18: Tom Morgan - Wisdom in the Woo

Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 18 with Tom Morgan. Tom is a writer, podcaster, and as he calls himself, curiosity Sherpa, who runs The Leading Edge, a community for leaders focused on authenticity and personal transformation. I first encountered Tom when he gave a talk at the SOWN conference about a year ago on Iain McGilchrist. Left versus right brain and curiosity. And I've since gone down many rabbit holes around Tom's ideas on complexity, consciousness, and many topics that I think I and most of us would put in fringe categories we'd call woo-woo, mystic, or spiritual.

But Tom spent most of his career on Wall Street and brings a rational, open, and scientifically inclined approach to ideas and thinkers that are quite surprising. Speaker B: With the conversation, I wanted to strike a balance for big brain ideas and practicality. Speaker A: So while we do talk about some stuff I suspect you'll find bewildering, if not outright ridiculous, we also focus on a bunch of practical questions like how to follow your energy, understand what your gifts are, and how to charter a new path for your life when it seems like you're at a dead end.

Again, while many of these ideas are somewhat out there, I couldn't help but find myself intuitively nodding along in agreement to many of them. The notion that we are all a small part of a bigger whole and that authentically playing our individual part in that whole is a notion that I find incredibly powerful. So if you're skeptical, I especially hope you listen with an openness and hopefully it stokes the flame of curiosity. If I were to share a thesis statement for the conversation, it would be that Joseph Campbell quote that Tom loves so much: "Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were only walls."

Now here's Tom Morgan. Speaker B: Tom Morgan, I'm sure we'll get into much more fidelity about what this means, but I'll start relatively simple. More and more people are talking about energy these days. Sort of colloquially, simply what gives you energy, what takes away energy, what people energize you. So in simple terms, my first question is, what does it mean to follow your energy? Hmm. Speaker C: All right, let's keep it simple. The best advice from all the people I've asked over the last 2 years in earnest as to how to improve your life in a tangible way is to, at the end of the day, pay attention to what gave you energy or took away energy.

And it is simple as noticing after a conversation, are you more energized? Are you more upbeat? Are you excited? Like, literally the concept of excitation, like, kind of, are you, like, vibrating a little bit? And then I think when someone recommends a book, does it come with this accompanying frequency where like, oh, that resonates with a whole bunch of things I've been looking at recently. I can't wait to dig into it. And then when you open it, for whatever reason, you're kind of tearing through it. There's this wonderful neuroscientist called Dr.

Anne-Laure Lecomte, and she's just written a book called Tiny Experiments that I recommend. Speaker B: Oh, I might, I think I might follow her on Twitter. She's great. Speaker C: She's just fantastic. And She calls it becoming a scientist of your own life. Mm-hmm. That basically for 2 weeks you sit there and you're like, of everything I did, what was energetically negative, what was energetically neutral, and what was really energetically additive? And you just try and increase the additive things. Speaker B: Oh, I might, I think I might follow her on Twitter.

She's great. Speaker C: She's just fantastic. And She calls it becoming a scientist of your own life. Mm-hmm. That basically for 2 weeks you sit there and you're like, of everything I did, what was energetically negative, what was energetically neutral, and what was really energetically additive? And you just try and increase the additive things. Speaker B: I like that answer a lot. Where do you get your energy? Speaker C: Positive sum games. There's a lovely framing that I only realized afterwards comes from this completely bonkers Greek Armenian mystic called Gurdjieff, that basically you need to have head, heart, and body practices in your life.

In fact, he said you should aim for things that have all three of them at once, which is maybe something else we can talk about. But I've realized that— Speaker B: It's like difficult. That's like multitasking. Speaker C: Well, okay, like so, An example would be going out and mowing the lawn while listening to an intellectual podcast and simultaneously giving thanks for the beauty of the day, which for me actually sounds like good fun. I guess that's my kind of fun. Yeah, but I realized that, and I did this completely by accident rather than like design your life.

I spend my mornings reading and writing about topics that I deeply care about, but also my audience tells me they deeply care about based on incoming feedback. And then I roll jiu-jitsu at lunchtime, which is an archetypal positive-sum game because the people really enjoy beating me up. And then the afternoon is meeting people, meeting new people, and then spending time with my family. But they're all nested positive-sum games. So the writing is positive-sum, the rolling is positive-sum, and the meeting people, hopefully, like, you don't know who you're going to meet.

But mostly in my life now, because I don't have to take any meeting I don't want to take, and I'm not selling anything, which is often a bit energetic energetically draining, most of my interactions are energetically positive, which actually, when you think about it, shouldn't be possible. Like, if, you know, second law of thermodynamics and all that stuff, which is again, something we can talk about, shouldn't be possible that you go into a situation and you both emerge energized at the end. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it certainly happens.

Speaker C: Yeah, but it happens. And that magic is what I look for. Speaker B: You're extracting something from the air, I guess. Speaker C: Generating it. Who knows? I don't know. Like, but it's great. I don't know. And it feels great. And I don't think you can burn out that way. Speaker B: Hmm. I want to talk a lot about curiosity, which is obviously attached to energy. But my first question related to it, there's this essay I really love, maybe you've come across, from Scott Alexander, where he talks about the lottery of fascinations.

And he's basically playing with this idea of like, you don't get to pick what you drew in the lottery of what you have to care about. And he's like, he sort of begins it by complaining about the fact that he didn't draw math as an intellectual. And so my first question about curiosity is why can't we force ourselves to be interested in something? And maybe as a second point to that, if you want to take it, is curiosity inwardly driven or outwardly driven? Speaker C: This is a bit dry, but I like a bit dry sometimes.

There's an idea that the universe trends towards greater complexity. Complexity is differentiation and integration. It's almost like a paradox, right? All the pieces are different, but they're all perfectly integrated. And the most intuitive example of that is you right now listening to this. How many parts of your body can you name? Like, even with biology class, like, what is it, thousands, tens of thousands? There's just this nested series of all these different parts in your body that are all completely integrated because you don't have to think about anything that you're doing right now, even paying attention to your breath, even like your digestion, everything.

It's all just happening in a completely integrated way. And complexity theory says that everything is evolving towards that. So there's this force, or maybe series of forces, who knows, I've got thoughts, that's pulling you in to be the most differentiated version of yourself. But if you're just shooting for differentiation, you're a cancer. You're essentially dissociated from the whole. But if you're integrated with the whole, the whole system gets more resilient because it's very diverse, but it also gets more integrated. And so you have this relational conversation with the system where it's like, I actually don't care about that.

And that's a feature, not a bug, right? As long as what you do care about is integrated with the system, which I guess is something else we can talk about. Speaker B: You have this Carl Jung quote that came up that I, I think is amazing. I don't have a ton of, frankly, strong thoughts on him generally, but he said, your future self calls to you in the present through what you're interested in. Obviously rhymes with a lot of what you just said. And I want to talk more about complexity before we get into it.

Interested in is like pretty vague language and it's, I think it's empowering in some ways, but it's also kind of vague. A set of questions. What does curiosity actually feel like? Are there different types of curiosity? You can imagine like intellectual excitement and romantic attraction as kind of feeling, maybe it's a spectrum. Speaker C: Yeah. I think there's love, right? And I think that love and curiosity are very closely tied together. And I think it is tied to excitement. That again, to be a bit reductively scientific to things, there should be an unlimited number of choices in front of you, but it seems very weird that the right one wouldn't feel different from an evolutionary perspective, right?

Like that if there are indeed forces that are beyond our current perception, why wouldn't there be one that gives you some sense of an optimal direction? And science is increasingly thinking, well, maybe that comes from the future. There's this wonderful idea of something called syntropy. Entropy, you're going to die, like everything falls apart. But at the same time, there's a symmetrical force called syntropy that drives us towards that complexification, that energetic integration drive. And the guy that came up with it thinks it actually comes from the future. Now that's a bit brain scrambling and all this time travel stuff always breaks my brain.

But it's, for me, it's like, what am I in love with right now? And I think that does extend to partners. I've always thought about a kind of Tinder for the soul, that like you have, particularly in Manhattan, an effectively limitless number of romantic partners. So how would they— how would nature narrow that? It would make you attracted to that person, but that's not enough, right? As anyone, any man on Tinder has ever discovered, it's not enough to be attracted to something. It has to love you back. And I think maybe that's one way to think about curiosity, which is you can be curious about things that don't love you back, right?

And that's when you get dissociated, or that's when you go down non-productive rabbit holes, which is very common in left hemisphere lateralized autism, where you just get really interested in something that isn't remotely integrated, and then you're in real trouble. Speaker B: My next— I think you just answered it. My next question was, what's the difference between curiosity and desire? And perhaps desire is a little bit of that one-directional— I mean, it might be received, but you can imagine all of the things we desire, whether romantic or not. There's this sort of, it's just about me, it's just about me and what I want.

I think that's right. Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's— minor aside, because I can't stop thinking about it because I'm curious about it. There's this guy, Michael Levin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: Came up episode I just put out with a guy who's making this hardware device, so He has some range. Speaker C: No way. So he has this, never assume I understand anything, but he has this theory where cancer cells are dissociated from the magnetic field of the body. And when you bring them back into the electromagnetic field of the body, they stop being cancerous.

And so when I think about people's interests and desires, is it aligned with the system? Is it aligned with the love of the whole system? Is it in service of love? As hokey as that may sound. And if it's something you desire, but it's not aligned with that complexifying direction of the system, right? Like, is that the right thing to like? Is that the right thing to want? If you want something from the narrow ego, they're all like, humanity tells basically only two stories over the millennia. And the one is the hero's journey, which is how do you become more aligned with the system?

And the other one is be careful what you wish for, which is Aladdin, King Midas, Sorcerer's Apprentice. The dude goes to the witch and asks for the thing, and it's always the wrong thing, and like hilarity or death ensues, and it's a disaster because you desired something that wasn't integrated with the system. But then what should you want becomes a kind of a bit of a head-scratcher as well. Speaker B: Yeah, which I want to get into. To talk about complexity just a little bit more, one line you have, you say evolution's solution to combinatorial explosiveness is curiosity.

It's kind of another frame on this, but I think specifically what's compelling to me is that like, we obviously all grew up with this idea of entropy. Entropy rules everything around me. I think it actually came from you. I'd never heard entropy framed this way, which is just things fall apart, which is a kind of a beautiful and brilliant frame for at least its effect. And yet, obviously things aren't just falling apart. If anything, they're getting more complex and specifically they're becoming emergent. And you see this across everything. Obviously, you talked about my body or society, but even like cities, Jane Jacobs, like you see this pattern everywhere.

You gave, I think, a helpful explanation of complexity. Can you talk a little bit more about how that leads to emergence? And then also, why is curiosity or what is like you talked about a force like what is this thing or this curiosity or the straw, this pole that is driving what you call complexity? Speaker C: I don't know. I think— I don't know. I don't know. I don't have good answers to either of those questions, but I look at like the more esoteric sources and mystical sources that I've read, and it's always like, what is the direction of travel?

And the direction of travel always seems to be towards more love more unity and more integrated consciousness. And that means less dissociation. Speaker B: It always seems to be that, like, in humans, in nature, in life, in— at a cosmic level. Speaker C: Well, no, I'm talking about the mystical traditions. Like, if you pass out every mystical tradition, you were like— if you literally go on a ChatGPT and be like, give me, give me the common factors of all the world's mystical traditions, right? That's kind of roughly what it spits out.

But it also now increasingly has this support from leading-edge science where it's like when you become more integrated as a human being, even in like an Internal Family Systems perspective, if you are full of all these warring sub-personalities that are all dissociated and want different things and traumatized and all this stuff, you're never gonna get anything done. But yet if you are all completely integrated and loving and focused on the good, you're gonna become incredibly powerful. Mm-hmm. But in this really beautiful aligned way. And that appears to be what this force of syntropy, or whatever you want to call it, is driving towards, which is more integration and more power and more alignment.

Speaker B: You people who aren't familiar with you at all have probably sensed like some level of woo. One of my favorite things about you is the fact that you kind of play with this idea, and we'll talk more about that. But just can you talk a little bit about— you've referenced the science around syntropy specifically, and then a lot of this stuff broadly. What types of science scientists— how much of it is psychiatry versus quantum mechanics and things like that? Like, what is the sort of emergent field here broadly?

Is there like— oh, maybe another way of putting the question would be, is there a beachhead kind of like area that you would suggest people start to peer into if they're just totally skeptical off the bat? Speaker C: Categorically, yes. Speaker B: Okay. Speaker C: I have had this conversation And we can even decide to find what this conversation is. But like this conversation, 500 times in the last 3 or 4 years. Speaker B: Okay. Speaker C: And the beachhead definitively for me is the work of Dr. Ian McGilchrist. Speaker B: Got it.

Speaker C: Right? Where, and we can go into it as much detail as possible because I think, you know, I was professionally paid, you know, directly for 3 years and indirectly for 20 years to find the most interesting things in the world for very rich, time-starved people. and I am of the conclusion that Dr. Iain McGilchrist is the dude that people will look back a century from now and be like, that guy had his hand on a model of reality that was both accurate and explanatory in a way that no one else had.

And I met him again a week ago on Zoom, and I'm like, yes, like, I stand by it until, until I find anyone else better. He's the guy. Speaker B: Let's hit it. One place to start would just be like, people can read more. We don't need to do the whole incredibly deep separation between the two, but the girl Chris focused on hemispheres. Can you give us the— people have heard about left brain and right brain too. Can you give the like maybe 2, 3 minute what you basically need to know?

I have a lot more specific questions, but probably helpful to have a primer. Speaker C: Yeah. So when we were growing up, you were told that like one side of your brain's mathematical and one side's creative. That is not true. And so science was like, both sides of the brain are effectively the same for redundancy purposes. That's also not true. McGilchrist's thesis is that both sides of the brain can do roughly the same thing. It's just the way that they do them is very different. Speaker C: Yeah. So when we were growing up, you were told that like one side of your brain's mathematical and one side's creative.

That is not true. And so science was like, both sides of the brain are effectively the same for redundancy purposes. That's also not true. McGilchrist's thesis is that both sides of the brain can do roughly the same thing. It's just the way that they do them is very different. Speaker B: And he's a neuroscientist. Speaker C: He is a neuroscientist, but ex-practicing psychiatrist, professor of imaging at Johns Hopkins. He started in humanities. He's a polymath, like he's a legit polymath. He went to the All Souls College at Oxford 3 times, which is the genius college, right?

And his last book is 1,500 pages with 7,000 footnotes and 180-page bibliography. Speaker B: But critically, maybe for the most skeptical, was neuroscience. Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: Which is like, gets into what we're gonna talk about, but I think has a different kind of weight than almost everything else you just said. Speaker C: It's totally true. Yes, he is a scientist of the brain and I think an elite one. And the good thing about being a scientist of the hemispheres is that they reliably get knocked out by stuff.

So strokes knock out one side, accidents knock out one side. Fascinating. And some people, I think very bad epilepsy sufferers, actually have a cortical corpus callosotomy, which is when the connection between the hemispheres gets cut. Speaker B: Wow. Speaker C: So it's actually really easy to test the differences between the hemispheres. And anyway, the TL;DR, if I can TL;DR a 1,500-page book, is the book The Matter with Things. The Matter with Things, best book I've ever read. Go buy it. I probably sold a few copies of that in my life.

The left hemisphere is narrowly focused, linear, logical, loves abstractions, loves control, hyper, hyper linguistic and concerned with sort of logic. And the right hemisphere is holistic, emotional, somatic, and almost entirely non-verbal. But it has a better understanding of the world across almost every dimension relative to the left hemisphere. It's just the left hemisphere lies, the right hemisphere never lies. It is competitive and it basically won't surrender control. And McGilchrist's contention, which once you see it, you cannot unsee it, is that the world is lateralized, like, unhealthily towards the left hemisphere, and it is creating all these horrendous knock-on effects that are, that are quite literally destroying the world.

Speaker B: And that's plenty more there. The specific element of over-focusing on the left side, is that a nature problem? Is that a something more genetic? Is it I don't know, mysterious forces? Speaker C: I think yes is the answer. And I think that the— what I think, me, is that look at— well, so first you've had assortive mating, which is that like in the last couple of hundred years, if you were really smart, you would go, you know, you would both be working in Manhattan, hyper-intellectual people, and you'll be marrying each other in a way that has never happened before in human history.

And all of those cities are dominated by the left-brain industries. And then you also have what percentage of your daily life relative to 200 years happens in your head in abstraction? Like way more. All of it. Like all of our lives is, our lives are conducted in abstraction, or at least the people that we hang out with. And so you have just so much more of the world is interacting. Speaker B: It's almost like you're using that muscle more. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker C: So there could be lots and lots of factors, but that's what I think of.

Speaker B: One obvious thing that I kind of found myself thinking about a little bit that you talk about is we need more balance. Part of Holt McCulloch-Reyes' whole idea— and it's funny, my first exposure to you was this talk you did at SOWN last year, which was the 5-minute version of this. I'll link to it if people are interested. It's great. Part of the conclusion here is like we need more balance from left to right. But I also get this sense, and even in your description of what their strengths are, of this notion that it should sort of be the right as the director or the— I think it's like the master and the emissary, this analogy, or the steering wheel and the engine.

And so one question I have is like, is it really about balance or is it about we need to shift to being a right-brain dominant culture or societies or species? Or is it actually— what does balance in this equation actually mean? What is— maybe part of this too is like, what is a healthy version of the left brain? Like, what does that balance look like? Speaker C: I think that— I mean, I think that's the ultimate question. I think, I think we have to go back to where we started, which is what's an energy diary look like and why.

See, in my personal situation, I have seen a, a tragically massive number of people get trapped in left-brain abstracted places and industries, and they're feeling an energetic and somatic pull to something that is non-logical that actually will possibly be their salvation, but they downweight its importance because it's not coming from a linear, logical, rational, and verbal place. It's just a feeling that they have, and they don't understand that that's actually coming. It might even be coming from the future. We don't know yet. Speaker B: Like, but even you want to take the least woo view, it's just a sense, an instinct that they don't have language or rationality to put around and thus devalue.

Speaker C: Yes. And so that's all this means. But yeah, McGilchrist, speaking for him, I think would say that we need— most societies have been right hemispherically driven. And in fact, there's all these myths that we've been telling throughout humanity about what happens when we don't. And The Lion King is one, which is essentially you have the king, and he gets overthrown. The dude's always British. He gets overthrown by a guy with a British accent. But no, but that's actually relevant. Why does he have a British accent? Because it's associated with intellectualism.

So you have this kind of slightly effete mad scientist or intellectual that overthrows the king. And then what happens to Pride Rock? Pride Rock becomes barren. Yeah, it becomes a wasteland. And then the king returns and it becomes balanced again. So we've been telling this— Miguel Crist shows again and again and again. We've been telling this myth for millennia about how when the right hemisphere becomes dominant, the entire ecosystem collapses. And 70% of the species on Earth have died in the last 50 years. Right? Like, scoreboard. Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.

I think another part of this too is that, as I found myself just going through so much of this stuff, there is this empowering frame of like, It's not that the left brain is useless, it's that it's the brushstrokes and the right brain is the picture, or it's the forest and the trees or all these things. I think you've talked about this a little bit and I want to get into it more in terms of what it practically means. One other piece on this though, it feels like attention is a really critical part of this.

There was one crazy point that you listed somewhere. It's that the left brain can roughly process like 60 bits per second, or sorry, not the left brain, the conscious brain can process 60 bits per second. The unconscious apparently 11 million bits per second. So it's sort of like broad versus narrow focus, or narrow versus broad, I should say. How do you think about intention around attention and the way it sort of connects to this stuff and left brain and right brain and curiosity? Speaker C: I think about it increasingly in the context of AI, which is that you have this, I type into AI, what should I do with the rest of my life?

Speaker B: I did this with the 3, it's crazy. Speaker C: And I don't know what you would get back, maybe what was it like, drink lots of water? Like actually, what did it say? Speaker B: No, it was really remarkable. Incredibly thoughtful. It wasn't wise so much as it was thoughtful. Oh, okay. But it was— it— I felt seen. Speaker C: Really? Okay. That's absolutely terrifying. I'll have to do it then. Well, because my sense was that AI can't determine relevance in the sense that, like, if you face— Speaker C: Really?

Okay. That's absolutely terrifying. I'll have to do it then. Well, because my sense was that AI can't determine relevance in the sense that, like, if you face— Speaker B: it wasn't a— it wasn't a random new fresh LLM. It was ChatGPT with memory, which I've been using for months. Speaker C: Oh, okay. That's slightly different. But I guess if you also said to it, who should I marry in New York? Right. Speaker B: It had some thoughtful ideas around the category of it, but obviously, yeah, it's not going to know.

Speaker C: Well, that I think maybe speaks to what the left and the right hemisphere do, which is that the right hemisphere kind of is your neck and it orients you in the world and says, this is something relevant for you to pay attention to. And then the left hemisphere is like— Speaker B: it's like exploit. It's like— Speaker C: exactly, explore, exploit. And the left hemisphere is like, I'm now going to analyze this, tear this to pieces, work out how rational it is, see if I can use it. And then I return it to the right hemisphere again.

It's this right, left, right cadence that McGill-Christ talks about a lot that you see in a lot of different places. And it almost describes cognitive dissonance and it almost describes the trajectory of a human life. But basically you have this, you see something, does it match your model of the world? And then you put it back, right? Yeah. I think it's brilliant. And then the human life goes the same way, which is like you start off undifferentiated as a kid and then you become this very abstracted professional and then you return those professional skills back into the world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: Everything follows this right, left, right cadence. Speaker C: But you never discount the left. The left, it's like, you know, you can use it as an analytical tool to help tear things apart, but you don't leave things torn apart. Speaker B: Everything follows this right, left, right cadence. Speaker C: But you never discount the left. The left, it's like, you know, you can use it as an analytical tool to help tear things apart, but you don't leave things torn apart. Speaker B: Yeah, the feeling I get is that we're sort of in this like left brain's in control.

The left brain is being hijacked by things that are really mainly digital things that are really good at hijacking attention. And thus, like one sense I have is that most people, if you are asked if you were to ask them what they are curious about, wouldn't really even be able to answer you because they're so shut off. Like, it's almost like their attention is so shut off that there's nothing— like, there's nothing— there's no signal coming through that screen. Speaker C: Yeah, it scares me a lot. One thing I always think about is slot machines, and everyone knows that social media design came from slot machines.

But, you know, I was reading a book about this where a woman was saying that she has to wear dark pants because she knows she's going to soil herself every time she goes on the cushion because she's so tied in to the machine, she can't get off them. And they call it the machine zone. Yeah. And part of that is like the unresolved mystery that we're pattern recognition machines. And so you've got a random number generator, but slots make it look like there's a solvable pattern. Whereas in the real world, there is actually a solvable pattern.

I believe there's— Speaker B: It's like faux, it's like a simulacrum of curiosity, or it's like a, yeah, it's a false representation of curiosity to be solved that's like getting short-circuited or something. Exactly. Speaker B: It's like faux, it's like a simulacrum of curiosity, or it's like a, yeah, it's a false representation of curiosity to be solved that's like getting short-circuited or something. Exactly. Speaker C: Where like, we're looking for hidden patterns because I think there is a hidden pattern. And when we find it, it makes a big difference to our lives.

Whereas like, there is no hidden pattern in those random signals, we just think they are. So it's like, it's the ultimate evil in some respects because in all these mystical traditions, they basically say the worst thing you could do is infringe upon someone else's free will 'cause it's free will, free will is the point of everything. And so if you have a system that basically co-ops people's free will by giving them an unsolvable problem that everyone knows is unsolvable, that's really close to evil in my opinion. Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting to think about free will in the, in parallel to this sort of idea of there being an intelligent environment and a force pulling you to things.

But I suppose the right metaphor there would be, it's almost a, yeah, it's a green light or it's a fish, it's a fishing hook or it's something that's pulling you versus anything that's forcing you or pushing you. Yeah. Versus, yeah. Speaker A: Now a quick break from the episode to talk about something for dialectic listeners from Hampton. Hampton is a membership for founders and entrepreneurs that provides both in-person and online community for support, advice, and accountability in the founder journey. One critical part of being an entrepreneur is managing your own financial life.

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Thanks again to Hampton for supporting Dialectic. Now back to Tom. Speaker B: I want to talk about how to make this a little bit more practical around curiosity. And obviously we're talking around this like idea of the intelligence in the environment. There's an idea from Christopher Alexander of like unfolding that's kind of similar to this, and it's very attractive, but I think sometimes this stuff can be very paradoxical, to use your earlier language. You have this amazing, amazing excerpt where you quote Ed Slingerland and then also talk about the Tao.

I'll read it in full. We advance our consciousness through greater integration, not intellect. The Tao is literally translated as the way or the path. It implies a degree of agency. I want to come back to that. One compelling interpretation is that the path is the same pursuit of what we love— differentiation, using the left hemisphere in service of love and integration using the right hemisphere. The Tao is the path of integration and complexity. So much of what we talked about. This creates the almost paradoxical feeling of trying not to try.

Successful alignment with the Tao brings effortless action, or wu-wei. Someone in wu-wei gains a charismatic power called de, as explained by Ed Slingerland. And then Ed, the result is an easy oneness of things, a state of going along with whatever presents itself with no expectations and no calculation. Such perfect relaxation brings with it incredible efficacy in the world as well as social success, as we would expect from the connection between wu wei and, and de. The state of true de, the highest virtue that doesn't think itself virtuous, represents a perfect harmony with heaven and the way, which gives the Lao— Laozian sage remarkable powers over man, woman, and beast.

Because he thinks nothing of himself, he is valued by others. Because he wants nothing, everything is given to him. In some sense, this is like an incredibly beautiful passage and idea. You referenced earlier, like the ways that, I mean, there's— that rhymes with stuff Jesus said. It comes across in so many mystical texts, but it's also kind of like unbelievably frustrating. It's like, try it. Like, yeah, you don't have to try. It's like this deeply, almost paralyzing paradox. And you've been really clear across so much of your writing that curiosity is not a head thing.

It's like doing. It's action. You say it's difficult to connect with your curiosity unless you know who you are. It's really hard to connect with your curiosity unless you believe you actually have gifts. The earlier quote talked about agency as well. Maybe one place to start is how do you actually get to know yourself better? How do you actually discover gifts or begin to sense what your gifts might be? Speaker C: Doing, doing, doing, doing it. Like, it's And it's not even immediately obvious to yourself a lot of the time.

Often it's people like, oh dude, you're really good at that. I am patient zero for paralyzing introspection, having had like a multiple-year nervous breakdown. So like, do as I say, not as I do. You know, I took, I went on an elimination diet when I was at my physically most disastrous. And after my energy levels went bananas, I started writing because I couldn't not. And then after I got better years later from my kind of dark night of the soul experience, I learned about Ian McGilchrist, and I learned about it, and I was like, oh my God, there's a theory in here that changes the world.

And if you told me that, like, I couldn't tell anyone that, I would have exploded. Like I would've been like, I'm not one of those people that can just sit quietly in their study and learn interesting things and like nod to themselves and be like, well, that's a really interesting thing. I'm never gonna tell anyone. Speaker B: I gotta text the group text. Speaker C: Like my wife was, my wife would like, like wants to kill me because I tell her everything I learn. But like that's in my personality. And so for me, there is this slightly clichéd thing now, which is like, do what you can't not do.

Yep. But that's very helpful. And also like, does it put you in flow? Right? What, what, how does time pass when you're doing something? Speaker B: So on one hand, I, I've had similar experience of, of being way too overanalytical. I love the idea of do what you cannot do. I love this. David Sennett has this idea of like, what if you, what could I give you a billion dollars? What could I not give you a billion dollars to stop doing? Like, it's empowering. But I think for a lot of people, it's like, I mean, you, you brought up writing.

Like, why could you not— why did you have to write to go maybe even upstream? Like, what does that actually feel like? You have another idea that, like, I think there are a lot of blockers to this type of stuff and curiosity broadly. You have another idea. You say belief that if you end up pursuing your curiosity, you'll lose any intrinsic value because you have no intrinsic value. So is it— how much of it is tied to confidence versus just like, this is fun versus like It's an intellectual rabbit hole.

There's different ways this might show up. Michael Jordan, it's shooting a basketball. Speaker C: Like, there's some parallel that maybe you're writing, but I think the unsatisfying answer for a rationalist is feedback, which is that the universe has to tell you that it's the thing you're supposed to be doing. And that often shows up in the way of synchronicity, that when you do it, there are strange, meaningful coincidences or there's a really strong response. There's a lot of focus now on the sense of worthlessness that people have, which I think is, is almost ubiquitous.

Like, I think with our separation, with the separation of our psyche from the whole that's necessary for us to be independent entities, there comes this intrinsic sense of like bedrock shame that they say at the bottom of all psychological work, there's this like sense of original sin and primal shame. And so like a lot of people spend their time focusing on like, how do I get rid of this sense of shame? That's actually secretly attached to everything. And whilst like all of this psychological work and shadow work I'm sure is really important, what's actually helped me the most of anything is getting feedback that my work is not worthless in a way that's meaningful to me.

I don't mean a bonus. I've been there. I mean, I get emails from people. Speaker B: Maybe it's bigger than you in a part. Speaker C: Yeah, well, I'm channeling stuff through me, not to sound too grandiose, but ideas that I didn't generate. I didn't generate any of Ian McGilchrist's ideas, right? Like I'm just I'm amplifying them in my music, my modest audience. And then people email me back to be like, I didn't kill myself because I encountered these ideas. Like, I get emails like that sometimes. And then you're like, I'm not worthless, right?

You can't get an email like that and think you're worthless. Like, it's just— and trust me, I mean, like, my buttocks clench, like, to the extent that they could create diamonds whenever anyone gives me a compliment. Right? Like, I'm really, really unable to receive love of any kind. But when the universe just shows it back to you through the feedback for your work, that does get— create this positive spiral where you can be like, oh, I'm just going to keep doing more of that because other people seem to like it.

And you know what, I love doing it too. But I've never considered myself a writer. When people describe me as a writer, I do feel like an imposter. Hmm. Speaker B: How much of this and curiosity is specifically about leading to creativity? Do you think creativity is the necessary sort of output of it? Speaker C: Dude, every time people use the C word, I can just feel my energy level just drop because I don't know what creativity is. Speaker B: I'm sorry to lower energy. Speaker C: No, but like, it's just like, well, I'll ask you, what does creativity mean?

Speaker B: Hmm. I think I've used a word or I've used a frame to describe art. Which I realize is not quite the same thing, is sort of something along the lines of transmuting an experience you've had into some kind of form that another person could experience. And so to me, creativity is probably close to that, which is something around, again, new, novel, like these things are less important, but some kind of inward-out expression of something to give. Speaker B: I'm sorry to lower energy. Speaker C: No, but like, it's just like, well, I'll ask you, what does creativity mean?

Speaker B: Hmm. I think I've used a word or I've used a frame to describe art. Which I realize is not quite the same thing, is sort of something along the lines of transmuting an experience you've had into some kind of form that another person could experience. And so to me, creativity is probably close to that, which is something around, again, new, novel, like these things are less important, but some kind of inward-out expression of something to give. Speaker C: I like that a lot. That's really brilliant. My concern, having been like a 20-year recovering finance professional, is when people hear creativity, they think poetry, finger painting, knitting.

Like, it has this— it's just something you do on the side, man. You're probably not that good at it, and it's a hobby. And I think what creativity actually is, is something existentially important. And I think that what almost everyone I know is wrestling with is like, can you have meaning in the mortgage, right? Can you have something that is intrinsically creative that doesn't represent a hobby that is essentially differentiated and integrated? But when people say creative, I think people immediately, maybe I'm just over, maybe I'm projecting here, but I think that people just put that into a box marked hobby instead of a box-marked kind of necessity.

Yep. Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, one of the more empowering ideas, I think, is this notion that you can do something creatively too, which may, maybe conflicts my definition a little bit, but there are certainly way more creative and way more rote things to do, accounting or whatever it might be. And for what it's worth, there's plenty of things in the world that I think we're fortunate that people aren't trying to do more creatively. So it's, it's fuzzy. We'll, we'll get more into sort of some specifics around that. The last question I have on this broad piece is, well, you have, you have one line, you say, if you're in stasis, you will lose interest in what you are doing.

I think anyone can relate to that, but it does bring up this question of like, what does it mean to maintain curiosity? What makes curiosity deepen versus sort of run out of rope? We've all been in the place of like, or you mentioned the autistic kids, like, you have your, whatever it's called, your special— special interest. Special interest. Like, that's an extreme version, but everyone's had— everyone's gone down a rabbit hole, and then you're not interested in that anymore. And oftentimes, maybe it's like, I was interested in, in this when I was a kid, or I had more of the time.

How does this become an infinite game? Speaker C: I think this is where you can tap in the left hemisphere and be like, I have to have some degree of faith that following this is a, is like a fruitful rabbit hole, but also a little bit of discernment that this isn't the dumbest thing you've ever seen. Like, I'm not gonna be playing in the NFL, right? And so you have to have certain guardrails around your curiosity, but you wanna let your curiosity lead the dance at all times. I think you need to have, again, I'm gonna go back to the energy diary and the passage of time, which is that you need to be increasingly aware when your energy levels are running out somewhere of how the passage of time feels.

And I think what eventually will happen is you will get in a, particularly in a corporate context, you'll be put in a place where the passage of time is so tortuous that either you need to numb yourself using some additional substances or you're just gonna have to move before like evolution selects against you. And I know many, many such cases of that because I was one. So you kind of have to have this fine sensitivity. And then something I think we've talked about, which is, I think it's a very, very sensible idea to keep like, you know, your fitness landscape shallow, which is like to keep your outgoings, to not need many things, right?

So that you can, you can pivot rapidly. Like me and my wife keep probably more savings on hand than the book, much more savings on hand than the book would tell us to do. But so it means that if I, as I did a year ago, decide to immediately zero out my salary to found Leading Edge, I can do that with a, with a much lower level of anxiety than if we had a huge mortgage and 50 different, like, outgoings that we didn't. I think it's for a certain kind of person that wants to live life in a Taoist way, you have to have a certain attitude towards material goods.

The, the degree of sacrifice there is unclear to me. I think abundance does come through this lifestyle in ways that I can tell you about that are mega crazy woo. But ultimately, when you're living a positive-sum game, you stop being comparative anyway. When you're living a positive-sum game, you care much, much, much less about material things. Not from the spiritual perspective of now I'm enlightened. It's just because you're having so much fun, you actually don't have time for the distractions, right? Speaker B: You don't need— So much of a better framing of it too.

Speaker C: Yeah, but it's realistic, right? It's not a denial of something. Yeah. It's that you, it's that like your daily life— Speaker B: So billionaires don't go on vacation because they're working. Right. Speaker C: Right, exactly. But also you don't need to go on vacation because your work is a vacation. Yes. Yes. Right. Hmm. Speaker B: Yeah. You, you teased at it. One of the things that seems to be one of the ways I think you seem to think about what you're doing and at least who you're serving is this idea of the sort of like semi-lost, I don't know if it's necessarily middle age, but middle something man in America.

And I think this is like super practical. I've gone through something like this fairly recently. I think you did too, which is like real exploration and pivots and changing when you're in that earlier place of stasis. You have a frame around this, like when you've hit your peak earning years and you just don't care about what you're working on anymore. I think a lot of people can relate to that. You say our society is a window of tolerance for men figuring it out, which is about 3 weeks to 3 months.

A real exploration can take closer to 3 years, and there are little to no safety nets in American culture, especially And then how can you be unhappy if you're rich? A common refrain. So it's circling, all circling. And again, I don't, I don't think this is certainly not specific to men or even specific to an age group or anything. But I think anyone who's like a little bit into their career or life has either experienced something like this or knows someone who has. And there's really what this seems to be distilled down to is this like complete and utter fear of leaving the local maximum.

You talked about like the steepness of the curve to go down and at root there. And this goes back to the material stuff a little bit of the last question of like some kind of sacrifice. My question is, how can anyone, but maybe especially people feeling some relation to one or all of the things I just said, and particularly people who are sort of have some pressure to be a provider, whether it be to family or other people in their life, or just frankly, like be serious. At their life stage or whatever it might be, how can they think about curiosity and all this stuff we just spent the first part of the conversation talking about and like real material changes or pivots in their life?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think about walled gardens a lot. They're a trend I am more bullish on than anything I've seen in my entire life, where essentially you need an incubator for your next identity. Where you can be like, okay, I was earning $500,[redacted address] and I'm just going to quit my job, right? Like, and, you know, in that situation, my wife worked. So like I had, I had some flex and I had no kids. Now I have two. I just don't think that's realistic for a lot of people. Speaker B: And by the way, there are plenty of Americans probably who would say just full stop.

I don't need any other details. You quitting to take no income to follow your bliss while your wife works is like already failing as a man. Yeah. Oh my God. Speaker C: But that was how I felt as well. And there were no shortage of people telling me that, right? But you don't need to do that, I don't think. I don't know. I'm reluctant to give anyone else advice in this area, but what I would say is that Anne Lorraine, her book is about tiny experiments, which is that I think your odds of being right first time on that Taoist path of differentiation-integration, it's probably pretty low, right?

Like the degree of self-knowledge it requires and then faith in the universe it requires, two things that we are not strong on. Are like a lot. So your odds of being right first time, I think, are low. At least I've been studying this really for, you know, best part of 10 years. And the people that get it right first time, I don't think I've seen one. So what you need is a way to conduct tiny experiments without blowing up your life, which is to work out what are the answers to both of those questions where what only you can do meets what the world needs, and then find ways of doing it that are a little bit scary, but maybe they're anonymous, right?

Or maybe you can talk to other people that have this job that you want and work out what their daily routine is actually like and whether that's something that would be energetically positive for you. Yes. Yeah. Speaker B: Whereas we're so tempted to do the like either change nothing or like blow it up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I quit my job, moved across the country, like all these. And, and we rarely— people don't really talk about that middle thing, which is so much more both plausible and realistic. But to your point, maybe actually better for finding the thing?

Speaker C: Because it doesn't exist. Yeah, right. We don't have it. Yeah. At least to the best of my knowledge. Like, it's the thing that's needed, but there's really no money in it, right? Like, there's no money in providing these communities to people, mostly because they're going through a period of financial insecurity. But like, I run one, right? And I think that they're going to be everywhere within a matter of years because it's this intermediary stage. You know, I think that There's a phenomenal interview I did recently with this, my personal Yoda, this guy Brian Whetten.

Oh, I heard part of this. Yeah. And he's brilliant. And he talks about this idea of like people playing win-lose systems, you know, tech and finance and mostly win-lose systems. And life is sort of a win-lose system at that stage where it's like, I just feel better because you're doing worse. Right. And like, and I'm winning, man. But also you need to lose. And then people get a bit older, usually around the age of 36, for whatever reason. And they're like, Well, that's all a bit stupid and I'm burning out, so I'm just going to only play win-win games from now on.

I'm going to find my infinite game and play it. And then you just fail over and over again. And, you know, Brian calls it the poor but pure valley. It's like, oh, I can't take money for consciousness work right now, right? Or I'm going to start a conscious startup and you just get eaten by predators because you have no defenses. And there's this naivety that comes with it being like, can't everyone see that the world should work this way? And actually, I think the system is collapsing outside, so it's actually going to get an an even worse environment for that, for those kinds of businesses right now.

Speaker B: But it's, it's pretty, you know, it's interesting is if this were hap— if you, if this were the common realization when you were 22, society might just be better at handling it. But the fact that it happens when you're 30 to 40, like, might even be part of the reason, like, society doesn't want to tolerate that. Society wants you to have started, and maybe that goes back to the school system or whatever, but it's telling that it takes 10 to 12 years or 15 years of grinding and being super competitive to— Speaker C: well, yes and no.

I think I meet a lot of people that are like, God, I can't believe I've just wasted 15 years as an accountant. And what I say to them is, actually, I've dealt with a lot of hyper-spiritual people since I've gone into the more woo-adjacent community, and a lot of them have horrendous executive function, right? Like It just, like, if you've worked in the front office of investment bank dealing with spiritual people, just like, it just drives you insane. And so I've always said that. Speaker B: The left brain and right brain.

Speaker C: Yeah, but I'd rather have a left hemisphere person working on themselves than a right hemisphere person working on the world, right? Like, it's degrees of agency. And so like those people, when they start to put these incredibly agentic skills in service of something that actually matters, they have sage-like impact on the world. Speaker B: But when you have someone who's like, mega wafty. They're like super tapped in, but they can't really talk about it. Speaker C: They don't do anything, right? Like, they all, you know, like maybe, maybe being in an ashram is great.

Yeah, right. But it's not interesting to me and I don't think it's needed right now. And so that's kind of where I land on that. Speaker B: But when you have someone who's like, mega wafty. They're like super tapped in, but they can't really talk about it. Speaker C: They don't do anything, right? Like, they all, you know, like maybe, maybe being in an ashram is great. Yeah, right. But it's not interesting to me and I don't think it's needed right now. And so that's kind of where I land on that.

Speaker B: Maybe it's been uncharitable. Yeah, that's helpful. We talked a little bit about finding your gifts, but a few quotes I wrote down that I thought would be useful to frame for the conversation and for the listener. You don't come out of the womb with a skill set that is valuable. I think it's from Joseph Campbell or Joseph Campbell goes on to say, you learn the rules, then you break the rules, then you follow your bliss. It's like this martial arts kind of metaphor. That was great. And then you— the first time I quit, I passively sat on the couch waiting for the, quote, universe to send me a sign.

I was sure it would protect me from falling into the darkness. It is— it decidedly did not. This was because I was not actively manifesting my individual skills in an integrated way. It was only when I started publicly exploring my strange mix of finance and meaning, a win-win creation that the world has responded so positively. I then received direct feedback, and it has produced material and spiritual abundance in my life. Faith means first believing you have a gift and then cultivating it, then offering it to the world. This is difficult.

So much of what we just talked about, the last one, your niche needs to love you back, which I love. My question on a few of these things is, and I've talked to so many people about this, clearly it's about both doing things and being attuned to feedback from the world. But there's this weird dynamic in almost anything worthwhile, which is like it's— it eventually gets to being what I call like aerodynamic or like downhill. And when you're in your bliss and you're in flow state and you're good at it, but— and maybe for a very rare set of people, it's just instantly like that.

But for almost everyone, real, like jiu-jitsu is a perfect example. I would presume the first 30 times you— I've rolled 3 times and like they were bad. I don't know I don't know if that's anywhere near something that could be a gift for me or something I would love. And it takes probably 20 times of trudging through the mud or more, some, some skills way more than that. And generalize this to writing or to whatever it might be, to posting podcasts on the internet, any of these things. As people are experimenting, doing the walled garden thing, like, do you have any sense of like how long to just sort of like blindly push the rock?

Or versus go back and find a new hill? Speaker C: Couple of answers. The jiu-jitsu thing is really funny, actually, that I did jiu-jitsu for about 6 months, got injured, got depressed, and quit for 4 years. Okay. And I had to— Speaker B: Classic example of what I'm saying. Speaker C: I had to walk past the jiu-jitsu gym. Like, it's 2 blocks from my house. I had to walk past it, like, God knows how many times in the next 4 years. And every time I walked past it, a little voice in my head said, You're a coward.

Oh, wow. Right? And, but it was also like, it wasn't a shaming voice. It was like, it was also like, you need this. You know you wanna do it. And I've been back now for 4 years and it's the single best, it's the single most material change in my life that has had the most positive impact, right? But there was something in me that was extremely adamant that it was like, it was like you sometimes you just know. And it's, again, it goes back to this kind of energetic idea. I think you can also narrow the constraints a little bit by thinking in terms of head, body, heart.

You're like, okay, what have I got that's head? Mm-hmm. Okay, cool. Is that positive sum? Is that in service of love? Am I enjoying it? What about body? Body's probably not in service of much, but is it positive sum? You know, is it, pickleball's probably positive sum. Both people get better from playing it, right? Is it something I can sustain intrinsically? Is it something I would do? Is it something you would have to pay me money not to do, right? To use David's framing. And then you have heart, which is, you know, like, how are my heart-to-heart interactions and how positive some of those, which I think in that case is like, how are, how are my daily interactions?

Who am I interacting with? And do those interactions fill me up or not? That at least narrows the framework a little bit. And I think it gives you something more practical to kind of hang on to. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: There's something around maybe the attention point too, which is you were maybe you were attuned in a woo sense to the voice in your head, or maybe it was you were literally just walking by the place. But it is interesting to think about the ways we might set up environment, or just like, I don't know, to your earlier point, like, I have to do something with my body to stay healthy to do all the other things I want to do.

Like, that— I think there are maybe, maybe one interpretation would be that there are parts of this that are really about attunement to like the deeper purpose, and the other parts that are just like surface area, or like— Speaker C: I think something that's really helpful is understanding and feeling qualitatively the difference between a challenge and a grind. Speaker B: Mm. Yeah. Right? This is exactly what I'm getting at. Speaker C: I think, I think maybe you've just got to climb hills sometimes. Speaker B: Right? Like, I think— That's why this is so hard.

Speaker C: Yeah. Like, I think, I think you've maybe just got to, for some people, like my nephew is like, like a world-famous DJ and like he came out of the womb knowing what he was gonna do and it's just been on a parabolic trajectory. Yeah, he's just been on that trajectory the whole of his life and will probably be there till the day he dies. But for me, like if you'd asked me at 21, like what, when people did, like what do you wanna do with your life? Like no idea.

And so I needed to go and climb a hill and I achieved like medium success, but also a set of skills that have served me incredibly well for the stuff that I actually do want to do. And you know what? Climbing that hill felt like a challenge. It was deeply challenging, but it was mega fun. I did 12-hour days for the best part of, you know, 15, 20 years, right? Like, this was building executive function. But when it becomes a grind, and we all know the difference, you all know the difference, like at least at the extremes between a challenge and a grind.

But we're told, particularly hustle culture says, just grind it out. That means you climb the wrong hill and that is the worst advice you can give. Speaker B: Well, the other part of the paradox is that if you do climb a hill, most people who finally climb a hill are like, I'm staying on this hill. I'm never going back down a hill again. And if you grinded up that hill, it's going to even be harder to sort of give up that peak. Speaker C: Wall Street has very, very high hills.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: If you're looking to— yeah. One last piece of this is that bridges into woo territory a little bit is synchronicities, or maybe let's call like more slightly mystical feedback. Can you just talk about that a little bit in terms of what that has meant for you? Speaker C: Oddly, for something that's a little bit woo-seeming, synchronicity has been probably the most practical way that I perceive integration. Now, for those who don't know, synchronicity is the concept of a meaningful coincidence, which, to go into right-hemispheric terms, a coincidence is just like, wow, you're, you know, like you rolled two sixes one after another.

It could be totally random. A synchronicity is something that feels meaningful. And one of the most frustrating things about synchronicities is when you describe them to someone else, particularly, they're like, it's just a coincidence. Speaker B: Partially because I think we've— we now have a meta-awareness of our being a pattern-obsessed species that will literally just find patterns in anything. And that's the overhang of skepticism, I think. Speaker C: But it's because it doesn't come with a feeling. It's a right-hemispheric impulse that it's like, oh, this felt meaningful. And when you're explaining the mechanics of it to other people, they're like, I'm just hearing the mechanics.

I'm not getting the accompanying feeling. Speaker B: Partially because I think we've— we now have a meta-awareness of our being a pattern-obsessed species that will literally just find patterns in anything. And that's the overhang of skepticism, I think. Speaker C: But it's because it doesn't come with a feeling. It's a right-hemispheric impulse that it's like, oh, this felt meaningful. And when you're explaining the mechanics of it to other people, they're like, I'm just hearing the mechanics. I'm not getting the accompanying feeling. Speaker B: Explaining the painting you saw. Exactly. Speaker C: That's a perfect— that's a perfect example.

And so, like, you know, it was meaningful. And actually, I believe, based on my own experience and many others, is that the more you build your right hemispheric sensitivity, the better you're able to determine if a synchronicity is a synchronicity or if it's just a random occurrence. Right. At least that's how it's helped me. And when synchronicities stop, you're probably going in the wrong direction. And when they accelerate, you're going in the right direction. And synchronicity can often just mean, you know, 2 weeks ago I was studying the concept of creative thought and I was like, you know, I really don't understand this one concept.

And the next day I randomly picked up a podcast from someone I follow because it was about another topic that I enjoy. And all she does is talk about the concept of creative thought. And like, I'm interested in these topics, so it's explicable. But the timing of that piece of information coming to me was for me a very profound synchronicity. Speaker B: And there's also, there's an element here too of like, oh, people could be like, whatever that phenomenon where you see more of the thing. Yeah, yeah. But it's like, it's almost not that serious.

It's just like, oh, this is another sign that I'm like on the track. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker B: And there's also, there's an element here too of like, oh, people could be like, whatever that phenomenon where you see more of the thing. Yeah, yeah. But it's like, it's almost not that serious. It's just like, oh, this is another sign that I'm like on the track. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker C: And I don't believe that availability heuristic thing that like once, once people tell you about elephants, you see elephants everywhere. I just don't believe that.

Like, sure, I'm sure that is true as well as, but like, let's go back to what integration is. From people that run markets, like for the absolutely devastatingly good investors, that I've studied, you realize that one of the primary determinants of their success is the ability to attribute a very high level of intelligence to the stock market, that they start with the assumption that the market's right and they're wrong. The rocket science intellects that I've seen fail the fastest in the stock market are the ones that start from the presumption that they're right and then work back.

Everybody else is a loser, right? And you have all of the Druckenmiller and Soros types. They start from the assumption that they're wrong and the market's right. And in Macrocosm, I think that one of the biggest improvements you can make to your life is to assume that the world that you inhabit— that we definitely don't understand, like, we definitely don't understand the way reality works. I need to make that abundantly clear. But if you assume that the world you inhabit is intelligent and relational and actually trying to help you, trying to help guide you on a certain path, that has just an extravagantly positive impact on your life.

And I don't necessarily need to know how it works. Dude, I've got lots of theories, but synchronicity, I feel, is one of them, which is like if integration was a thing, if the concept of you bringing your gifts to bear in the environment was rewarded by your environment, the best way your environment could show that to you would be a meaningful coincidence. It would show that you synced. You've literally— here, you just synced up. You just synced up with the flow of everything. Here it is. And have something that your right hemisphere, which determines your direction, can feel is meaningful.

You get a little ping. You get the ping from your right hemisphere that's like, this feels nice. Speaker B: And it feels like air under your wings. Speaker C: Yeah. And it keeps going. That's like the Taoist thing. Mm-hmm. That the— as the synchronicities increase, reality is harmonizing around you. Speaker B: You said the number one correlate of wisdom is openness. What is openness mean? Is that everything we've been talking about? Is that something else? Is it curiosity? Speaker C: Well, that's actually just a paper that has it on the Big Five.

Yeah. So there's the Big Five. Don't ask me the name, what they are. Speaker B: Conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, extroversion, and agreeability. Yeah. Speaker C: So, yeah, the 30 years of wisdom research found the number one correlate of Wisdom was openness. I mean, it makes sense, but also let's go back to where we started, thermodynamics, right? Like openness, you are thermodynamically open. I notice a difference in the brightness of people's eyes based on their curiosity levels and how closed-minded people are. They get the very dead eyes, right? And wisdom is the number one correlate of life satisfaction in old age based on the papers that I've read, which is amazing given how little attention people pay to the the conscious cultivation of it.

Speaker B: But like, yeah, we almost act like it's just something that happens, like you're out of, out of your control almost. Speaker C: No, that's why I spent all of last year studying ways to make you more right hemispheric, like that we don't do mostly because some of them like sound woo-woo. Yeah, but like for me, I look at the context of the— well, so let's do openness for a second. I think let's look at the risks of openness. People that do a boatload of psychedelics or are too open they start seeing patterns everywhere, right?

Right. And that's obviously like wildly problematic. It's like when people who have amazing pattern recognition in finance suddenly enter the New Age era, they believe every conspiracy theory, right? And they think that they have high discernment because they're finance person. I'm very guilty of that sometimes myself. I'm like, well, I'm seeing all these patterns here, so they must be true. It's like, well, you don't have any domain expertise here, right? So that's like super dangerous. But at this conference I spoke at last week, someone asked me about superforecasting. Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: You familiar with that? Yeah. So what makes a superforecaster is that like they, when something new happens, they can update their forecast by like a basis point, right? That like superforecasters take this perverse pride in like the granularity with which they can update their forecasts, which makes them amazing, better than experts, right? Experts, quotes. So like, why? Because they're very open-minded and they know exactly how relevant each piece of information is, and they can use that information to calibrate their priors. What's that got to do with anything? Well, imagine if that's the way you approach everything.

Your level of alignment with reality is going to get closer and closer and closer. And, you know, something I read once is that, you know, the goal of any species is to become correlated with its environment. If you're the bacterium that swims away from the sugar solution, you are not going to last very long. And so if your openness is allowing you to continuously get closer and closer to the flow of reality, that's going to make things really fun for you. And that is effectively wisdom. I've always said the opposite of wisdom is anxiety, which is not knowing what you're supposed to be doing and when.

So you're concentrating all these news headlines, all these pieces of information. You don't know where your agency is, and as a result, you're just spinning in circles, burning all this energy. And the wise person just knows exactly what to do and when. Which is why it correlates with happiness so much. But all of that is about openness because it's about how you're interacting with your environment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker B: One last bit on this that I, I find interesting as I think about is, because it feels very mechanical and almost left brain, but it has that wisdom part you're talking about, is I think you were talking about Ed Thorpe somewhere and you brought up error correction, which is like the root of, in a very rational sense, fallibilism, and this kind of fascinating kind of foundation of of science with David Deutsch and so on.

In some sense, it sort of feels like so much of what we just talked about is just taking a truly, like, open and integrated approach to error correction. Mm-hmm. Because we're really good at applying error correction to, like, certain things, and there's, like, a category of stuff where it's, like, off limits almost. Yeah, but, okay, and I— Speaker B: One last bit on this that I, I find interesting as I think about is, because it feels very mechanical and almost left brain, but it has that wisdom part you're talking about, is I think you were talking about Ed Thorpe somewhere and you brought up error correction, which is like the root of, in a very rational sense, fallibilism, and this kind of fascinating kind of foundation of of science with David Deutsch and so on.

In some sense, it sort of feels like so much of what we just talked about is just taking a truly, like, open and integrated approach to error correction. Mm-hmm. Because we're really good at applying error correction to, like, certain things, and there's, like, a category of stuff where it's, like, off limits almost. Yeah, but, okay, and I— Speaker C: correct me if I don't understand error correction, but for me, Error correction sounds like survival of the fittest. Mm. And survival of the fittest is only half of the equation. Mm. The thing that people do not understand about actual Darwinism rather than Darwinism you read about is that Darwin believed, as is true, that cooperation was a superior long-term strategy.

Right. And therefore there is a force in the universe, whether it's entropy or the holotropic attractor, whatever you want to call it, that guides people in a beneficial direction towards integration and complexity and wholeness, right? That's not error correction, right? Right, right, right. One of the things I read was that the odds of us being here having this conversation based on chance collisions of like of chances, right, is the same as a hurricane moving through a junkyard and assembling a working 747, right? And then the rebuttal to that is there's an infinite number of worlds.

This must be happening somewhere. And I get that. But I prefer the first one. Speaker B: I want to talk about your work a little bit. You've described yourself as being part of like this group of meaning nerds on the internet, which is awesome. And you've also described your skill, at least this was maybe a couple of years ago, so maybe it's evolved, but going from finance to what you do now is sort of like going through a huge amount of info, extracting it and synthesizing it and sharing with people in a way that kind of respects people's attention.

And then the last part of this, you've said, what is sort of like your prompt for people? Like, what question do you need to know the answer to that will also help other people? Hmm. My question is, what is the game that you're playing? And if you were to try to pull things forward and see the journey you're on, what is it? Maybe a simpler version of that question would just be like, what is the question that you're answering? Speaker C: The question I'm answering right now is the meaning mortgage question, which is the question that everyone who comes to me has, which is that, is the limit of possibility for me the material constraints within which I live?

Or if I choose the right path, will abundance come as a consequence? And what does that abundance look like and how much discomfort comes with it? Right? That I feel actually is the main quest for humanity right now, particularly in the West. Speaker B: Put it in a super, super trivial way, like, does this have to be a hobby? Speaker B: Put it in a super, super trivial way, like, does this have to be a hobby? Speaker C: Yeah, I guess. Can I, if I do what I love in service of what I love, will it make me money?

Will it make me enough money to live and not be ashamed in my family? Speaker B: Yeah, will I have abundance? Yeah, yeah. Speaker C: And I think actually, like, maybe to be a bit cheesy, but it never fails to make me a bit emotional. Does the universe love me? Which is that ultimately, like ultimately, ultimately, ultimately at the bottom of everything is the universe love. And maybe conditional on me choosing the right direction, maybe not ultimately. If I leap, will I be held? And, or is it just an indifferent box of atoms that is, you know, survival of the fittest.

And I think that plays into this view of separation and shame and anxiety, that ultimately I've just got to grind it out because there's so many people, there's so many people I've got to make happy. There's all these different requirements that I have. But actually you realize that if you did manifest your potential, things would work out even better. So I'm helping answer that question in my own life. I'm helping other people explore the answer to that question. Hmm. Speaker B: That gets on another thread I had, which is there's this sort of connection between fear, faith, and love.

Hmm. There, in many ways, like those are kind of the three themes running across all of this. How do you think those are connected? Speaker B: That gets on another thread I had, which is there's this sort of connection between fear, faith, and love. Hmm. There, in many ways, like those are kind of the three themes running across all of this. How do you think those are connected? Speaker C: One of the other guys that's been a big part of my scientific explorations is this guy Donald Hoffman. He's a cognitive scientist and he has what's called the interface theory.

So we all assume, I think most of the time, that what we're seeing is the totality of what there is. But we don't know that the visible light spectrum that we see is 1 ten-trillionth of what's available, right? The idea being that you need to see only as much as you need to see in order to survive in the moment. Everything else just gets filtered out because it's extraneous. And I think maybe a lot of people when they take psychedelics, their senses and filters explode, the doors of perception open and they realize all the things they're not ordinarily seeing.

Maybe it's colors on trees, maybe it's sounds, maybe it's like my senses blew open for a few weeks in Manhattan and it was absolutely bloody insane. So basically the idea is that you have these cognitive filters and what's interesting, I believe to like a ludicrously profound like degree, is that fear narrows those filters. When you're in a state of fear, the aperture just gets smaller and smaller and smaller, which I think we all know, like, like our ability to think creatively or to enjoy the things in life when we're really stressed about something is, is really limited.

And so the idea is, is that when you're in a state of relative abundance, you can see more opportunities and you can see better opportunities. And you also have the time to cooperate and collaborate and enjoy more love. I think this is all quite intuitive. But then when you think about it from a civilizational perspective, we are now in a, for us, most of us sat, like, don't know, it's gonna come over the wrong way, but we're in a post-scarcity world. If we learn how to allocate resources correctly, we are effectively in a post-scarcity world.

So it follows from that that if we are in a post-scarcity world, this species, we as a species can now evolve to see more of reality. To see more truth. And I think specifically the part of reality that we haven't been able to see, that we are now seeing— and I use the word see when it isn't seeing, it's feeling— is this syntropy, is this holotropic attractor, that when things get a little bit less bonkers and you're not concerned with what the left hemisphere is concerned with, which is, which is competition and self-regard, you can see more of the system and then you can integrate with it.

So as fear diminishes and love increases Love, I believe, is just simply how reality feels at base. So like, once you can get more of that, you can see more of the world. And when you can see more of the world, you can actually navigate it better. And so that spectrum of fear to love, I think, actually also corresponds to the amount of reality that you can see. Is faith that gap? Faith— faith to me has been a very charged word. Faith is propositional. For a lot of people, which is like, if, if you don't believe he was born and resurrected, you're going to hell.

And that for me was a very difficult phase of my life when like I was trying to save myself through the forced application of propositional beliefs to my life. That's not how I see faith anymore. I see faith as a conversation where typically I need to make the first move. That if you believe that synchronicity exists and ultimately reality is responsive, what you do is you make a move. You make a move and you see a response, which means it's not— not that much faith is required because then you make another move and you see another response, and then you make another move and you make another response.

You just have to move first. The faith is being able to move first and understanding that when that move is the right move, you see a response. That's faith. And then it becomes easier and easier to have faith the more evidence you have that reality actually works that way. It's again, you— the first step you make is probably out of fear. Right. But then the more you move out of love, the more faith you have, because the more you actually witness the results of your actions. It's not some vague propositional bullshit.

Speaker B: You are in this interesting seat where you are kind of like, in many ways, the speaker for the weird stuff, the woo stuff, to a bunch of otherwise fairly rational people or left-brained people. I think, I don't know if it was you or someone else, like the great challenge is that we have to communicate this right brain wisdom on left brain rails. This idea that like, in some sense, it's back to the sort of thing we were talking about earlier, which is like the people who join the collective or whatever, they're sort of not necessarily executive function or high agency enough to translate some of it.

Um, and I think at times it can be, this stuff can be really unbelievable. Like, I read— just reading it, it's like feels right or empowering or whatever. Other times it's fuzzy. You have this frame too of that I think is great of minimum viable woo and you have woo ratings at the top of your post and stuff. Open-ended question, but like, what is it like to strike this balance? You also seem to keep like a pretty loose grip on everything versus like being super dogmatic. Yeah. Like what— how do you think about this balance of doing what you do, communicating it, being really open to new ideas, holding them with a loose grip.

And then also, by the way, trying to make all of it not just heady and idea-based, but practical. Speaker C: It's adorable to think that you, I would succeed at any one of those impossible missions. My wife really helps. Yeah. My wife does not give a shit about anything that I write in the nicest possible way. And it used to really annoy me. She's like mega successful, curious, interested, but just not curious and interested in any of the things that I'm interested in, which is almost a universal dynamic in like the spiritual mystical phase, which is something, an interesting thing.

Like I think mostly 'cause it's a men problem at the moment. Speaker C: It's adorable to think that you, I would succeed at any one of those impossible missions. My wife really helps. Yeah. My wife does not give a shit about anything that I write in the nicest possible way. And it used to really annoy me. She's like mega successful, curious, interested, but just not curious and interested in any of the things that I'm interested in, which is almost a universal dynamic in like the spiritual mystical phase, which is something, an interesting thing.

Like I think mostly 'cause it's a men problem at the moment. Speaker B: Oh, interesting. Speaker C: Yeah, but you know, like I spent 35 hours over Christmas reading an alien transmission called the Law of One, which is legit one of the most interesting things I've ever read. But my wife comes out the other end of it and I'm like, wow, I've been reading this alien yada yada, blah blah blah. Like, and then that even for me, this is like 10 out of 10 on the woo rating. And she's like, "Cool, like what's the takeaway?"

Right? And she's like, "If this is taking time away from your kids," which it was, "how is it making you a better dad? How is it making you a better husband? What are this you bringing into the world?" Yeah. And I think that's a great framing that, you know, like there were ideas that came outta that alien transmission that materially altered my worldview. In ways that have changed my behavior. And that for me is sort of the threshold for an incremental piece of information, which is how is it going to change how I act in the world?

It's how I work out if a rabbit hole is productive, right? Like, I've got like interested in the topic of alien disclosure. I got like interested in the topic of like alien disclosure for like a few weeks. And then I was like, one, the discourse is psychotic, but also the timing of disclosure is not something I have any agency over. And it actually like won't make a material difference in my life until it does. So like, you just file that away in like the not wise pile, right? It's like, it's a question of agency, like where, like, is how productive is this rabbit hole going to be to the extent that I know?

And then how is it going to change my behavior on the other side? Speaker B: I have a couple of quotes about stories I want to read. This fractal mono— monomyth, the hero's journey, is the story that humans tell to describe how to participate in the process of complexification as individuals. We encounter the anomaly, a new understanding of consciousness. This presents the reality of a force that's superior to our egocentric perception of the world and then forces us to surrender to it, surrender control to it. A death and rebirth switches our locus of control from the left hemispheric ego to a right hemisphere that's significantly more connected to this emergent force.

And then the next quote: The success of a story directly corresponds to the degree of the evolutionarily important information it communicates. Why does so much wisdom begin with stories? Speaker C: Well, how else are you going to communicate something? Reality flows, stories flow, right? Like, and we've had written language for like one second. Yeah, one second of humanity's history. So things, things need to be memorable and stories are memorable. And that's a bit of a circular reference because then like, why are stories memorable? But I think they, they— the stories that are memorable mimic the structure of deep reality, and the hero's journey mimics the structure of deep reality by being an instruction manual for the most important process that we can go through, which is this one.

Speaker B: What are your favorite stories? Speaker B: What are your favorite stories? Speaker C: Well, that's a really tough one. My favorite hero's journey is The Matrix because it's It's about what's happening right now. So I really, really love that. My favorite fiction book, I really love East of Eden, 'cause that's about this as well. Speaker B: Oh man, one of my best friends has been recommending me that for years, and yeah, it's on the list. Speaker C: I mean, this is like a really, really dumb thing to say that it is, because I have a weird pathology that I will not read fiction, and everyone judges me for it so harshly, but I still regard like, reading as semi-work because it is semi-work for me.

And so I won't allow myself to read fiction. So like, I've only read like 3 fiction books in like the last decade. Oh my gosh. So I've read like Shantaram and like East of Eden. Shantaram's fantastic and East of Eden is like transcendent. Speaker B: What caused something to move past that filter? Uh, haha, curiosity. Well, clearly that almost seems in contradiction. You have plenty of curiosity, so. Speaker C: They were— I was curious enough about them to get over the hump. Speaker B: I like that a lot. On love, two more quotes.

Sorry to barrage you. Evolution also rewards complexification, so this force feels like love. The word love is probably the greatest linguistic limitation in Western culture. In the specific context of The Attractor, you can redefine love as the felt sense of increasing integration. And then Dr. Mossbridge's definition of unconditional love is totally different. Unconditional love is the heartfelt, benevolent desire that everyone and everything—ourselves, others, and all that exists in the universe—reaches their greatest possible fulfillment, whatever that may be. This love is freely given, with no consideration of merit, and with no strings attached, with no expectation of return.

And it is a love that motivates supportive action in the one who loves. Beautiful. The thing—and it goes to the first part of the quote—that made me wonder about is Are there other words that you use to add fidelity here? One that kind of came to my mind would be maybe beauty, but I'm curious if there's— love's such a baggage. Maybe it doesn't matter, and maybe it goes back to some of the core stuff you were saying about love as being like the base thing. But that feels very different than most of the ways we— and by the way, part— one thing hanging over all this is like curiosity and desire and love.

Like, in some sense, there are similar feelings attached to this constellation of things. Speaker C: I think maybe the scientific— I love scientific terms because that's what my intellect is, the bouncer. It won't let things out. Yeah, that's right. Like, so I like attractors, right? Like, like Tinder. Attraction is the thing that binds you both together. And there are attractors in nature. And I think Erwin Laszlo calls the thing that we're talking about the holotropic attractor, which is an attractor that drives you towards wholeness. I love that. Like, it's a bit wordy, but like an attractor that drives you towards wholeness.

Speaker B: And that theoretically is driving like my cells all the way up to— Yes. Me. Yes. Speaker C: No, up to and beyond you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. That's the, that's the bit where your brain gets scrambled. Yeah. Yeah. Is that it's— Speaker B: But of course we're the top of consciousness. Right, right. Speaker C: So like the human— that's interesting to me. Like I wrote an essay recently about whether the sun was conscious because based on a lot of different theories of consciousness, the sun could be conscious. And actually stars move in what's called a volitional way.

Okay. That we've created dark energy and dark matter to explain away the fact that stars move more than they should based on their mass. Whereas like if they were conscious, of course they would move in different ways that we couldn't fully forecast, right? But then when you're like, is the sun conscious, you moron? And you're like, well, first define conscious and then look at the various different theories of consciousness. And like work out whether the sun describes them. Speaker B: Emergence is crazy, man. Yeah. Speaker C: Well, the crazy thing about emergence is that different traits emerge at every different level of integration.

Speaker B: Emergence is crazy, man. Yeah. Speaker C: Well, the crazy thing about emergence is that different traits emerge at every different level of integration. Speaker B: Right, right, right. And we, the funny thing is we're, I'm obviously somewhat less bought in on all of this than you, but we are totally bought in on emergence around like, I don't know, Santa Fe complexity, like ant colony, like emergence, we're all in. But I guess it stops with us. Speaker C: There is a place where people will not go to the point that it makes them angry.

Now, anger is the most lateralized of all emotions. Where is it lateralized? It's lateralized in the left hemisphere. What is the characteristic of the left hemisphere? It lies when it doesn't understand something, it confabulates, and it will not surrender control. If there is an idea or class of ideas that is guaranteed to reliably make people disdainful of you. It is any concept that implies a degree of intelligence that's superior to the human intellect. Just try it. Try it with friends. Like, go out and talk about, like, is the sun conscious?

And people will be like, you have lost your goddamn mind. Whereas actually, like, the science behind it's like, not a joke. Speaker B: Ironic relative to all the AI stuff. I mean, if anything, you can imagine that being one of the things that maybe tips the scales towards more openness is that intelligence isn't precious anymore. Yeah, we're nearing the end. I have, I have two sections that go together. The first is about what you've called this sort of meta crisis that we may be in. And there's prescriptive views on the timing here.

There's more broad views. I think this ties to like, I don't know, in the tech world, everybody's freaking out about AI broadly. It seems that there are all kinds of crises, crises happening. There's stuff like the Fourth Turning. You hear different articulations of sort of like, I don't know, there's this Bo Burnham song a few years ago called That Funny Feeling, which I always think about. It's just this, like, the vibes are off. And you have this awesome quote where you basically lay it all out as coordination problems. You say, now we're operating at a planetary scale.

The next conflict is primarily about mindset. It's within ourselves. When you reflect a minute, it's incredible to realize how many of our hardest problems are almost entirely coordination problems. This goes back to the scarcity, lack of scarcity. For example, politics: cooperate to pass legislation, rebuild effective institutions. War: agree not to kill each other. Environment: agree not to kill everything else. Innovation: collaborate on technical innovation. Hunger: getting abundant food where it's needed. Inequality: allocate resources more equally. End quote. I think you also believe something else is happening, that there is an anomaly, that there's some shift that's happened.

I think my observation might be that it almost feels like the world is barbelling where you have this extreme shift And it's like every, every 19-year-old is just sports betting and nihilistic and addicted to their phone. Like, it's almost this extreme shift to the left brain of zero-sum selfishness. And then meanwhile, there's something else happening around more hippie, new age spiritualism. Yeah. What's happening? Speaker C: I think it's— I think the anomaly, if you ask, if you ask me what it was like, systems blow up when they encounter an anomaly they can't explain, and then they reconfigured themselves around that anomaly.

I think it's the belief in non-local consciousness. Every single thing that you have that people would describe as woo— psychic abilities, reincarnation, clairvoyance, prophecy, precognition, everything pretty much, like aliens, right? Like everything goes back on the table. I'm not saying it's true, it just goes back on the table with one jiu-jitsu move. Which is that consciousness is bound by neither time and space. And like, that's a pretty uncontroversial proposition that we've had since quantum physics, right? Like, but people don't seem to want to apply it to consciousness. If you're willing to countenance that, that remakes the world.

And if you think about there being a direction to non-local consciousness as described by the Holotropic Attractor and what Curiosity or whatever it is we're talking about, that also remakes the world. And this probably sounds like either elitist or culty or whatever, but I've noticed a bifurcation that you describe that you can have a conversation with people where they'll be like, hmm, that's interesting. Sounds a bit crazy, but like, that's interesting. I'm interested and I would like to hear more. And there's people that are like, you're an idiot. Shut down.

And those 'you are an idiot' people, their lives don't seem to be going that great. And maybe this is just selection bias for me, and I'm worried about those people, um, because they're almost exclusively playing zero-sum games. Um, and the people that are open to that idea— I'm not interested in convincing people that aren't. I'm interested in, in helping the people that are starting to understand that that could be possible lean into the right hemispheric traits that make that come alive. I do not even believe any of these things 100%.

I am not an evangelist for these in many different cases. I have just seen it work. So I am like, you know, worth another 7-hour digression that we don't have time for. But at the moment, there's these telepathy tape podcasts that come out that I've been having this very difficult relationship with skepticism about. But it ultimately comes down to, is consciousness non-local? And some days I think that there's a 50% chance that they're all fake. And some days I think there's a 90% chance they're all true. And holding these tensions right now is something that we're going to have to be doing as a culture.

Speaker B: It's interesting too, on the point of who sort of is open to it versus not. I think it's specifically also just highly ambitious, highly educated people on the coasts, probably in the US. Like, you ask the average remotely religious person anywhere in the world, and none of these ideas are that crazy. And so it's interesting sort of where the seeds come from. I think you brought up the telepathy tapes. I think when we met, you called them paradigm of reality, your paradigm of reality being obliterated. There's one just amazing expert excerpt that gives a sense of maybe the wildness here.

The primary obstacle to human cooperation has been the cognitive constraint on the number of people we can know and trust. But imagine how quickly that prisoner's dilemma would break if all participants are increasingly telepathic. There's a sense almost of like a boiling of the frog of humanity towards some openness here, as well as— and you've, you've written somewhat about weird other things and special powers and in the PSI stuff. I have two final main quotes I want to read before I ask you a last question, at least on this segment.

The first, in the epilogue, To the Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas argues this prodigal return may have been the entire point. I skipped a little. For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest, not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also finally to recover its connection with the whole. To come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, to differentiate itself from, but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of the soul.

And he goes on to say that telos, the inner direction and goal of the Western mind, has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation, participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciousness— consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation. And then finally, one more quote from somebody I love: Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Pierre Chardin. Maybe as your one chance to blast out the woo rating or whatever. Speaker C: What journey are we on? The one idea, and this is probably just recency bias because it's the one I've been learning about over the last few months, that I think might be true is the idea of Earth School. Never heard of it. There's a, one of the bombs I'll just drop now is that there's a surprisingly robust degree of empirical proof for reincarnation. Reincarnation. If you look up Ian Stevenson's work, which is bananas, um, but what's that on the woo rating?

Speaker B: Read the papers. Speaker C: It's low woo rating, man. Like, this is, this is, this is published research. Um, I strongly recommend people go and check it out. Ian Stevenson at UVA. That we essentially make a set of pre-incarnative choices. Our soul makes a set of pre-incarnative choices as to what lessons it would like to learn in an incarnation. We then incarnate into a body into a set of circumstances, your parents and your place, and you know what the curriculum is. But as any college student knows, just because you have a curriculum doesn't mean you're going to study for it and doesn't mean you're going to learn the lessons.

Yeah. And life progresses as essentially a mechanism for you to learn lessons. And the purpose of the lessons is always the same, which is for you to find this form of loving service, for you to become more open and loving and Godlike and able to give and receive love. So you know what the direction of travel is, always the same. But reality is responsive to your ability to learn those lessons. So essentially, when you learn the lesson, you get more abundance. And when you keep failing to learn the lessons, the beatings get more and more savage.

Speaker B: It cracks on you. Speaker C: Now, to bring it back to the Tarnas quote, in the Law of One, the alien transmission, they talk about the fact that on a lot of other worlds, The purpose of third density, where we are right now, is to learn how to make conscious choices. That's what humanity can do. We're self-aware so we can make conscious choices, and it's to, it's to effectively learn lessons. On a lot of other worlds, the veil of forgetting that said that actually we're divine creators was very, very thin, so there was no, there was no urgency to do anything.

On Earth, allegedly, the veil of forgetting is incredibly thick, so we all feel very separate and this is a really tough college. So we're very strongly separated from the divine, um, to the extent that everyone thinks it's a ridiculous proposition. But that means that your growth here is accelerated really, really quickly. This is like the Harvard of the universe, but it's a really tough school. And so the extent, the extent to which you feel this catalyst and this friction in your life, it's actually an accelerant. But it's an accelerant only to the extent that you're willing to have some metacognition to learn the lessons you're being presented with.

And to exhibit some agency to continue to make better choices. Because the idea is, is that you will just keep reincarnating for eves until you notice that there's a direction and there are lessons you're supposed to be learning, right? And that's the nature of karma. The nature of karma is not a punishment. It's simply if you, if you needed to learn a particular lesson that perhaps you hadn't learned in the last life, you will be learning it with greater intensity in this life. It's a really helpful framing and it allows you to treat, it's not like everything happens for a reason.

It's that everything happens for a reason and it's actually your job to find out what the reason is, right? Like, and that approach to the adversity that has come my way since I've learned about it has made me extremely resilient. Speaker B: Yeah, it's very, it rhymes with so much of religious ideas around struggle as well. Speaker C: But I'm starting to think that it's literally true, right? That's the purpose of the intellect in this, which is I've done enough research across mysticism and science that when I see this pattern and it matches all these different patterns and I reserve the right to change my mind next week if I learn something different.

Yeah, but it aligns with so many different areas that when it comes from like an alien transmission, I'm less liable to discount it because it fits. Speaker B: I think part of what I'm saying is that like all this stuff seems to be pointing at the same kind of spot in the sky. Yep. Speaker C: But most people make fun of the finger rather than realize there's a moon there. Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Uh, last set of just a few lightning round questions as we wrap up. Can you explain your frame pseudoscience is the Streisand effect?

Speaker C: Just so good, man. For whatever reason, if anything gets labeled pseudoscience, go and check it out and study it. Like, I don't know why, but like synchronicity is labeled as pseudoscience, integrated information theory is labeled as pseudoscience, like, like, like all of Rupert Sheldrake's work on morphic resonance. Speaker B: I think his son on a podcast, his son's like a mushroom guy. Merlin. Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all of like Graham Hancock stuff, that probably is a little bit more pseudoscience-y. Speaker B: But yeah, the problem is there are some real pseudoscience labels, right?

Speaker C: Again, that's the role of the left hemisphere, right? The role of the left hemisphere is the right hemisphere is open and pseudoscience is used like Pseudoscience implies that science has got angry about it. Speaker B: But yeah, the problem is there are some real pseudoscience labels, right? Speaker C: Again, that's the role of the left hemisphere, right? The role of the left hemisphere is the right hemisphere is open and pseudoscience is used like Pseudoscience implies that science has got angry about it. Speaker B: Yeah, right, right, right. Speaker C: Because otherwise it would just be factually wrong.

Right. Pseudoscience is like— it's like a slur. It's a slur. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. You mentioned at the top, Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff has become a recent area of interest broadly. Like a number of these people have come up, both modern and historical. What do you think happens with these people, these mystics or sometimes scientists or gurus or even prophets of the past, like, who sort of tap in? Speaker C: Yeah, a lot of it— there's most of— most of them, it goes horribly, horribly wrong. And I think the lightning round answer is that we need to increasingly rely on communities where no one person— Speaker B: too much for one person to hold.

Speaker C: Too much for one person to hold. There's a great— Speaker B: sorry, I was just going to say there's a great book about a bunch of physicists who go through something like this that's partially fiction called When we cease to understand the world, people like Alexander Grothendieck and Schrödinger and Heisenberg, and it's actually similarly shaped, which is like, this is too much for one person to bear in the case of quantum mechanics, but it all kind of comes back around. One thing that came up that I didn't get to watch the full video, I'd love for just the quick primer on, is the Jacob's Ladder Jordan Peterson thing you said was really meaningful to you.

Speaker C: I think it's brilliant. And I then had to put in the standard disclaimer that a lot of his work is extremely not brilliant. And this was also a while ago, I think. It was pre-crisis. Literally, I was sitting, I was in the line to Newark, in Newark security. And he talks about Jung believing that your future self is the guide in the present by directing your interests. That one moment changed my life. I was like, there's something in me. There was something in me that just went ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

And that in itself was a, was a sign. And actually the whole podcast is about, is about shamanic initiation, which is essentially being how, how are you a bridge between two worlds to keep both worlds on track? And, and what role does attention play in that in terms of driving people? At the moment we're off track and I think a lot of people are being drawn back on track by their attention. And that's kind of the role that he's talking about. Hmm. That's powerful. It's brilliant. Speaker B: We talked about, like, I think one of the things I really admire about you is you have a pretty loose grip on all this stuff while holding it through all of this.

Is there anything that you found yourself really starting to grip firmly that would be most rattling if you were to find out it was totally not true? Speaker C: Oh, it's a good one. I think if someone, like, I think if someone ruthlessly debunked McGilchrist's work, that would, that would hurt me a lot. But then even McGilchrist himself says, even if everything I have is debunked, it works as an explanatory metaphor for the world. And it kind of does. But I think if someone, if he was exposed as like a massive fraud, then—

Speaker C: Oh, it's a good one. I think if someone, like, I think if someone ruthlessly debunked McGilchrist's work, that would, that would hurt me a lot. But then even McGilchrist himself says, even if everything I have is debunked, it works as an explanatory metaphor for the world. And it kind of does. But I think if someone, if he was exposed as like a massive fraud, then— Speaker B: At least it reduces a lot of the quote unquote scientific foundation that gets to some of this higher level stuff. Speaker C: Yeah.

I think ultimately really the answer to that is that the universe is an empty indifferent box that doesn't care about me. And it's all just stuff. It's aimless stuff. We're accidents. Speaker B: Like that would kill me. It's so not new given everything we talked about, but you've said your favorite quote is Joseph Campbell's, "Follow your bliss and doors will open where there are only walls." Why is that frame so powerful? Speaker C: Because you have to believe all the premises. Follow your bliss, differentiation path first. You've got to do it first.

That's faith. Doors will open. You have to have the faith that the doors will open. But then they do actually open. Doors will open where there were only walls. Walls, as in you're looking at a wall, you're looking at a situation which is not rationally obvious that there's a good path forwards, right? You're there staring at a wall. Speaker B: There are no options. Speaker C: Yeah, there are no options, or at least no sensible options except your bliss. You either have no options or an infinite array of options, and your bliss is the signal.

And then when you step towards it, something really weird happens. Hmm. Speaker B: There are no options. Speaker C: Yeah, there are no options, or at least no sensible options except your bliss. You either have no options or an infinite array of options, and your bliss is the signal. And then when you step towards it, something really weird happens. Hmm. Speaker B: Uh, you mentioned earlier your nephew Fred again. For those viewers who don't— listeners who don't know, after seeing him live, a friend of mine observed that he basically was comparing Fred to Christian artists, and his idea was that like there's a lot of imagery and the raised hand and language, and it sort of created this spiritual experience.

What do you think he's tapped into? Speaker C: Him? Yeah. Like, no, him. I think it's what he's tapped into. Like, there's a moment, if you haven't seen the Boiler Room set, you see the Boiler Room set? Boiler Room set's one of the best sets I've ever seen, and obviously I'm biased. But I listen to thousands of hours of EDM a year. Like, I worked EDM. Anyway, so that set's transcendent. And then there's a bit in the set where this guy in a yellow t-shirt knocks into the decks and turns off the DJ decks in the middle of the performance.

So it's one of the best DJ sets of all time. You can tell everyone in the room tells it's one of the best, believes it's one of the best sets of all time. And then some dude turns off the decks. And what does Fred do? Fred laughs, wags his finger, and turns the decks back on. How many artists do you think would behave that way spontaneously? Completely spontaneously, as in like— Yeah, no panic. Yeah. And, you know, I don't want to talk too much about him, but that's who he is.

That's exactly who he is as a person. And that moment was totally spontaneous in that he couldn't have planned it. And I think when people see that, he is exactly how he is. Yeah, it's in the foil. Yeah. And all of his work, it's what he's feeling. We've Lost Dancing was his breakout, and that's what he was feeling. And that was the things that he was going through. and he's able to communicate that through his music. Total authenticity. It's extremely appropriate to what we're talking about. Yeah, yeah. He has D, he has that effortless charisma.

Speaker B: My final question, and I suspect maybe you would argue that this question even misses some of the point, but if you were going to go on a walk with 20-year-old Tom and just try to assure him a little bit, what would you say to him? Speaker C: I'm going to get into like Marty McFly territory where I would create some paradox and then I would cease to exist. Speaker B: It's been a long road, I think. Speaker C: Never underestimate the power of just keeping going. Just keep going.

Like when you're going through hell, just keep going. So our Churchill's lines, and like there have been some really, really dark places. That I've been to, that I think that like I was, it was a very, very small amount of time away from killing myself. And I think that, I guess I didn't, so I don't need to tell him that, but on a different timeline, maybe I would say that. And I think to have more faith in my own curiosity. Again, maybe I wouldn't believe that now if I hadn't gone through that darkness.

But like, I think if I have only If I have only one thing I want to tell the world, it would be that. And therefore, that was what I would probably want to tell myself. Speaker B: Thank you. I think like, I don't know, I'm new to this, but many ways what I'm trying to do with this podcast is like talk to people about their attractors and their curiosity and how they're being pulled forward by the world. And both this conversation and all the prep, yeah, it just felt very aligned and empowering and a lot of stuff going in the right direction.

So I appreciate you. Thank you. Speaker B: Thank you. I think like, I don't know, I'm new to this, but many ways what I'm trying to do with this podcast is like talk to people about their attractors and their curiosity and how they're being pulled forward by the world. And both this conversation and all the prep, yeah, it just felt very aligned and empowering and a lot of stuff going in the right direction. So I appreciate you. Thank you. Speaker C: I'm continuously very surprised that anyone would read so much of my stuff, but you, you've, you obviously did so much of my reading of my stuff and I'm, I'm always, I find that very meaningful.

Thank you. Speaker B: Of course. Thanks. Yeah.