Dec. 11, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:16:04
2862 The Strongest Version of Yourself - Elliott Hulse and Stefan Molyneux
Stefan Molyneux speaks with Elliott Hulse to discuss being a motivator, creating a system of practical steps to elicit personal change, ideas threatening the structure of society, environment impacting DNA via epigenetics, cooperation vs. coercion, the “newness” of the brain, body commonality, the mind-body dichotomy, transmitting enthusiasm, the attack on male sexuality, shadow material, the value of fathers, becoming clear about what you don’t want and moving towards achieving your dreams.
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I am with Elliot Hulse.
Elliot, you live in a fairly warm climate, is that fair to say?
Yeah, Florida is a fairly warm climate.
Fairly warm climate.
So, for those of you who are listening in the audio, other than the accent and so on, and the youth, and the biceps, I am the less tanned one, I guess you could say.
I'm also known as the giant ping pong ball with a beard.
So Elliot, good to chat with you.
I know we've done a show before and I've always found your videos and work to be very inspiring.
And I won't actually take off my shirt because I wouldn't want people to know just how inspiring it has or has not been.
But you've taken a bit of a turn, I guess.
Recently you had over a million subscribers on YouTube and you went ghost.
You beamed up.
So what's going on?
You know, I don't think it's anything more than the natural progress of personal evolution.
And one of the things that I discovered is that you need containment, at least I did, containment for this type of process to happen.
You know, if we're constantly in front of people, we're constantly getting feedback, our identity becomes so...
Intrinsically linked to the feedback that we're getting from people, the mirror that we're constantly standing in front of, that it's very difficult to reflect internally.
So more than anything, of course I could give you stories and whatnot, but more than anything, it's just been a time for me to go inside and grow so that when I do come back, I have something brand new to present to the mirror or camera, if you will.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly understand that there is, of course, when you're a public-facing figure, it's easy to become outer or other-directed, particularly if you're focused on motivating people, which is, of course, a big part of what you do.
It's very easy to get focused on the effect that you're having on others and the feedback you're getting from others.
Which kind of, I think, bleeds dry the source of your motivation, which is the sort of personal confidence and personal dedication.
So I can certainly understand that.
It sounds like, at least according to your blog, it was a pretty tough decision to make to step back.
Because you had crazy ferrets on double espressos, camera never goes off kind of output for a while there.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, I often think about how, you know, of course there are movie stars, they're in front of the camera, and even TV stars are in front of the camera.
But the thing is, with YouTube, as you know, we're in front of the camera multiple times a week.
And it's not like, at least it isn't for me, I'm not sure how it is for you.
It's not like, well, you know, I recorded these last year, and now they're making their way into the public.
It's like, no, I film it and upload it right away.
Right.
So it's almost like my entire life is...
And I'm pretty transparent also.
I talk about things as they relate to intimate details of my life are constantly on display.
So, I mean, did you sort of feel a certain vulnerability with the public exposure and sort of talking about your life?
Well, here's the thing.
I didn't know...
I started to lose myself, you know, and if you're an educator and an uplifter and, you know, someone who's helping people become stronger versions of themselves, but you haven't taken the time to educate and grow yourself, which is basically what it's become, too, because, you know, not only do I put myself in front of the camera to educate my students, but also I have a family, so I have four children.
I've got my wife.
I run a gym.
So what I really had to do is I had to cut myself off, isolate myself from the activities of my daily life, which I think most people are able to do by going home and reading or taking a walk, which I kind of was not getting much of.
I wasn't getting enough quiet time, solitude, really.
That's what I needed to nourish myself this way.
So I removed myself.
My office is now down the block.
It's not at the gym any longer, so I'm not constantly bombarded with people and ideas that kind of infiltrate your environment.
You think you're thinking for yourself, but the environment is constantly...
Meddling with your processes.
So I really just needed quiet time, quiet space, and reflection.
And that's what the past three months has actually been.
And I feel so much better.
In fact, my position from which I will proceed when I start making videos once again has shifted because I have shifted.
I've given myself the shift from motivator, inspirer is really the way I would describe it if you consider different personality types.
Inspirer to more of an educator or solidifier, you see?
So there's a difference between getting people excited at the visceral level, but then also giving them a method, solidifying that new feeling in your body and allowing it to make something tangible happen is the next step.
And I really just needed to mature.
I needed to grow myself.
I needed to create my own processes.
I needed to create my own forms of discipline and go through my own Yeah, you don't want to be a nutritionist who has no time to eat well, because you're just burning your candle at both ends.
Now, I mean, you have obviously had a lot of drive and ambition from day one, and you've achieved a lot of what you want.
And of course, when you look around, I'm sure that you see a lot of men and women who have What do you think is the biggest barrier?
What do you think are the steps that layer this wall between people and the achievement of their dreams?
What's the one thing or two things that you'd like to pull away from people's view of themselves and their potential to have them really reach the stratosphere that I think nature intends them to?
It really boils down to the most fundamental question that I believe a human being asks himself.
We're all motivated.
I know that motivation was a topic for our discussion.
And you might say that some people are motivated, but some people are not.
But in fact, we're all motivated.
There's always a motive to our actions and our ambitions.
But the real question boils down to, do you believe yourself to be and the world to be Good, inherently, or bad, evil, inherently.
Inherently evil or inherently good.
And I think that the decisions that you're going to make that are going to propel you into your future are going to come from that root question, that root issue.
Right.
So, I mean, to take an extreme example, if the only place you could be advanced was up the ranks of Nazism...
then you might not want to be ambitious.
You know, because if you believe that the world is evil, then the achievement of prominence or success would kind of be moving up in the firmament of wrongdoing.
Whereas if you believe that the world at least has the potential for virtue, then you can expend and expand your powers in the service of making the world a better place.
So that's very interesting.
I've never really thought of it quite that way.
Did you vacillate in those perspectives when you were younger?
Do you vacillate now?
No, I actually...
Here's the thing.
Fear is really...
When you decide that the world is evil and that you're evil, fear is where you're proceeding from.
And you can never feel good when you're proceeding out of fear.
Even if you do achieve lofty heights, you see, you could have billions of dollars.
You could have all types of power.
But if you've done this, if you've achieved all of this out of fear...
Then you're not really going to enjoy and embody that which should be pleasurable based on your circumstances.
Even if you didn't hurt anyone, but if you did it out of fear.
So there are a lot of people who have careers that are in the helping profession, doctors and whatnot.
You're a doctor because you feared not living up to the legacy of your father and your grandfather, who were both doctors.
You might be not a Nazi.
You're helping people.
You're giving healing to people in whatever way, shape, or form you do in your medical niche.
But you're there because of a root fear.
So even if you are doing good, you're still going to be torn up on the inside.
There's still a disconnect with who you are.
As a kid, I was kind of fearless.
I was the one who they would say, Elliot, throw the firecracker.
Or Elliot, go ring the doorbell.
So...
Very rarely did things scare me.
And I think I kind of proceed in the same way as an adult, where most people wouldn't take the risks that I do.
I kind of turn a blind eye.
I tend to think that things are always going to work out well for me.
I think that's really it.
I guess I've brainwashed myself into a place where I always think it's going to work out best.
So I take the action anyway.
I think that the world is good.
I think God is good.
The universe is good.
I know that I have pure good intentions, so I just run with it, and it always seems to work out.
Okay, so the devil's advocate position might be that if you were born without the fear muscle, Do you think there's a risk that you're trying to train people into doing something that comes naturally to you?
For instance, if I was born with the most amazing singing voice and just saying to people, well, look, everyone can sing.
It's like, well, no, you just happen to have that physical.
Like if you were born without that or have less of that, do you think that it's transferable?
Or do you think that people can achieve the kind of fearlessness that you seem to have had innately?
This is my attempt.
This is what I hope to do.
Because my videos up until this point have just been a projection of a courageous person.
And I'm not putting myself on a pedestal.
But like I yell about things that I've, I talk about things that I've experienced that have gotten me a certain level of success or influence that a lot of people would want.
And I discuss the typical fears that my clients, my personal clients would have on camera.
In other words, you know, I typically see people who are afraid of A, B, and C. And here's why that's a completely false fear and why that...
So speaking about it is great.
It's very easy for you to say, Elliot, sometimes people would say, because look at you, you did it.
But the other end of the coin would be, okay, great, I got you excited about these ideas, and I've caused people to take some pretty drastic actions in their life based on the inspiration that I've offered.
But I think where I've lacked up until this point, what I hope to be able to present is a coherent system, not to say that it's guaranteed to get you what I've got, but so that you can reflect on your core values, so that we can bring the shadow to light, those things that you're most fearful of, so that so that we can bring the shadow to light, those things that you're most fearful of, so that we can examine them, so that we can even integrate these things that you fear, or the shadow
That energy will give you power to move towards your dream.
If you start out with fear, and fear is a shadow...
It's a split-off part of your consciousness.
Say, for example, you're afraid to speak up.
I'm one of those people, my parents, when I was small, they told me, sit down and shut up a lot.
Zip your mouth.
And I go to school and they say, zip my mouth.
So you kind of proceed in life as a quiet person.
You think you're a quiet person, but really, your inability to create boundaries, your inability to go out there and assert yourself, your ability to be aggressive when it's needed, all then becomes a detriment to your advancement.
You see?
So by bringing that to light, we can discuss it.
But also, I have a tendency to believe that those things that were once split off and were shadow material can actually be integrated into a new version of who we're becoming for a number of reasons.
But one in particular is because guess what?
Now you have an experience of overcoming a challenge that you can offer to other people and be an inspiration to them.
So you become a greater gift to the world.
I think that's very nobly spoken.
And even if you're born with wings, if other people have the capacity to grow them, your example may shake their complacency.
One of the things I've been curious about in looking at your work is the degree to which – I mean, speaking personally, when I started doing a show on philosophy – I sort of was, you know, well, I'll speak the truth and I'll try and put arguments forward and make the case and speak about my own pursuit of truth and the pluses and minuses.
And I knew that some of what I was talking about was going to be radical or startling to people, but I never really thought that anything that I did would be that radical or startling as a whole.
You know, just saying the pursuit of truth, here's what I have found, here's what I've discovered, here's what I think I've established.
But there's a funny kind of thing, and I don't know if you've run into it.
I suspect that you have.
There's a funny kind of thing where if you speak the truth to people, you think that it's a one-on-one relationship.
Like you speak to someone, you say, here's the truth as I see it, here's the truth that I can establish.
And they accept it or they reject it or whatever.
But there's a third party in the room, and that third party is like the structure of society as a whole.
Why are so many people scared?
Why are so many people ground down?
Why do they not feel that life is a grand adventure that they can ride into the sunset?
Why are they afraid?
Why don't they have a voice?
When I started, I thought, okay, it's a one-on-one thing.
I'll help people get a voice and so on.
But you run into this third party called a social structure.
I mean, 85 people have more wealth in the world than the bottom 3 billion people.
There's a structure in society that profits from keeping people small.
And I don't want to get into all the economics and politics, because I think everybody knows that there's something out there, that they are the way they are, not just because of their family, but because of the whole structure that they live in, whether that's a nation or perhaps a religion or a culture, that there's a structure that profits from People being small and scared.
And it's always sort of struck me like if you're a farmer and you can convince the cows to attack each other if they wander off the field, you don't have to invest in electric fences.
Like if you can get the cows to attack each other or get the slaves to attack each other, you don't need to worry that much about paying all that money to enclose them.
And I'm just wondering, I'm so long rambling on all that, but I'm just wondering if when you've done the work that you've done and reached so many people and changed so many people's lives, When they change and when they grow, it's always struck me, or at least it has over the last few years, that they bump into a structure.
That they threaten more than just their own fears or maybe even their own personal relationships.
But there's a larger structure in society that enormously profits from people not questioning authority, from not living large, from not being good, and from not being big.
I don't know if I'm making any sense, but...
Yeah.
I totally dig everything you're saying.
And there was a long time there, several years, where I... Let me tell you an interesting story.
I'm a little bit woo-woo, kind of a hippie.
Oh, I know.
Oh, I know.
I'm coming in prepared, baby.
I know.
I'm waiting for the incense to start cooling up.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah, I got incense burning.
So I hired a coach about a year ago.
He works with a lot of the ideas of David Hawkins, and he gives...
A grade score up to 1,000 to levels of consciousness to a person and then in various areas of their life.
So you get a score.
So like, for example, a Buddha or a Jesus would be like 1,000 as far as an overall level of consciousness is concerned.
And then maybe someone who's mentally ill maybe has like a 10.
So there are multiple different areas that you can have your level of consciousness tested.
If you find out that you're low in certain areas, it's a good idea to then take a look at that and decide how you're going to proceed in life so that you can advance because you're ignorant.
It's a level of ignorance or blindness that you might be proceeding out of.
So he tested me in nine different areas, one of which that stuck out immediately was relationships.
And we went to relationships, and there were nine more different subcategories in relationships, and it was interesting because I had my highest level of consciousness as well as my lowest.
I had one area where I was enlightened and one area where I was completely ignorant, just stupid.
So the area that I scored with high consciousness was long-term committed relationships.
Well, that makes perfect sense.
I married my high school girlfriend, and I'm good with having long-term friendships and whatnot.
The area in which I showed up as basically ignorant, just a buffoon, and needed severe work, or at least attention, was my relationship to institutions.
Everything you're describing, bumping up against resistance, to me, all I could focus on is the resistance of institutions.
Be it government, be it school, be it parents in the home.
I was always just rebellious.
Anytime I feel like a limit to my power or to my freedom...
I feel stifled in right away and I want to fight back.
This is just my natural, my way, you know, based on the experiences of my childhood as well as what I wanted to bring up as you were speaking.
Have you ever studied the work of Bruce Lipton in epigenetics?
Epigenetics, yes, but not Bruce Lipton in particular.
Okay, so I read his books.
So you're familiar with the idea that the environment...
Well, at the very least, that's what we should focus on, because that's the only thing we can control.
Better way to put it.
There's no environment that's going to turn me into, I don't know, an aboriginal from Australia.
But there is, in terms of my DNA, we really should always try and focus on that which we can change.
Because trying to focus on that which we can't change is just a great way to grind yourself into a futile dust to be scattered to the wind of history with no visibility.
So, yeah, as far as epigenetics go, it's not the whole story, but it's really the only story that matters, in my opinion.
Right.
So the stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that our parents tell themselves when you're pregnant, when your mother's pregnant with you, according to similar ideas, the way your mother is treated, her fears, her hopes, her dreams, all sort of make their way into the baby.
Yeah, so if your mother was a Holocaust survivor, the child will carry the remnants of pain and fear associated with the events that the mother experienced while the child was in utero.
And they even have science to back up how the brain is actually formed based on the experiences of the mother.
And one of the things I actually do remember is that if the HPA axis is highly stimulated, there's a lot of stress.
She's releasing a lot of stress hormones while she's pregnant with you.
The brain of the child actually develops in such a way that the hind brain, the back brain, the reactive brain, the reptilian brain gets bigger.
And the front brain, that part of the brain that has more of our cognition and our ability to see objectively and whatnot and take our time shrinks.
So when we're dealing with a population like we are, and you and I assert ourselves as teachers, you know, we.
There's something inside us that we feel might be valuable for people to hear.
We've got to realize that we're dealing with the collective unconscious, if you will, as Jung would put it.
Generations and generations of experiences and ideas that make themselves present and manifest in our current reality.
So all we can really do is say, look, we're dealing with people at various levels of consciousness.
We're dealing with people with various access to ideas.
Now, of course, more so than ever, we have access to tremendous amounts of ideas.
So all we can really do is, and I say this like all we can really do, but we're doing such a tremendous job at it.
We're doing it faster and bigger and more prolifically than we've ever done it in the history of humankind, which is the sharing of ideas.
I mean, I think about the American Revolution and how, you know, Thomas Paine, he had to print all those copies of Common Sense and get them on horseback.
And they had to go up and down the east coast of the United States to distribute this to people who probably couldn't even read.
So one person who had to show up and read it to everyone in a town square, where today, you know, we walk around with these things.
And if I have an idea, I say it to the camera.
And within hours, 100,000 people see it.
So we're doing a tremendous job of being a positive vibration in the in the immense amount of vibration that's going out in this day and age.
So I'm grateful for, I'm happy for whatever positive vibration I can put out while I'm here.
And I don't feel like I have to change things so physically.
I used to think like I had to create revolution and tear down governments and ideas and I want to be a rallier and a fighter.
And I found too much energy was being exerted against the things I don't want as opposed to doing the things that contribute to what I do want, which is to further raise consciousness.
Right, right.
I mean, I think what you're talking about in the womb, I think, is fairly well established.
And there's even some very strong cases to be made that significant stressors in the mother at a certain period of the child's development have a strong influence on homosexuality versus heterosexuality, which I think is fascinating.
Because when we're in the womb, our bodies are scanning for the environment.
They're saying, are we in an environment of competition or cooperation?
Right.
In other words, are we going to be hitting each other over the head to get the bananas or are we going to be trading, I've got an apple, you've got a banana, whatever, right?
Are we in a situation of trade and reason and cooperation or are we in a warrior hierarchical win-lose environment?
And I think the body, when it develops, it says, well, if there's a lot of stress from the mom...
It must be a combat environment.
It must be a win-lose environment.
And that's what our brains get ready for.
That way we get more temper, we get more aggression, and we get fewer inhibitions in the neofrontal cortex.
So our impulses, because if you're in a combat situation, you don't want to be overthinking things.
You want to just be instinctive.
And so I think people who are trying to enlighten the world, we literally are opening the robot and changing the wires, which is a really wild thing to be doing.
And there are all of these theories from the past, like, you know, Marxism and fascism and so on, that said, well, if you change the politics or you change the economics or you change whatever, right, who owns the means of production, then you'll get different human beings.
That's not true.
You get different human beings when you have people using epigenetics adapt to peace when they are wired for war.
And that takes a huge amount of intellectual effort.
I'm a big fan of talk therapy and so on and constantly telling people, go to therapy, go to therapy.
Because going to therapy rewires, I believe, your brain and your epigenetics from war to peace.
And that so much of war is built into our neonatal, our postnatal, our childhood experiences.
And you can't go back and change people's childhoods, but you can have them work on cooperation rather than aggression, which really feels weird to people who are wired for war.
And again, I thought, well, I'm just putting words out, and the words will have an effect on people, and they may listen or they may not.
But the more I learned about it, the more expert I've had on the show, and it's what you're talking about, what you're doing now.
We're going down not to...
to philosophy.
We're actually going down to DNA and there's nothing deeper.
I mean, unless we can find that subatomic particles, then we'll have to go even deeper than DNA.
But we're going down to DNA and we're saying to people, you can change your wiring.
It hurts like hell, but we're trying to rewire the, because once that rewiring is done, I mean, absent some giant comet hitting the damn planet, we'll be set forever.
Because war begets war and peace begets peace.
And if we can rewire people to peace, to reason, to negotiation, rather than to aggression and win-lose...
That is going to perpetuate and escalate.
But boy, oh boy, does that ever threaten the structure of a society which has largely developed out of aggression and win-lose interactions.
And we're attempting to basically...
We're like Dr.
Frankenstein.
We're trying to change the species at the DNA level...
Through words.
I mean, it's really a wild thing when you think about it.
I just passed 100 million downloads.
So, you know, we've got a lot of DNA stuff, DNA changing stuff that's out there.
Yeah, absolutely.
There wasn't even a question in that.
So I'm sorry about that.
But I just want to sort of share the thoughts about the depth because you're talking about your deep dive.
This is what you're working on, right?
It's really exciting, and you're spot on.
We're changing people not just through ideas, but we're changing their bodies.
I've been in therapy.
I was in therapy for three years.
I come and go.
I work with various mentors.
One of the things that puts me in a unique position is my understanding of exercise physiology and movement.
And what's also incredible is that we can not only just change people's DNA by changing their thoughts, because obviously the physiology responds differently to the environment if you tend to believe that you live in a good world as opposed to a threatening world like you described.
But we can also work at the physiological level by helping people breathe better, by reducing muscular tension in key areas of the body that affect the brain.
Stretching, breathing, exercise modalities like yoga and intuitive stretching are really important in changing what I believe to be the whole brain because our body is linked to the brain.
There really is no delineation except for the stories that we've told ourselves about where our brain is.
My brain extends way down into my body through the spinal cord and it wraps around my organs and viscera and muscles.
Through various vortexes.
And if I'm going to change my thinking, I can't just do it in an abstract way with new stories, new images.
I also need to stand differently.
I need to breathe differently.
I need to carry myself differently.
My body should begin to feel differently so that I'm a completely different organism.
Well, I think that's true.
And certainly, in Western philosophy, I mean, it's very boringly called the mind-body dichotomy.
And it comes out of a lot of Judeo-Christian mythology, insofar as there's this soul that is completely independent of the body, which is the seat of your consciousness.
In other words, the body is like just this cart.
That carries your soul around and there's no particular relationship to it.
Like, you know, in the old AV days when they did big tube TVs, there were always the AV guys who wheeled the TVs around the high school and so on.
And the TV was totally different.
It was just a vehicle and that's the way that people view the brain throughout a lot of Western philosophy.
And the whole purpose, of course, in a lot of religions is to escape the body, which is the seat of sin, which fails, which is the province of the devil and there's this antagonism.
I grew up with a lot of that stuff.
It's not quite as bad as Catholicism in its negativity towards the body, but your body is basically this distasteful and smelly cab that you have to use to get from birth to death.
And what I found was, for me, when I started getting into exercise as a teen, and I did a lot of water polo and swimming and cross-country running and all kinds of tennis and squash and lots of sports, that helped a lot.
Because then, when you are working with the body, the speed at which you need to work It precludes over analysis.
You know, like if you're trying to get a squash ball in the corner, you can't mull it over.
You have to be very instinctive.
So I think it helps wire the brain to instantaneousness as much as possible with the body.
And then when I went to theater school, I did two years of the Alexander movement, which is a very sort of posture intensive, get you back to when you're a kid kind of stuff.
I've done years of yoga and stretching and dancing.
Dance!
Anyway, but I did all of this stuff.
I wonder why you're so intelligent.
And that's a very strange thing for a guy who grew up in England.
Because in England, I mean, your body is pale and gap-toothed and unpleasantly smelly.
And so I think it's a good combination of sort of Western philosophy and what a lot of the East teaches about the mind-body connection.
I just kind of lucked into through a variety of things.
And I think that's given me a lot of strength in terms of staying rooted in the body while disseminating the most abstract ideas.
Because a lot of people who do the abstract, I think it's sort of Christopher Hitchens, who was a brilliant writer, brilliant speaker, great polemicist.
Who smoked and drank himself into an early grave.
And I can't imagine Christopher Hitchens in a yoga class in any way, shape, or form.
And so I think that the bodywork is vastly, the value of bodywork is vastly underestimated.
And people wait till it's broken and then try to fix it, which I think is a real mess.
Yeah, if you wait until your body is broke, I can guarantee you that in many ways your life is also broken because the vehicle through which you've been approaching it has been compromised.
You're brain damaged if you're body damaged.
Now, I know that's a big statement, but really, if you don't have access to the intuition of your body, you've got to understand that your body does what it does without you having to think about it.
The entire autonomic nervous system, they used to call it the vegetative nervous system when I read some of the old books, basically just does what it does without any...
There's a tremendous amount of intelligence that is available to us if we are in touch with our bodies.
Yoga and Tai Chi and Qi Gong and exercises like that tend to give us access to the language of our heart, the language of our gut, so that it doesn't seem...
I tell a lot of people, I tell people often, listen to your heart or trust your gut.
Well, shit, if my stomach is sick from the food that I've eaten, I've got tension in my belly because I'm cutting off my sexuality from, you know, basically the tightness in your belly sort of acts like it's a corsetting effect against your, you know, between your upper body, you know, the human part of us and the animal part of us, you know, our balls and our ovaries and whatnot and the intelligence thereof.
If you've got a tight belly corsetting or cutting off the intelligence of your sexuality...
So that it can reach your cognition so that you can actually be familiar with, much less trust, your intuition, your gut, and your heart, compassion, love for one another, realizing that we are one thing.
If you're up here and this is tight, this is damaged, this is sick, then you've been proceeding in life as a handicap.
Well, it's this weird vanity that we have.
Our brain is our most expensive organ, and it's the biggest thing that we've got.
And, of course, it consumes the most water, and, like, it's crazy just how big.
But the thing is, too, it's new as hell.
You know, the body goes back millions and millions of years.
I mean, billions, if you want to count, all the way back.
The body and the way it works and what it does is way older than the brain.
The brain, I've sort of called it on a show the post-monkey beta expansion pack.
I mean, it's buggy as hell.
It's so distracting because the brain gives us all these cool ideas and the brain can get involved in puzzles and do all kinds of fun stuff and learn language and so on.
And so it's very intoxicating.
The brain can be like a hot and dangerous woman.
It's very seductive.
Yeah.
And it's very distracting from the body, which seems in comparison to what the brain can do, kind of boring.
Right.
And I think that going back to all of the stuff that has come from us, we only have the brain because the body was successful.
Right.
Right?
I mean, like when we used to be on all fours and the reason we have the brain is because the body went, hey, I'm going to stand up and that exposes less of your body to the sun, which means you have to use less water for cooling so you can use more water to grow a brain.
Right?
And our brain has grown to the point where, well, you know this as a dad, right before your wife would explode giving birth, she gives birth.
Because the brain grows and you see a baby.
They've got these like unbelievably bowling ball heads, you know, on these tiny little bodies.
And basically, the brain grows until, you know, another half inch and it would be like alien rather than a birth.
And so the body has developed everything.
Really beautifully.
And then we take this brain that is the outgrowth of the body and only is there because the body, quote, made good decisions.
And we go and run with the brain and completely forget about the body.
And it's like our best friend takes us to a party and we go chasing someone else and leave our best friend behind.
And it's like, but that's our best friend.
That's the real relationship, not whoever's at the party.
So it's just important to remember that the body is why we're here.
The body is why we have a brain and ignore it at your significant peril.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's an interesting analogy I like to make.
Have you seen these fantastic photographs of the entire nervous system where they've got the brain and the entire peripheral nervous system laid out?
Somebody did actually send me that.
Yeah, I've seen that.
Fantastic.
And it's so...
It reminds me of, and I often use the metaphor to describe a plant.
And if you could look at the root system of a plant, you know, it looks just like our peripheral nervous system.
It just, it spines out and wraps around and it creates an environment where it can receive what it needs and give back what it needs.
It's intelligent in and of itself.
But the brain looks so beautiful as a bud.
It almost looks like a fruit that would come out of a plant.
So if you look at the human nervous system as you would a plant, you could see that there's a root system and then there's a fruit.
You got the root and the fruits.
What we tend to do is take the – is if we were a piece of fruit and we were to say, well – Those roots, they just hang out in that dirty, nasty dirt down there.
I'm a piece of beautiful apple.
I'm a beautiful apple.
Shiny and...
I'm where the birds built their nests.
I'm not where the worms are.
Right.
Yeah, so that apple to say, sort of judge, place judgment on and separate himself consciously from the root system.
He doesn't exist.
The fruit won't exist.
It doesn't make any sense.
We have to realize and appreciate and honor our root system.
Well, and I've read some very convincing arguments for me, at least, Elliot, that everyone talks about peak oil and so on.
I think that the most...
The most scarce and necessary resource in the world is empathy.
Because if you have empathy for other human beings, that doesn't always mean sympathy.
It doesn't always mean that you agree, but you understand where other people are coming from.
Empathy and cruelty are opposites.
You can't do the two together.
And empathy, I believe, really comes from the body.
Because that's the one thing we share with everyone else.
We may have different ideas, different religions, different cultures.
But, you know, as Shylock said in Emotion of Venice, if you prick us as the Jews, do we not bleed?
Right?
The body, we all have in common.
And we all go through the same experience of growth and puberty and maturity and eventual decay and death.
I believe that those who are not connected with the body have the greatest trouble with And so I think that teaching people to get into their bodies helps remind them, as you said, like we're all kind of the same, but not in our thoughts, but in our bodies.
You know, I'm assuming you, like me, have approximately two nipples.
And so we have this commonality through the body, but if you're just an abstract floating head guy or woman, I think it's really hard because you focus on what's different between yourself and others.
You don't focus on the physicality and the body, which we all have in common.
And I think that part of the body work helps people to empathize with other people in a way that if you just focus, say, on your religion or your political party or your culture and so on, that's all in the head.
And that doesn't really affect the body that much, but the body we all have in common.
And I think that's where a lot of that hands across the divide can come from.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's interesting that you say that.
I recently have been reading some books about traditional Chinese medicine, which, by the way, is a 4,000-year-old study and practice.
I got cupped and I got acupuncture.
I had a problem with my back after exercising.
I shortened a tendon through injury.
And it worked.
I mean, the other stuff...
Nobody knew what to do.
I tried ultrasound and all this Western crap, although I'm a big fan of Western medicine in some ways, but it was the cupping, and in particular the cupping, which I think just draws a lot of oxygen-rich blood to the area and does a lot of good work.
But yeah, I gave up, and I'd never tried it before, and I went in, got the acupuncture, got the cupping, and it worked very well.
You might be familiar with how different elements are associated with different organs and whatnot throughout the entire body.
It's interesting that you keep doing this when you refer to ourselves and to compassion or empathy.
I'm trying to take people to focus on my nipples.
I'm very proud of them.
Sorry, just kidding.
The nipples are where we nourish also, right?
So you're nourishing people every time you do this.
Nice.
The lungs, the heart, the cardiovascular system, but mainly the lungs and the heart.
The heart is often used as a metaphor for love.
And when you say empathy, compassion, you know, people think of the heart and they do this.
But it's interesting that the lungs being the organ that we use to swim in that which every single one of us swim in.
We're surrounded by it.
We're nurtured by it.
It's inside us and it's outside us.
It is truly what links every single one of us to each other.
Not the color of our skin, not our national origin, not our ideas, but the heart, meaning lungs and oxygen.
Oxygen, oxygen.
Really, that's what it is.
Air.
Air is what ties us together.
The heart is the organ that pumps that which unifies us throughout my body.
The lungs is that which brings it in.
And guess what?
When I do...
Someone else is going to be breathing at a part of what I took in.
You see, we're really...
We're like fish in an ocean when it comes to oxygen.
And the lungs are our connection to...
The environment and to one another.
The heart.
The heart, lungs, air.
And we share, of course, the oxygen.
I mean, it connects us with nature, too.
I breathe out, the trees breathe in.
The trees breathe out, you breathe in.
We're all sharing the same molecules, which we don't do with our intellects nearly as much.
Now, what are you going to do?
I know it's always tough to ask when somebody's in the middle of a big life transition, Ali, but what is...
What's next?
Brother, what are you going to be doing coming up?
I mean, I can't imagine it's going to be – I think you mentioned once going camping in Florida, which is insane.
But given how cold it is up here, I certainly would take it over where we are.
You said sitting in a chair for four days.
I can't imagine that's going to extend to infinity.
But what's going to go on for you next, do you think?
Do you have any sort of instincts or intuition about that?
Yeah, I do.
And just to put it plainly, and I'll expand upon it in a moment, because I'm reading a book called Rhythmic Integration, about life path, you know, initiation, evolving.
And we all start at different places based on the experiences that we've had, and, you know, where we were born and things of that nature.
I identified with, on this life path journey, there are very different...
Characters.
The Inspirer.
And I read the chapter on Inspirer and it made perfect sense with regard to everything that is great about the Inspirer, but everything that makes the Inspirer suck.
In other words, all the things that make you awesome, but also the things that are going to cause you to crash.
And I feel like I totally lived out that phase in its fullness.
I did absolutely everything the best way that an Inspirer could, but at the same time, all the things that a typical Inspirer lacks, which is usually a unifying process of...
Something tangible as opposed to just excitement.
See, I get so excited and I do so many things and I have ability to get people excited too that you might want to drop everything right away and follow me!
Follow me, everyone!
We'll find out where we're going on the way!
Yes!
Hope it's not a cliff!
In a way, that's what I did.
I get really excited about certain things that I know are powerful, that I've used myself, but I have no system.
I just say, go and do it!
Let's go!
And we can go and charge off a bridge, off a cliff, and everybody would follow.
Not to say that everyone's ignorant, but that's part of my skill, is to get you really excited.
The thing is that the next phase of development, which is...
It's growing out of my withdrawal, my sabbatical, is the solidifier stage.
And the solidifier is the one that takes all the influence and all the passion associated with the inspiration and manifests it into something tangible that can actually bring people through a process to where they are even a bit more evolved than they were when they started.
Not just excited, but evolved.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, so knowing where the long-term destination is allows you, of course, to use your capacity to motivate others in the best possible way.
Because as you're exploring, other people who are following may have different paths of exploration, different processes.
So not just leading people, this is the great challenge too.
Like I steadfastly refuse to give people answers in my show.
Because to give people answers is to deny their capacity.
Right.
It's like you lifting weights for someone.
It's like, well, I don't see how that's helping you.
I mean, I guess I get a little bit.
And so, you know, when people call in, I do these call-in shows like six, seven hours a week, and people call in with Questions, problems, and philosophy and self-knowledge can be helpful with that.
I will not give people answers.
I just won't do it because that is to deny them their capacity to figure things out.
And that, of course, when you have the capacity to motivate people as you do, getting them to self-motivate, not in pursuit of your motivation or being drawn along like a water skier under your mercury engines— I'm going to
say you.
That enthusiasm so that they're as enthusiastic about their lives as you are about yours.
That, I think, is the real challenge.
Yeah, absolutely.
And no system is foolproof.
You know, it's just a matter of creating a form of containment so that certain ideas about yourself that you never considered, you know, because part of what we do is to motivate, we educate, you know, and educating means enlightening.
And I don't say enlightening like everyone's going to become a Bodhi Vista.
I mean, enlightening like you're shedding light on stuff that was in the dark.
You see?
So it's like, if I enlighten you, it doesn't mean I turned you into Jesus.
And it doesn't mean that I'm enlightened means that I'm Jesus.
It means that there are certain things that were in the dark that we can now bring to our attention.
Now it's a matter of integrating these new ideas into a new ego construct.
How are you going to approach the world now that you know that you're scared because your dad used to beat you up?
And that's the reason why you can't speak up to your boss and the reason why even though you're the most competent guy at your job, you're the lowest on the totem pole.
Great!
You know, a lot of talk therapy, a lot of Freudian therapy is centered around, well, let's discover why you're fucked up.
I was like, it's great.
Well, now we discovered why I fucked up.
I'm enlightened.
Yes, you're enlightened.
There's light shit on it.
But now, how do I take that information?
Like I spoke about before, you know, taking your shadow.
And Joseph Campbell says, eating your shadow.
Really, what you want to do is get to the point where you can eat your shadow, meaning we don't run away from it.
And this is, you know, a big part of our Western philosophy and theology has caused us to say, evil, good.
So we want good, good, good, good, good, and then we push away from evil, but as the saying goes, that which you resist, persists.
It's a matter of, okay, coming in touch with that shadow aspect, that split-off part of my consciousness, looking at it, realizing that there might be some good here, and now a process for integration.
And I tell you what, what I do find lacking, and it had been in myself personally, and I think it's what's lacking in the coming generations, is patience with The process.
Because we have so many examples of quote unquote success.
And there are so many different things to be inspired to and motivated by.
But I don't think enough talk is given to mastery in that this is a lifelong process.
Just because you discovered one Shadow aspect of yourself and you're working to integrate it doesn't mean another one's going to not pop up.
You know, I think the further you get along, obviously the deeper and the more insidious the shadow forms show up.
So we're not going to get somewhere.
We're not going to be successful.
We're not going to achieve some particular pinnacle.
We've got to realize that It's a journey.
And some believe it's a journey beyond our death.
So look at it this way.
We're not getting anywhere.
We're not going anywhere.
It's going to be a while.
Respect that it's going to take forever.
patience and it's going to take time for you to become a new version of yourself.
Now, you and I spoke maybe two years ago.
I would say that over the past 12 months, I have, it's taken me a year to have a breakdown.
Basically, when I say breakdown, I mean that when we find that the ego that we're using to proceed in the world no longer works, we either have to decide that it no longer works for who I want to become or the universe, God, the world says, crash, this shit ain't working And I had a kind of a combination of both.
I had to have a breakdown.
My ego construct was no longer resourceful for who I wanted to become.
But it takes, and I'd say I started cracking up around January, and I literally, like maybe the past month, I'm starting to feel like, okay, good.
Now I discovered these things about myself.
I've been enlightened to these different ideas that I never considered.
I have all these brand new tools.
I have a brand new environment that To incubate in, now I'm starting to feel like I'm a different version of myself.
It's taken me a year, and I move really fast.
It's taken me a year to completely break down and then begin reconstructing an ego that's going to allow me to move to the next mount.
And I have a feeling that when I get to that one, I'll probably have to have a breakdown too.
Because this is how we consistently evolve.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, my experience, yeah, you move faster than me.
For me, it was about 18 months.
I couldn't sleep.
I couldn't sleep.
And the reason I couldn't sleep was I was asleep in my life.
I was making a lot of money.
I had a lot of material success.
I was living with a woman.
We were going to get married.
And I was not awake in my life.
I was a machine of productivity.
And utility to others and to myself.
And I had left so many of the things that I wanted to do like artistic stuff and so on behind in order to be an entrepreneur and start a company and grow a company and make money and sell the company.
And at the time, too, like for you, when you hit a success point, you think, woohoo, I've made it, baby!
It's all smooth sailing from now.
I can go by Hawaii if I want, and that's going to make me happy.
And it was at that time of greatest success and, in a sense, greatest security.
I mean, I grew up dirt poor.
I finally had a couple of bucks.
And it was like, my body was like, okay, we're not going to sleep until you wake up.
And drove me into therapy, and I did years of therapy and turned it around.
And it gave me the strength to do what it is that I'm doing now.
And, you know, you have to...
I wrote when I was 17 in a poem.
There are times in life we have to bury ourselves first in order to be resurrected.
And you only bury a dead body.
And there are times where you've adapted to things for expediency.
Right.
Absolutely.
And then that's not, in a sense, what the world needs of you.
That's not what the future needs of you.
We all live in this world that has been made a paradise compared to most of history.
Because people were willing to go against the grain.
I mean, the guy who invented the car pissed off all of the people who had horses and carriages and all the guys who shoveled the shit off the horse streets, all the horse shit off the streets in towns.
Everything that we treasure, everything that we value is there because someone has gone against the grain.
And if you have the capacity to produce good things in the world by going against the grain, you should.
But it's hard to do that because, you know, we're a social species.
We like to get along.
And I wanted to mention just as well the shadow thing too.
Because, again, I don't want to sort of sound like I'm bashing too hard.
I'm talking really sort of structured, organized historical religion.
But this idea that the devil, the devil is out there somewhere in the ether, in the vents, in the pipes, in the clouds, in the dirt, in the lava.
It's out there.
And you have to smash that devil with self-righteous willpower and allegiance to ghosts and all that.
That to me is incredibly dangerous.
I have found in my life, whenever I banish evil to another country, I end up living there.
That's the eat your shadow thing.
When I was younger, knowing the power of language that I have, eloquent speech-making, quickness of thought and so on, I'm like, I should go into politics.
I wrote a party platform.
I looked into starting a political party.
I was like, I should go into politics.
Now, the way I view that now, it would not have been a very good decision and really would have turned me into some sort of Sith Lord.
I might have got my face on a stamp, but it would have been a destination letter to hell.
And recognizing our own capacity to use our skills and abilities for good or for evil.
There's a great scene in, oh gosh, The King's Speech, which is, I don't know if you've seen the movie, but it's about the king in England who prior to the Second World War couldn't speak.
He had a stutter.
He couldn't do any public speaking.
And he was watching a speech of Hitler's.
And he's like, well, everything Hitler says is horrible, but man, does he say it well.
You know, Hitler's capacity for public speaking, boy, if he'd been able to use that for good rather than ill.
And I think recognizing our own capacity for greed, for harm-doing.
I was certainly wired for combat, and I've done a lot of work over the years to rewire myself for peace, while still retaining the capacity for necessary combat and the pursuit of virtue.
But...
Yeah, definitely if we think that evil is always something forever out there that we have to guard against and fight against, I think that's actually how it gets in.
I think that lays the garage door wide.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
It's interesting.
I had a coaching session with a client a couple months back who spent several years in Afghanistan.
And, you know, he had to do some things that he no longer is, he doesn't feel very good about.
He mentioned some stories where he had to kill people and some of them innocent even.
And he comes back and he's supposed to integrate, reintegrate into American society after having that experience.
And he was cracking up.
He's having a very difficult time, and when I was working with him, I could see where he's tripping over many different parts of the stories and experiences that he's had.
And the one sticking point that I couldn't resolve with him because I only had one session with him, but I realized that this is where you're tripping, my man, and I feel empathy towards you.
His aggression.
We need aggression.
Aggression has been labeled as negative in certain ways, but aggression is a biological function that causes us to move outward when there is something needed.
Either defense, you know, defense is simply by creating boundaries, you know, so people can't take advantage of you, or just so that you can build yourself up in a way without having intruders.
It's just a normal thing.
Every creature on earth crawling has boundaries.
And aggression, meaning if there's something you want, you should be able to shore up the energy to go out and get it.
Aggression is a beautiful, beautiful thing that human beings have access to.
But when it's misused, in the case of injuring or killing innocent people, And you place a judgment upon it.
Now what happens is aggression becomes the shadow.
Aggression becomes the devil.
And at least it did for this young man.
And he set such high goals and lost the expectations for himself that were completely attainable, but he could not get the ball rolling.
He could not make something tangibly happen.
And it was simply because, simple and also profound...
You've rejected your aggression.
And whenever we bring up aggression, and I would have him act out aggression in various ways, I could see him retreat.
His energy immediately retreats and he places a judgment.
He's like, no, no, no, I don't want to be that way.
All I'm asking you to do is to shout and to pump your fist.
I'm trying to get him excited to physically use, because the body is the mind in this way, physically use your body to embody aggression so that when you have the opportunity to use it, You feel empowered.
But every time I got him to act it out, all I would recognize is a retreat and a judgment.
I don't like that part of myself.
I don't want to do it.
And I can't judge it because he's had his experiences.
But if he were to be able to eat the shadow experience, if he were to integrate that instead of judging it and pushing away from it, the man would be far more powerful.
Well, of course, getting involved in unjust military conflicts could easily be said as a lack of aggression early on.
A lack of evaluation.
In other words, he ended up with displaced and destructive aggression because of a lack of boundaries and pushing back and a lack of skepticism and a lack of resistance to authority and conformity and culture and his family, perhaps, who was like, yay, soldiers, and the indoctrination of his school and maybe even of his church.
Because there was a lack of aggression early on, you end up being exploitable, and then you become afraid of the very aggression that could have actually prevented you from getting into that bloody bluff.
Anyway.
Yeah, you've been a lot deeper.
That's it.
Yeah, it starts.
Aggression, and I would even go as far as to say masculinity.
And, you know, we could argue in various ways for femininity also.
But our sexuality, that's a better way to put it.
Our sexuality, the full expression of our sexuality has become shadow material.
You know, masculinity in its association with aggression.
You know, we're the aggressive person.
Typically the aggressive sex, meaning we've got a body that's made to go out and do things and to defend.
So we sort of lean in that direction a little bit more, has been so denigrated and the speech against it and there are even movements against masculinity as if all masculinity is shadow aggression or patriarchy that we lose ourselves by judging The penis to be something evil and aggressive in a shadow way.
Well, I mean, that's a big topic too.
But to me, it's almost been, hey, do you like civilization?
Thank a penis!
Because the reason we've gone out as men and built a civilization is to make women and children comfortable.
I mean, do you like having a roof over your head and air conditioning in a car?
Thank a penis!
Spend a day thanking a penis.
Kneeling while thanking a penis can also be helpful, but that's another story entirely.
But no, this demonization of male sexuality where, you know, if a man reads pornography, he's gross, he's a pervert.
If a woman reads gross pornography like Fifty Shades of Grey, she's just exploring her own blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
And, yeah, the whole question of the demonization of male sexuality, which has been going on since the dawn of time.
I mean, this idea that male sexuality is somehow innately violent and exploitive and so on, whereas female sexuality is wonderful and, you know, lyrical and blah-blah-blah-blah, to me is just unbelievable sexism.
And if it were applied to women in any other field...
Like, if we were to say, well, men's contribution to science has always been wonderful, and women's contribution to science has always been to drag it back and make it bad, I mean, people would be like, oh my god, that's sexist.
And the idea that we can have the projection of sexual dysfunction all onto...
All onto the male.
It puts a huge and heavy burden.
And I think it's one of the reasons why so many men are opting out, are galting, are getting out of relationships.
The MGTOW movement, the men's rights movement, the anti-marriage movement, the anti-dating movement.
I think that the projection of all of the dysfunction, which women are part of, Women do a lot of raising of children.
If man turns out dysfunctional, it's not entirely unrelated to women.
I'm not saying it's all the woman's fault.
But women are part of the cycle of violence, as I've talked about many times before.
But all of the dysfunction that results from both the male and female dysfunction all gets projected onto the man and is driving the man out of society and is driving the man out of his productive capacity to make the world a better place, which is very important for women and children.
And so I really push very hard back against this.
You know, there was this guy who landed a spaceship on a comet.
You probably saw this.
I mean, oh my God!
I mean, I have trouble backing into a parking space, for God's sakes, and this guy lands a spaceship on a comet.
And he wore this shirt that had some pictures of scantily clad women on it, which I thought was pretty funny.
And it was actually given to him by a female friend who was a feminist in this and that and the other.
And women were all like, oh, well, I guess that shows how welcome we are in science.
And it's like, oh, my God.
You know, I used to work in a daycare.
I'm back.
Oh, gosh, this would be more than 30 years ago.
It was when I was in my teens.
I used to work in a daycare.
And I think I was the only man working there because I've always really enjoyed spending time with kids.
And For men, you know, there's a policy in British Airways, I think it's been rescinded now, where a man can't be sat next to a child that's not his.
Because he might be a pervert.
And if you say, well, I really want to go and teach kindergarten and you're a man, what kind of feedback do you think you're going to get?
Because people are going to be like, oh, you're a man and you want to spend time around children?
You must be a pedophile.
So the idea that a shirt is somehow barring women from going into science, but men face no...
I don't get off another rant about that.
What this has done is it's made it early childhood, this incredibly gynocentric universe where there's scarcely a man to be seen for the boys growing up with no dads.
They're basically no dads.
The daycare teachers are all women.
The elementary school teachers are all women.
Maybe by the time they get to the end of junior high school, they might actually find a male authority figure.
And then the only people who are ever blamed for the world's problems are men.
It's like, how is it possible?
It's like a female planet for the first, like, 15 years of your life.
And I think it's tragic.
I think, you know, if we can get more men working in early childhood education, I think what a huge benefit that would be.
But, of course, women only feel, some women only feel sort of on the hard-done-by side of things and never think about what men are going through in terms of our experience in society.
Yeah, so many great points you make there.
The father archetype needs to make a comeback also.
In so many ways, be it biological, father spending.
Listen, the system is set up.
Here I go because I'm ignorant as far as institutions are concerned.
But I decided I wasn't going to do it the way everybody does it.
So I don't think everybody has to do it the way it's supposed to be done.
But the amount of time that even a father who is there for his children actually gets to spend with his son and daughter is so...
So reduced based on the way we choose to live our lives that if you study the work of Robert Bly and Robert Moore and these guys, they're into symbology and mythology but with a male spin on it.
Robert Moore in Iron John begins talking about how there becomes a distrust That grows in the boy for the father because he doesn't see what the father does.
So the boy is supposed to be attracted to and grow in the way that the pattern, the paternity, the father, is moving, but because he's so far removed from it, there's a form of skepticism, there's a form of even, how you would say, negativity projected towards the father.
Even though the father is a good father, and he's trying to be there, and he's doing the things that he has to do, it's the time, or the lack of time spent with The young, growing, pattern, father, child, that really damages our growth as a race of human beings.
Well, there was a study recently that said that the average father, and this is the live-in father, not even the remote father, the average father with a son has 15 to 20 minutes a week of unstructured time.
Like 15 to 20 minutes a week.
Imagine trying to learn guitar 15 to 20 minutes a week.
Not even a day, a week.
Wow.
Crazy.
Yeah.
So the pattern has to get set somehow.
It's just so funny that word paternity and pattern and how the root is the same and the father sets the tone.
He creates that pattern in the home.
Not to say that the female can't, but for boys in particular...
Boys have two problems.
Girls have one.
Girl has to separate herself from her mother because she's growing up.
So she comes through the mother, but at some point she has to develop her own ego separate from the mother.
The boy not only has to separate himself as an ego from the mother because that's his biological root and he needs to have his own ego construct, but he also has to battle against the sexuality, the issue that, boy, I'm not a woman.
Even though I came from a woman.
This is not an issue that, of course, is all copying unconsciously, but not one that a little girl has to deal with.
So what ends up happening in many ways, and I think this might be a part of the biological function and perhaps there's something we can do about it in society, but a part of the projection of shadow material goes against the feminine through the boy because he has to differentiate himself.
Well, girls are this way, and well, that's silly because I'm a boy.
So we have to create some sort of contrast so that we can push the mother away so we don't get enveloped and swallowed by her sexuality and become less masculine than our potential would allow.
Yeah, and I think there's a huge problem as well, which is I think boys growing up these days The way that we become men is through patterning ourselves over the elders.
Now, a lot of times they're just basically not around.
But also, the question is for boys, do I want my father's life?
Like, looking at my father, do I want to live as he has lived?
Like in Japan, the birth rate, I think, is down to 1.1%.
And there's a lot of asexual boys and men and women who just don't get involved in it.
Because I think a lot of the boys grew up in the 80s and 90s where the dads were gone 70 hours a week.
They died from what was called karoshi or overwork.
They were just never around.
And so the boys grew up and they say, okay, so if I want to be like my dad, that means I get a life like my dad.
Do I want the life my father had?
And if the answer to that in society as a whole is no...
You have a big, big problem with the young men in society because they don't want to become the men that their fathers were.
And of course, in my generation, growing up in the 70s, it was divorce.
I mean, like 40 years ago, we basically just kicked back in a hammock and said, you know what?
We don't need men to raise boys anymore.
Let's just let the women do it.
And I mean, I think it's been pretty unilaterally a disaster.
But I was looking when I was growing up and said, do I want the life that my father has?
Well, no.
I don't.
You know, get married, get divorced, pay alimony and child support.
And I mean, God, what a terrible mess that was.
And I think a lack of, you know, oh, men should be role models.
But society needs to give men the opportunity, and women, of course, we're just talking about men now, needs to give men the opportunity to live lives that their sons want.
And I was friends with, good friends with a guy who worked for me back in the day.
And he was, I think, about, I don't know, 12 or 13 years younger than me.
And he wasn't dating that much.
And I said, well, don't you ever want to get married?
He's like, oh, man.
Married?
Are you kidding me?
Did you see these guys?
They're walking along the...
The wives are walking quickly.
They're sort of dragging a little behind, sloped shoulders, head staring out the sidewalk, maybe carrying her purse.
You know, it's like, forget it.
I don't want anything to do with that.
And I think he was really talking about his own dad and what had happened.
And if there aren't men out there who are living a life that boys want, and I don't mean like rock star nonsense.
I mean, that's all great.
And if you want to do that, do it.
But that's not particularly practical for a majority of people.
But I just don't...
I think we've got two generations now of a lot of boys growing up saying, who am I supposed to emulate?
Who am I?
And now there's opportunities for redefinition and creativity in that.
But I think we have to grieve that loss of role models.
And the kids growing up could have the greatest generations in the past to look at and say, well, you know, these guys did a lot of heroic stuff.
But now, what's your life as a dad going to be?
I mean, you wake up, you drop your kids off at daycare, you go to work, you come home.
They may have, you know, you've got to give them baths, you've got to cook their food.
There's no quality time in any of that.
And with homework, which has never been shown to add one thing.
Add them to anybody's intelligence or learning capacities.
You can fight with your kids about homework.
The prevalence of sugar means you fight with your kids about sugar.
I just don't think that there's enough gold at the end of the rainbow of maturity for guys to want to get engaged at that level.
Yeah.
The very first conversation we had about motivation And what I said about, do you believe this to be a good world or a bad world?
If you study NLP, they talk about, are you someone who's running towards something or running away from something?
So I think we're in a good place.
I think we're in a tremendous place.
We're in an awesome place because over the past 40 years, like you said, we are getting clearer and clearer about what we don't want.
I'm having a first heart attack.
Time to change my diet!
Right.
So we recognize patterns that we don't approve of.
And I think my generation, and I'm even on the end of it, or I'm sort of like older, but the generation's coming up.
Knowing that we don't want the pattern that has been set, we now have access to various new patterns that are available to us through information like you provide and that I provide and the internet.
You know, there's more mentors to be used, to be accessed than ever before for men in the history of mankind.
I mean, there was a time when the only mentor was the shoemaker that you were going to end up having to be an apprentice for.
I mean, that was it.
It was that guy and your priest and your daddy.
But now it's like, take your pick.
Who do you want to decide to pattern yourself after?
Who are you going to use as your mentor?
And of course, it's virtual, but I think that we're also in a great place to rewrite our mythology.
And we have to write it with what we have access to in terms of communication and science.
And I use the term mythology because I genuinely do like religion in its mythological positioning.
I think the stories are so beautiful and they point to greater realities and they give us inspiration for ways of being that perhaps won't be accessible to us if we never see these symbols or hear these stories.
Right.
The thing is that it has to evolve.
The story has to evolve with our evolution, the evolution of our consciousness, our technology, and our science.
And we're in a place where we can rewrite brand new mythologies for boys to engage in.
We watch movies like Star Wars that give you a mythology about what it will be when we're shooting movies.
We're making our own planets and death stars and shit like that.
But right now, why not create a mythology around becoming the strongest version of yourself through the struggles of school and the empire?
You know, the empire will always strike back.
The empire will always be there.
So what story can you tell yourself about navigating your way through the empire?
What stories can you tell yourself about relationships and sexuality now?
You know, the old story, especially the ones that were told through movies and whatnot, is, you know, the hero.
He goes on his hero's journey.
And, of course, there's a hot chick there that always wants to have sex with him.
Well, that's one story, one that probably won't happen to most of us.
But can we come up with a story that allows working with our anima, the projection of our feminine on a woman and integrating her into our life, either through marriage or whatever union or lack thereof you choose, you know, whatever relationship you choose to have with the feminine.
Career and work.
Also, our education in our art.
You know, so we have the ability now, because of the breakdown, like I told you about my ego breakdown, to look at all the pieces, realize there are brand new pieces and reconstruct something brand new.
And I think over the next 100 years, that's what we're going to experience, is going to be the emergence of a brand new world mythology.
And that's the way I'd like to think of it, because it begins with tribal, egocentric, ethnocentric, national.
But now the mythology has to encompass the fact that You're in Canada.
I'm in Florida.
Someone in New Zealand, someone in North Africa, someone in Asia is going to watch this right now.
And it would be nice if we could all sort of come together with a, I'm going to shoot myself in the foot saying this, but sort of a one-world mythological order.
Not necessarily a political construct, but a story about who we are and where we're going that we could all be heroes, play our hero's journey part in.
So I obviously hope that you will be returning to public media again at some point soon.
Hopefully you'll come back on when you decide to.
We can announce it on a cross-channel promotion.
But for those of you who want to find out more about, you know, your thoughts and what you're up to, can you give us your web data so that people can find you easily?
Sure.
You know, I try to update every few weeks with a blog post about what's going on at Elliot Hulse.
E-L-L-I-O-T-T-H-U-L-S-E dot com.
So, I mean, from there you can find my videos, my Facebook and Instagram, various things of that sort.
Fantastic.
For Elliot's listeners, I do freedomainradio.com or you can go to youtube.com slash freedomainradio for...
Philosophy and books, they're all free and so on.
Obviously, it was a huge pleasure to chat with you, Elliot.
I wish you the very best.
It's good to see you out the other side of the dark tunnel of re-emergence.
Please keep us posted about your next move.
I'd certainly love to help publicize whatever you're up to next.
Hey, I really appreciate it.
I appreciate you reaching out.
I appreciate your concern.
And of course, I and everyone else who listens to your show appreciates all the information and ideas and entertainment that you provide us with.
Man, you're a robot.
You just keep going.
I love to see that you keep making videos.
They're always high quality.
So gratitude from me and everyone else for your work.
