The Mapp
Life is a journey, and every journey needs a guide—or at least a good story. Welcome to The Mapp, hosted by Michael Pursley, where we navigate the messy, beautiful business of being human. The podcast's name is a nod to both Michael A. Pursley Podcast and the "maps of meaning" that help us find our way in life.
Born during the stillness of the COVID-19 lockdowns, The Mapp emerged from Michael’s hunger for understanding. Inspired by long-form conversations that spark insights and refine ideas, Michael dives into deep, authentic dialogues with curiosity and humor. From life’s profound mysteries to its absurdities, nothing is off-limits.
Each episode unearths the treasure of human stories: wisdom, laughter, and moments of profound connection.
At its core, The Mapp is about the human story. It’s a place where problems shrink, purpose grows, and laughter and revelation often arrive hand in hand. For Michael, the podcast is more than a platform—it’s a mission. It’s an effort to create a space where wisdom is shared, ideas are tested, and hearts are healed. Whether through a profound insight or an unexpected laugh, Michael hopes listeners walk away from The Mapp with a sense that they, too, are part of a bigger story—one that is still being written and, in the words of another great storyteller, echoes through eternity.
The Mapp
Bridging Minds: The Dance of Logic, Intuition, and the Hero’s Journey Across Cultures
What if unlocking the full scope of human potential means embracing the great paradox within us: the delicate dance between logic and intuition, the left and right hemispheres of our minds? Join Johnny Ganta and Michael Pursley in a rich, thought-provoking dialogue from 2020 that transcends borders—both cultural and cognitive—as we explore the fascinating interplay between German and American perspectives. Here, the cold precision of structure meets the wild vitality of emotion, revealing how societal forces like healthcare systems subtly shape the soul’s contentment, while the unseen machinery of the mind drives our choices.
We dive into the depths of behavior’s roots, unraveling its neural underpinnings and drawing uncanny parallels to the artificial networks in technology—machines inspired, perhaps, by the mysteries of their creators. The conversation swells into a meditation on the uncelebrated legacies of past innovators and the quiet power of resourcefulness, drawing wisdom from timeless archetypes like Moses. It is in the murky waters of intuition, the whispers of the subconscious, where revelation waits. From the endocrine system’s shadowy influence on emotional responses to the enduring wisdom of stories like *The Matrix*, we challenge listeners to strip away the illusions of a fixed identity and awaken to a more authentic self.
This is a hero’s journey—not just a story, but a challenge. Batman, Neo, and the great seekers of myth and reality all teach us that growth lies at the edge of fear, in the face of chaos. Through cultural reflection, personal anecdotes, and the alchemy of mentorship, we explore the courage it takes to engage in truly diverse conversations. To step into the unknown is to court transformation, where old belief systems crumble and adversity becomes the furnace for growth.
This episode is an invitation—to wrestle with complexity, to reimagine art and life as a singular conversation, and to meet the dynamic, unpredictable truth of your own potential.
Thank you for joining The Mapp. If this resonates with you, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with others who might find it meaningful. Subscribe, leave review, and follow us on social media to stay updated and join our community of explorers. Together we navigate life’s pathways.
Hello and welcome to the Map. My guest today is someone who I would describe as a jack-of-all-trades, a maverick, a renegade with a cause, a nomadic student of life, an intellectual, a creative, a childlike innovator. Please welcome my friend Johnny Gunter to the map. I'm joined today by Johnny Gunter. My friend, thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:All right, all right, and I'm joined today by the legendary Michael Persley.
Speaker 1:Persley.
Speaker 2:The man himself. Yes, yes, yes, so good to see you, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you too. It's been a minute. Yeah, where are you at?
Speaker 2:right now.
Speaker 1:I'm in my office in Kempton, Germany, so at the deep south, the deep, deep south of Bavaria.
Speaker 2:South of Bavaria.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I gave up like kind of the rural country side of America for the rural countryside of Germany. So I'm living in the same world, just a different language. More cows than people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting, vibe, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. Um, and how does Germany compare to the states? Because I mean, it's more, it's a it's it's more homogenous society than America. So I'd assume that it uh well, that that it's less tense when it comes to certain political issues, at least in itself compliant people, like it's a colder culture, but they're more compliant.
Speaker 1:If you look back over the last hundred years, there was like five kind of political systems that happened which is really insane to think about, like shifting from a monarchy to a kind of democracy that was messed up to a dictatorship, to the DDR, to what we have today with the EU, what we have today with the EU. And Germans are pretty compliant. I mean, I think leaders figured out as long as you give them a healthcare system and some kind of pension system, they're pretty content. So I think, as long as there's six, five Germans get five, six weeks paid vacation, they have a pension system and they have a um health care system that they all pay into, that they pay nothing for health care and medicine and so when those things are rolling, irregardless of what the, what the political climate is like they're, they're pretty content.
Speaker 1:Obviously I'm using broad-stripping statements. There'd be some germans who disagree with that, but I mean as a whole, versus in america, like people I would say they're more emotional, like they're way more overly emotional and reactive to things, and they're not. I would say we used to be critical thinkers, but we even lost that in the last years we but we definitely never were critical feelers, like we never processed how our emotions fit into like objective reality and um, yeah, and we tossed the baby out with the with the bath water, and I'd say, like a lot of people are motivated to do like they want things. They want to do things that feel good versus things that do good over the long term, and so in the short term they feel good, but in the long term it's yeah. So anyways, that's just an observation I made, like that's what I've been.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's the difference between left brain and right brain thinking. The left brain is really good at routine, it's really good at finding stuff that it's good at doing sticking to that paradigm. And it's also where the dopamine reward system is located, like that's where you have most of the dopamine receptors and, as you know, that's where we get our kick, our sense of oh yeah, this feels good. I'm gonna keep doing that.
Speaker 2:And the right brain is different. It's based on a neurodegenerative system and that has more to do with getting a sense of reward from exploration. So that's trying new things, traveling to new places, tasting new foods, learning new things that you wouldn't otherwise consider worth learning. Maybe it's, you know, another religion, maybe it's another worldview, a political system or an ideology that you haven't really considered. That's right brain stuff, and a lot of people don't engage with the right brain as much as they could, as much as they should, because the left brain is all about that short-term, hyper-local. Think of it like Uber, right. It gets you from you know your place of work to home and back to work and then someplace out at night. And if you look at your Google map, you'll see your little squiggly. You know just your path, you know your little life in squiggles on a map. But the right brain is more like taking a KLM flight and doing a cross Atlantic journey to New York or to Sao Paulo or something like that. We don't engage it as much as we should. In fact, we're very scared of the right brain. This is where we, this is the place of dreams, you know. This is the place of the, where all of that subconscious activity happens. Where our intuition is developed, it's long range thinking. It's always, you know, it's a very, very different system. It's always, you know, it's a very, very different system. And, you know, we didn't even realize this until we started messing around with neural nets and machine learning, and we found that when, with machine learning, they had to essentially separate the two components of what a machine does when it learns, One is, you know, it learns. A machine learns how to do a certain set of instructions, and then what happens when the instructions need to get updated, you know, when there are new elements coming into the environment and you're learning things. They realized that unless these two, I guess, hemispheres of learning were separated, then what would happen is that you would overwrite all of the old learned information, and so they had to create two containers. Then, right, and then they found out that our own human brains are actually structured in the same way. So we have hemispheric specialization for the left brain and the right brain, and so it's essentially like we have two different brains in our head, all connected by the corpus callosum, without which we would be literally two different people, or a multiplicity of people, which is very interesting. But yeah, america, there's a whole lot of left brain thinking there and it's funny. But I mean, it's not just unique to America, it's unique with any culture that has sort of established itself and is trying to maintain control.
Speaker 2:I mean, just take the fact that we encourage children to. You know, play according to the rules, even here in India. You know, if a kid starts writing with their left hand, then that's bad because the left hand is dirty right. So you know, you tell them that's bad, that's bad. So you start writing with, you train them to write with the right hand and, interestingly enough, the right hand is connected to the left brain right, just as the left eye is connected to the right brain. It's very interesting If you actually look at a person's eyes when they're speaking, if you wanna know if they're really, if you actually look at a person's eyes when they're speaking, if you want to know what they're really interested, just look at their left eye right, because you'll find that if they are interested, that left eye will kind of, like you know, like expand a little bit and you got their interest, that is, if you're giving them novel information.
Speaker 2:You know, because the difference between the left and the right is cognitive routine on the left and cognitive novelty on the right. So the right is always looking for new things. It's always looking for, you know, something that hasn't yet been discovered or it hasn't yet realized, and it gets a kick out of that. Yet been discovered or it hasn't yet realized, and it gets a kick out of that. But yeah, you know, one funny thing is, when people grow old, the first hemisphere of the brain that begins to atrophy is the right.
Speaker 2:Isn't that interesting? Which is why you'll find a lot of old people sometimes just stuck in their way of thinking. They're stuck and it's only because they're not using the right brain to do its job, which is to discover new things. And then you wonder why you're depressed, why you're anxious, why you know life is meaningless. Well, it's because there is this very important side of us which we must pay attention to, and that is to be constant learners, constant explorers of the unknown, you know. And so, yeah, I don't know how we got into that, but man, just so you know the way this podcast is going to go, we're going to get very philosophical. Let me tell you that I'm all about it, dude.
Speaker 1:I'm all about it, dude. I'm all about it. I'm glad you brought it up, because there was a study done where they scanned the brains of small children and they found that both hemispheres of the brain were more or less the same size. And then when the children began to go to Western school like I'm talking specifically about Americans and the creativity of the children were about the same. But after like a few years in Western school, they noticed that the left hemisphere of the brain actually started to grow. And then they measured that the creativity of the children dropped by the time they finished school, that the creativity of the children dropped by the time they finished school. Man, I'm fudging, I'm fudging the numbers, but it was like it was way below 20 percent um from when they had started. And then they actually found that, like the right hemisphere had was a lot smaller than the left hemisphere because of the fixation on language, mathematics, deductive thinking and so on, versus um music, intuition, creativity and imagination.
Speaker 1:And when you look at people like albert einstein, who was a huge believer in tickling the right side of your brain and opening yourself up to imaginative thinking and and creative thinking, there's what? What I understand. There's two main forms of creativity. One is synthesized creativity, where I pull from a lot of different sources and resources and in my consciousness and in my being I kind of construct this collage of these different inspirationsations, so to speak, that I see and bring. Maybe it's an innovation, but it is a synthesized kind of um product from all these different sources. And then there's another kind of creativity where you're pulling stuff out of the ether, you're, you're literally reaching into the heavens, above the sun and pulling something down that has not been in existence before. It's very rare. And what you alluded to is, yeah, that in Western culture there is this huge emphasis on insurance, security, safety nets, backstops, um, to kind of correct our course, to maintain the status quo, to maintain life as it is, and and you see it most like, you can see it clearly demonstrated.
Speaker 1:I'll just give one example. If there was a factory that this is a literal example, but there was a factory that made carbonators for cars and they needed 300 000 workers to create these carbonators. And then there was a machine that was developed that you only needed 30,000 people to work the factory. So, in essence, 270,000 people roundabouts lost their job. And so the people who lost their job are saying this is evil, you brought in a machine and it took our jobs, and this is wrong, and blah, blah blah. But in essence what happened here was something called creative destruction, where the creativity of someone to engineer and innovate and bring this machine actually freed up 270,000 people to do something else with their life.
Speaker 1:And I understand that there's a lot of nuance to this and people could say, yeah, but those people need to be taken care of in the kind of transitionary phase and innovate. Like we're in a phase of the human existence, the human experience, where innovation is happening so fast, um, and it's it's compounding so fast and the more we information share through the mediums like the internet, that we can't catch up. You know, when somebody went from using a hoe to having a donkey that pulled a plow, there was a lot of freaking time between those that innovation where you could kind of catch up to it and and and whatever. And then when you went to the tractor and then from the tractor to industrialized farming, that happened real fast, like in America there was about 30 million farmers at one time and they couldn't produce enough food to feed just America. And then with the innovation of industrialized farming. You went down to 5 million farmers but the farms became massive but they had enough food to supply America but also export the food.
Speaker 1:Again, it's an example of creative destruction and again, I understand that there's a little bit of nuances, like we've come to the point where we don't need industrial farming has become like a for profit thing versus feeding people thing. And I understand, like, people's upset about climate change and the way animals are treated and so on, but I see the necessity of it in that period of time where you literally have people not having enough food, and so that was an incredible innovation. But there were a lot of farmers kind of left in the dust because they could not adapt, because what what took several generations to adapt to is now happening exponentially faster even than what happened to them. Like, if I look back at the tech bubble that came, where there were all these like weird little gadgets, like cameras, just there was just a little gadget for everything, and now we've just compacted everything onto into onto a smartphone or onto like, like computer dude is what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a super computer dude. Yeah, I mean we, we, we took a shuttle to the moon back in the 60s with the hard drive of a pocket calculator. That's nuts, dude. I mean, we take this granted. Oh man, you know, it's like we're spoiled dude. We don't know what we have, we don't know what we are supposed to really value. Um, yeah this is?
Speaker 1:this is something I bring up quite often because and I've said this before when I was a kid I don't know what it was I wanted to measurably change the world in some way.
Speaker 1:I wanted to leave an imprint in the world, a kind of legacy or something to where I would dramatically change the world in the positive and leave a lasting impression.
Speaker 1:And then something just kind of clicked in my head in the last years I don't know the name of the guy who invented the refrigerator, I don't know, I don't know the person who invented the vast majority of the stuff that I use on a daily basis that dramatically frees my time up so that I can do things that I to be entertained, to find pleasure, to find comfort or to grow and learn. And it's like, like you said we are, we are like kindergartners with nuclear, the access to nuclear bombs, like we have the internet with a smartphone, is like you have access to, to the, to the knowledge of the human collective, and you did nothing for it. Okay, yeah, you, you paid. You paid a couple hundred maybe if you got to use one, but you, you really did nothing and you're, you're, you're standing on the shoulders of the shoulders, of the shoulders, so many people. So I find that really fascinating. Um, just in the time that we live and what we have access to, versus like even a hundred years ago.
Speaker 2:A hundred years ago, seriously, man, yeah, I, you know what you said about, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants. I mean, that's something I think about a lot. You know, I don't take that for granted. Um, at least when I'm, uh, you know, trying to be consciously grateful for what I have, um, um. And if I didn't do that, if I didn't take the time to just spend some time every day thinking about, okay, this is what I have with me right now, um, I tell you, the days go by, you know, and uh, and then you know, I had this very interesting thought, uh, exercise that I did the other day and I was just pondering and I just I was like what, if you know? There was like, say, this paraplegic, right, didn't have any arms, didn't have any limbs, grew up their whole life in a wheelchair, being pushed around by other people. They could speak fine, they could think fine, and all that, but they didn't have limbs. And what if this person wanted to?
Speaker 2:I don't know, like run a race or try high jump or something like that. Well, they just couldn't. It's just a dream, right? But then what if one day that paraplegic wakes up in my body, right, all of a sudden, boom, he's Johnny Gunter. He's in my body right. All of a sudden, boom, he's johnny ganta. He's in my body, right, he's got arms and limbs and he's this skinny dude and he's nimble and at a right age, and what have you. And then he'll be sitting in my chair with everything that I know plus my limbs, and he would say to himself what the fuck has this kid been up to man? Like? I mean, he'd be like yo yo, yo, yo yo. I'm going to go for a run right now. I'm going to train for a marathon. You know, I'm going to start doing weights. Look, I've got arms, I can do pushups and I can start getting a chest.
Speaker 2:Why hadn't this guy been working on that? Like? What's wrong with him? You know, that's just the thing.
Speaker 2:So it's almost like you don't know what we have until it's gone, or you don't know how valuable something is unless you have been in a place of lack, which is why, like a lot of creativity, a lot of the creatives. A lot of the smartest people on the planet weren't, you know, just rich people, you know, who just had everything handed to them on a platter. The people that were forced to become creative were the people that were put into a position where they had to become resourceful. You know, they had to find a way to solve the problem, and that is the catalyst for the most interesting innovations we find on the planet.
Speaker 2:It's so when people say, you know, my life sucks, I don't have enough enough. You always got to think like what, what do I have right now that I can work with? You know, uh, I mean, I tell this to my students all the time, even if they don't understand it. Like, um, you know I, you know I, I. I love mythologies, I love stories, I love, um religious texts, and sometimes I'll share the story of moses, who you know. He grew up in privilege and then he is. You know, he's he, he, he murders this dude, right? Um, he's the adopted son of pharaoh. He murders one of the hebrews and now he has to flee egypt and so he runs off into the wilderness.
Speaker 1:He goes to uh what is the e what are the?
Speaker 2:Egyptians Moab, moab or something.
Speaker 2:I think that's where he is, anyway, anyways. Well, he meets his wife, zipporah, and he becomes a shepherd. And that's what he's doing. Man, the son of a king has become a shepherd and he has this staff right and it's like one day he's doing his thing, this Acacia Bush starts burning and he starts to get this vision. And the vision tells him yo, you got to go back and free your people. And he's like uh-uh, I got to start up. I can't do shit. And they're like the voice is like get your brother. Okay, aaron can talk, all right, use him as your mouthpiece. He's like okay, fine, I can do that, but what else do I have? I don't have anything. I can't. How am I going to? You know, show them that I am being, I am representing the God Almighty, and this and that. And he's like what is in your hand? He's like it's a stick. He's like throw it on the ground.
Speaker 2:All right, he throws it on the ground, it becomes a snake cool. Well, you see, that's the beginning that that story is, I think, the reason why you know you have such a simple tool in that man's hand and why he was still able to go and do so much. I think the moral of the story is to go with what's in your hand, right. We're always going to find excuses for not starting something, but if you just go with what's in your hand, right, we're always going to find excuses for not starting something, but if you just go with what's in your hand, you will find that that is a way, it's a way of stewardship that gets rewarded, which happens because not enough people do that, and so if you're one of the few that does that, then you'll find that as insufficient as you are, you know any lack of education, lack of the right upbringing or the right passport or whatever that is, but none of that matters when you just go with what's in your hand, as opposed to just saying I'll do it when I get there, I'll do it when I get to the other side, I'll do it when I have X, y, z. No Start with what's in your hand. See what happens. Okay, because there's a lesson to be learned there. The lesson is this of abundance, that you have so much more in your arsenal than you're even, like, consciously aware of. Let's start with that, because, consciously, all we're taking in in any given moment right, while I'm talking to you it's taking up most of my processing power, um, which my conscious mind has. I think it's something like a hundred kilobits of information a second that I can process. As I am talking to you, I'm using up 60 kilobits of that, and so that gives me very little room to actually do some listening now, which is crazy. But on a subconscious level, when we're thinking about all of our senses the sense of touch, the sense of sight, our ears, smell, taste, right, we're taking in about 11 trillion bits of information every second. Right, where's have more information in hand in our own brains than we realize.
Speaker 2:You know regular people. They want to go to Padre and say tell me, am I all right, am I doing the right thing? Or you'll go to some you know wise old woman, you know she's's gonna pull out some tarot cards and tell me my future. Or you'll look up to a teacher or a parental figure and say like am I good enough? Am I on the right path?
Speaker 2:And the truth is, this is something that most people don't do, which is just sit in silence and try and tap into that part of yourself that's already picked up on so much that has happened in the world, and all you have to do is allow that to sort of come up to the surface. Right, you play around with it. You know this is called developing the intuition. You know this is how you get that. What some people call like a prophetic ability, for example. These are merely people who have learned how to tap into that intuition system. You know, which is a very powerful thing. And so once you have mastery over the brain and what it can do, once you have mastery over the brain and what it can do, then you will find that you are not in lack at all. You have plenty to work with.
Speaker 2:And then the question is okay, where do I start? Because then that gets overwhelming, because then you're like well, now there's a million things I can't do, so where do I start? And so the cycle goes like you have those moments where everything opens up and the eyes awake and you know you're like, wow, I see everything, I see the full picture. I see I can see clearly now, right, and then all of a sudden the clouds come back. You know, it's like you have that moment of like enlightenment if we want to call it that and then it's gone again. And then we think to ourselves ah, that was just, I just had a weird moment. It doesn't mean anything. But then a few months later it comes back and you're like, oi, it came back again, you know.
Speaker 2:But then it goes away and then you start thinking, you start losing faith, because you're like why doesn't it stay? Why doesn't it just stay? Because if it's stuck, then maybe I do something with it, but it's not sticking, so maybe I shouldn't, I shouldn't be serious about it. You know, I shouldn't take it too seriously.
Speaker 2:Because then? Because? Because, when the clouds come, and when you stop hearing the voice from inside right, you're basically left with the voices of the people around you, and that is not helpful at all, because the people around you are essentially only using you as a mirror for their own psyche, right? So everyone needs to be validated. So when they say something, they basically want you to just reflect back to them what they think they are supposed to be doing right. So every parent's looking for that validation, every teacher's looking for that validation. But when you understand the truth of how powerful your mind is and the fact that you are uniquely and wonderfully made for a reason, and that you know it's taken all of life's energy um to go into building you and putting you here on the planet, at this point in time, when you realize that, then you don't need other people to tell you who you are.
Speaker 2:It's still very difficult you know, because we have these two eyeballs in our craniums, right. They're right there with us. They're right there with us and I can see you with them right now, michael. I can see my own eyes, with the eyes that are in my head right now, but it's only a reflection of my eyes. But guess what? Will I ever in my life be able to see my own eyeballs with my own eyes? Not a reflection, the way you can see my eyes if you were standing in front of me face to face, the way you can see my eyes if you were standing in front of me face to face. Right, I would never be able to do that for myself.
Speaker 2:And so that's a very interesting thought. You see, so we have all of these super organs and yet we don't know what it is, we don't know who we are, and so we just have to ask someone else tell me what you see. Look at me, what do you see? Who am I? Right? So that's the role of other people in community. It's to give us a sense of identity. And if you don't have a strong sense, if you don't have a strong internal compass, then you will be, you will move where the wind blows. You know, you will be like a house on a flimsy foundation. You know, and that's where a lot of people are. You know, they just get caught up in the rabble and the ruckus, and and it's just because it's. You know.
Speaker 2:This goes back to that whole left brain thing. It's like we want things to be binary, we want things to be right and wrong, we want there to be left and right, we want there to be good versus evil, and all of that white versus black, right, but what we don't realize is you can't have one without the other, and so then that's not a binary way of thinking. That's the third way of thinking. The third way of thinking is that you need white for black to exist, you need black for white to exist. Imagine if the whole world was white, right? Imagine if, for example, we could see everything with you. Know, I put you into a spaceship, you go out there for a spacewalk, all right, head, now, they can see this small sliver of the infrared spectrum, or, sorry, the electromagnetic spectrum, right Now. What if? Now we know that there's more beyond what we can physically see. Right, there's, like all these other x-rays, gamma rays, this, this, that, right, which we can pick up with other, you know, sensors.
Speaker 2:But what if your eyes? We were to give you Superman eyesight so that you could see everything all the time, right? Well, you get out there in space and everything would become a complete kaleidoscope of noise. It would be like a whole lot of overwhelming sensory input that you would not be able to make any sense of. And the same goes for the ears and the sense of touch and everything else. If we could taste everything, if we could, you know, hear everything, the whole range, right, as much as we would love that and think that that's a good idea, it's actually a disability, which is why having this limited view is actually a good thing, because I can only see this one sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Speaker 2:I now actually have sight Enough, sight that's needed for me to get from A to you know, and um, and now I can tell figure and ground. I can tell one thing from the other, right, because I'm I'm only seeing what I need to see, right, um, but yeah, speaking of figure and ground, it's like that's the, that's the thing about black and white. It's like imagine, just pure white, just pure, pure, pure white. Right, a white piece of paper, for example, it's just there With the moment you put like a dot on it, like a black dot. Now something's happened. Right, it's no longer just a white paper. You got a black dot on there. What does that mean? Right, and the same way, if it was all black. And now you have a little white dot in the middle.
Speaker 2:Well, what does that mean? You see? Because if the only color was white, then that black thing becomes something special. Now, you see, if the only color was black and if all we saw was black, and now you see one spot of just another color, that becomes special.
Speaker 2:And so then I would say both sides need to be grateful for the other, for existing. You know, in the same way, when you have the moment of being enlightened and the moment of being down in the depths, in the clouded darkness, you're grateful for the both, darkness, you're grateful for the both. But a wise person knows that ain't going to last forever, because life is constant motion. It's constant up and down, just like a sound wave, just like a light wave. You know, it's up and down, up and down, right, crest trough, crest trough. And so if right now I'm feeling down in the dumps, the right narrative that you want to give yourself is that I'm not going to be here forever. As much as this feels like a forever place, it's not Because you will come out of it. And when you come out of it, be grateful, be like oh my God, I can breathe again, I can see again. Amen, see you again, amen, thank you. Right, so you see again. And but just know this, you're gonna go blind again pretty soon. So but be cool with that.
Speaker 2:You know some smart people I know they'll actually um the stoics do this a lot, like um tim ferris does this a lot, you know, he know he'll practice this type of meditation where he will imagine the worst case scenario happening. Right, he has to go to a meeting or something. He's going to imagine it going to absolute hell. Right, it's just an absolute disaster, and he sits with that, he imagines every detail of that. He sits with that for, like, a minute, right, and then he flips it.
Speaker 2:He flips it to where he thinks of the meeting going. Absolutely amazing. It's flawless, his words are coming out smoothly. You know the people that he's talking to. They love him. They're like leaning in, he's very interesting, and now he starts to feel it. He starts to feel it, he starts to feel good about that, right, just as like before he was feeling really bad when he spent that one minute thinking about how shitty that could be right. You see, the way we feel about things is so, so funny, man. It's so funny because so what? What tim ferris does is he'll do, he will, he will, he will go one minute into a really dark place. Next minute he'll go into a really bright place, right, and then back into the dark place. Really feel that out. And then we'll back into that bright place. Really feel that out. How does it feel? Feel right, and then you'll speed it up. You'll flip-flop between dark, bright, dark, bright, dark, bright. And then you'll speed it up. You'll flip-flop between dark, bright, dark, bright, dark, bright.
Speaker 2:So, finally, it's like instead of this big, long, you know, low frequency wave of big ups and downs. You've got. It's much smaller now, the distance between the up and the down, and that's kind of how you sort of maintain some sort of equilibrium and then so then it doesn't matter whether it's good or it's bad, it's just you have trained yourself to sort of switch out of a bad state much more quickly than you would otherwise without that kind of training. Because sometimes bad things happen to you. You get traumatized, ptsd, this, and that it lingers, it stays with you for life. In fact bad things have a longer effect on us than good things that happen to us. You know, we know that. But when you train yourself to move between those two states quickly, then you won't have a situation where you know someone comes and tells you hey, man, you know you're dumb ass, like, you're inconsistent, like why don't you have your shit together? That's not going to weigh you down for three or four months, because maybe that word came from someone that you looked up to, maybe that was your mentor that said that to you, maybe it was just having a bad day, you know, because that's actually happened to me and the words of people have thrown me down in the dumps like that. And so you know, that's the power of the logos man. It can shape you, that is, unless you realize that you have that same power, right, and then you can also shape things. And the words you speak over yourself are very important. And then, going back to the whole, the way we feel about things, see, it's very interesting.
Speaker 2:You know, I shared this analogy with some of my students. Like, imagine you got like a dad, right, cheeky dad, little kid trots into the room. Dad gives the kid a little smack in the butt. Right, the kid turns around, okay, and sees that the dad is like he's got an angry face on. The kid looks oh, I must have done something bad. He just hit me in the ass. It's stinging now, and so now the kid starts to cry. Right, it's now made the connections. Okay, I got a smack in the ass.
Speaker 2:Dad looks angry and I've done something wrong. I'm going to cry. Now, same scenario. Right, kid trots in the room. Dad gives the kid a little smack in the ass. Right, a kid looks up at the dad and dad has a cheeky grin on his face. Right now, same smack in the ass, same pain threshold, but the kid interprets that, oh, he's in a cheeky mood, it's time to play Right, right, isn't that interesting, like how the mind creates our response to the stimuli. We get to choose how we want to respond to these things that happen to us and this is the narrow path man.
Speaker 1:This is the narrow path, man, this is the narrow path. But, yeah, yeah, your, your endocrine system is not the greatest. Uh, it's just a horrible driver. But it's like dictating what most people people are doing, and Joe Rogan calls it conquering his inner bitch. Um, yaka Willick and David Goggins also would share that sentiment about um. There's an internal dialogue and and, yeah, exactly what you said that there's. You get to choose how you respond to it.
Speaker 1:But your endocrine system is real baseline seek pleasure, seek comfort, avoid stuff that makes you scared or involves pain. And there you will have to create narratives around pain, around fear, around pleasure and around comfort, and then your brain, this big supercomputer, gets to figure out the pathways of how you do that. Normally you take the fastest way, the path of least resistance, as David Goggins calls it. But I love what you talked about about things feeling real dramatic in the situation. I think most of us can identify to some degree with like teenage heartache, so like when we're like young kids and we like a girl, but she doesn't like us back, or we have a breakup or something, and then at the time it just feels like the end of the world. You just feel like someone just stuck a knife in your chest, like to articulate the feeling of it. It's just like the end of the world. You know what you feel and I think that that's a real gift, actually, of how emotional we are, how, I would say, how open we are to process emotion that time, trying to find language to it, trying to find meaning to it.
Speaker 1:But it's like low risk processing, to say like if I'm, if I'm 12 years old and I, you know, I'm dating, dating a girl, or or 13, 14, 15 years old, dating a girl, and we hold hands and we kiss, and then she said I don't want to hold your hand, kiss you anymore, like that feeling of rejection is like getting able to deal with that feeling of rejection and processing it is way different than you're engaged to somebody or you're married to somebody, but it's like this, this low risk and this low resolution experience will create a kind of pyramid or steps where you can, you're trained to be able to process things, where what you just said about these waves of, like the highs and lows that we have to, we have to deal with it, tim Ferriss, is processing through.
Speaker 1:We got deep in the weeds, but I had a few thoughts that I jotted down quickly so I could keep trekking with you. So, yeah, you, you mentioned something about like this flash of inspiration. It's the way I took it like there's this, there's this feeling where you, your head, comes above the clouds and you feel inspired, or you or you you see a glimpse of I I immediately, when you talked about it, I literally thought about the scene in the third matrix film, I think, where neo and trinity go literally above the clouds and she sees the sun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, watch that last night, man, I watched that last night. Oh yeah, like you know, and then immediately back down. Yeah, dude, totally yeah it's ironic he was.
Speaker 1:He was blind, you know, and she had to describe it to him that just the, just the. There's so much in that. Um, but albert einstein, isaac newton and several guys, they were brilliant guys, but they explained their theories and ideas coming like this and it's it's tapping into that intuition as it comes. Write that shit down, like if that's you listening, like write it down, like Albert Einstein's theory of relativity or part of it was, was he literally was standing on a train platform and he wanted to tell the time. He turned around, looked at the clock and when he turned back around, like this just thought came into his head that when he wanted to know the time, it took time for him to turn around and look at the clock, so the time that he actually wanted to know was already gone. And so, like that's, that's how it came. It just came to him in a flash.
Speaker 1:And there's many, many people who brought innovations, who they, they, they had a dream or they had an idea and they just stepped out onto it and then they meditated on it and they tried to cultivate it, and they didn't take it as like a brain fart. They didn't take it as, oh, I ate pizza last night and then this is what happened, you know, and the ability that tied into what else you're saying, the ability to cipher or filter out information and the experiences that we're having. Information and the experiences that we're having is when you referenced earlier the capacity of your brain to take in how many kilobits of information is really incredible, because there's people who have like defects where they literally can't forget anything. They literally have a photographic memory of everything. And so, when, when it's like that, if you were like that, if you were able to remember everything and you couldn't filter out what you would concentrate on, literally it would be so difficult, nearly impossible, for you to attach any real meaning to your life. Because, for example, just use that, apply that laterally with something like love or pain, like, imagine if you loved everybody exactly the same the stranger on the street and your child, your dad and the guy who's serving you a shawarma. Like the amount of meaning and value that you'd be able to give to a word like love would be lost, it'd be totally lost. And so our ability to concentrate and the algorithm that's running in our head to filter what's important, what's not, I mean we'd all be dead. Because, like, oh, that's a tiger Cool. Oh, that's a tree Cool, no reaction Tiger eats you. So, like, the ability to like process on the fly, like fast, is actually a gift. But a step further, that to be able to process meaning and emotion and all those things is super important.
Speaker 1:And you alluded to like having a page. It's all white and there's something eric weinstein said that was like really simple but really profound, uh, a kind of ritual they do. So he's an atheist but he still practices a lot of uh the shabbat and and different rituals and in jewish culture and religion, even though he's a professed atheist. And one thing that they do, um, his family does when they take uh supper on the shabbat, is he he? He opens a wine bottle and he takes uh a glass of water and he pours water into the wine. And they do it because he says we've and he's a mathematician, so it's it adds to it. Anyway, he has a doctorate in mathematical theory, I believe, so it adds to it.
Speaker 1:He said we become obsessed with pure, with purity, with purism, with this like what would you talk about, about this left brain thinking, about binary thinking and stuff? And so he specifically pours the water into the wine so that everybody observes whatever, uh, perceptions we had about that bottle of wine before we opened it. We, we know now it's not pure, let's enjoy it, let's enjoy it. And it's dude. For me it's, um, it's so on point, and like what you, what you spoke about earlier about trying to communicate with your students, start with what you have. Um, I think it was Mark Twain who said that gradual improvement is better than delayed perfection. And and so, yeah, like, like, own the fact that you have this. Well, everything you just unpacked just now, you have this plethora of gifts and and, and and. It's so multi-layered that's inbred into you. You already have it. It's, it's, it's engineered inside of you just to use, but you have to have eyes to see it, to it. It's, it's, it's engineered inside of you just to use, but you have to have eyes to see it, to perceive it to, to know, like that, you have this.
Speaker 1:And I seen, when I was in africa, I remember just observing once that there was this little kid and he was wearing water bottles as flip-flops and I, like, I just stared for a long time. My knee-jerk reaction was being, as an American there, my knee jerk reaction was I felt a little bit of pity because I'm like, oh shit, this kid doesn't have shoes. But then I was like, no, this kid does have shoes. He actually made these shoes. He saw they needed shoes but he didn't have cash to go buy shoes, so he just made these shoes. They're not great quality shoes, but I saw like that I was at a crossroads there to either have pity and look down kind of on the situation or be a bit inspired by the fact that there's a spark of creativity in somebody to improve their current position and in that there's either hope or despair. I can either partner with like hope and despair for a situation in a sense. And yeah, those are my thoughts on what you just unpacked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know. Like going back to what you said about Einstein and the train and how he connects those dots to his quantum theories, right, that's a great example of what we call conceptual blending, right, and so conceptual blending is where you take information from two very seemingly disparate themes or streams of knowledge and you connect the dots right and so, like we said so, let's premise it with this, right. So the brain, as Aldous Huxley says, is a reducing valve. Right, it's going to trickle the information down to what is essential, what we need, what's going to get us from B to B on the map. Right, but you're going to. You're not always going to. You don't know if where you're headed is the place that you're supposed to be headed, if it's a worthy enough goal, yet, until you get there. And the chances that you discover that it's not a worthy goal when you get there is quite large. And so you continue to sort of, you reposition, and you begin to circumambulate until finally you hone in on something that is a worthy goal, right, but it all begins with this idea of being a fool, right? So when you're starting out on a journey, you know, let's say, you want to try something new.
Speaker 2:Well, there's this very interesting archetype of the fool or the jester, and it's a Jungian archetype. And what's very important about this archetype is that it is the starting point for every human being embarking on a new journey. You start off as the fool, and unless you're willing to be a fool right, you will never begin the journey. So if you knew everything, if you knew everything that could go wrong, for example, that might keep you from starting right. So sometimes it's better to just start. You don't need all the answers, you just start. And so what does the fool do? The fool circumambulates.
Speaker 2:The fool is like a babbling child right, interesting to use the analogy of a child. But children are brilliant because you know they have no problem. You know, babbling baby speak. They'll do that for a year, two years, and you know, eventually they'll start honing in on. You know words, sentence structures and things like that, and then, before you know it, they have sort of naturally absorbed this language of communication with other people. But the child didn't care about practicing like an idiot. I mean, we don't do that right, when you're trying to learn German, you're not gonna try, just speaking whatever rubbish German until it gets better and better. Well, you see, a child is willing to do that because it doesn't care about what other people think, right, the child is true to themselves, and so that's why it's very special, that particular point in a child's development. You know, age between age two to six, where they kind of just explore the world on their own terms and the adults in their lives are just there to guide them.
Speaker 2:But you know, like now, conceptual blending. How does that come in? How does that come into the picture? Well, conceptual blending is where you, you have stepped outside of your paradigm, right, and you get inspiration from something that seems completely different, right? So Einstein's getting his inspiration from the train, you know, a kid's getting inspiration for shoes from plastic bottles, right? Someone who? I mean? It happens all the time, but it's only when you're willing to think outside the box, really.
Speaker 2:And so our academic systems, right now, we will train students to think a certain way, to become specialists in this and that, right. And if you are not using the language and the dogma of the institution that you're, that you're in, then you, you know it's, it's like you're not one of them, you know. And yet for that institution to actually grow and develop, you need new information from the outside to come in, to breathe in new life into that place. And so this is why it's I mean, if you just look at just history, just look at cultures, look at religious institutions, this happens again and again and again and again and again you have usually one individual that's brave enough to go outside of the norms and they bring back information, that sort of challenges the establishment and once it's sort of absorbed and accepted, there's a whole revival that comes out of it, right, and it's a new life.
Speaker 2:But this is what human beings are made to do. Like we're made to go on exploratory journeys, not just in the physical space but also intellectually, you know, with what we learn, with the books that we read. Like we're so scared of the other side, right, and then we just hear like don't go there, bad people, they have bad practices. You know it could be evil for all we know, right, but it's either you're going to believe that or you're going to go check it out for yourself. And I found that you know.
Speaker 2:You know, when people say, follow your passions and stuff, it sounds like such a dumb thing on on one level, but I've discovered how true it actually is because you'll find that there are things that you've put up right, that you've absorbed remember 11 trillion bits of information coming into you every second, and yet you decide to focus on one thing. Sometimes you will distract yourself with with some random book for some reason. Right, why? Why? There's something there. Everything in your life has happened to you, and nothing goes to waste, and so, for a creative, you have to be willing to pick up those things that you are genuinely interested in and try and connect it to the problem that you're trying to solve right now, and you will find that the most creative solutions that you can come up with are when you are able to do that.
Speaker 2:So my whole philosophy is that you know nothing is separate. You know it is all interconnected. Why? Because it's all a part of the same system. It all follows the same patterns, and if we're going to talk about schooling and the education system, it's just that we have different words for the same things. You know, and so I've learned to. I've learned to translate when I hear. You know, instead of getting offended, because I can learn a lot from a lot of people. If I'm not gonna get offended, right, all I need to do is listen. They might use the wrong words that I feel is inappropriate or, you know, not politically correct or something like that. That doesn't matter to me, right? They're just using words. I need to translate that into my language so that I'm able to get the best out of what they're saying and then apply that to a problem I'm trying to solve. So this happens time and time again, man, but it's all about disrupting the way you find patterns in the world.
Speaker 2:So if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling creatively blocked, you know they say go for a walk, go, you know, go check out some I don't know a play or something. Do something different, change things up a little bit. The reason why they suggest these things is because you have to disrupt your patterns, you have to try new things, to get inspired, and when you are in a state of inspiration like nothing can stop you. That's what everyone wants to be Like. That's the ultimate goal, I think, for people. Can I be inspired? Because if you're inspired, man, man, you'll stay up all night working on a project, you know.
Speaker 2:And so how do you sustain that? You have to constantly go out into the places that other people are telling you. Don't go there, man, don't go there. Those are bad people. Well, for whatever reason, you you told them that you're curious about those people. Huh, listen to why you're curious about them, listen to yourself, right, they'll say they're bad people. But you're like, I don't know. But I just, I want to connect with them. I don't know, I don't know, man.
Speaker 2:So instead of listening to other people who haven't gone to the other side, you gotta go to the other side, and so that means that you're gonna have to go on that journey alone. Because, again, narrow path, and um fortune does favor the brave. But this is the great journey that every individual is called upon um to step out of the known world, the known paradigm, and to step into the unknown, the world of unknown possibilities, the world of potential disaster, chaos, whatever, and then sort of come back with an elixir, come back with news from the other side and then create a bridge between two worlds. But it's something for the courageous to do, it's something for the brave to do. Why brave? Because chances are, when you're on that journey, a lot of people are going to be telling you man, you shouldn't be doing that, you know. So the best thing to do is just you, do you, you do you and you keep you to yourself. Unless you're speaking to someone that really gets you, you know there's no need to throw pearls before swine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you think that now there's like this, this kind of paradox where now more than ever, we have the ability to pull from people who are objective thinkers in their respective fields? And, like what you said, that it feels like now there are people who are trying to bash down the barricades of terms specific, like, like. In terms of like we're talking about law or medicine or mathematics or whatever that there is a specific terminology that makes it exclusive, and it feels like there's a group of people who are trying to bash down and put everything into lay layman's terms and there is this cross pollination of intellects and there's this cross-pollination of creatives. That's happening, um, and and there was a story that came to my mind where where eric weinstein had his brother brett on and they talked specifically about in the 90s I think, when he was a student. I'll cut this really short for the sake of people listening, not to bore them. It's a good podcast, check it out. But specifically, brett was in a evolutionary biology class and there's like this rule in biology where the polymers in the DNA are longer. For bigger animals and generally for smaller animals they're shorter, and they found with laboratory rats in the United States they were abnormally long. And so he figured out that the breeding practices of the rats had affected that and that became a problem because they were ability to take on more toxins than normal rats. And then those tests were in fact a starting point for medicines used on humans. So, basically, humans were being given doses of toxins that we can't take because we were using the polymers of rats and that kind of equation. Anyways, the point was is that in his class it was actually a medical student who just had to take that class, and the medical student made that observation or brought something of it up.
Speaker 1:What you said, if someone coming out from a different sphere of society or a different field of expertise, and they just see it and they were like well, why is it like that? Like Henry Ford historically asked his team of engineers to create a eight cylinder block engine in one piece, and they were like I, can't be done. He's like that's fine, you don't have anything else to do, this is your full time project, do it can't be done. He's like that's fine, you don't have anything else to do, this is your full-time project, do it. And so he came back like six months later did you figure it out like, no, it can't be done, that's fine, it's your project, do it. And so there's this dude from the outside who's not an engineer. He's just like I'm gonna put time and pressure on you and eventually a pearl is gonna to come out. And so eventually, yeah, we did, we got this eight-cylinder engine, and it was something I wanted to ask you about.
Speaker 1:To make a full circle of my point, there's this paradox of we feel like creatives and intellectuals now are pushing to kind of make the perfect storm for things to happen like what you just described, that someone comes from the outside, they only speak in layperson's terms in your specific field, but they're trying to translate as best they can, and that person actually carries the key or the strategy or whatever to bring the breakthrough. And on the other side of that, more than ever now, because of algorithms on the internet, we have echo chambers where people are only surrounded by like minded people, people with the same ideologies, the same ideas and whatever. And so what would be? What's been your process and what would you suggest to people of how to get out of your box and like, not live outraged, not live offended, because I would also say that for me, for myself.
Speaker 1:I had to lay down a fence and exactly what you said. People would say things that would like kind of spike that feeling inside of me. Well, you shouldn't have said it like that and that's not the right word, but I like laid it down and I was just like I'm just here to learn, I'm here to be a student of life, student of of of what's happening. So how did you, how did you personally get to a place where you like laid down outrage and offense, and what would be your advice to people? Um to go out and be challenged by objective thinkers in totally different fields than what they're um exposed to in their everyday, normal goings. So you know.
Speaker 2:Jung once said that it is the darkest point of the wood that is the point at which you must enter.
Speaker 2:You know where you least want to look. That's where it'll be found. I mean, think if you were going to hide treasure, right, where would you hide this treasure? There's two places you'd hide good treasure right. One is out in the open, out in plain sight for everybody to see. They're going to walk by it. They take it for granted, just like we take these phones for granted, right, you? It's just always been there, so it's not treasure. Or you hide it in a dark place, a place that people say, ah, that's ugly, it's like.
Speaker 2:The challenge is not to waste your time dealing with people that aren't willing to go on that journey with you. The challenge for a person is to be willing to step away from the crowd and into their own light, right, and, but of course safety first. Step away from the crowd and into their own light, right, but of course safety first. So we're always encouraged not to step away from the campfire, because Lord knows what's in the dark wood and what's going to kill you, correct? Yes, so that's culture, that's culture's purpose, that's the institution's purpose, right, to keep you safe. But then, ultimately, when you make that decision to step out of the known and into the unknown, into the dark wood. That's up to you. You do it at your own risk.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, if you look at any movie, any hero who steps out into the unknown, or, whether willingly or by force, they go through a series of challenges, right? So you have Neo, who knows something is up with the Matrix. He knows there's something wrong, right, he knows there's a dude Morpheus that he must meet. And then, you know, one fine day there's a dude Morpheus that he must meet. And then, you know, one fine day, there's a knock on the door and you know, he sees this tattoo on this girl inviting him out to this club. But then his computer screen just said follow the white rabbit. So he's like all right, okay, follow the white rabbit, okay. So he does. And then he finds trinity. And then trinity tells him I know, you've been looking for morpheus. And then, finally, you know he's like okay, something, something's here, something here. And then, boom, he wakes up again the next day and, um, he's back at work you know his shitty cubicle job and everything. And he's like what the hell is that all about? You know?
Speaker 2:it was nothing right. But then again this external factor comes into his life to push him outside of his comfort zone.
Speaker 1:He didn't want to be there anyways.
Speaker 2:And then so Morpheus steps in as a guide. You know, as some sort of you know, the guide is another kind of an architect that will step into our lives many times. But you don't want to listen to the information Morpheus is saying. I'll get you out of here, man, you just got to do what I say Step out onto that ledge and there's your exit. You can escape.
Speaker 2:Neo gets out onto the ledge and he's like to hell with that man, I'm turning myself in and he turns himself in. So we have a reluctant hero here, right, but finally, finally, finally, once he gets rescued and once they pull that little weird thing out of his belly button and stuff, they take him to Morpheus, right. And so now, finally, he's at this crossing point, this threshold, where he has to choose you can take the blue pill and everything will go back to how it was, hunky-dory, or you can take the red pill and you can see how deep the rabbit hole goes. So he takes the rabbit hole and, sure enough, his world completely changes, right? He's now crossed that threshold. He realizes, he's now woken up in the matrix, and so he's actually seen his physical body, his physical condition and everything. And it is not what he expected, anyway. So they revive him, they bring him, they. You know he takes some time to like heal and this and that before he starts his training. But he's essentially now useless.
Speaker 2:In the matrix he was a computer hacker. He knew what was up. He was good at what he did there in the real world. Now he sucks. He is what we call a fool. Right, he can't even do Kung Fu yet. Right, he can't do nothing. So he then has to go on that journey and like meander, like a fool, but like learn who are my allies, who are my enemies. You know, like you know, don't trust that guy. What's his name?
Speaker 1:Cypher. Was it the sneaky bastard?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, don that guy. What's his name? Cypher? Was it the sneaky bastard? Yeah, yeah, don't trust that guy. But you can trust morpheus, you know. And then there may be various tests and stuff. Tests and, um, you know, he has to fight with morpheus till he, you know, gets gets good at what he does. And then, of course, there'll be that first ordeal that you'll have to deal with, and it's often that sort of a.
Speaker 2:That first ordeal is a sort of a moment where you come out of all of this testing and if you imagine the whole thing like a circle, you start at 12 o'clock and if Neil crosses takes a red pill at three o'clock, at six o'clock is where he is in the ordeal. This is the dark cave, this is the belly of the whale, right. And so this is the point where he goes and meets the oracle. And what does the oracle tell him? You're not the one. Yeah, guess what, neo, you're not the one, right, okay, all right, okay. So what do you do with that kind of information then? Right, so the hero must continue on the train. That's, even neo goes back to his old life, must continue on the journey. Now see, even Neo goes back to his old life, right, like Cypher, or you keep going. Thankfully, there's an external stimuli that forces him to keep going, which is the fact that Morpheus's friend needs his help. And so now Neo has to make a choice Like, even though I'm not the one, I'm still going to move forward to save my friend, and that's that Great. So he gets out of the cave doing that, so he's overcoming that ordeal.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, that's when we get like the propeller heads and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Speaker 2:You know all the weapons and stuff, and they go into that building and shoot everyone up and they save Morpheus and the helicopter and the jumping scene, and it's just, it's totally wild, it's totally cool and, yes, you get a reward after that. Right, it's a kick. But the story doesn't end there, because our hero has to come full circle. He has to come back home, to the place where he started, but as a transformed individual. See, he's gone on a journey into the dark world. Now, in order for his journey to be effective, he has to come back to the real world to tell people what's up. So now that you've disturbed the powers that be in that underworld, so to speak, you're going to be chased all the way back home, right, and so like much like that ordeal where there was a death to his identity, you get another death usually in these stories, and this comes towards the climax of the third act, which is where Neo actually takes a bullet and dies and Trini gives him a kiss and he comes back to life, right.
Speaker 2:So there's another death and resurrection. That happens, but really the idea is a very old idea. The shamans had this idea. Before they would bring their initiates back into the real world, into the village, they would have to go through some sort of a purification. Even the warriors would have to do this. There was too much blood on them, and so then they had to sort of purify themselves and that was a sort of a death ritual, because when they came back to the village they were not warriors anymore. They were going to go back to being family men and farmers and things like that. And so you had to put a death to that warrior identity before you can come back in, and so that's essentially what happens.
Speaker 2:But ultimately now in the story we fast forward and we see Neo is in the same place where he started the beginning of the story. He is in the matrix, but this time he's not Neo the coder in his room, he is Neo the Superman who is flying around and defying the laws of gravity and what have you? Right? We love that shit. We love those stories. Why?
Speaker 2:Why is it that we can connect with something that seems so abstract on the surface? You know, that's the fascinating thing about the brain, you know. So stories, mythologies, if understood in the right way, can tell us a lot about our psychology. It can tell us a lot about our own, the journeys that we have to go on, both in the external world and in our own internal world. It's mirrored, right that's something that people have to always keep in mind that the journey is it's happening in two places simultaneously. So one way of looking at movies is to understand that all of the characters in the movie are components of your own psyche and the people you're fighting with and all that. There's parts of you that you're fighting with, the people that are there to guide you, those are the better parts of you that are coming in at the right time to give you guidance. You have to choose whether to listen or not, but then, ultimately, when you get back to the real world, you have to carry some elixir.
Speaker 2:That elixir is proof that you've been to the other side and come back and you have not been scathed Right, because that's what everyone's fear was. If you step away from the campfire and if you go into the dark wood, you might get eaten by a lion, you might not see the yoke end, but you come back with proof of some sort of victory. It's like the Minotaur and Ariadne. And so Theseus has to go into the labyrinth to slay the Minotaur and Ariadne, and so Theseus has to go into the labyrinth to slay the Minotaur.
Speaker 2:Now, theseus was a warrior. If he goes in, if he went into the cave and slayed the Minotaur but couldn't find his way back out, well, no one would know if he had killed the beast or not. He had to come back with the head of the beast, right, um. And so that's where ariadne comes in. She's the one that gave him the spool of thread that he had to just follow back right and um. But the the point is, um, a lot of us go on journeys, right, and we have seen stuff, man, we have been to the other side, we have knowledge. Well, we sort of give up after that first reward, after we've conquered the first ordeal and experienced that reward, like how Neo saved Morpheus the first time. And you just live in that high and you just remain down there, but you never like come back up into the real world to tell people what you found, because that journey is just as difficult as as as your journey coming in. In fact, it's probably going to be the hardest journey coming back to the real world.
Speaker 1:You know, and that's where you have to be the most brave?
Speaker 2:Um, because what if people make fun of you this and that? But that's the point of the elixir. It's the kind of thing which is so good that people see. Ah, proof of concept, and I would say the elixir for many people would be just with their own life, their own testimony. The elixir is your story. Once you've put it to words, once you've made sense of it and you start speaking it aloud to people, that is proof of the journey. We don't realize that our own journeys are very, very special, you know, because people can go through a lot in life a rich man, a poor man, an Indian, an African American, a European it doesn't matter man, where you were born or how you were raised.
Speaker 2:But life has its own challenges for every person, and because we are human, we have this empathic ability to see ourselves in another person, even if that person is white or black or any color. That's really cool. This is why we can watch movies and just see ourselves as these different characters in a movie. We relate to the trickster in a movie because there is a trickster component in us. We relate to the anti-hero because there is that component in us. You know so when you watch the Joker, for example, you kind of or even like Batman with Heath Ledger's Joker, you kind of want Heath Ledger to win. Right? There's a part of you that is already empathized with that part of the psyche, and so that's something that we have to find interesting, because if we can empathize with all of these different people, then that means that there are parts of ourselves that we can empathize with too. And so that's what it means when you go on a journey of psychological integration, where you are now realizing that what you see out there in the world are all parts of you. What scares you out there in the world are all things that are there to scare you within you. And so what do you do when you confront a ghost in your dreams? You know, alan Watts says run into the ghost. Run into the ghost, because when you run away from the ghost, the ghost can become whatever. Whatever you want it to be, you make things up, it takes on a whole life of its own until you run into the ghost and realize that it's just vapor. It's nothing, you know. I mean, that's the thing about, like, um, you know, when people have uh, fears, like you know fear of, you know, fear of needles, or a fear of, um, closed spaces, or you know a fear of closed spaces, or you know a fear of bugs. It's all the same thing, but it's like you might not have a fear of bugs, but for that other person that does, it's a big deal. Do not put a spider near them, right, it will freak the F out, yeah, but that spider is this big monster in their head and the truth is it's a harmless little creature. If you learn how to handle one of them, you will actually feel so liberated, and that's happened to me.
Speaker 2:I used to have a fear of bugs, man. Yeah, I know it's weird and I just grew up that way, right, like, because you know, know, you'll see how other adults respond to these creepy crawlies. And they just they swat him or they step on him, they kill him. They'll say, oh, it'll bite, you be careful, right. And so, as a kid, you're like I was curious about that, but now you think it's gonna bite me. She all, right, I'm gonna touch that. Now I don't like you, right. And so you become an adult and you have all these weird fears.
Speaker 2:But then I found that with the bugs, like, and it happened, um, uh, when I was in college and um, I mean, I don't do a whole lot of entheogens or anything like that, but I did, um, have my fair share when I was younger, and uh, it was um. So I was on a trip, it was an interesting experience. But I was sitting on this beach and there were these caterpillars in this bush, and I used to be scared of caterpillars, man, they were too creepy. But I picked one up and in that moment I'm just looking at it and I'm like, wow. But I pick one up and in that moment I'm just looking at it and I'm like, wow, oh, look at those little digits, those little bits of engineering, like walking and crawling, and I was just blown away, man, I was fascinated. I was looking at it up close, up close, and I had this sense of just like liberation, man, like I was so scared of this thing and I'm holding it in my hand, dude, I felt on top of the world. I got such a massive kick from that. I no longer had to be scared of caterpillars, and thankfully, because actually the caterpillar now for me is one of my favorite creatures, because they turn into butterflies and I love butterflies, like I mean, what is a butterfly dude?
Speaker 2:Like, what is a butterfly man? They start out as caterpillars. They're eating leaves, right. They only like one type of leaf, okay, which they're gonna chomp, chomp, chomp all day, grow fat and chubby right Until eventually one day grow fat and chubby right Until eventually one day they kind of get into this cocoon and then they become this complete goo, this complete mush, right, and from that goo, from that mush, the body of a butterfly starts to take form and then it sort of bursts through the cocoon, a completely different creature, no longer eating leaves, now flying from plant to plant, flower to flower, feeding on nectar and some of these, like the monarch, you know it can migrate, you know, all the way from Alaska, or you know Canada, all the way down to Mexico over multiple generations, not forgetting that this is the course it must take.
Speaker 2:What happened to all of that information when it was in that goose state? How did it retain all of that in there? That's to me. I don't know. I love it. It's magical, it's beautiful. That's what keeps me excited about the world. But my point is this man, I wouldn't have this love of life and found this wonderful thing for me in this idea of the butterfly, if I didn't conquer my fear of bugs and first learn how to like the caterpillar right. So that's the thing, man. You know there's this dude, Darryl what's his name.
Speaker 2:I keep forgetting his name, dude. I think it's Darryl Evans. I could be wrong, though, but it's Darryl, something right, okay? So this guy? There's a documentary on netflix where he um, he goes and befriends the kkk right black dude right, yeah, yeah, I know this guy, yeah, yeah exactly all of his friends are like what?
Speaker 2:what the hell are you doing, daryl? Like you shouldn't go to those people. Why would you make friends with them? They're like evil, they're awful right. And yet Daryl goes, knocks on their door, you know, sits down with them, has a cup of tea with them, gets to know them.
Speaker 1:Daryl Davis. Daryl Davis.
Speaker 2:Yes, daryl Davis, gee right, and you know so. He has gone to the dark side, the other side, right. Well, what happened as a result of that? Did anything bad happen to him? No, in fact, quite the opposite. You know, he was able to overcome his fear of, you know, people that you know have developed bigoted attitudes and bigoted ideas about race, and he sort of conquered that by being brave enough to go to their homes and get to know who those people are.
Speaker 2:And then over the course of their friendship, his friendship with those people, they got to know him and where he was coming from, and a lot of these guys have never had a black friend, you know, and so or met a black guy really, or met a black guy, yeah, but here they have Darryl Shelby, darryl just being cool with them and sure enough, over time, you know, after enough conversations, they're like yeah, you know, darryl, you kind of changed my, my life, man, I don't know why I've been doing what I'm doing, but I always felt like I needed this identity.
Speaker 2:Um, it kept me safe, it made me feel like I had some control in a world that seemed so out of control. But like in the same way that I felt liberated when I held a caterpillar, that Ku Klux Klan guy felt liberated when they became friends with Daryl, you understand. And then you get that same kick that, ah, he's not the devil, he's not out here to kill me, right. And so then he says, wow, can we still be friends? Can we really be friends? Can we really do this man? And then they have to be brave enough now to step outside of their paradigm, to go walk their own path and take a narrow path, take their robe off and they give it, they give that old carcass to Daryl and say, hey, man, you can keep my robes. You see, that's dope, that's dope. And this is only for the few, this is only for the brave man, the people that are willing to go to the darkest part of the wood when everyone else is saying don't go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when Morpheus gives Neo the pill, he says just just to clarify I'm offering you the truth, nothing more. And there's maybe some synonymacy with freedom or truth or whatever, and liberation being pleasant and like. What you unpacked about neo actually was the opposite. Like I was at. All my adequacies and all my talents and all of the things that made me who I am in this world are gone, and it's yeah to death. And now I'm this other person who I have nothing really to offer here. Um, and then from that, that's the starting point to learning, that's the starting point to reality, that's the starting point to uncovering truth. That's just, that's the starting. That's to enter back in on the hero's journey that you outlined.
Speaker 1:I think about the third batman movie as well. When he's in the prison, I mean literally, he's in the pit. Literally, he's in a prison, in a hole, and he has to climb his way out. And if he tries to do it under his old set of abilities, in his brokenness, though, so christian bale is like, like screw it, I'm just gonna climb. So he tries to climb out the prison, jumps, jacks up his back even more, and he has to.
Speaker 1:He has to unpack, restructure, recalibrate and then figure out who he is now, and in that he had to conquer some demons. He had to conquer his, his fear of failure. He had to conquer this, this. He is not the God of Gotham, he is just a man, but like he has to go back into it. And so I liked how you paralleled all that to to people, um, being willing to seek objective thinkers, being willing to engage with people who might draw a fence by, by going to the, the darkest entry point, the their fear being the entry point. This is something that, um, I've tried to integrate into my life. It it's not complicated, but it's not easy. So, to face fear, to face pain head on, and anytime I'm triggered to be like I feel fear of something, I fear pain, whether that's in a dialogue with my wife or something that somebody says, or a failure that I experienced, or whatever.
Speaker 1:To meditate on it, sit on it, stay in it, like. This is one thing that I realized is like stay in the pain, stay in the fierce, like, let marinate in it, not not in a masochistic way, but in a way of like there's a button being pushed, there's an alarm going off in the basement, just like there's a smoke alarm going off. Your reaction is not to smash the smoke alarm with the hammer because it's annoying. Your action should be to go find out where the freak the fire is right. So you hear the fire alarm, then you look for the smoke, then you look, then you start sensing for the heat to figure out where the fire is at right. And that's kind of the internal alarm system for pain and fear.
Speaker 1:And sometimes it is something as trivial as a lie that we were told as a child or something we believed as a child or a meaning that we attached to it, and sometimes it's something that's going to shift our entire identity. Yeah, it's going to break our mold and our capacity to be like Neo in his old identity. He had to become, like you said, a butterfly. It's going to be a game changer, and that's scary as hell man, Like Morpheus saying, saying like I'm offering the truth, nothing more. It's like I'm offering you like to tap into another perspective of reality.
Speaker 1:And there's a picture I recently saw which there's many, many different ways to to depict this, but the picture I saw was um, there was a cylinder and the cylinder, like the circle part of the cylinder, was blue, and then the outside of the cylinder was orange and there was, there was a corner of a wall, and so it was depicting two things at the same time that light. If light was shining on the cylinder from the outside, it would cast a shadow of a, of a rectangle with orange around it, and if it casts light from the circle side, then it appeared like a circle with a silhouette of blue and the, and it said this is true on one wall, this is true on another wall. And it said this is true, um, showing you basically the third, breaking the fourth wall of understanding this. And so, if we're willing to do that in our own personal lives, like there's Johnny Gunta, how he sees and perceives and understands and feels about himself, and then there's Johnny Gunta how I see him, how I perceive him, how I feel about him. But then there's this other thing that exists outside of both our our opinions and our subjective and preconceived ideas about johnny gunter.
Speaker 1:And if we're willing to, um, take this journey and go sit with other people, like eric weinstein alluded to these parties that he gets invited to where, uh, he'll be there as a mathematician and then there'll be like a UFC fighter there and then there'll be somebody who is an actor or a musician or something, and so there's no, there's no pissing match to be had here. There's no pissing match to be had. But like it's crazy the kind of affirmation that he received and felt and also the inadequacies and insecurities that he felt simultaneously in the space, because if he measured himself on his ability to fight, then the ufc fighter is obviously going to crush him if he he he has an avid music fan, he loves playing the guitar, but if he measured himself against a professional musician again inadequacy. But if he tried to measure himself against those people and their ability to solve equations and mathematical problems, then he would have a false sense of security. And that's sometimes how we engage with the world around us. Is we want to build up our security, build up our identity within our security, within our realm of abilities, versus like going and just enjoying and and experiencing people and um, and in those, in those kind of dialogues, he would have conversations that he never would normally have. Like if I was going to a symposium where we drink wine and we talk about all the new innovations in the tech world, that would be a very different kind of conversation versus if I went to a bar with a bunch of UFC fighters and had a kind of conversation with them, and so the point of that ramble is an ability to zoom out to see the room, and I've used this analogy before and it's basically the same thing as the circle and the rectangle.
Speaker 1:But if I put a, if I duct taped an X on the floor in the room, I said Johnny, I blindfolded you and I brought and I said you're going to, I'm going to bring you into a room and I want you to describe the room to me and I and I laid you down on the floor, stomach face down, and then took the blindfold off and I instructed you not to move your head or just tell me what you see without um, anything. You, you know well, I, I see wood grain, uh, on the floor. Probably this is a hardwood floor, maybe it's laminate. Um, it's a dark color, whatever. Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:I put the blindfold back on you, take you out of the room, bring another person in, lay them on their back and then take the blindfold off, instruct them not to move their head, explain the room to me. And then, oh, it's a white ceiling, like it's textured. There's a smoke alarm there, there's a kind of chandelier lighting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I take them out of the room. Then I bring a third person in that person's standing upright, but they're facing the side of the room with windows on it, and I could do this with the entire room, and then I could just have somebody come and stand in the doorway or, sorry, allow a person to turn on the X and have a panoram, so to speak, of the room and then tell them to describe room. So then the description would change from just wood paneling or textured ceilings or windows to well, there's plants in the front corner of the room, there's some plants there, and there's some wall art and there's a chandelier, and then there's some storage units on the left side of the wall and then there's several desks in here and so on, and the point is that's what we open ourselves up to when we go to these people who have we would never meet in our normal everyday goings of life, or or experts going narrow and deep in a specific field.
Speaker 1:But allow them to give us the narratives, like the hero narrative that you just explained. Give me the narrative of your life, give me the narrative of the world and, and again, the main thing that's going to to get in our way. If we boil it down, when I, when you, when you say something that outrages me, why does it outrage me? Because I created a belief system, that belief systems are created so that we can surround ourselves with similar belief systems, so we can quickly anticipate the behavior and responses of people, so that for the functionality sake of society like I'm using broad stroke statements, but that's the point. The gist of what I'm getting at is that I want to quickly anticipate how you're going to react to what I'm thinking and saying, so that we can quickly work together, more efficiently. Work together if I need to marry my daughter off to you, I know that you're a good guy, and so on, so on, so on. If we, if you don't believe what I believe, then I'm unsure of you. I'm I'm insecure. What? How is he going to react? And whatever? It takes longer, but in that taking longer, I get the panoramic of the room. I get a bigger slice of the pie.
Speaker 1:St Augustine once said like if the world was a book, those who don't travel have only read a page, and so I apply this kind of reasoning also here, and me and you are very different. We have different backgrounds, different, different paths that we've taken in life. But I would never try to try to compare myself to your strengths or compare you to my strengths and so on, because, in the words of albert einstein, if you married, if you measured a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it would. It would live thinking it's inferior or dumb, and so, like fish were made to swim, and and there are other animals that are made to climb a tree, it would live thinking it's inferior or dumb, and so like fish were made to swim, and there were other animals that were made to climb trees, and so on. And so I love everything you shared. I think that it's not complicated, but, again, it's not easy to enter into the darkest point of the wood and I loved also you shared about that.
Speaker 1:There's treasure hidden in plain sight. It's still hidden, but it's hidden right. It's there, right in front of you, like what you talked about, like the awareness of having thankfulness, like there's stuff right in front of you, you already have it, you already are in possession of it. Have you cultivated the ability to be thankful for having a refrigerator, having a phone, going to school, learning multiple languages? All this stuff it's hidden, right in plain sight. But then there's other stuff. You have to find it, you have to seek it. And that whole passage in Deuteronomy where there's like fire and smoke on a mountain and that's where God is and there's this invitation to people to come.
Speaker 1:And I had a friend who studied he has a doctorate degree in theology and he also has a master's degree in philosophy and he studied in Israel and he sat under rabbis, sometimes just listening, and one rabbi. The teaching style of the rabbi was he would ask one question and then leave the class. So one day he said the one question that he asked was why does God always meet with people on a mountain? And he just left and the students were kind of left to stew and marinate in that question. So they discussed amongst themselves but then they left and, you know, meditated on it individually, came back and, long story short was, the rabbi gave a really short answer and then left again and he'd come back a third time and then unpack it. But the answer that he gave was like why does God always appear on top of a mountain and ask people to climb a mountain or or meet people in a mountain? He's like, because you have to climb it.
Speaker 1:And so there is this entry in the in the story of deuteronomy. It's really crazy to parallel what you're saying entering the darkest point of the forest, because there's literally black smoke, thunder like noise, and what was fascinating was some people in the crowd just seen that and hurt. They said they heard loud noise, but other people heard god speaking. And then there was this invitation to purify yourself, stand in your doorpost, and there could. There could possibly potentially be a meeting, but you had to enter into the tree in black smoke, right, and you have to climb the mountain. And Vince Lombardi has a famous quote. He said the man on top of the mountain didn't fall there.
Speaker 1:And this journey is not something that you can be a passive spectator in as an individual, and you have to. There's no blueprint in the sense of for Johnny Gunta specifically to enter into this process. There's no the hero's journey I could Google that. And there's a picture and it's like I can recognize intuitively oh, this is me. And this part has happened in my life, like this and this and this, but there's not. Like no one gave me an instruction manual and said, michael personally, like this is, this is how you're going to conquer fear and pain in your life, because when you're this old, this will happen. And then do this and this, do this and this, this. It's something you just have to engage in and surrender to the process and be present in it. In the same way, he's like okay, take this pill, all I'm offering is you, the truth. And from that point on he's, he's surrendered to the process. He surrendered and staying present in in that and facing it as it comes. And just to end on this, thought one thing that Yaka Wilnick says that I really have. It's became my mantra Anytime I feel super bummed or I feel disappointed or I'm starting to have a pity party for myself.
Speaker 1:There's a YouTube video called Good, by Yaka Wilnick in in his podcast and he just talks about how, um, his philosophy in the military was like anytime shit went wrong, it went bad, something catastrophic happened. He just said, good, he's like now we have time to improve. You get injured? Good, now you have time to figure out what went wrong and improve. Um, uh, you don have the, you're not ready for the presentation. Okay, someone's going to get the, get the promotion before you. You know, you have to take this time and and recalibrate and figure out where you went wrong. You have to figure out where you're, you know where the issues are, and so on, and so that's, that's. That's been his mantra and his.
Speaker 1:The people who served under in the military annoyed the shit out of them because they would come to him. They're like hey, boss, boss, we have a problem here. And, uh, they stopped doing it Cause they're like. Um, the guy said, hey, we have this problem, but I already know what you're going to say. He's like well, what am I going to say? He's like, you're going to say good, and he's like and so this, this kind of, has become my mantra of like if shit gets real uncomfortable, real scary, real painful, good, how am I like where this is my departure point I'm.
Speaker 1:There's no avoiding it, like, and if I do avoid it, the only way for me to avoid it is to create a whole another set of problems. Um, and I come from an area of the us that has a pandemic of heroin and fentanyl use for like the last probably seven, eight years, and that that's like not to oversimplify people's process, but I think that that's a part of it. It's like we want to avoid the fear and pain. So we, we develop ways to avoid fear and pain, but we that still is a problem. And then we've created another set of problems because we're going to become dissatisfied in the cocoon. We're going to become dissatisfied if we're in the hero's journey, if we're in the abyss, if we're in hell, if we don't choose to figure out a way out and to push out and we take the path of least resistance and stay in hell.
Speaker 1:There's a saying there's a light at the end of the tunnel, but if you stay in the tunnel long enough, your eyes adjust to the darkness and it's like in that, like, are you going to navigate your way out or are you just going to? Just, I already figured out how to navigate here. So I'm going to live here, I'm going to stay here. Those people, when you look at their faces, they how old are you? I'm 35. Wow, I thought you were maybe 50. Anyway, sorry, that was my tangent on no no keep going, keep going.
Speaker 1:That has been pretty integral in a lot of different areas of my life, whether that's in personal hobbies I have, like jujitsu, whether that's in my marriage. I'd say this is probably the key strategy in my marriage is just find stuff that's provoking me, that I'm offended by that, I'm hurt by that my wife has said or done, and then meditate on it, sit on it, figure out. Okay, I hear the, I hear the smoke alarm. Where's the smoke, where's the fire? And how am I going to put this fire out so that I can have a greater capacity to communicate better, to do conflict better, to be loved, um, well, or to love my wife well, um.
Speaker 1:And if that's in a profession, it's like failure, like the fear of failure, I would say, in europe. One fascinating thing about Europe, yes, the difference between Americans and Europeans, I would say them, the level of pressure never to make mistakes in Europe is I couldn't even put a percentage to it how much higher it is than in America. The room for error in Europe is so small and it keeps people paralyzed and fear. Like to start a business here, to be an entrepreneur. Most people go and try their luck outside of Germany. It's not so common that people would try it here. There's actually a phrase set that says innovation is killed in the crib in Germany, and there's been many Germans who had to go outside of Germany and try to work out how to get something to work, and then, once it, many Germans who had to go outside of Germany and try to work out how to get something to work, and then, once it was functioning and running well, they would bring it back to Germany and the Germans would Germanize it. Maybe it makes some improvements, but they there's a saying never break a running system, and so that mentality is ingrained. And so, if we live in that kind of thinking like you referenced, kids learning language like little kids are babbling blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They have no fear of feeling like a fool or looking like a fool, and that's how you learn language. That's how I learned language.
Speaker 1:I took a German language course for eight months. Didn't really learn anything. I learned a little bit of basics, but didn't really learn anything. I started working in a kitchen and I just mimicked everybody who was there. I just mimicked like I would just repeat the words that they would say to get it in my mouth, even though I didn't understand what they were saying and people got annoyed with me, like they were so annoyed with me they're like, oh my God, he's like a parrot. Why does he keep doing that? But I was like I just said, listen, I have to learn.
Speaker 1:And you Germans are the ones who, like I just said, listen, I have to learn. And you Germans are the ones who, like Americans, always say you're in America, speak American. You know, germans are exactly the same. They're like like really really like angrily. Sometimes it's not so much like that. In the North, like in major cities, people are bilingual, but in the South, here in Bavaria, it's like real old school, like that you have to speak German if you're in Germany. I'm like, okay, americans say that I wave the white flag, I will learn German. And so the way that I did it was, like you said, not worrying about how I appear, how I look.
Speaker 1:But that also has to come with the meaning I attach to failure, and so for me, the meaning that I would attach to failure is giving up and quitting, not making mistakes. So in that sense, make mistakes fast, make mistakes. Often. Mistakes are where you learn. If you succeed, you bypass learning. And there's people who have kind of like peaked in their career, had like fast success, whether that's in sports or as an actor or singer or whatever. Like they were really famous fast. So they were really successful fast and they never went through the, to the, through the trial.
Speaker 1:What's this thing, the gauntlet of failure? When you go through the gauntlet of mistakes and things not working, that's your best teacher. I would say that to anybody. And if you can not perceive that as pain and not perceive that as in a fearful way or be uncomfortable with making mistakes, if you could totally embrace that, then you there's no limit, like literally the sky's the limit to what you're able to, to achieve in whatever field or whatever you're, whatever you're seeking out. And what I'm saying is really simple, but it's not easy. Even I mean I'm saying it but I'm also preaching to myself, you know, because, like, no one likes that feeling of ridicule. No, I don't like it. It's not that I like when people like that's dumb and and why do you want to do that? And that's not safe. And people, people want to like what you said earlier. They want to mirror their, their selves, onto you and so, like recently I took a job, um, I was working in an industrial job here and it was really well paid Like as a foreigner in the German economy.
Speaker 1:I was making more than people, uh, who have multiple college degrees, who I'm friends with. I mean, the work that I did was really manual labor and it was crazy shifts and whatever, but I was netting what I make, what comes to my bank, was more than a friend of mine who's a teacher, right, and I have six weeks paid vacation. I have all these bonuses and benefits, yearly bonuses and stuff with my job and I got I offered a job in e-commerce, marketing for Facebook and Instagram. The point of this is that Germans around me were so skeptical of it. They were like, no, why would you work for an American company? And you know your job that you have has an unlimited contract and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They could not even like many of them who I talked to this is not all of them.
Speaker 1:Other people who are close to me understand, but the point is is that there's people who are going to try to like narrate your life for you. They're going to try to attach their meaning to what's happening for you, and then you get the choice to say, like, am I going to believe that, am I going to partner with what you're telling me is true about my life? And am I going? And for me, I'm always like what is motivating you? And this is the way I perceive it could be totally wrong, but there's a huge emphasis here on security. There's a huge emphasis here on security because there's always a backstop and a safety net to catastrophic things happening. But you know, there's so many cheesy American sayings about this no risk, no reward, go big, go home, all these kinds of things.
Speaker 1:And so that's kind of more in my DNA and the spirit of who I am, like I would rather try big and fail big than live mediocre, like a mediocre life and not have stress and like what, what you were referring to earlier, it's actually that stress, actually the process going through that pain, actually the process of going through being uncomfortable or facing fear that like reshapes us, that that remolds us and then injects us with something that wasn't there before. It's like Johnny Gunter is always Johnny Gunter, but there's this amazing thing about the human experience that, as he interfaces with situations and events, that it actually can activate stuff in him. It's there, it's already there, it's already in your toolbox but it activates it and it gives you an option to use it, to use it in actual real life, to use it. To use it in actual real life. And then there's some ownership that comes with that and like that whole thing that you talked about, the caterpillar, that's just.
Speaker 1:That's just a muscle that when, when that muscle gets developed, you scale up. When I start doing bicep curls or whatever, like fitness is a great example of measurable change. Like you, you, you do the bicep curl with the caterpillar and you're like, oh shit, this is crazy. But you know, you start pumping that, that two pound weight and then something else happens um, that's maybe like a five pound weight, but you have the capacity and the motor skills even try it and so on, and you and you scale up and the things that you're able to achieve, if you're willing to go into the process of doing that is is fantastic, you know, and it's like you said, it's very you know you don't even know what you're going to scale up.
Speaker 2:You actually have no idea. You know so, even though the way that we've evolved, like, for example, the tongue, which was primarily an organ just to sense, taste and eat, right, um, was not developed for speech, you know I. I mean, if it was developed for speech it wouldn't be connected to the. You know it's all mixed up the windpipe and the esophagus and all that. It's a big problem. People choke all the time and die right, but yet this is the thing that we used to talk, so evolutionary speaking. Once we develop this ability to speak with the tongue that we used to talk, so evolutionary speaking we, once we develop this ability to speak with the tongue, it's what they call exaptation, right, and so it's when you take something that you didn't, its original use wasn't for that, but now you have exapted it for some other use, which now opens a doorway to a whole new way of thinking that you couldn't possibly imagine. So now, once the tongue and speech and the logos comes into the picture, you know, you have.
Speaker 2:You know we start developing. You know ways of you know trying to keep the to sort of record what we're seeing. You know, so you would have you know back in the day. You know we had a hieroglyphs cuneiform, all of that shit, right, it takes a very long time to learn, right? And this, this is a cycle technology that was reserved for very few people, right? But then you know, then there's a whole shift that comes with the Axial Revolution. This is like some 800 BC. We start developing alphabetic literacy and numeracy, so it's the development of coinage and things like that. But something very interesting, something very interesting happens once we develop alphabetic literacy, because it's much quicker to learn than ideographic literacy, right, right? And so now what's happened to the psychotechnology is you have the ability to network one brain with another in different time states, right and so
Speaker 2:now something's happening. You are. You're not just having to record everything in here. You can reread the words of some, you know some sage who lived a thousand years ago and understand that for yourself. Now, this is crazy. Something huge has happened in that shift, and so this is basically what was the catalyst? Was the catalyst for developing our empathic abilities? Right, for our ability to reflect.
Speaker 2:You know, robert Bella calls this second order thinking, metacognition, and basically what this means is, through reflection, we have the ability to change our mind, right? So here's the thing about the mind. You you were talking about how you know the people in that room different perspectives. You know that cylinder. Which way is the light coming from? It's different from all sides. Right?
Speaker 2:We have this incredible capacity for self-deception. That's number one, right? See, there's always a double-edged sword to this fantastic machine. One is the capacity for self-deception, right? See, there's always a double-edged sword to this fantastic machine. One is the capacity for self-deception, right? So we think everything that we see is what we see. Nah, it ain't. You're seeing what you want to see, right? This is why I love magic tricks. I love watching magicians do their thing, because it just proves time and time again that you don't know shit, you can't see everything right, you're actually pretty much blind. Really, metacognition means that we also have the capacity for self-correction. Right Now, this one is the key.
Speaker 2:The capacity for self-correction is self-transcendence. This is that. It's where metacognition becomes metanoia, it's where you have the ability to change your mind on something. And that is huge. Man, this is some deep stuff. This is some deep stuff. I mean it's been told by many people in many different ways, but people don't really get this. They think they need to hold on to some paradigm that they'll be safe with that. But the one true constant in the world is change. You got to know that unless you change your mind about some stubborn ways of thinking that you've been holding on to, you will crumble, much like an old building that ossifies over time, you know, becomes brittle. It will crumble, right.
Speaker 2:And so there's this one quote in the Dharmapadaada, and it says the mind is the chief thing, like there is no enemy greater than your own mind and, at the same time, there is no ally greater than your own mind. There is no enemy greater than your own mind and there is no ally greater than your own mind. So people got to ally greater than your own mind. So people got to realize, like the war, where does it begin? It starts here. It starts right here, changing your mind about what you thought was one way of doing things you know, but then surprising yourself with things like you know, you know, like, like the tongue, which is exacted to perform the function of speech, we had no idea where that would take us.
Speaker 2:So if you're going to train yourself to think differently about even your own body, like, okay, you start doing biceps and curls and things like that, I if that then means you, you, you know, you're learning a whole new form of you know, um, body and mind through jujitsu and um, it's opened up a whole way of seeing the world, a whole new lens, um, that you're now conceptually blending. It's giving you answers and you're connecting dots. Like those are things that you couldn now conceptually blending. It's giving you answers and you're connecting dots Like those are things that you couldn't have expected before. I mean, you were just expecting to get healthy. You know I'm going to be able to tackle people when I get in a fight, but no, you're learning all the stuff about life and whatnot. So it's cool when we try new things.
Speaker 2:But I think the key thing here is to for the people and I want to say this to the people that are stuck in ruts, people that feel depressed, people that feel anxious about life I want to say this. I want to say try something new, go where you haven't been before, know that you have a capacity for great self-deception, but also know that you have a capacity for great self-deception, but also know that you have a capacity for self-correction. And so, while the self-correcting part is harder and it is the narrow path, this is that one thing you can do that will liberate you literally. And so there's a word for this change. It's a greek word, it's called metanoia. It means change your mind.
Speaker 2:You know and it's a great secret, it's like um for the people that can change their mind. They can turn away from one way of doing things and move towards another way of doing things that they possibly thought that they previously thought was either impossible or absolutely wrong. Just change your mind about your paradigm, because your paradigm right now is keeping you in a place of anxiety. It's keeping you in a place of depression. Why? Why, right? So if you're not finding the answers there, you gotta move, got to move, and if you stay still, you go stagnant. You start to stink. You know that. So if you're suffering with the stench of that, best thing to do is to get up and start moving. Try new things, talk to new people, learn about different points of view, indulge the things that you've been interested in.
Speaker 2:curious about that other people have told you stay away from it. Um, and I say that you know in the in, in the best way you know, you have a brain. I mean you. You, you can be responsible with your life and you have to start knowing that there's always going to be two sides to the coin. So, whatever you try right, there'll be good things that come out of it, there'll be bad things that come out of it, but obviously, if you're seeking the truth, then you will find it. You seek it, you will find it. But, yes, you don't have to be brave. Will bad things pop up on the way? Yes, definitely. Will good things pop up on the way? Yes, definitely. Will good things come up? Will revelations about yourself and possibilities about yourself that you did not know come up as well? Yes, absolutely. Will you feel good about that? 100%, because that's what being human is all about. It's about learning that you are literally limitless, and the whole journey is a journey of discovery discovery of who you are.
Speaker 1:I think I'll confess something for me in this. In the process that you're you're talking about one thing I felt kind of static in my identity. I felt kind of I saw myself really in a specific kind of way and in order to branch out and again do this thing that you're talking about about when I'm listening to people, not to try to correct them or be offended or outrage or whatever I felt like I was being. I was deceiving myself or being deceptive to myself or not being authentic. And one thing that I realized was that I was operating out of a mode of thinking where I felt like I had to be the same person all the time to everybody. I don't know if people connect with this or understand what I mean, but I just felt like I'd grown up and I'd seen people wear masks and they were being disingenuous and I felt like, okay, I would like to be the same and speak the same, and like with whether I'm talking to my parents, whether I'm talking to Johnny Gunter, whatever, I'll be the same guy. But I was coming from the departure point of when I'm talking to Johnny Gunter, when I'm talking whatever, I'll be the same guy, but I was coming from the departure point of like I'm a static person, like I'm always the same guy, and I would like to quote Bruce Lee when he said be like water when you pour water into a cup, it becomes a cup. Pour water in a bowl, it becomes a bowl. Pour water in a vase, it becomes a vase. The water is always water, but it takes on a different form depending on what the situation is.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of how I broke out of that that mold and reinterpreted even what Paul said about being all things to all people. And I don't feel like I'm like, for example, the way that I would interface and share love, so to speak, with my wife is very different than the way that I would share love with you. And that doesn't mean that I'm betraying who I am or being disingenuous or whatever, but I had to have that kind of shift and I think many people are locked into if we're talking about religious types or people who are institutionalized, they're like I have to stay within this paradigm and if I speak a different way or I'm with, you know, interfacing with people in a different way, I'm being disingenuous and it's not that that way at all. And I don't know, maybe some people connect to that, maybe people not, but that was some. That was a huge process for me to kind of undertake because I felt like, yeah, that I was, I was being disingenuous.
Speaker 2:Does that make any sense? Oh yeah, it totally makes sense. Okay, I think that's one of the our greatest fears. Man, Like we all, we all crave authenticity. We want to be authentic, and a good example of authenticity is a child just being them, you know. But then when the guests arrive and mom and dad say, hey, why don't you do that thing? Why don't you just start doing a little dance thing? That you do, you know. And now you're asking the.
Speaker 2:It is possible for human beings to retain authenticity and be able to play on demand, much like many musicians do you know, when they really get in the zone. I mean, they're doing it for a job, but they're still able to really just get into the spirit of the song and just, you know, do their and it's, it's a wonderful thing to watch. But the fear that you are not you, you know that's what happens when we've had enough people tell us that something's wrong with us. You know something's wrong with you, Just like how you said about the fish. Right, the fish, it's like. It's like someone says oh little fish, let me save you from drowning, you know.
Speaker 2:Like some monkey comes to the fish let me save you from drowning and he puts the fish up in a tree. I've had that done to me in my life many times, you know I'm a fish. I'm a creature of the sea, right but.
Speaker 2:I'm supposed to act and perform and function in a way that is defined by them right, and so that's the thing. All human beings are uniquely and wonderfully made, right. It's important for people to realize that, even with your own children, you can't control the outcome. You cannot try and you will fail. All right, my parents. We have four kids. All right, me, my younger brother, sam, there's Hiba, youngest sister, and Divya, each one of us super different from the other. Believe me Now, when we grew up together, like, we had some shared interests, but then, when we grew up apart, in different parts of the world, like, we all became different individuals. My parents could not have predicted that and they've only now started enjoying their kids because they've come to a point where they're like I can't control the outcome. They are so radically different from each other, especially us like. In fact, the more we try and like control, the more we find that we end up destroying and worse outcomes come.
Speaker 2:Come about because of, because of our need to control, and their need to control comes from like, like most people in society. It's like I want to control my kids because I I care about what other people will say about them. You got to stop worrying about what other people say. You know, that's step one and uh, step two just deal with yourself first. You know, if you, if you, are truly authentic, then honestly, man people, they really can't argue with that. In fact, when you see someone who's truly authentic, you just you're mesmerized, you're just like wow, they're so comfortable being themselves. I want to be like that. No one has a problem with it. It's actually a very attractive thing.
Speaker 2:But these people have come to a point where they just know who they are and they're going to play their part, and you know, it doesn't matter their political view, religious view, whatever. It's a wonderful site to watch, like people in a in a flow state, an authentic flow state, it's great. Nothing like it. And so this is kind of like why we all want to go there. We all want to be authentic. Well, guess what? To be authentic means that you, you might not be playing the part that someone else expects you to play. So dad wants you to be an engineer and you're going to play the role of engineer then and you're going to speak with the engineer's mask. Well, maybe you're feeling inauthentic because you're wearing the engineer's mask, but can you do? You get what I mean. You get what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think for me, my, my dysfunction was I wanted to give people all parts of myself and in in reference to the engineers mask, it's like, uh, when I show up to do engineer stuff, I'm talking to engineers, that I'm, I'm just going to give you the engineer part, and that's not being disingenuous, that's just me showing up to what's happening right now. And if there's an invitation, like if we met outside of work, and there's an invitation where I give you different parts of myself, I can. But I think I had an unhealthy relationship with what you said of like when I was growing up it was also the same thing. There was a big fear of what will people think. And so giving all parts of myself meant exposing people to my biggest failures and the like kind of ugliest sides of me where I would just like, hey, this and this and this happened in my life, so that, like that would be the departure point. Will you accept me as I am, knowing these things or not?
Speaker 1:And then I had to revalue how to share things, because when you live like that, it's a huge risk because, for one thing, that kind of vulnerability is super scary or disturbing for a lot of people just to share like deep things with people really quickly and it took me a long time to figure that out like, oh, especially being here in europe, in germany, like you know, things just take way longer.
Speaker 1:Like friendships just take way longer to develop, um, and and being, having intimacy, being vulnerable with each other, is just not a norm of the culture and you have to like, really be purposed and and even then it doesn't happen. But yeah to, on one side of it it's like none of my business what you think about me. But then the more intimate we are, and if I want to love you and respect you, well then I need to figure out if I'm violating you, hurting you or, you know, figure out those blind spots that we talked about earlier. And if I would subject myself to the, to the, to the loving criticism of Johnny Gunter in the pursuit of loving him. Well, that's very different than like me being estranged from you, like being an acquaintance of you and me basing my life choices on what I'm not doing and doing off of my supposed thoughts about what you think about me, and so in that sense, it's none of my business what you think about me good, bad or ugly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that took me a while, man. My whole life, most of my life, man, it was defined by other people. You know, if people thought I was good at something, I was talented at something, I'll do more of that right and if people said, hey, man, you're going to become this and that, then I would look at that and be like, well, this is what I'm going to become, then I really didn't know who I was and my compass was I really didn't know who I was and my compass was it was on the outside of myself and other people would turn the dial and tell me which way to go.
Speaker 2:I found myself then becoming a people pleaser, and this is what really scared me was because, yeah, I wanted to be all men to all you know, all things, all men. But I found that I was duplicitous, you know. I found that I was disingenuine. I found that, you know, remove all of these people from my life. I still I do not know who I am and I have not had a chance to develop my own voice, and it's a terrifying place to be.
Speaker 2:It's terrifying when you're you're in a dark place, you go to someone for help and then they tell you that, yeah, this is where you've been going wrong, this is what you're doing, da-da-da-da. And it's like especially if you've heard the advice before and you've tried it and it's not gotten you anywhere Like they're missing something, they don't have maybe enough information for the next leg of your journey, like you have to be willing to leave the tribe, leave the village and go and find that thing that you're looking for outside of that. But it takes guts to leave the tribe, you know, because you leave the tribe and then people are like, oh well, there, he's gone, johnny's gone, again lost, he's gone. And um, you know, if your identity is created by people that are really close to you in your community, when that happens, um, it's, it's really tough. But, like with the way my life is shaped up, is that I've been, I've moved from different countries.
Speaker 2:You know, I spent six years of my life in the States. Prior to that I was in a boarding school in South India just a little bubble, different world, right. America was a different world. After America, I was in Dubai different world, different friends, different community. And then, after Dubai, I was in Mumbai again different world, different friends, different community. And now Bangalore, right. And most of these moves were not voluntary moves In fact none of them were and I'm thankful that they were involuntary, at least up until this point in my life. Looking back, I can see I'm grateful that they were involuntary and they were sort of forced upon me, because I wouldn't have made the move otherwise.
Speaker 2:Man, I was too comfortable where I was, I liked the way things were, I liked being a people pleaser, I liked making people happy and when they said Johnny Dance, I would be that kid that would dance and do the thing. You know, but actually that wasn't me. I thought it was me, but it wasn't me. I've discovered now that a lot of my problems happened because I needed other people to define me, like I said.
Speaker 2:Now I'm in a place where I have a very small, small group of friends. I wouldn't even I'm quite the hermit man, I'm quite the hermit. So I know a lot of people that say, ah, community, this, that, yeah, that's important. And I have that in my own way, like I teach at a school, my community and my students, right, I'm responsible for them. My community is my family, my mom, dad, brothers and sisters and close friends. So when I talk to, to you, even catching up after a long time, it's community, but it's it's rare. But do I have like something like the kinds of circles of friends that I had in america or in boarding school or in dubai or mumbai, which were large groups of friends, have had made lots of demands of me? I had to be in a lot of places, be many things to many men and women. Man, that was exhausting, it was absolutely exhausting. I hated it, like it gave me a kick, but deep down inside I hated it, man.
Speaker 2:And so now I find myself at a point where, much like a hermit, you know, a man of the caves, a man of the mountains I keep to myself and then I will invest my time in one or two individuals that are in alignment with where it is that we're going, where it is that we're going, where it is that this ship is going, and if they want to be a part of that journey then they can come aboard.
Speaker 2:But I can only really invest my time in one, maybe two people max, and mentor them and, in the same way, be mentored by I wouldn't say one man or one individual or anything like that. I don't believe in that, because while when I was young I needed a mentor, I benefited greatly from a mentor, as I'm older, now, as much as I would love a mentor, I find that I still have to go with what's in my head. So if that old guy ain't here, my mentor is going to become a composite of multiple characters, right? Multiple people whose wise words are documented. Right it's. I'm networking my brain with another brain in another time state and I'm reading the words of lao tzu, jesus christ, right, um, I can listen to lectures by carl jung or alan watts, or even um jordan peterson, right and, and they all become composite characters for me that make up the mentor, right, um? Because ultimately the mentor's job is not to have you be a disciple for life.
Speaker 2:The idea is that once you've figured it out, now you go, yeah you know when, when you, when you get, when you get the secret, it's time to leave.
Speaker 2:Then the mentor is a success. But if you need someone to keep passively sucking at your teat, you know you're not a mentor, You're in a deep old mother, is what you are. Right, the child must fly and become their own thing, which is really interesting. Because for Jung, you know his mentor was. You know Jung had to. You know Freud's view on psychology was quite limited, you know, although what Freud did was still. He still unpacked a whole lot of stuff, Like we wouldn't be talking about the subconscious or anything like that, if it wasn't for Freud. But Jung took it to the next level. Jung was on a higher way, higher dimension, and so Jung understood that the psychology, our psychology, was connected to something much, much greater and it spanned time and it connected us across different cultures, across different generations. He called us the collective unconscious and but yes, Freud hated the fact that Jung went off on his own and so Jung was excommunicated from the Freudians and which was sad.
Speaker 2:But then, when Jung became a mentor himself to Eric Neumann, became a mentor himself to Eric Neumann, he did the right thing, you know. And so when Neumann wrote his book, the Origins and History of Consciousness, jung writes in the foreword of this book and he basically says and he basically says that this difficult and meritorious task the author has performed with outstanding success. He has woven his facts into a pattern and created a unified whole which no pioneer could have done, nor could have attempted to do. I unwittingly made landfall on a new continent long ago, namely the realm of matriarchal symbolism. And as a conceptual framework for his discoveries, the author uses a symbol whose significance first dawned on me in my recent writings on the psychology of alchemy, the Uroboros. And he continues. He basically says in conclusion that this book is the book that he would have written if he had stayed alive and gone on to the next phase. And so, yeah, neumann also forged new territory in the exploration of the vast unconscious. But Jung didn't hold him back. Jung was like, because he knew this thing is so big that it needs explorers to just keep going and keep going, and keep going. But yeah, man. I think this takes us back to the very beginning of our conversation. Like technology, you know what is that? Is it the enemy, is it the friend? Would you make it our whole thing? See, I think it's both. You know, I think that we have journeys to make as individuals, but really, the truth is we do not know what the kid that hasn't grown up with this device will do when they get it.
Speaker 2:In India right now, you see, they banned TikTok because of what's happening with China, which is very sad. But when TikTok was up and running, some of the most creative stuff that you could possibly see was coming out of the Indian kids on TikTok, and these kids were from low-income families, right, all they had was a smartphone at best, and yet they were doing, they were making some really cool videos, really cool jump cuts, you know, all just done with the apps in their phone. Like you might look at some of this stuff and be like I, traditionally, as a filmmaker, would have done this on my computer. I would have used after effects, you know, I would have used final cut pro and things like that to edit that kind of a video. But no, they're doing it all on their phone, and so that's the interesting thing about Gen Z is that Gen Z has grown up with the smartphone and they have learned how to use this technology like from birth. You know, it's just very natural to them.
Speaker 2:And so, as the world changes, like I think we're entering some very interesting times. So, like, how you know, uh, when we invented the you know the alphabet, alphabetic literacy, and that was huge for us, we now have another kind of literacy. This isn't this, this is another type of psychotechnology which it connects us to creativity on a whole other level. People don't realize that it's like. So I have a hope.
Speaker 2:My hope is this man, that young people and I really think that, especially in India, I can speak for India. I know that once India becomes digitized right, once there are no dead zones here, once education goes online and kids in villages can start learning from people all over the world, that's going to change everything, man, right, because it's going to be like they wake up literally. It's going to happen so fast as it'd be like them waking up like no limbs one day, and then next day I'm a fully functional human being. I'm going to start running marathons. What the hell was this kid doing, you know, sleeping when he had all of this stuff. You know, this middle class kid had everything in front of him and he wasn't using it. It's going to happen. Like that man, there's going to be a revival coming up from the bottom, from the gutter up, and I know it. I know it because I saw evidence of that on TikTok already. So, yeah, the power is going to go back to the children.
Speaker 2:Man in this new world, and because the kids know how to change, they are not scared of trying new things. They try new apps all the time, whereas us older guys we're like, ah man, I'm comfortable with Photoshop, like I don't want to use Procreate. You know like, screw that, but that's dumb. But these kids, they're just going to try new things all the time, like, and more power to them, because change is happening at a faster pace than it ever has.
Speaker 2:Right Hawking says that we're living in the age of complexity. Okay, it's only going to get more and more complex. So the one way to handle the one true constant, which is change, is to be a constant learner, to be a constant. You know metanoia, mother freaker. You know changing your mind about stuff, trying new things, exploring new things connecting the dots between your localized ideas and broader ideas that have always existed from the beginning of time to now, the whole left brain and right brain thinking. I'm just trying to tie up this whole discussion into one little fun bundle. But um, because we have covered a lot here and there's a lot of stuff you know, but um uh, do you have any good books to read?
Speaker 2:some?
Speaker 1:some recommendations for people based on what we talked about, or podcast or anything like that um well, podcast, yeah, I listened to jordan peterson's podcast and I listened to eric weinstein's podcast, yakuwa lakes podcast. Um, books, I would say uh. Sapiens brief history of the Human Race, I think by Yuval Haraj I can't say his last name and Can't Hurt Me David Goggins, pro-worlds for Life, jordan Peterson, the Way Less Traveled by Scott Peck. Yeah, one thing you said that I wanted to ask you is actually I did jot down some things before we start talking. We didn't really cover anything that I jotted down, but it's been great. But one thing I did write down was, for me, what you described about having like this kind of collage of mentors and having access to them, because we now have books and we have media and we have the internet, so we can have books and we have media and we have the internet, so we can have many different mentors.
Speaker 1:One thing I do is at my desk, I post on Instagram about it, but I do it. I post inspirational quotes, but I also just post pictures of the people who inspire me and like I kind of try to surround myself with them, because there's this concept. I've seen this multiple times but they're in different streams. But there's a book I read by Napoleon Hill called Think Rich, grow Rich. I was really turned off by the title, but a lot of people suggested to me and anyways he alludes to this that he had like a through visualization. He would meditate and he would picture himself sitting at a table and at that table would be like giants in the industry that he respected or that he felt would give him good counsel, and like different people, like abraham lincoln was one person, so they all would become characters of their own, like in his meditation state, in the eye of his mind, and they would come and give him. He would submit his ideas or his plans or whatever, and then some of them would either support and encourage him or criticize and critique the ideas that he had.
Speaker 1:I found this principle also in a book called the Secret Place. I forget the author's name, but essentially this guy was talking about using your mind's eye to carve out meeting places with the person of Jesus and being mentored by the person of Jesus, and he said something that happened by accident, not by necessarily him proactively seeking. It was that other people would start appearing in this space in his mind's eye, and so there were, like different people, biblical characters, but also different people in the world who would show up and start speaking into his life, and he didn't know how he felt about it exactly, but he found that it was okay because Jesus, in the transfiguration, spoke with Moses and Elijah. So there's this concept of being mentored by people. What you said was so important that it transcends time and space, and so my question I say all that to ask like my question to you is is in your, in your round table, who, who are some like big influencers for you, of people who are speaking into your life, who are reshaping your perspective and helping you get breakthrough?
Speaker 2:It's a very good question, man. Um, you know, I do. I do have literal conversations with people, you know, and uh, um, I find it is. It's a great way to step outside myself and take a different perspective, and this is possible because I've always been a method actor, right. So it's it's really easy for me to really get into the bones of another person, to start performing and then, as I do that, I start saying things that surprise me. You know, it's like, uh, that's why method actors, when they start like uh, doing an impersonation, they love doing them, because they say different things every time, like I didn't know I could come up with that, but I did, because I was embodying that person, right, that's what makes it great. So these are some of the fun things that human beings can do.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I step on a jordan peterson, right, but I have like I'll be, I'll be honest with you like, so with peterson, are we really doing this? Okay? So johnny ganta likes jordan peterson, right. And then there's my shadow, okay, who is called Antum and Crucible, and he really does not like Jordan Peterson. All right, so I like that. But you see, I brought it out of the darkness and I'm absolutely clear with how I this sort of thing, this like there are things that he said that has literally liberated me, you know, saved my soul. But then there are things that he said that has has literally liberated me, you know, saved my soul. But then there are things that he says that I feel like Jordan, you can, you can take it to the next level, but you're holding back here. I wonder why? Right, and that's where someone like Alan Watts will come in and so he'll sort of sort of take the baton and then, you know, carry that conversation further, right.
Speaker 2:And then you know, maybe Watts will pass on that baton. And then, you know, carry that conversation further, right? And then, you know, maybe Watts will pass on that baton to Terence McKenna and he'll start talking about some other crazy stuff, about, I don't know, language and entheogens and things like that, but then maybe he will reference Jung again. So now the batons pass back to Jung and then Jung will reference Eliade, and then, you know, it's, it's already become a lot of these people, and then Eliade will lead me to Joseph Campbell. You know, joseph Campbell will lead me to some, some movie that I've been meaning to watch. Now that director and his ideas are sort of, you know, I'm sort of seeing my life played out through that lens and um.
Speaker 2:And then sometimes, like you know, some some great fun character pops in, like camille palia, um, who, oddly enough, like I mean, I think she's, she's a, she's, she's, she's a, she's a riot man, she's amazing. But yeah, she wrote the book Sexual Personae, which I highly recommend. It's a dense book, but I mean you can open any page and just start reading and even if you don't understand what she's saying, she's a maestro when it comes to language. But I discovered Paliya on my own a long time ago and then rediscovered her again thanks to jordan peterson, because that man keeps surprising me with some of the people that he talks to. So, and he did an interview with palia and I'm like, hey, man, that's cool and you know, that's when, yeah, and then you see, all of the dots are connected, like I find that, with this particular crew that I've mentioned at my round table.
Speaker 2:You know we have palia, but she, she, she gets jordan peterson right, so she's connected to, she's connected to him in some way. Now, right, peterson has always been, you know, onto this whole stuff, okay, maps of meaning, right. So, right, brain, left brain, all of that stuff and mythology. He's trying to understand that, right, and all of this comes from a place where he wouldn't have been able to venture there if it wasn't for this guy who also sits at the round table Carl Jung, psychology and alchemy, right. And so now, what one man couldn't do all of these people are doing together now to create this composite mentor, right?
Speaker 2:And so now, jung, then references in the fine print, like all this stuff that you know I wouldn't otherwise think of. You know, looking up um, because they're thousands of years old. But then, like I said, I'll be listening to a podcast. Some dude like terence mckenna will then bring me back to young. He might mention merci, eliad. And then here I pick up eliad forging the crucible and I start reading that and I realize, oh, my god, this is answering all my questions about like you know shamanism, because I was my questions about like you know shamanism Because I was super interested in that, because you know, for example, I went through an interesting experience.
Speaker 2:I don't think we have time to go into that in this podcast. Maybe we'll save that for a part two. But I was working on an art piece called Jacob's Ladder and Jordan Peterson has a lecture on Jacob's Ladder and, oddly enough, he does talk about shamanism in that lecture and how it's connected. So once I started creating that piece, I started reading a lot of Eliad and stuff started becoming more clear to me. And then, yeah, man, then of course there's always going to be this dude who sort of Joseph Campbell, who's sort of like the left arm to Jung's right arm, who sort of made sense of mythology for normal people. And now we just use his work like it's no big deal with every blockbuster Hollywood movie that we make, right? And then, yeah, then there's certain outliers who I wouldn't mention on the podcast publicly because they're my secret mentors. Yeah and yeah.
Speaker 1:Is there anybody specific who you pull inspiration from for your art style, like the stuff that I seen on your website, like one. One person that kind of popped up into my head like when I saw some of your pieces was Salvatore Dali. Dali, yeah, and specifically that painting of a dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before waking up.
Speaker 2:It's the longest title ever for a painting for a painting, but, um, um, no man when it comes to art dude. Oddly enough, I don't have any mentors. I mean, I know I stand on the shoulders of giants and all that. You know I'm gonna say that, but I don't have. I don't have someone that I've looked up to and want to be, because my own art keeps shape-shifting. In fact, I hate it when I get stuck in a box, when people think that I'm just doing flora, fauna, botanicals and nature in the Garden of Eden. That becomes old to me after some time. I eventually that's just there for a season and then I need to go. Dark man, I need to show you the underbelly, the other side of that, right? So the serpent in the garden, let's explore that. Let's explore the dark caverns of your, the parts of yourself that you're avoiding. Let's explore that. You know some people get annoyed with that. They're like Johnny, why can't you just give me the Garden of Eden?
Speaker 1:the nice happy stuff.
Speaker 2:I'm like I'm sorry, dude, but this is this is this is what I do, you know, and so my, my own artwork keeps shape-shifting.
Speaker 1:I shape-shift with styles, I shape-shift with themes, but I do believe that it's all connected into into a much, much bigger picture that makes up a more completed idea of, I guess, what it is that I'm trying to discover about myself when I make this stuff yeah, I remember like someone recounting Bob Dylan winning like some folk singer award, and then he was invited to some music festival and then when he took the stage he like had an electric guitar and like people like were violently freaking out because it was like Bob Dylan, like that's not who you are, like you're the folk singer with string and acoustic instruments and whatever. And he's like picked up electric guitar and started playing. He's like no, you don't get it. Um, and there's a, there's a polish, a polish, um painter. Well, I can't say painter. He's obviously artist because he he started in photography and then people like ridiculed him. Photography because at the time he was taking these really obscure pictures from weird angles and perspectives and at the time like people wanted like really clear photos and like straight on perspectives and so it was very artsy what he was doing. It's not that big of a deal. Now, when you look at his photography, like it's not that big of a deal, but at the time he's really ridiculed by it. He departed from that study architecture and then later he just fell into painting and the things that he painted A lot of people would say that they're disturbing, but what I find fascinating about it is the imagery. There's a lot of hyper symbolism to it.
Speaker 1:He was heavily influenced by, like, the German Nazi occupation of Poland, the concentration camps, the Catholic church in Europe and those kinds of themes. And he never titled any of his pieces of art, so it's just literally like this is B7. Like he just just to have a title on it if you want it, for the sake of selling it or categorizing it or whatever. But there was no like title and people like would ask him often what it means. He was like figure it out. He didn't want to, he didn't even want to entertain that kind of dialogue. So you see the influence from those pastor things. Like, for example, there'd be like a Catholic looking cathedral, it looked kind of like Notre Dame, but it was made out of flesh. It looked like it was made out of stretched flesh over like like, for example, where the stained glass would be, you would see like the, the stretch, like as if you would stretch flesh over it and you could see the points of, like the barriers of where between the glass. But and it was the color blue. And so people had to kind of unpack and decipher his art and one thing that popped out was the kind of blues.
Speaker 1:He went through a time where he just used this really specific kind of blue, and what's crazy is the kind of blue that he used. There's only one way to make it and it's through a chemical, and it's the same chemical that the Nazis used to gas people in the showers and that blue would actually appear in the showers there. And so there's these layers, even with choosing the colors that he chose, um, anything. So I I for one, like enjoy people diving into, um any aspect of life, um, whether it's the good, the good, the bad, the ugly, and I think it's like, I don't know, maybe we're conditioned in a way, like people who would throw shade at you for not continuing to do garden and bean stuff, or like whatever it's like we're conditioned by brand recognition to perceive people in a certain way and they want to brand Johnny Gunta and make it so, so, so, and so when you conflict with that, people don't know how to interface with each other. Sometimes they don't know how to interface with art or interface with what's happening.
Speaker 1:I would say the same is true with, like this podcast. Some people were like, oh, this is too long, it's not structured, it's it's. They give me all these reasons why I don't like it and I was like, well, I never set out to do the things that you're doing. Like people are treated like they have no attention span and they're treated like they're morons. They're treated like you don't, you can't listen to anything if it's longer than four seconds or four minutes. If it's longer than four minutes, you don't have the capacity. I'm like, I refuse to believe that about people. I refuse to try to condition people like that, and one thing that I wanted was to have imperfect conversations.
Speaker 1:Like because giving each other the platform to speak, and like in this whole conversation there was this kind of back and forth with me and you, you would say something and it like all these fireworks would go off in my head and so then then I would come back and you go back. We never we never sat down and said we're going to make these talking points, condense it and like compress it and then polish it and then give it to people like that. There is a place and time for that and a space for that and a utility for that, but enabled to have these imperfect conversation is a muscle we lost, where we're not going to talk about religion at the dinner table. We're not going to talk about politics at the dinner table, but we're not going to engage in imperfect conversations because we don't want to have any kind of possible confrontation or conflict or difference of opinion. And so, like I don't know, like I feel that I'm like one side of me is conflicted.
Speaker 1:Where I understand people's time is valuable, so they're probably listening passively as they're running on the treadmill, going to work or doing something cooking in the kitchen. So I don't want to like just be noise're imbeciles and incompetent of listening to a long form dialogue. That's not this pre-packaged, branded kind of thing, and so I would maybe say that the explorative nature of your mind coming out through your art and people being able to interface with it, maybe would be a similar journey. I don't want to project on you, but I just sense at the time that I've known you, I would never be able to nail you down as something really specific and that's why I said, when I asked you to do the podcast, I said, johnny, will you be my Alex Jones?
Speaker 2:And have I been that for you?
Speaker 1:Dude, you've been Johnny Gunta. Alex Jones can't hold a flame to you like you're uniquely and specifically Johnny Gunta, and I really, really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I appreciate everything you shared. You tickled my brain the whole time and, yeah, it's such a joy to connect with you and here.
Speaker 2:Likewise man. This need to happen for a very long time. You know, since you said that you had the idea for the podcast, you know I was very excited about it and I knew that we were like already dabbling in a lot of the same stuff. You know, and when you were talking about, you know, your idea for the design, for the artwork and and even the main maps and stuff, like I knew that, like you know, there was some, some synergy there would be synergy between the two of us.
Speaker 2:If we got in a conversation and I felt that, I felt that throughout this whole thing, like that, there wasn't like a pause or an awkward moment, or you know, I feel like we just went from one interesting thought to another and we bypass all the boring. Well, what are you up to right now? You know what do you do for work and this, and that you know and I knew that this would happen with a person like you. You know, I'm grateful for that and both you and Vanessa have been a very big part of my life, like you know.
Speaker 2:I said I am a hermit, right, but there are very few people that will always have a very special place in my life. And so you and Vanessa have that special special place in my life. Have that special special place in my life, you know before.
Speaker 2:I met you guys. I was kind of like a like a stone man. I was hard, I was a stone. I didn't think that. You know that anything. I think at the time how I would describe it the word I used to describe it was that you guys opened my eyes up to the mystical, which was necessary for me at that stage of my life. I needed to know that there was another way of seeing the world, and so I'm very, very thankful for that man. Without you guys I, honestly, I would have. I do not know what trajectory my life would have taken in terms of my philosophy and how I think about things, but a very important time in my life Both of you showed up. Yeah, it was great. It was great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I appreciate those words, dude. I appreciate that a lot. I love you, man, to appreciate those words, dude, I appreciate that a lot. I love you, man. To wrap this up, where can people check out some of your art? You're on Instagram. You have a website called Studio Ganta. That's G-A-N-T-A dot com and you have various things going on there, but there's artwork. There's artwork is online shop there. You check out and your instagram is at studio ganta at studio ganta.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, and I'll link. I'll link it. Um, I'll put a link of that in the description of the video and everything so people can click through and have that. Yeah, cool, thanks for doing this, dudes.
Speaker 2:Thank you michael and uh.
Speaker 1:I look forward to uh the second time, dude, there has to be a follow-up man. There are so many things I wanted to cover.
Speaker 2:I know, dude so then, when you follow up, I'm, I'm all for that okay, dude, dude, all right man, cheers, cheers, peace.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the show. If you would like to check out Johnny's work on his website, you can find it at studioguntacom. Gunta is spelled G-A-N-T-A. You can find him on the same handle on Instagram and find him on Facebook at Johnny Gunta. And if you want to support the channel, don't forget to like, subscribe, download and share with your friends. All right guys, bye-bye.
