Tom Morgan: What Is Your Curiosity Calling You to Do?

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Curiosity and the hero's journey. How do those factor into your work as a financial advisor? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Tom Morgan. Tom is a director at Sapient Capital, which is a $7 billion advisory firm based in Indianapolis, Indiana. In today's show, Tom and I discuss the importance of always being curious, Joseph Campbell's work on the hero's journey, and his often misunderstood quote where he said, "Follow your bliss." And we have some conversation about Iain McGilchrist's work on why the world needs more right hemisphere thinking. It's a fascinating conversation about the need for transformation in the world and in your role as a leader. As a financial professional. Please enjoy my conversation with Tom Morgan. Tell me a little bit about your role at Sapient Capital.

So on paper, I'm a director at Sapient Capital. We're a large independent RIA. I write for them twice a month. I speak to our clients. I speak to people internally. I do 5 to 10 meetings a week with the most interesting people that I can find. And my mandate is kind of magnificent, really. It's to find the most interesting and meaningful things that I can find And then to write about them. And that involves finding ideas that are on the edge that are going to be mainstream in a couple of years, not necessarily from an investment perspective, but more from kind of a cultural perspective and then bringing it to interested people. I stole a line from Maria Popova who runs the wonderful website Brain Pickings or The Marginalian, I think it's now called, but basically she described herself as a curiosity sherpa.. And I love that idea. I mean, curiosity is something I imagine we'll talk about in more detail, but if you can put interesting things in front of other people and show them rabbit holes that are, that will improve their life, I don't think there's much more you can ask from that. The short part of a very long answer would be curiosity shepherd.

Okay. So tell me, what role does curiosity play in your life?

I think it's the most important thing. I really do. Like, I'm not saying it's the most important thing for other people. I'm saying it's the most important thing for me, and we can really go as deep on this as you want, but my own story involved getting quite stuck in midlife and then finding it very, very, very difficult to unstick myself and then to find a new path and coming out the other side of it. I've realized that what you're interested in and what you're drawn to is one of the most powerful forces for personal growth that is imaginable. And contemporary science and chaos theory and neurology and complexity theory and all of these, you know, complicated-sounding scientific methodologies are all finding that curiosity is a much, much deeper idea than we probably realized. And I guess If I could have any contribution to the world whatsoever, it would be to get people to cultivate their curiosity, but also to take messages from their own curiosity much more seriously.

So how do we as individuals become more curious? How do we cultivate this state of curiosity?

Yeah, I think that's an unbelievably difficult question. I think one way I look at it is there's a metaphor of bacteria. And if you apparently, if you drop a bacteria in a sugar solution,, it will learn to navigate itself towards the sugar because the bacteria that does not do that gets selected against by evolution quite quickly. So you have this living thing navigating a landscape based on, on energy and nourishment, right? And I think that we should think of ourselves in the same way, but what we are consuming is information. That's kind of straightforward, right? Like, like we exist in this limitlessly complex informational landscape, particularly whenever we've hooked ourselves up to the internet and some information feels more meaningful to us than others. I use the word meaningful very deliberately in that a Big Mac tastes good but leaves you feeling much worse afterwards or fast food or whatever, not to pick on Big Macs. Energetic information that is meaningful, I think, leaves you feeling better afterwards than beforehand. You emerge from it energized. You put down the book and you're like, wow, that was fantastic. Or you meet a new person and you walk away and you're really buzzed and really thinking what a fantastic interaction that was. We all know it. But having a faith in that kind of interaction and faith in that kind of book or faith in that kind of information to keep pursuing whatever gives us that energy, often when it means leaving other opportunities behind, I think it's very, very difficult in today's world.

So much of the business of being a financial advisor is about the numbers. It's about financial projections. It's about rates of return and those sorts of things. Yet we know that the real value in a relationship between an advisor and their client is really about the life piece. It's about what's the money for. It's about how can I use the money that we have to live the life that I want to live. What are some thoughts in terms of how an advisor can cultivate curiosity or curiousness in the person sitting across from them to really understand more about their life, what money means to them, what are the experiences that have shaped their beliefs around money? How can we cultivate that curiosity in the advisor that then sparks an interest in the person in front of them to want to share things beyond just the numbers and accounts and amounts?

I think all of this needs to be interpreted as sort of this hierarchy of needs, right? That once you have got the basics right of, you know, fantastic service and performance and asset allocation and behavioral finance and all the stuff that I think is now, you know, not easy to do, but relatively established in the wealth management industry, you've got to look at what's next. And I don't know, recently I was drawn to David Senra, who runs the Founders Podcast. And he did a podcast about a guy called Ed Thorpe, who maybe not everyone will be aware of, but effectively he, I think he was an academic and then he developed a portable computer before that was really a thing that could even the odds out on roulette when no one thought that was possible. Then he ended up founding an unfathomably successful quant fund, one of the very first, and then lived this really incredibly well-balanced life. And David Semrau, who studied now, you know, probably well over 250 people, it's like, this is the guy, this is the guy out of all of those people that I really think is most admirable and whose life I would want. He calls him his personal blueprint. And, you know, he talks about Enzo Ferrari, you know, never having got in an elevator and because he was so anxious and never having got on a plane and having questionable relationships with his family. And a lot of these guys who I think we, we really worship for being incredibly successful have actually had relatively unbalanced lives or poor personal relationships. And we all know the cliché about how important personal relationships and balanced lives are. It's just we don't have that many examples. But I look at Thorpe and there's a fantastic podcast I point people towards to listen to from Semra. What really came out for me is that he pivoted directions so many times in his life based purely on what was interesting to him. In that he did obviously at certain points get relatively significant financial comfort. So again, there is a hierarchy of needs here, but his ability to just completely drop one interest and move to another when it was no longer interesting to him, I find incredibly inspirational because it's so hard to do. And I think, you know, I would, I would sit across the table from someone and be like, if you're content you have enough, which is a difficult question for a lot of people. What is your curiosity calling you to do? What questions do you want to answer? What experiments do you want to run? And I think wealth is a platform to facilitate curiosity. I've written multiple times, I think it is the point of wealth. I genuinely do. I think the point of wealth is not necessarily security. It's once you're up that hierarchy, it's like, right now that I have the freedom to pursue what I love and ignore what I don't, that strikes me as the ultimate value of wealth.

And I happened to listen to that episode with Ed Thorp, and I found it pretty fascinating as well. And you also mentioned the hierarchy of needs. So I'm wondering, though, Thorp had great success very early on, and so he was financially comfortable at a very early age. Do you think that enabled him to then follow his curiosity, or do you think it was the curiosity that came first that then led to him pursuing things that ultimately led to some really nice financial rewards? Is it one leads the other or could it go either way?

I don't know enough about his life and I don't know enough about anyone's life, but you made me think of a quote from Joseph Campbell who's been the most influential to my thinking in this area where he talks about walking along a beam, which I think is a nice metaphor for the difficulty and the balance required to kind of follow your curiosity. And you know what he said, follow your bliss, where he said if you fall off the beam to follow money, it's very hard to get back on. But if you lose the money and you're still on the beam, you still have the sense of meaning. Now, I know that's a really, really difficult thing to say when people are struggling to make ends meet, but I think it's a great framing that the sensation of living a meaningful life is, in my opinion, the intrinsic goal. If you are a goal-oriented person based on any other abstract purpose, you can end up in some very bad places. Or once you've got those things, find it very difficult to find the path back to something meaningful. So I know that probably makes me sound a bit woo-woo and wishy-washy, but I do genuinely believe it. And I have a completely unfounded belief that, you know, the second half of the Joseph Campbell quote is follow your bliss and doors will open where only there were walls. Is that that's what happened in my own life, but it's also what I see over and over again with people in transition in life, is that if they follow their curiosity and produce something that the world needs, they receive value back for that in one way or another. Whereas if people just pursue something abstract, it often very much doesn't work that way, particularly in midlife. So again, this is kind of a faith statement rather than anything that's empirical. You're never going to find a study that's going to prove this out. But what you will do is when you listen, if you study successful people and you look at this dynamic and you look at the successful people that seem to be happy or seem to have lived a good life, the ability to switch based on curiosity does appear to be one of the critical variables.

And I'm glad that you mentioned Joseph Campbell here because I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about him. And as we think about the financial industry. As I mentioned a moment ago, we talk a lot about the numbers, but I think people are realizing that again, the real value is not in the numbers. It's in how we can help you live a greater life. And we talked about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, getting to the very top, the self-actualization, whatever name you want to give that, some form of transformation. And I think the financial advisor is in a great position to help foster, to help create the environment that would enable their client to be on some type of path toward transformation, which might be the highest value that a financial advisor can actually help create. So, you know this, Joseph Campbell was interviewed by Bill Moyers, and out of that came the book The Power of Myth and the whole video series. And I wanna read a quote here from the conversation between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. This goes back to the mid to late 1980s, and Moyers had asked him, he said, do you ever have the sense of being helped by hidden hands? And then Campbell responds, quote, all the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time. Namely that if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. So that's the end of the quote there. So tell me a little bit more about how you think about this idea of follow your bliss. I know the statement follow your bliss has become a bit of a cliché over the years, but I think there's a lot more meaning behind just the superficial interpretation that a lot of folks have. So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, a little bit of housekeeping. I have tried to read The Hero with a Thousand Faces twice and failed twice. I think I'll be honest, man. I just don't think it's a good book. The Power of Myth, on the other hand, that you just referenced, is in my top 3 all time. It is a gorgeous, gorgeous Q&A. It's a dialogue, it flows, and it's got more wisdom per square inch than almost any book I've read. I love it, love it, love it. And I got goosebumps during that passage. So a couple of things, and they may take a little bit of unpacking, but my God, I think it's worth it. So Campbell is most famous for the monomyth structure, which is the same plot pattern as Star Wars, The Matrix, Avatar, Interstellar, most superhero movies. It's 11 of the top 15 highest-grossing movies ever. And it's a very specific 16-stage journey that is specific because it is describing something of profound evolutionary importance, is that basically, you know, mankind encodes things in stories that need to be passed down. And We can talk about it in as much detail as you want, but it appears to me from all the work I've done on the hero's journey over the last 6 or 7 years that the hero's journey describes the pattern of transformation in humans, in a human life, in a culture, even in moment-to-moment cognition. Any phase change in a complex substance is described through the dynamics of the hero's journey.. And it is amazing to me that every culture across time had this same story, which I think just reinforces this idea that it's communicating something of ultimate value, which is why he called it the monomyth. And just maybe to make it a bit more tangible, follow your bliss is, I think, one of the most misunderstood pieces of advice ever, because I think people look at it as just do whatever you want, right? Do whatever makes you happy. But that, for me, we're back kind of in fast food territory. Which is, you know, you can kick your feet up and take heroin all day and it might feel good, but it doesn't really do anything. Whereas the follow your bliss, I think it has to be where what only you can do requires what the world needs. And let me explain the scientific logic behind that, that there's this emerging science of complexity that basically finds that there's a direction to the universe and that direction is towards greater complexity.. And I think that's actually quite easily intuitively understood, which is that, you know, a couple of million years ago there were just rocks on Earth and now we have the internet, right? It has been a linear progression towards more complex entities and more complex relationships. The definition of complexity in this context is something with very, very differentiated parts that are integrated into a whole. And so by following your bliss, you become the most Steve that you can be. You become the most Tom that you can be. You have a series of relatively unique gifts, and by cultivating and honing those, you become just more and more and more yourself in a way that's very, very enjoyable. It is blissful. But you also need to be integrated. You need to be doing something for which you are rewarded. Let me bring it all back together. How do you know if you're being rewarded? Synchronicities. It's what Carl Jung talked about, what Campbell talks about, which is that one of the two things I look for from a meeting is one, yes, coming in with energy and leaving with more energy. But the other one is synchronicity, which is, is there a strange coincidence? Is this person interested in what I'm interested in? Did we randomly meet the same person? It can be whatever it is, but it has to feel meaningful. And cultivating that sense of energetic sensitivity and that sense for when a synchronicity is actually meaningful rather than just random, those are two unbelievably helpful things.

Yet I come across a lot of people who say, I don't really have any major hobbies. I don't really know what I'm passionate about. I've got my job and it's okay, or I'm retiring from my job, but I'm not really retiring to something that I'm looking forward to. So as we think about this idea of the hero's journey, about transformation, what would you say to someone who says, I'm just not like super passionate about anything. I haven't found that thing that is really driving me and getting me excited. I haven't found that bliss in my life yet.

There's a couple of things, right? Like, are you happy, right? Are you generally very content? And you look back on your life's work and your family and all this stuff and you're like, yeah, no, it's good. You know, like I never wrote the great American novel and that's fine. To those people, I say, good. I'm not interested. You know, like I applaud your life, but I'm not interested in you. I— what— who I'm interested in is the middle-aged person, mostly men, who have reached a point of kind of dissonance and stasis where they're feeling unfulfilled, but perhaps they also feel bound and trapped to a role where they're in quote-unquote their peak earning years. It's what in the hero's journey is the call to adventure. It is stasis, right? First you have this stasis, this grinding And then you have a call to adventure, which is this, this appeal from the outside. It's described as an anomaly. In Star Wars, it's the message from Princess Leia asking for help. In The Matrix, it's the message from Trinity on the computer saying, follow the white rabbit. In the movie Interstellar, it's literally a gravitational anomaly. They're making it even explicit, right? There's something that intrudes into your life that says, now is the time. And then typically they refuse to call this a crisis and then they're forced into making a choice. That's the pattern of the hero's journey. I guess even if you haven't had the call and you're unhappy, again, those are two kind of important caveats. I often think that there is, for want of a less annoying word, trauma within us that prevents us from believing that we have a gift to offer the world. And to be fair, that was, and in many ways still is, me, where it almost feels arrogant, right? Where it's like, oh, am I gifted? Am I a genius? Like, what can I possibly do that is unique to me? I think a lot of the, the examination of that is down to kind of negative self-talk and a system that's told us to conform for as long as possible in order to create that foundation. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think once the foundation is created, you have the freedom to explore. But if you're being pushed to explore and you're not doing it, that's also when the suffering is going to start, in my opinion.

And I think it's also important that we have an intention here as well. This hero's journey that some people go on, it might be forced upon you because of a situation outside of your control that causes you to have to make some changes because of whatever happened. Other times it's things that you brought on by yourself. Other times it may just be a malaise in your life. You mentioned the midlife crisis. That could be an example where someone gets to their 40s and they look back and they say, gosh, I thought I'd be farther along in life than I am right now. What am I going to do? Am I going to resign myself to being average or whatever the case may be? And so I think it's also a bit of a shift in a mindset. And there's a quote from Marcel Proust that I really like, and he says, the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. And as I think about that quote, which is one of my favorites, it's not so much that you have to always do something brand new, totally break outta your shell. Sometimes, yes, that's what you need to do. But other times it's about seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. It's about walking through the forest and experiencing that as if you were a child through a child's eyes. And just the beauty, the smells, the sound of tree branches crunching under your feet as you walk along. The sound of the birds, the sound of the animals, the sound of the waves on the water if you're near an ocean or a lake. So it's about this intention to experiencing things in a new way. And oftentimes that creates the soil for transformation to happen.

I think I'd say I partially agree. Like, my attention span is now so bad that every time I go into nature, as I was this weekend, I'm beating myself up about not paying more attention to nature. I'm like, oh, this is so beautiful. I need to be maximizing every minute. Like, quick, quick, quiet my mind. Quick, kind of silence my thoughts. Quick, go look at that bird over there. And that's obviously my fault. But I think that a lot of Eastern traditions emphasize the achievement of states, right? That you meditate yourself to a state of nirvana. And I think what we need more urgently, and that's a value judgment, but I believe it, what we need more urgently is action. What we need is people that are being called to co-create, to do things that are meaningful and that help us move forward urgently as a society. And I think answering that call is of paramount importance. And I think I always tell people who are really suffering, your suffering now directly corresponds to your wasted potential. It's kind of harsh, right? But it's like, I find that an incredibly optimistic idea, which if you're just pottering along and you don't really need anything and you're happy where you are, it's fine. Like, relative to where you are, the potential gap is not there. But if you're doing something and you're like, as you say, I should be further along right now, where is that impulse coming from? That doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's something in you that says you are more and you can be more, and I am going to kick the crap out of you until you listen. And that for me is, is both terrifying and inspiring. It's an awesome responsibility. I guess one thing I'd caveat against, because it was a a place I caught myself for a long time, is often introspection won't get you to the place of knowing what your interests are. Our psyches and our intellects and our consciousness is very, very overdeveloped. And turning that analytical scalpel on yourself can often just rip you apart. There was a great, a great expression, which is that, you know, we don't think ourselves into a new way of acting. We act ourselves into a new way of thinking. If you're like, I'm not interested in anything, then I would just start by doing something. And I would do something that is intrinsically enjoyable for you, but also has some kind of output that you think helps other people. And then if you are greeted with both high energy and synchronicities as a result of doing that, I would suggest you double down on that direction. Yeah.

And you mentioned you were out in nature this past weekend. I was as well. I was out for a week, basically off the grid on a mountain climbing trip. And I went into that mountain climbing trip thinking that I had at least 2 more climbing trips that I wanted to do. I had 2 more specific mountains that I wanted to climb to complete a certain series of climbs that I thought I wanted to complete. So over the course of these, uh, 5 days that we're climbing, I came to the realization that my climbing days are actually done. What would be the point to me personally of doing these 2 additional mountain climbs. I'm not getting any younger. And I fast-forwarded and I said, okay, I've completed these 2 additional climbs. How is my life gonna be any different? The reality was it's not. Maybe there's a little bit of personal satisfaction, but I realized that phase of my life is done and I'm ready to move on to the next one, which is actually learning how to sail. So it was this time in nature and I, intentionally spent a lot of time. There was plenty of time to think during— this was like a 45-mile hike in and climb round trip. So it was a pretty good distance. So there was lots of time in the rainforest and up in the glaciers and everything. And I really thought about that and it was freeing from the sense that I don't have to have these specific, oh, I gotta complete these 12 climbs. To, you know, complete the circle sort of thing, but I'm ready to move on to the next item. And so I found nature in my case, I think a lot of people find nature can be somewhat transformative, but I think you also have to be intentional about it and have that soil and the nutrients there to be receptive to it.

I think you raise an incredibly interesting point that is also probably a little bit neglected nowadays, which is that some activities are intrinsically enjoyable. Great, not knocking them, right? But a lot of people chase peak experiences for the sake of the peak experience. And I think there's something important here, which is the flow state generates insight cascades that it gets us out of our normal patterns of thinking and we suddenly get this kind of download of new information. I think you then need to act on that and incorporate it. The whole adage about psychedelics, which is if you get the message, hang up the phone. You know, if you don't make the changes in your life that are coming to you as a result of the climbing trip, you're going to keep going in the wrong direction. The peak experience is not necessarily transformative in and of itself. It's the message that you get from the peak experience and the insights that you get there. And then you need to incorporate those into your life so that you can shift direction when necessary.

Yeah. And it was interesting because my climbing buddy that we've done a bunch of climbing trips together, He was asking me toward the end of the trip, he said, so what do you think about the next one? Do you want to go to Ecuador? And I said, I don't think so. I think this might be my last trip. And he was pretty shocked. And then I told my wife the same thing and she was pretty shocked that this was going to be the last one. You know, for me it was a bit of a transformative experience from the standpoint that what I thought I wanted to do going into this trip ended up being different coming out of the trip. For me anyway, that was very helpful. And what I'm also curious about too, as we think about these types of transformative experiences about the hero's journey, is there anything that you think a financial advisor can do, can take this concept of the hero's journey, and is there a way to relate that in guiding their clients through major life transitions, whether it's retirement or career changes. Is that an analogy or a metaphor that advisors can have in their minds as they're guiding clients through major life transitions?

Yeah, absolutely, actually. So let's look at it through the stages of the hero's journey, which is one stasis. You're bored, right? And you hear the call to adventure. So, you know, is the person in front of you board and hearing the call to adventure. Are they refusing the call or are they accepting it? And that, you know, the question would be like, what are you interested in right now? What business do you want to start? And do you have sufficient financial runway to do it? The first thing I feel people will feel when crossing the threshold, the red or blue pill decision, when you cross the threshold, you are going to confront something and that thing takes a lot of different forms. But, you know, in The Matrix, it's Agent Smith, it's the generic man in the black suit with the generic name and that represents conformity and that conformity may not always be financial, but it's the person that society tells you to be. It's the person that your parents told you to be. It's the person your teachers told you to be. It's the mentality that's very zero sum. It's dog against dog. It's Steve against Tom.. And that actually is the mentality that we need to transcend as an entire culture. But it's awful. I mean, it nearly cost me my life and I'm not exaggerating. For me, it was a 2.5-year voyage into psychotic depression of combating that mindset in myself and that lack of self-worth and discovering what I thought I was good at and feeling like I didn't fit in in Manhattan society anymore when I wasn't earning an income. And did I have any value outside of an investment bank? All of these things were absolutely awful, like indescribably awful for me, a true hell. And I'd say this so that you don't trivialize the decision. The decision is very, very difficult. But what I think the value of wealth is, is it provides a container. It's a womb, not for everyone. For some people, it's part of that restricting force. But for a lot of people, it can serve as a womb that these transition periods often take years. You know, I think your spouse often gives you leeway from somewhere between 3 days to 3 months., but often it's 3 years. And if you have a decent amount of wealth stacked away, you can really take that time to experiment and you're gonna have to try a lot of different things. And so, you know, that I feel is the value of the financial advisor. There's a lot of unnecessary overlap between financial advisor and therapist, but I feel that one of the things that people kind of start to obsess with in these situations is enough. And enough means a lot of different things, but I think the financial advisor coaching someone through this kind of life transition is there to just tell people that there's going to be enough and that they're going to be okay. And I think once that aspect of personality has been transcended, the financial advisor does the really easy part, which is that they help the person set up the business that they want to do or take the path they want to take. I think the return with the boon, with the treasure, I think that bit's easy. But I think that getting people to understand that they're being called somewhere else and then the really hard work of holding their hand through that transition.

So the final stage in the hero's journey is this idea of returning with the elixir. You've got the wisdom and now you're the hero. You're returning to this ordinary world. You're transformed. Let's take this analogy again with an advisor and their client. So they have a client who has achieved, quote, financial independence, and now they're like, okay, well, what's next? And so is there a way for the advisor to help the client who now has, quote, the financial resources to give back, to have the legacy, sort of this final stage of the hero's journey, so that whether we call it legacy or whatever name we want to give it, is there a way for the advisor to think about how they can help their client toward the end of their life on their deathbed not look back with regrets and realize that they did have a contribution. They did have an impact. They did have some transformation. They did have the elixir and they did something with it.

Yeah, I think about this a lot. Like this philanthropy model, you can see an ROI on buying a mosquito net in Africa. That is as admirable as imaginable, right? And there are obvious things to do around inheritances. And the thing, the only thing I'll say in inheritance is I think the value of an inheritance is giving your child the freedom to follow their own curiosity, right? It's the same all the way down. The way I think about legacy now has kind of changed a little bit, and it was the description of a king archetype, which is that the king is totally secure. He provides a safe space for other people to create and to become themselves. My friend Jim O'Shaughnessy has started a more of initiative where he gives, you know, a number of $100,000 fellowships to people that he finds inspiring. He has a media arm telling stories that are hero's journey narratives because he believes, like I do, the hero's journey is the story of transformation. And then he invests directly in companies that he thinks are facilitating this kind of transformation. So that is a true patron. And I think non-ideological patrons are what the world needs more of right now. I don't know a huge amount about the Medicis, but I think Cosimo de' Medici just prevented Florence from being a zero-sum game of all against all and gave people enough space and then told, you know, Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, all the Ninja Turtles to just produce beauty. And I'm sure there were stipulations like, you know, the glory of Florence or whatever, but they did produce beauty. And we're talking about the Medicis, you know, 600 years later when we're not talking about a lot of other people that were more deliberate philanthropists and have their names on wings. I think giving people patronage to do whatever they want to do is how you can produce legacy.

I want to go back to something that you had touched on a little bit earlier and this idea of left brain, right brain thinking. And this may have come from some of the reading of yours that I did, maybe from Iain McGilchrist as well. But as we look at the financial business, clearly it's a business of a lot of numbers. It's a business of a lot of left-brain type thinking. And I think you've talked about this, maybe McGill, Chris has talked about this as well, but we've been in a left-brain world for hundreds of years. And in order to solve the big issues that the world is dealing with these days, we really need more of the right hemisphere type thinking. Now we need both, of course, but maybe we've overindexed on the left side and now we need to move the pendulum more over to the right side. Do you have any thoughts about how in a big picture way we should think about this left brain, right brain, left hemisphere, right hemisphere? And should we be trying to shift more toward the right hemisphere? And as financial advisors, How can we help guide our clients away from being so focused on the numbers and more focused on this idea of you're going to be okay and shifting that mindset from do I have enough to I have enough and if I don't, I'll figure it out. And that's why you, Mr. or Mrs. Advisor, are with me to help figure that out as well.

I mean, I got so many thoughts on that. Again, to anyone listening, I would say seek out Iain McGilchrist's recent masterpiece called The Matter with Things. It's the best thing I've ever read. The bad news is it's about 1,200 pages long. The good news is it's a 180-page bibliography, so you could consider it the same as reading 100 books. I'd say this, it does come back to the same thing, which is not a coincidence, which is our exploratory attention is controlled by the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is linked more to our hearts and to our bodies. It is linked to that energetic signature that comes from information, I believe, but it is somatic, it is emotional. The right hemisphere is predominantly nonverbal. So what that means is, is that you are going to get a felt sense for where you should be going next, right? For something that you should be pursuing. And in the meantime, there'll be your left hemisphere, like, you know, freaking out. And it's loud and it's incredibly logical and it's incredibly smart. And it will say, dude, you're not ready for this. You know, no one's going to pay you to do that. There's no money in that. You're going to be super, super risky. You don't have enough money to do that. Look, let's stay with what we understand. And the left hemisphere seeks that safety. The left hemisphere is highly analytical. The left hemisphere is looking to keep you abstracted from the world in these digital representations and grid-like cities. You don't win though by trying to repress it. I've always felt that you win by giving your analytical left hemisphere something to do that it really enjoys. And for me, that's thinking about intellectual ideas and then writing about them, but only intellectual ideas that I feel are meaningful to other people. So I'm trying to follow my bliss and engage in that kind of positive-sum game where I'm like, all right, what does my left hemisphere toolbox really like doing? It really likes combining ideas and reading random books and finding interesting people and connecting different theories that seem to fit together. All right. I was doing that in finance, but about, you know, sell-side equity research, which was really interesting at the start and then eventually had absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. But once I used the same toolbox to talk about information that I really cared about, the world kind of opened up for me in this very, very strange way. And I think that that shift from we've got all these analytical tools that are left hemisphere, how can we find a way of using them in service of the right? That's an incredibly powerful idea that I think goes as deep as you want. And maybe the role of the financial manager is to help facilitate that transition.

I was listening to a podcast earlier today about a woman who is in her late 70s, and she has been a sailor for many, many decades. And she was asked what advice she would have for someone that wants to become a sailor, and she said, just go out and sail. And she said, what's interesting is everyone is against you going sailing. No one wants you to go sailing. Your mom and your dad don't want you to go sailing because they're gonna worry about you, that your boat's gonna overturn and you're gonna drown. Your friends don't want you to go sailing because then they won't be able to spend time with you and you've got some new passion. Your boss doesn't want you to go sailing because maybe you're gonna quit your job and just, you know, become a liveaboard sailor and cruise the Caribbean for, you know, the next 10 years. So there's all these people that don't want you to go sailing and To some extent, I think it's the same thing in society, that society wants us to make more money. Society wants us to have a job. Society wants us to consume all these things. And so we've got all this pressure to conform to what society wants us to do. Yet here you and I are talking about these grand ideas of transformation and the hero's journey and all these exciting concepts. And having enough money and that sort of thing. Are there any ways that we can help overcome any societal pressure that tries to keep us on a certain prescribed path that is socially acceptable? Because, you know, you think about Apple Computer and one of their most famous commercials from many, many years ago about Think Different, and it's the crazy ones that change the world. Yet we have so much pressure against us trying to be a crazy person changing the world. So any thoughts on how do we overcome the societal pressures to conform?

I can't remember where I read it recently, but I read a quote that's like, society celebrates its dead troublemakers and living conformists. That like only after these dudes are dead is everyone like, wow, that guy was a real maverick thinker. Wasn't he brilliant? Right? And then at the time, all these people get, you know, completely excluded. I think we need to step out, step back to answer that question because it's so crazily important. I think it's much more important than anyone really realizes at this point. One single person telling the truth and communicating an idea can change an entire system. You know, Alexander Solzhenitsyn came out of the gulags in the Soviet Union, wrote the Gulag Archipelago, and contributed to bringing down the Soviet Union because he wouldn't go along with a lie anymore. And I think that what we have now is a society that has hit stasis where we're all hearing and feeling this dissonance between the mindset that we have that's, you know, very zero-sum and go out and make the money and the results it's producing at kind of a societal and planetary level. We're watching all of our institutions break down one after another, whether it's at home with politics or our economy or geopolitics abroad, our climate, the environment. Climate change aside, I think we've managed to exterminate 70% of all the other living things on Earth in the last 50 years. If you just open your eyes and you look at what people, you know, I think Adam Tooze is calling the polycrisis, it's happening right now. So like, we can look at this and be like, yeah, personal transformation is a responsibility. But I think for now, like, do you want to be part of the future? Or do you want to be part of the past? And I think confronting that mindset in yourself, is the only way of doing it. But it also means that you have this redemptive power for the world around you, that if people look at you and they see someone who has made this journey and is standing safely on the other side for now, it gives them more encouragement to do it. Or if you're in it right now and you're suffering and you're getting by, and to anyone that is out there and suffering and getting by, you know, just keep on keeping on, like you will get through it, right? If we can show other people that this mindset can be transcended successfully and people can be much happier on the other side, that for me is a profoundly meaningful and redemptive act, even if it's only one other person that notices.

Along those lines, you've recently written about this idea of a prophet, not necessarily in the biblical sense of prophets, but how do you think about, how do you define what a prophet is in this day and age? And are there any, quote, prophets, as you think about it, in society today? And if so, what are they saying? What truths are they speaking?

And what direction are they trying to lead us toward? Yeah, the word prophet, a lot of stuff I write, it's really annoying because modern language does not exist for the terms that people are using. Awful word because it has such you know, religious overturns. But I like John Baveke's definition, which is a prophet isn't someone that predicts the future and tells you what's going to be happening 200 or 300 years from now. He's someone that tells you where you've gone off course right now. And I think in order to do that, prophets need to be able to see patterns, and they need to be able to see patterns that perhaps are hidden. It will not surprise you to know, for me to tell you that, like, the pattern that they all saw was the heroes journey, because it is the meta-pattern behind all the patterns. And, you know, I wrote that piece inspired by a recent book about Carl Jung, arguing that Carl Jung was a prophet. And would you like to guess what Jung's diagnosis and prescription was? It was essentially that our narrow consciousness, our left hemispheric reason, was creating a mindset that was allowing for the destruction of the world, and it was closing us off from the mystery and the magic and the power of our own curiosity. And his diagnosis was to surrender that to a higher intelligence, which is exactly consistent with Ian McGilchrist's left hemisphere, you know, returning to the guidance of the right hemisphere. He called his book The Master and His Emissary. The master and the emissary. The right hemisphere should be the master and the left hemisphere should be the emissary. That is the natural order of things. Whenever that diverges, things go horribly, horribly wrong. And so the prophet gets up and he's like, guys, we've all screwed up. And not only that, I have gone to hell, I have suffered enormously, and I have come back with a truth for you, that if you embark on this same journey yourself, you will have these same results, and you will free yourself of this mindset that's poisoning us and is poisoning the world. You know, this is a wildly personal conclusion, but the people that I think were prophets that saw this identical pattern You know, you have Carl Jung, you have Joseph Campbell, you have people like William Blake, who I'm not as familiar with, but, you know, he talked about the satanic god Urizen, U-R-I-Z-E-N, Urizen. There is an absolutely staggeringly good article by an anonymous man called NS Lyons, and he wrote a very long Substack article about how Tolkien and C.S. Lewis also saw this dynamic and wrote about it at length in their books. Not least of which was Lord of the Rings. But it's all about this lust for power, but without an understanding of kind of right hemispheric, holistic, intuitive context would just accidentally create horrible catastrophes everywhere. That is the One Ring to rule them all. That is Sauron's, you know, one eye. And so like those guys are the prophets and you talk about like the pattern recognition. For me, it's when I see 15 different people, all of whom I think are unusually insightful people all coming to the same conclusion, that means something to me. And that's what I live for, to be honest, because that I have followed my curiosity to those people.

And when one after another tells me the same thing, that makes me really, really fired up. Now we have the elephant in the room here, which is artificial intelligence. And I was writing about this recently and saying that AI is essentially speeding us toward an even deeper rut of this left-brain society that you and I have been talking about. And that we've essentially been marinating in since the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. So we've got this overemphasis on logic, analysis, efficiency, standardization. We've had higher rates of mental health issues. We've had a loss of connection with each other and with nature. And yet, if we take an optimistic view of that and what's happening with AI, it could lead to the greatest flowering of humanness, of right-brain prominence since the Renaissance. And the way that I think about that is everything needs a contrast. So like light contrasts dark, we can contrast AI with a renewed emphasis on holistic, big-picture thinking, on community, connection with nature, intention, intuition, creativity. And that's one of the messages that I say to financial advisors is that Sure, AI is great. It's a tool. But let's also go the opposite of AI. On the one hand, use AI for what it can do best, which is all of the things that it can do better than humans. But at the same time, we have to double, triple, quadruple down on our humanness because the more we move to a technology state, the more as humans we're going to crave connection and realness with each other. And so I think if we look at those two as a contrast and do what each of those do best, that might help us move this pendulum over toward the right side, as you've been talking about here.

I think anything I say on artificial intelligence should be discarded immediately. I don't have any expertise. I barely even have any relevant insights, and most of them are off the cuff. And, you know, one of the things we try and do internally at Sapien is, you know, See the present clearly, then offer your opinion, and then offer a forecast. Right. That's a really hard thing to do in financial markets because seeing the present clearly is almost impossible. And in this situation, it's like, well, what is the present? It is, as far as I can tell, AI is a universal intern. That's super, super helpful. That frees people up to do things higher up the hierarchy, higher up the wisdom stack. Right. If it can do the work of 10 analysts, but you still have to check its work because it's unreliable, that increases the value of your agent experience and your wisdom, right? That seems to be intrinsically liberating and very positive. And that I think is happening right now. That is not something I need to make a forecast about. I think the broader idea here, which is relevant to that, is again, don't reinvent things, don't reinvent patterns that are already very well proven. The pattern here that is very well proven is the left hemisphere is a tool. AI is a strikingly similar tool to the left hemisphere. It is analytical, it calculates, it can parse huge amounts of things very quickly. And as a result, the left hemisphere is not intrinsically evil. The left hemisphere is evil when it acts without context. The whole cliché about artificial intelligence is if you tell it to create paperclips and that's its only goal, it will destroy the world in pursuit of creating more paperclips. And that's actually an incredibly elegant example of the left hemisphere's problems, which is, you know, my favorite example is Mao's smash sparrows, where basically they noticed that sparrows were destroying grain reserves. So they killed all the sparrows and it caused a locust infestation that killed 50 million people. Right. Single point of intervention in a complex system blew everything up. And so I think when we look at AI, we have to be like, who does the rail serve? Right. Like we have this incredibly powerful technology. Who is it serving? And is it always being used with the benefit of the system in mind? Now, who the hell is wise enough to be able to determine that? And that's one thing that gives me pause, is that we can, as a species, be a little stupid. And we can do very dumb zero-sum things. That's almost the history of humanity. And now we've got a much more powerful, coldly rational tool than we've used before. But I can already feel myself moving into sort of the editorializing area. I don't want to be in.

I just think it's, we've got to keep asking ourselves, who is this tool serving? Well, Tom, you have given us a lot to think about here today.

Is there anything else that you want to share or touch on here as we wrap up? Yeah, I guess I'm going to repeat myself for probably the 50th time, which is if you've noticed something calling to you in your life, you've got your eyes open and this niggling sensation that either something's not right or there's something you need to move towards. Understand that that sensation now has a stronger basis in science than perhaps we've ever understood before. And to have faith in that direction seems to me one of the most important things that we can have.

Excellent. All right, Tom, what is the best way for folks to stay in touch with you? I know you've got this great Substack that you publish on a regular basis.

So how can people connect with you and stay in touch with all of your writings? Sure. Thank you. I write a Substack called What's Important that I write every couple of weeks. And Sapient Capital is where I work. You can reach us there. And then I'm much too active on Twitter.

My handle is @TomOwenMorgan.

Of course, it's not Twitter anymore. It's X. Oh, yes.

I'm never going to get that right ever. I know. Yeah. So if you send a tweet, what do we call that? You send an X and I don't even know what you do now.

It's— You know what you call it?

You call it a tweet.

A tweet. There you go.

Until it goes back inevitably. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Again, Tom, thank you.

This has been great. Thank you. All right. That's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

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