#813 - Joe Hudson - The Art Of Mastering Your Emotions
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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Joe Hudson. He's a coach, entrepreneur, and a podcast host. We are often our own harshest critics. Everyone knows that it's important to be kinder and more understanding to ourselves, yet this is a challenge. So what is a more reliable route to developing self-compassion, stopping negative self-talk, and getting out of our own way?

Expect to learn what the real matrix is, how to identify thoughts that might be holding you back, why feeling superior only works if you're suppressing emotions, why people struggle so much to connect with their inner world, how to reduce negative self-talk, where self-discovery actually comes from.

and much more. Joe is an absolute underground hero. He is going to be huge over the next few years. I'm adamant. I would happily invest money into this man, his knowledge, his insights, the tactical nature of everything that he does. He is really phenomenal, and I'm confident you're going to absolutely love this episode.

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I have been falling in love with your work over the last few months. I feel like it's been very timely for me as I try to

feel feelings and tap into emotions and you're the guy so i've scraped some of my favorite tweets and quotes from you that i've picked up and i want to go through some of those with you okay first one how to see the matrix one name an unwanted emotion in your life two list the ways you try to avoid it three notice that every way you try to avoid it you actually create it yeah

Yeah, I have an episode on that one. It's called The Golden Algorithm. And it's basically this idea that the emotion that we don't want to feel is the emotion that we invite in the exact way that we try to avoid it. So the perfect example of this in my life was I...

you know, had this experience of being emotionally abandoned as a kid. And so I would just keep on finding emotional abandonment everywhere I looked, you know, it was like, you know, the guy who's like, close their eyes, close their eyes at a bar, throw a dart behind their back, and they're always going to hit the wounded woman and like, they're going to be attracted to one another. And that's how it's going to work. Like it was, so I always, you know, created this abandonment. And

So when I thought it was coming, when I saw the abandonment, even though maybe it wasn't there, I would harden up. I would like, you know, get angry or something, which of course creates a more likelihood of abandonment. So I would try to not feel it and in the way of not feeling it, or I would like really try to caretake somebody and that would create resentment in them.

And then they would abandon me. So every way that I tried to avoid it, I was recreating it in my life. That just goes across the board everywhere. So whether I'm working with a CEO who's trying to avoid their shame, I can guarantee that they will do something to create shame and then have to deal with it in the terms of their company, for instance. So this is one of the realities of our lives. And it's an amazing thing because intellectually, you can get it. But what

Think people don't get is you can just literally look at every single place where you have pain and you can backwards engineer it You can go backwards and go. Oh, hey, right. So what am I trying to avoid? How am I avoiding it how that's how I'm creating it and Backwards engineer it. Why is it so reliable that the way you try to avoid it creates it like to me? It doesn't seem from first principles like that could be the case. You could avoid it in a way that doesn't create it. Yeah, I

You know, there's that the famous saying that which we resist persists. So so it's it's acting under the same principle. So it's not that it's not that. So, for instance, if it's it has to have the emotional catch of like you really don't want it. And so therefore, the way to.

change the algorithm is to actually go, I can't wait to be abandoned. I can't wait for someone to be angry at me. I can't wait to feel scared. I can't wait to have anxiety and then fall in love with those emotional experiences. And then the pattern all goes away. The thing that creates it isn't the fact that you're like, oh, that's not something that I want. It's the fact that you're avoiding it. It is the, oh, I don't want to feel that. So think about it in a workout context.

If you never want to feel challenged physically, you are going to be challenged physically. You, on the other hand, you're like, I'd like to be feel challenged. And therefore you're going to have a longer, happier lifespan of not being challenged physically. So any kind of complex ecosystem. And I think there's a great quark in the Jaguar, which was written by a Nobel scientist. I think that's the name of it talks about this. And so does, you know, who else talks about it is

The guy who did Black Swan. Nassim Taleb. Yeah. And he talks about basically like every kind of complex ecosystem, it needs to be challenged. It needs to have like a certain kind of

Like, like it needs to have the strain for it to stay healthy. And so it's the same thing. It's the same principle and action. If you are not leaning into the difficult emotions and learning to enjoy them and finding the gifts in them, then you're just, you're inviting them in the same way you would be with.

pain, physical pain. I've got an example story that involves a horse from last Saturday. So I went to a retreat called Miraval. So there's one out here in Austin. And for the people that don't know, it's pretty cool. It's like a sort of holistic health

Five Star Hotel meets a meditation retreat, kind of all rolled into one. And they've got a million different activities. One of them was equine therapy. Whitney Cummings told me that horses can sense when you're stressed and you can't be...

angry around a horse and stuff. And I thought, this sounds cool. Fuck it. Equine. I don't have horses on hand. I'll do equine therapy. I kept calling it horse meditation and the instructor lady really didn't like the fact that I kept calling it horse meditation. Equine therapy just seemed too wanky for me. So I called it horse meditation. And she

She introduces you to all the horses. For the people that haven't been around a horse, these things are huge. It sounds like such a... And people that are around horses will go, duh, yeah, of course. These things are massive, right? And it is intimidating, especially for the bigger ones to be around them. Anyway, I found myself sort of quite calm after a little while. They were all super chill. You know, they just stand there and look. They're not doing anything. It doesn't even look like they're breathing or alive. If it wasn't for the fact that they were warm, you wouldn't even know it was alive. Anyway...

The lady was well educated psychologically. She'd definitely done her work. And we go back into the circle afterward and she asks what came up. And there was one point where you had to try and get the horse to lift its leg. And you sort of do this by putting your hand on its upper shoulder and then you sort of ride it down the leg and you give it a little tug. And if it wants to, it'll show you its hoof and you can use it to clean the hoof with a little pick thing. And I noticed that as I was approaching the horse,

I wanted the horse to like me.

I really, really wanted this horse to like me. And I'd already set up a success failure algorithm in my mind that if I couldn't get the horse to do this thing, which the lady had said, you know, it's about being calm and it's about asking for this from the horse. It's like, oh, you know, if this horse doesn't lift its foot up, that's, I mean, that's just classic me. That's such a comment on how I am as a person. I'm like, yo, do not use a horse lifting its foot as the barometer for whether you're a piece of shit or not. Yeah.

Alas, here I am, like hoping that the horse likes me. And I mentioned it, I mentioned it to the group and it's really stuck with me. Like it's kind of a silly example, but I think name an unwanted emotion in your life. I want people to like me. List the ways that you try to avoid it. And like that, certainly in childhood and probably now in adulthood is definitely something that I could see. It just happened to manifest in the middle of horse meditation. Yeah, yeah. There is funny that you said that.

Somebody recently was watching me do the kind of quick coaching that I do in courses and we have some videos on them. And she was a horse whisperer, someone who basically works with unmanageable horses. And she's like, oh, you do what I do with people. It was an amazing, I was like, what? And for her, the whole thing was like that attunement, like the

energetic attunement or like nervous system attunement is a better way to say it like a nervous system attunement to the person and and there's no place you can see that more clearly with like than raising kids if and when you ever raise them uh

You walk into the house stressed and your kid will take like one or two chances to try to like get you unstressed. If you miss them, they're going to be stressed. It's only going to make the whole situation a shit ton worse. Kids are like horses. So he's Joe Hudson. All right. Next one. Next one. The spiritual path for so many is just another way to say, I am not good enough yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, from my...

That comes from my own experience. I got into meditation. So my story was that I had a meditation retreat. I didn't do it because of any reason, but I thought it would be a challenge. I had this amazing experience in this meditation retreat, and then I spent a whole bunch of time trying to get it back. And so meditation started for me as a form of management, which is absolute fucking hell. I was trying to manage myself into becoming better.

And that has to start with the assumption that I'm not good enough. And so, so much of this work is like, oh, there's this deep shame somewhere that says I'm not good enough and I need to fix my, I'm broken somehow and I need to fix myself. Whether it's, and they call it self-improvement, right? Where the other way of looking at it would be, oh, there's an oak tree. Like at what point in its life, what point of its evolution, of its development is it not perfect?

It just like it wouldn't particularly make sense. Our nature is to evolve, is to grow, is to change, but it doesn't make us bad before something that is essentially wrong that we have to fix. As a matter of fact, that concept is what slows down the process probably more than anything else I see these days is people thinking that there's something broken with them instead of just noticing that there's evolution that wants to happen.

I have been kind of obsessed with, I think, this question, which is this balance between being and becoming, this sort of delicate relationship

interplay between wanting to leave it all out on the field of play in life to, you know, get toward the end of it and think, yeah, like I fucking did it. Like I did things. I tried my best. I strived. I worked hard and I'm proud of the outcomes I got whilst also not wanting to whip yourself through the experience so much that you don't ever end up enjoying it.

And I did this series of live shows last year and probably the most common or one of the most common questions. One of them was, I don't know if the thing I'm doing in my life and the direction I'm going into is the right one. And the other one was, I know that happiness is to be found in the present, but I keep working very hard and kind of castigating myself with a tyrannical inner voice for the future. And this, the spiritual path for so many is just another way to say,

I am not good enough yet. This sort of perpetual, I also have this theory. I'd love to get your take on this, that

Personal development assuages our low self-esteem because it convinces us that we're not the finished product. So we don't ever have to actually judge ourselves. It's like, yeah, I might be a piece of shit today. I might not have any self-esteem right now, but I know that I'm moving forward. Therefore tomorrow or next month or next year, maybe all of this development and the trajectory that I'm on will mean that I'm finally, I finally feel good enough to love myself. Yeah. Yeah.

So when I hear that, I want to give you my opinion on the second thing you asked, but the first thing that struck my attention was the difference between being and becoming. If one can't exist without the other, there's no difference. So the idea that there's a difference is just fully just conceptual. You once talked about this thing you called thought superposition or something like that, where you have... Cognitive superposition. Yeah. So cognitive superposition is...

being and becoming and hold them both for a moment and then that whole duality just disappears. That's the first one. I don't think there's really any way that you would not strive. There's no way that I could convince you to not strive because that's part of how you're wired and I don't know any human being that isn't drawn to evolution, to evolving.

The question is, can you, you know, how much can you enjoy that process? That's really the question. And one of the best ways to enjoy the process is not to believe that there's like a, that there's an end, right? That that's part of like,

The problem with a lot of versions is that they sell you an end that doesn't really ever exist. There's no billionaire... Well, there are actually some, but there's no time where you're like, that's enough money or that's enough power or that's enough spiritual progress. It doesn't work like that. The...

There's just a choice that you're making that you get to make at any time about how you want to spend your time and how much you want to enjoy it. And for me, I really care about efficiency and enjoyment is just like this amazing way to measure efficiency. So if I'm driving a car and it's a really, really, really fast car, I don't call that an efficient car.

The efficient car is a car that moves from A to B with the least amount of energy. And somehow or another, like when we think about our lives, efficiency is speed. But if you really think about like, oh, I just did that thing and I came out with more energy than when I went in. I did just did that thing and I had so much enjoyment of it that I left feeling freaking great. That to me is like that's efficiency and and that's the enjoyment of.

That enjoyment is a great measurement of it. And so what I noticed is the more I focus on my enjoyment and not just me, like people, I coach people in the courses I do, I'll see so many people who are stuck and I'll just be like, yeah, just focus on the enjoyment, like make that the priority and their productivity just goes off the charts. Because everything else will be swimming downstream from there. That's right.

Yeah. So it's like, I would say that the question you asked being and becoming is not an, it's not a real question and, or it's a real question, but it's, it's, it's not a real context in that. And the answer, so to speak, would be enjoy, like, how do you enjoy this journey the most? And that,

rather than, you know, how do you get there? Because there's no there. The presumption is that the process of becoming can't be enjoyable and the process of being is enjoyable. That's the dichotomy, right? In the process of becoming, I posit an ideal. I compare myself to that ideal. I find myself lacking. That drives me to become better. Like that's the assumption, right? That there is no becoming that is enjoyable. Right. Yeah, that's right. And

The other assumption in there that's baked in is that if you just focus on being, you're not going to become, which is just like every meditation teacher in the world will tell you, well, any good one is going to tell you that's bullshit because we're just going to ask you to sit here and be, and then that's what's going to help you become, you know? So both of them, both of the two assumptions are false. What do you think about that idea of, uh, I'm not yet the finished product, therefore my low self-esteem and like,

subconscious self-hatred is assuaged. Yeah, that's the second part. So I think the, thanks for reminding me of that. Yeah, so my experience of that is the low self-esteem is, there's nothing that the critical voice in the head says to you is true. And so you can do anything you want to do, but until you see that fact, you're fucked. So not to say there isn't truth to it, but there is no fucking truth.

And so one of the main things that the critical voice in the head says, if I wasn't here, you would just sit around and drink beer and, and fuck off. And so you need me like that as an example would be one of the things almost everybody's critical voice in the head says. So great. I'll tell you what, I'm going to sit, I'm going to be your boss for the next like three months. And every two minutes, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to criticize you. Right. And then you tell me that's fucking effective.

You tell me that you get more motivated. Tell me that you're like excited to be doing the work that you're doing, that you want to work with me, that you need me. There's no way you're going to do it. Everything that the critical voice in the head says, there's a falseness to it. And when you can see that, it's like the cognitive superposition again. To me, it's not holding two things.

realities is true at the same time, it's holding all of them as true and not true at the same time. When that critical voice in your head goes off and you can just see like, "Oh, you're just scared." That's when the safety comes. There is no self-esteem that gets built by listening to the critical voice in the head and doing what it says. It doesn't work. If it worked, we would all be fucking very, very, have a lot of great self-esteem, but that's not the case.

The more that that thing is loud and brutal, the less self-esteem that people have. Robert Glover said a couple of weeks ago that he knows of very few people who have managed to convince themselves to change from a place of hatred. Self-hatred is a potent but toxic fuel, especially if you use it for too long. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a great way to say it. That's lovely.

Yeah, it's also just, I mean, think about this like mental experiment for a second. You're now going to, you're stuck on an island and you're the only people there are saints, you and a whole bunch of saints. And the thing about them saints is they're not perfect people or anything like that. They just love you unconditionally. They love themselves, each other and you unconditionally. You've got food, you've got shit, you've got everything you need, but you're stuck there and you're going to be stuck there for a decade. When you walk out, how are you? What's changed about you?

And yet the critical voice in the head says, no, well, you can't love yourself yet. You've got to blah, blah, blah before you deserve that. But we all know that if we were on that island, we would walk out just completely different. We would be the thing that we hope to become with all that criticism. That's the mental experiment. If you run it, you just see it right away. Like, oh yeah, you're not going to get to where you want to go through being a really shitty boss to yourself.

Just rounding out your idea of enjoyment as a measure of efficiency, or I guess energy return as a measure of efficiency and enjoyment as kind of the signal that tells you when it's working right. You say, when I do things with enjoyment, I use very little energy and often get energy from the doing. Is that, so is it your position that leaning into enjoyment will not only help you to

by design, enjoy the process, but also get you better results on the backside. Is that as simple as it is? Yeah, it's as simple as it is. I think there's a subtlety to it though. There's two ways to enjoy yourself. One is choose what you do that's enjoyable, but the other one is learn how to enjoy whatever you're doing. So right now you and I are having a conversation. If we both said, let's, how do we enjoy this 10% more of this conversation?

For me, immediately, I put some attention into my body. I'm like, I feel more deeply connected with you. You went and drank some water. You're like, oh, you took care of yourself. And so there's that too. So there's an enjoyment. One part of the process of enjoyment is how do I not change anything and just enjoy it more? And the other one is how do I do the things that are enjoyable or do things in a way that are enjoyable? And so you have to hit it on both those levels. If you only try to do the things that are enjoyable, you're fucked.

Because that's actually an avoidance and that avoidance is going to bring the thing you're trying to avoid to bear. So it has to be like both of those two things to get there. One of the most common...

answers around the friends that are kind of my level at the moment when we're talking about sort of what do you want to do with you know everyone's in their 30s some degree of sort of financial and professional freedom and a lot of the you ask you know what is it that you're hoping to really do the most common by the most common answer by far is I just don't want to do things I don't want to do anymore

Like that's the most common. And that is the, uh, either the first or the second version. It's, um, limit gearing your life and the activities within your life toward things that you enjoy more. So, uh, but you're right that there, there is a whole other world of first off inevitable things. Like you're going to have a kid, the kid's going to go to hospital. Like, what are you going to do? You're going to be sat in the waiting room for six hours and no one's going to give you an answer that you need that skillset because there's a kind of fragility to an over optimized, enjoyable life, uh,

because you never actually end up building the skill to be able to enjoy things that aren't enjoyable by design. But I think that on the other side, there is like a Puritan work ethic that a lot of people in the UK will resonate with where life being enjoyable or choosing things that are enjoyable feels...

like you're undeserving of it your needs your desires you know you shouldn't have them subjugate them who the fuck are you this you know that that's that's not for you um suffer and be and be grateful for it yeah yeah if you don't if you don't suffer you're not actually you don't

You don't deserve it, that kind of thing. Yeah, both of them are super toxic. I mean, if you look at who's least likely to recover from alcoholism, they're going to be an addiction. It's going to be independently wealthy people who don't have to. Is that right? Yeah, there's no flaming field.

so to speak, there's no, and you see this with, I mean, cause I work with a lot of billionaires. You see this trap that happens where it's like, oh, I can buy myself out of anything that I don't enjoy. And, and there's a con there's a consequence to that. The perfect example that I think about is when I meet somebody who's like dedicated more than five years of their life to caring for somebody like, uh,

mom that has Alzheimer's or a kid who's born with some sort of thing that requires them to be cared for full time. There's a softness to those people. I can recognize it. I can say to them, oh, wow, who did you care for for so long? I can see that in you. It's the only way you're going to get that. Some version of that is the only way you're going to get that, that kind of softness, that peace that they have. I know many people have meditated for years who don't have that. I hitchhiked up to

to Alaska, which is a really hard thing to do. I have experiences that I could only get that way and that was extremely uncomfortable. We would sit on the roadside for at the time five hours straight waiting for someone to give us a ride.

Um, so there's just something that like, if you are avoidant of things that you don't enjoy, there's something really toxic about that. And if you think that you have to, you can't enjoy life. And so it feels like it's the solution to that problem is how do I enjoy what's happening right now?

Are there any cues or mantras or practices that you fall back on when you think, what are the sort of fundamental components of maximizing enjoyment?

Yeah, so the way that, like the work that I do in the world, I try to create as much of it as a set of experiments, right? So because I don't, nobody really believes, like, I'm going to have a talk with you now. We're going to have ideas. There's maybe two that resonates with somebody who's listening to this thing. They're going to be like, that's cool. Maybe they remember them. Maybe they don't.

That's what intellectual understanding gets you. Whereas if you do an experiment and you run it, you're going to understand stuff very differently. Because I had massive authority issues when I was in my 20s, I didn't want to listen to anybody, so I just ran these experiments. The first thing experiment I ran was, I'm going to go two weeks and not do anything I don't enjoy. Somewhere on day seven or eight,

I was sitting in front of the garbage can. It smelled like shit. I did not want it in the house, but I did not enjoy taking out the garbage. And I just sat there. I was sitting there just sitting there like, what the fuck do I do? I have committed to this thing. And I was like, hmm. I'm like, the only way that I'm going to get through this is to figure out how to enjoy taking the garbage out. And that was like the first lesson to me that, oh, enjoyment was a state of mind as much as anything else.

And so how do I enjoy things? And then that became this new skill set. So to me, most of my mantras come in questions and because the questions leave the mind open instead of like closed and it leaves the mind in wonder. So for me, the mantra, I wouldn't call that, but would be how do I enjoy this 10% more? Just a little bit more.

And then that just builds over time. It's just like working out, like you're not going to get, you're not going to get all buffed and ripped by, you know, saying, how do I get to a hundred percent right now? It's like, how do I just like increase the weights a little bit?

Yeah, I had a very similar conversation to this one a year ago with Sam Harris. And he gave me inspiration for a realistic path to enlightenment, which I think is way, way better than most of the sort of permanent, non-dual, blissed out ideas that we presume you need to go to a cave for. And his was just stringing together a few moments of peace throughout the day.

you know okay you know if i can have my my mind and my feet rest in the same spot just just three times today okay and then maybe you know in a couple of weeks maybe that starts to become five whatever triggers you want i've got post-it notes around the house um uh and when you realize that just that sequence back to back to back and it's the same as this it just like it

Are you going to be able to make everything permanently enjoyable? No, probably not. But what would this be like if it was a bit more fun? What would this be like if it was a little bit more enjoyable, if it was a little bit more easy? Yeah. Yeah. There's also, just to give you a couple of other ones in that, like to kind of dovetail off of what Mr. Harris said was,

uh like here's a like a really cool trick it's like you're looking at me we're hanging out we're just having our conversation something that makes my life more enjoyable is the question what's looking out behind my eyes so if you like but keep your eyes open and look like and we're having the conversation you still understand everything i'm saying but you just have this question oh what's looking at yeah and say i see the smile on your face yeah it's just like what what like that

just that thing can create the peace in the moment. It doesn't even require you to go off and sit down and blah, blah, blah, blah. There's these little tricks like that, paying attention to your inner ear when you're listening to somebody. It creates this presence in the conversation. A lot of the work that I do is how do you have something like meditation relationally?

How is it that when we're in a conversation, when we're connecting with people and we're parenting or being a boss or whatever we're doing, how does that become our practice rather than our practice is something that we do and then we try to maintain it during life?

it doesn't fucking work it didn't work for me it works for some doesn't work for me yeah taking meditation off the cushion as it's called has been a bit of a difficulty for me i'm almost i almost feel like i'm uh bruce wayne and batman with uh you know where i who i am on a morning when i'm sat down a journal breathwork meditate read get up and go about my day and there's that me

And then there's the sort of dopamine, caffeine, nootropic fueled version of me that kind of fights fires throughout the day and reads things, but reads them with a purpose of kind of bringing them back up and blah, blah, blah. It's very, very, very interesting. I want to come back to it. I want to get some more of your questions, but I got another one here. So letting go doesn't happen by telling yourself to let go. Letting go happens when it is ready. Yeah, yeah, that's a...

That's how to explain that one. I would say there's this thing that I do where I ask people to put their hands together like this and I say, okay, try to pull your pinkies apart. And so go ahead and try, but that's doing it. I don't want you to do it. I want you to try to do it, right? And then feel that whole feeling in your body, that feeling of trying, and then just feel the opposite of it. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Yeah, so we think that we can get to where we want to go through effort. But there's another place that is like that. But the idea of surrender or the idea of receiving whatever words work for you, that allows for a whole secondary thing to get done. And sometimes that's far more effective than effort. And so...

I mean, like, so like when I'm lifting weights, I keep on using weights example, cause I know you're, you're into it. But, um, like when you're really doing like a really good set of reps, there's the effort part of the rep. And then there's the stretch part of the rep. If you try to apply effort to the stretch, you fuck the stretch. Like it's, it's about the op, you know, it's like that moment where the weight is hanging and it's like stretching out the arms, ripping the muscles. And it's a similar thing that there's,

There's something that has to be received into or surrendered into for it to be effective and work. And so what I notice is a lot of people try to let go and it doesn't work. Well, that was you, right? Finding this peak experience in meditation and then... That's right.

gripping tightly onto the desire which immediately creates this success failure with and the entire it was your first one first meditation retreat where it all went right yeah where you had no expectation you had no yeah that's right yeah yeah that's right and and then a thousand other times you know like the the too much effort a thousand other times yeah i mean that's fueled by the critical voice in the head right dude i think about this all the time so um

There's basically no scenario in life that I've ever looked at, or at least for maybe like the last 10 years, where I haven't thought more effort into

will not make this better. Every single thing that is put in front of me, if I just work harder, apply more cognitive horsepower, focus better, if I just lean in, if I grip more tightly, this thing will work. And I kind of have a... Okay. So can you show me then how that works with enjoyment? Yeah.

Fucking enjoy it. Fucking enjoy it, okay? You're going to enjoy this. It's like the sort of slightly outraged mother on a subpar holiday telling her children, we're having fun. We're all having fun. Why aren't you smiling? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Smile. This is fun. This is fun. This is fun. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, just thinking about that sort of gripping so tightly to things

And, and assuming that that is the outcome that you're trying to achieve, assuming that that's the thing that on the other side of it, uh, I've got to, it's not fully fleshed out. So I might, I might bumble this, but I'll see if I can get it across to you. I got the kind of, um, building out a, uh, an idea about hard work and about why it's so seductive in the modern world. The way that I think is that

Most people, most advice is charitably given to people who probably do need to work harder. Many more people, perhaps on average, need tightening up than loosening off. Therefore, the advice, the David Goggins, Jocko Willink, you know, stay hard, get up early and stop hitting snooze and doing all the rest of it, maybe does on average improve the lives of most people. But there is a very big cohort of people for whom that advice

gripping more tightly mentality pushes them further into the exact thing that they need to stop doing, that they're already trying to control all of the outcomes. They're gripping so tightly to all of the things that they're doing. And I think the reason that hard work is so seductive is that it reliably makes most things a bit better, but can actually for a very big number of people over the longer term make it way worse.

Yes, I would put a slight spin on that. I don't disagree with what you're saying, and then I would spin it a little bit. So I would say the thing that's seductive about let's work harder is, or let me inspire you to work harder, is one, it rhymes with the voice in the head. So it's like, I believe. So if you think about the voice in the head as a tyrant, most of us relate to the voice in the head like we're, you know,

Like they're the absolute person who believes in them, right? So pick whatever political figure you like. Think about the person that you hate on the other side. Sorry, think about the political figure that you hate and then think about the person who buys into everything they say. That tyrant is the voice in our head and we are the person who believes everything they say. And so...

When somebody says you need to work harder, they're like, yes, check. I knew I needed to work harder. I've been telling myself as a piece. That's so good. It's, it's like a, like psychological confirmation bias, like an internal confirmation bias. So that's half of the thing. The other half is this feeling of empowerment. Most people in our society feel very disempowered. They feel like they're scared of the consequences of the actions that they want to take. They're scared of the consequences of following their truth.

And so they feel very disempowered. And so this gives them a feeling of, oh, I can have empowerment. And so it's very sexy and very... And the empowerment side, I think, is absolutely right. That is actually, you need to have that. It's probably the agency. You have agency over the outcomes. Yeah. But once you actually figure it out that you actually have agency and empowerment...

Then the move is love. Then the move is learning to love yourself, love others, be unconditional in your love. And what you start to find out is that the unconditional love and empowerment, they can't really exist without one another. You can't really, what we call love that doesn't have empowerment is like codependence. It's like, how do I make you happy so that I can feel safe? It's a fear-based action.

And empowerment without love is actually just power and there's, you'll never get enough of it and it can always be taken from you. And so it's really, it's like those two things become one eventually. But so, so, so I would say that love would help anybody on that whole spectrum, but the sexy thing is, and the thing that they, that they are going to go for is the, you can be better, you can be empowered.

Dude, you're blowing my mind. All of these are really, really great. All right, next one. The desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are. Wow, man, you've been on my Twitter. Picking all of the headlines today. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, so there's this idea that basically if you're trying to be special, then that comes from a place of...

low self-esteem or that comes from a place of wanting to improve, wanting to be better. If you actually know who you are, you just couldn't. It's not a possibility. There's a great Tibetan saying, if you think somebody is better than you, then that's comparative mind, that's misery. If you think somebody is beneath you, that's comparative mind, that's misery. If you think somebody is equal to you,

That's comparative mind and that's mystery. Our society has fallen a little bit into the equality thing now, but if I'm not better, if I'm not worse and I'm not equal, then I'm special. And so then I know who I know. That would be me knowing who I am. As long as I'm in a comparative mind, I can't know who I am. That's basically what it's pointing to. Why would you be special if you're not better, worse or equal?

well i mean that makes me if i can't be better than anybody or worse there you i have to be unique i have to be i have to be something that's not those things so i read that i read um the desire to be special can only exist if you don't know who you are i said maybe maybe maybe it does dovetail that basically the desire to be special is kind of a fruitless pursuit because by virtue of the fact that

the chance of you being here is so infinitesimally fucking unlikely and that no one else will ever be born in the exact same space at the exact same time with your genetics and your experiences. And that the most that you can ever hope to know of any other person, even your best friend or wife that you've known for your entire life and shared everything with is one trillionth daily of what you get to see of yourself.

the sort of specialness is imbued in your own experience. The depth of experience you have of yourself is so asymmetric compared with that that you get from other people that the desire to be special is chasing a thing which is already there. Yeah, it's not what I meant by it, but it's really beautiful. I can't disagree with that. I think the way that I would say it is more like if you go back to Sam Harris, in the process of understanding yourself or what some people would call awakening self,

There's the moment of I am nothing and there's the moment of I am everything. When you see yourself clearly in that way that you are the same as everything, like you and God, you and nature, you and humanity, you are the same. When you see that you're nothing, how does the idea of not being special and or being special, how can it even exist?

That would be another way to say it. Why do you think people want to be special? Where do you think that drive comes from? They weren't loved as kids in a way that was deeply attuned. That they were told that they had to be of value, that they couldn't cry, that they couldn't get angry, that they, whatever. That who they were was needed to be managed. And so that they are looking for...

somebody to say, I love you, but then it never works out because even when you get it, you become the superstar. Everybody loves you, but then it doesn't work out. And so it's the only way it really works out is when you learn to love all those parts of yourself and therefore love all those parts of other people. I've got the word enough.

Coming up, as you say that, someone, you are enough, you as you are. No more, no augmentations, no accolades, no fanfare, no nothing. You as a child, you as an adult, you are enough. There's this thing. Even the idea of enoughness seems like it's limited in some way. I don't know how to explain it. There's this thing that it's similar to, you know, one of the teachings that they have. I think it's a mistranslation of

Like, oh, accept your emotional experience. The idea is that you're supposed to accept yourself. At least in my language, that doesn't really fulfill. What fulfills is welcome. I can't wait to have the experience of being abandoned. I welcome it. I have a quote that's, "Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome."

And it's welcome. It's not accept where you accept her children. You know what I mean? Who are the children of joy? The family of emotion. So all of them. So the more that people are willing to welcome the anger, the fear, the helplessness, the sadness, the grief, the excitement, which is also incredibly hard for people to feel, the

the more that you can welcome those and more joy just as a natural part of existence. One of my favorite stories, it's a dark story, but one of my favorite stories is about Tiger Woods. And his father was very tyrannical, especially when he was a kid. Sort of this guy who just drove Tiger to be the best that he could at golf. And there's a video of Tiger

I think he's maybe two and a half or three playing golf on some late night TV show. And his dad would during coaching and training, he would racially abuse him on the golf course. He would say these white people are never going to let you net you play here. You're not like it's not performing well, like real just heavy, heavy, heavy. But they had a safe word like you do during rough sex.

And he said, just if you ever need me to stop, just say the E word, say the E word and it'll all be over and I'll stop doing it. And he never once said it throughout all of childhood. And the E word was enough. Terrifying, man. And look at what came out. Look at what came out. You know, you have a guy, potentially one of the greatest golfers of all time, but a broken human. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the right. And then we tell the story that that's what's necessary to be the greatest of all time.

and there's definitely counter examples of it who like um i mean okay so to say that no human has trauma i wouldn't go that far so there's always like levels of trauma but there's not that level of trauma racial abuse on the golf course exactly so uh there's a guy i met recently he is now like a boy i'm sorry i can't i can't

Trump, he was with the Warriors. He was a really great player in the Warriors, but didn't start playing basketball. He's from Africa, and now he's a news broadcaster. I'm sorry, I can't remember his name. But I was at a party and I met him and

His story was like, I just wanted to go to college and I came from Africa. And so I played basketball till my fingers bled so that I could get the scholarship. And he tells this story and he tells about like the love of his parents and how that pursued him, how that, and I don't know too much about like a LeBron James, but my understanding that his mother and his relationship was definitely not Tiger Woods and his father's relationship. So yeah.

there's definitely places where that level of trauma is not required to well this this question um sort of i guess the the power of low self-esteem or the the the power of this need uh is probably the thing that's obsessed me the most over the last few years because when you look at someone like tiger and you think well you know look at what he achieved and you go okay but

your definition of achievement is, the art of achievement, the art of accomplishment, is so narrowly defined

it's just within this very one small domain is that what you want for your life and i'm watching um tour de france unchained on netflix at the moment have you seen this no no not at all i highly recommend watching it if you're obsessed with sort of human performance and the narrative it's like a behind the scenes kind of like that formula one uh drive to survive series yeah and um you just see these guys that are sacrificing everything a guy died in 20 last year on the uh

Giro d'Italia, like the Italian one. If they come off, at the very least, there's broken bones and there's skin grafts that are needed and all sorts of stuff. And this guy died. The point being, if you want to become the absolute best within a narrowly defined pursuit, there are a lot of weird externalities and prices. And really what you're looking at is a game of who is prepared to...

who is prepared to sacrifice everything else in their life the most in order to be able to win at this one thing. Yeah, I think also, so I obviously work with a lot of incredibly high-performing people in the business context. And so I think with athletics, I think we like to use that, like athletics and Navy SEALs, like I think we like to use that place. And I think that's, it's true, but it's also only one example of greatness is physical greatness, right?

And we're in a day and we're in a modern time where there's like you're competing with seven billion people for that particular kind of greatness. And so I think and there's only five percent of the top 100 percent that are ever going to be known for their greatness. And so I think that that's a particular thing, whereas something like business or art or like I'm not sure if that same kind of thing is required. Like I would.

If I wanted to bet on an artist that would going to be succeed and for me, it'd be the person who would more likely enjoy their work. When I work with super high-powered CEOs, my experience is that when they start learning to enjoy what they're doing, they become far more effective.

What's interesting is I don't think that's like, I think that if you're in certain bureaucratic positions, you might not rise to the ranks as quickly. You may, you might just leave, but particularly the CEO position or the C-level position of a company that say doing more than a hundred million in rev, those folks, when they, when they turn that switch on it totally, cause they're not, they're not in there. They get to control a lot of their day and what they choose to do to be effective.

So I think there's something about the physical performance in particular that's nuanced there. It's that hard work thing again, right? It's that gripping tightly. It's the assumption that in a domain where performance is easy to quantify, there are established rules around working hard and game tape and diet and sort of thinking about it 365, 24-7.

Um, but you're, you're totally correct. Like if you were to look at take podcasting, um, the best podcasters in the world are not the ones that live and breathe podcasting. They're the ones that have sufficiently interesting lives that they can actually talk about it on a podcast. There's work to be done, you know, and networking and conversational skills. They're also like the best biathlete in the world. If I have this right, I don't, I was told the story. I don't know if it's true, but

some Norwegian guy and like he sits on the couch like six hours a day because he's like, my body needs to rest if I'm going to be high performance. That wouldn't surprise me. But and the further that you get away from that into poetry, into art, into any any creative endeavor,

Those things, business, those things don't come about through sort of force of will. Even writing, I know that whatever inspiration is for amateurs, professionals just show up and do the work. That's true, I think, for the fact that most writers maybe need tightening up, not loosening off. But also, where does their inspiration come from? Their inspiration comes during the walk that they have or the nap that they needed in the middle of the afternoon.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so it's an interesting balance of like, how tight does the string need to be in your particular profession? And but there's also the question of, like you said, I know plenty of people who woke up at 60 who were like, I'm a billionaire, I'm successful, and I'm absolutely fucking miserable. That's a nightmare. That's, that's the future that everybody should fear. Yeah. And it's, and it's, it's incredibly prevalent.

I like I have another quote that's the problem with managing your life is that you have a life that you need to manage. And and that's that's I just see that happen for folks is that they've like managed themselves into this area. And now to maintain it, they have to continue managing themselves. And then at some point they're like that that hurts. It sucks. I don't want that anymore.

People who repress their emotional experience are fragile. They get stuck on decisions more easily and they are slower to heal from experiences. Why? Yeah.

So we talked about the, at the beginning, we talked about the matrix and the golden algorithm. So the reason that I came up with that is because I was looking for effective ways to get people out of patterns or habits that they were in. And so, including myself. And so what I noticed is that when people all of a sudden welcome, like in my case, the abandonment, then the pattern stops.

And so the way that we, like if you have emotional stagnation, shame is one of the best forms of emotional stagnation, guilt, another form of emotional stagnation, judgment, another form of emotional stagnation. When you don't have that emotional fluidity, then you're gonna start repeating these patterns over and over and over again. And so as far as the decision-making one, which is slightly different,

So there's a book, 2012 book called Descartes' Error by a neuroscientist who basically, it's now become more nuanced, but I'm going to do the un-nuanced version of it, which is basically the decision-making part of our brain is the emotional center of our brain. If you take the emotional center of the brain out of your body,

your IQ stays the same, but your life falls apart because it takes you a long time to decide what color pen it takes you. Oh, I've, I've heard there was a guy, there was a guy, didn't he have to choose a, uh, a date for an appointment and the, um, uh, interviewers or whatever were just looking at him and it took him 45 minutes because he has no value set. That's right. Yeah. So, so we make emotional decisions and it's really easy to see in your own life, not

that way but like how many emotions how many decisions did you make to not feel rejected or to feel loved or to feel like a success or to not feel abandoned or rejected you know what i mean there's so you so we make all these decisions on an emotional basis we don't make logical decisions we use logic as a way to try to figure out how we'll feel based on a decision and so

So I noticed that like the proof is in the pudding. If somebody is having a hard time making a decision, we find out what they don't want to feel. They feel that the decision gets made. I cannot tell you how many people who are, you know, slightly depressed and feel stuck when they get angry. They have absolute clarity on the other side of the anger. Just like, boom, it just, they've been black and white thinking, binary thinking for, you know, months on a subject. They get angry and then it's like 100% clear.

So what we're doing is we're trying to avoid an emotion in the decision that we make. And if we love all of the emotions, we have clarity in our decision-making. Yeah, I'm okay with the fact that some people might hate me on that. I'm okay with the fact that I might be abandoned. I'm gonna follow my truth and I'm gonna be okay with the consequences, which is the real empowerment that we're talking about. And so that's why, and so if we, it doesn't matter if you're like,

you know, a world leader or the, a billionaire with a massive thing. If you're trying to avoid certain emotional experiences, you know, like you're predictable, it's easy to beat you. And, and like, and, and you're going to be stuck in that pattern.

I get the sense as well that a lot of people that are high performers rely so much on their cognitive cerebral horsepower and it's proven in the past. Look at all the things it's got you. Look at how great your models are. Try my models. I mean, you had, if you had access to my model, your life would be better as well. So, you know, you have this, um, very sterile approach to decision-making and to moving through life. Uh,

And then you're told the exact thing that you're scared of doing, you have no experience in doing. Yes.

You now need to stop being the fourth degree black belt in this particular modality. Go back to being worse than a white belt, like absolute beginner at this thing that you don't even have any evidence that it's going to be good. Up against all of this evidence from fourth degree black belt modality that says that look at how fucking impressive I am. The world loves me.

Yeah. You're describing my first meeting with a ton of clients. The intellect is amazing and I love it and it's really useful and it's not your whole intelligence. My work really has an idea that there's the mental intelligence, loosely prefrontal cortex, human emotional intelligence, emotional fluidity, loosely mammalian, and the gut intelligence.

which is more like in the reptilian side of things. If you really want to have change and change yourself, you work on all three. You don't work on one or the other, but most of us are highly developed in one, not very developed in the other. You get a lot more transformation for the buck focused on the place that you suck. It's not abandoning the models, but hey, learn to go from zero to one in emotions and that's going to 10x your models.

as compared to go from 100 to 101 in your model, it's good. But eventually, the way I think about it is it's like three pencils with rubber bands and there's always tension between them. If one's really low,

But at some point it's just you're holding more and more tension. And so for me, it's you have to work on all three if you want real transformation. The emotional experience is just the one that is mostly abandoned by our society. We've been told

be logical, don't have, don't make emotional decisions. And we've experienced emotions as something that was bad, that made us feel out of control, that hurt our relationships. And so we immediately went to trying to manage them instead of learning how to harness them and instead of learning like the beauty of them and, and how they actually work because they don't work rationally. Like how many people have I worked with who are like,

yeah, I'm angry, but it's not rational. It's like, yeah, that's fucking emotions, man. None of them are rational, but they are incredibly wise if you know how to listen to them. I've been big into evolutionary psychology for the last four years or so and have had a lot of conversations about relationships, mating dynamics and stuff like that. And I've got a blog post brewing in me about how

even evolutionary psychology that tries to be all-encompassing when it comes to mating and mate selection misses the most important thing, which is the phenomenon of falling in love with somebody.

because it's not rational. And, you know, the way that I and all of my friends and colleagues have talked about this for forever is in terms of mate value and exchanges and mate guarding and, you know, male parental uncertainty. And it's, you know, it's this amount for that. It's trading resources for safety and so on and so forth. And you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's nice. That's nice. And I can put it on a spreadsheet and all the rest of it. But what about

the way it feels. And, you know, how many times I'm, I went through a breakup a couple of months ago, so I'm kind of slowly reintegrating myself back into the dating scene. And there's so many times I've found with friends that are dating and myself as well, where I'm like, dude, on paper, this chick's amazing. Like so all of the tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, all of the different things.

Why don't I feel like this is something that can continue? Why don't I feel like this is something that works? You go, well, because you don't get to choose that. You don't get to choose that. That's not so much. I'm going to argue there. I think you do, but it's not a short-term choice. So there's two thought processes. One, I love what you're saying about evolutionary psychology and

And I have this model that I use for like emotional evolution, like how we evolve emotionally and, and we can get, get into that because there's so little literature done on, there's like, this is how emotions work and this is what we can measure. But there's not like, here's how you develop cognitively. That is out there, Piaget and a hundred others, but there's no like, here's how we develop emotionally. But, but on the love thing. So,

So here's what I noticed is people fall in love with the folks who have the pattern that they need to heal in them. So you had a critical mom say, then there's a good chance you're going to fall in love with a critical woman. And like, that's where the heat's going to be. That's, and I've listened to people have their first dates and I'm like, you're just listing off what you're going to do to each other. Like, it's an amazing experience if you're listening to it from that

They're telling each other about themselves, but they're really saying like, this is how I'm going to relate with you. And this is how I'm going to, this is like, we're going to just paint this all forward. If you heal that stuff, then you're going to be attracted to other people. You're not going to be attracted to that anymore. And so my experience is like a good relationship is it starts with

here's my trauma. This is your trauma. They're well mated. We have something to learn from each other. The exact thing we're here to learn. And we're both willing to do the work on ourselves to learn it. And you put those two things together and you have a long-term successful relationship without them. It's questionable. Yeah. Alain de Botton says that, uh, on your first date, you should ask, there's one question that should always be asked, which is in what ways are you crazy?

I think that's a shorter version of what you're asking. - Exactly, are you my kind of crazy? - Yeah. - Yeah, and I mean, for me, marriage and child raising were the most important spiritual practices of my life or self-development practices of my life. Like, Tara and I just got really lucky, and Tara was really the person who

like when when i asked her to marry me she said yeah we're going to travel through southeast asia for six months together in backpacks if we can survive that we're going to see a therapist and we're going to do a meditation retreat if we're going to get married these were like the requirements god it's like your navy seal hell week but just attracted a little bit more and it was just like this beautiful thing that set the course for our relationship as a way to understand ourselves grow and to grow and then that that was always the purpose of our relationship

And the love was there and the love just has only deepened. And it's no longer like a, it's not like the kind of hot love of the first three to five months, but it's like so much better. - Yeah, I even had that, I was on the bike this morning thinking about this idea for what evolutionary psychology gets wrong about relationships.

And one of the things that came up was, you know, you describing this transition from passionate to companionate systems and blah, blah, blah. And he go, yeah, I know. But what does it feel like? Tell me what it feels like. Stop describing it in terms that can be written in a journal. And, you know, I guess this is maybe where, you know,

the limits of science actually in some ways do, and maybe you need to look elsewhere. Maybe you need to look to art and music and conversation and poetry and things like that, experiences. All right, next one. If you can't say no easily, you can't be trusted. Why? So we have this experiment we run in some of our retreats where your job is to try to get someone to do something. And at the end of it, we'll ask, was there anybody who

who didn't get a no, and there's always somebody where someone said yes to them. So they're in pairs and somebody's like, will you do this? And they have to ask you to do something that you can do right there in the moment. Will you do a pushup? Will you blah, blah, blah, blah. And somebody always doesn't say no. And you'll ask them, hey, do you trust them? They're like, no, you can't trust somebody. Like if they say no to you, then you know, they're in their truth. Otherwise you're like, what's actually happening under there? What's actually, what's actually going on for you?

And so it's just as simple as that. I thought the quote you were going to say was, if you can't say no, then you can't find your yes, which is also something that I say. And I think they're completely related. It's like, if you're hanging out with somebody and your experience of them is that they're always there to please you.

then you can't trust them because you don't know them. Because they don't even know themselves enough. They've completely lost themselves in you. And anytime that that relationship happens, it always ends in resentment. There's no relationship where somebody loses themselves in somebody else and there's not resentment that follows. Neil Strauss last year, the best quote of 2023, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

That's a good one. Fucking monster. That's a great quote. Why is it, you know, we're often told, especially as kids, but as we grow up as well, about the dangers of being selfish and focusing on ourselves too much and that we must give so on and so forth. If that's the case, why do we find it so hard to make our own needs a priority? Why do we subjugate our desires and the things that we need

in order to please other people? How do we hold these two things at the same time? Can you repeat that question? I think I heard you, but I want to make sure. Did you say we're told not to be selfish? Yeah, when we're growing up, like stop being so selfish, you know, give the toy to your little brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a world of solipsistic narcissists and all the rest of it. And yet in the same sense, we're somehow often subjugating our needs. Our desires don't matter. I don't make myself a priority. Please, please just like me, love me. It's because we...

learn from mimicry more than we learn from what we're told. And when a parent says to their kid, you're being selfish, it's the parent being selfish. But your parent never says to a kid, you're being selfish unless they're not doing what they want them to do. That's when you call a kid selfish. So verbally, they're saying, don't be selfish.

But the emotional system, the gut system, the guttural system is saying, be selfish like me right now. This is what adults do. We're selfish. We're so fucking selfish. We're going to tell you, we're going to shame you because you're not doing what I want. So we have that conflict inside of us. And then it just like goes everywhere in our life because we haven't actually resolved that internal conflict of, oh, okay.

I had a great example of this is I had a friend who was Catholic and he had just a wonderful tradition of faith in him. But at one point he said to me, he said, Joe, I have a hard time knowing when I'm supposed to take care of myself or if I'm supposed to sacrifice for others. And I don't know when I'm supposed to do that. And I said, oh, oh, I didn't know your God's a sadomasochist set up a world where there's a difference between those two things that it makes no fucking sense to me.

And my experience is that when I'm truly doing what's best for me, I'm also being highly compassionate for other people. Like there's, there's very little time. Like occasionally, like in business deals where it's like, it's just now arbitrary about how much money is going to who the, the principles of it had worked out. There's a couple places like that, but in almost all situations, it's,

If I'm really, really taking care of myself, it is also the compassionate thing to do for others. - That includes saying no. - Yeah, exactly. Almost most importantly, it is saying no, 'cause then I'm not breeding a relationship of resentment. And so what typically people mistake for being compassionate is like, did I make the person uncomfortable? Am I being nice? It's not compassion at all. Like a compassionate act might make somebody really, really uncomfortable.

And so usually when people are saying, don't be selfish, they're saying like, make me comfortable. And so, but being actually, when you're doing what's actually best for you, it's just not always going to feel good. If you're doing what's actually best for other people, it's not going to feel good in the moment. Long-term it will, but in the moment it isn't. People don't want you to be perfect. What they want is to feel connected with you. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the weird part, right? So I don't know how many people get, uh, they get, they...

they get so hung up around the axle being perfect first the first thing about perfection is there is no such thing there's like your idea of perfection my idea of perfection so it's an unachievable place and and if you notice with the critical voice in your head the idea of perfection it's a moving target like and typically if you really start listening closely to the voice in your head it'll tell you contradictory things it'll say like um

you know, you really have to work hard if you're going to get your goals. And then it'll say, you're abandoning your mom and dad because you're working too hard. Like there'll be all these, if you really like write down all the shit it says and you look for the contradiction, it's amazing. Just like that politician we were talking about. And the person's like, yeah, yeah, whatever you say, like they're contradicting themselves all over the place as well. And so,

And so that, so since you can't hit the target, you're never going to get there, but somehow we think if we get it right, then we'll be loved. But people actually want to feel connected. Great products, great podcasts, great friendships, great marriages, great businesses, all are built on connection. Great athletic performance is built on connection to yourself, to your body. There's no way someone's going to have

athletic intelligence without a deep connection to their body. So connection is the thing that actually, but somehow or another in our minds, because of the voice in the head, we think that perfection is going to get us somewhere. It doesn't. And if you literally do that work of saying, okay, like how do I make this podcast sound

more connective with me and with other people, it'll be a better podcast. So true. When I first started doing this six years ago, I thought that the job of a podcaster was to be this sort of ruthless indexer of information that basically the goal was to kind of extract as much wisdom from the guests as possible and then put it on the internet, like, like a live version of Blinkist, I guess. Uh, and it took, I don't know, probably 400 episodes for me to realize that

You're much closer to a vibe architect than you are to a synthesizer or essentializer of information. And the more...

That's one of the beautiful things about pursuits that are a little bit more artful, that there isn't perfect. And that's one of the problems, again, of using sport as a rubric. There's very tightly defined rules, right? We know what 300 kilos on the bar. If you pick it up and I don't pick it up, you win in powerlifting. Okay. Like, hooray. We know exactly what that is. But what does it mean to say that this was a better blog post? So this is a better piece of music. What does that even mean? And there's even sports stuff like bodybuilding in which it's not

so much about the quantifiable metrics it's about this sort of weird like ethereal way that it's all put together into an experience and there's the the movement and there's the song choice and there's the you know the fucking color of the tiny pants all of the different bits and pieces but yeah um first off that i love that idea um of of perfection and then the second one i had this idea about uh reverse charisma uh and there's this famous um

story about winston churchill's wife i think who gets to meet the two presidential candidates for america and she says that she left the first dinner with the first one feeling like he was the smartest person on the planet and she left the second dinner with the other saying that she felt like she was the most interesting smartest person on the planet and um yeah i realized i realized that uh

what we think we want when it comes to charisma and being around a table. What we think that other people want from us is for us to be impressive and sharp and witty and cool and funny and all of the rest of it. But when I think about the people that I like having around my dinner table the most, it's not those people. It's the ones that make me feel like I'm that person. And if you go, okay, well, if that's how

if that's what I want from other people, I can just be that to other people. And reverse charisma is way easier to achieve than actual charisma. Reverse charisma is just being interested in the other person. So yeah, I think so much from that people don't want you to be perfect. What they want is to feel connected with you. Yeah. And that's the, that's the place where I talk about love. So like,

If you learn to unconditionally love all the parts of yourself, it's really easy to unconditionally love the parts of others. And so all of that benefit of what you call reverse charisma comes with it, which is really quite sweet. But it also comes with it not from a place of like, oh, look what I got, which always falls apart. It's not like, oh, I've accomplished a goal. It's just like life is a dream that I never thought possible coming true. It's a whole different thing.

The thing about reaching a goal and having happiness there is it's only happiness because there's a moment where you don't have a goal that you're defining yourself by. That's why you get that happiness when you reach that goal. But there's this other kind of goal, which is like, I don't define myself by what I do. I do shit. I do it well. I like it. I enjoy it. It's fantastic. But I'm not defined by that. And then some sort of joy comes from that. Back to that original prompt of how...

I forgot. Gosh, you had a quote that you used of mine, but I can't remember what it was. Which one? The spiritual path for so many, I am not good enough yet. Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Back to that quote about spiritual path being not good enough. Yeah. One of the, uh, what my business partner in the productivity drink that I make, James took some psilocybin and sat on a cliff in Australia. And this question came to him, which was, does the world love you for who you are or for what you do?

And then, uh, I told this to Mark Manson and he said, here's an even harder question. Do you love you for who you are or for what you do? And, um, that, that's really stuck with me. It's a very, very difficult question to answer, right? You know, you, you,

almost promise you feel like you've been promised this value trade with the world if only i can be sufficiently impressive if only i can be smart or rich or sexy or successful or admirable or kind or giving or whatever the fuck it is then dot dot dot then only half the people will hate me like like look at all those people half the people hate them like it's just like

Yeah, the story that I have that's like that is, it was told to me by a guy who started these big retreat centers. His name escapes me, but he was talking about this near-death experience he had. And he had these two people walking towards him in the light. And he's like, oh, they're going to judge me. I'm here to be judged. I wonder if I'm good enough. And when they got there, they basically looked at him and said, so have you been good enough?

And it's like, I remember how much chills it gave me at the time because it's like, right. Yeah. This is like, this is the moment. Isn't it? It's there's no outside. That's going to give you any kind of validation. There's, you know, like, look at, look at the people who have all the validation in the world. Like they're in, in horrific rap battles. Trying to get a horse to lift its foot up. It's trying to get a horse to lift its foot up. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. So one of the big journeys that I've been doing for the last sort of seven or eight months now, facilitated through therapy, but required by the rest of my life was trying to feel feelings properly, trying to fully connect with emotions and tap into that just from a basic level perspective.

What is it about feeling feelings and emotions that's caused so many of us to struggle to just get there? Yeah, so there's a couple of things that get in the way. So if you're a kid who was physically abused and I put a quarter in one hand and a key in another hand without telling you what's in what, you wouldn't be able to know.

because you've killed the sensations in your body enough because it was too intense for you to feel. So if you had enough physical violence, you can't feel your body the same way anymore. So it's the same thing with emotions. So like when I was a kid, as an example, when I was a kid, I would be made fun of every time I cried.

And I was 20 something years old and I was going through a photo album and there was a picture of me crying. And I remember I was like crying. My parents threw a pity party to make fun of me. They even took a picture and then they put it in the photo album to be like, you know, see that you don't want to be that. I was like, oh shit, that's probably why I haven't cried in like 16 years. So I took the photo from the photo album. I put it on my desk and I was like, I'm going to learn how to cry again.

Six months, eight months later, I still hadn't learned how to cry. I was like, I didn't have any, you know, internet was just getting started. I didn't really have any resources. And so I would go, I lived in Los Angeles at the time. I'd go up to 10,000 feet and then I would like hike on a trail and then I'd hike off trail. So nobody gets to me and I'd practice crying. I would fake it. I'd be like, I'm an actor just trying to cry.

And I did that for like three months, twice a week until finally like it broke and I could actually have authentic tears. So the first one is that we just suffered some sort of abuse and that abuse could be really outward, like what happened to me. But it could also just be like every time you're sad, mom fed you. Every time you were, boys don't cry, girls don't get angry, you got ignored, you got, you know, bribed out of them, whatever. So

So very few parents are just like, oh, cool, I'm going to sit with you while you're having a big emotional experience and be in loving attention of that and attuned to you. It's a very rare thing. If you're a parent, go to get a book called Listen. It's a fantastic book on this and one of the greatest. This is for parenting? Yeah, yeah. For parenting. It's also really good for CEOs. Do you know who it's by? Yeah, yeah. Patti Whiffler. Yeah, she's a dear friend. She's amazing.

Yeah. The book is listening. The, the, the organization is called hand in hand parenting and it'll, it's really great. Five tools, super easy to use anyways, easy to you, easy to understand, hard as shit to use. Um, but anyways, so that, so that's one reason is that we were emotionally abused. And so we cut off the feelings of the emotion. And then the second reason is that

And I use emotional abuse because it doesn't, no one else is going to call it that, but I use emotional abuse because I want to just like call it what it is, which is like, you are trying to aggressively change somebody else's emotions, whether it's passive aggressive or aggressive you're like. And then the second reason is that all of us have this experience of losing control with an emotion at some point, right? Like,

I was jealous and I fucking couldn't help myself and therefore the woman left or I got so angry at this party and then I lost these friends. Like we all have this experience or just I'm 12 years old. I want to fucking pee myself. I'm having some, you know, I feel so out of control. And so that's the second one. We have that experience in the, and the natural stage of development is like, okay, I need to learn how to control my emotions. Oftentimes that second part only comes because of the first part.

Meaning, like I have two daughters and they have incredible emotional control.

at 13 years old because their entire life we've been present with them and their emotional temper tantrums and everything. And so there's like, there's no discipline required. There's no shame required. They're just like, they know what it is to feel connected and to feel good. And they want to feel that way. What does it look like to be present with a child or another person in their emotions? Ah, yeah. I'll give you an example of that. So it's being with them without being in them.

And for a child, a great example. So my daughter was having this really bad time when she was three years old and we're at a Whole Foods and she's just like, ah, having this temper tantrum. I'm like, all right, here we go. And I like sit down, I'm containing her and making sure she doesn't hurt anybody, not hurting the food. And I live in this like somewhat hippie town and this little hippie woman came over and she's like, are you okay, dear? And my daughter's like, ah, I'm just having my emotions.

I'm sorry.

So it's just being present with somebody and not judging them and not trying to fix them, not trying to make them better. Oh, it's going to be okay. I'm going to smile like none of that crap. It's just like, oh yeah, this is how you are. Fantastic. Let's, I can be with that. I can be with your fear or your anger or whatever it is. Without trying to change it. Without trying to change it. I mean, I will, depending on who I'm working with, but it's sometimes I like, I might say not at me. Like, I don't want your fear at me. I don't want your anger at me. I don't want your sadness at me.

But I'm happy to be here with it, with the sadness or the anger. So that's what, so it's just letting them have the full emotional experience while sitting with them and being present and loving them as they are in that experience, which is the thing that very few of us got as kids. And if you don't get that, then there's these big moments of feeling completely loss of control under an emotion and

And so then you're like, fuck, I've got to manage the fuck out of this. And so you start really trying to manage it. And then these fears arise, which is the third thing that makes it difficult. I'm scared that if I'm sad, I'll be sad forever. I'm scared if I get angry, I'll destroy everything I love. I'm scared that if I'm fearful, I'm going to actually be helpless. If I feel the fear, I'm going to actually be not able to do anything.

And those are kind of the three things that we have. Those are the three fears. They're completely fucking wrong, but they're the things that we tell, the stories we tell about those emotions. Just go back through them again. Sadness is going to last forever. If I really open up this sadness, I'm going to be sad forever. I'm going to be depressed. If I'm angry, I'm going to like destroy everything I love and, or destroy things that are important to me. And if I'm

scared I'm going to be if I allow myself to feel the fear I'm going to be paralyzed not going to be able to be competent I'm going to be helpless but it's not true like we all know anybody who's cried knows that in the other side of a good cry you feel fucking better right like if you feel your anger you become more determined like in in the in the Tibetan philosophy they talk about I think it's the five the five poisons and the five

virtues and everything like that. And then later on in the scripture, they talk about how they're the same thing. And my experience is that like anger is like a hose, right? So you think about anger as a hose and this is the energy that's running through it and you kink it this way and it's nice dress and you kink it this way and it's you motherfucker. I fucking blah, blah, blah, blah. You kink it another way. It's like, fine, I'll be okay. You know, like you can kink it different ways, but

When that hose is unkinked, it's Martin Luther King, it's Gandhi, it's a clarity and determination and a boundary. And that's what unkinked anger looks like. It is that clarity and determination. And so that's the virtue that's on the other side of the anger. To me, I call that all anger. And so because of these things that stop us, we never get to feel what happens when that

When that emotion moves through us unresistive, when we have what I call emotional fluidity. And so we don't get to that, like that kind of determination. We don't get to that, that kind of determination. There's other kinds, but we don't get to the, the joy and the,

and the excitement of life. I was going to say, so you've mentioned a bunch of emotions there that are negative. What I also think that people wish that they could feel more excitement or, or enjoyment or elation. Yeah. That's another fallacy. It's an absolute fucking fallacy. They want to like mentally, they're like, yeah, I want to feel that. But like,

Like, if you just, like, if I ask someone, like, if I'm in a retreat and I say to some people, okay, we're going to release some anger and let's move some anger. 10, 15 minutes later, eight out of 10 of them are going to be going. They're going to still be releasing that emotion. If I say, okay, hey, let's release some excitement. Most people are done in three minutes. It is really scary because the really positive emotions, if you allow them to fully fill you up, it really...

dissipates the sense of self, the identity starts moving, like collapsing in on itself. And so they're actually very hard for, I mean, we want them, but if we feel them for too long, we're like, what the, like it gets a little bit wonky for us, for most people. And it's like anything, it's like learning to feel those emotions. It's like, it only really comes after you've learned how to feel the negative ones. And then there's the work of actually feeling and being in those really positive emotions.

And it's why you can meet people who are like meditators for years and they peace they can feel, but they'll still be suffering with depression. That joy, that kind of like big heartfelt open joy, like that's a harder thing to feel than like a nice equanimous peace. That's interesting. It's definitely less safe. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh my God, this could be taken away from me. Oh my God, what the fuck's happening? Who am I in this? Because it's so big, it's so expansive, those feelings, that the idea of self just fucking can't compete. But there are still, so for all of me saying that people struggle to connect with their emotions, a lot of people listening to this show will be familiar with the cerebral horsepower praying at the sort of altar of cognition thing. But

There's also still a bunch of emotions that are just kind of less exciting and more dour that everybody is familiar with. Anxiety, you know, this sort of ambient sense of a little bit of fear that's going on. It's not full fear. It's not gripping you, but it's, you know, anxiety, worry, concern, anxiety.

uh, insufficiency, shame. Um, so we, we're connecting with some emotions, one subset of them. Is there a way, are you thinking about how they get alchemized or moved around? Is there a way that you think about this? Yeah. So, yeah. So if I think about emotional development, um, the, like the end of emotional, not end, but like kind of like the more mature areas of emotional development is like all those feelings there, they become, um,

hard to distinguish between the two or between any of them. And so that's an interesting piece to it. The other interesting piece is that a lot of what's happening is repressed emotion. So

Somebody has chronic anxiety. I've worked with people, say, with OCD, and oftentimes there's an event that started the OCD where they felt deeply out of control over a situation and unsupported. Out of control and unsupported. If they can go and feel, and they couldn't feel it at the time. It was not possible to feel because mom was dying, dad was dying, blah, blah, blah. Something, the parents were violent, whatever. There was some way they could not feel anything.

If we can go back and feel that emotion that didn't get felt, that OCD starts dissipating. As an example, I know people like oftentimes people super depressed, not super, like not depressed, like where they're having visions, but like a dysthymia level of depression where the negative self-talk is through the roof. If they really can feel the anger that they weren't allowed to feel as kids that all went inwards towards themselves, that depression starts subsiding.

So oftentimes the emotional, those little emotions that we're living with every day that aren't joy is because an emotion is stuck because there's an emotion that wasn't welcome. And so joy can't hang out there when all the emotions are welcome. If we can go back and feel those feelings that we're not allowed to be felt and we can welcome them that that's like the welcoming of abandonment, then the patterns change and then we can feel the joy.

And that joy can be scary. I have not seen one person when that joy first fucking shows up that it's not scary for them. Because it's just alien? It's fucking big, man. Joy is like, it's just big. We know ourselves by our contrast. We know ourselves by what we compare ourselves to. And in joy, the comparison, the contrast starts going away.

And so it's like, oh, you become like a speck of dust in the notion of joy when it's really allowed. Yeah. It's a very unmooring feeling. Deep levels of joy. It sounds...

Great. You know, again, people can use their intellect and rationality as I am right now to go, sounds fantastic. Feel feelings. Yep. Understood. Go back and hear the thing. But, you know, this, what does it look like? What does integrating emotions, embracing them, feeling feelings, what does the process of going from

cerebral performative autist to actual fully integrated human look like? Yeah. Um, so yeah, so there's different levels depending on like where exactly it got stuck. So if you are, so we have a tool called emotional inquiry, which is basically like you think about your, if you're like a little kid and you pick up a, a, um, frog,

You're like, what the hell is going on here? And you're like, kind of really investigating it. You're investigating your emotional experience with that same, with that same level of wonder. So it's just this guided audio that we have. And we have a course in the decisions course because it's all about emotional understanding.

because that's what clarifies decision making we ask people to do that once or twice a day the transformation is like where can people go if they want to pick up this course um well the course is called art of accomplishment is the course i think we have a site for you called view.life modern wisdom slash modern wisdom but it'll be in the links i'll find it i'll get it off you and i'll put it in the link yeah yeah um but it's called the great decisions course

But that emotional inquiry thing we have for free, we have a podcast where you can look at and it tells you how to use it and then you can go and download it. So that's all free. So emotional inquiry is one way to do it. Expression is really, really good and very critical to actually express your emotions. So for instance, when people think about expressing anger, it's such a weird thing. They're so scared of it that whenever we're scared, we think about things in a binary way.

it's like this way or that way so they're so scared of anger typically it's like i'm either going to hold my anger back or i'm going to get angry at somebody and they never think oh i can just get angry and not add anybody i can just like move my anger and not not get angry at anybody and not do it at somebody meaning that they're you're getting angry at somebody but they're not in the room they're not feeling it they don't have to know about it and so

So you can actually just express the emotions that you have. And if you can't figure out how to express them, then you can fake it till you make it. It's a very slow way to do it. We have things in our courses that take you through it, but that we can't give for free because it's just, we want to make sure we're monitoring people as they go through it. So that's another thing that it looks like. The other thing that it looks like is there's this thing that happens where your gut tightens

You're like, oh, and I don't want to feel that. And you push it away. So my example of this is like, we got kicked out of a house at some point when our second was very young in it. And every time I drove by the house, which I had to do on a weekly basis, I would feel like this punch in my gut, like, we're back. And I was like, oh. So I started driving by the house and I'd sit there and I'd just feel the fuck out of that feeling. Like, what is that? What's going on?

And so there's that other thing where when you feel that thing, our immediate movement is like, oh, let me move away from that. It's like, no, let's actually attend to that. Let's actually feel what that is. Just talk to me. I think that's a really lovely cue that people can probably quite quickly pick up on. Just take me through that step by step that someone has...

Just like the echo of a sensation that continues to come up when they see a person or whatever situation that they're in. Just walk me through. You feel that tension in yourself. What are you looking for in the body, in the mind? Yeah, that's fantastic. So everybody will do it a little differently.

Like I was so cerebral when I started doing this, I noticed the mental reactions to fear before I actually knew what it felt like in the body. But there's some great research that actually shows like through heat maps that there's very similar physical experiences we have with different emotions. Um, generally the way that I think about it is, or the way that I, I talk about it is, is that

emotions are held in the muscles so if i look at somebody i can tell you pretty quickly and it's like when i coach people people go how do you do that it's because just by looking at somebody's face or whatever i can tell what emotions are being held so

Like, oh, that's the critical parent hunch or that's the repressed anger line in the eye or whatever it is, you know, so you can see how people are holding their emotional experience. So it's all held in the muscles. So there's a physical sensation that comes along with an emotional experience. And the job is to get really curious about it.

Why am I avoiding that? So like if you're lifting weights and you feel that burn and you try to avoid it, you're not going to lift weights for as long as if you're like, Ooh, how do I like really get into that burn? It's the exact same experience. So you get that kook and you go, okay, what is, how big is that? How round is it? How thick is that? How dense is it? How is it moving? Like what's going on here? And so you just put your attention on the somatic experience of, of the emotion that's happening.

That's like the most basic. That's like the most basic way to start getting into it. At some point, the expression is really necessary because you can't unhold the emotion that like the musculature holding can't happen until, unhappen until you've actually done some expression. So we do this like week long,

workshop. It's off record. It's very hard to get in. We only do 36 people a year and it's in groups of 12. People feel like they've had a facelift. You can take shots before and after and their face looks different because the emotional holding has changed. And so

I only coach people who've been through that experience because when they've been through that experience, I don't have to justify emotional awareness. They know it. They know the benefits of it. They've seen the other side of it. And so that's another thing. But expression is really important at some point. And if you're expressing fear, really important to have that with loving attention, to not do that alone. When you talk about expressing, what do you mean?

So anger expresses usually with like a lot of yell, anger moving, particularly of the chest. The, um, so it's, you know, like it's because it's closed, the held anger is held in shame. And so the opening of the chest is a really important part of the expression of it. Similarly, um, fear is done with shaking. So if you look at a deer that just has been

captured by a mountain lion and then escapes, they do this like shake off thing. You can notice that like horses are kind of doing it. Dogs are kind of doing it consistently. Like they're getting that like low level anxiety off of their system on a regular basis. So shrieking and shaking is a big part of the, of the fear release process, sadness and grief, different sadnesses, tears with a lot of gut shaking,

But the, but grief is can like usually flows from all three. If you're like in a full grief reliefs, I was in this funeral, for instance, with my friend who had passed and everybody was like sad and sad and sad. And you could just feel like the energy was not, it was stagnant. It was like, he wasn't actually fully being grieved.

And I was like, I'm fucking pissed. And I got really angry. And then other people got angry. And then you could see so much move, so much of the grief moved. And if you look at those kind of indigenous grief rituals, anger is often a part of it. It's not just sobbing. It's like, ah, it's like hitting the wall. There's another part of it. So grief is like some sadness with some fear and some anger. But this is expressing it

It doesn't necessarily need to be to a person. If you're angry, does it need to be to the person that you're angry at? No, no, definitely not. I highly recommend not angry at somebody else as an emotional abuse. It's like it's it's it's saying I'm going to try to control you with my anger. It's horrible unless you have permission.

So there'll be moments like with Tara and I, I'm like, I really would like to express some anger, you know, and she'll give me permission or not. But the, but like with the kids as an example with the kids. So I'm making my Sunday pancakes. The kids are, you know, knowing, oh, this is the time when dad is like most focused and dah, dah, dah. So we're going to ask him like 20 questions and get in a fight, you know, like the whole thing.

And I'm like, ah, and it's like perfect timing. And I stop everything. I jump up and down. I'm like, I'm angry. I'm angry. I'm angry. I'm angry. And my eight-year-old looks at me. She goes, that was some pretty good anger, dad. Cause she knew that I wasn't angry at her. Like I wasn't, I was angry, but I don't need to put it on her. I can just move that anger and then get back to her.

to being a good parent you know and and and she wasn't scared of it it wasn't like i was a 200 pound man who was like yelling at like a two foot tall kid or three foot tall kid or whatever how do you think about this sort of relationship between brain and emotions and body and sort of moving out of and and between those is there a hierarchy is there an interplay is there a

They're all part of the same system. I, I, I make the distinction between head, heart and gut in transformation just because it's a good way to figure out if you're holistically achieving it or not. But I haven't found anything that makes it so that you're, it's better to do one than the other first or anything like that. The, what I notice is that, um,

People who are more one way are going to start there. I was more head related. I thought everything in my head because of the emotional abuse, I was high in my head. That's where I started. People who are like dancers who are deeply in their body, the somatic work is usually the first thing that they're going to go to.

but they're going to believe their stories for a lot longer than I did. So it's just like, it's where your inclination is. People playing to their strengths almost. Typically. Yeah. And it's where they get the lace bang for the buck, but it's usually. Yeah. As you said, you're going from a hundred to 101 as opposed to zero to one. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. I think a lot of people will be familiar with meditation. I guess probably everybody listening to this has tried it, uh, or maybe as an experienced meditator. Yeah. Talk to me about the difference between, you know, this is a new modality. I think emotional work, it's not even something that I'd really heard of until pretty recently. And I'm deep in the personal development world. Um, you know, stuff like what you guys do out of accomplishment, Hoffman process, um,

And then we've got sort of all of the therapeutic talk therapy, uh, sort of psychodynamic stuff, psychoanalysis. And then we've got mindfulness. What's the difference between, let's say mindfulness, emotional work, uh, and therapy and stuff like that. How do these piece together and how are they similar and different? Yeah. So again, like some, um,

Most work kind of hits on all three levels, the nervous system level, the emotional level and the head level. But they usually have one that's like a strength to the others. And so one's going to emphasize one more than the other. And so the emotional work that we do is unique emotionally.

But it's not the only thing we do, but it's what we're known for often because it's the hardest thing to find in the world. But we're working on the mental and we're working on the nervous system as well. And so I would say each one of those things has a strength in there. But even you say mindfulness, there's mindfulness that if you look at the Theravada Buddhism out of Burma, that's going to be a very somatic experience of

It's like moving your attention from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. It's going to be very somatic oriented, whereas other forms of mindfulness are not going to be as somatically. And so you're looking for the tool that fits the job and that fits you. And so that's typically how you do it. And so

So for instance, like when right now I'm doing the masterclass and so people will ask me questions and I'll assign experiments. And one of the ways that I decide the experiment that I would assign to the person is like, how heady were they? How emotionally aware were they in what they were doing? And so that's, you're just looking for that. It's very hard to describe how to know which one except for if you know you're really heady, go to the somatic. If you know, you know, the one that I think is actually more,

is more is just starting to come into the light is more of the nervous system stuff like how do you i would say the best practice for nervous system is the gut is is pleasure it's knowing that you can find that pleasure or enjoyment anywhere at any time that it's just watching the sensations of your body move and that there's like can be a deep enjoyment and

And that part I find is, is like oftentimes a place that will help people more than any other, because they, they're so dysregulated most of their life that they can't actually settle enough to make the other work useful. That's, that's interesting. Do you consider it kind of a foundation that the other two sit on, on top of? Just not, no, I don't. I think they're all equally important. I think they're, it's just,

for in today's society, it's one of like the on-offs. Like, have you turned the thing on and off? I don't know. Have I like turned the thing like, okay, let's just relax the nervous system and then see if all the rest of the tools will work. And so it's like that. I've got Johnny Miller coming on the show at some point soon. I know he's been on your guys' show. Yeah. So that world of

nervous system regulation sort of somatic work um somatic therapy something else one of my friends aaron's doing at the moment um yeah it's a whole a whole new world um yeah but if i'm looking at you it's deconstruction of the negative voice in the head it's finding a place where you can and you can cut this but um

If I'm looking at you, it's the deconstructing the voice in the head would be the intellectual work and the nervous system work would be like having a feeling of deep pleasure just in the existence of being alive. I would like really want to strengthen that muscle. And then the emotional work is release probably fear would be the place I would start. You're a good judge of character. Let's go back to the...

the negative self-talk stuff, because I think a critical, harsh judging in a monologue is something that lots of people are all too familiar with. What is there to know about that? Where does it come from?

Typically comes because we learned that's how to talk to us, but we learned it from our parents. That's typically, or not just parents, but like caregivers, teachers, et cetera. I remember I did a podcast on the voice in the head and my daughter listened to it. And she's like, my voice in the head comes from this teacher and this grandmother. And it was like, so, so I think that that, and she was like nine or something at the time. And, um,

10 maybe and and so typically that's what we've learned some of the stuff we've made up as a way to like we learned it to prevent a certain kind of experience emotional experience that we're having um but i think that the the part that's most useful to know about it is that the you try to stop it it won't fucking work like you can't you can't just be like i'm gonna stop that you can kind of modify it that way what's important is how you react to it so

If you come into my shop every day and I yell at you, you're going to treat me one way. And if you come into my shop every day and I'm like, oh my God, so good to see you. You're going to treat me another way. It's not any different with emotions. And so, or with the voice in the head, excuse me. And so, so the voice in the head comes in and does its thing. And if you react like, okay, you're right. I should do that.

Then you're going to get one thing. If you're like, oh, I really see that you're scared and I'm right here with you. You're going to get a different thing. If you sing in a musical, like, you know, or if you're like, wow, you're a shitty boss or like there's a thousand reactions. And what typically what we're doing is we're trying to control the voice in the head rather than think about all the different way running experiments about how we react to it.

is there's a lot of flexibility to go this week i'm going to react to the voice in the head this way this week i'm going to react to the voice in the head this way this week i'm going to react to the voice then and running those experiments starts to teach you how you want to relate to it how it wants to be related to and and and you'll notice that like there is care in it like it does want you to succeed it does want you to like there's there's it's quite sweet it's just

really incompetent it's misguided it's yeah and so it's like it's and so if you take it that way and you're like oh you have good intentions you just don't know how to do it let me work with you it's like a that's that it's going to show up differently in your life and then there is a point where just like most of it goes away like there's not a where there's not really repetitive negative self-talk

Wow. So in your experience, either with you or with your clients, you've been able to get them to a stage where that drops off. I think for very many people, it's such a staple part of the texture of their daily mind experience that that's like saying, oh, and what my heart would stop beating. Right. Yeah. So I would not say I get them to it, but I would say that that happens. That is an experience that happens for a lot of people in and around the work for sure. And

The way I look at it, it's actually a natural stage of development and that if you just take the things that have blocked development, it'll happen naturally. It's as natural as like a tree growing a branch that allows its leaves to be at the sun. It's an incredibly natural process and it's just that so many people get stunted that it doesn't happen naturally.

I've kind of got this, got it in my head about the, this blending of ambition and peace that we've talked about where, and this very typical trajectory that I see among a lot of my friends, um,

high standards, desire for high standards, which leads to positing an ideal, comparing myself to that ideal, inevitably falling short, fearing that if I don't reach the ideal, that I'm not going to be accepted, safe, wanted, loved, validated by the world. So critical self-voice comes in, which is the motivator. That's the charioteer whipping you as you have a bridle in your mouth and you try and run along and run faster, faster, faster. But then there's another

which I certainly know intimately well and I think a bunch of my friends do too, which is shame,

about being critical to yourself. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, how fucking pitiful, how stupid am I that I can't even have high standards without being critical and then thinking, oh my God, look at me. I'm being critical about me being critical and it's just this infinite regress of sort of self-castigation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what the, I think the Zen talk about it. It's like asking the, asking the,

ego to get rid of the ego is like asking a thief to take care of your house. It's never going to fucking work. And so it's a similar thing. It's like the negative self-talk starts working on itself and it just doesn't fucking work. And the antidote is loving attention. I mean, the amazing thing is just loving awareness can change so fucking much.

Like, like just sit with it next time you're on a, on a, on a plane flight and you're sitting there and somebody just ask them a question and give them loving attention. And like you just like un-fucking amounts of transformation can happen in an hour. I did that once. And I literally like asked one question in an hour and just listened with loving attention. And like,

Here are my problems. And then, oh, wait, here are some solutions to the problem. And oh, I hadn't thought about it that way. And they're like, and they just needed someone to just like be there and loving attention. Same thing goes for ourselves. Like loving attention can like solve a lot of shit. Oftentimes I see people have this recognition in our work where they'll, whatever, they'll pop through something. They'll be like, oh my God. And then the first thing they go is how do I keep it?

It's like, that's the exact wrong question. How do I keep it is saying that I am scared that it's going to go away. It's like, and then like, how is that going to help you? Instead of like, oh, I'm so grateful for this moment. Oh, let me land it in my body. Let me really feel this. What does this mean for my life? Let me absorb it. Let me digest it. How am I going to keep it?

And it's, and it, and it's back to me driving the thing. And, you know, where instead of just being in loving attention of the thing itself. What else is there to say around shame? Um, the emotional stagnation piece is really important. Um, it is an emotion that stagnates like the, the rest of the emotions is the way that I see it. So, and it's also, it's also, um,

This gets on a touchy subject, but you had that podcast on morality recently, which dovetails into it. Let's distinguish guilt and shame. Guilt being I've done something that I'm not proud of that doesn't feel right in my system and I don't want to do it again. Shame is there's something fucking wrong with me. I'm bad as a human being. I'm broken. I'm flawed or something like that.

When you feel like you're flawed, then how do you fix yourself? It really slows the entire process down and then you're ashamed of all the emotional experiences or some of the emotional experiences that you have. So you can't let them move and therefore you can't get to clarity. And so shame is that. Shame is on the mental level, on the prefrontal cortex level, it's negative self-talk.

On the heart level, it's a stagnation of emotion. On a gut level, it's I'm not safe. And you're basically, if you're constantly being attacked in the head, then your nervous system never feels safe. You fucking need to work harder. It does not make the human body feel safe. And therefore, you're never in that place of renewal where you can actually rest and recover and therefore grow and feel nourished and transformed. Like you know with working out, you need both the effort and the

and the rest, you don't work the same muscle group out every day because it doesn't work as well. And so it's the same thing. You need that rest. And so that's what's happening on the shame. It's those three things. And that's how they hit in the different categories of the mind or however you want to call it. Yeah. It's very interesting that some of the people who have got the most

lives have the least admirable internal states that people who are unbelievably successful in sort of worldly ways there's

If you were actually given the opportunity to trade and you knew the full price that you would have to pay in order to be them, it's probably one that you wouldn't foot the bill for, even if the benefit was a billion dollar fortune. Yeah. And then we make a story that we need to be that neurotic and fucked up to be successful because some successful people are that.

But I definitely know a lot of successful people who aren't like that. So it's also, there's a false narrative that that's a price you have to pay typically. And it's just like a great way for the voice in the head to justify itself. How do you think about the tension or the relationship between self-improvement and finding out who you are? I think the tension isn't there. I think if you find out, finding out who, self-realization leads to evolution.

There's no, like, you can't not do that. When you see, when you see that the voice in the head is not you, when you see the thing that you see for a second, when you ask what's looking out behind my eyes, like in, in, when you see that, like, there's like a lot of, like a certain amount of fear is going to drop away, which is going to help you evolve in a more quick or more enjoyable way. As an example, like there's no way like Sam Harris is like,

it's not like he has not improved in his, like he's done all this self-awareness stuff. I'm sure we could say, how have all the ways your life gotten better? And he could tell you what they are. So I don't think there's a dichotomy. I just think if it's like,

If I'm playing music and I focus on, I want to really impress people and be great at music, I am not going to make as much progress in my music as if I say, I want to get lost in it, or I want to be the best rapper. Or if I have something that's beyond, like I have a goal beyond the music, right? The best people, the people who make the most successful businesses aren't doing it because they want to make

money, they're doing it because they have a vision or they want to win or they want to compete. They have something that's beyond the money and the money is just a necessary aspect to their particular form of art. Same thing. If we want to be really successful at understanding ourselves or having more peace or joy or whatever the thing underneath self-improvement is,

You're going to get there quicker not by saying, how do I improve my wrong and how do I improve myself? You're going to get there quicker by how do I understand myself? You're going to get there quicker by how do I fall in love with myself? There's just better approaches. You can make some progress the other way. Don't get me wrong. It's just not as efficient.

And your definition of efficiency, again, is return on energy, joy during the process. Yeah, it's interesting with the efficiency point. Do you know the Eisenhower matrix? You've probably come across this. I don't. So it's a way that you can look at tasks. So you have things that are important, not important, urgent, and not urgent. Yeah, and it's a matrix that you can come up with. And as far as I can tell,

People are continually being pushed into the urgent more and more and more, which by design pushes you away from the important. That's not to say that urgent things can't also be important, but that they tend to, the urgent stuff tends to be urgent in and of itself. And it's like, uh, important, necessary, but not sufficient in order to be able to get yourself through. So,

Dopamine addiction is a huge part of that too. It's like that crazy. I see people do this all the time. It's like they want to press enter it. So the email is done. Enter, enter, enter, enter, enter. But every one, every email, um,

If you would have put a little more thought or consideration, not delegated the thought or whatever it is, you would have twice as few emails. But you're so into the enter, enter, enter, enter. Correct. Yeah, that's interesting that we almost create our own urgent environment. Correct. In that way. It's the golden algorithm again. And going back to...

I'm thinking a lot about this at the moment, sort of going slower to go fast. So I've had to put a ton of stuff on hold because the level of complexity that was happening kind of internally with the show and I've got this product that I'm trying to release and there's a live tour happening at the end of the year and there's a book happening next year and all of this stuff. It's like, look, I can continue to spin all of these plates, but the likelihood of one of them dropping and the pain that I go along the way. Okay, so I needed to kick the book

another year down the road paused a ton of stuff that i was working on and i was like i just want to really enjoy the show i really want to have fun when i have these conversations and i don't want to turn up having just been on five calls back to back and then this slack thing and then i'll get a couple of emails in and then i'll read the guest's book and then i'll like go and i'll do the episode and then i'll get straight back out because i've got that call to do that it's like this is not for this is not fucking like it's not what i want to do so that's required a

everything to basically stop that isn't just show and now rebuild all of the operations from the ground floor up so that everything runs nice and smoothly. And that's important. It wasn't urgent. It was never going to be urgent, but eventually it would have been one of those things that some fissure would have been cracked through and a huge fucking explosion. And I would have had a mental breakdown and I still may. Um, and, uh, but yeah,

thinking an awful lot about trying to prioritize the important over the urgent and it feels like the what you were talking about there this sort of you can brute force your way through this you can grip really really tightly and sure maybe you'll get some great outcomes but they're going to be less efficient in

In terms of return on energy and enjoyment, they're going to be less effective and you're probably going to be way more miserable the whole way. And like, what's the point? Like, what are we doing this for? We're doing this presumably to just be in an enjoyable emotional state the whole time in any case. So the quicker route to doing all of those things is to just focus on the important stuff in any case. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the, that's the other cool thing about enjoyment is that if I, so I do this thing in enjoyment called the five-star meeting. And so I asked all my executives to,

to rank every one of their meetings one to five stars based on how much energy it gave them. And then once they've done that for a week, the job is to make sure that you have a week in the next month or two where all of your meetings are five-star meetings. The two things that it does is one, it usually halves the amount of meetings they have, which is fascinating. But the other things that it does is it shows them every single place that their company is having issues.

Because that's the symptom. A bad meeting is the symptom of... So it's the same thing. It's like, oh, you could see in the future and say, oh, this isn't going to be enjoyable. So what do I have to do? And what you said was, oh, I have to make sure I've got a good foundation.

And so you're actually building the capacity for a bigger, longer term, more sustainable success. And, and you don't, you get that from enjoyment. You get that from like, Oh, was that an enjoyable? How will I make this enjoyable for me? Is there an equivalent of the five-star meeting experiment, but for people's personal lives? That's a great question. I mean, the 10% better. I don't know. I don't have one because it's like, there's,

So the thing about a company is that there's really only two things a company has. They have the relationships in the company and they have the ideas that come from the company. So the atomic structure is meetings and decision making. And it's those two things. If you get those two things right, your company is going to be fine. But I don't know what that atomic structure would be for a personal life. That's a great question. I definitely think about it. Thank you for that question. It's great.

You've mentioned a couple of times, danced around the word of accomplishment. I've always been interested in the title of art of accomplishment. Is accomplishment an art? Yeah. There's this great saying that the peak of a businessman's career, he's a poet and the peak of a poet's career, he's a businessman. Have you ever heard that? No. I love that. I don't know who to put that to. It's told to me by my friend Steve. I love that quote.

So you can get things done in a lot of ways. You can build a house in a lot of ways, but if it, if you do it in an artistic way, there's just a lot of joy and pleasure. The reason we titled it this way was because, um, I really, I was really interested in, in, in teaching self realization or self development, whatever you want to call it. Um,

But I wanted it to be really applied because that was my journey. I sat for eight years in a room meditating. And at some point, I had no money. I'd gone into debt. I was like $40,000 in debt living in the shithole in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. And I was like, oh, time to have a family and was married. I'm like, okay, well, I got to... And I knew that I would fail at whatever I did if I wasn't

if it wasn't about self-discovery. And so I became a venture capitalist and did that for 15 years and I ran this philanthropic organization and I needed to find how each of these things would help me become more self-aware. The business was a form of self-discovery, that I needed that. And what I found out was that

I mean, the Tibetans call it skillful means, but what I found out is that I sold better if the person I was selling to or I fundraised better if the two of us were learning about ourselves in the process. There was connection instead of perfection. And if I had connection, it worked better. And I found out if I connected to people better, there was more better product that was created. And all of a sudden, I learned that all these business tools...

if you use them as a form of self-discovery, become better business tools. And they also help you learn about yourself. And so it was incredibly rewarding for me. And so I wanted our organization to be practical. I wanted you to be able to walk away with tools that not only helped you understand yourself better, but helped you build businesses that were going to be more successful and more

and create actually fulfillment instead of just a shit storm of bigger problems. Yeah. I, I really appreciate the fact that you guys get tactical with it. Um, I think there's a big transition happening at the moment with, uh,

Online content, I think we're out of kind of the first wave of personal development information on the internet. I think that maybe you could have said that sort of Tony Robbins and that kind of era, late noughts, early sort of teens era.

And then, but the real big wave, I think that hit a lot of people was more Jordan Peterson, Alain de Botton from the School of Life. It was that kind of wave that really sort of opened people's eyes to, oh my God, there's, you know, sort of valid philosophical insights out there, which are imbued with meaning and seem to be timeless and evergreen, you know, like different people, different perspectives or whatever, but largely pick your favorite philosophy.

fucking wisdom dispenser of choice. Like someone said something over the last 10 years that's gone like, oh my God, that's how I see myself in the world. And that's great. But there's definitely been, because...

Lots of this stuff can sound fantastic, but never actually get stress tested in the real world. What it allows is for a lot of sort of fluffy aphorisms to sweep through and a cool insight that doesn't. Okay, that sounds great. But like, does this grow any fucking corn? Like, show me what this does and how do I make it do it to me?

So I think we are, and this is happening in many, many areas. We're moving away from the Mr. Beastification of YouTube. I think there's much more stripped back approach when it comes to vlogging, relatability, authenticity that people are trying to really tap into is all a huge revolution. It's a counter movement away from what we had before, which was...

more polished it didn't feel quite as raw and it wasn't as spit and soda so you couldn't sort of grab it with your hands so the fact that you've got questions to ask yourself like that like you know how could this be 10% more enjoyable like what a lovely you know that's a tactical thing one of my favorite ones was um realizing that you never focus on the peripherals of your vision this is your inside of the ear you've given me the uh auditory equivalent of this and

that you're looking at stuff the entire time, but if you just take a tiny little second and realize I've got all of this vision out here and immediately downregulate by like 10 or 20%, it's crazy how much that opens up. And I was like, fuck, like I love those practices. And those have been things, they were the things that were the most meaningful and impactful to me when I first started doing this. And

I think that there's a huge gap. I think what you're doing, this blending of robust, evidence-backed insights about human nature with a little bit of art, but then just really getting straight into the tactical stuff, I think that's where things are moving. I think that's what people want, not platitudes. Yeah. I think that one of the reasons it's effective, especially with the experimental philosophy that we go for is...

At some point in the development of a human, it's really important to realize that you have a choice. As an example, I have a choice. It gives me a sense of empowerment and agency. At some point, it's really important to realize I don't have a choice. I can't even decide what fucking my next thought is. It's all been a fucking gift. It's all been a gift. I wasn't in control of all of it. And this is just an amazing gift for me.

one platitude is going to hit one person, one platitude is going to hit another person. But if you give them an experiment to run and you let them discover that for themselves, it's going to land in their body, they're going to see the thing, it's going to be visceral, and it's going to actually move them through. Anything else is just like a short-term epiphany. It's the sugar of self-awareness instead of the, "Oh, I put this in my body, I've tried it." Nourishing meal.

Exactly. Yeah. That's really good for like flipping through YouTube. Yeah. Well, dude, I mean, you know, I've, I've contributed my fair share of watch hours to, to that stuff. But, uh, and I think that, you know, that is,

There's only so many different modalities that you can do that are really impactful and that you can do for free on your own with it. Like there's not an endless number of those, but there are a lot of insights that spoken at the right time in the right way will hit with somebody that's different. So, you know,

I'm all for aphorism porn as much as it's needed. I'm consciously making an effort myself to try and find tactical things to rely on. So we've gone through a few in spirit of that. We've gone through a bunch of interesting questions today. What are some things that people can go away with in terms of little questions that they can ask themselves? We can recap some of the stuff that you've already said or anything that you think. These are things I rely on an awful lot. What should people...

What should people leave with? - Yeah, so just on the stuff that we've covered already, change the way you respond to the voice in your head. Do that experiment and change every week the way you respond to the voice in your head. Just actually respond to the voice in your head is a really good one. And how do I enjoy things 10% more

The best way to do that is there's an app called Yap, and you set a reminder. I don't have any sound on my phone except for Yap. And so when I run an experiment with myself, I will use that as a reminder and be like, oh, and then I ask that question. So it's really good if you find a concrete way to remind yourself of the question. Other cool thing, and then the other one that we did was...

was just ask yourself who's looking out behind these eyes on a regular basis, like in the middle of conversation, that's a really good one. Other experiments to run, I literally have like 100. One of the ones that I find really effective is, and we do a workshop on this and we have a podcast, so it's really easy to, all free. And it's do a gratitude practice with a friend every day, seven minutes.

So it's saying out loud what you're grateful for back and forth. And, um, but do it from the feeling of gratitude that you have to feel the gratitude and then speak from the gratitude rather than I'm going to think of something I'm grateful for and say it. So it's an emotional experience and you move it that way. Particularly if there's people who are like having struggles with money, it's really effective to be grateful for all the physical stuff, like all the materialistic stuff you have in the world.

The reason that this is such a great practice, one is usually we solve problems with what's wrong, how do we fix it, rather than what's right and how do I grow it? What's right, how do I grow it is half of the solution set.

And so really, really effective way of approaching your life. Secondly, it changes who you think you are. So if I'm walking around constantly going, I don't have enough of this. I don't have enough of this. I'm not working hard enough. Then I walk around with lack, which is why there's like many billionaires that you and I have spoken to that are walking around going, I still don't have enough because, but if you can actually define yourself as what, like, oh, I'm the person who has all this shit.

then you change the way that you approach the world and you change who you think you are. It's incredibly effective if you actually have the felt sense of it rather than just the words, incredibly effective. I have been pretty sort of open about doing a lot of gratitude journaling, maybe fucking hell.

12 12 six month gratitude journals filled in in some house in Newcastle somewhere but absolutely if I look back on that uh so much of it is me just answering a question it's like okay I've got to get up and here's the thing and I've got to do it and what am I grateful for today I had a nice morning walk and I do the thing and it's like it's just another thing on the task to do as opposed to

the actual goal, which is to fucking feel the gratitude. Exactly. The goal was not to write a list of three a day for like fucking six years. Like how many that is like a number of,

And that wasn't the goal. And if you do it with somebody else, then you get the mirror neuron action of them feeling the gratitude, you feeling the gratitude. Is this important to do in person rather than over the phone? Zoom works really well. Okay. But you want to see the person? Yeah. You want to have the shared emotional experience and you want to like vibe off of each other. It's like the difference between playing tennis and playing against a wall.

It's just, I'm going to guess that silence is okay. If you're not going to just be able to spontaneously feel and come up with stuff like bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Yeah. Silence is really important. Savoring the gratitude is really important. Taking your time is really important. And, um, and feeling the gratitude before you speak. Those are all parts of the things we have.

We have instructions on it that I think you can find on our website, instructions for it. But that's a really incredibly powerful one. Another one, if you find yourself just at the beginning of the emotional stage, then just being able to label the emotions that you're having,

five times a day. What's the emotional experience I'm having right now and checking in and just doing that process can be incredibly useful for folks. Just being able to label. And the weird thing is that we've never had the same emotional experience twice, meaning like it's always nuanced. It's always different.

And so some people will not even be able to, they can't identify how they feel. They're like, I don't know. I feel fine. I feel good. So a trick to that is you can make the sound like, how do you feel? Like that's actually the feeling, a better representation of the feeling than,

I feel slightly disappointed with 10%, you know, whatever. So, but to actually like make a sound or label the emotion that you're having like five, 10 times a day is a great way to start the emotional awareness process just to like, oh, I, this thing is controlling me. At least I should be aware of what, what is controlling me.

Um, so, or it's, it maybe controls not the right word, but you know, it's, it's, it's influencing me and I should know how it's influencing me. So that's another great experience. Go, go, go and stand next to a horse.

Yes, exactly. Realize that you have a baby fucking irrational desire for the horse to like you. Joe, let's, let's bring this one into land. I really love your work. I think that, uh, what you're doing is genuinely novel. And I'm so glad that my friend Charlie introduced me to what it is that you guys do. Everyone's going to be interested to keep up to date with all of the stuff you've got going on. Where should they go?

uh art of accomplishment.com or view.life slash modern wisdom one word will be a great way for them to find out what we're doing oh yeah and there's there's all sorts of just by the way we have a podcast on a whole we have like 100 episodes on different topics we have a shit ton of experiments you can access we have like we we're really trying to give a tremendous amount of free stuff out there because we want it to be accessed by everybody including

five free workshops one like on gratitude so there's all sorts of ways you can participate for no money hell yeah well i'll uh i'm keen to bring you back on to talk about your view framework and there's probably like a million other things that we need to talk about as well but for now dude i really appreciate you thank you so much what a pleasure thank you yeah thank you very much