#968 - Dr Rick Hanson - The Psychology of Obsession, Rumination & Letting Go

29:51You know, it can orbit the stick, but it doesn't get released. It's not free. It's not truly autonomous. We're captured by our remanations. They seem so beguiling, right? They're seductive. We get caught up in them, and we're captured by them. That's not good. So yeah, think productively about things and feel the feelings along the way. I'll say for me that there are a couple of keys that can be really helpful. So when you find yourself starting to ruminate about something, be aware of it. And what you can do is to continue to reflect on whatever that was or let that movie play, but go wide. try to get a sense of your whole body, your whole mind because when we reminate we're locked onto that particular tile in the mosaic of consciousness.

30:43Other stuff's happening but we're sucked into that part and so it's good to kind of go wide because when you go wider you don't suffer so much and you take more into account and with that does technically a remination typically involves a lot of activity in the midline cortex, including the rearward portions, the default mode. And so, when we go wide, that tends to engage networks on the sides of the brain, especially right hemisphere for right handed people, because that's gestalt processing, holistic processing. And that tends to quiet activity in midline cortices. Wow, so go wide. And including go wide too, all the many things that were involved in that conversation at dinner that didn't go well.

31:27You know, this, where she was coming from, where you were coming from, the other people, the stuff that was happening, big picture, going wide really helps. And then also, especially as you can, try to feel below the surface. What's really going on here? That's being kept at bay by the hamster wheel of ruminating underneath the surface. And then third, try to come to a conclusion. What's the takeaway? What's the takeaway? What's the wisdom from here? How are you going to operate from now on? and what have you realized? So those three things, going wide, feeling below the surface and going after the takeaway, then that makes rumination productive and you're using this incredible neurological hardware for its best purposes.

32:11Not being trapped by it. Yeah. Why is repetition and compulsion weirdly comfortable in a way? What you know what I mean? It's like putting on an old leather pair of shoes, you know exactly how they squeak. They've sort of molded around that weird big toe you've got from when you kicked a football wrong and eight -year -old So funny. Well another story. Sorry. I was hanging out with a friend who I was talking to a buddy and let's see My friend was saying oh man. I've had my head up my ass lately talking about mistakes he'd been making and so forth. And his buddy replied on the volley just really quickly, yeah, but it's great to be home again.

33:01Right? There's Freud called it the repetition compulsion. Familiarity. We're drawn to familiarity because it's safer. You know, again, from a evolutionary standpoint, the known is safe, even if it's the known bad thing, the devil you know. right? That's known. And what's not yet known, that's where threats could lurk back in the Stone Age or Jurassic Park. And so I think that's one part of it, certainly. I think in the background as well, it's sort of there's this reassuring continuity of selfing. Even though the content is being, when the content is familiar, the frame in which the content is known or experienced is familiar as well, and that I think that gives us a comfort.

33:54Then, of course, biology. Some people are a little more tilted toward OCD or compulsion or other people. And then there's another element, which is really interesting. I hope it's okay that I'm just kind of going through a lot of fast, but well you're familiar with the big five theory of personality factors. Great. So acronym ocean, OCEA and the first one is openness and people vary on a range both by genetics and then acquired tendencies and how open they are and people who tend to be You're in their own mind stream. Again and again and again. So I think that's part of the two. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep.

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35:19Plus, they ship internationally. So, head to the link in the description below. 8Sleep .com, Sash Modern Wisdom, using the code ModernWisdom. A checkout. That's e -i -g -t -sleep .com, Sash Modern Wisdom, and Modern Wisdom. a check out. I'm intrigued about why not only with rumination but with sort of planning for the future were so prepared to keep ourselves trapped inside of something that we don't enjoy. We've been here before. We've been across this terrain and we know that it's filled with upturned tax and we keep stepping on them and all of them are painful and you go yeah I know but it feels it feels familiar and I wonder whether I wonder whether there's a relationship here between the fear of a lack of control that uncertainty.

36:10Very nice. Yeah. Uncertainty is so abhorrent to us, to our ground, not knowing that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty. That's super brilliant. And do you think that's particularly common in people who have a career or a life history in which they've been rewarded a lot for being in control and having control and directing things in particular? Certainly, I think the people who have been rewarded for being right for performing, There is a particular sort of free flowingness that you have around the friends that, I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, I don't have the...

37:02And in some ways, their outcomes in life can be a little bit more high variance, you might say diplomatically, because they don't plan for the future in the same sort of way. And they don't necessarily foresee all of the potential pitfalls and they don't have the structure that at least in the modern world for most people bears a lot of fruit. Right? Being able to know what tomorrow looks like, iterating on habits, compounding interest of saving money and knowing when you're going away and knowing what time you need to wake up in order to be able to make it to work on time. So you don't get fired.

37:44You know, all of these things are really, really important. So you say, okay, the more control I have, the better my life gets. Including about many of the things you talk about, your own optimization, your own physical fitness, your own workout routines, your vitamin intake, and all the rest of that, yeah. For me, a lot more around the mind, the more control I have over my own consciousness, the better it goes. So yeah, those of us who, yeah, I think also, just to go into it. There was a lot about my childhood that was fine and I just felt that. Whoa, I got dropped in. Do a stream in which there wasn't that much control.

38:30They were bigger than I was, right? The head more power. They were doing all these things. They were upset about this than that. They were like, yeah. And so, yeah, then internally, for me, a refuge was to develop a growing sense of autonomy where I did have control and I would increasingly create little domains in which I was in charge, including what I was thinking about or paying attention to. So maybe in part, if people have a turbulent, dysregulated childhood or youth, then they're going to be more or particularly appreciative in healthy ways, even, that can then hijack in not so healthy ways to have to be in control, have to be, have to know.

39:12Yeah, I think it's just a, it's such an ironic tragedy that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe way worse than anything that could reasonably happen in the real world. I guess we're sort of going into forecasting as opposed to ruminating. Yeah. That's a kind of ruminating where you're caught up been imagining a future and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just I had this, I read this sentence, which it's kind of funny. I'm such an addict to memes or aphorisms that I'll happily take something that didn't mean what the author meant and then repurpose it into my own. It's kind of like when I first read Harry Potter when I was a kid and I'd never, I'd never heard the name Hermione read out loud.

40:04I'd only ever seen it written down. So I went four and a half books of Harry Potter convinced that it was Hermione and then they released the movie and they called her Hermione and I sort of rejected their interpretation of the authors, like a word that you know a name that's relatively common or whatever, but that I'd never heard. And I was like no, no, no, this is the way that, this is the way that I do it. Right. This is the way that I'm going to see it. And it's kind of the same is kind of the same with this, that we have our perspective on things. This is the way that this thing is going to be.

40:38And for me, I saw this sentence written and it was this author talking about thinking in superpositions. You know, you have this Schrodinger's, there's a degree of uncertainty. We don't know whether the cat is dead or alive. And then he was talking about how most people abhor the uncertainty so much, they need to collapse the superposition down into an answer. And this is what we do. When we fantasize catastrophe, we are collapsing the superposition of uncertainty. So, yeah, the idea of thinking in superpositions, I think is a nice... It's also cool. I love that. Yeah, thinking in superposition is such a thing.

41:19Oh, I'm going to take that away. Feel free. It's bastardized from someone that didn't mean it to mean what I meant it to mean. Oh, I'll be quoting you. You know, respect your sources. Let's go. It's like the human centipede of plagiarism. So this is so cool. So in the sandbox of relationships, let's say, and hurts about that and fulfilled longings, you know, the normal range, how can not knowing be helpful?

41:52Long pause here It's a good no mind. Yeah, don't know mine beginners mind don't know mind Receiving the next moment as it arises not knowing I had a friend a very deep in practice long time teacher Say to me quite a while ago. I sort of was asking him What do you what do you do at your core practice these days? That's a really useful question? I think for people that engage in practice like I'm kind of what's the primary what's a primary focus for you? He said, living with absolutely no expectations and to really track what absolutely no means. That's really something because the brain is an expectation generator.

42:33It wants to know. It freaks when it doesn't know. You know about people in these sensory deprivation tanks who will start to hallucinate because the brain needs content. It wants content. It's quite a deep thing to just not know. So I think back on people that I've been in wrangles with let's say of one kind or another who let's say to have truly mistreated me or I have myself felt sad and remorseful about something and I did a mistake on me or there's some Tangle where I can't believe they did that. I did not see that coming I have found it really helpful to when I can to say okay all that and Don't know.

43:14What's it feel like to don't know? No. Not without labels, don't know the meaning, the implication, just don't know. Suddenly it feels freer and looser. It's kind of not knowing it's like a kind of solv that dissolves, that congeals, crud of rumination. Hmm. Being comfortable with that. Yeah. How do you let in certainty to cultivate, don't know mind? I mean, that's a major practice in some traditions. Cultivate, don't know mind. And I think it's, for me, it's really fun because I'm a kind of scruffy autonomous type person. And I don't want my brain to control me. I don't want the program. I want to control.

43:58I want to control me even from myself. That's right. I want to be the ghost in the machine. I don't want the machine to control me. I'm living in the machine, not my inner being, whatever. And so I like disrupting. It's disruptive to not know. maybe so, or another way I put it, putting it as maybe so, don't know, maybe so. And I just wonder how, for you, for example, if we apply this to relationship issues, don't know. Don't know what the future will be, don't know what the past is meant, you know, just so much I don't know. To me, that feels like unpacking. It's very expansive. Yeah, it feels that way.

44:41Yeah, it's very open. It's um, the resistance can really only be generated once you've planted a stake in the ground somewhere, once you've made a position, right? And then you dug this thing in, this is, this is what I think was right. This is what I think happened. This is what I think will occur. And then everything begins to exist in relation to that. And that's where the resistance comes from, because there's something to resist against, like the dog running around the pole. But if you don't, it's total free -flowing, yeah, exactly. That's really nice. Do you write poetry? Any chance? I've actually started.

45:26I did it for the first time a couple of months ago. I really enjoyed it. That was just an intuitive sense of how your mind stream unfolds. Yeah. I've been hanging around with musicians a lot more over the last few months. And I always had this sense. Maybe everybody has this, that they assumed that their particular mode of communicating or their particular art form is the one that sort of maximally allows for effective communication. And I knew that music was able to say things that words can't, because there is sort of emotion and there is tension and release and there is swelling and there is harmony and there is rhythm and there is all of this stuff.

46:13But I don't think I'd ever considered fully that lyrics can say something that prose can't, that words, you know, that in absence of words, you're actually able to say more than if need to be more explicit that vagaries can be sort of more educating and insightful than precision can. And yeah, that, that I guess if you're not musically minded, which I'm not, the closest approximation that you can get to doing that is poetry. That's really lovely. Yeah, I don't think, well, I wrote a paper in college. There was an epic poem. Now that's the closest I've ever got to ever do poetry. I'm not sure it was any good.

47:04Yeah, the best poetry is like what we're talking about. It stops your mind. You know, like, it humors the same way. The gesture. I'm thinking of Lear's fool, King Lear's fool, right? The gesture who has privilege. You have that moment where your mind stops. And in that space is possibility, right? And the best poetry does that for us. What about letting go of emotionally charged memories, you know, stuff that has happened a good while ago and yet when we're at our, when we're sleep deprived, when we're feeling scared, when we're a little bit more vulnerable or we're a bit more agitated or whatever, this is the sort of thing that keeps coming back up.

47:50How do you come to think about letting go of emotionally charged memories from the past. Yeah. Well, that's been personally important to me. And it's also professionally, come squarely in my willhouse and the short version for me here would be we can't let go until we let in fully. And so very often when we go back to things is because there is some non -experienced experience that has been trapped in the neural nets of memory that needs to be released. And so the revisiting of that material, sometimes in the frame of a kind of doomed quest, like if only I could do this or that, I'd get the finally the blood from the starvation.

48:39Seeking, yeah. That's right, redemption, absolution, etc. Exactly. So we tend to go back to it, you know, again and again and again. And so therefore to truly let go, we have to really open and then resource ourselves so we can feel it most fully. But what typically happens when you feel it most fully is it moves through you. You have to be a little careful with the white hot core of trauma. So what I'm saying here is not necessarily true for that because there are certain experiences, they once they do get into emotional memory, they are not going to go. What's around them can change over time, the context, the understanding, the sense of self related to that terrible trauma, let's say, you know, can shift and you can become more regulated about not being so hijacked by that memory.

49:35But I think realistically for people, sometimes you can get a complete release, but just sometimes we have to live with it and then how do we live with it? Well, that's a whole topic which I think a lot involves letting ourselves turn a corner from it after we've really worked it through. You know, every time we recall that episode, we feel like crap. So we deliberately help ourselves to turn a corner so we don't keep revisiting that episode. That's a piece of truth. But I think so that's it's hard one wisdom, you know Version of this Another story so I was a kind of fearful kid and laying there in bed very active imagination As an adult I was prepping for the psychology license in in America where the the grill you on things and you have to know about the Rorschach the inkplod and so I took a Rorschach To prep for the license exam.

50:27I'll reveal something that I hope will not come back to haunt me which is So I did the Rorschach with someone who knew me well as a grad student grinding away Apparently young kids getting a lot of stuff done late 30s at the time and she came to me with the results She said are you feeling okay Rick? Well, I'm busy. I'm doing my dissertation. I'm trying to get licensed I got two young kids and I'm the sole provider of my family, but yeah, I'm feeling okay She said well there are some kind of psychotic features here

51:00And I was like, what? And she said, well, this is why, because when you look to the ink blood, you would give like six different possible images. And you could elaborate a lot of why you saw it and all the rest. And that sometimes happens with people who are crazy. And I said, huh, I'm not. You know, she said it also happens with people of a very rich imagination and are kind of creative and have a lot of access. So that pointed out a lot of psychedelics, a lot of inner work. You know, and I'm a performance kind of guy. I'm like, hey, how much can I see? I'm gonna see a lot of things I want to get an eye score So my point is I have a good imagination So there I was 10 years old and bad scared to death because I was convinced there was a monster under my bed And I could hear little sounds and I was alone and I Finally did one of the most the bravest things I've ever done.

51:51I kind of screwed up my courage I said, okay, I'm sick of this if you're under there eat my face You know, and I tucked my head, you know, I leaned over the bed to what was underneath it, knowing I could eat my face, and just once it dusted my knees under there. But I had to enter into it. You had to be brave enough, you know, to go into it. And I think that's what we have to do sometimes to get a full release from some of our deep material. To face it. And I imagine that the experiences that you had in psychedelics probably reinforced that as well. Yeah, exactly right. I had some of this is quite intimate to myself.

52:31I'd kind of leave it alone a little bit, but I had a lot of early experiences in psychedelics in which I'd look at, oh, I don't mind talking about it, actually. I'd look at kind of a screen like a ceiling, a white ceiling, and very quickly there would be these demonic devouring faces, bloody teeth, just like, whoa, I didn't like that, you know, and that was fairly recurring. And then a year or two or three of that passed with probably maybe five to ten trips during that time, closer to ten. Finally, I was in the park, highly recommended if you make it to California. And I was staring at a bush with thorns, you know, it does hurt.

53:26There's a lot of thorny bushes. And every thorn was a devouring face coming at me. And at that point, I just had had enough of it. And I said, okay, and I dove into the face, so vendor the devouring faces, demonic devouring, kind of feminine, witchy, you know, bloody, sharp teeth, jagged.

53:56And then in that moment, I got a release and realized that that, well, that was where these disowned pushed down in a way, parts of myself, that were witchy, kind of the opposite of my masculineized, logical, spot -like, top -down, leading within elect, ammo. Just like the wild witchy. And nice. I was very nice, my nice boy. And this was this disown part of me. I could feel the shivery in my body right now that I talk about it. And it was disowned, set away. And there was an integration of it in that moment. And ever after, I've never had a nightmare since. Wow. I've had dreams that were a little uncomfortable, like someone's trying to get me.

54:51So yeah, that's another, these are extreme examples. Have I, heroic? Not to praise myself, but just to say to other people, It's noble to step into the pain or to go for it into it. It's noble. It's heroic to do this. To feel it fully. A quick aside, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years now and it just got even better. AG1 next gen keeps the same simplicity once a day, but now comes with four clinical trials backing it. In those trials, AG1 next gen was clinically shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels within three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times even in healthy adults.

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56:05Right now, you can get a year's free supply of it to mean D3K2 and 5 free AG1 travel packs plus that 90 -day moneyback guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom. I love the idea of ordinary victories. sort of mundane successes like that. I've been thinking about these more and more recently that there's a lot of things that we overcome that are so kind of normal and unceremonious and unimpressive and inward and idiosyncratic as well. There's such a part of us that even trying to unpack and explain, which you very successfully managed to do that.

56:59But stuff that's even less grand than that. But you win. You win over this sort of little part of yourself. And I think that when we're talking about letting go, about dealing with change well, about being brave in the face of uncertainty, these are things that nobody is going to really pat you on the back for. Oh, you dealt with the inbuilt uncertainty of living in a universe that you don't have full control over. Congratulations, well done. Like, everybody has to do that. You just did it. But this time you did it with more grace. This time you did it with more equanimity. This time you did it more quickly, more deftly, did it more peacefully.

57:38You did it without castigating yourself. You did it without staying up all night, ruminating. And yeah, winning mundane victories, boring successes, I think is a, I know we should congratulate ourselves even more for those because the big success is everyone else going to congratulate you for. Oh, the new book was so fantastic. Oh, podcast episode. Congratulations on the wedding. It was so beautiful. You looked at them. They look at how well your kids doing in school. Like, yeah, you know, like the things, the things that are kind of obvious, but slightly more normal successes all the way up to the Nobel Prize and you got the most recent title, all the rest of the stuff, whatever, job promotion.

58:19Yeah, cultivating, reducing down the bar of what constitutes worthy of praise and success, even if it's just inwardly. Or maybe outwardly as well, like, hey, I did this thing today. I had this great, I'll invert you and I'll do story time. So I had this really lovely rancher and Wrangler, a guy called Dry Creek Dwayne on the show. About last year, he is an older fellow from Wyoming. Seven kids, old school guy, big beard, permanently got a cigar in his mouth, cowboy hat, old school, old school as fuck. You know, big man, raw, mangled hands from ranching and wrangling and picking at horse shoes and stuff in an entire career.

59:05And he has spent a long time dealing with, I think, quite a sort of classic that generation anger from sort of masculine discontent. And he's found himself at a really sort of beautiful place of peace. And he considers himself sort of the anti -grind set bro person. He's very much maybe the answer to your problem is to grab a cigar and sit on the back porch and read a novel and think about it a bit. You know, he's not, he's the notion template that you should use in the five step process that will allow you to track time, block the calendar for the next, he's none of that. And he was explaining this day where there'd been a particularly difficult horse and he was trying to break, domesticate, train this particular animal.

59:58And he had got up kind of on the wrong side of the bed And that day he wasn't feeling it, but he had to go to work and this is what he does. So apparently he went and he saw him not in his best state, horse, not in their best state either. And he went and he said he sat down and he just looked at the horse, the horse was in its stable. He sat down on this stool and he let up a cigar. He said, I smoked the first cigar. And then I let up a second cigar. I smoked the second cigar and I potted around a little bit and then I came back and my wife asked, so honey, how was your day? He said, well, I didn't break anything and that's a success.

1:00:41And I just thought that was so wonderful to be able to drop down. Yeah, everybody loves this idea of grand victories, right? We've got this, I think you've you've referred to it as your one wild and precious life. Mary Oliver's quote. Yeah. It's which is beautiful. And in built in that is this kind of pressure. Oh, I need to make the most of my day. I need to, this needs to be done now. Because if I do this now, then I can do something else next after now. And then tomorrow, now can also, I can, like, it's almost kind of like a denial of death. In a way, it's like, if only I could fit more life into my life, it wouldn't be like I'd push death further away from me.

1:01:28And inherent in that, in a meritocracy, in a capitalist world, in a world where people are growth -minded, and they want to achieve a lot, and I want to get things done, I want to make a game, I'm going to fit lots in. There's a pressure to do lots of things in that. And in some ways, that's impressive. There There are objective differences between walking 100 meters in a day and walking 100 miles in a day. There are differences in the experience. But on the flip side, if you can be the sort of person like Dwayne, for whom walking 100 meters is able to generate for you the same level of content and well -being as for someone else takes 100 miles, who's got it better?

1:02:17Because yeah, and I don't know, I just think it's a really nice redress to the more, more, more hungry ghost type approach that people have for achievement and that's not to say if you know, you're looking at a poster child for trying to make things happen and agency and autonomy and all that sort of stuff, but I certainly know that when I play with things with grace and ease and sort of more, I don't grip things so tightly I'm less attached to the outcomes of stuff that it doesn't really matter because I'm happy no matter what. It's, you know, is an enjoyable experience because so much of the unenjoyability of the thing is the gripping of it.

1:02:58And on top of that, the outcomes oddly enough in some weird circular way, the outcomes tend to be better as well. So yeah, I've been thinking an awful lot about, it's another fork on this. I was talking to a friend Alex, we did this huge four hour long episode a couple of weeks ago, and people really liked it. And there was this bit in there that I really want to work on. I'm going to try and write about it over the next few months and maybe doing essay on it. I think a lot of people are quite ashamed about taking pleasure in simple things. It sounds lovely. It sounds like a lovely thing to do, you know, just a cup of coffee and a a fresh morning or whatever it might be.

1:03:42But there's a little bit, at least in my mind, of really this, this is what considers, this is what constitutes like impressiveness to you. How, how pitiful, how shameful, how, how unimpressive is life for you to only need, what you know, you should be conquering mountains and, and, and forging pioneering forward and doing all of this stuff, it's that sort of masculine drive for more. This again, very sort of 21st century western, I want it, want it, want it, I'm going to build it. And the more that I kind of see, huh, I actually quite like simple things. I actually don't need to be all that impressive.

1:04:24And in the same way as Dwayne saying, well, I didn't make anything was today. I didn't break anything. And for him to go to bed and consider, that was a good day. I think cultivating that same thing, being able to get the pleasure from 100 meters that you could from 100 miles, being able to feel a sense of satisfaction in the boring and mundane successes in overcoming that little part of yourself even just once today that you did. I just think, Yeah, that's a lovely, a lovely redress to the hungry ghost that sits inside of all of us. Wow, really, wow. And you're nudging me to reflect on the relationship, the linkage between identifying with a heroic narrative that is your ego ideal, that you're identifying with, everything has to be big, big, big lights.

1:05:23And the difficulty in actually feeling, deep feelings of rejection, failure, and defeat. If we become more able to tolerate experiences of, in the sandbox rejection or more broadly, defeat, failure, they won. They scored on me. I will never get justice here. They scored. I was once walking down a hallway in high school. I went to a large high school in California, 2700 people. And I was just kind of spaced out. As I walked in past all these kids, you know, transition period, somebody punched me hard in the stomach. I was walked on by. And I was not a kid who fought a lot. I didn't have active enemies.

1:06:08someone just clocked me for no reason. Bam! And I'm like stunned. I turn around. A couple of seconds ago, I was going by, I see a sea of moving heads going down the hallway. I'll never score on that kid. I'll never get justice for that boy. I'm sure who punched me. So, do we accept that? But if we can accept rejection and failure and defeat and not being special, Then we get less hijacked by and we have less ruminating about this heroic narrative of the magnificent that our life must be and anything short of which is not acceptable. How do you think about the role of humor and sort of play with this?

1:06:55I get the sense that the sort of people who listen to your show with your son which everyone needs to go and check out being well is awesome. I just had a doctor Scott Eilers on, the depression guy, who I learned about from you guys. He's so good. I imagine lots of people listen to your show. I certainly know lots of people that listen to my show. They're serious people that earnest. You know, they're like, they want to get, I want to do stuff. I want to make my impact here. And I want to, I want to really want things to happen. But there's a kind of brittle fragility that comes along with seriousness as well, if that makes sense.

1:07:34And I wonder, you know, in the little armory of things that we have to play with, you know, this, I'm okay with uncertainty. That's one of the lessons from today. Like sitting in the thinking in super positions, right? I'm gonna allow these worlds. I don't need to collapse this down. The don't know mind. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe so. Okay, that's lovely. That's a nice area here. I wonder how you come to think about the role of absurdity, humor.

1:08:15Well, for myself,

1:08:20Yeah, playfulness. So one detail is that research shows that little juvenile rats who play with each other have more neurotrophic factors in their brain which promote new connections. So play is actually a factor of learning. And so if you care about learning broadly, you know, development, healing, like what happens in therapy, playfulness is a real aid. People listen, let's say to you or to me, and it's nice in the moment, and is there some interest in an ROI, not out of needing to have this magnificent narrative of constant growth in your life, but just plain common sense. Yeah, I'd like to have some kind of lasting gain from listening, let's say to you or to me.

1:09:08And so, playfulness promotes that kind of learning. And I think back on how many therapy sessions I did with people that were so somber, so inert, and there's no playfulness, and they didn't get anything out of it. While they're not in their heads, oh yeah, dark, that's right. No lasting learning. Play really promotes lasting on the one hand. On the other hand, you're raising the question about certain ways of being that maybe in particular cultures or gender socialized types are devalued like earnestness. You know, it's sort of embarrassing to be really earnest and sincerely earnest, not just in some problematically ponderous or pompous earnestness, but a kind of vulnerable sincerity in which there's wanting the best.

1:10:02Please, sir, may I have another bowl? I think of the risks.

1:10:11There's no escape valve. There's no get out of jail for you. Reveal. Yeah, exactly. You're seeing. You're seeing there's no, I didn't keep half a foot out of this situation. This is me opening up. Yeah. You are pegged to this stake with the risks that are entailed. That's what I wanted. And this is really what I wanted and I really wanted it and I said it. Yeah. And to me, to go back to, I love what you said about really appreciating small victories so forth, to go back to the nobility. And I kind of relate to that in an early Buddhist frame of, these are the truths for noble beings, not noble by birth, but noble by effort.

1:10:48There's a nobility in letting yourself feel deeply or be revealed deeply. Like to go back to that maybe conversation in dinner that went bad to say, you know, at At the end of the day, I was there in good faith. Maybe I was on skillful. I said this or that. There's lessons to learn for the future. I was there in good faith. I was there with my whole heart, deep down. And I was brave enough to be earnest and sincere enough to kind of lay it out. Like, yeah, take pride in that, healthy pride. You know, appreciate yourself for that. The heroism, the nobility in that, and the uncommonness of that.

1:11:30To me, that's where real bravery is. That's really cool. Yeah, I love that. I get the sense that this is one of the reasons why allowing yourself to be puppeted by your own fear, to not show up. There's an equivalent in the world of content creation, which is audience capture. So continuing to throw red meat that is predictably going to be liked by the audience, but doesn't necessarily resonate with you as a person. It's actually, you know, the word grifter, have you been familiar with that, Riker? So I asked, it's a word that gets thrown around on the internet a lot, for all manner of different individuals.

1:12:12And I genuinely was interested. I said, hey, for the people that use the word grifter, what is the best working definition of what that word means for you? It's just kind of a slight, it's a calling. Yeah, it's just a very odd, nebulous term that people tend to use for someone that you think might not be fully authentic. Like, come on, let's get a bit more specific. And somebody said, and I actually really appreciated this, and this is currently my working definition, somebody promoting a product or staking a claim that they wouldn't use or don't believe themselves. So here is what I'm doing out front.

1:12:49This is what I believe in private behind. I was like, ah, that's in there. Okay, I can work with that. That's like a functional definition, I think, for what people think they mean when they say that word. And my point is with the audience capture thing, it's you not being you. It's you trying to be manipulative in a way. It's this sort of meta you, it's playing persona, not person, it's projecting, et cetera. And that conversation at the restaurant that was ungainly or didn't go the way that you wanted, the difference between you showing up with vulnerable sincerity, or just straight up sincerity.

1:13:30Like this is me and this is the position that I hold and I said it, all right, can I have said it with a little bit more deafness, yeah, probably, and you know, I could have delivered it, but I tried, like I gave it a crack and that was actually what I meant. I said what I meant and that you know I can take some lessons from it. The difference between that and the lessons that you can take from that situation and a situation where you didn't say what you meant and you were still rejected is the kind of the last bastion of well I tried and you know punk like I guess you know you can kind of laugh it off there is a there is an ability to do humor in that, but where is the humor that you find that I compromised myself to try and be somebody else?

1:14:18And that was rejected. There's an additional level of difficulty in getting past it. And I think it's just a nice justification for showing up sincerely, showing up earnestly, sort of playful seriousness, I think is, why? I have this additional level of protection for all of the fear that you are going to have by being seen and by this being me and by a rejection of that, not being a rejection of a projection, but a rejection of a person and that person happens to be myself. What you do gain in that is, well, at least I was myself, at least this weird character I tried to play, this role that I tried to perform wasn't rejected because to be honest, like that's kind of more pitiful than the other way around.

1:15:09And so true. I'm thinking the ways in which playfulness is a great aid to aspiration without attachment. And if we're incredibly not just earnest, but if we're self -righteous or pompous about our pursuit of even a wholesome goal. That sounds so good, but to be playful about it, I think about I made a play using the word for a woman in my late 20s. I was part of this whole personal growth context kind of half a cult. I won't name it now. And so everybody was really deep in each other's business kind of all knowing each other. And there was a woman in a relationship with like the head dude. So I was like a layer or two down from alpha and she was with alpha boy.

1:16:06And I fully played, went for it. It was public, it was known, I wrote these nice little notes, I told them what I was doing. And I went full out and I didn't know if I would get it, I didn't. She was relatively kind and it was okay. But at the end of the day, I felt good about myself, that I, little Ricky, kind of the dork, had still stuck my neck out, and made a play for a particular woman. And I feel great, I went for it, right? If I hadn't gone for it, I'd be thinking, you would see, you should have gone for it, why not, take the risk. But what enabled it was there was a playfulness about it.

1:16:48It was a kind of improbable goal, and I could be playful about it, which helped me be less attached to the outcome. Yeah. My friend Charlie did a wonderful video breakdown of Jordan Peterson's most recent debate against 20 atheists. It was on a Jubilee YouTube channel. So it's a series called Surrounded. And it's doing huge numbers. It's really cool. Kind of like speed dating for debate, I guess. Is kind of the way that I would format. Yeah. We used to call them a fishball. you're in the fishbowl and you've got 10 or 20 people around you, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And each person comes in individually and you do a bit and then they move on and so on and so forth.

1:17:34And he does this comparison between Jordan when he did that Kathy Newman interview in 2019. So what you're saying is that really famous one in front of the purple background. And this most recent one. And Charlie is very interested in charisma and he's talking about likeability, being into playfulness and he's very deep into self -work and mindfulness too. So I think that sort of percolates through. And he has this, he just compares them side by side. And I'd never even thought of this because the way that people change, especially over a long period, I've been six years, maybe seven years since that first debate came out and then there's this new one.

1:18:12And if someone changes slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, you kind of, you don't really notice, is like when did you get fat? I don't know, one day at a time. And he just makes a really lovely distinction between Jordan and that first one, where Kathy's sort of pointing her finger at him and saying, so what you're saying is this thing? And he goes, no, I'm not saying that at all. I think that's silly. I think that's really, I think that's, I do. I think that's really silly. And you just have this, it's keeping him regulated, it feels more casual, it's much easier to get on side, it's a much more likeable approach.

1:18:47Now, he's standing his ground, but he's standing his ground in a sort of, you know, really fluid sort of Bruce Lee kind of way. And then you look at the approach in this most recent Jubilee debate, and it's very rigid, you know, it's precisely what do you mean by the term that you just said. It's sort of definitional a lot of the time. And Jordan is significantly more... He's been through the ringer, I think, over the last few years, which very well I imagine would cause any normal sane person to come out the other side and have the armor up. And he's now deep into his religion. And this is talking about religious.

1:19:28Maybe there's some real tacit differences between the first debate and the second one. But I think that the example still holds, which is the version of him that was able to be Bruce Lee playful, you know, he looked like he was having a better time during that debate. And certainly, I think came across in a more sort of likeable manner. And maybe there's some topics that it's just hard to do that on and perhaps faith is one of those ones that people don't feel like they can be as playful or equivocating with. But yeah, when you look, those two different worlds, you think like the one that's, I think that's silly.

1:20:17I really do. I think and you can see what's the sort of memory everybody knows if even in the moment, if you're able to just drop into the insult, get pinged across the table at work or whatever it is. And as opposed to trying to clap back or as opposed to trying to break the fourth wall and make it really serious or as opposed to taking it personally and allowing it to ride up, if you just giggle and go, ah, that's silly, we have been silly. Is this, or whatever, whatever little sort of neutralizing retort comes, I think, I don't know, when I think about the sort of memory it would make for me, in the moment you're able to begin to sort of reframe the rumination trap that you might get caught in later that day when you start to think about how it went.

1:21:04It's like, yeah, I don't want that with grace. That was like, as ease and, you know, playfulness. I think people, these days, there's so much phoniness and grief, just like you say. And I go back to my early days in the whole human potential scene in LA in the 1970s, where you go to a party and you think you're having a deep conversation with someone about, you know, the inner world and the psyche and you began to realize that they were setting up a pitch to enroll you in their workshop. And you suddenly realized that you had felt like you were a thou to their eye in Martin Booper's construction of three kinds of relationships, I thou, I yet and it yet.

1:21:49You felt like a thou to their eye and then you realized you were being seduced. You're going to have to dig deeper into the eye and the it and the... Okay. Slow that down. It's a very cool model. One of the really useful cool models. Martin Moober said essentially the three kinds of relationships. Eye and Thou, where you're the eye and to you, they are a Thou. They are a being in their own right. There could be a differential of role. You could be a police officer and you are now arresting a suspect and putting them in jail. they are still without you in the context of your roles. They are being, you are not exploiting them as a means to your own hands.

1:22:29Then there's I -IT where the other person is there, you might be superficially polite, you don't care about their inner world at all, they're irrelevant. You just want to get the answer to your customer service question or you want them to get over to fixture plumbing. That's it, I -IT. And then it is bodies in space like in an elevator passing each other. That's a very cool framework. and it raises a question, can you thou all be ex? Can you approach? Can you enter into interactions with people, even with your roles as a thou to your eye? And can you be aware of the subtle movement into itting them?

1:23:04And like you and I right here, I feel like we're in I thou. We're doing our thing, you're moving us along, I have a role, you have a role. But we're like beings. We're not exploiting each other narcissistically as extensions of ourself. And then there's something also to realize, do you feel like a thou to their eye or do you gradually start to feel like a net when you're on the receiving end of a grift, which is a con, a con, a grifter is a con man or a woman, whatever being, then you feel like you're being itted by them. And in this world in which there is so much with media and consumerism and the US, I'm I'm sure the epicenter of a lot of the worst of this, LA especially, where I grew up, it's about phoniness, it's about pretence.

1:23:54If you have 300 best friends, you have no real friends, for example. And so in that context, including in which now with AI, it's so easy to manufacture fakes, deep fakes included, I think increasingly there's a longing in us for the realness that we evolved in. in our small bands, it was real. It was really real. I had eyes, skinned as can, touched to touch, life or death, every day, real. And so we long for the real. And so when we find the real, when we feel that a person is, as Carl Rogers put it, congruent, that there, what's really true about them on the inside is what they are aware of.

1:24:38They are mindfully self -aware and is what they're showing to the outside. on those three circles line up that are congruent. When we encounter that in other people, that these days is the coin of the route because it's rare. To a lovely point, I've had this term a couple of months ago, somebody trying to speed run authenticity and it was in relation to online content creation and basically, how do you growth hack relatability? What is that? And that's a meta -grift. It appears to not be a grift or whatever. What are the constituent parts of creating an I -thou relationship? And how do I reverse engineer that to make an I -it relationship into an I -thou relationship, which is terrifying and funny?

1:25:35But you know, I really agree. And that increasingly is, especially with where my life's gone over the last four or five years. I mean, since we spoke, nearly seven years ago, you kind of need your detection rate on needs to become ever more finely attuned, because as you ascend in whatever notoriety or the impressiveness or the skillfulness of the people that you're hanging around with, you need to be able to become ever more attuned to smarter and smarter tricks. And unfortunately, I think to fly the flag for everybody should be a club promoter for a couple of months at one point in their life, which is still a campaign that I haven't managed to get off the ground yet, but I think being exposed to a very high volume of people who are largely unencumbered, maybe they've had a little bit to drink, maybe they're out with their friends and not really thinking too much, you learn a lot about human nature by watching people in cues.

1:26:43Very strange, there's all the liminal space where they don't really have much to do. And I spent, you know, I met a million people in cues across my career and decades. That's super cool. You're naming that and doing what clips from that, people in cues, as it were. It was just, that would have been great if that was the case. But I was just watching, I'd be seeing 100 to 518 to 24 year old, 28 year old kids talking and just for position. And guys would be in front of girls and they'd be sort of, how are we going to talk to the one behind us? Some people would be impatient, they'd be thinking about having any ending, some people would feel slighted because they were waiting longer than they wanted, some people were really, you know, whatever, all the rest of the stuff.

1:27:29And yeah, as you continue to sort of whatever ascend up through that, the games that people are able to play in order to be able to access that become more deft and it's strange to think about the people that you like the most are the ones that you see them and you think that they see you. It's like, ah, like here we are, two people. And it's oddly really simple to actually get to that stage. And yeah, the people that I find myself hanging around with with, you know, a lot of an increasing number of options here in Austin, big scene of stuff that's going on. And the people that I like to hang around with are often not like the most impressive ones, not to say that my friends are impressive.

1:28:15But it's, it's just people that I'm like, ah, Yeah, like here we are. You're seeing me, I'm seeing you, there's not really anything else that's going on here. And that's like an adventure, right? And it feels like a real adventure, as opposed to, I don't know what, like a, you know, allegory of the cave, shadows on the wall type projection. Yeah. So much about that. I think it's okay and it's necessary to select, skillfully, what is genuinely true in you to present to the world, depending on certain situations. So, for example, if I'm in a presenting a talk to a bunch of scientists or clinicians, I'll select what's authentically real in me that's appropriate to that setting.

1:29:02That's really different from selecting what's real in me when I'm hanging out with our kids or adult kids. It's not the totality of what's real inside me, but it's genuinely what's inside of me. So I think on the one hand, there's a total place for that. On the other hand, I think that it's really useful to be aware of how we get kind of identified with and captured by our increasingly polished act in the world and track that. One thing that has helped me about all that is to realize that it's in my best interest to be less preoccupied with myself and to be less focused on the controlling or influencing what's happening in the minds of others in regard to me.

1:29:59The more that I realize that, what's really good for me to kind of relax that and just I accept the risk of rejection and failure, right? To go back to all that in the sandbox. Then it gets a lot easier to just let go, release. And just not know who you are. Where do you come to think? You bravery encourages sort of being a bit of a theme today. Now how do you come to think about cultivating that? Someone who thinks, I feel like I'm being a little bit more cowardly, or I've being cowardly my entire life more so than I would like to be. How do you come to think about where courage bravery sincerity comes from?

1:30:49Well, let's talk about interpersonal courage. So I've known a lot of people, men and women alike who are physically brave or in business settings who will move into alpha roles and be strong in those regards, but interpersonally, they're scared. And interpersonal cowardice, if you will. And so in that area, I think when it's helpful to realize, oh, I would like to be more that way. I would like to be more willing to risk dreaded experiences of defeat, failure, rejection, being laughed at. And there might exaggerated expectations of how horrible that would be from my childhood when it was horrible or I saw it being horrible for other people, humiliation in high school is a really big deal.

1:31:39Most of the time these days in adults, like you say something dumb that give you a bad review, the river moves on 10 minutes later, nobody thinks about it, it's gone. But we anticipate it being horrible. So you might say to yourself, wow, it would be good for me to be more willing to risk that dreaded experience to tolerate that. So now you know what you're doing. That helps right off the top. That's executive function top down. Okay. I'm gonna expand my comfort zone for what I'm willing to tolerate, which means pushing back the bars of my invisible cage in how free I'm willing to be in life. That's really helpful.

1:32:20And then what I find is what works again and again is to actually take those risks and occasionally feel what you dread. But feel it. You release it and then you realize I'm still okay. You'd move through me. It doesn't defeat me. I'm not consumed by it. I'm brave. I'm noble. I'm heroic. Yay me. I got through to the other side. And then as you do that, suddenly now your window of tolerance, the work bars of the cage continue to expand. That's been a big thing. And then I think there's a slightly incredibly cool man. I love how we talk about this stuff, by the way. It's so much, it's unusually cool.

1:33:01So I think everyone ought to listen to Chris's show. Awesome. The toothpick and all. OK, so there's this whole thing in learning broadly, including personal growth learning, where you generalize from one domain to another. You cross over. So as an example, I got into rock climbing early 20s. As I experienced myself as kind of an unmanly unathletic person, because my own background, my dad, was a cowboy, like the cowboy guy you talked about, you grew up on a ranch, not Dakota, but he did, he was a manly man, but he never did sports with me, never threw up all with me. This was not how it was. If we were on the ranch, we'd go horseback riding, but we lived in suburbia, so he didn't throw a ball.

1:33:52Anyway, rock climbing. So I was start doing hardcore, scary stuff that would boost my sense of being an okay dude in that way. And tons of women climbing that get a lot of value from it in their ways as well, that said, what I would do that is when I was with someone who was being domineering, pompous in relationships, Some guy says, no, man, you got to do this with that. Or I was maybe scared about entering a group. I would recall the emotional memory, like you did kind of early on in the show here, where you tuned into the felt sense in your body, a ruminating while I would tune into the felt sense of climbing, pulling over an overhang, being determined, problem solving, why we have to crack, what it feels like.

1:34:41And I would access that. I would tune into that for a few seconds to mobilize that inner sense that was strong and brave and courageous in that domain. Right? I'd activate those circuits of courage in that area of rock climbing and then I'd be much more prepared to deal with this really kind of aggressive assertive asshole. That would be, I don't know, when you ever try that, do you across domain Yeah, I mean the confidence that you get from, for instance, the live shows that I've been doing the last few years, I've got another touring around the US and Canada toward the back end of this year.

1:35:21It really does make, if you've stood in front of a few thousand people with nothing except for a microphone and it's patient eyes, maybe inpatient eyes, staring at you. And like what else is there? You know, one of the biggest fears that everybody's got and you go, I did that thing and it was, I, it kind of went well. That's pretty good. And yeah, when you cross that, it's like, okay, so really is this the thing that you're worried about? You're worried about this conversation, you're worried about, like you did that. Can you not remember what that felt like? Yeah, that's right. All right. Ah, okay, yeah, that was good.

1:36:04That was a thing. Remember what that felt like. Not just remember what it was. Then you're in your head, you're just seeing the image of it, but you're calling up the somatic markers, the body. Yeah, what it felt like. Yeah. Rikio, great, dude. So are you. Every time we get to speak, I didn't know what we were even gonna talk about today. I had a bunch of stuff in my head and then you started to still liquefy, So, where should people go? Your courses, your online course is a grade, the podcast grade, you go on the boat. Thank you, thank you. Send people in the right direction on the internet. Well, so people can find me, just Google my name.

1:36:43And by the way, I appreciate that. And I'm really startled also that you're doing some kind of live thing. I'd love to know more about that. And I would really direct people your way, certainly. I think I would really just kind of talk about, But, briefly, as this global compassion coalition that I started with some friends and colleagues a couple of years ago, that's really growing. And the basic idea is if we're going to actually continue the progress that humanity has made over the last ten, hundred thousand years, and especially if we're going to tackle things like global warming, poverty, children dying of hunger, big stuff that is rooted in ongoing systems that are unjust, we need to grow larger and larger collectives, collaborations, coalitions, alliances, partnerships, motivated by compassion, which is a response to suffering that wants to do something about it.

1:37:38So that's the idea, global compassion coalition across many differences and divisions, at least one thing in common. Yeah, people are hurting needlessly and we need to become big enough to be strong enough to push long overdue systemic change to happen. So people can go to globalcompassioncoalition .org. It's free to join. It's a moral stance and there's some nice benefits for yourself along the way for being part of this cause, which I'm trying to enroll, Chris, in. We need to talk about that. All right. I already want to talk to you again. I'm already ready for the next one. It's strange I was saying before the friends that I like spending the most time with other ones that they feel like they're there.

1:38:24Even across the internet, there's not many people. This is close to the highest praise that I could give you. There's not many people that are able to regulate my nervous system virtually. And yet there's something about your demeanor that's able to do it. So I hope that we've managed to give people 90 minutes of regulation today as well. Lovely, lovely. With you. I appreciate you man. Until next time Rick. Yeah.