ladies and gentlemen welcome to the muscle intelligence podcast i am incredibly humbled and honored to host today's guest this book written by barry michaels and phil stutz has made a tremendous impact on my life and i truly feel humbled humbled and honored to have them joining me today on the podcast dr michaels is living in california as a functioning psychiatrist and just a absolute wealth of information he's truly a gift of a person the information and the knowledge and the wisdom he passes on to us is nothing short of remarkable and dr stutz who is the creator of the tools which is the book i'm referring to um the fact that he was willing to make time for us today to join us truly speaks of the man's character and his mission during his life and as you hear during the interview dr stutz is suffering from a little bit of parkinson's and at times it's challenging to hear him at times his connection isn't awesome he even cuts out for a few minutes and then he joins us again but we did our best to edit the podcast because truly it's an incredible conversation there's so much value provided here by these two gentlemen and i just didn't want to lose this information because as i say the tool the book the tools first recommended to me by brian johnson of uh currently of the heroic app um was just just an absolute game changer for me and understanding how to get through challenging times to think differently about improving myself as a person and ultimately get through you know the darkness that we all have inside of us the challenges that we all have we talked a little bit about today about the tools we talked a little bit about how phil came up with these tools and now how barry continues to perpetuate this message as we move forward and uh in staying with the theme um the person who introduced me to this book as i say was brian johnson through his incredible his incredible platform previously called philosopher's notes then called optimize now called heroic and brian is on a mission to ultimately help you curate and direct your own hero's journey brian has been a previous guest to the show someone who is one of the most highly requested guests of the show he's got decades and decades of being a student of reading learning and sharing his wisdom and now his app is just absolutely a phenomenal tool for people looking to optimize life so if you haven't heard of heroic yet here's what they're up to so they have been wielding technology meaning creating this incredible app like really really well designed amazing user interface specifically to help you move from theory to practice to mastery and brian's terms the entire heroic team have been working tirelessly to get this app out so that ultimately you can have access to all of the best information on the planet from all of the best books so brian has actually read and summarized over 600 books and that was the original foundation of his business he then evolved into what he calls this plus ones which is adding more value over and above the summaries of the books and now he's moved into his coaches program which i actually did in 2020 a 10 month coaches program to ultimately help you take this information and teach it to one first yourself and then anyone who else in your life who you're hoping to to help um talk about the hero's journey there's just so much behind heroic that i strongly suggest you guys check out um there's an incredible wealth of information i could spend the next half an hour really going through all the details but first and foremost head over to muscleintelligence.com heroic and you're going to get hooked up with 20 off the discount for your entire first year and it's incredibly incredibly cheap and incredibly incredibly valuable um this might be some of the best small amount of money you invest this year and so the way i use it personally i like to read pre-read books what i say is pre-read so brian's actually summarized over 600 books into between six and ten minute videos and and about a six to ten page pdf so instead of reading a book which can take eight to twelve hours i'm gonna go read the pdf first go watch brian's summary see the big ideas extract the big ideas and then decide if i actually want to go read that book and sometimes i don't and sometimes i just get the big ideas and there's so much value in that so without more rambling for me head over to muscle intelligence.com heroic and then sit down and enjoy my podcast barry michael's phil stutz because it was one of the favorite ones i ever did i truly felt honored and privileged with these gentlemen joining me today and i appreciate your patience in us trying to optimize the audio and ultimately patience in understanding phil and his description of things so enjoy the show and listen all the way the end because we have some golden nuggets coming at you just love to get into uh you know barry starting with you your background is really interesting so obviously having gone to harvard become a lawyer kind of decided that wasn't for you and then went into uh ultimately this this idea of being a psychotherapist i'd love to just have you kind of walk down the path of how that began for you yeah it um you know when i was young i i think my family always really emphasized getting good grades academic achievement um you know etcetera etcetera i think my father had always wanted to be a lawyer and he couldn't afford you know to even go to you know higher education so i didn't know that that's interesting yeah i became a businessman his i mean to really go back into it his father was kind of a petty crook and so i think my father wanted to be a lawyer to sort of make up for that and really yeah there was never any really overt pressure to be a lawyer but there was a lot of overt pressure to do something that was sort of deemed uh prestigious and acceptable you know to the larger society and i also was interested in politics so i wanted to go into politics and law seemed like a good thing to do to get into there so anyway i went to law school i did really well in law school i enjoyed law school i started practicing law and realized that i just hated it i mean i mean i mean i literally hated every minute of it i just i remember sitting in the law library in my law firm just thinking how do i get out of this like i hated every moment of it i stayed there for three years basically because i just had no idea what to do next and i still just couldn't stand it and so i just one day i up and quit and i had no idea what to do next but it was the best it was the scariest thing i've ever done on the best thing i've ever done because it just opened up vistas that never would have been open for me before you know i went to europe i sort of bummed around for a while and what i realized was that the thing i did enjoy about my law firm was that all of the other lawyers would come to me to complain about their problems and i was actually pretty good at talking to them you know talking them through it i realized well i could do that for a living you know so um i went back to school got my degree and then i think the year i graduated i met phil and he just completely revolutionized the way i conducted myself as a psychotherapist it was new catalyzing energizing it was a completely new way of doing therapy than i'd ever been in touch with before so that's interesting so so phil i'd love to hear from you what you were doing that was so revolutionary obviously i'd love to hear kind of how you guys connected also but you know kind of rewinding behind what barry was doing saying like what was it that he was so enamored by that caught you know his attention ultimately what led you to that because obviously if you're doing something so unique you had a unique thought process yeah you know i think part of the problem was that because it was unique it was it was very hard for the rest of but they organized psychology or psychiatry to actually connect to it he i think because of his instincts he has tremendous intelligence instincts and tremendous workouts he has the greatest work ethic in for any person ever in my life so that's just my way of saying he was able to recognize something i think and also he's a practical person anyway here's what happened i i was um i went through the new york city um medical establishment training i i did my residency in psychiatry in new york in a place called metropolitan hospital would you be if you ever seen the movie um hospital that it was filmed actually where i trained so it was a um it was a fantastic training um but but it had to end at some point away at the end of it they started to give you patience individual patients that you treat for on your on your own that you weren't allowed to do that until the very last year of your residency so i started to treat these people and right away i had a problem with it the problem was nobody really told me exactly what to do but i knew one thing which is people would come to the sessions they'd read the session and they'd leave it without anything tangible to give them hope they leave the session without a sense of where we were going they leave the session without um homework that they could do in between mostly they left the sessions feeling just about as badly as when they walked in sometimes worse i didn't like it not that i'm such a great guy or such an altruist um but as the thing went forward and it became a career you know a profession i couldn't take people's money and i was happy to earn money but i couldn't take it if they weren't getting something you know i felt like that was i was um selling air so to speak so um without um wasting time at all the fights i had with my supervisors i decided that i was going to try to before before anyone could leave my office after a session i was going to try to give them something now what does that something mean it means that we try to delineate the symptomatic problem they were having with that without um so much attention to the cause um and then i would try to um i would invent something in my mind like here's the classic one that i invented which is people are avoiding probably more than any other than anxiety avoidance is probably the biggest problem that faces so an avoidance has to do with fear right so i i developed this thing i called the reversal of desire because the normal the normal average person's desire is to avoid fear to avoid anything that's uncomfortable right so i i developed this tool basically it's called the reversal of desire so instead of the typical desire wanting to avoid fear i made them go right into the fear and there's a tool and steps to that and everything um so that was the very beginning of and and it worked a little bit um if you want i mean i could tell you some of the background because one of the interesting things about me is that i i was able to take like this particular thing about the reversal of desire i got the idea for that tool when i was when i was in the 10th grade i was like i weighed about 92 pounds and i was i was like the youngest kid in all high school and we had a mechanical drawing i don't you know what that is it's like a draft of course yeah so they anyway so i'm saying i'm like the worst drawer draft draft draftsman you could possibly imagine so they sit this kid next to me and the kid the kid sits down and i was 13. hillary was about 19 and a half and it so happens that he was he was a star running back not not only for a whole high school but in the whole city he was first in all city half that whatever they called it and at first i was scared to even look at this kid he was so much up he had four arms like as big as my chest that's what it looked like anyway but we neither of us could do the mechanicals wrong we just couldn't do it so we start to and talk to each other and this guy obviously he the only thing he wanted to talk about was football and he told me something that was amazing he said um you um he said i'm sorry he said i am not the most talented half back in the city i'm not the fastest i'm not the most elusive but he says i have one advantage over all the other running backs and he says i like to get hit i like it and i'm looking at my kid lost his mind you know i was intimidated enough and then this guy's it was like the most animalistic and he says i i call for the ball from scrimmage on the first play i run right at a linebacker offensive and whoever it is and he i don't try to avoid him he pops me and i'm on my ass and he says when i get up from that hit i felt like i could conquer the world and even though i was 13 years old they said hmm this has got to be something to this and this one seems stuck in my mind and that cuts to 20 years later i began to experiment with that and it worked right away as i was um developing that tool i realized i had a talent for this book for and i would make it a point to demand of myself that everybody that would leave they would leave with a tool i mean there's a million of them maybe we'll go with some of them um but that's how it started um all right just enough about that fella i love that that's a great story it was actually going exactly where i wanted to go i'm curious what it was about you at such a young age that drew you to the desire to help people it's not a very common thing that a 13 year old would be when i was nine years old i had a brother that died um i was nine he was three um and my parents um he died suddenly we were kind of yeah kidney cancer my parents were not religious they had nothing in terms of dealing with it so the whole family collapsed out of that collapse i became the leader of the family at age nine and i as a a whole lot of the story about my father i became his psychiatrist um i didn't know what i was doing but i i seem to have i had an optimistic soothing presence let me put it down well here's the thing my father wanted me to be a doctor anyway but after my brother died he really wanted me to be a doctor um and because it was it was in new york and there were various violent things happening one of which was um one of my friends was thrown down in elevation he lived so we went to visit him in the same hospital metropolitan hospital where i was trained just by coincidence when we're walking out of the hospital after having seen him my father turns around he points to the hospital and he says that's the only profession because that's the only which means it doesn't matter what else you do in life you're a failure unless you become a doctor so my my younger brother died so that was part of my my life's mission would be to fight death i mean now it sounds insane um and then i had this experience down the elevator shaft where it was reinforced um the funniest thing of all of it is and my family's psychiatry was nothing it was completely looked down on it wasn't real medicine but my father just credited he said you i'm gonna pay for medical school you just have to graduate you can take whatever you want and so i took psychiatrists well i felt plenty guilty about it because i enjoyed it it was the only thing in medicine i really enjoyed did that answer the question i remember it very much answers the question yeah absolutely so i'd love to have uh maybe barry you could kind of walk down the path of telling us a little bit more about the reversal of desire because it sounds like for both of you that maybe is the most impactful tool yeah it's certainly one of the most impactful tools just to back up for a moment and fill in you know some of what phil was talking about you know up until the time i met phil i understood what traditional psychology was about which was it was premised on a false premise and the false premise was in order to overcome problems you have to dive deeply into what caused the problem now if just a moment thinking about that it doesn't really make any sense you know you don't need to know how your toilet got stuck in order to unstick the toilet and yet when it came to the human psyche traditional psychology believed that you needed to delve into causation in order to solve the problem when i met phil it was such a revolution in my thinking because what he said was no you don't need to understand it and even if you do understand it that's not actually going to solve the problem for you what you need are forces that don't feel like they're available to you when you're experiencing the problem which gets us to the problem of avoidance when you're afraid to do something or when you can't get yourself to you can't discipline yourself to sit down and write or do a task or write an email or anything that you know we all avoid a wide wide variety of things what's happening inside of you is that you're a little bit afraid of the pain that is involved in moving forward whenever you move forward and do something even if it's something you want to do there's a little bit of pain and discomfort attached to that a because you don't know what's going to happen and b because it requires effort and effort you know we're all lazy we'd rather not extend effort then expend it okay which means that in order to move forward you need to change your relationship to pain you need to accept that pain is actually part of life that pain is actually part of moving forward i mean i see you nodding i'm sure that you're incredibly familiar with this as a trainer because you got to get people to face pain all day every day so the the secret of the reversal of desire is that it takes our normal desire which is to avoid pain at all costs and it reverses it it says bring on the pain are we saying bring on the pain because we're masochists no we're saying bring on the pain because pain is an absolutely necessary part of life and you can't move forward without facing it and by desiring it you shift the direction that you're moving and generally we move away from pain when you desire something you move toward it and the moment you start to move toward pain something really magical happens i'm amazed even now after i've used the tool for 35 years you move toward pain and you feel free and excited to embrace it strangely enough you don't feel pain you feel excitement euphoria almost so that's the way the reversal of desire works yeah that that's what i thought it was the law of pain which is if you confront pain and go into it it actually diminishes if you back away from it and try to avoid it it gets bigger and that's a law you could try in small things big things where well it sounds like there's a bit of the new yorker in in this uh tool right there's the the bit of like the i hear it kind of the new yorker coming out it feels like the new yorker like bring it on i love pain pain sets me for you that little bit of like new yorker's edge do you think it was part of that that kind of uh initiated this tool we'll say i do in a way i mean in the most superficial way i mean we took a brand new seven speed but yeah yes it was it was the main thing was schmuck if you're gonna take people's money and time and claim you're a doctor or whatever you better deliver something yeah i mean that that was an ethos and i never thought of it as a new york thing but yeah it is a new york thing but no question uh yeah in california we would just talk it to death there may not be that new york swagger if it was in california right it'd be kind of like the soft like cushy landing rather than like we're going right through it kind of a kind of an off topic question still on topic but but a little bit of a tangent someone who lacks trust right so um it seems as though that some clients i experience including myself at times uh have an innate lack of trust for authority so for you know my parents for it is that something that you would recommend one of the tools for yeah i don't know that there's a you know a single specific tool for that but see the truth is tools evoke forces that you weren't aware of prior to that you just felt stuck you know and you weren't aware that there was something there that could actually help you when you use tools regardless of what particular tool you're using and you use them over and over and over again and you start to experience these i hate to use this language because it sounds so cheesy but these helping forces like however you explain them you could call it god you could call it forces in your unconscious working for you rather than against you basically exactly what starts to happen is you start to trust something higher than yourself and that changes your entire relationship with authority i i guess what i'm really saying is that authority figures are really just avatars or stand-ins for your relationship with something higher than you however you want to define that and when you can start to trust that then you can start to trust them and the trust is more real because you're not you know it's part of the reason we don't trust authority figures is that they're fallible [Music] and we know that they're fallible and so we're wary of putting our trust in them higher forces are infallible and when you can trust them then you can trust a physical literal human authority figure knowing that he'll probably make a mistake at some point it won't be the end of the world you know it's like he can be human you know kind of thing yeah one of the things you really seem to take into run with over the last few years barry is the idea of discussing the shadow and doing the shadow work and that was one of the things i was really excited to dig into today if you wanna because it seems like there's a parallel there right if someone's lacking trust in an authority figure it's probably to do with something something within the shadow that maybe myself or other people aren't accepting yeah i i could talk about the shadow from now to eternity i love the entire subject in fact just to give a plug my business partner kristen sergeant and i are giving a week-long um seminar at the omega institute in rhinebeck new york in july on july 4th so um it's sold out already i tried to apply it so i signed up for the other one there's two you're doing two events right no just one there's another shorter event i think maybe it's online i figure it is but i sign up for the second one i'll have to find out about that yeah the shadow is this just unfathomably rich resource that we have inside of us that shows up in the form of our worst qualities it's one of these strange paradoxical things in life where the part of you that you tend to be most ashamed of that you least want to reveal to other people it might be a secret foible that you have or an obsession that you have or it might be that you feel like you know not good looking or that you're don't speak well in public or whatever it is it's the part of you that you're most ashamed of that if you're able to forge a relationship with it turns out to be this unfathomably rich resource for you one way to understand that by the way is that if you're constantly hiding or repressing or rejecting this part of you you're coming to reality with half of you instead of all of you you're coming to all human interactions feeling like god i sure hope they don't see that shadow you know be behind me whereas if you can accept your shadow and i mean fully embrace that ugly you know who you've been ashamed of your entire life then you're free you just stop caring what other people think about you which means that you can express yourself with a freedom and a spontaneity that you've never felt before i mean i'm a really good example of that i was afraid of public speaking for my entire life i mean just terrified of it and through shadow work it has turned out to be one of the most enjoyable fulfilling things i've ever done in my life and i'm not i'm not only not afraid i look forward to it and it's really genuine it's it's the i mean i look back and it's like jesus have you changed it's crazy so is it being willing to acknowledge accept and maybe engage with those parts of you that you simply haven't wanted to let out in the past or is it is it it's going as far as doing the things that maybe you would have been afraid to do in the past like if you could walk us through some of those kind of intricacies of it it's really both a big part of shadow work is just forging an image of your shadow so that you can interact with it in your imagination that's going to sound strange to most of your listeners like what are you doing you're talking to like an imaginary friend or something my listeners here at all it's all the weird stuff for me so it's okay okay good um because very very quickly what we find is that when people forge an image of their shadow the image becomes very real so all of a sudden you'll be talking to your shadow and it will say something to you that you didn't think ahead of time like you're not making it up and putting those words in it's you know in its mouth it's interacting with you so it's a you know you can you can get a little flavor of this if you go back to a vivid dream that you've had where you're talking to some figure and the figure is talking to you just as if they were a real person in the real world that's what shadow work is like except you're awake you're not asleep you know while it while it's happening and what happens is the the stronger your relationship with your shadow gets the more it begins to trust that you're not going to shame it or reject it anymore or judge it anymore the more it becomes a resource for you um i've had my shadow tell me things that i should do that were scary for me that turned out to be the best things i've ever done you know risks that i should take things that confrontations that i should have because i'm shy about confronting people and unerringly it knows better than i do what what's best for me you know in a certain way so it becomes an ally instead of a source of shame do you take care of time in the day to explore it or is it just something that as it comes up you allow it to come through and you maybe engage it i try to tell people to do both you know i think in the beginning when you're doing shadow work when you're just sort of familiarizing yourself with the concept of it it's really good to have a specific time every day when you're going to interact with your shadow like at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day or if you're a freak like me you know both you know just to book in the day it's good to start off with just very basic questions like how are you doing you know how are you feeling what's it like living inside of me is there anything that i did today that um you really liked that you really appreciated is there anything i did that really put you off you know in some way you know and it's really amazing how the shadow will say yeah there was at one point where you were interacting with that person and you got like a little shy and you didn't you weren't bold enough you know and i really wish you had just stepped out and said what you wanted to say you know kind of which is really helpful you just like getting feedback from somebody who's going to tell you the truth and who's living inside of you watching you every moment of the day and knowing when you're sort of pulling your punches when you're really not being truly yourself you know kind of thing certainly this ultimate form of journaling and reflection right it's like journaling within with your higher self or with a higher version of yourself exactly do you think there's only one version of the shadow or one version that lives within saudi or is there multiple no i think there are multiple versions in fact i think there's probably ultimately countless versions of the shadow what phil and i have done is try to sort of separate them into like two or three categories though the first category is the mo the classic shadow which jung talked about carl jung was the was the person who sort of invented the concept of the shadow um and that that's what we would call the inferior shadow not because it is inherently inferior but because it it it's constituted [Music] it's made out of all of the traits that we think of as inferior you know maybe i feel like i wasn't educated well enough or maybe i feel like i'm not articulate enough or maybe i feel like i'm not good looking or not attractive to the opposite sex or you know whatever it is the second version of the shadow is the evil shadow which is not again not inherently evil but it's whatever qualities we regard as bad you know things that our parents told us don't be that way don't be selfish or don't you know and and the the evil shadow is very important because it often holds your deepest ambitions it it's the part of you that knows what it wants and is willing to do anything to get it yeah it doesn't care what anybody thinks it just wants it's just looking for the fulfillment of who you are who you really are inside is that some type of synergy with the ego it sounds like you know the i don't know i'd like to differentiate there so obviously the ego is the one that's protecting you it's the one that maybe cares about you and so it sounds like there may be some parallel there in this lexicon the ego would be the part of you that cares more about being a good little boy and attaining the approval of your parents or the authority figures then it cares about the deepest ambitions of the shadow the shadow wants to become who it's meant to be the ego wants to fit in and be acceptable to the parents so it's going to put down the shadow and that's that's why it regards it as evil is because it's not really evil as a as an objective judgment it's evil because it threatens getting the approval of the of the authority figures do you think the shadow is the most accurate name for it is just because it kind of looms behind you or it looms inside of you or it sounds like it may need a different nomenclature if it's ultimately aspiring to allow you to live at your highest and best maybe it doesn't maybe the connotations of shadows incorrect i'm curious your thoughts on that well there's one good part about about naming is that which is you can't get rid of your shadow um if your shadow follows you around with it i think that's that's the original genesis of the idea um that's a good question though i don't know i i just felt like that inferior shadow that's what i call it eagle shadow then there's a sick shadow to make it more complicated what's the third one this this the sixth i think yeah these are these are all things that are let's say socially undesirable that we want to hide the first one the the um uh the inferior shadow is obviously um something you're ashamed of so somewhere the the evil shadow doesn't have any shame at all but the the the the third one the sixth shadow so so each of these things have something that's that's not each of these things have something you like you wish weren't there but they are there i don't know very mentioned i don't know but that's how you originally said he said the partnership is there it's not going away um there's nothing you can do about that um so and that's why that's what he called the shadow um but the the sick shadow i don't know have you dealt with this barry have i we talked about this the sick shadow no yeah okay so so the third and the deepest human weakness is what i call sickness it means we're mortal it means we're eventually going to die and in a certain sense we're weak now the sick shadow only thrives when it's part of a matrix and you you can call you can call out the field or you can call the um the the great mother if you want or what whatever it is oh and another thing you should know about this and stop me if it's going too far afield um the sick shadow has to do with life as paradoxical as that may sound and um the the the best the the most profound archetype of life is a tree believe it or not so the sick shadow has to be turned into a tree that grows up you know beyond the um beyond the earth and and up in the in this whatever you want to call it to feel every all life all life forces are connected so healing depends to a large degree except in the evil shadow using the evil shadow and that is the shadow um uh sick shadow and in this sick shadow the sick shadow can can connect to that tree of life much better than because the other shadows of lying about what they're capable of knows that they they posture themselves as separate individual life forms i see it as a triangle facing downwards and in the six shadows on the bottom you have to find it's a very very deepest level of life um anyway so that's my my strengths that sound that sounds incredibly interesting i'd love to have either one of you kind of like expand on that a little bit because that's if it's if it's the way you're connecting into life from higher power seems like both of you kind of keep coming back to this concept of using the tools to allow yourself to connect into these these higher forces and it sounds as though if i'm not mistaken the shadow or the stick shadow is the path uh yes that's absolutely correct um i mean technically the sick shadow to the bottom of the of if you look think of it as an image the bottom of it is roots and and every root of every plant in the whole world is connected at least in a mythological sense so so that's the that's the bottom ground um connection but then the tree grows and then you have the the green level layer and that does not connect automatically the green layer um okay the bottom of the thing is by the roots right the bottom level rules is physical you can see there's al there's also a complementary um level of connection up here in the green layer and that connects by a field you can't see the connection of every you don't see every tree or leaf connected but they are all connected so the trick is to to move from the roots up where we're in a higher level in the a field yeah you're able to feel the handling of course yep for sure um which brings us a whole other thing about the field did you guys talk about that there no no but you look at me like you want me to talk about it i love you wrong with it phil is that okay barry yeah yeah okay i just want to say one thing very quickly though which is if if if your listeners are having trouble you know sort of relating to this just it's the simplest example is you know when whenever phil and i have a patient who gets sick you know it's sad and it's difficult that they get sick but they almost invariably experience an immediate deep appreciation of life that they never experienced before that's the sick shadow right because it's sort of in touch with mortality and the sort of temporalness of life it's also much more in touch with the preciousness and the appreciation for life yeah do you think some of the these sicknesses that people express are actually an expression of a repressed shadow so like maybe a thousand percent a thousand percent i i would go so far as to say it's the shadow dragging us down begging us to experience life at its most basic root like level and the more and the more civilized and sophisticated our society becomes the stronger that pull is going to get my question was just like more the stronger that pool is going to get to kind of return back to the the true nature of the self yes the shadow will not allow us to become rootless it won't allow us to go floating up you know that's it can you explain what that means very rootless it it the shadow grounds us the shadow says not in words in much more powerful ways you are housed in a finite physical body that deteriorates you're a spirit but you're a spirit in the material world housed in a material body that is going to die and and it it's not saying that to bring you down it's not saying that to depress you it's actually saying that so that you can get in touch with the appreciation that you have for being alive for for having this experience of you know of being alive the one of the dangers of our like incredibly sophisticated society is that we lose touch i mean you're probably more in touch with this than we are because you work with people's bodies people lose touch with the fact that they're housed in a physical body and when you lose touch with that you lose touch with death when you lose touch with death you lose touch with the appreciation that you should have for every single moment of life that's interesting so is that coming back to this idea of people who are constantly aspiring or uh pursuing things outside of themselves this idea of grandeur and accomplishment obviously there's some requirement and necessity for accomplishment but finding ways to incorporate that and staying grounded and doing things ultimately your body needs to thrive i think what we're saying is that there's there's an often an unconscious drive behind that there's there's nothing wrong with accomplishing things we're all in favor of that but there's often an unconscious drive behind that for immortality to prove that you've transcended the physical body that you're no longer that you're really not going to die you know kind of thing i'm not saying that anybody thinks that consciously but it's the but it's the sick shadow that actually roots you that keeps you grounded it says no you're still gonna die yeah and there's one other aspect to it which is the sixth shadow is the best part of you at going through death and rebirth um it's it's almost made for that so if if use death or deterioration very differently deterioration of death as long as it leads to a rebirth and whichever one you guys mentioned it leads to a connection so the connection to the whole world universe whatever is not just the way of connecting to the to this sick shadow it's it's using the sick shadow as a uh how would you say it as a conduit to to the whole world of life and because death is like masculine something it doesn't have to be physical death it could be a failure a depression whatever um that's that's kind of masculine that's like a stripe to push your forehead or something but but the rebirth is feminine and it requires feminine requires a connection to everything it requires wholeness however you want to say it and that itself to the ego is a is a weakness but it's actually necessary i thought you would have taught some about the war the thing we're starting now um oh we're sort of re-refurbishing our website and and launching a whole new yeah yeah so we're going to make the tools available to the public it'll be cheaper for them and seeing the shrink of probably be more effective um so but the way we want to get people's attention is not so much to talk about in terms of psychological problems we want to talk about in terms of societal problems how does a societal problem let's say pandemic just an example how does that fit into what we're doing with individual clients what's actually going on and why is it so probation and why is every person every person freaked out it's unprecedented it goes beyond the united states also the answer there's a war going on but it's an invisible war you can't take its model from past wars which was more crude you know and think about you have you have a war within the human immune system you have a um you have a war in the extremities of political views you have a war in terms of absolute terror about the unknown ability of the future essentially it's unprecedented i don't know what to do about that no i'm just kidding so one good way to think about this is to think about it as a war um and it gets complicated because the war will both oppose you and try to keep you from making progress but it will also help you now the would that be it helps you because your attempt to deal with the war let's say the classic one is uncertainty how do you deal with uncertainty it doesn't matter whether whether it's uncertainty that you're experiencing a third grade when your parents moved you to a new school or that you don't know what russia's going to do next or you you don't know what the next uh iteration of the variant is going to be it's it's really human there are a few of them it's the human challenge if we and okay here's the trick and vaccinations we've got a good example of it that people say well vaccination and i should have free will and so what i want is my body of course however they left out one thing when they assert that right they're also endangering other people i mean that's pretty clear unless you believe you're cheering to it and even that is not the bottom line but it it require okay here's here's one way to look at the goal of human development and evolution is to develop the individual potential passion and at the same time not let not make that make you separated from the rest of the human race so you have to have a collective connection and simultaneously you have to have personal goals and personal sense of direction so that's that's the problem that's facing us i just want to add one thing to what phil is saying because it's so it really goes to the heart of what i learned from phil which is every single individual's struggle against his demons whatever his demons are whether it's anxiety or depression or we talked about avoidance earlier on um it has this individual component to it which is what psychotherapy has recognized since since its inception but but what he um what he taught me is such an important thing is that every single individual struggle against his own demon will have a profound effect on the war that he's talking about the collective war because the collective is literally just that it's a collective of individuals you know kind of thing and so you know what we see in our i don't know what to call it it's really kind of like a community is that um the health of the community is improving as the health of each individual improves and health may be not the right word i mean in a very broad sense but but as each member of the community uses tools the overall health of the entire community grows and becomes more and more robust so every time you use a tool you're fighting a war and everybody benefits at least all the good guys benefit yeah so it's using a tool is not the way that characterizes behavioristic superficial mechanical exists exactly the opposite the stuff that's superficial is to do it without without tools and and i'm a good example that you know literally when i use tools i'm a better husband i'm a better father i'm a better friend like it literally affects the people around me and vice versa did you ever try to do something and fail you try to do something and fail you failed yourself and finally you give up the next day it happens by itself have you ever had that experience yeah okay that the thing of you i gave up but it happened anyway that's it's like the field did it it's an invisible super powerful intelligent force that wants to support and enhance your personal goals and give you the power to achieve those but at the same time do it in a way that um makes a contribution into the collective so no human being could figure out how to do that because in some ways they're opposites but the field knows how to do it now there are four laws of the field and it feels very peculiar first of all it's a female force you can't force it to do anything it it works on um uh relationships you have to have a relationship with the field and here therefore um if you have a relationship it goes away it feels like up here and if if you violate the the laws i'm going to outline for you it like drifts away not because it's punishing you it's because he can't see you it can't find you so the human psyche has to raise itself up to a little bit higher levels to get an advantage in the field um so here i'm going to give quickly obviously all these things are complex but the first one is um is what they call it non-attachment yeah it is the place called opponents of non-attachment so what does that mean it means i want this very badly i'm trying to get it but i'm also willing not to have it so you're an athlete probably your next athlete i assume is that right yep what did you play i played everything growing up and i ended up becoming a professional bodybuilder in my growing up years okay so if you know um if you have the inspiration i had the um the experience once when i was i was a freshman in college on the freshman team we played with school in basketball it was terrible i think they were called in the work of russ anyway we were killing them we're winning by 40 points i said let's go home why are we gonna have to finish the game and then a peculiar thing happened i was about 25 feet from the basket and i shot but just as i let go of the ball it was the referee was off to the left and i saw him raise his whistle to his mouth so i figured he was going to call the play dead so i'm in the air i see him i think the play is dead i'm totally relaxed from 25 feet and i said i was 16 years old i said geez wouldn't it be nice if i could have that degree of relaxation and focus all the time now that was when i was 16 20 years later i tried to develop it but you can see when you're fully relaxed meaning you're not attached to the outcome you actually get better outcomes it's a paradox so anyway that's so so when i saw him raise the whistle it was the policy of non-attachment i was not in fact that's that's rule number one rule number two is called micro transactions and this you could um you can go on forever with this but a microtransaction says every interaction you have especially if you're in a position of authority um if you're managing something if you're the boss but but it's true for everybody every time you interface with another human being it's a chance either to make them feel you and them are part of the same tribe so to speak same species and in that sense we're equal or not and um you know the typical thing is a guy is working on then he gets up to go to the men's room or something and he passes the janitor on the way into the into the men's room now most guys you said uh i would they wouldn't even look down and go do their business and come back but if you're practicing the um micro transactions you gotta i tell you i don't give a because actually doesn't run you know huge you just stop for a second you look him in the eyes and even better if you know his name how are you whatever it takes five seconds but what that does is weaving it's it's weaving um a connection between you and everybody in the organization so all right so that's and then we go on and on but that's the micro transaction the next one is called commitment and commitment means very simple commitment means you're not allowed to quit no matter what happens you're not allowed to quit now why is that important it's not that the goal we're going for is so crucial it's the process of not quitting that evokes the human higher self and the human higher self is um is it immortal when you die nothing nothing goes with you into the next world so to speak except your willful acts that you do not quit on so when when you're when you're doing something or trying to do something and you don't quit what you're actually doing is evoking your higher self so that's the way i think of it is that the field is infinite the only part of you a human finite human being that's infinite is your commitment that's right infinite commitment connects you with the infinite part of the field well i wish i was as articulate as you are i will just stagger by the last one so the last one is self um restraint yeah because it's self self-restraint and the reason that one is important is if you if you lose yourself for strengthening a cookie you you get drunk when you shouldn't it doesn't really matter what you have a fight with somebody you can't control yourself all of those things bring you down to a lower level and on that lower level the the field can't see you it's not punishing it doesn't even know you're there so each one each one of these little things that you use to um what do you call it uh gratify yourself yeah yeah immediate gratification whatever um is actually amazingly enough restraining yourself from something even a small thing i give you a cookie is actually a spiritual practice and and what it does is this way i don't think it's time for but it requires a spiritual force to restrain yourself and in that in that restraint you develop the power that goes way beyond just not eating the cookie so anyway so those are the four rules of the field and when i first kind of developed these i most people said yes you and southern californians missed those there was one group that took it very seriously they were writing down one of them and that that group was guys who run big companies amazingly enough why is that because they have to make so many decisions so quickly and they can't possibly have enough information they just don't so if you have somebody like that and i i say to them you can get this indefinable mysterious invisible force on your team they don't give a what the theory is behind or anything they say okay sign me up which i found was quite a surprise two questions that kind of follow that up um one was something you guys have just kind of come up with in discussion and and kind of contemplation and the follow-up to that is if you were teaching a younger version of yourself any number of concepts would this in your mind be the highest level concept or would it be all i mean if you had to choose just one subsection of the information you're teaching because this sounds like it's incredibly a powerful tool to teach someone who maybe is you know a child or someone who's young and teach them this as a way of living well here's what i think about this uh it's funny uh barry and i always get brian johnson you know him did you brian very well yeah what he's suggesting two things one this stuff should be taught in school sure you think of all the we've learned in school you know versus something that will help you in the material way and my experience at least with teenagers i don't have too much experience with really little kids they they flock to it um if i tell them hey you got a problem you got a solid you they don't but if i tell them this is a skill that will give you power and you get a little better with your friends you'll feel more confident that whatever they want to know that and they don't care about anything else this stuff is i just have to say phil authored a good eighty percent of this stuff on his own and taught it to me so i don't i don't wanna i wanna i am not a co-author of this material i don't know where he got it from i don't know it's a mystery but i'll tell you one thing about this thank you um i'll say one thing about that um this is not stuff you can learn out of a book it's impossible maybe after you know it you could teach it to somebody else but it has to be learned in action and that's called the um that thing where you have to open the donut shop i don't know but it's but it's experiential learning it's not it's not didactic it's not intellectual no you have to feel it instinctually number one and then number two you have to apply it and see that it works so if somebody says do well i find this superficial ineffective and you're just a star whatever they want to say i said that's fine try what i'm asking you to do for a week if you don't feel something fire me please fire me and it's hard to compete against that but the whole thing is it's all empirical but it's not empirical in in a weak way or a superficial way it's empirical because there's no other way to get at this information to be a good parent you you can't you can't read this i mean you should definitely read the books that we have added the website is it has so much free information in it what does that call the tools thetoolsbook.com [Music] parent and parents get the most complex problem in the world with no instruction booklet so and parents have to face the fact the only way they can really get inside their kids and strengthen them because that's what the game is really about the only way they can do that is to change themselves and again this moves us far away from the abstract this is so so incredible we got such a great insight into everything we're doing so in 2012 you guys wrote the tools in 2017 you wrote coming alive and it sounds like in 2022 you guys will want to brand new website to allow us to go deeper and deeper uh if you could tell us a little bit about that before you go i'd love to hear about it we just want to spread this material it is so helpful to the people that you know we but we can only see a limited number of people and we you know we've spawned other other tools practitioners and coaches and stuff like that and if people need referrals they can go on the website and ask for them but we're looking to the website to really make the information public and accessible it'll have videos it'll have explanations it'll have recordings of webinars we'll have live webinars that people can join to learn more about the tools it's just going to be a vehicle to really communicate the whole the whole philosophy of the tools and the and the nitty-gritty practice of how to how to use particular tools that's all going to be through the toolsbook.com exactly bill thank you so much for being here barry absolutely incredible to connect with you both uh thank you very much for making the time and uh for so much for spreading your wisdom you've got a student in me listen thanks so much ben that's a wrap ladies and gents i hope you enjoyed my podcast with barry michaels and phil stutz as i said tons of value and if you haven't already picked up their original book the tools go ahead and do that now go over to amazon do that you can also go to thetoolsbook.com where they continue to provide additional trainings and additional information and as i say one of my favorite books uh really of probably of all time as far as value i've read at least three or four times by now and uh so much wisdom and just actionable wisdom right there's there's one thing that's you know theory but giving you things that you can act on immediately with proof of how they work um i have so much so much appreciation for uh dr michaels and dr stutz as you can hear my voice and today's podcast once again just to remind you is brought to you by the heroic app one of my favorite resources since 2007 i was using this earlier version of this app previously called philosopher's notes then called optimize.me now called heroic because it's all about you and your hero's journey and brian is empowering literally millions of people now to understand all of the wisdom of 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