137 Achieving Escape Velocity

In physics, Escape Velocity is the minimum speed an object needs to leave the orbit of a planet. In life (metaphor), it's the minimum psychological conditions one needs to leave an old reality (patterns and perceived norms) and enter new ones. This episode discusses how to prevent backsliding into old patterns, leave the monotonous or familiar, discover new territory, and embrace the unknown.

Transcript

Escape velocity in physics is the minimum velocity one needs to escape the gravitational influence of another larger body,

Like a planet,

To leave orbit.

And it's a metaphor that I've used and it came up in my conversation with Noel Freeh,

Who was on the podcast a couple episodes ago.

As a minimum condition,

One needs to significantly change his or her reality.

This is different than,

You know,

Incremental goals and improvements.

I want to get 10% better at this.

I would like to have this be a little bit more or whatever.

This is like,

I'm experiencing this and I want to experience something totally new.

This type of intention or desire,

I think,

Tends to come up with those big meaningful things.

One category would be like problems where maybe you feel like despite your best efforts,

Nothing's really changing.

Maybe you're going to the gym and you're not really getting into shape or some resistances come up with your creative goals or you're working really hard to change your financial situation,

But it kind of feels like you're just shuffling things around.

It's kind of like you're stuck in orbit of a planet where you are moving,

But you're not really getting anywhere or you're kind of cycling through.

You're kind of still affected by,

You know,

We could call gravitational force of something,

Right?

There's that.

And,

You know,

This is a timely episode.

I decided to put this out now because we're in a new year,

Which even though it's an arbitrary point in the Earth's revolution around the sun,

All of us,

Including myself,

Can't help but assign some meaning to this changing of 2021 to 2022.

And whether you're the type or not to set new year's resolutions,

It's normal to ponder,

Okay,

What can this calendar year look like?

I want to change what I want to do new.

And for myself,

You know,

I have various life changes,

The big one being expecting a child soon.

But this year,

Different than other years,

And this is kind of stemming from my dark night of the soul experience where I've just been moving away from tangible concrete on paper goals into kind of this realm of like I know I want to experience something new and maybe bigger,

But I want the level of fulfillment I want to experience from here on out.

I want it to be so new that I wouldn't even know what tangible goals to set.

I want to break into new territory where I can't just look back and be like,

I want like 10% more of this.

So in this episode,

We're going to be speaking about this idea of escape velocity,

Of breaking into a new world,

Whether that means,

You know,

Getting free of a recurring problem or simply wanting to get into a new space where you're anything but the same old,

Same old.

And this could apply to tangible goals,

Typically when it comes to some,

You know,

Some blockage or problem,

But also like the thing that the latter thing I mentioned of just wanting to get into a new set of experiences,

Explore new unchartered territory in your own life experience.

This episode is essentially on rapid change.

And just to be clear,

As far as our analogy goes,

Escape velocity are the conditions one needs to meet to significantly change your reality such that there's no backsliding.

There's no falling back into orbit,

No going back into old patterns where you can essentially be,

You know,

Out exploring new things,

Discovering new ways of being or new experiences and look back at the planet you came from.

And like,

Oh yeah,

I remember that time that I was spinning in whatever pattern or cycle,

Not to even say it was a bad thing,

But here I am exploring new worlds.

So this episode is for you if you found yourself,

Maybe you are,

You know,

Someone who sets a New Year's resolution and it's not the first time you've set this resolution and you're maybe not so optimistic.

I mean,

I'm recording this now on New Year's Eve,

But it's probably coming out a week later.

So maybe some things,

Some habits have dropped off and this is something that you want to find something new rather than,

You know,

Putting in effort and experiencing the same thing.

Or again,

If you want to break into a basically a new reality.

Right now you're listening to Episode Achieving Escape Velocity,

How to Break Free of Old Patterns and Explore New Worlds.

Happy New Year everyone.

Coming to you now from Copenhagen.

Just moved into a new home after about a month of searching for the place where Nalai and I will settle and have our child finally found it.

There's some echo in this office and there's probably new bugs,

New,

You know,

You probably wouldn't recognize it unless you're a bug expert,

But the bugs in this part of Thailand sound a little bit different than the last part of Thailand I was in.

I just went on a motorcycle trip with some buddies up in Northern Thailand.

Part of it was to sell all of our stuff there.

We had a lot of furniture and things,

But it's also kind of a symbolic bachelor party for myself.

Going up there with some guy friends,

We rented motorcycles,

We drove up to the Burmese border and drove along the mountains.

There's a mountain range that separates Thailand and Burma in the north.

And we basically drove.

It was beautiful.

Like we found some tea villages.

My buddy Robin is a tea expert and he was able to share with us all the things,

Only tea snobs and tea geeks.

I understand it was fun.

And that's what we discovered.

For me,

He knew it was there,

But I discovered a village in Northern Thailand called Mey Salong.

It was like a very kind of quirky rural village where they had all of these murals up and of like people wearing military uniforms and didn't mean anything to us.

It's me and the two guys were Canadian.

But then we came across one mural that was this Asian man and there was some tanks and stuff and then there was a Taiwanese flag.

And we're like,

Oh,

Taiwan,

Interesting.

Taiwan here in Northern Thailand.

And it turns out that that village was largely settled by Taiwanese refugees a couple of generations ago.

The Chinese fighters of Chiang Kai-shek who were fighting against the Red Army but failed,

Fled to Taiwan and some of them fled further into Thailand and settled this village.

So it's very interesting because lately I've been very,

Everything I learned about the CCP makes me very anti-China.

Yeah,

Whatever.

I'm not going to get into that,

But I was very happy to just be in a Taiwanese village.

That was cool.

And when I got back,

I was kind of a bachelor party because when I got back on the 21st,

I mentioned this in the Polarity Principles episode,

Nalaya and I had a private wedding.

So she's now my wife.

We might have a real wedding one day,

But I consider us married.

Kids coming up soon.

Yeah.

So anyway,

Lots of fun stuff.

And we just won one fun announcement about the podcast because if you subscribe to Spotify,

I think they do this for everyone.

They send you your year wrapped.

It's like a little infographic thing showing you what you listen to and whatever.

For podcasters,

They send you your podcast year wrapped.

So they send you whatever stats.

So one fun thing is the Rano podcast listenership has grown by over 100% on Spotify.

That number is a little bit misleading because I think a lot of people,

For whatever reason,

Switched from listening on Apple to Spotify.

Last year,

A majority of the listeners were on Apple podcasts.

Now a majority are on Spotify.

I'm sure that has nothing to do with me.

So maybe our total numbers haven't grown by 100%.

But this other statistic,

Which was a lot more meaningful to me,

Was that Spotify notified me that around 100 people listen to almost every episode of his podcast,

Which was humbling and surprising and interesting.

100 is still a humble number.

Not a huge podcast by any means.

So just the idea that 100 people,

Most of whom I don't know,

Actually listen to every episode and I'm sure,

I guess you guys are listening to this right now,

Maybe you think like,

Man,

I got to really take this seriously.

I can't let those 100 people down.

I can't put out crap basically.

I can't put in volume content because they're actually listening and I don't want to bore you guys.

So I'm grateful for that.

And of course,

If you are listening and you enjoy this episode and you can think of what one person that you know that would get something out of this episode,

It would mean a lot to me and hopefully to that person if you shared it directly to that person.

All right,

Jumping in.

So one reason why I love this analogy of escape velocity is that there's a lot of elements in the analogy that we can draw from the physics and the physics imagery to psychological forces.

And this idea,

The first time I used this concept,

The first time it came to me was actually when I was back in the cult.

This is maybe seven,

Eight years ago now or more.

Yeah,

Maybe eight years ago.

I was in the cult and a cult is what I define a cult as is an alternate reality that is different from conventional society or what we would call the real world.

If you caught my cult episodes,

I describe this a little in more detail.

It's not like I was physically separate from regular society,

But in my mind I slowly became more and more separate.

It was a world.

And I remember this is maybe six or seven months into the cult experience,

I was going in layer by layer and there was a point where myself and a young woman,

We were both recently hired to go in deeper and we were discussing fairly lucidly of like,

Is this a good idea?

I mean,

We were at this kind of a threshold point,

If you will,

Where we could see deeper into the cult than one could see on the outside.

We could see the inner workings.

We could see some of the manipulations.

It was obvious from our vantage point that it was a cult and it did change people's minds very drastically.

But from that point,

We were both in our early 20s,

We're having a lot of fun in this world.

We've had great benefits to our growth,

But also in entertainment and enjoyment.

And we were like,

Oh,

Is it a good idea or not?

And we were noting how we could see what was scary about going into the cult world was not the going in part because in the going in,

You have access to more information,

More opportunities for growth,

More experiences.

That was all fun.

What was scary is once you were in,

It seemed like people couldn't really leave because we would see people who were deeper in the cult who,

In some ways we might look up to because they had access to what we perceive as wisdom and was wisdom at the time.

And they were leaders in this community and whatnot.

But it seemed like they had become so detached from the old world that one,

They couldn't really go back.

And the few that actually tried to leave and go leave the cult and go back into conventional society had a really hard time.

It's like once you were in and the deeper you're in,

The harder it was to get out.

So I remember,

You know,

She and I were discussing this because there was this one person that we knew,

We saw a few of these over the time period,

But one person in particular was trying to leave.

And it seemed like every time she tried to leave,

She would like basically get sucked back into orbit and then crash back onto the planet of one taste,

Right?

Obviously,

This is metaphorically.

And this is where I first came up with the idea because when we did see a very rare occurrence of someone who was able to break free of one taste after being very deep in,

No one ever had a heart,

No one had an easy time leaving.

Like there was a lot of force you had to overcome.

And the person had to like achieve this like level of sanity or like this level of groundedness and sureness in their reality that they could overcome the forces,

All of the social forces that were there.

And this is where I thought of the idea of like,

Oh,

It's kind of like escape velocity.

Like you need a certain amount of kinetic energy you need to break free of the orbit.

So one term within this analogy that's important is the idea of a world.

So in our common parlance,

Most of us,

You know,

When we think of the word world,

It's synonymous with the planet Earth.

But actually what world means is it's the bounded reality in which you could freely move.

So the reason why most of us think of world being synonymous with Earth is that,

You know,

For a human being who can physically walk,

You should be able,

Your world should be the planet Earth where you can just move freely.

And in some cases that is,

But in many cases that's not,

Right?

Like you actually can't just walk across the border of countries.

If you're a citizen of the United States,

For the most part,

Your world where you can freely move are the boundaries of the United States,

Right?

And there's even restricted zones within it.

And there's places you can't go at certain times or there's certain things you have to do to go certain places.

So the world is the spatial boundaries.

It's also the time boundaries,

Is also the rules.

You know,

If you want to go from US to Canada,

You can do that.

You know,

That you can say Canada is part of your world as well.

Or,

You know,

But you have to follow the rules of crossing borders,

Right?

If you're playing it for a different kind of set of boundaries,

If you're playing a game of chess,

For instance,

For the time that you choose to play the game of chess,

That is your world,

Right?

It's the 8x8 board.

It's the amount of time that you're playing if there is a time game.

But it's also the rules too,

Just like passport rules.

There's rules of chess.

And if you break the rules of chess,

You're no longer in the world.

You can't be in the world and break the rules because otherwise you're not in the world,

Right?

This idea of world is coming from James Carse,

Author of Finite and Infinite Games,

My favorite book.

And I think this is,

You know,

Just a useful way of recognizing bounds of reality,

Right?

Chess,

Any game,

Anything that we call a game,

A sporting game,

You know,

It's bound by a field,

It's bound by rules,

It's bound by time.

You break those,

You're free.

I mean,

To go back to the nation example,

You know,

We have this term first world,

First world being all of the developed countries.

And you know,

If you are a citizen of the first world,

You can basically freely move through most of the worlds.

I mean,

If you're a citizen of the US,

You can,

If you follow the rules,

You can go to Europe,

You can go to pretty much any developed nation.

If you're part of a third world,

If you live in a citizen of a third world country,

Your chances are your ability to move freely are less.

Not always,

But it depends on various other status things,

Right?

Like a first world citizen can go to a third world country,

But he's still part of the first world,

Right?

He has free movement in a way that maybe a third world citizen can't.

And you know,

I mean,

Obviously there's other nuances,

Like you could be a very wealthy third world citizen,

In which case you're kind of part of the first world as well,

Right?

And actually one interesting but also sad thing I learned somewhat recently is when I was up in the Chiang Rai area,

We were up there taking a vacation,

But also exploring farms for what became our Kudra business,

Our herbal adaptogen business.

I was training in Jujitsu up there at a Chiang Rai CRT gym,

Chiang Rai,

Jujitsu.

They have a great program,

So shout out to them,

Where they basically sponsor orphans.

Because something I only learned while I was there is that there's basically peoples in Northern Thailand and in surrounding regions where they're not citizens of Thailand,

Right?

There's peoples known as the Hill Tribe,

Peoples,

Some of them have integrated into Thailand,

Into the world of the Thai nation,

But some haven't.

And it's worst for orphans whose parents were not Thai citizens,

Even though they were born in Thailand and maybe their parents and their parents' parents were born in Thailand.

But because they,

You know,

No one in their family basically opted in to the Thai system,

And I don't know exactly the details,

These orphans basically have no citizenship,

Which means they can't go to school,

They can't do a lot of things,

They can't drive a car,

They can't leave their province even,

Because there's border checks and if you don't have a Thai national ID or a passport,

You can't even leave the province.

So for these kids,

Their world is super tiny.

And actually,

You know,

One of the reasons why I'm shouting out this Jujitsu program is that they offer a way for these kids who basically have a real,

Or they're bound to this really tiny world and this really restrictive rule set,

Set by the government.

If they can get good at Jujitsu,

They can get a sports scholarship to university,

They can get not even a passport,

They can get an ID card so they can simply leave the city or province they were born in.

So we actually decided at Kudra to donate 10% of our profits to this program.

So if you do purchase a bag of Kudra,

10% of your money is helping out these kids expand their world.

But as far as the worlds that we live in psychologically,

There are two types of bounds to our world.

There are the external defined definitions,

Like the rules of society,

Or the rules of a game if you're playing a game,

But we're talking about the game of life.

Typically,

We're talking about laws,

Rules of society,

But also implied rules such as social norms,

Other social forces,

Whether you get shamed for a certain set of actions,

Basically like these social constructions of reality that also bind free movement in a sense.

Now with a lot of these things,

Actually with all external bounds,

They only really shrink our world when they eventually affect some sort of internal binding of a reality.

So these are your perceptions of what you can and can't do,

Both as far as being allowed to,

But also your abilities.

Like if you're,

Say,

Really low in confidence,

You've in a sense shrunken your perceived world of what you are able to do.

If you're a shy person versus a socially confident person,

Even though you and a confident person and a shy person can be in the same exact environments,

The confident person obviously has a lot more free movement in the space of what he's able to do as opposed to the shy person whose world is a little bit shrunken because of his or her perceptions.

Now when it comes to a lot of these internal binds on our world,

There's another more common physics analogy that people use all the time,

Which is inertia.

In physics,

Inertia,

You've heard of as objects at rest tend to stay at rest,

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

The actual definition is inertia is resistance to acceleration.

Any body moving at any speed is going to try to stay at that speed,

Or specifically stay at that velocity.

Actually,

I might be mixing up speed and velocity.

I can actually hear my dad was a physicist and I can hear his voice in my head right now.

He's still alive.

He's just not a physicist anymore.

I remember him at various times correcting me,

The difference between speed and velocity,

Velocity being a vector,

Speed being a scalar.

Anyway,

That means nothing to anybody probably.

We have,

As far as psychological inertia,

We have a resistance to changing speed.

That's what is felt.

To bring us back into physical reality,

I just mentioned I was on a motorcycle trip.

The thing that you feel when you're on a performance vehicle or any vehicle is acceleration,

Speed you don't actually feel.

I actually learned from one of my buddies that as far as driving a motorcycle,

And it's probably true for sports cars as well,

Sometimes it's a lot more fun to stay in lower gear because even though you can't hit the highest top speed,

You get a lot more power as far as acceleration goes.

It feels a lot more thrilling to go from 40 to 60 really fast at really high acceleration as opposed to being at 90 at a constant speed.

There's a different thrill with going just at high velocity,

But acceleration is what we feel.

Acceleration is what a physical body resists and psychologically it's what as far as reality change goes,

Inertia is this kind of resistance.

Returning to our greater analogy of escape velocity,

Escaping the planet,

The world,

What keeps us in orbit is this force of gravity.

Fun thing with the words in this analogy,

Gravity of course is the attraction of mass to each other.

It's what pulls an apple to the earth as Isaac Newton discovered or named,

But actually the word gravity existed long before Newton used it to describe this force.

Gravity in English means or meant prior to this and still does but it doesn't use that often seriousness,

Right?

As in something being grave.

Newton found this to be a good word for describing this force of when things are heavy,

When things are brought to the earth,

They feel serious.

There's a serious feeling.

The feeling is,

Essentially Newton was using the divisive metaphor to use this word gravity to describe this force.

Psychological gravity is the seriousness of our perceptions.

How much a given idea weighs us down and actually affects us,

How much it affects the path of our movements.

A simple example,

It's kind of benign but I think it does illustrate as far as the gravity of social perceptions.

On this motorcycle trip that I keep mentioning,

For part of the trip,

It was three of us who are about the same age,

Similar places,

Similar values in life.

There's one guy who's a little bit younger than us.

He's got this big brother's,

Little brother's vibe.

He's very cool but he's just from a different life situation.

He's also half Thai and so he's a lot more affected by Thai culture than the rest of us,

Right?

One of these things that's very common here in Thailand is this kind of collectivist culture of signaling that you're down with whatever the collectivist idea is.

This has become very apparent since the pandemic because it's very common here in Thailand to see people driving by themselves in a car with their mask on.

We tease our friend about it but he's just,

He kind of matter of factly is like,

Oh,

It's to let everyone know that I'm not a rebel essentially.

It was even to the point where this one night we were in Chiang Rai,

We went out to the bars and hanging with us,

He wouldn't have a mask on because we would tease him and it's also silly.

We were sharing a lot of space anyway.

But the moment a Thai person would walk by on the streets or if you'd walk into a bar that had a Thai person,

He put his mask on,

Right?

Not for any health reasons,

Right?

And I'm not arguing the health benefits of masks or no masks.

The point is that it was completely a social perception or a social,

It was a belief that this is what you have to do.

It's important to do this thing.

Whereas for us from the outside,

It doesn't seem that way.

To him,

The gravity of this meme is very high.

To us,

It was so low that it seemed ridiculous.

And I kind of joked because I've been on this brainwashing kick for a while that in order to overcome this perception in him,

He probably would have to spend many,

Many hours with us and no hours with Thai people.

It would actually come down to time.

And that would be the only way.

It would be kind of like moving him a little bit further away from the planet of Thai culture and a little bit closer to our culture,

Right?

That would be the only way to change the gravity of his perceptions because to him,

It's very serious.

To us,

It's not very serious.

In one taste,

Which was a totally socially,

A different world,

Totally on a social perception level,

This analogy also flushed out in that the deeper you were in,

Just like with physics gravity,

The closer you are to the center of the mass,

The greater the gravitational pull.

It was like that going into one taste where on the outside,

It was kind of interesting,

It was kind of compelling,

But I kind of felt like I could leave at any point.

But the more and more I got in,

The stronger and stronger that force was to the point where at some point I was accelerating so fast that it was very difficult to leave.

The deeper you got in,

The much harder it was to achieve escape velocity.

This is true with propaganda,

Which I'm going to be discussing in probably the next episode on semantic consciousness with any kind of social change,

But also the closer you are to any kind of influencing force,

The more it affects you.

I mentioned this in other episodes where when I'm speaking to a guy who's kind of stuck in old patterns,

Even though his interests and his intentions are in one way and he's always hanging out with the same people or maybe he never left his small town,

The thing I'm like,

Listen,

You can receive coaching,

You can read all the books,

You can take all the courses,

But dude,

The thing you need is to leave your town.

If you simply leave all of those influences,

It'll be so much easier to freely move because all of those forces are affecting you.

The mind is very plastic.

We are very easily,

It's very easy to influence the mind.

We have a lot less control over our perceptions than we like to think,

Which is again a subject I'll go deeper into in next episode.

The first principle of achieving escape velocity would be to reduce the pull of the gravitational forces keeping you in the world you're in,

Keeping you in orbit.

Instead of gravity where you're seeking levity,

Instead of seeing these forces as serious and things that maybe cannot be questioned,

Like for instance in this same example,

My friend doesn't even,

My young friend doesn't even question the idea that one should wear a mask when another Thai person is around.

It's so serious.

In the same way that someone who is so serious in a video game feels like they have to accomplish this mission,

From the outside,

You're like,

Dude,

Why are you getting stressed out over grand theft auto?

It's not that big a deal.

It's not that you should never take things seriously or that you should throw your middle finger up at every rule,

It's recognizing that it is arbitrary and you have choice in how seriously you take a perception.

We're talking about these gravitational forces.

I mean,

As we mentioned,

There's two things that bind your reality,

The two types of binds.

There's the externally defined and the internally defined.

So externally,

They're essentially rules set by some body,

Whether it's something as small as these are the rules of chess,

We're playing chess.

If you want to play chess,

You have to follow these rules or society.

And this is not an argument for anarchy by any means,

I want to be clear,

But just recognizing that all of the laws,

The lines on the map,

All the things that these authority figures say you have to do,

They are in a sense arbitrary.

And not to say that you should,

I mean,

I'm in favor of there being some sorts of institutions and legal system,

Of course.

Like I'm not,

I'm not,

I'm interested in some anarchistic ideas,

But I'm not an anarchist.

But when someone feels that they are bound by something external and they have no choice,

It helps to recognize,

It helps to introduce a little levity of recognizing that you always are choosing whether or not to take something seriously.

And that in itself can take away the shackles in a sense that occur in a lot of people's minds.

I can't,

I can't do this,

I can't do this because I'm not allowed.

An extreme example of this is on the first page of my favorite novel,

Shantaram.

I've mentioned this in another episode before,

I think it's very pertinent here.

There's this opening scene where he's chained to the wall in an Indian jail cell and he's being beaten and he's got infected sores and he's basically the opposite of physically free.

Like his world is very small in that sense.

But he recognizes that in himself,

And you know,

Of course this is an extreme view,

But there's truth to it,

That in himself he always has the choice of whether or not to hate his captors.

I think he is,

I mean,

It's kind of like a choice between hate and love in that moment.

Which you know,

Again,

Extreme,

Maybe hallmark-y,

But also like when you think about that,

It's a very freeing thought of like,

No matter what's going on outside,

You do have freedom of how you choose to perceive things,

Of how serious you choose to take something.

And if this guy can do this in a jail cell and it is based on a true story,

Then with a lot of the things that maybe it's easy to complain about,

External things,

Or even in a sense external perceptions that have become internalized,

Like how you're affected by social norms or the influence of a childhood experience or something,

You do have a choice.

And in that sense,

In itself,

That is a very powerful idea to remind yourself of.

The second type of binds are those internal ones.

In fact,

All of those external bounds on reality only really affect you when you let them become internalized,

Right?

Like when they become like,

When the influence of a parent or teacher or childhood experience ends up becoming a tendency that continues on into adult life,

Right?

It might not be so easy to just snap your fingers and change your reaction when it comes to whatever the thing is,

Right?

Maybe you have a weird relationship to money because of something that happened when you were young regarding the things you wanted,

Or you have a reaction to whether or not people like you or whether,

You know,

How you behave in dating situations or things like that.

It might not be so easy to snap your fingers and just change it all,

But also recognizing that you don't have to identify with that,

Right?

You can kind of look at it from a third person perspective,

Okay.

It's like,

Okay,

There's this program that exists.

It was programmed into this person that I am,

But programs can also be unprogrammed or reprogrammed or new programs can be put in.

Like that in itself,

I mean,

It's kind of in a sense a form of positive thinking,

But one that I think is a little more actionable of like,

Just like whatever things can be wired into me,

New things can be wired into me,

Which is another way of introducing optimism.

And a second way to change those tendencies come down to actual action,

Right?

Like once you've identified,

Okay,

These are the forces that seem to bind my experience.

These are maybe the tendencies that I've internalized.

One way to change it is to change your actions.

And this idea of escape velocity and really changing,

You know,

It made me think of some experiences with 12-step that I've had briefly and that I'm aware of from other people.

One thing that I've always found interesting by people who are in 12-step recovery for some sort of addictive behavior was that they take this,

They take essentially what is a habit which is say abstaining from the substance of their choice so seriously that there's very little margin for error.

And even though I've never been a substance addict per se,

I found this idea very interesting from kind of like a creativity perspective or a creation of life perspective in that what if you felt that there was no margin for error in what you did,

Right?

Where like,

You know,

Not an ounce of attention could be wasted,

Not a second of the day could be spent on other things.

What if you treated things like that,

Whether it was true or not?

If you did,

If you took every single like spare ounce of creative capital of intangible resource and dedicated into something,

Certainly that thing would take off,

Right?

I mean,

It's kind of hard to not use this physics metaphor analogy of like,

You know,

Entering or taking off.

If you focus every ounce of what you had on a thing,

Of course something would change.

And even though on a practical level,

I am a little bit critical of 12-step and how in a sense it binds someone into a new world where they kind of have lack of freedom.

I've talked about this in other episodes.

I do like this idea of no margin for error which brings us into the next idea which is accumulating energy.

And actually,

First I want to read a quote from Jung's Red Book.

It's been one of the – I'm like reading like six or seven books on rotation so I don't know when I'll finish any of them.

One is the Red Book.

This is a quote that I underlined.

In Jung's Red Book,

If you don't know,

It started off kind of as his journal entries of him exploring his own unconscious and it's kind of like his dialogue with his inner daemon and whatnot.

So a lot of this is kind of like somewhat channeled.

And the thing that he wrote that I underlined is,

Succumb to no temptation but do everything of your own will.

That was kind of a prescription that he received from his higher self or his daemon.

Succumb to no temptation but do everything of your own will.

This reminds me of this idea of like you are not letting any other force,

Whether internally driven or externally driven,

Pull you away from actually what you want,

From your will,

From the direction you're trying to go.

Which going back to our analogy,

What is required to achieve escape velocity?

Well,

You need to accumulate enough energy.

Like to achieve that velocity,

You need enough kinetic energy to overcome the force of gravity.

So what does it mean to accumulate energy in a psychological sense?

I would say that is the feeling of aliveness.

And actually,

Again,

I keep mentioning this motorcycle trip,

But it was impactful on me in different ways.

There was a point where we had been on the road for a few days.

We had drank a lot of good tea.

We've had a lot of great conversation.

We wasn't on a phone for four days,

Which was amazing,

Out in nature.

And there was a point towards the end of the trip where we had stopped at a rest stop and I felt like this buzz in my.

.

.

I don't know how to.

.

.

Yeah,

I guess I'll call it a buzz or this tingle in my body that was subtle and it felt good and exhilarating but also almost too much.

I think what I said to my friends was,

I feel uncomfortably alive.

I was like feeling too much stuff.

And I noticed in that,

While it felt good,

There's a part of me that wanted to do something to bring the energy down.

I wanted to be on my phone or eat sugar or jerk off.

I wasn't horny,

But I had this like,

Man,

I could really take the edge off if I just.

.

.

It was that kind of feeling of too muchness.

I was already thinking about this idea of escape velocity.

It's like,

Man,

Imagine what it would be like to have five times more of this kind of feeling.

It would be really uncomfortable.

But something would have to happen because everything was heightened.

My sensations were heightened.

My thoughts were all kind of loud.

It was like a lot.

And it's this idea of if you accumulated enough energy.

.

.

Well,

First,

To enter new worlds,

To escape a gravitational orbit,

You need a lot of energy.

So this in itself should be a goal to achieve escape velocity,

Which is accumulating more and more energy.

And this can be done through quality-driven habits.

Because the idea of consistency and developing habits,

Atomic habits,

Tiny habits,

This kind of self-help 101.

And I've talked about the idea of process goals versus outcome goals from my friend Alex Hain.

Outcome goals being trying to get some extrinsic results,

But process goals being just having the goal of like,

I'm going to do this.

I'm going to control my inputs.

And there's something.

.

.

Of course,

I think that's a useful idea.

It's better than being hung up on these far-off-reaching things that are maybe outside of your control.

But I was actually thinking about this more.

And I think in the process of accumulating energy,

Of accumulating this subjective feeling of aliveness.

.

.

And energy actually,

In the sense,

And we can even bring this back to physics,

That energy is the capacity to do work.

The more you feel this goodness inside you,

Or this aliveness inside you,

The more you can do.

When you don't feel this aliveness,

You're apathetic.

You're kind of indifferent to everything.

But I was thinking about this idea of habits.

Of course,

It's good to have good habits.

I believe in having good habits.

My habits have changed from here and there.

And I went into this more in the solving ambition acceptance dilemma episode.

It's very possible to set process goals that lead to some desired outcome in a way that kind of reduces your sense of good feelings,

Of aliveness.

I've talked about,

I've set fitness goals that ended up hurting my body because I wasn't recognizing to the moment-to-moment thing.

And I think on further thought,

There are three stages of habits when it comes to accumulating energy.

And I think in the first stage,

Which is probably most often talked about,

This is kind of the.

.

.

You just have to do something to overcome resistance.

Resistance is the enemy,

As Steven Pressfield speaks about in the first third of The War of Art.

And in that sense,

Just doing something minimal consistently is what you're supposed to do.

Because all you're trying to do is fight resistance.

It's like BJ Fogg's idea of committing to flossing one tooth.

It's so easy.

It's impossible not to do it,

Or it's very unlikely.

You won't need a lot of willpower.

And chances are,

Once you start doing it,

You'll end up flossing more teeth,

Maybe get into the habit naturally of flossing your teeth all the time.

With writing,

Tim Ferriss has talked about just writing one sentence a day.

How could you not write one sentence?

You just commit to that,

You'll end up writing a lot more over time,

Et cetera.

But then there's the level of where you're no longer bound by resistance,

And then it gets into just creating more volume.

How do you get the most volume in?

You know,

I think I really like the,

We're going to make a fitness analogy now of volume training versus intensity training.

This is kind of a debate.

It's been an ongoing debate in the physical culture world for a long time.

Intensity training being going hard,

Typically training until failure,

Going for the heaviest weights possible.

And the idea is,

It's the most bang for your buck if you lift heavy.

Volume training being,

You're not going until failure,

You're not trying to do the hardest thing possible,

But you're trying to get in a lot of reps over time,

Which maybe means taking a lot of breaks.

Of course,

Especially subscribing to kettlebell philosophy and more on the volume training side,

Because you don't necessarily want to train until failure when it comes to developing a habit.

If you go to the point where you feel like you can't do anymore,

Which in terms of a typical non-physical habit would be maintaining interest.

If you do something so hard that you're not eager to do it again,

Well then you're kind of doing yourself a disservice in the long term.

Because in order to accumulate this energy,

You need to get a lot of reps in essentially.

You need to maintain your interest because interest is essentially indicative of the energy that your mind is experiencing essentially.

Also in the fitness world,

When it comes to volume training,

Intensity training,

There are two kinds of mass one could build when it comes to muscle mass.

Volume training is typically favored by body builders because training until failure,

For instance,

Helps build sarcoplasm in the muscles,

Which is a fluid that inflates the muscles and makes them look bigger,

Essentially show muscles.

Whereas volume training in this way develops what's known as myofibular mass,

Which is the actual contractile fibers,

Which is the part of the muscle that actually does the work.

We're talking about energy is the ability to do work.

That's the part that's important.

This kind of physical training doesn't allow for fast gains because this kind of muscle tissue is a lot harder to grow.

But it does,

So it's not fast gains,

But it's also not fast losses.

Like body builders can never maintain peak condition all year because it's actually impossible to maintain that amount of sarcoplasmic mass among other things.

Whereas myofibular mass,

Once you develop that,

Your body doesn't give it up very easily.

So bringing this back to the whole psychological experience and your experience of life and changing your reality,

Going for volume or just finding a process where you can consistently increase your sense of aliveness is the best way to accumulate energy.

So first is overcoming resistance,

Then it's increasing volume,

Essentially creating a high volume habit.

But then there's a third stage,

Which I think I'm only recognizing that even exists and that I should be moving into now with certain processes that I have in my life,

Which is not like,

I'll speak about my creative output.

I don't have resistance to sketching a podcast or writing.

These are things that they've been ingrained in me so much that it actually just feels good to do them.

The thing that I've noticed where I'm at with these kinds of things,

Because my creative output is essentially the input when it comes to almost all of my,

Certainly all of my career goals.

It's not just about quantity anymore,

It's about quality.

For the past many years,

I can easily commit to sitting down and writing for two plus hours a day.

The stuff that I put out though isn't always stuff I feel good about.

So there's one perspective of like,

Oh,

You can't really control that.

You can't really control creative quality.

You just create a lot of stuff and something will be good.

And I think that's fine.

That's a good perspective if you're tempted to not even try.

But I've been trying to think,

Especially also shifting my attention from tangible things or quantifiable goals to a certain experience I care.

I spoke about in the Dark Knight of the Soul episode.

I'm kind of changing my religion from optimizing for productivity to optimizing for presence.

So what does this mean as far as accumulating energy?

If I'm not trying to accumulate energy to necessarily do more things,

But experience more quality.

And for myself,

When it comes to creativity,

For instance,

It seems to be what can allow.

.

.

Yeah,

Kind of going back to what can allow me to feel the most alive before I even do such and such work.

I don't have any goals of like I'm going to write a certain amount anymore because I don't have resistance there anymore.

Kind of what I've been tracking,

And I'll share,

This is not a prescription for what anyone else should do,

But what I'm kind of playing with,

I should say,

Of how to optimize my energy so that I can have an output of quality that I feel good about are some simple practices of.

.

.

It actually comes from a book,

Another one of my favorite fictional books called Jitterbug Perfume.

In that book,

It's a comedic philosophical book by Tom Robbins where a few of the characters are trying to live forever.

And they learn from these Indian mystics who live in some cave deep in India of these basically practices to balance out their four elements,

Earth,

Air,

Fire,

Water.

So I'm looking at it symbolically.

Obviously,

It's not a real prescription of how to live forever,

But it is based on something.

It is allude to something.

So I've actually.

.

.

The thing that I've been tracking,

And I've tracked habits for a very long time,

Right?

Like I was one of the first coaches on the Coach Me app,

Which is basically a habit tracker app.

I'm into that stuff.

I think it's good for some part of your life.

But what I've been doing is simply tracking things that affect different parts of my energy in accordance with these four categories.

So I'm just going to share what I've been doing recently.

This is not to say that anyone else should do this,

But this is something that seems to lead to good quality of mind and feeling,

Which is what I've identified is the type of energy I need to accumulate to break into a new reality.

So for air,

Air applies to mind and breath,

Which are related,

Of course,

Which is why every meditative practice has some focus on breath.

And it's a common thing if someone's freaking out,

You tell them to breathe because it's hard to have a conscious,

Be conscious of your breath and have a spastic thoughts at the same time.

So in the book,

They describe a basic pranayama practice.

For me,

The thing that I try to do every day is spend some time reading or journaling while I'm doing it,

I'm paying attention to my breath,

Which is another thing that is discussed in the archetype challenge,

Was one of the archetype challenge lessons to do active things with your mind while making sure you have some ambient attention,

Ensuring that you're breathing in a slow,

Natural way.

Water,

Of course,

Is water,

But also emotions is representative of that.

In the book,

Jitterbug Perfume,

The prescription is to take hot baths every day.

For me,

I've recognized I'm pretty much always dehydrated.

So I've made it a daily habit to make sure I'm drinking actually specific herbal teas like kudra and other herbs that I've gotten into every day.

Fire is creativity and lovemaking.

So this has been something that I've practiced on and off for many years anyway,

Which is arousal control.

I do note every time Nalai and I make love and I do note whether or not I ejaculate because actually for each of these categories,

It's the thing that I've noted can increase my energy and a thing that can decrease it.

Especially for air,

It's reading and breathing,

But the thing I don't want to do,

The thing that kind of reduces my air energy,

If you will,

Is being on my phone.

So if I'm on my phone late at night,

I give myself a black mark.

If I made sure to read and breathe,

I give myself a white mark.

Sometimes I have both.

For fluids,

It's drinking something like kudra,

Which is hydrating,

And the black mark I give myself if I do something dehydrating is like drinking coffee or alcohol,

Which I still do sometimes,

But I just mark it down.

For fire,

It's making love,

And the black mark is if I ejaculate,

Which I don't feel shame about if it happens,

But I do note it.

I mean,

If you're on my email list,

I'm actually going to send a little photo of what I do on the back of my journal,

Marking my black and white marks for these categories.

The final category is earth,

Which in the book is eating right food in small quantities.

They recommend fasting.

Tom Robbins did spend a lot of time actually in basically doing spiritual things before he wrote comedic novels about them,

And he was actually a friend of Timothy Leary in real life,

Who we of course mentioned on this podcast,

And in the book Jitterbug Perfume,

There's a character named Danny Boy Wiggs,

Which is kind of obviously based on Timothy Leary.

So anyway,

A bunch of trivia there.

So for myself,

Earth representing the body,

I give myself a white mark.

If I not only eat right,

Get my macros in,

But I also do my basic mobility practice,

And then the black mark is if I eat something like artificial sugar.

So I don't have any hard proclamations,

Like I'm going to never do this or only do this,

But these are habits that I've recognized,

Both positive and negative habits,

And I simply mark them on the back of my notebook.

And it's been interesting just looking at it zoomed out,

If I look at the last 10 days,

It's kind of obvious when I have more black marks than white marks,

That day wasn't so great.

And if I have consistent days of black marks,

It's kind of obvious that I'm not going to achieve escape velocity.

I'm certainly going to either stay in the same place or go backwards.

Whereas I haven't been on a streak where I've had only white marks more than three or four days in a row,

But I have noticed I do feel more alive,

And perhaps this is my commitment for 2022,

Which is to have some really long 10,

20,

30 day streaks where it's all white marks and no black marks.

So we'll see.

Maybe I'll report on that later.

Because I think there's something also when it comes to that internal resistance of if you set your metric for whether you're good or not as something that you're ultimately going to fail in,

You set the parameters for success.

So it's foolish to tell yourself you're going to go to the gym every day when you know you're not.

Give yourself the opportunity for the winner effect,

Which is just set yourself up in a game to win.

This is something that's come up a lot with some of the younger guys I've been coaching lately.

And I think this maybe is true for everyone in different stages of life,

But I've noticed with a lot of people recently,

It seems like they are measuring themselves up to an evaluation model that they don't even know where it comes from.

But it's an evaluation model that always makes them wrong.

Like I was coaching a guy who he's going through stuff where he wants to be more socially free,

Like in dating,

But also with people.

And he has this internal narrative where it seems like he's always finding something that he did socially wrong.

And first,

It's usually things that probably no one notices.

And even if someone notices,

It's not really a big deal.

It's like,

Where did this come from that he's judging himself from some external perspective?

Does he even know?

Which brings us back to this gravitational pull of recognizing that all of these things,

Nothing is serious.

Anyways,

So the first principle is recognizing your gravitational forces and basically taking the gravity out of them,

Introducing levity.

The second one is finding something you can do consistently,

Something you can do in high volume because you need high volume to really make change that increases your aliveness at whatever stage you're in,

Whether it's simply trying to get over resistance or trying to reach high volume or trying to not only have high volume but high quality.

Because to really change,

And we can even go to very tangible things like the most common New Year's resolution,

Which is to get in shape,

No one ever really gets in shape who wasn't in shape by doing minimal things.

You kind of have to become obsessed.

Like the people who really,

You know,

There's lots of people who are the gym and kind of look the same all the time.

And then there's people who basically become snobs about it,

Like they become obsessive about it.

And those people are the ones who are like,

Man,

You look way different,

Right?

Like they're the ones who are willing to go into kind of extremes beyond just doing the bare minimum of flossing one tooth.

Because the thing is,

When you achieve a really high level of,

We could say energy,

You accumulate a lot of energy,

It's almost difficult not to escape or enter new worlds.

You know,

I didn't tell too many personal stories this time,

But the times in my life where I feel like I really broke into new worlds,

And I'm not saying these stories because I've mentioned them in other podcasts like the Road of Trials,

But there have been times where I was broke and I realized I had to do a certain thing.

I had to do it over and over and over again,

And eventually I made enough money to change my situation.

Or one with arousal control specifically.

Actually when I first,

The longest I've ever gone with basically experiencing sexual stimulation with myself or with women and not ejaculating,

I think I went on like a 90-day run of almost daily something.

The only time I actually really committed to that was right before I put out my arousal control program,

Because I wanted to see what was possible essentially.

I had never gone I think more than 30 days,

And even that was where I think my more common streak was like two weeks or something of like making love every day without coming or something.

Usually I would let myself off the hook.

Because that's actually one thing that keeps us in old worlds is,

And I'll speak for myself because I've noticed this even recently,

That when I'm on a streak of doing things that I said I was going to do,

Like oh yeah I did all these good stuff,

Or I ate the frog,

I did the practice,

I did whatever.

Often there's a point where I feel eager to spend my surplus,

Because it's uncomfortable to,

It's kind of like a mental trick or almost like an addict's mind trick of like,

Oh yeah I'm ahead of the game,

I can kind of spend some of what I've accumulated.

But of course if you do that every time,

It's like the torsos of the hair,

You have this head start,

But eventually you lose the race.

And with arousal control specifically,

Well one,

When I did that 90 day streak,

I really felt alive.

And all I'll say,

I can't one to one say that the 90 day streak caused this to happen,

But that program was the biggest boost to my wealth that I had experienced on my own.

Where I wasn't working with a company or working with something,

Where I really did everything on my own.

I'm not saying that not coming for 90 days made me rich by any means,

But there was something in that of how seriously I was taking every ounce of my attention,

That I was just seeing things differently.

And I was experiencing things differently because I was willing to basically accumulate that level of feelingness.

And for another example,

Actually at that time,

I put a couple of my clients through kind of like a being a run of that program before I released it to the public.

And one guy,

He was practicing it for,

I don't know how long,

But he was saying that he noticed when he really practiced arousal control,

It was kind of like he couldn't kid himself anymore.

It was like his emotions and his feelings had become so heightened,

Especially when it came to the things that he wanted,

That he couldn't lie to himself.

It's like when it came to those uncomfortable desires of whatever he wanted in his,

Maybe his relationship life or his business life,

Like he couldn't use resistance excuses because the feeling was just so strong.

And that to me is like a great description of what it is to accumulate the energy required for escape velocity.

It's like you're feeling so much of what's true for you that those resistances that that previous gravitational force can't affect you,

Which is why in addition to having positive accumulative habits,

It's important to reduce the energy zapping habits.

Like a lot of the things that I've become very critical of recently,

I mean mainly social media and technological influence,

But also things like junk food and anything that allows you to trade your feeling of aliveness for momentary pleasure is essentially a sedative.

Right?

I mean,

A kind of conspiratorial view on social media is that as a way of controlling the masses and keeping people in low velocity so that you stay wrapped up in someone else's orbit,

Whatever that social narrative is,

As opposed to staying away from that stuff that zaps your attention and energy,

Accumulating as much energy as possible,

And then seeing what comes out of you.

Like especially with where I'm at in life personally,

Where I don't have any glaring problems,

But if I'm honest,

I don't feel super satisfied.

I feel like there's something more I can do that I'm not totally sure.

I am postulating that if I really accumulate a lot of energy,

It'll force me to discover what that is.

Which brings us to our final principle on achieving escape velocity,

Which is seeking negentropy.

I spoke about negentropy in the Four and a Half Principles of a Man's Life podcast some time ago.

Negentropy being the opposite of entropy.

Entropy,

Which you may remember,

Is defined as disorder.

But really it's more than just disorder.

Or actually the way to describe disorder is that what describes a configuration as disorderly rather than orderly,

Or entropic rather than negentropic,

Is that it's interchangeable.

It's a configuration where it's interchangeable with many other configurations.

So for example,

If you have 300 pages of a novel ordered in the proper order where it actually makes sense from 1 to 300,

That is a very low entropy configuration.

Because out of all the different combinations you can put those 300 pages,

There's only one that actually makes sense versus,

The number's really big,

It's 300 factorial ways where it doesn't make sense,

Right?

300 times 299 times 298,

Right?

It's a really big number,

I don't know what it is.

So to actually get it right,

If you were to throw up the pages randomly,

The odds of getting it exactly right,

1 to 300,

Are extremely low.

Which makes it a very low entropy configuration,

A very meaningful configuration.

Because it's not interchangeable with many other ways.

So when it comes to our lives,

And low entropy in our lives,

Entropy essentially is commonest.

If your mode of being is interchangeable with everyone else,

Well that is a high entropy thing,

You're basically,

You're just one of the masses,

It's meaningless,

Right?

You're interchangeable with everything else.

There's infinite ways to be a bland person.

There's infinite ways to just be an average Joe.

There is only one way to be an individuated version of you.

You know,

And this is,

You know,

Yeah this is a bit of a,

You are special,

But you're only special if you actually exercise your specialness.

If you individuate yourself so that you are highlighting the traits that are uniquely you.

Because,

You know,

If you allow yourself to be influenced by collectivist programming that says we all should be the same and you should just get along with this group.

And actually the bigger the group,

The bigger the group that's trying to be homogenized,

The higher entropic it is,

Right?

Because to find the lowest common denominator between two people is one thing.

But to find the lowest common denominator amongst a million people is not going to be a very low denominator,

Right?

Like it's going to be,

Anyway,

I know I'm mixing math and science and fitness metaphors,

But you know,

I am ad-libbing right now as well.

But like individuation is trying to reduce the entropy of your expression as greatly as possible.

Your personal uniqueness,

Which I think is something that kind of naturally happens when you reduce the influence of external gravitational forces,

Right?

These external things that take you off your path or off your otherwise free flowing expression.

Things that keep you trapped in smaller bounds of a smaller world as opposed to accumulating enough energy so that your feelings become so loud that they direct you into things,

Right?

Your emotions become so heightened that you have no choice but to follow them.

What one beautiful example that came from someone I was coaching earlier this year.

This was a guy who basically was trapped by like mother complex,

Nice guy syndrome stuff for most of his life.

And you know,

Everything seemed fine.

He was getting by,

Wasn't always fulfilled in relationships,

But nothing was ever so bad and everything,

You know,

Everything he did in relationships with women were socially acceptable and status quo.

Even though he wasn't happy really,

He wasn't really fulfilled.

Then he met someone who,

She was kind of a crazy woman,

But in many ways,

I would say an angel in his life because she took advantage of all of his nice guy programming.

She basically stomped on his heart and did all the things that,

You know,

All the things that are undesirable.

And you know,

It has caused him massive,

Massive pain and it caused him,

You know,

Kind of a desperate desire to change.

And there's a few times in our early conversations where he was breaking down and crying with shame and pain.

And you know,

Every time I'd be like,

Good,

Right?

Because the first couple of times he would apologize,

Like,

I don't know why I'm crying.

I don't want to cry.

He's like,

No,

No,

No,

This is good.

Good.

I want you to feel his pain.

I'm glad you felt this pain because unlike all of the other years in your life,

You've now finally experienced an acute enough pain that'll force you to change.

There's the hopefully,

You know,

More pleasurable way you can accumulate enough energy to achieve escape velocity.

But the other thing that it gives you that energy sometimes are problems.

Most people enter an interest in personal development because of something unfortunate happening.

Unfortunately,

Right?

Like not a lot of people that I've met become super interested in developing themselves just because they want to go from pretty good to a little bit more good,

Right?

Like it's pain that often gets us into this mode,

Which is a fine enough call to adventure.

But that only was able to happen because he allowed himself to feel what was true,

Right?

He didn't judge it and he just felt the thing.

And that feeling led him to a new reality where he's not bound by those problems before.

Because the truth is,

Even though he didn't realize how upset he was in those past relationships where he was just good enough to get by,

He wasn't happy actually.

And he was essentially sedated to not recognize how he wasn't really on the path he wants to be.

Whereas this smack in the face,

This stab in the chest helps him recognize like,

Oh hey,

This is not cool.

I have to enter,

I have to leave this planet and enter new worlds.

And actually I brought this up to him.

And so I bring this up now for this point on negentropy.

It's a quote by Aleister Crowley that is often quoted by people who like Aleister Crowley,

Which is,

Do at thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

This is kind of the basis of,

Aleister Crowley was an esoteric mystic in 19th century Europe.

Do at thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,

Even though it sounds kind of,

I mean it comes from him,

Is kind of the foundation of a lot of modern self-help of essentially respect what you actually want,

Right?

Do at thou wilt,

Wilt being your actual individuated dreams and desires.

And this is something that we explore in the archetype challenge because it's one thing to set goals for things that have been externally defined.

It's another thing to recognize your kind of unexplainable desires and interests,

Like things that,

It's not like,

Oh,

I like baseball because my dad liked baseball.

It's like,

I don't know,

I like,

I'm interested in this topic and I don't know where it came from.

It's almost like I was born with it.

Those are the things we want to explore the most because as far as we can tell,

That is your nature,

Right?

And even down to traits,

Like heightening the traits that you happen to have,

Like owning the traits that you happen to have.

There's so much freedom in that because to finish the sentence,

Do at thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,

What binds people the most is this perception of laws that they did not create themselves,

Right?

It could be legal laws,

But really we're talking mostly about social perception laws of like,

Oh,

I can't do this or I'm not allowed to do this or it's not,

You know,

I'm not,

I won't be a good boy if I do such and such as opposed to,

This is what I genuinely feel in me.

Not like,

Not in a reactionary way,

Not in a programmed way or a way to like be liked,

But this is what I genuinely feel.

And because I feel this way,

It is the law.

It is the right and wrong that I will,

I will assess my actions on,

On whether or not I am being true to it.

Obviously,

You know,

If you're,

If you're somehow born with genuine feelings that are very antisocial,

Maybe I wouldn't,

I wouldn't accept that that,

That should be the law.

Like if you want to just go around being a serial killer.

Yeah,

I mean,

That's certainly not the,

I mean,

Well anyway,

We don't have to get into that.

I'm being a little silly now.

This statement is a description of being free from external forces.

It's very similar to the Jung statement I read earlier,

Which is to succumb to no temptation and do everything in accordance with one's own will.

They were actually around,

I believe,

At the same time,

So I don't know,

Maybe they traded notes back then.

Because achieving true escape velocity,

Where,

Achieving true escape velocity in your life means leaving the comfort or the familiar to discover new worlds.

And leaving that comfort,

I mean,

The biggest thing that binds someone to a given reality to a given orbit is a fear of leaving the familiar,

Of leaving the comfort of what you know is too scary for many.

Which is why,

When I recommend to a guy stuck in a small town where everyone's thinking small and kind of holding him back in a sense,

When I suggest to him the kind of obvious thing to leave the town and just explore,

You can always come back,

Right?

Go explore the world.

When such a person says no and a few guys have been like,

Ah,

I can't do that,

It's just,

Even though they desire these big things,

They're afraid to leave the familiar.

And this is just a decision you have to make if you find yourself clutching comfort is that that is literally what it is to escape the orbit,

Is to go out and discover the unknown and discover new worlds and see what exists that maybe you can't even plan for.

And I think that's the most exciting thing,

Especially once you overcome your acute problems,

Maybe the thing that got you into this idea of creating your life actively.

It's exciting.

It is scary.

It's also exciting to enter a space where it's so new and adventurous that you don't even know what goals to set.

I mean,

That's kind of where I'm hoping to land.

Like when I was thinking about,

Do I have any specific goals for 2022?

Of course,

There's something like,

I would like to save more money and I would like to be a good father for my new child and all those things that are obvious and true for everyone.

But really,

There's no thing I want to acquire.

There's no specific experience that I want.

It's like,

I know I just want the feeling of being in a heightened state that I haven't before that's basically so new that I wouldn't even know how to set a tangible goal because it's all of it.

That's personally what I want to experience.

The point of all of this is that if you really want to change something,

When you achieve escape velocity,

You still have freedom.

You always have the freedom to go back to old worlds if you want.

You can go back to your old town.

You can go back to whatever way of being.

You can give away your money or whatever the thing is,

I don't know,

Whatever your goal is.

But when you've achieved escape velocity,

You have choice.

You're basically in space on your own to discover new worlds,

To do new things and you can always look back and you look back and reminisce.

You'd always go back.

But the point is you're free.

You're no longer bound your trajectory.

That was the word I was trying to think of earlier.

I couldn't think of the word trajectory.

Your trajectory is no longer controlled by something else,

Whether they're internal tendencies or forces or whatever.

So I hope this episode has been useful on escape velocity.

I mentioned a few things just in case perhaps you're new to the podcast and you want to go back and listen.

I mentioned the ambition acceptance dilemma.

That's kind of what it sounds like.

It's an episode from I think last June or so where I'm describing basically whether you should go hard or not.

Around that time,

Also another episode I mentioned was four and a half guiding principles for a man's life.

It's something,

It's a symbol I've tattooed on my notebook.

One of my buddies has it too.

Both of those episodes came after a four by four by 48 challenge we did aspired by David Goggins.

Other resources I mentioned are the Mask and Archetype Challenge.

It is a 21 day program I created based in Jungian archetypes specifically to summon the testosterone driven characteristics from your unconscious.

Basically what it means to be really be a man for yourself that is lodged in your unconscious,

Not driven by culture or anyone else.

Just some exercises over a 21 day challenge to uncover that in you.

And I also mentioned arousal control.

It is something I just believe is good for men to practice both for your sex life but also for your emotional well-being.

Those are all things.

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Happy New Year everybody.

If you liked it,

Please share it with somebody.

I'll see you in the next one.

Goodbye.