#118 - Cory Allen - We're Drowning In Information, But Starving For Clarity

Cory Allen spent years learning how to separate who he was from the stories, labels, and expectations placed on him. We explore why suffering can become a doorway to deeper awareness, how meditation creates space between stimulus and response, and why we're drowning in information but starving for clarity. We also unpack what it means to stop performing an identity and start living with intention and how that shift transforms our relationship with self-worth, ambition, creativity, and the overlooked opportunities that quietly change your life.

Timestamps:
00:00 Who You Are vs. The Idea Of Who You Are
08:02 How You Think vs. What You Think
14:16 Why Pain Can Take You Deeper Into Yourself
16:32 Why Too Much Information Can Hold You Back
21:14 Maximum Self-Confidence With Minimum Self-Worth
27:56 The Cost Of Living In Your Head
34:41 When Wellbeing Data Replaces Self-Awareness
38:21 The Freedom Of Not Being The Main Character
42:03 The Space Between Stimulus & Response
53:42 Why Some People See Opportunities Others Miss
58:08 Is Cory Allen Ambitious?
59:35 The Tools You Were Born With
1:04:37 Shifting From Music To Writing
1:08:55 What People Need Most Right Now
1:15:31 Your Thoughts Are Not Facts
1:18:14 Learning To Trust Your Own Voice
1:22:25 Playing With Reality
1:24:52 Connect With Cory Allen

Thank you so much for listening. I truly appreciate your time and support. Let me know what you thought of the episode and what you would like to see in the future. Any feedback would be awesome. Don't forget to subscribe for more exciting content on YouTube, and leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever platform you are listening on.

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Transcript

Cory Allen spent years learning how to separate who he was from the stories, labels, and expectations placed on him. We explore why suffering can become a doorway to deeper awareness, how meditation creates space between stimulus and response, and why we're drowning in information but starving for clarity. We also unpack what it means to stop performing an identity and start living with intention and how that shift transforms our relationship with self-worth, ambition, creativity, and the overlooked opportunities that quietly change your life.

speaker-0 (00:00.046)

Well, officially Corey Allen. Welcome to the show. You have shared that when having a conversation with someone, talk to the person rather than the idea that you have of that person. Mm-hmm. What do you see as that gap between who Corey Allen is and the idea of Corey Allen?

speaker-1 (00:02.478)

Officially thank you.

speaker-1 (00:17.75)

That's great question.

I can only tell you what my idea of my idea of me is, because it's what I'm guessing that other people think about me in terms of whether I look into, you know, the the the abyss of the internet and also how people approach me in life and digitally. the idea of me is that I am a very calm, stoic, but warm and insightful and

I think I would say a person who's always trying to to help people understand themselves more deeply. And I also would like to think that people the idea of me as being very approachable and friendly, and also probably a little bit unexpected as well, because I do have a pretty I have this very silly, abstract kind of streak that runs through my personality. So I think that's

usually how people think of me, I also really hope and I believe that people think of me as very trustworthy and very honest and very straightforward with the people that I care about and also just people that I meet in life.

speaker-0 (01:33.656)

What's something about yourself that you know that maybe not come through the idea of what people may think about you?

speaker-1 (01:42.954)

pretty much who I am, you know, I'm a very authentic representation of who I am to others. something that people might not know about me is that let's see.

speaker-1 (02:02.466)

th that I like chess a lot. That's something I don't talk about. But I know that's not really a personality trait. That's a that's a hobby. yeah, I I don't know. I honestly I I really have spent so long just trying to be make sure that I'm really open with people that there's not really anything that part of me that I conceal that people might not know about.

speaker-0 (02:26.402)

Sticking with this notion of the idea of a person and taking you back to your childhood and I think it could get into this understanding of okay, creating this idea of who you are, especially as a kid. What do you remember most about your mom pretty much fooling you into taking you to a psych work and saying you need to go into an inpatient program?

speaker-1 (02:51.096)

Well, I don't know how you know that, but I must have said it somewhere, but it's very impressive. Yeah, I'm sure. I must have, yeah. And what was the question now? You threw me so much by knowing that that I

speaker-0 (02:57.122)

You did say it.

speaker-0 (03:03.136)

I guess just like what do you remember the most about that experience? And I guess tying it in with that notion of okay, there's a separation between who I know I am in an internal level and there's kind of this idea of who I am that's being created by either your mother or other forces at that psych ward.

speaker-1 (03:24.052)

Yeah. I mean, the feeling, of course, was just betrayal, you know, and also shock and confusion. But then there's also been this part of me, and it's because of my early experiences in life where I've had this level of hyperindependence and this feeling like, well, I'll just figure it out. Like whatever happens, I'll always figure it out. And it's up to me to use my creativity and my

like problem solving skills and intellect and also ability to see the angles of perception of the people that I'm talking to and and with, not only how they're seeing reality, but also how they're seeing me within their reality, to then circumvent the situation or neutralize the situation when necessary. So in that case, I very quickly saw kind of what was happening and just felt, okay, like literally I went into action to like, I need to start laying the the framework

with everyone I talk to in a way that will help me exit the situation as quickly as possible. So don't express my frustration, don't express my anger, don't lash out, don't tell people anything other than, yes, thank you, cool. I feel great. There's some type of confusion here. I don't know why I'm here. Yada, yada, yada, to be able to get out of that situation as quickly as possible. I mean, even though whenever I was in there and I was in

I guess I was I think I was in seventh grade when that happened. so I was like twelve or thirteen. I y they were trying to immediately give me medication too. So they were giving me Zoloft and which is an antidepressant, I don't know if that's still out there. And then they were giving me like tranquilizers and various other things, but they would make you line up, you know, they'd take your shoelaces, they'd make you line up in the morning and they'd give you medication, and then a nurse would look in your mouth to make sure that you swallowed it.

But I would always put it in between my my gums and my teeth and open my mouth and I'd go spit it in the toilet every day because even though that I I knew I knew nothing was wrong with me. And even then I thought I don't want to be like synthesizing my brain chemistry, you know, just like freestyle because I'm like, I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine, but I'm I'm n I in not in need of that medication. And so I'd go spit it out, you know. And it's wild that like

speaker-1 (05:47.16)

being in a place like that where they it was an interesting experience because I saw people who were of course much older than me, but people that were really, really facing like serious mental health challenges. you know, I saw dudes like losing it and like attacking people and biting people and getting the like classic Hollywood, like the the needle in the neck and then they bass out, you know. people thrown in like the padded room, like people trying to like

escape the elevator and go run into traffic on the highway. 'Cause this place was, you know, you don't know how long you've been in Austin, but this was on Mopak. This is off Mopak and like thir like thirty fifth street. And every time I drive by that building, the building is still there. It's I'm sure it's something else now. But I drove by it on the way here, as a matter of fact. and so yeah, like being in a place like that and being told to like go in your room with no clocks and no windows for like solo time.

For five hours. You don't know if a minute's passed. You don't know if five hours passed. You can literally like lose your mind being in a place to help you try and get corrected, but I would say that I don't know that that place necessarily had everyone's best interests in mind. but yeah, the idea of being there and that happening, not only did it it just really deeply reinforced the the programming and the patterning that I was already experiencing of like, I'm just gonna be thrown into

chaotic situation again and again and again. And it's gonna be up to me in each of those situations to stay grounded, to figure it out, and to basically just take care of myself.

speaker-0 (07:26.67)

I think one of the most fascinating things about that experience, especially at such a young age, is that you have this conscious awareness going back to the medication with Zoloft of I'm not going to take this because I know this is going to would in a way actually create even more of a idea of you and sort of shifting your brain chemistry. And I think that's so crucial because to mirror that with, okay, so that's your early teen years. And then mirroring that with, you know, in your mid teen years.

You have a conscious awareness again of okay, here's another external factor that can kind of change something within my head and what I'm getting at is, you know, you get exposed to, okay, I can shift my consciousness and my mind through meditation. And where that exposure really comes from you at the start is through reading. So you, you know, you've shared that you read Nietzsche at the start, and you describe that as, this is how I think. And then

you read a lot of Eastern philosophy and you describe that as, this is what I think. That's an interesting relationship that I never thought about, like, there's a how and a what to how we think, like to our thoughts. What do you see as that relationship there between, you know, how you think versus what you think?

speaker-1 (08:42.699)

Yeah. I mean another fantastic question. you know, from that time, I was already aware of my inner life in terms of arising material. And when I talk about arising material, I'm talking about mental formations. So in, you know, for anyone that doesn't know and Buddhism, they'll talk about they'll refer to anything that arises on the stage of consciousness that could be thoughts, emotions

impulses, reactions, anything in there as a mental formation. And it's a useful to think about in that way because truly that is the operational system of consciousness, is we have the observing self that is kind of watching the sh the show unfold. And then on the stage of our mind, there are there's a flow of thoughts that flow by, there's emotions, there's impulses, there's

Yeah, recursive loops, is all these you know, mental stories, everything lives there. And being able to have that space within yourself gives you the ability to see the contents of your mind and everything that's happening in your body with an an external clarity so that you don't get lost in the story of those emotions and reactions or false thoughts or whatever. You're able to see them for what they are and then let them go.

I developed that sense of awareness, I think somewhat naturally, but also through ultimately a a survival mechanism. Whenever I was young, I had to, because of my environment, I had to hash out the story I was being told or what that was being leveraged against me versus what I actually observed as truth and reality on my own. And that quickly made me understand, because I had to understand perception of self and perception of environment.

And so that sent me in inward, looking at my mind, noticing how I was reacting to the environment, to the thoughts I was having, to the stories I was being told, to the feelings I had. And that made it to where focusing on that helped protect me and helped me guide my way more skillfully through that environment. Now that made me realize that there are there there's a certain math and structure to the way that we think. Then there are also

speaker-1 (11:00.332)

what we think, which would be our values and our point of view of life. I think that I realize that how I think is very abstractly with big ideas that are isolated down into very kind of razor-sharp edges. what I think is that underneath everything for me anyway, it is nothing but th there is this

Inextinguishable feeling of compassion and empathy and a deep understanding about the human condition. And I mean that in the sense that from my suffering early on, I understood that the pain, the fear, the anxiety, everything that I felt is not special. That's it's a human quality.

And the deeper that you get into your own suffering, the deeper you realize that those feelings are human. And it made me realize that those exist in everyone. And I thought, the same way that I am, you know, gray rocking or stonewalling, sh expressing how I feel to the world, so must everyone else be. Everyone must be scared and feeling, you know, either hopeful or hopeless or frightened or

Depressed or anxious, they're just not signaling it to the world because that is another evolutionary human safety mechanism, to not look vulnerable to the pack. And so understanding that opened this really deep and rich compassion for me very young, even though I had to I concealed that because I wanted to protect myself. But that was always what I thought was correct.

in what I felt was right as a human being. So whenever I read Nietzsche, I saw, this guy is writing in the way that I think, the math of my thinking, big ideas broken down to these razor star badges that are really getting at something, getting at something that turns a key in your mind, that unlocks your insight and shifts your perspective and wakes you up. And you know, I like to garden with dynamite, you know, it's like getting in there, really like going deep with stuff.

speaker-1 (13:23.97)

But then the Eastern wisdom traditions were really like, this is the the view of life as a person that I find resonates with me most. This is how I I want to walk through the world i as much as I can.

speaker-0 (13:41.208)

Did you start to see or did you have an appreciation when you first started meditating? You talked about, you know, your pains and your suffering as okay, this isn't special to me. Did you also start to see it as like, okay, this is actually the source for me to go deeper? Like the reason for this pain is why I can go deeper into myself.

speaker-1 (13:59.5)

Yeah, I I did have that insight. And I think that, you know, what's interesting is that the pain is why I started meditating in the first place. And so they kind of helped each other along. And that's something I've, you know, say a lot is like people that are meditating aren't necessarily aren't usually doing it because they're happy. You know? If someone isn't like, I've got the best life ever, everything's great, I think I'll try meditating. It's because they're feeling anxious, it's because they're feeling overwhelmed or stuck, or they have some type of presentation

suffering that they can't quite visualize or understand yet. And so they're trying to create the quiet conditions so that they can hear themselves. And that was what happened to me. It's like I picked up one of these the a book you know after reading Nietzsche, the first Eastern Wisdom Tradition book I picked up was Essays in Zen Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki. And it's, you know, this is in the nineties, it's and and he's from be f way before that. You know, he is from lived in the early 1900s. So

It was before things were chunked out. And here's the top ten ways to meditate for business success. It was the first ear you know, early translations from ideogrammic language into alphabetic language, from Japanese symbols into, you know, American English. And there are like long spiraling, scrolling sort of paragraphs of like pointing to the way, you know, not really talking about anything.

And I would just read them again, each sentence again and again and again and again until it made sense to me and then move on to the next one. And there's just a part in there called on meditation that's just like, here's, you know, 200 pages just talking around meditation in general. And I just absorbed all of that and just started experimenting with it. And I realized the more that I did it,

the more I could actually notice my consciousness expansing expanding and the more that I was aware of my inner life, and that's what really started the whole process.

speaker-0 (15:57.41)

Because meditation was such a exploratory, spontaneous process for you. Do you think that was a massive advantage for you compared to nowadays? Like you were just saying, like joking, like here are 10 ways. Like we have so much information at our fingertips that I think it can be really overwhelming and stressful, and you almost get into a state of analysis, paralysis where you're like, okay, where do I begin? How do you think your journey where I mean it was crazy how you even got exposed to Nietzsche?

That that's a story for a different time where you can share that. But like, how do you think that was an advantage for you if it was just being very spontaneous?

speaker-1 (16:34.968)

Yeah, I think it was a great advantage because it it set me on two unique paths that I think have served me well. One is that I had to figure it out for myself. And that wasn't just taking information in. It was learning how to learn to navigate the inner life. And that was incredibly valuable for me. and I think that it also made it to where I

I didn't have all of the expectations that a lot of people have around meditation. Because now I'll talk to people and they say, I've tried to meditate, but it didn't give me X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, well, why are you expecting that to happen? Like, embrace it with zero expectations and zero mistakes and discover what it is for yourself in the moment. The other thing that did for me was set me on a path because I'm a very curious little fella and I like to

explore things deeply and look at different schools of thought and then extract pieces of them and combine what I find useful and what makes sense to me. And so it set me on a path of spiritual eclecticism where a lot of people, even like very close friends of mine, they kind of find one path and then that's what they do. And they're those paths are really viable because they've been around for a couple of thousand years, a lot of them, and they are explicit

gradual paths to you know enlightenment is that the st it's steps are all laid out for you and you just follow. Problem is I have a real problem with authority. And so I like to study everything and create my own kind of autodidactic path. And I think that served me well because it gave me a very, very overhead view of a lot of different disciplines. And it really let me do what what you all of this sounds like work, I suppose.

But really it was fun. Like I was doing it because I was enjoying it. Like not only was it making me happier and feel better, but was also fun because I was just like, let me just like fuck with my brain and see what happens. And that's why I would like, you know, take acid and sit in the closet and put a towel under the the door and meditate in the darkness for four hours. Or I read this thing that, you know, monks would sleep on their left side of the brain to saturate that hemisphere of the brain with blood all night if they wanted to have a

speaker-1 (18:56.59)

creative day and on the right side of the brain, if they wanted to have a a more administrative day, or in the in the late 90s, I found this terrible little shitty like Windows audio generator that would create binary beats. And so before I had these two giant speakers that were risen to the level of my bed. So I would lay in bed and just listen, I'd get super high and just listen to music every night when I fell asleep as a teenager. And so what I started doing with these is I would do things like I would set

Okay, I'm going to sleep at like midnight and I need to wake up at eight. I'll set an eight-hour binary beat cycle, but I would start doing things where I would have the frequencies go to like crazy places during the night. And I would be like, let me try and scramble my brain and let me wake up and see how I feel. Just like all and I would take notes and like I create all these experiments just to see. And I would like I made my own flotation tank. Like whenever I was a teenager in my bathtub, like I would turn the hot water on, turn the lights off, and then

set like a like I would plug the the tub just enough to where if I left the faucet on there was always warm water coming through. And I would like take some mushrooms or something and get in there and just explore my brain for like two hours. And I would go really deep sometimes where I would get a washcloth and get it wet and then put it over my face. And so it forced it's like waterboarding. It would for you could barely breathe. And so it taught me how to take like

one breath a minute, maybe like one breath every two minutes, and like really slow down my whole biological system. And I was just basically what I was doing is just like like grabbing my nervous system and like ripping it out of survival mode and into parasympathetic mode, you know, without really knowing it.

speaker-0 (20:39.0)

The the phrase that comes to mind for me when you talk about that and especially going to that exploratory phase and you calling it fun and just like finding out how you can shift make these shifts within yourself, the the phrase that comes to mind is self-reliance. Yeah. But I wanna tag two other phrases onto that because you've described the effect of meditating when you were younger. You described it as having maximum self-confidence with minimum self-love.

That's a pretty interesting friction.

speaker-1 (21:10.998)

Yeah, that's how I describe myself, yeah, as growing up was maximum self confidence and minimum self-worth. Yeah. yeah, that's a a combination that it I mean, it honestly it served me pretty well in a lot of ways because it made me keep going and going and going and going and d trying to achieve whatever the goal that felt like it was right at the time. At a certain point I realized that that's

not sustainable and it's also not the healthiest way to proceed because, you know, in my whenever I was a teenager, I was obsessed with this stuff, but also obsessed with music. And I was writing music and com and started composing music whenever I was in my, you know, late teens and then more formally after that. And I w and I was a music producer for for years as well.

And so before I stepped out and started doing this type of stuff publicly, I was still studying it privately, but I was really focused professionally on music. And that high confidence, low self-worth thing was fine there. But whenever I started sharing my ideas, my thoughts, my insight with people in public, I realized that's not gonna work. I need to I I can't be

Tell in good faith, I can't be telling people like, this will help you, here's what my experience was, here's how you can do this, if the whole time I'm just sitting there hating myself and feeling like worthless, love like unlovable, you know, a piece of shit, while I'm telling people how to access com compassion. And so because I did so much work to create that world for others.

that I engage with, but I never really create for myself. And so that was whenever I really shifted and started working on that. And I'm happy to say that now I on I feel pretty good about myself. Maybe every Tuesday around lunchtime, I you know, but for the most part I feel I feel good.

speaker-0 (23:23.83)

What do you think really created that spark within you to be able to create that equilibrium between the two?

speaker-1 (23:30.284)

A lot of things. One was, of course, meeting my wife whenever I was young was well, we weren't married whenever I met. I met this this woman and then we got married. but that was really crucial because I came from a place of being like a hundred percent intellect, zero percent emotion. Even whenever I was deep into all of yeah, I it was this is something that people do. I certainly did it.

You can look at like Buddhism or Eastern wisdom traditions, especially like Zen, and you can really take the love out of it if you want and look at it as kind of mechanistic processing type of work as opposed to something that really has to do with the the heartful path. That was definitely what I was doing, you know, just listening to Death Metal, reading Nietzsche, reading Zen Buddhism, and you know, and then meeting my wife, you know, she was so

Full of love, but also so smart and have a zero tolerance for bullshit that and not in a not in a rude way, but just like not afraid to have difficult conversations, not afraid of conflict, not afraid to say, hey, you know, l this is happening. You know, you gotta acknowledge it. That was incredibly valuable and useful and necessary. and then of course, with growing an audience online.

just a immense immense amount of responsibility because for me the most important and precious thing is the trust between someone who's like following and listening to me to help inform their life in what I'm saying to them. And the thing that I really I would say detest is whenever people create delusion for others to enrich themselves.

And that's like the easy way to say that would be or simplified would say the grifter people out there in the world. And there are big grifters who everyone knows. I'm gonna name them right now. No, there are the big grifters who everyone knows. And there are a lot of medium-sized grifters who would like to grift more but don't know how. And then there are smaller grifters who are grifting without really realizing it. And to me is very important to

speaker-1 (25:57.568)

show up for people and guide them in a way that was wholesome and real and guided them towards what I was saying because that is my most important value in terms of a relationship with people that consume my work is honesty and real really walking the walk and really talking the talk and telling them shit that's real, you know, not stuff that's not platitudes.

Not the easy answers, not not what's gonna make them buy something from me, but something that's gonna help them in their life.

speaker-0 (26:34.784)

In your late twenties you s described that your intellectualism kind of got the better of you, or you just became just fully on the end of intellectual to the point of, okay, this is overwhelming and and unbearable. What was the work like? And did your wife help with that, or what you know, what was the work like to kind of I guess get back to center stages there as well?

speaker-1 (27:00.076)

Yeah, so there was a period where I basically was trying to just the path was always to expand my mind whenever I was from the beginning of this thing. And the with more expansion comes more detail, and with more detail comes more mental load. And with more mental load comes exhaustion and ultimately kind of a nervous system consciousness breakdown and freak out.

You know, what happened was that I had zoomed my mind out so far, and it's just kind of a way that my brain works, is thinking about the simultaneous nature of reality at all times. That's why I love chess so much. I am thinking about like, you know, even right now, if I'm sitting here, we're having a conversation, but there are also mental formations that are arising where I'm thinking about like.

We're a couple of biological machines. And in both of our stomachs, there's like digestion happening and our blood is moving. And there's like white blood cells going to attack cancer cells and things that are coming up right now. And like our hair is growing and there's water running through that plant over there right now. And it's r reacting to the light that's in the room. Like that that type of complexity is in my brain all the time, pretty much. And it

And what's useful is that a another part of my thinking is is pattern finding. And that's why pattern recognition is it comes to me natural, because I'm I see the world kind of encoded in that level of simultaneous happening between the individuality and the connection of all things. And so finding the patterns between those things is a lot easier. and so whenever that

started, was expanding, it got to a level where my awareness flashlight was kind of so on that way of thinking, as opposed to just being a guy like in the world having a conversation. I was literally waking up in the morning and I'd be like, well, my eyes just opened and a hundred thousand particles of light just entered into my retinas and bounced and my brain just processed that. And then I just took a breath in. Well, there's 300,000 oxygen cells. Let me take this

speaker-1 (29:18.114)

you know, comforter that's made out of wh whatever fabric and that's a y here was its journey to get here and da da da. And then like it would be s you know, I could look out the window and I'm like, well, there's billions of microbes in the soil right there and each of those

speaker-0 (29:31.638)

You're saying this is like what your internal dialogue would be like? Yeah.

speaker-1 (29:34.19)

And it's it's like so fast that like I'm talking it, but it would happen like all the stuff I just described, I would think in like one second. Yeah. And I'd look out the window and I would think like, well, there's like all these people's houses and they it's interesting how each of their houses is this little ecosystem, and it's so specifically them that no one else knows about. It's so intimate. And then they'll go get in their cars and drive to work every day. And really everyone in life has their little eco biological chambers.

They get into their car and whenever they drive, they'll go to a different place for eight hours and then they'll drive back. And really when you think about it, humans are replicating their own biology because that's all we really understand from the deepest level of like ancient brain encoding. And so what we're doing by getting our cars going to places to work and coming back is they're replicating our artery system in our body. So really we just turn the rows into giant arteries and we are the blood cells moving from one bump. You know, like just thinking that shit.

all day long. And he got to a level where I was just kind of like feverish with it. And I wasn't getting a lot done elsewhere. Yeah. And I it was getting harder to kind of be human in the way that I wanted to be, because I wasn't real I was present for everything but like what really mattered, I think. And so I sat down and I thought, all right, I have to break this. I gotta like undo this somehow.

And I thought, what's like what what what's the foundations of self? They are mind, body, and soul or spirit or consciousness, whatever you want to call it, life force. I like to use life force. It's a little sci-fi and it takes it makes it secular, you know. and I thought, okay, well, I've been focusing on the mind. I've been focusing on the life force.

I have not paid attention to my body one time in my entire life. Maybe I should try and literally embody all of this stuff that I've been learning and experimenting with. And so I thought, all right, l how do I get into my body? So that was over I was 29. I just started running. And not not like in a forest gump way. I I took breaks. I just I I ran every day, you know, and I started running like, you know, like four miles a day. And

speaker-1 (31:56.94)

I actually haven't stopped that. It's been like 15 years almost. And so I've still run, you know, a lot a week because of that. But then I started doing yoga every single day. So I would run for an hour a day. I would do yoga for an hour a day. I would meditate for an hour a day. And really doing all of that just to get back into the body. And that plus my, you know, the mental muscle of being able to direct my internal awareness.

I just started making it a habit to really bring it back to the present that was that I could tend to in the moment, not the one that was just happening. Like what c what in life can I tend to? What can I put my hands on and be a part of, as opposed to just zooming out and being like, I'm a fleshy meat suit with a wave of consciousness floating in it, you know, stuck on a rock in the middle of infinity. Like, this is great. You know, I really locked in and that that's what broke it.

speaker-0 (32:53.206)

It's interesting. I feel like a lot of the people that I talk with and I'm no different, it was almost like the exact opposite type of journey or path where it it started in the body and almost became too mechanistic and too trapped in that it was like, Hey dude, like there's something bigger to you. But it was like the exact opposite for you, where it was like, Okay, I need to ground myself again here. another component of the well being perspective that I wanna

Talk to you about is because I feel like what we've talked a lot about here is, you know, feeling like just how does this make me feel? And I feel like nowadays it's become so deeply intertwined to talk about feeling and our well-being with our personal data and just like having needing the evidence or the external factors to sort of confirm that the way that we're feeling, rather than simply just like tapping into ourselves. How do you think that?

Data can sometimes hurt us more than help us.

speaker-1 (33:57.282)

Yeah, I mean, humans aren't machines. You know, we're organic creatures. And like some of that data, I suppose, can can be useful, but ultimately there is something that we all have that will give you all the information you need, and that is your nervous system. And so what's happened, and this goes back to, you know, the question you asked me about

Why do I d did I think it was useful to learn meditation in a more kind of in the wilderness as opposed to through a chunked out online course? It's the same type of thing. It's like, yes, you can apply some of that data to what you're experiencing, but you can really get somewhere if you when you feel something arise, just sitting with it and being there with it. And you don't have to understand it. You don't have to have an insight from it immediately, just be present with what it is.

And don't distract yourself. Don't dissociate from the feeling. Don't try and label it and box it into something, because that's what all of this data has done. It's created a lot of of boxes that they're like, okay, check the box, check that box. How does it check this box? It's like, forget about the boxes for a minute. Those are it's like peop whenever people think get there are musicians and they're playing something and then they get really worried about music theory. And like, well, I don't know. I always tell people I'm like, music existed before music theory.

Music theory was created to try and talk about what we're already doing in music. So forget about that. Play what feels right and what sounds good to you. And if you need to understand accord voicing, then go look it up. This is kind of the same thing. It's like the f the f fundamental feelings of self are so much more complicated and intimate and relative to you specifically than any type of testing or boxes or categorization could could tell you. And so

But people have been really trained to not rely on their own ability to think for themselves, to feel for themselves, or to figure things out for themselves. So they look towards the answer. It's basically w how Google has trained every generation, you know, that's pr under, I don't know, 40 years old right now to to look for to just find the answer instead of figuring anything out. And that's kind of, I think, a symptom of that is that instead of sitting with a thing.

speaker-1 (36:19.702)

In understanding yourself. People just want to be fed. They want a Google answer about themselves. And that's just not how the human mind and human body works.

speaker-0 (36:28.47)

And it will, I think, more times than not can lead to more stress. Or we kind of just use it as a crutch. If it's not showing us what we want to see, then okay, something must be wrong. And it's an exact opposite of what we've been talking here and why meditation can be so powerful. I think it's like, okay, like let me actually tap into myself, like let me see what I'm actually feeling here. To continue your journey. Okay, so we're talking about, you know, your late twenties of being overintextualized.

To mirror that, from thirty to thirty-five, you describe those years as I got over myself. What does that mean?

speaker-1 (37:06.176)

Yeah, yeah. well it it coalesces with the having a lot of confidence and those self-worth things changing. 'Cause the a lot of confidence I think was s with that comes a lot of ego, a lot of kind of main character energy, a lot of thinking that you're special. And you know, I I think that it it was around that time and that was really whenever I started doing my podcast.

And talking about this stuff publicly, that I just realized that I needed to forget about feeling special because it again, it wasn't serving the goal. All that stuff about like feeling thinking I was the smartest person in the room, having like feeling like I was bringing the most kind of vibe to whatever situation, wanting to be that guy, you know. I was just like, that's just all it's all bullshit. And it's all in the way of

speaker-0 (38:02.508)

It's all idea stuff.

speaker-1 (38:03.508)

Exactly. Yeah. It's it's in the way of who I want to be, really. But it was a again, it's a protection mechanism. It's because I didn't have any sense of self-worth, I had to rely on that to feel like I was somebody to prop me up and be this, you know, this kind of bold and strong character. And so as I l what's interesting is that that's also another thing in my life, you know, is that people always look at me as being someone who was strong and

can take care of things and is self-sufficient. And I wore that, you know, because of that. And at this at that point though, I realized like all that stuff was getting in the way. And more of I began to let go of that part of my the identity that I was clinging to, of being like, I need to be the one with the attention. I need to be the one controlling everything. I need to be like the baddest motherfucker here and impress everyone. I just let go

you know, it took a little bit of time, but I let go of all that stuff. I stopped trying to be special. And what came out of that is a deep, like authentic part of myself that just filled in the rest of the spectrum of who I wanted to be. It's like all of that stuff of who I w of of what I was lacking literally just kind of begun rising to the surface the second I stopped focusing on trying to be that the the guy, you know?

speaker-0 (39:31.214)

Do you think that process, you know, had taken had started when you started meditating and it had finally risen to the surface, or what do you think created such a switch?

speaker-1 (39:42.69)

Yeah, I think I think so. I mean, it you know, medi that's one of the things I I'll tell people about meditation is like you'll have results on day one, but you also have results on day one thousand and day ten thousand. You know. it just keeps deepening if you keep practicing it and if you seek for it to be deeper. But yeah, I think that that definitely started the process because it the meditation gave space for the compassion and

those parts of myself that I really who who I really am. And it just took that long, you know, it took 15 years for me to take off the armor, for me to let the compassion turn into the strength that grew enough to kind of explode the armor. And so it's certainly, I think, responsible for it and was really useful in me navigating that time of life.

speaker-0 (40:41.56)

Yeah, I mean you gave yourself space and room to breathe and allow it to shapeshift in a way. Yeah. With that in mind, can you explain what the stimulus response gap is and how important, you know, creating that space is? Especially because I think and I'm guilty of this as well, I feel like the stimulus response gap has just become kind of just like a buzzword and we actually don't understand like the workings of it. Yeah. So can you just give a little bit of a deep dive there?

speaker-1 (41:09.304)

I'd love to. So in my in my first book, Now Is the Way, I call it the mindfulness gap because it's kind of cute, you know. but that's really what it is. Ultimately, it is the space between, you know, receiving something from reality. It could be someone saying something to you, it could be an environmental situation you're in, it could be something that you're thinking, a reaction that you have to someone else, to an experience.

Or to your own thoughts, and noticing that reaction. So the stimulus is the event, it's the trigger that creates an emotion that creates a thought, something like that. Those emotions and thoughts are usually going to be a emotion of fear, an emotion of anger, or a thought about saying something sarcastic, saying something rude.

These are all defensive mechanisms that we have that are often what people react with. People also react out of ways of self-protection. They may say, you know, yes when they mean no. They may perform a certain answer because they're f scared or they they they don't want to get into a conflict with somebody. These are all kind of the reactions that we have based on the stimulus that comes out of some life, whether that be outside of us or in our own minds.

The response part is, you know, how we respond to those that stimulus. And that could be if someone says something rude to you, normally y if you are not monitoring yourself, which ultimately at the end of the day, mindfulness is just self-monitoring. If you're not monitoring yourself and you're on autopilot, you might say something aggressive and rude back because you have an emotional response, your ego gets tinged and you go and you say something back without thinking about it.

If you're paying attention and someone says something negative to you, instead of having that that automatic reaction, you have the stimulus and then you intentionally choose what your response is. So you think in that moment and that can you can give yourself a split second, you can give yourself a whole second, you can give yourself ten seconds if you want, to actually consider how to move in that moment. And that could be, depending on what your goals are.

speaker-1 (43:33.29)

Me, if someone said something rude to me, I would generally find compassion for the person saying something rude because people that say rude things are suffering deeply. And then I would think to myself, why what are they trying to achieve or why are they saying this to me? And I'll respond in a way that not only lowers the temperature of the interaction, but also opens a door to make them feel safe.

Which I know might sound weird, but it it's amazing how when someone's in pain, if you can help neutralize and create some spaciousness around that pain, how much they snap out of of that pattern that they're in. So it's ultimately, as I described, recognizing what's happening, how you're being triggered by your experience, and then having that gap in there, you know, the mindfulness gap to then

respond to the world, to a person or to yourself with a a level of intentionality. And I think that that self-monitoring is is one of the most valuable things that a person can learn because it helps you, you know, our minds are deeply layered with our emotional history, with every early imprintation we have, like every one of our first experiences with like

Objects with people with contexts all have a deep impact on us for the earliest implementation. So when our mind is unfamiliar with something, the first thing creates an association. And that first association sticks with us for life. If the first time you go and try and talk to a woman and she laughs in your face, you're gonna have

of a mountain to kind of climb and you're gonna have insecurity around that. If the first time you do it and they're like, hey, what's going on? You know, what's happening? Then and hopefully her voice doesn't sound like mine. That'd be a little weird. But no, if they say, you know, hey, what's going on, then you're gonna have a positive imprintation where, okay, good. Like this is good to talk to people go up and talk to people. Like it's safe. I feel, you know, cool. And so, you know that all of those things that we experience

speaker-1 (45:55.278)

Create this rich, complex tapestry of our emotional and intellectual makeup. And that's kind of the switchboard. It's really a symbol system that we go through life and we apply these symbols to everything we're experiencing and every person we meet. And our experience is so deeply rooted in that it contains our emotions, our memories, our first feelings when we felt that, and so forth. And so having this.

Mm, this awareness and this spaciousness keeps us from just replaying the inherited emotions and feelings and associations with our first experiences with what we've been through in life. It helps us engage with the present moment as it is now and helps us show up as who we are now, as opposed to replaying the patterns of who we were whenever X happened to us.

our insecurities or our vulnerabilities or our fear or our resentments or angers around a certain thing can be moved to the side and we can actually engage with what is as opposed to what we think is. And being able to experience life like that, it lets you really flourish and become, you know, the the greatest, richest part of you come out and be free because you're not battling these kind of ghosts.

from from the past. You're not just responding and reacting. You're able to be intentional and be the person that you say you wanna be, you know, in life. And it gives you that that space to show up and do that.

speaker-0 (47:36.686)

When creating that space, how do we make sure that non reactionary doesn't shift into being disengaged?

speaker-1 (47:43.938)

Hmm. Yes, that's a great, great question. You still should take action in that moment, but it's about skillful action, not about disengaging. It's not doing that to not feel anything. It's doing that to feel things accurately. So that then whenever you respond, you can do it with clarity instead of chaos. And to go one deeper layer into that that I think is might be useful for some people to hear.

Is that once you get into meditation and mindfulness and you get a sense of the world outside of yourself, it's very easy to become passive. It's very easy to mistake detachment for non attachment. And that's generally just a part of the journey that people experience. So for example, I've had someone reach out to me and they say, hey,

You know, I'm really frustrated because, you know, I am trying really hard to be kind of non-attached to my my frustrations, my resentments and whatever around my partner. She will do stuff, and I'm always the one that has to kind of step aside and let it flow by. And I'm always trying to kind of create that positive space, take the high road, not take things personally, and she's just going about life being unexamined.

and reactive and she's not really trying to meet me halfway with this. So I feel like I'm always the one doing the work and it's really frustrating. Well, what's happening there is a person is mistaking detachment for non-attachment. They're detaching from the situation and not re-engaging after they don't grasp whatever the negative emotion or negative sensation they're feeling is. The real key to doing this stuff properly or in a way that it will really become

like fulfill like profitable, I suppose, in in the moment, is to notice whenever something happens and you could feel angry, you could feel frustrated. I feel angry, I feel frustrated sometimes. And I r you know you recognize it. And then once you let that go, and letting it go doesn't mean just being kind of like a robot or something and being like, well, the switch is on, I'm angry. Now the switch is off. Now I feel like cold as a lizard again.

speaker-1 (50:08.288)

It's feeling the flare of emotion, feeling that the temperature rising, seeing it like cooling it off, letting that calm down, and then re-engaging with the moment. And it's so important to engage. So for the example of this this fellow that hit me up, instead of going like, well, I'm just d walking the path correctly because I'm letting all this stuff go by and I'm not reacting to it, but now I'm frustrated, it's like

Well, man, you gotta r you gotta now say to your wife, say to your partner, hey, you know, like I understand why you said that, but, you know, it bothers me because of this, or like I wish you would do this, or it would be meaningful to me if you would this, trying to actually tend to reality and the conflict in that moment that's creating the feelings in the first place, instead of just disengaging and living in a type of

Kind of meta denial.

speaker-0 (51:09.708)

I I think the big thing to that going as well as meditation and I've been on and off with meditating and I it's it's funny, when I have guests who, you know, tap into consciousness for meditation, I feel like I get back into a good routine of it. And I guess kind of like a breakthrough that I had and it goes to the stimulus response gap. And this is just something that naturally er arose within me of just like because good like going to what you were saying of, you know, people wanting to get something from meditating and it's like

Hey, how about you just do it and whatever arises arises. And what I've come to appreciate, I feel like recently within meditating, it's like, I'm trying to embody this how I feel right now outside of the experience of meditation. And I feel like that is what goes to what the stimulus response gap is, where it's like, okay, I feel some type of stimulus, but I'm actually going to feel it. And I'm going to allow it to be within my body rather than just within my head. And

Tying this in with another philosophy of yours on portals, because I feel like with portals, that's about you you need space to be able to see that as well. What do you see as the correlation there between the stimulus response gap and the way that portals either come into our life or feel like they stay at a distance?

speaker-1 (52:32.012)

Yeah, I mean the I I'll define portals for listeners real quick. It's something I talk about in my second book, Brave New You. It's whenever essentially whenever opportunities arise and appear in life. And they're like these portals where if we choose to go through them, we can kind of move into another version of our life where that thing we dreamed of or wanted to be possible.

Is real and it's happened because we've chosen to kind of go through this growth path and move into somewhere new. The stimulus response gap is really useful there because you to be able to see those opportunities to change your life, you have to be able to slow down and look deeply. And if you're going through life simply reacting to everything like a pinball machine, you won't have the clarity.

To see something that you don't expect. And to be able to see opportunities in your life, you have to be open enough to see what you don't expect to see. Most of us go through life just saying, this is the thing way things are, this is the thing way things will be, and this is my role in it. That is a version of life that is very shaved down. That's a version of life that's

not going to let you thrive or exist outside of what you think is expected of you. And being able to z step back a little bit, zoom out and look deeply at life, look at life with curiosity, receive and really allow things to sit with you instead of looking for what you expect, will make it possible

To see these these opportunities that are the things that will change your life. And I know the like, it's gonna change your life is that's a pretty, you know, sounds almost a little hubris or some hyperbolic or something like that. But it is true. And I will say that the way that I've experienced it and I've mapped it with a lot of other people, is it's always the the big changes, the big changes for me, the big breakthroughs always happened.

speaker-1 (54:56.758)

whenever there were two parts of myself in my my personality, my skill set, or whatever it might be, my interests, that I had never considered connecting before. But an opportunity arose or something came to me that asked me to connect those two qualities of myself that I hadn't connected. Whenever those things connected, it created a third thing that I never would have

Gotten to otherwise. And it was a huge, huge positive impact on my life and my career. And I think that that part that process is not only watching, you know, being an artist is watching, it's paying attention. It's seeing life. We're all looking at the same reality, but through what with the lens that we look through it is what's unique. And

looking, like making sure that your lens is always clean, that you're seeing life from a lot of your own like dimensions within yourself, not just the ones that you're used to, is how you'll discover these deep, incredible parts of your own existence that you may have never gotten to before. But it only comes from deeply receiving. And like I said, that's why an artist can take, you know,

They can look at the same thing, but meaningful art comes from whenever an artist looks at something and tells us something about it that none of us could see. And whenever we see that, we go, it our minds are blown. And we go, how did that artist see that in this thing? You know, and it's because they were looking deeply. And that's how the portals work.

speaker-0 (56:34.968)

Huh.

speaker-0 (56:47.246)

Do you consider yourself to be ambitious?

speaker-1 (56:50.282)

Yeah. Very, but in a in a in a way that my personal sense of who I am is not connected to it.

speaker-0 (57:02.988)

Yeah.

speaker-1 (57:03.34)

Yeah, I'm ambitious not because I'm trying to prove myself, not because I need to feel successful so that others see me s as successful. I do it I'm ambitious because I have a relentless burning curiosity about reality. And that creates a lot of drive because I always have to be

Getting into things, experimenting with things, playing with things, playing with reality, seeing what's out there, seeing what's deeper. And in that process, to to integrate and to really do that, you have to make stuff. You know, you have to have an you have to input stuff and then output stuff. And that's how you you process it all. And so yes, I happen to be very ambition because I love doing that. And

The buzz that creation and exploration gives me is what makes me feel really alive.

speaker-0 (58:04.334)

Conscious ambition, I would call that. To mirror this idea of portals, of like these new doors opening up, you've shared that like one of the key things that you do is to help people reconnect with the tools they were born with. Where do you think you've seen that within your life where maybe not necessarily new doors opening up, but actually getting reacquainted with something that was with you early on?

speaker-1 (58:05.846)

Yeah yeah.

speaker-1 (58:32.45)

Yeah, I I think that it's again, it kind of comes back to paying attention. And I think if we we often take our natural abilities and skills for granted because and we mistake those for something that everyone has. We think that, because I can do this effortlessly or I really like doing this, or it's easy for me, it must be easy for everyone else. And that's just not true. You know, in I think

The more we give space to our inherent positive qualities, and the more that we look at those and honor them and respect them as like, hey, I can do this thing. That's that's a skill that not everyone can do, it can help you not only reconnect to it, but can help you focus on it and like make it thrive and make it flourish. I mean, that's like, to me, I I understood that I can just like talk very articulately.

And explain abstract concepts and break them down into clear, straightforward, simple ideas most times. And from the time like I've been talking about weird shit and and abstract stuff and pulling it into focus with people since I was a teen. That's what I would do as a teenager, sit with my friends and just do what we're doing now, but just you know, a very wild and and unskillful and ridiculous manner, you know.

And so that's why I started podcasting. Literally, I was like, Hey, I always just sit around and have these conversations with my friends anyway. I know a lot of interesting people already. I love talking about this stuff. Why not make a living at it?

speaker-0 (01:00:14.712)

Yeah, just I think that's so true. We're so we're so blocked off to what like just makes sense. Or like if something w we think w everything always needs to be tangled or we make things harder than it has to be. when it comes to

your relationship with, you know, where you started versus where you are now. I mean, at your core, you're a sounds guy more than a words and a speaking guy. Yes. What created that shift from music to writing?

speaker-1 (01:00:49.868)

Yeah, well, I I want to talk about that, but also I I wanna just go back to the previous sentiment for just one minute. And another element to this honoring your natural qualities that I think that it took me a long time to understand and figure out. So I just think it's valuable for people to hear now. Once you start honoring those things, there's gonna come a point.

Whenever people outside of you start engaging with you because of what you've shared. And what will happen is you, if you look for it, you will start to see that why people are coming to you is different than what you think you're giving the value you're giving to the world. So what happens is you start, let's say you start making a podcast.

And you think my podcast is going to help people because it's going to make them, you know, it's going to give them all these different ideas that they can apply to themselves. And you think that's what I'm doing there. But people may actually come and listen for a totally different reason that you're not aware of. And paying attention to that and like watching for that, listening to what when people tell you, whenever someone tells you what you're giving them, whenever someone tells you why they listen to your podcast.

why it's meaningful to them. Like listen closely to that. Because we have these this idea of ourself and we have this idea of why and how we should be received in the world. The reality is, is that we can't see ourselves. We see ourselves from the inside. Everyone else sees us from the outside. That's why I pay attention where my wife tells me something. She's seen me from the outside ninety-nine percent more than I have.

And so she knows what what I'm how I exist in the world. So it's just really useful to get that information and listen when people tell you that and then connect that more deeply to that skill that you have. It's okay to kind of move the the direction of a little bit, and you can connect what the world wants and gets from you and kind of move the the self-identified version of your value aside.

speaker-1 (01:03:08.492)

And then aim your skill at that and that's how you become successful. Just FYI.

speaker-0 (01:03:13.206)

That's great point.

speaker-1 (01:03:15.382)

The other question, which is a great one, how did I move from sound into what I'm doing now? I mean, it's really all the same thing. It's i I don't know if you noticed, but I even talk in kind of musical, melodic sort of lines.

speaker-0 (01:03:29.9)

Sound definitely still plays a huge impact. You can see in the way that you write and speak. Yeah. Which is really cool.

speaker-1 (01:03:36.216)

Thanks, yeah. Every line I write is melodic. Like the i it all has a rhythm and even if you were to say the things out loud, l if you hear my voice how it's going it's literally I'm it's just in me for it to be like a s like a perpetual saxophone solo for something. Yes, and that's how the the words are as well. It's like I just turned on my manuscript for my third book called The Called The Quiet Age.

speaker-0 (01:03:55.958)

That's deeply ingrained within you. Yeah.

speaker-0 (01:04:06.504)

Literary ASMR in the description.

speaker-1 (01:04:08.916)

Man, you are good. And it's short form writing, so each page has its own kind of short, maybe fifty word writing, some things a little bit longer. But I just spent a day going through giving notes for the design team and the editors of like return after this word, not that word. Return and I put, I don't know, fifty or a hundred of those in there because I w the where where a word is returned after

Someone's reading it, it makes it a piece of music, right? Anyway, ultimately it's what I began to trying to transmit with sound was all of the stuff I'm talking about. If you listen to any of my music, it's all very the easy way to say it's all very relaxing. Intentionally, from a compositional point of view, everything everything is just perpetual.

musical resolving. So for people who aren't familiar with the music, there will generally be in a song a chord or some or some melodies or notes or whatever. And then that chord will change to another chord that usually creates a type of tension. And then that chord will change to a chord that creates relief. That's called r the resolving a chord. It's like we have this thing happens, a set you know, kind of a a a feeling, and then we get a little bit of tense. That's what creates stakes and emotional

purpose and emotional awareness for someone. And then once it goes to a different chord, it resolves, it it releases that emotional tension and we feel like, that's why song like songs that end with that feeling feel good, you know? That's why every if you look at movie scores, horror movies have nothing but atonal screeching and intention because they're trying to and no with no resolution, because they want you to feel uptight and tense. Ambient music has

A lot of nice open resolving chords because it wants you to feel relaxed. So my music is nothing but resolution. It's just perpetual resolution. And that's what I want people to feel. I want them to feel calm and open and aware because that's how you are embodied and that's how you learn about your that's the s the frequency you need to get into to be able to step out of your pattern of being so that you can.

speaker-1 (01:06:31.038)

observe yourself, observe your mind, and and live a d into a deeper version of reality. So this is literally, as I was like each record I would compose, it was I was coming up with kind of a new way to transfer that feeling I was talking about. And at one point it literally hit me, I thought, I am essentially asking, and because I'm so curious, every record had a different sound to it, different instruments, a different aesthetic. I thought,

I'm literally asking people to learn a new language every time I put out an album when I really am just trying to express this core sentiment. And I thought, why don't I do that with words? That would probably be a lot easier than this. That's literally why I started podcasting, where I was like, instead of trying to say all this stuff through music, let me just say it with words. Yeah, it'll be a lot easier. And then as I was doing the podcast, I thought, you know what's even more straightforward is writing.

speaker-0 (01:07:15.671)

A lot easier to decipher.

speaker-0 (01:07:31.0)

Wow. That's fascinating. You started writing on social media as more of like a creative exercise. And then you since described that as you started building a following and more eyes and, you know, comments on your writing. You said it's kind of shifted into a way to get data and an understanding of what, you know, the world or the culture really needs or what they're resonating with. So I guess like with that framework.

in mind, I guess like in present day, like what's your analysis of that data or of what people are asking for?

speaker-1 (01:08:08.44)

Yeah. So I would say that yeah, I I still write, you know, things that I believe, things that feel right, things that are meaningful to me, things that I think will be useful. But what I do is I watch the patterns of engagement around the various topics, the ideas, the way the ideas are delivered, the languaging of the ideas, the structure of the ideas, all of those things to understand how like the public I've

know, about a million people that follow me across my platforms. That's a pretty good sample size of humans. Like how do people in quotes respond to this stuff and what are they searching for? So it's a two pronged thing of like what's the best delivery method and then what should be delivered? You know, what's the information? And that's useful if anyone's out there trying to build their social media, it's like scraping your own data. I would say do that. Pay attention, like every if you're a writer

even if you're you know doing podcasts every like month or if or if you're podcasting every three months, depending on how many episodes you put out, look at your analytics. Look at the top three performing podcast episodes you did and then deep dive them. Look at like, okay, why what was I talking about here? What was the conversation? What would the audience get out of this conversation? Put your mind in the mind of the listener, not in your mind. And just imagine you're rolling up on this conversation for the first time and then go,

Think about and like, why was this meaningful? What did I take away? Do that with the other two podcasts and then contrast that data and go, how where are the patterns in this? How are these things connected? And how can I now fold that into my approach to future podcast episodes? Again, anyone listening, do that with your writing, do that with your whatever you're doing. And it's a way to basically you're panning for gold within your own creative path. So whenever I

If I look out into the ocean of kind of where of collective consciousness, let's call it right now, people are very much looking for relief. They're from the overwhelm of society, the overwhelm, the burden of stress, of feeling like they're working a lot, they're burned out, they also don't have a firm sense of a comfortable future.

speaker-1 (01:10:32.742)

they feel like they're living in a world that isn't that they can't trust anymore because of like reality has become so flexible with the internet. They're living in a world where there's so many ideas being shot at them every day that they don't really know what to believe or what to think. They are also living in a world where we are so hyper-individualistic and we are so become such entrepreneurs of personality.

that the people who are saying, here's how you should be, that those type of people and that stuff is so prevalent that people feel like, like we said earlier, they need to fit into those boxes as opposed to just being themselves. People also feel like that if they don't have some type of public persona about themselves, if they are they are existing in public and succeeding in public, then they're failing in private.

All of these things, if we really boil them down, it comes down to permission. And it comes down to being able to step away from the tension of urgency culture, to live at your own pace and to do what feels right to you, and to listen to what you want to do, what feels good to you in your life, what matters to you, and to do that unapologetically. And that's

all of my luckily lucky for me, that's what all of my work talks about. And my work also I put an edge of rebellion on it too. Because I'm like, look at all of this stress, all of this like performance, all this needing to like keep up with urgency culture, all that stuff. It's all it's all an illusion. It's all ultimately, not to get political here, it's all it's of which I won't, but it it's

It's ultimately manufactured by our corporate overlords to keep us productive.

speaker-0 (01:12:35.372)

I think that's an important point to make because I feel like when it comes to content, you can play within two different lanes of like you could have been of the mindset of like, I know what people are stressed about and let me just continue to confirm what makes them, you know, feel bad and like, you know, I see you when in actuality you're not even giving them something that could actually help them. Right.

speaker-1 (01:12:59.842)

Right. And and most people, there's many, many people out there that look at that symptom and go, I'm here to help you. And then they send you through a funnel to buy their whatever that they're trying to buy, you know. That said I do have a new course now. I'm just talking but but yeah, man. And so I I try and talk to that stuff and I like putting a kind of rebellious edge on it of like because it's inspiring and motivating and it gives people that little sense of

dissent they need to disrupt the feelings of guilt. It turns like there's no better way to turn feeling small and feeling guilty into a like, like, man, fuck that. Like I'm not doing that. I'm gonna go then a little bit of a little bit of rebellious talk, you know? And so I think that and that's all of what my my book that's come out in October, The Quiet Age, that's what the entire book is about, is how to recognize this situation we're in.

How to step out of it. And then importantly, what do you do once you're out of it? Because now you're just left with yourself. How do you go inward and re you know, realign and reemerge?

speaker-0 (01:14:09.518)

I think an important framework that ties in nicely with that that I've heard you talk about, understanding our thoughts and beliefs as valid rather than true. How has that informed your own thoughts and ideas, but especially your writing? Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:14:26.254)

Yeah, I mean I think that our thoughts are th they're just suggestions. It is the brain trying to notate how we perceive reality to prepare us for what we might experience next, or to give us some type of material that we can use to try and process something we experienced to let s like to integrate something so we can let it go. Our thoughts are not facts. Our thoughts are just these

notes and the mind creates a lot of them so that we'll have as much material as we could possibly ever need to deal with the complexity of like human experience. Thoughts are valid, of course, because many times they are close to truth and they point to something reasonable that we should consider. But like for example, like I'm thinking this table exists right now, and that's a a very valuable thing to put on a ninety-nine percent I

I agree with that, but I would also say this table only exists if you're looking at it through the perception of a human mind. Because if you brought a a snake in here and it looked at it with its infrared vision, it would not see the table. So it would not exist in that reality. So in the dimension of human perception, sure, here's table, but to the the rest of the world, it's just an obstruction, you know.

and I s you know, of course there's an object, but it's about the symbolism we apply to it that then feeds back into our own experience, our own way of thinking. And so yeah, separating our truth, you know, the the the truth from just the information is really useful because it keeps us from making a sh assumptions about ourselves and about the world. And that can look like mental stories.

that create, you know, anxiety, that could that you talk down to yourself, that you you're what ifing a bunch of things, that you're keeps you from throwing spike strips into every time you you know you you get going, you get an idea, and they immediately, you know, pop your own tires. It's like, well, I can't do it because of this, this and I mean most of the times that's all just imaginary. These are just thoughts, sort of anxious thoughts and we convince ourselves it's true. So just I think recognizing those things are incredibly valuable because it keeps us

speaker-1 (01:16:44.684)

Deeply connected to the present moment and what's actually happening now as opposed to our temporary idea of what's happening.

speaker-0 (01:16:53.026)

When it comes to creating a final product of something, so for in your case, a book, when you were working on that first book and you were a first time author, you described that experience of feeling like you were more of a collaborator rather than like fully being an author. You gave up too much ownership of like the the process of putting it together. So obviously a very important lesson. And I mean, to marry that with the book that you were just talking about that's coming out, like

Enter here, enter here. How have you gone about navigating external input versus just following your own internal gut on things? Yeah.

speaker-1 (01:17:34.378)

I I in the past h have always well, I would say in the early, early past, I was only down from my own viewpoint pretty much with creating things. As I started becoming more of a public figure, I started trying to make sure that I wasn't being closed off to the knowledge that other people had.

or the influence other people had that could be valuable. And I really try and and this is something I do, you know, now with just life in general, is I I like to try and triangulate information because again, I'm basically testing my own perception of what's happening. It's like I'll think something and I'll talk to someone else about what they think about it and I'll talk to someone else about what they think about it. And those two viewpoints give me a triangulation point for my own thinking

So I can see what might be objectively true more clearly. and so I did a lot of that in the early kind of times. But as I had experiences with doing that, I became a lot more stringent about that. To where now it's pretty much I create and what I want to see in the world. And if there is a point where I'm unsure.

then I will talk to people about it. But I have a clear vision for what I want to do, what I want something to look like, what I want something to read like or sound like. But if I get to a point where I'm thinking about it, I look to trust the people and say, what do you think about this? And it will usually either generate an idea within myself or they'll give me an idea that's really useful. And so that's how I operate now. It's basically just what my vision is, is what I go for.

Unless, you know.

speaker-0 (01:19:32.28)

How do you know when to take that external input and it creates an idea or for you to further go down that path versus just scrapping something?

speaker-1 (01:19:43.766)

It's all in feeling. Like whenever I everything goes back to feeling. Like w no matter what it is in life, but also in creativity, you've no there is a feeling in the pit of your stomach. You know if something is good, you know if something's bad. People will say, no, no, I'm just unsure. Like it's a bunch of butterflies and I feel overwhelmed. It's like, that's cool. Like keep listening. Like sit there and like be honest with yourself. You

you there is that feeling there and that's what I pay attention to. That's what people ask me like have asked me before many times, like, do you get freaked out posting stuff on Instagram every day? They're like, like three million people may see that post that you put out. Doesn't that freak you out? I'm like, I never even think about it, literally. Because whenever I create something, everything has that gut check. And if like it feels right to me, structurally and like idea wise and aesthetically

I'm like, then it's cool. Then like it's can go out into the wilderness and live on its own. I don't think about it. But I would never put something out that I didn't that didn't feel right to me. And so in those moments whenever I'm like unsure about something, I will wait until I have that feeling again. And whenever I have that feeling, then I'm all right, that's the way it should be.

speaker-0 (01:21:03.758)

We've talked a lot we we've talked a lot about different relationships, it seems like, today. You know, your relationship with meditation, your med your relationship with writing, with music, obviously it all channels into this just this relationship that you have with yourself. And I wanna finish with one relationship, which is your relationship with Santa Claus. Okay. Do you know where I'm going with this?

speaker-1 (01:21:32.94)

I think so, yeah.

speaker-0 (01:21:34.07)

So just to give a little story here. So as a little kid, you ask your mom to go to the mall because you want to see Santa. And in your massive mind, you you you're like, I I'm starting to doubt if Santa Claus is real here. And you do a little bit of A B testing where you tell Santa one thing that you want for Christmas. And then when your mom asks you, you know, what do you tell you s tell her something different so that you could see if like, all right, this does this experiment work? What gift shows up?

And obviously the one that your mom you told your mom that's under the tree. And you described that entire experiment and that experience. And it's actually a phrase that you used earlier. You described it as started playing with reality from a very young age. What does it feel like you're still playing with when it comes to reality today?

speaker-1 (01:22:20.248)

Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (01:22:25.708)

Well, I mean, very quickly after that Santa Claus when I did that one with religion. and I think in terms of what I'm still playing with, I I think the I think it it's just the same. Like it's I'm still doing that with everything. I mean, it it's because that, you know, the the hull of mirrors of our human experience never stops it ne it never ends. And so I think I'm still always trying to surprise

myself about how I can exist in certain moments. I I think it's very important to play with the idea of who other people are. I think I don't talk to my idea of people. I talk to them truly. And I think that that's a really useful way to take our expectations about what should be

And move them aside so they actually experience what is. And I think that that is what the the path is really about.

speaker-0 (01:23:29.026)

Finishing where we started, Corey Allen, it's been great talking with you today. Where can people go to learn more about you? Anything else you'd like to share? Any final thoughts?

speaker-1 (01:23:38.606)

Yeah, I'll be it's six in the morrow tonight, just hanging out so can come come. no, i if you go to corey dash allen dot com, there's a lot of stuff there. you can also check out my book Now is the way or Brave New You. Both of those are there. On s all social media handles, I'm Hey Corey Allen. And I think that's probably enough information for people to find me.

speaker-0 (01:24:05.902)

Yeah, it's a it's a great starting point. There's a lot there that people can dive into that it would there's enough there that a lot of time that they could spend. So great talking with you today.

speaker-1 (01:24:15.884)

Thank you man