00:00:00- You're in a very different place now
00:00:01to when you started doing your thing online.
00:00:05What's the unifying thread?
00:00:08Is there one between sort of all of this stuff
00:00:11or do you see it as different Charlies?
00:00:12How do you come to sort of construct the narrative
00:00:15of what your interests have been
00:00:16and your personal growth over the last decade and a bit?
00:00:19- Sure.
00:00:20The terror was in not having a thread.
00:00:22So there was a time about three years ago
00:00:25where I could not form a story that connected
00:00:28who I had been in my 20s to who I was becoming in my 30s.
00:00:32And I was thinking about this.
00:00:33I've heard you talk about the lonely chapter
00:00:35where you go from I'm just blending in
00:00:37to I'm gonna take control of my life
00:00:39and I'm gonna dial in these optimizing things.
00:00:40I'm gonna start my business, get in shape,
00:00:42eat the right food, et cetera.
00:00:43I discovered a second lonely chapter
00:00:46which is when you bottom out on the optimizing thing
00:00:50and your friends are still very much in that optimized zone.
00:00:54And I did not know where to go,
00:00:55but I just knew that it wasn't working.
00:00:57- Wow.
00:00:58- So the common thread for me
00:00:59was that there was this problem in my life
00:01:02that started with I'm too shy, nobody wants to talk to me.
00:01:06And you start off in victim consciousness,
00:01:07which is this is just who I am
00:01:08and I will just deal with this for the rest of my life.
00:01:11You read the game, which is what I did.
00:01:12You have this breakthrough, read Dale Carnegie,
00:01:15read all these other guys and go, oh my gosh,
00:01:17I can change my behavior, get different results.
00:01:20But then once I had all the different results,
00:01:23which was I was 30 years old,
00:01:25had this business that I dreamed of,
00:01:26the girlfriend that I'd imagined myself dating,
00:01:29bunch of friends, money was coming in.
00:01:31There's most cliche thing happened,
00:01:34which is there was an emptiness
00:01:36that I could not pinpoint or explain
00:01:38and things I started unconsciously breaking things
00:01:42because I didn't know where to go from there.
00:01:46So to answer your question, the thread has been,
00:01:49I try to attend to the greatest problem in my life
00:01:52and figure out who I can learn from to solve it.
00:01:55- What does breaking things look like?
00:01:58- It looks like I'm in the business that I love,
00:02:01that I dreamed of.
00:02:02One day it was like, if I could just make $2,000 a month,
00:02:05live in Latin America and do work that I found meaningful,
00:02:09that's the dream.
00:02:10And I hit that and then I moved the goalposts
00:02:12and I moved the goalposts and all of a sudden I'm complaining
00:02:15and I go, I have to make one video a week.
00:02:17Three years prior was I get to do this
00:02:20and it became so annoying.
00:02:23These people are asking me and I have to hit
00:02:26all these targets that I'd set for myself
00:02:27to surpass views and all sorts of things.
00:02:29I started having issues in my friendships.
00:02:32I started having issues in different kinds of relationships.
00:02:35And I did not know that what was happening,
00:02:38I would say it's like my soul was waking up.
00:02:41I had no concept of a soul, I wasn't a religious person,
00:02:44but the lack of emotional and spiritual nourishment
00:02:49that I'd allowed myself to experience for the last decade plus
00:02:52had caught up with me is what happened.
00:02:54- Was the success and the pursuit materially antithetical
00:03:02to spiritual connection?
00:03:08- No, that's the tragedy, right?
00:03:11- I didn't need to sacrifice one to get the other.
00:03:13- I had it, it was, I think the temptation is
00:03:16when you have unresolved emotional issues,
00:03:20which I think we all do from childhood.
00:03:22And you've spoken to people about trauma, I know,
00:03:24and the ways in which we have these events in our past
00:03:28that happen and we make vows to ourself
00:03:30that I will never experience that again.
00:03:32And then our entire life bends around
00:03:34not having that particular experience again.
00:03:36And so we all have these unconsciously in our lives.
00:03:39And I started off with this business that was,
00:03:41it was just it, it was, I was learning in every video.
00:03:44I made this Donald Trump video.
00:03:45I learned so much in doing it and people liked it.
00:03:48I had both, I was filling myself up and helping the world
00:03:51and making money.
00:03:53And then that people pleaser kicks in.
00:03:55And then that you could be doing better kicks in.
00:03:58And it became, I have to top the last thing that I did,
00:04:01which was never the early motivation.
00:04:03The early motivation was always,
00:04:05how can I solve my own problem
00:04:06and help people that are like me?
00:04:08But it devolved into, can I have another video
00:04:13that is better than the one before?
00:04:14Can I make more money this month
00:04:16than I did the prior month?
00:04:16And that endless loop became deeply depressing to exist.
00:04:21- Yeah, well, when you are at the start of your journey,
00:04:29you have all of the hope that somewhere on the path
00:04:34from the bottom of the mountain to the top of it,
00:04:37you will find a thing that fills the void
00:04:39that you're trying to fix.
00:04:41But when you get to the top of the mountain,
00:04:43you've achieved all of the stuff and the void's still there.
00:04:45You go, oh, fuck.
00:04:49And this is, have you heard me
00:04:50do my unteachable lessons essay?
00:04:53- I may have, but please.
00:04:56- Okay, so this is the most robust.
00:05:00I chat a lot of shit, right?
00:05:02I come up with lots and lots of ideas and insights
00:05:05and stuff like that.
00:05:06Some of them are more scalable
00:05:10and like replicable than others.
00:05:12This is maybe like the most robust of any of them
00:05:16and it just keeps coming up.
00:05:17And I think it's because of my age and where I'm at
00:05:20and where my friends are at.
00:05:21People like you or Dr. K or whoever it is.
00:05:24This is unteachable lessons.
00:05:26- Hit me.
00:05:27- No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is
00:05:30going to be for us to find out for ourselves,
00:05:33we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings
00:05:35from our elders, songs, literature, historical catastrophes,
00:05:38public scandals, and instead think some version of,
00:05:41yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me.
00:05:46We decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way
00:05:49over and over again.
00:05:51Unfortunately, they all seem to be the big things too.
00:05:54It's never insights about how to put up level shelves
00:05:56or charmingly introduce yourself at cocktail party.
00:05:59Instead, we spend most of our lives learning firsthand
00:06:02the most important lessons that the previous generation
00:06:05already warned us about.
00:06:06Things like money won't make you happy,
00:06:08fame won't fix your self worth.
00:06:10You don't love that pretty girl she's just hot
00:06:12and difficult to get.
00:06:13Nothing is as important as you think it is
00:06:15when you're thinking about it.
00:06:16You will regret working too much.
00:06:18Worrying is not improving your performance.
00:06:20All your fears are a waste of time.
00:06:21You should see your parents more.
00:06:22You'll be fine after the breakup
00:06:24and be grateful that you did it.
00:06:25It's perfectly okay to cut toxic people out of your life.
00:06:28Even reading this list back,
00:06:30I'm rolling my eyes at how fucking trite it is.
00:06:33These are all basic bitch obvious insights
00:06:36that everybody has heard before.
00:06:38But if they're so basic, why does everyone so reliably
00:06:41fall prey to them throughout our lives?
00:06:43And if they're so obvious,
00:06:45why do people who have recently become wealthy or famous
00:06:48or lost a parent or gone through a breakup
00:06:50start to proclaim these facts
00:06:51with the renewed grandiose ceremony
00:06:53of someone who's just gone through religious revelation?
00:06:57It's also a very contentious point to say on the internet.
00:07:00If you interview a billionaire
00:07:02who says that all his money didn't make him happy
00:07:04or a movie star who said her fame felt like a prison,
00:07:07the internet will tear them apart for being ungrateful
00:07:09and out of touch.
00:07:10So not only do we refuse to learn these lessons,
00:07:14we even refuse to hear the message
00:07:16from those warning us about them.
00:07:18Even more than that, for every one of these,
00:07:21if I think a bit deeper, I can recall a time,
00:07:24including right now, where I convinced myself
00:07:27that I'm the exception to the rule,
00:07:29that my particular mental makeup or life situation
00:07:32or historical wounds or dreams for the future
00:07:35render me immune to these lessons being applicable.
00:07:38No, no, no, my unique inner landscape would be fixed
00:07:42by skirting around the most well-known wisdom of the ages.
00:07:45No, no, no, I can thread this needle properly.
00:07:48Watch me dance through the minefield,
00:07:50avoid all the trip wires that everybody else kicks,
00:07:53and then you kick one.
00:07:55And you share a knowing look with somebody else,
00:07:58the kind that can only occur between two people
00:08:00who have been hurt in exactly the same way,
00:08:03and a voice in the back of your mind will say,
00:08:05"I told you so."
00:08:06Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:08:09(breathing deeply)
00:08:12Yeah.
00:08:13(laughing)
00:08:15Yes.
00:08:17So I've wrestled with this,
00:08:20'cause you close with, "I told you so,"
00:08:22and I actually think that is a part of the trap,
00:08:26which is you're not supposed to make the same mistakes
00:08:29that everybody else makes.
00:08:30You're supposed to listen to your elders.
00:08:32And what I've seen is that it's kind of like grades.
00:08:34Like, you're not supposed to skip counting on your fingers
00:08:37to jump to mental math.
00:08:40You are supposed to bump your head.
00:08:42You are not supposed to listen to other people tell you
00:08:44that it hurts to bump your head
00:08:46or burn your hand on the stove.
00:08:47As much as it hurts to have done,
00:08:49I think there's something beautiful about the process.
00:08:51And part of the most difficult thing for me
00:08:53was that I kept beating myself up
00:08:55for exactly the reason that you were talking about.
00:08:56Why didn't you foresee it?
00:08:57Everyone told me this was gonna happen, right?
00:08:59Why didn't I catch it?
00:09:00Such an idiot.
00:09:01So there's a model that is, it's not uniquely mine,
00:09:04but it helps me understand it,
00:09:05that I think of as a pyramid,
00:09:07that I think is appropriate here and is somewhat related,
00:09:10which is we start if this is a pyramid at the very top thing,
00:09:14which is with our attention on results.
00:09:17And this is sort of victim mindset,
00:09:18which is to say we're in junior high, high school, wherever,
00:09:22and we go, "Man, I wish I had that girlfriend,"
00:09:23or "I wish people liked me."
00:09:25And we talk with our friends and we pontificate
00:09:26about what we would do if we had $100 million,
00:09:29but we do nothing to make it happen, right?
00:09:32When you leap from that to the lower level,
00:09:35which is foundational to it, which is behavior,
00:09:38you don't get to bring all your friends with you, right?
00:09:40'Cause some of them wanna just stay there,
00:09:41and this is what I think you were talking about
00:09:42with this lonely chapter idea.
00:09:44As you shift into, I'm gonna take action,
00:09:46I'm gonna start going to the gym,
00:09:47I'm gonna start counting calories,
00:09:49I'm gonna start making sure that I do enough work every day,
00:09:52and I'm not just gonna go,
00:09:53"Did I get the result that I want?"
00:09:54I'm gonna go, "How are my inputs, my behavioral inputs?"
00:09:58You lose people, but you gain something,
00:10:00which is, as you focus on this, this stuff, it occurs.
00:10:03It's secondary to that.
00:10:06But then the journey that I think I started
00:10:07probably 10-ish years ago was you have everything you want,
00:10:12and the hole is still there,
00:10:14so you start paying attention to the emotional layer,
00:10:17which is underneath that, because at the action level,
00:10:19it's all about discipline.
00:10:21Don't wanna go to the gym, just do it.
00:10:23Feeling sad, turn it into rage,
00:10:25and make, and propel yourself forward, right?
00:10:28But you start to realize that those corrosive emotions
00:10:31are a type of fuel that just hurts,
00:10:33and you can get all of the actions in place,
00:10:34and all of the results can flow, but you will feel crappy.
00:10:37So you start tending to your emotions.
00:10:39Joe Hudson shows up in your life, right?
00:10:41When the student is ready, teacher appears,
00:10:44and you start sitting with shame,
00:10:45and you start sitting with helplessness,
00:10:47and grief, oh, grief, rage, instead of just anger, right?
00:10:52And so as you get in touch with all of these,
00:10:55your emotional fuel starts to shift.
00:10:57You're taking not exactly the same actions,
00:10:59but you're still taking effective actions,
00:11:01and then over time, your results come back,
00:11:03but there's a dip in between every one of these levels.
00:11:06When you switch from results to actions,
00:11:09you're the loser who's going to the gym and is still skinny.
00:11:11When you switch from actions to emotions,
00:11:13you're the guy whose business is shrinking
00:11:15while everyone else is kicking butt, and why are you lagging?
00:11:18They're having so much fun conquering the world.
00:11:21- And denying how they feel.
00:11:22And yes, and the problem that I did and everybody else does
00:11:25is you try to drag people
00:11:26who don't want to take that journey.
00:11:28So I realized now at each stage,
00:11:31I have been very aggressive with the people closest to me
00:11:36in trying to incentivize and pull them
00:11:38to the level of development that I feel called to,
00:11:40and it's not appropriate.
00:11:41There are people waiting as you achieve these levels,
00:11:44even though it feels like there's not.
00:11:45And I say achieve, that's even a different mentality.
00:11:49But what I'm seeing, and there may be many more beneath this,
00:11:53is I spent years now on the emotional place.
00:11:55And the unlock for that is obviously you have more joy
00:11:58and you can operate from that.
00:12:00But the thing that I have not said before
00:12:02that scares me, I'm afraid to say it,
00:12:05is that there's a level beneath that
00:12:07which is spiritual religious.
00:12:09And it's terrifying to acknowledge
00:12:12that the deepest wound that I've been able
00:12:15to find inside of myself is there.
00:12:17It is a separation from life, a separation from God,
00:12:22a separation from all of these things.
00:12:24And everyone has their own story in the West
00:12:27of how that came to be.
00:12:28But culturally, if you look at us,
00:12:30we are all recent immigrants in America,
00:12:33you especially so, right?
00:12:35There was something going on with our family and our homeland
00:12:38where it was like, it's kind of crappy
00:12:40or it's not working here.
00:12:41We're going to cut ties with our ancestral lands.
00:12:43We're going to cut ties with our extended family.
00:12:45We're going to cut ties with this sense of belonging
00:12:47to a larger community to try
00:12:49to form a better life for ourselves.
00:12:52And so a lot of people, particularly in America,
00:12:54I have found are ancestrally disconnected,
00:12:57spiritually disconnected, disconnected from the land.
00:13:00They found convenient ways to get everything
00:13:01from food to friends to whatever they need.
00:13:04And they can't, myself included,
00:13:07identify the location of the pain,
00:13:10the location of the hole,
00:13:11'cause you would need to have a soul
00:13:13in order to feel that pain.
00:13:15And if you don't have a soul, you just need more stuff,
00:13:19or you just need better behavior,
00:13:20or even you just need to feel better.
00:13:21But as I've dropped into this layer,
00:13:23it's like, oh, the relief, the gift, the joy, the beauty is,
00:13:28I don't even want to sell it too much.
00:13:31It's staggering and humbling and beautiful.
00:13:36And so that's been my arc lately.
00:13:38- Well, Hebermann was not there yesterday.
00:13:41He basically said the same thing.
00:13:43So you're in good company.
00:13:44This God pivot.
00:13:48- The God pivot.
00:13:49(both laughing)
00:13:52- It seems to be reliably happening
00:13:57to people who get to a certain place.
00:14:02So I'm interested in,
00:14:05there's a bunch of ideas that are being mapped here.
00:14:08So I love what you said about the unteachable lessons thing,
00:14:10that it's kind of your job to burn your hand.
00:14:13And the reason that I like the term unteachable lessons,
00:14:15and one bit that's probably missing from that essay
00:14:18is to reassure people that the voice in the back of your head
00:14:21that tells you, I told you so, that's a prick.
00:14:24And you shouldn't be listening to that.
00:14:26The reason that these lessons are unteachable
00:14:29is that nobody learns them.
00:14:31So the fact that you supposedly know
00:14:36that it's going to happen, you disregard it, it happens.
00:14:39That is the lesson.
00:14:41The lesson is that everybody doesn't learn the lessons,
00:14:44if that makes sense.
00:14:45And that should hopefully rid you
00:14:46of at least a little bit of the,
00:14:48I should have told you so shame,
00:14:49you should have known that this thing was going to happen.
00:14:51Okay, that's the first thing, which is great.
00:14:54I love your hierarchy of results,
00:14:59actions, emotions, spirituality,
00:15:02and that at each level as you try and pull somebody through,
00:15:06there is a lonely chapter that comes along for the ride,
00:15:09and there is a pullback in terms of real world results.
00:15:12Because you have moved ever out of outcomes
00:15:16and ever more inward, right?
00:15:20Ever more from the world, from the material
00:15:23to something that's a little bit deeper,
00:15:25a little bit closer to self, a little bit like more central,
00:15:30right, increasingly sort of turning you inside out.
00:15:33And at each level of this that you move through
00:15:36is interesting, for me, a few things come up.
00:15:40First off, the first lonely chapter,
00:15:43which I think is accurate,
00:15:44your friends are gonna leave you behind
00:15:45because of that pivot.
00:15:47There's another side to the lonely chapter too,
00:15:49which is your actions throw into harsh spotlight
00:15:54other people, so the looking glass self, right?
00:15:57That you are observing yourself through the influence
00:16:00and the expectation and the perspective of other people,
00:16:03and they have an incentive for you to not change
00:16:05because it's effortful for me to update my opinion.
00:16:08Charlie's the charisma guy.
00:16:09Like, you know, he's like Russell Brand videos
00:16:12and Donald Trump and like, you know, fucking Robert Downey.
00:16:15Like that's, I know Charlie, Charlie's the charisma guy.
00:16:18Oh, fuck, Charlie's changed.
00:16:21I don't like that.
00:16:22First off, it means that if he can change, I can change.
00:16:25And his change throws my lack of change into harsh spotlight.
00:16:28Also, that's effortful.
00:16:30Go back, can you not be, 'cause I already,
00:16:33I had to do a bit of work to work out who you were.
00:16:35Stop fucking changing, right?
00:16:37Another part is, well, if I really care about Charlie,
00:16:41especially if I'm in a relationship with him
00:16:43and he keeps changing, well, maybe what if one of the bits
00:16:47of change that he does means that he sees something in me
00:16:52that can't come along for the ride?
00:16:54What if his evolution results in a discarding of me
00:16:59as his friend or as his partner or whatever?
00:17:02Well, that's not bad.
00:17:03So the people around you have a lot of incentives
00:17:08to keep you where you are.
00:17:09And this isn't, sometimes it's malicious
00:17:12or, you know, sort of conscious, but for the most part,
00:17:14it's just someone going, please don't abandon me.
00:17:16Like you're changing so much and it's wonderful for you,
00:17:19but like, I feel inferior.
00:17:21I feel insufficient.
00:17:23I feel behind.
00:17:24I have this sort of sense of lack of not enoughness
00:17:27and this fear of abandonment.
00:17:29Please like just, can you not like just any leaks out of us
00:17:33in all of these different ways?
00:17:35So I'll pause there.
00:17:37- Yeah, no, I mean, it makes me,
00:17:39you're not making me sad.
00:17:41I'm reminded of my grief over so many of these.
00:17:44And I'm reminded of, there's the people
00:17:47and the perspective that can often be talked about
00:17:49of people holding us back.
00:17:51But what I look at is the terror of being the one
00:17:54who is changing and recognizing, oh my God,
00:17:57you're staying the same.
00:17:59I'm the one who is forcing our relationship
00:18:02into a new structure.
00:18:03And the shame and pain and grief of that.
00:18:07- I see in you, person who isn't changing,
00:18:09the pain of watching me, person who is changing, change.
00:18:13I might stop changing in order to-
00:18:14- And it's hard for me to be around you.
00:18:16So when you're in a liminal space,
00:18:17and I've seen this many times,
00:18:19when I was in this in-between space
00:18:21of still really wanting material success
00:18:23in a way that just hooked me
00:18:25and also sensing that it was unsatisfying,
00:18:27I would have these days where I'd like start work
00:18:29and then like, oh, get away from me.
00:18:31And so when I sit down with someone
00:18:33who is firmly in that achiever phase
00:18:35and they're rock solid in it,
00:18:37it's more congruent than I am.
00:18:41And I find myself frustrated and angry with their congruence.
00:18:45And so I think this is an interesting way
00:18:47to analyze someone, we don't have to go deep into this,
00:18:49but like a Donald Trump or an Andrew Tate.
00:18:51They are deeply congruent at the level of ego.
00:18:54Like they are fully on their own.
00:18:56And I don't mean this judgmentally, on their own egos side.
00:18:59There's not a waver, there's not a flinch,
00:19:01there's not an anything.
00:19:03When you enter into an in-between paradigm space,
00:19:06you're flinching all over the place.
00:19:08You're not sure.
00:19:09- I'm not certain about this.
00:19:11- I kind of think, what do you guys think?
00:19:12You're testing the waters, will anyone come with me?
00:19:16And so it's very difficult to be around high conviction,
00:19:18highly congruent people in a different stage
00:19:21that is particularly a stage that you're coming from
00:19:23when you're in that thing.
00:19:24And so I look back and go, I had to internally
00:19:27and sometimes externally demonize people
00:19:31that I had been close to
00:19:32because they were external representations
00:19:35of the thing that I was growing out of.
00:19:37- You were trying to shed this.
00:19:39- Not even trying, I wish I was trying to stop sharing.
00:19:42It was happening at this point, I couldn't undo it.
00:19:46That was the most frustrating part.
00:19:48I was like, if I could go back, I would.
00:19:50- A quick aside, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish,
00:19:54your testosterone levels might be the problem.
00:19:55They play a huge role in your energy,
00:19:57your focus and your performance,
00:19:58but most people have no idea where those are
00:20:01or what to do if something's off,
00:20:03which is why I partnered with function
00:20:04because I wanted a smarter, more comprehensive way
00:20:07to understand what's happening inside of my body.
00:20:09Twice a year, they run lab tests
00:20:10that monitor over a hundred biomarkers
00:20:12and their team of expert physicians analyze the data
00:20:14and give you actionable advice
00:20:16to improve your health and lifespan.
00:20:18Seeing your testosterone levels
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00:20:51- Yeah, I mean, the first time I ever saw Peterson Live 2018
00:20:55and someone says the depth of my consciousness
00:20:57causes me to suffer.
00:20:59Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply?
00:21:02And he says you take more of the thing
00:21:07that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic
00:21:09that girdles the world around you.
00:21:12Very apocalyptic from Jordan.
00:21:13But then he said, you can try and regress back
00:21:16into a sort of more animalistic state.
00:21:19You can try to sort of devolve.
00:21:20You can put Pandora's toys back into her box
00:21:23and try and pretend that you don't know
00:21:24what's on the other side.
00:21:25But it's too bloody late for that.
00:21:28It's too bloody late for that.
00:21:29That's what you're talking about.
00:21:32You're like, fuck, it was so much easier
00:21:36when I was just on my grind.
00:21:39I had congruence, I had conviction.
00:21:41And my conviction looked outwardly like confidence,
00:21:45even if it was ignorance.
00:21:48But it presented as certainty and people really like that.
00:21:52And they seem to be attracted to me
00:21:54'cause my aura was energizing and electric.
00:21:56And I had like shit happening, man.
00:21:58And I didn't doubt myself.
00:22:00I didn't doubt.
00:22:01And it didn't tarnish the whole process.
00:22:04And now I'm like trying to evolve.
00:22:06And my evolution is making me miserable
00:22:08because I don't have the certainty
00:22:12that what I'm doing is what I'm supposed to be doing anymore.
00:22:14- Yeah.
00:22:15I mean, you said a couple words,
00:22:16like confidence comes from confide trust, right?
00:22:20It's the ability to have trust within yourself.
00:22:22So you're in these stages of high conviction,
00:22:24high confidence, and they're authentic
00:22:26to a particular time in your life.
00:22:28Where for me it was, I know what's important.
00:22:30I'm in pursuit of what's important.
00:22:31When I look someone in the eye
00:22:32and I tell them this is what I believe,
00:22:34it's congruent for me.
00:22:35And the terror that happens when your sense of self
00:22:38expands outside of that congruence,
00:22:40where you no longer feel the ability to fully trust
00:22:44this new piece of yourself,
00:22:45that you're becoming aware of.
00:22:47Perhaps not a new piece,
00:22:47but a piece that you're becoming aware of.
00:22:50And as someone who teaches charisma,
00:22:52I have long recognized that conviction is,
00:22:54if I had to say one thing, it is the backbone of charisma,
00:22:57is the ability to be congruent on your own side
00:23:02and internally aligned.
00:23:04But it's not the end all be all,
00:23:07because it doesn't allow for growth in that phase.
00:23:10So you look at like Conor McGregor,
00:23:12super high conviction, has had some emotional issues
00:23:14that he doesn't seem to have been able to integrate well,
00:23:17'cause that would require him to doubt,
00:23:19hey, maybe I haven't been behaving in the best way lately.
00:23:22But the conviction has what's taken him to where he is,
00:23:25so why trade it in, right?
00:23:26- Yep, yep.
00:23:27You're asking somebody to get rid of the thing
00:23:31that they have evidence is effective
00:23:33at getting the results in the real world
00:23:34and respect and admiration in order to do a thing
00:23:39which loses all of that and feels like shit
00:23:42and puts them back to before a white belt.
00:23:45Is it any surprise that people choose
00:23:49to not take that trade?
00:23:52Like it's no surprise to me at all.
00:23:53- It's shocking that anybody does otherwise.
00:23:56That's the bigger surprise.
00:23:57And it only, and if I've heard people talk,
00:23:59and Joe Hudson says something similar,
00:24:01which is you enter into increasingly
00:24:04a state of choicelessness.
00:24:06Like this is not what I would elect from a strategic choice.
00:24:09My mind does not see the value of this.
00:24:12So clearly, but some other part of me,
00:24:14and we could talk as your sense of awareness moves
00:24:17from I am my thoughts, I am thinking about things,
00:24:19I have strategies, plans, ways of engaging with the world.
00:24:21Like I locate myself up here to a bit more embodied.
00:24:24I feel my butt on the ground, my feet on the floor
00:24:26and really like the central column, the heart.
00:24:30This piece right here, this is the tender piece.
00:24:32This is the piece that can do vulnerability.
00:24:33This is the piece that can weep and cry
00:24:36and love and hug fully.
00:24:38And this is the piece that has wonderful strategies
00:24:41and it's really cool and I don't want to throw it out.
00:24:42I think that was something I also tried to do
00:24:45for a period of time, which was a mistake.
00:24:47- What did that look like?
00:24:48- So this is where I think part of the reason
00:24:52that I think people, men in particular,
00:24:55have negative associations with sensitivity and vulnerability
00:24:59is because some of the early stages of arriving there
00:25:03where it's not more fully integrated
00:25:05can look like you're just a raw nerve.
00:25:08And anyone who touches you, you just cry
00:25:10and there's a lack of containment.
00:25:12There's not a full embodiment of the vulnerability.
00:25:14And so part of what helps you have some consistent thread
00:25:21of past, future is your head.
00:25:23It's the part of you, like you need it to strategize.
00:25:25But I think the big shift, and again,
00:25:27I'm very much a student in this.
00:25:28I'm learning from people far ahead of me,
00:25:30is that this switches from the master to the tool, right?
00:25:36The mind, the strategy, all of that sort of stuff
00:25:38becomes something that you can deploy from time to time,
00:25:40but not something that when you sit and meditate
00:25:42chats the entire time.
00:25:43You can drop into a quieter felt place more often.
00:25:48And again, I'm a bit above my pay grade here
00:25:50'cause I don't live there.
00:25:51I'm talking about the thing, yeah.
00:25:54- How many people have the choice with this?
00:26:02- This is another thing that upsets me
00:26:04is I had the impression that there are so many guys
00:26:07that are similar to you and I have hit achievement thresholds
00:26:11and moved goalposts so many times.
00:26:14And I admire them and I look up to them
00:26:16and I've learned a ton about business from them.
00:26:18And I see so many of the influencers like you
00:26:23and in the space, I feel like they're there.
00:26:27I have this conversation with a lot of people.
00:26:30And what I've heard before is like,
00:26:31oh wow, the hair on my arms is standing up
00:26:34as you're talking about this stuff.
00:26:35I feel it, it's yeah.
00:26:37There's some demons that I'm running away from,
00:26:39some stuff in my past that I thought that I could bury
00:26:42that I'm willing to verbally acknowledge
00:26:43but not necessarily dive into.
00:26:46And so I do think that there is a choice
00:26:48at the edge of all of these thresholds.
00:26:50Just like there's a choice at the edge of results,
00:26:52which is, hey, I've seen that people who take these actions
00:26:55start to get in shape, start to earn more money.
00:26:57Am I willing to let go of the safety and comfort
00:27:00of not trying in order to apply myself?
00:27:03I think similarly there's a question of,
00:27:05am I willing to let go of the certainty and the control
00:27:08that I have by completely managing
00:27:11all of my actions all the time
00:27:13and to enter into this irrational, feminine, emotional space
00:27:17where I am not totally in control?
00:27:20And I think that there's a lot of people
00:27:22have that choice today.
00:27:24I think we all have choices.
00:27:25- Well, the raw nerve thing I think
00:27:27is an interesting analogy
00:27:29because almost all cross-cultural definitions
00:27:32of masculinity include emotional control
00:27:36or some variant of that.
00:27:39- You can shortcut it.
00:27:40So the way to, I think the depth of masculinity
00:27:44is to feel everything
00:27:48but to have a vessel that can contain it, right?
00:27:51So that it is not just immediate instinctual.
00:27:54You hurt me, I punch you, right?
00:27:56It's not you hurt me, I just dump on you, I cry at this.
00:27:59That you're still feeling intensely
00:28:02but there's a system that can feel it,
00:28:05tend to yourself, not abandon yourself,
00:28:08be vulnerable in front of the other person
00:28:09which would be to show them that you're hurt
00:28:11without dumping it on them and then choose how to behave.
00:28:15You can shortcut that though by just not feeling.
00:28:18You can just go, somebody insult me, I don't care.
00:28:21That's a hater.
00:28:22Like you can get mental models and all sorts of stuff
00:28:25to just cut everything beneath this off and just say,
00:28:28well, that wouldn't be practical for me
00:28:30to listen to what the haters say
00:28:31and you can just lose all of the feeling.
00:28:34And what you gain from that is an incredible efficiency
00:28:37in terms of getting stuff done.
00:28:38I mean, if you look at the wealthiest people in the world,
00:28:40they are very good at disconnecting from their feelings
00:28:42most of the time.
00:28:43It's tough to make billions and billions
00:28:46and billions of dollars and stay in the game
00:28:47for that amount of time at that intensity level
00:28:50without abusing your own feelings, right?
00:28:55- Because you're permanently having to suppress.
00:28:57- Yes, and you can make a lot of money.
00:28:59- But it gets in the way, right?
00:29:00This is one of the reasons why an interesting definition
00:29:04of vulnerability, Joe Hudson's definition of vulnerability,
00:29:07telling the truth even when it's scary
00:29:09or speaking your truth even when it's scary.
00:29:11That is very much a lean in definition of vulnerability.
00:29:17But especially as you transition from like results to action
00:29:22and then action to emotions,
00:29:25your outcomes in life are reliably going to get worse
00:29:27and you're going to feel worse
00:29:29and people are going to treat you worse.
00:29:30So, well, why would I do that?
00:29:34I'm going to sacrifice the only observable metric
00:29:36that anybody cares about and that I can flex on Instagram
00:29:40and in an increasingly meritocratic, rationalist,
00:29:42materialist society is the only one
00:29:43that people can judge me based on outwardly, right?
00:29:47No one knows the peace of mind I have
00:29:49when I go to bed at night.
00:29:50And I can kind of forget that.
00:29:52It's like, yeah, sure enough.
00:29:53I haven't had a peaceful night of sleep in three years,
00:29:56but like, you know, like fucking look at my car.
00:30:00So I think an interesting unifying thread
00:30:04that I see between at least some of the people
00:30:08trying to come up with-
00:30:10Well, so there are ways of conceding
00:30:12and I think you're raising a really good point here.
00:30:14That is, if you just,
00:30:18to become a monk is not available to many people.
00:30:21Technically you could fly to Nepal
00:30:22and wear a loincloth and hold a cup,
00:30:24but that's not a likely outcome for a lot of people.
00:30:28So there is this need to exist in consensus,
00:30:31economic reality where the opinions
00:30:34of other people affect you.
00:30:36They matter, they have a direct impact
00:30:39on your level of survivability
00:30:41and also just your ability to be social and happy in life.
00:30:43So that's real, all the things that you're saying.
00:30:45But then there's also the unique spiritual calling
00:30:49that everyone has, which is that it's the little voice
00:30:52that you can learn to drown out.
00:30:53It's not a loud voice, but it is a persistent voice.
00:30:57And it's always there.
00:30:59Like, warned you at the beginning of the relationship,
00:31:02warned you midway through the relationship.
00:31:03It's there at the end of the relationship, right?
00:31:05It's just there.
00:31:07And I think, I know that what I'm trying to do
00:31:10is to find a marriage of those two things
00:31:13where I am honoring the need to function
00:31:17and live in the world and produce stuff
00:31:18that other people want and like
00:31:21and having attention outwardly focused
00:31:23in order to do that. And to respect
00:31:24your own evolutionary programming,
00:31:27which is you're a social creature.
00:31:28Of course.
00:31:29You need validation, recognition.
00:31:30You don't want to be abandoned by the tribe.
00:31:32You don't want to be so weird and fucking esoteric
00:31:35that nobody can relate to you
00:31:36because that's probably going to be pretty tough to handle.
00:31:39Yes, and I think a huge aspect of communication
00:31:43and empathy is the ability to go,
00:31:44where's this person at?
00:31:45Meet them where they're at.
00:31:46And meet them where they are.
00:31:47And that requires external focus.
00:31:50Then there's the internal focus,
00:31:51which is, can I shut it all out?
00:31:53And no matter what anybody says or does
00:31:56or thinks or cares, what's true about me?
00:31:59And this is hardest in the realm of like,
00:32:00why am I here?
00:32:01For some people, it's what is my sexuality?
00:32:04There's these very, very challenging questions.
00:32:07And there's always this tug.
00:32:08Well, how are people going to respond to it?
00:32:09What will they like?
00:32:10Ah, that wouldn't work financially.
00:32:11And I think to become able to hold
00:32:16or allow both of those currents to exist in you
00:32:20at the same time is the work.
00:32:22And there's not like a checklist
00:32:24that I can give you in order to do it.
00:32:25I'm still learning it myself.
00:32:27But I'm waking up to the tension between those.
00:32:30And I'm also waking up as you go.
00:32:33I think the cool thing is you can follow either one
00:32:36and they will lead you to one another eventually.
00:32:39Because if I had this period of,
00:32:41if I look at the beginning of "Charisma on Command,"
00:32:42it was very external focused.
00:32:44How are people like what I'm doing?
00:32:45Is the girl at the bar happy with what I'm saying, right?
00:32:48All of that stuff.
00:32:49I'll make a video.
00:32:50But it actually took me at this roundabout route
00:32:52to this beautiful, creative thing that I got to build,
00:32:56especially early on in the business.
00:32:58And so in pursuing this external egoic dream
00:33:01of living on the beach with my friends,
00:33:03doing work that I wanted while doing yoga, I found myself.
00:33:06Like I found this internal guy.
00:33:07And then I lost him.
00:33:09And then in the last couple of years,
00:33:11you can also lean to the internal side,
00:33:14which is you go deeply internal.
00:33:15And for a while, I mean,
00:33:16I know we don't wanna do too much personal stuff,
00:33:18but I was like, I'm gonna do these weird projects.
00:33:20I'm gonna make a Dungeons & Dragons show.
00:33:21And I'm gonna make- - I loved it.
00:33:23- I'm gonna make stuff that nobody wants to watch, right?
00:33:26And I don't care.
00:33:27I don't care.
00:33:28This is me, me, me, me, me.
00:33:29And then you go, oh, this isn't as satisfying.
00:33:31Like I want to serve.
00:33:33I actually do want to give of myself,
00:33:36but in a way that is meaningful to other people.
00:33:39And so I think if I look at the arc
00:33:41of what charisma meant to me, there was this,
00:33:44who do I have to be in order to get what I need
00:33:47from the world, is a foundational question,
00:33:49I think, of every child, every adolescent.
00:33:51And I think entering into maturity
00:33:53is about recognizing oneself as capable,
00:33:58still interdependent, but the love comes from me.
00:34:01The love is who I am, and I radiate that.
00:34:04It's not how can I get love?
00:34:05It's how can I return to the love that I am?
00:34:07And when you do that,
00:34:08a different kind of economic activity comes online,
00:34:12which is service.
00:34:13And I feel like I'm at the precipice of this.
00:34:15Like for the first time,
00:34:17the energy of the questions that I'm asking
00:34:19isn't merely how can I people please and serve,
00:34:22and yes, I'll get some money from that.
00:34:23It's that level of service.
00:34:27It's what's the most honest, true way
00:34:30that I can meet this person where they are
00:34:31and still tell the truth.
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00:35:37That's drinkelement.com/modernwisdom.
00:35:43Oh.
00:35:44What about the one that's in between?
00:35:47So you've gone,
00:35:48"How can I get the outcomes that I want in the world?"
00:35:51I assume that there's one that's in between those two,
00:35:53which is, "How do I serve the people?"
00:35:55Which is, "How do I serve myself?"
00:35:57Like, "How do I learn about me and do the inner work thing?"
00:36:01And I think I get the sense
00:36:02that that's the last seven, six, five years
00:36:04or whatever it is for you.
00:36:05So is that right to say that there is a kind of a middle?
00:36:09I think that serving oneself is a wonderful point
00:36:12at any stage, anywhere,
00:36:14'cause they eventually become the same,
00:36:15serving oneself. - On your journey, though,
00:36:16with this, "I want the outcomes I want in the world."
00:36:20Got some, fuck that, didn't get it.
00:36:21You don't go straight from there to service.
00:36:25- Correct, correct, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:36:26So they're all levels of self-service
00:36:28at the level that you're capable of doing it.
00:36:30So self-service looks like,
00:36:32at that level of awareness, if you will,
00:36:34"I need something, they have it.
00:36:36Who do I have to become and be to get it?"
00:36:38That's me serving myself.
00:36:39Now, it's an interactive way of doing it.
00:36:42Then service becomes, "I'm tired of doing that.
00:36:44I want to be more honest about my emotions."
00:36:46So self-service is taking a break, slowing down,
00:36:49withdrawing for a period of time, going inward.
00:36:52There's this dark night of the soul.
00:36:53If you look at the hero's journey,
00:36:55if you look at it like a clock,
00:36:56there's the lower half of the clock,
00:36:58which is the trials and tribulations.
00:37:00We can talk more about that,
00:37:02but those mythic stories have this period of time,
00:37:07as Jordan Peterson would say, the belly of the whale,
00:37:09where you are compelled to acknowledge
00:37:14the darkness inside, the pain inside of yourself.
00:37:18And so that is what self-service looks like.
00:37:20If something keeps tapping me on the shoulder,
00:37:23telling me that I got to pay attention,
00:37:24I'm going to go attend to that.
00:37:26And we could talk about specifically
00:37:27what that might look like,
00:37:28but I know you're talking to Joe Hudson.
00:37:29He's wonderful for this sort of thing.
00:37:32- I want to get your perspective on both of those things,
00:37:35the, how do you say, the 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.?
00:37:38- Yeah, 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.
00:37:40So first off, I love mythology these days.
00:37:43I think Carl Jung is perhaps the most brilliant man
00:37:47of the 20th century,
00:37:48and I think deeply underrated even his thing.
00:37:50I look at Jordan Peterson
00:37:51and the impact that he had on society,
00:37:53and there must be a union giving us some lessons somewhere.
00:37:58We crave it as a country in the West,
00:38:01because I think it is the synthesis
00:38:04of the analytical mind thing that is so popular
00:38:08in the West materialism with the Eastern spiritual side.
00:38:11I think Carl Jung is that bridge for many people.
00:38:14So then you have Joseph Campbell,
00:38:16who comes and creates this hero's journey arc.
00:38:18I'll talk broadly about it,
00:38:21but what I've seen is that these occur
00:38:23in 12-year cycles roughly.
00:38:25I'm not saying this,
00:38:26but I've noticed the first 12-year cycle
00:38:27for me was starting charisma on command.
00:38:29And the entire idea of the hero's journey
00:38:32is that you enter into a part of yourself
00:38:36that you didn't know existed.
00:38:38You come out with a treasure
00:38:39and you bring it back to the world.
00:38:41And so the entering into the hard part
00:38:45the first time around was I have to dig deeper,
00:38:47work harder, take financial risks, all that kind of stuff.
00:38:50And what I bring back
00:38:51is this way of being with courage, I would say.
00:38:54That was like the gift that I had to share,
00:38:56which is you too can go to Brazil
00:38:57and start your own business
00:38:58and talk to that person that you're attracted to.
00:38:59And it's a spiritual gift that you're giving
00:39:03and it can come through the medium of YouTube or whatever.
00:39:06Descending into it this time,
00:39:08I would say the gift that I'm finding is
00:39:10through reconnecting with all the split off parts of myself,
00:39:16if one connects with as many of the split off parts
00:39:19of their self, which means going into the times
00:39:21that someone was cruel to you,
00:39:23that you were cruel to others, the pain in your life,
00:39:25the grief that you haven't processed,
00:39:26all of those sorts of things.
00:39:28As you bring more of those together,
00:39:30you find an abiding
00:39:32love
00:39:35that is there.
00:39:37And that's, for me, was the turn from the emotional inquiry,
00:39:40which is really tough to sometimes describe the value of it
00:39:43'cause you're like, "This is really challenging."
00:39:46But I would say the other side is,
00:39:48it's like, "Oh, I know peace.
00:39:50"I cried listening to a song on the way over here twice
00:39:56"because music is beautiful.
00:39:57"I watered flowers the other day
00:39:59"and they came more back to life than I cried
00:40:03"because it was so beautiful."
00:40:05To participate in something so lovely.
00:40:08And the world is just more stunning.
00:40:11And it's not like, oh, that's stunning
00:40:13if I get 10 million followers
00:40:16or it's stunning if I win the prize
00:40:17or if the girl likes me.
00:40:18It's like, no, no, it's all stunning.
00:40:20I told you, sitting here with you today,
00:40:22watching your growth path is fucking...
00:40:24- The word that comes to mind is wholeness or enoughness.
00:40:29- Thank you for speaking it more clearly than I did.
00:40:31That's exactly it, yeah.
00:40:33It's wholeness.
00:40:35We fragment ourselves in order
00:40:37to effectively fit in as children, right?
00:40:40So we've got this eclectic, weird interest
00:40:42or we have a sexuality that doesn't fit in with our...
00:40:44So we go, that's not me, that's other people.
00:40:47And you see it come through in all kinds of projections.
00:40:49So often in some of the most strict religious communities,
00:40:53they have, as we know, these pastors or these priests,
00:40:55and I'm not saying all priests,
00:40:56but are some of whom are most likely to be vocally anti-gay
00:41:00but have secret dalliances on the side
00:41:03because they've split off that piece of themselves
00:41:05because they believe that their community and God
00:41:07does not approve of who they are, right?
00:41:09So we all do this in different ways.
00:41:11Our community doesn't approve of our sadness.
00:41:13It doesn't approve of our sensitivity, of our artistry,
00:41:15whatever it is.
00:41:16And so in recovering all of that wholeness,
00:41:19you get back more of yourself.
00:41:20And what that looks like is more creativity,
00:41:22more connection, more joy.
00:41:24You stop trying to impress the people
00:41:26that you've been so caught up on for the last 10 years
00:41:29and actually start hanging out with the people
00:41:30that have loved you all along and are there.
00:41:32You become aware that there are more people like that
00:41:35all around you.
00:41:37I know that I spent a lot of time focused on the person
00:41:39who was just out of reach as you described in your--
00:41:43- Zone of proximal development socially.
00:41:45- Yeah, exactly, yeah.
00:41:46- Or relationally.
00:41:47- Yes, yes, yes.
00:41:49- So the question that I have
00:41:56and I think is kind of an important one
00:41:59is to try and get people to think about
00:42:01what their definition of success is.
00:42:04Like what does getting the outcome that you want look like?
00:42:07And at each level of resolution or depth
00:42:10or the outcome that I want is to be financially secure.
00:42:15The outcome that I want
00:42:16is for the people that I admire to admire me.
00:42:17The outcome that I want is to be attuned with my emotions
00:42:20and be able to feel things.
00:42:21The outcome that I want is to truly know God,
00:42:24whatever it might be.
00:42:26And the conflict that I see comes between people
00:42:31who have differing definitions of the outcome
00:42:33that they want for their life.
00:42:35So the person that's action-oriented is saying,
00:42:37well, you are trading the thing that I want,
00:42:41which is outcomes, for the thing that you want,
00:42:45which is emotional presence, connectedness, sense of peace.
00:42:50And I think the reason that we have this bit of self-doubt
00:42:55in the back of our minds
00:42:58as you're the person that's moving through it
00:43:00is you turn around and look at the person who is congruent,
00:43:03who has the thing, plus the confidence and conviction
00:43:07that you used to have, and you're like,
00:43:09I've lost all of those.
00:43:12I've had to let go of all of those.
00:43:14My real world results are fucking falling backward.
00:43:18And I no longer appear as certain,
00:43:21and I don't have the certainty myself
00:43:22to carry myself through. - I don't feel it.
00:43:24- Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:43:25So they don't respect me as much,
00:43:26and I'm less effective in the world.
00:43:28And I also have self-doubt about whether or not
00:43:30the thing that I'm doing is the thing
00:43:31I'm supposed to be doing.
00:43:33You go, well, where in there is the reward?
00:43:38And at each level, it's the same as,
00:43:40you're telling me that I'm not going to sleep in,
00:43:43which is something that's comfortable for me to do,
00:43:45in order to get up and do my meditation
00:43:47or go to the gym on time,
00:43:48and I'm gonna be ostracized by my friends
00:43:49because I can't go out.
00:43:51My drinking buddies aren't my drinking buddies
00:43:52'cause I'm not drinking no more.
00:43:53And I don't have my gym buddies yet
00:43:55because I haven't gone to the gym enough
00:43:56to get respect from the people that go to the gym,
00:43:57and I haven't worked out how to speak to them
00:43:59and what their culture is.
00:44:00So at each different fucking level,
00:44:03you're becoming less effective in the paradigm
00:44:07that you know on this sort of plane of existence
00:44:09that you're aware of to go through Dark Night of the Soul
00:44:12to then come back out the other side.
00:44:15And do you remember when Jordan talked about King Arthur
00:44:20and the Knights of the Round Table?
00:44:21- No, I don't know this one.
00:44:22- Oh, dude.
00:44:23So, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table,
00:44:28they need to go and get treasure from the dragon.
00:44:31They all set off on a journey.
00:44:33In order to get to the dragon,
00:44:34they have to go through the forest.
00:44:37Each man enters the forest
00:44:39at the point that looks darkest to him.
00:44:41Oh, I fucking love that visual.
00:44:45I think it's so sick.
00:44:47It's so cool.
00:44:48Okay, what is your particular pathology?
00:44:51What is your particular fear?
00:44:53Because that's the thing that you're going to face.
00:44:55Is it people pleasing?
00:44:57Is it the inability to sit with silence?
00:44:59Is it the fact that you desperately need the validation
00:45:01of other people?
00:45:03Pick your mental malady of choice.
00:45:05That's the thing that you end up facing.
00:45:10And yeah, I really want to plainly call out
00:45:15what the pain is.
00:45:17For every level, there's a devil.
00:45:19And what is the devil that you're...
00:45:22To try as best as we can to be like,
00:45:25okay, I think this is probably what it's going to feel like
00:45:29to go through each one.
00:45:30- So for someone moving from action to emotion.
00:45:32I mean, you just nailed it.
00:45:33Which is I am at every level,
00:45:35you are giving up success in that thing
00:45:38to get something that you have no promises.
00:45:41Brian Wettin has an interesting framing,
00:45:44not just around this,
00:45:45but he says a travesty is when you give up
00:45:48the higher for the lower.
00:45:50So travesty is when you trade your inner peace for money.
00:45:53Sacrifice is when you give up the lower for the higher.
00:45:57And so you give up the utter freedom of being a bachelor
00:46:00to start a family or something like that.
00:46:03And so I think this is...
00:46:05To pull on another myth, this is Abraham.
00:46:07This is the sacrifice.
00:46:08This is the willingness to give up the lower for the higher.
00:46:10And that story is pretty horrifying in a lot of ways
00:46:12because he ties up his son and it's about to kill him.
00:46:14But the underlying idea is that there is a higher.
00:46:17There is a command inside of me that I'm not going to deny.
00:46:21I'm terrified of it.
00:46:22I don't want to do it.
00:46:23Soren Kierkegaard wrote "Fear and Trembling,"
00:46:25which is exactly what you're expected to feel
00:46:28when you have that divine call tell you,
00:46:32"Leave your job, exit this relationship, marry her."
00:46:36That's a terrifying one.
00:46:38Have a baby.
00:46:39When that call from this place,
00:46:41as you get familiar with it calls,
00:46:43it asks you to trade in your identity of who you were
00:46:47and it is an ego death every time.
00:46:50Every single time that little identity must die
00:46:54and something else is born.
00:46:55And there's not the guarantee,
00:46:58even though we can rationally go,
00:46:59"I'm still going to be alive," and all these things.
00:47:01But that's the feeling, is ego death.
00:47:04Yeah, dig into the fear and trembling
00:47:06because I think a lot of people,
00:47:08the sort of people that have made it
00:47:09this far into this episode,
00:47:11I assume are either going, "What the fuck?"
00:47:15Or they say, "Oh, there's something here.
00:47:17I'm resonating and there's something here."
00:47:20- Neutonic.
00:47:21- Thank you.
00:47:22There is something here.
00:47:23It's fucking evidence-based,
00:47:25very tasty zero calorie energy drink.
00:47:27That fear and trembling,
00:47:31that peering over the precipice,
00:47:35that sort of existential vertigo,
00:47:38where you go like, "Yeah, yeah."
00:47:41You're like, "Holy fuck."
00:47:46- What more is there to say about that sensation
00:47:49and about stepping into it
00:47:51and about the first steps and the biggest steps?
00:47:52- You don't have to force yourself.
00:47:54It will call.
00:47:55It will call you.
00:47:56And if you're going, sitting here,
00:47:57and you probably haven't made it this far,
00:47:58but if you're going, "I don't know."
00:47:59I kind of just, I really encourage
00:48:01and love people being where they're at.
00:48:04So I think a mistake that I had made,
00:48:06which is everybody needs to move as quickly as possible
00:48:09through these phases.
00:48:09That's all to optimize our idea.
00:48:11Your time will come.
00:48:12If what I am saying is true,
00:48:15this is not something you have to do.
00:48:18Like your ego is not going to be the one doing this.
00:48:21It's going to, in many ways,
00:48:22you have to participate and say yes at some point.
00:48:25You'll have your choice, as we talked about earlier.
00:48:28But the call will come.
00:48:30And you can ignore it about 10 million times.
00:48:32It will keep ringing for you.
00:48:35And the consequences will get more and more dire.
00:48:37You ignore it once, you go out.
00:48:39It's a little bit of a difficult relationship.
00:48:40Ignore it for 20 years.
00:48:41You're in a loveless relationship
00:48:43and now you've got kids and a divorce on your hands.
00:48:45Like all of that sort of stuff.
00:48:47The consequences of not listening
00:48:49begin to erode the actions, the results, the emotions anyway.
00:48:54So the good news is you don't have to do anything.
00:48:57- Yeah, one way or another,
00:48:58this realization is going to arrive.
00:49:01What do you think is going on there?
00:49:03Is that, do you come to think about it in material terms?
00:49:06Do you come to think about it as the universe
00:49:08having to ramp up the volume of the lesson
00:49:10until you go like, "Hey, Charlie, now, please."
00:49:15- If all of this is right,
00:49:18fundamentally you are so much more than you are aware of.
00:49:21And we all recognize this implicitly,
00:49:23which is if I were to say,
00:49:25what's your blood pressure right now?
00:49:26What's happening in your liver?
00:49:27Obviously there are pieces of you of which you are unaware
00:49:31and do not need to be in charge of them.
00:49:32When you go to sleep, they just keep humming along,
00:49:34keeping you going.
00:49:36There are massive psychological pieces of us,
00:49:40spiritual pieces of us that exist that we're unaware of.
00:49:43You just don't have to be aware of.
00:49:45It's taken care of for you, but it's still you.
00:49:49So the idea is that this always has been the case.
00:49:52It always will be the case.
00:49:53You're just waking up to it
00:49:55and becoming more aware of it as you can swallow it.
00:49:58Because if you were to be dumped into it,
00:50:00as some people do with intense psychedelic experiences,
00:50:03you can crack, you can break yourself
00:50:06if you go a little bit, a little bit,
00:50:08you go too fast into these sorts of things.
00:50:10And so actually rather than speeding through these,
00:50:13it's like, enjoy, enjoy the ride.
00:50:15I remember believing that optimization
00:50:18and getting everything you want,
00:50:19be like 25, 26, 27 was the end all be all.
00:50:23Some of the happiest and most joyous times of my life
00:50:25was doing that stuff.
00:50:27- Me too.
00:50:28- You just can't go back.
00:50:29You can't step in the same river twice, right?
00:50:31And so where I wanna help people
00:50:34and you asked who's there,
00:50:35it's when you were like, I remember it was so good.
00:50:38Like, why can't I make it go back to that?
00:50:39It's you can't go back.
00:50:41You know too much.
00:50:42You have learned too much.
00:50:43You have come too far. - It's too bloody late
00:50:44for that. - It's too bloody late.
00:50:46(both laughing)
00:50:47- You've got to move forward.
00:50:48And so what I hope to do with the rest of my career,
00:50:51and I'm learning in this conversation and others,
00:50:54is to really help people at those paradigm shift points,
00:50:57those lonely chapter moments,
00:51:00to move gracefully into the next phase.
00:51:02'Cause it is a bear for all the reasons that you said.
00:51:05It's not fun to do.
00:51:07Nobody is really encouraging you to do it
00:51:09in your current sphere.
00:51:10I would just love, love, love to hold space for people
00:51:14to make those leaps.
00:51:16It's such a privilege to watch somebody.
00:51:18As you've seen, if you've ever seen someone
00:51:20exit out of victim consciousness and start to go to the gym
00:51:23and start to dial in because of something that you've said,
00:51:26it's like, oh my God, it feels so good.
00:51:29It just is, it's true at every level.
00:51:30- The next one, the problem is the movement
00:51:33from action to emotion is so unsexy
00:51:38in a way that the movement from results to action is not.
00:51:46Like that, every underdog movie ever in history
00:51:50has a montage of a guy sorting his life out
00:51:53by learning to be disciplined and upward aiming.
00:51:57Very few of them have a guy deeply learning
00:52:01to get in touch with the inner child inside of him
00:52:03and crying at Christmas movies.
00:52:05Very few, very few.
00:52:06And if it is, it's wrapped in this sort of redemption
00:52:10of a person who was too far on one side
00:52:14in terms of their masculinity.
00:52:15And this was a righteous correction
00:52:18that was like comically needed
00:52:19in order to rebalance the people around them.
00:52:22For the most part, a man specifically getting in touch
00:52:24with his emotions is not in service of him.
00:52:27It's in service of the people around him.
00:52:28In some ways that's beautiful,
00:52:30but the way that Hollywood portrays it is not that.
00:52:33It's not this sort of existential gift to the world.
00:52:36It's like, no, his wife needed him to be more attuned
00:52:40when she was, like he was on his phone
00:52:42and filling in Excel spreadsheets when they were at dinner.
00:52:45Like, okay, that's a pretty low resolution way to look at it.
00:52:48- Yeah, I mean, you're very right.
00:52:50I think we live in an either childlike
00:52:54or adolescent culture in terms of most people's development.
00:52:57And even the term unsexy is like,
00:52:58that's really what adolescents care about.
00:53:01Adolescents are trying to be sexy.
00:53:03That's the thing.
00:53:04And into your 20s, 30s, it's fine.
00:53:06It's not to say that you can't have it,
00:53:07but it's not sexy.
00:53:10It's loving.
00:53:11And there's a difference that like,
00:53:13you're not trying to be sexy
00:53:15is do other people find me attractive
00:53:17and want to more towards me?
00:53:18Loving is do I feel love?
00:53:20And am I radiating it to myself and to other people?
00:53:23So you're right.
00:53:24It's not sexy.
00:53:25It's loving.
00:53:27And even I think those words are apt
00:53:29because the quality of romantic interactions
00:53:32that you choose in this period shifts from what's sexy,
00:53:35who's cool, who's physically attractive,
00:53:37who can help me with my status,
00:53:39to who do I love and what do I love?
00:53:42And that changes the quality
00:53:44of your romantic relationships dramatically.
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00:54:55What if, I know that you mentioned,
00:54:59basically, the volume of the lesson will get turned up
00:55:02until you start to hear it,
00:55:03would be a way to maybe say that.
00:55:06Or you die.
00:55:08Or you die.
00:55:08Let's say that there's someone who goes,
00:55:12"I feel like the volume's kind of loud already,
00:55:16and the fleeting thoughts and the little whispers
00:55:20are kind of, I feel ready to pay attention to them,
00:55:25but I'm still scared of making that transition."
00:55:27You mentioned that you want to be kind of a careful shepherd.
00:55:31Who was the boatman that helped get Dante across the river?
00:55:36Who's that dude?
00:55:38You know, Dante's inferno.
00:55:39- It's not Karen from Greek mythology, okay.
00:55:41- Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:55:43So he's blind, I think.
00:55:44- Yeah.
00:55:45- And I've got my fucking mythology glossary.
00:55:50You want to be this boatsman, shepherd thing.
00:55:53You're like, "Hey, you're going from this bit of land
00:55:55to this bit of land here."
00:55:56And let me make it at least a little bit less scary
00:56:01that this is a journey that you can do with grace, right?
00:56:06Graciously, I think was one of the words that you said.
00:56:09Someone is on the precipice, they're on the cusp of,
00:56:14I feel like this is an evolutionary step
00:56:18that I'm prepared to take,
00:56:19and I'm kind of like ready.
00:56:21Without pushing and without going like,
00:56:25wait for the volume to be turned up,
00:56:27what are some of the things that you would say
00:56:29to that sort of a person?
00:56:30- Yeah.
00:56:31One, what I hope to convey for the first chunk of this
00:56:34is this is normal.
00:56:35This is you're not broken that this is happening to you.
00:56:38In fact, if you want to take some spiritual pride in it,
00:56:41like you're advanced, you're moving quickly.
00:56:44And even though it's hard, nothing's broken.
00:56:48The second thing that I would offer would be
00:56:49you're going to enter into a stage,
00:56:51probably if you're coming from the optimizer stage,
00:56:54that is far more irrational and feminine and intuitive
00:56:57than you're familiar with.
00:56:58And those three words probably terrify you
00:57:01because they're associated with the victim stage,
00:57:05which is I'm a tumbleweed and life just happens to me
00:57:08and I have no command of anything.
00:57:11- It is evolution, but feels like devolution.
00:57:12- Correct.
00:57:13And that's, I totally get the optimizer sees somebody
00:57:16who is doing work intuitively.
00:57:18And they're like, that's who I used to be 10 years ago
00:57:20and my life was miserable.
00:57:21No way am I leaning into that.
00:57:23But there's a difference between listening to craving
00:57:26and listening to intuition.
00:57:28So we're trying to turn up, experiment with and explore
00:57:32the feminine, irrational, intuitive callings that you feel.
00:57:36So there's a number of ways to get closer to this.
00:57:39And there's degrees of safety and risk
00:57:42involved with all of them.
00:57:42Some of them are, go with the one intuitively
00:57:46that seems interesting to you first,
00:57:48would be what I would say.
00:57:49So you've got standard meditation practices.
00:57:51You have breath work practices, Wim Hofen,
00:57:53otherwise Stan Grof.
00:57:55You have therapy.
00:57:56You have men's groups.
00:57:57You have psychedelics.
00:57:59You have sound healings where they play the bowls
00:58:01and you just allow the vibration to wash over you.
00:58:04You've got long walks in nature.
00:58:06You've got strenuous physical activity
00:58:09that is not rigidly structured.
00:58:11Like I think that the gym where you're pushing yourself
00:58:14and you have to do it, but even you could still drop
00:58:15into like a zenless zone state and that sort of thing.
00:58:19But I would say like more sports, recreational,
00:58:21those sorts of things.
00:58:23Music, all of these sorts of things.
00:58:25Find the one that hits you.
00:58:27And I've done all of these.
00:58:28Singing, dance, all of these kinds of things
00:58:31are this intuitive flow, feminine, reconnect you
00:58:34with joy, feelings, emotions.
00:58:37And then from that, what you'll start to realize
00:58:39is if you do a breath work or therapy,
00:58:41like, oh man, I need to have a conversation with my dad.
00:58:43(both laughing)
00:58:45And so then--
00:58:47- Came here to do breath work.
00:58:48- Yeah, I came here to do breath work.
00:58:49And sometimes it's, I just need to call this person
00:58:51and tell them I love them.
00:58:52I need to apologize.
00:58:53I need to say that that upset me and hurt me.
00:58:56You're gonna start cleaning up the messes
00:58:59that you've left untended.
00:59:01Things that you pretended were okay
00:59:03that are not okay actually.
00:59:05And be gentle with yourself.
00:59:08It's not like I did the breath work.
00:59:10I got, okay, call them right now immediately after.
00:59:12This is gonna be a time span of like,
00:59:14I'll do breath work again tomorrow in a day or two.
00:59:16And if I still feel that way,
00:59:17I can call them when I'm a little bit less raw
00:59:19and I have a little bit more of that containment.
00:59:21So I'm able to have this conversation in a way
00:59:23that is both emotionally vulnerable
00:59:25without emotionally exploding on this person.
00:59:27- Yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah.
00:59:29- And so as you start to do these different
00:59:32intuitive, feminine practices,
00:59:36you're gonna get little hits of,
00:59:38I want to make a Dungeons and Dragons show.
00:59:40I want to make this phone call.
00:59:41I want to do this thing.
00:59:42I don't care how much it costs.
00:59:43You know, like that sort of stuff.
00:59:45And you want to experiment in little ways.
00:59:51And this was crazy,
00:59:53but I was playing a video game two weeks ago.
00:59:55I know, crazy.
00:59:57So I'm playing a video game and after every little level,
00:59:59it's called Hades II.
00:59:59It's got my Greek mythology, I love it.
01:00:02After every minute or so,
01:00:03you have to make a choice between upgrades that you get.
01:00:06And as I'm playing this game, I'm like doing it.
01:00:09And I am optimizing my upgrades
01:00:11'cause they have percentages associated with them.
01:00:13I'm doing the math in my head
01:00:14to see which one is gonna output the most damage
01:00:15to do the thing.
01:00:16And for some reason, fine, thank God, it clicked to me.
01:00:19I was like, what am I doing?
01:00:20Like I've turned this game into a test
01:00:22where I am every time picking the same upgrade.
01:00:25I'm not exploring, I'm not having.
01:00:27So I went, I want the purple one.
01:00:29And it's like, that one's objectively worse.
01:00:30I want the purple one.
01:00:32So I start doing random things in this game
01:00:34and there were a number of things that happened.
01:00:36One, I remember that I was meant to have fun,
01:00:38that like I was playing a game that I had made a job somehow.
01:00:41And this is what I did with my business,
01:00:43but this is just another apocryphal story of,
01:00:45yeah, I do it even in video games.
01:00:46So I started having fun.
01:00:49I unlocked, I escaped my local minimum.
01:00:51So what happens when we're optimizers
01:00:53is we optimize around the world
01:00:55that we understand and know, right?
01:00:57So if you're optimizing for muscles or for whatever,
01:01:00you've got an idea that this is what people like,
01:01:03that maybe women respond to it and it's best for my health.
01:01:06But if you explore it a little bit further,
01:01:07maybe you'd find other modes of exercise
01:01:09that better served your deeper want and deeper need.
01:01:12- There are longer levers that you're just not aware of.
01:01:14- Exactly, but if you can't explore
01:01:16'cause you're such a hyper-optimizer,
01:01:17you can't figure that out.
01:01:18So I actually got better in this game after a dip.
01:01:21I was like, oh wow, I found these new build paths.
01:01:24And then third was,
01:01:25I started looking at the artwork in the game,
01:01:27which is stunningly beautiful.
01:01:28And again, this is meant as a metaphor is, smell the roses.
01:01:32Look at the artwork in the game that you're playing, right?
01:01:35I had gone through life trying to get to the next end
01:01:39as fast as I could.
01:01:41And it had permeated
01:01:42even to my recreational video game playing.
01:01:45And so letting go of that, I was like, wow.
01:01:48And then I'm looking up myths of Aphrodite and Aries
01:01:51and all these things.
01:01:52And I realized, oh,
01:01:53I didn't wanna play the video game to veg.
01:01:55I wanted to play the video game
01:01:56to get inspired about these myths
01:01:58so that I could sit down later with Chachie PT
01:02:00and just reflect on them.
01:02:02And I was like, oh, that's where my intuition was taking me.
01:02:05It was taking me to the game, to the artwork,
01:02:07to the deeper exploration of this myth,
01:02:09but you have to remain in contact with your intuition.
01:02:12One other thing on this that I think is worth mentioning
01:02:14is that a lot of people give their intuition
01:02:17a horrible reputation because at one point,
01:02:20they knew they shouldn't have gotten
01:02:21into that relationship with a girl,
01:02:22but they said, no, I need to, like, I feel it.
01:02:24It's calling me.
01:02:25Three years later, it explodes.
01:02:27She cheats on them.
01:02:27It all goes sideways.
01:02:29And they go, that was the part of me
01:02:31that didn't have a checklist
01:02:32because my intuition pulled me there, my instinct.
01:02:35What they don't realize is that, yes,
01:02:36it might've pulled you into the relationship,
01:02:38but then at month one, it was dinging saying,
01:02:40okay, something's off here.
01:02:42And at six months in, it was saying, time to get out.
01:02:45So the problem is we listen to intuition a tiny, tiny bit,
01:02:48and then we try to bail,
01:02:49but intuition doesn't work like analytics does.
01:02:52Our mind sees the end that we're headed towards.
01:02:55I want a physique.
01:02:57And then it backwards breaks things into steps
01:03:01so that we can achieve the desired outcome.
01:03:03Intuition starts at the next step.
01:03:07It keeps you foggy as to the actual place that you're headed.
01:03:10You don't know,
01:03:11and it's greater than you could possibly imagine,
01:03:13but it only tells you, play the video game.
01:03:16But if you want to use intuition fully,
01:03:18you've got to stick with it through these various steps
01:03:21and let it take you to its desired end,
01:03:24which is terrifying for people who want control
01:03:27because you're playing a video game.
01:03:28This is a waste of time, and I don't know why I'm doing this,
01:03:30but my intuition is telling me to.
01:03:32Now I'm looking at artwork in this dumb video game, right?
01:03:35But if you stick with it,
01:03:37I have found this is a deeper layer of self-trust is,
01:03:40oh, I can trust my analytical mind
01:03:42and I can trust my intuitive flowing feeling thing now,
01:03:47which is a really cool something to have come online.
01:03:50- Well, the perennial over-optimizer,
01:03:54insecure overachiever thing,
01:03:55walking anxiety disorder harness for productivity,
01:03:59like Andrew Wilkinson says.
01:04:01The reason that people are hyper-optimizers,
01:04:04at least in part,
01:04:05is if you know every different permutation
01:04:09of every different potential outcome
01:04:11and you have prepared for it,
01:04:12you have constrained the uncertainty of the future down.
01:04:16You've created order from chaos, right?
01:04:19I don't need to worry about the potential branching futures
01:04:22because I have obsessed so much
01:04:24that 99.9% of potential future universes
01:04:26are ones I've already predicted, accounted for,
01:04:29and been ready in order to be able to deal with.
01:04:32This leaves me with just, I'm ready.
01:04:35I'm ready for this, right?
01:04:36Uncertainty, anxiety is uncertainty.
01:04:39It's ambiguity about what is going to happen.
01:04:42Anxiety is expectation versus outcome.
01:04:46Like I do not know what is going to happen.
01:04:48And this is how much our minds abhor uncertainty
01:04:52that we would rather create a nightmare in our mind
01:04:57than we would deal with
01:04:59a more preferable level of uncertainty.
01:05:01Like we would prefer to imagine the worst possible outcome
01:05:05because at least that collapses the choice architecture
01:05:08down to a single place.
01:05:09Now the place is the worst,
01:05:10it's significantly worse than maybe what even be
01:05:13physically capable by the universe.
01:05:15Like we imagined things that would break the laws of physics.
01:05:17Like fucking someone comes back from the dead to torment us
01:05:20in this version of something.
01:05:21But we prefer that to uncertainty.
01:05:26So when you've got this choice space,
01:05:31you think about thinking in superpositions, right?
01:05:34You collapse the superposition down, you observe it
01:05:36and you're like, okay, this is exactly what's gonna happen.
01:05:39The over-optimizer decides to have as many branches
01:05:42open in their mind as possible,
01:05:44prepare for each different one of them.
01:05:45And that is antithetical to, I trust myself.
01:05:50I'll be okay no matter what happens.
01:05:56I'm whole now and I'm enough.
01:05:58And whatever comes in the future,
01:06:01I will be okay and whole then too.
01:06:04And if you have come from a situation where you go,
01:06:08well, I happened to life.
01:06:11I had agency and intention and I took myself from a place
01:06:15that I didn't want to be to one that I did
01:06:17through intention and agency and action and leaning in
01:06:21and making a fucking dent in the world.
01:06:25Like that is the strategy.
01:06:30And that was the big first,
01:06:31like this is literally every first level archetype,
01:06:36movie, underdog, Rocky, fucking cut scene thing ever.
01:06:40Like that's literally what, that is the hero's journey.
01:06:42And it's like, that gets you to like three o'clock.
01:06:45- There's a masculine thread,
01:06:48which is the one you're talking about,
01:06:49which is order out of chaos, analytical, structured,
01:06:54I happened to life initiating.
01:06:57And then there's the feminine thread,
01:06:58which is receptive, listening,
01:07:01what does life want for me, feeling, flowing, et cetera.
01:07:04And so it's not to just be feminine.
01:07:07I think this is very important.
01:07:09It's not merely,
01:07:10'cause if you see people that don't have this masculine piece,
01:07:14this is almost like the LA woo woo,
01:07:17I'm a spiritual coach at age 23.
01:07:19I just follow my bliss and follow my intuition
01:07:22and I can't pay my bills.
01:07:24There's something that they have there,
01:07:25which is a willingness to go with the flow,
01:07:28but they lack the ability to unify these two.
01:07:30And so Carl Jung talk about the highros gamos,
01:07:32which is the sacred marriage of the divine masculine
01:07:35and the divine feminine principle.
01:07:38I think as a society,
01:07:39this is perhaps what's going on with men and women
01:07:40at some level.
01:07:42What we've done is say,
01:07:42okay, look, men, you can do the masculine piece.
01:07:44Women, you can do the feminine piece.
01:07:46The union is gonna come at the level
01:07:48of both of you guys getting together.
01:07:50It works, it's been stable for a long time.
01:07:53There's problems with it, as we've sort of seen,
01:07:55which is women are encountering the problems
01:07:58that men have had.
01:07:59Now that they enter into the workplace,
01:07:59they're finding meaninglessness,
01:08:01which men have known for a long time.
01:08:03Just slaving away to take care of the family
01:08:06that you don't get to really participate in
01:08:08or be emotionally connected to.
01:08:09That's been hundreds of years of men in the West
01:08:12have known that and now all over the world.
01:08:15Men are experiencing the difficulties of women,
01:08:17which is, hey, when I get in touch with my emotions, it hurts.
01:08:20It hurts like hell.
01:08:21So now I'm realizing that I would like people
01:08:23to consider me and take care of me
01:08:25and I'd like more systemic issues
01:08:27to make things a bit easier for me.
01:08:29And women are going, yeah, we've been saying that
01:08:30for a long time. (laughs)
01:08:31So I feel like there's been this initially painful
01:08:35but beautiful flip that is occurring culturally
01:08:38where women have entered into masculine roles
01:08:40and are getting the benefits of it,
01:08:41but also are beginning to see the costs
01:08:43and the things that the men in their lives have shouldered
01:08:46that they have not understood.
01:08:48And men are getting into the feminine realm
01:08:51of starting to get in touch with their emotions and go,
01:08:53oh wow, this is a lot harder than I had recognized.
01:08:56And my hope is in my personal relationship
01:08:58and more broadly, instead of having the primary unit
01:09:02of masculine and feminine togetherness be husband and wife,
01:09:06I think there's an increasing opportunity
01:09:07for more integrated individuals
01:09:10to be integrated inside of oneself
01:09:13and then to meet the other person
01:09:14and to form something greater.
01:09:16Because when you are dependent upon the other person
01:09:18for feminine access, meaning you have a wife,
01:09:22you are the breadwinner, you're the guy,
01:09:23but she's the one with all the positive emotional feelings
01:09:26and she's connected to the kids,
01:09:28there's a sense of dependency and resentment
01:09:31and frustration and control.
01:09:33- Why do you get that thing and I don't?
01:09:35- Yeah, and because I'm doing all of this, I'm in charge,
01:09:38I get to tell you what to do.
01:09:40You see the woman's side of it,
01:09:42which is I'm completely dependent on this man for survival.
01:09:45I need to people please him.
01:09:47I'm frustrated, I'm gonna cheat with the pool boy.
01:09:49I want to escape this even though I need him to survive,
01:09:53I'm frustrated that I need him to survive.
01:09:55So the idea that we've talked about for a long time,
01:09:57that old cliched advice, which is don't get
01:10:00into a relationship until you are whole in yourself,
01:10:03I think a really useful way to think of that
01:10:05is how are my masculine and my feminine threads
01:10:08integrated inside of myself?
01:10:10Am I capable of achievement, initiation, structure, analysis?
01:10:15And am I also capable of flow,
01:10:17receptivity, intuition, and feeling?
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01:11:30What have you learned about the language of masculine
01:11:35and feminine is not one that I am super familiar with.
01:11:38And I think maybe part of it
01:11:40is that there's a good amount of shame attached to that
01:11:43as you suggested, like what mad,
01:11:47it's cool to say attuned, connected, dropped in,
01:11:51aware, transcending including
01:11:55like Wilberian language type stuff as a guy.
01:11:58Like that still feels,
01:11:59it's the same as Joe's vulnerability definition, right?
01:12:02It still feels like kind of strong, but to say,
01:12:05"Oh, I need to embrace my feminine energy."
01:12:08Like go fuck yourself, man.
01:12:10- My irrationality, that's a big one.
01:12:12- Irrational, yeah.
01:12:14I mean, this is the critique
01:12:15that men have of their wives and girlfriends.
01:12:17She's so irrational.
01:12:18We are irrational.
01:12:20I think this is one of the big tricks
01:12:21that men play on themselves
01:12:22is they pretend that the women in their lives
01:12:24and they project all of the irrationality onto them.
01:12:26How irrational is it
01:12:26to try to get more and more and more money
01:12:28and more and more status past a certain point?
01:12:30That is hyper irrational.
01:12:31Like to what end are you--
01:12:32- You have proved to yourself
01:12:33that the thing that you are attaining
01:12:35is not the thing that makes you happy
01:12:37and yet you're still trying to attain more of it.
01:12:38- Deeply irrational.
01:12:39- Well done, dude, yeah, super, super fucking clever.
01:12:42- So those pieces, feminine, irrational,
01:12:47singing, dancing, flowing, enjoying one's body, right?
01:12:52I think even from what I hear
01:12:55and have experienced with myself,
01:12:56part of what men get out of their sexual relationships
01:12:59is many times they're able to be with someone
01:13:01that is more capable of pleasure than they are.
01:13:03And they're able to vicariously participate in the pleasure
01:13:07and they're making it happen.
01:13:08And that's good enough for them.
01:13:09Now, they're not experiencing it at the same full body level
01:13:13that their partner is perhaps capable,
01:13:15but they're close to it.
01:13:16- Well, think about that.
01:13:17If you wanna really fucking point the finger at guys,
01:13:20how many guys during sex treat sex as another business
01:13:25that they need to successfully exit?
01:13:27Well, if I can go through this particular sequence of steps
01:13:30and in the past, I've managed to build an exit
01:13:33as similar business in this particular way.
01:13:37So I've got a blueprint and I got it,
01:13:38you know, I got a few tricks up my sleeve
01:13:41that I can deploy in this way.
01:13:42It's like, oh, not only did you turn your video game Hades 2
01:13:46into a business that you had to optimize,
01:13:49but you turned this thing,
01:13:51which is supposed to be like loving presence,
01:13:54into a business that you're supposed to build an exit.
01:13:58- And what I've seen in myself
01:14:00that I believe could be a pattern, at least with some men,
01:14:02is the part of what drove early Charisma on Command
01:14:08and early Charlie was deep people pleasing
01:14:11that was particularly directed at women.
01:14:14Like I was okay if some of the guys didn't like me,
01:14:16but I desperately, desperately wanted women to like me
01:14:18and was willing to shape my habits, my exercise routine,
01:14:22everything to like bring in
01:14:24as much female attention as I could.
01:14:26And I know that experience in sex of like trying
01:14:30to make it good for the other person at a high level,
01:14:34which I didn't realize.
01:14:36You do that for long enough, you just wanna get out of there.
01:14:39I'm tired of just trying to make this other person happy
01:14:42and it can create, you don't realize it,
01:14:43or I didn't realize it, shadow frustrations,
01:14:46shadow resentments, shadow things,
01:14:47because you don't know, and I've heard you talk about this,
01:14:50you're so obsessed with meaning
01:14:52that you don't know how to access pleasure.
01:14:54- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
01:14:55Yeah, that's, I mean, the Frankel's inverse law,
01:14:59I think is so fucking prevalent, dude.
01:15:01That's another one that's robust.
01:15:02It's a little bit harder for people to grasp
01:15:04and took a real long time for me to look at.
01:15:06But yeah, if pleasure doesn't come easily to you,
01:15:10you say that pleasure is basically for suckers
01:15:12and you focus on meaning.
01:15:13It's like, I will grind set my way through life
01:15:17because the slow accumulation of progress
01:15:22towards something which is supposed to be a well-meaning goal
01:15:26is kind of more reliable, actually, I think, to a lot of men.
01:15:34It's like, it's more objective.
01:15:37It's like, ha, I see where I was on graph yesterday
01:15:41versus today. - It's masculine.
01:15:42It's forward projected.
01:15:43The outcome is the meaning in many ways.
01:15:46I'm fighting for the freedom of my country.
01:15:48It's this, I know what I'm doing.
01:15:50I'm gonna break it into smaller steps.
01:15:51We're gonna have these little battles on the way.
01:15:53This is persistent and clean,
01:15:55and I'm directed at that thing.
01:15:57- Limited chaos, limited uncertainty.
01:15:58- Pleasure is right now.
01:15:59It's right now.
01:16:00Right now, it could be left.
01:16:01Right now, it could be right.
01:16:03I'm gonna follow this flow,
01:16:04and it doesn't provide any long-term guarantees,
01:16:07context, or anything.
01:16:08It's gone the next moment.
01:16:10And so it's this obsession with the masculine thread,
01:16:13I think, in many ways, of future orientation
01:16:16and driving in towards something
01:16:17rather than can I just be present and understand
01:16:20that I can't control it.
01:16:21It's gonna leave, and that's okay.
01:16:23- Two examples from my life of your Hades II thing.
01:16:26George Mack's 30th birthday in Miami last year,
01:16:29we were playing foot tennis over a net,
01:16:34and we were playing this game,
01:16:37and I realized that it was competitive
01:16:40but not very beautiful.
01:16:41And I said, "Okay, well, why don't we change it to be,
01:16:44"even though we're on opposite sides of the net,
01:16:48"we'll be part of a team,
01:16:49"and the goal is to have the fanciest tricks."
01:16:51Two of the guys are ex-champion freestyle footballers,
01:16:55but neither of them were using their skills.
01:16:57Both of them were trying to win the game.
01:16:59I'm like, "I don't want to see who can do this.
01:17:02"I want to hand the ball off to the guy
01:17:04"that can do three-round-the-worlds in a row
01:17:06"and watch him do something and go, 'Fucking sick, dude,'
01:17:09"and then watch him pass it across the net."
01:17:11So he did that, and as soon as I said it,
01:17:14one of the guys was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah,"
01:17:16and then we can count how many we do,
01:17:17and that can be, I'm like, "No!"
01:17:19They're not even doing the thing again.
01:17:21They're reverse engineering it.
01:17:22And the second time, it seems to happen around nets, I suppose,
01:17:26the second time I was playing pickleball,
01:17:28a co-ed game with this girl who was 21,
01:17:32and Austin, Texas, me and her versus another guy and girl,
01:17:37and it's one-one on games going into best of the final game,
01:17:42and we're like, we've done the little thing
01:17:44where you tap paddles over the top of the net,
01:17:46and we turn around, and we're walking back to the baseline,
01:17:48and I'm like, "Okay, so we need to remember
01:17:49"that when he comes up to the net,
01:17:50"he's really bad in his backhand,
01:17:51"so we can force that in,
01:17:52"but we need to play into the kitchen.
01:17:53"The dinks need to be a little bit wider,
01:17:54"and we've got to do this."
01:17:56Like, look, I'm loving yourselves,
01:17:57but we can go with being a little bit deeper in this.
01:17:59She turns to me, and she goes,
01:18:01"Yeah, let's not forget to have fun."
01:18:04I was like, "Yeah, yeah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
01:18:08"Very good."
01:18:09And that moment of, I can just enjoy
01:18:14what's happening right now.
01:18:15Sure, there are times, if you're a neurosurgeon,
01:18:20probably the in-moment enjoyment of what you're doing,
01:18:23that's not the time for it.
01:18:24But, and this is where I think the definition of success
01:18:29that I mentioned earlier on is a really important piece.
01:18:34You can go through life trying to optimize
01:18:38for maximum outcomes, like maximum objective success.
01:18:42Like, other people can see it, I can touch it, feel it,
01:18:45put it in a photo album or a bank account
01:18:47or a follower number or whatever online.
01:18:49But you will peer over the present moment's shoulder a lot.
01:18:54Looking for what's coming next.
01:18:56The hyper-vigilance will cause you to never really
01:18:58have your mind rest where your feet are.
01:19:00I'm seeing this with my live shows.
01:19:02I'm on tour at the moment, playing Regent Theatre
01:19:04this Saturday in LA.
01:19:06And I can go out on stage and do my show
01:19:10like as close to perfect as I can get and never be there.
01:19:16I'm not there, I'm not at the show.
01:19:20And in some ways, maybe that's part of a flow state.
01:19:23But I think even within like the flow stateness,
01:19:26like when you lose yourself in it, you're not fully like,
01:19:31this rules, like this fucking rules.
01:19:35So you have to, I've found for me,
01:19:37there are moments where in the set I can pause and be like,
01:19:41for just like two seconds, I'm like, fuck, I'm there.
01:19:45And when I look back, this is how I kind of know
01:19:48that it's working at least a little bit.
01:19:49This is super white belt, like fresh clay shit.
01:19:52But that's what I remember.
01:19:55I don't remember delivering the lines.
01:19:57I don't necessarily even remember the laughs or,
01:19:59I remember incidents where they break the pattern.
01:20:02So the sound went out in New York and I was working
01:20:04with just the stage wedges pointing at me,
01:20:07bouncing them off the back wall to 1500 people
01:20:10while they tried to fix the sound.
01:20:11So I had to like freestyle some bullshit on stage.
01:20:14And I remember that and that was cool.
01:20:16But the only other bits that I remember are where I've gone
01:20:19like and seen inside of my own mind and gone,
01:20:24here I am, I'm walking back to the baseline
01:20:26and we're about to have fun.
01:20:27We're playing foot tennis
01:20:29and we're going to try and make it beautiful.
01:20:31And I get the sense, this is where the success thing comes in
01:20:34that I don't know if this is true.
01:20:37Maybe it gets you from a hundred percent of performance
01:20:40to 150 or 101, or maybe it gets you to 95 or even 90.
01:20:46But regardless of that plane of success outcome based stuff,
01:20:51it's like how much more presence and how much more joy
01:20:56and awareness have you got of what's going on?
01:21:00And ultimately, why are you doing these things?
01:21:02Presumably you're trying to achieve success
01:21:04to create some sort of an emotional state
01:21:06that is sufficiently enjoyable for it to be worthwhile.
01:21:10Or else why would you be doing it?
01:21:12Like even if you ask the why question enough times,
01:21:15it ends up being like, because it feels good.
01:21:16It's like, why do you need money to get the house,
01:21:18to get the car, to get the girl,
01:21:19to get the, because it makes me feel nice and enough?
01:21:23And you're like, well, what if you could access
01:21:24that more directly by just going,
01:21:27fuck, I'm here.
01:21:31Yeah, I'm here, I'm fucking here.
01:21:34Like, holy shit, we're alive.
01:21:37- Yeah.
01:21:38- That fucking rules, like, you know what I mean?
01:21:41- That's it, that's it, yeah.
01:21:43- How, I'm so curious, you've asked me,
01:21:47without trying to say it for this conversation,
01:21:51like, where are you in your,
01:21:53using maybe some of the models that we've talked about,
01:21:55like, where does success honestly lie for you these days?
01:22:00- Yeah, it depends how juvenile I'm being
01:22:03and how brave I feel.
01:22:05- Yeah.
01:22:06- So for me, a lot of it is around courage.
01:22:08It's the courage to step into listening to that intuition,
01:22:11those fleeting thoughts and those whispers
01:22:13in the back of my mind.
01:22:14It's the courage to let go of patterns
01:22:19that I know have given me things
01:22:21that I desperately wanted in the past.
01:22:23Validation from people, recognition, a sense of mastery,
01:22:27admiration from people I admired, respect.
01:22:31- No, it's crazy, sorry to interrupt.
01:22:34- No.
01:22:36- The feminine thread is so important here
01:22:37because it's the feminine thread
01:22:39that is capable of receiving.
01:22:41So there's, part of the reason
01:22:43that we keep pursuing validation and money
01:22:44is 'cause we haven't been able to receive
01:22:46what has already been heaped upon us
01:22:48because we haven't well-developed that ability to just go,
01:22:51and yeah, without forcing it on you, man,
01:22:54I mean, I come in here.
01:22:55Dude, you called me, I'll just,
01:23:02you called me four years ago, five years ago?
01:23:05I had three million, you had less than a million subs?
01:23:09- Oh, it's like less than 100,000, yeah.
01:23:10- Yeah, and you were way too confident for your size
01:23:14and like really precarious and friendly.
01:23:17You're like, let's get on the phone, we did it.
01:23:18- Assumed a bunch of familiarity with you
01:23:20that like finessed you into being my friend.
01:23:21- And you were, I think you probably had your computer
01:23:24on a bureau?
01:23:25- Yeah, yeah.
01:23:26- Just like, my God, like,
01:23:30you've made, you've manifested.
01:23:34- But if this isn't arriving, dude, what is?
01:23:37- And it's strange because the line between high standards
01:23:41and satisfaction or enoughness is delicate
01:23:45because you go, I want to further refine my art.
01:23:48I want to become better at the things that I do.
01:23:49I want to continue seeing creativity
01:23:51and finding opportunities and ways to progress
01:23:54and deliver things that are cool and different,
01:23:56like filming in a fucking garage in the middle of LA
01:23:58for no reason other than it's pretty.
01:24:00- That's the feminine thread.
01:24:02And so you do have it,
01:24:04'cause you actually can't get this far without some of it.
01:24:06And I've been all or nothing people.
01:24:08I mean, like all of these people have this intuitive hits.
01:24:11You can't get very far without it.
01:24:13But your guys' attention to detail, the unnecessary nature.
01:24:18- Completely unnecessary.
01:24:19- That is, why do we need a big rock, honey?
01:24:22I don't want to, that's a lot of money.
01:24:23It's like, that is to see beauty in the unnecessary
01:24:28and to be energized to participate in, create,
01:24:32cultivate that sort of beauty
01:24:34that maybe no one else recognizes.
01:24:36That's like for you.
01:24:38That's a beautiful intuition to lean into in your business.
01:24:41And I think it has, it has paid you dividends,
01:24:45but not in the immediate sense that a lot of ROI options
01:24:49that you might've chosen.
01:24:50- Well, I mean, we just put out this, the first tour diary,
01:24:53which was tracking the trip to New York and then Toronto
01:24:57and then back home over that.
01:24:59Honestly, I think it might be one of the most beautiful things
01:25:02we've ever put out.
01:25:03It was so fucking cool.
01:25:04And I watch it back and it's just this gorgeously shot,
01:25:07very slow pacing on the edit.
01:25:11The cuts take fucking ages.
01:25:13There's payoffs that don't occur until like the end of this
01:25:16over hour long vlog.
01:25:19There's entire scenes that are just left untouched
01:25:21like seven and a half minutes.
01:25:23And I'm like, this is so fucking cool.
01:25:27I'm so proud of it in ways that I'm not
01:25:29of the best performing TikTok that we've got.
01:25:32So, okay, you asked about what the current stage
01:25:36of evolution is that I'm at.
01:25:38And I mentioned that on the days where I feel the bravest,
01:25:43on the days where I feel the most in tune,
01:25:45on the days where I've picked my phone up the latest
01:25:48and gone for a walk and done my meditation
01:25:50and done my breath work and stuff,
01:25:51not from a place of I need to over optimize,
01:25:53but from a place of this makes me feel good.
01:25:55And I just like doing it.
01:25:56Like that's my preferable morning.
01:26:01I would say I kind of took the emotion red pill
01:26:06probably about a year, just under a year and a half ago,
01:26:11like summer of last year and getting ill
01:26:15and like eating shit with that was probably partly needed.
01:26:19Maybe this is my like-
01:26:23- No, no, that's very common.
01:26:26It has to break, it has to stop working.
01:26:28It was a market correction on a stock
01:26:33that had had a fucking serious bull run.
01:26:36You know, I moved to America nearly four years ago now.
01:26:41And the channel was at like 200,000 subs
01:26:44and we're gonna hit 4 million this month.
01:26:47There was me, Dean and a Mormon
01:26:50in a Facebook Messenger group chat
01:26:52that was like the whole team.
01:26:53And you've walked in and you can't even remember the names
01:26:55of everyone that's here today.
01:26:58Not that any of those things are like markers of validation
01:27:01or like even efficiency, but what they do show
01:27:05is that growth has happened
01:27:06in like a relatively short space of time.
01:27:08And the slowing down of momentum,
01:27:13like the curtailing of that inertia,
01:27:19like that forward momentum thing stops you
01:27:22from hiding a lot of patterns and whispers
01:27:27and fleeting thoughts in bravado.
01:27:30And this is how the rock star that just continues
01:27:34to release fucking slammer after slammer after slammer,
01:27:36the album after the album, after the tour after,
01:27:39and they end up developing all of these patterns
01:27:42that they've never had to reflect on
01:27:44because the world is just,
01:27:46the volume of success from the world is so great
01:27:50that the fleeting thoughts and the whispers
01:27:51in the back of their mind just can't compete at all.
01:27:55And yeah, it takes you getting to the stage
01:27:57where the world turns up the volume of that,
01:28:00of the repercussions and the consequences.
01:28:02So that was a big part of it.
01:28:03And then I kind of made this,
01:28:05I think if people went back and looked at the podcast
01:28:09at the back end of last year,
01:28:10I said something to the effect of like,
01:28:11I'm really interested in emotions.
01:28:13I'm really interested in trying to be
01:28:15less emotionally decapitated,
01:28:17like feel things below the neck.
01:28:19Okay, well, I'm gonna work on that.
01:28:20I'm gonna ask a bunch of questions.
01:28:22I would go as far as to say that your,
01:28:25I would say that that video,
01:28:28the first video that you did,
01:28:29Theo Von Schon Strickland was probably 20% of,
01:28:34to maybe a little bit more, maybe even a third of like,
01:28:41oh, there's some there there.
01:28:43Like I see something in what Charlie has uncovered
01:28:48in the way that he's speaking about this,
01:28:52in the patterns that he has sort of unearthed.
01:28:54Oh, that's like a, that is nourishing to me
01:29:00in a way that reading "Atomic Habits"
01:29:04for the first time was nourishing to me.
01:29:06Or listening to Peterson's "Hey, Tell the Truth"
01:29:07was nourishing to me and stand up straight
01:29:09with your shoulders back and clean your room.
01:29:11And like, okay, so that was moving from like results
01:29:13to action, and then this is moving from action to emotions.
01:29:15I'm like, okay, there's another level to this.
01:29:19And the fact that it was at the time where you go,
01:29:23things are going pretty well, but like, huh,
01:29:25there is something here that is not whole.
01:29:28I have learned unteachable lesson number fucking 54.
01:29:31And then this year has been me trying
01:29:38to increase the bravery to step into that stuff.
01:29:41It is a challenge when you have planted a flag in the ground
01:29:49and I love this analogy of planting a flag,
01:29:51especially if you've got expectations from people around you
01:29:54'cause you say, this is me and this is what I stand for
01:29:57and this is who I am.
01:29:58Especially if you've got a public platform,
01:30:01because what you thought was a flag you'd planted
01:30:03in the ground on a piece of territory
01:30:05is a tether that you're attached to.
01:30:07It's a stake that you've driven in and you're like,
01:30:10oh, this wasn't a flagpole.
01:30:11This is something with a fucking leash attached to it.
01:30:14And I'm on the end of the leash
01:30:15and I can't really run away that much without upending it all.
01:30:18And people going, well, who the fuck is this guy?
01:30:20You said this thing previously
01:30:22and now you don't believe in it.
01:30:23Like spending the first three years of this podcast
01:30:28doing life hacks, optimizer episodes
01:30:32about the best note-taking like space repetition,
01:30:34Ebbinghaus forgetting curve flashcards there.
01:30:36I'm like- - Five steps
01:30:37to talk to a girl, yeah, yeah.
01:30:39- It's the same fucking arc.
01:30:41And then this sense of, well, people came for that.
01:30:45And then also the potential of the thing
01:30:50that I previously thought was the solution I've realized
01:30:53is maybe the problem.
01:30:55And you go, well, I'm gonna have to like undo
01:30:59not only my own thinking,
01:31:00but I'm gonna have to publicly state.
01:31:02I thought that if I was able to remember everything
01:31:06I learned that that would be the answer.
01:31:08I've managed to do pretty much that.
01:31:12It's not the answer, fuck.
01:31:14That's well seen in yourself, really well seen.
01:31:18- So yeah, now at this stage where it's quite precipicey
01:31:24for me, doing the retreat with Joe was
01:31:28challenging in a way that I've not been challenged
01:31:35and beautiful in a way that I've never really seen before.
01:31:39So that was like a sober, but psychedelic dose.
01:31:43- Yeah, that's another thing I hadn't listed,
01:31:44which is these with the right person,
01:31:46those sorts of weekend or week long retreat things,
01:31:50very powerful for this kind of stuff.
01:31:52- So that kind of, that was the equivalent.
01:31:54They say that like whatever meditation
01:31:56or the level zero consciousness altering stuff,
01:32:01taking psychedelics, heavy dose of psychedelics
01:32:05is basically taking the stair lift
01:32:09to the top of the mountain briefly.
01:32:10And then you come back down and you're like,
01:32:12okay, I kind of got an idea about
01:32:13where it is that I'm going.
01:32:14That was a way of seeing that soberly, I think.
01:32:18There were a few experiences there,
01:32:19which I, again, hadn't taken anything.
01:32:23Like I have no explanation for what the fuck happened.
01:32:27Like I literally have no explanation for what, for what.
01:32:30- In the Theo Vaughn video,
01:32:32one of the things that I hadn't realized when I did that,
01:32:35that I reflect on now is that,
01:32:37you know what made Sean cry in that Theo Vaughn video?
01:32:40For those of you who haven't watched
01:32:41Theo Vaughn is interviewing Sean Strickland
01:32:43and Sean breaks down in tears talking about his abuse
01:32:45and Theo beautifully is just with him
01:32:49in a big, strong UFC guy.
01:32:51Do you remember the sentence that he said before?
01:32:53- It's okay, buddy.
01:32:55We don't need to talk.
01:32:56- Sorry, sorry, Sean's.
01:32:58What made Sean cry?
01:32:59- Oh, no.
01:33:01- Okay.
01:33:02He says, I stopped believing in God.
01:33:04That's the wound.
01:33:08Like he was talking about the abuse that had happened to him
01:33:11and hiding under his dad's bed.
01:33:12And yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:33:13And he goes, stop believing in God.
01:33:15That's it, man.
01:33:19Like that's, yes, the abuse is horrible
01:33:22and terrible and is enough.
01:33:23But the wound wound is there.
01:33:27And it's there for everybody.
01:33:32And I just, to get my atheist bonafide is in,
01:33:36I have the chapters of a book that I was gonna release
01:33:39before Christopher Hitchens released "God is Not Great"
01:33:41that was my atheist book.
01:33:42Like I was gonna go in line with Chris and Sam
01:33:45and deeply admiring and Alex too.
01:33:47Like love what Alex is up to.
01:33:48And yeah, man, ripped.
01:33:52I didn't want my skull ripped off either.
01:33:53I wasn't hoping that that would happen with me, but it did.
01:33:58And yeah, you have those mountaintop experiences.
01:34:03They're beautiful.
01:34:05And then the question is that it will take me still years.
01:34:09I'm sure, like, how do I live like this?
01:34:11Like how do I function and live with this integrated
01:34:16into how I treat people and how I treat myself
01:34:19and how I conduct my business?
01:34:21- The first time that we left the farm that we were on.
01:34:25So we'd been there for seven days,
01:34:28pretty much 12 hours a day of unrelenting,
01:34:31very deep emotional work with this one group of people,
01:34:3411 other people plus four facilitators.
01:34:37The first day that we left, we were advised go and do,
01:34:42the actual first day we left, we went to the beach.
01:34:44We went to the beach and I cried at the sun,
01:34:48cried at the moon, cried at a dog
01:34:50and then nearly cried at a seagull.
01:34:52- It's a super moon tonight.
01:34:53It's gonna be rad.
01:34:54- There was something happening yet last night.
01:34:56It was super big last night.
01:34:57- Yeah, tonight's the full moon.
01:34:58- Okay, fucking, we'll be ready.
01:35:00- We'll be ready.
01:35:01(laughing)
01:35:03But sorry to interrupt.
01:35:05The separation from the stars and the moon
01:35:08is a profound nationwide, mostly citywide travesty.
01:35:13Like the inability to locate yourself
01:35:16in something that eternal, which isn't eternal,
01:35:20but it's like that durable.
01:35:21Oh my God.
01:35:22- Yep. - Yeah.
01:35:23- Yeah, I was watching, that's actually another,
01:35:25look at me just my, this is my crying diary.
01:35:27The blood red super moon that happened in 2021 or 2022,
01:35:34I remember where I was, I was in the Airbnb
01:35:35that I lived in for three months
01:35:36when I first moved to America
01:35:38and I was watching Peaky Blinders on my own.
01:35:40So I could not be more engaged
01:35:42in this historic period drama thing.
01:35:44And someone texted me and was like, have you seen the moon?
01:35:47And I go outside onto the balcony
01:35:49of this Airbnb that I'm staying in.
01:35:50And I look up and it's this huge bright pink moon.
01:35:54And just immediately I'm like, floods,
01:35:56like floods of, like sobbing floods of tears.
01:35:59Like what the fuck, this is a while ago now.
01:36:01So I don't think I've necessarily had the language.
01:36:04What is going on?
01:36:05Like, why is this happening?
01:36:06Like shame around, like,
01:36:08why am I crying at the fucking moon?
01:36:09Like, am I broken?
01:36:10Is there something up with me?
01:36:12Is this weird?
01:36:13Am I feeble?
01:36:14Is this like weak?
01:36:15What is this?
01:36:16Like, I don't, I'm glad that there's nobody here to see it.
01:36:19And then when we finished the retreat, cried at everything.
01:36:24And then the next day, one of the pieces of advice
01:36:29was you should go and get some body work done.
01:36:31Like it might be nice.
01:36:32Like some gentle body work would be like a good way
01:36:33to kind of reintegrate.
01:36:35I mean, one of the guys that was there were like, right, okay.
01:36:37Nobody wanted to drive.
01:36:38Nobody wanted to get into their car.
01:36:40So they're like, I don't feel,
01:36:42I don't feel particularly human.
01:36:44What did they, what did they call it?
01:36:46Uh, uh, not karma sick.
01:36:50Uh, uh, fuck.
01:36:52Not dope sick.
01:36:54There was some, it was something, something sick
01:36:56for how, like emotion sick or something,
01:37:01which was basically like an emotional hangover
01:37:04that you'd had from that week where everything
01:37:07was a little spacey.
01:37:09It felt very psychedelic.
01:37:10No one wanted to drive.
01:37:12One of the people did and drove us into the local town.
01:37:14We went into this Thai massage parlor place
01:37:19and the front desk was the classic little running waterfall
01:37:25and like very gently playing music.
01:37:26And one woman behind the counter,
01:37:29we had to fill this form in and me and the guy
01:37:30that were there, we were like, we need,
01:37:33we're going to wait outside.
01:37:35Is that okay?
01:37:35Being inside of this very calm, very normal,
01:37:38one other person reception area to a massage place
01:37:42that we were going to go in and enjoy was like too much.
01:37:45It was too much stimulus.
01:37:47People didn't want to drive.
01:37:48People, we didn't want to talk to people.
01:37:49Someone went into Whole Foods and left
01:37:51without having bought anything.
01:37:52They were like, I don't, I can't,
01:37:55I don't know what to buy.
01:37:56I don't know where to go.
01:37:57Like there's people in there.
01:37:58It was just too stimulating and overwhelming.
01:38:00And the main thing that I realized coming out of that
01:38:03was how many of the patterns I have in life
01:38:05that are compensatory mechanisms for a world
01:38:07that is not very gentle with somebody
01:38:10that is an open vessel.
01:38:12- Open vessel, yeah.
01:38:12I think this is, this is, this is okay.
01:38:14So now we can get into the final,
01:38:16my intuitive crackpot series, okay?
01:38:19- Here we go.
01:38:21- I think that as I watched "Love on the Spectrum"
01:38:25and I've been going through this stuff myself
01:38:26and I see the stimming that these autistic people are doing
01:38:30as they're dating and they're rocking
01:38:31and they have, the noises are too loud.
01:38:33I'm like, oh, this is someone
01:38:34that doesn't have the coping mechanism
01:38:35to deal with a world where the volume
01:38:37is turned up way too loud.
01:38:39And the gifts that are often connected with autistic people,
01:38:45which is like, that guy can just like play music,
01:38:48like nothing, he's just in it.
01:38:50The way that that person is obsessed with buttons,
01:38:52like they see something that the rest of us don't see.
01:38:55They're, they struggle to fit into a world
01:38:58where it is just not sensitive, right?
01:39:01And so I think what you're experiencing
01:39:03and you'd asked at the beginning
01:39:04in one of the questions that you'd sent to me was sensitivity.
01:39:08I think what happened as you take your armor off,
01:39:11you're like, oh, this is me, I'm sensitive as hell.
01:39:15And in order to function effectively
01:39:17in a world that is too loud, too brushed,
01:39:19bumps into me, all these kinds of things,
01:39:21I've learned effective armoring coping mechanisms
01:39:26to make me function well, but at the cost of the beauty,
01:39:30at cost of some of my deepest gifts.
01:39:33- Can I, I need to interject, sorry.
01:39:35- Yeah, please. - So I don't break
01:39:36the fourth wall around like the way
01:39:37that the business operates basically ever,
01:39:39but I think this is a particularly revealing conversation.
01:39:42It probably makes sense.
01:39:43And it's also related to something that happened today.
01:39:46So as a perfect example of being sensitive, open,
01:39:51and sort of transparent, being a transparent vessel
01:39:54for this sort of stuff is antithetical
01:39:58to operating in the world somehow,
01:40:00or at least it requires a degree of openness
01:40:03that you're not typically rewarded for in the past,
01:40:07which means it's hard to do in the present.
01:40:09So this morning I told you maybe one
01:40:11of the most beautiful things,
01:40:12and I've like got all excited about this,
01:40:13and we've got this edit and like use some
01:40:15of my favorite tracks and we did all of this stuff.
01:40:17And then during the episode that I recorded this morning,
01:40:19there was an error on the upload.
01:40:21And it meant that after 10 minutes of it being up,
01:40:24that got taken down, we had to re-upload it.
01:40:26- And so your notifications and-
01:40:28- Everyone's pinged it.
01:40:29They've tried to watch it.
01:40:30It's taken down.
01:40:30And I'm like, we've flubbed the release
01:40:33for this thing that was really beautiful.
01:40:35And during the break of the episode with Matthew,
01:40:38when I go to the bathroom to have a pee,
01:40:39like the episode go up, and someone's like,
01:40:41that thing happens.
01:40:42And instead of me saying, like what I felt was like,
01:40:46fuck, why did this happen?
01:40:47We need to find a solution.
01:40:48This is the objective metric and they shouldn't anything.
01:40:51What I should have said is like, ow.
01:40:54- Yeah.
01:40:55- Oh fuck.
01:40:56Look, I'm sure nobody meant for this to happen,
01:41:01but like, oh, that hurts.
01:41:03Like I really loved that thing.
01:41:04And I felt so proud of it.
01:41:05And I wanted other people to feel the way that I feel
01:41:08about it and now I'm worried that not as many people
01:41:10are going to see it.
01:41:12I didn't do that.
01:41:12I didn't say that.
01:41:13My initial response was like, what do we need to do?
01:41:16We need to come up with a solution.
01:41:16We've got to have a five step process to get through
01:41:18the thing as opposed to me just sitting people down
01:41:19and going like, ow, that hurt.
01:41:24And fuck, I hope it doesn't happen again.
01:41:30Whatever, like maybe not even that.
01:41:32And that pattern that I realized, like this armoring
01:41:37that you have of yourself, because if you're always
01:41:40this open, like you're getting out a lot.
01:41:43- You're getting ouched a lot.
01:41:44- There are lots of ouches out there.
01:41:45- Yes, yes.
01:41:47- Credit to Joe.
01:41:48A fantastic developmental thing to deepen into this
01:41:52is to say ouch out loud when you are hurt
01:41:55by someone or life.
01:41:55- That's where I took the ouch from.
01:41:57- I was saying ouch the entire ride over based
01:41:59on a phone call that I had this morning.
01:42:01Ouch, ouch.
01:42:02And I got to, it was this, anything.
01:42:03I could have powered through it.
01:42:04I behaved totally, you know, it would have been simple
01:42:07to just, this was not a big deal.
01:42:08- Yeah.
01:42:09- But as I did the ouches, I got to, oh my God,
01:42:11I didn't feel love from this person and that hurts.
01:42:13It just hurts.
01:42:14Like they don't have to give you love.
01:42:15It just, it hurts anyway.
01:42:17And we have a choice.
01:42:19We can feel the pain and not cut off that aspect
01:42:22of ourselves that, and what you described,
01:42:24like the sacrifice and not feeling the pain
01:42:26is that you lose that, oh, I really wanted people
01:42:28to feel the way that I felt about this.
01:42:31And then that has downstream effects of maybe the way
01:42:33that you treat the next blog is more efficient
01:42:35and less beautiful and it's, and you lose the essence
01:42:38of the thing to avoid experiencing pain around its fragility.
01:42:43And that is just, yeah, that's everywhere.
01:42:45- Keep going through your developmental kooky world theory.
01:42:48- My kooky world, where were we with?
01:42:51- You'd said?
01:42:53- Oh, autism.
01:42:54- Yes.
01:42:54- Autism is related to, I really think it's people entering
01:42:58the world with an intense sensitivity.
01:42:59And I think we can look to people,
01:43:02our autists, autists, savants for not how we will become
01:43:07at all, but like for some of the pains of sensitivity
01:43:12and some of the gifts that are associated with sensitivity.
01:43:15And what we can still do is we can still have our armor
01:43:17that we can put on when necessary.
01:43:19We can have our containment for our board meeting
01:43:21and this, that and the other thing.
01:43:22But the ability to just go, oh my God, it's so loud.
01:43:25It is so loud.
01:43:27Even right now, you know, there's planes in this
01:43:29and our attention is able to dial in and tune everything out.
01:43:32But when you tune everything out, you miss the beauty
01:43:34of the flowers and the cars and the cicada
01:43:37that is making noise and how awesome everything is.
01:43:39So that's one piece.
01:43:41This is a hard tangent, but whatever.
01:43:44We've been all over the place today.
01:43:46So we talked about mythology.
01:43:49Mythology is a beautiful connection between emotions
01:43:54and that like God thing.
01:43:57And because mythology often deals with gods,
01:43:59but it deals with this archetypal realm.
01:44:02That is, I find more understandable, approachable.
01:44:06And this is what I said, Carl Jung is like so great
01:44:08because he bridges that emotional level with the divine.
01:44:12And so a beautiful bridge is mythology.
01:44:16And I already hear that some of them,
01:44:17you've talked about Cassandra and that sort of thing.
01:44:20These myths, I mean, I don't know which one is,
01:44:22let me see if there's one
01:44:23that is particularly relevant to you.
01:44:25There's not one that comes to mind immediately,
01:44:28but using chat GBT to just be like,
01:44:31hey, what's the myth of so-and-so if it pops up?
01:44:34Really, really powerful thing that I have experienced.
01:44:36- What do you think about sort of mythology?
01:44:39Is it a, it's not the full dose of religion
01:44:44with some of its sort of stodginess and inaccessibility?
01:44:48- So here's my broad view of religion,
01:44:50spirituality, et cetera.
01:44:51There are these mystics all around the world.
01:44:54Jesus, Muhammad, Rumi, you know.
01:44:56They get it at various levels.
01:45:00It's tough to translate.
01:45:02It's like, how do you say it?
01:45:04First off, how does it come out of your mouth
01:45:06in a way that is honest to your experience?
01:45:08Extremely challenging.
01:45:09And then for somebody who hasn't had that experience,
01:45:11they're gonna write it down now in a book
01:45:13and codify how everyone else needs to be.
01:45:15So I think that's what's going on
01:45:16with a lot of the big books is that
01:45:18there is a mystical insight from somebody who got it
01:45:22at a very, very, very deep level.
01:45:25Difficult for them to speak,
01:45:26difficult for other people to write down 60 years later.
01:45:29And then we're a lot of people
01:45:30that aren't directly connected with that experience,
01:45:33projecting their mother and their father onto the creator
01:45:36of the universe, that he's upset with me
01:45:38and he wants to punish me.
01:45:39And a lot of that made it into the text.
01:45:41So I don't treat the Bible as literally every word is true,
01:45:47but I treat it as a repository that has been mistranslated
01:45:50some of the time of a brilliant mystic,
01:45:53like somebody who got it.
01:45:55And I treat other texts like that,
01:45:57like there's some level of understanding integration
01:46:00that the person who came up with this had.
01:46:02That's why it survived so long.
01:46:04That's why it was so meaningful to people,
01:46:05even if they couldn't describe
01:46:07why it was so meaningful to them.
01:46:09So Greek, Egyptian, these pantheon gods are really useful
01:46:14for relating to you the archetypal,
01:46:18emotional patterns of life.
01:46:21So for instance, the story of Ares, Aphrodite, and Hephaestus.
01:46:26Hephaestus is the craftsman god.
01:46:29He's got a lame leg.
01:46:31He's a craftsman.
01:46:33You might call him a brainiac.
01:46:35He's not a physical powerhouse.
01:46:37He's the only god that is crippled.
01:46:39He is betrothed and wedded to Aphrodite,
01:46:42the goddess of beauty,
01:46:42but she cheats on him all the time
01:46:44with the alpha chad, Ares, right?
01:46:47So they have a bunch of kids,
01:46:48but the story of Hephaestus and Aphrodite and Ares
01:46:50is that Hephaestus learns that he's being cuckolded.
01:46:52He creates a cage above the bed.
01:46:55Ares and Aphrodite go at it.
01:46:57He drops the cage on them and then brings in
01:46:59all the other gods to laugh at them.
01:47:01And it's like an archetypal exploration of the pain
01:47:04of the academically inclined guy
01:47:09who is hurt by the aggressive masculine man,
01:47:14who takes something that he loves
01:47:17and then moves into his zone of power,
01:47:20which is intellectual and shames him.
01:47:23And you see this play out.
01:47:24I've heard Brennan Lee Mulligan,
01:47:26who you might be familiar with,
01:47:27who's a Dungeons and Dragons guy, very smart,
01:47:29tell his very personal story of he was a smart kid.
01:47:32The tough kids pushed him around, made fun of him,
01:47:34but he got really good at insulting them
01:47:36so he could just cut them to the core
01:47:37because he was smart enough to do it.
01:47:39And so there's these patterns
01:47:41that if you look at these archetypes,
01:47:42almost like Rorschach tests,
01:47:44which is, which one is calling to me?
01:47:47I don't know, there's something about,
01:47:48I'm curious about Ares, I'm curious about this.
01:47:50You look up the story, you read it.
01:47:52What do I make of it is a beautiful way
01:47:55to start to recognize some of these archetypal patterns
01:47:59in your life because they have existed
01:48:01for thousands of years before you.
01:48:03And I could go on and on and on
01:48:04about all the different ones that have been valuable to me.
01:48:07- So symbolic, the story is more than just the story.
01:48:12It's less the literal?
01:48:13Is that kind of the, what's the key?
01:48:16- Okay, so the key that Jung, Peterson, et cetera would say
01:48:19is that these are like metaphysically real
01:48:23in a way that is not just metaphorical or symbolic,
01:48:26that there are, how can I describe this?
01:48:29That there are near universal structures in human psychology,
01:48:34for instance, for father and for mother,
01:48:37that we do not come in utterly blank slate.
01:48:40And there are recurring patterns based on,
01:48:42you could call it evolution, or if you're spiritually based,
01:48:44just like this is what it is to be human,
01:48:47that by relating to these archetypes,
01:48:51seeing how they strike us,
01:48:52we can learn the pieces of ourselves that are missing.
01:48:55So maybe we didn't have the world's greatest mother
01:48:58or greatest father,
01:48:59but if we relate to an archetypal story of a good mother
01:49:03or of the wise father or something,
01:49:06we can re-come into contact with the piece of us
01:49:09that we felt should have been there when we were kids,
01:49:12but we couldn't put our finger on, we couldn't describe,
01:49:13and so we can't explain the pain
01:49:15that we're experiencing of the loss.
01:49:17These stories help us reconnect with that
01:49:20in the same way that the hero's journey
01:49:22inspires young men to go out, be heroes,
01:49:24understand that there's a sacrifice and a rocky montage
01:49:26that they have to go through.
01:49:28These stories give you steps and relationship with,
01:49:33oh, that's what was missing,
01:49:36or, oh, that's what's up next for me.
01:49:38I'll give you one small example of this.
01:49:40Joseph Campbell has this hero's journey that he charts out,
01:49:43and it's basically a clock where you start up here,
01:49:46it's three o'clock, you meet the mentor,
01:49:47you descend into the underworld, it's the belly of the beast,
01:49:50it's the Garden of Gethsemane at the bottom.
01:49:51You come back up, you get the divine revelation,
01:49:53you come back to the community.
01:49:56I had been charting where I was,
01:49:57and he's got basically, I think,
01:49:5812 to 17 different stages, and I found myself,
01:50:01I was like, oh, this is belly of the beast.
01:50:03I am lost, utterly lost.
01:50:05And shortly after that, I was like, what's up next?
01:50:08Temptation of the woman.
01:50:09So in the story of the Odyssey, and stop me if I'm--
01:50:12- No, dude, I want more myth.
01:50:14- Okay, more myth.
01:50:16In the story of the Odyssey,
01:50:17Odysseus has gone through everything.
01:50:19He had 600 men, they're all dead.
01:50:22He's washed up on this island.
01:50:24He still hasn't arrived home
01:50:25after near like 13 years after the Trojan War.
01:50:29He still can't get back to Ithaca.
01:50:32And he's defeated, and he lands on this island.
01:50:34Every island he's gotten to has been torturous.
01:50:37And there is a beautiful nymph named Calypso, a goddess,
01:50:41who just wants to marry him, have sex with him,
01:50:43and keep him there.
01:50:43That's it.
01:50:45Just stay.
01:50:46And so he gets to the end of the journey,
01:50:47and he's offered, just stay with me.
01:50:49He's with a goddess.
01:50:51And he stays for a while,
01:50:52but he ultimately makes the decisions like,
01:50:53no, I have to go back.
01:50:55I know it's gonna be hard.
01:50:56I know it's been brutal to get here, but I have to continue.
01:50:59And this is what Campbell calls
01:51:00the temptation of the feminine, temptation of the woman.
01:51:03And I found myself here,
01:51:05went through the bottom of this ark,
01:51:07and a buy offer comes in for Charisma on Command.
01:51:11And it's, dude, you could just ride off in the sunset.
01:51:13You could just put it away.
01:51:15You're frustrated with it.
01:51:16It's not working.
01:51:16Just, you could take the money.
01:51:17I'm dividing it up in my head.
01:51:19How many years?
01:51:19How much of this?
01:51:21And I knew where I was in the journey,
01:51:23and I was able to go, ah, I know this,
01:51:25and this isn't what I want.
01:51:27Even though it's gonna be hard, I want the struggle.
01:51:30There's something, there's a home that is calling me.
01:51:33And so I was able to navigate that
01:51:35with a bit more understanding.
01:51:36And then I knew after that comes Atonement with the Father.
01:51:39And so there's this other stage that I had to go through,
01:51:42and I could go on and on and on.
01:51:44And then I knew after that comes Apotheosis,
01:51:46which is the connection with the divine,
01:51:48and then the ultimate boon.
01:51:49Right now I sit at the return,
01:51:52which is the refusal to return
01:51:53is basically where I'm at right now.
01:51:55So after you get the grail, the lamp, the thing,
01:51:58and you've done all that work,
01:51:59oftentimes the hero's like, well, that was really hard.
01:52:01I don't think I want to go home.
01:52:03I finally made myself comfortable
01:52:04in this other secluded inner world.
01:52:07I don't think I want to bring this back to the community.
01:52:10And sometimes there's a chase.
01:52:11Sometimes someone has to pull them out of it.
01:52:13But I was like, oh,
01:52:14maybe that's what this podcast is for me.
01:52:15This is Chris inviting me back to you.
01:52:19- I have a question.
01:52:20How the fuck do you talk about charisma anymore?
01:52:23- So it was really hard.
01:52:25And I said at the beginning,
01:52:26I'm sorry that this has been so disjointed.
01:52:28One day I'll have this smooth.
01:52:29I had understood charisma to be,
01:52:33what do people like about me?
01:52:34And I still will make videos.
01:52:36Like how do they, what steps do I do?
01:52:38Say, think, et cetera, yada, yada, yada,
01:52:40to get someone to like me.
01:52:41It was all based on if I was behaving
01:52:44in a way that was approved of.
01:52:45That was my understanding of it.
01:52:47But as I get deeper into myth,
01:52:48charisma is a Greek word.
01:52:50The etymology of charisma is from the same word as charity
01:52:53and the charities, which are the goddesses.
01:52:55But charisma is a divinely given gift,
01:52:59often associated with speech,
01:53:02but associated with someone that God moves through.
01:53:06And so you can speak charismatically,
01:53:08but you can dance charismatically.
01:53:09You can paint charismatically.
01:53:11You can like love and hug and you can live charismatically.
01:53:15So as I go, oh wow, I picked the perfect word.
01:53:19I picked the perfect name for this company
01:53:21for me to grow into.
01:53:22I just didn't know it at the time.
01:53:23And so I am learning now how to serve the core audience
01:53:27that wants tips, tricks, all this kind of stuff.
01:53:30But I need to expand it into how does God move through you?
01:53:35And for me, that looks less like here's the phrase,
01:53:39here's the thing to do,
01:53:41but finding the intersection of radiance and authenticity.
01:53:45I think in the past I had been like,
01:53:48look, I want to be authentic,
01:53:49but I'll just give you an example.
01:53:51The first day of the course,
01:53:53Charisma University that we have,
01:53:55I think a lot of the stuff could be used,
01:53:56but is when somebody asks you how you're doing,
01:54:00don't say I'm fine.
01:54:01Don't say busy, don't say good.
01:54:02Be better than that.
01:54:03Be phenomenal, be wonderful, be, you know.
01:54:06And you can treat that at any level of the pyramid.
01:54:08You can go to the results level,
01:54:09which is no matter what I'm feeling,
01:54:11I am going to say I'm phenomenal
01:54:12and I can betray my emotions.
01:54:14I can take actions to start to take steps in my life
01:54:17that I've worked out that day and I've gotten something done.
01:54:19So I'm more likely to actually feel phenomenal
01:54:22when someone asks me.
01:54:23I can treat the underlying emotional level,
01:54:25which is have I been with my shame, my grief, my et cetera?
01:54:28So then no matter what I say, I'm like,
01:54:29dude, it's kind of a rough day.
01:54:31There's still something emanating from me.
01:54:34Or I can do it at the spiritual level,
01:54:35which is like, oh my God, I remember God.
01:54:36I feel fucking incredible.
01:54:38And I can radiate it that way.
01:54:41So for me, it's more about,
01:54:44just like I had to grow out of the shell that I was in,
01:54:46it's yes, the same piece stays,
01:54:48but it's also more than that.
01:54:51And so that's how I have come around to being like,
01:54:55oh, I did want charisma on command.
01:54:57I wanted to grow it into much more than it was
01:55:00and have it mean something significantly more than it did.
01:55:03And there's a challenge of bringing the audience with me
01:55:06and leaving some of them behind.
01:55:07And I'm a weirdo and all that kind of stuff is a stress.
01:55:10- How many subs you got?
01:55:116 million, 7 million?
01:55:12- 6, 6.9 or something?
01:55:14- Right, 7 million subs.
01:55:15- Yeah.
01:55:16- The market for I want to say cool things
01:55:20to get girls to be attracted to me
01:55:21and the market for I want to get in touch with my feminine
01:55:24and be able to dance without shame to music in my bedroom,
01:55:28not quite the same.
01:55:31- Yes, and look at Jordan Peterson.
01:55:33Look, core, core.
01:55:35He is a union psychologist who the first thing, yes,
01:55:39he came on the scene for politics, but it was Genesis.
01:55:42It was all of this unsexy Pinocchio, Genesis, Lion King.
01:55:46I truly believe that the public needs a union,
01:55:51a speaker for Carl Jung to be present.
01:55:53Like we need myths.
01:55:55- Is this a pivot that you would burden,
01:55:58you would potentially carry yourself?
01:56:01- I would deeply be honored,
01:56:02I would just love to pray for that opportunity.
01:56:06And I am trying to learn how to gracefully
01:56:10make that transition.
01:56:12And I have put out videos where I'm more experimental.
01:56:14They don't do as well,
01:56:15but I'm still in the zone of sorting through
01:56:17how to talk about this stuff.
01:56:18And perhaps I should have come in here and just been like,
01:56:20I got my list of myths and I'm going to tell them.
01:56:22- No, no, no, no, no, no.
01:56:23This has been one of the most intimate conversations
01:56:26I think I've ever had on the show.
01:56:30- You've got something, you're there with something
01:56:34and Dr. K is there?
01:56:36- Well, let me ask.
01:56:39I think you're there too.
01:56:42- I'm edging.
01:56:43- You're edging.
01:56:44- I've been edging for a few months now.
01:56:46- So let me ask.
01:56:47If you were able to take that stake out of the ground
01:56:52and didn't have that tether
01:56:53and the cameras could disappear for a moment.
01:56:56And it's okay if the answer is no,
01:56:57'cause I know I didn't for a long time.
01:56:59Do you have any direction of where you would head, walk,
01:57:03do without the expectation?
01:57:05- There's a few.
01:57:11I'm pulled toward fun, at least in part at the moment.
01:57:21And that-
01:57:23- I love that for you, by the way.
01:57:24- Me too.
01:57:25- I love things that integrate ancient past,
01:57:28which for you is being a club promoter.
01:57:30I love things, yeah.
01:57:32- The way that that will come through
01:57:34is multi-guest episodes.
01:57:35So me, George, Mac, Zach, and another person
01:57:39are gonna do a sort of regular, probably monthly,
01:57:41something like that.
01:57:42Hang style episode.
01:57:43Working title is smoke break or office hours or whatever.
01:57:47Drop in or some shit.
01:57:49I like the idea of that because it is part of a releasing
01:57:57of a lot of the control.
01:57:59What is the outcome that we get from this?
01:58:00Well, I'm not too sure.
01:58:02And what is it we're gonna talk about?
01:58:03Well, I'm also not too sure.
01:58:05But it doesn't need to be fucking last 24 hour news slop.
01:58:09Tucker Carlson's in a beef with Nick Fuentes and Ben Shapiro,
01:58:11and we need to, how does this?
01:58:13So that will be a little bit of relinquishing of control.
01:58:15That's part of it.
01:58:16- Cool.
01:58:17- And that gives me an opportunity
01:58:19to put more personality across,
01:58:20as opposed to this thing that I've done for so long,
01:58:22which is be a vessel and a pet.
01:58:27A pedestal for people who have great ideas.
01:58:31People I'm interested in about things I'm interested in.
01:58:33Like, what is it that I can distill from you
01:58:35and then make you look as amazing as possible?
01:58:37And that's been great,
01:58:38but I've subjugated myself a lot throughout that.
01:58:40- I see this, yeah.
01:58:42- And it's like, okay, if not now, then when?
01:58:45Like, and it's the same for the success thing.
01:58:47If not now, when have you arrived?
01:58:49If not after a thousand episodes
01:58:51and a quarter of a million words written in five years
01:58:54on my newsletter,
01:58:55like when do you feel like your ideas
01:58:58have sufficient veracity or legitimacy
01:59:00or authenticity or whatever the fuck to be able to go?
01:59:03I think maybe I can contribute a bit.
01:59:06Maybe I can make it a little bit about me.
01:59:08And I never wanted to make it about me.
01:59:09And part of that was a defensive tactic
01:59:11because I found in my past,
01:59:13especially when I was getting bullied as a kid,
01:59:14that if I made myself small, if I didn't make it about me,
01:59:18if I didn't make myself too loud or too big,
01:59:19that the eye of Sauron sort of didn't get pointed at me.
01:59:22One of the things that I'd learned, I think as a child,
01:59:25was if I'm too smart in class
01:59:28or put my hand up and get the answer right
01:59:29or perform too well in whatever,
01:59:31sometimes the bullies would notice me more.
01:59:34Whereas if I do something like people,
01:59:36people can mistake smallness for a lack of a,
01:59:42people can mistake like humbleness, smallness,
01:59:44self-deprecation for a lack of a threat.
01:59:46And the internet is the same with regards to this.
01:59:51So one thing, more fun, making it a little bit more about me.
01:59:55Here's some ideas that I've got.
01:59:56I'm gonna actually like move toward that.
01:59:58Something Patrick, that David mentioned to me
02:00:00a long time ago, actually.
02:00:02- Is there a core idea in there that is around which you're?
02:00:07- There will be.
02:00:08So this is the next bit, I guess.
02:00:10The problem that I'm having at the moment
02:00:14is I only just arrived at accepting
02:00:16that emotions were an important thing to work on.
02:00:18And now I've got this like,
02:00:20it feels like I took psychedelics and saw something
02:00:22I wasn't supposed to see.
02:00:23I'm like, I was like ready to map this next bit
02:00:28of the journey or a better example.
02:00:31I love this.
02:00:32I've been thinking about this a lot.
02:00:33Maybe it's 'cause like Elon's kind of crushing it
02:00:35with space exploration.
02:00:36It's an old style of rocket, right?
02:00:38Remember the old school, like Apollo rocket?
02:00:41- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:00:42- So when you're on the launch pad,
02:00:43there's a particular fuel source
02:00:44and a particular engine that gets used.
02:00:45And then after that.
02:00:47- I have to try this.
02:00:47- Goes in and get it.
02:00:48And then after that it's booster rockets
02:00:50and they like kick in.
02:00:52So at a particular altitude,
02:00:54there is a particular fuel source
02:00:55and type of propulsion that's used.
02:00:57And then you get to another one and another one kicks in
02:00:59and then you get to another one and those fall away.
02:01:02And then another one happens.
02:01:03And I'm like, I was just about accepting
02:01:07that the booster rockets had come on online.
02:01:09And now there's this, I'm like, where am I?
02:01:12So that's thrown a little bit of a spanner into the works
02:01:15for me like trying to map stuff,
02:01:16which is why it's really useful to have this conversation.
02:01:19But the thing that I'm kind of prepared to at the moment,
02:01:23like really, really lean into is the pride of sensitivity.
02:01:28Like trying to find strength in sensitivity
02:01:32and in emotionality and really asking questions around,
02:01:37how do you navigate the things that you feel
02:01:45and still get the outcomes that you want?
02:01:46Like balancing real world results
02:01:48with an inner sense of enoughness.
02:01:50Okay, what's that?
02:01:51How does that piece together?
02:01:52I think that probably for the next 12 months
02:01:55is gonna be a real core theme for me.
02:01:58Funny story on that.
02:01:59You know Myron Gaines from "Fresh and Fit"?
02:02:02- I don't know him, but I love him.
02:02:03- We went for like shawarma
02:02:05or like some Middle Eastern-y food thing in Miami,
02:02:10maybe two years ago, something like that, or 18 months ago.
02:02:12Just before I'd started thinking about this,
02:02:14but I was like tapped in a tiny, teeny tiny,
02:02:16weenie a little bit.
02:02:17And we sat down and he's like kind of gregarious guy,
02:02:20da, da, da, da, da, da,
02:02:21like sort of talking about all this stuff.
02:02:22And I was just interested to find out about him
02:02:25and like, you know, where does this like particular firework
02:02:30like spiral around to?
02:02:32It's like ideas and stuff and a past and a future
02:02:35and all this, and he was talking about this stuff.
02:02:38And then he said, he was telling me about this experience
02:02:42that he'd gone through and like,
02:02:43this thing happened and this thing happened
02:02:44and this thing happened.
02:02:45I just went, "Oh, how did that make you feel?"
02:02:49And it stopped the conversation,
02:02:51totally stopped the conversation.
02:02:52And he like must've paused for maybe five seconds.
02:02:57Look, and he went, "I've never really thought about that."
02:03:01- Wow.
02:03:02- Like no one's ever, I've never really thought about it
02:03:04and no one's ever really asked me or something like that.
02:03:07I was like, "Oh, that's cool."
02:03:09- That's really cool.
02:03:10- That's cool.
02:03:10- Also credit to him.
02:03:11- Yeah, for seeing it.
02:03:12- Really, and I was like, "Huh."
02:03:15And there was a bit as well, like when everyone like that
02:03:18sort of like super forward leaning dopamine energy thing,
02:03:23there is a little bit of like, how do I get through this?
02:03:26Like gotta be a bit more person in there.
02:03:28Like I wanna excavate it and like that,
02:03:30I'm interested in that.
02:03:31For the first five years of the show, I wasn't.
02:03:35I was interested in like the shell.
02:03:38I was interested in the outside,
02:03:39like the action and the results.
02:03:41I'm like, "Okay, like how do I like poke in?"
02:03:45Not because I wanna see you cry,
02:03:46not because I want like some like overly unnecessary.
02:03:50- I'm not Steven Bartlett.
02:03:52- Steven's got a skillset.
02:03:54- Steven's amazing, I love Steven.
02:03:56- I'm not sure.
02:03:57I think for him, what he's wanting is like the expression
02:03:59of how that made somebody feel.
02:04:01Whereas what I'm interested in is like,
02:04:03what is the marriage between the outcome that happens
02:04:06and that feeling and how is that?
02:04:09I'm like fascinated by tension.
02:04:10So I'm like, "Okay, how does the tension
02:04:12"between these two things happen?"
02:04:13Also sitting with somebody crying,
02:04:15and this is a failing of mine and a strength of Steven's is,
02:04:19and I learned this during Groundbreakers with Joe.
02:04:22If somebody else cries, I cry a lot.
02:04:24Like if I see someone in pain or discomfort
02:04:28or I ask somebody a question
02:04:29and it's either the sadness or happiness
02:04:33and like they go, I go.
02:04:34- Me too.
02:04:35- And I have shame around like that.
02:04:37So I'm like, okay, in order for me,
02:04:39the number of times that somebody's cried on Steven's show,
02:04:42and like, I'm not sure how many times I've seen him cry.
02:04:47Certainly in response to somebody else,
02:04:48he seems to be able to hold space.
02:04:50Now, I don't know whether, I'd love to,
02:04:53we were talking this weekend, I should have.
02:04:55- What's going on inside?
02:04:56Yeah, he's so curious.
02:04:57- Are you numbed to it?
02:04:59Are you insulated from this?
02:05:01Or are you so dropped in that you've like alchemized it
02:05:05and you're like, I'm able to like fold Joe Hudson
02:05:07view framework, like.
02:05:09- Either, my experience of it, I cried,
02:05:14was I felt his presence, yeah.
02:05:18- That's a fucking, I mean, that's like,
02:05:20to be able to do it, to sit with somebody in that
02:05:22and to hold space in that and to not.
02:05:24I mean, some people, I guess, are just like less emotional
02:05:27in that way, like their emotional trigger,
02:05:29or they don't present it in the same sort of a way.
02:05:32But if you're able to hold the space
02:05:36and not have like, this is the impartiality
02:05:40and the empathy thing, right?
02:05:41Like, I'm not going to try and change you
02:05:44and I'm with you without being in your emotions.
02:05:47That's like black belt shit.
02:05:51That's like very, very, very impressive.
02:05:52I don't have that, whether it's a skill
02:05:54or whatever you want to call it, I don't have that trait.
02:05:57So for me.
02:05:58- Dude, there's like a super team that we can make, I think.
02:06:02- This is what, I was about to say this,
02:06:04you, Dr. K, Joe Hudson.
02:06:06- Dr. K called me a year ago, credit to him.
02:06:08He's like, something's happening.
02:06:09(laughing)
02:06:10He's like, something is happening around masculinity
02:06:13and it's not time yet, but it's going to be time soon.
02:06:15And I just, and I think he said your name and he was like.
02:06:19- He spoke to me about this.
02:06:20- Yeah, he's like, and he's just like,
02:06:21I don't have any takeaway, but keep your phone on.
02:06:26- He said something similar.
02:06:27He's like, look up for the fucking bat six, dude.
02:06:30Look, there is, here's a couple of frameworks,
02:06:33here's a couple of frameworks that might be interesting
02:06:34for you.
02:06:35As far as I can see, we've had two waves
02:06:39at the Manosphere so far.
02:06:40First wave of pickup artistry was Neil Strauss,
02:06:43the game mystery was negging.
02:06:44And like, have you seen the midget fight outside?
02:06:47And it was.
02:06:48- Which was also like, that was a switch from results
02:06:50to actions with regard to being attractive to women.
02:06:53'Cause prior to that, it was just, you're as handsome
02:06:56and as wealthy as you are.
02:06:57And that is your outcome with women.
02:06:58And it was like, oh, you can behave in a certain way.
02:07:01Then second wave Manosphere was post me too,
02:07:04because pickup artistry was never going to survive
02:07:06the wave of sort of calling to account men
02:07:08for using position to coerce people into sex.
02:07:12And then we got a kind of sanitized,
02:07:15slightly adjusted version of it.
02:07:17And it was red pill, black pill, blue pill, soy boys, cucks.
02:07:20It was like simps and betas and alphas.
02:07:22And it was like that whole world.
02:07:24- Which interesting, and I'm kind of projecting,
02:07:27but is these guys started to feel upset about their things.
02:07:30They were getting bothered and they said,
02:07:31they took a almost more feminine approach.
02:07:34We're going to talk a lot about our problems.
02:07:36- Well, don't forget.
02:07:36- And ask the world to be different.
02:07:38- Don't forget.
02:07:38Don't forget that the like in cell, black pill,
02:07:41red pill community came out of PUA hate.
02:07:44Like PUA hate was the original Reddit.
02:07:46And PUA hate was people who had done pickup
02:07:49and had found that the strategies had either not worked
02:07:53or worked and made them aware of their own shortcomings.
02:07:56Look at how much I need to perform
02:07:57in order to get women to like me.
02:07:59- That's really frustrating.
02:08:00- Yeah, like I at core am so far away from what women want
02:08:05that I need to construct
02:08:08this elaborate fucking cathedral of bullshit
02:08:11in order to get them to like me.
02:08:13That is another comment on my self worth.
02:08:16- And I do want to pause
02:08:17because I think that these are huge spheres
02:08:19and I don't, I've spoken to people in it
02:08:21and there are well seen cultural commentaries
02:08:25that do come from the red pill community.
02:08:27I broadly disagree with,
02:08:31I think the emotional undertone of it is pain, but yeah.
02:08:35- Well, who was it that said, I think it was Dr. K
02:08:38that was like, everybody in the red pill
02:08:40is a hopeless romantic.
02:08:42- Yeah, that's what I'll see.
02:08:44- It's like cool.
02:08:45It's like pretty kind of nice.
02:08:46Anyway, and I'm like, okay, that was second wave.
02:08:49But one of the things that it denied was sensitivity
02:08:53because sensitivity didn't show up front
02:08:57the dimension of masculinity
02:09:00that was supposed to look commanding.
02:09:02And I'm writing a lot about vulnerability
02:09:05and about emotions at the moment.
02:09:07And I think you're right.
02:09:08Like whether it's my current working title
02:09:11for the mano pause or the like third wave manosphere stuff,
02:09:16Mack and Murphy, William Costello,
02:09:18Rob Henderson from like the academic sphere of this,
02:09:22Alexander date psych, like they're kind of pointing at it
02:09:24from a more like academic lens,
02:09:27all post-grads or doctoral students or whatever the fuck.
02:09:30And then Dr. K, Joe Hudson kind of marrying master coach,
02:09:35East and West stuff, modality focused,
02:09:39you coming in with like psychedelic sort of lens to it.
02:09:43And then I guess I'm ancillary to that
02:09:46in kind of like bro sphere type stuff.
02:09:50You're credible in a bro sphere,
02:09:52which I think is really important.
02:09:55Really, really important.
02:09:56- But there's something going on, dude.
02:09:57And I don't know what it is.
02:09:59The conversation I had with Tucker Carlson,
02:10:04I think correctly identifies a lot of the problems.
02:10:07One other thing just to add in on the men piece.
02:10:12When I first, the like arc of me working through
02:10:16a lot of the mating stuff,
02:10:18which inevitably ends up just pointing back at yourself.
02:10:20Like whatever it is that you enter at,
02:10:21it ends up coming back to you.
02:10:23You start off going, wow, there's some stats
02:10:25around sexlessness and like matinglessness
02:10:28that kind of it's scary.
02:10:30I wonder what's going on.
02:10:31So you go to evolutionary psychology and you say,
02:10:33what are the underpinnings of our motivations?
02:10:34Proximate ultimate reasons for behavior, mate guarding,
02:10:38jealousy, male parental uncertainty, resources,
02:10:41intersexual competition, intersexual competition.
02:10:43God, that's interesting, but that's not the whole picture.
02:10:46And then you move down to environment mismatch
02:10:49and you say, okay, so how is modern environment
02:10:52and ancestral programming coming together
02:10:54to create these odd mismatches?
02:10:55That's interesting.
02:10:56And that's currently where a lot of the red pill
02:10:58and a lot of the conversation from both men and women,
02:11:01mostly men, is at.
02:11:02But the next step down from that,
02:11:05which is kind of where I'm at currently, this is my model,
02:11:07is even if you know what's happening in the world
02:11:11demographically in terms of stats,
02:11:13you know our ancestral programming in terms of
02:11:16what are the underlying motivations
02:11:18and incentives for how we work.
02:11:19You then marry those two together to get modern mismatch.
02:11:23At no point in anybody's relationship ever
02:11:27has anyone directly interacted
02:11:29with their environmental mismatch.
02:11:31They interact relationally.
02:11:34Okay, so what is the emotion that I feel
02:11:36when my partner out earns me and I'm a man?
02:11:38- Got it, got it, yeah.
02:11:40- That's the vanguard, like the tip of the spear
02:11:43of how this shit works is-
02:11:46- It's mediated by emotion, yeah.
02:11:48- Emotion, bingo.
02:11:49So that's where I'm at.
02:11:50- Oh, it's like, yeah.
02:11:51Well, she makes more than me and that's a problem.
02:11:52It's like, it's a problem 'cause of how I feel.
02:11:54It's a problem 'cause how she feels.
02:11:55It's a problem 'cause, yeah.
02:11:56- Yes. - Got it.
02:11:57- So the tip of the spear of this shit,
02:11:59and this is Gay Hendrick's work, fucking awesome stuff.
02:12:04And in part,
02:12:07no more Mr. Nice Guy, Robert Glover,
02:12:11like he's sort of like looking at a part of this
02:12:15in the wing of this.
02:12:17So yeah, there's like some fucking autistic Avengers thing
02:12:20where there's cool information
02:12:28and vibes that if combined correctly,
02:12:34I think could make for like a really fucking good,
02:12:37holistic bit of development.
02:12:39- Let me ask 'cause this is, I think, love my dad
02:12:43and I didn't feel like I had,
02:12:45I didn't wanna be my dad in a lot of ways.
02:12:48And I look around and I see a lot of people
02:12:51that as cheesy as it sounds, did not have male role models.
02:12:55I don't know if it happened in your neighborhood,
02:12:56but I couldn't find a marriage that I wanted.
02:13:00I still struggle.
02:13:01- It was a role model desert for me where I grew up.
02:13:03- Yeah, I think it's a role model desert of a world
02:13:07for our thing.
02:13:08I don't know how many people are familiar
02:13:09with like male-female relationships in suburbia
02:13:12that work in a way that feels good.
02:13:14And the complete lack of that meant that my generation
02:13:19and we were like lost boys.
02:13:21I was the farthest ahead.
02:13:22I was the old one, right?
02:13:24And so I think there's a huge opportunity
02:13:26'cause we've decried the loss of ritual
02:13:28and the loss of male connection is for you, me, et cetera,
02:13:32to be both digital, five, 10 years in front mentors.
02:13:37But I also think there's some possibility
02:13:40for a digital, physical hybrid, which you experienced
02:13:42with Joe where you were in person with people of,
02:13:46oh my God, the missing older brother,
02:13:49the missing younger uncle.
02:13:52Like that archetype is just, we're starving for it.
02:13:57- But this is why the live shows,
02:13:58this is why the tour, that's like just-
02:14:01- And that's what Jordan Peterson was.
02:14:03He was everyone's dad.
02:14:04He was the guy who said, I believe in you,
02:14:06but you can do better.
02:14:08He filled that father role for people all over the world.
02:14:11And it's not ideal that he had to do it,
02:14:13but it was in tremendous service to those people.
02:14:16And I think that there's a, he was so much older.
02:14:20I think there's an older brother,
02:14:22younger uncle thing that is like-
02:14:24- Well, also there's an issue with sort of selling it
02:14:26that I don't know how many people want to be Joe Hudson.
02:14:30I want to be Jordan Peterson.
02:14:32I don't even know how many people want to be Joe Rogan.
02:14:35So you're like, fuck, if your main audience is 34,
02:14:39like can they look at someone that's 20 years their senior
02:14:43and be like, oh, that's where I might want to be,
02:14:47but not right now.
02:14:48So yeah, bringing it the fucking distance
02:14:52a little bit closer.
02:14:53- Jordan was able to talk at a high level
02:14:54about male-female dynamics in a way that was helpful,
02:14:56but it wasn't five, six, seven years out of the dating pool.
02:14:59He met his wife when he was like elementary school
02:15:01or something. - Yeah, exactly.
02:15:02- Yeah, so how do I do it on Snapchat or TikTok?
02:15:06It's like that tactical level was not available with him.
02:15:11And so that's what I think is really,
02:15:12I hope that people can find my content
02:15:14at the level of what do I text her
02:15:16and stick with me all the way through the things
02:15:18that I haven't gone to, which is like, how do I propose?
02:15:20How do I be with her?
02:15:21How do I be a good dad?
02:15:22I think there's a really potentially beautiful ladder
02:15:27of male development that is being broken down
02:15:30and reconstructed so that people can enter at various levels
02:15:34but also see that, oh, there is another stage coming.
02:15:37I may have to leave some people behind.
02:15:39It's not the end of the world.
02:15:41I see that my older digital brother or uncle
02:15:43has gone through this before.
02:15:45And that, why do I want to do that?
02:15:47That's what I didn't have.
02:15:48Like, you know, reading Tim Ferriss posts.
02:15:50- Even with, yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:15:51Even with the people that we did have
02:15:53that our parents didn't have.
02:15:54And it still wasn't enough.
02:15:55- It wasn't enough.
02:15:56- It wasn't enough.
02:15:57It was with Tim, who I love and saved me,
02:16:01was here's how to do it.
02:16:02You know, here's how to do it.
02:16:03But it wasn't like, I see you.
02:16:05I'm there for you.
02:16:06I get it.
02:16:07- And this is what it's going to feel like.
02:16:08- And this is what it's going to feel like.
02:16:09- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:16:10- And you can stick maybe, yeah, yeah.
02:16:12- Bro, this has been so much fun.
02:16:15I feel oddly exposed as well.
02:16:18I feel very, like the tide's gone out and my pants are off.
02:16:23- We have control over the edit, so you do whatever you want.
02:16:25That is true, we will see how much of it makes it in.
02:16:29- Thank you for sharing with me, yeah.
02:16:31- What can people expect from you
02:16:34over the not too distant future?
02:16:37- What can they expect?
02:16:40Chaos, I don't know.
02:16:41I'm really excited.
02:16:42I won't even put my stake in the ground.
02:16:45I'm excited to find out myself.
02:16:47- Unreal.
02:16:48Charlie Hooper, ladies and gentlemen.
02:16:49Dude, I love you.
02:16:50Thank you.
02:16:50- Thank you, man.
02:16:52- Thank you very much for tuning in.
02:16:55Personal conversation there with Charlie.
02:16:58I really loved it.
02:16:59I think he's brilliant.
02:17:00And if you enjoyed that one,
02:17:01Scott Galloway is also fantastic and available right here.