The 5 STEP METHOD To Turn Your LIFE AROUND! | Jordan Peterson & Russell Brand

If you don't have a goal, you suffer and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place.

You have to be willing to accept that what you think you should get might not be right.

If you don't agree, don't agree. Fight or hold your peace because you see what happens.

We must have an aim in our life. No matter what stage of life we're in. And if we don't have some type of aim, even if for a few months of an aim of going somewhere or direction, we're gonna, the suffering is gonna be even more suffering.

Pointless.

Because we're already gonna face the greatest challenges in life. That's right. You're stuck already struggling.

That's right.

There's no way out.

Diversity is coming no matter what. That's right. If we have big goals or small little goal or whatever it may be, but it's gonna be less suffering if we have an aim.

Yeah, well, not only it's worse than that even because the suffering is-- There's zero meaning. Well, the suffering is pain, and the suffering is anxiety and uncertainty, and the suffering is hopelessness. But the consequence of all that is that you get bitter. And when you get bitter, you get mean, and you get cruel, and you start to hurt yourself and other people. So it's not only that if you don't have a goal, you suffer. It's that if you don't have a goal, you suffer and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful, and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place. And so, because you can't suffer pointlessly without becoming bitter, and you can't become bitter without becoming cruel. So you need an aim. The question is, then the question of course, Bitter aim. What you should aim.

Yeah, better aim.

Yeah, better aim, that's for sure. So then the question is, what should your aim be? Now we have a program. It's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. I have this website called selfauthoring.com and that program helps people write about their life. And so there's a past authoring program. To establish your aim, you have to know where you are. It's like you're trying to orient yourself on a map. You can't orient yourself on a map unless you know where you are. You also have to know where you're going, right? So those are the two relevant things. The past authoring program helps people write about their lives. So it's a guided autobiography. We ask people to break their life up into six epochs, six sections, and then to write about the emotionally important events in those epochs and to detail out why the positive things happened and why more of that could conceivably happen in the future and to detail out why the negative things happened and to try to understand why with a name to not replicating them in the future. Because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past. The purpose of memory is so that you figure out what went wrong when something went wrong so you don't duplicate it in the future. So that's the purpose of memory. And the past authoring program can help people catch up. And you know you have to catch up if you have memories that are older than about a year and a half that still cause you emotional pain when you think about them. Or if you dwell on them, they come spontaneously back to mind. It means that there's part of your life that you haven't mapped out properly. and it still has emotional valence that's gripping you. You're still holding onto that story.

Or it's still holding onto you.

Right, you haven't let it go. Yeah, well you haven't been able to navigate your way through it. There's a pitfall there that you fell in and you don't know how to avoid similar pitfalls in the future and that's why your brain won't let it go. Because it's saying that's what the anxiety systems do. It's like, this happened to you, it wasn't good. This happened to you, it wasn't good. This happened to you, it wasn't good. Fix it, fix it, fix it. that will never go away unless you fix it.

How do you fix it?

Well, you have to figure out why it happened.

Right?

That's the first thing is like, how did you, how was it that that situation arose to pull you down? And that's not simple. That's why, well, that's why we have the writing program, because it's complicated to think it through. But you, but if you face it and you, and you meditate on it, let's say, and so you do this voluntarily, there's a pretty high probability that you'll be able to Decrease the probability that will be repeated in the future.

So... And go ahead, I don't want.

To cut you off. Oh, well, the second part of the program helps people do an analysis of their virtues and their faults, same sort of idea. What's good about you that you could capitalize on? What's weak about you that you need to fix so that it doesn't bring you down? Right, and that's the present authoring. But the future authoring program is probably most relevant to you and your listeners because you're interested in helping people establish aims. And so we already talked about the fact that you need a name in life or that's where you derive your meaning and without that things go to hell and as literally as that can be taken. And so but it's not easy to ask people to say, well it's easy to ask them, what do you want in your life? It's a very hard question to answer.

Because it's too vague and grand.

So we help in the future authoring program, we help people break that down. So okay, so here's the situation. Put yourself in the right frame of mind. So what's the right frame of mind? It's like rule two in this book. Treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. You're someone that you are responsible for helping. So what that means is you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies, that it's worth having you around and that it would be okay if things were better for you. So you need to take care of yourself like you're taking care of someone you care for. So there's a bit of a detachment in that. And then the next thing is, okay, so now look three to five years down the road. You get to have what you need and want, assuming you're being reasonable, and that you actually want it, which means you're willing to make the sacrifices that would make it possible.

What do you mean by reasonable?

Well, that's the next thing. Well, within your grasp, that would be something.

What if something is out of your grasp, but you still push hard enough to get it?

Well, then you need an incremental plan. You need to break that goal down into steps.

Crazy goal within a year that's like, you haven't even done the work to.

Master a skill yet. Yeah, I got it.

Yeah, well that's it.

And you can have a high end.

Goal and more power to you if you do.

Time to get there. Well, you need a pathway to it. Absolutely. You know, if it's 10 stories up above you, you need a staircase to get there, right? And so you have to build the staircase too. And so in the future authoring program, so you're asked first of all, okay, you get to have what you want and need. That's the proposition. But you have to aim at it. You have to define it and aim at it. So then the first thing is, okay, If you could put your family together the way you wanted it to be, what would that look like? And so that might be your siblings and your parents, but that also might be your wife or your husband and your kids, assuming that you're at that point in your life. If you could have the family you wanted, what would that look like? Right, okay. Career, same thing. You get to have the career or the job that is within your grasp, necessary and suitable for you if you were taking care of yourself. How are you going to educate yourself? Because you're not as smart as you should be. There's a lot more things you need to know. So you've got to keep learning and moving forward. So you need to plan for that. How are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically?

Right?

So how are you going to avoid the catastrophic temptations, for example, of drugs and alcohol? Because that pulls a lot of people down. You need a plan for that. You're going to be a social drinker? How much are you going to drink? How much is too much? What about your drug use? You've got to regulate that so it isn't a pitfall. How are you going to use your time meaningful and productively outside of work? because you need to plan for that. So that's, and there's one other that, that's the six in my set. Yeah, I think there's seven initial questions and I don't, I don't remember the last one. Oh, intimate relationship, of course. So you have, you, do you want, do you want a long-term stable intimate relationship? And if you do, then how would you like that to lay itself out? You've got to have a vision for that, because if you don't have a vision, you're not going to aim at it. And if you don't aim at it, then you won't even see the opportunities when they arise. that's the thing that's so cool. I wrote about this in chapter 10, which is be precise in your speech. It's a chapter about the fact that aims structure your perceptions. So, for example, once you aim at something, your brain, literally, the perceptual structures in your brain, in your visual cortex, reorient themselves to calculate a pathway to the aim. And then what they show you in the world is obstacles to that path and open pathways to the path. That's actually how the world reveals itself, just like. Just like when you're driving in a car and you have a map and you aim at a particular place, then.

All the things that are related to.

That place show up in the world. It's exactly the same thing. Because you are traveling through time and space, and you need a map. And so after you answer these seven questions and you're encouraged to do it badly, because you don't have to be perfectionistic, just complete it. Because a bad plan is better than no plan. gives you something to improve. So even if your aim is vague, and even if it's off target, if you start aiming and you see you're off target, then you can shift and you can make it more precise.

You start to recognize what you don't.

Want in that aim.

Yes, exactly. Say, oh, I thought I wanted this, but I don't. So let me renavigate and figure out.

What I do want. Exactly. And you might have to try a bunch of things.

Well, you will have to.

That's why you shouldn't get perfectionistic about it. You will absolutely be wrong, but you won't be as wrong as you would.

Have been if you were aimless. Right, right.

So it's a so there's a bit of space. No man's land.

No man's land is worse than no.

Man'S room is a bit worse than a bad path.

That's exactly right.

Ooh, I like that. That's a good one. That's a good one. And it's right.

It's right.

You don't want to be in no man's land.

Why did you use that phrase? Because that's right. That's exactly right. I think for me, the idea of walking around aimlessly is like the worst idea in the world. It's like zero purpose, zero mission, zero certainty at all.

It's like walking around in no man's land, aimlessly. But it's funny too, because in no man's land, everybody's shooting at you. Because that's a military term. No man's land is the space between two enemy positions.

You bet.

So if you're aimless, you're also at a place where everything is shooting at you.

Dang.

Yeah, so it's a very good metaphor that came to mind. Yeah, well that's why we remarked on it. That's very, very cool. So then we say to people, okay, look, now, Okay, now you've thought about this for a while. It's nice to do this over a couple of days too, because then you get to sleep on it and that helps reorient yourself. So then, okay, now you write for 20 minutes. Don't worry about grammar, spelling. This isn't a composition exercise, right? You get to have what you want three to five years down the road. What does your life look like hypothetically? Write it out. Write it out. Okay, so then that's the first part. The second part of the exercise. So now you've got your thing d'ame, Matt. You think, well, I'm motivated because I got my thing to aim at. It's like you're not as motivated as you could be because you don't yet have your thing to run away from. Because if you really want to be motivated, you want to be going somewhere and you want to be not going somewhere else.

Which typically is a pain.

Yes, or pain or anxiety. Some domain of suffering and guilt.

I don't want to feel this anymore.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

So the other thing we ask people is, okay, now take stock of your weaknesses. And imagine that you let them multiply, you got hopeless, and you augured in and things were as bad for you as they could be in three to five years.

What are some examples of weaknesses that people might have?

They lie, they procrastinate, they avoid, they're grandiose, they're narcissistic, they're undisciplined, they're nihilistic, they're aimless, all of those things, right?

Victim mentality.

Victim mentality, they take the quick way out, they pursue impulsive pleasures, they sacrifice meaning for expediency, They don't take care of their basic responsibilities. They fight stupidly with their parents. They don't negotiate properly with their spouse. They're bitter at work because they haven't said what they have to say. They haven't thought through what they're doing tomorrow. They drink too much. They smoke too much.

They take too many drugs.

They don't regulate their- Don't work out, yeah. Yeah, so there's like- Got to step up. Everyone knows, man. Everyone knows.

And everyone's got a set of weaknesses that they know about. And so we say, all right. What are some of your weaknesses?

Like three weaknesses that you know right now you could still work on and then three things that you think are really- A lot of things, a lot of things are things that I've taken care of in my life. Like I used to smoke when I was a kid, I smoked a pack a day, I used to drink a lot, I didn't work out. I wasn't nearly as disciplined as I should have been. I wasn't as careful with what I was saying. My most likely negative outcome probably would have been, I really like to drink, alcohol was a really good drug for me.

Is that why you did your thesis on that?

Well, partly, it was mostly because the opportunity came up for me to investigate drug and alcohol use. But I came from a little town in northern Alberta. It was a heavy drinking town. And that could have been a real trap for me. So anyway, so we have these people say, okay, now you know your weaknesses and you know what particular hell you would descend to if you allowed yourself to descend into it, because you've probably had a taste of it. It's like you really let that go and you're in a terrible place in three to five years because you haven't done what you should do. What does that look like? It's like everybody writes that down. Write it down. So you know, because one of the things you want to have behind you, let's say you have to do something difficult, like go confront your boss. It's like, well, maybe hope isn't enough to encourage you to do that. You think, well, no, if I don't encourage, if I don't go confront my boss carefully and intelligently, then I'm going to hate my job and Then I'm gonna drink more, then I'm gonna end up in that little hell place that I designed for myself. It's like, oh, I'm not going there. I don't wanna talk to my boss, or I don't wanna confront my wife, or my husband, whatever it is, or.

My father, or my children for that matter.

But if I don't... Then I'll resent myself or I'll resent this situation. And I'm gonna end up going down this terrible pathway. It's like, because sometimes when you're moving forward, you have to do something difficult. You might think, well, why bother? And the answer is, well, so I.

Don'T end up in hell. How about that?

Oh yeah, oh yeah, there's that.

So, if you don't experience the pain now or the difficulty now, you're gonna have a deeper pain later.

Yeah, yeah, that's life.

Much deeper pain later. What are your thoughts on this? Having a dream that is inside of your soul for years that you never fully commit to. You dabble again, like we've done so much in so many things. We dabble, but you never fully commit to. What does that do to us if we continue on for the rest of our life never fully going all in on our dreams?

I think it obviously reinforces the idea of incompetence or it reinforces the idea that you are incapable of following through. And I feel like we have an obligation to follow that or as you say, put it aside entirely and watch the, you know, look, we all know in the grim economies of our lives, if we were to put aside staring at some goddamn, senseless social media platform and give that time to learn in Spanish, we'd speak Spanish by now.

In four languages.

Yeah, yeah. So like, you have to be willing. That's why someone like, you know, Tony Robbins is so sort of you think, 'cause that man, he just makes those choices. If you ever heard him tell the story about how he like learned polo.

Who'S just like, I was like, I.

Wanted to learn polo. I'm f***ing ill. Like every time I go, whenever I'm walking my dog, I feel like, I'm friends with Tony. And I've told him this. I say, like, whenever I'm walking my dog or anything, I feel like, oh, this is not, Tony wouldn't be doing this.

Tony would be learning something now. Well, you know, you could be learning.

Spanish while you walk the dog.

You know, like, I mean, he's powerful, but he is a one-off let's face it.

Yeah, I just actually interviewed him again yesterday and it reminded me that he learned, I think, to become a black belt, like, while he was on tour for two or three years. And he was like, I did it the fastest time anyone's been a black belt. I had the master come on stage and, like, behind the scenes, in between sessions, I would spend 45 minutes, then go back on stage. I was like, You're an animal. The commitment is unbelievable.

What was that, like what martial art is that?

I think he just learned, I think he learned karate. I think it was, this was probably decades ago when he was like, I'm gonna learn this, but I'm on tour. And he brought the guy with him to just teach him all day in between on stage. So it's been a thing.

One of the things I most admire about him is that the way that he will identify an objective and then not be restricted by sort of our conditioned, either emotional or cultural responses. Admittedly, we're talking about someone with some incredible resources. Yes, we are now, but the reason he's got those resources is because of this ability that he would just go, okay, I'm gonna learn that thing. They haven't put aside all of the.

Yeah, there's not time, there's not this, there's not that. He eliminates excuses. He just says, there is no room and he goes all in on his desires.

It's pretty powerful. Tony, you exhausting genius.

One of the things I think that holds a lot of people back, myself included, is when we doubt ourselves. When we don't believe in our own abilities or what we're capable of creating in the future. What do you think are some ways that we can overcome self-doubt in ourselves to gain that real confidence, not fake confidence, but overcome the doubts that hold us back from You know, asking that person out or going after that career opportunity or just saying, I'm going to go after what I want in my life. What are some ways to eliminate that self-doubt and gain confidence?

Well, self-doubt can be critical, Louis, because it can be a component of awareness. I feel that the answer must always be the embarkation on a spiritual life because It's difficult, isn't it, in this world of personal development that we find ourselves in, for us not to take on the tropes and objectives of a culture that I think at this point we need to be querying and looking to move away from. We've all been deeply inculcated to believe that the pursuit of happiness is contingent upon the attainment of of our petty, trivial desires. But real happiness is contingent on being free from those petty, trivial desires. As long as I'm a prisoner to that, like, you know, see if someone's like that, that doesn't know, you know, can't pluck up the confidence to ask someone out or can't pluck up the confidence to pursue their dream or whatever. For me, I don't feel like it's my job to operate at that that intersection at the intersection of well come on believe in yourself you're as good as anyone else you'll never know unless you try. I don't think that's my job. My job is like why do you think you want this? What do you think it's gonna do for you? What do you want really? What do you really want? What do you really want? What is it you are looking for? You know a friend of mine observed once that in the 1980s the prominent sort of entrepreneurs were all about zipping about on speedboats and whooshing through the skies in hot air balloons, trepid, bold adventurers. The very same tycoons now are all about greenness and ecology and safety and helping, responding to the trends that define a time, this time now of apparent fragility. I think our job is to look for some truth beneath culture, that culture in many cases is not our friend. Culture is here to chain us to systems of tyranny, subtle tyranny. What is freedom really if it is only freedom to operate within certain parameters. It isn't freedom at all. I'm not saying I wouldn't rather be a person who's affluent in California than a person that's sort of poor in, I don't know, Tehran or Senegal or, you know, I'm not gonna be poor anywhere, frankly. It's pretty grim to be poor in anywhere in the world. I've been poor in places before. But I don't feel like our job is to train people to bend themselves into a shape where they can succeed within these systems. I think our job is to train people so so that they learn to challenge these systems, to create fairer systems that are not solely built upon the fulfillment of individual goals. My friend Adam Curtis, the great filmmaker and genius, says the genie is out of the bottle now on individualism. It's never going back in. You're never gonna be able to tell people, hey, why don't you forget your own identity? You're just a member of a community, of a collective, of a parish. You know, that's not gonna happen now. Everyone, nothing is as real to you or I as our own thoughts, as our own dreams, as our own, but that's just the way it is now. Perhaps through this we can attain some meaning and if I refer back even to my own suggestions, serve the thing you are pursuing. You know, if it's like you really want to go out of a boy or a girl, why are you looking to serve them or do you think they're gonna somehow solve or absolve you? You see them as some salve or if you're after some dream, why is it because you don't feel like you're good enough or you're worthy? You know, one of my friends said to me that you're like someone who's been up to the all-you-can-eat buffet table, stuffed your face full of everything and then to everyone else, you don't need this stuff.

You don't need it.

This cake won't work for you. You've done it. But I have had this experience. So, you know, anyone that's saying, well, that's easy for you to say, then yeah, god damn it, they're right. Well, it wasn't that easy to get here, let me tell you. But what I would say is, this is, I would say this, that you are beautiful, that you are enough, that you deserve to feel content and happy. But you have to be willing to surrender everything. You have to be willing to surrender everything. You have to be willing to accept that what you think you should get might not be right. Where did it come from that idea? Where did that idea that, you know, because if you are meant to be a world-class athlete, if you get on and do, you know, I mean, do the Tony Robbins version of get on and do the work, don't let anything stand in your way, believe in it, be willing to suffer, have the discipline, make the sacrifices, then that's all sort of cool. But if there's any reason you're becoming a world-class athlete, it's because your father told you you're not good enough and that you're cheap and you ain't no kind of a man or woman or whatever, then that you don't need to deal with that. Otherwise you're gonna end up strung up in a hotel room one way or another, you know, because it doesn't, like, you know, like you and I both know enough people, like, I've. Having experienced the type of celebrity that I experienced, I've met people that, as I'm sure you have, that are in at the Apex, the Zenith, they have enjoyed it, they have been to Kubla Khan, they've had it, they're in there drowning in riches and drowning indeed, because it's not real. It's not real. Never lose sight of the fact that we are in limitless space in every direction. Never lose sight of the fact that in the subparticular world, the rules of physics as we previously understood them are falling apart, never lose sight of the fact that our senses are limited and we can only see 0.63% of the electromagnetic range that we are operating essentially in darkness that the neural activity that we experience that constitutes our reality is only a tiny percentage of the potential of our own brain, let alone the potential brain of God. Wouldn't it be a coincidence if we were issued with all of the senses necessary to experience total reality? Isn't it more likely that we think of reality as just being the circumference of our sensual world? So there Limitless experiences as you had and many of them lay in the realm of mystery. Engage with the mystery, meditate, pursue these spiritual disciplines. Don't rely entirely on the material path. This is not like, you know, neglect the body or hate the body. Love the body. We are in this material world. We are God-made flesh. We are having this experience in bodies. But I don't think you can take what this culture is offering you as a solution and think that it will be a solution. You'll be, Disappointed. The map is not the territory. The map is not the territory. When you get there, it's not like that. It's not like that. So, you start where you are. Start with you now.

Absolutely, absolutely. I have about 17 more hours of questions, but I'm going to ask you about four final questions to respect our time and maybe we can do another follow-up in the future. with the next book you have. This book, Revelation, it's hard for me to finish books. It's really hard for me to finish them with, you know, growing up with a learning disability, reading and writing was not my forte. But I finished it and it was beautiful. It was unbelievable spoken word poetry. And I don't know how you do what you do. It's an incredible gift and a talent and people just need to listen listen to it and just to hear how talented you are as a spoken word artist. It's unbelievable. But the way you were able, we had many, and many of the people that you mentioned throughout there, I've had the fortune of knowing and interviewing Wim Hof and all these other individuals. Yeah, I went to Poland. I took 13 guys to Poland last year and did five days with whim. And, you know, I've had him on many times and had some great kind of spiritual experiences in Poland with him playing the guitar. singing and us jumping in ice rivers and climbing up mountains naked in the snow and crazy stuff that we did together. Our friend Jay Shetty connected us and I've done many weeks in India meditating at different places and I'm on a constant journey for myself and that's why I really wanted to have this conversation with you. There's many things I want to ask you, hopefully for another time. But I grew up in a religion called Christian Science. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Christian Science. But there's a, it's a lot about the things you've been talking about and the things you talk about in your audio book on Audible. And one of the things that the founder, her name is Mary Baker Eddy, said back in the 1800s was Stan Porter at the door of thought. And that really stood with me as a child growing up in this religion. I'm no longer really active in the church or anything, but the foundation is still with me of the mindset. Stan Porter at the Door of Thought. And I'm curious, how do you manage negative thoughts when they try to enter your mind? What's your practice beyond meditation and the things you talk about in your book and your YouTube channel, which is incredible? But how do you really navigate negative thoughts that come into mind? The thoughts of addiction, the thoughts of lust or greed or fame or whatever the things that are coming to you that you've tasted this buffet you've tasted for years. How do you manage that?

Well, it's what I do is I don't try and do it alone, you know? Like, I think that's a very beautiful piece of language and a lovely experience you just shared with me, mate. And the way that, like, I experienced negative thoughts a lot, experienced a lot of fear and, you know, like, all of the things that you've listed, here's a very practical way that I deal with it. I'm like, I felt like I was looking at social media too long in particular, like, you know, I'm like, When I do YouTube videos, I feel like I'm justified in checking, oh, how many views did it get? You know, and what are the comments? But I have worked with people that can handle that. I'm not qualified to handle that sort of stuff because otherwise I get, I go into a point where I'm sort of numbed by it. Like, it's not like the people saying nice things really helps me or the people saying bad things really hurts me. It's like a sort of a numb, dumb stare. And so, like, I sort of, you know, then someone reached out to me, who's like a famous musician. And she's sort of told me, I'm like looking at stuff too much. And I go, all right, well from now on, right, one day at a time, me and you, whenever we're thinking about doing that, let's reach out to each other, you know? And like, so I start doing it with her, hey, I'm thinking of doing it now. And we talk about the feelings that we have and what it elicits in us when we want to do it and what it feels like to not do it. You know, if you want to know if you're addicted to something, see what happens to you when you stop doing.

It, then you will know.

Then you will know, oh, I could stop anytime. Stop then. Let's try it. And like then, oh my God, I'm ashamed. full of fear. And then similar with pornography, if I don't want to look at pornography, but not judgment on anyone else who does, but for me, if I think, oh no, I don't like how I feel, how it accumulatively makes me feel, then I make a choice that I'm going to reach out to someone else who's sometimes it helps specifically with that thing. I've done it before with someone like my mate didn't want to eat no more bad food and I was cool with food at that time. So I was like, well, I don't want to look at porn. So when I want to look at porn, I'll check you, you with the food, you know, so we do it like, and it's not even, that's non-hierarchical by the way, we're both sort of people that are just sort of trying it and trying to improve ourselves together. I also have mentors that I know evidently you do, like they're further down the path than me. And like, you know, for me, I tend to use the mentors in a, with a broader, you know, with a broader strokes, like, you know, this is how I'm feeling about family, this is how I'm feeling about being a man, this is how I'm feeling about fatherhood, work, whatever it is, you know, I check in with them, and then you've got to listen to them. Then you already, like, see if you, you know, if you have the privilege of access to people like Wim Hof or Tony Robbins, and you ask Tony Robbins, what should I do? And then Tony Robbins tells you, do it.

Do it.

You know, like, you know, and then, like, then you're suddenly, you've got Tony Robbins's brain, then you're running off of that, you know? Now, a lot of the time, what Tony Robbins tells you might be unachievable. Okay, all you got to do is become a black ball in World, Tell me something easier. Or like, you know, sort of like with Wim Hof or whatever. All these sort of peculiar yogis and geni. We've lost sacredness, broadly speaking, in our culture. That's what that book is about. How do you reconnect with sacredness after we've sort of decided all those ideas are old fashioned, they don't really work, they're not for me, or they've become compromised by their own hypocrisy or dogma or whatever it is. You know, like, you've got, like, for me, it becomes find it everywhere, find it everywhere, find every conversation, what is the sacredness? nurse. What is the beauty of the person that you are dealing with? What is your job in this moment? Are you taking or are you giving? And I have to legitimately ask myself these questions all the time because, and, you know, God, the only advantage that I have over someone like Tony Robbins is I think that I'm still in it. Like, you know, I talked to Tony Robbins or Eckhart Tolle or whoever, and I thought, my God, these people are, like, in their own ways, transcended Masters. Like, so, like, it's like if you're asking, you know, sort of Maradona about football, like, you know, God rest his soul. Like, you know, like, he can't tell you what he does. He doesn't know how he does that. No one knows. That's the point of it. You know, like, but some of us, it's like, look, I'm on, like, every day. I know, like, you know, like I think I say in, in that book, I certainly say it places. Like, you know, Eckhart Tolle, he lives there. He lives in the awakened state, moment to moment, fully present, returned to the present. Like, you know, he's sort of, like he says, the second he comes off the stage from talking, that experience is done. That's it. You can never be happy in the conceptual mind. Whenever you're thinking anything, whenever you're comparing or projecting, you could. The conceptual mind will always make you unhappy. It can't make you happy, you know, like that. And, like, so. But for me, I go to those places, Louis. I get there, but I come back. I come back for the chocolate. I come back, you know, I feel. Oh, my God, God, we're all one.

Right?

I'm just going to have a bit of chocolate or have a You know, like, I can't get out of the mud.

The monkey mind. Yeah, the monkey mind.

I hear you.

How do we start to heal the memories of the past, the traumas of the past, so that they don't keep hurting us in the present?

Well, the first thing I would say.

Is.

You know, sometimes there's a crisis and well-meaning mental health professionals rush in to discuss the trauma while it's still happening. That's a really bad idea. People are generally traumatized because something actually horrible happened. and dwelling on it in the moment just makes it worse. It's not like anybody has a solution. Here's how you should understand this. You know, someone's just shot up your kid's school. Here's how you should understand this. That'll make it all better. It's like, no, it won't. If you have old baggage, that often comes up. If you're having an argument with someone, doesn't it? you know how it is. This is partly why people don't like to have a dispute within a relationship because it's a thread and you pull on that thread and just God. Oh, that we had another rule. Do not agree with something you don't agree with.

Ooh.

Like if we're gonna, if we decide you and me that we're doing this, we don't go back and say, well, I didn't really mean it. We don't get to play revisionist with our history. So if you don't agree, don't agree. Fight, object, or hold your peace. Because you see what happens with couples is there's a little fight and then one says to the other, yeah, but you did this and then that person says, yeah, I know I did that, but then that was because you did this and each this gets bigger. Until what's on the table is why the hell should we stay together at all?

Right.

And so every fight becomes why the hell should we stay together at all? So that's another thing you want to do is you want to have the fight about this thing.

Not about everything.

Not about the past, not everything. It's like, okay, you were flirting. I think you were flirting more than you should have been. Okay, so I go away and I think, well, okay, maybe I was. okay, well, then we have to have a discussion about why. And maybe we can solve that. But mostly what we have to do is figure out how to not have that happen again. Okay, so we're gonna go see the same couple again. What is it that you want me to do? So I'm the flirtatious one, let's say. What do you want me to do? Well, you have to figure that out. It's like, no, I'm stupid like you. We're equally stupid. I need to know what would satisfy you and you need to figure out what would satisfy you so I know. And that's also extremely useful is let your establish your conditions of satisfaction, make them explicit, let the other person know.

Yeah, you can't read someone's mind.

We're very bad at that. We're bad at reading our own minds for that matter.

Yeah.

So if we. If I have a fight with. With Tammy, let's say, sometimes I remember to say, okay, what. What do you want me to do right now? What can I do?

What.

What should I say and mean? You know, and you think, well, you shouldn't let the other person put words in your mouth. Well, fair enough. You know, I'm not act. I'm not asking for something false. I'm saying I'd like to not have this happen. Can you see a way out? Is there something I could do to increase the probability that that's the route we could take? And, you know, sometimes that works. But the other person has to let you know what they would find satisfying.

You mentioned sexual shame and it triggered something in me about just the shames of the past that people tend to hold on to. I think I might have mentioned this to you the last time we talked. I'm not sure if you know, but I was I was sexually abused when I was five by a man that I didn't know. And for 25 years, I held on to the secret, the shame. And if anyone ever knew about this, then I would never be loved. I, you know, right.

Because you feel contaminated. A permanently.

Yeah, I would, you know, I wouldn't have any guy friends.

No.

Girls would find me attractive. My parents would disown me. You know, I went down the rabbit hole. These stories of, you know, I'm the only one this has ever happened to. I never saw any examples of this happening to. Right. And about eight years ago, I started to really heal that and start sharing that shame in many different therapeutic experiences that allowed me to start the healing process. I'm curious from your perspective with all the work that you've done, what is the best approach for someone to really heal their shame? Whether it's around sexual abuse or trauma or just anything, whether it be small or big or any type of shame that they might have. how does someone release shame in a healthy manner so that it doesn't make them a prisoner of these emotions of the past that hold them back?

Well, you hinted at a few things when you just described what. What happened to you is you said, well, first of all, you know, I thought I was the only person this had ever happened to. It's like, no, it's a universal. human experience to one degree or another. Now, you know, I'm not saying everyone was sexually abused, and I'm certainly not saying that some people aren't sexually abused to a degree that's so extreme, it's unimaginable where there are others, you know, get off relatively lightly. But it's still, it's, it's well within the realm of normative human experience that sexual, that sex goes wrong in some way, at least you regret something that's happened, something you've done or something that was done to you. So putting it in to when, when you're the only person that something has happened to, that's really not good, right? Because it alienates you even from yourself. You have no idea what to do with that. And so that's sometimes why people find it such a relief to have their illness diagnosed. It's like, oh, There is, this is known, there's a category, other people have had this experience, maybe there's a pathway through it. So just knowing that you're not the only person like that can be very helpful. Updating, it's like how you were how old?

Five.

Okay, well one thing to realize when you're 25 and you were abused when you're five is that you're not five anymore. Right. Right? That the person to whom that happened is no longer there. You're there. But so, you know, you might feel afraid of relationships, you might feel afraid of all sorts of things, but a lot of that was, you're sort of feeling that like that residual five-year-old. I tell a story about one client I had. She was abused by her older brother and she told me the story and I drew a picture in my head while she was You know, I kind of pictured her at five and this teenage, hulking teenager, you know, taking advantage of her. But as she told the story, I realized that her older brother was only a year, two years older than her. While he was seven, was like, okay, well, they were, she wasn't the victim of a tyrannical male in some sense. She, they were two badly supervised children. Now, that doesn't mean that what he did was right. But she was still the five-year-old in the memory, but she was 27 or so when she came to see me. And so the first thing I did was just point that out. It's like, think about the seven-year-olds you know.

Right?

From for a five-year-old, a seven-year-old is an adult. But for an adult, a seven and a five-year-old are clearly both children. Well, that just changed things somewhat. It made her feel less vulnerable in the moment. what your brain wants from you in relationship to a traumatic memory is indication that you're no longer vulnerable to the same problem. That's what memory is for, right? You remember something bad and you process it so that you change your interpretation or your behavior or the situation or whatever you can change so that it isn't going to happen in the future. And that'll, if you do that thoroughly, you'll generally let yourself rest.

You have the memory to protect yourself from it happening again.

Well, that's the purpose of memory in general. You make sense of your past behavior so that the good things that happen to you can be duplicated and the bad things can be avoided. It's not to make an objective record of the world. It's to make a functional map of the world that you can apply to the future.

And so, So how do we let that go? How do we disassociate something that happened a year ago, 10, 20 years ago, that is no longer happening, but is seems to be triggering us?

Oh, it's very difficult. Well, I would say, you know, one of the things you need to develop if you've had an experience like the one you had, perhaps, because I don't know the details, you probably need a theory of malevolence. you need an explanation. It's like, how could a person do that?

Well, you have to have an.

What if the explanation isn't good? They were just bad person. They just.

Well, then you need a philosophy of bad. You need a philosophy of evil. You have to understand it so that you're no longer a victim of it. You have. Because otherwise you can't put the event in a. In a context. Right. You know, and sometimes that means. the development of real philosophical sophistication. And that can help because then you can start to separate out malevolence from benevolence because maybe you're afraid of any intimate relationship now because it's been contaminated with that. And everything's fuzzy and foggy. And so you need to understand the person who did that, at least to some degree, so that you can separate that person out from all the other people around you who. That you encounter in situations that might be reminiscent of it, you know, so you. You felt vulnerable for app for. Perhaps you felt ashamed. All those things have to be gone through. What do you think? You know, when you're ashamed, when does. What elicits that? What are the eliciting cues? What do you think when that happens? All of that has to be taken apart. I said in this Beyond Order book that, you know, if you have a memory older than about 18 months, that still bothers you, right? It's still got emotional resonance. They write it out.

Older than 18 months ago or.

Yeah, no, older than 18 months ago or more.

Yeah.

Otherwise, it's not really in the past, right? It's still happening that.

That.

Whether you should delve into something. how you should delve into something traumatic that's currently happening is a whole different issue. But if it's an old memory and it still bothers you, it means that you haven't decomposed that experience sufficiently to detach it from the emotion. So imagine when something terrible happens to you, you don't understand it. So then you might say, well, if you don't understand something that's happening to you, how can it be terrible? Because it doesn't terrible mean that you understand it. And the answer is, well, you understand things in stages. And the first way you understand a terrible thing is by freezing in terror or running. That's the understanding. It's not conceptual. It's embodied and emotional. And so event terror, that's the first category. Okay, now the next question is how do you get it out? How do you get out of the terror? Well, you realize that nothing truly dangerous is happening. Well, what if something truly dangerous did happen? Then you elaborate your view of the world to the point where you're no longer vulnerable to that terrible thing. And that's extremely difficult. So the memory of something terrible stays terrible until you effortfully process it and decompose it into, well, often into a much more sophisticated map of the world. And it's really hard to do that.

What's the thing in your life that was the hardest to do to deconstruct after the event so that it didn't consume you emotionally? from the initial terror. Because you study this, you practice this, you teach this stuff, but when, you know, as a practitioner teaching it, is there, was there a time where you were like, man, this is really hard for me to understand?

Oh, absolutely. It's chronic. I mean, that state is chronic for me at the moment, I would say, partly because I've become so insanely famous and I have difficulty with that for sure. It's very difficult to understand. and so, and I wouldn't say I've managed it. I'm managing it, I suppose, and then health trouble that has hit my family and me has been so devastating that I'm, I haven't managed that either. Like, you know, that's the thing I suggest to people. No, that isn't even that. It's that what have I found that you do about terrible things? Generally, you don't run from them, especially if they're not avoidable in the future. Generally, you stand, confront, decompose, understand, adapt. But just because you generally do that and it's the best bet doesn't mean it's definitely going to work. It's just the best shot you have at it. You know, it'd be lovely if something always worked, but if something always worked, people would never get sick and die.

Right.

And we do all the time.

So.

We do our best, but that doesn't mean that that always works. But it's still the best that can be done. It's still better than all the alternatives.

So how do you cultivate your own personal inner peace amongst the different changes that have come up, whether, you know, the fame, the health challenges, personally, maybe challenges with family or friends. How do you personally keep a level of inner peace amongst the chaos?

I walk a lot. I exercise a lot. A lot. Like, I'm walking about seven miles a day now and working out as well, and so. and that's necessary. I take solace.

If you didn't walk and work out, where do you think you would be? Really?

Definitely. Yes. Yes, definitely.

Is that physically because you wouldn't be physically taking care of your body or because mentally and emotionally your peace would be chaotic and it would drive you to die?

That.

Wow.

Yeah.

So that you were saying, sorry, I was interrupting you.

Sorry.

Peace. That comes to you if you're fortunate. And sometimes it doesn't come. I try to do things that I think are worthwhile. that seem worthwhile. And that gives me solace, I suppose. So I'm writing, I'm talking to people who I find interesting about things that I think are crucially important. I'm trying to learn. and to communicate as a consequence of talking to these people. I'm trying to do what I can for my family and my friends and to do what I can beyond that as well in a variety of different ways. Those are all useful endeavors and they keep me going.

What have you found to be the best practices of managing mass attention, whether you want to call it fame, mass attention, mass audience, people being fanatical about your message, your work, you as an individual.

Luckily, that hasn't happened too much, the fanatical side of things. You know, I've had the odd brush with people who were a little more persistent than was probably good. And, you know, I could see lurking signs of mental health issues behind that. And, but fortunately, very little of that has happened. And that's certainly all for the good.

Because you're not, you're not living in LA. That's probably why.

Well, it could be, could be. But it will, for whatever reason, I've been pretty fortunate about that.

Yeah.

I talk over what I'm doing with the people around me all the time. and try to keep it on the proper pathway to the degree that I'm able to do that and to see if what I'm doing is justifiable and ethical. And we're all terrified of this, you know, to a degree that is very difficult to communicate. You know, we live in a time where if you make a mistake, you can be shredded. And I would say to some degree, the more visible you are, the more thorough the shredding.

Oh, right. Yeah.

And so the cost of an error, an ethical error, is unbelievably high. The cost of the appearance of an ethical error is extremely high, much less the cost of an actual ethical error. And so we're very careful to act ethically in every manner possible. appearance and reality.

Because everything's being watched. Yeah.

Well, and I, I mean, I can, I, I have no idea how any of this looks from the outside, but my reputation has been on the line publicly many, many times, and partly sometimes outright accusations, sometimes.

As a consequence of.

Things I hypothetically said, sometimes as a consequence of newspaper articles that, you know, have taken a particular twist. And God only knows how many times a consequence of my own inadequacies and errors. But every time that rises up as an issue, there's a two-week period where No one in my family knows if this is the time that it's just going to go to hell.

Really?

Where it's all- oh, absolutely. Sure. Well, look at how many people it happens to. And look how people respond, Ben. You know, it doesn't take a very big Twitter mob to chase anyone back into their hole. How do we chase a company for that matter? Back into its, on its heels. I mean, Isn't that, is that how it looks to you? I mean, what do you think about this?

Yeah, I'm just curious as people, individuals, whether it be me, you or anyone, wants to build something, wants to have a goal and aim as you talk about and go after this thing that they care about and share their opinion, share their voice, have good intentions. Maybe someone doesn't like those intentions, but have good intentions. is how do we as human beings think about reputation? And does reputation even matter anymore if anyone can try to tear your reputation down? Should we be focused on having a good reputation?

Yes. Yes. But you should be more focused on deserving a good reputation.

What does that mean?

Don't do things you know to be wrong.

And even if you don't lie. Yeah, don't lie.

Don't be careless. You. I mean, especially if you're. See, I'm fortunate, I I suppose. I put all my lectures online, so virtually everything I've ever said to a student is. I mean, obviously not, but a non-biased sample of everything that I've ever said to students is available. Well, it hasn't come back to bite me.

Right.

And that's hundreds of hours. Why? Well, because I've been fortunate enough not to have said anything fatal, and, you know, maybe that's because I'm careful with my words. I don't want to attribute too much virtue to myself in, in relationship to that. I know that good fortune plays an immense role in how things turn out for people and that you can get unlucky, but You know, one rule I didn't write down is act so that you can speak of what you do. So there's two domains of lying, right? So one lie is a statement, the other lie is an action. You know it's wrong. You do it anyway. It looks to me like that's becoming riskier and riskier.

Right, people aren't doing that anymore because they're getting caught.

Yes, and the consequences are dire. Well, but then you think about this, you tell me what you think about this. One of the things that Carl Jung taught me again was that, you know, as we become more technologically powerful.

The.

Quality of our individual morality becomes an increasingly pressing social concern. because if each of us are far more powerful than we once were for good and for evil. And so with this technological prowess comes an associated ethical demand. And I don't see a flaw in that argument. I don't see how that can be anything other than true. If technology multiplies your power, then it multiplies the cataclysmic consequences of your own immorality.

Right.

And if you did one thing 10 years ago and someone finds it, it could haunt you, it seems like, is what's happening.

There's no doubt about that. Not only could it, it will.

It will.

In all likelihood, you know, and that's a problem too, because of course people do make mistakes, you know, and, and I'm, I'm perfectly pleased that my teenage years aren't stored on YouTube, for example. It must have been terrifying.

Gone a long time ago.

Well, it must be terrifying to be a teenager now knowing that your drunken foolishness at a party could become the next viral YouTube video.

I mean, yeah, I was lucky enough never to, I've never been drunk in my life. And that was a conscious decision because my brother actually went to prison for drugs when I was a kid. And I was in a prison visiting room many weekends for many years and witnessing the consequences of doing certain things. So for me, I was like, I don't want to touch any of this stuff. I don't even care if it's like, I'm gonna sell it, but I'm never gonna take anything. And I. But it doesn't mean that I didn't do bad things. Like, you know, I cheated, I lied, I stole, you know, I did all these things that I'm not proud of when I was 10 to 13 until I got caught. And I was like, oh, my con. My actions actually affect. a lot of people. And I remember the shame.

Well, it's normative behavior. I mean, if you look at adolescents, imagine there are adolescents who break rules all the time, including criminal, including legal rules. Okay, well, they tend to become criminal. It's too much. But then at the opposite end of the distribution are adolescents who don't break any rules, and they tend to develop in Internalizing disorders, depression, anxiety disorders, that sort of thing. So they're two constraints. So there is a certain amount of exploration of rule breaking that's a normative part of healthy development. And but now, you know, you could take a chunk of that, a video of it, a record of it, and it's permanent. Can you imagine not being able to forget your past?

Painful. You talked about healing the childhood wound, feeling inadequate, feeling insecure, feeling not enough, or all these feelings on your kind of search or yearning for fame and what does this experience look like, this drive to be more connected to love, to God, to that higher thing. When did you feel in your life the most insecure? And when did you fully start to understand how to overcome your insecurities?

Many of these negative emotions and feelings have like a wisdom in them, don't they? Because even like the most ferocious forms of chemical dependency that I've experienced, crack and heroin addiction, are kind of about melt in the boundary of who you are. Look at the idioms around it. Get off your face, get smashed, destroy yourself. That on some level, again, using inappropriate means, you are trying to transcend and become free of the self. It's a spiritual impulse. I may have to talk people through that more slowly because it seems sort of stupid to think of some hunched, drunk or junkie slumped in a doorway as being on a spiritual quest. But when you think that spirituality is simply the valorizing of the inner life over the outer life, the need to connect, the need to feel something truthful and real, then anyone that picks up a drink ever or smokes a joint is after a spiritual experience. They're trying to feel better. Man, I felt insecure and worthless a lot of times in my life. It happens to me again and again and again. I'm lucky that I'm an addict. because the addiction shows you, it takes you to extremes. So you're confronted with the fallibility of the choices you're making, that these choices won't work for you. I think a lot of people, and I wrote about that in the recovery book, are able to struggle along with moderate addictions, moderate addictions to food or sex or success or whatever, never ever reaching the point of crisis that would facilitate transformation. Metamorphosis, real change, real change. You know that book Revelation I'm telling you about in that moment that you talked about going down to that place in Skid Row, the Union Mission, you know, I was doing a craft thing there with my wife, my wife does crafts and writes about craft and like creativity and parenting and mental health and stuff like that. So we went down there, so I was very much just in an assistant role. The first time I went there, yes, it was to talk to them kids and I felt like I didn't feel qualified and I didn't feel good enough to do it. I felt somewhat ashamed, I felt ashamed of the, like I think I said in Revelation, like about, you know, if you're talking to homeless kids on some level, like, because this Union Mission, it's the only one of their missions that takes families. That's what it is. The others take either men or women or adults or whatever. This one takes whole families. There's a lot of people in there more than they should be in any civilized Nation. And, like, when I was, when you're there, you want to tell them, look, this isn't your fault. It's not your family's fault. You're a byproduct of a economic system that simply cannot generate. Well, it can generate enough wealth, but it doesn't, it doesn't distribute wealth. fairly for a number of complex reasons and you at the ass end of that. And I can't explain that today. It's patronizing and somehow dismissive. But more importantly that day that I went to do the craft, I sort of saw or maybe even someone told me it, maybe I didn't have this realization, maybe someone said it to me, they don't know they're poor. They don't have that contextualization. They're just children. They're just children. And it was sort of beautiful and amazing. And since having kids, as I said, I don't do, well, I used to do a lot.

Me. I love children.

I've always have children. I used to get right. And I didn't have kids till, like, I was 40. So I was very much like, if I was around my mates, kids or whatever, I'd really play with them and, like, get into characters with them and do a lot of joyful play. And now I've got kids. I can't be bothered with that. I'm tired. I'm exhausted. I'm not interested, you know? But that day, like, I held it down because it was my wife was doing this stuff with the mums and the kids, and I felt the heaviness and I felt the shame. of the adults and I was lifted by the joy of the children. But I held back, you know, like I was just helping them. They were making Play-Doh together and all this kind of stuff and doing these craft activities. And then when that finished, I let myself off the hook a little bit. I let myself be a dinosaur and a monster and be all crazy with these kids and monkey around with them, you know. And like there's one bit where like all these little five-year-olds and six-year-olds and seven-year-olds they pulled me to the ground and they was beating me up and stuff. and I sort of looked up for a moment and all I could see, my whole vista was filled with children's faces and they were smiling and they were full of joy and this is when I felt, God is here, God is in this room. Look at this, there's nothing but joy and love and play and happiness in this lowest of place where people are suffering, poverty, being disregarded, neglected and the whole room, my whole experience is filled with love. This is just one moment in time of course, I know that those children children have got whole lives ahead of them and have whole lives behind them. But in that moment, there was an absolute realization of something sublime and divine. And for me, this is an important force, an important energy that has to be mobilized, valorized, brought to the forefront, exalted in our culture, made the emblem and the driving force and the raising dexterity of the way we live, not marginalized, neglected to the sidelines so people can plunder the Earth and look at the Earth as a resource and look at human beings as a resource. and fortify systems of elitism. For me, the basic idea, the Sesame Street values, kindness and love, kindness and love, instead of the values that currently dominate, selfishness, greed. This is what's at play now.

Yeah, I love that you talk about Sesame Street values. I'm a big Mr. Rogers values type of guy myself, which are very similar, I guess, in the fact of just be kind to your neighbor and be loving, be generous. I'm curious, when have you felt the most loved in your life? And when do you currently feel the most love?

Sometimes I think about my wife when I'm not with her. Like, when you're with her, she's just a person. But when I'm not with her, like, I sometimes think, oh, my God, I found this person. I found this person that just loves me, doesn't care about anything, she's not particularly, you know, I've known people that are very impressed by aspects of my nature and behavior. You know, I can speak fast or whatever and say a lot of stuff and I can be novel. I don't know. My wife doesn't seem to care about any of that. She doesn't sure. She just sort of sees me as I am and I feel very at ease. Sometimes the greed in me once stimulation, excitement, plaudits, fanfare, the carnival of life. But I recognize I have been to that carnival and, you know, I've had my turn. And, like, it's like it doesn't work for me. There's never enough for me. For me, it's the spiritual path. It's the spiritual path. And I think that's true for everyone, but it's not really right for a person that's lived the life I have to be, you know, I feel like Spiritual principles are for yourself, not for other people, you know? Like, oh, these are the things that I must do and other people have got to find their path, I suppose. And maybe I can sometimes be helpful to people, usually directly in an intimate way. Hopefully I can be helpful in a broadcast way, because indeed that's what we're doing. But who knows? I'm not sure that I was, I hope I was helped by people talking on the internet or on TV. I can't remember it ever happening.

What is the thing you love about your wife the most?

My wife, she's strange in a way that you wouldn't straight away notice. She seems, because she's beautiful and she's capable and competent, but she's very unusual little person. You know when you're married to someone and you like, you know them, you know that after dark they turn into sort of the foulest, most impatient person, you know, and that they have little ways. What I have in my marriage is a real intimacy, you know, like I have the ability, I don't have to, I can tell, she knows everything. She knows everything about me, you know, and like I, I need a sort of authenticity in my connections in life, Louis, because otherwise it's very, very sort of lonely. So what I love about her, I guess, I love her playfulness, her creativity, her willingness to change, her openness to conversation. There's like loads of things that I love about her. She's weird and she's a laugh. She's a funny person to hang out with.

That's beautiful. For the younger audience who might be confused about their life, their direction, their purpose, their relationships, and they might be chasing something, they might be looking for or fame or power or money, whatever they're looking for. What are three things that you would recommend they prioritize in their chase, in their journey, in their life? What are three things that you wish you would have prioritized that you would share with them so they don't waste their life away or make bad mistakes?

Live in service of the thing you claim to love. You know, like if you were saying that you want to be an actor to make sure that what you don't secretly want is actually I just want loads of attention and power and glory and glamour, you know, like make sure that you are in service of acting or music or whatever it is and that means, you know, like all of us have gifts and we often use these gifts like we put the gift to work. Like right, gift, get out there and make me some money, go make me a star. Imagine if it was like a little bird or a child or something, you have to look after it and take care of it. You know, me, comedy, I have always, this is the, thank God, it sort of saved me before I was switched on sort of spiritually or whatever. And even at my most keen and needy, I always really, really loved comedy in a geek way. You know, I watch a lot of stand-up comedy, I study, sitcoms. I learned them. I love Monty Python, I love Richard Pryor, I know my heritage, I know the line that I'm walking. I studied them and observed them. So when I was doing stand-up comedy, which I was for years and years and years before I made any money out of it at all, I was becoming practiced and I was in service of comedy. Of course, I also wanted to be a big famous star and I wanted people to love me and I wanted to have lots of opportunities. Of course I did. But thank you know, what could I do, man? I had both things. I had both things. Thank God I have both. You know, if all you've got, if all I'd had had been the appetites, the appetites for the plaudits, the prestige and the privilege, I don't know where I would have ended up. So first I say be of service to the thing that you claim to love. Don't think about what it's gonna give you. Think about what you can give to it.

Okay.

That's the first one.

I've got to do three. Yeah. If you've got three, yeah.

Second one is have something away from it that is not about it. Cultivate your inner life and your spirit. Don't allow it to entirely devour you. The fact is, I think, that we are spiritual beings in essence. We're the only animal that we know of on this planet that have these complex in us, these lives of complex inner subjectivity. As far as I know, my dog doesn't sort of go, oh God, that was embarrassing. you know, I mean, like, he just is him. Although it does sometimes look a bit embarrassed thinking about it. But, like, you know, we can't spend our life in continual outward pursuit of an external goal, because in all likelihood, we're pursuing something spiritual anyway without knowing it. We're looking for approval or connection or power or status or whatever it is. You can't get that as we, you know, we started off with this thematic. idea established by your Carey quote there, mate. So you have to have something that's separate from it. I would suggest meditate. Learn how to meditate. Practice meditation. Practice meditation. Find a form of meditation that works for you. Don't try to change the rules and say something. I meditate when I'm on the treadmill, or I meditate when I'm gardening. Sit down with your eyes shut and meditate. You can have, like, guided meditation. In fact, I do guided meditations on Luminary Podcast Above the Noise. You could start there or you could do my on my side channel Awakening with Russell Brand on YouTube. I do guided meditations on there also. But you know, God, don't stop there. Tich Nat Han, Ram Das, Mooji, all like great, great teachers. Great teachers available everywhere. Meditate, meditate. You have to cultivate your inner life away from it. That's the second one. The third one, do you want the third?

Yes please.

You're very lovely aren't you? You're very sort of patient and kind person, sincere and sweet. Well the third one I would say is make helping other people something that is integral to your life so that you don't get, you don't do what I did and become so absorbed in yourself and what you want that When you get it, it doesn't work for you because it was it's meaningless. Like so, like if you if part of your life is helping other people and if you want to go for the black belt in this then help other people without other people finding out about it. If you can help people privately, no one knows about it. No one knows about the time you volunteer down at the shelter or the thing you do for a particular person that's in need. if you can do that, then what you're cultivating there is a relationship with a higher frequency of being. Because of course, kindness or virtue now, virtue is itself a commodity. There's not a corporation on earth that isn't putting up some flag or another to ally itself to some cause without actually changing its core behaviors and values, just applying the wallpaper of virtue. If you have some Virtuous behaviors that are not advertised that are not known by anyone but you you know next time someone Calls you out some little voice in you will go mm-mm I do that thing nobody knows about that.

Yeah, I think it's interesting I've always been on the mindset of like Show some of the stuff you're doing to help others so that you can inspire other people to be like, oh, okay, that's I should do that to you or whether it's a donation or showing up and giving time or some of your resources or talent, but definitely you don't need to show it all the time. I think it's important to show some to inspire and evoke it out of others to be like, Hey, listen, I'm doing this thing. I'm trying to inspire you to do something in your life that's a cause for you. That's the way I've approached as well, but I'm with you on keeping some of it for yourself or not needing to share with others to get an applause or validation or to be like you're a good guy or something.

I like that, Louis, because we can create sort of shared values together. Like, you know, by role modeling for one another, you can inspire others. And it's not something you can do alone. You know, this idea that sort of, like, sort of fated or sainted individuals are going to save us doesn't work as well as the idea that collectively we can bring about greatness and change. This infatuation with the individual is sort of part of the problem and I think all of us fall prey to it because it seems so real. What's as real to you as your own thoughts? What's as real to you as your own pleasure? You know, there's legitimate, ongoing philosophical debates about whether or not.