how fear disguises as logic

0:04Men claim to be logical thinkers. And I say, you're not a logical thinker. You are crippled by fear and you're disguising it as analytical. You're broadcasting it to the world as analytical thinking, but it's really just fear underneath the surface, right? So when guys are like, "Oh, I really need to think it over," what they really mean, like, "I need to have all the facts," what they really mean is that they're trying to control reality so that they feel safe. So then they can make a decision. That's not logical thinking. You are now experiencing the Nectar of Time. There is no reasonable logical answer

0:52within the dream for a dream. I give the example of being chased by a lion in a dream. If I ask, "Where did this lion come from?" the real answer is, there is no lion. Wake up. But if I won't accept that answer — "No, no, no. I see a lion. You must give me an answer" — then you have to say the lion came from the jungle. But where in the jungle? Well, from its daddy lion and the mummy lion. And where did they come from? They came from their parents. And where did that come from? There's no end to this, you can see. And none of it is actually true. It's only on our side. There's only the question and no answer. On the side of those who are enlightened, they don't seem to ask this question. They have the answer, but not the question. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another

1:39episode of Nectar of Time. I'm your host, Tamir Barzilai, and today we're going to be speaking with Ian Coll. Ian is a men's work facilitator. He helps people to figure out what's going on inside. Myself, I can admit that I'm very analytical. I try to be as logical as possible, although I don't think I'm very successful at that. But I don't always trust my intuition or gut feeling, because I'm aware of the distortions that can impact those gut feelings, those emotions, those what I believe are softer signals for reality. And so today's episode is just a glimpse into the many worlds and the many possibilities of our lives, and how we can have a little bit more conviction with our decision-making

2:26process. So I hope the show is valuable, and we'll see you on the other side. I grew up with a very dysfunctional nervous system. So, I grew up with very bad Tourette's and OCD, which just led to my entire life crumbling and breaking down in my kind of mid-20s. And I realized that I didn't have tools to regulate my nervous system. I didn't have the tools to open up and let people in and connect. And I just carried a lot of shame. And there were just a lot of things that were barriers to fulfillment, happiness, connection, like living a good life, living a life that I'm excited to wake up every day and experience. So that was what got me into all of this, more as a participant. And then

3:15I got to a point where, you spend enough time in retreats and working with mentors and training programs and doing all these things to better my own life, that I felt like I had an obligation to give back to the community of men, because there are men that are struggling, like, big time. And there's a lot of reasons why that might be. But to answer your question around what's the work that they're doing, it's just working on themselves to become the best version of themselves possible, so that they can show up for themselves and show up for their partners, for their kids, for their communities, for their businesses. But it's really just about inner alignment and coming — I talk a lot about it, it's a remembering process. It's not about becoming something that you're not. It's about

4:01coming back to who you truly are. And that, in my opinion, that's some of the deepest work that you can do. So coming back to who you truly are, are you talking about childhood wonder? Are you talking about skills and curiosities that have been replaced with, "Hey, I need to pay my bills, so we need to do the rat race"? Totally. Yeah. I believe fundamentally that people are born — I don't want to use the word pure, but people are born, for lack of a better word, pure. Just, there's no patterns, there's no conditionings. And then over the course of life, the way that you were raised, life circumstances, stress, trauma, things not going well, people screwing you over, like tragedy, all of these

4:48things stack up. And the way that I talk about it is, imagine a basement, and you're just throwing crap in the basement year over year and year over year, and that's impacting the way that you show up in the world. It's impacting how you think, how you take action, how you view yourself. So, but all of that crap that's being shoved into the basement is not yours. It was taught to you, it was modeled to you, things happened to you. So, when we talk about coming back to yourself, it's, you know, building enough self-awareness to recognize that a lot of those things, they're not you. It's like a patterned version of you, or it's like a veil. You can imagine it's like the shield of armor that you've kind of developed and built over the years, and you occur to the world as that thing. But there's usually a part of you behind all

5:36of that that's the real you, like the things that really interest you. It's the daydreaming, it's the curiosities, it's the things that really make you happy. And a lot of the stuff does actually go back to childhood. Like when you think about coming back to yourself, right, you ask adults, "What makes you happy?" And most people will think about things that they did when they were eight. Mhm. Because there you didn't have all of that crap stored and built up, and the life experience that's kind of hardened you. It hasn't happened yet. What you're talking about is scary. You know, I [clears throat] — it took me a while to actually use that word, scary. So I have a therapist that I go to every couple weeks. I think it's good. You know, I have some buddies that are very hardcore, doing all the hardcore stuff, Iron

6:26mans, marathons, ultramarathons, etc. All the fun stuff. And sometimes in that demographic, therapy and all that — work with respect to someone else can give you answers about yourself seems kind of crazy. Yeah. Right. And it took me a while to actually break from that paradigm and realize what therapy actually is. Therapy is just talking to someone very smart in a field that you don't actually have much knowledge in. So I've opened myself up to therapy over the last few years and sort of moved away from what some people might call toxic masculinity. I don't know that I would label it that

7:13specifically, but there is this hardcore mentality that is useful. Mhm. But you have to know its time. Yeah. Right. The time to be David Goggins is when you're running. [laughter] Totally. And you need to get to the finish line. That's the time to be David Goggins. But you don't need to be David Goggins all the time. Sometimes you have to be Seneca the philosopher. Yeah. Sometimes you have to be the scientist. Sometimes you, you know, you have to be the poet. So when you're talking about all these things and I'm saying that it's scary, that's a new paradigm, that I've allowed myself to admit that something in life could actually be scary. And the reason it's scary for me is this. I'm so used to who I am right now. [snorts]

8:00I'm so used to my patterns. I am so used to my furry little demonic friends that hang out with me and control my life, that there is a fear of returning to the self, because in some ways it feels like the answer is too easy. It's too easy to do that. It must be hard. I must summit the mountain. Yeah. To be that new person. Or some people will say you have to destroy everything and then you'll be reborn. Yeah. But you can just be reborn. Totally. Yeah. And people would rather choose familiar pain

8:48than step into that unknown. Like, most people have some level of understanding that they're not happy or fulfilled with something in their life. It could be causing a lot of stress. It could be causing a lot of anxiety for them, and they continue to choose it every single day, because it is more scary and more uncomfortable to, like you said, go into that unknown, and choosing something different, whether it's going and seeing a therapist or whatever it might be, like trying to understand your emotions for the first time. But we're habitual beings. We live off of habit and pattern. And most people, myself included, we tend to think the same thoughts every day, do the same things. Our days tend to look the same. And it's just, change is scary. Not because you're worried that there's

9:36something bad on the other side. It's just the fear of the unknown. Human beings — going back to your thing about logic — a lot of us don't do well with that space of the unknown. Yeah. So that's a beautiful segue into what I wanted to talk with you about today, which is, unfortunately there exists a multiplicity of unknowns at any given point. Mhm. And to me, that is the challenge, that is the work: understanding, how do I achieve a level of comfort in taking a step towards one of many unknowns, and not knowing which unknown

10:26is the best unknown for me. And I have a little passage here, okay, from The Bell Jar, written by Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath, famous author, poet, that I think is very apropos for this conversation, and it will set the stage for us. Okay. "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children. And another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the

11:14figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them. But choosing one meant losing all the rest. And as I sat there unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black. And one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." I love that. It kind of reminds me of this. So, it's essentially not knowing, the internal struggle of not knowing if we're on the right path, and the opportunity cost of being in that paralysis. Absolutely. It's this fear of — I heard it described recently, you know, you spend your whole life — or I think the fear is that people don't want to spend 5 years, 10 years, a

12:01lifetime, you know, crawling up a ladder just to realize that the ladder has been leaning up against the wrong wall the entire time, and then you have to walk back down, and it's this feeling of starting over. And that keeps people paralyzed from taking action. And the way that I look at this is that you're never really going to know if it's the right path at first, 'cause I think that there's a delay between the actions that you take and reality that appears. And I also think it's a practiced skill, that if you are habitually in a state of paralysis that's preventing you from taking action because you're scared that you're not on the right path, what's also true is that you can retrain yourself out of that.

12:50You can train yourself to be like, "I don't really know if I'm on the right path, but I'm going to do it anyways," because what's the other alternative? Like, I [clears throat] — something that I teach a lot of the men in my work is this whole conversation around dying complete. But not dying complete in the sense of, am I going to die complete in 60 years? Like, if my head were to hit the pillow tonight, lights were out, that was it, what would I have to do today so that I could die complete tonight? And it really does a good job at shrinking everything that's important right down into probably a couple of things. Like, if I asked you, what would you have to do if you were to die tonight? What would be the most

13:37important things that you need to do today so that if you were to die tonight, you could die complete? Yeah. See, my brain produces an error code [laughter] trying to [gasps] — trying to give you an answer for that. It will go in and it's like, "No, no, we are not even addressing this question. We cannot compute." Why? It's an issue. It's an issue 'cause so much of life is spent thinking about the future. In my life specifically, there's the business and there's the goals and there's the ideals and there's the visions, and today feels very much like a stepping stone. It feels like a — you know, a tennis player that is in training, and you're asking them, "What are you going to do, if

14:27you die today, to die complete?" They're like, "There's no way. I have to win Wimbledon." But then what happens when you win Wimbledon? Well, that's a different therapy session. [laughter] But this is the struggle, right? We always think that life will begin when — I will be able to die complete when — but we [clears throat] all know this. We all know this, this isn't new information. It's just, for whatever reason, human beings, it's like we have to go through this process where, oh, we have to figure it out for ourselves. Money. Money is a great example, where a lot of people are like, "I will be happy when I hit this number." And other people that have hit that number have told you, "I thought the same thing." And then you hit it and you're like, nothing changes in your life. You get used to it, and then you just move the goalpost and it becomes something

15:13bigger. But everyone's like, "I know that, but I need to figure this out." There are some lessons that I believe you just have to learn on your own. And that's one of them. The constantly changing the goalpost, you know, trying to achieve a certain thing in order for you to die complete, or in order for you to be happy, you never actually get there. And what you're doing is you're constructing your own prison cell. Yeah. And you're giving the key away. Yeah. Yeah. It's very much like you have a vault, and on one side of the vault is the most intricate code mechanism that will take you 20 years of — what is it called? Cryptology, or I

16:01don't know what the term is, to figure out how to, you know, unlock that vault. Whereas the other side of the vault is actually wide open, and it's [laughter] all day. It's open. You can just walk through it. But it's so much better cognitively for us to go and try to fiddle with the codes, because that will feel like we've earned whatever's inside. And it feels scary to just go around to the other side and say, "Wow, I have all this treasure." If you can feel whatever's in that vault, the love, the gratitude, the presence, all of that, then you're good. Then you're good. Absolutely. But for some of us, it's difficult to just go from feeling

16:48into the vault. We have to think our way into it. And that's really where we stumble. And maybe we get there one day, once all of our thinking is done. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's never going to be done. So something that I talk a lot about is, you have men — anybody, this isn't just a men's thing — but you have to, in terms of the realm of feelings and love and, like you said, gratitude and intuition, I believe that you have to create space in your life to work on those elements. Like, if your schedule is packed from the time that you wake up to the time that you go to bed, I'm not surprised that that person might not be connected to their heart, or they might not be in touch with themselves. But if you sat down, I

17:36guarantee — I can almost guarantee you with 100% certainty that if you sat down every single day with no agenda, and you set a timer for 35, 45 minutes every single day, and the intention was just you sitting, not even meditating, but just exploring what is happening in my internal experience, you will find access to your emotions. You will find access to what's going on. You don't need someone to tell you what you're feeling. You will eventually be able to say. But we don't create that space. We weren't taught to create parts of the days in our schedules to work on our emotional health. Our emotional health and our mental health is arguably, in my opinion, way more important than physical health. Like, the reason that people are extremely

18:25unhealthy, yeah, they have physical habits and things that they're not doing, but they're not tending to their emotional health. They're not tending to their mental health. And it shows, it manifests through the body. You just look at people when you go into a grocery store. Even things that I don't believe that — a lot, put it this way, a lot of men come to me and they've done years of therapy and their life's not changing and they're still really unhappy. It's because they go to therapy, they do some work with their therapist, but then they don't do anything else in their day-to-day. Yeah, that's a big — It's like going to massage. It's like massage therapy, or sorry, it's like physiotherapy. You go to physio. That hour that you're there, that's not where the injury is healed. It's when you're doing your exercises at home for 15 minutes three times a day. Meditation, breathwork, sitting with yourself. That's the at-home version

19:12of therapy, or men's groups, or coaching, or whatever. You have to go home and you have to sit with yourself. You have to do that work. Yeah. Doing the work in almost every aspect of life is the thing that needs to be done. That's the thing. The talking about it, the podcast, listening, the book reading. Until you actually internalize that and then take action on it, it's almost as if you didn't read it. The only way is to actually do the work. Yeah. And I believe that people massively overcomplicate it. I've been in this for years. I've, you know, logged almost 300 hours of in-person retreats, lots of somatic work and embodiment work and shadow work, and

20:00I've worked with mentors, and I've done cognitive behavioral. I've done so much stuff. And the moments in my life where I just carve out some time to just be with myself, with no agenda and no phone, and I just sit down on my sheepskin with my meditation cushion, and I'm just with myself — when I do that consistently, that's when I feel the most connected to myself, connected to other people. It's like slowing life down. And it's so funny, because it's free. It's free. And it's not only — with meditation, you don't have to go — when people hear meditation, I think they think it's this hour and a half in a cave, with like — and no, like, five, 10, just start with two minutes, and then move it up to three, and

20:47then four, and then five. And the thing about meditation is, it's like cardio. As you do it, it doesn't feel like torture anymore. Like, when I'm meditating and then I stop, getting back into it, it's frustrating. I can feel my body fighting. But when you're meditating every day, it's like going for a run every day. Eventually 5 km doesn't feel like anything, right? Yeah. You're a runner. You get it, right? Like cardio. And what's so funny about meditation is that it also improves your focus. It improves your emotional reactivity. There's so many other benefits to it. But at the end of the day, I think it just comes down to — it's like the highest form of self-respect is, sit down and just give yourself 10 minutes to be with yourself every day, in your breath, and just see what happens.

21:33It's the whole thing, like, you don't have time. It's like someone said, "I don't have time to read a book." It's like, you don't have time to read a book because you're not reading books. [laughter] You know, it's like — Totally, it's a recursive — Yeah. And you know, obviously we could go down a rabbit hole with the whole time thing, but you know, it's not that you don't have time, you don't make time, right? Because I believe that, and I don't care who you are, I believe that everybody has five or 10 minutes for themselves a day. And I know there's probably some young parents out there that are getting, you know, really mad. I mean, 'cause, you know, the whole — you'll see these 21-year-old fitness people that are like, "We all have the same 24 hours in the day." And it's like, you're single

22:19and you're a nepo baby, and you have as much time in the world as you want. It's different than someone who's like 36 with like three kids under the age of two. It might be a little bit harder for them to find their 10 minutes. Mhm. But people do it. People find ways. They set up a schedule where their partner takes the kids for the 10 minutes, and then they have the 10 minutes in the bedroom to meditate. I mean, you see religious people do it. I mean, Jews pray three times a day. Muslims pray five times a day. Totally. They're running their families. You can't take five minutes to — even if you believe in Satan, who cares? Just take the five minutes. I've seen videos of this dad meditating with his eight-year-old son. Yeah. And you're like, beautiful. He's meditating, his kid's meditating. That kid's going to grow up extremely successful, 'cause he's learning how to

23:07calm his breath and calm his nervous system. But you know, it's funny about the comment of the tech overlords, and you know, I think that ultimately we can't just blame the tech giants. We're also at this place in society where it's still culturally appropriate to just be on Instagram all day long. But if I came over and you were just drinking shots of whiskey every day, I'd be like, "Hey man, I don't think you should be drinking for six hours a day." But on average now, people are like — I believe that eventually social media is going to be on the DSM-5 for addictions. Yeah. Why not? It blew people away when video games popped on, you know, 20 years ago. They're like, "What?" It's like, "Yeah." And I agree with you that Facebook has no product. If we all just decided one

23:53day, culturally, to just get off social media, they're laying off 400 people the next day. Yeah. There's no product. They don't actually give you anything. They'll survive off WhatsApp messages. I don't even — can they — they don't even make — how does — WhatsApp doesn't even make money? Yeah, exactly. What's even the point of the app? [laughter] Yeah. So, it is interesting how it is really up to us, but we do feel stuck, and they're not really doing much to help us. But then again, if I was trying to maximize shareholder value, I also probably wouldn't put a monk mode on Instagram, 'cause what's the point? Oh, just lose money. It's like, "Hey, if you guys don't want to use it, here's the door. You can delete your account, deactivate it." But everyone has to check up on,

24:41well, how this person is doing, or how that scandal is going, and totally, blah blah blah. But nobody's mad at the CEO of Costco, because Costco is not demanding six hours of your time every single day. But they're just as incentivized in trying to make as much money as Bezos and Zuckerberg and all those guys. It's just that it's causing a lot of internal conflict. I've been talking to a lot of people about social media, and it's like they know that it's a problem. They're aware that they don't want it to happen, but they just can't. Their brain is becoming so habitually on it, they don't know what to do. Well, it's FOMO. And then you get off of it. Like, I deleted Instagram off my phone for a weekend, for like 4 days, a couple weeks ago, and I could feel my brain hunting for it every single day.

25:29Yeah. It was like, "Oh, Instagram, Instagram." And it was like, what is going on? And it's just internal battle. Yeah. It's a problem, and that is one of the many impediments to finding that inner thing, finding that inner home that we've been talking about. I want to mention a book that I just finished reading. It's called Recursion, by Blake Crouch. Speaking of tech overlords. So this takes place sort of in the same timeline that we're in right now. Basically there's a billionaire that finds out that there's this researcher that has come up with a way to potentially

26:17access memories and reaccess memories in order to help, you know, dementia patients. Okay. Because her mom is going through dementia. It's very traumatizing. It's very tragic for the family. And so, she's putting all of her scientific research into coming up with some form of a solution that we can access the memories in our brain using some sort of a chair with sensors that you could just sit in, and you can access things. Billionaire gets a hold of this researcher, gets a hold of this idea, and basically writes her a blank check. Says, "I want to take this to everyone in the world. I want to make this a thing." Meanwhile, in a parallel part of the story, there's a cop in New York that is noticing people suffering

27:07from FMS, which is false memory syndrome. So, in some other part of the world, which then comes to be revealed, it's a different timeline, people are suffering from this false memory syndrome. They think, "Oh, I was married to this person, and they broke up with me, and everyone died." And he has to go save someone who's about to jump off a building, as a cop, and talk them off the ledge. Not out of anything real that happened to them. It's a false memory that has infiltrated their brain. And this entire book goes into this technology, which is called the chair. And it's actually quite interesting, how you actually create a new timeline. You basically go into this chair, you record a memory that happened in the past,

27:56and then you go into this deprivation tank where they actually biologically kill you. So they reduce your heart rate to nothing, and they let the DMT get released, because when you die, DMT gets released. So they let the DMT release, and somehow between the deprivation tank and the chair, it creates a new paradigm, a new reality, a new timeline, starting from the place where that memory was recorded. Okay. The problem very quickly becomes that eventually years go by — and this is a spoiler alert for people who care enough. I'm not really going to spoil the end of the book. I mean, this is really the premise. But what happens is years go by, eventually the government

28:44wants this tool, 'cause then they can go back and use it to assassinate people. Okay? [laughter] I mean, that's the ultimate military tool. 100%. Would be to access these memories and use them to create new timelines so that they can avoid their aircraft carrier getting destroyed, and they can wipe out millions of people from the world, and they can do all sorts of gnarly stuff, nuclear war, blah blah blah. And what happens is, the main character is Barry, and Helena — Helena's a researcher, Barry is the main character — they now see that the world is getting worse. Yeah.

29:29So every time the world gets worse, they have to go back, create a new timeline. And they keep deleting timelines, creating new timelines, deleting timelines, creating new timelines. And the book is called Recursion for a reason. But there's a beautiful, beautiful lesson in all of this, which is that no matter how much they want to go back and fix things, they cannot prevent things from going awry. They cannot prevent things from going — if you interfere with the world as it is, if you are upset, if you have regrets — you know, Barry, he lost his daughter in a car accident, and his first memory that he returns to is the night that she got killed in the car accident, to save her from getting

30:16killed. And I won't say much more about how the plot goes on, but it doesn't work out for anyone. No. And so what this connected me to, and I think it was actually quoted in the book, is Kierkegaard. Søren Kierkegaard was a philosopher, and he said, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." Right. It's — hindsight, you know, tells all, right? So this book looks into pain, because a lot of this is related to pain. Like the men's work — if pain didn't exist, you wouldn't have to do men's work. No, totally. I would be unemployed. Right? [laughter] And so the lesson that they come to is this. This is quoted from the book. This

31:05is a passage. It says, "Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human. The beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other." And you know — Yeah. I love that. This is something that, actually, when I talk to older people, when I talk to people who are like 70-plus, they've had beautiful things happen. They've had painful things happen. And a lot of times they just have this understanding that they've internalized, that this is just the way life is, that someone like me who's 31 does not want to accept. Want to avoid all pain. I want to have everything work out

31:51perfectly. I want to do it by the book. Yeah. I want to hold the Grand Slam championship trophy. Anyway, so over to you. Yeah, I love that quote. I agree that pain is an inevitable part of the human experience. And I used to want to avoid the pain at all costs there. You know, the bad day, it was like, anything I can do to make this day better. Now, I welcome the pain, because without that pain, the good days wouldn't feel so good. And a really, you know, micro example of this is, I went out for a run today, and I did heavy legs and squats yesterday, and I was dreading this run, and I was like, "My legs are going to feel terrible." I went on the run today, my calves,

32:39everything felt horrible. And when I got on the run, I was instantly hit with that resistance, as my legs are hurting: "I don't want to do this. This sucks." And then I had that quick moment. I reminded myself that, in order for those runs to feel so good, on those days you're just flying — the reason it feels so good is because you have this recent experience of the run feeling so bad. But if your runs were just good all the time, they would no longer feel good, because that would just become the new baseline. Yeah. And I think that's a really beautiful mirror of life. That's how life works. It's like those days that feel so good, where you feel like you're on top of the world and everything's going well, it

33:26feels like that because last week it was terrible, and it was pouring rain, and you were upset, and you got some bad news, and all of these things. But that's the wide experience of life. And I tell guys all the time, stop trying to make the bad days good, and stop living too much in the good days, and just allow yourself to be with the full experience of life. And I think that the real message is that we're never going to know what the correct path for us should have been. We're never going to be in the position of God to see everything from, you know, four dimensions and be like, "Yeah, you should have gone left instead of right." And that is paralyzing from an intellectual standpoint. Like, to

34:14actually look into it and say, "No, like in chess, there should be the next best move." Like, the computer in chess will know the next best move, right? And we want that. I want that in life. I want to be able to calculate the next best move. And you can calculate it, I think, in small, contained environments. Yes. But you don't know what's really going to happen. [clears throat] Like, I don't set 5-year goals. I don't set 10-year goals, because I don't think that's how life unfolds. I believe that you can have short-term goals. You could have direction. You can have some intention. But man, I couldn't have told you 5 years ago that I'd be doing the work that I'm doing now. My life had to fall apart and collapse into complete chaos for me to get into a men's group, which then spiraled into years of stuff.

35:03Now here I am doing the same thing for others. Like, 5 years ago I was moving across the country as a dirtbag climber, shooting with a camera here and there, trying to make money as a photographer. Fast forward 5 years, 6 years later, my life looks very different. I didn't set that goal. Life has a way of manifesting. Yeah. And things are going to happen that you don't have control over. Yeah. But, you know, with that said, you can also find so many examples to the contrary, and we just don't know it, 'cause I do think it's all probabilistic to a certain degree, where you have people that are like — wasn't it Tom Holland who was like, "I'm going to be Spider-Man, and I'm going to marry Zendaya," and he said all these things,

35:48and sometimes it happens. And sometimes it happens. But there is this success — what is it? Survivor bias, where you look at the ones that made it, and you don't see — some people manifest X, Y, and Z and it happens. Other people manifest X, Y, and Z and they get hit by an ice cream truck. Not an ice cream — they go pretty slow — but they get [laughter] hit by a different truck, and then it's over for them. And we just don't know. There are formulas and there are probabilities that suggest doing these actions will make you successful. And I think you have to abide by those as the rules of the road. But you just don't know what's ahead, and there's no use. As long as you're generally making

36:37common sense decisions, then there really isn't anything to worry about. Yet it's still, you know, it's still difficult to actually wrap your head around that. And especially for someone like me, because I'm talking from personal experience. I want to analyze, and I want to know, and I want to have this understanding of everything. Yet all of the sages and all of the great gurus and just all of the people that have a deep understanding of the world will tell you that is a futile task, to try and understand everything. Well, because you never will. Yeah. And I think it's an immaturity on my part to think that I will understand it. Well, look at this podcast studio that we're in.

37:24Did you plan for this? I did not. I did not. No, it just happens. It happens, right? You had an idea, an impulse one day, like in the old, you know, set up an office and have a studio, and then now it's the most booked-out studio in the city. You didn't plan that. That didn't come to you in a divine meditation of, "This is the thing that I'm going to go down and focus on." You kind of followed an impulse, and it worked. And that's the polarity on the other side of things. I could also be like, I don't think I'm in control of anything. Right. Like someone else is in the driver's seat. And so I will say, you know, this episode is not really meant to be, you know, for me to come to an answer, or for any of the listeners to come to any conclusions. It's just a stimulus for more thinking,

38:13for each individual to come to their own conclusion about how they want to see life. I'm still on my journey on how I'm dealing with all these ideas and thoughts, and everyone's saying, "You've got to be more in your feelings. Just deal with your intuition. Blah blah blah." I'm working on it, Ian. Okay. I'm [laughter] working on it. Yeah, man. I mean, when I think about — so, this will be really fun. You'll love this one. I have this saying that, you know, men claim to be logical thinkers. And I say, you're not a logical thinker. You are crippled by fear and you're disguising it as analytical. You're broadcasting it to the world as analytical thinking, but

39:00it's really just fear underneath the surface. How dare you? Right? So when guys are like, "Oh, I really need to think it over," what they really mean — or, "I need to have all the facts" — what they really mean is that they're trying to control reality so that they feel safe. So then they can make a decision. That's not logical thinking. Fear is an emotion, is part of your emotional body. So there's actual logic, like, "I need to go home and make sure that 5 + 5 equals 10." That's logical thinking. Or, "The car costs this much. I need to logically go through the numbers and the budget and make sense." But that's not what a lot of people are doing. They're in that spiral of like, "Should I do this? Should I do that? I don't know. I want to have this answer. I want to have that. I want to have this figured out." And the energy is very

39:47swirly. It's kind of like a haze, right? That's not logical thinking. That's not being analytical. That's ping-ponging between fear and doubt. Yeah. It's a mishmash. And a mishmash. And yeah, that's not logical thinking, you know what I mean? But people claim it to be. Yeah. I think for me, I can logically, or analytically, or intellectually escape from certain — it's a defense mechanism. Yeah. And I can say, "Okay, well, fine. We're on a floating rock." And no one knows why. And no one knows why. No, we never will. Yeah. Well, maybe [laughter] that's the hope. But there's no answer in sight. That's

40:35for sure. No. So, you know, if people are listening to this and they're starting to wonder, like, well, now what? Right. Well, I think — and I feel, I should say, I feel that [laughter] — great — that it's a feature and not a bug of whatever playground we're in. And actually, one quote that ties it in is the beautiful Alan Watts, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, which — I kind of want you to have this book. I'm still working through it. But it's literally the work that you're doing. It's the taboo. Mhm. Against knowing who you are. Like, it doesn't feel culturally

41:22appropriate to be doing that kind of work. It's against the grain of masculinity, for example, to go — it's everything that you're saying. And one quote here that he talks about: "It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd, uncanny, and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist, but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary

42:09multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of doing it, from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock? Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder and its expression in poetry and the arts are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons." Wonder. Wonder is not a disease. Wonder is not a disease. Man, he is wise, isn't he?

42:58Yeah. Wonder is not a disease. What is wonder, then? Is it a gift? It might be the antidote. It might be the thing that saves you from the analytical, logical, toxic, recursive loop. Yeah. Like getting curious. Yeah. Curious from a non-fear origin, I think. I mean, what do you think? Looks like — yeah. When I think about the word wonder, when I think about curiosity, it tends to soften a lot of the analytical loops that we get into. Yeah. Like, for example, I could catch myself in a state of physical fear, contraction, and whenever I

43:46just kind of look up and get curious, that feeling of like, "Huh, I wonder what my body is trying to tell me right now." It's like possibilities. It's like, huh. It helps to de-armor. Right? 'Cause there's, "I'm feeling anxiety," then there's, "Oh, it's a problem that I'm feeling anxiety." And those are two separate things. The anxiety is just a physical manifestation of something's happening inside of you. And then we attach a story, and frustration, resistance, and, like, there's something wrong, and I'm feeling anxious, rather than just being like, "Huh, wonder what that's about. Hm. Wonder. Oh, okay. Wow. Clearly my body is telling me something." And then sometimes you literally just remember that you haven't had any water today. Yeah.

44:33But you got curious as to what — you're wondering what your body is trying to tell you. So that's kind of what I took from that. Yeah. I do think it's the right way, like what you said exactly. It can help you deal with the uncertainty and the anxious feelings. Even for me, just reading that, I'm like, "Oh, okay." Like, I don't — you can have wonder — actually, you can wonder things from a place of fear. You can be concerned about things from a place of fear. But it's that wonder that comes from that curious inner child — totally — that's like, there's endless possibilities. And I do find myself getting stuck in these loops and stuck in these boxes, and then every once in a while something happens, I snap out , I'm like, "Why do I even care about that box that I made?" Totally.

45:21That's me. I created that prison. That's what you said when we started this episode. It's the prisons we create for ourselves. Totally. And wonder might be just one key that opens it up, and it's like, dude, bro, all this stuff is whatever you want it to be. Totally. Most of the time the key is in your pocket, or the door's open. Yeah. So the door is open, the vault is open. The vault is open. Get the gold, or don't. Or don't, and walk away.