Activating Your Life Force (Phil Stutz)

Listen now (45 mins) | "The human being is the most giving, self-sacrificing, loving entity and also is the most devious, amoral, vicious, and murderous is the better word..."

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I met Phil years and years and years ago, although he probably would not remember. He was part of an event that I put on and I got to witness him and Barry Michaels, he is a therapist and Phil's lifelong collaborator. They wrote The Tools and Coming Alive together and at this event, they did a live session. They just invited someone up from the audience and worked with her and it was stunning. I'll never forget it. I think many of us generally in the culture are aware of Phil's uncanny brilliance and his ability to take what feels like deeply spiritual heady concepts and ground them in actionable tools to help people really get momentum in their own lives. He has been known for decades all throughout Los Angeles and Hollywood as the person who could transform the lives of screenwriters who were stuck with writer's block.

He has worked with mega mega industry leaders, politicians, what have you, and what has made him notable is that his brand as a psychiatrist is anything but what you would normally expect from a psychiatrist. Now we have legions of life coaches and other modalities where people really get in there with people and help them problem solve, but when Phil started working, he's in his seventies now that didn't exist and he in many ways created an entire field That's very Phil. He just sees reality on a different plane. He became more famous recently when there was a Netflix documentary called Stutz about his life and people really got to him because, well, actually he just joined Instagram, follow him on Instagram, but there's not that much from Phil out in the world, and I interviewed him for Pulling the Thread a couple of years ago when he released a series of essays that had written early on in his career called Lessons for Living.

And in that conversation he was sharing all of these tools that I had never heard of. The Tools, which was a massive New York Times bestseller is really about these five mega tools for igniting creativity. It's a really valuable book, but Phil's mind is much more spiritual and much wider than that. Phil has very advanced. That's why the audio might sound a little shaky at times, although I think we finally figured out how to really record him and he's physically quite limited, but his mind is a steel trap, and so I started on this adventure with him. Originally we were going to just create a simple workbook for The Tools and I thought, oh, maybe it's a deck. And I had all these ideas and I brought all of these examples to our first meeting where we were deciding whether we wanted to work together, and it became quite clear within the first five minutes that we were definitely not doing anything simple.

No. Instead we were going to write what is essentially a hybrid between a book and a workbook: True and False Magic. Though it's really not a workbook, it's not a very long book, but it's something that you can work with. It's Phil's larger philosophical model though. It's the way in which all of these tools, these short actions that you can take in your life to move forward, fit into a much larger framework that is deeply, deeply spiritual. Phil is a student of Rudolph Steiner. He has his own theories about God and energy and higher forces as well, and we did not hold back. This will surprise no one who listens to this podcast, but I really wanted to understand and pushed him hard to explain that even though what is ineffable and impossible to explain does arrive at some sort of conclusion. It was so fun to work with him.

We became great friends and again, this was supposed to be sort of a quick and short project, but Phil and his assistant Sarai Jimenez, who I adore, who is a young mother and therapist who will do incredible things in the world, particularly with children as her career unfolds, was such a fun co-pilot. We were like the Three Musketeers. We really had an incredible time over many, many, many, many sessions. It was a deeply nonlinear experience. We went back and back and back into these tools and concepts until we put them where they needed to be and I played the role of the reader or the patient asking all the questions until we had really clearly articulated concepts. Concepts that cannot at times feel quite abstract that we then needed to ground with stories from Phil's practice and life. I learned so much. There are so many concepts in this book that I use all the time.

He's just a giant in his field and singular and surprising and as you will see in our conversation today, we go into some of the concepts in the workbook and then he turns to bossing me around a bit as a proxy I think for all creatives and for all of us who feel unsure how to assert ourselves in the world. And his answer to me and his advice to me will definitely surprise you. I'm still thinking about it. Let's build some energy around Phil and his work because I really think that the more of us who can access and build our life force, the more of us who work with higher forces, the more of us who are building fields with each other across space and time, the more formidable we become in all actions of co-creation. And as Phil says, the opposite of evil is not goodness. It is creativity. We need more creativity in the world.

MORE FROM PHIL STUTZ, M.D.

True and False Magic

Lessons for Living

The Tools

Coming Alive

Stutz

Follow Phil on Instagram

Phil’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

STUTZ:

Okay, I'm going to describe this, but it's private. It speaks me and God. Anyway, so the idea is something created the universe, something must have created it, right, but the mindblower is the part that created it that you can't see, that you don't know what it's is. You and the whole thing is almost beyond incomprehensible, but I became obsessed with this. I looked at it. This was a gift from God to human beings that he would give them the same creative power, not that he has, it's that he is. If I get in a better show, I'll explain that, but it has to do with the idea that death gets turned inside out. Do you know about that?

ELISE:

I've heard you talk about this. Can you explain it?

STUTZ:

Yeah. What Steiner says is when you die or after you die, you don't go anywhere. You're still right here, but you've turned yourself inside out or just looking as if I've turned this jacket or whatever it is inside out. So you're still there, but you become, when you look out normally you're seeing the world from your point of view, but in this case, when you look out, you're seeing yourself because you've turned to yourself inside out.

ELISE:

But is this the idea that essentially when you die you're disembodied, but the energy is still present, it's just not organized into a material form?

STUTZ:

Yes and yes, because that's the logical sequence of events. You are already beyond anything that a human being can grasp or understand or experience because it's before everything. When you turn yourself inside out, then the whole, what you used to think of as the world is actually you, but you that you're seeing encompasses the whole universe. So it's like who is home, who's busy creating the universe and giving you 10 million time you are, and that's a very hard thing to grasp because we're used to a linear view of this object over here in the center. It's a paradox inside a paradox because what you're seeing out there is a projection of yourself.

ELISE:

One of the things I love about yourself, there are many, if you can believe it, even after we've been through this experience together, but it's this headiness or just trying to track your mind as it sense makes of our experience, but then the fact that you drill it down into feeling and action in really simple ways, it's such a rare genius.

STUTZ:

Thank you.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, I love you and what I love about True and False Magic as someone who has admired you, and I will say when I first encountered the tools, even though in their most rudimentary form, I was like, oh yeah, this is how I understand. This is how I actually feel the universe. I felt this as a child that nothing would happen until I put myself in motion.

STUTZ:

You did?

ELISE:

Yes. I figured this out not before you, but as a kid, before I ever read The Tools, I understood that a dynamic that I needed to create with the universe in order to create momentum in my own life, I learned this as a kid and in my early twenties, and then when I read it, it crystallized it for me and put it into the system. And I love a system as you know, and I love a framework and I really want to understand why. And so working with you has also been an honor because the minute I feel like, oh, I cracked it, or I understand it, or I've made this thing, Phil's made this thing that's ineffable concrete and understandable, then you shock the shit out of me and essentially show me that I know nothing. How can any of this really be knowable?

STUTZ:

Yeah, that's good. You're smart. Did you go to Harvard?

ELISE:

Phil, let's go back to your opening statement, which is this inexorable mystery at the heart of everything which is creating something out of nothing and always we are that type of creator.

STUTZ:

Yeah, that's the point.

ELISE:

And everything that you do is about creation.

STUTZ:

But when I set out, I don't think necessarily we achieved it. My idea was this is the most unstoppable force and the whole thing for me was okay, so whatever that force is, we can't quite define it or experience it, but the assumption is you can still use it and you are allowed to have something that power if you piss God off, which means you misuse the power that comes with that, especially the worst thing of all is trying to use fake magic to take the place of real magic. Real magic must be shared. In fact, it doesn't even exist unless it's in a field with other beings, let say other people. What?

ELISE:

No, I love it. It's so powerful, I think.

STUTZ:

Yeah, yeah. Mostly people either get it and it'll be odd by the idea.

ELISE:

Can I just pause on something you said because I think it's really important, which you said you don't think that we nailed it, and I think if we put this book out into the world and said, this is it. This is a perfect exegesis, of the universe, and there's a certainty. Well, no, the whole point, you'd be undermining your entire thesis, which is

STUTZ:

That's very helpful. That's good.

ELISE:

Yeah, that this is a process and a protocol and that it requires these three domains, the need for constant work, the reality that we're going to face pain constantly and incessantly. There's no escaping it, and that our experience is founded on uncertainty and certainty is not only a lie, a toxic drug for many of us in going through this process with you and literally holding your hand and saying it's never going to be perfect or complete because that's the whole point of creation also, right? I mean, we write about this.

Perfection is a fo. I mean nothing can be complete if it doesn't contain the imperfection.

STUTZ:

Yeah. Did I say what Steiner says about this?

ELISE:

I don't know. Tell me again.

STUTZ:

He said the universe is perfect because it's not perfect.

ELISE:

Yeah, and it's interesting too, thinking about the people that you have traditionally worked with throughout your career, whether it's prisoners or at Rikers or the people in your early practice days in New York or this highfalutin, mega creators and titans later in your life, that it's the same protocol and the same process for all of us.

STUTZ:

Yeah. Yes. In fact, that's the definition what a human being is. It's so crazy to talk about this since you can't see your fields smell it, but the human being inherently needs your partner and the partner has to be the human being.

ELISE:

Let's talk about that more. This is this core idea, which I think is actually really beautifully represented in working on this book with you and doing it also with Saraim who's not on the mic but is present in the room with us, the three Musketeers that made this project, but that you can't create anything of any value by yourself, and as you said earlier, real magic requires co-creation and is it only possible amongst a group of people or can you co-create with higher forces?

STUTZ:

Yeah, the answer is yes.

ELISE:

Okay.

STUTZ:

Where you come into this impossible cycle, it has to do your personal karma. So there's certain things you might have to meet and accept. In some sense, the pain or the limitations and somebody else will trigger the entree into the cycle might be totally different, but you sure you want to distribute this episode?

ELISE:

The episode? I think people want as much of you as they can get.

STUTZ:

As much as I can become. I think that's the right way to say it. And this was starting to creep up on me, just the fact that I became like semi famous and at first I want to reject the whole thing, and then I realized that's just another aspect of not accepting reality. People will come up to me and say, you changed my life of someone I never saw. I never said a word and I didn't like it at first, but then I said, even though the form of the acknowledgement may be not so my liking, I try to strip it down to okay, but there's some positive force coming towards me and it helped a lot instead of making everything like some kind of existential battle.

ELISE:

Well, I think that what's part of your zone of genius is even though we write in the book about how you created these tools, which in some ways provide some symptom alleviation gives someone a practical action to take in the face of life. So here's an easy example that we write about the law of speed. This is something that I understood at an early age. You can think of this as procrastinator's dilemma, but you talk about how the longer the time elapses between when you know need to take action and when you take action, the more confidence you lose. And so part of this is getting the muscle going where you are taking action. So something as basic and simple as that is so helpful to people. I think people work these tools for the course of their entire life, and yet it's connected to something ineffable, ephemeral and big, which is crack to me as you know. I just want to understand, and I think you have humbly have some answers even if they might be impossible to articulate because they're paradoxes. Yeah. So let's talk about this idea of creativity because obviously there's creators in the world that we think of the artists, the actors, the musicians, the writers, but I think you would argue that we're all creators.

STUTZ:

Or you could say every aspect of living gives you a chance to be a creator or not even the smallest thing. It's a state of mind that you are part of human evolution. The whole human race has to direct itself no matter how poorly job we do of making this the state of mind, the state of soul forever, that's where we're going. We're supposedly going. You don't agree with that?

ELISE:

No, no. I do agree with that. I think too about the protocol or process of this book and the call that you make about how, particularly at this moment in time where it feels like you talk about it as everyone feels dissatisfied and everything feels upside down and awful and it feels like part X and shadow and maybe capital E Evil or it's capital E's Emissaries are here and very present. How important it is for each of us to do the protocol and do the practice, not for credit and not for any sort of specific event or result, but because we're being called to battle. I mean it's hard to use war metaphors, but it feels true in this moment in time and that I think a lot of people, because they're not an academy award-winning actor or competing in the highest echelons of society think like, well, what am I don't have a role to play here, and your point is not true. We all do.

STUTZ:

Yeah. One assumption that I think is very helpful is the opposite of evil is not good. The opposite of evil is creativity. So it's a battle to create or not to create for the bad guys to win, all they have to do is make sure you become shaky with lack of confidence that you have this ability and that broadens the playing field tremendously. It is a relief because I have to only do one. Like I say in the program, you have to change one thing, everything. In fact, that's a good metaphor for what and if you fail to commit to that process, he wants to do well with it. That's not important, but you got to keep at it. If you fail, then you soldier yourself to the devil. That'll be the medieval believable interpretation of it.

ELISE:

And so what you're saying essentially is that particularly in this society where we think problem solution, if then I just need to do one thing or make it to a level and then all of my problems are solved, I'm exonerated from pain hard work, and I will have certainty. Right? That's the devil's elixir.

STUTZ:

Yeah. That's what they're selling you.

ELISE:

Yeah. That's what they sell you, that you get to a point and the rules don't apply and you're good, you're done. You get the best table, you get the girl you are happy forever after, and you're not going to ever get punched in the face by God. That's one of your lines from the book when you're talking about this concept of the frame, which is at a certain point in your life, your frame gets exploded by death, death to the ego, illness, loss of job, loss of health, whatever it is, and suddenly you have to reorient yourself and you're going to do that over and over and over and

STUTZ:

Over again.

ELISE:

Yeah.

STUTZ:

Yeah. The frame itself is created by evil. And you could argue that every frame in the human world is created by evil because all frames are inadequate describing reality, and then you're back to these paradoxes. But people understand an insoluble paradox is a very great accomplishment. It is because it is going to lead you places where if you're try to be logical, you wouldn't even get with a thousand million miles of it because you lack the ability. It's only when you get the sense that the frame is mutable and is not supposed to have a conclusion. And as a matter of fact, a frame without a conclusion is much closer to the truth. Or if you want to say it differently, you just attack your own frame.

ELISE:

Yeah, it's a very compelling lie that there's some sort of there there and that some people have it figured out. Meanwhile, that's not what life is about. Life is this ever unfolding process of hard work, pain and uncertainty. And yet I will say, I mean who knows how well I'm doing it, but that's compelling and fun in a fucked up way about life is getting punched in the face. This makes me sound like a total masochist, but when life gives you, when God, however you want to conceptualize this gives you challenges, blows up your frame again and again and again, and you have to respond and that's what makes it compelling.

STUTZ:

Yeah,

ELISE:

I think,

STUTZ:

Yeah, a hundred percent. That's excellent. Mike Tyson, the famous quote, he says, everybody has a plan when they fight him, and most of the fighters were afraid of him and because the commentator was talking about the fighter's strategy, so they asked Tyson about it. He says, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's exactly right.

ELISE:

That's

STUTZ:

An amazing

ELISE:

Quote.

STUTZ:

Is it? Yeah, it's famous.

ELISE:

Phil, I know you like to tell me what to do, but I've been thinking a lot about this idea. One of the things that I feel like I've tried to organize my life around, I mean I even wrote a book about sins, the seven deadly sins and this quest for sort of goodness or the way women are conditioned for goodness. And I think about my own life as a creative person. So obviously our world right now is strange, uncertain, scary, and there's also this, particularly in my space with media and podcasts and books, what feels like a cacophony coming from, honestly, a lot of men, but when you look at the top of the podcast charts for example, I don't even know if you know who any of these people are, but it's like the Joe Rogans and they have an inordinate amount of influence.

I don't hate Joe Rogan, but an inordinate amount of influence on the world and on people's minds. And my show by comparison is teeny tiny, and I do a ton of things creatively to support myself and my family and I have both this instinct or this feeling, I have to grow this and I have to make this bigger and there needs to be a counter to what's happening in the world and doing that in any way that's not organic would feel anathema to my own integrity and it feels not right and weird, and I don't know if I'm creating a limiting construct for myself or whether I don't know how to feel about any of this, except how do you raise the volume to counteract what's happening in our world without selling yourself out?

STUTZ:

Most of this stuff you want to do, you'll feel compelled, is logically good for other people, whatever you want to call it. So that'll take you to a very high level of evolution, but not the highest. The highest has something above the apparent of whatever you're doing.

ELISE:

As I'm listening to you, and I want to talk about Universe One and Universe Two because I think it applies here, but there's this part of me, this deeply held part of me that's like I don't do anything that I do for a claim or monetary reward, and I also, this is how I support my family. And so it also sets up this dynamic. For me that's a clash between Universe Two and Universe One because in many ways I think I don't do Universe One that well, or I need to do it better in order to enable more Universe Two, but maybe we need to explain Universe One and Universe Two to people.

STUTZ:

Value in Universe One is defined numerically. Now the good news is that led to science because his whole thing is very logical, but it also led to arrogant ill-informed model for a universe.

ELISE:

Universe One, the way that you describe it in the book is, as you just mentioned, it's numerical. It's based on money and growth and rationality, and it's what would convince you tell the story of, I think it was a childhood friend who's a teacher, formidable teacher of kindergartners teaching them how to read and all the parents come to her for advice and ultimately she was convinced that why should she teach children to read for $61,000 a year when she could go into private practice and make so much more money? That is Universe One and a nutshell, which would encourage her to give up this highly creative value driven gift for commerce.

STUTZ:

But here's the trick, which drives people fucking crazy, good people, the bad people, this didn't bother them at all. You have to create something that's unreal. You have to take the role of the devil in order to actually make the whole mechanism work. So whatever you're trying to do, just say, Stutz says, I have to add an extra 10% where I become evil.

ELISE:

And you're saying that's a mandate that you have to become evil.

STUTZ:

I don't know. It's not a mandate, it's an inevitable awareness.

ELISE:

Okay. We define Universe Two for people.

STUTZ:

Yeah. Universe Two is completely different than Universe One. Universe One value is defined mathematically, which inevitably means value is defined by money. Now, Universe Two is completely different. Universe Two is not based on anything numerical. It is beyond creativity in other, it's the indescribable give you a fucking headache for the rest of your life. Impossible to explain pure faith that what I'm telling you and what I'm telling you is you have to act more evil and there's no way you could rationalize. It's like faith, but this is the deepest thing of all.

ELISE:

And are you saying here you've to act more evil? Is this advice for me based

STUTZ:

On, yeah.

ELISE:

Okay. Wild. Okay,

STUTZ:

So if you don't do it, you're actually failing the universe. This has less to do with your personal goals. It actually has more to do with the universe. The only way, especially you that you will accept the need to do this is if you consider it a contribution to the whole human race. And that's a hard one to grasp about changing frames that demands of you that you stretch out or make larger your frame, the exact thing that part of you has a judgment about and feels have to be stamped out. You can't do that until you accept the truth, which is you are immersed in evil and the only thing you can clinging to out of that is that hopefully there'll be some good that will come out of that. Now what?

ELISE:

No, I mean I feel this on every part of my being and I also want to resist it with every part of myself.

Yeah.

What does this look like for me to be 10% more evil?

STUTZ:

Let's say you are raising money for charity or something like that and the person is on the bubble of giving a lot of money or not, and it is for a great cause the donor that you are looking to work on and get some money from. To me, not only is it okay for you to lie to him as a whitewash, you must do that. You must do it. And that's what redeems. The thing is that I'm compelled by a higher force and there's no way I can prove to you that that's the correct way to do this. That's going to work.

ELISE:

I recognize everything you're saying is sort of like my own quest, my fear of my own darkness. It's a huge hurdle. And you've told, just for context, for people who are listening, Phil before has told me, you need to be more of a bitch. Where is that part of you? And I'm terrified of that part and part I think because I'm terrified of how I'll be received if I were to be a bitch.

STUTZ:

Well, look, the obvious thing is you want to play around this in the next, how far ahead do you get in your My podcast? Yeah.

ELISE:

Oh, I'm organized and on top of it. So a couple months.

STUTZ:

So to put up anyone given one is a couple months preparation.

ELISE:

Yeah.

STUTZ:

Okay. During that period, trying to integrate into that preparation, something that's a lie.

Now, I'm not saying that lying is great, but to me in our culture, the idea that you shouldn't do anything bad or you have to be good is itself evil.

ELISE:

Yeah. Wait, this is so big though. I think my entire book, next book, which I'm working on right now, is about shadow and binaries. And I recognize even as I'm describing myself and this need to sort of be kind and good is a rejection of my own shadow. It's a rejection of part of myself, and then I project it onto the other people. And that's the whole genesis of my next book is looking at the ways in which we do this.

STUTZ:

It’s also avoidant, but if what you think you want is predicated around this evil that it doesn't count, it has to be done completely selflessly. And that's what we were saying calls it, and a good way to think about it. It's something that you wish you didn't have, but if you didn't have it, you fail. It's lying and name dropping.

ELISE:

Oh yeah, you told me I need to drop more names, which is really funny.

STUTZ:

Yes.

ELISE:

Lying, name dropping. What's a third?

STUTZ:

Bragging.

ELISE:

Okay. Lying. Bragging and name dropping. You also told me I need to do more of that. So funny. I have so much judgment about all of those things.

STUTZ:

So you have to practice the impossible.

ELISE:

But Phil, how in the context of Universe One and Universe Two, do you then not become enslaved to Universe One? How do you keep yourself honest in this practice? Because, and I will say there's a big part of me, and this is where I feel like I get really stuck around growth. I know a lot of rich people. I know a lot of famous people. I know a lot of investors. I know that there are people who I could call and say, I need you to get behind me and I'm going to build something, and I could get money and poured into the production of my show and get a fancy studio and spend a lot of money in marketing and hire publicists, right? And Universe One scares the shit out of myself. Try and become a highly visible thing. And then every part of me wants anonymity and quiet, organic, stealth growth. I just want to appeal to the people I appeal to and let that be enough. And yet I feel well who's going to show up and meet this darkness in our culture? If the people who can meet this darkness in the culture safely won't do it. That's the push.

That's the push, that's the push. I got to do it.

STUTZ:

If you sent me of faith, these are things that if you don't feel absolutely compelled to do, and don't even try because they're not in this universe. One wavelength, which is like a cause and effect thing. This is the effect comes before the cause. The human being is the most giving, self-sacrificing, loving entity and also was the most devious, amoral, vicious, and murderous is the better word, and that's what a human being is. It's both of those things. And the devil says, no, it's not. All you got to do is be good. And by the way, I'll tell you exactly how to be good. Think about it, and I can make you good. And the way I'm going to make you good is by telling you a lie such as we can put you on a satisfying and well respect position in society, let's say. But your Part X gets involved in it from your point of view, which is there's no other way to do this except to violate, because Part X is going to want you to violate it and lose everything.

ELISE:

So essentially it's my Part X that's convincing me right now that to get bigger and go after this is bad or base or Universe One, essentially I'm being tricked by my own Part X into staying small and compliant and abiding by this idea of, well, if it's good and if it's worthy, it will find its own audience and time and it's wrong to push.

STUTZ:

Yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah.

STUTZ:

And that's your responsible, especially right now.

ELISE:

Well, it feels like this is a metaphor for our entire culture where we're watching such extremism on one side and they're quote unquote getting away with it, and our response is like, I would never do that. And so we are failing to gather the resources and the energy to go up against it.

STUTZ:

Correct.

ELISE:

Yeah.

STUTZ:

And on top of that, the people you're going to be preaching to or talking to, whatever, won't understand a fucking word that you're saying. And that's part of the deal,

ELISE:

Phil, it's always a delight. Phil, you're the best. I love you. Thank you. This has been such. I get overly excited. He got so excited when I told him I loved him. Say bye. To whom? To everyone who's listening, just say bye.

STUTZ:

Oh, goodbye. I hope you come back next week.

ELISE:

Alright, bye everyone.

Every time I sit with Phil, I feel like I experience a small explosion of my own frame. I think I have it nailed down cognitively. I really do think I understand his model, and in some ways this is true. I'm a good student of Phil's, and yet he always says something to me that makes me realize I don't quite have it after all. And that's kind of the point. That's the point of true and false magic too. This is an ongoing iterative process. It's a protocol. It's a training program. We are never done dealing with the vicissitudes of life. We will never be exonerated from pain. The need for constant work and contending with uncertainty. Those are the three domains and they persist. We never transcend them. We don't escape them. We don't get over them to believe that friends is what Phil calls the realm of illusion.

And that's a place that many of us think we want to live though. When we might get a glimpse of it or manage to visit, we recognize that it is to quote him a snapshot world. I'm going to come back next week with my solo episode and go deeper into what Phil was talking to me about, which is this insistence that I have to hold myself back and how in some ways it's a bit of false pride. He would tell me it's my own part X, which I've dressed up as something good. Again, this isn't what I expected to hear from him today. I wanted him to validate me and this, I don't know, whatever I'm up to. I have to think about it a bit more because it also makes absolutely complete sense and I recognize that this is the next big piece of work for me.

And I'm sure many, many, many of you can relate. I know that there are a lot of fellow creatives who listen to this podcast, although I would also argue, and Phil would argue that we're all creators regardless of which area of life we might express ourselves in. That's the whole point of this process called life as he said. And I think this is so stunning. The antidote or the opposite of evil is not goodness. It's creativity. Anyway, true and false magic is available wherever you get your books. It's not coming out in hardback. It's actually coming out straight to paperback, sort of this interesting hybrid. It's very well priced because of this. It's not a big book. It's maybe 120 pages. You can probably read it in an afternoon, although Phil would also tell you that you need to read it every day for the rest of your life.

But if you've been wanting something that creates a bit more structure around Phil's work, that's a larger container, this is certainly a bite of that. I find it really satisfying. Some of it is still a little heady and beyond me, but this is what I wanted from him and it was such an honor to get to make it with him. And don't be fooled. Yes, I'm in there in some intangible way doing all the connective tissue to pull it all together, but this is really Phil's philosophical model and it was an honor to help him scaffold it. Alright, I'll be back on Monday for my solo episode and then back on Thursday with a normal episode pulling the thread.

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