Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Each episode of the podcast Personal Kosmology traces one seeker's journey: the beliefs they inherited, the experiences that broke them open, and the questions they're still living.
I'm drawn to people who didn't just change their minds, but rebuilt their lives around what they found.
In their stories, you may recognize your own.
Something just snapped in my psyche
in a good way.
I had this immense pressure
between my eyes,
and every pore of my body became bathed
in transcendent, unconditional love,
something I'd never felt before.
Like thousand orgasms together,
I could actually feel anyone's emotions
if they came within 12ft.
I'm like, oh, you're sad, you're happy,
you're excited. And then I went home.
My wife immediately
started crying on seeing me like,
I don't know what journey you're on,
but I don't want to be here with you.
I'm such a good boy.
I didn't miss a day of work.
I went to work the next day
and walked into the office,
and my entire left side of my body
shut down
and my roof of my mouth went numb,
and I went straight to the E.R..
So I was like, I'm having a heart attack.
There's a psychotic.
Break down and a spiritual breakthrough.
And the surface manifestations,
like wandering
the street in open
hearted bliss or chaos, are quite similar.
But one of them lands
you in an evolved state,
and one of them is regressive
and puts you in an institution.
I met ended up being, like, face to face
with the head of psychiatry at Columbia,
and I was like, they felt like
a spiritual component to this experience.
And he looked at me with his cold,
clinical eyes and was like,
if I stimulate this part of your brain
with an electrode, you'll believe in God.
I remember one day waking up like,
you know,
Eton, Oxford, first
young managing director.
Yeah.
Penthouse apartment, beautiful TV wife.
I just got to the end of the bed,
and I fell down in the fetal position,
and I cried and cried because overnight,
I was incurably mentally ill
and had no hope.
Then the darkness started.
Welcome to the Personal Kosmology of Tom
Morgan.
I'm your host, Devin Martin.
To my left is my friend Tom Morgan, who
I think my job today is to pretend
like I don't know you.
I've been thinking about the fact that,
like, of all the guests I've had so far,
I know your story the best, I think.
And I'm excited for you
to tell it to people.
And I'm going to try to lead us down
avenues that even things
I don't understand.
But if people know you today,
it's the leader
of a community that I'm a member of called
The Leading Edge.
You've been referred to
as a curiosity sherpa for billionaires.
Yeah.
And I think
what's exciting about your trajectory
is that you are
somebody who took a traditional path,
discovered some inner voice,
and started following it,
and got led into the wilderness,
got quite lost.
Yeah.
And is now helping other people
do the same thing,
reorient towards
some kind of inner compass, which is,
we could maybe
say their curiosity or their heart,
or their intuition, or their right brain
integrated with their left brain
and are helping people
become better stewards of their power,
give their gifts to the world.
And so I'm excited
for people to understand how the hell
this happened to you.
And just to give a little foreshadowing.
We met during, I would say,
probably a low point in your life.
You were actually a client of mine before
you became a really good friend of mine.
And, he came into my office
in a spiritual emergency.
Psychotic break. Confusion. Yep.
And so that's what
we're building up towards.
I want to understand
exactly how that happened.
But take us back.
Because you were raised
in, I don't know, you tell us.
Where were you?
I mean, looking at your bio, it's
interesting because I was just looking.
You went to Oxford and you have a degree
in philosophy and economics,
which are things.
I don't even know why they go together
for most people, but for you.
They actually make sense.
But take us back.
Is that the path
that you were led to believe
was going to be a good one for you
in your house growing up?
We were.
You raised to go to Oxford?
Yeah.
I think it's the short answer.
My dad was a diplomat
and had come from relatively modest
background.
He was very smart.
He was probably genius level
like you spoke nine languages
fluently, was very, very charismatic.
My mum had also been to Oxford.
I grew up around the world, in Korea,
Poland, in Mexico when I was a kid,
and then moved back and went through
the UK educational system.
My sister was very bright and
I think she was three years ahead of me.
So it's sort of like what
what she does, you're going to do next.
And she,
she got into Oxford and then I had a,
a generous but quite controlling
great uncle that said
that I will pay for your college,
but only if you get into Oxford.
Oh, wow.
And so you were really funneled
towards that.
At the time.
So. And give us,
give us the background of your home.
I love hearing like the spiritual,
philosophical, economic philosophy
you were raised
in. That's a great question.
So I grew up from sort of 89 onwards
in central London in like a modest,
nice home, kind of, I'd say upper middle
class background
class, I think, was really important
to my family, but only in retrospect.
My dad had grown up again,
pretty, not like poor,
but like, I'd say lower middle class.
And then by the time he died,
he was a night.
He was very proud of being Sir
John Morgan.
And I only realized
kind of like long after he was dead, that
I think a lot of insecurity
tied up in that.
And he then and my mum was from
like a relatively well known but sadly
not super wealthy Liverpool family.
And I
just think, I think he felt
that very keenly.
He had all this genealogy around the house
of like, all these family trees
going back as far as they could to prove
that he had some sort of like noble birth,
which, you know, if you go back
far enough, you know, like everyone's,
everyone's everyone's famous.
And, and as a result, like,
he wanted to send me
and my half brother to eat it, which.
Does that mean?
Eton is, like,
the most prestigious school in England?
And it's like where all the leaders
go, you.
Know, this is a primary school.
No, it's a high school. Yeah.
So I went to like a good London
like high school.
So I prep school and then like in a late
public school which
is obviously England
to the opposite of what that means.
And it was really tough.
Like I was bullied psychologically
and physically, really, really badly.
As if you were an outsider.
No. Like,
just because I think I was, I was chubby
and I was insecure
and I was mean to other kids,
and suddenly all the other kids
turned around on me,
and no one spoke to me
for literally a year of my life.
Oh, wow.
And so I was in this,
and then I was really kind of like,
gaslit for the
for the remaining four years.
And I had very few friends.
Was very introverted.
But at the same time became
physically quite confident
because I was a fat inner city kid.
And you go to somewhere like Eton
and they they beat you into shape.
They're like, you are running three miles
before breakfast if you're out of shape.
And by the end of my time there,
I became the captain of sport and became,
like, physically quite competent.
But I've never been physically competent.
I just tried really hard.
So not everybody runs three miles.
They, like, put you on a scale.
And if you're out of shape. No,
it was more like.
It was like an eye.
It was like an eyeball.
It was just like,
you're clearly out of shape.
You need this more like
they ran all the kids.
But I think they took a look at me.
And then the first time I did it, like
I thought I was having an asthma attack
and I had to stop the run.
And like, when all the kids realized
I didn't have asthma,
they then bullied me even harder
because they were like,
you got out of the run
by pretending you had asthma.
And I was like,
I literally never run that far before.
And like, kind of folded.
And this whole thing, like,
I remember waking up one morning
and realizing I had to run in the freezing
cold three miles,
which was a lot
when you're like, you know, 11,
I'm feeling
total despair, you know, like the no one's
coming to say to you.
Like in a really, like,
austere institution.
Like the place look like
looks like Hogwarts.
And anyway, like.
And do you look back on that
and say, like, that hardened me.
I'm grateful because now I know
an inner strength I didn't have.
Or was it just abusive? Yes.
Yeah. Right. Like.
Yeah. Like I think it
give you one example.
You go in at the end of every exam term
and there's 250 kids in a year,
and they read from the bottom to the top.
So they'll be like number 250 out of 250
Devin Morton.
And that's your academics like your GPA.
That's where you
where you stack up against the school.
And so basically, like everyone in the
school knows that you're the dumbest kid.
Wow. Right.
And then it gets worse because at the top
you have the kids
that are on 100% scholarships.
But if they come out of the top 20
enough times, they lose their scholarship.
So you have the kids at the top
who absolutely losing their minds
because all the other kids in the school
are like elite intelligence and so like.
And this is not just the aristocracy,
this is the smartest kids.
This is from the aristocracy.
All the places I've been in my life,
from Oxford to the City of London,
the smartest single group of kids
was the right.
And there's a lot of,
like, nepo baby stuff in there as well.
Like people with, like,
five generations of family that go there.
Don't get me wrong,
they love that stuff as well.
But like the fact
that they would read the school
from bottom to top shows you that
they weren't like letting people ride.
And if you if your academic performance
didn't match up there, just
they'd just kick
you out. And would you say
intellectual performance was
the religious background of your family?
Was that. Yeah, that was the value system.
You know, I was I was paid
for getting good school reports.
And I wanted to be like my dad, and my dad
was very clearly, incredibly bright.
And, you know,
my sister was very bright, and,
and I ended up like going to Oxford.
I got in, which was,
which was not a given because I was like,
I was never really broke.
The top 50 had eaten
just to show how competitive it was.
Like I ended up.
I we should tell the story later.
I ended up doing very well at Oxford
and I didn't even break the top 50
at Eton, which kind of validates
like how tough this was.
And they I was like
on the cusp of applying to Oxford.
They don't get too many kids apply
otherwise they kind of flood the zone,
but they let me apply.
I got in and then basically, like
basically spent
my entire second year out of three
completely stoned, at Oxford, Oxford.
And go back for one second. I'm.
Where was your I don't know of your inner
child, your curiosity.
Was it leading you at all
at this point in your life?
It sounds like you were funneled
into, like, other people's metrics.
This is what success looks like.
How were you grappling with
that internally?
Did you have a vision for a life
you wanted to live,
or was it just like validation?
Yeah, but I would say that
the first thing I got into
was politics at Eton and I wasn't.
It wasn't a thing
I. Was trying to meaning you.
You were curious.
About it, about as a topic,
not really like daily politics,
but like sociology and health systems work
and how people behave.
And I realized I was lit on fire by that.
And then, you know,
arguably the most prestigious,
subject at Oxford is philosophy,
politics and economics.
And so that was the only place
for me to really land.
And so PPE is like,
you know, something like a third
of the frontbench of every US, of every UK
government is PPE.
So like it.
But for really funny reasons.
The basically like
they'll be like week
one we're going to do Plato.
Week two we're going to do Aristotle
we and like it's not possible.
Right, right. So what it does
is it teaches you to bullshit.
So basically like all of the like
if you have people that come in
from like Hong Kong Chinese systems
and they're like, okay,
so I now have to read the complete works
of Plato assimilated
and understand it in a week,
and they all go insane.
After like six weeks,
they all go completely insane.
All the public school boys are like,
I'm going to read a tertiary text,
pretend I've read everything
and bullshit my way through it.
And this is before Google.
And never mind ChatGPT.
It was. I was there in like 2000.
So you had this edge
where basically like you had the internet,
but your tutors did it.
Right and they didn't fully understand
the implications of that. Yeah.
But I mean, I like, you know, the
expression you're only cheating yourself.
I cheated myself egregiously.
I didn't go into the Bodleian Library,
the most famous library
in the world, once in my time at Oxford.
Yeah, I read one.
Book.
In my time at Oxford from beginning to
end, and it was Machiavelli's The Prince.
Oh, God.
And the reason why I read
it was because it was 70 pages long.
So like literally, I, I completely like,
like a game to my Oxford degree and so.
Was the goal just to get through it. Yeah.
Well actually yes or no,
I, I had this recurring nightmare,
the beginning beginning with end of third
year.
You do finals and Oxford being Oxford,
the entirety of your degree goes
down to eight exams over a two week
period, like Death or Glory.
And I had this recurring nightmare that
basically I woke up like about Easter time
before my exams and was like,
oh, I have to teach myself my degree.
I've done nothing.
I had to teach myself
my degree in two months.
And so I went into the library
for like 3 to 4 hours a day
of like hyper focused work.
I just did
exam papers over and over again.
I was like,
all right, I'm just going to do the papers
and I'm going to manage to the paper.
And then,
this story is interesting
because it has shaped my life ever since.
So basically, I went in, I did the exams,
I finished every paper 40 minutes
early and walked out.
Oh, wow.
Three hour exams.
I finished 40 minutes.
I was like, I'm not going to sit here.
Like getting increasingly nervous.
I'm just going to walk out.
And then I went to Africa
with a bunch of my best friends.
For three months, I was like, camping
around Africa, traveling and Oxford.
Being Oxford,
they don't email you your results.
They post them on a wall,
like physically in a college.
Right?
So it's just like just because Oxford,
they want to do things differently.
So anyway, I'd emailed
all of my college mates to be like,
can you tell me what the results?
I wanted to come out.
So basically
I went to an internet cafe in Malawi,
and one of my college mates
had given me the full rundown of everyone.
And in England you get like the top 10%
gets the first, the 60% get a two one.
That's where everyone's shooting for.
And then there's a two two,
which is like you're kind of screwed up.
And then there's a third,
which is like you devastated.
He screwed up, right? And he was like,
this is where everyone stacked up.
It was exactly where I thought
they'd stack up.
And I got a two two. And I was like, shit.
It kind of makes sense
given the fact that I founded my degree
and like, I didn't really learn anything.
And I'd finished all those papers
40 minutes early, like, I.
But I was like, to your earlier question
line of questioning,
it was, no one's going to love me, right?
No one's going to love me. I failed my
I failed everything in my life.
I've disappointed.
The one thing I wanted to do was like,
please, my dad. And.
And so for the next four days,
I was on a train to da Salaam, Tanzania,
and I prayed over and over and over again.
God, I will do anything,
I will do anything, I will do anything.
If you can just reverse this result.
And we haven't laid the religious
background like, is prayer new to you?
Are you somebody who ever prayed
before this moment?
Church of England.
So like Christmas and Easter
they call it CV.
And so like I think I was steeped
in like the metaphysics of Christianity,
like it was the water that I swam in
but didn't have any religious
or spiritual life
like at all,
and nor did anyone in my family.
So this is just pure desperation.
This was like straight up desperation.
So I get to an internet cafe
in Dar es Salaam
and I call my dad
from like an international call center.
And I'm like, dad, I'm just so sorry.
I really I really felt like I worked
really hard, but, like,
I've really disappointed you.
He's like, what are you talking about?
I'm like, well, the two two.
And he's like, he's like,
what do you mean?
I was like, someone email
me and tell me I got a two two.
And he was like, well,
I have a letter from the university here
saying you have a first.
Which was a far more outlandish
outcome than the two two.
Like, absolutely impossible.
I'd never got a first in any single thing
I've ever done at Oxford,
like completely off the charts, and
it completely
transformed my view of myself
in the most negative imaginable way.
Because I was brilliant,
I was effortlessly brilliant.
Did it give you permission to phone it in?
So I left university and was like,
I want to go be a soccer agent.
And turned out
that the company was extremely not robust.
It ended up going bankrupt
or like folding shortly afterwards.
But I was like, I am so bright,
I don't need to try
like at anything anymore,
because I'm just look at my resume
like I'm like, look at this
level of validation was unheard of for me
and everyone in my family
took it incredibly seriously.
Everyone in my peer group was like,
if you get a first, like, it's
a really big deal because it's like.
You've got eaten.
You've got first at Oxford, right?
Golden child. Right.
And I was just so arrogant
and incompetent.
I got fired from my first job
after ten months.
And and were you just phoning it in
just like.
Yeah, getting stoned and not.
Paragon. Right.
Just real arrogant
and thought
I understood things that I didn't, and
I think I must have been just intolerable
and I just but also, I think it was.
Funny because I think of you
as very self-effacing now.
Like, not arrogant.
I'm like, I would prefer
if you were a little more arrogant
because you're quite brilliant,
but you're always like, nah,
you shouldn't trust me.
Well,
but I spent I've spent an enormous time
in my life subsequently, which I guess
maybe we'll talk about being humbled.
But like,
I guess the
punchline of that story is,
is that since I've become more mystical,
I've.
I have a real, like,
very significant doubt
as to whether I manifested that outcome.
And it was the first time in life
I was being taught,
be careful what you wish for.
Wait, did you find out?
Was your friend
fucking with you with the two? Two?
Yeah, I called him up and he was like,
yeah, I was just joking.
But it didn't make any sense.
And it still doesn't in retrospect.
And it wasn't praised as a joke.
Like, it just it just didn't stack. Up
like he never showed up for the punchline.
Yeah. Just left you swimming in it.
Yeah. He never emailed me again
to be like, hey just kidding.
Your the first like it was just
it doesn't make any sense.
And so like I'm like I.
Part of me is like.
And in that moment
you thought I'm brilliant.
You didn't think God is real.
No. Yes.
No no no no. No, I thought God.
Well, thank God, I'm brilliant.
Thank God I actually am a genius. Right?
And was there any reflection on the prayer
at the time of what it did it work like?
Were you thinking?
I think someone's listening.
Maybe, but not much, I don't think.
I don't think it was like.
You didn't start praying for everything
you wanted. No. Absolutely not.
You just assumed you deserved it.
Yeah. Because,
look, it's here in black and white.
Look. Look how brilliant. I am. Yeah.
And then I spent seven months,
in my parents at it.
Just terrified to apply for jobs again
because I couldn't handle rejection.
And in that moment
when you said soccer agent.
Yeah.
That was like
I could trust my childhood dream.
I could be anything
I want to be in the world.
This sounds like the most followed
your curiosity? Fun.
Interesting. Yeah. And it failed.
Well, I had actually interned in Tokyo
and Hong Kong during college
with the Lehman Brothers,
and I was like,
the one thing I don't want to do is work
in equity sales
because you're just leaving voicemails
for disinterested people.
And, So it was on your radar.
As something I didn't want to do. Yeah.
And so I was like, when I left university,
everyone was going,
everyone with the first, like,
consultancy, like I interviewed Lazard
and like, oh, did all these like,
really like main track jobs.
And then I ended up getting so beaten down
and ended up getting headhunted for
the city because I had such a good degree
through like my,
my half brother actually hooked me up.
And I
don't give him enough credit for that.
But basically, like I got in other slight
funny story,
I made it through 16 rounds of interviews
and the recruiter calls me at the end.
It was like, it's between you and no one.
And I had a final round of interviews
with this woman who just clocked me
for exactly what I was able to
and vetoed me.
And so the recruiter called me up.
They chose nobody.
Nobody over me.
But one of the guys really liked me.
And actually, the reason
why is because we had a 40 minute argument
about why I'd left, eaten off my resume,
and I left eaten off my resume
because I didn't want the association
positive and negative.
And he was like,
where'd you go to high school?
I was like, eating. He's like,
why haven't you put on the resume?
And we had a 40 minute argument about it.
And he was like, I like the way you work,
and I'm going to hire you
to be a US specialist
on the Merrill Lynch equity sales desk.
And even then I was like,
I don't think I want to do it.
And he was like, what is wrong with you?
Do you know how much money
you're going to make?
Do you know what you're going to do?
And the long story short, is
four months into
that job, maybe four weeks into this job,
I was like,
they're flying me first class to New York.
Like, which is it's completely insane.
Like,
and I get paid to learn about the world.
And actually, the people around
you are quite cool.
And if you don't take it seriously,
like it was actually brilliant
and I was completely wrong
about my interpretations of finance,
but it was not something
I'd ever wanted to go into.
It's interesting because I feel like
a lot of a lot of my clients,
a lot of people in your community,
a lot of people
we know who landed in finance.
It is the is a long, slow,
degrading of their internal compass
and self-confidence that lands them there.
So they're basically navigating
by other people's values.
Yours is such a punctuated
example of that.
Because you escaped,
you were like, oh,
I can trust myself and you right
in that moment, we're like, nope.
And then it was like, well,
this is what society values.
You'll get paid a lot in
some part of you was saying no already.
I think ish actually.
Like, I really, really enjoyed finance
for ten years.
You did. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
So even though you were like,
I don't want to go into equity sales, you
then found it. I was wrong.
I was wrong about my initial impression
of it.
Like, you know, equity sales at the time,
you had 50 geniuses,
often charismatic geniuses, writing
research about things in the world.
And I was at a time in my life
where I wanted to learn about the world.
I realized in retrospect, I did not care
about the stock market at all.
Like I didn't have a PA, I wasn't trading,
I didn't like going out with clients
and getting shitfaced and, you know.
Talking their book. And.
Yeah, and I didn't like that at all.
But I liked I liked interacting
with very intelligent people that time.
The people writing the research.
And my clients, you're
speaking of very, very, very bright people
all day, very curious people all day. And,
you know,
I did that for four years in London,
went through, went from like The Graduate
to like the highest performer
on my desk, but mostly
because everyone else got fired or left.
And then in nine, I fell in love.
The world ended financially, and I'd been
a US specialist, and every time
I'd gone to New York, I'd just been filled
with this incredible galvanizing energy.
And then for people on the New York
desk, resigned to go to UBS.
And I was like, that's my window.
I'm going to go
I got an internal transfer to New York
and ended up in like, oh,
nine in New York.
Expecting to get fired.
And everyone was like this.
This place is inherently toxic.
You're going to get fired
after six months.
It took them six years to fire
me. But like.
How was your
how was your confidence at this time?
Was it rebuilding you,
being there and doing well? Yes.
Yeah, I was overconfident,
you know, I spent all my time
chasing women and partying and like.
Oh, yeah, there was an article about
what's the TV show?
Yeah. Industry.
Industry. Yeah.
You you are quoted heavily
in this article in the journal.
It was I'm finally made the cover
of the Wall Street Journal.
And it was about all the sex
I wasn't having on Wall Street
because it was like,
this is great show called industry.
And basically it's like it's
just full blown HBO sex and drugs,
at least in the first couple of seasons.
Then it really goes
into good characterization.
But basically I was just like, yeah, that
wasn't really my experience in the city.
Like they actually got the vibes right,
but like,
I was not having that sex
and sadly no drugs at all.
So yeah,
so but New York was a big shiny object.
You got transferred to New York.
Brought me alive.
It really brought me alive.
And then
I'd say about 2015, like
there's been a lot of revisionism on it,
but I read like sapiens.
And I realized at that point
I was starting to get really interested
in big themes and actually, like,
whilst I was a terrible trader,
I started to see things in the future.
I read like the,
the seminal Tim Urban piece on, on AI.
And I was like, oh shit,
we're in an exponential business stage.
And I was like,
oh my God, all these fang companies,
they're going to go exponential.
But again, like, did
I put a dollar of my own money on it?
No. Right.
But I was like,
oh, drones and self-driving cars and AI,
they're all going to go.
They're all going to be huge.
And this was like 11 years ago.
But basically, like, I kept writing
these really long form emails,
about all this stuff.
And it slowly morphed into like,
not my job.
And my job was like selling prime
brokerage to clients
and doing all this cross-selling.
And I was still like the number one ranked
sales guy in America for research sell.
The research analysts
thought I was like, amazing
because I just loved that stuff so much.
And then they fired me.
And just to give people context,
there are people who write research
on, say, a vertical
or it could be macro or something,
and they put out newsletters
for a sales guy where they most of them
also getting subscribers
and putting out newsletters.
Sort of,
Because you build quite a big email list.
I had a big email list.
I wrote a summary email
every week of all the stuff
that was coming out of the bank.
And all this increasing
became all the stuff
that I found interesting as well.
And that gained
like a pretty big following.
And this is a long, slow shift from
investment advice to,
I don't know, life advice.
Exactly, exactly.
And so it was starting to bleed in early.
You were getting what more,
bigger, broader themes, big themes, big.
Sweeping global themes, trends.
And I was pulled to that.
And I think my bosses came in
at that point and they were like,
this guy is like not doing the actual job
that he's compensated to do.
And I was like, I will be fine
because the research analysts love me.
And then one day
just kind of had to do it. They fired me.
And it wasn't totally unexpected,
just because there had been
so many rounds of way offs in general,
because it's what they did.
But it hit me really hard.
And did you know you were poking the bear?
Were you feeling like
you're what you were doing was provocative
or out of the bounds or.
Yes, you did. Yeah.
Yeah.
And but I'd always been fine.
And I was like, I, I think in retrospect,
it was like, I can't actually compromise.
Like, I'm too interested
in this stuff to compromise.
And they were like,
he's not going to compromise.
And I thought,
I'll be fine because I've seen seven
different management teams come through.
I'll see you out as well.
And then things will pivot
back to the stuff that I care about.
And I was extremely,
extremely bad strategic call.
But I think it was the universe
being like, dude,
like you're meant like I was never
interested in the stock market, as I said.
So it's like, you're not meant to do this,
but this has been the grounding
for you to learn how to communicate
really rapidly, really effectively
with people that aren't interested
in what you have to say, and then to write
about that in ways that capture people's
attention really quickly.
So it's like a really accelerated
bootcamp in that.
And then I ran out of road, but I didn't
understand that I'd run out of road.
And like, people
were people on the street were like,
quite surprised that I'd been fired.
We didn't really do any good.
It just made me feel more indignant.
And then, I got hired by a really,
really nice investment bank.
Were like, we fire no one ever.
And for me, like,
they made me a managing director,
which in your 30s was like quite unusual.
Yeah. Guaranteed salary.
It was fantastic set up.
But then a round about the time I met you,
I started dying.
Yes. Explain to me, because,
I think the first time we met,
the way you introduced
what had been going on internally,
there was some explanation about.
I'm meditating.
I'm using this head piece
biofeedback device.
I'm exploring my inner worlds.
And something broke. Yeah.
So like what?
There was some kind of double life
going on.
This is not what you were writing about.
You were at home exploring something else.
Yeah. How did that start?
So I started I looked back
photos of myself from my 2015,
and I look like absolute shit.
I'm starting to get fat.
Like I'm sort of like morphing into a non,
non individuated human.
Everyone around me,
like a guy comes in every day
and just watches TMZ on YouTube
every day at full volume in the office
during the morning call,
some other guy just comes in and naps,
right.
Like, and my physical state
and my mental state start declining.
I start getting brain fog.
I start getting weird pains
all over my body.
And so I go through the whole U.S.
healthcare system and they got nothing.
And eventually
I go to a functional medicine doctor
and he's like,
just go on elimination diet.
I did a year long course in functional
medicine after after all this happened.
And I would say the only thing that
I got from it is do an elimination diet,
which is just for people
listening is like,
you take everything out of your diet
for three months.
It's a long, long time. Yeah.
And then reintroduce things back in
and see what they do to you
when you reintroduce them.
But the net effect of that was basically
my unconscious awoke and took me over.
And were you using food to numb yourself?
Yes. Yeah, definitely. I still do.
Like I was food and alcohol and caffeine
and it makes you quit them all
apart from caffeine, I think.
And suddenly I started writing
and I wrote this, like, 60 page
fugue PDF of all the ideas
that I ever felt meaningful.
And I kept telling my wife, this is what
I was supposed to do with my life.
Like just absolute, pure conviction.
This is what I'm supposed
to do with my life.
It was explore these ideas and write them.
Just write about them like and
subsequently forgot about that.
But like, one day,
the pivotal moment in my life
is one day I come into work and I'm like,
finishing the book.
And my best friend had read the book
and be like, where are you in this book?
And as I finished the book,
the last chapter was about
how the Hero's Journey isn't a story,
it's an operating manual.
And the moment I realized that,
something just snapped in my psyche
in like, a good way, I had this immense
pressure between my eyes
and every pore of my body became bathed
in transcendent, unconditional love,
something I'd never felt before.
Like that
thousand orgasms, like together. And.
But it was really stable.
It wasn't like a Kundalini,
like electrical, like vibration.
It was just like it,
you know, I had it described afterwards
as like a heart opening,
and, and then I was like,
oh, I know what the Dow is like, Teo.
I know what the Dow is.
It was really weird because I hadn't
really been thinking about that.
I had been reading it,
reading an almost psychoactive book
called living at the Edge of Chaos
by this woman, Helen Shulman,
where she was like,
you can get to the edge of a grid
structure, and then it dissolves.
And that was what happened to me
at that moment.
I literally saw energy on the trees
outside.
There were crazy synchronicities like my
I called my sister
very close with and I was like,
I think I'm having a spiritual awakening.
And she was terrified because it had
destroyed the life of one of her friends.
A. Spiritual awakening.
Yeah. Like, like murdered her life.
And she was like, oh my God. Like,
you got to be careful. Like.
And I was probably by a,
like a mental health definition,
probably psychotic at this point,
even though it was like really stable,
felt really stable at least.
And anyway, I was like, the universe
is made up of a mix of order and chaos.
And she sends me
these picture of a Catholic
she had bought two days before with order
on one cough and chaos on the other.
And so now the synchronicities
are starting to synchronous.
Go crazy.
Another thing,
a guy called Tom Morgan from Bristol
tied himself to a bunch of balloons,
like in the movie up and floats
away across South Africa to like,
promote his adventure company
the same time, right?
Like so everyone like the week after.
Everyone's sending me these legs and like,
weird things.
Like, I synchronized my awakening
with a guy in Stockholm I'd met once
for three hours on a roof in Brooklyn,
and he started sending me like,
like all these emails being like,
awakening is synchronized
at the same time.
And we just knew it had synchronized
at the same time, like in a quantum level.
It was.
How did you get connected
in the first place?
We just stayed in touch after,
like so I read an article about for him,
coming out was a
was the source of his spiritual awakening.
And like he
then said, that article had been prompted
by a lot of my writing
and the meeting that we'd had together.
And we just like
we felt like we entangled.
It was really hard to describe
just at that one moment in time.
So I had someone that I could speak
to about it.
And anyway, after.
That, and your worldview at this time
is pretty material reductionist.
Otherwise.
I mean, I'd been meditating with an EEG
headset to your point, which I think was
probably pretty reckless.
But I was interested
in the bliss that it brought me rather
than any of the metaphysics.
But I was exploring these ideas.
But I'll say that literally
over the 25 minutes,
my worldview completely changed that.
I was like, oh, baseline reality
isn't what I thought it was.
I then went and had like an hour long
meeting face to face with a hedge fund.
But on the walk over there,
I could actually feel anyone's emotions
if they came within 12ft.
I was like, oh, you're sad, you're happy,
you're excited.
Like just as
it was like warm as they walked past me.
You're wide open. Wide open.
And then I went home.
My wife immediately started crying on
seeing me because she just was like.
Like the look in your eyes
or the energy coming on.
She says, oh, the above, right?
That I was just not normal.
And she starts crying like,
you are, like you are out there.
And I was like.
And she said to me, in retrospect,
I only found everything.
She was like, I don't know what.
I don't know what journey you're on,
but I don't want to be honest with you.
And I was in a situation
where everything I said
my heart would hurt if it wasn't true.
It was really, really strange.
And then I started having precognition.
So I had a precognition
that I was going to be engulfed
in immense pain, like immense pain.
I actually wrote a follow on chapter
to the book
about the pain,
and then I had another precognition
that I was going to be
the center of a node
of a network that would spread
transformational truths. And,
but I wasn't going to originate the truth.
I was just going
to let them flow through me.
But I saw the picture
in my head of this, of this network.
And there were other,
other things as well.
But basically it was just like
it was like remembering the future.
It was like,
this is definitely going to happen.
There was no doubt in my mind.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're working
and you have a job
and you're trying to keep it together.
I'm such. A good boy.
I didn't miss a day of work.
I went to work the next day,
walked into the office, and my entire left
side of my body shut down
and my roof of my mouth went numb.
And I went straight to the E.R.
so I was like, I'm having a heart attack.
Is this the immense pain?
No, it was just I the whole the whole left
side of my body shut down
the moment I walked into the office.
And I now understand hemispherical it was
it was my right brain being like, dude,
dude, dude, you're walking back into
the place that's killing you, you moron.
I am going to take you out.
And so I ended up in the E.R.
where I was like,
I think I'm having a heart attack.
And they're like,
no, you're having a panic attack.
But it wasn't that.
It was just a full, right brain takeover.
When did you stumble into
Ian Gilchrist's work?
That was the problem. So like,
there was a there was a foreshadowing,
really.
This all started
actually, I think like around about time
I met you, I went on
I went on, on holiday in Hawaii,
I was swimming off Lahaina
and suddenly I had a full body
panic attack.
For the first and only time in my life,
my whole body just blew up
to a million times its normal size
and my my inner monologue went bananas,
went to hospital,
found nothing wrong with me,
and then the only thing
I could think about
was this article I'd read about a woman
that had a left hemisphere
stroke and lost her inner monologue
while she was doing karaoke,
and then Iain McGilchrist was mentioned
in that article, but that was looping
in my head for reasons
I could not understand for years,
and I didn't revisit the McGilchrist
until 2020.
Explain.
For people who have no idea who he is
and why he's relevant here, yes.
I think Ian the McGilchrist is
the greatest living thinker.
He is. He was at Oxford.
He went to the genius college at Oxford
three times.
All Souls,
he started off in the humanities
and then became so interested
in the structure of the brain,
and that he has made the study
of the brain's hemispheres his life focus.
And this is one of the points
where everyone pops up on the internet
and goes, that stuff's debunked.
And it's not.
It's really nuanced, but effectively,
you know, there's
this is actually quite easily
empirically proven
by people that have hemispheric damage,
or they have the corpus callosum
in their brain severed, where basically
the two, the two sides of the brain
can do the same thing,
but they do it very differently.
It's not that one side's mathematical
and one side's creative.
The things like the way that they pay
attention very, very important.
So McGilchrist’s favorite is a bird.
The left hemisphere focus is very narrowly
on the ground to see what's edible,
while the right hemisphere is focused
on the entire environment.
To see
if you're about to get eaten by a cat.
So they're both paying attention.
They're just doing it in
radically different ways.
And broadly speaking,
the left hemisphere is very limited,
linear, logical and hyper verbal,
and the right hemisphere
is emotional, somatic, energetic,
and almost entirely nonverbal.
So basically, like the sum total
of all my McGilchrist work
is essentially that the right hemisphere
is better at almost everything, but
it doesn't communicate in ways
that are acceptable in today's society.
And so people are very likely
to overrule it,
because one of the other
fascinating dynamics
is that the left
hemisphere is competitive with the right,
and the right hemisphere
integrates the left.
So basically the when the left hemisphere
is threatened, it's like.
The. Like, I don't know what I'm doing,
but I'm going to double down on whatever
it is.
And I'm doing this linear
and predictable and logical
and inexplicable to to anyone listening.
And the right hemisphere is like, dude,
this is killing you.
And I think in retrospect,
like what happened to me on that day of my
awakening.
Well, whilst there was this
what do I like about McGilchrist's?
This theory doesn't deny
the possibility of mystery,
but the mechanics of what happened to me.
I lost my inner monologue.
I started seeing the world more energetic,
and my senses
got dialed up to a bajillion percent, like
in the Bradley Cooper movie limitless.
That's what it felt like.
And I felt like intense connectivity
to everything and everyone around me.
I was like, oh,
this is just a rebellion of the right
hemisphere,
that eventually
it just gets bored of your shit,
that it's like, listen, if you're not,
if you're not going to pay
attention eventually,
I'm just going to take the wheel.
And it did take the wheel, but in a way
that was like utterly discombobulated.
So his his book that was out at the time,
his first big book was The Master
and His Emissary.
And the idea is that the right hemisphere
is the master, and the left hemisphere
is the emissary, which is supposed
to go out and do things and report back.
And our society
has put the left hemisphere on a pedestal.
And so it's not just individuals,
but like what we value as a society
is rewards for the left hemisphere.
So it's become more and more dominant.
And it's it's like the right hemisphere
said not only became the master again,
but kind of kicked out the left hemisphere
for a while in your head.
Yeah.
And what's funny is that
he makes the point
that, like, humanity has had myths
since the beginning of time to say, like,
don't do that,
but it happens periodically.
But like, you know, The Lion King,
you basically have,
you know, the hyper
intellectual British scholar kill Mufasa
or arrange for the death of the Mufasa,
and then pride
Rock just goes to shit, right?
The environment gets despoiled the
the moment the left hemispheric intellect
takes over. Like,
look at all the bad guys.
It's always the mad scientist.
Yeah, it's always the mad scientist
tinkering with something
that he doesn't understand.
You know,
full blown Jurassic Park like you,
you you, you, you influence a variable.
And it's always a handful of variables
that can be measured and quantified.
And you think you understand
the whole system because of it.
And then you realize there is much broader
context that's being left out.
My favorite example is Mao's five best
campaign, Smash Barriers, where basically
he's like, okay, the sparrows are killing
a reading all the grain reserves.
We're going to kill all the sparrows,
so they kill all the sparrows,
like, really effectively.
And then which.
A campaign of citizens going out
and by hand
killing sparrows, which you have to
imagine what that felt like
and what had to be denied inside
of each of these people to go do this.
But they did it
very successfully, to the point that.
50 million people died, the greatest
manmade disaster in human history.
Massive contribution
because there was a locust infestation.
That they realized
the sparrows were eating the locusts
and keeping them under control.
So without the sparrows,
the locust went insane
and ate a very crops
they were trying to save.
And I was reading, I was reading,
yeah, this week, actually, that
all of Mao's advisors were coming to him
being like another record harvest.
No, the record harvest Mao like, because
no one wanted to give him a bad idea.
And there is something of that
in the left hemisphere where it's like, it
just it just ignores like counterfactuals
and but it's it's enormously powerful.
Yeah.
And if you look at everything
we're doing in society,
it's kind of that it's like, oh,
engagement algorithms, that'll be great.
They'll be they'll make us very profitable
or this quarter's profits or whatever
it is. Right.
Like you ought to one variable
and you don't have any context.
And it's perhaps nowhere as concentrated
as in finance as in Wall Street. Yep.
Where you can literally become
a multi-millionaire by following the left
hemisphere or hyper
logical algorithmic thinking investing.
But some part of you
is shoved into a box or cut off.
And I think we both know
a lot of people who have had strange
physiological sicknesses or mental health,
physical health problems,
which are some part of them.
I think speaking up, saying
this is not for me, I want to change.
One of my favorite lines is from
Kes Louis, where he's like God whispers
in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience
and shouts in our pains.
And I have multiple
I mean, I can't imagine
how many people you know,
but they literally have heart attacks,
right?
They'll,
they'll they'll get to the cusp of death.
You know, someone someone we know in
the community had two widow makers,
two winner makers, whereas, like,
you didn't get the message the first time,
you're going to get a second time.
And you know, my favorite,
my favorite hero's journey.
Because again, I did realize
my starting book, The Hero's Journey,
is, in my opinion, an operating manual
for how to do live transitions.
Well,
where you basically it starts in stasis.
So Neo's a cubicle monkey.
His attention follow the white rabbit,
usually from the anima,
from the feminine, from Trinity.
In this case says follow something.
He follows something.
He gets shown the true nature of reality.
But then he goes back
to being a cubicle monkey, right?
He goes back to the office,
and then the agents come
in, interrogate him, and he's like, well,
now I kind of have no choice
but to go and seek out Morpheus.
And then he gets the choice
of crossing the threshold,
which what do people do when they kind
of voluntarily lose their job?
Leave their jobs or lose their jobs?
And then you go through this confrontation
against the shadow self, which is Smith,
the force of conformity,
the guy in the identical suit
with the same name as everyone else.
The thing that's kind of pulling you
to be like, undifferentiated.
And then when you integrate that, the end
of the matrix, he integrates Smith.
He doesn't kill him, right?
You see his heart stop and restart,
and then he integrates Smith,
and then he becomes an integrated human
being, the one.
Right.
The reason why I'm going through this long
winded thing
is that, like,
it's this refusal of the call that is a
dominant part of the hero's journey.
But in the hemispheric perspective, it's
because that call is coming to you.
And energetically
it's like I've got this nagging sense
or this for me, like the positive
curiosity towards something, but like,
I had this certainty
during that manic state, but
definitely was manic, where it's like
I'm supposed to be a writer.
And then I was like, nobody's
going to pay you to bite, you idiot.
You're being paid like a half million
dollars a year, guaranteed.
And you're writing actually
got you in trouble, right? Right.
But even when I've been after that,
when I was in the safe space,
I was writing, just not about stuff
that I wanted to be writing about.
Right. Yeah.
And at this point, were you
orienting towards the darkness,
towards the shadow, towards that?
This is a hero's journey.
And I have to pull on this thread
because to me, what I remember is
there was this kind of like one foot
in the chaos and one foot in the like.
I have to put it all back in the box
and go back on the path and like,
be stable because this might be crazy.
Didn't miss a day's work.
At one point I was meditating so hard
I was trying to kill my ego,
and I succeeded in killing my ego
for like two days.
I've kind of forgot who I was,
and I had to build a collage of photos
to remind myself what my identity was.
I was in this ludicrously expanded state.
My senses were blown out.
I had this
and this very strong intuitive sense
that I had to deal with my trauma,
but I didn't really know what that was,
and I think
I still probably haven't reconciled it.
But basically, like,
I had this really crazy two months
when I was when I was seeing you
and then, And remember,
we were having conversations.
There's a psychotic break down
and a spiritual break through
and the surface manifestations,
like wandering the street in open
hearted bliss or chaos are quite similar.
But one of them lands
you in an evolved state,
and one of them is regressive
and puts you in an institution.
And navigating that
is excruciatingly difficult and nuanced.
Well, it depends who you're
talking to, right? Like
the night of the of the awakening.
You know, my wife was in tears
and we were lucky to have a connection
to a famous yoga nidra,
a guy called Richard Miller.
And he was like,
he sort of gave me some early guidance,
but a lot of the spiritual stuff was like,
congratulations, you're enlightened.
And then the psychiatrist we ended up
speaking to were like,
oh, you're bipolar, right?
Like, and I'd never had
any mental health issues before,
but they're like,
oh no, you're definitely bipolar.
And maybe it's relevant.
Your wife is an ABC news anchor.
Yep. One of her close friends partners
had a panic attack on Dan
Harris on camera.
And as since been on a spiritual journey
and I think he was a resource.
But there was also this question
there of like, was this a good thing?
Is this a bad thing?
This ruined your career,
this launched you forward.
I mean, so you were speaking to him
and you had some other connections there.
He connected me to Willoughby Britain,
who's pretty much, as far as I could tell,
the only resource
about adverse meditation events
where it felt like
this was a meditation trigger
and my wife was wasn't
is kind of quite anti meditation.
And she was like this blue you up.
And Willoughby was like, yeah,
go and hug like something
with a good nervous system.
Go and hug a tree,
get the hell out of the city.
This happens,
but it can take a long time to resolve.
And I think she was right.
For me it
was like, how do I contextualize this?
Because I was mentally ill
and I was delusional at times. And,
you know, I meant that being like, face
to face with the head of psychiatry
at Columbia,
which, again, my wife got me to see
and I was like, they felt like
a spiritual component to this experience.
And he looked at me with his cold,
clinical eyes and was like,
if I stimulate this part of your brain
with an electrode, you'll believe in God.
He's just like,
basically like, there's no there.
That dude, we're just looking through you
to find the right dose.
And then when we find the right dose,
you will be symptom management
for the rest of your life.
And that's it.
We can make you a high functioning, high
Q stable human being in the system.
Once again, it was kind of his no,
no, no. You're disabled.
Oh, you're disabled like.
You're done like I remember funny.
I remember like, we're gonna neuter
your intellect, but you'll be no decent.
You're disabled.
You we will stabilize you and you're done.
Right? Like was was what I took from it.
Maybe it's not what he said, but
it's what I took from these conversations.
I was like, oh, I'll be better right now.
Like, no, no, you're you're you're
now on a lifetime course of medication.
Right.
And like
and I think part of
it was because I was
so spiritually inflated,
they didn't want me to go
off the reservation again
and go off the meds.
They were like,
no, stay on the meds and like, stabilize.
And maybe you'll approach a normal life
at some point, but that shouldn't be.
Or based on expectation.
I remember one day waking up.
And like, you know,
Eton, Oxford
first young managing director.
Yeah. Penthouse apartment. Beautiful.
Like like TV wife.
I just got to the end of the bed,
and I fell down in the fetal position.
And I cried and cried and cried
because overnight
I was incurably mentally ill
and had no hope.
It was. It was almost like that despair
I felt when I was a kid.
I was literally no hope at all.
And that was it.
And that then the darkness started.
It's worth mentioning here, too,
that one of the themes
that keeps coming up
in these conversations and in my work,
is that we don't have containers
for people to break down in.
We don't have a rites of passage
which encourage this,
and we certainly don't have wise elders
who look at this and go, okay,
I've been through this.
This is going to get ugly.
But there's another side.
And so you were I mean, you were hearing
a lot of different voices,
but our culture wasn't channeling you
in one stable direction.
You had to navigate it on your own.
You had to decide,
do I trust this person or this,
you know, academic, intellectual,
you know, established person.
And so you were you were adrift.
And you live in Manhattan, dude.
Like and I ended up with a kid on the way,
right.
Like, what am I going to do?
And I did explore different things,
like becoming a yoga nidra teacher
and all these different paths.
I mean, like, eventually
just quit the job in the investment bank
without a plan, which in retrospect
was probably the right choice.
It's something you helped me with,
but it was like at that point I had this
such a benign view of the universe.
I was like, the universe will sort me out.
I sat on the couch doing
nothing for three months.
Then my wife was like, well,
what are you actually doing?
I'm like, oh, I'm becoming a coach.
And I'm like, I would have been singularly
unsuited to be a coach at that point.
I know from you how hard it is
and how few people are good at it,
but I was like, the universe has got me.
The universe is fundamentally benign.
I feel it,
I know it intrinsically, and I still do.
But the universe rewards action.
And so at that point, I spent three months
on the couch and it was a disaster.
And eventually I panicked.
It was a moment where I was working with
a coaching company and they were like,
can you organize a road show
for us through New York
with the most famous people in the in
Wall Street that, you know, and I realized
I could probably only get two people
to take that meeting as a favor.
I remember walking into the bedroom
and crying hysterically
at how worthless I was
about how I couldn't deliver anything,
and so I panicked and went back to work
for a mutual friend of ours,
for a year,
which was selling credit card data,
which was basically
all of the things that I was good at
with all of the good stuff
abstracted away from it.
And I did that for 11 months, and that was
as close to suicide as I've ever got.
And at the time that we were working
together, you
you did have this other your newsletter
had morphed into a community,
the first form of a community you built
Cumae, community of mutual Improvement.
What was the genesis of that?
Because I think that's important
for where you end up later.
You know, it's funny you say that.
I've never even really thought
about that connection.
But yeah, it's obvious in retrospect,
but it never really thought about it.
It was a mutual friend of mine
called Nick, who worked at a hedge fund
who was very interested
in self-improvement.
And we were like, we just reckon
people are interested in this stuff.
We should organize dinners
or events based around topics.
And oddly enough, my wife went to one
based around sleep with a sleep doctor,
and that was the genesis of a book
that she wrote about sleep.
You and I connected on one that ended up
being transformational for certain
people's lives who were in attendance.
Including mine, by the way.
I had a very strong intuition
the year I took off
and lived in a mountain
that I was going to work
with people on Wall Street.
And then I became the top ranked coach
in New York City
on like, Google and Yelp and Wall Street.
People descended upon me like hedge fund
managers and stuff.
And I was like, oh, I hate this work.
These people are not asking
interesting questions.
It was like biohacking
and performance, right?
And when I was introduced to you,
it was a mutual friend
who was a client of mine
who said, trust me, Tom's different.
I know he works on Wall Street,
but you should work with him.
And then you invited me to go
speak in front of this group of, like,
heavy hitters at Evercore ISI office.
And I was still like,
I don't think these are my clients.
And I gave a kind of fuck you presentation
saying, like,
you guys all have daddy issues,
obsess to it.
Like you're like prisoners
in like, inmates and military people.
And then half the room came up to me
and wanted to work with me,
and I was like,
oh, Tom is a portal to these really
deep, really interesting people
working in Wall Street.
And ever since then,
I love working with these like
titans of finance
who are on a deep spiritual inner journey.
So that night transformed my career
massively.
But it's funny
you didn't think of that as,
oh, this is me, I'm a community builder.
I'm a writer,
transforming my wife's
life, transforming my coaches life.
I didn't see it
as something that could ever hold me
and to be fair, like, don't do it
yourself down.
I remember walking to your office
and spending session upon session, unable
to tell you what I cared about.
Yeah, right.
You were trying to tease out from me
all the different ways that you could
what I was actually passionate about.
I couldn't do it right.
Like, I remember writing, like,
what do I actually care about?
What am I interested
in? What's my creativity?
Nothing.
And I was sitting there in front of me,
which was like what I was writing about.
But then I, I moved away from it
so many times in that transitional phase
where I was trying
to be of service to people in ways
that weren't aligned with my personality.
It took me two years of hell
to get back to the place
where I felt that I was doing
what I couldn't not do, you know?
Because in my experience,
the most disciplined people,
which are often
the most successful people,
are the ones who have been the best
at putting their own preferences aside
to do what other people value. Yeah.
And then rekindling that inner flame
to try to figure out who am I?
How do I want to contribute to society?
What's my purpose in
the world is brutally difficult. But.
But you you locked onto curiosity.
You locked onto there like that.
I think that was one of the words
that really signaled like,
there's some there's some there, there.
I don't even know
if you knew fully what it was,
but you knew if you pulled that thread,
good things would happen.
Like, do you remember when that started.
To the. Minute. Because there was this.
So Jordan Peterson right.
Like, I wonder how many of your
your listeners are familiar with him.
Like he he started with problematic ideas.
He got increasingly more
and more problematic.
He's in some sort of weird state right now
for the second time.
But there was a moment,
I think, around 2015,
where it was the first time I'd ever heard
an intellectual talk about God,
and not in like, a sky beard kind of way.
Right?
And there was something about him
and his ability to communicate,
occasionally communicate
mythology and transcendence
that was like literally electrifying.
And it was obviously true.
You don't go from 0 to 250 million
people like following you
if you're not got hold of anything.
There's a quick digression.
Actually, he had a
what sounded like a hemispheric breakdown
in his early 20s,
where essentially he had like a 170 IQ.
He could win every debate immediately.
And then a voice in his head
piped up and said, you don't believe that?
And he'd have a panic attack.
And then eventually he would only say
things that the censor would let through
because he didn't know
which side of his personality that was.
And then there was a time
when he got famous where I felt
when he spoke with that voice,
he was telling you real truth.
And when they spoke with the other voice,
they talked about gender
or politics and climate change.
Yeah.
But there was this moment he gives
this lecture called Jacob's Ladder,
which is still one of my favorite lectures
of all time,
although it has his classical
like incoherence of him.
But it's basically he says that
and this bit isn't even really true
to Young's work.
From what I understand, it's a bit
it's a bit garbled, but he basically said,
your future self acts in the presence
by directing in the present,
by directing your attention,
that basically your attention
is a guide from the future of what's
going to evolve you in a benign direction.
And that I was standing in Newark Airport
in the security line
and it just went right.
There was this like snap moment.
I was like,
and then I think subsequently, as
I refined the idea of a years, I was like,
there's this brain breaking question,
which is, can you choose what you're
interested in?
And you're like,
ish, right?
Like, if I tell you
how to spend the rest of your life
as an actuary, you'd be like, fuck no.
But like, you have agency in that choice.
Yeah.
And the fact that it's
in the West,
we don't understand relationality.
We don't understand the relational force.
That's kind of half
you and half someone else.
And I was like, oh,
I can't control what I'm interested in.
Which means there's
something that must be.
And that something is
maybe not entirely me.
And I think anybody who has multiple
children is disabused
of the idea that you mold them
and create their personality.
Like, kids
come out with some innate personality
and you can break them
and you can support them.
But some part of them, it just is.
And I think, you know,
our educational system
does not necessarily orient us towards
discovering that and nurturing that.
And a lot of people, it atrophies
if it's not used,
but then it speaks up through
the unconscious and through sickness
and all these other things.
And so I think you can learn to find
anything interesting to some degree,
but some part of you
innately has a directionality.
And so you were starting to orient
towards that.
And I think writing has always
been your biggest clue.
Right. Well.
But reading and writing and discovering I.
Had to be broken first,
which is essentially like I did
two years
in hell of like botched transitions
in, in Manhattan and eventually needed
ketamine infusions to get out.
And I had seven ketamine infusions.
They were hilarious drug experiences.
And then on my eighth, I had a full blown
hell trip.
Didn't feel redemptive.
It just a straight up trip to hell.
And then within a week after that,
my personality came back online.
I went from completely dead eyed
and unable
to speak really coherently at all
for years, to being able to hear music,
to be able to experience emotion, relate
to other people, think about other people.
And then weird shit happened.
So like the
one of the most scariest and interesting
things I've ever read is an essay called
Meditations on Moloch by the polymath
psychiatrist Scott Alexander.
That's basically about zero sum games
and how they destroy the world.
And I think that's the dynamic
underneath Wall Street.
And I actually felt I encountered that
demonic force in a truly archetypal way
during my time,
particularly in the credit card company.
The first article
that I had the mental strength to read,
I saw him published
another article called Studies on Slack,
and I know what it was about, but
I was like, oh, I'm going to read this.
And it was literally
it was like May of 2020.
It was the first article
I was strong enough to read,
and it ended up being about
the countervailing force to Moloch,
which is space that's generative.
This is not slack,
the communication platform.
This is having spaciousness,
the the absence of tension.
Yeah.
And his basic view is like
eyes are a massive evolutionary benefit,
but it takes like a million years
to get eyes,
at which point you're completely helpless.
So it's like,
how does it make sense that you have
you need slack to evolve these things,
but you should be being killed off
instantaneously
the moment you try to evolve them.
There must be a force that's kind of,
rather than just survival of the fittest,
is working towards this complexity
and this benign unfolding.
And that ended up being the idea
that meshed
with the complexity theory
and with this sense of curiosity.
And then simultaneously, I read
Ian a McGilchrist's book, and I was like.
Oh, I've spent all these years with people
trying to fit it
into either pathology or enlightenment.
And this book meshed completely.
And then at that point I was like,
you know, some psychos can read a read
something like that
and not want to tell anyone but me.
With my background of communication
and obsession and sales, I was like,
everyone I know needs to know about this,
and I couldn't not do it.
And then I started writing about it, and
then all these synchronicities unfolded.
But it it was so like I had to be reduced
to zero to think this was viable.
And then in the process of rebuilding
my psyche, I think my heart
actually became attuned to
what was genuinely true and interesting.
Or it's true and interesting for me.
And then I was off to the races,
but it wasn't something that I was able to
follow from within the abyss.
Looking back, is there
a moment when you felt like you got
a foothold and the journey you're on now?
It started to build in a stable way
because there was a lot of like
false starts and destabilizing
and grinding you down into a pulp.
I mean,
I can kind of look back
and see how it was all a journey.
Yeah, but I wonder if there was a moment
that felt like, okay,
I can trust this inner compass.
I am heading in the right.
It might not be successful yet, but I.
I know I'm doing it the right way.
No, there was an external moment
of validation, which is probably
the craziest synchronicity of my life.
Which was?
I wrote a piece
about the use of attention
in the hedge fund world
that was sort of McGill Christian,
but I can't remember if it had that in it.
I sent it to a list of 100
former clients from Wall Street like,
hey, here's something I'm interested in.
One of them saw it.
Guy called Tom pence,
who works for a big wealth manager
and was like,
I'm going to hire you to write for us.
But based around these lines,
because you're different
and you're interesting
and you're writing about these themes.
And he
paid me the same as I was being paid
for my kind of joke job during Covid to do
exactly what I thought I was best at makes
absolutely no sense,
but also communicating these ideas
to a finance audience.
And to be clear, everyone else
who would get this salary, there's an ROI.
Yeah, there's a measurement. What?
Your writing is producing revenue for us
because you're selling the things
that we're selling.
And for you, he was like, nah, I think
you're doing something interesting.
Yeah.
And I was sort of like a
it was sort of like a patronage.
And I mean,
it was one of the kindest things
anyone, anything
anyone's ever done for me.
And it gave me a cocoon for three years
to go on a bunch of podcasts
tell this story,
but also to find my voice twice.
All my writing got scrubbed
off the internet for different reasons,
and it was fantastic
because that writing is nowhere there.
And I think if I read it back
now, I'd had to shoot myself.
But like basically I was just
iterating week after week after.
Week run by who.
I just got one got scrubbed
due to a legal dispute with the company
that I was in,
and another time it got scrubbed off
because my old firm changed ownership
and they just removed all my articles
on the website.
And so twice
all my articles got scrubbed and I'm like.
And at the time I was like, wait,
all my writing is gone.
And now I'm like, fantastic.
And at the time, were you thinking,
I need to be building my brand,
having Twitter,
having some kind of stable presence?
No. And I think if any of the firm
that I was in, they saw it that way.
But my employers initially were like, nah,
just don't create a through line to us.
Just write about what's interesting.
And I think in fairness to me, I did
and start to lean too heavily into me
and my brand.
But I realized
people really cared about my story,
that I was eventually like,
because I'd been reduced to zero.
I mean, I was a dead eyed freak
that was trying to get a job at Starbucks,
right? Like I'm failing, right?
Like my lowest
ebb was going in for a meeting.
For an interview on Eighth Avenue,
sweating through my suit.
And they interviewed me
and a 20 year old girl for the same job
at the same time, with a 20
grand starting salary in marketing.
Right? So okay. Question to you, Cynthia.
Okay. Question to you, Tom. Same question.
Like it was just like
I was like, I couldn't ever believe
how far I'd fallen from where I was.
And so now, like being able to tell people
that from that perspective,
but having the pedigree of someone
who was a like a managing director,
even when I thought it was kind of stupid,
like it really resonated with people
and suddenly people were coming to me,
including some of our mutual friends,
that were like,
you're writing about reincarnation,
and suddenly
I'm interested
about reincarnation as well.
But yet I run a hedge fund,
and eventually I became too
egregiously weird for a wealth manager,
and I was just very ill suited there.
And they were like,
far too patient with me.
But eventually I was just like,
I keep saying stuff
and the universe keeps bringing me
people who look like me but shouldn't
be like me because we're not supposed
to be interested in stuff like that.
And I was like, oh, there's a
there, there, there's something happening.
And I still believe that even more so.
And yeah, and you would
start introducing me to people
who would become clients who were,
you know, on the same, a similar journey,
questioning their sanity,
questioning reality,
certainly questioning their career.
And you explore being a coach
and you decide, you know, you still,
I think, provide mentorship to people,
but you don't formally coach anyone.
When did this start to form
into what you're doing now? Like
I was being asked for a year before
I had the courage to do it.
I mean, to build the community.
Yeah, I'm extraordinarily risk averse.
It was actually one of the articles
I wrote back
then was about 21 core ideas
that I never encountered.
And the 21st idea was Dunbar's number.
And I was like, all 20 ideas fit together,
but the 21st has no relationship
to any of these ideas.
And I only realized years later
I was like, yeah, does.
So explain to people Dunbar's number?
Yeah, Dunbar's
number is basically the idea
that the maximum size of a coherent
human community is 150 people
with plus or minus.
But basically, once you go beyond that,
that's the that's the number of people
that can all know each other
rather than just you can know.
So if I introduce Devin to Mike,
I know that they get on
and you start to have a coherent group.
And so basically,
for at least a year before I ended up
forming the leading edge,
people kept coming to me to be like, I'm
in some sort of deconstruction phase.
Actually, less often
it was deconstruction.
It was more, you know, what they call
epistemic loneliness, which is like,
I'm a serious dude with a serious job,
and I'm interested in something
that's professionally
disqualifying or dangerous, right?
That, like, people will realize I'm
starting to lose my edge or it's something
esoteric and I can't talk to people
with discernment about it.
And at one point you started writing
your online articles with a woo rating.
Yeah. Yeah.
That was a,
that was a, it got mixed reception.
But the idea was, is
you have to have this matter, awareness
of how out there an ideal covering it
which is like
if this is related to complexity theory,
it's like a two out of ten
because people are fine
with like empirical science.
But if it's related to reincarnation, it's
probably a nine out of ten,
because that doesn't fit
the current established paradigm.
And I think helping people understand
that you're maintaining a degree
of meta awareness of these ideas
you're exploring is a good idea.
It gives them permission to wade into it
without claiming they fully believe it.
Just saying no.
This is important to explore,
and I think a lot of what you're doing
is giving people permission to leave
consensus reality and not feel crazy.
Yeah, yeah. And I think it's
I've realized this, I've been doing this.
So Leading Edge has been running
for nearly three years.
And the other day
I, I asked everyone in leading edge
to fill out
how many people that met and the number.
So it's the happiest,
probably of the happiest things
I've ever done in terms
of how it made me feel. But,
the average member has met
30 other people out of 150 and.
In person.
In person, on zoom
or in person, like 1 to 1.
And I realized that there was a linear
correlation between the number of people
that someone had met and the benefit
that they'd received from the community,
but also the transformation
from a business
from a personal perspective.
And I realized that actually, like,
what happens is,
if you're interested in something,
you know,
some crazy Pew has some crazy statistic
that like 49% of Americans
have had a mystical experience.
It's a common knowledge game, right?
Like everyone's
almost everyone I've ever spoken to again
because of what I do selection bias,
but has had some sort of crazy experience
that they can't explain.
That's often the most meaningful thing
in their life that they can't speak
to someone else about.
And the moment you surrounded
with someone who who's of their tribe,
or it's just a normal
like middle aged person, right?
And they're like,
they can both drop the persona and
be like, yeah, shit, that happened to me.
Like, yeah, there wasn't
alien in the corner of my room or
yeah, I did have like a crazy experience
on psychedelics.
I can't contextualize
these are hugely meaningful for people
and they can't speak to other people
about it.
And so at the moment,
they do. They're bonded. Yeah.
And there's this weird thing in one on one
interpersonal relationships where it's
kind of like, who's going to go first?
Yeah.
Am I going to like,
leave the fold and signal to you
that's safe for you to go there?
And I feel like
what communities like the leading edge do
is the container goes first. Yes.
The container is bigger
than the individual's current context.
Yeah.
And so people are almost forced
to get weird
to fit in, which I think is very healthy.
Yeah.
You don't have to go through that dance
because if like if you do channel
and yet you're a private equity executive,
like it's
completely a norm with the community
that people will be like, yeah, that's
I've had some of those experiences too.
And, you know, just to back up and explain
what it is, it's 150 person community,
a third investors,
a third founders and a third mystics
and kind of people like you.
And we do a bunch of different things
I can go into and tedious detail, but
essentially it's a container
for the expiration of these ideas
and to a lesser extent, transitions, where
it's like, I'm not quite in the niche
that I want to be, and I'm trying to get
in a better niche that more
brings
me back into integrity with myself again.
That's that's been less core to the group
than I thought it was going to.
It's actually just been more a mechanism
for the exploration of curiosity.
And I should maybe explain
that we're in New York right now.
This is the annual summit where
the majority of the group at this point
gets together in one room.
People members are invited to get on stage
and speak, share
something of their personal journey
or their professional work or some,
you know, provocative,
experiential happening.
And it has been fascinating
to watch through WhatsApp
and a lot of people synchronistic,
bumping into each other
in strange cities all over the world,
like real relationships are being built
and real projects are taking shape.
And I think one of
your fascinations has been, how does this
not just transform the individual,
but ripple out?
And how do people invest differently?
How do they become
entrepreneurs differently?
Now you're going to get a rant now.
Good, good.
That's what I'm trying to provoke.
I believe that
leading edge is hyper replicable,
but not scalable because of the necessary
constraint of 150.
Up until now, you've had
hyper transactional IPO
is fine,
but like hyper transactional communities
and then ineffective spiritual communities
like bypassing, right?
There's
now this massive middle of the bell
curve of mid-career professionals
I call the Terracotta Army.
You know, given either massive creativity
or massive extra central crises
or both by AI at the same time,
as there is a
millennial old transitional stage
that starts weirdly for some people at 36.
But whatever midlife transitional period,
all these things are coming together
at the same time to create, in my opinion,
effectively limitless demand
for these containers that's not being met.
I've been exploring this area
for coming on five years,
and I've now found 31 communities, either
information or operating, that I've now
networked together in a network.
And I'm like, guys like, this is,
you know, ten years ago I saw AI coming
and and then another five years ago
I really saw, like psychedelics
and like consciousness
and the weird stuff like UAP.
I saw that coming
in. And I was really early now.
And now I feel
that this is coming in again
and maybe I'm just smoking crack,
but it's coming now
that basically the so much demand for it
I have, I have a vision that I don't think
I'm going to be the person to implement.
But I'm like,
all right, if any billionaires listening,
get 30 people a quarter from
the City of London,
Wall Street, Silicon Valley
and take them into a container
for three months,
get them the best people in the world
like you to teach them
how to steward a community
and then send them back out,
back out to other centers of power
and say, maybe even with the grant,
if you're a nice Berliner and say, recruit
150 and then you have a decentralized
movement of all of these communities
sharing resources and ideas
in totally coherent ways, in a movement
that no one owns where it's most needed.
And I'm like, you would have 30,000 people
within one year
if all went well, which it wouldn't.
Right?
You'd have to have disasters
like most people wouldn't
be able to get to the 150, but best case,
you'd have 30,000 people in a year
based off for cohorts of 30
in all the places where it matters.
And I know that it's needed
because I have a constant parade of people
knocking on my door
who I can't accommodate in the leading
edge in increasingly senior positions.
Yeah, it's bizarre.
And talk to me about what goes
well in these communities.
Like from your perspective as somebody
who's been shepherding one for a few years
at its best, how is this different from
your local,
like your coworkers,
your church, your family?
Like the type of communities
that people otherwise have?
I don't want to imply that it is better
in any of those.
It's different. It's it's supplementary.
People aren't abandoning their families
or their work, but.
I think.
I I'll tell you what I see, which is that
in the tri state area
around these major professions,
for example, when you have to play that,
do that dance of mysticism,
a lot of the time people actually just
aren't there, like your partner, isn't
there a lot of the time you're growing
at different rates to people around you.
You're interested in different things,
and actually
finding the others is very difficult.
And making a digital community
coherent is the secret sauce,
which is what I'm focused on.
But like we're across 21 countries
and they found me.
So but you can be sure to within a certain
amount of variance that the person
on the other end of the call,
that leading edge is open.
And that's what these communities
do differently,
which is they all send out a certain
signal based around their unique flavor.
And then the people that come in
know that they're safe from day one.
Whereas even in your church,
if you started talking about these things,
if like if it's not the right acceptable
kind of thing
for the right acceptable
kind of church, you're in real trouble.
Yeah. Like or in your community.
Like if you become the weird person,
a lot of these ideas are very threatening
to the, to the status quo.
And I think that being able
to explore this within a said container,
again, it's a common knowledge game.
I feel like once it's out there,
most people are cool with it,
but it is very dangerous.
And you're going to hate this,
but you are like
the charismatic leader of this group.
I mean, your curiosity being on display
in your writing sends a signal to people
that it's safe to explore these topics
and they are attracted to.
I want to talk to Tom or people,
other people who are interested
in the things that Tom's talking about.
Is that replicable?
Can you
train other people to be that beacon?
No, I don't think you need to be like,
again, I've looked at all
these communities and people do
do them very differently, and they take on
the source energy of the founder.
But I think as
as long as they can provide a safe space
for people to explore their curiosity,
people come to leading edge, come to it
like they tend to be quite interested in,
you know, this guy, Doctor Michael Levin,
who's like a fringe biologist
that's doing this crazy pioneering work
like we were on him a couple of years ago,
like maybe longer ago.
And so, like,
we like to be at the edge of these things
that blend science and spirituality.
Again, not everyone, probably 30% of
the communities into that kind of stuff.
That wouldn't be the same in a community
that's interested in, say, like dyads
or ifs or like I found a deal flow
in spiritual areas, like all of these
things all have different flavors.
Me, I have a very high curiosity drive,
which is why it's called the Leading Edge,
because I get a buzz
from being on the leading edge.
I don't expect other communities
to look like me.
Although I think it kind of helps
if curiosity is the guiding force,
because if you target anything abstract,
you're going to run out of road
or things are going to come transactional
quite quickly.
Yeah, curiosity and love don't run out.
And the reason
why I like curiosity is it tends to be
what takes people into a better niche.
And so like a lot of the people
who are transitional in the community,
but again, it's not all of them.
They're given a container to experiment
with a transitional identity.
Would you
say this is changing
you running this community?
I mean, it has to, right?
When I started this,
all like the smart spiritual people
like you,
they're like,
this is going to be rocket
fuel for shadow work.
And I've had so many situations
where like, something really weird has
happened in the community, but like a week
later gets mirrored in my personal life.
And it sounds a bit grandiose to be like,
the community is me and I'm the community,
but it's it's.
You give a concrete example.
Sure. I mean, maybe a little bit
a little bit private, but like,
there was a moment when,
there was
there was a lot of feminist anger
demonstrated in the community
around this rape site called motherless.
And this became
sort of this, this out of control,
like rage.
That, for me, was the first and only time
I felt really like something I got, like,
out of control in the community.
And it was very challenging
for me to reel it in
and for me to look directly at it.
And then a couple of weeks later,
I spoke to the most intuitive people
I know
about matters completely unconnected
to the community on my own shadow work.
And they were like,
oh, you have this huge, dissociated
part of yourself of like feminine rage.
And I was like, wow.
And they had no idea
what was going on in the community.
But the two were mirroring each other
at the same time.
And this has happened over and over again,
where
it's like the
your community will show you the work.
But even more bizarrely,
at the start of this year,
I decided to go back into the demons,
the really darkest time
in my transition and leading edge
would put something on my calendar
two weeks before I knew I'd needed it.
Yeah, right.
Like I'd have a meeting with someone like,
what do you wanna talk about?
I want to talk about X.
And I was like,
but that's what I'm focused on doing today
in my inner work about this thing.
So Leading Edge
showed up in this incredibly synchronistic
way, just basically like
this is what you need to work on next.
And if you don't keep doing the work,
your community is doomed.
And it's worth noting, too,
that like curiosity is a driving force,
but so is healing.
And everybody in
the community is sharing a practitioner.
They're working with a modality
that's helping them
and their personal story
of why this is important.
And the other thing is it's it's
creating a bigger container
for people's vulnerability.
In my experience, where, you know,
it's it's healthy for people to say, hey,
I'm struggling with this.
Does anybody have a resource?
You know,
and that has been so beautiful to witness,
I think for, for a lot of people who
that is not something they've had modeled
to them in their life before.
But not only that, like one thing
that I think is really cool is that
I see it as a restaurant, right?
And this is not something that I've found
anywhere else, where basically it's like
Leading
Edge is a really good restaurant where
if you go in and you order the pasta,
you know the pasta is good.
But if you don't like pasta,
have the steak right,
but you know,
the steak is going to be good
and you're sitting next to someone
that's a pastor guy,
and he may be like,
you should try the pasta.
Like, no thanks, I'm a steak guy,
but you know, the ingredients are good.
And that approach to all of these,
you know,
beyond paradigm healing methodologies,
it's the wild West out there.
And if you can be like, actually,
I've been using this person
for three years
and I found them really transformational.
Subjectively,
you should go to that person.
But if you're not a breathwork person,
go to ifs.
If you're not an IFS person,
go see my channeler or energy worker.
There's no yelp, right? Like
you were number one on Yelp for years,
but even that got Dial Goat, right?
There's no
there's no common ground for people
to exchange like notes on who's been
really transformational for them, but
also to so many charlatans in this space.
And don't get me wrong, like, I'm
sure we're going to make egregious errors
around this, but like, you're
the only coach I refer people to, right?
Literally
the only coach I refer people to.
And I'm like, you're in leading edge,
and there's a handful of people
I wish it was larger who I'm like,
oh, you need X, go, go to her.
Right.
Like again, it's subjective,
but go to her.
And now we're building this bigger
and bigger network of like part of my
not so secret
goal was to get people who are world class
at certain things that are charging
whatever seems to be the industry
standard, which is $200 an hour
to be charging like a thousand, right,
because you're working with a billionaire,
but what you're providing
is so much value.
You should,
like so many solo practitioners that are
truly gifted, living hand to mouth,
because there isn't really a category
for this transformational work yet,
but yet it is transformational.
So I'm like, listen,
if I can create a supply demand mismatch
for your work with very rich people,
you can start to
have more confidence in your work
and you can start to raise prices.
And that's been one leading edge,
not for a lot of people,
but for a small number of people has been
transformational to their business.
This might be trying to get you
to go on another rant, but let's talk
a little bit about money here,
because it's such a central theme.
And so on.
One end of the spectrum,
we have these people
who are doing really high integrity,
massively
transformational gift to humanity work
and not getting paid a lot.
And on the other hand,
we have maybe, you know, extractive
titans of finance
who are becoming sent to millionaires.
And it's not clear
what value they're providing.
And I know you've been
begging or
challenging or pushing for the way
people spend their money,
invest their money,
donate their money to evolve.
And it's been a huge frustration point,
I know, to see people who,
with extremely high
net worth wade into some of these topics,
have a transformational experience,
but then struggle to allocate capital
differently.
Well.
One of the guys in our community,
Jeff Williams,
he talks about the mystical budget,
which is like, you just get used to like
earmarking a certain amount of money.
I say earmark the money first.
Be like whatever.
Work out
whatever percentage of your of your free
cash flow is acceptable every year.
Be like, you know, three grand.
I'm going to spend three
grand this year for me.
Like because of what I do,
it's like 10 to 30 grand
because I'm constantly
reviewing practitioners
who I always make a point of paying for.
But like, go see them all
and work out where your growth is.
And it it feels very selfish to people.
But I'm like, yeah, look
what happens to your marriage after this.
Look what happens to how
you are as a father.
Like,
look what happens to your personality.
Allocate this money
and then spend it so that you don't regard
every person you pay
for as a waste of money or uncertain.
But there's also something
that you've picked me up on that
I think is actually a great insight,
which is a lot of the time
I want people to be spending money,
but there aren't clean containers
for that money to go into.
Yeah, right.
I want people to be spending money
to change the world.
But when I look
at the quality of the deals
and the companies being formed
on the other side of that,
they're shit, right?
Or I look at the people
that they should be paying
for transformational work, and often
they're like really dodgy and low quality.
And we haven't developed
a holding infrastructure
to accept the amount of money
that needs to be spent on these things.
We're building the rails,
but we don't have the containers.
And what's been very interesting with
Leading Edge is that when a good container
comes along,
it fills with money instantly, instantly.
We just saw this happen with John Price
and Richard Raw.
Yeah, John, who was just a guest here
and is just filmed the documentary
with Richard Rohr, who's a brilliant,
brilliant teacher and author,
and he came to the leading edge and said,
I need some capital.
And it was like one week.
We raised the capital, but it was
it was everything,
you know, if you ever want to raise money.
What do you need?
You need something that's exclusive access
and something that's time sensitive
and something that other people
are getting involved in.
Ideally that's prestigious.
Richard Roar, quantitatively, is the sixth
most influential person in leading edge.
So people know who he is.
And Richard,
you know, not to be spoiled about it.
He's in poor health.
So this is enormously time sensitive.
And John has the connection to him.
And so he's like,
we need to raise money to do this,
otherwise it's never going to get done.
And so many people felt
a heartfelt connection to Raw's work.
But also they had to do this now.
But also they wanted to be connected
to a documentary about him,
because it's really cool that this thing
may end up be going getting huge.
Right. And and so I was like,
oh, this is a perfect container.
Like I intrinsically trust John Price.
You know, everyone should listen to the
interview with him. He's he's phenomenal.
So you created this clean container
and then suddenly wash money in.
And I noticed the same thing with
practitioners is that money doesn't flow
and not consistently.
There are a lot of charlatans
that make bank.
But in my experience,
the people that I know
that aren't good tend to get the business
that's commensurate
with their work,
but they often not charging enough for it.
But they are getting lots of work.
And then outside
of the individual mystical budget, there's
this question of investing in general,
the financial system evolving.
We have some brilliant people
in the leading edge.
Nadia speaks amazingly about how to heal
your relationship with money,
but do you have a sense of where
this is all heading?
How do we become better
stewards of our capital?
Certainly as the country
with the most wealth
and the most investing,
this is incredibly important.
Be realistic.
Which is that like there's no public
markets company that's like
heart centered, mean you can make cases,
but nothing in the SNP.
And yeah,
but if I if anyone one more person says
Patagonia and going to shoot myself right.
Because it's like great.
You've got one example dude.
Try to try three, try for try 100.
There's
trillions of dollars of capital out there
and you can't invest in Patagonia.
I don't care.
Right.
Like in private equity,
they're all asset strippers.
VC doesn't have the pay off.
Heart centered, stable companies
do not have asymmetric payoffs
because those tend
to be quite exploitative.
Sometimes they do. But whatever. Right.
Like their user growth, they're hacking.
It's not making
a small number of people really happy.
And so what are you left with?
You're left with families and families.
Give me the hope that families
can look across different payoff profiles.
And in by families you mean like high
net worth individuals, family offices?
Yeah.
I'm like an older
people have made this observation,
but I feel this is sort of
what's going on is if these people
typically Gen two, Gen three
so willing to be like, all right,
I'm going to work out what bucket
this is in, which is itself really fuzzy.
It's like, is this a for profit
or is this philanthropic?
Because spiritual initiatives
like to blur the boundaries, like,
are you burning your money
or are you genuinely expecting a return?
And the spiritual industrial complex
is very bad at generating a return,
because the system can't support
fully positive some players yet,
and I'm not sure it can at the moment.
And so you have to work out like
how do we centralize those businesses is
are the VCs that can do it?
I see people doing it all the time
and I just see mostly failures
and I'm not sure why yet,
but I'm I'm optimistic
that it maybe maybe we need
some sort of systemic collapse.
I doubt we're going to get it. But like,
you know what?
What I think is probably going to happen
is that AI
will make it easier to be a solo piano.
Like what I have. Like
I run the leading edge entirely.
Just me gives me a very, very generous
living because I've worked out
how much money I need
and I back into that.
Right. I could
I could make a lot more from it.
And then technology
has given me the ability
to run it all from home very comfortably.
I don't know if it's feasible
to think that that's possible,
but it's more possible than it was
24 months ago.
Does everyone end up paying each other
for their AI businesses?
I don't know, like that
sounds a bit like a Ponzi scheme,
but I think that's where we're where
we're heading towards,
rather than necessarily
some grand new asset class
of like transformational businesses,
as those tend to be quite disappointing.
It's almost like a balancing force.
There are going to be these
probably I mean, we used to say,
oh my God,
there's going to be $1
trillion company now.
It's like there's going to be
these Deca sent to trillionaire companies,
you know, condensing wealth.
And but then there might also
be this groundswell of solopreneurs
who are allocating capital
and receiving capital in a whole new way,
incredibly fluid,
I guess, movement of money.
I mean, if you want to talk about AI,
Zuckerberg talks about.
And one of the things that I think is
maybe a good vision,
he talks about every member of meta,
every Facebook profile
having its own AI, which will be
customer service, you know, storefront.
I'll basically allow anybody to, like,
snap their fingers and become a business
and offer their wares.
And I think there's a dystopian version
of that playing out.
But there's also a kind of
a beautiful version
of like lowering the barrier to entry.
If you have something you want to offer
the world, how do you find your audience?
How do you offer it?
How do you receive payment?
Because I what I've seen as being
a coach for, you know, 17, 18 years is
there's a lot of really gifted people
who don't know, don't know how to
or want to learn marketing.
You know,
they don't want to build a website.
There's just a lot of friction
in the system
because we are operating on a global scale
to find our audience.
We're not just going to the person
next to us.
And so I could see AI allowing people,
and some of them will create a 150
person communities, perhaps.
Yeah,
I think
I think you're just going to see different
business types emerge quite quickly
because people can iterate on it.
And it's really funny, like I'm
one of those people that's
that's really hyper
cautious and scared about AI.
But then I look at what's happened
in the lives of the people around me.
It's just been this huge
flourishing of creativity.
Yeah, right.
Like like what if you go online
like the last few years is like,
we've achieved AGI,
we're all doomed, right? Like.
And then I look at what people are doing
there, like,
is this like Jonny Miller's incredible
11,000 word essay
that's all done with these beautiful
AI like illustrations
on, like, his one passion of clenching
that then got a million views, right?
Like he did something.
He did a beautiful piece of art.
It it was so popular
it crashed his website.
And then it leads into his one passion
and his work
with his nervous system mastery.
Like, I'm seeing this happen
all the time with the people
who want to be on the leading edge
of where these things are going.
And it's like generating
like dollars for them.
And I think that I think that the
me and
my wife went on honeymoon to New Zealand,
and we spent three days
hiking from, Queenstown to the sea.
And we didn't we realized like two days
in, we hadn't heard a single bird.
And we said to the guide,
why don't we hear birds?
He's like, well, because the British,
the British introduced stoats
and stoats ate every single bird.
And even when we got to the sea,
they were eating all the baby seals.
But basically they,
they introduced, like the Australia
and New Zealand are completely different
because New Zealand went underwater for
like 800 million years ago or something.
There's literally nothing on it
that can hurt you at all.
And so every time they introduce
a predator, they destroy the entire
ecosystem.
And stoats
unbalanced the entire ecosystem.
And so
stoats like a little weasel.
Oh, okay. It's like a nasty little weasel.
And so basically, like, that's the way
I think about public markets,
that basically you've got one stoat now,
and actually the same guy
I had that meeting with
when I during my awakening,
he was like, in ten years,
there's going to be one stock in the S&P.
And actually like he was right.
There's like one stock in the S&P.
There's like I mean effectively
there's like the AI companies
when they come public that would be
trillion dollar companies and then
little thing.
And so I think what you're going to have
not that my prediction is worth
anything as you've seen,
but like you're going to have like
these massive
titans like that are the complete power
or massively unstable,
fluctuating by trillion dollars
every single day,
maybe making maybe vulnerable to collapse,
but probably not going anywhere
unless we get Terminator two funding.
This really long tail of people
who are maybe even, like, hyper localized,
like the utopian vision would be like,
yeah,
they're localized in the way that it's
just a small number of people
paying a decent amount of money,
or it's something that really helps
people in their local communities,
or it's someone helps people get to like,
you know, 200 grand a year of income,
something really comfortable.
But in a way, they're not beholden
to the existing system.
Maybe.
Maybe I feel I feel like I'm
as it's coming out of my mouth.
Not a bit naive, but I'm hopeful.
I think there's got to be elements
of truth in that.
It does feel wildly unstable
to have these huge.
I mean, it's
the opposite of diversification, right?
Diversification is antifragile.
Yeah. Stoats all the way down.
You end up with one species
that destroys all the others.
And that's that's the sign of an ecosystem
that's about to collapse.
Anything else
at the leading edge of your mind right now
that you we haven't talked about?
What are you reading about right now?
I'm going through the most fallow
stage of my life.
I haven't really read anything
in six months.
I don't know.
Why is that? Because your life is so rich.
You don't need books. Yeah.
No. I've started doing dream work
with our mutual friend
Molly Adler's, moots.
And since I started doing it,
I've had the same dream 13 times.
13 now, 13 times.
Never happened before.
I mean, you have the occasional God, I'm
going through my exams.
But this happened 13 times.
Where I'm at my desk,
on a trading floor, and I have my clients
call sheet in front of me.
And there's always, the client
says, people
that you like calling every day
because they were also known
as the people you never called.
And the longer you didn't call them,
the the worst things got.
But it was all bullshit.
Like the
my overriding sense in the dream
is that, like,
this is actually all bullshit, and none of
this is making any difference to anyone.
But if I speak up, it's going to I'm
going to get fired.
And and then I wake up and then I'm like,
well, God, I'm not there anymore.
And I've had that dream 13 times
and I've been sitting with it
for like the months I've been having it.
I don't know what it means,
but I don't know whether it's my
whether it's something
around us
that needs to explode or something
in the way that I'm currently structuring
my life that needs to explode.
The thing.
That you don't know
what you're not saying,
there's not something that you're like.
Yeah, that's what everyone says.
Oh, there's something key.
You're not saying that's that.
There's nothing, there's nothing
that it's obviously like all of this
is what it's really about, right?
The only thing that's
been really alive for me at the moment
is I'm like this network of communities.
It's not working right like that.
We have this.
We have all these 31
community founders together.
I see this supply demand mismatch.
I see this as a trend.
I see the good that we're doing
and it's not working like that.
There isn't there isn't money
flowing through these networks yet.
There isn't resources
flowing through these networks yet.
So I'm like to my point,
oh my, my smoking crack.
Like I see this systemic interest
in this thing.
That's, that's in my opinion, done
enormous good for the members of my group.
And everyone's like, well, that's
because you're such a unique,
special person, Tom,
that no one else could run a community.
And like, bullshit.
Like there were enough people on earth
that can run this adequately rather
than perfectly that this is a thing.
And then when we network everything
together, I've had this image that had
been has been shared to me
by a lot of the intuitive.
So I speak to the ones I really trust,
and one of them described it
as seeing all these beacons
light up around the world, and another one
said she saw it like an energetic grid.
And I actually,
I think in energetic grids.
So this makes sense.
Where basically I think what we're doing
is putting together the rails
for a new system, but there's nothing
flowing through the system yet.
Like everything we'd be talking
about is a system
that's like that could persist forever,
and not one of those imminent
five D shift people.
But like, there's a system
that doesn't quite work for most people,
and it's kind of juddering
and it's very zero sum and it's becoming
it's becoming stoke like.
And then there's this second system
that's taking place, but there isn't
anything flowing through it yet.
Which is hopeful in the sense
that like people keep saying
it's going to collapse, it's
going to collapse.
And it's like, it's
okay, we're building a net, right?
I like a lifeboat, right?
Like there's a lifeboat.
The Titanic is going down.
We're having a ranger on a lifeboat.
Do you want it right? Maybe.
Maybe the maybe the boat's
going to take ten years to sink.
Maybe it never sinks.
But like, it's a party
in the meantime that you're invited to.
I'm. I'm just thinking, like,
who are you supposed to call?
What or what is the call?
Is your book part of this conversation?
Tell me about the book.
Yes, that is forthcoming.
You have it. You have a deal.
I have a publisher. It's.
The book is called attractors, and it's,
You know,
I always think you should have a tagline.
I think I've thought of it
as as, Atomic Habits for intuition,
which is essentially
like Atomic Habits was all about.
Here's how you marshal your left brain
to achieve the mastery
and results
that you want in life. And it's great.
5 million copies sold. Well done.
And this is actually like, okay,
when that mechanism runs out,
how do you
how do you use the right hemisphere?
There's a very common dynamic
that we were talking about earlier
before we hit record.
There's about like particularly men
tend to be so left hemispheric
that they follow one rabbit hole hyper
productively for their whole career.
And then like mid-forties, everyone in
your office was like, okay, that was done.
That's done now, either
it was the wrong hole
or I need a new one, right? Like, I need
I need a new hill to climb.
And the method of cognition to get to
that new place is fundamentally
right hemispheric
and as I discovered, can kill you.
But actually.
So the book is going to basically be like,
hey, there's this thing
that I call a tractor intelligence
that is like robustly supported
not just by mysticism
but by complexity science.
Right. It's a thing.
And you can either
trust me on that or not.
But let's just say you give me
give me the benefit of the doubt.
I'm going to sketch it out for you,
and then I'm going to use
my McGilchrist hemisphere
theory to explain why you typically don't
connect, to be able to connect it to it,
or why you get stuck.
But then the rest of the book
is a mixture of tools and anecdotes,
like you have given me
one of the best one,
and it's been echoed
by a lot of the other people
I really trust, which is the Energy Diary,
which is like, you know, New Age
people have ruined it for everyone
with like everything is energy.
But it it kind of is.
Physicists are saying the same thing.
So like maybe kind of is.
And if you think about curiosity,
curiosity is intrinsically energetic
and the right
hemisphere is superior navigation.
And basically everything in
is predominantly energetic.
So navigate towards
the things that give you energy.
And the worst case scenario
you're going to be for more energy, right?
Like but keeping.
And for people who don't know an energy
journey
is where you just
look at your calendar, track
everything going on in your day
and then give it a rating.
And I like the one
the version that has two dials,
one is increase in decrease in energy
and the other one is positive
and negative valence because you can be
high energy and hate something.
Yeah. Or low energy and hate something.
But it does build this internal compass.
And I think you have to warn people.
One of the side effects of this
is that things you don't enjoy can become.
It can become so unbearably obvious
that you don't enjoy them
that you have to do something about it.
Yeah.
You have to take the audio foot.
Right.
Like it it
this sort of this point of no return where
most people when I do coach people,
it's like
they just had to be told
that they can't go back.
Right.
And that realization is a relief
and a terror. Yeah.
Which is like I often tell people
actually go home and have a funeral.
We're all self like,
do you literally have a funeral
with you and your husband,
or you and your wife, like,
go home and like present
everything that you used to be
and thank it and send it off
and, and accept
that there's something new coming.
Because once that toothpaste
is out of the tube,
there's literally
you can't do anything to put it back in.
And most of the misery
I see and the suicides I've seen.
Is going back. It's going back.
I just got goosebumps because, the
I had a career for 13 years.
I was coaching for two years
at the end of it,
but I just couldn't see the transition.
I didn't understand what I was going to
do, and I had a breakdown
kind of, and just decided to go off
and spend a year on top of a mountain.
But I went to Burning Man first,
and it was a rite of passage theme.
And then God bless Robin.
My she was a songwriting friend of mine.
We wrote something music together
every week.
She threw a going away party for me
called Burning Martin,
and she asked me to give her my the outfit
that I wore in my former career,
which was like the blazer
and the button up collar,
and she built an effigy of me,
and we threw a party and played music
and sang and danced.
And then she lit it on fire,
and she burned the old version of me.
And I knew when I was leaving
I was like, I can't go back.
But to have your community witness that
it was
similar to like, I was
shocked at how a wedding felt meaningful.
I was like, oh, this is just an expensive
party. It's a joke.
And then I realized, oh,
to be witnessed by your community,
making a commitment to
something is profound.
And it it carries
some of the burden for you.
It's a lot for an individual
to just decide to change their whole life.
But when your community goes, no,
we see you and yes,
go and no, don't come back to saying
don't, don't, don't, don't retreat.
But you're also speaking
to the thing that we don't have,
which is to be witnessed and accepted
for the burning of the former identity
and maybe burnings too harsh, like
the integration of the former identity.
One of the major fuck ups,
maybe the greatest fuckup of my life
was burning down that identity because I
thought it was useless not integrating it.
You know, the whole transcendent
include thing, which was like,
everything I learned on Wall
Street was bullshit.
And it needs to be discarded
so I can be a hospice worker,
which was literally my thought process
at one point. Right?
Yeah.
It was like, no, dude, like,
you're good at communicating
and you're really curious
and you're interested in things.
You integrate them in service
of something greater.
So don't burn it down.
But you can't go back.
You can't go back down the whole lot,
you know.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I similarly like
I did not have any vision for how doing
security systems was going to be useful,
but I spent 13 years navigating boundaries
and halls of power and getting big
projects done and seeing how people suffer
inside of these large corporations,
and it's been incredibly useful.
Yeah.
All right.
Tell us, how do people connect with you?
Maybe,
if somebody's watching is like,
oh, I want to start a community.
How do they also do that?
I. Am on Substack, the leading edge.
I'm on Twitter, my real name.
And I, for better or for worse, make
my calendar completely open to people.
You know, I spend more than half of my day
speaking to people.
And at the moment, the universe is
sending me 3 to 5 people a week.
Who has started communities. Wow.
So, like, I should probably be charging
for it, but, like, it's it's a thing.
And I'm very happy
to give people the advice that I've given.
I'm an N of one, but it's worked.
I think on a three year basis.
It's worked.
And I'm very excited about this as
a category so people can follow me there.
Beautiful.
Thanks for being on,
for being a great friend.
I'm excited for the summit tomorrow.
Thanks for. Having me.