What did they teach you about connection that Western science is only now just catching up on?

Hmm.

[sighs] Beautiful question.

You know, there's...

I've been very, very fortunate to be invited into some extraordinarily privileged circles.

I was invited by an elder to do men's business in Australia at Uluru, which was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.

I was...

What does self-love look like when it's not performative or indulgent, but it's grounded and rational?

Mm-hmm.

And my father, when he was a young man, was spooning gasoline on a dude ranch in Wyoming, and his buddy dropped gasoline on the ground, and it caught fire, and my father had third-degree burns down to the bone and s- spent six months in a hospital, was told he'd never walk again, couldn't straighten his legs.

I share that to say, years later, when I went through one of the most profound challenges of my life, a dark night of the soul, my girlfriend had cheated on me, and I was deeply alone, was going into some real darkness, my father shepherded me through a men's group, and, called the Mankind Project.

Over four years, that men's work was profoundly healing to me, and I'll tie it to the question you ask in a second.

But what I loved was, in that experience, which was a process of individuation, which is something young men and boys have had since time immemorial, where they would move from boyhood into manhood, and women had the equivalent.

Part of that would be a confrontation of your fear, and that would be the way in which the young part of you would die, and you would be held by a group and individuated into a new collective reality.

And part of that experience for me was involved with fire.

I'm not getting any traction." How does resonance explain that, and what should someone do to better navigate those situations without feeling like they have to give up their song?

Well, [laughs] I, I wanna sh- I wanna shift over to the science behind this conversation, and as you're doing the deep research for your book, what did you find? What is the res- research showing with regards to, you know, evidence to support this concept of resonance and energy and vibration and the biological oscillations within us?

S- s- uh, so much.

Uh, right? So, you know, first of all, biological entrainment, how we are entraining each other, right? Like, so first thing that I'm fascinated by, I think there's a lot of...

You know, one of the things, it's always interesting to look at trends.

You know, I saw when I, when I did the event, you know, had the honor to do the event with His Holiness, it was around meditation, and I saw it two- in 2015 that Headspace and these oth- there were other tools that were coming up that were talking about, okay, let's go back.

Obviously meditation's been practiced for thousands of years, but there's kind of a cultural moment.

Now as I, as I, as I listen, I'm seeing, especially in the relationship field, a lot of talk around nervous systems, right? And this, and this context of nervous system.

But hit us with, with, with your pure water download stories.

You know?

It does work.

It is...

Guilt is an effective mechanism, but what it doesn't do is inspire the sense of our shared human possibility.

It's more, uh...

It's still kind of...

It feeds this notion of kind of us, them, and, and I'm gonna give something up to, to support someone else.

Mm.

discern, decipher my

song? So I'll give, I'll speak in the musical sense and then I'll be actually very concrete so that it's, so I write, there's a whole, half the book is about this.

Half the book is about tuning the instrument that is you.

Because in order to create beautiful relationships out in the world, we first have to come into right relationship with ourselves, right? And to know what our true north is.

Now, I think that song gets refined relationally But the fundamental aspect of the process, just like a seed, non-mixing metaphors, but just like a seed needs to find the right soil and begin to grow before it enters the forest where it reaches its full fruition, we need to first tend to the seed that is us and find that soil.

And so, again, I'm going to switch back to the metaphor of music.

The way I think about it is, You know, one of the core practices I talk about in the book, this is to keep it pragmatic and then we'll expand back out into the ideology.

What's the elements of making something into a movement that

Hmm.

And I think unfortunately, that's become, that's become the default, right? Where it's like, you know, when, w- when, when I grew up, you know, I'd go skateboarding.

You know, we didn't even have cell phones, right? It was literally like, if you liked a girl, you had to call her dad and ask you to get her on the phone [laughs], you know? It was like a very different reality.

So I feel like, uh, with the advent of the internet, with the advent of artificial intelligence, which obviously also poses different threats existentially as it relates to, you know, job security, but, but specifically relationship, right? Now they're talking about, like, the research with young men, it's crazy in terms of, like, most young men haven't even been on a date in the last year, haven't approached a, a, a woman in the last year.

Like, and so the, the opportunity to have a relationship with a digital approximation of a human is gonna become, I think, a real issue, and is already a real issue.

So to me, to bring it home, it's, it's like, how do we, how do we look at relationships differently? How do we see them as, i- in my view, the true gold that they are? Like, they are the, the key to how long we live and the quality with which we live.

And so to me, you know, I think true wealth is the quality of our relationships.

... certainly a disconnection from self and, and others.