Slimy vs. Authentic Charisma — Joe and Dr. K on Charisma on Command

Welcome back to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. Today's episode is a really special one. Joe joined Dr. K on Charlie Hooper's podcast Charisma on Command, where they talked about authenticity and what charisma really is. This is a really fun one, and there's a lot of gems in it, so I wanted to release it on our own podcast as well, and I really hope you enjoy it.

Joe, Alok, wonderful to have both of you guys here.

I'm thrilled to be here, man. This is like Super exciting.

Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys. So I have spent 20 years trying to figure out charisma, and there's only a few people that I would genuinely ask this question to. So I'm very excited to do it. How is it that you guys understand charisma? Do you see it primarily as behaviors, mindsets, something else?

You want to kick things off?

Yeah. I make a distinction when I think about charisma is there's two forms of charisma. There's the form of charisma that is I have learned a set of behaviors that allow people to like me, be convinced by me. I think typically that's— I would call it like a slimy form of charisma.

Okay.

And, and the thing about it, the notable thing about it is that it, it doesn't last very long. Like that kind of charisma can, can hold in a relationship from, you know, maybe 3 to 6 months and then at best, maybe just the length of a car sales, you know, like somewhere in there. And then there's a form of charisma that is just basically, I would call it authenticity and aliveness, where there's somebody who is so deeply on their purpose being themselves and full of aliveness where they're not restricting parts of themselves. And then that's an incredibly something that draws people in. Deeply. I think the, the first one comes because you want something like power. You want people to like you. You want people to love you. You're trying to fill a hole. The other one comes because you have learned how to love yourself and all aspects of yourself. And so that, that's how I think of it. I don't think about it as one thing in modern society. I think about it as two.

I, I think the first part of my journey was very much what you might have described as the slimy form of it. Do you have a similar understanding of it? Do you see it as—

Yeah. So, uh, one thing I love about Joe is that blows my mind how he understands so much about the things that I have formally trained in. So like the way I'd answer that question, so 2 or 3 different things. So I tried to understand this myself, like what is charisma? So the first thing that I sort of realized from psychiatric training is that we think about charisma as if it's within you, right? Like charisma is an attribute of a person. But fundamentally, how do you— if you're on a desert island by yourself, can you be charismatic?

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And so the first thing to understand that I think most people miss is that charisma is a dyadic interaction. It is about a response of something that you do that happens in the other person. So no mastery of charisma will be complete until you recognize that there is something in the other person that needs to be activated. Now the question becomes, how do you go about activating it? So this is where I think there's several layers to it, right? So we have like you know, uh, and this is what's so fascinating about the research on charisma is it's so multidisciplinary. You have studies from leadership, management, business, like Harvard Business School kind of stuff. Then you have stuff about basic psychology, you have stuff about neuroscience, and then you even have, um, charisma research from anthropology and history. So people will look at like people like Rasputin and try to ask themselves How is this person so charismatic, right? And which, what, 'cause like he kind of has this bad reputation, but is that sleazy? But it absolutely withstood the test of time. So I think that the way I think about charisma is in like all of those dimensions. And when I work with people, it's like working on, okay, let's understand what are the variables that make a leadership successful? How do you cultivate those on a personal, from a personal standpoint? What's going on in the brain? And then how do you connect to this, deeper kind of charisma that, like, Joe is talking about, right? That is not about the other person, that really comes and flows from within you.

Wow.

Love both of those. Is it— go ahead.

Yeah, to geek out a little bit more, there's another interesting thing about charisma, people thinking they don't have it or they do have it. So just as like an internal experiment, most humans have a critical voice in their head, repetitive negative self-talk. That part of you is super charismatic for most people for the beginning of their life. Meaning that most people listen to that and they're like, yeah, uh-huh, I'm on. Yes, yes, I should lose weight. Yes, yes, I should be a nicer person. Yeah, I've done it. So there's a relationship that we have with ourselves where there is some part of us that we are in a charismatic relationship with. And so that's a really interesting thing to think about when someone's saying, oh, I want to be charismatic. There's an interesting thought process of like, well, what's the part of you that is charismatic? And what's the part of you that's just following along going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, listening to it? So it's an interesting— it's an interesting thing to see that there is that charismatic nature in all of us.

Yeah.

And that's a very direct experience of being able to see it.

I feel like I've noticed that growing up, that the things that— you're a middle schooler, and the thing that makes the girl like you is ignoring her and running away from her and teasing her or being mean to her. And so I— as I look back, it's— I wonder if that's a projection of like the things that are charismatic early in our life are the parts of ourselves that are not forthcoming and open and kind to ourselves. And for me, I see that some of those early behaviors that I learned were like, if somebody asks you to do them a favor, make sure that you don't just do it and roll over like you're, you know, you're— you work for them or something like that. And so I'm curious, is there stages where it looks— tends to look different inter— inter- interactively between different people based on life stage? Or how should people even go about learning this if it's something that has so many different ways of being expressed and, uh, types of it almost?

Yeah, so I, I think, um, the way that I would— I approach this is like, let's look at like the basic research. Like, what is the best body of research that tells us what charisma is? The problem with that kind of research is if you say like authenticity, which is a huge part of the charisma equation. Telling you what charisma is, is not the same as developing it, right? One is like what it is like. So like, how do you be successful in life? You, you can, you can ask someone that question and they can say, be rich. That doesn't give you like a method. So, so kind of my approach is what are the things that actually contribute to charisma? And then what is the mechanism of attaining those things? So my understanding of it is like a couple of big variables float to the surface. The first is having a vision.

Mm-hmm.

So if you sort of think about like who in your life is charismatic, they have an idea of where they're going. That's like a very huge thing. Second thing is, um, the ability to deal with setbacks with some degree of like equanimity and resilience. So when we think about, and this is mostly from like the leadership research, we think about what makes a leader. It's like when things go, when, when things go bad, who do you turn to? Right? Who can handle problems? And that's where, like, the vision and the ability to be resilient and deal with setbacks is huge. The third really, really concrete thing is good with words. So this is where we go like a little bit, you know, theoretical for a second. But how do we know whether a human being is competent or not? So competency in most human beings comes from like their mind, right? So the way that they think, Like if we look at like the mo— what separates human beings from animals, it's our mind. And what— how does one human being understand the quality of another human being's mind? And that is through speech, usually. So this is why, like in the field of psychiatry, we had Freud, who's trying to figure out what is going on in someone's mind. And what does he do? He listens to them. So how do you know about the people in your life How do you change the minds of the people that you work with? You know, you use the power of speech and you use your ears. So it's basically like some degree of authenticity. That's the fourth one. So authenticity, vision, the ability to deal with setbacks without getting like destroyed, and then being articulate with your words. Those are like the four biggest variables. And then there's a couple of variables that are really weird. That are also pretty big, but I think we'll get to those later.

Sure.

It's a— that's a— I love that breakdown. It— the two things that come to mind when I hear it, the, the, the first one is that there's a study that was done, gosh, I think it was like in the '90s or something, where they had people come up and speak in front of groups, and then they all said how intelligent they were, and they did not track their intelligence well. They tracked how well they spoke. So basically, if you speak well, we think you're intelligent, even though that may not be the case at all. They're not actually correlated.

Wow.

Or they're not highly correlated. So, so that, that's one thing that's really interesting. So there is an articulation that especially in the short term really helps you, helps you convince people that you're, you know, you should be somebody should be followed or somebody who's smart. The other piece that came to mind as you were speaking about this is that I don't know. Any research on this, but I just know the practicality of it, which is people often are found charismatic by the way they listen. And I don't know where that is in the, in the research, but meaning I think there's like something famous where there was Miss Roosevelt or something like that had two prime ministers of England, this story that you've heard about. And one was like, he was the smartest man in the world. And the other prime minister said to her, she said about him, I felt like I was the smartest woman in the world. What I noticed is that just listening and the way that you listen and how open-hearted you're listening and how accepting you are and the questions you ask often is like a very charismatic thing, both in leadership and otherwise. And I think it's a missed part because we're usually going, I'm going to go into a meeting. How am I going to say the thing that I want to say? We're not saying, oh, I'm going to the meeting, how am I going to listen? But the way that you listen actually has as much, if not more power of what you get out of that meeting and what people think of you.

Is that age dependent? Because you said people miss this. I didn't make a video on listening for about 6 years. Right. And I would say I still had a magnetism to people. So I was very focused on what I was saying, how people understand what I was saying. As I get older, I noticed that shift. Is that something that is age or stage dependent as people get into it? What do you think of that? Because it seems like such a glaring omission, but at the time it didn't seem like a glaring omission.

I mean, I don't think it's age dependent. I do think it is, in a sense, stage dependent.

Okay.

Right. So I think if we, if we talk about, you know, I love Joe's like very practical framework of like there's the sleazy kind and then there's like this deep thing. And the other variable that I was alluding to, by the way, is one study looked at very charismatic people and basically found a variable which is like divinity. So if you look at like Joan of Arc and Jesus and the Buddha and Rasputin, some of the most charismatic people in the history of humanity are like spiritual people. So I think that if we sort of look at like some of these surface level things, and I think listening is a great example of something that cuts across the research, right? So there's a, there's a certain amount of authenticity that is related to empathy, that is related to listening. When you truly listen to people, what you articulate back to them, right, sounds so intelligent. So I think like listening is this beautiful kind of like thing that, that allows— it's kind of like an amp. It lets you check a lot of boxes. And I think basically you can start with some of these like skill kind of things. But I think the real charisma, like this, transformative world-shaping charisma, which each and every one of us have, in order to unearth that, like, I think listening is one step along that process. And there's a very interesting mechanism which we can get into, but I think we'll get into that when we—

Would love to.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's talk about unearthing it.

I think as far as your stages go, what I notice is that listening doesn't happen until you stop having something to prove. So that's— that I think, and which is again being in love with yourself or accepting yourself. The more you're accepting yourself, then these other things unravel in you. Good.

I feel like I have a really— because I've been trying to understand the way that you guys say it in my own— I feel like I have a good sense of it. So what is this process for unearthing it, for developing these vision, the ability to speak articulately, to listen well. How would you guys advise people to go about taking their first steps, assuming that they're— my audience is often like from young 20s to upper 30s, if that's that typical stage of life?

So I think maybe what I can do is talk about the 4 variables that I mentioned, and then I think the real conversation is going to be getting to that true charisma. And so I kind of want to like finish that off and get into this discussion of loving yourself, which is still confusing to me, by the way. So I'd love to hear what you have to say. Right. So the First thing is a vision. So I think a lot of people, if you look at like their direction in life, like they sort of don't have a direction. So we're in a society where our senses, our senses are bombarded by what we should do. There's like Instagram influencers and like YouTubers and like everyone's like telling you what you should do, what you should be. Social media has an effect on our ego, which is very bad, right? So it makes us self-conscious. It makes us more depressed, it makes us more anxious. So literally what these algorithms have figured out how to do is make you feel bad about yourself and then sell you an answer. The problem is that there's a thousand answers for everything that you feel bad about. So the first thing is that's— there's no vision there, right? There's no unifying thing. You're always trying to solve a problem. Love the way that Joe put it. You're trying to fix something within yourself, but that's not a vision for your life. That's trying to like fix this today and fix this tomorrow. So you kind of have to do some internal work, which I think we're going to get to and really develop like what you want from your life. And the only way you're going to find that is from you. And then once you have a path, once you have a plan, then people will like literally gravitate towards you because you're one of the few people who seems like they've got a clue. Because everyone— we have a loneliness epidemic, we have a mental health epidemic, you know, so that then the moment that you become this thing, people just start like showing up. So that's, I think, a big part of that vision. I think articulation is really, um, actually simple. So what I strongly recommend people do is anything that you're going to talk about, you write first. So there are a couple of cool neuroscience mechanisms there where when you write, the first thing that it does is it slows down the speed of your thoughts, which helps them like gel a little bit more. You think faster than you speak. So a big part of speaking well is like slowing down your thoughts. The other really cool thing about writing is when you write something, it activates your sensory input, right? Because you're reading what you're writing. And the moment you activate your sensory input, whatever you're writing sinks into your brain and you learn it. Now, once you know something, then when you open your mouth, it sounds really good, right? So like, how do you become more articulate? You literally write it out. And one thing that I didn't really appreciate— so I tried to write a book on video game addiction and it sucked. But then the first time I started streaming, the words came out like really fluidly because I had written this 300-page awful book. But in the process of writing, it clarified my thoughts. So that's vision. That's articulation. I'm sure we'll get to like setbacks and equanimity and things like that because I think that's going to be kind of like ego-related. Um, so I think those are like 2 or 3 really, like 2 really big things that people can start with. And then I think there's this deeper work, which will sort of make things I'm sure, like, easier as we move on.

Yeah. The only thing I would add there is, if I remember the research correctly, I think the writing things out is probably going to work for 70% of the people. And so, so if you're one of those people who've done that and it doesn't work, then you're probably an auditory processor. And so you could probably do it by speaking it out over multiple times. Yeah. So it's, it's dependent, but most people are writers.

Yeah.

And I love the phrase some people think in order to talk, and some people talk in order to think.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'm, I'm that auditory person, which is why I remember I was sitting at a— when I was doing nonprofit work, uh, helping run this, um, this foundation, and I was in a meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, and, uh, and this woman just walks up to me, she goes, oh, you don't read, do you? You're, you're an auditory processor. I was like, how did you know? And she, and she described all my behaviors that that let her know that I was. So as far as I would say, those are amazing practical steps. The number one thing that I think to do is really deeply inquire as to what makes it that you want to have charisma, to really understand that about yourself. So typically, the way that it works is once I have this, then I can be lovable. Once I have this, then I can be good enough. Once I have this, then I will be happy. And that's the, that's the ultimate con that, that, that, that we tell ourselves. And so to recognize that there's nothing that you actually have to do to, to love yourself or to be loved, you don't have to create a certain amount of value to be. So questioning the problem itself, questioning the premise, I think is a really good first step for the other things that, that you know, the deeper authenticity part of it, because that's going to teach you exactly the places that you're not accepting yourself. If you start looking at what you're telling yourself you have to do to be good enough or lovable or not abandoned or whatever, that's the places that you're going to be able to go in and say, oh, these are the parts that are unloved. This is where I start my work.

When I look back, if I say, okay, what might I have asked myself? I think I need a girlfriend, or I need a— this, this particular guy needs to like me or something like that. What would be the practical walkthrough of, okay, so my initial answer is, I, that girl has to like me in order for me to like myself. Then what? And so what I took is, okay, I'm gonna make her like me. And so I know what to do now. Figure out what she likes, you know, be all of the things that she likes.

So Charlie, when you did that, what happened next? Yeah, exactly.

So what I started doing was watching very carefully. What is she responding to? What are women in general responding to? They like guys who play guitar. I learned to play the guitar, you know, right? So, so just run that process for about 10 years, and now I'm doing jiu-jitsu, learning multiple languages, like trying to be the Renaissance man that I can, which is effective in a way. And there was wonderful secondary tertiary effects of I love music and I got to do that. And I didn't at that beginning stage get to the the self-love and the self-acceptance. So I'm curious how someone might run through that in a way that is cleaner than what I did, perhaps.

Hold on a second.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm assuming—

I think we're going the same place.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, and then you got the woman, but it didn't—

Right. So that's what I exactly want to hear about. Correct. So don't fast forward to 10 years.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Started doing the deeper work. I want to know one year in. Right. So let's let everyone who's listening to this is like, but I think we need to hear.

Sure.

When you started getting in shape, when you started playing guitar, when you started making money, 2 years and 3 years.

Sure.

You did get the girl, Charlie.

Yeah.

What happened then? Girls.

Girls, I'm assuming. Yeah.

Yeah. No, at first it was, oh, God, I'll just— at first I felt like king of the universe. It was the greatest, most thrilling, excited thing that I could ever imagine. I didn't understand why everyone in the world wasn't quitting their job to go out to bars and flirt and receive validation. It made no sense to me. And, uh, when I saw, you know, the occasional 40 or 45-year-old at the bar, I was like, that guy gets it. Like, that guy, he gets it. Um, got girlfriends, had casual encounters, and then, you know, the, the one that I definitely had to have after years of didn't get that girl in high school, didn't get that girl in college, But I was 27, I finally got that one that I had to have. Did, uh, had an intense period of just wanting her to really like me as much as possible that lasted many, many months. Um, and then it became like the biggest ache in my life, this like trying to make this relationship work in a way that felt good for me and for her. Was I was still seeking— like, I was like, I still want to be in a non-monogamous open relationship because I need all the attention from multiple women, but I have to please you as well, and I want you to like me. And I, as I reflect back on it, I understood my own happiness to be how much smiles, applause, and kneading is being directed at me from my primary partner and other women that I was casually seeing. And then my hair started falling out. And I, you know, like, yeah.

So, you know, and I'm going to tee this up, I assume, and you can spike it over the net, Joe, because I'm pretty sure we're going to go the same place. But like, so this is what I see. And it's so challenging because sometimes people will come to me and they come to me and they like want to be better, right? They want to be accepted. They want to be loved. And then they think like, okay, like clearly people respect dudes who are ripped, dudes who are rich. Let me be that so I get their respect. And then they fall into a very dangerous trap, which is that they succeed.

Mm-hmm.

And then there's this other really— this huge problem arises, which is like basically unsolvable. Now, you love this girl, you're into her, you're crushing on her, you hate yourself for it, and you feel powerless, but you want her so bad. So you do everything that you're supposed to do, and then she says yes. And then when you go home, you're wondering, who is she in love with? Who did she say yes to? Did she say yes to this crafted version? But what about the loser that I was before? What if I ever become that again? What if I start losing my hair or I start making less money? So now what you've managed to do is get exactly what you want, but it's like a house of cards that could get wiped away at any time. There's this really scary, like, fear of abandonment because you haven't been accepted.

Mm-hmm.

Your money has been accepted. Your appearance has been accepted, you know? And so, like, it's so scary. And doing that work, the deeper work, is like, it's such a common pattern where I'm going to succeed and then I will get what I want. And it really messes me up even more.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. There's so many things I could say about it. The, the, my pithy phrase on this is, um, the problem of becoming somebody to be loved is that you never get loved. The person that you were pretending to be is the one that gets loved. And so it never fulfills. And that's like the, basically what was just said. But the secondary part is that there's a way to look at that that says, oh, so glad that didn't work out because now I can actually do the real work. It seems to me that there's Oftentimes this necessary step. For me, it wasn't about looks or money. For me, it was about awakening and spiritual fulfillment. But, oh, once I get to this place, then, and then when you get to that place and there's no there there, it's this amazing thing because then you have to reflect and say, oh, what is it actually? And then so, so there's a, there's a part of human development which is you don't want people to walk before they can crawl. There's a whole bunch of neurological issues that come from that. And so if that's where you've gotta go to figure out that it's completely unfulfilling, you know, feel free to go there. It seems apparently I needed to do it. I'm sure there's ways.

Yeah. I needed to do it too. And I think actually many people do.

Yeah, exactly.

Right, so many people need to walk to the end of the road to realize that this is not working.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and then there's a, there's a, some people get lost there because they don't, they just can't imagine that there's something other way to do it because there's no examples of another way to do it. And so if you find yourself in that place, then it's back to how do you love yourself? How do you love, get acceptance for who you are? And, and, and when I mean who you are, I mean all the aspects of yourself. What I notice is, and a good way to measure it is that the more that I love every aspect of myself, the more I can love everybody. So if I'm in the world not being able to love somebody, that's clearly a pointer of where I'm not accepting myself. When I get triggered, that's clearly a pointer where I'm not accepting myself. And so, so that's where that— that's when that work starts coming into play.

So let me, let me ask a question that I know I would have had at 27, because it's the first leap of improvements in my life came from seemingly not accepting myself. There was all of this advice when I was 13, 14, 15, just be yourself, just be yourself. And like, that wasn't going well for me at the time. And so I developed this philosophy of not going to be myself, I'm going to choose myself. I'm going to decide how I want to come across, how I want to be, and I'm going to select that and habituate certain behaviors and ways of being. And my conception of myself was this choosable thing, that there was no essential— it was completely choice-bound. So I'm wondering If I'd heard you say you have to accept yourself at 27, I would have bit back hard.

Have to.

Okay. And great, because I would have heard it that way for sure.

That's why you're doing— that's why the 27-year-old needs to do all that stuff, because everything is a should and a have to. Otherwise, there's this— the self-relationship is one of force.

So what is the self if not this collection of chosen behaviors that I accept.

Let's not go into that. Okay.

Yeah, I agree. I think we've got one major step.

Yeah.

Before we can get there.

Let's hit it.

So, so, you know, it's maybe I can, we'll get there. So, so, you know, it's interesting because I hear this a lot, like, especially in like dating, because dating is really hard right now. And people are like, oh, you know, just be yourself. I think that's terrible advice. So I think if we I think the worst thing you can be is yourself. I know.

I know. Yeah. We don't, we don't. So looking forward to that because I know you get it. So the twist that you're about to do, I just cannot wait.

So exactly right. So, and I think this is going to give us the layer that we're missing.

Okay.

So when someone says, okay, so let me ask y'all, right? So when someone says I should be myself, what do you think that means to them?

To me, I could tell you what it meant. Yeah, I should be shy, reserved, withdrawn, like my video games, um, and not effective in my communication with people and have the same small group of friends that I do and not more than that, right?

So I think when we— when most people say, like, you know, like, I, I hear all these things, like, if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best. Which in a relationship is a license to continue to be an asshole. So I think most people live this life where they have all of these internal tendencies and what they think, and then they fight against those internal tendencies. So I feel like being an ass, but I need to be nice. So there's like this internal tension and they, they think, okay, like I should be nice. So like this is the the part of me that I'm going to project. That doesn't work, right? And so instead, what I should do is the layer underneath, like all these raw emotions, all of these things that are like underneath that I regulate. That's really who I am. But if you sort of look at it like from a developmental and psychiatric perspective, everything right underneath what you show the rest of the world, that's what people think myself is, right? It's the, it's the person that I am. It's the unfiltered thoughts. But that is not you, right? And I think that's, that's the main twist. But I think this is where, like, as a psychiatrist, like, what are we underneath what we show? We're like a pile of disorganized attachment styles, mental conditioning, like mental habituation, a lot of internalized shoulds, haves, whatever, right? So when someone says, you know, if someone can't handle me at my worst, they don't deserve me at my best, there's a core like brutal, unlovable part, and they want that acceptance. And so it's kind of weird, but like, you know, I, I think that the parts underneath you kind of need to be fixed, need to be healed. I'm sure you don't use the word fixed, but I do, right? So, so one of the interesting things is I, I do think that if you look at it from like a clinical perspective, there is a bad way for your mind to function, and there is a good way for your mind to function. That what you perceive as yourself to be is actually a pile of, like, microtraumas that have built up into something that I would call ego or a humkhat. And I think that's the big missing step. So a lot of this, like, finding authenticity is about actually getting rid of your ego. And it's interesting because Joe keeps on using the word love. I don't know what that word means. Yeah, right. So, so I'm sure we're talking about the same thing, but that language has never made— like, the concept of self-love. If you ask me today, do I love myself? I don't know what that means. I just am, you know, I don't have a— I would even say, like, the goal is to not even have a relationship with yourself, because the moment that you have a relationship with yourself, a relationship is between two things. And my path to self-acceptance— I wouldn't even call it self-acceptance because that, that means that someone is doing the accepting and something is being accepted, and that's actually duality, that's division, that's not the real self, that's a very subtle form of ego, right? And I don't know if that makes sense, so we can get into that, right? Yeah, so, so it— and just the, the word love has always been confusing to me because I don't know like what people mean by that.

Yeah. So it's interesting. There's, there's two pieces I want to go down. I want to address that because I see this, some, some semantics that are, that, that can be switched around for us to, to see that we're talking about the same thing that I think we know we're talking about the same thing. And then, um, but there's one other part that I want to talk about, which is there's a brilliant design to humanity is what I noticed. And, um, and it relates here, which is the first part of it. Say, call it two parts, right? The first part of it is that the feeling that I'm trying to avoid feeling, I'm inviting in exactly the way that I'm trying to avoid it. So if I don't want to feel like I'm a loser, then I am going to do all these things, play guitar, da da da, get the girl so I don't feel like a loser. And in that, you got to feel like a loser, right? So we do. When I was in my 20s, it was abandonment. I was emotionally abandoned. My dad was an alcoholic. It was like my mom was in Al-Anon. There was just no way I was going to be emotionally abandoned. So every time I started to feel that abandonment, I would do one of two things. Yeah, fine. Which clearly made somebody abandon me. Or I would be Come, could you, could you please? Which also makes people abandon you. And so I was inviting the thing. The reason that our system does that, as far as I can tell, is that when we were younger, we got certain things set in place that said the microtraumas, which basically said, you're not allowed to feel this thing. Don't feel like a loser. You're not allowed to feel like a loser. You're not allowed to feel unloved. If I felt abandoned by my parents, I'd be like, crap, like, the people who are supposed to take care of me aren't taking care of me. It would just— devastation. Don't feel that. And so I keep on recreating circumstances to bring that emotion back up so that it can finally be welcomed and loved. And so for me, what that means is literally, if you think about the love part of it, And I don't do it because I'm supposed to love and accept myself all as is, though that's exactly what I'm doing. It's also, using slightly different language, it's also the most efficient way I've found to heal those microtraumas, which is microtraumas generally are here's a whole bunch of parts of you that weren't loved and accepted, and so you have contorted yourself out of who you are to get the love and acceptance that never actually fulfills. So, okay, I won't be scared, Mom. I'll be strong, Mom. And now that part of you is unloved and it's in the background. And so your authenticity, in my language, is all the unloved parts being able to be there. And so the most, very most effective way, and you can't jump to it, you have to actually— there's some steps. But eventually the most effective way that I notice is to love the parts of yourself that you are not accepting. And the other word would be welcoming the parts of yourself that are accepting. The reason I use love is because there's a visceral felt sense of, oh, I— if you think about a puppy or a niece or nephew or a child, there's a feeling that you have that you're like, oh, that— oh, and there's a softness, often like tears if you really let it in. There's— it's like almost of a heartbreak. And it's like, oh, I feel that towards the dog or the kitten or my son or my daughter. What is it like to actually turn that towards myself? What is it like to actually viscerally, somatically go, oh, that love towards myself? And just like essentially you're like, there's nothing wrong with you, but there is. But there is. These things do need to be fixed. And we'll, we'll say that so that you can have that moment. Similarly, there is from what I notice for myself for a long time and for most people that I work with, there is two sets, two sides of the self. And this is what I notice is this is one of the paths, one of probably 10 paths that I'm aware of that allow people to actually get out of duality into nonduality. So yeah, we're both saying yes, we'll agree with you that there is a problem here so that it's a more effective way to work on it. But essentially there's not really a problem. And it's very confusing.

So, yeah, I know it's confusing. So like, yeah, I think it's clear to me that Joe and I are on the same page. I think it's just this is what's so fascinating. This is what I love about listening to you talk and watching you work with people is we're clearly starting from the same place and we end up in the same place. Yeah, but our routes there are very different.

Very different. Yeah.

So it's interesting because I— and I think we get— and maybe this will make sense, but so when someone comes into my office and they're like, Dr. K, I'm having problems, And what I'll say is like, yeah, bro, you are having problems. I think this is the key thing. We can fix them, but it's okay for you to be flawed. Yeah, right. It's not that you're not flawed. I think this is where the language of self-acceptance and self-love, I've just seen it clinically get into bad places. And I think this is something about the way that you use it. I think you understand it in a way you see it exist in a way that I think that when people say like self-love, that means letting the degenerate parts of me run wild, right? And this could also be like by virtue of who we work with on average. And so I think where I kind of come from is like, yeah, if you're like, if your life is screwed up, like I agree, let's fix it. But it's okay for it to be screwed up, right? Right. It like up until this point you have tried reflexively to fix these things. And what Joe stumbled into, and this is what really blows my mind, is like, I think it was Freud who originally coined the term like repetition compulsion. So this is something that is very, very common and well known in psychology that we continue, and not only in psychology, also in Eastern spirituality, but we continue to create, when we try to fix the problems in our life, we just create those problems. And, you know, Joe offered a really great example that I'd love to flesh out. So I work with a lot of people with, Narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, sociopathy. And these people, like, you know, in borderline personality disorder, you have a fear of abandonment. And so what happens is when you're in a relationship with someone, you're like, this person is going to abandon me eventually. And then they're like, Charlie, don't abandon me. Don't go, don't go, don't go. And then, and because that never gets satisfied, and you're like, I'm not going to abandon you. Like, tell me you love me, Charlie.

I do, I do.

You love me today, but what about tomorrow?

Yeah.

And then it's I told you 6 times, I keep saying it.

And then what happens is that, that right there, right? So hopefully, like, people see that face, right? And then people with borderline personality disorder, they are very sensitive to faces. So if you're smiling right now and 10% of your face is actually frowning, which is really weird, but you can do that, right? You can tell when the smile doesn't hit someone's eyes. Someone with BPD will ignore the 90% of the smile and they will see the 10% in the lack of love in your eyes. They'll see the frustration. And so what they end up doing is, since I'm never reassured by you, I'm like, Charlie, love me, love me, love me. And then what I'm going to do is drive you fucking crazy. Yeah, you can't handle it anymore. And then you're like, I just need a day away from your anxieties. And then suddenly I've created the abandonment that I feared. And each time it happens, the wound gets deeper and deeper and deeper. And then I'm hungry for the next person to love me and hungry for the next person to love me. And on the eastern side, that's kind of this weird, like, cycle of karma that the Buddha sort of talks about, right? He says, like, we get trapped in this cycle of karma. And like, the more that you try to escape, like, it's like a Chinese finger trap where, like, the harder you pull, the way life is, which I mean, I love you, Joe, but like, when you're like, oh, the human being is beautiful, I'm like, we're also like fundamentally flawed and trapped in this cycle of karma, right? So many of our survival reactions. And that's what happens. You learn like this avoidant attachment stuff, anxious attachment stuff. I agree, we're beautiful, but also we're like fundamentally kind of like the way that we survive our problems creates problems for us. And it requires so much work and insight to sort of get there. And that's why Joe and I have jobs because, you know, so it's fascinating.

Yeah. It's interesting. As you were talking, it's exactly almost the opposite in my approach, which is somebody comes to me like, I have a problem. I'm like, prove it. And they can't. Yeah. So, so like, it's a, it's an interesting thing, but both work. And it's, it's an interesting, what's interesting to me about it is that if you, there's this thing about, uh, just the developmental process that I get really, that I geek out on, but a very interesting way to think about it is there was a time in my life where The word nowadays is agency. But I needed to know that I could control, that I had agency, that I was choosing my life. That life was a choice because I felt disempowered. I felt oppressed by my parents, etc. So I needed to— I have a choice. And that offered me great relief. And the way I say it now is every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen. And then just a little bit later, whatever decade, I guess just a little bit later, all of a sudden that feeling of choice was a burden to me. Mm-hmm. That to see life as a gift, to see that every one of my thoughts was not something that I was choosing, that I couldn't even choose to stop my thinking, that every time I had gratitude, that was a gift that created relief in my system. And so there is this— there is a time and a place for for the methodology.

Yeah.

No matter what it is, like, it's not about is it the right thought? It is, is that the useful thought today in this moment? And there's definitely a time where it is incredibly useful to say, yeah, you're fucked up and that's okay. And there's also a time that's really useful to say, prove it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Can I share with you a model that has really helped me with this? Because I have been The everything is a rut has been so challenging for me because I was like, I've already tried surrendering. I did that when I was 15. It didn't go well.

So you can't surrender. Yeah, we'll get into that.

So the, the model is, I think, I think it comes from Michael Beckwith, but it's, you know, I'm sure you're familiar, like to me, by me, through me, as me. And if you're not, it's this idea that people start in something called victim consciousness, which is life is happening to me and I live in a state like, whose fault is it that things suck so much, basically? And just please don't be my fault. It's somebody else's. The big leap to the next stage, buy me, is, no, I'm taking responsibility. I'm taking control. And this is where I live. That conversation didn't go well. It's not because we're not a match. It's because I could have been more verbally fluent or been funnier or smiled wider, whatever it is. And so most of personal development, you might call it, occurs in this buy me stage. I'm taking control of my finances, my health, my everything. And then where I feel like I've recently gotten to is the pain of that, the endless responsibility of having to—

exhausting.

It's so— well, at first it's liberating, and then it's a cage. It's, it's horrible. And so the end of that is you step into Through Me, which is where I feel like I'm starting, where you allow gratitude to move through you, uh, grace to move through you. Miraculous, I don't know what I'm going to say, but here's me to move through you. And that has helped me a lot to not feel like I'm just moving backwards into this victim consciousness. And I've— and I can subtly now— oh, they're not the same. You said you can't surrender at the beginning, and I guess I'm starting to get that these are fundamentally different approaches.

Yeah. What's after through me?

As me, which is so life moves through me. There's still a separation.

Is there something as me?

Life is as—

is there something after that?

I think it's just as me in the stage.

What do you think?

Yeah, there is.

Oh, come on, hit me.

Yeah, I'm having a hard time verbalizing it. Yeah.

So, so, so I would— easy, just as, as, just the— as long as there's a me, there's one more step. Right.

So, so like I was going to say is, but yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. But again, language is really weird. It gets really weird here.

Yeah. But I think there's absolutely one more step.

Yeah.

A five-step.

Cool. Cool. I mean, I don't, my guess is there's no, there's probably a dozen steps after that too. My experience is evolution doesn't end. It's not like there's not some place where you're like, boom.

Yeah. Yeah.

But there's definitely something past as.

100%.

But I would have to know his definition. There's a, you could geek out on this forever.

Yeah.

But what I do notice about the developmental cycle generally is that each new phase isn't a, a, a, a, an, it's a, it's an integration as well. So you're, you're, you're, you're seeing something new, but you can't stop the integration. Meaning I am walking, but it doesn't mean I now can't crawl.

Yeah. So that's interesting because I, I think, um, you know, in, in psychiatry we have great phrase that really stuck with me, which is growing up is the process of abandoning what works. Yeah, yeah, right. So if you look at people who have these patterns in their life where they're stuck, like chasing, like, okay, like you, so it sounds like you did it all, Charlie. You got in shape, like learned how to play guitar, multiple languages, right? So like you had something in it, it worked, right? Like you got the girl at 24 and then got the girl at 25 and then got the girl at 26 and you keep on doing more and more. It's working. The process of really growing up is getting rid of what works. So you kind of refer to it as an integration. I know it's going to be weird. I think we're golden, but I would call it disintegration, right? I would call it getting rid of something, like literally getting rid of something. So getting rid of your old patterns, getting rid of— and so going to this place of even there's no me left, right? So you're like getting rid of a certain pattern of interaction. And like, a good example is like, when you're 2, you can kind of cry and you can get away with it. I have some patients that continue to have temper tantrums when they're like 26, 27, 68, and they're throwing temper tantrums. And in order for them to grow, they have to get rid of the thing that their spouse tolerated that allowed them to get their way, is what you sort of have to get rid of.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Both are true. There's an integration and a disintegration.

Yeah.

Yeah. And especially with the sense of self, there's a disintegration. But even in that, there's also then my experience that this— I think we're going— we're going to jump the shark until we get to the what am I question. We can talk about like where that goes. But yeah, I don't want to get—

well, I'm out of my depth now, so I want to let you guys steer from here on out.

I think we're okay. Like, let me just ask, like, Charlie, Can you summarize what we've covered so far?

Yeah.

Like, where are we right now? I appreciate it because I think we got to go there and I don't know how much longer we—

So we started with this, this idea of charisma and what is it? It's, it's an ability to vision and communicate clearly and to listen well. And there's all of these behaviors. And then what I heard, this is my— as I piece it together with my own understanding, is there's a social mask that is, hey, everyone, you know, it's that thing. Then there's what I'm going to call an ego, which is you have to take me and accept me. And I'm like, I am this thing. And there's— it's an unconscious belief of this is what I am. And there's something deeper than that that is— I'll call the self here— that is unified and has the, uh, effortless quality of charisma, it sounds like, in this. And that at different stages of one's life, there are many different approaches. There's a— to, to doing it. And one is to fix all of the surface level problems to get the girl to do the thing, to do this, to do that. And another way in is to realize there never was a problem. I didn't need the girl. And my way has been, you know, I guess you could call it top down. Yeah. And it sounds like that was our way.

Yeah, probably.

Yeah, sure.

So beautiful. So I'm thinking if you—

there's one more piece to it that I think would actually tie it together. So in the Greek of charisma, it was a, like, it's a God-given gift or God's given gift. It's this, it's this thing that you don't actually get to, you don't get choice in. It's just a gift. And I think most people take that as some people were given it and some people weren't given it. And I don't know how they meant it, but my, my guess is somebody along the line meant it as No, that's the gift all of us are given. And whether you call that gift the thing that is not separated inside of ourselves, or you call it awareness, or you call it a disintegrated sense of I, or you call it the evaporation of ego, or whatever that is, that, that thing is probably what they're talking and pointing to when they say like the religious people often have a huge sense of ego or— and I'm sorry, huge sense of them. That's also true.

Very common.

Yeah. Also have this sense of, of that, that divine gift that we all have. And so they're there, they see and feel that and live through that process often, even if it's distorted through trauma or whatever. They have that thing. And that's where we're, we're pointing to when we start talking about the self and what is the self and is that is, is starting to see that the ego, which you defined as I think I'm this and this and this, I also define it as I don't think I'm this and this, right? Somebody is like, no, no, I'm not that pretty. Also ego.

I'm not a loser.

I'm not a loser. Also ego. And so, so there is this So, and when I'm speaking to the idea of there's your authentic self, that's what I'm speaking to, right? I'm not saying you need to be fixed because that doesn't need to be fixed. But, and absolutely there's work that needs to be done for you to be able to see, to drop, to see that, to understand that's who you are. So that's the—

Yeah. So if I'm sort of feeling like I'm going to offer some language that— and maybe once we— if y'all like the language and it feels like it's a model that kind of works, then we can get to the real stuff.

Yeah.

So, you know, and it blows my mind once again, Joe, that like you— like, I don't know how you learned this stuff, but like, you know, I spent like literally years and maybe you did too, but years in India and South Korea and Japan and stuff like at monasteries and things like that. But So I like this term ahamkara, which is the Sanskrit word that loosely gets translated as ego. But the technical translation is the feeling of I, right? So anytime you say I am dot, dot, dot, that is not actually what you are. That is the ego, right? So this is where when Joe is saying I'm a winner, that's ego. I'm a loser. That's also ego. And so I know it sounds kind of weird because we think we are these things, but like I'm a doctor, right? Like, that's— if, if I were to say I'm a doctor, everyone would agree. But like, show me. Yeah, right. So where is the doctor in me? Like, you can't find it. It's not a real thing. It's a construction, right? So, so, and this is where people will say, like, so all of the attributes, anything that you— if you say I am dot, dot, dot, anything that comes after that statement is part of ego. And this is really confusing for people because if I say I am a man, right? And because everyone's like, oh, like, that's like, that's biological, right? Where I'm not trying to get into like gender rights or whatever. I mean, like in a very technical sense, forget about morality and what's right or whatever. Let's, let's talk scientifically. How do I know I'm a man? Like, Charlie, are you a man?

First blush is yes.

Yeah. So how do you know?

I look at my genitals.

So let's say you have testicular cancer. You have to have your testicles removed, right? So this is like work that I've literally done. I've had patients who have a double BRCA-negative mutation who have to have double prophylactic mastectomies. I've had patients who have hysterectomies. The uterus needs to be taken out at the age of 24 because they've got really bad fibroids. If I remove your genitals, are you still a man?

Uh, I don't know. I am. I think so.

Um, right. So then some people will say, like, you're— you still have XY chromosomes, right? Right. So is that where man comes from? Is it the genitals? Like, which part? What part of you makes you a man?

And ultimately everything can be taken and will be, it seems like.

Right, right. So this is where even there's so many foundational things about our identity where I love Joe's language of like, show me, like, prove it to me. Right. And we're so trapped in this idea that I am something, whereas if we really look at like kind of what we are, you know, you change, your thoughts change, your emotions change, your identity changes, your body changes. So none of those are really what makes you you, right? Like, if I lost an arm, I'd still be me. I was still me before I graduated from medical school. People think that you become a medical doctor when you get your, your piece of paper and you finish medical school. I know the day I became a doctor, it was 6 months after I got my M.D.

degree.

It was like when I was on call and someone asked for my help and my senior was unavailable and I was able to handle it. It's when I was at a wedding and someone was like, is there a doctor here? And you're like, okay, yeah, no, this person doesn't need to go to the hospital. It's a panic attack, not a heart attack. If I'm wrong, they die, right? So like there are moments where we have this feeling of becoming, but that's not really who we are. So the ahamkara is when you say to yourself, I am a winner or I am a loser, It feels that way and it feels true to you. And that's the way the ego is. But if you kind of think about it, like, I can't biopsy you and find either of those things. And so a lot of what we're talking about in terms of this deeper charisma, this authenticity that comes from the layer, that divine connection comes from the layer beneath ego, because as long as you are chasing ego, you're going to get back to this trap that we talked about with you, where it's like, I'm going to be better, I'm going to be better, I'm going to be better. But the more that you become that thing and the more that people love the shell that you become— I'm going to become rich, I'm going to become handsome— it doesn't actually solve the problem. Right. And this is how you become narcissistic. This is how you become hypersensitive to other people's judgments. This is why you can't leave the house unless you get a nose job. That's all the growth of the ego. So this is the biggest problem, is that so many of the things that we do to fix the problems in our life, as Joe said, just make them worse.

It's really well said. The way I give people a direct, potentially a direct experience of this is try to get in touch with the thing that you've always been, like, that there's never been one moment that that hasn't been true. And there's a, there's a sense that happens is the words can't come to mind, but there's a sense of that, which is that place that is beyond the ego. And there's this very weird thing, and I'm really curious about your thinking on this, which is there's a, again, every epiphany is a rut waiting to happen. There's a place where fighting the ego, really important, like disintegrating the ego, really important. There's also a place where it's really important to say, oh, there is no ego. That's just an illusion. That, that whole thing was like a, you know, it, that happens. And apparently, from what I understand, uh, from neuroscience, is that the sense of I happens in the same part of the brain that hallucinates. So like the, the, is that, do you know about that?

I would not say that.

Okay.

But we can get into that if you want.

Yeah, I don't— I just— it was an article I read and I was— but generally there is just a— there is like a— that sense of self is at some point there's a time when it's really important to, to like see through it and to work, work it out. And there's also a part where there's just like a, you know, I think there was, there was an Irish mystic named Wu Wei, and he said, Fight your ego. Try to destroy your ego. Try to see through your ego. The only problem is that it doesn't exist. And I remember after 10 years of fighting it, that moment gave me massive relief to read that. I don't think it would have if I hadn't fought it for 10 years. Yeah.

So I think a couple of thoughts just to kind of pile on to that.

Yeah.

So first is, you know, I think the ego, we know where it sort of comes from in the brain, and it's fascinating. So the ego most likely comes from something called our default mode network, which is our sense of self. So the default mode network is the ability for you to like recognize that you have an identity, right? So when you look in the mirror, you don't see a face, you see you, right? Like you have like an identification with that. That's probably the default mode network. The really interesting thing is a hyperactive default mode network is what makes you depressed. So if you look at— if you talk to someone who's clinically depressed, I am a loser. My family is better off without me. It's always me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I can't do this. I can't do that. And they don't think about anyone except for themselves in a weird way, right? So like, if you're really struggling with depression, you'll notice that you're looking at yourself. You're thinking about yourself. I go out with my friends. I'm thinking about how I look. I'm thinking about how they would have more fun if I wasn't here. I'm thinking about how I should have jumped into that conversation. I had something really funny to say, but I didn't know how to jump in. And now I'm not saying anything. And now I'm just sitting here and like—

and they're like the exact opposite of charismatic.

Absolutely.

They are like the— they are the people that everyone's like, oh, God, could you— I just don't want to work with you. I don't— please don't sit next to me. No, no, no. They're coming over. They're the people. They're creating that reality. And it is because they're the farthest away from that authenticity and sense of yourself, whatever you want to call it.

So I think I just love the way you brought that back. So I think the more internally divided you are, that fundamental charisma— so you can be car salesman charisma by being internally divided. You can think one thing and be slick on top. That doesn't last long. The core of this charisma I think we're talking about is to not be internally divided. As long as you are feeling anxious, and pretending to be confident. You can pretend to be confident, you can appear confident, you will never be charismatic.

I feel like we've gotten to a really important core, which is this lack of internal division or just a wholeness.

Absolutely right. So that's, that's where the authenticity— because the moment that I have something within me and I'm pretending to be something else, that's not authentic.

And, and that when I'm pointing to, when I'm saying be yourself, It is that sense of wholeness that I am pointing to. It is that thing, oh wait, that's the thing that I've always been. When you went there in your mind, or the people are listening, if they went there, that wasn't like two parts. That was a sense of oneness, maybe not even with self, but with everything. Yeah.

So beautiful. So I think this is what's really cool about the default mode network. So if we look at the fastest acting, so default mode network is overactivation of default Sorry, depression is overactivation of default mode network. Right. So I'm constantly thinking about myself. The fastest treatment, pharmacologic treatment for depression is ketamine. And ketamine was originally not a psychiatric agent. It was used in anesthesia. Still is.

Tranquilizer. Yeah.

Dissociative agent.

Okay.

So tranquilizer puts you to sleep. It doesn't put you to sleep. You're actually awake with ketamine.

Okay.

It dissociates you. So your sense of self disappears. So this is the other cool thing. Meditation deactivates the default mode network. The other really cool thing is psychedelics.

So yeah, well, well, let me finish.

Let me finish.

I know, I know, I'm with you.

We're with you. You're gonna say the opposite and we're still gonna agree. Yeah, so, so psychedelics, this is what's really fascinating. If you look at the studies on psychedelic healing So people will ask people, when you take a psychedelic, what do you experience? If you see colors, if you see cool things, you don't actually heal. The, the, the subjective experience that correlates with trauma improvement, depression improvement with psychedelic substance use is ego death, ego dissolution, deactivation of the default mode network. And it is the sense that even at your deepest self, You know, there, there's the surface thoughts, then there's the ego, and then at that deepest self, you're not even you, you're everything. So people who experience this sense of interconnectedness come out of that experience with a different perception of themselves. I am no longer a doctor, I'm no longer Alok, I'm no longer a man.

Yep.

And that's literally the default mode network. And this is why I feel really strongly about it. I'm confident this is correct because we have three different that, you know, meditation, psychedelics, and ketamine all activate this thing. We know it's hyperactivated, so that's kind of like how we get to that self.

Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna geek out for a minute. First of all, uh, I want to just put a warning out to anybody who's listening to this: ketamine is highly addictive. I have seen some great human beings get completely fucking destroyed by that drug.

Agreed. Don't use ketamine.

Yeah, so Yeah. Or use it really sparingly, really well, with really great people with you. But so that's one thing I want to say, just because I've suffered personal grief and loss through that. The second thing is, I agree, meditation does exactly what you're saying. At a point, meditation does exactly what you're saying. There is a point where people meditate and how they meditate, they're reinforcing their ego. And so, so there's also that. So if you're meditating in a way where you're not trying to manage yourself or control yourself, then it's a higher chance of that disintegration happening than when you're trying to manage and control yourself. Saying that because I did that for a decade and I know exactly what that's like.

Yeah.

Which I think is actually part of the journey and important. So that, that's the things there. I think the— I couldn't agree more with the Default mode network. I love— I didn't know about that. It's like such an amazing—

I'll send you some stuff.

Yeah, please. That, that is really cool. And my experience is those are 3 ways to do it, and there's other ways to do it too. A sense of loving yourself, I find, also does that same thing because one of the aspects of the somatic experience of love is that you're not giving or receiving. Anymore. Like, if you deeply go into that state, it's a lot like a, like a, an amazing orgasm that you might have. Like, not the kind of like a porn orgasm, but the orgasm where you disintegrate is another place where you can, where you can find that. Love is another place you can find that. Um, deep intimate relationship is also a place you will— you start noticing. We'll do this thing with groups where you've got like 6 or 7 people and this person is anxious, this person is anxious, and we'll ask this person to hold the anxiety and literally feel the anxiety and they can basically no longer feel it.

Tell me about it.

It's a— it's a— I don't understand.

So I'm just trying to understand even logistics of it. So you're in a group of people, 2 people are feeling anxious, you ask one of them to hold.

No, no. Let's say we're working with one person and they're going through something and we'll ask people to hold their emotional states. And it makes it in a group, it makes it that other people can't hold the emotional state. It's a really fast— let me make it really practical. You've got a husband and wife dynamic, and the husband always worries about money, and the wife is always like, ah, relax, it's okay. And then one day the husband's like, I'm not worried about money anymore. Guaranteed. Yeah. Or you're in a business meeting and there's the naysayer, and finally the team's just like, I'm done with this naysayer, we're going to get rid of this naysayer and then come back to that group in a month and there's a new naysayer. So there's this interesting dynamic of seeing— when you see yourself through a community, there's a sense of self that disintegrates. The most— the best experience of this, where when this is fully understood, happens in— that I've ever heard. I can't pronounce her name, unfortunately, but it's this tribe in Africa where if there is a husband and wife that are having a problem, they don't see it as a husband and wife problem. They see it as a community problem. This is the way that in Ayurvedic medicine, my fingernail is kind of rigid. That means it's a digestive problem, which I can also see in my eyes. They see this as a symptom of a community problem. And so the entire community comes and works with that couple to heal the that because that's how they're going to heal their community.

I feel really moved as you talk about that.

Yeah. Yeah. And that also is a disintegration of the sense of I, that it's not actually me. So it's there. I think there's lots of ways to do it. And every single one of them that I have ever run across, deeply healing, crazy healing. And as a matter of fact, when we do some of the work where we're asking other people to hold emotions, this, that experience of non-duality, of seeing self as everything, happens consistently. So there's like, there's lots of modalities that I have found or experimented or played with that bring that thing in every single one of them deeply, deeply healing.

They restore wholeness by— No, no, no.

They show that we are whole.

Restore implies it wasn't there to begin with. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's got to be a second conversation. So I just call that when I teach that to my patients, I call it an emotional umbilical cord. So you're just connected and emotions pass back and forth. It's a really useful technique to use from a manipulative standpoint. So if you're in a challenging work environment, like I call— so someone taught this to me, one of my mentors, sitting in someone's seat. So if someone has a pattern of behavior and you start engaging in that pattern of behavior, it'll flip.

Yeah.

There's a certain amount of energy, and I don't— I'm just using that as a general— there's a certain amount of stuff that is non-physical that exists between us. And if I don't hold it, you will. And this has been shown in research. So like, because I want to go back to it, but this is really cool. So if you have a child with an anxiety disorder and you have a parent with an anxiety disorder, if you treat the parent without touching the child, whatever benefit the parent gets will get translated over, not one-to-one, but will basically get translated over into the child. Oh yeah, right. So we share emotions and there's all kinds of empathic circuits that get activated. This is also where, like, charisma kind of comes in, right? So when you're authentic and you're not internally divided, when there's no car salesman, right? So like when we're sitting with a car salesman, we kind of get convinced. And this is why they use tactics like timeshare presentations. They know that we're not going to trust them. So they emotionally manipulate us. Yeah, they figure out how to do that. But even when you're in that situation, you can empathically detect that undercurrent of what they're not sharing with you. So the more unified you are, the more authentic you are, the more not yourself you are, the more connected you are, the more that will create this dyad of charisma.

That takes us back to the beginning of the diet. I love it. I love it.

So I think the one thing that, you know, we've talked a little bit about is like Charlie's journey. Joe had a journey. It sounds very similar to my own in the sense of you have to go through the motions, you know, you have to kind of do things the wrong way to realize it doesn't work. One of my favorite stories about this is if you sort of look at these spiritual leaders from the Indian subcontinent. In ancient India, we had four castes, and the Brahmins were at the top, and they're the priests, they're the teachers of meditation, they're the gurus. Then you have the kings, the Kshatriyas below them, they're like nobility. The really interesting thing is that all of the enlightened people— not all, all the famous enlightened people that come out of the Indian subcontinent, none of them are priests. None of them are meditation teachers.

Oh, interesting.

They're all kings. So Buddha was a king, Krishna was a king, Ram was a king. These are considered incarnations of Vishnu. Um, even Mahavir, the, the founder of Jainism, is like, was a king. So one time I had a question for a teacher of mine. I was like, why are all the kings getting enlightened and none of the priests? And the answer is really interesting. It's that you have to chase material things get them and then realize it doesn't work. Right? So if I, if I tell anyone at home like, oh yeah, like, discover your true self and like, you don't need to get the girl to be happy, there's a seed of like, I don't know that, right? You have to actually try something, realize that it is insufficient to really look for something more. And so I, you know, I think it's the question that I've got for you, Joe, is, okay, so you're talking about this authentic self. We've all been through these hard journeys. Do you think that everyone has to go through that journey, or how do we get to that authentic self?

Yeah, the way I think about it is in a human development way, in a human development framework. So you could look at lots of different models of this. Terri O'Fallon's Stages is one, and Spiral Dynamics is another, but there's Generally, I would say growing up is waking up, waking up is growing up. And so there's a set of stages that you have to go through, but it's all of our birthright. And as long as, you know, and it seems like trauma gets in the way of it. So the more trauma that you've been encountering, oftentimes like it slows down the process, which is why you see somebody who's still acting like 7 or 13 or 21. And so, but I think that there's just this natural development that happens. In humans. This, and it's all theoretical, um, meaning, yep, there's research, there's a lot of research on it, there's a lot of things to prove it, but I think we're all still just guessing about how this all works. I don't think there's been enough work done for it to be really secure and this is how it goes. But my experience is that there's a— most of the work has been done on the cognitive framework, so Basically, the way you think about— the way I think about cognitive development and what I would call head awakening is your sense of self, your sense of time, and your sense of context change, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger until they kind of explode into, you know, they kind of rearrange. So if you look at a little kid, and you say, um, your birthday, 6 months away, be excited, Billy. Billy's not excited. Billy's excited because they can kind of conceive about a week or two away. An average American can conceive of about 3 and a half years, which is why they could all sign 4-year loans that would, like, blew up on the housing market. Um, you know, there's traditions clearly where it's 7 generations, where what I do today, I'm thinking about 7 generations ahead. That, you know, in the American Indian tradition. So that length of time expands until there's a point of implosion, which is, you know, infinity is found in the depth of a moment. It's not found in a length of time. Same with the sense of self. And a little kid, what do you want for Christmas? G.I. Joe Kung Fu Grip. What does mom want for Christmas? G.I. Joe with a Kung Fu Grip. What does dad want for Christmas? G.I. Joe with a Kung Fu Grip. They get a little bit older and dad wants a Tesla, mom wants a new husband, whatever, you know, whatever it is. And so, and that sense of self grows from family to tribe to nation to humanity to ecosystem, and then it implodes into oneness. You see yourself as of everything. I could go into context too, but that's enough. So basically that's how, and then at some point in that lack of sense of self, you can't believe any of your thoughts anymore. Your thoughts, yeah, they're true, they're not true. I could see them being true in this way. I can see them not being true in this way. But you can no longer go, oh yeah, that is right. Because that requires the ego. You have to see yourself in that. So that would be what I would call head awakening. The heart awakening, what I call heart awakening, which is more of the emotional side of things, more the mammalian side of things. It's where our decision-making happens in the brain, is in the emotional center of the brain. That looks like we start off with— we're just taken away by our emotions, and then we go into managing our emotions, and then we start going into loving and accepting all of our emotions. And as we love and accept and have them move through us without having us be controlled by them, the emotions start to clarify. So anger starts becoming determination. Anger stops looking like nice dress or you son of a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It starts looking more like a Gandhi or Martin Luther King anger, which is, this is unacceptable. And so our emotions start changing into a place where they're all pleasurable. They're all acts of— they're all— there's a kind of a felt sense of love in all of them. And there, it's a very fluid thing where we're not holding, holding our emotions as who we are. And, and the key thing there is, as that opens up, as that heart opens up, two things happen. One is that we just fall in love with— there's literally a felt sense of love and joy. That is kind of perpetually there more and more. And also, you can't believe your emotions, just like you can't believe your thoughts. So the head awakening really feels like, really feels like peace, but that, that peace that you can always get at any time. But the sense of joy, that sense of love comes from a heart, more of an emotional process. There's been very, very little research done on that second part. That I'm aware of. You just made it look like maybe you know some, and I would love to get it. There's a huge amount of research in human development on that first part, but I think this is just a natural progression of who we are, and we just have to go through— we have to crawl to learn how to walk. And so that's how I see it working. And then there's a gut one that we don't have to go into, but generally that's, that's generally how I see it. And so when I'm working with people, my assumption is this is their birthright. That there's work to be done. But let's start with the assumption that this is your birthright. This isn't something that you have to achieve. Because my noticing in modern Western culture, the idea of achieving it is often a very egoic state, which actually enforces the ego rather than— Yeah.

Who is it that conquers the ego? I conquer the ego.

Ah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And so oftentimes I'm— I'm— that's why, because of the context in which I'm working in, that's how I would speak that truth. If I'm working in a context where everybody's lackadaisical, I'd be, yeah, you gotta get, get your grind, you know, let's go, let's go, let's do it, push-ups, or whatever it is. So which is like, if I think about Guanca's work and the Vipassana stuff, it's very discipline-oriented, very hardcore. But that culture is far more going with the flow than our culture. So it's just teaching to the audience.

Yeah, so I'm kind of curious about, so there's so many things there that I could, I feel like you're a tennis ball machine and there's a lot of balls coming over the net.

Yeah, it's a lot.

I'm happy to return any of them.

Yeah, yeah. Any of them.

But I'm curious, Charlie, if something kind of calls to you about the scope of what we're talking about today.

Yeah, I have a number of things. I don't need to race there. I have one of the questions that is coming up is like we're talking a little bit about charisma and what I mentioned about like, be— we're in the depths of our birthright and being ourselves and Donald Trump is president, you know. And so like, I want to at some point wind back down to the concrete reality of like, okay, so if this is, this is the most charismatic thing, how come it's not everywhere? How come we're not seeing this radiate more. But so I don't need to take it there right now.

Yeah, so maybe I'll offer like a couple thoughts and let me know if y'all feel— so, so Joe, what I liked about what you said is I, I think I'm sort of seeing a model, right, where there's like the— and, and you work really somatically, really viscerally. Yeah, working with sort of stages of development, really understanding that like— so a couple of like themes that I'm noticing is the way that we respond to our emotions. So first is there's a lack of awareness of what we're feeling, and the emotions are going to be controlling all of our actions. And I'm going to be infusing a little bit of my conclusions in here.

So very true.

So first thing is like, I'm not angry, you're angry. So as long as you're there, nothing in your life is going to be going well. Then comes the second stage of being aware of your emotions, but then we have to manage it. Oh, I'm angry. That's not okay. I need to control that anger. Yes. Third stage is, okay, it's okay to be angry. What is the anger telling me? What is the anger motivating me to do? What— like, this is a part of me. This is not bad. It doesn't need to be controlled. I don't need to be controlled by it, right? Right. How can I understand this, integrate it, live with it?

I would say that the most crucial part there is the welcoming of it.

Sure.

Oh, I can't wait to feel angry. I can't wait to feel anxiety. I can't wait to feel I can't wait to feel joy. And what I notice is that that welcoming comes in stages as well, which is first, depending on society, but usually the first one is anger or sadness. Like upper middle class white culture is men, it's sadness, is anger is the easiest to access. Women, it's sadness. And then the other, then fear, but then like pleasure and joy and exuberance. Those are things that people We will do work with people and they'll get angry for 45 minutes and fully move anger and get to clarity. But we ask them to, like, do pleasure and it's like 2 minutes in there, I'm done.

Yeah, it's really hard for them.

It's really hard.

Yeah, right.

Because the anger, the pleasure has so many negative associations with it.

Right. Yeah. So it's— but it is the welcoming. It's like, I can't wait to feel that thing again because I know how much wisdom is in it. I know that it's a great signal. I know that when I, when I love it, welcome it, that my life changes in great ways.

The other thing that really struck me is how much— and I don't know if this phrase is going to mean anything to y'all— but how much Anahata chakra oriented you are. So like how heart chakra oriented you are.

Yeah.

So, you know, even when you talk about like head awakening and heart awakening.

Yeah.

Um, and this is why I think I don't understand like half of what you say. Like, I get it. Yeah, I know we agree, but like the self-love thing has always been confusing to me.

Yeah.

And so the— I've noticed that the visceral emotional perspective.

Yeah.

Connects to the heart chakra.

Yes.

In terms of spiritual development.

Yeah.

That is just not the chakra that I chose to focus on.

Right. Yeah. And by the way, me too. So meaning that all I cared about was head awakening. That's all I thought there really was from ages of 24 to probably like 37, 40, something like that.

And so the question that I—

I'm so— what is the chakra that you decided to focus on?

Third eye.

Third eye.

Okay. Third eye chakra.

So head.

Yeah.

So I guess the question that I've got for you, Joe, is like, Can you, uh, do you talk about your spiritual journey publicly?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, very rarely, but I do.

Yeah. So can you tell me like what that looked like?

Yeah. So the head— so, okay, so what happened was I was— I've always been interested in it as a— I was born and raised Catholic, so I knew the parables of Jesus better than I knew than the people who were teaching me. I just was. And then I collected parables across all things. I got But it was all very intellectual understanding, no experience. My wife, part of condition of marrying my wife was we were going to do therapy, we were going to do a 10-day meditation retreat, and we were going to go through Southeast Asia backpacking for 6 months. We could survive those 3 things together, we could get married.

Her conditions or your conditions?

Her conditions. Okay. Her conditions. Yeah, yeah. My wife is absolutely responsible.

Mine too.

Yeah. And so So, and then in that, in the 10-day meditation retreat, I had an experience of oneness with the universe that lasted about 8 seconds. I got God's little drug dealer. It was just like, and whatever that was, I was going to spend the rest of my life looking for it. Like, I wanted that thing. And I just, all my ambition, all my dedication went towards that. And so I, but I had massive authority issues. And so listening to teachers was just not going to be a thing that I was going to do. So, but I needed their information. So I'd listen and test and listen and test and listen and test. And so that's, I started this experimental process of, oh, so the Buddha says this about grief, how, let's see how true that is. Like, what's the experiment I can concoct that will teach me a felt sense of it? And In that process, I also just did every possible thing I could find. Hoffman Process, different forms of therapy. The therapist that we went to, I feel so grateful. She was amazing, had her own awakening experience and didn't even recognize it. Like, she was 80-something years old while I was talking to her one day and she said, oh, this, that kind of thing happened to me once. And she told me, and I'm like, come on. And she— so, so I got really lucky there, but we just basically— I just basically looked everywhere, or I just dedicated to— I didn't make money. I went into debt. I just— and it pretty much crescendoed with me sitting in a room meditating by myself for the greater part of 7 to 10 years. I would worry about money and meditate. Those were my two pastimes and literally meditate about probably about 7 hours a day. It's like a lot of my time.

So when you say meditate, what kind of practice were you doing?

Yeah, so I had this really interesting thing. So I started with Vipassana, that was my first meditation. And because I was a child of an alcoholic, I could always read people pretty well because it was what you needed to do to survive. And so I went in for one of the questions and I told them what was happening with my meditation practice. And so in Vipassana, the idea of meditation is that you, at the beginning, you put your attention, from head to— after you learn to focus and concentrate through just focusing on your nose, you move your attention from the top to the bottom. And my attention was moving on its own and I was following it. And I basically asked, is that okay? And the man was like, no, you got to do the thing. And the wife was like, what are you doing? Like, you shouldn't say that to him. And so they disagreed. And so I immediately lost trust. And so what I would start doing is I would just read books on meditation and experiment. Oh, this form of meditation, let's experiment with that. This form of meditation, I'll experiment with that. Until at some point I had the recognition that I was just trying to manipulate myself and manage myself. I wasn't actually being with what was. And then it just turned into just enjoyment. It's just, oh, I'm just gonna sit here and enjoy myself is really where it ended up being. During that whole time, it started with a guy named Papaji who was a Ramana Maharishi descendant. But that what am I question popped up. It was who am I in Ramana's words. It turned into what am I, then turned into what am I essentially. And that question 10 times a day would cross my mind. It was without any— there was no discipline to it. It was just like, this is the question over and over.

Spontaneous.

Spontaneous, or trained, because I was so into it for so long, then maybe it became spontaneous. But it just— and so that question I wrestled with for a decade, easily. And then at the same time, I'm starting to do all this emotional stuff, and I'm living with my wife, who was all about the emotional stuff. And she would make fun of— she'd be like, hey, baby, tell me about your spiritual journey because I'm bored and I need to go to sleep. Like she had nicknames for everybody. Papa G was Punjab Potatoes. I know that probably sounds right, but she had fun, made fun of everybody. Like Stephen Harrison was somebody who I really dug, and she'd call him being boring. And Adia Shante was like, uh, I can't remember who's— he's now a friend. But like, it's just like, it was just— she just— I was dissociative enough where she knew that there was— it was getting in the way of intimacy with myself and with her in that process. And so she was making fun of it, and— but she was deeply in an emotional, doing a lot of somatic and emotional work. And so then, a bit of a, what they call like fog walker, I had the moment of awakening, but I didn't even particularly notice 'cause I'd had so many peak experiences that I had chased. And I'm like, I'm not chasing peak experiences anymore. And I'm at a meditation retreat going to the bathroom, and which very typical story. Had this moment of, oh, the question, what am I, extinguished. It was just so clear, not verbal, but very clear. And that's when I got really lucky. Right after that, I had the thought that this never ends, that the evolution never ends. And so, whereas I saw a lot of my friends who had gone through it and had some sort of awakening experience get stuck in the identity of awake, for whatever reason, I didn't get stuck there very long.. And, and mostly because of that thought, oh, I know this never ends. And so I collected all these tools from all these people, but mostly I'd been experimenting this whole time. And so I got there and I was like, oh, okay, the, the negative self-talk, the voice in my head is almost completely gone. I thought it was gone. There was— and I noticed little things like, oh, the to-do list is still there. There's like, there's other, there's like little parts of it that are left, but mostly it was gone. The editor was gone. And there was this vast spaciousness that I could hang out in any time I wanted to. But there was this recognition eventually that there wasn't— that didn't make a joyful life, that didn't make a life of love, that didn't make a healthy family. This is about when the kids were young. And so I was like, oh, what the— what's going on now? Like, what is that thing? And that's when I really got into— I met a man who had the ability to sit with people as you and I do, and in a very brief time, their whole life would be shifted. And I got really into what he was doing. And he passed. He was a good friend, and he got cancer. And you'll, like, you'll find this story funny. Got cancer, and he came to live with us to cure this slow-moving kind of cancer. And lymphatic thing. And he, uh, and he lived with us, so I got to see him work and work with him. And he worked with a lot of people, so I got to really see what was going on there. And he, um, and then he passed of a heart attack on his first silent retreat. So he also had an awakening situation, also had a still a strong sense of self, like not in an unhealthy way, um, and And then he died at his first silent retreat of a heart attack. And so, um, but when he passed, I was like, I know there's other people who must be able to do it. So I went around the world, like, finding them, studying with them, seeing what they had in common. And that's where the VIEW framework came for the, for the connection courses. Here's a way to relate with people that actually allows for a lot of depth and intimacy. And in that became the relational work. And the relational work, it's, it's all— it's like you can't avoid the emotion and the somatic to actually do like that deep relational work, is— was my experience. And so that opened up that doorway. And what I noticed is there's a lot of awakened people, but they were— the thing that I thought was the thing that was going to make me good enough or happy enough or whatever it was, I was watching people act out of ego and sleeping with their students and doing all this stuff. And but they clearly had the the awakening. In fact, at one point I invited 16 of them into a 3-day retreat with me, and I just watched their egos battle. And I remember—

these are spiritual teachers?

Yeah, yeah. I remember I invited Adya to come. I'm like, I'm really excited because everybody talks about it differently, and I would love you to be there, and we could all learn from each other because I saw all these different paths and everybody was kind of stuck on their path. And he said, ah, no, man, there'll be way too much ego in that. And I remember saying to him, like, I was like, that's exactly where we should be then. Like, if there's— if, like, if we were— there's all this awakening, there's all this ego, like, what is going on here? Like, this is our place to figure this out. He very wisely said no. And, and so I got to see all that. And I said, okay, well, what, what's actually happening here? And that's when I really started delving into the emotional work.

Interesting.

And I focus on the emotional work and I speak through the emotional work again, not because I think it's more important than the head or the gut. I do it because it's— what I notice is you want to— if people trans— my experience is if transformation requires humans to work both on the head, the heart, and the gut level, deep transformation, you can get a lot of ways in any one of them. But if you really want the deep stuff and you— or you want alacrity in your movement, working on all three levels is really important. And our society is just really out of whack on the emotional. There's not a lot of people doing that deep emotional work. There's a lot of head experiences. There's a lot of nervous system stuff that's going on now, the breathwork and all that. Like, all that stuff is great, but it's— I just saw the whole of emotions. And so often I focus there because it's just the lever that I get the, the best sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's fascinating. I mean, I, I think, um, I'm pretty sure— I know this sounds weird, but I understand every step of that journey. Yeah, right. Sounds—

it sounds—

and, and it's interesting how, um, kind of, I sort of ended up like— I think there's a part of us that ended up in the same place. So my heart chakra work happened like kicking and screaming.

Yeah, mine too.

Into it, right? Yeah. So, so, and I, I'm just sort of thinking about people who are listening to this And, um, you know, if they're listening to this, I imagine their main question is like, okay, so what do I do, right? Yeah. So, so we started with this very like, you know, head level, here's the regression analysis of charisma and what are the things. Yeah. And you can write things or you can talk out loud. And then we sort of talk about this ego piece, about sort of noticing your ego. Um, I loved your model of I don't know if it was your model or my representation of your model of unaware of your emotion, aware of your emotion, managing it, welcoming your emotion. And then through that welcoming, the transformation kind of happens on its own, which is kind of where I feel like called to go for a second because I think the key thing, if people are listening to this, I imagine they're like, okay, how do I become charismatic?

Yeah, right.

Which is like, If you guys have been paying attention, you know the problem with that question is the word become.

Right.

Right. So, so, so there's this weird, like, you have to— this is something that is cultivated, not done. You have to get out of the way and the charisma will, like, float to the surface.

Yeah.

Right. And I think that this is where I think about a couple of, like, more technical things. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm a little bit more head-oriented.

Yeah.

And so, you know, my journey was like just a couple of key themes that were really similar.

Great.

One is I never had a guru. I had a lot of gurus.

Yeah.

I, you know, I spent years going to different teachers and different ashrams and things like that.

It—

I spent a lot of time with contemplative practice. I think the big— maybe a couple of big differences that sort of led me to slightly different places One is I formally trained in neuroscience and psychiatry.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and then the second thing was I really tunneled down, sort of using that like scientific mechanistic perspective, I really tunneled down into like the mechanisms of spiritual awakening.

Yeah.

And, and so I, I think all these things sort of happen in their own time and all that stuff is kind of true.

Yeah.

Um, but I think that there are certain things, if we're talking about the process of connecting with that on authenticity. Yeah, I think what you're saying absolutely works, right? So if you sort of— there's certain things that I would kind of say are getting in the way. The first is the lack of awareness of what you're feeling. Second thing is trying to control what you're feeling. The behaviors that you create will worsen your circumstances. We've talked about that. And I think this is the confusing part for many people, which is then if you kind of get out of the way and you welcome the emotions, they will like rise up up, right? There's a bunch of them that are stored.

Yes.

Packaged that will start to rise up.

Yes.

They will start to rise up. And then that's a very oftentimes painful process that we cannot run away from. The fact that we run away from it to begin with is how they get stored in the first place.

Yes.

Yep.

And then some sort of uncontrolled, unintentional, right? So I think it's interesting where you were, you kind of leveled up when you were on your way to the bathroom or using the bathroom.

Using. Yeah.

Using the bathroom, right?

Yeah.

And, and so, so that's what's really hard. But I want people to like really understand that, that if you set up all the pieces, right? So if you like have the right soil and have the right water and have the right sunlight, then it will grow eventually. You can even have the wrong soil and the wrong water and the wrong sunlight and it'll grow too.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You know, and I think the, the, the, yeah.

And there's lots of things you can do about soil and sunlight and yeah. Yeah.

And, and so just a couple of parallels that I thought are hilarious is like my relationship with my wife was also like, it was funny. So I decided to become a monk.

Yeah.

And so I came back and going back to like finding girlfriends, right? So like I had had a string of, I couldn't even call them relationships, just failures at relationships. I had like joined a fraternity in college. I was like a junior in college and had tried to date women and things like that for like 2 years with really very little success.

Yeah.

Just a lot of bad habits. And then what I realized is like, the moment that I decided to become celibate, you know, like, in my mind, there was still this ego of like, oh, I'm celibate. I'm above. So I'd taken this thing that I sucked at, and my ego had turned it into something that is beneath me.

Yeah.

So like, I suck at doing well in school, therefore I'm not going to be material. And I suck at dating. So my ego is going to twist that into I'm above all of that.

Yeah.

And then the big irony is that, like, that was a huge step for me because I had all this, like, internal stuff going on. I had a subtler level of internal stuff with the ego.

Yeah.

But then I could just be with her, right? So she thinks I asked her out on a date. I don't think I— I really didn't ask her out on a date. Like, that's not what was in my head. It was just like, okay, now I'm done dating women, but like, here's this person, I can just show her around, right? She likes Thai food and like, let's go eat. And then the other funny thing is that she's, she like really makes fun of me a lot in my spiritual journey.

Yeah.

Like I'm like super like hardcore and she's like, all right, whatever, bro, you know? And she mocks me relentlessly. And I realize that like that is also like a karmic thing that like helps me. And it used to bother me a little bit.

Yeah.

Or not a little bit. It used to bother me a lot. And then now I've like come to learn how to laugh at myself and like this. And that helps with the spiritual ego of like having no ego.

On the good news, you'll have teenagers soon. You'll get more of it.

Great.

It's the best part of teenagers.

Yeah, I may need your help with that. And so the, the, where I sort of end up with the story is like, I do think that there are particular mechanisms of that I think trigger that transcendent understanding.

Yeah.

And if we're really thinking about like how to become charismatic, that authentic self, I do think that there is— if we look at the anthropological and historical research on revolutionary figures, some of them have this, like, what I would call conduit to divinity.

Yeah.

Which you kind of say is, is everybody's birthright. I sort of agree. Yeah. And I think it's their birthright, but not necessarily in this birth, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't have that. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I'm with you.

Yeah.

Meaning I don't have that. I don't have that overlay.

Yeah. So I think that overlay is a great word. So I have an overlay that I put over, like, over this that is, that is quite like mechanistic.

Yeah.

In terms of, you know, cultivating that connection to your true self, which involves dissolution of ego. I'm like 100% convinced that your steps will get anyone there.

Yeah.

And then I think there's all kinds of other, like, dimensions to kind of go in, in terms of like the intentional cultivation. So I think the big maybe split in our spiritual journeys is at some point I started— and I also had issues with like ego and authority and stuff like that. But my big thing was— so then I wanted to learn like the science of it, right? So how do you cultivate a connection with the divine? How do you channel that energy? And I know that sounds weird, but I mean, literally, like, there will be physiologic changes, cognitive changes, emotional emotional changes. Yeah, there are states of consciousness, blood flow to different parts of your brain. We know that there is a physical side of this coin. Yeah, but trying to activate the physical side doesn't work. You need to sort of do the spiritual side, and then the physiology kind of follows.

Yeah, like, I think his name's Neuberg. It's like he has the, the neuroscientist with all the like neuroscientific, like the scientific features of awakening, and he did all the studies with did all the studies with, like, free writing and different kinds of prayer and everything.

And, like, oh, interesting.

I'll get you the book. Yeah, I've done some. I've, like, dabbled, but I haven't gone deep. Yeah.

And, and so I, I mean, that's kind of— I just wanted to respond, and, like, I'm kind of curious, like, where y'all are, where y'all want to go.

Like, yeah, uh, so what are the, like, the cultivation part? Like, what, what, what specific things are we— are you talking about there that I'm—

that I'm— yeah, so, so I, I Okay, so let's like start with the model, right? So you have unawareness.

Yeah.

Then you have awareness of your mental and emotional functioning.

Yeah.

That comes with regulation of that. So you're trying to exert control. One part of your mind.

Yeah.

Or one part of you is trying to control another part of you.

Yes.

Then we have the dissolution of that, the welcoming. We're not going to have any kind of internal resistance.

Yeah.

Once internal resistance goes away.

Yeah.

This solves a lot of people's general problems. I'm anxious around people. I'm trying to control, oh my God, like, what does this girl think? I'm on a date. It's a first date. Am I doing well? Am I not doing well? As long as you're stuck in your head, you're not being empathic. You're not being connected to her or him. And then like, so you're not going to form that connection. So your anxiety is sabotaging things. So we need singularity of self, right? So we need like a unity of like not fighting yourself, welcome your emotions, all that kind of stuff. I think this is where there— so beyond that is where there's a whole process. So this is where what I've sort of found is, is there are intentional— so if we look at conduit to whatever else is there, yeah, when our default mode network deactivates, when we use psychedelics, when we have meditative awakenings, there are— when endogenous DMT starts, uh, producing in our brain, we have a connection to something beyond us.

Yeah.

Now I think this is like— may sound woo-woo, but I think it's like actually scientific.

Yeah.

So you can do studies on people who take psychedelics who will consistently report certain kinds of experiences. So what I got super curious about is how do I drive endogenous DMT production? Yeah. And so there are certain things like holotropic breathwork, I think is like one physiologic state that will sort of do it. But then there are all of these, like, esoteric practices. I don't know what you ended up learning, but like, I started studying a lot of tantra and, you know, doing Kundalini practices, Kundalini, like, chakra practices.

Yeah.

And then I sort of found that there are consistent ways, and this is a lot of what I teach. And, and, you know, there are jokes that I'm a cult leader, right?

Yeah.

And, and the only way I avoid being a cult leader is by telling everyone I'm not your guru. Like, we could absolutely go down that road. There's a hilarious joke joke in our community about it. But, you know, there's certain practices that are, are kind of focused Kundalini practices.

Yeah.

That will trigger connections to things beyond through me, right? That'll get rid of the me.

Yeah.

There are many ways to get rid of the me, but I think in, in my system, or what I really like hunger for—

yeah—

is like a certain kind of dissolution of me. So I had a guru and and I asked him for a mantra about 21 years ago. And he asked me like, do you want spiritual success or material success? And at the time I had sort of like was failing out of college and was— and I was like, can I have both? And he's like, yes, there is like a mechanism to have both.

Yeah.

And so what I found is really bizarre is in my journey, like I've become very materialistically successful.

Yeah.

And also I didn't have to like sacrifice spirituality, right? There's this idea that you have to pick one or the other. But if people are paying attention to the thread of the con— you don't. The two actually come together.

Yeah, exactly right.

And I, I know you work with some, some truly remarkable human beings who have done great, great things, and as you help them spiritually awaken, their companies start skyrocketing in terms of productivity. That's been my experience too. Yeah, I just work with a lot more degenerate 25-year-olds living in their mom's basement. Um, and so there are all kinds of like tantric techniques. So I'm a huge fan of tantra because it directly activates, you know, you'll get chakra awakening if you do what you do. There's no doubt in my mind. But then there are certain things that supposedly on an energetic level or pranic level or whatever, on a spiritual level, will like open those up more.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I— what I— what's interesting to me is how many there are. Yeah, I thought there was like maybe And one of the reasons I think that we were lucky was we were born in a time where we could have a whole bunch of teachers. And absolutely, when people are doing the experiments that we do in our course, a lot of that is creating that. We have one exercise in particular where I've been meditating for 20 years to find this place, and you do it in a 5— you, Joe, like that. And so I do think that there's a tremendous amount of— and what's interesting to me is there's relational ones, there's ones all on yourself, there's ones with breath. And where I am confused in this— or not confused means I'm trying to find a solution, so I'm not confused in that way. But what I don't understand in this is this. It seems to me that there's somewhat of a choice that I think we, we as humanity like to have a construct of one, that we're typically in the center, and two, there's typically an end, and three, there's typically one way. And all of them always are proven to be false. We're not in the center of the universe, as it turns out. The sun is— the Earth is not in the center of the sun, you know, the sun's not revolving around the Earth, etc. Like, we just consistently— and what the way I, I think about awakening now, or the process now, is there is a flowering, but there happens to be 10,000 forms of flowers. So it's not like you don't look into the garden, you're like, oh, humanity has flowered and it's all roses.

That's so interesting because I both agree and disagree with what you said.

Great. That's right.

So, so you are at the center of the universe. There is one way. And I forgot the third thing.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Right. Totally. Totally.

Yeah.

That's like the Tibetan saying. Mind is wide as the sky, action is fine as barley flour, meaning that I can conceive of all the different thought processes, but there's only one action I can take.

Yeah, so, so it's, it's interesting because this moment I say I disagree with what you said, you're like, yeah, yeah, every time. So, you know, my experience has been that— and here's just, I'm gonna just toss out words.

Yeah.

So each person has their unique karma, right? So your genetics are unique, your experiences are unique, your thoughts are unique, your psychological traumas are unique. Your strengths are unique. You are at the center of your universe. Like, literally.

Yes.

Right. And you can't be anywhere else. You're like half the— not half. The problem with 99% of my patients is that they're trapped in their lives.

Right.

They can't get to live anybody else's life before they come to me. And I imagine before they come to you, what they're really trying to do is live a life that is not theirs.

Yes.

Right. So, so, and then the issue becomes, how can we understand? And this is where I think the, the clinical training kind of comes in. You know, if a patient comes in and says, my stomach hurts, there is a system to figure out what is the right move for that person. And similarly, there is a spiritual system of diagnosis. Where is your energy? Which, which, uh, places your energy in, in your chakras? Um, and I think you I'm sure you know this. I'm sure you have an intuition of me in the same way that I have an intuition of you, right? So you have— and so then, then my, my goal has been like, okay, from like an outcomes perspective.

Yeah.

Which meditation practice do I teach this person given their cognitive fingerprint, given their like, you know, is this person focused on improvements in depression? This is the work that I was doing at Harvard in terms of research.

Yeah.

I was developing clinical protocols that were meditation regimens to target particular illnesses. And, and then I started doing this whole thing, so that sort of went by the wayside.

Yeah.

But even from a community standpoint, we'll still develop very particular meditation regimens that are tailored to, uh, a certain kind of— if you have this kind of ego problem, if you have this kind of, like, um, if you're, if you have trouble waking up in the morning, um, a big part of it is like, if you've got ADHD, a lot of the traditional teachings are going to be hard for you to access.

Yeah.

And, and so going back to you know, the 16 gurus that you assembled for, like, the, the wrestling of the gurus.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things that I found really frustrating is I never went to a guru or almost never went to a guru, especially when they're like established traditions.

Yeah.

Like if you go to like learn Transcendental Meditation or like Vipassana or anything like that. Yeah. I've never heard any of those traditions say, oh, we're not the right teachers for you. You should really go do something else.

Yeah. Or I've never heard any of them say you should do multiple traditions.

Yeah.

Almost all are like, you need to dedicate to this.

Absolutely.

And of course they say that because they got all this benefit from this by dedicating to it or they wouldn't be teaching it. So I get why they say it, but yeah.

And so the one thing I would kind of finalize with is that if people are sort of sitting there like, how do I get started? Right. So the one thing that I would say is what I liked about what my guru taught me that I sort of do is I like to start with the Ajna chakra because if people don't understand— so for those of y'all that understand what Joe and I are talking about, like, I'm not quite sure what to tell you except keep doing what you're doing, right? This is part of your karma. This is one step that's going to bring you closer. If y'all get what we're saying, totally fine. If you want to understand it more— yeah, not if you want it to happen, not if you want it to work, but if you want to understand it more—

well played.

Third eye practice like trataka, which is, uh, candle gazing, like where you like just stare at a candle for like 1 to 5 minutes without closing your eyes. You don't want to strain yourself or anything like that. Is a great place to start that intuitive understanding of like get it energy. Um, I don't know how else to say that. I don't know if that makes sense to y'all, but yeah.

The only thing that I would say that's— I, I definitely have not gotten to the place where I am saying I mean, obviously when I do coaching, I read what's— where somebody is, and I, and I— but generally the way that I approach it is I feel like we have— all humans have this innate migratory path in us, meaning that the way that a salmon knows how to get back to— we have this thing that pulls us into our own development. The way a tree knows how to extend towards the sun, we have our way of knowing how to extend towards the sun. And so generally what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to— I'm following that in the person. And so, and often when I'm working with people, the way it experiences, it's a— it can be very aggressive looking from the outside, but it's— I'm pinging against them and like listening to the sonar that comes back.

Yep.

To say, oh, this is where they're ready to move. I definitely haven't taken it apart the way you have. It would be really cool to like study that. But, um, but, but, but, but I'm definitely— pattern recognition is happening. But what the other thing that's happening is I'm really letting them lead because somehow or another what I've noticed is, and it might not be the most efficient path, but it is a more efficient path than the other ones I've run across, which is to, to that person knows where they need to go next better than I do.

Absolutely right. So, so I think that, um, so because it's tricky, like, how do you surrender? How do you accept? How do you welcome?

Yeah.

And, and I think that if you, if we look at the themes of like today, it's kind of getting out of your own way, right? Letting that gravitational pull, like, stop pulling against gravity, which is exactly what's so terrifying. But if people look at You know, if you've been stuck your whole life and you're trying to figure out how do I be charismatic, how do I be charismatic, how do I be charismatic? And then you're like, just be yourself. Well, that's like a pile of a mess down there. I'm with you. But even underneath that, right? So if you like, before you had all those harsh lessons in life, before life kicked you when you were down, like, what were you? That's still in there. Yeah. And just stop the patterns that are enhancing it. And what I'm really hearing from you is like, just let that natural gravitation of what you kind of feel called to do. There's a voice in you that is not like a panicked voice that you fight against, right? Right. So I'll call this like sometimes like a really quiet voice. It is, right? So you need to— it needs to be very quiet for you to listen.

Yeah.

There's a message in the silence. Yes. And, and get out of the way of fighting against something and just whatever comes, just like let it come. And then there's that natural gravitation.

Yeah.

And I loved your imagery of like sonar, right? So you all can also have internal sonar, whatever you think, just let it come and let it pass. And then like, what's underneath? What's underneath? What's underneath? That's also the, you know, I recently got into Ramana Maharshi.

Yeah.

And it's so pure.

Yeah.

But I think it's like the last time I looked at it was like 15 years ago and I just wasn't ready for it yet.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The only thing that I would add into that is just the— that life— without life, without tension, without— there's no life. If I took the tension out of your lungs, your cells, you'd be dead. Without tension, there's no pleasure. If you ever, like, feel pleasure and you're like, okay, I'm going to take all the tension out of it, there's no pleasure. There's no aliveness without tension. And so as humans, we're trying to get out of tension on some level, and It's such an interesting way to think about tension as, oh, how do I hold this ever more gently? And so to some degree, so much of this dissolution comes from the receiving, or how do I hold this even more gently, particularly in our society, particularly. But I know that it's not there for everybody.

Yeah, I think one response to that is like, You're— and I'm with you 100%. So, you know, I think most people want one side of the tension to win.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And if people are struggling to understand, like, you know, why would I want tension? Like, why would I embrace that tension? This is also where, like, you're like a heart chakra dude. So, like, holding things gently is like not my jam.

Right. Yeah.

You know, I'm like, like, embrace it. Like, be in the middle, get torn apart by it. Like, you can hold it gently.

Also that.

Yeah, definitely.

So like, like, get torn apart. Like, get wrecked, bro.

Yeah, anything that you can find to destroy yourself lets you know what you can't be destroyed in you.

Well said.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, so, um, and then I think if people— if that's confusing to people, just like if you play video games, you know exactly what I mean, right? So the moment that a video game— you start winning at a video game all the time, the moment that loss gets taken off the table, as soon as the tension is gone, yeah, there's no game, right? There's no game anymore. There's no fun. There's no joy in it. Yeah, right. And we're winning and losing in video games every single day. That's why we play them. I don't know if you play video games, but League of Legends noob over there, Dota noob over here, right? So, so, and that's what makes it fun.

Yeah.

And, and the whole problem is if, if people are saying like, and people will come to me like, but that's a game, it's not real. Right? So how do you get past that? And that's where I think we come back to ego.

Yeah.

Because what makes your life not a game? It's your ego. It's your investment. It's me. Oh my God. Yeah, right. That's what makes us afraid of failure. That's why we have to be a certain way, because we're so invested in it. But I think the more gently you hold it, the more you start like playing around. And I think this is what's hilarious about both of our wives is they taught us how to play. Yeah, right. They taught us like, like you can just chill. Like, so what if you get screwed?

Yeah, exactly.

You know, and I remember Charlie had sort of sent us this question about confidence and charisma. And I think like a lot of people think that confidence is what makes you charismatic and that competence makes you charismatic, right? So competence is what makes you confident. And confident, it was what makes you charismatic. But there's a really interesting kind of— that's sort of not true. So if you look at people who are incredibly competent, there's also— they're not confident.

Nope.

They have imposter syndrome.

Yeah.

Right. So we literally have a basically a clinical entity at this point that shows you that you can be really, really, really good. I did my— I went to medical school at Tufts and I did my psychiatry training at Harvard.

Harvard.

And what I found is like there was very little imposter syndrome at Tufts, but the second I showed up at Harvard, there's a ton of imposter syndrome.

Oh, that's cool.

And there's so many more competent, arguably, people at Harvard than there are at Tufts.

Yeah.

And so everyone's chasing this idea that if I get really good at something, I will be confident.

Yeah.

And if I can be confident— someone who's charismatic is someone who walks into the room and like is confident in themselves, right? So what I'd say is that Competence doesn't lead to confidence. And if you guys don't believe that, all you need to do is look at a 1-year-old trying to feed themselves. I'm gonna tell y'all, they suck at it, but they still have a ton of confidence.

Yeah.

And so in my experience, I'd love to get your thoughts about this. Competence doesn't lead to confidence.

Agreed. Yeah.

Confidence for me comes from— and what I try to encourage people to do is not fearing failure. Right. So to survive failure is really when you can be confident. When you fall down and you pick yourself up, then you can afford to fall down. Then you can afford to walk into a situation, not know what's going to happen, and still be confident.

Yeah. So there's so many thoughts on that tennis ball machine coming. Yeah.

Sweet. Get wrecked.

Exactly. Your turn. Yeah. So, um, the first thing about, like, to touch on imposter syndrome for a minute, this is one of my favorite things to say to people. And they're like, I have imposter syndrome. I'm like, that's because you're an imposter because you don't know what the fuck you're doing. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I made this up. Bezos made that up. Like Elon Musk, we all made it up. Like, that's like, no, we don't know. If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't be doing anything innovative. And so Yeah. So there's a thing. So if you look for how to get out of imposter syndrome, it's impossible because the issue is you are an imposter. The other thing that's interesting that you said, I totally agree that once you recognize that you can, that you have overcome challenges, but there's a recognition part of it. Meaning today I was walking on the beach with one of my daughters who was worried about something. And she— and I was like, I don't get it. Like, when have you failed? When have you not succeeded? And it took her a minute, but once she recognized, oh, right, then she could— some of her could relax. Meaning that it's not just, yes, we've gotten down when we're up over and over again, or we've pushed ourselves past where we— and we've gone into the difficult thing. We've allowed ourselves to get wrecked. It's also the recognition that that has happened and that you've done that, I think, is also like a super important part of that.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I think it's the more important part, but I think it's less accessible.

Correct. Yeah.

So, so, so generally speaking, what I find works faster but dirtier is just fail.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Definitely.

So just fail and then, then you realize it's nothing to be afraid of.

So, and so, so there's the hominula in the brain. I think I got that right, which is the part of our brain that like moves dopamine around. And it's basically in all vertebrates and it makes it so that we don't fail over and over and over again. And so because I don't want to eat that same mushroom again and die, I don't want to fight the same bear and get my butt kicked again for mating rights. That's the part of our brain. And so one of the things that I noticed that's really good about it is, and we use this as principles in companies, is that It's not— you set up a situation where you can't fail, but you're failing, meaning that you're iterating, you're constantly iterating. And the science, as I understand it, is that they did this research, which I really dug, of people who didn't have any money who lost weight compared to those who didn't. And the ones who did had an iterative mindset, had a constant, oh, I'm going to try a new thing, I'm going to try a new thing, I'm trying a new thing, which is something that You have, I have, Charlie has. And what I notice, it is the only thing that is pretty much constant for people who are successful and maintain that— that they're not like a one-hit— they're not Island Boys or something like that, right? They, they basically are consistently working. And I think it's absolutely— but there's a great trick, which is to not even see it as failure. To go in and then say, oh, I can iterate again, I can iterate again, I can iterate again, because then all life is is an iteration and a learning process.

Yeah, I mean, completely agree. So there's one really interesting thing. So I was at, when I was at Harvard, I was basically a resident who was focused on resilience for residents and interns.

Cool.

Right, so you get a bunch of these kids and I had a buddy of mine and I asked him, you know, what's your first year like? And he's like, it's awful. I was like, why? And he said, it's terrible to take a bunch of kids who used to be the smartest in the room and suddenly make them average. It's traumatic. It's really scary. So there's something really great that I kind of stumbled into and I didn't figure out until you're sort of the mechanism behind it. But there's something called the Nemec effect, which is the right way to give feedback around failure. So a lot of people think that if someone like, you know, you have this compliment sandwich where it's like, Joe, you're great at this.

Oh yeah, shit sandwiches. Yeah, I call it exactly the same thing.

It's a shit sandwich, right? Bread on the top, shit in the middle, bread on the bottom.

Yeah, right. Very ineffective.

And people know right away, empathically, they know right away that you're just saying that, right?

Yeah.

So there's something really interesting.

You're calling them weak. You're saying, hey, oh yeah, you can't handle it. Yeah, you can't handle it. So you're not only saying, are you wrong, but you're weak. Yeah, it's a horrible way to do it. Yeah.

So, so what, what works really well is when you tell someone they have a shortcoming, but tell them what it, what it is in service to. So, hey, this is what you're good at. And be authentic. It's not a compliment sandwich. And like, you have the potential to be a really great doctor, but as long as this is going on, you're never going to get there. Yeah, right. So like giving feedback in service to a greater thing, right? Which I think touches on these themes of ego. It's more than you. You can afford to fail. Your failure is an iteration. So how do you develop an iterative mindset? Everything that you have, the only difference between a failure and a setback is whether you keep going or not.

Yeah, right. So, so this is where I'll geek out for a minute. My experience is that way that you just talked about feedback, that it's effective because you're doing it in this nonjudgmental way. Basically, you're, you're not, you're not calling them wrong or right. You're just kind of being I'll give you an example. I was actually by the coast, not too far away from here. And this guy said, you know, Joe, this is a while ago, Joe, you're a dick. And I was like, I'm not a dick. He's like, don't fight it. There's no problem with it. You're just a dick. Just be a dick. And I could take that feedback because there was nothing to defend against. And the way that you're— because there was no, you're wrong, you have to change. There was no shame coming at me. There was no trying to. And what I'm hearing from you is that that's some version of that is what's happening and giving that level of feedback. And my experience is we give that level of feedback. This is where I'm tying the heart back into it. We give that level of feedback when we are not trying to not feel something.

Yeah. So I would use slightly different language. I think we're talking about the same ballpark of thing, but I would say there is a judgment. The difference— so let me just— yeah, yeah, I'm sure we agree.

Yeah.

So I think that when you say judgment, ego comes with it, right?

So I'm not saying discernment, and you're saying discernment, right?

So like when I'm like, literally when there's like an intern who's like ordering a bad medication, yeah, right, that the patient is allergic to, I want to make a judgment and I want to say this is bad.

Correct.

The reason that becomes difficult, and I think this is what you mean by judgment, is this is bad becomes you are bad.

Correct. That's right.

And so when you can lovingly and compassionately not trigger the ego, right, right. So you can give a judgment, and oftentimes judgment comes with ego. But if you can tease those things apart, and the way you disable the ego is, what is this in service to? You will be a doctor one day. Yeah, that will be great. But if you give your medication— if you give patients medications that they're allergic to, you will never be a great doctor.

Yeah, right. Absolutely. And And the, but the, the, the heart point that I want to, want to point to is that what I notice is when ego is involved, when I'm going to call you bad, it's because we don't want to feel something. I do that to another person.

Yeah.

When I'm in that level of judgment with people, what I notice is it's because I don't want to feel something. And that's the amazing— that's where the heart chakra comes in so much for me and how it disintegrates. Just as an example of how it disintegrates that sense of self.

Yeah. So I think it's— that's heart chakra. Here's third eye chakra.

Yeah.

So ego arises to protect— with same thing, ego arises to protect you from negative emotions. So as long as there is negative emotions that are unacceptable, ego will arise.

That's right.

Right. So like, if it's like, oh, like, that girl turned me down, like, I didn't like her anyway. Yeah, she would have been lucky today.

Yeah. Or I'm bad and I'm horrible because she didn't like me. Both.

Yeah, yeah, both.

Exactly.

Right. So I think your heart chakra will absolutely get you there because if you just accept the emotion, then the ego has nothing to defend against. There's nothing wrong with the emotion.

It's a great way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Cool. Nerding out complete.

We are. Yeah. Not completely. So we're going to stop for a minute. Yeah.

It's like, I guess every once in a while I catch Charlie out of the corner of my eyes, like, so I think, I think if people are listening to this, the key thing is like You know, this is also something that I think is really important. Oftentimes when people listen to things like this, they think to themselves, what am I taking away? What do I do? Yes, just listen. So parts of your brain are going to be absorbing it. Yeah, you won't notice it right away. A month from now— and this is what happened with both of us, I'm 110% sure— yes, we read things that we did not understand, but it planted a seed in your subconscious mind. And as you go about living your life, as you have these experiences, one day you're to be taking a piss and it will click.

Yeah, exactly. I would even say allow yourself not to try to get it. Yep. Right. What I notice is when people start trying to put it together and construct a world around it, it slows the process down tremendously.

That is what you would say.

That is. And then I would— and then I would agree with you that a construct is actually a really great thing to have. Happen. It's very useful at times.

Construct it. And I, I, I, and I think this is the, the key thing is like, if we're— what we're talking about here is kind of like, you know, there are multiple ways to get to this core thing.

Yes.

And, and so do whatever works for you. If you're, you're an auditory person, talk out loud.

That's right.

If you're a visual person, write it down. And, and that's the thing is like, I think what Joe and I are talking about today are principles.

Yes.

That you have to modify based on your genetics, your circumstances, where you are. These are tools. Yeah, right. And there is an art to accomplishment.

Yes.

Right. It's not like a perfect science. You have to sort of figure out like it just at some point it'll click, it'll feel right.

Yeah. It's funny, the first thing I ever wanted to do, first piece of content I ever wanted to do, I never did it, was to get 4 different awakening teachers all ask the same 20 questions. Just hear how different the answers would be, but they're all pointing to the same thing. And I feel like we get to do that a little bit. Like, we get to— it's really nice to be able to. And, and for whatever reason, our ability to not get lost in the semantics or the ego of my way or your way, that we can see, yeah, the wisdom. And I think that, that, that in itself is like probably the more powerful pointer in the conversation is for the people who are listening, that the, like, we're— it's one level you could say it's more important for us to find the wisdom in each other, but the other, the more important thing is that we, we know that we're all pointing in the— we're pointing in this— everybody's pointing in the same direction. I think that, that including you, including the person who's listening who thinks that they're at war with themselves, there's something in you that's also doing this.

Yeah, I think I'm just debating about— so I think a lot of what Joe and I are talking about cannot be done. But if you listen to it, you will hear it happening right here. And that's exactly what you need to do.

Do.

Right. Yeah.

Words get in.

And like, if it's confusing and it doesn't make sense, like, that's kind of the point. So I think a lot of this, like, transcend— like, the breakthroughs in your life are not things that you logically concluded. Yes. When your logical framework actually fell apart and you discovered something beyond that.

Yeah.

And it's really hard to do, arguably impossible. But that doesn't mean you can't do it. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

Right. Yeah. You can't make sure your soil's good. Yeah.

Your turn, Charlie.

All right. Exactly. You want to talk about Donald Trump, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I—

somebody's like, I got I take my hands off this wheel and just let this happen.

Um, yeah, no, you may want to edit it out.

I think— no, well, I, I, I, I, I, I, I felt like we had— our listeners would love this.

And, and not that it's not for me, I was just like, something is happening, and I just— this is part of my practice is like, get the fuck out of the way.

Like, yeah, so I think it's a great representation of what we're talking about.

Yeah, yeah. No, it was, it was challenging for me to track the part of me. And this is an interstitial that wanted to get the title right and fix it, you know, and make it go a certain way. But it was like, this is your practice. There is an energy that is moving through the room right here. So thank you, guys.

Yeah.

So what I, what I hear is Manipura, navel, heart, and third eye. So navel chakra is really important for the metabolism of emotions. So like divine love and the acceptance and the welcoming comes here, but the getting the— so this can wash away the bad stuff.

Yeah.

But when you even in interviews, when you focally, like when you pull out your sniper rifle and you like shoot at an emotion. Yeah, right. And that emotion gets resolved like that. That's navel. That's not heart.

That's true.

After you do that a couple of times.

Yeah.

Then heart opens up and then they like get it and they feel whole. But you've been like, sniper rifling like rats in their warehouse for a little while before that.

Let's jump right there. So you guys both have these conversations with people on the internet. You coach.

Yeah.

Tell me. Yeah. You're listening from your gut. You're picking up things like what, what is going on as for both of you? Because you're— what I see is you seem to make people have these intellectual breakthroughs where they sort of see themselves in a different way. And I've also— and you'll— people will cry or laugh or just unfold or unwind in some way.

Yeah.

And what is going on in each of those encounters, those ways of being?

The most, most essential is I'm listening. My experience is I'm listening. I'm listening to myself. I'm listening to them. I'm, I'm vulnerable in the listening and in the asking of questions. I'll often ask questions where I literally pucker to ask the question, and I usually know that that's a really good question. There's a feeling of vulnerability. There's a deep impartiality in me, even though it doesn't look like it, where I, I don't think I need to get that person anywhere. I'm not there to help them. This isn't— there's just, there's not a lot of I in the equation. So oftentimes at the end of it, I don't remember what happened. I don't know if it went well, and I don't care. It's like none of that. When I say I don't care, I don't mean I try not to care. I mean I don't even conceive of it, care. And then deeply empathetic. I'm feeling the thing they're feeling. So oftentimes if I'm working with somebody and I'll say, yeah, what's going on in your gut? I can't even see it. But because I'm so empathetically in with them that I'm actually able to feel it. I feel it through my own body, through my own system.

So we've talked about that. You said that navel or the umbilical cord. How do we feel that more effectively? How do we attune empathetically Is that something we've already discussed?

So what my experience generally, and I think this is a place where we might, we might, might disagree. There's a Zen story about a young and an old monk walking down the path and the young monk says, oh, I can start to like know what people are thinking. He's like, ah, what does that have to do with awakening? Oh, I can read people's thoughts. What does that have to do with awakening? Like as he walks through, he's going, having all these different things And my experience is that if you go after trying to figure those skills out, um, it can be incredibly destructive. It can be like chasing money, it can be like chasing sex. It's— it, it can really destroy somebody. It can create a much, um, more solid form of ego. Whereas if you allow that stuff to unfold naturally because of your own self-awareness— so that's how I would recommend the path. I would recommend is to understand yourself more and more and more and more. And the more you understand yourself, this stuff naturally occurs.

So tuning to your own gut, to your own heart.

Correct.

And then when you're listening to someone, you'll just feel— it's like, oh, I feel—

yeah. So I did this form of breathwork for like, uh, 7 years or so, where it was a kind of an extinct form of Reiki and breathwork that I would do. And when I was 2 or 3 years into it, I could look at somebody's body and know what emotions they were holding and like how they were raised. Not because anybody said, this arc means critical parent and this means like, I'm not playing the failable mother, right? It was because I actually just went through all that stuff in myself.

Ah.

And so that's the way I recommend doing it because that's the thing that actually gets you to the freedom that you're really looking for beyond the power of being able to do it.

Yeah, I've had at times a spreadsheet approach, which is like, you know, if, you know, she posts these kind of photos on Instagram, the dad wasn't there, you know, whatever it is. And yeah, one, people don't like to be analyzed that way, even if it's true. And it is not actual empathy. It is a repetition of what someone who had empathetic attunement might, might have said in the moment. Yeah.

Okay.

So that makes sense. Go through oneself and it'll just sort of unfold. What's going on with you when you're having your conversation?

My first question is, why did you think that would be a point of our disagreement?

Because it sounded like there was some part of the traditions that you had. Actually, yeah. So it was an assumption on my part about Kundalini work, which is that oftentimes there's, oh, this is the thing that you will get from this Kundalini work that I've seen in the real world. So that's where I thought we might disagree.

Yeah, so I, I mean, I don't think we're gonna disagree.

Okay, okay, great.

Yeah, clearly when I saw your face, so it was like, you know, because I think like, and that's the key thing, that was an assumption that, that you were— not, not to blame you or anything, right? But like, I don't feel that didn't come from me, it come— came from your understanding of what Kundalini work is, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, so in a sense, anyway, I don't know, I was just kind of confused because I was like, no, this is like, this is exactly— this is it.

Exactly.

So can I ask you a specific question about this?

Last time you were here, we sat down after and I started sharing with you that, you know, there was stuff coming up in my life and you're like, I see that. I like— yeah, I said, what do you mean you see that? You said, oh, third eye shit.

Yeah.

And I'm curious if you could elaborate.

Absolutely. So I think this is what's really— this is going to get like a touch theoretical.

Sure.

But not the touch theory. I realized something recently Credibility is very far away from truth. So like, I love that he gets it. So I'll walk y'all through it. So if I want to say something that's credible, let's say I want to say something to you and I want to make myself credible. How do I make myself credible if I'm talking to you?

You have to understand my world to a degree.

And I have to understand your world, right? So the more ignorant you are the more credible I have to be. You kind of get that? So credibility only works when the— like, why do we need credibility? Because we don't know, we don't trust, we don't know that this thing is true, right? That's why we need to be credible. I need you to believe me, but believing requires an absence of knowledge. Like, by definition, if I know where my keys are, that's different from believing where my keys are. One is a statement of fact and one is a statement a statement of belief, one is a statement of ignorance. So one of the things that I've started to do recently is like worry less about being credible. I showed up and I tried to be credible, but what I realized is like credibility assumes the ignorance of the person. But truth is truth. Whether people believe it or not is like up to them. The more knowledgeable they are, the more they will know that I'm correct, which is why you laughed, right? And the less knowledgeable they are, the more they'll— they're likely to think that I'm an idiot, which is like, okay, I love this.

I just want to say you've helped me a lot with this because the phrase that I've understood from you is it is not your responsibility to be understood. It is your responsibility to speak the truth. But I have often done the work of being credible, of making myself understood, and in such I'm diluting the, the me or whatever it is that I'm saying.

So, so I, I think there are times where it's important to be credible. So when I'm a doctor, like, I want to be credible first and truthful second. But there are times where there, there's, there are times for credibility and there are times for truth. This is a conversation where I think truth comes first. So what Joe is describing, you know, as he does this kind of work, is in the Sanskrit word, this is a Siddhi. I don't know if you've heard that term, but so, so this is really fascinating. There's like this thing called Patanjali's Sutras, which is like the Bible of yoga. So if you like, look at like the seminal text on what we call yoga, a dude, or maybe lots of people named Patanjali— woman, we don't really know— wrote this text about what is an asana, what is a posture, how does the mind work. Like, it's like all the really basic stuff that modern science basically like follows. Like all the stuff about meditation and things like that, like it's basically rooted in Patanjali or captured in Patanjali. The third chapter— it's four chapters— the third chapter is really short and it's just a list of things. So he says, like, in chapter one, he's like, an asana, any yoga posture, has two requirements. That's it. There are all these postures, downward dog, this, that. All the postures, asanas, have two things in common. One is that they're— it's stable. It's not motion. The second is it brings the attention to the present. That's all an asana is. You can make whatever asanas you want. You can make up your own yoga postures. As long as you're stable and you're focused on the present, that is the asana. That's the essence. It's the equation. Chapter 3 is the development of psychic powers. And he's like, by the way, if you do these practices, you will develop these, these powers. These things are not believable. Fair enough, whatever. They're not credible. Fine. He just says, by the way, this is what's going to happen.

Addendum.

Not addendum. He's like, if you walk the spiritual path, you will develop abilities that will appear supernatural.

Appear, appear, appear. Really critical word.

Yeah, why we at it, right? They're not supernatural. Yeah, they're just hard to access. And there's a whole conversation which I, I can go into a bunch of detail. I've had a lot of— I'm not saying I'm psychic or anything like that, but there, there's like whole systems of understanding this stuff. But these things are also incredibly dangerous. So I want y'all to understand, and I think, I think Joe gets this, um, so a little bit of what we do seems exceptional. It's not exceptional. So like, people will— I mean, it's exceptional, but it's not supernatural. So people will like ask me, right, so like, I'm a psychiatrist, this is how I know what I do. No, I, I do what I do because of my spiritual practice. Not psychiatry is there and it has a role do, but my intuition and what I know about people, in the same way that, that Joe knows things about people and stuff like that, I don't think that that can be taught in psychiatric training. Because if that was taught in psychiatric training, the majority of psychiatrists would be able to do what I do. And, and it's not that what I do is special, it's just like, if you train in that way, you will learn how to do that. Very simple. Joe has trained in that way. Way, which is why we both do it. You can train in that way. Anyone can train in that way. A big part of what we do in our community is try to teach them that stuff so that they realize, I'm not special. You can do it too. It is your birthright. Right? So I get to where Joe gets, but like, I come there from a different way, sort of. So the other thing that's really scary is like, you know, I see these posts sometimes on the internet of, if I were a billionaire, I would just start fixing problems. And, and, okay, so this is like really a statement of ignorance. Like, the, the moment that you have great power and you start exercising it, you realize how much you fuck things up. So like, the moment that you have something really powerful, like, let's just say hypothetically— I'm not even saying these things exist, okay? They're, they're— I've hypothesized neuroscientific mechanisms through which we can do quote-unquote supernatural things. It's not really supernatural, it's just a finely, finely in tune, empathic circuit, attending in the right way, like all kinds of stuff, which we can get to in a second about what I do, how I would explain what I do, which I think is the same as what you— not the same, but you know, the same. Yeah, there's absolutely a neuroscience— there must be a neuroscience correlate. The question is, does neuroscience sufficiently explain it, or is there something beyond neuroscience? That's a debate for philosophers. So what happens, though, is the moment that you start exercising these powers, you get caught, you get trapped by life in a way more vice-like grip. And I think this is where, like, you know, like you quoted a Zen, you know, parable.

Yeah.

I'm going to quote— I think it's Notorious B.I.G., Mo Money, Mo Problems, which like is really confusing for people until you have it. The number of patients that I've had that have windfalls of cash flow. Speaking of ketamine, will, will burn through millions of dollars of drugs, right? Like, like their lives get— and it's not that money doesn't buy happiness. It does. It buys happiness up to a point. If you can't pay your bills, like you have no financial security, money will absolutely remove the things that get in the way of your happiness. But at some point, the more power you have, like, you can get trapped by life way easier.

Can I just— what are these powers that you're talking— and it doesn't mean— so you're using money as like in the thing, but do you mean that empathetic circuit? Is that what you're saying?

I mean, so I would refer you to the text.

Okay.

I'm not making these claims. You guys can read the text. But Tanjali says if you want telepathy, do this. If you want to travel through time, do this. If you want to turn into the size of an atom or the size of a universe, do this. If you want to know the moment of your death, do this. There's a really simple practice that I can share with y'all. If you just breathe, you'll notice that your breath has a certain length. So if you like put your hand like face up below your nose and you breathe out, you'll notice that the breath goes a certain way. If you do that practice for a decade, you'll understand all kinds of things.

Okay, got it.

Okay, got it. Like you do it every day for like an hour for a decade. And this is the timescale that we're talking about. I started doing a month of practice 21 years ago. In my experience, there were basically 3 levels of stuff that I got through that, that were at 7-year stretches. I don't know why. It's weird. But this is like consistent practice every day for 7 years. And the culture that we live in, the reason that everyone doesn't believe what meditation is capable of is because they don't understand the timescale. Everyone's like, use this app for 5 minutes, do a different guided meditation every day. This is like telling someone, okay, I want you to paint for 10 minutes today, draw for 10 minutes tomorrow, go for a swim 10 minutes the next day. If you want to build something through meditative practice, you have to do the same practice, not necessarily every day, but basically every day for years or decades. In order to truly see the fruit of it.

So even, even in my question of what are you doing in that moment, it's like, what did I do for the prior 20 years? Is, is almost the answer.

So, so I think— no, I would say that that's not— I would say there's a distinction. So there is 20-year— that's not what he's doing. 20 years is what his— he has become. So there's a difference between playing an instrument and like playing a guitar is different from becoming a guitar. What he's been doing for 20 years is building a guitar. When he sits with a person, he's playing the strings. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay, so here's what I would say he does, which is what I do, which is just the same but different. The more empty you become, the more that you remove your ego from the equation, then you can attend fully to someone else. The analogy that I would use— this is also like a meditative kind kind of thing, which is like the story of two cups. So this guy comes to the Buddha and he's like, I've studied with a bunch of teachers, I'm not enlightened yet, help me out. And Buddha's like, cool, I'll help you out. So then Buddha starts teaching him things, but the guy's like, but hold on a second, I studied with this other guy and he said this. And then Buddha next day is like, okay, whatever, so then do this. And he's like, I started with this other guy, he did this. And then Buddha one day tells him, okay, come back and then bring two cups, bring a cup of water and bring a cup of milk. He says, okay, now take the cup of water, take the cup of milk, pour the milk into the cup of water. And the guy's like, what, what do you mean? And I'd encourage everybody to pause the video right now and do this at home. Take a cup of milk, take a cup of water, pour the cup of milk into the cup of water. Have them both full at the beginning. What happens? The milk overflows. If you want to learn something, you need to empty your mind first. If you want to sit with someone, you have to empty yourself. When Joe says he attends to people, the key thing there is that he is empty. So what the other person is enters him, and then he attends to himself. But it's not what he feels. He is an instrument. He's like a radio wave. He's like a radio antenna picking up other things. But the more that you have your own shit going on within yourself when I sit down. So I can do this with random strangers. I can never do it with my wife. The moment I sit with my wife and she tells me how annoying I am, I'm like, no, I'm not. Yeah, I am adding something to the equation. This is also why it's easier to talk to strangers and listen to strangers, because there's no ego, there's no relationship, right? You can talk to a stranger on a park bench, pour out your heart and soul, and it is easy to you, because you— there's an emptiness to it. There's no ego, there's no attachment. So I, I would say that he does it, I do it. I do it in a slightly different way, so I, I operate from a different place. My antenna is tuned to a slightly different frequency.

My wife does it in a different way too. Yeah, like, if it's like, if, if he's here on the spectrum, I'm here on the spectrum, my wife is over here on the spectrum. My wife will just literally say almost nothing. And yeah, and she'll just, what if you just put that 2 inches behind yourself? And they're, ah, yeah, just another different way.

This is what I— this is what's beautiful about it, is that I used to conceive of— and you can bucket charisma into— there's types of people who have really strong visions and type of people who have high convictions and types of people who are funny. But what I'm hearing is, you know, if it is this divinely offered gift. It comes in as many different flavors as there are people. And there are things that we seem to be tracking in that there's an emptiness, there's a listening, there's a thing. But the way that your wife shows up is going to be with her own flavor. So in a way, and this is what I'm seeing in my own life, there was always a seeking— what's the right thing to say now in this situation that I can distribute in an online course and tell everybody, here's what to say to start the conversation, here's what to say 3 minutes into the conversation. Here's how to get the date. And that's helpful, you know, to have the text message. It's necessary, I think, for me at a stage to like, what do I text?

What do I text? What do I text?

Give me like, hey, you know, I know this is crazy, but would you like to go out sometime? Okay, I'm okay, I can get through it. Um, but this is where I'm super fascinated as this spiritual thing connects with charisma. And the Greek word has just fascinated me. I was like, why did I pick charisma? Charisma, and there is something there that was always there. What is charisma on command? It can— can you open up to that you that, uh, says the perfect thing that is you in the moment instead of the objectively perfect thing for the moment? I don't know if that makes any sense, but that is— okay, so given that, that there's all of these foundational things that are established prior to that moment, in the moment, for someone who, you know, hopefully is also doing these practices, maybe taking your course or your course or going through it, in the moment, what is something that can be done to begin this process, just, or help it along a little bit to get to that place of emptiness or ability to show up and listen in the way that is most deeply effective, or to say the phrase that is most deeply effective, or even maybe my language is not even would choose?

I would give this one as one of the, one of the practices that I notice works really well quickly. And it works well because when people taste it, they want to keep doing it. So part of the practice is picking a practice that you actually will keep doing, or it's— and, and this practice has a lifespan, like most of the things that I would, I would suggest most of the things would have a lifespan, and it might be 10, 20 years, but it has a lifespan. And, um, but what I notice, a great way is that typically we have a negative self-talk or a repetitive voice in the head. According to, I think it's the Mayo Clinic, it's like 50,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day or something like that, most of them repetitive. And people at some point notice them, and then at some point they want to get rid of them. And, but the more they resist, the more it persists. And so it doesn't actually change. So a very cool practice that starts emptying you out really quickly is every day or every 3 days, pick a way you want to react to that voice in the head that you've never reacted that way before. So typically though, what happens is the voice says something and our response is either, yeah, yeah, you're right. That's the charismatic part of you that you're following. Or it's sometimes, yeah, you're right, but I'm not going to fucking do it, asshole. Yeah, I'm going to— I'm still going to eat that chocolate cake. Right. Those are one of the reactions that we have. But you could have literally an infinite kind.

I was just thinking you could like clap and have a ton of applause. You could have like the birthday party, a surprise party.

You could. Yes, you could. You could say— you could say— you could say, wow, I could really use you to be a better boss. Or you could say no. Or you could say I see how scared you are and I'm right here with you. You can have literally 100 different responses.

What I'm noticing in me is that some of those felt like, oh, I want that one, and some of them didn't. So even in just listening to those options, I was like, well, I like that last one the best. Like, I see.

And so, but my recommendation is experiment for a while. Just get to know what happens to that internal self-talk that we consider to be us. What happens when you react to it differently? And I find just the experimentation will help you unfold the thing very, very quickly. A lot quicker than, for me, I notice people unfold it a lot quicker than some early stages of meditation even. But it's really important. The critical point is you're not trying to get rid of it. And the critical point is that it's an experimentation. You're learning about it. You're in wonder about it. About it. And if you can do that with the internal self-talk, it is an incredibly effective tool. And I'm hoping that what you're about to tell me is that there's a Sanskrit word for this practice, but I haven't seen any other. I haven't seen it.

So once again, Joe, I'm impressed by— so I could give you an hour-long lecture about why that's a great practice.

Mm-hmm.

That's cool. But the two things that I would say is, first is, if that practice is hard for you, I'll give you guys an introductory practice. Because I, I love it. I can't top that.

Yeah.

All I can do is give you an on-ramp onto that if that's hard. Um, and that is brush with your non-dominant hand. So what, what I strongly recommend people do—

totally, that would still work, right? That's so good.

So it's so hard with the cognitions that we have. There, there's a whole— I, I, it's so weird. So sometimes I'll do a lecture like that is like deep spirituality and it clicks for people. So I did this lecture on vasanas, which are basically repetitive mental habits. So great lecture that really like popped. And, and so I'd say that the problem with those is we're so engaged with them, right? It's so challenging. And I, I know why Joe recommends this, because if you learn it from Joe, he's gonna teach it in a way where you can do it that you can't do on your own. Like, I, I get that, right? So you give them a certain amount of diksha or initiation that allows them to do it, but it's really hard because those repetitive thoughts are oftentimes the ones that are the hardest to resist. It's the hardest to do something new. So I just start with a little, a touch of neuroplasticity and practice the skill of responding to things in different ways. And the easiest way to do that, brush with your non-dominant hand, right? You can only do it for a couple of days. Joe will give you something that'll work for 20 years. Do mine for like 3 days. Yeah, then try Joe's if you're having trouble. But if you can go straight to Joe's, go straight to Joe's.

Great.

That's a really great—

yeah, yeah.

I love all of this.

Okay.

And part of the reason that I didn't start down this path is because when I looked out into the world, and it wasn't the same guys at the time, but when I look at a Donald Trump or an Andrew Tate, I do not imagine that they are doing this sort of a thing. And yet they are incredibly influential, uh, powerful. People seem to follow them, like them, trust them. Polarizing figures for sure. What is going on? Like, if this, if this takes you to the essence of charisma, what is going on with these seemingly charismatic individuals that are, that as far as I can tell, have not followed a path that is at all like these ones? Is that a pseudo-charisma? Is there something else going on there? Is it— what, how do you understand it?

Yeah, what I noticed is this is a really challenging topic because it's so— we're using two people who are very divisive.

Sure. So to some degree, the guy in your office who doesn't appear to do this or something.

Yeah. Um, so there's a couple of things that I would say is that, uh, um, without judgment on developmental scale or anything like that, um, my daughters are 3 and a half years apart. What I notice is that's who kids adore, is like they listen to other kids that are just slightly older than them more than— my whole life I have been following, reluctantly questioning, the authorities that are just— have a little more understanding than I have at this moment, and I'm following that. So I think that there's a natural— one part is I think there's a natural peace to that. The other thing that's interesting is that people really want to buy the bridge, you know, they really want to buy them. We all really want to buy the bridge until we don't. So there's something natural in us in the evolutionary path to have somebody who has the answer, has somebody who feels assured, who feels conviction. And we want that. If you look at, like, whether it's our rock stars or our politicians, it's like there's something in us that wants to feel safe. And if we follow somebody who looks like they're assured, and, and in their minds they are, I mean, empathetically, we— they are convicted.

Yeah, there's a— we're like tuning in to like, oh, they, they believe this through and through.

They do. Yeah, that is it. Like, and, and if they don't, the third time they say it, they will. And so, so there's like this part of us that it's like, oh, cool, there's some conviction that I now I don't have to actually take responsibility for myself. And then I think there's something really that, that, that's another part that makes it that we— and so some of it is this very natural thing that we want. I think the other piece that's occurring is that as a society, like we talked about, like as a society, we want homeostasis, we want balance as well. And so what I notice is that when any side gets righteous, when there's an— if there's no naysayer in the room, eventually the naysayer comes up. If any side gets righteous, there's the other part of it.

Yeah.

And so, but to me, the more the, the, the more Great question. The question that is more productive, the more productive question is when you're faced with somebody like that, what's, what's, how can they be an avenue to your freedom, to your unwinding, to your, and can you see their point of view? Can you understand the value that they provide? Can you not see their point? Can you see outside of their point of view? Can you not see that can you use them as a way to dissolve your ego? Assuming there's an ego, but right, that you can— you use that person as a way to dissolve. And it was funny, you said earlier this great thought of, you know, there's a joke in your community about being a guru. And I— if anybody says, calls me a guru, oftentimes what I'll say is like, I'm— yeah, I'm just like a guru. I'm just the next iteration where I want all the power to be in your hands. Not in mine. And it's a good one, right?

Love it.

But the— but it's the— but it's that same thing. It's like if, if that person has you pissed off or enraptured or enraptured, they got you. Yeah, they got you, right? That you're not, you're not actually in yourself anymore. And you're— and you— there's so much to learn about your trigger, about how your projection or all that stuff that can get to your own freedom instead of like, you know, what makes them that.

It's interesting because the opposition to Trump and the opposition to Andrew Tate is arguably the thing that has fueled—

absolutely—

the, the— and, and that same thing is occurring internally, which is when you see someone who is so certain, so this, so that, and, you know, I'm gonna— no, they're not. And instead of like, what, what breaks inside of me when I— or what hurts, or when I come into contact with that. That's an interesting practice.

Yeah. And that's the— and we all want to be able to fall. Oh, yes. Take care of me. And we all want to resist it. It's like— and all of that's in ourselves and it's all happening in ourselves. If you're really bothered by Donald Trump, I guarantee you, you have a voice in your head that sounds a lot like Donald Trump.

It just— yeah, this is how— yeah. No.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. And if you— right. So anyways, that's the place where I think that there's freedom rather than to—

it's the— I mean, I like the Jungian psychoanalysis, but so for me, I'm conceiving like the return of the repressed, the externalization of the shadow in me, which is when I look at it, it's this repressed power drive, this unashamed I want, I take, I— that is out there. And I'm good with that and I have no issue. And then I look at— we— I know you don't want to go into it, but I look at the left or the Democrats. There's this hidden power drive, you know, that is not claimed in the same way.

Interesting. Yeah. Working with CEOs a lot, really powerful CEOs, what I notice is if they fully are like, I want power and this is power and da da da da, they are incredibly dangerous people. If they are fully, I don't want power, I'm not the most powerful, they are incredibly dangerous people.

That was me. That was me. Not that I was hurting anybody.

Yeah, it is to— it is like to acknowledge the power that you have, to, to, to not run away from your narcissism, to, and to, to love all of that as well, both disintegrates it and also just on an actionable level makes you far safer. And it's the rejection of both and, and the, or the grasping of both that makes you dangerous. And if you have a lot, a lot of power, yeah.

Yeah.

Did you— anything that comes up for you around that?

Yeah. So I, you know, I love Joe's answer and I'm going to give a completely different one. So I think, you know, if we go back to like the mechanism of, okay, there's the sleazy charisma, there's the authentic charisma. I think what a lot of people will kind of potentially jump to is like, oh, they have the sleazy charisma. I think this is where the model—

yeah, yeah, that's not true.

It's not true. I agree. So and that's like their own judgment, right? So I think what they really speak to is how much of a dyad charisma is. So why are they the ones that are popular? There's a thousand people who are saying a thousand things. They're the ones who have floated to the top. For someone to be charismatic in that way, they must have an audience. So if you want to understand why they are charismatic, you must look to the audience because they're the ones that are watching them. So here's the harsh truth that I think not many people are willing to accept. So if you're a man in the world today and something doesn't go your way, no one is there to help you. So speaking of Democrats, I'm not saying this is right or wrong, I'm just making an observation. So if you look at the— during the presidential election, if you look at the Democratic website for the, the people they support and the mission they support, they support minorities, they support people of different sexual things, orientations, immigrants. Like, I'm not saying that's right or wrong. And then at the very end, they say women. They literally listed a bunch of people, chose a gender, and did not pick men intentionally, right? So, so if you're a man today and you struggle, the most common thing you hear is you're privileged, you don't have a right to complain. Especially if you're— oh my God, like, y'all are the worst. Y'all are white men. At least I'm a minor. My skin is brown. Right? I'm part of the oppressed. And, and so what, literally, like, you have people, but like, men have the highest suicide rates and they're climbing. I, I, you know, I, I love it. I had a patient, I used to work a lot with people in finance, and I had a patient who had a kid and she wanted to go back into investment banking. And the bank has a program for mothers who have left to raise their kids because like women, we as a society should support women who make choices. And if they make choices and they want to make career changes, or if they're having difficulty, we should have like equality of like board representation between men and women. We should help women get into college. We should have women-only scholarships. And I'm not saying these things are bad. I'm just saying this is the way society is right now. There are plenty of women-only scholarships, very few male-only scholarships, but 60% of people in college are women. So if you look at the experience of men, they don't get help from anybody. If a man has difficulty with their emotions, no woman wants to take responsibility. And fair enough, right? They say like, it's not my job to baby this man. That's the work that I do to a certain degree, you do to a certain degree, you do. And I think it's in that order. I think maybe I have the biggest babies, but who knows, right? And, and so like, this is the, like, literally the experience of men. You can look at all kinds of metrics. I, I just look at suicide. And a few years ago I asked myself a question: if men have it so easy, why are they killing themselves at 4 times the rate of women? Like, why do these men— and I've had men in my office who are privileged, 6-foot-4, rich white men who want to kill themselves, you know, like have fantasies of tying a noose around their neck tying the other part of the noose to a tree, getting in a car and slamming on the gas pedal.

Hmm.

So, like, what is going on? Like, like, are they privileged? Yes. And there's more to the story. Do they have advantages? Yes. And there's more to the story. But we live in a society that does not accept that. So the weird thing is everyone thinks that Andrew Tate is super toxic. He's the most validating voice. He's the most emotionally validating voice that I've heard talking to men.

Donald Trump, same thing for his audience.

Yeah, absolutely right. So everyone says your audience, my audience, not sure about you, right? So like our audience, Charlie, is— I mean, this isn't true really, but like it's losers, right? There are a lot of quote-unquote losers in our audience. So what we realize is there are a lot of young professionals, the average age our audience is now like 32, it's like 30 to 35% women. So I'm sort of making a characterization that's not really accurate. But there are a lot of people, dudes out there who are struggling, feel like losers, trying to fix being a loser. And what does the world tell them? The world tells them you've got a bunch of advantages, you're fine, you should— and if you're not fine, you should be fine because you're a privileged man. There's one person who tells them they are shit, and that person is Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate says you are shit, let me help you from beta. You're a piece of shit, I'm gonna validate.

There's a validation and a reality.

Yeah, like, you're right.

Yeah, you are.

The world, the world is unfair. There are 1% of men who get everything and 99% you are a fucking loser. Here's how to change.

Versus people like, that's not true, love yourself. Exactly, exactly.

The other thing about their character their charisma is, in both of the cases that you mentioned, is that they, they're really not self-conscious.

Yeah, deeply.

Yeah, right. They're really not self-conscious. Like, one of them hugged a flag, you know, like, that's like performance art, lack of self-consciousness. That's like an amazing lack of self-consciousness. And I think that all of us want that. All of us want that lack of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness on top of. We might not want it in that particular way, but we all want that on some level. It's an interesting thing because I was looking at, um, who won the election over the, like, since Jimmy Carter, and I was just watching different, different of them speaking. It's like, wow, it's kind of like almost the person who has less self-consciousness wins. It's pretty— it's a, it's a really good indicator. The less self-conscious, the more they're likely to win. They don't have to be smart. They don't have to even be articulate. It's just like a lack of—

I'm going to be me, which is less internal division.

Correct.

It is.

Yeah.

It's greater sense of internal—

less internal division.

Right. In that particular aspect.

Yes.

Yes.

Right. Because like, I do not think that they go home and are non-divided internally. But, you know, I could be.

I think they both have a vision.

Yes.

Right. And I think they're both articulate. Like, I mean, people will say like Trump stumbles around with his words and stuff like that, but he's able to speak. So what I mean, he'll say all kinds of things, but there are a couple of statements that will really resonate with the dyad. And then the other really interesting, like, metaphoric thing here is we've been talking about, you know, if there's something bad and you try to make it go away, it just comes back stronger.

That's right.

And these two people have one really interesting thing. The harder people try to take them down, the stronger they become. Right. And so there's something going on here where that's just not the energy. They thrive off of it. Right. Because what it does is it galvanizes their supporters. It creates more of an us versus them kind of mentality. Mm-hmm. You know, and I think I know. I mean, so We talked with Sneako a while ago, and I don't know if it was you or someone on your channel.

I did the video.

Yeah. And so I think like people will sometimes blame us for talking to platforming toxic dudes. My conversations with like Sneako and Aiden Ross and some of these like toxic people are some of my most favorite conversations. I know this is going to get me a lot of flack, but I think there's like, they're good dudes.

I think I think the way— I think your handling of it is exactly the antidote and is so important and is so inclusive and does not leave anyone behind. I love watching those conversations.

Right, right. So, so that, that like, oh, like you shouldn't talk to bad people, then like what do you— and I'm not, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk. Some people say you shouldn't talk to bad people. And then I'm like, well then what should you do? Right. And then people will say you should cancel them, you should destroy them. And like, that's fine. I'm not saying that that's wrong. It's not my place to say like, if you want to annihilate whatever, like go for it. That's not what I know how to do. That's not my gift to the world. That's not the methodology that I've seen works. And so I, I think these are people that we should be— I completely agree with what Joe is saying about these people serve a karmic purpose of like awakening. Like, if you really have problems with these people, look within yourself first. Right, and see what's your issue. What are you really angry about? How can you not understand, right? So then you're like, like, I don't understand how people— like, even within my family, like, there's a huge generational divide between, like, Democrats and Republicans, and we're, like, all, like, in the same general household. But— and, and people like, I don't understand. And people say that reflexively. Me, right? Like, I don't understand how someone could follow Andrew Tate or vote for Donald Trump. Then the first fucking thing you should do is understand. Don't judge. Try to really figure out, because clearly they are doing something that matters a lot to a lot of people. And if you ever want to change this dynamic, good diagnosis precedes good treatment. It starts with understanding. Then you can figure out what to do. Trying to take them down may work, may not work. I idea. But I think that there's something really like powerful going on. And I think that like kind of like what Joe is saying, I know it sounds kind of weird, but like whether this is good or bad depends on what we do with it.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's an interesting, it's an interesting thought process, right? If you're, if you are in a place that is harmful to you and you are seeking help, you're typically not seeking judgment. You're not seeking egoic judgment. We know inherently that if somebody can show up with us as a human being and be with us as a human being, that that's probably one of the most effective ways for us to heal. And the, the, the thought process that I love around this is imagine that you go onto an island and you have all the food and water that you could ever use on this island, and you're there with 12 people. And those 12 people all happen to be saints. And saints, they draw boundaries, they take care of themselves, but they unconditionally love you. They love you unconditionally. They don't accept everything you do, but they unconditionally love you. And now imagine you're stuck on that island for a decade. Like, what happens? Who are you when you walk off that island? So we like know this.

Yeah, we don't need anyone to coach us or train us. Yeah, yeah.

Need this thing. And yet when we see something out in the world that we don't like, the very last thing we think to do is behave like a saint.

Yeah. Beautiful. Would love to continue. And I want to get you fed. So thank you both for sitting down with me today.

No food for you.

No soup for you. Amazing chatting with both of you guys today.

Yeah, it was an absolute privilege.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. Wow.

That was fascinating. Thank you, Joe.

Thank you, Dr. K. Thank you, Charlie.

And thank you to everybody listening. And if you love our show, we'd love your support by either sharing it with a friend or rating us in your podcast app or by subscribing. Joe Hudson and myself, Brett Kistler, are the hosts of this show. Munyi Kelly is our producer, and this episode in particular was edited by Charisma on Command, and I want to thank their team once again for all their hard work and for letting us share it with you on our channel. Thank you everybody, we'll see you again in 2 weeks.