Snowball Psychology
A snowball is a life project that starts with a snowflake of intention and picks up energy and mass to become a snowball of vitality, authenticity, and yes real world success. Hosted by Steven Bradshaw, Psychotherapist, Executive Coach and Founder of Beyond Psychology Center--beyondpsychologycenter.com, LMFT #136584
Snowball Psychology
#6 Josh Horsley Interviews Me--The Passport to Space, Software Update for Humanity, Piercing the Great Filter, The Role of Human Excellence, Thinkism, I Feel Therefore I am, Build the House You Want to Live In, Scenius, Story Follows State
I am interviewed by friend and podcaster Joshua Horsley, who runs Testpiece Climbing. We talk about about my work as a somatic therapist and how it applies to the rise of technology in our current moment. We go deeply into the foundation of embodiment that is required to harness great technological forces.
You can find Josh's climbing podcast, Testpiece Climbing on:
Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@testpiece) and
Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/2myCxsYLarUS8oTetheNBu)
I don't think humans will make it through the great filter unless we, invoke that kind of excellence. The more people that are excelling, the better we feel about the human race and the more good things start to happen. And for everyone involved in the project, I'm hoping that together we form a loose confederacy of people doing rad things.
I'm Stephen Bradshaw, and this is Snowball Psychology. Josh Horsley is a close friend and you'll hear from Josh that we met rock climbing about a decade ago and we've each gone through several iterations of identity over that period. He has a climbing podcast called test piece that has been snowballing for a couple of years. He's just generally a good thinker. You'll hear that Josh is interviewing me for one of his longer range podcast projects. We're both interested in a lot of the topics around how to live in the face of rapid technological change. And what that means for us, how we'll need to update. Enjoy.
Josh:Steven P Bradshaw. How's it going, man? Welcome to the podcast.
Steven 2.0:Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
Josh:Yeah. Yeah. This this conversation I was going to say it's a long time coming, but really we have conversations all the time about all these things. So I guess it's just a normal one. Just to give a little background, in the context Steve, I've known you for at least a decade. We met through climbing. And when I say climbing and that we're both climbers, most people might just think climbing is a little thing we do, but we definitely went in very deep. And I think when we first met each other, we were somewhat fresh out of the corporate world where we had both done a stint in finance out of college. You were full on. In the wild, what we call dirt bagging definitely just embracing the climbing lifestyle. And so because of that and I was as well but we bumped into each other all over the world, Spain, Bishop, California Seattle. And I think what kept us together. Over all these years is that we just had a shared interest, a shared love of well, there was finance to start, which, even though we both abandon it, I'd say we still appreciate it. And just philosophy psychology. We're both voracious readers and. We stayed in touch and over the years, it came as no surprise that you headed towards psychology and actually ended up as a therapist. And yeah, I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I saw all these acronyms after your name and therapy or psychology is a very broad topic. But before we get into our our deep conversation, can you just give me a hint as to, what's your specialty in therapy? What, what's what did you study in that broad field that, that brought you to where you are today?
Steven 2.0:And I also just want to respond to your first point there of how we met. And I think we share, I think we share a growth mindedness. I think that's maybe what we both are willing to be updated by the other. And so our conversations have always been interesting and have evolved and grown. And that's, that's fed me and that's brought me back and back.
Josh:Yeah, this openness to the changes that the world confronts us with both as a world and the people that you meet is, I think I like that growth mindset idea. You've definitely. Shape my views because you are willing to to confront my views and to disagree. And, uh, that really is rare. I feel like in today's society where people just either tow the party line or aren't disagreeable enough to say, Hey, you're full of shit. Are you? And here's why. And yeah, no, I just wanted to echo that back to you, but yeah, I'll let you continue on.
Steven 2.0:In terms of the letters, the way that I work is somatic experiencing, and I'm a somatic experiencing practitioner, which is a three year intensive training, focused on the body and surfacing information from your body into your awareness to update your way of being, to update your thinking, to, and to widen your ability to use the nervous system. So that more of you is online and your thinking becomes of a higher quality. Your thinking is not separated from feeling that you're thinking and feeling start to work together. and then the other, specialties you might've seen the letters, LMFT is a licensed marriage and family therapist. It's in California, the kind of main way that people get licensed to be a psychotherapist. And then I'm also a certified group psychotherapist and I've always been interested in groups and collective fields because I don't think we can do anything meaningful alone. Like I'm ready. I'm interested in cooperative models.
Josh:The seniors. I love that a little idea that you've seeded me with over the years, this idea that the lone genius is Maybe a Hollywood trope or a made up thing where really greatness comes out of a collective. So somatic. This idea of your body and the feelings you get and how that's connected to your Consciousness or your experience in the world, your, your intelligence. I think it's interesting because, so we met climbing, which is a very, it's a very physical sport and we could talk about how it's mentally challenging as well, but let's face it, like there's a deep physical component. But then when we would chat, we're talking about, Deep philosophical things, I'd say a theme for us is to go right to the meat of it, right? It's not oh, did you see that baseball game and kind of dance around the issue? It's, and which is no big surprise that you went to being a therapist and I'm a podcaster that just the idea of being able to jump right into it. And so this connection of the brain and body and doing away with that duality that is often associated with. That discussion, I just think it's a really interesting practice and something I just want to emphasize through working with you also is that you just, you can't really separate the 2 and you're not quite as you're not as smart as you think you are. If your body is disconnected and, I just want to maybe hear a touch more about why you brought the, why you were so attracted to somatic experiences and bringing them into your practice and just maybe help me understand what I'm missing when I describe somatic psychology.
Steven 2.0:One field and I think you have an interest in talking about this later is psychedelics and for a lot of people, psychedelics have surfaced information, that was outside of their consciousness, usually embodied forms of knowing and embodied knowledge and those experiences that people have can be extremely transformational. One night can change the course of someone's life in substantial ways. People leave relationships, people figure out, what their real purpose is. People involved in that kind of work start to eat healthier. Their relationships shift in, in ways that are helpful for them. So that's a kind of condensed or accelerated form of somatic work. But I think that type of work, it's very hard on the body. delivers a kind of peak experience, that itself, it's not addictive in the conventional sense of other types of drugs, but one can definitely go around the inside wheel where you're addicted to epiphany or, in a process of, searching that doesn't, ground and integrate into life. And your regular life stays somewhat distant from your experiences in the journey, realm, or the same can be said for retreats or kind of places where peak experiences happen. And so for me, somatic work is landing all of that. And somatic people often also guide in the psychedelic work, and there's a lot of overlap. Somatic work is very experience near. It's deepening your experience of the moment. Yeah. Like right now, one can either be a floating head consciousness where you're completely caught up in the, the dialogue that we're having, or we can drop in and widen, our experience of ourselves and suddenly the whole nervous system is included. And we have a sense of, okay, there are my legs, there are my arms, there's the core. We have a sense of the, what's called the tone or the quality of the nervous system. How much of it is online? Is it agitated? Is it calm? And then as we do that it actually starts to shift what we talk about. There's an adage in somatic work called story follows state. The stories that we hold to be true follow the state of our nervous system. So if you're in an anxious place stories of despair and catastrophizing are going to seem true to you. And it's very hard to think your way out of that. But if you can shift your nervous system and often it can be as simple as taking a walk, doing some deep breathing, meditating, doing some exercise, you talk about the quiet voice, which I like a lot, often a different story starts to come in of hope of optimism of growth. And just in changing the nervous system, something was made possible. So I'm, yeah, I'm interested in helping to update all of us, including myself. And I think the main update we need is more embodiment. I think that's the ailment of the West. It's no coincidence that psychedelics have become a thing right now we are more alienated and disconnected from our bodies than, maybe at any time in history. And so I think that, the drug matches the ailment.
Josh:Yeah, as you're saying that I'm checking in on myself. I'm like, okay, I, so I like. Podcasting standing up. In fact I just in general, like having anything, we're over zoom or, Riverside, wherever you want to call it. And I like the standing up feeling versus the sitting down. I feel like it I start hunching over and leaning forward and that's not really me. I like, standing up and saying, come hello world. Uh, And it made me think of a study that I remember reading where people had literally bigger ideas. When they were in a giant cathedral or, when, if the, if your ceiling is 30 feet tall, it's better to brainstorm in a place like that versus your garage or your basement. So you touched on psychedelics and I find them absolutely fascinating. And yeah, actually before I move on, I want to share a little thing that I remember. Hearing about psychedelics that blew my mind, and it was this study where they had, I think they had, they took physicists or mathematicians. We'll just say hardcore scientists who had a problem that I want to say. They almost deemed intractable. It's been 5 years. They're working on it and they gave them I'll say LSD, a psychedelic and had them work on that problem. And very large percentage of them had some kind of significant breakthrough. And I actually think that the really key there is to mention that they had a significant problem that they were, that they had worked on and we're trying to make a breakthrough on. So it wasn't like they just Took some drugs and walked out into a meadow and had amazing epiphanies. It was that they were focusing on something and it blew my mind to think that here's something that people that a person had worked on for a decade and they were stuck and taking some exogenous thing had them have a breakthrough. I think We still don't know everything to know about psychedelics. It's an understatement, but it's just mind blowing to think that you could take something that is so mind blowing that you advance your ability to understand the world in a significant way. So quickly and easily, one afternoon instead of, a decade or decades.
Steven 2.0:Yeah. So that study it's James Fadiman study. I think there were 50 scientists and I think they'd been stuck on their problem for two months. It had to be central to their work and something that they really couldn't solve. And yet virtually all of them, you know, reported major breakthroughs. The patents were filed. Some of them were architects and real buildings were built based on the designs they came up with. And yeah, it was pretty incontrovertible that it did actually facilitate breakthroughs. And I think your point is so valid that these were very disciplined and Determined people, the people that had possibly the most to gain from psychedelics, probably quite intellectualized and academic as well. Something we talk about a lot is the action reflection loop. I think that's a very important concept that we can't just reflect and, endlessly think, thinking, never tells you when to stop. And we can just endlessly elaborate. We need a feedback loop. They'd been acting in the world. They'd been doing studies, doing research and had hit a wall. So that was the time to reflect and to go inward. And then new information came, new connections were made. And the last thing I just want to say there The drug is not giving you something that's not already part of you. I think that it's taking offline parts of yourself that block and govern and limit your consciousness. So it's giving you more access to other aspects that you don't allow in regular consciousness.
Josh:I like that. I really liked that. I think that takes a little bit of the mystical away from it and gives the power back to us and recognizes that. It's maybe a nice tool, but there's no there's no hidden special thing in those substances. It's just a tool. So I think that is a great segue into our main topic which is this term Accelerating consciousness, and I remember when you said this to me accelerating consciousness, and it just got me there. There's something catchy about this idea. I think it just really gets me. I really want to unpack it and understand what you mean by accelerating consciousness, and I want to better understand what you mean by accelerating consciousness maybe things that you've done that you feel like in the past has quote unquote, accelerate your consciousness. Actually, before we get into those exact tips or things that you've done what does that term mean to you? What do you mean when you say accelerate your consciousness?
Steven 2.0:Sure. I think there's so many ways to think about it. Not all forms of acceleration are good. And, mostly acceleration is a way of disconnecting and, going at a pace that's not sustainable and effectively racing to the brink, climate change All for, all kinds of things in our culture are not necessarily going to produce the kind of progress that we want and civilizations do collapse. There've been many civilizations the Easter Islanders, were they accelerating consciousness as they chopped the last tree down?
Josh:Wait tell that story, Steve, cause I literally have in my notes as I forgot it was Easter Island, but that's a favorite little, Parable, real life parable, something like that. Can you just talk it through again?
Steven 2.0:Yeah. So it's in Jared diamond's book collapse which chronicles civilizations that have collapsed. And, basically they there was a tragedy of the commons. They were on a small Island with limited resources and they, there was no central governing body to protect the trees. So they. basically just decimated the island of its natural resources. And then there was, no further expansion was possible. They were done. And the, the whole civilization collapsed. Everyone died. That is my understanding. I'm sure that's oversimplified. That's certainly we know that's possible. That, 99 percent of species have gone extinct in the history of, planet earth. So extinction is not uncommon in natural terms.
Josh:Yeah. And so this is just interesting for us because. I always have this, almost this kind of optimistic look into the future, right? I'm always excited for what is to come. I always think that we're up and up and up. And, there, there's always been this, I want to say tension, but this is what I love about talking to you is this kind of. Hey, Josh, I like, yeah, I'm excited about the new iPhone too, but things don't always work out like you hope they will. We have to be careful. We're building things that I like your quote. I'm going to butcher it, but this technological giants, but moral midgets. Yeah, I don't know who said that. I know you use all the time, so hopefully you can remember who, who said that.
Steven 2.0:Yeah. Carl Jung said that.
Josh:Oh, okay. Yeah, I've heard that guy. And so I think why I was taken by that idea of accelerating consciousness is because I think it's somehow I realized that's actually what I'm trying to do right here with my project is I do think that technology progresses and it progresses at an increasingly accelerating rate, and it has a lot of promise. And in general, my question is always, how do we keep up? What's the meta skill to make sure that we are on that ramp of progress and can't honestly can take advantage of it? What really hit home for me was that is the way to handle technology that we need to, keep up with it. And I don't want to put words in your mouth because I know we're gonna, see it differently, but. For me, it got me really excited because I had more thought about, this like cautionary tale to govern technology rather than say, how can we keep up or how can we be technological giants and moral giants.
Steven 2.0:Yes and yeah, I agree with you that we are called upon more than ever to evolve our consciousness right now, and that if we don't we will not be able to handle the God like powers that we clearly have. And we clearly are developing and is it possible, Fermi's paradox, the great filter, why don't we see other signs of intelligent life, perhaps, there are things that are hard to progress beyond to create a form of governance where you cooperate and you can progress outwardly rather than getting locked in conflict. I do think acceleration of consciousness is possible. I think there's nonlinear acceleration, but what really matters is the direction and where the information is coming from. And in my own life, when I was part of investment banking and private equity basically accelerating and, working hard and playing hard and, trying to rock climb as hard as I could and accelerating, up the grades to, achieve, something that I could be proud of Accelerating didn't necessarily mean just doing all those things I was doing harder and faster. Accelerating actually first involved a kind of deepening to the broader system, a perspective beyond my egoic, framework at the time. And tuning into my intuition figuring out what I was ready after, what really mattered to me. And then reforming around that. And then as I started to do that all kinds of tailwinds kicked in because I was systemically operating from the right place. I was I was providing more value to the people around me. I was just, it just made more sense in many different ways than the, the previous projects were vanity projects, or it just weren't, they weren't my deepest calling. And yeah, I think accelerating means firstly figuring out where you're going and then in terms of where the information comes from that aspect, I think there's, we actually need to go quiet. The quiet voice that you talk about, we actually need to get this information from our system. It's not something we can linearly map out and consciously develop. There is an updating that happens from the broader nervous system that we can tune into and receive, but we can't necessarily map. And that's why it's non linear. One conversation can change your life. There's always the question, how long does therapy take? And for some clients, they've been doing a lot to potentiate something and the fruit is really ripe and, it's there to be picked almost immediately. And there's a tipping point that can happen with consciousness where something's been working underground that can now come to the surface. And then in other cases that fruit is not ripe to be picked and the tree needs to be grown first, or the, the soil needs to be fertilized. So I think the non linearity is important. But if you do the right work and you're tuning in to the systemic information that comes to you via your broader nervous system, you start to get onto that curve. That does have a nonlinear component to it. And what you are bringing forward starts to resonate with other people because your body is picking up what everyone's body is picking up. And so something nonlinear starts to happen. And I think that's how movements start and that, things that really changed the world happen in this kind of way.
Josh:Gosh the non linearity part of it is what really gets me. I think that. It hit me when I thought about we, we are not just smart monkeys like we are, but we're more than that were there. I would say we still came out of monkeys and, there, there is a very close connection, but there is clearly leaps that have happened that are. Not linear. It doesn't happen. There is some tipping point. And I also want to point out that something that I've always really respected and talking to you about is you are very pragmatic. you talked about how I have this idea of my quiet voice and maybe I've just finally started to tune into it where. Everything that tells me like go. And then there's a quiet voice that has some little message. That's really easy to override. But I just think it's important to, to point out that I know you, or I, yeah, I know you as someone who is very pragmatic focused, you know, I'm actually one who likes to, you know, Yeah. I mean, I have a philosophy degree. I get stuck in that think ism that maybe Kevin Kelly talks about where I like to see if I can think my way out of problems. Despite my love for all things sports and physical. And so I just wanted to emphasize that idea that you hold this forward as a pragmatic approach to accelerating consciousness. And that in order to do something nonlinear and in order to have a step function change in our consciousness, that the, that shouldn't be, finally being promoted to partner at your law firm. You that path that you're, that many of us are on probably isn't going to be. The step function change that we're looking forward to truly evolve to the next level. And I think you already answered this, hidden in all this is this idea of can people change, right? How fixed are we? And even when we say accelerating consciousness, what did change from monkeys to humans? And. How stuck are we and what's your feeling when you say there's a non linearity or non linear potential and change, like how far can we go or is the sky the limit?
Steven 2.0:Yeah. And I want to come back to think ism as well that you started talking about and that you noted in yourself. And I would say I, I've observed that shifting in you as we've spoken over the years. Yeah. And it highlights something important, which is that the specifics matter for each person and that as we update ourselves for our blind spots that updates culture and as we start to do it, it makes it easier for other people to do. We can think about your thinkism as a protective strategy that can tend toward too abstract and so your Acceleration isn't necessarily thinking more in more detailed ways. It's unwinding the parts of your thinking that are out of date and are old protective strategies. And in that update, you'll start to receive more from your environment. Protective strategies. They keep us safe, but they also keep us blocked from information. So we're running our usual defense game instead of noticing what's available in the environment and developing in the kind of most efficient way into our environment. And so the update is, yeah, for each person, they need to figure out what are my protective strategies? What are my ways that I hold myself back that are A vestige of my childhood of the cultural imprint I received, and then that's the major update. We all need a software update that corrects for our childhood. That's basically what therapy is. And that software update is a order of magnitude change once you make it. That, your protectors people don't like protectors and others generally we don't like people pleasers and overly obsessive perfectionists or excessively reactive types that, get into fights easily. All of these things basically block us from intimacy, connection and information in the environment. There is a project where everyone does that and suddenly there's a kind of unlock that happens collectively. Carl Jung said the individual is a rare achievement. Most people are not individuated. Most people are still operating on the scripts that they were given. They still need to run this update. When you look around, I do think that there's a massive amount of untapped potential and that's why there's a hope. That's why there's a case for optimism, even though. we have destroyed 82 percent of the biomass of wild mammals in the last century. We're absolutely devastating our nest. But there's the potential that we're waking up to. And I think there's a huge birth of consciousness happening in this age. And we've, may just have enough power, enough tools to run that software update in time. And so I think that's what the exhilaration is about catching up to our technological prowess.
Josh:So I love that. I love that. There's so much, low hanging fruit, really like in some ways, it seems like there's so many of us who are on a treadmill. I really agree with you that the individual is rare and it just blows my mind. How many times I just hear people. I say, I call it towing the party line or regurgitating the the headlines that you read in the paper okay, let's say we all reach our potential or I shouldn't say reach our potential. Let's say we all unblock ourselves and allow our ourselves to be present, be thinking clearly. When you think about what kind of world that becomes when we are no longer held back by protectors, what does that really look like practically? And how does that help us go into the future or address the problems that we've created at this point?
Steven 2.0:I think, to pick one thing the passport to space, maybe not destroying your home planet. For instance the level of our gamesmanship as a species might go up the level of our play, the level of our authentic engagement can, expand and we can spend more time in flow states. I do think play is central versus work. I think as technology does more and more of our work, we absolutely need to figure out how to play. Otherwise basically we'll just drive ourselves into the ground inventing forms of work and just never, ever harvesting the dividends of technology. There are utopia models where people continue to develop and there's creative expansion that happens even when the basic needs are taken care of. I don't think that it's necessary for us to have utilitarian work To create meaning, I think we can get meaning from creative expansion from expression. Like this podcast project of yours, I think is closer to the frontier of what a good job looks like these days. Versus something where you're doing a repetitive task all the time. Part of the unlock is that we can all enter into more and more of a flow state more of the time.
Josh:I want to be one of those people that gets a passport to space. What would you say for a lay person or someone tuning in to actually have a practical tip How does one start getting on this exponential curve?
Steven 2.0:Yeah. And I'm glad you bring it down to earth because I think we can get Into the stratosphere in an ungrounded way where the home planet is destroyed, we basically outgrow ourselves and the way that we don't do that is grounding firstly into the body and the body is the vessel that houses our consciousness. How we look after the body already matters. And so that's probably where to start, making sure that you're, you're doing the right things for your energy, that you're connected with other people and there's a lot of privilege to this, making sure that you're in a kind of safe, constructed life. Your environment matters. The more you can do to create your own mental health and your own physical health. That's the foundation Um, And then secondly containers, we haven't spoken about containers yet, but, that was probably one of my greatest epiphanies. Personally, we haven't talked about it yet, but I traveled for five years rock climbing. I think that's when we met actually midway through my travel. I was reading a lot and I was on this kind of fixation about increasing my climbing grade. And then that morphed into being an artist. I thought, you can't live as a climber, but, people want art. They didn't need me to climb a mountain, but surely they'll buy art. And then, As I went down that rabbit hole, I discovered yowza it's incredibly difficult to live as an artist. And, a lot of my energies were just pouring out into the world I wasn't getting feedback. I wasn't, making an impact on other people. And so basically my life force was uncontained. It was spraying out, in both of those projects. And so the thing I realized to myself is, you need a container, you need multiple containers. And my project since then has been building containers for myself. building a profession I first needed to figure out what. I cared about enough to stick with. I remember saying to myself, you've built too many houses and walked away from them, build the house now that you're actually going to live in, construct the container that will be the place that you operate from. This office is a very important container for psychological work. It grounds the work, that we do that's abstract and intangible in a physical location. Psychologically, More and more positive work gets associated with a place, and it starts to have an energy about it. It starts to be important, for the development of consciousness for the development of healing and growth. So the physical location. Below that, the body, I also see as a container. Having a company, we have a network of practitioners at beyond that helps to keep me sane, keep me grounded. It's not just a solo operation. My creative projects that go into the world, like they each have containers. So I just see containers as essential for developing consciousness.
Josh:Yeah, when I hear that term container, it makes me think of almost like focus, if you have energy and it's not aimed in any direction and not just aimed, but if you think about a gun, if you light a bullet on fire, it might explode. But, If you have a barrel that aims and focuses that energy, now you're off to the races and you had that question for me before we started about, how have our chats accelerated my consciousness? What is it that really change for me? It's this focus. And so I thought that was a really interesting idea of having a container. It Is the way that one can actually push forward on some realm because it's a focused energy.
Steven 2.0:Yeah. I like that focus. And I think as you focus, you distill and concentrate your life force as well. You've reformatted other things to allow you to do this. Energy leaks are a big topic. I think we all have them, substance, habits, reading late into the night or doing different things that affect your energy that, are less than ideal solutions to the emotional problem that they are trying to address.
Josh:It's funny how, you live the dream of traveling all over the world rock climbing, in general, lots of free time compared to someone with, I don't know a hundred hour a week job and somehow it doesn't quite work out like you think it does, That grounding of that routine is really powerful. I just was texting with a friend of mine about how I have become more productive having kids, like just, I have less time and somehow I have more productivity. So there's this idea of tapping into your body to, to get answers, but then I know that you're very interested in technology and using technology to, to help us solve these problems of answering these questions of life and accelerating our consciousness again, to use the term of the day, how do you think about those connecting? How do you use technology to in your work as a therapist?
Steven 2.0:Yeah. I am interested in staying current and updating. think At the center, we've talked a lot about this, that, as more and more stripped away from things we've made identity claims on, as chat GPT takes away a lot of our manual labor and even thinking work, where does that leave us? It boils down our humanity in some ways, or it strips away all the non essential layers. So what does remain after all of that? And I think soulfulness. And, that's why I keep coming back to the body. I think at the end of the day, we're feeling beings. the, I think therefore I am, Decarte's pronouncement and the next hundred years that followed into material rationalism and thinking identified activity. That made us alienated from ourselves. I think I feel therefore I am, or I experience therefore I am, is a better deeper home for our identity. There's this essential quality in it, like coming back to the most core element for each person. Is essential. And I don't think that will get replaced by technology. I think we need to meet with other sentient beings to do that. Maybe I will become sentient. But then it's the question of will we want another species to do that work for us? Heinz cohort talked about in a therapeutic relationship, the role of idealization as extremely important there's some aspect of the person you're working with that you find attractive that you're interested in, and then that motivates you to interact with them. And you see them as. Somehow ahead in some way or somehow having something that you want and that over time it moves into more of a twin ship where you can see that you have the same thing now that the other person has. And with chat GPT or with any kind of AI, we can't become it, so it is a different type of a thing The modeling is different. The whole conceptualization of what's happening is different. Will we be able to benefit from that kind of exchange? I don't know. I don't know. Do you think that before that, the A. I. S. That, exist today and are likely to exist in the near future. Not going to move us in that kind of deeply soulful way. They might solve superficial questions, they might tell you to meditate, or they might sort through your problems and, some kind of mechanical way. But I think there's something, there's a spark. There's something deeply soulful that happens in human encounters and human conversations. I don't think if you were an AI and I was speaking to you, I wouldn't engage in quite the same way. There's something about you being a sentient being that calls something in me forth.
Josh:Yeah, it's just it's really yeah, it's really interesting to think about how technology, uncovers what is truly human. I think that's what I hear, this idea that the more technology we have and the more of our. Tasks. It allows us to to get away from, you press a button and, you get big Mac delivered. Please don't do that for your mental health, because that's not healthy for your, your life force. But, the point remains, you can literally, as you projecting the future, you can imagine that there's a button for anything, or maybe you don't even have to think about what you need. And it just appears and the idea of knowledge work Manual labor, it goes away and there's always these people that are worried that creates a crisis. It's your job is your meaning. And, we do see that people, when they stop work, the amount of people that die right after they retire is disturbing. But in my eyes, and I think I'm repeating what you're saying is. It just, it chips away the more we have technology take over these tasks that we identified as being something only a human can do. Whether that was hoeing weeds in the beginning and now it's, making Excel spreadsheet the more we find out what remains, what is this like truly human essence? And to me, that's really exciting. I don't see that as a negative. I don't think that what's at our core is nothing. I think people are overstating it, that we're going to have, we may have a crisis of meaning along the way. As these things get removed, but my hunch is that the core, there's still some spark. I like that idea. Some, there's something special left and yeah, hopefully yeah, I'm getting that right.
Steven 2.0:Yes. It is. It does hearken back to essentialism. I think the important thing is that it's the seat of identity and knowing the observer self, below all of our different personality strategies. There's a feeling center that when we properly Start from there, and we stay connected to that place, then we lay the right foundation and then we can use all the tools we can, layer up and in all kinds of ways we can go on, amazing adventures and it's all well founded. It's built on the right foundation. And because it's built on the right foundation that it tends to be sticky. When you've done the deep in a work the answers don't tend to change every three months or 12 months, or the deep thing, like I wouldn't be surprised if you're still podcasting 10 years from now, 20 years from now. I just have that feeling. And so when you do the deep work yeah I think you do the deep work and then that you really create a firm foundation and then all the tools become, you don't lose your thinking, you don't lose your, creative genius, you don't lose, all of the extended tools and frameworks and things that we layer on.
Josh:I really want to ask you about Neuralink because I think one of my theories is that. We built up all these layers, but now we can't wait another 50, 000 years for another layer of our brain to evolve. Or perhaps we're at the limits of what our, how our brain will evolve in this environment that we have available to us. But now we almost become, Cyborgs where we have a phone in our pocket, we externalize some of our thinking and putting a computer into our brain definitely changes something about it. I know you're reticent about getting cut open and having a chip be put in you, but I guess what does this say about. How we operate in the world as conscious beings. If we are now being influenced by the tools we create, does it change any of those basic assumptions around how to, operate? Or is it, something completely new?
Steven 2.0:Yeah, I think it's an extension. You used iPhones I think there's a bifurcation that happens, the consumer class and the creator class, and you can use a phone in two kinds of ways, you can use it to basically numb out and doom scroll and just consume information in a way that does not develop your consciousness, in a meaningful way. Or you can use your iPhone to, travel like Kevin Kelly did traveling through Asia, documenting disappearing places, and then you're using your phone as a tool that's linked to a project that's deeply meaningful and is expanding your consciousness in some way. So I think the same will be true of Neuralink and all, all the different kinds of cyborg extensions that you can use. That come out of this. I think that, there's obvious cases like helping blind people see and, helping people control prosthetics better. And, where there's clearly a deficit of some specific nature that can be filled in. And I think that's a very easy to justify type of solution. Turning the interior of your brain into the Facebook empire doesn't to me seem like a good extension of human potential.
Josh:You don't want to just have Instagram scrolling across your vision, 24, seven with ads blaring at you. Yeah so first of all, I just liked that you. You really are making sure that we understand that technology is a tool or it's in, in some ways, it's like subservient to that deeper meaning that we have or can develop it, it doesn't replace it, right? It's not that you put a chip in your head and you press a button and now you're good to go.
Steven 2.0:Yeah, I think, you need to work from the right foundation if this does not link to intuition and the feeling center, then it is a bypass of some essential part of our humanness. And if your thinking is controlling, and has access to the full internet and it's, this kind of hyper powerful thinking being, but it's disconnected from feeling. I don't trust that. And I think it's going to be important that we don't add on these tools to, an already alienated and disconnected Western psyche to create, atrocities on nature. That's not hard to imagine that movie ideA.
Josh:So is what you're saying that if we forget any step of that layer that we've built up that we've wisdom that we've acquired throughout. Millennia or billions of year that we are going to mess it up because we need to be integrated at all levels of that stack there's something that we need to tap into that is there from the bottom in order to be able to handle these. New things that come along.
Steven 2.0:Yeah. I do think that there's a forcing function in nature ideas that align with nature survive, or as Carl Jung said, if you think along the lines of nature, then you think properly. Okay. We're not abstract beings, we're embodied, we exist in a natural context. If we destroy all the species on our planet, it's unlikely we can survive in that case. It's too complex a system. We're nested within nature. It's easy to imagine how we could invent technologies that don't align with nature and that precipitate our collapse. One can certainly imagine versions of this that do align with nature. I think avatar is maybe a portrayal of this, the Navi versus the planetary being done by humans. The humans clearly don't align with the natural system there and they are rejected by the natural immune system. The Na'vi are shown as integrating and incorporating Western tools, but in a way that's not rejected.
Josh:Yeah I, this is what's so interesting is that you're not saying, Hey, Josh, you, you can't go to Mars. Like you're not saying that's a bad thing. You're not even saying don't do Neuralink. Again my thing is, what is the meta skill that we must have in order to handle the increasing change that we're seeing in our environment, the ever increasing change. And so what I hear from you is this, making sure that the attitude you adopt or the way you address the changes that come need to be in tune with all that came before it. Otherwise you perhaps are heading in a poor direction.
Steven 2.0:and I, I want to put it back to the software update metaphor. It's so many people have not received the update and the update comes from the body, your nervous system knows where you're a false, the body is a truth machine. Dealing with change is the meta skill to learn. In order to cope with this rate of change, we have to cultivate a letting go and allowing ourselves to be updated systematically through the nervous system. And what's important gets distilled and presented to us. We can't actually think it through. It's too much to think through. The meta skill is learning how to metabolize your own personality to break down components into a more fluid arrangement so that new crystallizations can form that are more aligned. That's not one and done type of work. It's a process of updating. And I think that's why you need a container where you can do that, where it is safe enough to allow things to fall apart to some degree. And by addressing that on an ongoing basis, you start to get more and more comfortable with yourself as an agent of change. So you, you identify with the change itself rather than any fixed crystallization. So you are the thing that's updating the crystallizations and breaking them down and too much fluidity is chaos. We can't just melt to nothing. We're fixing the, the, the. Airplane while we're flying. So we, we have to go in a way that is sensible and, we take certain things offline to fix them, while we rely on other things. And there's a kind of an intelligent way of running that update. You don't have to, tune out and drop out of society and, go live in a cave or I think there are ways of doing this that preserve your, stake in civilization and, start to bring in more and more of your authenticity and more of your embodied knowledge. And your life becomes better and better without having to fully disconnect and melt down completely to reform. It's a process of melting down aspects of yourself and reforming aspects. And if you do that in a systematic way over a long period of time, something starts to happen where it just becomes a natural way of being, where your identity is just constantly updating in a fluid way.
Josh:Yeah I like that. I love that. The only constant is change itself. And, that is the thing that I really see with having young kids is I'm trying to think about how to encourage them for this future. And I think should I tell them to go study computer science? And you think maybe studying computer science was really good, five years ago or 10 years ago, they're young kids now. Is that going to be the thing to study? Then you start, going through these different ideas and you realize, wait, like there, there is no thing to study because, it changes and so this cultivating that awareness of how to deal with change is that mess skill we're talking about. I guess I want to throw it back to you to ask you what was the biggest thing that accelerated your consciousness?
Steven 2.0:I like this question. I'll flip it back to you when I'm done. Yeah, I think there were periods of my life where I went in deep reflection and, read, enormous quantities of things. Alan Watts, carl Jung. People who are trying to basically figure out, what is the right way to be, how do you orient to the world? I think there's stages of developments, consciousness needs stages so that the next level can reflect back on the previous level of development. That is how we develop out. And so it's easy to disregard. Early stages as not important, but often they set the stage for the next, piece of development. So I would say, traveling for five years and reading a lot probably did, accelerate my growth, even though I would say I was still pretty lost and confused when I returned. I knew I, I needed to figure things out and I, I had a strong motivation to find my purpose. And then it was in that context that, I had some psychedelic experiences that reconnected me to parts of myself that I had lost touch with. And there was a remembering process that happened where I, came to more fullness, more aliveness. But I don't think that alone would have been enough. Starting working with, a figure who's become a mentor to me and who I've worked with now for, about five years, the regular container of showing up and explaining myself, having him point out aspects I was missing, being challenged, being in relationship with. mentor figure, I would say that of everything, that's probably the thing that, started to, actually change the way I was behaving in the world. But also in that process was when I figured out I wanted to be a therapist. Starting to work with clients, I see 30 to 35 clients a week. I probably speak to ten fold more people than I used to speak to in the typical week or a month. I was very disconnected before, and now I'm connected. And I think that has been very transformational. I think people used to be dangerous to me. And then as I've done my own inner work and then been around a lot of people, people have feeling safer to me. that hyper connectivity, there's a lot of updating that's happening in that. There's a lot of feedback. So I think that helps to accelerate things
Josh:Yeah, it made me think again about that focus, right? That that meeting someone and chipping away. All the things are sloughing off those things that don't fit into the container puts all your energy in one specific direction. And, uh, yeah, I, I know you said you're going to throw it back on me. It's not totally dissimilar from yours where, I studied philosophy in, in college and it really was a big change for me. There was something about learning about a person's view of the world and really seeing the world differently through the eyes of, The Greek people like Plato and Socrates, and they just jumped to Descartes who really started existentialism. then you read Kant or Nietzsche and you just see the world differently. You say, Oh gosh, this great person has painted a picture of how the world works. And that's one quarter. And then you jump to the next one and you get the, you know, Heidegger's version of the world. And somewhere along the way, you start. Realizing that you have your own view of the world and you borrow and sample from each of these great minds and the theme there is, what's the what is reality or what's the metaphysics of the world, which I'm always fascinated by. And it helped me, uh, narrow into how I think the world operates and what I think is important. And the other thing, you mentioned psychedelics I had my normal teenage years where I would smoke marijuana and may not be a classic psychedelic, but it can still be pretty darn strong. And I had this realization that I could just change myself. I, if there were things I didn't like about myself, I could change them. And if I, in the hint is always, if you see something in someone that you don't like, often you're seeing something in yourself that you don't like, and you're seeing it out there in the world. And I think those two together were really powerful where I just realized that I could change my world. And also that. I saw how different people painted the world and seeing all those different worlds allowed me to better understand how I viewed the world. And then how I could navigate it. And I think that, that kind of leads me to these questions. I have today about looking forward into what's next and asking. How do I navigate this world? And also how do I teach my children to navigate that world? Tackling what's inevitable is always something that is interesting to me. But let's bring it all the way back to the extreme pragmatism that the thing that I appreciate about you and your work is the pragmatic bent. so Steve, you started beyond psychology center. Tell me more about what you're hoping to accomplish there. The people that you're working with and just, plug your latest project that is really cool.
Steven 2.0:Great. Thank you. Yeah, so I, I agree that I think first and foremost, I'm a pragmatist, whatever works. And so beyond is set up in that way. Beyond tradition beyond orthodoxy, open to new evidence based treatments. We're not doing anything with psychedelics yet, but I could foresee that at some point. But, in terms of somatic work, which is really the, unfolding cutting edge of psychology in the last 20 years. It's a collection of individuals. There are 15 of us at the moment, who have somatic backgrounds and the idea is, to start a local movement where there's more authenticity Basically it's the house that I want to live in. I want to create a culture that I actually want to be part of. and I want to invite people to that and, accept their input into the culture and for everyone involved in the project, I'm hoping that it basically helps us to clarify what we're personally interested in and building and, that everyone becomes more aligned to their mission and, together we form a kind of, loose confederacy of people doing rad things.
Josh:home I want to be in, I love that build the home I want to be in. I do want to hit you with a few super rapid fire questions before we actually log off. Do you want to live forever? Steve?
Steven 2.0:if, if the answer is no, then I'm really interested in the psychology of that person. If you're choosing to live now? Why not continue to make that choice?
Josh:Actually I feel the same way. I actually did have this conversation with a couple of my friends where I just thought Of course you want to live forever, but they really pushed back. They said, no way when I want to live forever. And I actually thought it was really sad.
Steven 2.0:Yeah, it is sad.
Josh:There's this concept of longevity escape velocity. And that if perhaps due to our technology, we can live to 110 years that if you. Live to 110 years, maybe by the time you get there, they'll figure out how to keep you alive until you're 140. And, on and on. And, of course, you probably have to be, making the right choices and have the right means and to to catch that escape velocity curve. But that's part of my impetus for being here is I want to live forever to Steve. I'm glad we have that in common. Makes me happy.
Steven 2.0:Yeah. And I think you're touching on there as well. The privilege thing that there, there is an unfortunate reality. People who are in therapy tend to be privileged people. And I don't know how we can shift that, but that is one of the systemic updates Where only some people get to the desired land there's systemic issues in that, there's a lot of survivors guilt for one.
Josh:I don't disagree with you and but I'm here not just to keep that information for myself. I'm here to share whatever I learned with everyone. And we're all in that journey together. Let's try and make it to the escape philosophy. Steve.
Steven 2.0:Yeah. Yeah. And I think as each person that shows up and does the work and helps to move their life forward helps other people. I already do feel that there's a kind of beacon of permission and a enabling that happens. And there's just more capacity in the system. So I don't think it's a zero sum game. I do think if you in this podcast help some group of people to catch the technological wave and live longer and, scale up efforts like that could help a hundred thousand people or 10 million people, in a wider kind of ripple that happens. I do agree with you that I see progress as a positive, I am an optimist at heart.
Josh:That's good. Yeah, there is some truth around the inequality inevitably someone will get left behind. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should all stop and lower ourselves to the lowest common denominator.
Steven 2.0:We need human excellence. Are you familiar with Harrison Bergeron, the Kurt Vonnegut story?
Josh:No.
Steven 2.0:Yeah. It's a a short story about a communist type society that tries to effectively weigh down, this human with superhuman powers. And, it's like a cautionary tale against a society that starts to, set itself against individual excellence. I think what you're doing is interested in excellence. You're interested in, the best kinds of thinking, the best kinds of use of technology, how to basically develop in the most interesting and, formed way. I don't think humans will make it through the great filter unless we, invoke that kind of excellence. The more people that are excelling, the better we feel about the human race and the more good things start to happen.
Josh:That is a very positive some mentality you have there. Yeah, just because someone just because you're striving for excellence does not mean someone else shouldn't be. And if you see someone that you admire and believe are, showcasing the excellence let that propel you cheer them on. And we're all. We're all in it together and their excellence does not take away from yours. And yeah I'm obsessed with those who do amazing things. My other podcast, it's about how to go from good to great because I just, I've always been entranced by. Greatness and and excellence. And I see it as empowering, not threatening. Yeah, plus one to all you out there who are just really looking to be great. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Steven 2.0:Thank you.