in that moment. And ever after, I've never had a nightmare since. Wow. I've had dreams that were a little uncomfortable like someone's trying to get me, but. So yeah, that's another, these are extreme examples

that are heroic, not to praise myself, but just to say to other people, it's noble to step into the pain or to like, go for it it into it. It's noble. It's heroic to do this, to feel it fully. A quick aside, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now, and it just got even better. AG1 Next Gen keeps the same simplicity, one scoop once a day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it. In those trials, AG1 NextGen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times even in healthy adults.

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That's www.drinkag1.com. I love the idea of ordinary victories, sort of mundane successes like that. I've been thinking about these more and more recently, that there's a lot of things that normal and unceremonious and unimpressive and inward and idiosyncratic as well. Like there's so, there's such a part of us that even trying to unpack and explain, which you've very successfully managed to do that, but stuff that's even less grand than that, but you win, you win over this sort of little part of yourself. And I think that, you know, when we're talking about letting go, about dealing with change well, about being brave in the face of uncertainty.

These are, these are things that nobody is going to really pat you on the back for. Like, oh, you dealt with the inbuilt uncertainty of living in a universe that you don't have full control over. Congratulations. Well done. Like everybody has to do that. You just did it. But this time you did it with more grace.

This time you did it with more equanimity. This time you did it more quickly, more deftly. You did it more peacefully. You did it without castigating yourself. You did it without staying up all night ruminating and yeah, winning mundane victories, boring successes, I think is a, a, a, no, we should, we should congratulate ourselves even more for those. Cause the big success is everyone else going to congratulate you for, oh, the

new book was so fantastic. Podcast episode, congratulations on the wedding. It was so beautiful. You looked at, look at how well your kid's doing in school. Like, yeah, you know, like the things, the things that are kind of obvious, but slightly more normal successes all the way up to the Nobel prize and you got the most recent title, all the rest of the stuff, whatever job promotion. Um, yeah, cultivating, uh, reducing down the bar of what constitutes worthy of praise and success,

even if it's just inwardly or maybe outwardly as well. Like, hey, I did this thing today. I had this great, I'll invert you and I'll do story time. So I had this really lovely rancher and wrangler, a guy called Dry Creek Dwayne on the show about last year. He is a older fella from Wyoming, seven kids, old school guy, big beard, permanently got a cigar in his mouth, cowboy hat, old school, old school as fuck. You know, big man, raw mangled hands from ranching and wrangling and picking at horseshoes and stuff for an entire career.

and picking at horseshoes and stuff for an entire career. And he has spent a long time dealing with, I think, quite a sort of classic that generation anger from sort of masculine discontent. And he's found himself at a really sort of beautiful place of peace. And he considers himself sort of the anti grind set bro person. He's very much maybe the answer to your problem is to grab a cigar and sit on the back porch and read a novel and think about it a bit. You know, he's not, here's the notion template that you should use and the five step process that will allow you to track time block the calendar for the

next, he's none of that. And he was explaining this day where there'd been a particularly difficult horse and he was trying to break, domesticate, train this particular animal. And he had got up kind of on the wrong side of the bed that day. He wasn't feeling it, but he had to go to work and this is what he does. So apparently he went and he saw him not in his best state, horse, not in their best state either. And he went and he said, he sat down and he just looked at the horse.

The horse was in its stable. He sat down on this stool and he lit up a cigar. He said, I smoked the first cigar. And then I lit up a second cigar, smoked the second cigar and I potted around a little bit. And then I came back and my wife asked, so honey, how was your day? He said, well, I didn't break anything. And that's a success. I just thought that was so wonderful to be able to drop down.

Everybody loves this idea of grand victories, right? We've got this, I think you've, you've referred to it as your one wild and precious life, right? Mary Oliver's quote. Yeah. Um, it's, which is beautiful. And inbuilt in that is this kind of pressure. Oh, I need to make the most of my day.

I need to, I need this, this needs to be done now. Because if I do this now, then I can do something else next after now. And then tomorrow now can also, I can, like, it's almost kind of like a denial of death. In a way, it's like, if only I could fit more life into my life, it wouldn't be like I pushed death further away from me. And inherent in that, in a meritocracy, in a capitalist world, in a world where people are growth minded and they want to achieve a lot and I want to get things done, I want to make, I'm going to fit lots in, there's a pressure to do lots of things in that, and in some ways that's impressive, right?

There are objective differences between walking a hundred meters in a day and walking a hundred miles in a day. There are, you know, there are differences in the experience, but on the flip side, if you can be the sort of person like Dwayne, for whom walking a hundred meters is able to generate for you the same level of content and wellbeing as for someone else takes a hundred miles, who's got it better? Because yeah, and I, I didn't know. I just think it's a really nice redress to the more, more, more hungry ghost type

approach that people have for achievement. And that's not to say, you know, you're looking at a poster child for trying to make things happen and agency and autonomy and all that sort of stuff. But I certainly know that when I play with things with grace and ease and sort of more, I don't grip things so tightly, nonetheless attached to the outcomes of stuff that it doesn't really matter because I'm happy no matter what, you know, it's an enjoyable experience because so much of the unenjoyability of the thing is the gripping of it. And on top of that, the outcomes, oddly enough, in some weird circular way,

the outcomes tend to be better as well. The outcomes, oddly enough, in some weird circular way, the outcomes tend to be better as well. Um, so yeah, I, I've been thinking an awful lot about, um, it's another, another fork on this. I was talking to a friend, Alex, we did this huge four hour long episode a couple of weeks ago and, uh, people really liked it. And there was this bit in there that I really want to work on. I'm going to try and write about it over the next few months and

maybe do an essay on it. I think a lot of people are quite ashamed about taking pleasure in simple things. It sounds lovely. It sounds like a lovely thing to do. Just a cup of coffee and a fresh morning or whatever it might be. But there's a little bit, at least in my mind of really this, this is what considers, this is what constitutes like impressiveness to you, how, how pitiful, how shameful, how unimpressive is life for you to only need what you should be

conquering mountains and, and, and forging, pioneering forward and doing all of this stuff. It's that sort of masculine drive for more this again, very sort of 21st century Western, I want it, want it, want it, I'm going to build it. Um, and the more that I kind of see, huh, I actually quite like simple things. I actually don't need to be all that impressive. And in the same way as Dwayne saying, well, I didn't make anything worse today. I didn't break anything. And for him to go to bed and consider, that was a good day.

I think cultivating that same thing, being able to get the pleasure from a hundred meters that you could from a hundred miles, being able to feel a sense of satisfaction in the boring and the mundane successes in overcoming that little part of yourself, even just once today that you did. I just think, yeah, that's a lovely, uh, a lovely redress to the hungry ghost that sort of sits inside of all of us. Wow. Really?

Wow, really wow. And you're nudging me to reflect on the relationship, the linkage between identifying with a heroic narrative that is your ego ideal that you're identifying with. Everything has to be big, big, big lights. And the difficulty in actually feeling deep feelings of rejection, failure and defeat. If we become more able to tolerate experiences of in the sandbox rejection or more broadly,

defeat, failure, they won, they scored on me. I will never get justice here. They scored. I was once walking down a hallway in high school. I went to a large high school in California, 2700 people. And I was just kind of spaced out and as I'm walking past all these kids, you know, transition period, somebody punched me hard in the stomach. I just walked on by and I was not a kid who fought a lot. I didn't have active enemies. Someone just clocked me for no reason.

Bam. And I'm like stunned. I turn around a couple of seconds are gone by, I see a sea of moving heads going down the hallway. I'll never score on that kid. I'll never get justice for that boy, I'm sure, who punched me. So do we accept that? But if we can accept rejection and failure and defeat and not being special, then we get less hijacked by and we have less ruminating about this heroic narrative of the magnificence

that our life must be and anything short of which is not acceptable. Matthew 10 How do you think about the role of humor and sort of play with this? You know, I get the sense that the sort of people who listen to your show with your son, which everyone needs to go and check out being well is, is awesome. I just had a, a Dr. Scott Islas on the depression guy, um, who I learned about from you guys. He's so good. Um, I imagine lots of people listen to your show. I certainly know lots of people that listen to my show.

They're serious people that earnest, you know, they're like, they want to get, I want to do stuff, I want to make my impact here and I want to, I really want things to happen. But there's a kind of brittle fragility that comes along with seriousness as well, if that makes sense. And, uh, I wonder, you know, in the little armory of things that we have to play with, you know, this, ah, I'm okay with uncertainty. That's one of the lessons from today, like sitting in the thinking in super positions, right? I'm going to allow these worlds.

I don't need to collapse this down. The don't know mind. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe so. Okay. That's lovely. That's a nice area here.

Um, I wonder how you come to think about sort of the role of, uh, absurdity, humor? Well, for myself, yeah, I playfulness. So one detail is that research shows that little juvenile rats who play with each other have more neurotrophic factors in their brain, which promote new connections. So play is actually a factor of learning. And so if you care about learning broadly, you know, development, healing, like what happens in therapy, playfulness is a real aid. People listen, let's say to you or to me, and it's nice in the moment. And is there some interest in an ROI? Not out of needing to have this magnificent narrative of constant growth in your life, but just plain common sense.

Yeah, I'd like to have some kind of lasting gain from listening, let's say to you or to me. And so playfulness promotes that kind of learning. And I think back on how many therapy sessions I did with people, they were so somber, so inert and numb, there's no playfulness and they didn't get anything out of it. While they're nodding their heads, oh yeah doc, that's right. No lasting learning. So play really

promotes lasting learning on the one hand. On the other hand, you're kind of raising the question about certain ways of being that maybe in particular cultures or gender socialized types types are devalued like earnestness. You know, it's sort of embarrassing to be really earnest and sincerely earnest, not just in some problematically ponderous or pompous earnestness, but a kind of vulnerable sincerity in which there's a wanting the best, please sir, may I have another bowl?

Think of the risks. A little character. There's no escape valve. There's no escape valve. There's no get out of jail freak out. Your reveal. Yeah, exactly. You're seeing, you're seeing there's no, I didn't keep half a foot out of this situation.

This is me opening up. Now you are pegged to this stake with the risks that are entailed. This is what I wanted. And this is really what I wanted. And I really wanted it. And I said it. Yeah.

And to me, to go back to, I love what you said about really appreciating small victories so forth, to go back to the nobility. Um, and I kind of relate to that in a early Buddhist frame of these are the truths for noble beings, not noble by birth, but noble by effort. There's a nobility in letting yourself feel deeply or be revealed deeply. Like to go back to that maybe conversation at dinner that went bad to say, you know, at the end of the day, I was there in good faith. Maybe I was unskillful, I said this or that, there's lessons to learn for the future.

I was there in good faith. I was there with my whole heart, deep down. And I was brave enough to be earnest and sincere enough to kind of lay it out. Like, yeah, take pride in that, healthy pride. You know, appreciate yourself for that. The heroism, the nobility in that and the uncommonness of that. I mean, to me, that's, that's where real bravery is.

That's really cool. Yeah. I love that. I get the sense as well that this is one of the reasons why allowing yourself to be puppeted by your own fear to not show up. There's an equivalent in the world of content creation, which is audience capture, so continuing to throw red meat that is predictably going to be liked by the audience, but doesn't necessarily resonate with you as a person.

It's actually, you know, the word grifter, have you, do you know, familiar with that? Right. Okay. So I asked, it's a word that gets thrown around on the internet a lot of all manner of different individuals. And I genuinely was interested. I said, Hey, for the people that use the word grifter, what is the best working definition of what that word means for you?

Because it's just, it's just kind of a slight, it's a slur. It's a calling. Yeah. for you, because it's just kind of a slight, it's a slur, it's a calling, yeah, it's just a very odd nebulous term that people tend to use for someone that you think might not be fully authentic. I mean, come on, like, let's get a bit more specific. And somebody said, and I actually really appreciated this, and this is currently my working definition, somebody promoting a product or staking a claim that they wouldn't use or don't believe themselves. So it's here is what I'm doing out front.

This is what I believe in private behind as I, huh, that's okay. I can work with that. That's like a functional definition, I think for what people think they mean when they say that word. And my point is with the audience capture thing, it's you not being you. It's you trying to be manipulative in a way. It's this sort of meta you, it's playing persona, not person, it's projecting, et cetera.

And that conversation at the restaurant that was ungainly or didn't go the way that you wanted, the difference between you showing up with vulnerable sincerity, or just straight up sincerity. Like this is me and this is the position that I hold. And I said it, all right, could I have said it with a little bit more deftness? Yeah, probably. And you know, like I could have delivered it.

So, but I tried, like I gave it a crack and that was actually what I meant. I said what I meant and that, you know, I can take some lessons from it. The difference between that and the lessons that you can take from that situation and a situation where you didn't say what you meant and you were still rejected is the kind of the last bastion of, well, I tried and you know, fuck, like I guess, you know, you can kind of laugh it off. There's, there is a, there is an ability to do humor in that, but where is the humor that you find that I compromised myself to try and be somebody else and that was rejected.

There's, there's a, an additional level of difficulty in getting past it. And I think it's just a nice justification for, yeah, showing up sincerely, showing up earnestly, um, uh, you know, sort of playful seriousness, I think is, huh, why I have this additional level of protection for all of the fear that you are going to have by being seen. And by this being me and by a rejection of that, not being a rejection of a projection, but a rejection of a person. And that person happens to be myself.

What you do gain in that is, well, at least I was myself, at least this weird character I tried to play, this role that I tried to perform wasn't rejected. Cause to be honest, like that's tried to perform wasn't rejected. Because to be honest, like that's kind of more pitiful than the other way around. CB That's so true. I'm thinking the ways in which playfulness is a great aid to aspiration without attachment. And if we're incredibly, not just earnest, but if we're self-righteous or pompous about our pursuit of even a wholesome goal, that's not so good. But to be playful about it, I think about, I made a play using the word for a woman in my late 20s. I was part of this whole personal growth context,

kind of half a cult. I won't name it now. And so everybody was really deep in each other's business, kind of all knowing each other. And there was a woman in a relationship with like the head dude. So I was like a layer or two down from alpha and she was with Alpha Boy.

And I fully played, went for it. It was public, it was known. I wrote these nice little notes. I told them what I was doing. And I went full out. And I didn't know if I would get it. I didn't. And she was relatively kind and it was okay.

But at the end of the day, I felt good about myself. That I, little Ricky, kind of the dork, had still stuck my neck out and made a play for a particular woman. And I feel great. I went for it, right? If I hadn't gone for it, I'd be thinking, Kurt, you wussy, you should have gone for it.

Why not? Take the risk. And, but what enabled it is there was a playfulness about it. It was like an improbable goal. And I could be playful about it, which helped me be less attached to the outcome. My friend, Charlie did a wonderful video breakdown

of Jordan Peterson's most recent debate against 20 atheists. It was on the Jubilee YouTube channel. So it's a series called Surrounded and it's doing huge numbers. It's really cool. Kind of like speed dating for debate, I guess, is kind of the way that I would put it.

What a format. Yeah, it's really fun. We used to call them a fishbowl. You're in the fishbowl and you've got 10 or 20 people around you, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And each person comes in individually and you do a bit and then they move on and so on and so forth.

And he does this comparison between Jordan when he did that Cathy Newman interview in 2019. So what you're saying is that really famous one in front of the purple background and this most recent one. And Charlie is very interested in charisma and he's talking about likability, being into playfulness and he's very deep into self-work and mindfulness too. So I think that sort of percolates through.

And he has this, he just compares them side by side. And I'd never even thought of this because uh, because the way that people change, especially over a long period, it's been six years, nearly seven years since that first debate came out and then there's this new one and if someone changes slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, you kind of, you don't really notice, right? It's like, when did you get fat? It's like, I don't know, one day, one day at a time. Um, and he just makes a really lovely distinction between Jordan in that first one, where Cathy

sort of pointing her finger at him and saying, so what you're saying is this thing. And he goes, no, I'm not saying that at all. I think that's silly. I think that's really, I think that's, I do, I think that's really silly. And you just have this, it's keeping him regulated. It feels more casual. It's much easier to get on side. It's much more likable approach.

Um, now he's standing his ground, but he's standing his ground in a sort of, you know, really fluid sort of Bruce Lee kind of way. Um, and then you look at the approach in this most recent Jubilee debate. And it's very rigid. You know, it's, it's, um, precisely what do you mean by the term that you just said is sort of definitional a lot of the time and, uh, You know, it's precisely what do you mean by the term that you just said is sort of definitional a lot of the time. And you know, Jordan is significantly more, he's been through the wringer, I think over

the last few years, which very well, I imagine would cause any normal sane person to come out the other side and have the armor up. And he's now deep into his religion and this is talking about religion. So, you know, maybe there's some real tacit differences between the first debate and the second one. But I think that the example still holds, which is the version of him that was able to be Bruce Lee, playful, you know, he looked like he was having a better time during that debate. And certainly, I think came across in a more sort of likable manner. And maybe there's some topics that it's just hard to do that on and perhaps faith is one of those ones that people don't feel like they can be as playful or equivocating with. But yeah, when you look those two different worlds, you think like the one that's, you know, I think that's silly.

I really do. I think, and you can see what's the sort of memory everybody knows if even in the moment, if you're able to just drop into the, the, the insult gets pinged across the table at work or whatever it is, and is opposed to trying to clap back or supposed to trying to break the fourth wall and make it really serious, or as opposed to taking it personally and allowing it to ride up, if you just giggle and go, ah, that's silly, you've been silly. And you just, or whatever, whatever little sort of neutralizing retort comes,

I think, I don't know, when I think about the sort of memory it would make for me, in the moment you're able to begin to sort of reframe the rumination trap that you might get caught in later that day when you start to think about how it went. It's like, yeah, I dealt with that with grace. That was like, it was ease and, you know, playfulness. I think people these days, there's so much phoniness and griff, just like you say. And I go back to my early days in the whole human potential scene in LA in the 1970s, where you'd

go to a party and you'd think you're having a deep conversation with someone about, you know, the inner world and the psyche, and you began to realize that they were setting up a pitch to enroll you in their workshop. And you'd suddenly realize that you had felt like you were a thou to their I in Martin Buber's construction of three kinds of relationships, I, thou, I, it and it, it. You felt like a thou to their I, and then you realize you were being seduced. You're going to have to dig deeper into the I

and the it and the. Oh, okay. Slow that down. It's a very cool model. One of the really useful cool models. Martin Buber said essentially the three kinds of relationships, I and thou, where you're the I and to you they are a thou. They are a being in their own right. There could be a differential of role. You could be a police officer

and you are now arresting a suspect and putting them in jail, but they are still a thou to you in the context of your roles. You are not exploiting them as a means to your own ends. Then there's IIT, where the other person is there. You might be superficially polite. You don't care about their inner world at all. They're irrelevant. You just want to get the answer to your customer service question, or you want them to get over to fix your plumbing. That's it, I it. And then it it is bodies in space, like in an elevator passing each other. That's a very cool framework. And it raises a question, can you thou all beings? Can you approach, can you enter into interactions

with people, even with your roles as a thou to your I? And can you be aware of the subtle movement into itting them? And like you and I right here, I feel like we're an I thou, you know, we're doing our thing, you're moving us along, I have a role, you have a role, but we're like beings. We're not exploiting each other narcissistically as extensions of ourself. And then there's something also to realize, do you feel like a thou to their eye or do you gradually start to feel like an it?

When you're on the receiving end of a grift, which is a con, a con, a grifter is a con man or woman, whatever being, then you feel like you're being aided by them. And in this world in which there is so much with media and consumerism and the US, I'm sure the epicenter of a lot of the worst of this, LA especially, where I grew up,

it's about phoniness, it's about pretense. If you have 300 best friends, you have no real friends, for example. In that context, including in which now with AI, it's so easy to manufacture fakes, deep fakes included. I think increasingly there's a longing in us for the realness that we evolved in. In our small bands, it was real. It was really real. You know, eye to eye, skin to skin, touch to touch, life or death, every day, real. And so we long for the real. And so when we find the real,

when we feel that a person is, as Carl Rogers put it, congruent, that what's really true about them on the inside is what they are aware of, they are mindfully self-aware, and is what they're showing to the outside. When those three circles line up that are congruent, when we encounter that in other people that these days is the coin of the realm because it's rare. It's a lovely point. Um, I've heard, I heard this term a couple of months ago, uh, somebody trying to speed run authenticity. Uh, and it was in relation to online content creation.

And basically, how do you growth hack relatability? What is that? And that's like a meta-grift, right? It's a grift that appears to not be a grift or whatever. What are the constituent parts of being an, of creating an I, thou relationship and how do I reverse engineer that to make an I, it relationship into an I, thou relationship? Um, which is, which is terrifying and funny, but, uh, you know, I, I, I really

agree, um, and that increasingly is. Especially with where my life's gone over the last four or five years, I mean, since we spoke nearly seven years ago, you kind of need your detection radar needs to become ever more finely attuned because as you ascend in whatever notoriety or the, um, impressiveness or the skillfulness of the, of the people that you're hanging around with, you, you need to be able to become ever more attuned to smarter and smarter tricks. Um, and fortunately, I think to fly the flag for everybody should be a club promoter for a couple of months at one point in their life, which is still a campaign that I haven't managed

to get off the ground yet. But I think being exposed to a very high volume of people who are largely unencumbered, maybe they've had a little bit to drink, maybe they're out with their friends, they're not really thinking too much. You learn a lot about human nature by watching people in queues. Very strange. It's this odd liminal space where they don't really have much to do. And I spent, you know, I met a million people in queues, uh, across my career.

That's super cool that you're naming that and doing what clips from that, you know, people in queues as it were. It was just, that would have been great if that was the case, but I was just watching, you know, I'd be seeing a hundred to 518 to 24 year old, 28 year old kids talking and jostling for position and guys would be in front of girls and they'd be sort of, how are we going to talk to the one behind us? Or they'd be, some people would be impatient. They'd be thinking about how they're going to get in.

Some people would feel slighted because they were waiting longer than they wanted. Some people were really, you know, whatever, all the rest of the stuff. And yeah, as you continue to sort of whatever, ascend up through that, the games that people are able to play in order to be able to access that, become more deft. And it's strange to think about the people that you like the most are the ones that you see them and you think that they see you. It's like, huh, like here we are, two people. And it's oddly really simple to actually get to that stage.

And yeah, the people that I find myself hanging around with, with, you know, a lot of, an increasing number of options here in Austin, big scene of stuff that's going on. And, and, and the people that I like to hang around with are often not like the most impressive ones, not to say that my friends aren't impressive, but, uh, it's, it's just people that I'm like, ah, yeah, like here we are. You're seeing me, I'm seeing you. There's not really anything else that's going on here. And that's like an adventure, right?

And it feels like a real adventure as opposed to, I don't know, like an allegory of the cave shadows on the wall type projection. Yeah, so much about that. I think it's okay and it's necessary to select skillfully Okay. And it's necessary to select skillfully what is genuinely true in you to present to the world, depending on certain situations. So, for example, if I'm in a presenting a talk to a bunch of scientists or clinicians, I'll select what's authentically real in me that's appropriate to that setting. That's really different from selecting what's real in me when I'm hanging out with our kids or adult kids.

It's not the totality of what's real inside me, but it's genuinely what's inside of me. So I think on the one hand, there's a total place for that. On the other hand, I think that it's really useful to be aware of how we get kind of identified with and captured by our increasingly polished act in the world and, you know, track that. One thing that has helped me about all that is to realize that it's in my best interest to be less preoccupied with myself and to be less focused on the controlling or influencing

what's happening in the minds of others in regard to me. The more that I realized that it's really good for me to kind of like relax that and just accept the risk of rejection and failure, right? To go back to all that in the sandbox. Then it gets a lot easier to just like let go, you know, release and just not know who you are. Where do you come to think, bravery and courage has sort of been a bit of a

theme today. Now, how do you come to think about cultivating that someone who thinks, I feel like I'm being a little bit more cowardly or I've been cowardly my entire life more, more so than I would like to be. Um, how do you come to think about where courage, bravery, sincerity comes from? Well, let's talk about interpersonal courage. So I've known a lot of people, men and women alike, who are physically brave or in business settings, who will move into alpha roles and be strong in those regards, but interpersonally, they're scared

and interpersonal cowardice, if you will. And so in that area, I think one is helpful to realize, oh, I would like to be more that way. I would like to be more willing to risk dreaded experiences of defeat, failure, rejection, being laughed at. And there are exaggerated expectations of how horrible that would be from my childhood when it was horrible or I saw it being horrible for other people. Humiliation in high school is a really big deal. Most of the time these days in adults, like you say something dumb, they give you a bad review,

the river moves on, 10 minutes later, nobody thinks about it, it's gone, right? But we anticipate it being horrible. So you might say to yourself, wow, it would be good for me to be more willing to risk that dreaded experience to tolerate that. So now you know what you're doing. Um, to tolerate that. So now you know what you're doing. That helps right off the top. That's executive function, top down. Okay.

I'm going to expand my comfort zone for, for what I'm willing to tolerate, which means pushing back the bars of my invisible cage and how free I'm willing to be in life. That's really helpful. And then, um, what I find is what works again and again is to actually take those risks and occasionally feel what you dread. Feel it. You release it and then you realize I'm still okay. It moved through me. It doesn't defeat me.

I'm not consumed by it. I'm brave. I'm noble. I'm heroic. Yay me. I got through to the other side. And then as you do that, suddenly now your window of tolerance, the bars of the cage continue to expand. That's been a big

thing. And then I think there's this other incredibly cool man. I love how we talk about this stuff, by the way, is so much, it's unusually cool. So I think everyone ought to listen to Chris's show. Awesome. Toothpick and all. Awesome. Okay. So there's this whole thing in learning broadly, including personal growth learning, where you generalize from one domain to another.

You cross over. So as an example, I got into rock climbing early 20s. I experienced myself as kind of an unmanly, unathletic person because of my own background. My dad was a cowboy, like the cowboy guy you talked about. He grew up on a ranch in North Dakota, but he was a manly man, but he never did sports with me. Never threw a ball with me. This was not how it was. We were on the ranch, we'd go horseback riding, but we lived in suburbia. So, you know, he didn't throw a ball. Anyway, rock climbing. So I would start doing hardcore, scary stuff that would boost my sense of being an okay dude in that way. And tons of women climb,

they get a lot of value from it in their ways as well. That said, what I would do then is when I was with someone who was being domineering, pompous in relationships, some guy says, no, man, you gotta do this or that. Or I was maybe scared about entering a group. I would recall the emotional memory like you did kind of early on in the show here where you tuned into the

felt sense in your body of ruminating. Well, I would tune into the felt sense of climbing, pulling over an overhang, being determined, problem-solving, why we have to crack, what it feels like. And I would access that. I would tune into that for a few seconds to mobilize that inner sense that was strong and brave and courageous in that domain, right? I'd activate those circuits of courage in that area of rock climbing. And then I'd be much more prepared to deal

with this really kind of aggressive, assertive asshole. That would be, I don't know, would you ever try that? You know, cross domain thing? Yeah. I mean, the confidence that you get from, for instance, the live shows that I've been doing the last few years, I've got another tour around the US and Canada toward the back end of this year. It really does make, if you've stood in front of a few thousand people with nothing except for a microphone and it's just a patient eyes, maybe

impatient eyes staring at you. Um, like what else is there? You know, is one of the biggest, one of the biggest fears that, that everybody's got and you go, huh, like I did that thing and it went, no need to, was I okay? It kind of went well. That's pretty good. Um, and yeah, when you come across that, it's like, okay, so really is this the thing that you're worried about worried about this conversation you're worried about, like you did that, like, can you not remember what that felt like?

Yeah, that's right. Oh, okay. Yeah, that was good. That was a, that was a thing. Remember what that's right. Oh, okay. Yeah, that was good. That was a, that was a thing. Remember what that felt like, not just remember what it was. Then you're in your head. You're just seeing the image of it, but you're calling up the somatic markers, the body.

Yeah. What it felt like. Yeah. Rick, you're great, dude. So are you. I, uh, every time we get to speak, I didn't know what we were even going to talk about today. I had a bunch of stuff in my head and then you started soliloquying. So, um, where should people go?

I, your courses, your online courses are great. The podcast, great. You got the book. Thank you. Thank you. Send people in the right direction on the internet. Well, uh, so people can find me and just Google my name. And by the way, I appreciate that.

And I'm really startled also that you're doing some kind of live thing. I'd love to know more about that. And I would really direct people your way, certainly. I think I would really just talk about, briefly, is this global compassion coalition that I started with some friends and colleagues a couple of years ago, that's really growing. And the basic idea is if we're going to actually continue the progress that humanity has made over the last 10, 100,000 years, and especially if we're going to tackle things like global warming, poverty, children dying of hunger, big stuff that is rooted in ongoing systems that are unjust,

or big stuff that is rooted in ongoing systems that are unjust, we need to grow larger and larger collectives, collaborations, coalitions, alliances, partnerships, motivated by compassion, which is a response to suffering that wants to do something about it. So that's the idea, global compassion coalition across many differences and divisions, at least one thing in common. Yeah, people are hurting needlessly and we need to become big enough to be strong enough to push long overdue systemic change to happen. So people can go to globalcompassioncoalition.org. It's free to join. It's a moral stance and there's some nice benefits for yourself along the way for being part of this cause, which I'm trying to enroll Chris Hemp.

Ah, we need to, we need to talk about that. All right. Well, I, I already want to talk to you again. I'm already ready for the, for the next one. It's strange. I was saying before the friends that I, I like spending the most time with are the ones that they feel like they're there. And, uh, even across the internet, there's not many people, this is close to the highest praise that I could spending the most time with are the ones that they feel like they're there. And even across the internet, there's not many people,

this is close to the highest praise that I could give you. There's not many people that are able to regulate my nervous system virtually. And yet there's something about your demeanor that's able to do it. So I hope that we've managed to give people 90 units of regulation today as well. Lovely, lovely. With you. I appreciate you, man. Until next time, Rick. Yeah.