Grimoire, Fuzzy Dust, Out of The Ooze, And The Okay-ness Deficit

This episode wanders through the intriguing world of innovation's 'fuzzy dust' and the our age's 'okay-ness deficit.' It delves into the compelling tale of Master Wilburn Burchette, whose transition from a musician to a psychic unfolds amidst his homemade guitars. As we reflect on "the internet" and it's contentious role in society, discussions pivot to 'out of the ooze' moments of digital withdrawal and the profound 'digital abyss,' prompting a reevaluation of our online habits and their effects on genuine human connections.

You can find a.m. on Instagram and TikTok at @absurdwisdom. We are produced and distributed by DAE Presents, the production arm of DAE (@dae.community on Instagram and online at mydae.org).

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent. While we make every effort to ensure that the information shared is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions, or correction of errors.

You can contact us at daepresents@mydae.org.

Transcript

Ben: 1:44

You know, I, I occasionally collect. Little pebbles come across my path and I put them in my pocket for these conversations because I know, I know you're good for it, basically yeah, I was I was reading an article about Master Wilburn Burchett, which I don't know if that's a name either of you have ever heard.

a.m.: 2:05

I mean, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a dude to hang out and have a, have a, have

Ben: 2:10

a

a.m.: 2:10

stout with, you know.

Ben: 2:11

And he's, he's a relatively, relatively reclusive person. Musician who recorded prolifically in the 70s, you know, like seven albums, something like that, and he built his own guitars and played on his own instruments and his. Music had a overlap with some sense of spirituality and the occult. His albums were titled like guitar, grimoire and music for transcendental meditation. And I wouldn't really recommend it for any kind of meditation. You know, it sounds sort of like water dropping from the inside of a cave overlaid with Horror movie soundtrack, it's it's stimulating. And in any case, he dropped off the face of the earth and became a, a psychic after that and stopped making music

a.m.: 3:14

as one does,

Ben: 3:15

as one does.

a.m.: 3:16

I'm just looking up as you talk a, he died recently and B he, he missed his calling as a Orson Wells impersonator.

Ben: 3:22

Yeah, he, he has the look for sure. And maybe, maybe the volatility. Oh, wow. And someone tracked him down and actually did an interview. He didn't really want to talk about his music for a long time. And he was talking about his years as a, as a psychic medium and all the things that he predicted, he claimed that the predicted the fall of the Soviet union and some other events, and he says, the one thing that he didn't predict was the internet. He never saw it coming and his criticism of the internet. And this is, this is sort of what I wanted to tee up was that it destroys without replacing.

a.m.: 4:00

Interesting.

Ben: 4:01

And my first reaction to that was bullshit. The internet's constantly creating, we're creating new things all the time. It's like water flows into the voids and. But the more I've sat with it, the more I can start seeing where he's coming from in that statement. I'm really curious what your, you know, first, second and third reactions are to that. Cause this is someone who's, I think, fairly thoughtful.

a.m.: 4:28

My first reaction to it is something that, that, that, that sort of been an arc for me. You know, I, I, I spent the first Decade, decade and a half of my career really pushing in again, did innovation work, right? So pushing in on getting this conversation about individual, like our premise was leadership is an art form, right? That it's an act, a unique act of self expression by this person or this group of people at this time in this place, et cetera. And and so really pushing in on, on the, on the kind of, you know, Two things. A, the kind of centrality of individual voice and vision or collective. But this particular, you know, group as a necessity for making, right? Whether that was in, you know, pharmaceutical industry or painting or, you know what I mean? Just this really dig in. And then the second thing was the, the, the necessity to disintermediate. even things that work well, like to, you know, bring Shiva energy to the thing and just fucking blow it up because that's also required for it. And then, you know, so this is going to get to the, and then like in the early two thousands, like professionally, I can pinpoint not that this caused it, but like, like, like if I had to place a flag, it would be a theory. You Otto Scharmer, Betty Sue Flowers, and that crew released this thing, Theory U. And that like the decade following that is this tidal wave of practitioners and self help books and all these things about individual and, you know, individual voice and individual in parallel with the internet and social media and, and, and pushing you, your perspective, your idea, your entrepreneurial adventure, your, your, your, your, your, your, right. And pushing them. Breaks it down. Break down the old, break down, right? And so this, that's the first place I go to when you, when you, when you I'm forgetting his name already. I just couldn't see his face now. That, that face is not going to leave me. It's such a compelling, he's got such a compelling look and energy. What was his name? It's a Master Wilburn Bruchette. Master Wilburn Bruchette. What's, what did, did, did his mother name him master? Or is that something he just gave himself later? Cause I love it. I'm going to go ahead and assume that he, he gave himself that title. Yes. I love it. That's the first place I went to is that I kind of agree that it's the internet and then all the things that spawned is this energy of break it, right? Break ideas, break institutions, break, break, break, break, break, break, break. And then what? entrepreneur, fuzzy dust, go, you know? And so that, that's where I, that's my first reaction. When, when, when I hear, when I hear that I, I, I kind of feel like in, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a, in an important way, it's kind of accurate. It, it's encouraged us to, you know, to break everything because we get access to snippets of reasons why, like there's no thing that in and of itself is perfected, right? And so now with access to more stuff, we see, oh, well this is why this doesn't work and this is why that doesn't work. So that's the first place to go. I'll pause there.

Ben: 7:11

Yeah. And I, I had a thought yesterday, I was in New York and this is the first time that I've really been struck by this and I'm going to try to formulate this thought without it just seeming like, you know, grumpy guy yells at cloud. But it was on the subway.

a.m.: 7:25

That's my corner. Yeah.

Ben: 7:26

I'll let you take that stance. And, and I mean, truly, Some outrageous percentage of people waiting for a train, for the 4 train down from Grand Central, were staring at their phones. On the platform On the train and yeah, I've been to New York a lot over the last five years, even more in the last 10 years. And I'd never really been hit by this before. Maybe there was some critical mass where it flipped over from 70 percent to something that felt overwhelming, but truly no one was interacting. And everybody was in their own individual space, which I get it. It's a survival mechanism in a city, but you're, you're surrounded by humanity. And yet you're stripping every possibility of connecting with anyone, even in the small ways that you can. That are meaningless, you know, the first thing I feel like that got taken away was Used to be able to see what someone was reading on the subway by looking at the cover of their book Yeah, and there's tiny little connections. It's like I've read that. Oh, it looks interesting and then it got switched to Kindles and then switched to phones and Now we kind of have our own worlds that we carry around with us and you know, we're constantly lamenting You Our relationship with phones, but what we did with the internet is we created something so addictive, so all consuming that for me, what I feel like it's actually destroyed is our relationships with, with each other, like healthy, normal human relationships in the sense that we are not leaving ourselves open. We're closing those doors. We're creating a safe space that's isolated. We've kind of, you know, drawn that circle and says, don't, don't cross this, this border. This is the world I've created for myself. It lives in my phone. I'm connected to other humans through the internet, and I'm not open to new experience.

a.m.: 9:25

What's hitting me, Ben, I have not thought of it this way, what's hitting me in what you just said is You know, the, the early language around it and the language still today is digital highway, right? It implies it's a means to getting somewhere, but actually what we've created is destination. It's a place to be not a vehicle to get somewhere.

Ben: 9:39

Yeah. Yeah. It, you know, it suddenly feels like, I don't know when the last time you saw the Pixar film WALL E, but there's a cruise ship. On Wally and everybody has big recliner chairs with a screen and kind of a big gulp, you know And they just they they don't have to Interact with any of the other passengers because they're just going around on their little island And it really bummed me out, man I, I see a market opportunity for get your exercise in all you. But, you know, I, I just, I wonder what the trickle down effects of that are going to be that, that persistent lack of, of connection and who knows whether that's a like pandemic hangover or if it's a combination of technology and, and this little inflection point in culture. But yeah, I, I'm suddenly seeing what the world looks like. 10 years out and it doesn't really follow in a direction that I'm enthusiastic about. But on the flip side, we've now put ourselves in such a, such a confined space with our relationship with, yeah, I'm going to say the internet, but there's devices involved, there's lots of components to it that. I don't know if you've noticed this and I find myself actually feeling this way on occasion. And as how I know, I need to really pull myself back out out of the ooze is you get a little dopamine hit, not from interacting with the technology, but from ignoring it. If there's a time where I feel myself reaching for my cell phone to pull it out and instead I make a conscious choice. To leave it there, to set it down. I actually get a rush, like a physical rush. I can feel it coursing through my body of, Hey, I did a thing. I ignored it. And you feel suddenly liberated or empowered because of that moment where you, you overrode your kind of default connection to this thing. And suddenly you look up and the space around you is a little brighter. You can see the paint in the walls. You can see the light coming through the windows. And it's, that's actually the thing that kind of gives me hope. It feels like the way out, that suddenly we're gonna find more joy in the escape from the addiction than we find in the addiction itself.

a.m.: 12:00

Do think that that's true at scale?

Ben: 12:02

It might require generational change in order to become true. And I don't know if it's going to happen with Gen Z. Yeah, I was, I was talking to a colleague who has a 19 year old and you know, we're, We're both film buffs and for me watching watching a movie is like you want to put everything away. It's an escape It's a time to really focus and become absorbed and he says this 19 year old watches things with his phone as a companion It kind of is with him through the journey of watching a movie Which means that it's actually a shared experience not between him and the film but between him the film the context his phone provides, the information he can look up instantly, the opinions of his friends. And that's a completely different way of consuming that than sitting in a dark theater alone as an escape from, you know, everyday life or just as an immerse, immersive experience. And so I, I have to feel like whatever comes after that generation has that connection to that device is going to be a whiplash.

a.m.: 13:07

Well, it, it, it may be actually I didn't watch it, but I caught the highlights. You saw the keynote OpenAI's

Ben: 13:12

I drove, drove back from New York city last night and had a conversation with it. So

a.m.: 13:17

now, now four, Oh, it may sort of, sort of negate the need to interact with technology and obviously the phone gets, we've already got the humane device and a couple of other devices are like wearable. in essence, right. AI devices. Right. And so if you get a thing down small enough, maybe it's in my watch and you know, and it's all voice engaged that may, sort of negate the desire to be lost in your phone. But are you actually no longer lost in your phone? Right.

Ben: 13:46

Yeah, maybe. I mean, you know, this is going to come across as the peak of irony as someone who's yammering away on a recorded podcast. But one of my ongoing daily goals in life is to just shut the fuck up.

a.m.: 14:00

Yeah.

Ben: 14:01

You know, just stop talking And I, you know, anything that I can encourage is that maybe it's, it has its time and place, but it's not, it's not my primary goal.

a.m.: 14:10

Yep. Yeah. I, I I, I am really finding a certain level of one of the things that's. Current for me is, is, is realization of a certain kind of exhaustion. Both, like it's, it's been literally since my 20s since I've led a, A system whose intention was to grow, right? Because of the need here, like we gotta grow because the need is like, you know, not because there's any desire to grow. Sadly, there's a need to grow. But also because of what I've said, you know, endless times, like I spent my career consciously loving being one of the men behind the curtains, right? Like advisor work, you don't have to. And this is a lot of public speaking, a lot, just more out than this. And Yeah, this is what you're saying is just so present for you said it much more succinctly as his desire to just shut the fuck up to just sit. We were recording with Kyley and Sam a couple episodes ago. And you know, we're, we're talking about this about just, you know, the glory of a, of a Saturday afternoon after the market, I cook a little and then I just sit on the couch. There's no TV. There's no music. Maybe there's a cup of tea. What are you doing? I'm sitting here. Are you planning something? No, I'm sitting here. I'm not meditating. I'm not, I'm just here, making no noise, listening to no noise. Yeah. And so this, this, this wearable AI, whatever winds up being right, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't negate that. It just gives you a more streamlined, seamless object free way to still engage with all the noise.

Ben: 15:32

Yeah. I mean, it has the benefit of doing an endless amount of instantaneous, silent processing, but human beings can't do that. And so what it's encouraging us to do potentially is not actually process our thoughts, but instead speak them instantaneously without sitting with them. And you know, that's that's an important thing to be able to do is to sit with it and listen to it. I guess to tie this notion of attention time into yet another Piece of content. I hate that word content. It's it's like thing, you know, it's like when you Yeah, man I'm gonna i'm brainwashed to use it but a film I watched a movie called Wavelength by director Mike Snow. He's an experimental filmmaker and This was done in 1967 and effectively it's a fixed camera up in the corner of what looks like a large loft apartment in a city somewhere. And you realize it's a slowly zooming in and it is about a 45 minute long movie it starts with a snippet of Strawberry Fields Forever played over a radio It's kind of barely distinguishable and then stops quickly and as it's zooming There's flashes of daytime nighttime yellow blue Kind of edited in a way where you feel there's a human behind it And throughout the course it zooms in slowly and you don't know where it's going You don't know what the focal point is or where the destination is And eventually you go from seeing the interior of the room to the light and the focus slowly changes and you can see out the windows. You can see the buildings across the street. You can see that there's this exteriority to it, but the zoom is relentless, right? It moves forward always at all times. And eventually a kind of high pitched drone starts, and if you're, if you're a don't touch that remote kind of viewer, it becomes loud and irritating and really rattles you. And eventually you realize it's picking a focus of, well, I'm not going to spoil it because, you know, people, listeners can watch. But something In the distance and it really kind of sucks you in and one of the the beauties of Anything that really is trying to play with your attention like this is it completely adjusts your notion of time? You are you become captive to that? To its concept of how the clock ticks forward. You know, there's, there's lots of movies that do this and songs that do this. I mean, art does just does this in general to us. It creates an alternative sense of time and given the pace of modern life. Often, and I think the special ones, are slower. They're not accelerating. They're really hitting the brakes. And this does that in a dramatic way. And if you give it your attention, where you're not pulling out your phone, you're not looking around, you're not taking a bathroom break, you just absorb it for 45 minutes, It creates almost an altered state of consciousness. I mean, really you finish this and you wonder like you have to blink and figure out where you are at the end. And that's, that's really, really special. And what I'd love to see from the internet, the things we create, the things we build, instead of trying to accelerate, to try to play with time. In that same manner to find things that are creating these distortions, that stretch instead of compress. And that's, that's I think, different than saying we all have to slow down. Right, right, right, right, right. I mean, really actually playing with our concept of time and our perception of it.

a.m.: 19:21

Interesting. I, I'm not sure what, what I, what, what I want to add to that. I mean, it's, it's, it's a really interesting notion. I, I, where my, you know. Where my thinking immediately went to is, is the impossibility of what you're saying at scale, right? I think, I think, and, and, you know you and I both live lives, despite the fact that you're working on big global issues I think we both live lives that are like, very localized and not, you know, not, you know, Well, unconcerned, but not in, in, in the sense of apathy, but unconcerned with, you know, the world in the sense of impacting, right?

Ben: 19:53

The world will come and go.

a.m.: 19:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Exactly. Exactly. It's interesting. I, I am we had a great year at DAE and we had Relatively invisible to the world, and even to the most of the students, I think. We had a lot of really big mistakes in hindsight. And one of them was not playing enough. Behind the, you know, the thing because again, there's such an urgency and such a request from, from the world for us to kind of expand that we were trying to figure out how to systematize some things and bring just more, you know, management rigor to the backroom thing. And so, so we need to get into a lot less of that. That's context for what I actually want to say is I've been talking to Kyley a lot about how next year and we've already got some things in play. Really, really, really going back to loosening up and for the kids, again, not in a way that's visible to anybody other than me who's like got, you know, and Kyley who's got like such a long term view on this thing The kinds of experiences and inquiries that you're pointing to around, you know, stretching time, right? Like, like ways to, you know, interventions and, and, and invitations to stretch time. We did so much of that in the early couple of years. And then this past year was so much of it became like a luxury. And I've really been sitting with, with, you know, how do we bring in new experiences and new people. I am increasingly concerned, I'm always concerned about are we doing enough to not just get kids ready for the tech world, and you know, that stuff's great, we're great at it, you know it's what the funders and everybody likes to see in terms of these crazy projects these kids, crazy projects this year, man, really crazy projects that these kids are doing. But you know, that's not my juice. It's not why this place is here. And so I, I, I grow increasingly concerned as the world moves, you know, forward faster and faster and more and more and more about are we keeping up on that side? And I'm really in an inquiry right now for next year. Really concerned about for next year, concerned in a good way about, you know, how do we Offer many more kind of provocations and invitations to the kids outside of the tech curriculum. And, and so I'm just processing what you're saying. I, I, I love the essence of what you're saying. I'm trying to process it in the context of, so how do we, how do we, how do we create invitations for students around, you know, things that have them stretch time? Cause they are so pressured, not from us, but like in life.

Ben: 22:10

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's not easy. It's both the age that they're at and the age that they're living in. You know, if I, if I knew what it looked like, I would have built it by now, but I think that's part of the, part of the joy of it. And it comes back to a term that you use, which is play. You know, you can, we think of play, I think in the sense of frivolousness, like I'm going to play with this thing, like I'm going to futz with it. I'm going to tinker with it, but it's not that play should be a sense of. really active discovery and trying things that are risky. Like play should be risky if plays structured and safe, it's not really play. Right. And if you have, if you have the nervous parents standing over you saying, well, if you don't learn this skill, you're not going to pass an interview or you have to, you know, talk about the order of complexity of a bubble sort. And so you got to learn this. You got to, you know, set that aside. That information is there and is there to everybody. And so the question is for you and your students, like, how do you come out of this experience with something that's unique and that can't be learned elsewhere? That's not part of another trajectory that they're going to intersect with. You can always, you can always turn into that lane. Of knowledge acquisition and skill building in a really structured way like that's that's there Right. So what's outside that you you can't otherwise learn And then how do you create the space? Where you kind of hold court and some people get it and some people don't and as an institution You're okay with the fact that some people aren't going to receive that And that's all right, because you know what, they've got all this other stuff and there's still useful skills being acquired here, but then some people are going to have an experience that they never even knew existed because they discovered that sense of play. They took that risk. Something got on unlocked in them. I had a trip to Nashville recently and I got out and for one evening got to see some music and came home and was watching an interview with a guitarist that I, I got to see. And I was talking about practice and how he became so virtuosic and he said, well, you do it, you just do it. And sometimes it's sort of like these little morsels that come to you and you kind of, you, you. Come to understand the interval at which those morsels are delivered, and you understand that there's gonna be gaps between them. Sometimes you come up dry, you practice for two hours, nothing. Nothing. And then, oh, okay, I got a little bite, and that bite's enough to keep you going. And then, completely by surprise, you get, you get the whole pie, all at once. And you never know when that's going to come down, you don't see it coming, but you, you participate in the activity because you know of the potential of getting that whole pie. And I love the way that he was describing it because he's also doing it with a deep Nashville twang that I can't emulate and won't for, for fear of insulting anyone. But boy, I mean, that, that to me is an experience that I think translates well outside the realm of practicing anything or music. It's just, it's universal.

a.m.: 25:31

Yeah, The word I'd add to the, you know, to to the conversation there is discovery, right? Like what you're pointing to then leads to actual discovery as opposed to getting to the predefined destination or even getting to the, you know, predefined broad territory. I don't know what the destination is, but the territory, right? And even that is not, you know, not, not where the, where the, where the big opportunities are, where the big juice is, where, where human beings can really come alive. It is through the kind of play you're talking about, just, just a discovery, the thing that you could not possibly have predicted, known, et cetera, in advance. You allow it to find you, you know, you don't go looking for it, but you create the conditions in which you allow it to find you. And then all of a sudden you get this download of this whole thing. Holy shit. Look at this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this, this, and, and this has obviously been like a career long thing for me, right? This, this issues of art and play and, and, you know. There is this sort of binary understanding of, of either it's kind of frivolity, it's, it's, you know, this inconsequential thing, it's, you know, the thing you do on the side, or even, even when, you know, people revere it, it's still, you know, Divorced from humanity for me. It's like, Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's that's what you do when you cultivated yourself Or that's what you that's what a civilization does once it achieves economic, right? and all of that like it's To me, it's fun what you're talking about with play the way you talk about play discovery what I would consider art It is central to being human. It is actually one of the things that is absolutely central to be human Economic transactions are not central to being human But, you know, but I think this thing that we call art, that I call art which is not, you know, the out of the artifact, the thing, this thing of play, this thing of, you know but that is actually a big part of our natural state is to discover, you know, and to be discovered in this act of really rigorous engagement with the thing.

Ben: 27:13

I do wonder sometimes if, if calibrating. The amount of these types of experiences in our lives is a little akin to having a balanced diet of actual food. You know, every once in a while I'll go a long period and I realize, I'm probably just terribly iron deficient right now. Yeah. And you don't really realize it until it's a problem. And you can kind of, you know, recalibrate if you're paying attention. But sometimes you just go like, why don't I feel like shit? I'm tired all the time, you know, and suddenly go, I'm like lacking this really essential vitamin and, and there's definitely this balance to experience where if you approach everything in a structured way with no play, with no discovery, You're nutrient deficient and you know, you're probably acting in ways that are not ideal for you, the people around you. Suddenly you get that nutrient and everything, everything slots in. It feels clearer and brighter. And if it is, you're really, it's, I mean, there's no test for that, right? How do you, how do you wake up and go, Oh, I need like 10 percent more play today. If you're even looking at it like that, it's probably the wrong way to hold it. So,

a.m.: 28:24

yeah. It's actually worse than, than, than the way you framed it Ben, because we're going back to the, the, the master's observation about the internet just breaking things and, and not replacing them. If you find yourself in a society that's constantly feeding you, Things to consume that iron deficiency before you can even get to discovery of it. You're going to have an understanding of symptoms. I'm tired. I'm groggy. Cool. Coffee, sugar. This hack, that hack, this right. And I'm never even going to discover what the actual deficiency is. I'm going to do a variety of things to treat the symptoms that have me feel like, yeah, I fixed it. Right. Because I'm just being bombarded with, and then in, you know, An hour, a week, a month, a year, when that thing no longer works because my body's adjusted and now I'm even in a more iron depleted state and I feel even worse, it's okay. The internet's going to bring me a thousand new miracle sort of remedies for my symptoms, right? So it's even worse. It's even worse than, than the kind of lack of plain discovery. There's a an emphasis on what are the symptoms of, and then what can you do about those symptoms? I

Ben: 29:29

have to believe in the purity of the medium, though. You know, I think it's, it comes to our use of it, and the way that we've defined it, and the systems that we've built that make it easier to go in a certain direction than another one. But the idea of the internet isn't something that I would rail against in a vacuum. Obviously, I've dedicated my life to trying to find, you know, meaningful ways to affect society and affect change through that. And I, I don't think I've nailed it or even really gotten close yet. But if I didn't think that there was promise in the medium. I wouldn't even be doing it And so that's, that's kind of the question is like, how do you take this, this thing, this river and, and say like, well, you know, we built boats, but I'm not really sure that boats are kind of the right way to, to interact with this. Maybe we should just be waiting in it. And, and what does that actually look like now? That's really, there may be a sense of necessary destruction. Where you actually don't blame the internet for destroying more than it creates, but you say, you know what, actually, we need to destroy a lot of the systems we've built that, you know, created this scaffolding we're now standing on and get back to just standing in the damn water, get our feet wet for a little bit and then figure out where to go next and without the hubris of assuming that, well, this time we're going to get it right. Like maybe you bake in the idea of. Every once in a while we need to recalibrate this thing.

a.m.: 30:59

Well to to extend your your metaphor into perhaps a silly place but to you know Bring it back to my curve ongoing theme

Ben: 31:06

silly is not allowed here. We don't do silly

a.m.: 31:08

Perhaps what's needed is an acknowledgement that We have gotten to a place collectively to be affluent enough to give everybody their own pair of damn waders So they don't have to worry about getting wet And now we can let them all go play around in the water and some of them may in fact wind up with boats and some may not and some right, but it is again for me, the central sort of blindness in, in, in, in the world is we made it like we made it, you know, 200, 000 years we fucking made it. Nobody knows what to do with themselves, you know after making it. You know and and collectively we made it and we're just not we're just like dysfunctional because we're still we're we're We're playing a game that was critical When there wasn't enough There's enough now. We know how to have enough. We don't know what the fuck to do with ourselves to me That is essential if we could figure that one out Everything else falls into place.

Ben: 31:57

Oh, there's certainly enough. We might we may still have a distribution problem. Yeah Fair to go, right?

a.m.: 32:02

That's my point. We haven't acknowledged that Yeah. And so we still keep hoarding and we still keep, you know, ussing othering all that. I only worry about other and the danger of other when I think I'm unsafe. When I'm, you know, kind of whispered in my ear that, that what I have is going to go away and what I like as opposed to, and, and, and that I becomes even worse when what's whispered in my other ear is, yeah, but what if you had two cars? Yeah, but what if you had a. Electric Tesla, pickup truck, and what if you can go to Tahiti and what, right? And so I get these two voices whispering in my ear constantly, and then it keeps us in a, in a, in a, you know, pre industrial state psychologically around fear for survival, as opposed to whispering on the ears, dude, we made it. We just got to get everybody waders and we know how to do that. And then whispering my other ear around, you don't need seven pair of waders. What you need is to like feel the grass under your feet. What you need is to spend time working on that relationship with your son. What you need, like these are the things you need. Not, you know, the pickup truck or the whatever, right? To me that, that, I mean, maybe it's idealistic, maybe it's whatever, but that to me is the central ill of, of, of the era that I got to live in, which is that, was that, you know, collectively we have enough and nobody realizes it, and so we're all still kind of clawing at things, and some are better than others at clawing. And some have amounted, have amassed so much, it makes it easier for them to claw more. And it just feels like a, such a silly game. It's, it's, it's like playing Monopoly and the game is over and people are still grabbing at, at, at, at greenhouses. They're like, dude, the game's, what are you, you know? Let's, let's, let's have cake now. How do you know what I mean?

Ben: 33:45

I guess the question, the following question, I don't really know if this is a genuine concern or just a hypothetical, but either way I'll oppose it is once you have enough and you say, all right, well, we're going to, we're going to now divide this up a thousand ways. How do you avoid being, you know, I guess I, I think of the song, right? Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of tiki tac. It's how do you prevent that cookie cutter approach of everyone having enough where enough is defined as the same. That's that's an interesting inflection. I think

a.m.: 34:16

yeah, so for me the enough thing isn't about a sort of quantified Like okay, everyone's going to get 1. 2, you know cars on every whatever, you know This amount of salary that and it's up. This is psychological enough, right? The work is on psychological sense of enough Yeah, and then I've consistently found that healthy people like people who are content with themselves like legitimately comfortable in their skin. They might have a, you know, like predisposition for really appreciating wine and they're going to spend the money on the wine, but they're not going to go chasing 17 other things that they have no connection to, but that somehow is just filling a hole. They're going to find the thing that's actually natural expression for them. And yeah, they may well accumulate more of that thing than anything else. But they're not going to be in this blind sort of just chase, right? That's more for me. What I'm pointing to around enough, the individual sense of it's cool. I I'm okay. When I tell the kids day one here, I'm oh, you're okay. That's what I'm talking about. We're not enough. No, absolutely. It won't work. 90 hours building an app. Go for it, man. That's great. But come from a place of, I'm already okay. That's the yield that I'm pointing to. Nobody feels like they're okay. Nobody feels comfortable in their skin. Other than those who are playing the just as bad game of I'm okay. You know,

Ben: 35:33

I've learned firsthand you can't, you can't build your way to, okay. You can't code your way to okay. You can't, you can't do it through credentials or, you know, it's just, it's not going to happen. That's an endless chase, right?

a.m.: 35:47

But that's the society. Yeah. That's what we tell kids to tell adults. Okay. You have to degree your way to okay, you have to job your way to okay, you have to house your way to okay, you have to prestige your way to okay, you have to, it's all these things, right? And that's exactly what I'm telling you. If you can have folks be okay, then they're not chasing for the sake of chasing. And again, if you may well have a legitimate, whether it's biological, whatever it is. Passion for some, you know, expensive thing that you're actually going to engage with the, you know, the master and his, I'm going to keep just calling him the master. Like I would imagine he probably spent a lot of money on those guitars and the equipment and all that. Right. But that's like in the path of what his expression is. Great. He doesn't have to have the same amount as everyone else. Right. That cookie cutter kind of thing. It's just authentic.

Ben: 36:31

Is that the the grading system at DAE every day? You say, are you okay?

a.m.: 36:35

Every day when they come in and, and again, we, we, so we talked to faculty about this because it could get rote, but there's a huddle and in the huddle is who wants to check in who, and the graduates are kind of, who are you today? And then it's blockers who's experiencing blockers. I didn't get enough sleep last night. I did like all the ways, like just to get out there that this is just who I am today. And then the kind of thing in the culture is cool. That's okay. All right. So every single day starts with that. And sometimes you can just get mechanical and we got to then bring faculty back together and say, Hey, okay, folks, this, we just did a checklist of, of, of huddle. No good. What's going on? And usually it's an indicator of what we do for ourselves. Right. But we sort of fall into, and this is part of what happened this year. There'll be a pick. Anybody else is we got a little too mechanical and stuff, some stuff like this for, for a handful of reasons ultimately all my responsibility because I'm responsible for the place. But we got to mechanical and to whatever, but, but yes, that is how we start the days.

Ben: 37:38

I mean, that, that's getting to something, I think pretty interesting, which is the idea of. Bringing your whole self to something that you're engaged in and letting you can take that and Attach that to anything but in particular in professional environments. I think for a long time it was seen as keeping a professional distance was the thing you were supposed to do, right? That was responsible saying don't don't get to know your employees too Well, cuz one day you might have to fire them. Well, I I think it's started to turn over and maybe I just feel this way because this is how I feel and I think it encourages the people around me to do the same is you bring your whole self to whatever you're doing because I don't want to leave who I am at the door for Six seven eight ten hours a day It doesn't make sense to live without yourself for that long And if you bring your whole self other people can acknowledge it and suddenly there's context to it for all sorts of behaviors, thoughts, goals, you know, it just makes more sense. Otherwise, you're just like, you're talking to this weird, like stripped facsimile of a person that has, you have no idea what's actually going on in their lives.

a.m.: 38:46

And, and the, and the paradoxical then balance becomes like with the kids, right? I'll just use cool. That's who you are today. And. This shit's got to get done on your project because you said this is what the next stage is, right? And so now it becomes not like, Oh, okay, you've had this happen. So let's just, you know, we're going to eat Cheetos and lay on the couch. It becomes in the context of who you are today. What's the best way to approach this, right? And it may be slowing down progress and picking it up later, but, but it's not just ignore it. If that becomes the dynamic thing around the education process is cool. So who you are today working on this project, what gets done on the project, as opposed to the project is what it is and who I am doesn't matter, right? The kids, the reason we do it every day is it's not that cool. You're okay today. We never have to check in again. Every single day. fucking day, you are somebody different. And in the workplace, we don't have the the usual sort of excuses for it are reasons, rationales, really intelligent rationales. We don't have the resources and the capabilities to do this kind of practice every day at scale. We open ourselves up to legal liabilities if we ask too many personal questions about people in the world with all this nonsense, right. That is in part real, but it's not, you know, organization suffers from the same enoughness, blindness as a society and individuals as a whole do. Like we don't have enough time. We don't have enough resources. Of course you do. In fact, to go back to your thing you raised previously, if you engage in certain regular practices, you'll make time. You'll actually stretch time if you shift the way you engage with human beings in the workplace. Right? kind of notion of practices, because everything you were speaking about previously to me is, is about having long term practices that then yield these, you know, the discovery that yield, you know, all, all of these things we seem to be looking for. But there's no sort of habitual way to get there. You know, habit and practice are very, very separate. I'm not sure how I got on this thread from what you said, but, but, but, but I'm, I'm way down it