CW 430: Creating A Meaningful Life & Spiritual Honesty with Eric Maisel Author of ‘Life Purpose Boot Camp’

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. This is episode number 430430. Can you believe how time flies? And we're already well into the four hundreds and before you know it, we're going to be at the 500th episode and, and then the 1000th episode and we'll just keep on going. And you know what that means for your new listeners. I have to warn you, it's like that warning on those cigarette label packages, which by the way, I wish those were larger and nobody smoked at all because that's just a terrible habit. The next big thing, by the way, is going to be ending air conditioning abuse. That's like the new secondhand smoke. I want to start a campaign against air conditioning abuse. You know these places you go into and it's freezing cold and those very same people are talking about the environment. Well, how about if you help the environment by not making it 61 degrees in this place? Anyway, I digress. Already.

Our guest today. Oh, yeah. If you're a new listener, we're about to get you addicted to the show. That was my warning label. That means you'll only have 429 episodes to go back and catch up on. So anyway, for you regular listeners, you don't have to do that, but you can if you want. Anyway, this is the 10th episode. A 10th show. And you know what that means. We go off topic, we talk about something of general interest, general life success, something that will benefit you in your life and help you be a more effective human being. We're already talking nine out of ten episodes on being effective as an investor and making money and growing the abundance in our life financially. But every 10th show we want to talk about something of general interest. And this one's kind of interesting because we have Eric Maisel today, Life Purpose Boot Camp author of many books. This discussion, as I recall, got kind of heated between him and I. Between he and I, I think is the more proper way to say that. I apologize, mom, because you're probably listening. And I thank you so much for. For being a grammar Nazi when I was a child, because at least now I only sound like an idiot when I say something stupid. Not when I. At least I'll say it with proper grammar most of the time. But anyway, yeah, so this discussion got a little bit heated and you'll hear that later in the interview. But he was a very interesting guest and I think you'll enjoy this episode. And you can see where we have our disagreement. So I'll just let you figure that out without me giving you too much information about it. Hey, be sure to join us for our Birmingham Creating wealth seminar and Property tour. And that'll be the weekend before Thanksgiving coming up in just a little less than a month from now. So get your plane tickets, get your hotel book. We got a good room rate at the Gorgeous, and I mean gorgeous, because I stayed at this hotel when I was in Birmingham just a couple of months ago and I wanted to have our event there because I thought it was such a beautiful, classy, very new, if not almost brand new, Weston Hotel. Just a gorgeous property. So I think you'll enjoy that. And you can register@jason hartman.com, click on Events and get early bird pricing. And by the way, for those of you members, we always have great discounts for our members on our events. So that is one of the prime benefits of your membership and I think a lot of people forget that. So check the membership section, you know, Jason Hartman University section there, and be sure you take advantage of our very, very substantial discounts, which will more than pay for your incredibly inexpensive annual membership. Okay, so be sure to check that out. And that applies to all of our events. It'll apply to the Meet the Masters event that will be coming up in January. We're about to get all those details announced for you as well. The Birmingham Property tour too. And then of course, don't forget the monthly conference calls for members only. Those are fantastic. We really address some deeper topics on those. We try to address some interesting stuff that we can't or don't necessarily want to do on the podcast. The archives are on there so you can go back and listen to all of the old ones as a member as well, so you don't have to listen to them live. I do not like when you're required to listen to stuff live. You know, one of the beauties of technology is the concept of being a single. In other words, you can produce the content at the producer's convenience. Or I, as the producer can produce that content at my convenience and you, the listener, the consumer of the content, can listen at your convenience. That's called asynchronous and it is really a handy thing. Unlike the old days where we had to watch TV at the given time or listen to the radio show at the given time, now everything's, you know, it's on demand. It's asynchronous. So that's a very convenient thing. And you know, I mentioned on the last episode we did have some very significant and unfortunate problems where we had six episodes delayed on itunes. And so please go back and listen to those, not the least of which is the unbelievable Bill Bonner. And that's episode 425 that was in a blackout period. There were six episodes that just would not publish to itunes. For some odd reason, we finally fixed it. It was about a two week sort of not a blackout, but I'll call it a gray out because of our technical difficulties. They are fixed. So episodes number 423. Oh, even 422, the eight financial rules that apply to everyone and their money. 423, Scott Paul, the Alliance for American Manufacturing. 424, Sidney Powell, exposing corruption at the Department of Justice. 425, Bill Bonner of Agora Financial. 426, property management profile for Birmingham, Alabama. You'll get some good information about our upcoming tour there. And 427, Libertarian Senate candidate Sean Ha. 428, John Challenger, talking about global outplacement and employment. And of course the last episode, which was after we solve the Problem. But you may not have gotten to that yet because you're probably stacked up a little bit with those other six episodes. And that is Jenny Craig, business and health and weight loss guru Jenny Craig. Yes. You know her name. It's a household name. And I recorded some really important and very well done intros. I was quite proud of my intros for all of those episodes. So do not miss those. Those are in addition to the guest. And for today, let me see. I'm coming to you first of all from Beautiful Den, Colorado. I'm here at a Mastermind meeting today. We visited. Well, we visited a couple interesting things. You know what they legalized in Colorado recently? Yes, it is. That is recreational use of marijuana now in two states and really Washington, D.C. as well. Because those government people, you know, they don't want to restrict themselves from being able to consume all the pot they want to consume. So that basically there they made it a $25 fine. De facto legalization, right? Well, today we visit Techstars, which is an incubator for tech companies. Nothing to do with marijuana by the way, just mentioning, I'm telling you about my day here today. So we visited them. You've probably heard of that famous incubator Y Combinator. And techstars is right up near Y Combinator. We all gathered around, did a little masterminding and heard about some of the companies they've helped develop from the startup stage. And that was very interesting. We toured a farm, a marijuana farm. I couldn't believe it. I saw images today of things I only have seen on TV or in print before. Learned all about it. It was really quite interesting. You know, I learned that this company that used to only do medical marijuana, which of course in and of itself is a big industry since they started doing the recreational side several months ago, they basically do about $1 million per month in revenue. And while that sounds like a lot, you know, a 12 million dollar company is a pre, little, little small to mid sized business. They have a hundred employees. And I thought that's not really very good at all, you know, because if you look at one of the efficiency metrics for judging a business is revenue per employee. And some of these tech companies that are highly leverageable in terms of revenue per employee, one would be obviously Google, right? Google would be, be definitely one of those. Revenue per employee is very, very high compared to the old smokestack style companies, Manuf companies where they're not as highly leveraged in terms of leveraging technology. You know, we talk a lot on the show about leveraging money and real estate being the most debt favored asset in America and how you can grow your wealth so much faster with leverage. Well, you know, you can certainly also do that through technology. And so in comparison this company, you know, I said to one of the founders as we were touring this facility, a rather amazing facility, I said, what's your revenue like? And she said about a million dollars a month since we started doing the recreational side of the plant. I thought 100 employees and a million dollar a month revenue, 12 million dollar a year company that really isn't anywhere near as profitable as I thought it would be. And I said that to her, I said, well you know, that's no big deal. I thought this was like a gold rush for people getting into this business. And she said you know, think about it. Prices with legalization. Of course, the benefit is it's putting the drug cartels and those scumbags out of business. And this is just. Folks, this is just like on Wall Street. You know, I've talked a lot on prior episodes about how these business people get on tv. You hear them in the media, the big business people in the corporatocracy. They complain about regulation. Well, secretly they love government regulation. That's my thesis on it. And the reason they love it, of course, is because it is a huge barrier to entry. It keeps competitors out. It lets them and their crony capitalist friends basically dominate these markets in semi monopolies. So you know, who's going to compete with these giant public companies? Who's going to enter into these businesses, right? Basically nobody. You know, even look at a giant company like Microsoft when they launch a search engine, bing bing, they're not getting much traction against the huge established competitor Google, right? So the same is true with regulation in the business of pot. Okay? You look at these drug cartels, when the government makes things illegal, basically they have created a semi monopoly for drug smugglers and drug cartels. And you look at these, these hideously violent Mexican drug cartels that basically run parts of that country, if not maybe a lot more of that country. I really don't know. I'm certainly not an expert on this. You look at the famous TV series Breaking Bad, all of this stuff basically is put out of business with legalization. And you know, I've debated this thing in my mind for many, many years. And I remember the first time I went to Amsterdam where, you know, they have legalization and very liberal drug laws. And now Portugal has basically legalized everything. You know, I went there thinking I wanted at least marijuana to be legal because I thought at least it would clean up that business and put a lot of these drug smugglers and people out of business. Now that was way back in the days of like, my impression of the drug business was sort of post Miami Vice, right? Remember that show? Of course, there's all kinds of violence and crime associated with that, which is just, just terrible. And I came back from Amsterdam thinking it was kind of scummy and I didn't like it. I was walking down the street, I remember, and someone would come up offering to sell me drugs. And I think, you know, I don't want to live in this kind of soc at all. That's disgusting here. It seems pretty normal. I mean, I don't know, you know, I guess the jury's out and we'll see how it all goes. But certainly they have put a lot, they have taken a huge bite out of the business of these drug smugglers and these drug cartels. And I think that is a good thing. We'll see how this plays out on broader society. We'll see how, you know, the driving under the influence thing, you know, now there's, I mean, certainly that was always there, like it always has been there with alcohol. But I guess the jury's out. We'll see what happens with Colorado and Washington state and of course, Washington, D.C. it was certainly a fascinating day, to say the least, in touring that facility. And kind of just seeing this is like, you know, just sort of a normal business where there's just normal people business people running it. And very matter of fact, I was, I was quite surprised. So we shall see how it goes. Before we get to our guest today, I want to talk to you about something I mentioned on a prior episode and really I've talked a lot about with Generation Y. You know, you might be sick of me talking about the millennial generation and Generation Y, but I tell you, it's a big deal. And the reason it's a big deal is because it is, like I've said before, the largest demographic cohort in American history and frankly, probably all of world history, bigger than the baby boomers. And the baby boomers for the last couple of decades massively shaped and influenced the American economy and the world economy. Well, this particular issue that I want to discuss is not just about Generation Y, but it is also in large measure about Generation Y. So it's not just about them, but it is about the largest demographic cohort, which nobody even recognizes. Demographic cohort or even a psychographic. I guess it's a psychographic cohort. That's the other thing that economists and demographers look at is psychographics. In other words, what people believe and how they think and what their behaviors are, but also demographics. That's more about what, their age, you know, their, their household style. In other words, are they single, are they married, et cetera. Right. So I guess this one could fall into sort of both parts. Right. And I got this email from John Burns, and you know, John Burns, real estate consultant. We've had John on the show a while ago, and we do need to get either him or some of his people back because they do put out some really good, useful material. So this article is by Molly Carmichael, a principal with John Burns Consulting, and it's entitled delayed Marriage Equals Delayed Homeownership, very important to us as real estate investors, of course. And I've talked about this a lot. And this largest demographic, or psychographic cohort, I guess you could sort of call it both in the last three presidential elections. I mean, this is huge. You know, most people think, well, it's, it's Caucasian voters, it's Hispanic voters, it's retired voters, or members of the aarp, you know, the American association for Retired Persons, or people, I'm not sure which, none of those. You know what it is? Get this, it's single people, okay? Marriage rates are plummeting. Okay? And this article is about that. And what does it mean to homeownership, okay. By the way, I don't know if you can hear my dog, but she's chewing on a bone. Before I started this podcast, she was quiet, doing nothing, just laying there. We're in the hotel room here at the, at the Hyatt, this beautiful Hyatt Regency in Denver. Color. We're here and, you know, the dog is in the room with me. She flew over here. Yes, flew on the plane with me. I thought, you know, Colorado, it's an outdoorsy place. I want to bring Coco along and maybe go hiking with her and that kind of stuff while I'm here. So anyway, she's here and she's chomping on a bone now. So if you can hear that, I apologize. Anyway, this is a pretty homey podcast sometimes.

Anyway, take it for what it's worth. Okay, what was I talking about? So this demographic cohort, single Americans, is really not recognized as one. Why is that? Well, it's because it spans racial lines. So it's not a race. It spans career and socioeconomic strata. So it's not poor people, it's not rich people, it's just everybody. And it spans different age cohorts and age groups. So it's, you know, people of every age from 20 to 24 to 85 plus. Okay, so I'll just read you what Molly Carmichael wrote, and this is fascinating because it has big impact and it bodes really well for us as investors who want to hold long term rental property, want to hold income property. So she says the share of 25 to 29 year olds who are married is down by almost. Get this. This is staggering. Okay? My narrative, my commentary, right? But she says it's down by almost 48% for men and down by 43% for women from 1970. This single fact is one of the biggest game changers in the housing industry. And then she has a chart that is very well done from the US Census Bureau with some math that they added to it that shows these different age groups and how marriage rates have declined. Now, you know, say what you will about cultural and societal implications, and I'm probably going to agree with you about a lot of those, even though I happen to be single, but looking. So keep that in mind, listeners, if you know anybody. This is huge for rental housing, okay? And it's for many reasons, which some of them she highlights here. Okay? So she says, you know, what impact does this change in marital status mean for your housing strategies? It is huge. And remember, this is written to mostly builders and developers because that's who John Burns is really serving as that market, you know, selling consulting services and data to these companies. Right? But it says the housing market is unquestionably fueled by life stage changes, particularly the change of marital status and the addition and subtraction of children. These changes significantly affect where consumers want to live and what kind of home and community they will choose. For example, singles are more likely to rent. They are more likely to rent. Yes, you heard that. And of course, you know this intuitively. I don't even have to point this out. It's sort of obvious, right? But singles are more likely to rent and live in locations that are closer to entertainment and employment. Okay? Marriage usually ignites the desire to own a home with a variety of locational and housing choices depending on income and family present. Okay. Cohabitation has certainly been on the rise in recent decades, but home ownership rates for cohabitating couples are much lower than rates for married couples. Now, that would seem obvious too, right? So all of this is pointing to let them rent from you. Okay? You've got a lot more demand for the rental housing you, as an investor, offer to these people. I mean, the next 10 years in the rental housing business is phenomenal. I mean, the demographics and psychographics coming at rental housing are really, really strong. Maybe the strongest they've ever been in history. I don't know. But, you know, I would venture to say the strongest they've ever been in history. I mean, this is really just amazing stuff. Okay, the next bullet point. Molly points out, the addition of children makes owning a home almost a necessity, given the need for yards, toys, education and social circles. And then she says children moving out often results in lifestyle changes, including different social circles, different home size and floor plan needs, meaning that a lot of people, as they're downsizing and becoming empty nesters later in life, they want single level Floor plans and then different floor plans, fewer bedrooms, maybe just one or two bedrooms still, in a spacious home with lots of square footage based on bedroom count. Okay. And location preferences also begin to shift. So I just wanted to share that with you, even though this is a 10th episode show, because I tell you that is important and it bodes very, very well for you, the investor. So happy investing, start buying some more income properties, some more rental properties, because there's a lot of renters in your future, and that is very good news. Okay. And even if there aren't, say I'm wrong, right? Say all of this is wrong, and say it's more like the last episode where I talked about the easing of loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We talked about that on the last episode. That means, you know, that bodes for a push for higher home ownership rates. Right? So either way this goes, if we have higher homeownership rates, that means higher demand, which means upward pressure on the value or the price of the property you own. If we don't have that and we have more renters and lower homeownership rates, that means upward pressure on demand, upward pressure on rental rates. So either way, you win. You just know that income property is a multi dimensional asset class and you adjust your strategy accordingly as you monitor it along the way through the years in your portfolio. So you always have to keep up to date. Even after you own a big portfolio, you've got to be listening to the podcast and listening to updates and watching the market and using sensory acuity to determine your investment strategy along the way. But fortunately, unlike the stock market, the modern version of organized crime, you only have to monitor it slowly because it changes slowly and it doesn't demand a lot of your attention. Just kind of a simple monitoring strategy will do just fine. So let's get to our guest. Today you're going to hear some interesting stuff with this guest. I think you'll really like this interview and it does get a little spicy. Okay. You can tell the guest gets a little defensive at some points and, you know, maybe rightfully so. So I think you'll enjoy it. So let's get to our guest, Eric Maisel.

It's my pleasure to welcome Eric Maisel to the show. He is author of more than 40 books on philosophy, religion, creativity and innovation. He's widely regarded as America's foremost creativity coach and author of the new book, Life Purpose Boot Camp. Eric, welcome. How are you?

Hi, Jason. I am great. How are you?

Well, fine, thank you. And give our listeners A sense of geography. Where are you located?

I'm 30 miles east of San Francisco in a town called Walnut Creek.

Fantastic. Beautiful place. Well, tell us a little bit about your work. There's a lot to cover here. You've got a huge body of work.

I do. I have three main interests. One is working with creative and performing artists and articulating their challenges and helping them live better lives as artists. I'm also interested in meaning and life purpose. And I've been developing something I call natural psychology, which looks at meaning in a new way, in a slightly different way. Looks at meaning as a certain kind of psychological experience rather than as something out there in the world. And as soon as we look at meaning that way, many things change. And then my third area of interest is mental health reform. I'm in what's called the critical psychiatry movement, a movement that doesn't think that the current way of treating mental disorders is really working and that something new is needed.

Fantastic. Well, gosh, I'm thinking I want to start with the subject of meaning, because that is so all encompassing. It sounded like, from your very brief explanation there, and I'd like to ask you to dive into that more deeply, but it sounded like a lot of meaning advisors, I guess I'll call it, for lack of a better word, or philosophers are actually saying that meaning is outside of oneself. It would seem like that is an internal process.

It would seem, wouldn't it? But we have 2,000 years of the metaphor of seeking meaning. That meaning is in a book or on top of the mountain or at some guru's feet. So in fact, although meaning is internal and a psychological experience, we've been misled by our metaphors for thousands of years to think that there's some place to look for meaning. I've been trying to champion the paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning and telling folks that there is no meaning to look for. There's only the meaning we influence and create. And when you actually get that, then suddenly you understand that there's work to be done on a daily basis to make meaning investments and seize meaning opportunities and spend your life in a certain way, not waiting for meaning, but rather creating meaning.

Meaning is an inside job, if you will. Right.

It's another psychological experience, like ecstasy and sadness and anything else. It's a special, unique psychological experience. But that's what it is. And in fact, there are two kinds of meaning. Let's say one is call it inadvertent meaning. Like you look up at the night sky and suddenly you're filled with the sense of the meaningfulness of life. You didn't do any work there, it just came upon you that life feels meaningful. And then there's what I call value based meaning making, which is the idea that by following our values and principles, first of all, we have to know what they are. But by following our values and principles, we can make meaning of the sort that actually makes us proud, proud of our efforts. Because I think that's what we're actually after in life. It's not to be happy. Happy is wonderful if we can pull that off. But it's to make ourselves proud by our efforts. And we make ourselves proud by engaging in what I call value based meaning making.

You talk about meaning investments. You mentioned that. And this value based meaning making and that distinction, that happiness, that's not a be all, end all, isn't it? I think a lot of people believe.

That we want to make use of ourselves. I think there is no one more likely to commit suicide than a bored aristocrat. Someone who had everything, you know, we can have all the toys we want and all the sensual pleasures and what have you and still not experience life as meaningful.

It's definitely not about hedonism, is it?

It's not about hedonism. It's about living our values and living our principles. And we all kind of know that. And we know that if we could, we'd want to do the next right thing and then the next right thing after that. But life gets in the way. Our responsibilities and errands, what have you, all sorts of things get in the way. But when we step back, we understand that that's what's going to make us proudest, is actually living a life based on our values and principles.

How do we decide on our values and principles?

It's really tricky because many of them contradict one another. You know, for instance, if you're an artist, you might believe that one of the things that's really important to you that you value is getting your creative work done and having a career. But you may also realize that you value relationships and you want to have a life with your loved ones. And in a daily way that often conflicts, or anybody in business, I think, discovers that kind of conflict. Where they want their career to go on an upward spiral, but they also want to spend time with their loved ones. It's kind of a cliche how difficult that is to do both things. So it turns out that making a list of our values or a list of our principles is far from the end of the game. It's not a bad exercise. But once you have that list, it has to be put into context. You have to live those values and principles in a daily way. And one of the ways I suggest to clients and to readers is that they engage in what I call a morning meaning check in just half a minute in the morning, where you make conscious decisions about where you're going to make meaning investments on this day, that you're going to spend two hours writing your novel and one hour walking in the park with your loved one, what have you. That we spend our days much more intentionally and in a much more deliberate way than we typically do.

Well, now more than ever, you know, we are in reactive mode as this onslaught of information and demands and emails and questions come at us. Peace and solitude are just really very rare commodities nowadays.

That's right. It's why I think we need much more sort of existential organization than we engage in. Everybody makes to do lists and gets things checked off their to do list, but that's not the same as having a to do list around meaning and purpose. To keep our life purposes close, I have folks engage in sort of oddball activities like create a life purpose statement or fabricate a life purpose icon or create a life purpose mantra. That is to have some tools available so that you can remember what your life purposes are as life rushes by.

So are any of these values and principles universal, or are they all subjective to the individual?

I do think they shift. And you know, there are humanist values that we want to feel, we sort of feel are universal, But I wonder if they are ultimately. So if I had to come down on one side or the other of that, I would say that values are contextual rather than universal. For instance, we might hold as a value our survival and our health. Maybe that's universal, except maybe our son needs a kidney and suddenly we're going to undergo severe surgery to take care of our son because that's now a value, because we value his life. And then the next day, or rather the next year, he decides he's going to enlist in a war, and now suddenly we're for that, even though now he's risking his life that we just gave him a kidney for, and then one year later we discover that the war is not a good war, now we want him back, etc. So I do think that values shift according to circumstances and our understanding of situations.

Very interesting. Yes, they definitely do. And the fact that they're in conflict with each other. What should we do when our Values are in conflict with each other. Is there a way to.

Well, first of all, it produce. First of all, it's good if we notice, because otherwise we'll be experiencing high anxiety and not knowing where the anxiety is coming from. So even though it's painful to understand that values are in conflict, it's better to notice it than to not notice it and just stay in a kind of unconscious pain when we discover they're in conflict. We have to make changes. One of the things that I keep suggesting to folks is that they take personal responsibility for their life, which may include making large changes. If, for instance, we believed that our work was meaningful or ought to have been meaningful, but we don't actually experience it, that we get our PhD in Archaeology and we discover that digs are actually really boring. It's just a lot of dirt and what have you. You know, if we discover that this thing that we've spent so many years, even decades setting up for ourselves isn't meaningful, we have to make a huge change or else we're just throwing sort of good hours and good days after bad. It's very difficult for folks to do that. But it's better to make those changes than to remain in conflict.

So that's the idea of cut your losses. Yes. Right.

That's right. And it's really not easy to do because we're talking about identity, too. You know, if you feel like your identity is based on you being a certain kind of professional with a certain kind of prestige, and now you understand that you have to throw that over because your life isn't actually meaningful, it's very hard to do on the identity level.

Creative people do they tend to get more anxious or more depressed than other people? Does one come with the other? Is that a bit of a curse?

The short answer is yes. 100% of creative folks are going to experience that kind of sadness or despair we nowadays call depression. And they're also going to experience higher anxiety than the next person. Not because they're more anxious by nature, but because the beast makes them anxious. If you think about it, the creative process is one choice after another. Put the comma in, take the comma out. Put a little red here, put a little blue there. It's one choice after another. And choosing provokes anxiety.

So the very act, the very creative act of choosing, of having to do, having to make one choice after another, hour upon hour, year upon year, provokes anxiety. As to the sadness, a lot of the sadness is existential in nature. By that I mean a lot of creative folks don't actually believe that what they're doing matters. Who needs another photograph? Who needs another. Some more pigment on canvas? Who needs another short story? Well, we do need them. But individual creators on a daily basis often wonder if what they're doing is really that valuable matters that much. Since it's on the one hand, hard work, which makes them sort of grumpy on a daily basis, and also work that they can doubt, it's easy to fall into despair over one's choice.

Usually they get so much positive feedback from the environment and from their fans.

I got to interrupt you there, Jason, because they do not. 99% of creative and performing artists get no feedback from the world. They don't succeed. So if we're talking about celebrity artists, that's one group of artists. But most creative and performing artists do not make it so on a daily basis. They're not getting support from anybody, including their mate and their families, who are telling them to do something else and make some money.

Yeah, get a real job.

Get a real job. As a rule. Really. As a rule, 95% or more of creative performing artists are not making a living or even very much money from what they're doing. So they're not experiencing success. And that's another reason they're down so often, is that they're not experiencing success.

And fair enough. I mean, you know, when I referred to that, I was referring to the. What the world would call successful or at least notable creative people. Maybe some of these people who aren't experiencing success, on the other hand, aren't really creative. They've chosen the wrong thing, you know, like the starving actor, you know, or the starving artist. Maybe they're really just not that good.

Well, there's no doubt there's some normal distribution of talent, but a lot of good people never make it. The Tchaikovsky violin concerto was booed off the stage. Things that are avant garde or special are often hated when they come out. So I wouldn't say it's that, of course, there's gotta be a normal distribution of talent, and some people are gonna be more talented than others. But I think it's the savvier artists who make it rather than the most talented artists. I think it's an entrepreneurial business, and, you know, if you are sort of an entrepreneur by nature, you're much more likely to make it in the arts than on sheer talent.

Right, right, right. Well, maybe being savvy is a form of creativity.

Well, it is. Well, it certainly is.

Okay, so can you give our Audience Eric, any tips on how to be more creative?

Sure, there are some real basics. One is that you probably have to institute a morning creativity practice before your real day begins, because virtually everyone has a real day, has a day job or another career has a life. And if you try to wait until the evening, if you spend your busy tiring day doing your day job and then hope that you're going to write in the evening or paint in the evening or compose in the evening, most people can't do it. They're both too tired by the end of the day and they're both. They're also a little sad by the end of the day because they didn't get to spend their day the way they wanted to. So on a practical level or a tactical level, the most important thing is to get up an hour earlier. Nobody wants to hear this. Get up an hour earlier and spend that hour from 5am to 6am Getting your creative work done. That has three big benefits. The first is the obvious one that you'd get work done. That's a big benefit. The second is that you would get to make use of your sleep thinking. Folks don't really realize that in addition to dreaming during the night during REM sleep, we also think during non REM sleep. And that thinking is very important, except it goes away the second we turn to the new day. So if you institute a morning creativity practice, you get to make use of that sleep thinking the night before. You can ask yourself, you know, what does Mary want to say to John in chapter three of my novel? And your brain will work on Mary and John chatting all night long. And then you can take dictation in the morning and that's a very big deal.

So it's really that simple of just give yourself a problem before bed and your sleep thinking will work it out for you.

Of course, it can't be quite that simple, but it's almost that simple now. You may not get it the first day. I have clients who use this sleep thinking process to solve problems and often it takes some days or weeks to get the problem solved, but they're holding a certain kind of intention, namely the intention to turn over their sleeping brain to solving this problem. And answers do tend to come just to round up the other thought. The third reason for morning creativity practice, why it's so important, is that by starting the day doing your creative work, you will have the experience of having made some meaning on that day and the rest of the day can be half meaningless and you won't get depressed you know, it's a kind of meaning inoculation. So there are a lot of good reasons, just on a practical level, to start your day with your creating.

Well, I am most definitely, Eric, a big fan of getting up early. And I think there that old saying, you know, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise is there for a reason. Because morning time is just. It's just a great time of day. It's a productive time. But, you know, you talk about sleep thinking. Is there an optimum amount of sleep? Probably depends on age. Because I noticed with myself at least, the older I get, the less able I am to sleep very long. And I don't know, I don't seem to mind it too terribly much.

I guess I don't think there's an optimal amount because it's partly a function of how much of the sleep is deep sleep and how much of it is restless, not really restful sleep. The more deep sleep we have, the more we're able to manage to go on as little as six or seven hours. But it really depends on the quality of sleep. I have to tell you a little anecdote. It's slightly long.

So I did a book called Sleep Thinking, and my publicist said I can get you on. To tell the truth, I don't know if you know that game show, right?

I remember it.

And so I appeared on the game show. As you know, there were three sleep thinkers, there were three Erics, the real Eric, me, and then two false Erics. And one of the questions asked of me was, is there an optimal amount of time to sleep? And I gave an answer, sort of like the one I gave you, but I said it a little more closely to six hours is enough. Well, hardly anybody in the audience believed that. So we managed to get a lot of wrong answers and we made some money.

Yeah, that's funny. So that optimum time, I just want to, you know, like when you're deep sleeping, are you REM sleeping or are you sleep thinking? That's not rem.

That's right. We dream in REM sleep and we think in non REM sleep, in deep slee.

Okay, okay. Oh, so the REM is lighter than deep.

The REM is lighter. That's why we can get so agitated with our dreaming, because we're actually in it. Sometimes, of course, it feels like very deep sleep, those dreams, but there's even the deeper sleep.

Okay, so any more on becoming more creative?

Well, I think the morning creativity practice is one thing. Actually owning, actually practicing Some anxiety management techniques is actually really important because as we were chatting about a moment ago, so anxiety threads through the process. And if you don't understand that, the number one thing that people do to avoid the experience of anxiety is to flee the encounter. They leave, they go away. And that's what a lot of would be creative folks are doing. They're never quite getting to the page or the canvas. So I think it's really important for folks to understand the place of anxiety in the process and to deal with the place of anxiety by having some anxiety management strategies at the ready. There are as many as 20 or so different categories of anxiety management strategies. So there are lots of things for folks to try to reduce their experience of anxiety.

Did you want to maybe just share one or two or, you know, give a concept on that?

Sure. I mean, there are many straightforward ones. Deep breathing is an ancient technique for reducing our experience of anxiety. Smart cognitive thinking, namely only thinking thoughts that serve us, not increasing our sense of anxiety by the kinds of thoughts we think. There's a beautiful way to marry those two things, namely smart cognitions, with deep breathing, by dropping smart thought into a deep breath. I call those incantations where you figure out what thoughts are useful for you to be thinking and then you drop them into a deep breath. So you're on the inhale, you're thinking half the thought and on the exhale you're thinking the other half of the thought. That's a very simple but useful technique. There are relaxation techniques, there are things called discharge techniques where you get the stress out through physical activity. So as I say, there are many, many tactics and techniques. Some are more body oriented, some are more mind oriented, but there's something there for everybody.

The last thing I want to ask you about is just the topic of religion. You address philosophy, religion, creativity and innovation. Tell us about your work on the religion side.

Well, you may have been slightly misinform.

My work on religion is that I'm an activist atheist and I've done books like the Atheist Way. So I wouldn't say that I'm in the religion camp. In fact, I would say I'm in the anti religion camp.

Well, so let me ask you about that. Isn't atheism a religion?

I don't think so, but, you know, we could debate that.

I thought I'd throw that out there.

It's one of those things one could debate. I don't think so. So, you know, I think personally that the idea of positing someone out there, some, some entity out there that you then follow is actually a betrayal of our common humanity. I don't think we know what's out there. That doesn't make me an agnostic, which it might sound like.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask, you know, why not be an agnostic?

Yeah, we don't know that, but I, I'm positive that the pronouncements of religious folks do not make sense. But, you know, that's a whole nother a topic for another day.

Obviously it is. The interesting thing that I think that the atheists out there, they don't address is the societal issue in the value.

Of religion to society.

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of times it's framed in a negative way. Oh, look at these hypocrite religious people. Or look at the Muslims stoning people to death. Or very rarely does a Christian guy kill like an abortion doctor or something versus the other side. But they always like to pick those examples. But I think they're missing something there. What are your thoughts on the societal side?

Well, it's an interesting question. One of the challenges that individual atheists have is that we don't have community because atheism by itself is not a reason to gather in potlucks and what have you. So in that sense, the community that religious organizations provide is very important. In fact, the hardest challenge for someone leaving their religion for a new atheist is losing their home church. That's what they experience as the hardest.

Right. But they can always join an objectivist group. Ayn Rand was a devout.

But as you're saying, it doesn't actually work the same way. It somehow doesn't go as deep. It's an actual loss for them. So I think that idea of home church, or not that idea, but that experience of home church is in fact very poignant and powerful for folks. And it's actually harder to lose the home church than to lose God for new atheists. So in a way I agree with you. On the other hand, I do think that religions are more dangerous than benign. That's my view. So on balance I would probably disagree with you. But you know, in that one sense I do agree with you.

Well, so tell me about that though. I mean, you know, I want to be, you know, fair and give the equal time here. Why are religions more dangerous than benign?

Well, I think if you're starting from what I believe is the untruthful place of making up gods, then you then have to.

Force or demand of the folks around you that they perpetuate what I'm saying is a lie. And organizations or cultures or groups that by whether it's violence or by shunning or by this or by that, perpetuate certain dogma. I think those are dangerous organizations.

Here's the thing. You know, I almost liken it to economics. I'm quite the economist. You know, I really like studying economics and I mean, I like a lot of things, but economics is quite fascinating to me. For the last decade, there's this principle in economics that talks about you can't hear the dogs that don't bark. In other words, there are some economic things that you. By them not happening, you can't measure them. And I think that also applies to the religion debate because. Because if you take, for example. Okay, well, religions aren't benign. They do things, they engage in things, they burn people at the stake. I mean, the Salem witch hunts, there's all kinds of history out there. Obviously. The thing that scares me the most is it seems that most of them have modernized except for one, which is still doing that kind of stuff. The question I think that needs to be asked, I think it's a fair, intellectually honest question, is, is okay, so some of these people are doing bad things, and that's true. The question is, would they be worse if it were not for religion?

Well, it's a question that's often asked. I don't think so. I mean, those most secular countries, like the Nordic countries or what have you have the least violence and the least this and the least that. So I think it's another long debate kind of question. I'm going to give you the short answer, which is I think, no, I think when you're freed from having to be lying about things internally and you can actually talk about your own values, what you value, what your principles are different from what you're told are your values and your principles.

Then I think you give yourself the chance of coming up with a higher morality, not a lower morality.

Well, yes, that may well be true. The problem is it's a maybe. Of course, like you said, atheists don't have community. That was. That's an interesting observation. I haven't thought much about is there's, there's no sense of community. And that is one of the great things about.

But, you know, but it is a, it is a maybe. But. But I think here are the choices. On the one side is if, you know, if you agree with me, on the one side is perpetuating lies and the other side is being honest and then just seeing which does produce the more moral person. So if it's a maybe, I don't think the conclusion is, well, let's stay with religion, since it might be dangerous to let go of it. I think the right direction is let's let go of religion to see if people get better. I think they will.

It's a debate for the ages. I mean, you know, we're certainly not going to solve it here.

That's right.

It seems that there would be a lot of. I'm not saying it's always a disease, but I'll call it a disease in excess of the disease of hedonism. People will just wantonly sort of do whatever they want. If all they have is the government to answer to. I guess it's just going to be the government, then, you know, there just won't seem to be any boundaries.

You know, I would say. But I do think that you're. That you're saying this to support religion. And I would say, let's see, your argument is if the shackles or if the virtues of religion were let go of that, people would go in X direction. I say they'd go in Y direction. We'd have to see.

One of the things with religions is to witness and to recruit, if you will. Okay. What does an atheist believe about that? I mean, you said you're an activist atheist. Are you recruiting?

I think that we have a complete spectrum. I think that any given atheist would be somewhere on the spectrum from this is just for me and I don't really care what other people are doing to being actively against religion and let's call it recruiting. Yeah, I would be on the recruiting side. Yeah, I would like religion to hold less sway. I would like there to be more people who see through religion. So, yeah, I would say that I'm on the recruiting side.

Okay. All right. I just wanted to see that. I always like to ask my guests to give out their website and tell people where they can learn more about their work.

Absolutely. It's ericmaiselle.com and that's Eric M A I S E L dot com.

Any closing thoughts about natural psychology? I didn't really get to ask you about that, although I think we alluded to it in our discussion toward the beginning of our talk today. Just any closing thoughts about that or anything?

It's not exactly a closing thought, but it's a gift to folks. They can get my book Natural Psychology for free by going to naturalpsychology.net. it's available there for download for free. So if folks are interested in what I'm talking about here, about meaning as a psychological experience and what flows from that fact. They can learn about that in that book.

Fantastic. Well, good stuff. Well, Eric Maisel, very fascinating and spirited discussion. I appreciate having you on the show and thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

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