TRANSCRIPT

***Transcript has been edited for readability

Sean: Tom, I was telling you yesterday as I was preparing for this conversation, it’s somewhat maddening. And that’s rare, I feel like, for me, prepping for a conversation. And I was telling you, so many of your ideas led me down other interesting rabbit holes, and it was just like I had 80 tabs open preparing for this, so it made me really interested in what your creative process is like.
You bring and pull out so many interesting ideas, it’s very obvious the depth that you go to on ideas, but the breadth you have, and I’m genuinely curious what your creative process is like to bring these writings to fruition.

Tom: It’s a, I mean, clearly we’re going to go in with something incredibly strange straight off the bat in that case. A friend of mine on the internet  called Liberty, and I think he coined this idea of, like, information scent. That, like, information has a tangible scent to it, and there’s something to that.

Like, as you’ll know, like, my whole shtick is curiosity. But what I’ve noticed is this… This kind of embodied intuition that you get when you’re pursuing something that’s interesting, like it literally at its most extreme feels meaningful. And what’s really interesting now is that I have kind of a formalized process, but I wake up at 7am, depending on the kids, and then I’ll write for about four hours.
I’ll go to jiu jitsu to kind of clear my head, kind of my new obsession. And then I’ll come back and usually that’s when I’ll meet people and kind of expand my, my quote unquote network. And then maybe if ideas come out of that, I’ll write again at the end of the day. But what’s funny is that I used to be in the productivity bro stage in my mid thirties, like I got to read a hundred books a year.

And I think that was helpful in terms of laying down a base. Now I don’t read that much, but what I do do is get increasingly sensitive to the, the, the literal felt sense around information, where it’s like, I’ll suddenly have an urge to go and look up something I read, like, years ago, and it will trigger something else.

Or someone will tell me to read something, which they do 50 times a day, and it will feel different to me for whatever reason. And I will read that thing. So it’s, it’s kind of this very intuitive thing. And what’s interesting about it is it gets better. Like the more you trust it, the better it gets at showing you stuff that is going to be interesting.

Sean: You said you’ve, you had to read all those books to lay the groundwork. Do you think that’s an essential component? To be able to develop that, that intuition and just that, that felt sense. 

Tom: Hmm.

I think some people are just better at it than others. I think people, some people are better at knowing what they’re interested in than others. I think some people start from a better base of wisdom than others. But, if you want to be a bit mechanical about this, like intuition. Is pattern recognition based on the unconscious laying down of information in your mental database, right?

It’s like if you show a chessboard to a grandmaster for three seconds, and it’s a game of chess, he’ll be able to memorize all the positions because he’s seen so many games of chess. But if you make the pieces random on the board, he won’t have any advantage over a novice. And so the way I think about pattern recognition is whatever you’re interested in.

You have to lay down a robust base in order for you to get the benefit of intuition. It’s why our intuitions are so good about people because you’ve had a gajillion personal interactions in your life, and so that’s such a rich database for you to draw from that when you do like you, you just get good gut instincts about people.

But you’re not gonna have people crap all over intuition as a concept, but like. Intuition on the basis of no experience is not intuition. Intuition on the basis of a lifetime of experience is like a superpower.

 

Sean: You talked about having that trust and developing that trust. I have a line from you. I highlighted it by reconnecting us to the guidance of intuition. It frees the ego from the illusion that it needs an answer for everything and that it’s the sole architect of its own fate. It gives us access to emergent forces that create through us.

I first want to understand how that trust works.

 

Tom: You fall a lot. You know, like I, I had this very strange kind of spiritual experience where I felt like I, I kind of touched the ground of being and realized that ground of being was, was, was love and everything was gorgeous. And it was this very, very strange thing that happened to me. And then immediately afterwards I quit my job.

Because I was like, well, obviously the universe is love and everything’s going to be great and I’m going to be fine. And I was absolutely not fine. Like I was just sitting on the couch with an increasingly angry wife. And I think what I realized over that process is it’s, you’re, you’re, you’re only going to be fine if you’re at that place where exactly what you can do meets what the world needs.
So you have to offer it that gift first, like that. That’s the definition of a sacrifice. It’s where you have to, you have to make a series of sacrifices of your creative work, put them out into the world. And if there’s no response, there’s no response. You’re not doing the right thing, probably. Right. But if you put something out in the world and you get an instant piece of feedback, whether it’s a coincidence in the form of a synchronicity or just a boatload of money, or all of your friends are like, that’s amazing.
Or something goes viral. You know, that’s the right thing to do, but the rub is. You don’t get that intuitive feedback until you’ve actually put something out there, which is, which is tough.

Sean: What about that process where you’re putting things out there and nothing’s come to fruition, and you’re not finding any of those synchronicities? What do you say to the person who’s going through that?

Tom: I think there’s this thing where, like, you know… Like Melville wrote Moby Dick and no one read it in his lifetime and he never knew it was successful and Van Gogh never sold a painting and, and all of that stuff. Right. And I think, I think to be, to be a bit harsh. I think a lot of bad artists lean on that and they’re like, Oh, genius is never understood in his lifetime.

And I’m like, Oh, there’s a lot more bad artists than there are Van Goghs. Right. And I, perhaps the most interesting, yeah. Like philosophy of life that I’ve encountered over the last six or seven years has been Taoism and Taoism basically says, if you’re on the right path, things are going to go great for you right now.

And it’s even though it’s like. a quasi religion, a lot of, like, the things we think about are, you know, things will be great for you in the afterlife. And Taoism is like, no, no, if you’re on your beam right now, like, you, you, you can’t predict how the abundance is going to come into your life, but it’s going to come into your life if you’re doing the right thing.

And a lot of the disenchanted rationalist world we live in, a lot of people are like, oh, dude, just grind it out. Grind it out and your reward will come, which is, for me, just as dumb as sort of like, it will come in the afterlife. Because for a lot of us, the afterlife is retirement, right? Where it’s like, the land of milk and honey will be this time when you can play golf for the rest of your life.

And I’m like, ah, unless you’re really into golf, man, like you’re probably going to die like four years after retirement because that’s what a lot of guys do. So like. Stop grinding away for something you’re not going to get benefits from now, and again, like, try and match your skill set to what the world is requiring of you, because then your day to day becomes exceptionally pleasurable as a process.

Sean: Is that one of the things you’re looking for? That feeling of pleasure in the day to day? That you’re on the right path?

Tom: Yeah, it’s the only thing, I’ll be honest, you know, like it, you’ve got to, you’ve got to be careful with it because I’m sure fentanyl feels great to do every day, right? But it’s not good for you. And I think you have to calibrate your meaning. And all of that meaning comes from the feedback you’re getting from other people.

Has this been meaningful to other people? Right. And so again, like something that just feels good to you. I’m not sure it is the right thing. Like, if you’re a really bad drummer in a garage band, and you’re just sitting there and you’re not getting any response, and you’re not making any money. I don’t know whether that’s the best use of your talents in life.

But again, I’m not any of those people, but I was a bad writer for a while and I wasn’t getting much response. But now I feel like I’ve got a little bit better. I’m getting more responses. So that’s, and I’m getting more, I’m getting a much higher sense of meaning from it because I’m like, Oh, this is working.
This is resonating with other people. I think you do need that audience response.

Sean: Then rewind a bit. Go back to the earlier Tom. What was it like when you weren’t getting that feedback? You couldn’t tie it as much to meaning. Yeah. What was the internal narrative like for you to stay on that path and keep going then?

Tom: I think there’s two forms of feedback you get when you’re doing something online. I think there’s you suck and I hate you, like kind of trolling, which like it kind of bounces straight off you because you have no idea who I am. And then when you’re a really good friend. Who’s really smart and this happened multiple times.

So it’s like, dude, your articles make no sense, right? They’re disjointed. You’re trying to do too much. Like, the, the idea, the ideas don’t link together properly and I would get really hurt and defensive and like, angry and egotistical about it. And I was just like It hurts. Good. Like that, that’s feedback, right?

And you’ve got to calibrate that feedback. And I believe that feedback that hurts tends to be quite good. And like, one of the most interesting things I’ve learned is that, you know, anger is one of the most lateralized emotions in our brain’s left hemisphere. And so whenever you get angry about something, it’s a huge signal.

And it’s usually a signal that your ego is being threatened. And that for me is a growth experience every time it happens. So if a piece of feedback makes me angry, I’m like, Ooh, what is, what does that mean? And that happened a lot when I was a writer, I was like, dude, you don’t understand me. You know,

Sean: When were you able to make that switch though? Where all of a sudden, oh, this is a growth opportunity. I can lean into this. Versus, oh, my ego is getting in the way.

Tom: There wasn’t one moment. It was an iteration. Like it is, your stuff slowly gets better. I think. For me,

Sean: What’s one of the other reasons that your stuff’s able to get better? I’ve just seen enough people that, even with a lot of people giving them feedback, it seems like the development in their craft is not there. And I’m wondering if you have any awareness on how you’ve developed that craft,

Tom: You have to really care about it. You have to really, really, really care about it. And I think you have to spend. This is a really cool concept which Jim O’Shaughnessy introduced me to in this book called the user illusion. And it’s called X formation.And X formation is like the value of any information is determined by either.

The volume of information discarded to create that information, or the computational power or length of time spent creating it. So just to simplify that a little, it’s like, I’ve read 50 books, and I’m going to put them into a tight paragraph, which doesn’t lose Okay. Thanks. Any signal or I’ve spent five years thinking about this thing and I’m able to distill it into that paragraph.

There are two versions of the same thing, right? It’s compression, compression, compression, and maintaining value. And I think in order to get better at anything you want to do, you have to be doing one or both of those things. You have to be reading a lot. of high signal stuff around your area and able to condense it, or you have to be spending a lot of time thinking about things.

And that means getting comfortable with what I call kind of like pleasant dissonance, like you just don’t have the answer to something. And people are very comfortable with this idea physically. Like, everyone knows what that means in terms of going to the gym, right? The constant pressure to break down the muscles.

I think it’s less understood psychologically. Like, Richard Feynman said the best way to be a genius was to have a dozen of your favorite problems in your mind at all times. And just work on them. And there’s something mysterious where, like, if you’re just working on things, you’ll randomly get downloads of answers.

And I think in order to get better, anything head centric, you have to be willing to kind of hold these unanswered ideas in your head for a really long time. In my case, it’s often like, I mean, like five or six years. It’s like with big, with the really biggest questions in life, you have to hold them for five or six years.

Sean: What would you say are the inner questions you’re trying to answer for in life based on if I was to zoom out and just look at all of your writing, all of your reading, it’s clear you’re pursuing something. And I’m wondering if you ever thought about what that actually is for you?

Tom: Yeah, all the time. I think this is a really weird dynamic. Maybe it’s not that weird where your inner and outer life reflect each other to a higher degree than you than you really have noticed. And often if your intention in life, your life itself has been turned into a question. And actually, if you can.

If you can devise and articulate what that question is, it often has that kind of same effect on you randomly getting an answer. If you’re like, okay, the thing I’m really struggling with right now is X. And that’s the question that my life is asking of me. So, to make this tangible, I was in an investment bank for a while like a long time and eventually ended up in an investment bank in a role that I was not interested in.

And. I looked around and I saw a lot of men between, you know, 35 and 55 who were similarly completely stagnant, but reasonably well paid and were unable to find a second act in life. And we’re often explicitly told, as I was many, many times that there was no second act for them. They were too well paid and they didn’t have a transferable skill base.

And I saw suicides. I saw like, just this, this decimation of human potential. And so I was like, Oh, I want to answer that question. I want to answer that question. I want to answer the question of how men mostly pivot in midlife to a different way of being. And then my life got turned into three years of, like, indescribable hell, where I became that dissonance.

My life became that question. I made every imaginable mistake. And on the other side of it, I came up with a theory. And the cornerstone of the theory and the thing that I would like to be known for is the power of curiosity. That basically, if you get stuck in a place without energy, where everything you’re interested in kind of, like, shrivels and dies. The thing that is signaling to you using your attention and using, you know, like attraction, like an energetic force is probably your path out. And what I’ve been circling around for the last four or five years has been the consilience from a bajillion different disciplines around this idea, where it’s like, there’s something, there’s something outside of us that signals to us the best path for our future growth, and it does that by directing our interests.

And that, for me, I first heard the idea in 2017, and that, for me, has just blossomed into this incredibly powerful area. Because I think it kind of answers the question for a lot of these guys that are stuck in very rational mindsets, which is that your first step out is this call to adventure, which you hear through whatever is grabbing your attention next.

Sean: So being in a very logical world, you operate in the finance world, mostly. What do you say to the people who then push back, I’ve got the car, I have the mortgage, I have the kids in school. How do I just leap and assume the net’s gonna appear?

Tom: I think it’s the hardest thing you can do. Like, let’s not trivialize this, you know, like my transition period was three years of hell. And I think one of the, one of the most dangerous things we do, we do a lot of dangerous things. One, we tell people that have a creeping dissonance in midlife that they should just be happy with what they have.

They have this material abundance. And they should just be happy with what they have. And that, that creates this immense shame around people who have enough and yet still feel dissatisfied. And that’s because in most other cultures where there are a lot of other more advanced cultures, we would have a formal initiation process into the second half of life where you, you, you went from being driven by your ego.

And cultivating practical skills to being driven by this emergent force where you finally put those skills back in service of something greater than you. And that, that initiation process was like a death and rebirth for people. It was horrific. It was horrendous. But, culture held a container for you to make that transition.

And so we tell people that opportunity doesn’t even exist because our culture doesn’t even have an understanding of that force, despite the fact that science has been pointing to it. For 50 to 100 years. And so people are either on the side of like, Oh my God, I’m so dissatisfied and I don’t know why.

And I have a belief that actually like that dissatisfaction kicks in because you have enough, that there’s something in your psyche that goes, all right, you’re in a stable enough marriage, you’ve done enough for your kids. You’ve got enough money. Now I’m going to blow you up right now. I’m going to blow up all your failed coping mechanisms.

Now I’m going to blow up your life because you can withstand it. It doesn’t do it to you at 18 because you don’t have any of the tools. Right. So it blows up your life later, but that blow up once you’re on the other side of it. Can often be like, like mental illness and pathologized it was for me where I was like, they were like, Oh, yeah, you’re to my wife.

Your husband’s broke, right? He’s never getting better. He needs to be in symptom management for the rest of his life because I was so like, psychotically depressed and so people get stuck in multiple stages of this journey because we don’t understand that it’s a journey and that creates tragedy.

Sean: So what allowed you to not stay stuck?

Tom: I don’t know, like, it’s the mix between action and inaction. That’s really, really hard. I screwed up so much, which was part of the benefit for other people that I’ve got so much to teach you because of so many, so many horrifying mistakes. So my attempt to get unstuck in a crisis was to actively pursue things that I felt were meaningful.
So I cultivated. A set of skills after, you know, 15 years in finance that I then immediately discarded because it felt that finance was meaningless. And I moved towards something that I felt was objectively meaningful. So as a hospice worker, I went to Fordham for social work for a couple of semesters.
I tried to be a recruiter to help other people through transitions and I was like, actively trying to get myself unstuck. And one of the central paradoxes of Taoism, which I now understand, is sort of the trying not to try, where you have to be really sensitive to the external feedback and signals you’re getting, and you have to be really willing to cut your losses quickly when you’re in the wrong spot, when you’ve made the wrong experiment.

And the problem with our society right now is that, like, if you’re in midlife, it’s hard enough to pivot. You get someone to give you a job. I got someone to give me a job. You go through the bajillion rounds of interviews, like you, you get all your healthcare set up, you go through all the onboarding. One of those jobs I knew within two and a half days, I was in the wrong place.

And I stayed there for 11 months. Right, because I didn’t, and it was the worst 11 months of my life, like by a long, long way, because the job was just completely wrong for me, but it was really well paid and on paper it was great. And so I just got ground down and ground down and ground down until, like, there was nothing left of me, at which point the cost of the experiments became zero because I was zero.

I won’t wish that on other people, but that means that then I kind of saw the process of nihilism and losing faith, of losing faith in everything that wasn’t true. You basically, all the things you think are going to save you don’t save you until there’s one thing left at the bottom, and that’s this force.

And then finally, your ego just surrenders and gives up, and then lets go, and then you can start trusting it.

Sean: Makes me think of that C. S. Lewis line you love, God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. And it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. How important is actually listening to that pain and exploring it further, which is one of the things I think you did an incredible job of.

Tom: I think… You know, someone explained it to me as, yeah, if you break your finger, you’ve got a broken finger, right? Like, but if, if you have unexplained chronic health ailments that the US healthcare system can’t find anything for, you might want to consider whether that’s more of a spiritual sickness.

And that cannot be diagnosed by the US healthcare system. It just can’t. And, you know, one of the things that happened to me sort of on a more practical basis was I was falling apart. I was in a very toxic environment full of very nice people, which created a lot of confusion, right? Like, this is a really nice place where I’m, where I’m being paid lots of money and I’ve got a really big title and, and yet, like, I’m starting to get brain fog and I feel pain in lots of different places where you shouldn’t really have pain, where you like, don’t have major organs.

Like I would, I felt intense pain on the left side of my ribs. Like there’s nothing on the left side of your ribs, right? And then, and then your ego is like, God, it’s a tumor. I’ve got a tumor there. And you go into, I went into these spirals of hypochondria, which I think was also part of like the death rattle of my ego where I was getting obsessed with mortality and life hacking and all of that nonsense.

But I actually got it. I went through a bajillion different doctors and then eventually I went to a functional medicine doctor and the functional medicine doctor put me on a three month elimination diet, which is to stop everything fun, like quit all stimulants, alcohol. I think you’re out, but I think I was on black coffee.

But what that does is clear the signals. And one thing you realize is that the second half of life is intuitive and embodied. And If you don’t have access to those intuitions, and my God, I still don’t because I’m such a mentalized person, but it started to give me clearer access to the signals. And once those signals came through, I started writing a book and I wrote a book that was just a list of like 60 pages of resonant quotes.

And at the end of the book, I was like, well, what is it resonating with? Like, what does that mean? Like, what does resonance mean? Like, I picked these quotes for a reason. Why did I pick them? And what are they, what are they literally resonating with? And I realized it was my soul, my unconscious, the thing that bound me together.

And that realization, like, snapped me out of consensus reality. Like, I had a spiritual awakening. Weird things happened from that point onwards. But it was basically like, I now regard it neurologically as the rebellion of my right hemisphere over my left. I literally bought a book with that title a couple of days afterwards, and I realized that that was the concept, which was my ego was just, my ego was just ignoring C. S. Lewis’s pains. And it required me to clear out that bandwidth in order to get the message, and that message manifested itself through resonant facts. And then, going back to the start of our conversation, that sense of resonance is something you can cultivate. And that keeps you on the path.

Sean: Along the lines of this, to start with that, you were talking about transitions and helping men understand that transition. And clearly you’ve gone to the depth to have this level of knowledge for your own transition. And I want to hear more about wombs. And what does a safe womb look like in today’s society for helping people actually transition through what you were just describing?

Tom: So this is unbelievably interesting to me, and it’s really something I’ve come to in the last couple of weeks. Which is, as I was saying earlier, there was, you know, there were mystery schools and wisdom schools, and there was initiated knowledge in other cultures where it was like, Okay, you’ve got to this stage of life, now a thing’s gonna happen to you.

It’s memorialized in the Hero’s Journey. You’re going to go through this transition phase. And… The concept that has most interested me, and I think is like, hyper relevant to your podcast and your audience. Is this concept of initiated power where you can’t make a black belt, not a black belt, right?

Like I do. I’m kind of obsessed with Brazilian jiu jitsu and I roll a lot with black belts and I’m a crappy blue belt and you’re most at danger in the gym when you’re rolling with a strong white belt and you are safest. When you are rolling with a good black belt, they can destroy me and they never do.

And they’re just so controlled and the level of discipline and power, you know, it takes 10 years to get a black belt of like four times a week. It’s not like other martial arts, in my opinion. So like the level of embodied mastery these guys have is insane, but it manifests itself through control. And the thing that I think that all men want deep down is that.

So like. this brilliant, brilliant framing that I’ve been exploring in the last couple of weeks, which is the concept of saving the father from the underworld. So it’s the foundation myth of ancient Egypt. It’s Horus and Osiris. It’s Pinocchio saving Geppetto from the belly of the whale.
It’s Luke Skywalker redeeming Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars. And what it means… is this, there’s an excess of masculinity and excess of order in our psyche, that eventually seeks control at the price of life and it shuts us down. And often in midlife, that’s a failed coping mechanism.

It’s something that’s kept us safe for a really long time, but it’s now outlived its usefulness. And so what happens is you have this call of the archetypal feminine. And I know the gendering of these things is problematic, but it’s how it’s, it’s how it’s been described. And it just means a set of like unique characteristics.
The archetypal feminine is like Trinity on the computer in the Matrix, or it’s Princess Leia in Star Wars. And it’s this call to creativity. It’s what I was talking about earlier in terms of your curiosity being piqued by something. And then the tyrant. Typically, freaks the hell out. So you have King Herod killing all the babies.
You have Pharaoh killing all the babies when Moses was coming up. And you have Stalin killing a million people, right? Like, because the tyrant side of you starts to realize its time is up. And for us, as individuals, it often means panic, panic attacks, anxiety. You know, the kind of health problems that I was experiencing because…
That failed coping mechanism will kill you to remain in control sometimes, it will literally like, it will, it will, you will set your psyche up against itself, because it has to learn how to surrender, but on the other side of that process, you become what’s known as the king archetype, which is a really stable, secure man that has let the creative feminine into himself and has worked out a way to use it with harmony, and I just look at today’s world, and I’m like, yeah, Most people are like tyrant mentalities.

Most corporations have that kind of extractive methodology. Most of our public figures are actually kind of in that really profoundly insecure tyrant mentality where their position in life is dependent on just an abstract role or their intelligence, which is something that’s, that’s kind of arbitrary.
And what I think people want is an initiation process. Which gives them power that cannot be taken away from them. You, not by redundancy, not by artificial intelligence, not by old age. It’s power that resides in you. And I think my own experience was like, I can get fired tomorrow. And I’ll still have the knowledge of my own transition that will never be taken away from me.
So it was hell. It was like genuinely pure hell. But the stuff I learned in there has proven useful to other people over a series of years and actually has proven valuable. So, like, it’s initiated power. Well,

Sean: How many people in that position do you think have earned that power that resides in them? What I mean is I think a lot of people end up rising to certain levels, and they’re facing that destruction of the ego. But they haven’t gone to the depth and earned the level of knowledge to have a secure base like you have, and I’m just wondering what you’ve seen.

Tom: There you have it. You know, I’ve said this a million times, but I’m going to say it again. I meet a lot of people of this kind… At the start of the journey that is like, you know, the cliche, is this all there is? And I say to the first thing I said to them, well, the first thing they say to me is I can’t let my family down.
And you’re a family man. I’m a family man, right? Like, that’s not a trivial, that’s not a trivial observation. Right? Like the American system could not be worse set up to prevent people experimenting in midlife. You have your greatest financial responsibilities, you have your biggest mortgage, you have healthcare insurance, you have all this, all these things that are structurally keeping you in place.

But I say to them, there’s no greater burden a child can bear than the unlived life of the parent. And that hits everyone, you know, squarely in the stomach every time I say it, because everyone knows it’s true. That a dad with fire in his eyes is much more useful to a child as a role model than an extra bedroom.

But, as I’ve said earlier and will continue saying, because we don’t have a midlife rite of passage, people just end up feeling ashamed. Or they’ll numb the call through booze or, you know, things that don’t really matter. Like, you know, I love, I’m not a golfer, but like, they’ll be like, my hobbies are enough, right?

I can’t get enough out of, you know, my, my, my 18 holes every weekend to keep me in a place I don’t want to be because of my responsibilities to my family. And I’m not saying that’s not incredibly admirable. I think that’s like a profound sacrifice and, but maybe sometimes the world needs more from you.

Maybe there’s something really special inside you that you’re not manifesting, and the world needs that a lot more. That it needs you in the role that you’re in right now. And, you know, the weird thing about Taoism and my work is that it’s impossible to see it at the time, but actually that place might create more abundance.

Maybe not financial abundance, but it will create, it will create a situation that is sustainable within your lifestyle.

Sean: Hmm. The people who listened to that call to action, have they developed the trust first, or are they just willing to risk it? Yeah.

Tom: just intuit this way earlier in life. They know what they want to do and they do it, right? Like, my nephew is a… Exceptionally talented musician and he’s now super famous because he just has been able to follow his bliss his whole life. I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way.

In fact, I know he doesn’t. I think some people just know what their bliss is and are concerned about cultivating it from age six. And I think watching how the world responds to that gift gives you faith. I think for other people, I don’t know, man. Like, I always wonder whether my worldview is completely skewed by the fact that none of my friends are traditionally religious.

I’m in Manhattan, you know, the most left brain materialistic place in the world, pretty much. And so I always wonder whether, like, everything I’m saying, there’s people listening to this nodding their head and being like, yeah, of course, you know, like, but I don’t think so, because every conversation I have, when you start to talk about surrender to a higher power, people just glaze over.

And I think it’s because all of the terminology we have around this concept is either dogmatically religious, which you either are or you aren’t, or it’s alienating in some way, like, alienating spirituality. And so people, and, you know, like, let’s, let’s look at this from a weird perspective, like, the failed coping mechanism doesn’t want you.

To give up to succeed, you know, like the failed coping mechanism would like to stay in charge. Thank you very much. And the failed coping mechanism is your intellect, right? Like, it is your intellect. So the intellect, like, it is. It’s it’s hard to convince a part of your character of something when it’s salary depends on it not understanding it right like it just like it will not let that go and it’s interesting to me the conversations I have where you just watch people and it’s like that that bit of the TV series Westworld where you’re showing people the way out and they’re like nope doesn’t look like anything to me they can’t compute it because it just you It just completely violates every part of rationalist science that we’ve grown up with.

Sean: Hmm. I want to rewind a second ago because that quote that you said about the kids, and then obviously that line you have about a kid would rather have. A father with fire in his eyes, then an extra bedroom. I love that. But I want to know how you wrestle with… I think it takes a somewhat evolved being to understand the sacrifice the parent is making, or the spouse is making, in order to, let’s call it, follow their bliss there.

What about the spouses, or the children, who aren’t as evolved, and don’t understand the deepest sacrifice that parent is making?

Tom: I think part of it’s structural. I often joke that like 80 percent of our problems come from having violated Dunbar’s number, which is, you know, the, basically the, the maximum number of friends or like tribe size that we can have is 150. It’s held, like our brains are only so big and our time is only so limited.

The number of relationships we can plausibly have is about 150. And so. One of the major, major problems that we’ve done is we’ve split things into units, right? Like, you’re a unit of five. Like, I’m a unit of four, where it’s me, my wife, and two kids, right? Ordinarily, if you were going through some stuff for a couple of years, the tribe would be like, you know, Sean’s got it going on.

He’s going through the archetypal process. We know this happens because we’ve seen it happen for thousands of years. He’s going to be a bit crappy for a couple of years, but you know what? His family’s still going to get fed because we know what this is. When it, on an extreme example, you know, a lot of, a lot of Other societies would put the shaman experiencing the call in like a room for two years.

They’d lock the dude in a room for two years because they know that he would completely lose his mind and he would go through this savage initiation process into another stage of life where he could heal the tribe. So like Again, those, those incubations existed. I think the lack of those puts an insane amount of pressure on the spouse, and like an insane incomprehensible amount of pressure on the spouse.

Like, I was lucky that in the three years my wife was working and my wife was successful. So like, we didn’t starve, but I was also like, Like variously insane, like not functional and depressed. And, you know, like the data says that it takes about three years, right? A full career shift takes about three years. And I think that even the best spouse has room for about three months, but also not understanding that it’s going to take multiple failed experiments. It’s going to be like a really traumatic phase for, for, for the, mostly the husband, but in a lot of situations, the wife, and this may be a slight tangent, but it’s something I’ve come to realize is that, like, when I look at the structure of my friend’s marriages and mine particularly.Men get stuck in their heads a lot, like men, someone like me, like is constantly playing with ideas and it often makes me a bad husband and a bad father, because I’m so preoccupied with playing with these abstract ideas.

I’m not anticipating the needs of my family. And you could times that by a thousand when I was going through this crisis. It was my preoccupation with the second half of my life and how it was going to go. Literally there was no room for anything else in my psyche, there was just a constant voice telling like, you know, and it wasn’t a good one in my voice talking about this.

And on the other hand, I’ve realized that I think what a lot of wives want is for men to acknowledge the sacrifice. Is that, you know, that’s what women do? They sacrifice their bodies for childbirth. They sacrifice their time and effort to maintain the household. I know this is kind of a traditional gender role thing, but it played out anecdotally in my friends.

So I’m not generalizing further than that, but they often just want people to notice what they’re doing. And I think you get into an incredibly extreme example of that through these transitions where the wife is on their own. Often, you know, like really, really like having to lean into everything in terms of the maintenance and the household and the kids.

So, but they also don’t get the support because I feel like the tribe, the tribe would have realized that, you know, Diane is now on her own because Sean’s gone into, gone, gone into the woods for two years. And so that lack of support. I don’t know how we go about it, but I think community is the answer.

Sean: Yeah, one of the rabbit holes I went down, I sent this quote to my friend yesterday after preparing for this. And it’s an Esther Perel quote and she says, We come to one person and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one.

And I think you’re hitting on one of the things that’s really challenging. Today we’re asking the people to give us all of that. And it’s just an impossibility, which I want to tie back to some of these transitions and the womb. Have you found secure structures for these transitions to take place? Is there anything like that going on right now?

Tom: I think there’s a, I think there’s a business model here that hasn’t been thoroughly explored. I know there are individual people that are doing it. But the mystery for me is why you have the world awash with capital. In all these different areas, and it doesn’t seem to be serving. I think 1 of the greatest unmet needs.

I think 1 of the problems is that it requires us to acknowledge the existence of forces that we’re not ready to acknowledge. I met someone recently who’s trying to raise over a billion dollars. To bring overwhelming spiritual experiences into the medical mainstream. So basically it’s like, all right, Tom’s just had a Kundalini awakening to kind of usher him into a new age of spiritual rebirth.

What are his, what are his outcomes if he goes in and decides to take lithium or he decides to go to an ashram, right? Like you can, you can usher people through this. Without having to burn down the medical system or people having to reject the, the, the stabilizing benefits of medication. So, like, that’s like a literal container that I think society needs to create.

And, that’s one area that I think. Either philanthropy or profit motives could do it. There’s also communities like I think Steel Evolution’s homework, you know, groups of 150 people, like set up groups of 150 people and fill those containers with the best practitioners. You know, I recently did an interview with a phenomenal life coach called Devon Martin.

He’s legit. I’ve met his family. Like, I think he practices what he preaches, and he’s been working in this area for 15 years. And I’m like, put him in the container. Put someone who does holotropic breathwork, put someone who does, you know, lucid dreaming, whatever it is that you think is the thinnest end of the wedge to help people through this transition who are stagnating, or to help people who are in crisis on the other side, create a container.

full of other people that are either going through it or have gone through it and recreate that tribal structure that we’re missing. The question that I have is, will people pay for it? And I don’t know.

Sean: Well, let’s focus on the container. Then one of the things that you fill your container with is Brazilian jiu jitsu, and I’m just wondering for you, what you’ve opened up in the mind by going to the body. I’m just curious what that experience has been like for you.

Tom: I think Brazilian jiu jitsu is close to perfection. Because there’s lots of things going for it. The first of which is limited, limitlessly complex. So I do it with a gi, which just means like a glorified dressing gown, and it’s about grips, moves, move combinations, submissions, sweeps. I’ve been doing it for two years, four times a week, and I feel like I’ve barely repeated the same move twice in terms of what I’ve been learning, which is utterly overwhelming.

But if you’re a bit of a, you know, like an overly intellectualized person like me, That’s just amazing because you’re suddenly forced to focus on something, really focus on something, you know, for at least an hour a day. Your phone’s off the mat. And then you have this, this, I call it the jujection, which is like, you walk in feeling either a little bit hungover, a little bit down, a little bit, a little bit off the pace, and the fact that there’s someone trying to choke you unconscious focuses the mind in a way that, that like nothing I’ve ever encountered does.

So, like, I’ve been, I mean, God knows, 300 times now, you know, however many times, four times in two years is, four times a week for two years is like. I’ve never left without massive euphoria. Like I knew I leave 70 percent of the time disappointed in the fact that I got choked unconscious, but I don’t ever leave without feeling euphoria.

And that for me is just intrinsically valuable, but at the same time, I’m physically in the best shape I’ve been since my mid twenties where for strength, flexibility, my friend calls it murder yoga, because if you, if you’re not. If you’re not flexible in a certain part of your body, that part of your body will be found and stretched at some point by someone who’s 250 pounds.

So it’s, it’s just amazing. And I think that, like, a guy I really liked called John Verveke talked about how Tai Chi changed the way that he was in the world, in that he learned to flow more in the world. And I think there’s something to that where it’s like, I’m the least aggressive person you could possibly imagine.

I’ve literally never been in a fight outside of, outside of you know, a controlled setting. But what it does is it, it, you move through the world in a more confident way, not because you can beat people up, but just because you’re more secure in your own body. And from a straight instrumentalist perspective, I get lots of good ideas.

Like I’ll come out of, I’ll come out of jujitsu and I’ll be like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And that’s an insight cascade that you get through the flow state. And that’s really helped me in my writing. But in today’s world, like after COVID, I was like, I’m never going to a gym again. Like, I just, I just hate the gym.

I’m not one of those weirdo psychopaths, probably like you are, that can go in and just lift, lift until they have destroyed their body or run until they, you know, have destroyed their body. Like I, I. I don’t have that in me. And so I realized that when I got into my forties, I needed to find as many things as I could that I did for the intrinsic joy of them, right?

Like where, where there is no goal. You are just finding stuff that you can maintain for a long time. And the rub of Brazilian jiu jitsu is you get injured all the time. You get horrible little joint injuries for the time. Like there’s no getting around it, but everyone in my class, so I’m 42. Everyone in my class is older than me, which is pretty nice.

Sean: That is interesting. Yeah. I use my workouts to access the mind. I don’t go to a public gym. I have a gym at my house and I work out in the pitch black. 

Tom: Wow,

Sean: I’ve been doing it for years now. And I think it’s a completely different experience and I would recommend anyone who has access to their own gym to try it out.

It’s very unique. And I feel like my mind goes to much more interesting places. And I also think there’s even a level of intention and focus that allows you to be fully in tuned with the body, which outside distractions seem to prevent.

Tom: That’s one of the most interesting things I’ve heard, like, that’s so I’ve never heard of that. And yet, obviously, when you hear it, you know, it immediately makes sense. I mean, I would obviously drop a dumbbell on my head in the first 10 minutes and like would be killed. But that’s incredible. That’s so interesting.

Sean: I want to understand, cause you go so deep on the ideas and topics you’re exploring, have you ever explored some of the founders of some of the great martial arts or even the founders of jujitsu?

Tom: No, I mean, only a little,

Sean: Because I’m curious what they knew that we don’t, which led them to the exploration of their martial art.

Tom: I think there’s a second answer to that question because I don’t have an answer to the first question, which is that, like, what’s the point of any of this? Like, I watch a lot of people. The goal is balance, right? The goal of everything is balance, a balance between chaos and order. You know, like I was saying earlier, the king, the king has a balance with the masculine and feminine within him and that enables him to like to be, be both creative and structured, right?

And I, I think about what’s the point of any of this? You know, what’s the goal that we’re all shooting for? And I often think of, of the Taoist sage and the Taoist sage My dad actually met one once in his life and he gets up to the top of this, this mountain in China and there’s this dude with like dust on the top of his hat and on his shoulders because he sits in contemplation so much.

And the, the, the Taoist sage comes up to them all and it’s like. Hey, I’m, I’m like a super powerful magician. I can’t really talk to you guys very long cause I’ve got to go make a thunderstorm. Andcthey all kind of giggle and then they go and sleep at the temple. And that night, yeah.

from a blue sky, there’s just this crazy, intense thunderstorm. And a lot of people are like, oh yeah, coincidence, yada yada. The way I think about that story, whether or not it’s true, is that where you want to get to in life is trying not to try, where you have an incredibly strong ego. And yet it’s being used completely in harmony with the world around you that you have such strong discernment, you can click your fingers and make a thunderstorm appear.

And I think of like the one inch punch, where if you watch like a really, really extreme martial artist, they can do. insane amounts with such a minimal application of force. I think it’s why Wall Street has, you know, such an obsession with the art of learning by Josh Waitzkin, because that’s all, that’s push hands, right?

That’s learning this deeply embodied, like, high leverage form of movement. And you’re never going to get there. Like, it’s an unattainable goal. But that’s also what wisdom is, which is effectively… Like, you know exactly what to do at exactly the right time and anxiety is the opposite, which is when you have no idea what to do, and you have no idea when to do it, and you’re trying to control all these exogenous variables that are ludicrous that you can’t control.

Right? So, like, the opposite of wisdom is anxiety. But wisdom is brilliant because you’re just completely, you have just your environment completely under control. And you can react to it at exactly the right time. And you use that sensitivity to steer your life in the right direction as well.

Sean: It makes me think of, essentially, you are so strong and sound in your base. You’re at the center of the hurricane, where there’s no chaos happening, but chaos can be happening all around you and you’re so stable. I’m peering back there because I’m trying to find one of the books on my bookshelf. It was the founder of Aikido, and I’m going to butcher his name.

It’s something like Morihei Ueshiba, and he used to be able to stand there with a wooden dowel that was essentially six feet out. And this was an 85 year old man, and he could have multiple students pushing the rod as hard as they could. And this tiny, he was like five foot two, old man could be holding that rod and would not move an inch because of his power.

And that, I think, is what you’re describing. That power, that control, and getting to that level,  is something truly remarkable. Yeah.

Tom: that away from him. I mean, like maybe he’ll break his arms. Yeah. You know, like yada, yada, right? Like, yeah, it can be taken away from him physically, but the embodied knowledge. Cannot be taken away from him.

And I think that a lot of people are like, Yes, but that’s a dude at the top of a mountain doing martial arts. And I think what you can do is relate it back to what we were saying at the start, which is, You can do this with information. Like, it’s obvious that you can do this with information. That you can either tell people something that is a word of truth, like transcendent truth that changes Changes their life in one quote, you know, Carl Jung could do that where he was so intuitive.

He could say one sentence to you that would heal you and that would change your life, right? Like, it was sort of like the miracles, but also you can get this information sent. Where like, you know, exactly how to calibrate the direction of your explorations down rabbit holes, because you have cultivated this embodied sensitivity towards new information, and you can’t really explain it to people as you did, as you could tell from the rubbish job I was doing explaining it, where it’s like when I talked to really, really good investors.

They’re just like, Oh, I just knew that that was a bad thing. So I didn’t do it. And, and, and then they have to write these like really clever, like notes to all their clients explaining why they did something, but yeah, but they just knew, and that’s expertise to me,

Sean: Where do you think you’ve developed your expertise the most?

Tom: I have that much expertise. I think I know a lot about transitions now. Because I was given the worst one imaginable, and I, and I botched it so many times. And what’s interesting is that transitions are fractal. So, like, if you understand how the pattern of a transition works, like, to be a bit pretentious, a phase change in a complex adaptive system, if you understand how that works, that knowledge is leverage-able across lots and lots and lots of different fields.

And so. When I wonder what I’m good at, like, I meet a lot of people now and I’ve suddenly realized what the point of myth is. And this was one of those, one of those questions that I sat with for like five or six years. There’s something Joseph Campbell says, and Joseph Campbell’s got a blindingly high ROI on reading him.

Actually, just to quickly clarify, reading his books was a nightmare for me. The power of myth and his interviews are gorgeous, but I’ve tried to hear with a thousand faces twice and fell twice. I just, it’s, it’s like a series of ingredients rather than a soup. But, there’s this quote that he had, which is sometimes the mind rambles off and wants something the body doesn’t want.

And the purpose of myth was to harmonize the mind and body. And I was like, I don’t really understand what that means. And then I realized that there is an archetypal pattern that human life takes. And you can wander off that path really, really easily. You get distracted by something else, you end up in the wrong job, you end up with addiction, like, you just stray off the path.

And when someone comes to you and they’re like, oh dude, there’s a path, there’s like an archetypal path, and here’s where you are, and here’s where you should be. That heals people because that path is real and it shows them a way to get back on track. And I think that’s what the shaman did. That’s what the priest did.

You know, when you were the, the value of dogmatic religion was that you were sitting in the pulpit, sitting in the, in the pews and from the pulpit you heard like, this is a very specific parable about how you screwed. And then you realize it’s talking about you because humans screw up in these wonderfully reliable ways and you’re like, Oh, no, I screwed up that way.

I need to correct that and get back on track. And I think that’s the value of, like myth and parable, because also like we’re so head centric, we tend to assume that we can decide whatever we want to do. And good luck with that.

Sean: Hmm. A question Tom you’ve asked me over the years is, who do I look to as a modern day sage? I’m wondering for you at this point in time, who are you looking to?

Tom: I hate that question. I hate it because either I’m not looking hard enough or there aren’t any or there aren’t enough. And it makes me like, like really emotionally sad. And I think part of it is that the Tyrant is winning at the moment. I don’t think the Tyrant’s gonna win. Like, I’m super optimistic about the world, but I think like, when you look at all the most famous people that we’ve held up as founders, when you look at their lives, their relationship with their families were rubbish.

Right. And they weren’t very nice people and they’re not very happy and they’re not flourishing. And I think that a lot of the sages, because of their nature, the paradoxical nature of their power, they’re not very well known. But they’re very, very happy and successful. I really enjoy the work of John Vervake.

He seems to have like, he’s a really thinking intellectual that’s concerned about wisdom. And he also emphasizes the importance of the ecology of practice. So he’s like, you need. You need a contemplative, meditative, and embodied practice. So the meditative is like passion, the contemplative is meta, which is love and kindness, which I believe is just a way of connecting yourself to the rest of the world.

And then there’s embodied, which is, you know, keeping you in your body. And it’s a dynamic series where if, if, if any one part of your life comes apart, You can lean more heavily on the other side of it, and it kind of makes you anti fragile where you, you just have these different things that can keep you in balance.

And I think a lot of the people that I’ve really enjoyed in the sort of the sense making and meaning community, they can get really, really mentally abstracted, like, ironically, and they can get really up in their heads. And that’s a really dangerous place to be. You’ve seen a lot of people that I won’t name, but you can see pretty obviously, who get themselves into really tough psychological spots by not having grounding practices.

So he’s someone that I’ve, I’ve particularly enjoyed. 

Sean: Yeah, I think I was listening to Morgan Housel recently. He was saying the 10 richest people in the world between them. There’s 14 divorces. I just thought that was pretty interesting, but you’re mentioning the meaning there. I’m wondering where you find the most meaning in your life.

Tom: I think meaning is found in the process. I think it’s one of the, one of, it’s probably obvious to a lot of people and I can’t, I can’t tell how obvious it is to people that like Carl Jung said that thing you can do is set up a goal and a rigid goal. And then place meaning there because everything that comes into your life that doesn’t conform to that goal, you’re, you’re going to bat it away and the universe is much smarter than you.

And so I think meaning comes from finding a process that is sustainable that you enjoy intrinsically and is integrated into the world. So, like. Just if we could take a little diversion into like, thinky science for a second, because it’s important. It seems like the universe trends towards complexity.

You know, we started off with rocks and now we have the internet. It’s obvious, things could get more complex over time, but the definition of complexity is something that has highly differentiated parts that are all completely integrated into the whole. If all the parts are the same, you have a rock.

If nothing’s integrated, you have a gas. So you want something where every part’s different. And yet every part is working in service of the whole. And so when I think about that, that tells you what evolution wants from you. And the reward that evolution gives you for pursuing that is a sense of meaning.

Like, I don’t think things feel good arbitrarily. Like you can take drugs and dumb things. Like, but, but things that in and of themselves feel meaningful for their own sake, that’s not a coincidence. And I think evolution made one thing feel particularly amazing and better than everything else, which is this sense of deep meaning that you get when you’re following a niche that’s highly specific to you.

Which is why giving advice in this area is so difficult because it’s like, there’s something that your set of experiences is, is lining you up for and. The pursuit of that niche is just going to feel awesome. But if you’re pursuing that niche in a way that doesn’t serve something, doesn’t serve the whole, it’s not going to work.

So what you do is you get this constant calibrated feedback from the world, usually in the form of synchronicity, in my opinion, where it’s like, yeah, you’re going the right way and things are going to work out great. You’re going to get abundance, like you’re going to get your, your life is going to feel meaningful.

You’re going to stay on the beam. And it makes sense to me why evolution would reward that. How mysteriously it does it, I’m still unsure. But I’m pretty sure it’s more mysterious than people think.

Sean: One of my favorite lines of yours is that the real superpower is living a life where what’s blissful for you and beneficial for the world gradually becomes the same thing. And that’s actually why I started this conversation off around what you do for your ideas and creativity, which sounds like, all right, what’s his one, two, three process here.

And I feel like you have one of the best. Concepts of how you explore that and your internal guidance. And I think it’s just a beacon for so many people to start living and following more in alignment with that. And I know you had to go through hell in order to get that, but I just think it’s so crucial.

That’s why I wanted to bring that up there as you continue to explore what feels right within you and bring those ideas to fruition for a better whole. I just think that’s just incredible what you do day to day besides. Besides the creative process in your exploration, are there other things that you do to zoom out?
Like you were mentioning, you’re in New York, you’re, you’re surrounded by similar types of people. I’m just wondering how you actually zoom out of that.

Tom: I get a massage once a week, which is my  indulgence when I was unemployed, it even took that away from me. It was like everything got taken away from me. All my respites got taken away from me. And so now I’m extra, extra glad when I have enough money to go to a cheap massage place once a week and I lie on the table and I get forcibly put in my body.

By a lovely man called Alan and stuff just comes to me. So that really helps me zoom out on a semi embodied level. I’m obviously having a slow motion midlife crisis. So I’ve got really into DJing, and I’m bad at it, but what I do is I write and listen to a lot of melodic trance music.

And if I was going to be weird about things and God knows what I am like. A lot of other cultures had drumming rituals to put people into trances to generate an altered state, and I think that does it in me. I’ve realized that when I write to trance music to, to like, rhythmic beats, my, the quality of my writing is more original and more interesting.

I think to formalize it a little, Stan Groff, who’s , this crazy brilliant guy that developed holotropic breathing when they made LSD illegal, he was just like, you need You need ecstatic experiences, like non ordinary states of consciousness, every so often as kind of a safety valve, that I think you can be marching off again in that direction the head wants.

And then if you don’t get that zooming out perspective break, you can just end up marching off the cliff in the wrong direction kind of forever, right? Like, so you need to find a way of generating an ecstatic experience. So for me, that’s, you know, Jiu Jitsu, it’s low key ecstatic experiences. Like listening to the trance music and it’s, it’s the massage, but I, you know, like I constantly feel guilty because I, I don’t meditate.

And I’ve never really had the patience for it. And if I do meditate, I do embodied meditation

Sean: No, no breathwork.

Tom: Nope. I got into it for a little while. It didn’t stick.

Sean: Hmm. I’m surprised with jujitsu. You didn’t end up going back to it.

Tom: Yeah, I always, I get a lot of guilt about this, right? Like, I’m like all the stuff, everything. The first thing everyone tells me is why don’t you meditate? I’m like, I don’t know. I just don’t really want it. And maybe that’s just because maybe 10 years from now, I’ll be like, wow, I can’t believe I wasted so much of my life, not meditating.

But also like, as I get older, I’m like, dude, lean into stuff that you enjoy and that you can, I used to be very fatty. I used to be very fatty, you know, like I’m going to have nine months where I’m into kettlebells. I’m going to have three months where I do the Wim Hof method. And if it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t stick.

And like, Jiu Jitsu stuck. And like, I do the, I do the massages because I love it. Like I, I love, love, love it. I like it. Like, to the point of, like, there’s not a huge number of things that you love in life, and so lean into that niche, I kind of think I should do that.

Sean: Help me explore something I’ve been wrestling with a long time. I’ve been trying to write about this recently. And so this Eastern world thinks about tranquility, right? Like Zen peace in the garden. And you’re kind of exploring what it sounds like to me is rapture. And I think about that balance between tranquility, what you’re seeking.
Meditation, things of that, or rapture, what captures your attention. And the way I think about it is I’m with you. I’ll take rapture all day. The things that I’ve had the deepest joy in life were times where I was, to use your words, exploring my curiosities and essentially going after things that rapture me.

Not just tranquility up on a mountaintop by myself.

Tom: I mean, that’s, I’m so glad you brought that up, so glad. I’m a bit triggered by all this, probably because I’m not very enlightened, but after I had my spiritual experience, part of me was like, dude, just… Just get up onto a mountaintop and, and, you know, meditate yourself to enlightenment. And that was a legitimate path to me.

And it makes me think of Michael Singer, who was this big meditator dude. And he started trying to meditate himself to enlightenment. He kind of hit a ceiling. And then he was like, you know, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into the world and I’m going to basically surrender to everything that life is throwing at me but from a place of kind of egoic centeredness and he ends up like being an accountant for like a like a medical like records firm and go IPO ing and making like like billions of dollars or something nuts like he’s like a net worth of 200 million.
And, and I’m not saying that, like, that’s a route to success, but that is the implementation of a Taoist philosophy. Because one thing, and Jung said this all the time, and I think it’s something we neglect a lot, is that if you go too far in the other direction, from like, rationalist, nothing means anything, to like, spiritual, meditate yourself to enlightenment, a lot of that, I think, in our culture is like, bliss chasing, where it’s like, I’m going to do the Jhanas and get myself to a place where I can generate bliss in my body on command.

And don’t get me wrong, that sounds really nice, but does the world need it right now? Like, I think we’re in a slow motion global crisis and I think we need more kings than we need monks. And there’s something about that that’s like spiritual bypassing. It’s regressive and people get very proud of the things that they can do with their mind.

And I’m like, No, dude, what are you doing in the world? Like, I’m sure that those spiritual practices, I know that they lead to right action, but keeping that balance alive is really hard. I don’t know how you do it.

Sean: You bring up The Kings again, and I know this is a piece you sent me that hasn’t come out yet, and I just want to read you a paragraph that I love. And it’s insecure, tyrannical chimps eventually get torn to pieces by an alliance of the other males. The most stable human systems are helmed by a secure King by making space for the feminine.

He creates a balance of stable order and fertile growth. His role is closer to a gardener in a lush and diverse greenhouse or the conductor of an orchestra. A good practical model is that of a patron. And I just love that. And we’re going to close up here. And I just want to leave that impression of what that looks like for people to keep in their mind.
And lean more into that as they’re going throughout their day. I just think that’s so impactful. And Tom, you’ve had such an immense impact on so many people through your writing, through your speaking. I would love to know though, if you could do this, and I know you speak to a ton of people, but you could talk to anyone dead or alive.

Who would you love spending a weekend with?

Tom: I mean, I feel like literally everyone on earth would say this, but I’ve believed that there were certain people on earth that had Access to like archetypal truth and often that, like, I do believe that, like, spiritual transmission is a legit thing. There are people that you listen to and you’re like, I don’t know where their words are coming from, but it’s not them and that makes a conversation with them rather than like an information exchange.

It makes it like a. Like a transformational exchange and I’d like to speak to someone like, you know, like Jesus. I know that’s like an immense cliche, but if this guy, if this guy really was, you know, one of the most transcendentally connected people of all time, like the quality of the words coming out of his mouth will change you.

And I just think that having that kind of direct experience would be nuts.

Sean: Hmm. Tom, say you’re going to change some people. Where do you want me to direct the listeners? Where can they stay connected with you? Stay up to date on all the things that you’re putting out.

Tom: I write a sub stack called what’s important question mark because I am a bad father and husband. I’m too active on Twitter at Tom Owen Morgan, and I do make an effort that if anyone DMs me, if you’re in Manhattan, come grab a coffee or a beer. I try to meet everyone.

My new book, Masterpiece in Progress: A Daily Guide to a Life Well Crafted, is out now!