Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #37: Music as Medicine: Why Guitar Is a Pathway to Belonging, Healing, and Change — Matt Hinsley

Transcript

#37: Music as Medicine: Why Guitar Is a Pathway to Belonging, Healing, and Change — Matt Hinsley · Love Conquers Fear

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  This is an instrument that I first ordered when I was 16
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  years old. The guitar is very much our
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  organizing principle. It's the reason we engage with
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  kids around the world. It's fun, it's interesting.
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  You can express yourself with it.
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  And music is this miraculous thing.
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  Music can bring us together. I think of it as a perfect
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  fusion of human and divine, because for manifestation on
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  this plane, the divine needs a vessel.
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  That's something that we have an opportunity to be in, a gesture
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  of kindness. We can be that vessel.
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  I will just say that I feel like it's a kind of ascension.
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  It's maybe a prayer. Welcome back everybody to Love
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  Conquers Fear. I hope you enjoyed the last
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  episode with Chris Bache. It was an amazing, amazing
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  episode, followed by a dinner that we actually had right
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  afterwards, and the conversation around the table was so moving
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  as we were all probing on trying to decode reality and how
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  humanity is ultimately going to make it to the age of abundance
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  for all. He's a beautiful human being.
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  And I want to give a shout out to episode 32 with Michael
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  Collins for the documentary that he's laboring on that we
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  discussed in that episode called Intuition, which is all around
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  teaching children how to navigate essentially
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  consciousness or source or whatever you would like to call
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  that to do miraculous things. And outside of the astonishing
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  reveal of what they can do with blindfolds on, you know,
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  including blind children, it's it it really is about teaching
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  them a skill that they can use throughout their life.
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  And that's the big point. It's not just the magic trick of
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  being able to, you know, read while you're completely
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  blindfolded or, you know, pick out from, you know, Uno card
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  deck, you know, the yellow 8 or ride a bicycle down the street,
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  you know, and navigate completely blindfolded using
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  that, you know, the third eye, really the sole to see
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  everything. It's it's really about
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  developing the whole person and part of humanity making it to
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  the age of abundance for all is US realizing how to develop
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  those beautiful gifts within ourselves.
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  And I showed Chris Beige on the way back to the Austin airport
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  to drop him off the trailer that Michael's been using with donors
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  like me. And it moved me to tears again,
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  Moved him to tears. I mean, to see what these
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  children do and think about how that's going to change the world
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  and what kind of leaders are going to grow up to be is just
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  absolutely beautiful. It just really moves my heart.
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  I cannot watch it without tearing up every time.
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  I'm actually starting to tear up now.
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  Just just telling you about it. Just thinking about it since
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  since I watched it again this morning on the way back to the
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  airport. But today's episode is actually
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  going to be, you know, about a similar topic.
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  And if you haven't watched episode 32 with Michael Collins,
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  definitely dive into that. Just a beautiful heart.
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  And I'm with someone else today that has a beautiful heart that
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  also is very much working with children to teach them how to be
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  much more intuitive and teach them how to be much more fully
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  formed human beings. So I want to welcome Matt to
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  Love Conquers Fear. Brad, thank you so much.
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  So good to be with you brother. Oh it is so wonderful to be
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  here. I've so enjoyed watching you
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  have deep and beautiful and meaningful conversations in this
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  space. Well, thank you to be.
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  Here now with you is is a really an honor.
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  Well, it's it's an honor for me. And I should say, you know,
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  shout out to to Rick Reader for interviewing us.
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  Definitely. I was very happy that he did
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  that. And he's been moved by the
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  podcast and thought, you know, we should really, we should
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  really connect. And we had a beautiful
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  connection last time in your studio and you're the CEO of
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  Austin Classical guitar. That's right.
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  Here we are. Here's an example of a classical
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  guitar for sure. Tell tell me about this one.
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  This is an instrument that I first ordered when I was 16
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  years old. I never graduated from high
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  school. I went to college when I was 16
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  as a as a young person and that first year I had a mentor who
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  suggested I I get on the list for one of the Great American
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  guitar makers. His name was Robert Rock.
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  And so Robert was in Washington state, and I got on his list and
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  it was a long waiting list to get an instrument.
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  And I finished my undergraduate degree four years later and then
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  started my masters here in Austin.
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  And yeah, finished that two years later and started my
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  doctorate. And then my mom got a postcard
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  from Robert Rock saying, I'm about ready to start making your
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  guitar. Right.
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  And so whole lifetime had passed.
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  What felt like for me, that was about 7 1/2 years.
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  OK. And so this is this is the
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  instrument that was that he made for me.
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  And it's kind of been the one ever since.
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  It's been with me to many places.
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  I got it in 1999. And this is Western red cedar
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  and the back on the sides are Indian rosewood and it's an
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  Ebony fret Borg. And every rosette, this is a
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  rosette which is the ornate mosaic around the sound hole of
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  every classical guitar. And these are signatures of
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  every guitar maker. They're everyone's unique and
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  they make them by bundling sticks of different colored wood
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  and then slicing them off and creating these mosaic designs.
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  It's. A beautiful design and and it's
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  that's really cool. It's almost like it's it's own
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  signature. You know, it's on ISBN number
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  that in a much more beautiful. That's that's really, really
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  cool and tell tell me about like the Austin classical guitar
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  journey. Like how did you how did you
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  start it? You know how old is it and how
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  how many children does it reach at this point?
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  You know what was the big motivation at the beginning?
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  So much to say. Well, the interesting thing I
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  think is that the motivation at the beginning is became evolved
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  into something else. And what what it started out as
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  was a desire that I had to create a platform for musicians.
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  OK, I really wanted. I was an undergraduate student
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  studying guitar. I knew many wonderfully talented
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  people around the world. And I received the great advice
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  that so many musicians get from their parents and from people
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  who care about them, which is to go do something else right for a
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  profession, make money in another way.
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  And you can play guitar when you want on the weekends, which is
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  wonderful advice for the right people.
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  But for me, I was obstinate and really thought that there was a
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  lot in the world of music that I wanted to continue to explore
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  and to give. And so the classes that we had
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  around music business all had to do with competing for what
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  seemed like a very small slice of pie, right?
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  And as I became enchanted, and I really did with nonprofit
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  organizations as a teenager, just running a small student
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  club in my undergraduate school, researching economics of the
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  arts in America and starting to learn about the nonprofit
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  structure. I, I came to a place where I
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  decided I really wanted to make a bigger marketplace, wanted to
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  add to the capabilities for musicians like myself that I
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  loved and that I respected. And so that was the entry point
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  for me. It was very much trying to build
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  a a place where more musicians could thrive and of course all
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  the great benefits of. Of of that would be.
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  For the community to experience great art and for musicians to
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  be supported in the process. But what happened, Brett, was,
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  was I started to have experiences.
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  And I, I was 20 years old when I started running ACG.
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  Yeah, it was 30 years ago. Wow.
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  So I'm young and I'm going through my master's degree and
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  I'm running this organization that interacts with the public
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  and I start to be challenged. The way we look at so many
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  things in the world is through a progressive lens.
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  The sense that more advanced classes are better than less
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  advanced classes. Higher grades are better than
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  lower grades. More money is better than less
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  money. A higher paying job is what we
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  should aspire to next, whatever that progressive senses.
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  And when we apply that to music, wonderful and terrible things
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  happen. So wonderful things are the
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  people progress and become incredible examples of the
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  ability to to to play music at a very high level and celebrate
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  that. And we do celebrate that.
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  But the downside is, is, is all the folks that are left out
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  along the way. I can't tell you how many people
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  have come to me, found out I was a musician and said, oh, I was
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  terrible at that. Or, or, or I never practiced
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  enough. Or a student will come to a
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  lesson and be immediately shamed within their own mind because
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  they feel as though they aren't good enough for this next
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  experience. And the truth is that there's so
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  much more room for joy and music can do so much more in the
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  world. So as an example, as a young
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  person, I love teaching kids. And I had in my mind that I
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  would be someone who could generate through my teaching and
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  through my studio, the best guitar players, you know, kids
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  that would go and be on TV and radio and win contests.
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  And actually, it turns out that all of that happened.
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  But then in, in, in 1999, this woman in her 70s, Lana Burwell
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  came into my orbit at Austin Classical Guitar and suggested
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  that we start a program for adult amateur layers.
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  And it's not that I had no interest in adult amateur
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  players or doing a program for adult amateur players, but it
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  wasn't like, where does that fit on the progress spectrum in
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  Matt's young, in the young Matt's mind, right, an adult
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  amateur student is not going to be on the pathway to Carnegie
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  Hall. And so I I essentially told her
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  I wasn't interested, but she was very persistent.
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  And so she carved out a space within our organization to begin
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  rehearsals where adults could come together and play music
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  together. That was 26 years ago.
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  We have members of our adult community ensemble and now we
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  have 7 such ensembles in the community.
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  But we have members of our adult community ensemble now that were
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  in the 1999 original ensemble, meaning that they've spent 26
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  years of their lives coming to rehearsals, giving of
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  themselves, finding within themselves things they didn't
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  know that they had. Having irreplaceable
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  experiences, building friendships, getting involved
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  with our organization in many ways, from making music to
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  listening to music, to volunteering to donating, to
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  being on the board of directors. Some of my great friends are
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  through that simple program that that wasn't my fault.
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  I, I didn't do it on purpose. She brought it to me and I
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  acquiesced. And so when Lana died in about
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  two, it was 2008, and her son called me and asked if I would
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  speak at her funeral because because what she had done for us
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  had really meant a lot to her in that last decade of her life.
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  I think it was at that moment that I had a little reflection
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  opportunity to realize, whoa, this woman and her kindness and
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  all of the experiences that came about as a result and the other
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  humans that came into our sphere really changed me and really
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  changed, you know, be added to the change that would become
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  Austin Classical guitar. Moving from a music
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  organization, a guitar organization to a life
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  organization to A to a community service organization that that
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  exists to inspire people in our community.
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  And many times a guitar happens to be in the room, but lots of
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  times it's not. The guitar is very much our
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  organizing principle. Yeah.
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  It's it's the reason we engage with kids around the world.
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  It's the reason kids pick it up and, and, and and play because
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  it's fun. It's interesting.
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  You can express yourself with it.
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  And music is this miraculous thing that I know we'll talk
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  about today. We are in the Music City too.
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  We are in the Music City. It's in the it's in the water,
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  it's in the air, right? It's in the ether.
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  I was born and raised here. My first first ever concert was
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  Willie Nelson. I'm four years old.
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  Oh wow, so Willie Nelson backyard BBQ.
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  How incredible and what an impact that man has made.
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  Oh my. Gosh, talk about he you know the
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  The Dow of Willie by Turk Pipkin.
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  He's a great human being. He needs.
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  To be on this podcast if he hasn't already.
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  I know he really does. We've we've supported the
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  nobility project for a long time.
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  We actually visited Mahiga Ho Pie right after it was
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  completed. Wow.
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  And that was our big trip to to Kenya and Tanzania.
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  And that was, that was personally my favorite trip I've
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  ever had with Deborah in the in the house.
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  I don't know if you noticed, you probably didn't because we're
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  rushing, but there's a £500 giraffe I saw.
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  That giraffe, of course. Yes, that's from Kenya.
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  Is it really? That's from that trip, yeah.
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  We wanted to have something, you know, pretty, pretty awesome to
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  remember, remember the trip. But you know, that was the only
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  time in our entire lives where we felt a little bit like
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  celebrities because these kids are coming out and, you know,
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  you have to you have to remember that the situation there is
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  these kids would like hike to their middle school like often
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  four or five miles. Most of their parents didn't
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  even have cars and they had no high school.
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  And so in this area of of Kenya. And so that was it.
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  That was the end of their education.
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  And these these kids just surrounded us and they're
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  pinching our skin because it's like they haven't even seen skin
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  this color in their entire life. And anyways, it's, it's, it's so
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  cool. What, what Turk and his wife
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  Christie have done with the Nobility Project and all the
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  musicians they brought to bear in Austin to including Willie
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  Nelson to, to really, you know, raise money for, for, I mean,
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  you know, Turk Turk didn't have to do that.
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  Like he dedicated a huge part of his life to building these
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  schools all over, all over Kenya.
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  I love it. Yeah, I love.
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  It Yeah, what a what a beautiful human being.
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  And, you know, and I, and so I marvel at where music lives in
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  that equation, you know, where music can bring us together.
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  It may be a fundraiser. It might be adults making music
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  together. It might be music as a vessel
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  for words, music joining with poetry to become the song that's
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  the anthem of our childhood, the anthem of our of our
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  adolescence. At Austin Class School Guitar we
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  have had a wonderful and very unusual opportunity to add a new
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  course subject to American public schools.
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  So before 2000 America had orchestra, choir and band in its
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  school programs, but not guitar. Guitar was rarely taught and if
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  it was taught it was kind of a one off project of maybe a of of
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  1 teacher, but certainly nothing at scale.
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  And the reason for that, or one of the reasons for that, is that
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  guitar has always been sort of a one-on-one instruction kind of
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  prospect. And we stepped into public
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  school education in 2001 with a, a, a small donation allowing us
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  to give free lessons for kids that couldn't afford them and to
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  find students that would qualify for the program.
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  We started looking around at schools and we found a school
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  that had one of these experimental guitar classes, and
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  we stepped into that class to work with the instructor there.
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  He identified several students. We began working with the kids
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  and very quickly realized that the class was a little bit
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  disorganized. There were, there were, there
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  were just from a sequencing standpoint, the kids were being
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  asked to do things they probably shouldn't quite be doing in in
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  the sequence. So we asked if we could help
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  organize the class and that became a years long relationship
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  where where we were working within the classroom, we were
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  still giving free lessons for some of the kids in the class
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  that would qualify. And pretty quickly it went from
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  15 kids to 40 kids. And then the next year it had
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  100 kids and we had two sections.
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  And then the next year the middle school next door heard
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  about it and they wanted to add a guitar class.
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  And so 2003 I went over there and added a second class.
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  And so by 2004 we we knew 2 main things.
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  One was that kids really want to play guitar.
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  There's a lot of kids in America who aren't in the traditional
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  music offerings who would love to play music and guitar is a
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  great conduit. And the other thing we learned
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  was that we didn't have any idea what we were doing and neither
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  really did anybody else in terms of classroom based education.
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  And so the opportunity that we had was really to try to work on
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  that challenge. We developed a a pretty robust
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  curriculum sequencing ultimately teacher training protocols,
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  teacher training systems and summits all around the country
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  to begin to do guitar education in a deep kind of inclusive and
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  spiritual way with groups of kids in K12 schools.
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  And here in Austin in 2008, the school district was struggling
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  with engagement for kids in Fine Arts in lower income schools.
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  Whereas in more affluent schools there were many options for for
• 18:53
  kids to to take very high quality Fine Arts classes, in
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  lower income schools there were less options, less kids involved
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  and less support from things like parental booster clubs.
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  But by that point, we had five guitar programs in in five title
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  one schools and all five of them were fully enrolled.
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  Couldn't fit any more kids into those classes.
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  And so the district grabbed us. And so we want you to add guitar
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  in all the schools. Wow.
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  So we did that. What a gift.
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  And in the process of adding programs to all the schools, we
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  had many more schools around the country, around around Texas,
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  around the country and outside of the country start to ask us
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  for help. So we've had this incredible
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  chance to to work with 10s of thousands of kids.
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  And and at this moment there's there's more kids enrolled in
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  guitar class in Austin ISD than in any other music program
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  except band. And so it's a really it's a
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  major leg of the table. And the remarkable thing, Brad,
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  is that it's not about the guitar.
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  And it never was. Yeah, it's it's it's guitar
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  happens to be a medium through which.
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  We can find meaning, we can find connection and it could have
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  been something else. Guitar has its wonderful
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  qualities that make it unique and it's so popular.
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  And Speaking of Africa, we have an amazing program in a in an
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  orphanage there in Uganda that is just lights my brain up every
• 20:25
  time I they show me another video.
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  But but you know, the opportunity to to, to supply
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  instruments and then supply curriculum and teacher training
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  and then let humans make beauty and find beauty together is
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  really the opportunity that we've had in the organization.
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  And it's one that I'm eternally grateful for.
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  I mean, it's really amazing the, the level of impact.
• 20:47
  Did you, did you ever have a forward conversation where
• 20:50
  people are like, and we should change to the name because like
• 20:53
  it's we're having a nationwide impact, although with the name
• 20:57
  Austin in it, yes, as the musical city, yes.
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  It's just incredible. Like to think about that kind of
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  nationwide impact. It is an international impact.
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  Yeah, yeah, it has been a conversation for sure.
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  When we wonder about honestly, we the the curriculum lives
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  within its sub brand guitar curriculum and guitar
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  curriculum.com. And that's where, you know, if
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  you're a teacher somewhere in the world interacting with us,
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  you probably know us as guitar as guitar, not not Austin
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  classical guitar necessarily. I'm just in wonder about it and
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  I'm in constantly in wonder about music as part of this
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  equation because we we we decided that our change agents
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  are, are are really beauty and kindness and beauty.
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  It's, it's like, it's like the, the nucleus and the electron
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  that make up an atom. It's, it's, it's, it's beauty is
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  the reason people leave their homes and come to our concert
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  hall. It's the, it's the reason we get
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  together. People hear about an artist,
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  they say, I want to see that artist.
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  And kindness, though, is the electron.
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  It's that invisible thing that's operating throughout the whole
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  space. That's what we train our
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  teachers on. It's what we train our our staff
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  and our volunteers on. How do you welcome people into
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  this space now that the space is made?
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  And when those two things collaborate, it's it's
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  incredible what what how souls change and relationships develop
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  over time. Yeah, on episode 25 of the
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  podcast Patrick d'ent Tempo, he said the way that he defines
• 22:36
  love is actually it's witnessing beauty, that when you witness
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  beauty, that's like witnessing God and that that is the
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  definition of love. And I just thought that that
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  that's just such a amazing way to to look at it And, and, and
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  you get, you know, obvious examples.
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  I mean, I'm, I habitually, and I've raised, I've raised, I've
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  raised our daughters this way to say, if you really witness a
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  sunrise or sunset, you get a day of your life back at the end,
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  you know, and I don't know if it's a day or not, but, but, but
• 23:17
  like to, to, to witness beauty. And, you know, our older
• 23:21
  daughter Rachel, who we were talking about earlier, who, by
• 23:24
  the way, started out playing classical guitar.
• 23:27
  I haven't told you that. How about that?
• 23:29
  She would be one of those that would now tell you I fell off
• 23:33
  the wagon or whatever, But but she can pick it back up and
• 23:36
  that's the thing. You can return to it.
• 23:38
  But that she was, it was, it was really beautiful to see her in,
• 23:43
  in concerts and, and you know, it was, it was really, really
• 23:47
  cool. She just has so many interest,
• 23:49
  you know, so, so many interests. I mean, I told you she's a
• 23:52
  triple major at 2 lanes. Incredible, but she wrote about
• 23:56
  it in her essay, one of her essays to to get into Tulane.
• 24:00
  Wow. You know, Patrick was like just
• 24:02
  witnessing, you know, a beautiful sunset, a beautiful
• 24:05
  sunrise, just a, you know, a, a, a moment with a child, etcetera.
• 24:10
  That is, that is the definition of love, that witnessing of
• 24:14
  beauty. I love it so much and it's so
• 24:17
  powerful, and I'm gonna think about that as a definition for
• 24:20
  love, because certainly witnessing beauty has been a
• 24:26
  thread in, in, in, in, in, in my life.
• 24:28
  Oh my gosh. I can't imagine how much you've
• 24:31
  seen. It's like.
• 24:32
  A reasonable. Life arc, you know, if you, I
• 24:35
  mean clearly this is your calling.
• 24:38
  You know, you can just see it. You know, the way you light up
• 24:41
  and and I just absolutely love love your heart.
• 24:45
  I'm sure you're just seeing beauty all the time, where
• 24:48
  you're seeing a kid's life transformed by picking this up
• 24:53
  last night. I at our we have a theater here
• 24:57
  in town called the Rosette the Rosette and it's an intimate 85
• 25:03
  seat theater in Hyde Park. But a husband and wife on stage,
• 25:06
  he was playing what they call a chromatic harmonica, which is a
• 25:10
  big old harmonica with a key that makes allows you to play
• 25:12
  every note. And that's not a normal
• 25:15
  harmonica. And then she was playing guitar
• 25:18
  and they were doing tangos all night long.
• 25:20
  John Burnett was there. Who if you've ever listened to
• 25:22
  NPR and heard any story in the last 40 years about Texas or
• 25:24
  Mexico, it was John Burnett. He was in the audience.
• 25:28
  He's a harmonica enthusiast. And so he was so excited to see
• 25:31
  the show brought Michael Crockett from KUT, who does the
• 25:33
  Brazilian music or he's on just show.
• 25:36
  They were there. Super knowledgeable, right?
• 25:41
  Dear, dear friends were were were scattered throughout the
• 25:47
  audience right right behind them was a We've been very deeply
• 25:52
  involved in doing education work with incarcerated youth for the
• 25:55
  last 15 years and built a very first and only for credit daily
• 26:01
  performing arts course for incarcerated kids in Texas.
• 26:04
  And but one of our offshoots of that program is to work with
• 26:09
  kids who are a court involved in the community.
• 26:13
  And there's a, there's a, there's a program that sent us a
• 26:16
  young lady who's who's as part of her court mandated work is
• 26:20
  displaying her progress through work with our organization.
• 26:24
  She's learning to play the guitar.
• 26:25
  She's and last night she wanted to volunteer for the concert and
• 26:30
  see the show. So she was sitting one table
• 26:33
  behind. There was a gentleman there who
• 26:38
  I haven't seen in a long time, and I actually saw him again
• 26:42
  this morning. He came by the theater and gave
• 26:43
  us a, a contribution. So I say all of that only to say
• 26:47
  that the, the, the beauty that I get to see is so wild because I
• 26:53
  get to, it's the beauty on stage.
• 26:55
  And then it's the, it's the awareness that the experience of
• 26:59
  beauty for each of these individuals.
• 27:01
  They're some of them with knowledge and aspiration, some
• 27:04
  of them with history with us, some of them just beginning
• 27:07
  their journey and in that really difficult stage of life where
• 27:10
  they've got some challenges to overcome all in the room at the
• 27:14
  same time, experiencing so much meaning.
• 27:17
  Yeah. I really think that that, that
• 27:20
  that's what we're up to, right. It is I, I, I'm, I'm going with
• 27:23
  Patrick. I think.
• 27:24
  I think it's love. Yeah, yeah.
• 27:26
  I think we beauty's all around us, right.
• 27:28
  I mean, there's the obvious beauty of the things that we
• 27:31
  call beautiful. And then there's the the, the,
• 27:34
  the Ant crawling across the threshold of in front of our
• 27:37
  door. That's right.
• 27:38
  There's the urban environment and there's the bridge that
• 27:41
  human beings have somehow created.
• 27:42
  And there's the Internet, and there's this, There's and.
• 27:47
  Do you know John O'Donoghue? I know the name, but I don't
• 27:50
  know him. He wrote a book called Beauty
• 27:52
  and I'm going to recommend it. It's good.
• 27:55
  John O'Donoghue was a priest who left the priesthood to become a
• 28:00
  poet and a Mystic, and he passed away in 2008.
• 28:03
  There's a magnificent interview on On Being with Krista Tippett
• 28:08
  with John O'Donoghue. He's Irish.
• 28:11
  We'll put a link in the show notes.
• 28:13
  I love it. I love it.
• 28:14
  The reason I bring it up is that he said something once that
• 28:16
  stuck with me and it was talking about how effort applied to
• 28:21
  things is. My paraphrase is a preparation
• 28:24
  of the soul. If we take that time and
• 28:27
  attention to learn something or to watch the sunset with our
• 28:35
  attention, that the effort that we spend in that action is what
• 28:41
  prepares the soul for the experience of beauty.
• 28:44
  That's, that's, that's really cool.
• 28:46
  And of course, our, our souls are living in a place of
• 28:49
  absolute beauty and in a place of, of light and love.
• 28:53
  And we know through quantum physics that it all goes down to
• 28:57
  that level as well. You know, I know that that that
• 29:01
  you're a deeply spiritual person and I also know you wrote this
• 29:07
  book form and essence. What was your what was your
• 29:13
  goal? Well, well, first of all, let's
• 29:14
  just discuss the book, what it's about.
• 29:16
  But but also what was your goal in writing that?
• 29:19
  What, what was your what was your goal with humanity in terms
• 29:22
  of did you want humanity to have a sort of heart shift?
• 29:26
  I really, really hope so. Yeah.
• 29:28
  Yeah, that's the hope. Form and Essence is was a
• 29:34
  product of having spent at that point just over 25 years doing
• 29:39
  the work that we've been talking about.
• 29:41
  So not only playing the guitar and experiencing incredible
• 29:46
  music and watching people's lives transformed with it, be
• 29:49
  they kids in Title One schools or kids in Uganda or kids in
• 29:53
  prison or kids in affluent schools or, or the general
• 29:58
  public, but also being the guy who has to find the money to
• 30:04
  make it all possible. And so in a way that's a kind of
• 30:09
  a knife edge between 2 worlds that I think most people don't
• 30:12
  think necessarily go together terribly well.
• 30:15
  It's the, it's the, it's the, it's the primordial soup of
• 30:19
  creativity, which is hard to pin down and hard to quantify and,
• 30:24
  and, and, and the world of, of sort of finance.
• 30:27
  So those of us in the nonprofit fundraising space are often
• 30:31
  walking along that, that, that, that space.
• 30:34
  And I kind of love it. I think it's a wonderful space
• 30:37
  to inhabit because I think there's something spiritual
• 30:42
  about that. Actually, I think just like
• 30:45
  there in our world, we conceive at least of of sort of the, the
• 30:50
  mortal physical plane and the divine spiritual plane.
• 30:53
  And then what we, what we seek for the connection between the
• 30:57
  two. These are two elements also
• 31:01
  that, that, that, that do beautiful things when they're
• 31:04
  connected. And so it's wonderful to be kind
• 31:06
  of in that space of trying to figure, figure that puzzle out.
• 31:09
  I mean, it's clear from all ancient spiritual texts that the
• 31:14
  goal of the soul and lifetime to lifetime is to manifest love.
• 31:20
  And nonprofit work is the ultimate manifestation of that
• 31:28
  because you're really trying to create a big impact.
• 31:32
  And I've, I've always said it's, it's some of the hardest work
• 31:37
  because you're raising money from people for karmic benefit
• 31:43
  versus a capitalistic benefit. That's right.
• 31:46
  So you know, you know that you're really focused on moving
• 31:50
  the heart and moving humanity, really uplifting humanity in a
• 31:57
  beautiful way. And not that capitalism can't do
• 31:59
  that. It does, yes.
• 32:00
  It's especially conscious. Capitalism does that really
• 32:03
  well. A term coined by your last by
• 32:05
  the last guest. I saw the podcast I believe.
• 32:08
  John Mackey was on episode 30's the the Co founder of that that
• 32:12
  movement. Yeah.
• 32:14
  And wrote a beautiful book on it with Raj Sasodia, who I also
• 32:18
  served on the board of Conscious Capitalism with.
• 32:20
  And wow, both of them are amazing people.
• 32:23
  I'll definitely have Raj on the podcast.
• 32:25
  He and I in our due for a catch up and I excellent.
• 32:28
  I know he likes that we had exchange about.
• 32:30
  It, the book was reflections on, on, on in 25 years of that life
• 32:37
  and, and a concern that I have that if we can say form is
• 32:46
  things we can see own measure, claim to be true and ideological
• 32:53
  sense things you can put on a bumper sticker and say this is,
• 32:56
  this is it. I've defined it.
• 32:58
  And that's what yeah. So the idea taking form in that
• 33:01
  sense and essence being everything else back to the
• 33:05
  electron and nucleus analogy, that essence being the swirling
• 33:09
  things, the emotions, the meta characteristics within us,
• 33:14
  things like resilience, the the significance of things, the
• 33:22
  actual meaning of things, not what it is, not what we say, but
• 33:26
  what we mean, right? What that carries or, or the
• 33:30
  spirit. And I think that there's a
• 33:31
  component of mental health within all of that as well, as
• 33:35
  much as that is a hard science in a lot of ways.
• 33:37
  Also, my worry was that we as a society are focused over much on
• 33:47
  form. And while essence, elements of
• 33:51
  essence are known to be important to each and every one
• 33:54
  of us, when it comes down to making the systems that we make,
• 33:58
  making the decisions that we make, form almost always wins.
• 34:04
  It's kind of it has an outsized place and and and so I sort of
• 34:10
  present form in essence as coequals.
• 34:12
  It's not an either or, but it's it's very much two things that
• 34:17
  work beautifully together. I think of, you know, my lens
• 34:24
  through education and getting to see into systems where we see so
• 34:28
  many thousands of kids struggling and thriving.
• 34:33
  There are so many factors that will form the platform for
• 34:40
  success for a young individual. And those are mostly meta
• 34:46
  characteristics. They're mostly that sense of
• 34:49
  confidence, that sense of direction, the the kinds of
• 34:56
  things that you get from having great parents who have cared
• 35:00
  about you and loved you and supported you through success
• 35:03
  and through failure. The grit, the stick with itness.
• 35:06
  Angela Duckworth on Ted Talk. I talked about grit.
• 35:09
  That's a great talk. And all of those things are not
• 35:14
  what we test because we test the kind of aptitude in math,
• 35:19
  reading, and science that we think are the purposes of of
• 35:24
  education from a structural standpoint and from a funding
• 35:27
  standpoint. And really, there's not even
• 35:29
  anything necessarily wrong with that.
• 35:31
  It's great to measure outputs and you've got to measure
• 35:33
  something, but whoa, do we get confused along the way.
• 35:38
  As the days and weeks and months unfold, we can start to do
• 35:43
  things like eliminate art and music from a school because test
• 35:48
  scores were low and we need to have higher test scores.
• 35:51
  And so we're going to do more math, reading and science so
• 35:53
  that we can, we've got a, we've got a problem that looks like a
• 35:55
  nail. We're going to get a hammer.
• 35:56
  We're going to hit the nail with the hammer because that's an
• 35:59
  obvious solution to an obvious problem.
• 36:02
  But my experience is that humans are a lot more complicated than
• 36:06
  that. And, and creating nurturing
• 36:11
  spaces, you know, in a very holistic sense, creating a space
• 36:15
  where we can perceive beauty on a daily basis, for example, as a
• 36:20
  core strategy for success, not as a nice to have or an icing on
• 36:24
  the cake is what leads to phenomenal success.
• 36:31
  My only expertise in this arena from a direct observational
• 36:35
  standpoint is through watching teachers succeed.
• 36:38
  And we ended up actually devising a system for bringing
• 36:41
  essence into the classroom, which was something we called
• 36:44
  the five elements, which was belonging, personal
• 36:46
  responsibility, perseverance through challenges leading to
• 36:49
  small successes, performance and celebration as the five elements
• 36:53
  that must exist in every classroom every single day.
• 36:56
  And what are the teacher behaviors that bring about
• 36:59
  belonging and a sense of personal responsibility and the
• 37:02
  rest everyday and performance and celebration.
• 37:05
  And The thing is, when you do all that or something like it,
• 37:09
  you create energy. You create good positive energy.
• 37:12
  You get kids that want to go to your classroom.
• 37:17
  And if all we're focused on is how many beats per minute you
• 37:20
  can play AC major scale, how fast, how perfect, how much
• 37:24
  better? If you're in book one, well
• 37:26
  golly, you got to get to book 2 as fast as possible.
• 37:28
  If we've got a progress mindset or a measurement orientation
• 37:32
  around human development, then we could leave the humans.
• 37:38
  Behind some of the greatest musicians were the paradigm
• 37:42
  Breakers, right? Those are the ones that didn't
• 37:44
  just follow the linear progression to, you know, I
• 37:48
  mean, the one of one of the chapters in, in, in the book
• 37:52
  that's coming out this year that I wrote called love conquers
• 37:55
  fear, humanity, AI and the age of abundance for all.
• 37:59
  Really this, you know, the podcast is, is a, is a precursor
• 38:03
  to that and it'll probably continue well after the book,
• 38:05
  but is, is on education and we can't pretend like education is
• 38:12
  just styled in it's and, and you know, we beat up on America
• 38:16
  about that typically as Americans that the reality is
• 38:20
  there's a worldwide problem with it.
• 38:23
  It's there's there's a lot of countries that are really
• 38:26
  languishing when it comes to education.
• 38:29
  And, and I think this age that we're going to enter into with
• 38:34
  age of abundance for all it's essence is going to matter way
• 38:39
  more than form because the acceleration we're having with
• 38:44
  AI, quantum computing, robotics is going to lead to form largely
• 38:50
  being taken care of. And we, there's a lot of things
• 38:52
  to discover in form. And we, we only know what 4% of
• 38:56
  the universe is made of. We call that matter.
• 38:58
  We don't know what 96%. So we call it dark energy and
• 39:01
  dark matter. We have no idea.
• 39:03
  There's never been a reconciliation between quantum
• 39:06
  and classical science. You know, we don't know what
• 39:10
  consciousness is. We, you know, there's we were
• 39:13
  talking about the secret of secrets.
• 39:15
  That's right. And you just finished reading it
• 39:17
  as well. Yes, a great book by Dan Brown.
• 39:20
  He's done a great service to humanity and leveraging his
• 39:23
  megaphone to really put the meticulously documented science
• 39:28
  out there about the evidence is consciousness is fundamental and
• 39:32
  something that we receive and we're derivative of of that.
• 39:35
  And obviously the Tilapte tapes, they just wrapped up season 2 at
• 39:40
  the end of 2025, which is a great season.
• 39:44
  You know, more evidence of non local consciousness.
• 39:47
  This essence is really what makes us most human.
• 39:52
  You know, as as you me was talking about in the episode
• 39:56
  that I did with him, you know, we are training people through
• 40:02
  education to be like robots. We need to trade them to really
• 40:07
  be fully formed human beings and, and leverage their, all of
• 40:12
  their gifts. And you know, we I was talking
• 40:15
  with with Amos in that episode about how business people, too,
• 40:22
  are artists. You know, can choose to be
• 40:24
  artist, you know, art artists everywhere.
• 40:27
  If we, if we take that 100%, if we take that and and so essence
• 40:31
  is really so key to it's, it's never going to matter more than
• 40:37
  it's going to matter in the next 10 to 15 years in terms of what
• 40:40
  is the nature that of, of us being most human.
• 40:44
  Like what is it about us that's actually special?
• 40:48
  And you're bringing that out in in this program?
• 40:52
  Yeah, I hope. I hope that that's the result.
• 40:55
  You know, I think that, you know, the spaces that we try to
• 40:59
  make in, you know, at least through the work with music.
• 41:03
  Music is such a mysterious actor.
• 41:06
  All of this is mysterious, of course, right?
• 41:08
  That's why it's difficult to talk about and but it's so
• 41:11
  important to talk about. I think of it as a perfect
• 41:14
  fusion of of of human and divine.
• 41:17
  It's it's like a smile. It's perfect fusion of human and
• 41:21
  divine because the because for manifestation on this plane, the
• 41:27
  divine needs a vessel. And that's something that we
• 41:31
  have an opportunity to be and, and in a, in a gesture of
• 41:35
  kindness, we can be that vessel. We can, we can radiate and share
• 41:39
  love in, in, in so many ways. And and I think music is the
• 41:43
  same is the same way, and that it very much takes a human to do
• 41:46
  it, to write it, to be it to to sing or to or to or to or to
• 41:51
  move a string and create vibration.
• 41:57
  But what in the world does it mean?
• 42:00
  What does a note mean? Where where it's something.
• 42:04
  It's so miraculous to me, even after all these years of doing
• 42:06
  it, that that we don't have really much of A of a verbal
• 42:11
  sense of what this non verbal communication is all about.
• 42:15
  We can ascribe meaning to it, but yet it's meaningful to every
• 42:20
  single person. One of my favorite things is
• 42:23
  working with five year olds, and we think of five year olds as
• 42:27
  being elementary in their skills.
• 42:30
  And I suppose that's a fair thing to say.
• 42:32
  But if you give a 5 year old a guitar and set them up and begin
• 42:37
  doing something that they're able to do rhythmically, then
• 42:40
  instantaneously their little bodies start swaying back and
• 42:43
  forth. I mean, they are so advanced
• 42:46
  music makers because the music itself is very meaningful to
• 42:50
  that body and to that spirit, and we just don't know what it
• 42:55
  is. And back to the varied audience
• 42:57
  that I had in my theater last night.
• 42:58
  Each of those people receiving that beauty and recognizing it
• 43:02
  in that space means it can mean more than one thing, right?
• 43:06
  It's each, each, each, each observer is able to have it
• 43:12
  reach them in its own way. And I think that's different
• 43:15
  than most words. You know, words often carry so
• 43:17
  much specificity to them then then that there's a obviously
• 43:21
  also very, very powerful but. Have you ever seen the
• 43:25
  documentary Inner Worlds? Outer Worlds.
• 43:27
  No, I haven't. Oh gosh, you're gonna, you're
• 43:30
  gonna be very happy about this one.
• 43:31
  Highly recommend at actually at the beginning of what I'll call
• 43:35
  my soul quest. You know, where I set my
• 43:37
  intentionality in, in Kerala at the end of 2024, that 2025 would
• 43:43
  be all about the inner journey and led to me reading over 55
• 43:47
  books, you know, some of them twice, like like Chris Baish,
• 43:53
  who I just just add on, you know, the universe, it it, it,
• 43:57
  it really what it does is it brings together science and
• 44:00
  spirituality in a really beautiful way.
• 44:03
  And, you know, including quantum physics and, and the ancient,
• 44:08
  you know, mystical text. And it really makes a very
• 44:13
  strong case and shows very strong evidence that the
• 44:17
  universe itself has so many different vibratory fields.
• 44:23
  And I just think you would, you would love it because it, it
• 44:26
  reframes just the, even the, the, the mirror act, you know,
• 44:31
  the, the, the mirror essence of sound as, you know, a spiritual
• 44:37
  vibratory field that can actually shape matter too.
• 44:43
  And, and shows a lot of examples of that.
• 44:46
  How do you think about that in terms of, you know, music and
• 44:50
  whatever this reality is that we're that we're living in?
• 44:54
  Yeah, I think of, you know, what I've get, what I get to witness
• 44:59
  is transformation over time. So I have experienced so many
• 45:10
  young people, years after the fact, point back to a moment
• 45:15
  when their lives changed because an artist came to their
• 45:19
  classroom and performed, for example.
• 45:23
  This is not an isolated occasion for me.
• 45:26
  And, and I think about that a lot.
• 45:28
  I think about, OK, how does a person's trajectory change
• 45:31
  through an impact that occurred? In essence, it's about how
• 45:35
  intention itself is carried. And I think music is a vessel
• 45:43
  for intention and, and so that can come and land within us when
• 45:49
  we hear. Well, it does every time and
• 45:52
  depending on how open we are or where we are already, we are as
• 45:57
  or or prepared our soul as as John O'Donoghue would say.
• 46:00
  We had a young lady couple years ago who was detained at the
• 46:07
  Garner Bets Juvenile Detention Center here in in Travis County
• 46:10
  who was in our guitar class. She was doing really well and
• 46:15
  she asked her teacher if she could play a piece of music for
• 46:21
  the judge. And she was in a four trial,
• 46:25
  four phase trial scenario and she was trying to get from phase
• 46:29
  three to phase four. And, and so the piece she wanted
• 46:35
  to play happened to be a piece that I had written and I'd never
• 46:38
  met her before. And and so the teacher asked if
• 46:43
  I would come to the courtroom and play the piece with her
• 46:47
  because he wasn't going to be able to be there.
• 46:49
  He had to be out of town on that day.
• 46:50
  So I brought 2 guitars with me to the courtroom and I sat
• 46:54
  through three other phase trials before hers.
• 46:59
  And the courtroom was cold physically and figuratively.
• 47:08
  And each trial was interesting to watch because you had the,
• 47:11
  the young person and you had a team of maybe 3 or 4 people
• 47:14
  around, an attorney and a caseworker and a, and a, and a
• 47:17
  teacher or something. And the judge and basically each
• 47:21
  person in was examined. They were, their behavior was
• 47:25
  examined, they were giving testimony and they're, they were
• 47:29
  being judged. And I had never met this person.
• 47:32
  Still, even at this point, we'd never met each other, right?
• 47:34
  But she saw me with the guitars and I saw her waiting.
• 47:36
  And so, so, so we kind of sussed each other out.
• 47:39
  So then it was her turn and they did the similar process with
• 47:42
  her. At which point the judge is
• 47:43
  looking at her notes and she says it says here you want to
• 47:46
  play the guitar. Right, right.
• 47:49
  Yeah. I imagine this doesn't happen in
• 47:51
  the courtroom, all that. I can't imagine.
• 47:53
  Yeah, this may have been a first.
• 47:54
  Yeah. And, and the, and the girl said,
• 47:57
  yeah. And, and so the judge said, OK,
• 47:59
  well, I'll give you 2 minutes to get ready.
• 48:01
  Brought my guitar down to the, the two guitars down.
• 48:04
  And I met her and introduced myself and, and she was nervous
• 48:08
  and, and we sat and I'll never forget sitting, we were sitting
• 48:12
  very close together on purpose because I wanted her to just
• 48:15
  hear the guitars fully. And, and so I just had her play
• 48:20
  a couple of notes and I saw, you know, the fingers are shaking on
• 48:24
  the strings and she's, you know, but one of the things we're good
• 48:27
  at is setting kids up for success.
• 48:29
  So we knew that what she was going to do that day, she was
• 48:31
  going to do great. It was going to be expressive,
• 48:34
  powerful. She was probably 15.
• 48:37
  And then beauty, this thing happened.
• 48:45
  We played something gorgeous together and it had a it had a
• 48:51
  beautiful soft start all throughout.
• 48:55
  It had rises and falls that she had learned that she really
• 49:00
  committed to. There were two points along the
• 49:04
  way where we slowed down together and communicated even
• 49:07
  though we'd never met each other before and and ended phrases and
• 49:14
  and there was 1 long. We call her crescendo in music
• 49:18
  where it gets louder, you know, progressively louder.
• 49:25
  That's the best I've got for you in terms of atomic
• 49:27
  transformation with music. That space was.
• 49:32
  Completely transformed. You took a cold place that
• 49:37
  people are very, very nervous just going into a courtroom.
• 49:40
  I mean, almost anybody for anything, yes, whether or not
• 49:43
  they think they're in the right or wrong in terms of their setup
• 49:48
  to, to win the case. And you know, there, there you
• 49:52
  are transforming the entire space through vibration.
• 49:56
  And she changes her narrative. Yeah.
• 50:01
  Right up until that moment, she is this, you know, object that's
• 50:07
  being judged by a bunch of people that have power literally
• 50:11
  over her. And then she has a moment where
• 50:16
  she's an artist. Did that lead to a good outcome
• 50:21
  for her and the? Yes, as far as I know, yes, as
• 50:24
  far as I know, these are tricky. We have thousands of hours of
• 50:29
  service now in lockdown facilities in Texas.
• 50:33
  And, but it is true that it's a pretty dense environment to work
• 50:38
  in. And, and, and because of
• 50:40
  probably good reasons that, you know, you know, you're always
• 50:42
  able to actually track people when they leave and get
• 50:45
  identities and things. So right, right.
• 50:47
  But, but we know that in the, in the months that we have with
• 50:50
  people within the facility that really special and beautiful
• 50:53
  things happen. And in many cases, we have been
• 50:56
  able to continue relationships as well.
• 50:58
  You know, in, in episode 33 of the podcast with, with Susie,
• 51:04
  so, so and, and Alex, I can't remember Alex's last name right
• 51:08
  now, but she's the chair and he's the CEO of level, which
• 51:13
  helps the incarcerated through education.
• 51:16
  And it's actually having a real heyday because now it's much
• 51:20
  more powered by, by AI to be able to help create that lift.
• 51:26
  And it was shocking to me that in the United States, we have 4%
• 51:34
  of the world's population. That's that simple knew that.
• 51:39
  But we have 25% of the world's incarcerated and, and, and
• 51:43
  largely, you know, forgotten about like get labeled that way,
• 51:47
  you know, Anthony D'mello. And in the book awareness, which
• 51:51
  is a great one that I just reread here at the beginning of
• 51:55
  2026 as I I, I was preparing for a silent meditation retreat.
• 52:00
  My first, my first one, actually.
• 52:02
  Yeah, excellent. I talked about it a couple of
• 52:04
  episodes ago. But, you know, for four days,
• 52:09
  you know, it really tunes up your senses, you know, to do do
• 52:14
  something like that, really to bear witness to consciousness in
• 52:18
  a in a very deep way. And you and you start to see
• 52:20
  beauty everywhere. You start to see beauty
• 52:22
  everywhere. It's all the little details that
• 52:25
  you would just miss because you're thinking about the next
• 52:28
  thing or worrying about the past and, you know, just completely
• 52:31
  missing the only moment that matters, which is the, the
• 52:36
  present. And you know there, there is no
• 52:40
  moment but but the present and it's the, the eternal present.
• 52:43
  And the teachers, John and and will Cabot Zen call it a radical
• 52:49
  act of sanity. Take your seed and and I know
• 52:54
  you're, you're, you're into meditation.
• 52:56
  How do you, I mean your essence, you know, your soul is just so
• 53:02
  soothing to be around. Wow and so, so beautiful.
• 53:05
  Like how do you, how do you kind of, you know, stay grounded cuz
• 53:10
  Aceo job. I've been ACEO, you know, yes,
• 53:13
  you have 6 times. And it's, you know, it's a, it's
• 53:18
  a intense job. And, and I, I, I mentored lots
• 53:21
  of CEOs. You know, we're, we're investors
• 53:23
  in about 150 startups and wow, great.
• 53:26
  And one of the thing, and we've been doing a long time and, and,
• 53:28
  and we're also investors in a number of VC funds.
• 53:31
  You know, one of the things I, I, I always tell CEOs is that
• 53:34
  one of the hardest skills for me to develop and Vedanta helped me
• 53:37
  a lot with this. The study of Vedanta in India is
• 53:42
  to be more calm ocean inside, not ride such the high emotions
• 53:49
  up and the high emotions down and and try to maintain your
• 53:54
  sense of objectivity. Not being a robot, you know,
• 53:59
  you're human, you feel it, but, you know, trying to be this
• 54:04
  steady, cool hand on the wheel. And the best way I found to do
• 54:13
  that is, is through being in nature, you know, exercising
• 54:19
  regularly and, and following a path of spiritual development,
• 54:24
  which takes a lot of work. It really does take a lot of
• 54:27
  work, but it, but it, it's the embodiment, you know, get your
• 54:31
  soul more embodied in your physical vessel so that that
• 54:35
  light and love can shine through.
• 54:37
  And I'm just curious like, what are your techniques, What is,
• 54:41
  what is, what is your practice like?
• 54:43
  Oh wow, There's actually quite a few.
• 54:45
  I mean, you know, a handful, I should say.
• 54:47
  There's some things that I've been doing for a long time that
• 54:50
  really are routine for me that helps keep me grounded. 1 is, is
• 54:57
  Qigong breath meditation that I learned when I was a teenager.
• 55:02
  And then I, I, I engaged with it for about a dozen years.
• 55:07
  When I was getting ready to go perform before I walked out on
• 55:10
  stage, I would do this meditation because I'd found as
• 55:12
  a young person that, you know, wow, OK, that's pretty relaxing.
• 55:15
  So I'll do this before I go out on stage.
• 55:17
  And then at some point, probably around 30, I realized this is
• 55:21
  just good. I think I want to do this all
• 55:24
  the time. Why not every day?
• 55:27
  And so, and that's a breath meditation that really tracks
• 55:31
  the body me through points that that start at the head and, and
• 55:36
  it's almost like a sensation of being filled with oil and the
• 55:39
  oil lowering each with each exhale through, through points
• 55:43
  that go through the nose and the atom's apple and the upper chest
• 55:46
  and lower and upper thigh and knees and then out through the
• 55:49
  toes and then and then the same thing on the back and then the
• 55:52
  sides as well. So it's the three-part of breath
• 55:55
  meditation that that brings me into my body.
• 56:00
  Can you repeat the name of it again?
• 56:02
  Qigong Qigong Qigong. OK got it.
• 56:05
  Yeah. And then I discovered something
• 56:07
  in a moment of crisis. It was actually a milestone.
• 56:11
  We had reached a point in the organization where sort of
• 56:13
  achieved the dreams and then I had a now what moment and that
• 56:17
  unfolded of course, over months. But but I was spinning around
• 56:21
  losing my losing myself a little bit and and threw a bunch of
• 56:26
  introspection came upon an idea. The idea was that I had a sort
• 56:33
  of an unsolvable equation in my mind that was, that was sub
• 56:38
  logical, that that was impacting the way I was going into things
• 56:42
  that was causing stress. And it was a, it was a desire
• 56:47
  essentially to please people and have everybody be happy all the
• 56:50
  time. And, and, and I'm fine when
• 56:51
  people aren't deal with it every day.
• 56:54
  But this wasn't about that. This was an unsolvable, you
• 56:56
  know, something over Infinity. And it was, it was, it was
• 56:59
  making things difficult. And so I came up with a simple
• 57:01
  statement, which was I rise above the cares of others.
• 57:04
  I rise above the cares of. Others rise above the cares of
• 57:06
  others, and that wasn't meant to me.
• 57:08
  I'm going to be a jerk now, right?
• 57:09
  We take care of #1 you know. I don't see any form of
• 57:12
  jerkiness in here in your in your vessel.
• 57:15
  But it was very much for me specifically about this one
• 57:19
  thing, and I discovered that bringing that forward in my
• 57:22
  consciousness solved the problem instantly.
• 57:26
  But it was only a brief solution.
• 57:27
  And the habit of thought would start to creep back in and I
• 57:30
  would find that the stress was back and the worry and I was not
• 57:34
  enjoying any of the work. And I would go to beautiful
• 57:36
  concerts and couldn't wait till they were over.
• 57:39
  Oh my gosh. Because I was there was this
• 57:41
  thing that was, that was that was gnawing, that was, that was,
• 57:44
  you know what's going to go wrong?
• 57:45
  But it was not even that logical.
• 57:46
  It was love, something logical. I rise above the cares of
• 57:50
  others. And then I thought, OK, Matt,
• 57:51
  you're a classical musician. You know that in order to get
• 57:55
  great at something, you have to practice it not once, not once a
• 57:58
  week, not even once a day, but throughout your life and
• 58:03
  habituated in a powerful way. And so I rise above the cares of
• 58:06
  others became a mantra. I practiced the mantra multiple
• 58:09
  times a day. And then I started to discover
• 58:12
  others. Ended up finding 15.
• 58:16
  So I have 15 things that I practice each day.
• 58:18
  And some of them are actually keys to positivity.
• 58:20
  They're not. They're not trying to ward off
• 58:22
  the evil spirits like I rise above the cares of others.
• 58:27
  There are other things that bring me great joy, like I am
• 58:30
  white hot energy. It's a silly one, but it's the
• 58:32
  way I feel. It was the best way to describe
• 58:35
  a feeling in my body when I'm inspired.
• 58:39
  And I found that just thinking about it, just speaking the
• 58:42
  words right now. Yeah.
• 58:43
  Yeah. I'm there.
• 58:45
  Yeah, fired up. Yeah, yeah.
• 58:47
  And so I thought for a while they practiced that one.
• 58:50
  Yeah. So mantra practice that was very
• 58:52
  unique to me, but became a meditation and the Qigong and
• 58:57
  the journal. And the journal was, is the mind
• 59:02
  primarily it's a gateway to other things, but it's the, it's
• 59:05
  that. So it's it's mind, it's body,
• 59:07
  it's spirit, and those three things that that are sort of
• 59:10
  part of my daily my daily practice.
• 59:13
  You know, I feel compelled to to ask you this question because
• 59:16
  it's it's one that people get all the time or they're thinking
• 59:21
  all the time that a lot of them are afraid to ask because they
• 59:27
  don't want to embarrass themselves.
• 59:29
  And we just need to be like super authentic.
• 59:31
  But what do you say to the person who says, Nah, I just
• 59:35
  don't have time. I just don't have time.
• 59:36
  I don't have time to do that. And they could even have that
• 59:41
  transference. And I've been a recipient of
• 59:45
  this myself where it's like, well, you know, you can do that
• 59:49
  cuz you're CEO, you know? Right, right, right.
• 59:52
  Good for you. Right.
• 59:53
  You've got the resources. Right.
• 59:54
  Exactly. And, and, and one of the things
• 59:57
  I've talked about on this podcast quite a bit is that
• 1:00:01
  quite a few of the most spiritually developed people
• 1:00:03
  I've ever met in my entire life have very, very, very little and
• 1:00:09
  are working, you know, manual labor type jobs.
• 1:00:12
  And you know, we visited Bhutan. Over the the winter break for
• 1:00:18
  the first, well, for me and the kids first time, it was
• 1:00:21
  Deborah's second time. And you know, it's known as one
• 1:00:25
  of the happiest countries on earth.
• 1:00:27
  It's a deeply Buddhist culture. It's all about happiness is
• 1:00:33
  found on the inside. It's not very capitalistic.
• 1:00:37
  It it's, you know, but it, but it's all about that deep inner
• 1:00:44
  journey and you can just feel the energy there.
• 1:00:47
  You can feel the happiness of the people versus sometimes, you
• 1:00:51
  know, the mania that we have in, in, in aspects of American
• 1:00:56
  culture and you know, and the frankly, a lot of the
• 1:00:59
  algorithmic manipulation which which keeps us there.
• 1:01:02
  You know, the dystopia pushed us by the media, the dystopia
• 1:01:05
  pushed us by social media and just kind of trying to hijack
• 1:01:09
  our basest fears and really our amygdala to keep this just
• 1:01:14
  click, click, click, click, click like mice in in a maze
• 1:01:17
  looking for the cheese. And you know, I'm just curious,
• 1:01:21
  like, what do you say to those people?
• 1:01:23
  Like, how did, how do you develop these, these practices
• 1:01:26
  for the quote UN quote super busy people?
• 1:01:28
  I mean, everybody, I think I, I don't know if I've, I've, I've
• 1:01:32
  met that many people who are like, Oh yeah, I'm just, I'm not
• 1:01:36
  super busy. Fair to the wall again today,
• 1:01:38
  right? Exactly right.
• 1:01:40
  Yeah. Well, there's so many things to
• 1:01:42
  say. I mean, the first has got to be
• 1:01:44
  love, though. You deserve this.
• 1:01:46
  Yeah, what you just said is, is an unusual thing in a beautiful
• 1:01:51
  way because you are constantly leading organization, which is
• 1:01:56
  committing so many beautiful acts of service.
• 1:01:59
  And one thing that's really challenging for, like,
• 1:02:04
  spiritual, you know, clergy is that they're giving, giving,
• 1:02:07
  giving so much that they actually forget about the
• 1:02:10
  nourishment of themselves and to love themselves.
• 1:02:13
  And so I just want to double click on what you just said.
• 1:02:17
  Is, is, is is unusual and a great way.
• 1:02:21
  And all the spiritual texts are reminding us, hey, we have to
• 1:02:25
  allow love to conquer our own fear.
• 1:02:27
  Then we can help other people go through that journey and then we
• 1:02:32
  do it together. Humanity, a sense, right?
• 1:02:34
  That's how heaven and earth merge.
• 1:02:37
  And so I, I, I love that. I mean, we're so much more
• 1:02:42
  effective when we are inspired. I actually wrote a blog post
• 1:02:47
  about this recently called The Fire of Inspiration.
• 1:02:49
  But it was really a love letter to my board of directors who
• 1:02:53
  wring their hands in their, in their perceived duty to raise
• 1:02:57
  money for our organization, to help raise money for the
• 1:02:59
  organization. And then nobody trusts me.
• 1:03:05
  You know, it's always, it's always the organizations that
• 1:03:07
  hire me to be a consultant to come and help them that, that I
• 1:03:10
  feel like the, the, the words are really listened to.
• 1:03:12
  But when you're the local guy, it's, it's, it's harder.
• 1:03:15
  I always try to suggest just come.
• 1:03:21
  Come to what we do and open your heart and be moved.
• 1:03:27
  Be truly moved. Don't come there out of a sense
• 1:03:30
  of duty. If you don't like one kind of
• 1:03:33
  concert, then come to another kind of a concert.
• 1:03:35
  Come to the thing you love. Meet our students, talk to them,
• 1:03:42
  because once you do that, you will be a superior fundraiser.
• 1:03:48
  You may not know it, but you're going to speak about these
• 1:03:51
  experiences to people and then you do the metaphysics of the
• 1:03:55
  experiences that you've had will cause you to be a a superior
• 1:04:00
  advocate, which will lead to things we can't possibly
• 1:04:04
  predict, right? But they're going to be good
• 1:04:06
  because there's no way they couldn't be because that's how
• 1:04:08
  the universe works. It's so difficult.
• 1:04:10
  I think that we get into narratives as humans that we,
• 1:04:13
  we, we speak a narrative that holds us in a certain level of
• 1:04:16
  consciousness. I am a busy person.
• 1:04:20
  That's a narrative, right? You tell yourself that all the
• 1:04:23
  time. Guess what?
• 1:04:24
  Exactly. You're going to be right.
• 1:04:26
  Absolutely. I work hard.
• 1:04:28
  I worked really hard to get here.
• 1:04:30
  You're carrying that and we could probably make the dossier
• 1:04:37
  that would be factually substantive of that.
• 1:04:41
  But what do you want from that? What is that?
• 1:04:44
  How is that serving you? Do you want everybody to know,
• 1:04:49
  is it important to you that you're seen sweating or that
• 1:04:53
  you're seen rushing? Do you need people to, to, to,
• 1:04:57
  to, to bow down in some way and, and, and defer?
• 1:05:03
  All of that is weight, I think, and and we just deserve better.
• 1:05:10
  I do have a conversations with spiritual nature with a lot of
• 1:05:13
  people. It just sort of happens.
• 1:05:15
  And I think it's just kind of walking in the world a certain
• 1:05:18
  way. And this happens to you all the
• 1:05:19
  time. I'm sure it does.
• 1:05:21
  And people say what's going on with you some point, you know,
• 1:05:25
  how are you doing that? And and they want to know.
• 1:05:27
  And I think that that's that's the entry point.
• 1:05:30
  Last year I've shared this on the podcast quite a few times.
• 1:05:36
  10 friends told me about their near death experiences and
• 1:05:41
  before 2025, you know how many friends have told me?
• 1:05:44
  0. Zero and some of these were
• 1:05:46
  friends for 10 to 20 years had not told me about the most
• 1:05:50
  transformative experience of their lives.
• 1:05:53
  Like, like, I haven't had a near death experience, but you know
• 1:05:59
  that that's one where you know, I'm going to have Evan Alexander
• 1:06:03
  actually on the podcast, he wrote proof of heaven.
• 1:06:06
  And that's, that's the most amazing kind of first hand
• 1:06:11
  account of the near death experience where he where he saw
• 1:06:14
  what heaven was. And you know, that's completely
• 1:06:20
  transformative forever because then, you know, that we actually
• 1:06:27
  come from this place of, of light and love and that we have
• 1:06:30
  a soul. And, and I think it's from 10
• 1:06:32
  million Americans who have, who've had those, but creating
• 1:06:36
  that aura container energy, you know, whatever, whatever it is
• 1:06:43
  of, of hey, I'm open to talking about these things.
• 1:06:47
  Not I'm only open, but this is the most important essence of
• 1:06:51
  what makes us human. You know, do we have a soul?
• 1:06:54
  Is there God, you know, where are we going?
• 1:06:57
  You know, why are we here? What what matters more than that
• 1:07:01
  and the development of of 1's being in a lifetime is so
• 1:07:08
  important in the way you're able to move in the world and be
• 1:07:13
  hopefully of service to others and to help humanity is in.
• 1:07:18
  I spend a fair amount of time in the book talking about
• 1:07:20
  environment of creating one's environment so that it's
• 1:07:23
  conducive to this kind of development.
• 1:07:27
  And, you know, we tend to think of, you know, spiritual
• 1:07:30
  development as being all stuff we got to do sort of like
• 1:07:33
  exercise. And there's a big component to
• 1:07:35
  that. But but I do think that we're in
• 1:07:38
  control of our, of our media consumption.
• 1:07:42
  We're in control of, of the people that we interact with.
• 1:07:48
  And, and you know, sometimes we, if we're CE OS, we have to
• 1:07:53
  interact with lots of people and, and, and there's less
• 1:07:56
  control or you know, that to, to about every single person.
• 1:08:00
  But there's those people that you can go to, to get your
• 1:08:05
  inspiration from or to share inspiration with.
• 1:08:08
  And surrounding oneself with with with colleagues that are
• 1:08:12
  uplifting is a really powerful technique.
• 1:08:17
  Informed essence. I kind of narrow it down to a
• 1:08:23
  gratitude awareness and wonder. I think gratitude is just one of
• 1:08:27
  those hacks. It's a great spiritual hack
• 1:08:30
  because it's gratitude spins out of things that exist right in
• 1:08:37
  front of us. I can be grateful for this
• 1:08:39
  guitar, right? And I ought to be honest, I am
• 1:08:43
  grateful for that guitar, Brett, but I hadn't thought about it
• 1:08:45
  until just this moment in this conversation.
• 1:08:47
  It's been sitting there, but wow, am I so grateful for it.
• 1:08:51
  And as I say those words, all the love and the experiences
• 1:08:54
  that I've had with it come flush flooding back to me just in the
• 1:08:57
  act of gratitude. And so if we look at that and
• 1:09:01
  say, OK, well, wait a minute, gratitude, it's easy.
• 1:09:02
  It's easy to do. It's right there.
• 1:09:04
  There's things all around us to be grateful for.
• 1:09:06
  People, opportunities, objects, thoughts, then we can lift
• 1:09:13
  ourselves in that way. And I think that's a gateway to
• 1:09:16
  awareness. But as you step out into the
• 1:09:18
  world, it gets trickier. And, and, and I think that one
• 1:09:24
  of the challenges that we face now is, is this influx of
• 1:09:28
  massive amounts of information, many of which you have to do
• 1:09:31
  with things that we don't really have direct dominion over.
• 1:09:34
  And, and, and so we can care about things that are happening
• 1:09:37
  far away, for example, and, and, and, and, and then much of that
• 1:09:43
  is tinged with a, with a whose fault is it mindset.
• 1:09:47
  So we're also typically led to this terrible thing is happening
• 1:09:51
  in this part of the world that it's somebody's fault.
• 1:09:54
  And so that's an invitation for our soul to get just a little
• 1:09:57
  bit darker and, and to carry now some, some anger or some fear.
• 1:10:03
  And and that's costly. So I'd like to shift a bit and,
• 1:10:09
  and I know that you're actually a pretty prolific author,
• 1:10:14
  actually. So you're kind of like, like
• 1:10:17
  astonished me a bit. You know, I gave you, I gave you
• 1:10:20
  a copy of the Lattice. You know, we talked about it a
• 1:10:22
  bit and and then you were telling me about your your
• 1:10:28
  fantasy books and oh. Yeah.
• 1:10:30
  I was like wait, hold on, there's 5 out, there's a 6th 1
• 1:10:36
  coming out and. You know what I mean?
• 1:10:38
  Yes. Unbelievable, yes.
• 1:10:40
  So let's let's talk about that. I am having so much fun with
• 1:10:43
  this Brett and and so the series is called Tinder and Flint.
• 1:10:47
  So the things you use to make, you know, sparks and fire in a,
• 1:10:50
  in a campfire, right? Tinder and Flint and and fire
• 1:10:54
  indeed is a big part of this particular series.
• 1:10:58
  But you know, there's a lot of things going on.
• 1:11:01
  I think back to self-care. The series really began as
• 1:11:05
  something that I wanted to do to get in touch with the boy that I
• 1:11:10
  had been before I started doing guitar all the time and
• 1:11:14
  nonprofits all the time. And I think I mentioned I never
• 1:11:17
  finished high school and 1st all of a sudden was in college at 16
• 1:11:20
  years old. And then I was running a
• 1:11:22
  nonprofit when I was 20. And I've been doing that for 30
• 1:11:24
  years. So it's, it's kind of a little
• 1:11:26
  bit like an escalator that I kind of got on it found me or I
• 1:11:30
  found it, I'm not sure. But somewhere in my, in my late
• 1:11:34
  30s, I was doing these introspections and I was finding
• 1:11:38
  these, these mantras. And actually one of them, this
• 1:11:40
  is true. One of the mantras that I ended
• 1:11:43
  up landing on was I am Matthew Hensley, which doesn't mean
• 1:11:46
  anything to anybody, but to me what it meant was I used to be a
• 1:11:51
  person that I have forgotten about and I, and I want to
• 1:11:55
  revisit that person. And so I started thinking each
• 1:12:00
  day about my childhood, usually and really transporting my mind
• 1:12:07
  back to the, the, the, the bedroom, the fish, the rug, the
• 1:12:13
  closet, the, the paint on the door, the stain on the side of
• 1:12:18
  the door where our animals would go in and out of the kitchen
• 1:12:22
  door. We had horses in the back.
• 1:12:24
  And, you know, so many places to visit that were dear to me that
• 1:12:29
  I hadn't thought about at all in many, many years.
• 1:12:34
  And I started doing that every day 13 years ago.
• 1:12:39
  So I've now taken thousands of trips back into my memory of my
• 1:12:44
  childhood. But in the process of doing
• 1:12:46
  that, one of the things that I also, what was very clear to me
• 1:12:49
  was that fantasy is a world that I always enjoyed as a young
• 1:12:54
  person and I enjoy casually as an adult.
• 1:12:57
  I have to imagine that we share our love for Jr.
• 1:13:00
  Tolkien. Yes, we.
• 1:13:02
  Do is that best movie series? Yes.
• 1:13:07
  Best. Best, you know, best series of
• 1:13:09
  books, including The Hobbit. Yeah, just yeah, just
• 1:13:12
  unbelievable. Yeah, my mother read me The
• 1:13:14
  Hobbit at some point in my childhood and I was never the
• 1:13:17
  same after that. Yeah, I mean, The Lord of the
• 1:13:19
  Rings, like reading it, it makes you want to go on a journey.
• 1:13:22
  It does, because you feel like you're on the journey with them.
• 1:13:25
  It does. Just beautiful writing.
• 1:13:27
  And it's the paradigm, right? It's the hero's journey.
• 1:13:29
  It's Star Wars. It's Harry Potter.
• 1:13:30
  It's it's Lord of the Rings. It's these things that are so
• 1:13:33
  much of what each of us in the course of our lifetimes go
• 1:13:36
  through. Yeah, maybe more than once.
• 1:13:38
  Yeah, shout out to Joseph Campbell.
• 1:13:39
  Yeah, absolutely codified the hero's journey.
• 1:13:41
  Absolutely. I wrote a piece of music last
• 1:13:43
  year called Journey. It was 10 pieces all about that
• 1:13:46
  paradigm. I covered the hero's journey and
• 1:13:48
  love conquers fear. Oh goody.
• 1:13:50
  And OK, I can't. Wait, so this is a roundabout
• 1:13:53
  way of saying that, that I started writing a story and it
• 1:13:58
  was, in a sense, a love story to some friends of mine.
• 1:14:01
  So I kind of built them in as characters.
• 1:14:04
  And then my mother had read me The Hobbit when I was a kid, and
• 1:14:06
  I wrote my first chapter or two, and I sent it to her, just
• 1:14:09
  emailed it to her, and she liked it.
• 1:14:13
  And writing is kind of a happy place for me at this point.
• 1:14:16
  I'd written a nonfiction book about how to build a nonprofit
• 1:14:18
  arts organization, and before that a guitar book.
• 1:14:21
  And so I was, so I enjoy writing.
• 1:14:25
  And so I wrote another chapter 2 and sent it to my mom.
• 1:14:28
  And after about the 3rd or 4th shipment of chapters to mom, she
• 1:14:31
  accused me of making it up. She's a practical joker.
• 1:14:35
  And she was basically saying this is pretty good, you know?
• 1:14:38
  Are you? Did you really write this?
• 1:14:39
  And did you thought I was playing a joke right?
• 1:14:41
  You found some old talking archives.
• 1:14:44
  Right, exactly. But in in seriousness, the the
• 1:14:49
  series is, you know, very much an opportunity and fantasy is
• 1:14:55
  great for this. It's an opportunity to look at
• 1:14:58
  things like form in essence, in another, in another lens to say,
• 1:15:03
  to say, OK, how does kindness work in this, in this world?
• 1:15:07
  How does personal self development, spiritual
• 1:15:10
  development work in in lots of fantasy traditions, you have
• 1:15:14
  things like clerics. Well, a cleric is a magical
• 1:15:17
  being and they can do cool stuff, but it's all rooted in
• 1:15:19
  what it's rooted in their connection to faith.
• 1:15:23
  Magic users are interesting and they learn all of the things
• 1:15:27
  that you can put together in components and make spells.
• 1:15:29
  And that's fun. But it's rooted in what it's
• 1:15:31
  rooted in education, curiosity and development of the mind and
• 1:15:35
  understanding of the cosmos, right.
• 1:15:37
  And so, so there are, there are all of these kind of parallels
• 1:15:40
  that are easy to, to work with as you're, as you're writing.
• 1:15:43
  And, and one of my great concerns in the world today has
• 1:15:51
  to do with what appears to me to be unnecessary fracturing.
• 1:15:56
  And so in this particular world of Tinder and Flint, while you
• 1:16:00
  won't meet this individual until the 4th book, there is action
• 1:16:05
  happening in the world that's causing people to fracture.
• 1:16:09
  And, and so I'm playing with, with that.
• 1:16:13
  And it's not about who's right or who's wrong.
• 1:16:16
  It's specifically not about that.
• 1:16:18
  It's specifically about the rift, the space in between the
• 1:16:22
  two poles and energizing that space and, and playing with it
• 1:16:27
  and benefiting from it. And so it's really the energy of
• 1:16:30
  separation itself, which is not unlike Sauron.
• 1:16:33
  And and you know, Sauron, we never really see corporeal in
• 1:16:37
  Lord of the Rings. He's just the eye, but he's bad
• 1:16:40
  and he draws all the people to him and creates these things.
• 1:16:43
  But so it's it's, you know, it's not unlike something along those
• 1:16:47
  lines, but it's certainly it's it's it's own it's it's own
• 1:16:50
  world. So I've been having loads of fun
• 1:16:51
  with it. I even had somebody option it
• 1:16:54
  for a screen adaptation working to develop it as a as an
• 1:16:57
  animated TV series. So while we'll see if anything
• 1:17:00
  happens with that, that would be and I'm having fun fun imagining
• 1:17:04
  that. So for or out and every place
• 1:17:07
  name, this is a fun little little secret.
• 1:17:10
  Every place in the entire series is taken from a street name in
• 1:17:13
  Tarrytown. Oh cool.
• 1:17:15
  So the Rock War is the second book.
• 1:17:19
  Meridian is the third. Terrytown being a pretty famous
• 1:17:22
  Terry and Austin, right? And Dromarian.
• 1:17:25
  And then the new book is called Castle Hill.
• 1:17:27
  Yeah. Oh cool.
• 1:17:28
  I used to love going to Castle Hill Cafe.
• 1:17:30
  Yeah, me too. Yeah.
• 1:17:32
  I've got a lot of great memories with parents, you know, who
• 1:17:35
  unfortunately passed away at all, but they were amazing.
• 1:17:38
  But like going there, I haven't thought about that place for a
• 1:17:42
  long time. I share my love for bringing
• 1:17:46
  people together. I, I think that a lot of
• 1:17:51
  suffering in the world has been through the dogmatic separation
• 1:17:57
  of things, whether it's, you know, political parties or
• 1:18:03
  whether it's science and spirituality or, you know, I
• 1:18:10
  mean, I was having this conversation with, with, with
• 1:18:12
  Chris Bosh and we're talking about it as well over dinner.
• 1:18:17
  That think, think about the unnecessariness of just the fact
• 1:18:24
  that, that the study of consciousness was taboo like 20
• 1:18:31
  years ago. You'd be laughed out of the room
• 1:18:33
  if you were an academic and said, Hey, I want to, I want to,
• 1:18:36
  I want to really study consciousness.
• 1:18:39
  And what are we at all as human beings without consciousness?
• 1:18:44
  That's that is the essence of what makes us most human.
• 1:18:48
  And I think it's, I think there's something very divine
• 1:18:51
  about it. You know, I think it exists in
• 1:18:54
  the, in the quantum realm. These are, you know, the, the
• 1:18:58
  quantum realm part is a theory at least, but I think there's a
• 1:19:02
  connective fabric that binds all things and I explore that in the
• 1:19:05
  lattice. That is what the lattice is.
• 1:19:08
  And people have have seen that either through meditation or
• 1:19:12
  psychedelics or near death experiences.
• 1:19:14
  I mean, there's, there's lots of different ways to, to see that
• 1:19:18
  our actual reality is one that's rooted in connectedness and love
• 1:19:22
  and light, You know, that we're all light energy, you know, in
• 1:19:26
  our, in our core essence. And, you know, we share that,
• 1:19:32
  that love for bringing, you know, tearing the dogma down and
• 1:19:38
  bringing people together. So how do you think about this
• 1:19:42
  moment? Because you know, the, the, the,
• 1:19:45
  the reason I'm doing this is that this really is my soul
• 1:19:51
  song. You know, I, I believe that my
• 1:19:53
  biggest purpose in this lifetime is to help humanity make it to
• 1:19:58
  this age of abundance for all. And I'm certainly not alone.
• 1:20:00
  There's lots and lots of people that, that, that really care
• 1:20:03
  and, and, and are really trying their best, including in, you
• 1:20:07
  know, the AI space, You know, people like demosis of this and
• 1:20:11
  Mustafa Suleiman, you know, Reed Hoffman, Mira Morati, Dr. Fifi
• 1:20:15
  Lee, who have deep intentionality, like really want
• 1:20:18
  us to make it to this age. And humanity's never prioritized
• 1:20:22
  anything more that you know. 2025 marked.
• 1:20:25
  Around $7 trillion of announcements, you know, towards
• 1:20:28
  this advancement of AI and the creation of AGI and you know,
• 1:20:33
  once we, once we accomplish AGI, then we'll accomplish artificial
• 1:20:37
  super intelligence after that. How do you, how do you think
• 1:20:40
  about this moment? Because you know, if, if you, I,
• 1:20:43
  I don't know whether or not you believe in reincarnation.
• 1:20:46
  We haven't discussed that, but I I do.
• 1:20:48
  But it essentially we're we chose to be here during this
• 1:20:53
  moment in, in, in evolution. We chose to Incarnate knowing
• 1:21:00
  that humanity would face this, this fateful choice.
• 1:21:03
  Are we going to allow love to conquer fear or are we going to
• 1:21:07
  continue to play the 0 sum scarcity fear based game that
• 1:21:15
  quite frankly would destroy us with technologies as powerful as
• 1:21:19
  we're we're talking about here? And I'm 95% certain we make it
• 1:21:23
  as I've talked about many times on this on this podcast.
• 1:21:27
  I'm just curious how you see this this moment.
• 1:21:30
  AI is developing things that I don't understand right now.
• 1:21:36
  You know what? I've watched your podcast and
• 1:21:38
  I've listened to people talk about the things that are
• 1:21:40
  happening, and it's sort of all wondrous to me.
• 1:21:44
  I do think that as we make tools that are ever more powerful, we
• 1:21:50
  achieve an age of abundance in form.
• 1:21:56
  We can in many ways, we kind of blended there already, at least
• 1:22:00
  in this nation. And it will continue to become,
• 1:22:04
  you know, the the the things we're able to get, the
• 1:22:07
  information we're able to acquire, the way in which we're
• 1:22:11
  able to to beam an excellent material to a place that before
• 1:22:18
  didn't have access to that excellent material.
• 1:22:21
  All of these things are are increasing at this incredible
• 1:22:25
  rate to me. All right.
• 1:22:28
  And so in a, in a way, at least in my lifetime, I feel as though
• 1:22:33
  the challenge and the opportunity is the same
• 1:22:36
  challenge and opportunity that we have always had, which is in
• 1:22:42
  the territory of, of why practicing awareness and
• 1:22:49
  participating in those things that make us most human.
• 1:22:53
  You're probably familiar with David Hawkins and I've I've.
• 1:22:57
  Recovered How to Surrender to God.
• 1:22:59
  Oh, good. It's one of one of his books.
• 1:23:02
  He's he. He's a lot like Anthony Namello,
• 1:23:05
  where they're both just so joyous and funny.
• 1:23:08
  You know, they're like the George Carlin of spiritual
• 1:23:10
  features. His theory of, of levels of
• 1:23:14
  consciousness has made an enormous impact on me.
• 1:23:19
  And, and just for, for the listener, the the idea is that
• 1:23:26
  there's, there's, there's two big categories.
• 1:23:28
  There's force and there's power. And he has a book called Power.
• 1:23:31
  Versus force. That's I think that's his most
• 1:23:33
  famous book and. Probably, and in the space of
• 1:23:36
  force, one of the great insights.
• 1:23:38
  Is it anything thought or done in a mindset, in a level of
• 1:23:45
  consciousness and force must be yet counterforce that generates
• 1:23:50
  a force against and and and then anything done in power is done
• 1:23:58
  in the support of the significance of life itself.
• 1:24:03
  And so those lower levels of consciousness and force include
• 1:24:07
  things like it begins with shame and moves through grief and
• 1:24:12
  apathy and fear, which we're talking about here.
• 1:24:16
  And fear, I think is in the middle.
• 1:24:17
  You know, it can kind of, we can put, we can pull it all into
• 1:24:20
  fear if we want, But fear, anger and pride, those are all levels
• 1:24:27
  of consciousness that live in a, in a space of, of, of this
• 1:24:33
  oppositional force. And in that space, in essence,
• 1:24:36
  we're doing things to try and get things where we're moving in
• 1:24:40
  the world and force to a try to manipulate or achieve.
• 1:24:44
  And so if we're at the very top of the spectrum, pride, it's
• 1:24:47
  pretty innocuous. But hey, I love my sports team
• 1:24:50
  and I'm proud of our sports team.
• 1:24:52
  And what the counter forces to that is we.
• 1:24:55
  Yeah, but we love our sports team, right.
• 1:24:57
  And there you have the the the duality.
• 1:25:01
  And something in fear is going to accomplish something similar
• 1:25:04
  as well. And so this is really the
• 1:25:05
  instrument of power in the political sense.
• 1:25:10
  And in as we ascended his levels of consciousness models we the
• 1:25:17
  pivot point is is courage. And then above courage.
• 1:25:22
  He I love his first level in in in power.
• 1:25:26
  Power not in the political sense, but power in the in the
• 1:25:29
  sense of supporting the significance of life itself.
• 1:25:31
  It's a space where where you no longer are concerned with
• 1:25:35
  whether or not you get the seat on the airplane or the person
• 1:25:37
  next to you gets the seat on the airplane.
• 1:25:39
  You've you sort of, it's gotten to a point where you realize
• 1:25:42
  there's one seat on the airplane and somebody has to get it
• 1:25:44
  right. And if you don't get this one,
• 1:25:45
  you'll get the next one. And that's the first level in
• 1:25:47
  power. And above that you get to things
• 1:25:49
  like joy and love, right, and enlightenment and places that
• 1:25:53
  most humans don't get to too much.
• 1:25:56
  So anyway, I say all of that to share my response on this, the
• 1:26:02
  path we're on, right? We're on this hockey stick with
• 1:26:04
  AI and, and, and the opportunity for human achievement in a level
• 1:26:09
  we've, you know, you never seen before.
• 1:26:12
  We can do so much, but do we do it in force or do we do it in
• 1:26:18
  power? I think that's the that's the
• 1:26:20
  that's the big question. I think it's the question that
• 1:26:23
  you ask really in this, in this whole whole adventure.
• 1:26:27
  And I feel like that's always been the question.
• 1:26:31
  And I and I understand that with AI and the things you're seeing
• 1:26:36
  that are that are far more insightful than I in, in the
• 1:26:39
  world of technology and, and in global perspective, I think
• 1:26:43
  you're feeling urgency around it.
• 1:26:45
  Oh, me and me and many, many technologists.
• 1:26:48
  I mean, you know, some people they've, they've felt it, I
• 1:26:51
  think through the lens of intense fear.
• 1:26:56
  You know, the, the think about the 37,000 people in April of
• 1:27:01
  2023, you know, just five months after Chachi PT had been
• 1:27:07
  launched, you know, as we're recording this like we're barely
• 1:27:10
  over three years since the launch of Chachi PT and they
• 1:27:13
  signed that moratorium call just like, you know, stop using, you
• 1:27:18
  know, like let's, let's just have a pause on all AI
• 1:27:21
  development for six months until we figure out what's going on
• 1:27:25
  here. And I thought that was
• 1:27:27
  ridiculous, frankly, back then, because, you know, if your tribe
• 1:27:32
  discovers fire, you know, we've talked about fire, then of
• 1:27:37
  course, you know, you're going to share it like there.
• 1:27:40
  It's almost like there is no, it's like too good for humanity
• 1:27:44
  has to have it like to warm, you know, our our caves back then
• 1:27:48
  and cook our food and, you know, advance the species.
• 1:27:53
  And that is how I look at AI. But I do think that God works
• 1:27:58
  through us all, you know, whatever people want to view God
• 1:28:02
  as. And I'm not professing to
• 1:28:05
  understand the, the, the nature of God or, but something created
• 1:28:11
  The Big Bang and LED to, LED to the, the miracle of all of us
• 1:28:15
  being here. And every materialist has to
• 1:28:17
  deal with that. You know, grant me that miracle.
• 1:28:20
  I'll explain everything else to you.
• 1:28:23
  Just the one. And you know that technology is
• 1:28:28
  going to force us to make a very fateful choice.
• 1:28:32
  And you know the lattice, What I explore is that we find out that
• 1:28:38
  species throughout the universe had reached a certain level of
• 1:28:41
  advancement like we're at now, and had to make that same
• 1:28:44
  fateful choice themselves. One of the challenges I always
• 1:28:50
  have to the, the, the people that believe in Uaps and I have
• 1:28:53
  no reason not to believe in them, but never had that
• 1:28:56
  experience. But I don't, you know, it's hard
• 1:28:59
  for me to imagine that all the people are lying about it.
• 1:29:02
  I don't believe that either is OK if they, if they're if
• 1:29:08
  they've ever visited us, that means they've conquered faster
• 1:29:11
  than lightspeed travel or interdimensional travel, meaning
• 1:29:14
  that they would have faster and lightspeed weapons or
• 1:29:16
  interdimensional weapons, if they did not already allow love
• 1:29:22
  to conquer fear because they would have had the ability to
• 1:29:28
  destroy themselves amplified so many times over, even what we
• 1:29:31
  have today with nuclear weapons that they would have had to make
• 1:29:34
  that fateful choice. And so they must be here to help
• 1:29:37
  us in some way or be benevolent in some way.
• 1:29:41
  And you know, I think that this acceleration is so pronounced
• 1:29:47
  that it's going to lead to us making that fateful choice.
• 1:29:49
  The other thing and and and I think you're kind of going there
• 1:29:54
  just to clarify is that I love what you're saying about that.
• 1:30:00
  It will allow us to advance in form understood, but I also
• 1:30:05
  think it's going to allow us to advance in essence.
• 1:30:08
  And the reason why is that, you know, advancements like brain
• 1:30:12
  computer interfaces are going to lead to a place where we're able
• 1:30:17
  to decode what our reality actually is.
• 1:30:20
  You know, you and I believe there is something divine about
• 1:30:24
  consciousness. We're gonna be able to prove
• 1:30:25
  that scientifically. That's that's that's what
• 1:30:28
  happens at the beginning of the lattice.
• 1:30:29
  Wow. And once we prove that science
• 1:30:33
  and spirituality don't have to be dogmatically separated, they
• 1:30:36
  can come back together. There's no, it's, it's
• 1:30:38
  unnecessary suffering to be like it's, it's, you know, my tribe
• 1:30:42
  versus your tribe all over again.
• 1:30:44
  It just doesn't, doesn't even matter.
• 1:30:47
  And you know, the ancient Mystics, what they were talking
• 1:30:50
  about led to thousands of years later, the proof of it in
• 1:30:57
  quantum physics. You know, it made the patriarchs
• 1:31:00
  of the field like Max Pond become very spiritual as a
• 1:31:03
  result. You know, Oppenheimer later on
• 1:31:06
  became very spiritual, you know, quoted from the, the Bhagavad
• 1:31:10
  Gita. So it's, it's, it is team
• 1:31:15
  humanity all the way though. The next, next 10 to 15 years
• 1:31:18
  are gonna be that time where, where I think, A, we're gonna
• 1:31:22
  discover more and more about what our reality actually is,
• 1:31:25
  which is gonna help us unite. But B, we're gonna have to make
• 1:31:28
  that choice to allow love to conquer fear because in a way we
• 1:31:32
  have no choice but to do that. You know, imagine the vast
• 1:31:37
  majority of humanity have an access to artificial super
• 1:31:40
  intelligence. I think they'll use it mostly
• 1:31:45
  for good. Yeah, we're going to have
• 1:31:46
  terrorists that will use it for bad.
• 1:31:48
  But there are so many good actors that will that will fight
• 1:31:52
  that. And I do agree with, with Byron
• 1:31:56
  on episode 11 that you know that most human beings, you know, the
• 1:32:01
  the vast majority of human beings are wired deeply for
• 1:32:04
  good. And that is our, that is our
• 1:32:06
  soul. That is our essence.
• 1:32:08
  That's what I get to see every day for sure.
• 1:32:10
  Yeah, you do. That's what I witness.
• 1:32:12
  You really don't witness beauty. And I mean, it's a bubble, but
• 1:32:15
  it's a big bubble at this point. I see a lot of people from a lot
• 1:32:18
  of places. And.
• 1:32:20
  And I think that one of the laws that is clear to me is that
• 1:32:25
  energy begets energy. And we feel that when we're
• 1:32:31
  feeling lazy and sitting on the couch all day, we just makes us
• 1:32:34
  feel more lazy. You don't, you don't gain energy
• 1:32:37
  from doing that. You gain energy from putting
• 1:32:39
  energy out. And, and the energy of love, the
• 1:32:44
  energy of kindness is, is an attractive and it, and it brings
• 1:32:48
  more people to it that I think of, you know, the practical
• 1:32:51
  person, the foot soldier in me that's, that's out there working
• 1:32:56
  to make change with something so gentle, something so small and
• 1:33:04
  simple and ancient on a day-to-day basis is, is I, I
• 1:33:13
  know that the many links in the chain have to come together to
• 1:33:17
  be, to be strong and. Well, let's let's witness some
• 1:33:21
  beauty right now. Yeah, I would.
• 1:33:24
  Love to witness some beauty right now.
• 1:33:26
  Well, I've been thinking about it for.
• 1:33:27
  This is a first for the love Congress.
• 1:33:29
  Is that. My goodness, this is it, Yeah.
• 1:33:31
  Yeah, me so so the I think the piece I should play partially
• 1:33:39
  cuz it's just one of my all time favorites.
• 1:33:40
  A beautiful piece of music is is from Paraguay and the composer's
• 1:33:47
  name is Augustine Barrios Mangore.
• 1:33:49
  He was a member of the Waranee native peoples and he wrote a
• 1:33:54
  piece called Julia Florida or Julia Florida.
• 1:33:58
  And this is it. I will just say that I feel like
• 1:34:03
  it's like it's a kind of ascension.
• 1:34:06
  And so it's a, it's maybe a prayer.
• 1:34:07
  This is this is a a prayer for humanity to make it.
• 1:38:47
  Wow. Beautiful, beautiful.
• 1:38:50
  I love how he ends that. Just, oh gosh, a little prayer.
• 1:38:54
  I am so thankful for our friendship and.
• 1:38:56
  Thank you for your heart. Me too.
• 1:38:58
  All that you do out there in the world and you know, it takes
• 1:39:02
  takes all of us with team humanity and that's it.
• 1:39:05
  You're you're putting a lot of love and light out there.
• 1:39:08
  And that was an absolutely beautiful moment.
• 1:39:10
  Thank you, thank you, Thank you so much for having you.
• 1:39:12
  Again, so much for being on. Yeah, we'll do everything we
• 1:39:15
  can, Yeah. Really, we really appreciate it.
• 1:39:17
  So thanks again everybody for tuning in to Love Conquers Fear.
• 1:39:21
  What a special, special episode. Stay tuned.
• 1:39:25
  Fully booked. It's it's it's amazing who's
• 1:39:29
  coming on the podcast and really having a hard shift out there.
• 1:39:32
  I'm getting more and more messages every day from people
• 1:39:36
  who have picked up books that have been discussed on this
• 1:39:41
  podcast, have supported initiatives.
• 1:39:43
  Katie Brown has been getting so much love recently for Scorpion
• 1:39:47
  Creek Ranch. You know, shout out to her.
• 1:39:49
  Michael Collins is raising a lot of money for Intuition.
• 1:39:54
  Just a beautiful, beautiful documentary series.
• 1:39:58
  And there's a lot of good stuff happening.
• 1:40:00
  And so those vibrations in the universe, let's keep them
• 1:40:04
  coming. I appreciate, appreciate all of
• 1:40:06
  you and all the love you're sending my way and all the
• 1:40:09
  light. Thank you.