4 Steps to Build Emotional Maturity & Make Relationships Last (Tom Bilyeu Interviews Jay)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When we're left alone to ourselves, we hear things that
we may not be comfortable with. I don't like where
my life is going. I'm not happy with how I look.
Everyone else is doing better than me. Oh they just
got proposed to, and I'm still alone. All those thoughts
get space to actually be heard is when you're scrolling.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
It's like, oh, they got proposed. Oh cute bunny. Oh
like you, You're not even listening, you're scrolling away thoughts.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Tell me, what is the secret that you've learned from
monks on how to master yourself?

Speaker 1 (00:40):
I think one of the first things that I'd suggest
and explain to people is that when I lived as
a monk, a lot of the wisdom that we studied
and the Eastern literatures that we spent time excavating, those
were not aimed at monks. Those were just aimed at
humanity when they were written. When they were written, they
weren't talking about the Vaders. Correct, are the vaders?

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Exactly?

Speaker 2 (01:01):
So?

Speaker 1 (01:01):
The Vaders are five thousand year old texts that literally
talk about everything from aira vada, which is the science
of health. So Veda means wisdom or science of and
so ara vada is the science of life, the science
of health. You have their own version of Vastu Vader,
which is closest to FUNCTIONU. So like how to design

(01:23):
your home, how to set up different things around your
home for purposeful esthetics. You have the science of warfare
in the Vaders. Oh yeah, so there's a whole text
dedicated how do you reconcile that? You reconcile that in
the sense of there's knowledge and wisdom on how to
properly do each aspect with integrity, with purpose from a

(01:47):
point of protection. Recognizing I think me and you can
probably vibe with this the idea that we all want
a world. I think we'd all like a world that
has no war. But if we live in a world
pretending that there is none of that and then we're
not prepared for it, that sets us up worse. And
I think, whether you look at that on the macro

(02:09):
of war, or you look at on the micro of
anxiety or stress or pressure, if we pretend that stress
doesn't exist, it doesn't make it go away, it doesn't
make it better.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
But being prepared for it.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Actually allows us to potentially avoid it, potentially navigate it
with more integrity and authenticity. And today, I feel like
when you don't have codes for difficult things in society,
you see people make really bad mistakes. You see people
not having a codebook or a rule book on leadership,
and that's what it leads to. You see people not

(02:43):
having a codebook or rule book on how to navigate war,
and therefore people do what they feel like. And so
I find that what the Vedas we're trying to do
was give you a set of code and a set
of rules and a set of limits so that you
would be more controlled, more more, more greedless, more negative

(03:04):
desire less in those situations, so that you wouldn't be
pulled into something by your ego, but you could actually
go back to something that would help you get there
to get the best result for people in humanity. And
I think that's what's so special about the Vedas, that
ultimately it's dedicated to uplifting humanity through each of these
different things that we experience in life.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
It was really interesting to hear you talk about the
part in I think it was in the Vedas about
the guy who's to prepare for war and you're talking
about even good people have to learn how to fight.
Found that really interesting. But the book starts with solitude. Yes,
why solitude, because that was a part where I was like, Okay,
here's where the monk part is coming into this. And
I think it's pretty important for people to be able

(03:46):
to be alone before they try to get into a relationship.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, I think we've created this feeling in society where
loneliness is the enemy, Like being alone is seen as
a weakness. So when someone goes to school and throws
a birthday party and not many people show up, you're unpopular,
Whereas if lots of people showed up, you were really important,

(04:10):
you were.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Significant, brutal. I can think of a few things that
would be more devastating to a kid than no one
showing up to your birthday exactly.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
And that's how it's flamed, that's how it's talked about.
And then the next thing is.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Like, would you tell your kids if they if they
went to have a birthday party and nobody showed up
to day? Would you really be like, hey, solitude is
a good thing, Like how would you?

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Well, I'm not that so.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
I can't say, But what I would say is that
I would change it in the invite process, So I
would ask them to only invite people that they felt
really connected to or they felt they've really vibed with them,
wanted to celebrate their birthday with. So I think the
challenges when you're a kid, you also hand out way
too many invites. So I think that's what ends up
happening is that you think a good birthday party is

(04:50):
a packed room and even I mean people still feel
that till they're fifty sixty seventy, like that is until
the way dead, until they're dead, right, Like you feel
a good birthday party or a good event, even when
people say, like when I die, like, if there's loads
of people there, that will be a thing. I think
we've just programmed ourselves to believe that if we're not
surrounded by people, we can't celebrate, and we can't be celebrated.

(05:12):
It has to be about scale of how many people
are there. And I would say that's one measurement, but
the other men's measurement is the depth of how well
they know you. I know tons of people who threw
a great birthday party at fifty five hundred people showed
up and they felt actually I went, actually I went
to a birthday party this year. It was a big
birthday party, and I was speaking to the person whose
party it was and they were, like, so many people

(05:35):
invited people I didn't know to my birthday party and
they felt lonely at their own birthday party. I don't
want If I have had kids, I won't want them
to feel that, And even for myself, I don't want
to be in that position.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
I'd rather have.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
I saw this thing on Instagram and it was someone
that posted like it was like a ten this is
a British currency. It was like tenpence and then one pound,
and so tenpence is larger circumference than the pound, but
the pound is greater in value. And so the caption
on Instagram said that my circle is shrunk in size,

(06:11):
but is increased in value. And I was thinking that that,
to me, resembles the kind of life I would want
for myself and for my children if I had them.
But if I could have both, that would be amazing, obviously,
But I don't know how real it is to be
able to say we can have both. So I think
what I'm trying to say with solitude is that if
there isn't a sense that I am happy with myself,

(06:36):
with my own company with the thoughts that circle around
in my mind. Imagine how complex that is when you
add another confused individual who's not happy with their thoughts,
not happy with who they are, not happy with their mind,
and now in a relationship, you're putting two confused people together.
Why is their pain, why is their fallout? Why is

(06:58):
there so much disappointment in a relationship? In my opinion
and from the perspective of the Eastern studies, is that
because there's an internal dissatisfaction in both people that they're
now bringing to each other, and so the strength of
solitude is using that time. I've still not found a
better solution for self awareness than solitude, because in solitude,

(07:25):
it's the only place you get to hear your own
voice and make sense of other people's opinions. If I'm
standing in the middle of a group of one hundred
people and they're all yelling their opinions at me, chances
are some of them are going to rub off, some
of them are contagious, some of them are going to
reject And I don't get the space and time to
make sense of what's my voice and what's noise, Whereas

(07:48):
when I get time to myself I get the opportunity
to reflect on and introspect and go do I want
that thought to be mine? How does that fit in
to my life? How do I feel about this?

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Right?

Speaker 1 (08:03):
You get to have that dialogue with yourself, and I
feel we've lost the art of self talk and self dialogue.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
Well, let's go into it. So what is that art?
Like the if you put a human being in solitary confinement,
you will break them in a deep and fundamental and
scary way that I wouldn't have predicted. That seems very
weird to me. I know it to be true, not
because I've experienced it, but because you just hear it
over and over and over and over, like, if you

(08:31):
really want to destroy the human spirit, isolate them. So
how is it that we take this thing that will,
on a long enough timeline, absolutely decimate you and make
it something that becomes the most profound setup for self awareness?
What do you have to do in that solitude?

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (08:47):
So the first thing I'd say is that it would
decimate you if you go into it twenty four hours
a day.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
And that's not what we're recommending here, right, I'm.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Not telling someone to twenty four hours be in solitude
for a year, Like, that's not my recommendation. My recommendation
is in your week, there has to be at least
one hour that you spend by yourself. And in that hour,
you're not watching a show, you're not reading a book,
you're not on your phone scrolling, so you're not distracting

(09:17):
yourself with anything or stimulating yourself with anything external, and
you're sitting there and just observing your thoughts. Now, one
hour is going to seem like a long time in
the beginning, but I'm saying one hour would be great
in a week. If you're starting that at ten minutes,
that's brilliant, that's enough.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
But the goal is it enough?

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Like? Are you being kind? Are you trying to let
people off the hook? Are you worried about people flaming
you in the comments? Like you meditate two hours a day?
I'm not mistaken, Yes, So what should people do for real?

Speaker 1 (09:45):
I do believe that ten minutes is a good place
to start, because I do feel that.

Speaker 3 (09:49):
You shouldn't stay there.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
You shouldn't stay at ten minutes. I should grow.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
I think I look at it as like when you
do a colpelndze right for the first time. So The
first time I did a Colpelanze, I was doing it
with a friend and they were they'd been already doing
it for a long time, and I didn't want to
walk out and I couldn't do it, and so I
stayed in there. Yeah, literally, so I stayed in there
for longer than I wanted to the first time I
did it. So if I did it myself the first time,

(10:13):
I think I would have been there for thirty seconds.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
The first time I did it for five.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Minutes, because I was in there with someone who is
in this we're fully simmid five minutes. It was great
fully simmized up to here right, not fully summized. And
so when I look at that, and I look at
something that I found challenging when I did it, I
was like, if someone told me I had to be
in there for ten minutes the first time I did it,
I potentially would never have got in right. And the
idea that I could have started with thirty seconds and

(10:38):
built myself up to three minutes and then built myself
up to five minutes, I really do like that process.
And I think you have to and this is self
awareness again. You have to know whether you're someone who
likes to be thrown in the deep end, or whether
you're someone who likes to build up incrementally. I'm generally
someone who jumps into the deepend So I was pushed
in for five minutes and that works for me, because
for me, I'm the kind of person needs to be

(10:58):
pushed off to break the mental barrier to then go
back and build a habit. That's my self awareness. I
became a monk in order to learn these things. I'm
an extreme person. That's how I learn and build habits.
But someone else goes to me. Actually, Jay, I like
meditating for five minutes a day, and it works for me,
and now I have confidence I can do ten minutes
a day, I can do fifteen and I love that.

(11:19):
So I don't think it's an either or I genuinely don't.
That's not a cop out. I think you have to
know who you are, and so if I want to
learn something, I'll schedule the whole weekend. If I wanted
to learn archery, I would set up archery classes for
eight hours a day all weekend. I wouldn't learn it
by doing archery once a week because I want to
figure out whether I'm deeply interested and care about this

(11:41):
enough to actually commit to it weekly.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
But that's my mindset, that's who I am.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
So I think the first thing I say is ten
minutes alone every week where you sit and you just
observe your thoughts and write down every thought that comes up.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
This is weird. I hate this. It's boring.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
I can't believe Jay and Tom told me to do
this right, like whatever else is coming up, and write
it down and just become comfortable becoming aware of your thoughts.
And what you find is that the first time you
do this, it is just going to be random noise
like that, what shall I eat tonight? What's going on?
It's just going to be that stuff. It might be
I hate this, I'm uncomfortable, this is not fun on

(12:21):
board like it will just be natural dialogue like that.
What you find is the next time you do it,
or the next after a couple of times that you
do it, you now might start asking interesting questions. You
might now start noticing a pattern of thoughts that repeats itself,
like I've just been thinking for a week about what
that person said to me about how I look, or
I've been thinking about what that person said to me

(12:42):
about something I did online, like, and it's just been
in my mind and it keeps repeating itself. Now you're
going to start to find what you spend most of
your time on. So studies show we have sixty to
eighty thousand thoughts per day and eighty percent of them
are negative and eighty percent of them are repetitive. So
if our life is not transforming our thoughts, Now, if

(13:03):
I asked you what are you thinking about?

Speaker 2 (13:05):
You're a self aware person.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
I'm pretty sure you could tell me on any given
moment what you're thinking about. You ask most people what
they're thinking about, the reaction will be in an emotion
like I'm just stressed. I've got too much on at
the moment. But we can't be really clear. So what
this is giving you is a clarity of what are
those repeating negative thoughts and how do we want to
change them? So that's step one is a even becoming

(13:27):
aware of the thoughts. So if I ask an average
person when you wake up in the morning, what's the first.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Thought you had?

Speaker 1 (13:32):
Oh, I'm tired, that's the first thought for most people.
You finally made it to coffee, You add your morning coffee,
and you're thinking God, I hope this coffee gets through
me through the day because I'm so tired. Second time
you've had the thought. You get to lunchtime, you're like, God,
is it only lunchtime? Like, and I can't even eat
lunch because I'm busy working. God, I'm so tired. You
get to six pm, maybe you've got to work an
extra hour because no one finishes work at six anymore.

(13:54):
Seven pm you finish, You've got I'm exhausted, I can't
wait to get home. You get home, and somehow at
eleven thirty seven pm you get the courage to watch
another episode and you.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Repeat the cycle. Right, that's a six thoughts in the
same day.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
As people get that awareness of what do you want
them to do with it? Or that's not the right
what is the effective thing to do with it? If
you're trying to better yourself in whatever, whether it's love
or something else, but if you're trying to make progress
and not just document, like, where do you go with that?

Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, so we want to disrupt that algorithm, right, that
pattern that's been developed.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
To just stop thinking negative.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
No, so we're not going to do that. What we're
going to do is we're going to say I am tired.
We're going to take that thought. We're going to accept it.
We're okay with that, We're good with that. And I'm
going to sleep early tonight. So I'm accepting the thought
that I'm feeling. I'm not going to wake up and
never feel I'm tired. I mean, I wake up and
feel i'm tired sometimes, but our literally go, I'm tired.
I'm going to cancel my plans for the weekend. I've

(14:50):
done that so many times where I've had the busiest
week at work.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
I'm tired. I can feel that, I'm stressed.

Speaker 1 (14:55):
I'm even getting a bit snappy with my wife, Like
I can feel all those things. And I look my
weekend and my weekend is decked with social events, and
I go to RADI I'm like, I'm about to cancel
everything this weekend because I don't think I have the
resilience to get through. But if I didn't give myself that,
and all I keep saying all week is I'm tired.
Then it gets to the weekend. My friends are coming

(15:16):
and I'm like, God, I wish they wouldn't come in today.
Then they leave and I'm like, oh God, I'm so
relieved that they left. I wish they would have left earlier. Right,
It's like all negativity just brewing. And so what I'm
saying is accept the feeling, and what are you going
to do about it?

Speaker 3 (15:29):
Yeah, that's the question I was asking myself. And now
what and now what this bad thing has happened.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
If now what, and if this, then that, like if
I get tired during the week, then I will cancel
my plans on the weekend. If I have weekend plans
that are really important, I'll sleep early on the weeknight
so that I'm ready for it. So like this week,
I'm with you. I've got something every night this week.
Every night there's an event, So I know that this
weekend needs to be RESTful. I just gave myself permission

(15:54):
to do nothing for four days. It was beautiful because
my other days have been so busy. But if I'm
not having time to structure and think about these things,
you're literally running from one thing to another. So I
feel like people are chasing peace. People are chasing peace,
not realizing that when they slow and still and make

(16:16):
that space, they then learn how to find peace. So
people are looking for peace in the meditation. That's not
how it works. The meditation creates the space for you
to figure out how to create peace in your life.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
That's where the piece is.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
That's interesting. So my experience of meditation is that is
where I get literal peace. So I started meditating because
I was going through really stressful period in my life
is years ago, and it was just misery at a
physical level, and so I thought, I've got to find
some way to de escalate my stress and anxiety. I've
been told a thousand times why people to meditate. Let

(16:51):
me actually try this. So I try it, and at
a physiological level, it just lowered my stress and my anxiety,
and I was like, this is amazing. I've since tried
to get like my wife, for instance, to use it.
It doesn't hit her in the same way that it
hit me. But the piece came for me in breathing
from my diaphragm. It was so physiological. And it's the
older I get, the more content I create, the more

(17:13):
I realize that I'm all tactics, like I just know
how to translate the airy stuff into end. Go do this, yes,
And so I'm curious, do if you just sat and meditated,
You're saying that's not going to bring you peace. You
have to solve this riddle of all these pieces bouncing
around in your mind.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
I'll take back the categoric way I said that, So
I guess what I was leaning towards is I'm not
saying that meditating itself can't be a peaceful experience, but
I feel a lot of people who have stressed out,
busy lives are just looking for a break from it.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
And it can provide that, but sometimes.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
It can't because you're too stressed and busy, and a
lot of the times a healthy way of using meditation
is to make sense of stuff so you can go
back to your life and apply it. So for some
people it is peace and that's fair, and I agree,
I do find piece and meditation, But for some people
it's giving them that break and that gap between experience

(18:12):
and reaction. It's giving them that gap between stress and
struggle that allows them to reorient themselves and say.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
This is what I need to switch, this is what
I need to move.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
And I feel maybe you're someone that does that anyway
and does that naturally, and then meditation can become just
what it is and give you that piece. But I
feel that for a lot of people, just sitting there
with their thoughts is stressful just.

Speaker 3 (18:39):
Observing it because they don't know what to do with it.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
I think.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
I think, first of all, there's a big fear around it, right,
It's just we're scared.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
I don't understand that at all. What are people scared of?

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Well, I mean it's the same way as saying, like,
why people scared of sitting in cold water?

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Rights?

Speaker 3 (18:53):
How I get because it sucks.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
It does suck.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
So what I'm saying is people that I've talked to
you who struggle with their thoughts make those things.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Easy because they don't know what to do with them.
Like the cold thing. It's e So look, I'm gonna
have a massive physiological response. YEA, not fun. I'm doing
it for reasons, so I do it. I can stop
doing it at any time. But a thought doesn't have
to be painful in the way that cold exposure. Like
even wim Hoff says, I don't like being cold. I

(19:21):
do it because it serves a purpose.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
But even he says that the loss of love was
more painful than any of the cold he's been through, right,
Like that thought of losing someone you love is far
greater than the pain of sitting in cold.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
I think that's like the background thing that's really messing
with you.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
Yeah, Like I feel like I was even talking to
I was even talking to Amar from Yestery and if
you've have.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
You ever had them?

Speaker 3 (19:44):
I know, yes, Siria, but I've never. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
So they do loads of crazy stuff too, right, and
they've they've gone. And so I was talking to Amar,
who's one of the Yes three guys. They're awesome guys,
and he was saying to me that, so this is
really fascinating, and I love where we're going with this,
by the way, and please keep going there because this
I can only have this common session with you.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
So I'm very happy right now.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
The thing about what Amma was saying is that he
said the whole point of yes theory was saying yes
to crazy stuff that we wouldn't say yes to, and
that's how it started. And he goes, we got to
a point we're saying yes to crazy stuff was not
difficult anymore. So now when we said yes to doing
something crazy next year, we actually didn't find that uncomfortable.

(20:24):
And yes theory was all about seeking discomfort. So he goes,
we realized we were just seeking comfort. Doing something bigger
every time was just more and more comfortable, and he goes, actually,
what's most uncomfortable for me right now is to sit
alone with my thoughts every day for fifteen minutes and meditate.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
And he said this, man, I was like wow, like
it was so profound.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
So yes, let's go down and all that down to one. Yeah,
I'm going to give you my hypothesis. Yes, people are
afraid that they people don't respect themselves or their self
respect is fragile, and being alone with their thoughts is
just going to be intrusive and they're going to lose
more respect, I guess, because that would be. That was
the thing that I struggled with in the beginning, and

(21:01):
I've spent my entire life making sure that I can
be alone because I always tell people the only thing
that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're
by yourself. So the only thing I can think is
when people are alone, they don't feel good about who
they are, and so they seek distraction.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
That's it. I mean, it's as simple as that.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
It literally is like I'll give a study and then
I'll specifically speak to that point like. Men and women
were asked to be alone with their thoughts for fifteen
minutes or give themselves an electric shop.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
I know where this is going.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
They did this experiment, thirty percent of women chose an
electric shot. Wow, and sixty percent of men chose an
electric shop.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Oh wow. I had that back. I guess the other way,
And when asked.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
Why, they said, because they didn't want to be alone
with their thoughts. Because we're skinning our thoughts. Now, your
hypothesis is accurate, I would agree with it. I think
the biggest thing is that when we're left alone to ourselves,
we hear things that we may not be comfortable with.
I don't like where my life is going. I'm not
happy with how I look. Everyone else is doing better

(22:04):
than me. Oh they just got proposed to, and I'm
still alone. All those thoughts get space to actually be heard,
whereas when you're scrolling, it's like, oh they got proposed
Oh cute bunny, Oh like you, you're not even listening.
You're scrolling a thought. That's literally you're scrolling away thoughts.
And that gives us a sense of comfort that we

(22:25):
don't spend longer than three seconds on a thought. But
then when you're asked to spend three minutes or more
on a thought, that thought gets to like grow and
build and become scarier and bigger, almost like a monster
that unknown of it. Right, It's like, I think that
what people are most scared of is they've been trained

(22:46):
to numb themselves. We live in a society that knows
how to numb emotions and numb feelings, right, I don't.
I'm so upset about something, I'm going to go and
drink alcohol to numb that feeling, to not experience and
start feeling I messed up at something. I'm going to
go and gamble away my money to numb the feeling

(23:07):
that I felt. I'm going to go and watch something
on TV because I just want to numb how I
feel right now.

Speaker 2 (23:12):
Now.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
I'm not saying that I don't do any of those
things to number feeling when it's really painful, or that
we shouldn't ever number feeling at all, But our goal
is we just want to numb things away.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
And I don't think that That's.

Speaker 1 (23:25):
Why sitting with your thoughts for fifteen minutes is really hard,
because there's.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Nothing to numb it.

Speaker 1 (23:29):
There is nothing that will numb it, and even sitting
in the cold, nothing numbs that apart from your own
senteredness and breathing.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
You have to go to that.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
And I think that's why sitting alone with your thoughts
is such a powerful practice, because what you're saying, if
you want to be happy, being happy about yourself when
you're by yourself, that requires you to not numb anything
about yourself, because that's the full acceptance.

Speaker 3 (23:51):
So interesting. So I've been thinking a lot recently about distraction.
Why distraction exists, because I think it actually serves a
pretty powerful person if we didn't have the ability. So
there's a part of the brain called the basil ganglia,
which is known as the gear shift in the brain,
and for people that have obsessive thinking, they get stuck
and the basil ganglia is not able to let them

(24:12):
pass that thought into another thought. Now, I think one
of my superpowers is my gearbox is amazing and to
the point where it almost becomes problematic because I can
I'll forget about something that I was obsessed with thinking about, ah,
because my gearbox just like goes into the next thing.
And so that has shown me that I can very
easily get myself out of a loop. If I'm on

(24:35):
something that's super negative, I can get out of that.
But for somebody who can't, you need that external distraction
and doom scrolling. Like there was one period in my
life where I was so I had so much going
on that even the thought of meditating was just like,
well then everything is going to come crashing down. And
I was like, but I know better than to not meditate,

(24:55):
so I need some sort of primer to soothe me
enough to get me into meditation. And it was actually
doom scrolling cats, not just cats, but like things like
that where it's like cute, funny fifteen seconds to digest
the idea and then you move on to the next
And I trained my YouTube algorithm on shorts to only
show me like cute fun things, and I would do

(25:17):
that for like seven minutes, and then I would go meditating.
I was like, wow, that is freakishly effective. So you
have to wall things off because if you doom scroll
for seven hours, you now never get anywhere. But if
you don't understand how powerful distraction can be enough to
get you to the point where now you can take
advantage of something like meditation, which is going to leave

(25:40):
you alone with your thoughts. It's really really fascinating.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yeah, I love what you just said about distraction.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
I've always allowed myself five minutes an hour to be random,
and I often have. I've either do a time or
on my phone, or at one point I was really
into like hour glasses or minute glasses, and I would
just turn it over.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
What do you do in that time?

Speaker 1 (25:59):
So I would allow my to scroll, I would allow
myself to search random stuff on YouTube.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
I'd allow myself.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
So it's giving myself the capacity to be random. And
what I found in randomness is that you connect really
interesting dots.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, that's why I like meditating.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
And so I find like in space where I don't
know what I'm going to type in, or I'd pick
up a random book for my shelf, or I would
find a random thing that I'm scrolling through. But allowing
myself to do that for five minutes every hour allowed
my mind to have that space, to have that gaps
to connect dots but then return back. But that's us
using distraction rather than just letting it be there, right,

(26:34):
And I think when distraction controls you and drives you,
and everyone knows what it feels like to be on
a rabbit hole where you end up on some random
website or some random YouTube channel.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Everyone's been there. That's not a good feeling.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Like, I don't think I want that feeling where I
end up somewhere seven hours later, where seven minutes of
randomness is really healthy and beautiful and can be amazing.
And so why can't seven minutes of stillness? I can't
seven minutes of listening to sounds or ambient noises or
nature sounds, right. I think there's also a sense of

(27:08):
I think it's reconnecting with our breath. There's an amazing
study I talk about in the book about how when
we spend time with people that were close to or caregivers,
with people that love us, our breath and even our
heartbeat can synchronize you.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
That is so weird to me. It's so strange, right, dude.
Humans sink up to each other. The one that freaks
me out the most is that women will sink their
periods and they all sink to the dominant female. That
stuff gets sad, super crazy. Wow, yeah, super crazy.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
It happens to my wife and her sister all the time.
But yeah, I don't know which. Yeah, nice question.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
That's so fascinating. Yeah, so walk me through. Okay, so
we get self awareness, so we're I love that you
started the book with solitude. So we stop being afraid
of our thoughts because we're doing the and now what
So we have the saying it's overwhelming, it's freaking us out.
We're going to deal with it, which I love that.
And now in the context of becoming in fact, here
is a thing that either you're going to be like

(28:06):
one hundred percent or this will be where we debate.
I think if you want to be in a relationship,
you must be worthy of a relationship. Now I'm going
to push it even farther and make Jay Shuddy the
Monk a little uncomfortable. Maybe the ultimate way to think
about it is you are asking somebody to have sex
with you. And that's crazy. It is the weirdest sort

(28:26):
of energetic thing that we do. Like I think about
this a lot. I love this with Lisa. I went
from how my name is Tom to exposing my genitals
and doing what one does. It's like, that's a big
chasm to cross. And if you're going to ask somebody
to go on that journey in a way where they're
as excited as you are and you don't end up

(28:47):
in jail. You have to be somebody that's worthy of that,
and that's a big ask. So one, does that resonate
or do you think I'm out of my mind? And
if it resonates, how do people become worthy?

Speaker 2 (29:00):
Well that's very monkish of you.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
I mean that you've put sex on a very sacred,
high value facts, right, right.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
So when you said earlier about loneliness, I was like,
I've actually been the loneliest I've ever been. Was in
the middle of intercourse, Yeah, which is a crazy thought,
like I be anymore with the person, and because there
was no emotional connection, I felt so alone.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
Yes, crazy, I'm so glad you brought that up though, right, Like,
that's what we understand about loneliness now that loneliness isn't
about the number of people around you. It isn't about
how popular you are. It doesn't matter how many people
are surrounded by you. If you don't feel understood, if
you don't feel seen, if you don't feel heard, you're lonely,
right Like, That's what it is. And so when you're
saying I'm having sex with someone and I still feel lonely.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
That's real.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
But you, from your definition of just how you broke
that down, you're placing sex is extremely sacred as a
high value.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
There could be lots of.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
People listening or watching, and or maybe people that we
don't even that aren't in this community that would actually
disagree and they'd just be like, well, sex is your sex?

Speaker 2 (29:59):
Like what? They don't see it that way? Right, the
way you see it.

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Is probably more aligned with the vaders than the other perspective,
for sure.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
The idea that if you're about to do.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
Anything intimate with anyone, physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, the amount
of like exchange of we just talked about exchanging heartbeats
and breathing. I mean, if you think about how biologically
affected you are by a relationship, let alone how emotionally
and then spiritually affected you are by a relationship, and
how much karma you share from a spiritual level, how

(30:31):
much energy and vibration you share on a spiritual level.
You're talking about like completely syncing up or destroying your
synergy with someone. And so I would say I agree
with you. I don't think you're crazy at all. I
think you're spot on.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
So how do you become worthy.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
So I think that I mean, I don't think you
have to complete solitude in order to move on. And
so in the book, I break down the four things
that the Vaders breakdown, which is preparing for love, which
is solitude, practicing love, which is in a relationship right.
The third is like preserving love because or protecting love

(31:12):
because there's a part of us when we're burnt through
love that loses the belief in love or changes. So
there's a protection of love that comes at phase three.
And phase four is what I call perfecting love. And
so if those are the four phases, solitude is the
one preparing for love, and you have to do a
lot of that becoming worthy in solitude because what I mean,

(31:34):
we're saying something here that we're I think we're on
the same page. The idea that if you walk into
a relationship and you don't know who you are, you
don't know what you need or what you want and
what you're building and what you're creating, you're basically going
to hope that the other person is going to answer
all those questions for you, or you're going to outsource
that inadequacy to them to make you feel worthy. So

(31:58):
that's why we walk into a relationship and we accept
the currency of attention as love. We accept the currency
of validation as love.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
That's big in a social media culture, right.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
We accept the currency of attention, validation, compliments, comfort, random niceness.
We accept all of that as love because we ourselves
haven't defined and experienced what love looks like on our own. So,
how you become worthy of another person is first becoming
worthy for yourself. And what does it mean to be

(32:31):
worthy for yourself? To me, it's doing hard things alone,
when you've done hard things alone and you've grown through them.
And when I say alone, I don't.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
Mean without your family or without friends.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
I just mean when you've broken through some of your
own barriers that gives you a healthier sense of self
esteem and self worth. I think self worth doesn't come
from saying affirmations in a mirror. It doesn't come from
just like pretending to be happy. It doesn't come from
being positive. Your greatest self worth is going to come
from breaking through stuff that you didn't think you could

(33:05):
break through.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
Do people expect you to say just look yourself in
the mirror and say I love myself? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (33:10):
I think people.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
I think people sometimes project their own belief of like
the word self love, right, So there is a form
of self love, like I love going to spas, I
love getting massages, So I'm into that form of self love.
But I see that as more self care. I see
that like caring for myself and things like that. When
I think of self love is just telling myself I
love myself. I've tried all of those things, and I've

(33:35):
seen how they are not possible when I haven't done
some other work. Yes, right, like me looking in the
mirror and just saying I'm amazing, I'm wonderful. If I
haven't done something amazing that day or done something wonderful
that day, I don't believe myself, right, And that's the
problem people have. They're like, I don't believe it. Now,
there's two sides to it. I actually believe a lot

(33:57):
of people have done hard things, but they don't give
themselves credit for it.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Very possible.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
So there's there's a big group of people, my mom included.
I interviewed my mom recently, not on the podcast I
want to, but I did what I'm happy I did.
I interviewed her at a dinner just me and her
because I really wanted to get to know her story.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
But I realized it I didn't feel.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
You record it. I'm guessing it didn't because that with
my father in law recorded it. It was we shared
that No.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
No, I would love knowing the background of your father
in law.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
Dude, that's interesting. We should ask Lisa because it was dope,
like that guy's story is crazy. Yeah, that's unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
And that's what I'm saying that we don't even know
the people closest to us, right, so love again anyway,
But that's that's a whole other thing. But I said
it with my mom. I asked her questions like I
would ask on the podcast. And I was talking to
her and she was telling me that it's at like
fifteen years old. I think fifteen sixteen years old.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
She was born and.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Raised in Yemen. Oh wow, And so yeah, so she's
living in Yemen. Yemen are trying and it was called
Aiden at the time. They're trying to the Brits who
have colonized the country are fighting against the Yemeny soldiers
and she's studying for her exams while there's gunment on
her rooftop. Like that's her story, and I'm like, Mom, like,

(35:09):
you've never told me how bad this was.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
You just told me you left Yemen because of the
war and moved to England, Like that's the story I know.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
And all of a sudden, I'm discovering that you were
actually studying for an exam while there's people with guns
on your roof defending tube and you're in the middle
of all of that, and you're fifteen years old. And
she never told me that. I was thinking, she's done
how things and she doesn't even see it that way
because to her it's normal.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
Interesting do you think she thinks it's normal or do
people confuse enduring which is extraordinary with Oh, but I
didn't actively choose it, and therefore I completely discount.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
It totally totally.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
Well, I mean, at least from my mom, I can
say that she just sees it as her life. She
doesn't see it as like hard or easy or that
that's her kind of way she sees stuff. It's kind
of how I feel something the world. When I talk
about my monk experience, it's very normal to me, Like
there's a part and I chose to do it. There's
a part of me, and there's just like it's normal.
And people are like, that's crazy, like why would you
ever become a monk after school? It's so bizarre, But

(36:10):
to me, it's not that bizarre. And so it takes
me a minute to be like, oh, wait, a minute,
is pretty crazy, right, Like not many people do that,
but I don't sit in that thought that often, and
so I think there's I think what I'm saying is
that this becoming worthy is breaking through some of your
own barriers and limits, whatever they need may be, which
is what you discover in the solitude. And the more

(36:33):
you break through those, the more you feel worthy for
anything and everything, because you go, wow, I've done some
really tough stuff on my own. I've like really pushed
myself in this way, I've really tried something new. And
now you're not looking for that person to fill your worthiness.
You're not looking for that person to say you're amazing
and you're the best and you're incredible, because you've experienced
your strength.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
When you've experienced your strength, no one can make you
feel weak. The right person will only make you feel stronger, right,
And that's the key. When you've already done hard things,
the people around you will only make you feel stronger.
That's why you know they're great to be in your
life because they're not making you feel strong, They're making
feel stronger, whereas what we often find is that whoa whoa, whoa,

(37:16):
whoa whoa.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
They're not making you feel strong, they're making you feel stronger.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
So I'm saying like, we're not so even even in
a positive relationship with us, Like when I'm around you,
right and we have a healthy relationship, we know each
other a fair bit. It's like, I'm I consider myself
to be self aware and self confident and have a
high degree of self worth, totally open about it.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
I have no issues, no issues, No reasonable person will
push back on that.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, no issues with it whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
And I feel that the people I like to be
in my life are not people who I'm looking to
support that or or do that, but they're able to
help me discover more about myself.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
So there's a sign of strength.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
So I had a client I was working that was
coaching with last yeah, and he did this for me
and it was really powerful, And I was like, I
only like working with clients who also I learned from.
So I have a selfish motive there, but it's it's special.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
He said.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
I've never met someone who ties up spirituality, business, and
practicality in one person like you do it. And I'm
not saying that to self promote. I'm saying that because
he gave me permission to be all three and that
made me strong.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Second, and it was just really powerful.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
I felt so like freed by that statement to be
all three because it made me stronger. I know I
adn't those things, but that person made me stronger. That's
what I'm saying. That you gravitate towards when you already
have a sense of self worth, whereas when you don't
have a sense of self worth, you look for the
person who's saying, oh, you're really good at that, Oh,
like maybe you should work like you're looking for someone

(38:45):
to make you feel better about yourself from zero, whereas
you're already out a ten and someone's like finding new
ways of showing you more of yourself.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
That's there's something beautiful about that, agreed. I don't even
know if I'm articulating clearly, but.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Very clearly from my perspective. So I think that there
is a biological imperative hardwired into the brain that you
must do hard things in order to feel good about yourself.
And when I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint,
and this is why I think rich kids implode. You
just never had to do hard things. From an evolutionary perspective,
I think it was just so hard to stay alive,

(39:20):
Like for millions of years, it really was red in
tooth and claw like to stay alive. You were kill
or be killed. You were hunting, gathering, fighting other tribes.
I'm just crazy. And the people that were going to
survive were going to be the ones that got an
emotional a self applied emotional reward for doing something hard.

(39:43):
And when you do something hard, you recognize it. It
needs to feel good, and if it does, then you
will keep doing hard things and you're the far more
likely to survive than the person who's like that sucked.
There was no redeeming qualities. And so it's just like
when I think about that, because if I were to
create a recipe for fulfillment, it's very simple. It's working
really hard, doing hard things to gain a set of

(40:06):
skills that allow you to serve not only yourself but others.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
That's it.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
That's the whole recipe. But it really has to be
that you had to do something hard. If it came
easily to you, it won't give you the sense of
respect that you want. Like the stuff that I've gotten
more easily in my life, I don't take a lot
of pride in it. It's always the stuff that I
grind out, like through pain and suffering, and I endure.
In fact, I want to read you a quote, this
is one of my all time favorite quotes. To those

(40:35):
human beings who are of any concern to me, I
wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities. I wish that
they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self contempt, the
torture of self mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished. I
have no pity for them, because I wish them The

(40:55):
only thing that can prove today whether one is worth
anything or not, that one endures.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
That is so rual. I definitely can't. I'm not gonna
so good like and subscribe.

Speaker 1 (41:13):
I think I get the sentiment I would not wish
on anyone's amazing.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
So pushback as hard as you can, because I love this.
So if you agree, in fact, where where does it
break down? Because this is why I don't have kids.
That is what people need, in my opinion, and you can't.
I can't do it.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
Yeah I can't.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well that's well, that's where we where we disagree, right because,
like I get the intention and the spirit of it, But.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
Do you think if they avoid it?

Speaker 2 (41:42):
I don't think you have to. I feel like for.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
Most people, for most people, life is already hard in
some areas. I don't think there's many people I know
at least where I grow up.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
Does it make them better or worse?

Speaker 1 (41:57):
Well, I don't think they have the tools, which is
why we have TAD Again, we're doing to that, right, Like,
I don't think that when I look at the people
I grew up around or the areas I grew up in, and.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
It wasn't the worst of the worst. It wasn't best
the best. Yeah, it's it's not loved, right, it's not.
Yeah you've been of course, Yeah, it's not nice.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
And people made bad choices because they didn't have good
role models, right, Like people made bad choices because they
didn't have good tools. They didn't make bad choices because
of just where they were. It's because they didn't have access.
Today we have access, and that's what we're trying to do.
I feel with our work because I look at myself
and I could clearly if I what's that called sliding doors,

(42:34):
if I m visioned like where my life could have
been if I didn't take a few steps, I could
easily have been today addicted to some drug, getting involved
in things that were highly violent, and finding myself validation
through gang culture.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
Like I could have so ended up there.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Like I literally could pinpoint three decisions that could have
totally took my life in that direction, and none wan
know who I am today, and I'd be a very
different person, not because I'm a bad person or because
I'm attracted to any of those things, just because I
didn't have access. I got lucky, and I see that
the access that I got to the monks at an
early age just transformed the trajectory of my life. But

(43:15):
most people don't meet someone random. We followed the same
people on Instagram, we followed the same people on YouTube.
We all watched the same stuff, We listened to the
same stuff. How many people in there last seven days
could be honest and say they heard from a random
voice that was unexpected, or they saw a random person
that they didn't know that sparked a new journey in

(43:35):
their life. Like, that's how random it was for me
to meet a monk. I didn't grow up religious, I
wasn't around monks, I didn't go religiously to meet monks,
like I met someone who completely sparked a different thought
when you're sitting down with trauma experts, when I'm sitting
down with neuroscientists, like I didn't grow up with neuroscientists,
Like who.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Are speaking to those people? So I feel, yeah, I
just feel like that.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Going back to that statement, I wouldn't wish pain on
anyone because I feel that life is already hard. I
would just wish that people opened up their hearts and
minds to the tools that would help them deal with
that hardship better and not try and rely on what
they currently have in their toolkit.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
That would be my wish. It asks me what my
wish is?

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Right.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
The only way I can like and subscribe to that
state is if we modify slightly and say, I wish
that people could develop a profound sense of self worth
and avoid all of that. But I don't think they can,
and so this may be a cruel twist of evolution. Like,
I want to be very clear, I'm not saying I'm
glad it is this way. I'm just saying I think

(44:44):
it is this way. Now. My beef with the idea
of I wish that, you know, these horrible things upon
people is that it breaks most of the people that
it touches. But I don't think people can become a
version of themselves so they'll be proud of unless they
go through that stuff.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
So I think the compassionate monk and me can't wish
that on someone in that way. And you could argue
that real compassion is letting the right thing happen to
someone that they need to go through.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
I just don't think and that is what we're.

Speaker 3 (45:15):
Ooh, that's interesting. So here here was my catch with
one of the reasons I didn't have kids. I knew
I would intervene if something bad was happening. Now, as
I get older, I feel like I might be more
capable of letting it happen. But at the time when
I was sort of peak like should we should we not?
I was like, I know, I will intervene. Would you intervene?

Speaker 2 (45:37):
It's always do you want to have kids? I don't know.
There's the answer.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
We don't know.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
We've been we've talked about it. We're very like we're
probably at that stage, and so we've been very open
about it.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
We're like, we don't know. And partly it's these kind
of things.

Speaker 1 (45:51):
Partly it's how it affects service and impact how there's
so many there's so many things, right, there's so many
facets to that question of.

Speaker 3 (45:59):
So, let's say darr who has two children, your co
host on your show, Yea Darren Jay. For those that
aren't liking and subscribing yet, would you want them to intervene?

Speaker 1 (46:12):
When I saw so, I saw a couple of parents
that I was friends with a few years back, and
I remember that their two year old was like putting
her hands through a candle, like on the other side
of the room. So we were all hanging out here,
there two yearlds running around, and there two year olds
on the other side of the candle and they're doing that,
and my natural instinct at the time, this is probably
like maybe like eight years ago, my natural instinct was

(46:35):
to go and be like, help that kid. And I'm
always mindful of other people's kids too, because I just
feel like something, you know.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
And I was about to jump up and help her,
and they're like, no, no, I leave it.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
She's fine, she'll if it hurts us, she'll know next
time not to touch that and let her learn by herself.
And I was like, wow, that's really impressive, Like I'm
scared your kid's gonna burn their hand and you're really
Now I'm not recommending either or My friends are great
parents and they're very loving, and that's the challenge today,
right Like a lot of peop would be like, oh
my god, they don't care about their kids. I think
they do care about their kids. I think they're really

(47:04):
great parents, but them allowing them their child to do this.
I would then see pictures of them they moved into
the countryside and stuff, and their kid would just be
like out like swinging on trees, like climbing stuff and
falling over. And they were so comfortable with that because
they had that mindset that there should be an openness.
Now I think there's that openness, but then there's intervening

(47:25):
when it gets really painful, Like what if your child
gets involved in drugs? Are you not going to intervene?
Like are you not going to educate are you not
going to And obviously in all the right ways you'd
hope would be the healthy ways of intervening. I don't
think ever walking in and telling a kid to stop
or don't do that, is it ever going to work.
But to me, intervening is important at certain points where

(47:50):
you think it's like really going off the edge of
the cliff, versus when you feel like it's healthy experimentation
and you don't. But I'm saying this obviously in theory because.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
I don't have to. But when I look at it
with my the closest person I can compare it to
is my sister. So my sister's five years younger than me.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
When she was born, I held her in my hands
and I felt like I've parented her in many ways.
She's I call a kid like that's my nickname for
my younger sister. And if I look at my sister,
I made mistakes by intervening too much sometimes. So I
didn't really want her to have a job growing up
because I worked a job growing up when I was fourteen,
and I didn't really think that that was healthy for her.

(48:29):
And now I look back and I was like, realized
that was a mistake like I should have let her work,
and I don't think that that was a good decision.
And so that's me going Okay, well that was a
bad intervention. And then there's other things where like we
have a really open relationship. She tells me all their
challenges with really good friends. She's not scared to tell
me something like that's the healthy part of it. And

(48:49):
so I look at like how parenting is so tough
because you look back and you're like, ah, I'm wiser now,
and then you look back and go, oh, I got
that right. So I think, whether it's kids or not,
I guess my point is I wouldn't wish pain on
someone because I think they're going through some sort of pain. Anyway,
that's my point. I can't wish pain on someone. That's
I'm really I hear it.

Speaker 3 (49:11):
What is the formula, like if you want to be
in a healthy relationship, what what's the number one things?
The number one thing people get wrong? And what is
the fix?

Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, so I'm going to give you three I break
them each down in this book. So the three are
and the first one simple and basic, then and then
it gets more complex and interesting. So the first one
is you have to like their personality, you have to
like their company, you enjoy being around them, You enjoy
being around them for longer periods of time, which is
an important experiment. Like I read a study that showed

(49:43):
to make someone a casual connection, you have to spend
forty hours with them.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
For a casual connection. WHOA.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
If you want someone to be considered a friend, it's
one hundred hours of time with that person. And if
you can consider someone a good friend, if you consider
someone a good friend a great friend, it's two hundred
hours plus. If you can't like someone's company for two
hundred hours of undistracted time, chances are you don't really

(50:16):
like their personality. We both know people that we would
love to spend a weekend with, but we wouldn't want
to see them every weekend. That's okay, Those can be
great casual friendships. We both know people that we wish
we could spend more time with, but we don't prioritize.
They're good friends, but they're not going to be the
best friends. And then we know people like our wives,
who we spend a considerable amount of time with, disproportionately

(50:38):
more with them than we do with any other human
on the planet, and you know, hopefully we make good decisions.
We're happy about those decisions. So when I look at
it that liking, that's what I mean. I liking that
person's company and personality. To give it some tangibility of
what that means. The second thing you need and this
is where I want to be very clear about my language,
because this word gets thrown a lot in relationship talk,

(51:01):
but I don't mean it in the same way. So
the thing is, you have to respect their values. And
what I mean by this is nineteen nine percent of
us in relationships are trying to make our partner respect
our values.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
We want them to like what we like. We want
them to love what we love.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
If I'm going to watch football on the weekend, I'd
love for you to come with me. If I think
that going towards this is really important, you should be there.
So we demand that our partner respects our value rather
than respecting theirs. And I'll give a tangible example. So,
for example, Radi's number one, and I ask a lot
of couples to do this exercise. If I'm working with someone,

(51:41):
I'll ask couples to rank their top three priorities, including
themselves in order.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
And most of the time one partner will say.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
You are you the partner, So you would say, Lisa,
if you're the kids, you'd say the kids and then themselves.
That's a general order that people will put. Now, sometimes
you get a curveball where someone goes, me, you the kids,
and every time someone writes that, their partner goes, how
could you put the kids third?

Speaker 2 (52:14):
How can the kids be third? Like how does that
make any sense?

Speaker 1 (52:17):
And how can you be first? And it's like, well no,
because I know that I don't want to give you
my leftovers. I want to give you the best of me.
So when you look at respecting someone's value, when I
look at rather these values, rather they's number one value
is family, her family. My number one value is my
purpose and my service to the world. Those are not

(52:38):
the same values. A lot of people say you have
to have the same values in a marriage. I don't
subscribe to that. I don't think you have to have
the same values.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
I think you have to.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
I think if you're looking for someone with exactly the
same values, you're going to take a lot longer to
find that person. I don't know anyone in the world
that I know that's happily married, and I'd love to
break it down with anyone who genuinely could say we
have the same exact values. So I respect rather the's
values family, which means when family a priority in decision making,
when family becomes a priority during the holiday season, when

(53:04):
family becomes a topic of conversation, I'm zoned in.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
That's something she deeply values and cares about.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
If she's going to choose family over anything, I'm gonna
be okay with that because she's made it very clear
that's her number one value. Same back at me if
I choose purpose over anything. She knows that's going to happen.
It's not a surprise. I know so many people who
are trying to get their partners to change their value,
and I just don't see that happening. Or that person

(53:34):
compromises their value and now feels less versions of themselves,
like a less adequate version of themselves. And now you're
dating the second best version of the person you love.
And so that's respecting values. And the third thing is
and this is what differentiates it is you are committed

(53:54):
to helping them get to their goals. You're committed. I
may like your goals, Tom, But we're not in love
and we're not in a relationship where I'm committed to
your achieving your goals.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
I deeply appreciate you in the world. I think you
have an amazing impact. But if someone asked me, Jay,
you could feel this way about a friend. I'm not committed.
I'm not actively doing something. I may support, a collaborate,
a help, but I'm not committed. Whereas with my wife,
I'm committed on a daily basis, going rather, what do
you want in your life?

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Where are you going? What do you need?

Speaker 1 (54:25):
What support do you need? What can I do for
you to help you get there? It's not about her
helping me get to my goals. She's thinking about that,
but I'm thinking about how is that? So those are
my things for a happy relationship. Those are three key things.
I mean, there's so many more things I could go into,
but they have to give the overview formulas those three things.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
So what trips people up? Are they? I'm assuming selection,
if that's such a big part, they just select the
wrong person.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
Yeah, why I think people select the wrong person because
they are looking for First of all, we select the
wrong person because we make so many snap judgments off
of a few basic inputs. So one of the things
that the wady Is talk about is something called the
six opulences. And we've talked about this before, we talked

(55:11):
about them in a different context. But the six opulences
are fame, wealth, power, beauty, knowledge, and renunciation. Those are
the six opulences. These are six things people pursue, people value,
people admire.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
Right, we can all agree with that.

Speaker 3 (55:29):
I love that renunciation made the list. Yeah, that talk
about self awareness.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Yeah, it's a huge one. And so those six are
the six opulences.

Speaker 1 (55:36):
And what we do in relationships, which is really interesting,
is when we find someone has one opulence, we ascribe
them other qualities. So someone is wealthy, we assume that
they must be organized and that they'll be organized in
the home. If someone is attractive, we assume that they'll
be able to articulate themselves effectively. If someone is powerful

(56:00):
at work, we assume that they're really good at organizing
date night. Right, there's these qualities we start ascribing people,
and so often what happens is one opulence does this
halo effect into making you believe that this person has
a lot more gifts and skills and qualities rather than
through research and learning and experience. You're just giving them

(56:22):
away to that person. And we do this in interviews, right,
we all know how the halo effect works in interviews.
If you're interviewing a more attractive candidate, you're more likely
to hire them. More attractive hostesses and waiters and waitresses
get bigger tips. Like this is just how human psychology works.
But it's very risky when you choose a life partner
based on how attractive someone was for thirty seconds. And

(56:45):
so I find that selection goes wrong because of that,
because we ascribe qualities because of one opulence rather than
actually seeing those qualities. It's like me saying to you,
when did Lisa realize she could trust you. I'm hoping
it's not day one, because trust is something that has
to be proven time and time and time again. Trust

(57:07):
is something that she has to see time and time again.
He said he was going to be there at this time.
He turned up.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
He said he was going to show up for this moment.
He showed up.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
That's trust. Trust is not built because someone was really
nice to you. And so trust is something we throw
away and I can dive into the levels of trust too,
But you.

Speaker 3 (57:28):
Know, yeah, I mean if those are the top notch sayings,
let's yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:31):
So I talk about four levels of trust. This is
actually in Think Like a Monk, but it fully connects
to this book. There are four levels of trust. My
belief is that whenever you meet anyone someone knew, your
relationship with them should start at zero trust. Now, what
we do in life is we believe that there's only
two things in everything. We think everything's binary right, black

(57:54):
and white, left and right.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
Trust. Don't trust? Now?

Speaker 3 (57:57):
Is zero trust sitting at the zero point between trust
and distrust.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
Zero is sitting at no trust beginning yes, because you.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
Don't have an active like you're not looking at them suspiciously.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
Correct, So I'm gonna get yes. So I'm gonna give
you the level. So the idea, So the first point
being that we see trust as too binary. I have
people I trust and there's people I don't trust. To me,
that's too limited, and it doesn't help because what that
means is if I like someone, I automatically trust them,
which is massively unhealthy. And so what I'm saying is

(58:30):
that zero trust is correct between distrust at the bottom
and then trust higher, but there's three levels in between.
So when I meet someone, especially if you're dating them.

Speaker 2 (58:40):
You have zero trust in them. The next step is
transactional trust.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Transactional trust is I know when this person says they're
gonna do something, they do it. I know there's an
equal exchange in the transaction. I like, if I say
I'm gonna do this work and you're gonna pay me
this amount, I know you're gonna pay me at that time,
that's transaction trust.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
It's what you have to do.

Speaker 1 (59:01):
Employees, it's what you have to do. Teams, it's what
you have with colleagues. We don't want this because it's
not sexy. It's not it doesn't feel like love. It
feels too professional, it feels too corporate. But really, every
single person has to go through these levels with you.
The next stage is reciprocal trust, where you know someone
loves you and appreciates you and will do good for you,
but you're not counting, you're not checking.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
You know.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
It reciprocates naturally, it cycles around. This is a healthy
level of trust after some time where the transaction has
been proven over and over again. Now you don't need
the contract right now, you don't always need to sign it.
And then the fourth stage, which I believe is practically impossible,
is unconditional trust, which is that god like trust that
we all want in the person we end up with.

(59:45):
The problem is we give unconditional trust away early and
then we fall down those levels to zero trust. And
why we feel so let down by people because it
just felt like we felt down four flights of stairs.
That's why breaking trust feels so deep, because you gave
someone level for trust when you should have started at

(01:00:05):
zero and work their way up. So let people earn
your trust when you talk about being worthy, like, let
someone earn your trust. Let someone be worthy of your trust.
Don't just give it because they're nice and kind and
they brought you a gift, right, So.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
Why do you think we have that instinct? Is it
just the halo effect of you are kind to me
and I'm letting not spill over into other areas.

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
I think we just want to be loved so desperately.
We're so desperate for it because it's been put on
this pedestal that this is the defining factor of success
in life is could you find someone to love you,
because then you'd be lovable then you'd be worthy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
Then you'd have what it takes.

Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
If you were able to convince someone to spend their
life with you, then you're worthy. And we're so desperate
for that that we will happily speed through those Instead
of two hundred hours, we'll tell someone we love them
in two months, because we'd rather have it and think
we lost it than to have never found it at all,

(01:01:06):
because never having found it means we were never worthy,
whereas if we found it and lost it, and even
if it wasn't perfect, at least there was some part
of us that was lovable. And that's why we'll stay
in toxic relationships. That's why we'll settle for people who
are not worthy for us, because we'd rather feel like
we're in love than actually build it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
And I think that's the challenge, is.

Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
That we live in such a feeling world as opposed
to a building, creating world, which is a doing world,
which is an action world. I start the book with
this beautiful statement of this conversation between a student and
a teacher, often attributed to the Buddhen. So a student
goes up to the Buddhen and says, what is the
difference between I like you and I love you. And

(01:01:47):
the Buddha replies, when you like a flower, you simply
pluck it and throw it away, or when you love
a flower, you water it daily. And to me, that
is the difference, because we're so scared. Yeah, we're so
desperate to just smell that flower, observe its beauty for
a few moments, toss it away. But that person who

(01:02:08):
turns up every day and waters that flower and gives
it the sun and gives it the soil, no one
wants to be that person. But that's love. Then you
have a beautiful garden. Then you have this beautiful view
every day of all these flowers that you grew. And
so to me, it's the desperation of the feeling of
being loved. Is is making a settle for Lester.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
It's really interesting now you say that nobody wants to
be that person because of the effort and energy, Like
this is something that Lisa and I say a lot,
and I'll be curious to see if you agree with this.
I think you will. That love love really isn't enough
just to be super cliche for a second, that really
a relationship isn't just about love. That's one of the components,
but it's going to take a lot of work, but

(01:02:47):
work of the kind that you describe, watering it, making
sure it has enough sun, you know, wiping the leaves down,
make sure there's no bugs on it. It's an attentiveness, yeah,
an investment maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
And it's un sexy, right. I keep using that word too,
because it's not what's been portrayed. It's not what it's
meant to feel like. It doesn't look like that Pinterest board.
It doesn't feel like the wedding day every day, right,
like the challenges that I think. I mean, I was
looking at the studies the amount of money that gets
spent on weddings. It says the more you spend on
your wedding, the more likely aor to divorce earlier. Like really, yeah,

(01:03:19):
that's the trend, Like you have a shorter wedding, the
more you spend on your you have a shorter marriage.
The more you spend on your wedding is what the
studies show. And so when I saw that, I was
just like, Wow, I didn't spend that much on my wedding. Thankfully,
now I'll get the studies. But I was looking at
that and again I'm not again I'm not saying don't
have a big wedding. I have a big wedding, and
I love big weddings. I love attending. I'm just saying

(01:03:40):
that it's interesting how much if you think about it.
When you're planning a wedding, you organize a priest. The
priest is there to remind you of your commitments. When
you get married, who's your priest? Who's reminding you of
yourments every day? We never think about that. When you

(01:04:03):
get married, you have a guest list. The guest list
is made up of people who love you and support
your marriage. When you're married, how deeply do you think
about the people you're surrounded by and how much they
build the community of helping you flourish in your marriage.
At your wedding day, you think about what you wear,

(01:04:25):
what you say to that person. From the moment you
wake up to the moment you go to sleep. You're
conscious of eating every one of your words, maybe hopefully
trying to be at least in your marriage.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
That goes out of the window.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
So you think about the amount of forget the money,
the amount of effort that goes into planning one day.
Imagine if you took all that effort and used it
to plan a marriage. How successful would every marriage be?

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:04:50):
It's a shift of energy, and it's a shift of
mindset and saying we spend so much time, money, energy, resources, attentiveness,
your word to plan a wedding, but there's no attentiveness
to plan a marriage or a long term relationship if
you don't want to be married.

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
Why do you think it is that if you're spending
a lot of money on the wedding, that that's inversely
correlated to the length of time that you stay married.
Is it just messed up priorities? What is that?

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
I mean, I think it's hard to I'd have to
look deeper into it. I mean, it's hard to stereotype
because I guess there's so many of both, right, I'm
sure there's other things that buck the trend. I think
there's a part of it that you could say that
the bigger the wedding or any gesture, not even wedding,
any gesture you're trying to overcompensate for, trying to make

(01:05:43):
this feel like it's special and important. I think sometimes
people can throw their partners amazing birthday parties in order
to make up for the whole year.

Speaker 3 (01:05:51):
What do you think about now? It seems like the
trend and I don't have the data, but I'm almost
certain this is accurate, that people are getting married less
and less and less and less. Yeah, I've seen having
less sex less kids. Like it's a trend that freaks
me out. Are you at all concerned?

Speaker 2 (01:06:05):
That's a great question.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
I'm not concerned about people not getting officially married if
they're in committed, long term relationships that are healthy.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
I think it's a catastrophic error.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Interesting. Why do you think the certificate and the commitments are.

Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
Imporant abstracted from the certificate? You need to do something.
There is a lack of ritual in our lives now.
So I read The Power of Myth when I was
I think maybe even before I met Lisa, but certainly
before we got married, and the book was talking about how, hey,
the big problem with society today is there's no coming

(01:06:42):
of age ritual. Part of the reason the divorce rate
is so high, he speculated, was because there was no
like real ceremony that meant something, that reminded people you're
a different person on the other side of this. And
so for me, I read that and was like, Okay,
when I get married, that's going to be it one
and done, never again, barring death, and or I mean, look,

(01:07:02):
you make this point in the book several times. If
you're an abusive relationship, get out. I one hundred percent
agree with that, assuming I'm not.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
That.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
I wanted something that would really remind me that I
was a different person. So I wanted it to be painful,
and I wanted it to be permanent, and so I,
as an act of a ritualistic scarification, I got a
tattoo and got married and had the priests and the
waving of the smoke and all that. And even though

(01:07:31):
it was all in not only Greek, which I didn't
speak at the time, it was an ancient Greek, so
whatever few words I did know, I really couldn't hang
on to. But there was something about the sense of
ritual and importance of people in fancy dress and like
all of that that it really did allow me because
I was willing to say, this is a big moment,

(01:07:52):
I'm never going to be the same again, and then
reinforce that by getting the tattoo, and the whole time
I was getting the tattoo, I was focusing on the
pain and say saying this is forever. This is a
way of permanently altering my body so that I never
forget that I've made a commitment. And I think people,
if you're not even willing to go through a typical
marriage ceremony, like brah, your chances of going through dude. Look,

(01:08:18):
first of all, I've been married for twenty years. I
know what I'm talking about. And this went from I
was going to be the breadwinner wife, stay at home,
take care of the kids, to not having kids and
my wife becoming an entrepreneur. If you don't think that
was like some radical change. And through all of that,
I just knew divorce isn't an option. So since I'm

(01:08:41):
completely unwilling to be in a loveless marriage, how do
we grow together? And because it was like, well, I'm
not going to be in an unhappy marriage and I'm
not exiting the marriage, that only leaves making the marriage awesome,
And so all of a sudden, it's like, okay, well,
clarity of thought, I need to focus on making this awesome.
And when people don't have that, there's just an attitude

(01:09:03):
of like disposability from sex to marriage. And look, I
am not opposed to casual sex. I've had my share.
It was mostly fun. There were a couple of times
we talked about earlier where I was like, Okay, well,
even if it's a one night stand, I need to
be interested in the person. That's my own personal realization.

(01:09:24):
So I think people need to take that not more seriously,
like terrifyingly seriously, because that person is going to shape
you in ways you can't imagine. And if you go
into that like whatever, like you're living your life by
the law of accident. And I see that echoed through.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
So I love the idea of what you said about ritual,
Like I think richual is a powerful They're important.

Speaker 2 (01:09:47):
I mean they're totally part vaded culture. Like ritual's everything.
Like rituals are those you know.

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
Me and weddings are like days, seven days Jesus.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
To make you realize having put on this commitment is
like you get married with someone over seven days and
you meet all their family and they meet all of yours.
Like there's an imprint, right, And that's the word is
some scara, Like some scara means impression or imprint. These
rituals leave imprints or impressions that are powerful to help
you become new or to become more.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
And so I agree with that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:22):
And the only thing that I think I'm open to
is that people take a little bit longer to decide
before they commit, and that if you are in a
marriage that I think there are just so many people
today that are married that aren't using your mindset of

(01:10:44):
I don't want to be in a loveless marriage.

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
What do we do?

Speaker 3 (01:10:47):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
I literally will And by.

Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
The way, I see you and Lisa as just like
I Talking to you about this stuff is so exciting
for me because I love how you and Lisa love
each other. I love how you talk about your rules.
I love how you talk about your principles. I love
how you talk about the lessons and I agree with them.
Like I think we're very aligned and I'm very much earlier.
This book isn't about my relationship. This book isn't about
look at how successful my marriages. I've not been married

(01:11:12):
for that long. This book is about studies and the
vaders and science and the research.

Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
And the tools.

Speaker 1 (01:11:17):
But the one thing I will say is that I
check in with RADI regularly and I'll often do an
alternative and I'll say, is this relationship going in the
direction you want, and I'll check in with it. I'll say,
is this relationship actually going in the direction you want?
If it is great, what are we doing right? And

(01:11:38):
if it isn't, what direction do you want to go in?
And what is that require of you? And what is
that require of me? And I'll be ready to commit
to that. And that has been one of the healthiest
questions for me to ask, because I'm like you, I
don't want to live longer than a couple of hours
in a loveless relationships and it's something within my control.

(01:12:01):
Like I don't want something within my control to be
painful for longer than it needs to be. I don't
want to be in a relationship where I don't talk
to you for a week. I don't want to be
in a relationship where we argue for a month about
the same thing. I didn't subscribe to that, Like, that's
not what I committed to, Like I didn't set my
life up in a way to live with pain for
years and years and years. And I saw that in

(01:12:23):
my family, and I was like, no way do I
want to create that in my life. So I'm going
to do everything possible, But what I find is that
a lot of people are in relationships where there isn't
a collaborative approach. I at least kN you are collaborators
in this. Me and RADI are growing into collaborates. And
this is like, if you're not with someone who's collaborative,
it's really tough. I meet a lot of people who

(01:12:45):
are like, I'm ready to do the work. I want
to do the work, but then their partner doesn't reciprocate
with any energy or any enthusiasm because they think we
already did it. We got married, we had the kids,
we both have a job, we have a house you
worried about, right, Like, that's the response people here. And
I'm speaking to that person and saying, well, if you
need to slow down getting married, it's okay. And if

(01:13:08):
you are married and it's not going in the right direction,
that's okay. But because I don't want to put I
don't want to put pressure on people to think that
marriage is the achievement. And I know you're not doing
that either, but I think a lot of people see
marriages the end and the achievement as opposed to the beginning.

Speaker 3 (01:13:24):
It's the container, it's the container, but it's not seen
that way. Yeah, it's interesting. So Lisa and I got married.
At the time, it's it did feel like we were young,
but by today's standards, we were infants.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
Aha.

Speaker 3 (01:13:38):
It's really crazy. But when I think about how much
if you can construct the right container, it will improve
your life vastly. The reason I'm so celebratory of marriage
is that nothing, and I mean nothing, not business, ambition
and self improvement. Nothing has given me as much as
my marriage now because I treat it like the flower

(01:13:58):
that I water and keep the bugs off and make
sure it gets sunlight and all that stuff. I mean,
it's a massive amount of time and attention. But when
I think about what the human animal is wired for,
it actually isn't necessarily just a monogamous marriage, but you
can go in different paths. It's actually something I wasn't
sure if it would come up today. I think that

(01:14:19):
there is a buffet of offerings that are available to
work with human wiring. And depending on the circumstance into
which you are born, you will either be in polyamorous
polyandros where there's multiple males which is to one female,
which is very unusual, and then monogamous and it's utterly

(01:14:43):
I'm so aware that those are real that I make
sure that I take more time and attention to grow
the one that I'm in in the right way, if
that makes sense. So, but knowing that I do have
the wiring to thrive within this, have to be very
thoughtful about how we mix that cocktail. In the book,

(01:15:05):
you talk about like defining love and making sure that
you understand each other's fighting styles, and all of that
gets really wonderfully practical. You've got the fighting quiz where
people can go figure out, like what's my fighting style?
Do you put the same kind of attention on understanding
whether the words you use or masculine energy or feminine.

Speaker 1 (01:15:26):
I didn't spend a lot of time in the book
on masculine and feminine energy only because I think that
it's not in our current vocabulary, and it's not really
how the Vedas ultimately treat everyone as a soul. And
so that's already beyond gender and beyond energy in the

(01:15:49):
sense that we are all equal energy. So the ved
has come at it from a standpoint of you and
me are made of the same stuff consciousness wise, there
is no difference in the consciousness that you onn that
I am, or anyone in this room or anyone in
the world, and therefore I am not superior inferior to
any other individual. Hence we can only ever be a team.
So when you really going to the core of the

(01:16:09):
teachings that I kind of live my life by, I
can't start to see better or worse, or bigger or not.
So I don't just look at Radi as a team
member on the fact that she's my wife. I see
as a team member because I see her as consciousness
and divine energy, which is the same as the energy
that's within me.

Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
Because I'm not this body, right Like.

Speaker 1 (01:16:28):
I genuinely believe that the core of my being is
that I'm not a physical body, and so it's very
hard for me to get lost in conversations around physical
body and gender based or masculine feminine energy because at
the core of it, that's not how I'm structuring my life.

Speaker 3 (01:16:45):
How does that influence the way that you think about it?
Because I'm the exact opposite. I am. I am of
this body nothing else. When I die, it's a light switch,
I'm gone. If you take a needle in jab a
part of my brain, it's going to impact how I'm
able to process the world. So it's very direct how
I which is probably a big part of the reason

(01:17:06):
I'm so tactical. I just view the world through that lens.
It is my temperament. So if you don't have that,
would you call yourself a duellist? Like where spirit and
body are completely separate?

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
No, So it's like, well so yeah, So in off
Phloso it's called simultaneous one indifference, so it's both.

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
It's like you have the I'm I'm living in this body,
but I am not this body.

Speaker 3 (01:17:32):
So the idea you be separated from, Like, do you
believe in an immortal soul that will outlive everybody? Yes? Yes,
and sorry to be so grounded in the physical. Does
that continue to exist in a physical place or there
is another realm that we don't have access to when
we're in this body.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
Yeah. So the philosophical understanding that I have is that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
The consciousness continues to seek physical form to experience physical
pleasure and physically experiences until the point that it is
materially exhausted and is able to truly live in its
full consciousness, not needing a physical form to exercise physical
needs and.

Speaker 3 (01:18:10):
Design, and how does that consciousness manifest itself once it's
transcended the pursuit of physical pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:18:17):
It's described in quality, not in Obviously I have no
experienced that, so sure my only experience of it is
through meditation and practice.

Speaker 3 (01:18:25):
And is it an intuitive understanding that you would be
hard pressed to put into language.

Speaker 2 (01:18:31):
No, it's a state.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
Well, the state is described as full of knowledge, eternal,
and full of bliss. That's the state in which we're living.
And so what I'm explaining is that through what we
call purification of consciousness, once the material body is no
longer useful, you're then living in that full spiritual consciousness.

Speaker 2 (01:18:52):
Would be a spiritual form, a.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
Form that is not doesn't bleed when you cut it,
it doesn't get damaged, it doesn't get hut. It is
an eternal form that doesn't have those needs or fallibilities,
I guess is the right word.

Speaker 3 (01:19:07):
So if in the Christian tradition there is this place
called heaven, which at least is sort of like a
physical place that the spirit goes and lives out, it stays,
and you will be reunited. Admittedly I'm not a Christian theologist,
so I'm sure I'm getting some of this wrong. But there's,
at least in popular culture, there's the idea to transcend

(01:19:28):
into heaven. It's a place there are people that you know,
in love, you're reunited. So there's a sense of recreating
still the physical world, just in a non physical form.
It's what, at least in design circles you call skewmorphic.
So you're taking what you know, and even though you're
trying to imagine something completely different, you tend to cram
it in to the same thing. Right, So we imagine
in clouds and stuff like that. What's that version in

(01:19:52):
the Vedic tradition?

Speaker 1 (01:19:53):
Yeah, So the Vedic tradition is there is an eternal
divine relationship with the Supreme Being that in this space
everyone has that unique experience and unique relationship with each
other and Divinity personally.

Speaker 3 (01:20:07):
So would you meet Radley again in that space.

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
Hopefully if we're both making back. Yeah, and Radley's definitely
a vagage I take that back. Yeah, Rady's good, but
not necessarily as my partner, not as the way I
see her here, as a completely different version to what
I see here, because this is just simply one lifetime

(01:20:32):
on a notch of lifetimes.

Speaker 3 (01:20:34):
And does that at all inform your marriage.

Speaker 1 (01:20:38):
That informs our marriage in the beautiful sense of the
detachment with the love, in the sense of there's a
feeling of I love this person, I'm so glad I
found them in this lifetime to do this life with,
to serve in this way, to have this impact, to
choose to want a better humanity, to leave it a better,

(01:21:00):
a happier, healthier place, to leave it a more healed
place that unites us in a profound way that I
couldn't have have with anyone else who didn't feel that
way about it. And at the same time it detaches
me from recognizing, you know, this isn't everything either, and
that's okay, Like it's you know, let's not make this

(01:21:20):
the be all and end all of everything either, Like
this is just one experience, it's one aspect. And so
I think there's this beautiful connection, but then healthy detachment
that comes from both and the ultimate understanding that she's
not my property, she does not belong to me, I
don't own her, and that she's on her own journey too,
and that that journey is the most important journey that

(01:21:43):
I'm supporting her on. And this journey is the most
important journey she's supporting me on, beyond all the other
stuff that we're doing together. Like, that's the journey we've
committed to. So I think it has a profound impact
on how we conduct our lives.

Speaker 3 (01:21:56):
It stops you from snipping the flower.

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
Absolutely, And even though me and you have very different
overall and that's why I've always found fascinating to sit
down with you. Even though me and you have very
different systems of overall belief or philosophy of like what
our container is, of how we view life, we approach
life far more similarly than many people I know, Like

(01:22:20):
I consider myself to be highly and as you say
in the book, we have fight stars, we have the
relationship problems, Like there's so much tactical, practical stuff in
the book because that's how I view life too. I
view life as highly strategic, but with a spiritual lens.
And I think that it's I find that really interesting
how we're both trying to approach life through strategy, through systems,

(01:22:41):
through processes, despite having you know, me having much more
of a philosophical and I guess intangible view of reality.

Speaker 3 (01:22:51):
Do you know, Donald Hoffman, I don't as.

Speaker 2 (01:22:53):
In from the Hoffmann process. No, So.

Speaker 3 (01:22:58):
This may be why, although you probably push back on this,
so as somebody who's agnostic, meaning I literally just don't know.
I have no idea what the truth is.

Speaker 2 (01:23:07):
But I don't think anyone does. And I kind of
live with that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:09):
Like people always ask me, like, where do you see
or someone, I'm like, I don't know either. But I'm
having read the theology and spirituality and the modern day
New Age everything that I have, I'm betting on this
and so it's simply a hypothesis. And I'm very open
about that. I'm very cool with that because I just

(01:23:30):
think life is a hypothesis. Pretty much everything I do
every day is a hypothesis. There's no genuine truth that
I can say that I know for a fact that
this is what happens when this happens, including doing this interview,
including whatever, writing this book, like what comes from it
is so different and so diverse than you could expect.
So I lived my life in an hypothesis. So I've

(01:23:52):
studied plenty of books and researched and spoken to people
and sat with teachers and sat with masters, and I've
come up with what I've is my hypothesis based on
that experience, and I think everyone's entitled to the hypothesis.
And that's why I don't consider myself with you. I
always end up talking about some of my own beliefs
or values or philosophies that I identify with. But why

(01:24:13):
I don't preach them or why I don't impart them
on others, is because that's not my goal, right Like,
my goal is to help people navigate reality in what
we can see, feel, and hear. And then I have
my own set of beliefs and values that guide my
moral compass, But those are not the ones I'm imparting.
Those are not what people are being exposed to because
I see them as two separate things. My compass on

(01:24:36):
a deeper level is different to the work I'm doing
in the world to help people navigate this. This is
all based on fact and truth and experience and you
know reality. The book is based on that. Think like
a monk is based on that. But the beliefs that
I have are a hypothesis. Those are not the ones
I'm sharing.

Speaker 3 (01:24:52):
I love that. Yeah, where can people follow you as
you explore your hypothesis?

Speaker 1 (01:24:56):
The best place right now is eight Rules of Love Dog.
That is the place to find my new book, A
Rules of Love, which will guide you through everything from
finding love, keeping love, dealing with heartbreak and then finding
love again.

Speaker 2 (01:25:11):
That would be the best place to find me right now.

Speaker 1 (01:25:15):
M

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