#010 - Cory Richards - I Risked My Life In Order to Save It. What I Learned About Creativity, Belonging, and Living a Meaningful Life.

There were people who were celebrated by the world and there were people who were honest with it. Most of us learn early to manage the distance between who we are and who we present ourselves to be. We curate, we perform, we build an identity that the world can consume and we live behind it. Sometimes for decades, sometimes forever. Corrie Richards built one of the most compelling identities in modern adventure. World-class climber, national geographic photographer, record breaker. The man who goes where no one else will and comes back with images that stop the world in its tracks. Diagnosed by Polar at 15, dropped out of high school, put in a psychiatric unit, and took all of that, the chaos, the darkness, the disorder. And buried it beneath one of the most celebrated careers in adventure photography the world has ever seen. He became the first and only American to summit an 8,000 meter peak in winter. He photographed the National Geographic for over a decade. He climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen. Corrie is a man whose words are as poetic as they are piercing, whose life is a beautiful duality of both how-tos and what not to do. And whose climactic scene ironically came with a camera in hand facing not out of the world but back at himself. Intimacy beyond measure, moments after escaping death, fragile, terrified, and true. Maybe that's what we've been all all been looking for, the deepest truth. And today, I'm on the edge of my seat to dissect both the summits and the psyche of the man who, in his own words, in order to escape madness chose to live madly, a man who risked his life in order to save it. So without further ado, Corrie Vichets, it is an unbelievable gift to have you on the show. Thank you for being here. What did you write that? I mean, that's the best intro I've ever had, for sure. Yeah, really, really. That made me tear up. So, yeah, when I thank you, it's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. No, Corrie, really, it's some guess we dive straight in, but just understanding the depth of the places you've been and the poetic nature of your book. I felt the least that I could do is to give you something that is, I mean, I know it's only a fraction of the testament of the man that you are, but it is really an honor to be here with you. And so thank you for joining us on this show. Thanks for having me. Really, really, I appreciate it. It's fun. These conversations, you never know where they're going to go. And I trust this one already is going to go to some weird wonderful places. I can't help but begin with this, this, the quote that I ended with, which you said, you know, I will, in order to escape madness, I will live madly. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, early on in my adolescence, there was this idea that there was some fundamental brokenness or that madness through mental health was a sentence more than it was a gift. And so I was always scared. There was always a profound fear that I would go crazy. You know, like I always, I always had this idea that somehow I was going to end up in the park, you know, screaming at trees. And, and, and so the way to quiet that for me was, was to go do the things where my mind quieted, right? So I could quiet it down through, through climbing through extreme environments, through high stimulation. And this is very normal and natural when we have, you know, whether it's complex, complex post-traumatic stress, or mental health issues, our minds are very loud. And, and we seek things, whether they're drugs, alcohol, sex, love, or, or extreme environments, to just quiet it down. And so it just so happened that what I chose was something where I was risking my life. And, and yet at the same time that was, that was saving it and that madness externally, the view of what I was doing was, was, you know, to some people mad, but it was my way of escaping exactly that. It's interesting because it also seems like having read your book that at some point, it was no longer saving your life, but also destroying it. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I was going to say, and it worked until it didn't, right? Because that's only sustainable for so long. In the same way that you see drugs and alcohol destroy lives, for me at least, and I don't want to paint, I don't, to, to brought a brush here, but for me, it became maladaptive instead of a healthy adaptation. That's not to say I couldn't do it again, and it would be different now. But, yeah, it was, it did start to erode me. So how do you reflect on, like, as you look back on that career, how much of it was born from inspiration and how much was it of it was born from compensation? Oh, God. Yeah, great questions out of the gate. Oh, I love it. Inspiration versus compensation. I've never heard it phrase that way. Look, a lot of it was compensation, compensating for sort of an understanding of a fundamental deficit. It was, it was trying to declare some level of value in the world, right? Because when we're taught or when we inherit a story of brokenness, it's very easy to believe that then there's something to prove, to prove that I am not broken, to prove that I do have value, to prove that there's something in me that is, is worthy of, of existing. And so there's a tremendous amount of compensation in that. And yet, where it led me, was deeply inspirational. Yeah. And to be in those places, to feel those, those emotions, that smallness, that the observation of what we're so inherently and already a part of. So it's, I've really settled in this place in my life where it's always a yes and, which is annoying as fuck, by the way, right? Like, when everything is a yes and people are just like, come on, but I've never encountered anything that isn't. Does that make sense? Well, give me some more subs, like tell me more about what that means to you when you say everything is a yes and a yes. Well, everything, there is, look, the way I understand the world is simply that it operates on duality. And so, for example, one of my favorite young quotes is, define an enemy and you become one, right? So if you have an enemy, that necessarily makes you an enemy. And so there's always that yes and, well, yes, that is your adversary. But now, because of that, you are an adversary. And so it is always, there is always the opposite to something. If you are right, well, that necessarily means that somebody else is wrong. And the irony of that, one thing that I really think is everybody's right. And I'm not saying their beliefs are, quote, unquote, right. But what they believe internally is that they are right. And so it's a yes and yes, my truth is my truth. And your truth is your truth. It's not a but. And I'm sure we'll encounter many of those throughout this whole conversation. Yeah. And I want to go straight into now. How do you reflect on then the context of your story? You are maybe more vulnerable than anyone I've any book I've ever read. I have not experienced the depth and levels of vulnerability that you brought to the table. So just thank you for that. Because as I shared with you off air, to have experiences that it was so deeply unique yet to write them and create the story in a way that is so unbelievably relatable. Um, obviously you mentioned like being on top of some of the tallest peaks in the world, but also some of the more intimate moments of you on your quest for identity and quest for self and sexuality. And you sort of traverse the landscape across the board. And so like when you reflect on the choices that you made, do you reflect in a manner that is through the lens of any regrets, I suppose is my question. Regret is so interesting. I mean, I think it's too cliche to say I have no regrets. Because I do think that I experience regret at times. However, for me, the way every frame that is, I try very hard not to view any decision through the lens of regret, but rather, so the way I say it is I don't feel regret for anything, but I feel pain for the pain I caused. Right? Like that's more of an empathetic shift towards I can feel the sort of distress and the disruption and the destruction that I caused. And I can feel pain and empathy for those things, but to regret anything, what would A, what would be the point and B would it be honest? because if any of those things hadn't happened, then there's a high likelihood that we wouldn't be having this conversation. And this is what, not podcasting, but this is what my life has become. It's a conversation about the totality of humanity. And so without any of those, then I wouldn't have the richness of experience to even talk about it. - Yeah. - So just, yeah. - Do you have a specific example of experience that like to use your words that you maybe don't be grabbed because it's led you here and at the same time, you still hold the painful? - Yeah, I mean, well, when I lost my job at National Geographic, there's a chapter in there about this sort of, we were at the height of me too, and I lost my job around an anonymous accusation. And when we look back on it, I wrote very candidly about it. What actually happened was, I don't want to say innocuous, but in hindsight, now people would look at that and go, "Well, what the fuck?" But I still feel pain for whatever pain I cause while acknowledging that the trauma of that situation was highly likely more biased in my direction, right? And do I regret what happened? - No, but I feel pain for the disruption I cause. But going through that thrust me down a path of really learning about masculinity and feminism. And that's just one example, right? That's just one example where I look at it and I go, "I'm so grateful that happened because had it not, I wouldn't have been forced to educate myself." And I could have made the decision to not educate myself and just be angry about it. - Which I was for a very long time. - What were you angry about then that you now understand? - Well, it felt at the time like, it felt like there was no space for just being human and making simple mistakes of misunderstanding. And so, and that anger I think can persist still, where I think we need to make space for the missteps of our existence and our humanity. And we fuck up all the time, right? Like every single day we go through things that were like, I could have done that better, right? And, but now I look at it more like, well, it was important for me to understand the position I hold in society simply by being a man, right? Which I had never really contemplated before. And, but also not hammering on myself for being a man. Which I think has been momentarily very invoked, right? Where it's like we immediately sort of compartmentalize around race and gender these days, which is ironically exactly what we're in my mind fighting against. - I know, yeah. - Does that make sense? - Yeah, I mean, it speaks to the broader context and it also feels very intimate as it pertains to the personal journey you've been on to discover what it even means for you to be a man. - Yeah, which I'm still discovering, I'm 45, and I'm still like, oh wow, what is this? What is this journey? And certainly when my dad died last year, that also disrupted sort of an understanding. It had this idea that when our parents die, when a father dies, no matter your relationship with them, the idea of paternal safety evaporates, right? And because there's no man above you, and that's ubiquitous to being a man or a woman. And even if you don't have a relationship with them, the idea of paternal safety, the thought that it could have existed goes away. And when your mother dies, you have the evaporation of unconditional love, right? So these two things happen, and only in the death of a parent, do you experience them? - I have yet to lose my parents, this isn't for me, but yeah, and I know you can't replicate. It's impossible to replicate the actual experience of isn't a parent, but if you could just take me into that. - Yeah. - Experience from what was that like? - Well, it ended up being very beautiful, it ended up being a reconciliation between my brother and I who have had a very complicated relationship. And yet it was a reconciliation that was brief and momentary, so we came together, overcame everything, and then separated ways again. So, but I think my father, that would be enough for him, but it was beautiful because we were there. He had been sick for about five years. And when it was really time for him to go, we all knew it and we went home. And then my brother and I sort of just ushered him into through that threshold because he was basically, he wasn't coming back in terms of like vivid consciousness and lucidity, that there was, that was not gonna happen. And so, you know, and this is very common in hospice situations where it's like, well, quote unquote, just make him comfortable, which is sort of like, just feed him the morphine, you know, and eventually they go away. And so to make that decision with my brother was really, really powerful. - Oh, you had to, he did, he was not conscious of it. - He was not, yeah, yeah, so, I mean, it's just, so David and I sort of made that decision with our mom and that's a very powerful decision to make, you know? So, but also what a stunning gift to be able to just say, okay, we're gonna take the pain away and certainly, you know, a man who had been so active through his whole life to be confined to bed and not conscious and not, you know? And then, and so I think it, I think his death was very much the closing of a chapter of both parenthood but also fraternal strife. - Yeah. - And beyond that point, whether or not my brother, ever quote unquote, reconciled, isn't consequential. - Yeah. - Because we did what we needed to do and then there was the closing of that moment. - Yeah, I mean, there's two places I really wanna go here and I wanna present both so I don't forget. - Yeah, yeah, either. The first is, like, what has the absence of your father over the past year led, what has that journey led you into? Has it pertained to the discovery? - Yeah, yeah. - And the second is there's a great quote, there's a quote that I love that we had, a guy called "Masting Kip" on the podcast yesterday and I asked him, "What do you believe you're the greatest challenge in the world today?" It's when he said, "It's not that we disagree, it's that we don't know how to disagree and remain connected." And I wanna understand from your perspective, why do you believe you and your brother have found that so challenging? - Well, I think because, and I'm sort of paraphrasing George Carlin here, who I just adore, but he said, "The problem is when we allow our ideology to become our identity." And so, to the point of not knowing how to disagree, we've allowed ideology to consume us to the point where we identify with it. And then when somebody challenges that ideology, we don't perceive it as a challenge of an idea or an opinion, but rather a challenge to our personhood. And that feels horrifying. And so we fight against that. And then right back to the beginning, we define an enemy. Because it's not, but people generally aren't coming at us with a challenge to our personhood. They're coming at us with a challenge to our thoughts and our stories. And so, but we collapse the two into our identity and then we fight against it as a personal attack against ourself. - Which is interesting because we're actually only fighting against then our own perspective. I actually, you know, I dabble in whether it's poetry or songwriting, I'm not really sure, but one of the things that I've written is, I'm fighting myself. I'm just using your name. You know, it's like, and I think that's true. Even in conflict and relationship and conflict, I'm always fighting myself. I'm fighting my own story. I'm fighting my own attachment. But I'm using your name to try to get through it. And so I'm misplacing the actual source of conflict, which is an internal one. Now that's not to say that I can't disagree with an ideology or a story that you've told or that you are telling, but ultimately what that's doing is triggering something in me that's uncomfortable. And that is, that's actually what needs to be addressed. It doesn't mean that I need to agree with you, but my discomfort around that is what's important. So how can I, again, yes and how can I hold to my, my integrity, my values while making space for yours? 'Cause I think really, really, like having a thought is powerful. Being able to let go of a thought is true power. Can you elaborate on that for me? Yeah, I mean, when we can let go of something, let go of the idea of being right, the righteousness, you can be right or you can be free. And when we can allow ourselves to let go, not of the ideology, but our need to be right, then we are liberated from the conflict that exists with our need to be justified in our own opinion. And there's a tremendous amount of strife that comes from those places. But we all do it, right? Like we're in a conflict in our relationship. And we're both coming at it from a different perspective when we both believe we're truly right. And as soon as you can lay down that sword of righteousness, you can step into the experience of the other person. And in doing so, you start climbing the mountain together instead of fighting your way up it. You know what I mean? I do. I'm curious. I wonder if that is the great modern dysfunction. You know, like that we have never been in a world that is more lonely, more divided, more disconnected. Yeah. I wonder if and the paradox of it all is that we've never been more connected. Right. You know, so I wonder if that is like at the crux of the this connected and ever increasingly disconnected world is that is the modern dysfunction. I think it is the modern dysfunction, but I'd also think it's the universal timeless dysfunction because I'm not actually convinced yet. Sometimes I believe we are, but sometimes I'm not convinced that we're actually in the most divided time ever. In fact, I think this has been the case. My in the same way that we've always thought we're living in the end times. You think that could be something that I think there's some of that. I think we, but what I what I think is true is we're more aware of the division because we're inundated by information that convinces us that we're so polarized. But if you look back at the history of America, we've always been polarized. Like we always have. And that's that's sort of the the requisite extension of a two party system. Yeah. And I'm just speaking about, but but globally, yes, we're entrenched in ideology that has become identity, but I'm not certain that that's ever not been the case. The only part that I have a challenge in agreeing with you there is the statistics around men right in our modern day. Right. One in five men can identify a best friend. Yeah. I think there's there's a start about the dating apps that like the top one percent of women or the top one percent of men get 99% of the women. Yeah. So the rest of the absence of intimacy. Yeah. So the second leading cause of death for men under 45 is suicide. Right. Right. So how do we reconcile that? Well, again, I'm not I'm not because our data only extends so far back. I'm not totally certain that that's ever not fit in the case. Yeah. But I just don't know. I just don't have the information and I don't want to speak out of turn. I don't want to speak as a social scientist because I don't really know. I just don't really know. Yeah. What I will say is that men are in a place of profound struggle because I don't think we have very purpose driven lives. I don't think we know where we belong right now. And without purpose, without without some fundamental understanding of where we fit in culture and society, then we we search for anything that allows us to feel like we belong and that belonging or the absence thereof that vacuum is what creates all the pain and sadness. So again, it's it's not an issue of being men. And this is it's it's an issue of it's an issue of where our specific gender or sex fits in a culture that has adapted to that that has blended, you know, has blended roles. Yes. And there's there's not there's not anything wrong with that per say it's just a challenge to figure out now where do we go. But the statistic around, you know, the top percent, you know, the top 2% or whatever, I mean, I know prof Galloway talks about this all the time is troubling. It's really troubling because the expectation that especially in Western contemporary culture that men fulfill this specific archetype to be desirable is crushing romantic relationships. It's crushing birth rates. It's it's crushing everything. And I think but see that's interesting because I think that becomes an issue of what expectations are we putting on on our on our chosen romantic partnerships and the people we choose and are those realistic, especially with dating apps and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Which by the way, I'm on. Right. So like, yes, and yeah, I'm part of the problem. And I'm trying to figure out the solution. And I occupy quite frankly, that top 2%. I mean, my next point would be the like for the person watching this that maybe does not has not been blessed with the aesthetic that you have been pretty privileged. Yeah. I mean, it's a very real thing. Yeah. Yeah. So how to understand that you are maybe in that top 2%. What do we do with this other 98? What is what is being missed by the other 98% or are they missing something or are we in culture missing something? Well, first of all, there's nothing sexier than being yourself. And there's nothing sexier than being at home in oneself. There's nothing more attractive than somebody who's engaged in their purpose. And I would say further that by placing the highest calling of your manhood or masculinity on partnership, that becomes problematic. The highest calling of personhood is to live a life of fulfillment. And in doing so, we draw in, you know, partners because it's irrefutable. It's like, if you're walking around confident, secure, engaged, directed following a purpose, that is going to be sexy as hell to somebody, right? It almost sounds like the solution for the modern man who can't find a mate, quote unquote, is to stop thinking about the mate and go think about your mission. Yeah. Think about your mission. But also, fuck, don't try to over optimize your life, right? You see that all the time. Okay. Well, to find a perfect mate, I got to do a cold plunge and I got a journal for an hour. And then I got to get in the sun. And then I got to have huge packs. And then I like, I got to drink all the functional mushrooms. I got to do ayahuasca. Like whatever the fuck it is, that too becomes problematic. Yeah. All of those are the symptoms of the underlying constraint that is that I'm not safe to be myself. Exactly. And I have to fix myself in order to be. It's like, it's like one of those things where, and I've said this before, you know, there was that study that showed the grip strength is a predictor of longevity. So people started going and just getting grip things and doing this and it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're missing it. You're missing it. It's a lifetime of labor and physical activity that gives you a strong grip that then predicts longevity, right? So then we're doing all these things that we think make us, you know, optimize us as men when it's not that at all. And I'm also sure that there's potentially something even behind the grip strength, which is what has been required of a man and what endeavours is he had to fulfill upon and what character traits is he had to develop and the grip strength is just a symptom. Exactly. That's what I mean. It's, you know, if you're talking strictly about longevity, what that indicates is you've gone out, you've lifted rocks, you've done hard things, you've, you've, you've, you've lived a life where you are engaged with your body. And, and that is predictive of bone density and lean muscle mass. And those are the things that are actually, you see what I mean? Yes. So it's, it's, and I think the same is true with, with all these little things that we're trying to biohack our way into. I really don't, and this, this might be controversial for some of the listeners. I, I think biohacking is mostly bullshit. Like if you want, if you want to be healthy, it's actually quite simple. Eat whole foods, walk a lot, hang out with a lot of good friends. You know, don't, don't take in too many drugs. A little bit. Great. Whatever, whatever your, your flavor is, it's not that hard. You know, red light, blue light glasses at night. Okay. Cool. That's like, you're, you're trying to optimize for the top 0.5%. And that's actually, but spend six hours a day in community. Yes. Call a friend. You know what? You can get away with a little blue light at night. Yeah, you can never optimize your way out of a lonely life. Yeah, yeah, you can't. And what's happened, at least it seems to me, is we've got the sort of monk mentality now. And that actually exacerbates the loneliness. What does that mean? Meaning, I've got to do all these things. I've got to optimize myself so completely. And then it becomes my topic to the point where where where we're missing the the totality of our existence in that like we're missing. How would I phrase this? We're missing the juice. We're we're you know, or I guess this we're drinking the juice, but we're missing the squeeze, you know, and and the squeeze is the real stuff. So I don't know if that made total sense, but but again, it seems it's a yes and with it seems conflicting with the idea of go out, find your purpose, live a purpose driven life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that longevity, we could geek out for three days over the conversation around longevity. One of the best ways I've heard it put was by Peter Crowe and he said longevity is the most seductive term for the ego. Yeah. Oh yeah. Because what it implies is that you aren't fully alive right now. Yeah. Yeah. I just think that's deeply powerful in a world of of that the underlying maybe subconscious motive behind a lot of the choices to extend my life or to shift myself is that I'm not enough as I am a hundred percent. And I think the wellness community in general, which by the way, I'm adjacent to is is also quite sick in that the the whole thrust behind it is that there's something wrong with you now. There's nothing wrong with you now. You know, all your flaws and all of you know, that is who you are. It is what you are at this moment. That doesn't mean it can't change. It will change with mindful attention, but the point is not to change yourself so completely that you arrive at some perfect point. You're not going to. Yeah. It's kind of like the difference between seeking and being curious. Like seeking is always I'm seeking this end goal. I'm and there's there's anxiety in that. Like, I have to go to the guru. I have to do this. Curiosity is this playful paradigm, this playful way of existing. Oh, that's I wonder about that. Yeah. You know, without a need to arrive someplace. Yeah. I mean, that seems like quite interestingly like one of the greatest dances of your life. I was like this dance between seeking curiosity and the the party you that maybe believed for a long while that if only you could change yourself, you'd be you'd be all right to be yourself. And then the final it almost sounds like the way you've arrived to and I'd love to understand when this happened. Yesterday. Yes. Right now on the show. Right now. I just did it. Yeah. No, but the understanding is that like when when did you reconcile and maybe more importantly, what have you come to learn from that process of like, and then I want to go in this rabbit hole of like this whole like culture of labeling you were diagnosed by Paul. Yeah. How old? 15 15 15. Yeah. Like, I mean, how in the absence of maybe superimposing my own perspective on. Yeah. Yeah. How did that influence the way you saw yourself just by purely being given that label? Yeah. I mean, so I was the way the way it panned out was, you know, I was my mom took me to see therapist when I was one a psychologist. Yeah. One one one you'll one year old because she noticed in me a a sadness, I suppose she thought her her child was depressed. There was a melancholic nature to my my way of navigating the world and and I was always very mercurial. I was always very moody and and I could flip, you know, I could I could be high and then I could be, you know, devastated and low pretty pretty quickly and and as that as the violence at home between my brother and I accelerated those those tides became more pronounced. And then I was put in a psychiatric unit when I was about 13 and stayed there for about a week before getting moved to a longer term care facility called Lifeline and that's where I was diagnosed with bipolar and this was this very intense sort of inpatient outpatient facility and when I was there I ran away three times and, you know, I was kind of on the street for a little while and a lot of things happened in that window that in the book I write about, you know, with a lot of detail but getting diagnosed was both comfortable and horrifying. It was comfortable because all of a sudden there was a place to put what was happening. There was a place to understand it. You know, and all all the diagnosis really is is a word that describes a collection of behaviors and a collection of sort of neurobiological mechanisms, but with diagnoses come incredible stories. And the story of bipolar specifically is one of, you know, volatility. There's something very scary in you that can flip at any moment and you don't know when it's coming. And so that's where this idea of madness came from. There's a madness that lives in me. And I had experienced that to a degree. I remember standing in our den and it was very late. I couldn't sleep. I was, you know, I'd started having pretty pretty pronounced insomnia and my mind was just going so fast. And I couldn't really make sense of the noise inside until the thoughts became sort of fragmented. And it was just this rush. And yet you feel separate from yourself because there is an observation of what's happening, but an inability to control any of it. And that feels just wildly out of control. And diagnoses are a way to give us some semblance of control. They're a way to provide certainty. They're a way to compartmentalize. And they come with these stories. Now you see, you know, everybody's diagnosed with something. Everybody's on the spectrum or ADHD or bipolar or a narcissist. And that's not helpful because it all does exist on a spectrum, but we are pathologically self-obsessed at this point where we're all trying so hard to understand the nature of our being and our existence. So we put ourselves in a box. But then we start to go, well, hey, you know, I'm this. Ergo, my behaviors are explainable and understandable. But we stop there. Yes. And that's not the fucking point. All we've done is create more language around why we're not behaving the ways we want to behave. Yeah, just because you're well versed in talking about your problems doesn't mean that you've you've addressed them. Yeah. Or even, or even begun to, I mean, that's one step on the journey. But you know, when we, when we, it also helps us escape accountability. If that makes any sense, especially when we talk about narcissism, right? So keep going, go down that. Yeah, yeah. Like so, all of a sudden, when you diagnose an ex-partner as a narcissist, you have, you have offloaded the entirety of the dysfunction and toxicity onto them. There's no accountability. And unfortunately, for everybody who's doing that, not everybody, quite likely, they're not a narcissist. They're just not. Yeah. You were in a bad relationship where behaviors presented themselves and that presented in a sort of a narcissistic, with a narcissistic quality. Real narcissism, you know, narcissistic personality disorder is is very, very pronounced and very extreme. But they're not monsters. Narcissists are not monsters. They are dealing with their own set of complications. And quite frankly, a lot of narcissists, people who have a high expression of that become very successful people and do big, big things. So this is my feeling about all diagnoses and mental health in general. These things are not things to be cured, but managed. If you take out bipolar disorder, you take out 90% of the world's greatest art. Think about that for a second. You don't want to, you don't want to fix that. You want to manage it so that people don't end up hurting themselves or hurting others. And I would extend the same to narcissism, if that can be managed, and I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a clinician, so I want to be very careful with how I phrase these things. But managing those things is possible. And in that management, we become capable of doing incredible things. Same thing with ADHD or ADD, right? Some of those people are the most wildly creative, dedicated, productive people. Yeah, I mean, it seems like in some ways the labels themselves can be used to fuel wonderful things, and they can also be used as ways to keep ourselves trapped. You just gave me a great example, because I'm bipolar, I create great art. Yeah. That's a narrative. Yeah. But on the antithesis, the other side of that is like, because I have ADD, I can't pay attention. Right. And they're both labels, but it's like one is maybe serving the betterment of putting out magic in the context of the world. Well, either this is happening to you, or it's happening for you, right? And if it's happening for you, then there's a reframe there, and that's the reframe that allows you to leverage these things in the greatest possible way. If it's happening to you, you're a victim of circumstance and victim. People hate to hear that. Yeah. Oh, they hate it. They hate to hear that. Victims hate to hear that they're a victim. Oh, my God. And by the way, I've operated as a victim. I did for a very long time, you know, oh, I'm bipolar. And I use that. I would use it to my benefit. Hey, I fucked this up while I'm bipolar. I heard you talking about, I heard you on the virtual podcast. And you mentioned the hesitancy you had in writing your book, because you didn't want it to come across like you were being a victim. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You felt as though you maybe were teetering that way at some point. For sure. For sure. And also, you know, one day I was like, huh, I wonder if there's a, like, I was subreddit on my book and I went down and, I mean, Reddit is, it is a rabbit hole of vitriol that is unmatched, right? And so there was this whole thing about people like, oh, he's a wannabe philosopher and he just thinks and he's using this stuff to escape accountability. And I'm like, well, that's exactly not the point. It's good to know that it came across that way to you, right? That's information for me. But I definitely don't want to be a victim of circumstance and the point of writing the book and writing so frankly about it and exploring these things is not to escape accountability at all, but rather to put context around behavior. And hopefully ease the way some people are judging themselves. It's not to say what you've done that was really shitty is okay. It's to say, give it some perspective, give it some structure and then address that so that you don't continue to do those things. By the way, that doesn't, that doesn't excuse anything that you did along the way. That's still your responsibility to address and apologize for you. So, labels are wonderful and terrible and for me the goal is, it's great to become language and it was for a really long time. But that's only the first step in unwinding. Yeah, it's like, I mean, you mentioned the word narcissism and the delicacy around that way. It's almost like, for some people, the initial label, like understanding, let's say you do a psychologist or therapist and you've been trying to navigate and make a relationship work. And the initial understanding that the person you in relationship to has heavy narcissistic tendencies will be quite freeing. Yeah, of course. But then that comes a point in which you almost have to graduate out of the label to be able to let it go, because it doesn't ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's helpful because it eases you're like, oh, now I get it. And that's really good. But ultimately, the point of that is to then help you set healthier boundaries. And it doesn't matter that that person is or isn't a narcissist. What matters is how you move forward with yourself, with life, to set healthier boundaries around what's acceptable and not acceptable for you. So it's all an inside job. You're not going to change that person if you stay there, well, then nothing changes for you. Yeah, exactly. Because the label of the other person, if you if you used to make that the integrity of the dysfunction is maybe the escaping of where the opportunity lies for you to operate. Well, and guess what? It's ironically narcissistic to label somebody a narcissist so you escape all accountability. That's weird, right? Is it a thought about it that way? Yeah. It's it's not doesn't mean you're a narcissist. Yes. But it does mean that you're escaping all accountability, because it's all on them now. Yeah. Wow. But it's and also this is not to say that people haven't been in very toxic. Yes. dysfunctional. I'm not trying to rob people of their experience at all. It doesn't mean that there wasn't wildly painful. It doesn't mean that there wasn't profound boundaries crossed dysfunction, betrayal. All of those things still exist. Yeah. And that's very fucking valid. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not trying to extract that from people. Yeah. Was this conversation? You mentioned it. The word has come up a couple times already today. I almost went back through your conversation with Mitchell to to count how many times you use this word. Yeah. The word is belonging. Yeah. It is maybe at the core of the world that I that I traffic in and what I think I'm most fascinated by. Yeah. It's understanding how. What it looks like to practice and pursue it in my own life, but also how to define it in a world that seems to have it misconstrued and so like I want to begin just in this vein with you like how would you define belonging? What a beautiful question. Belonging to me is the sense, the felt sense that there is a place in which you are totally welcome in your totality. That would be real belonging. And or faux belonging is there is a place for you so long as your ideologies match my own. That is not belonging. That's that is defined by that's where something that's the car that's the car pulling the horse. You call that manipulation. Yeah. Yeah. That's not real belonging. However, we find a sense of great ease and we find that that relief when we identify with a group and quite often it comes with an ideology. But for me like in my men's work in my men's group, we aren't none of us are there because we necessarily believe a certain way, but rather because we're aligned around pursuing our values, pursuing our virtue and living in integrity to the best of our ability. And we all disagree about certain things. We disagree about parenting. We disagree about acceptable behavior and relationship. We disagree about all sorts of things, but what we're all dedicated to is pursuing our virtue and our integrity alongside one another. And in doing so, we create a community in which we belong, because we are there welcome in our totality. Can someone belong to a place inside of themselves so deeply that despite the external environment, they still have that sensation? Well, I think you just nailed it even further. There's levels to this. And in my experience, you can always find a place of belonging within yourself. And I feel like quite often that is facilitated and found through a community, because it's reflected back, belonging, all emotions in my experience are self-sourced. Every single emotion we feel is actually coming from us, right? But it's through connection with other people that it's illuminated. Yeah, we just live in a world of minutes. Right. So in this person, I'm getting a reflection back that I belong. And with my best friend, Geo, you know, it's so funny, you said one and five people can't define a best friend. I'm like, I can't choose. You know, like I have so many guys that I just fucking adore, right? Like I love these men. And my friend, Geo, when I'm with him, I always feel a sense of belonging. We're totally different people, right? We do different things. We align on creativity. But he's a parent I'm not, right? So, so that is what he's doing is creating, what we're doing is co-creating an environment in which we both feel that sense, that internal sense of belonging coming from us. But could you have had that with him two decades ago or a decade ago? No, no, absolutely not. So then that presents the question, like, has it required a sense of self-acceptance from both of you to be able to meet each other in? For sure, for sure. I was doing drugs once. The best way ever to restore me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there I was doing drugs. I was doing a psychedelic called 5MEO DMT. And by the way, we can talk about this, like, I didn't do drugs for a very long time. I was sober for a long time. And then I got to a place where I was like, there's more to explore. And I don't think drugs are necessarily, they're not a silver bowl, they're not a panacea. But I remember I was in deep in this experience. And it was as if I felt what you were talking about that place inside. But it was almost a physical sensation where I felt my spine, like so deep in my chest, I was all the way through and I felt my spine sort of restructure itself and become profoundly solid. And I can go to that place even now sitting with you and just feel that's that's that's home, right? And at home, you always belong. So if you can get to that deepest place in yourself outside of of what's going on in the world around you outside of your community, you can always find home. You can always, always, always find it. My friend Elena Brower says she starts this beautiful meditation. And she says there's a place inside of you that is always at rest, always at peace. And makes me emotionally thinking about that meditation because that's what I'm talking about. That's home, you know, and when you get there, it is one of the most profound feelings you can have. It's not even a feeling. It's a sense. It's a it's an ownership. It's an agency that is beyond the external sources and it and it is so anchoring, it is so grounding. And yet to use her words, we all forget. And the goal, at least in my life and she does it through meditation, I do it through other means, is finding ways to return home again and again and again. And the more you do it, the more practice you become. And the more quickly you can access it so that when you are disrupted and when you feel lonely and when you feel isolated, you can always find that place. And it doesn't have circumstantial, a circumstantial predisposition. It just exists. What about that? It made you emotional. The understanding that it's always there and that sort of there's a sadness and a beauty around it that we just forget so easily. We just forget that like it's always there and when and it's natural to seek and search around us for some solidarity in the world. But certainty kills creativity, certainty kills curiosity. Comfort is the end of growth, right? Being uncomfortable and becoming really, really, really fucking okay with being uncomfortable is the gift. And that's where we really, really grow. Certainty kills creativity. I've never heard it put like that. It reminds me that there's a quote I wanted to ask you about in here. You said, "My most creative contributions to life have been where I can feel death." Wow, I wrote that, Jesus. Sometimes people read from my book and I go, "Wow, that's good." But I forget that I wrote it. I'm like, "Oh." You've got to go back. There's an abundance of quotes. I think the amplification, the proximity to death amplifies life in a profound way that only that proximity can. And so being in those environments is a constant expansion of creativity. What are we capable of? Because the more you push the physicality, the more the non-physical, the ethereal that the creative is, is unlocked. But that's not to say that everybody should go out and try to find the edge. Because that was going to be my next question was, like, hearing you say that, and I've had maybe a few handful of moments in my life in which I felt that sense of proximity to death. Definitely, it's simultaneously a company's more of a liveliness than I've ever felt. How would you encourage somebody to dance with death or get closer to death in that way? I think it's just pushing your physicality in any way that feels appropriate to you. But I think the way through hard times is through physical practice and close community. Both of those things, look, I've done all modalities of exercise. For me, one of the best ways to get there is through high-intensity training. When you push yourself so far that you feel like your brain just goes silent, you think you're going to throw up. That's that same sort of growth edge that I'm talking about. So you're not necessarily telling someone to go and get almost dying enough? No, no. But also do go out and push that boundary. And there's safe ways to do it, right? Was it a part of you that ever felt like there was a sense of an addiction to that edge? Oh, for sure. Yeah. It was like you want to get back there because the sense of mundaness in normality is not. I was talking about that this morning with my friend Brit. We were having breakfast and I was, we were walking back to my place and I was thinking sometimes I really struggle with now that I'm not climbing, now that I'm not pushing those boundaries, now that I'm not doing those things and going to war zones and there's sort of a mundane nature to life that can feel very confining. You know, I look around me and I go, is this is this it now? Is this, is this all there is now? At the same time, I think my journey or part of my my growth is understanding exactly what we're talking about, which is I don't need to touch the edge to feel alive. I don't need to touch death to feel alive. And yeah, it's like it reminds me of actually, I keep drinking it up, but I heard him heard ritual talking about this on another show. He said like, because obviously he's in the ultra space. It's like the real discomfort for me would actually be to not do an ultra. Right. Right. Doing the ultra is not the thing that makes me the most uncomfortable. It's not doing it. We, you know, it's most uncomfortable for me is being at home alone with, with nothing to do, nothing going on. That feels like death to me. And my part of my growth is coming to terms with the fact that I don't have to fill that space. And there's ways that I do it where I just try to marvel at my living room. For example, just look around me and look around. This is an exercise I do with people sometimes. It's like, pick something. Just you pick something right now. Pick anything. Find that fireplace behind you. I'm marveling that. Okay. So the fireplace, right? There's, it's infinitely worthy of both gratitude and awe. It's just a fireplace. But somebody had to come up with mortar, right, to hold stones together. That is a mix of science. People have been trying and working and perfecting this for, for eons, right? How do we hold things together? That's just one aspect. So just the mortar there is hundreds of thousands of man hours of trying to figure that out. Then you've got the rocks, which are, you know, they were built over time. They were compressed over time. And then you've got somebody who has to go, well, what if we stacked rocks? And, you know, and then you've got to go, okay, well, then somebody was like, okay, what if we, what happens if I noticed this warm thing happens, this fire thing happened? How can we harness that? How can we learn this fireplace represents, you know, a totality of the human journey to get to this point. So you can just sit there, throw some logs in there, and be fucking warm. You can do that with anything, plastic, glass, like how long did it take to perfect clear glass, right? And then, and then to cut it and then to figure out saws. So we could cut it. Like it is abs Absolutely astronomically fucking brilliant the world we live in and yet we forget to look around and that is Accessible to us at any moment at any time. I drive down the freeway. I was with my friend the other day and So stupid I'm driving down the freeway and there's like an overpass. I'm like bridges Like how fucking cool. I don't know you must be like. Yeah, yeah, like I'm like bridges I just said that and and she looked at me and she's like what and I'm like, but they're so cool, right? Like there's a swath of concrete. We had to come up with concrete. We had to figure that out Then cars and it like and so we can just drive down the freeway from point A to point B and yet everybody's sitting in their car Going everything's fucked, you know, and I'm like Nothing is fucked like it's like it's so amazing Yeah, yeah, and and in those moments of deep deep discomfort of being with myself if I can turn myself outward and Marvel at what I'm a part of Guy, but and I've quoted that and Guy Bergs quite a bit but he says the point is not to show how inventive and creative you can be but to notice what how much you can notice what you're already a part of and That is again, that's a set that's a form of coming home That's a form of noticing that's a form of quiet and calm that if you can practice it continually over and over and over again You start to the world around you starts to open up and express itself in a way that is so unbelievably beautiful Yeah You know, Corey the question that I've been most excited to ask you on this show. I think you just answered and the question was gonna be How have you been able to develop such an intimate relationship with reality? What a fucking beautiful question. I mean again, the way you phrase these questions is Is masterful really you should you should really be proud of how you phrase these things. Yeah, truly Thank you. Yeah, no, and I think yeah, that's that's how I would answer it, but also it's it's coming home to The acceptance of self which by the way, I still Blow it all the time, you know, I don't think that what people don't see is is You know like a month and a half ago I I was so Like clinically depressed that I didn't leave bed for four days people people look at my life and they go Oh, you know, he's doing all these things, but there's always in me this sort of like I should be doing more What am I and then when I when I experience those deep spells of depression there's there's like this Intense self-loathing that comes with them and and people don't see that but part of my Relationship with reality is when they come which they will and they will continue to come and that's okay Is going back to that place of it just is right it just is right now and the more we can Get into the isness of things It it it helps us it at least it helps me Ride the tides and and and come to grips with Simply what is happening, but I'd flip the question around to you because it's so good I want to know how you have done that because I think this is a learning, you know One for me. Oh, thank you The reason I ask you that is because reading your book put me in a space that I Think is the most beautiful space for me to operate inside of which is this lens of like intimacy with the world and Reading your book and the poetry of it Put me there and so I think the best way that I I Have been able to develop it is by Surrounding myself and often it's not with people that are in my physical vicinity But with works of art and people that are in that I am deeply inspired by that have touched to that place You know, they see the world in that way like Bob Dylan You know Steve Jobs the manner in which he sort of blended this just fascination with Great art with science and spirituality People like Dermott Kennedy who's my favorite artist. He's a poet. Mm-hmm. I think that has been the best way that I know how to tap into that Space yeah, and then I think even almost More importantly is to remove everything that isn't that mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Like I am so fed up of being around people who see the world in a mundane way. Mm-hmm And the natural The natural Sort of symbiosis I suppose might be that might be the correct word would be that over time the more time I spend in those spaces the more I begin to reflect that that lens as well And I just become resentful but none of them much more of my own relationship to life mm-hmm And so I think it's the it's the dance of choosing maybe maybe the big lesson is choosing my people wisely mm-hmm Yeah, it's been the greatest the greatest way. I mean, that's what I that's a beautiful answer and I think Like really having a solid reflection on what kind of people you really admire in life, especially as it pertains to men It's just it's like it's like really identifying what your values are and values aren't You know, it's not this people grouper that people grouper this race or that race It's there's so much deeper than that identify being able to identify our values Consistently and then aligning with people around us who hold those same values and And you know in religion and what not it seems like that as an alignment of values, but they're actually it's actually deeper than that Yeah, yeah, it's it's you know your values are humanity your values are global Wellness your values are safety and and then we find communities in which we You know exemplify those values And I think most people get stuck not because They're absent of clarity although they would convince themselves. They are like I don't know what I value Yeah, yeah, yeah, I traffic a lot in the in the space with young men and the narrative a lot is like well I just don't know I'm not clear on what I want yeah My answer often is it's not that you're not clear It's that you're absent of the courage to say no to everything that isn't that yeah, yeah, you know that seems like a greater challenge for people It's not that they don't know but like do you have the courage to say no to all people things that do not represent that because the this the tenderness and the and the Like this life is so short. Yeah. Yeah, and we just don't have time to be in the spaces that are And not conducive to was like seeing the world in the way that we wish to see it. Yeah, yeah It would be impossible for me to really understand the experience without actually having it. Yeah, but I can't help but see and feel a myriad of sort of seemingly contradicting emotions in one image and that is the image National Geographic. Yeah, yeah, you know right after the avalanche Yeah, maybe maybe you might say otherwise, but the closest you've been to death and you're like how do you reflect on that image? And and also the like the irony of the fact that you've spent your career taking photos of other people in your most maybe your Most famous image is a selfie of you unquestionably well First of all the first known portrait. This is this is a longer die a tribe. I'm going to get back to the avalanche, but Can you name who invented the the The light bulb Thomas Edison, right. I mean he yes, you're absolutely right. That's the name I'm looking for The telephone Oh, I'm gonna say no, no, no, no, Graham Bell Graham Bell. Right. You got it right. Amazing. Graham. Um, okay, the camera Hold on no, I have no idea So the guy that that invented so first of all that the camera itself was Theorized by people like Plato there's like 400 BC people were talking about what would become the camera obscure they had observed This thing where you know if you punch a tiny hole in something in a dark room it will reflect An upside down image on the wall adjacent right so they knew there was something to this The guy that commercialized or or eventually brought it to Sort of the broad market is a guy named Louis DeGare and And the first known Photographic portrait we have is a selfie The reason I bring this up is because two things photography change the world as much as anything else Everything we do. I mean look at what we're doing today. It's a moving picture. It's it's a series of tiny photographs over and over and over again, right? Photography changed the nature of reality. And everything we do, everything that operates in the world these days is quite largely based on imagery. Now that's not to say that satellite communications and stuff like that are, however, the way we tell the story of that is through imagery. Photography became the first universal language that was accessible to everybody. And that is that is that is a profound leap forward for us. And nobody very few people can name Louis de Gaire, right? The idea that the first portrait was a selfie is really interesting to me because it it it examples how we have always been in search of ourselves, right? We've always wanted to know more about ourselves and the camera created a way for us to observe ourselves that we had never had before. So back to the avalanche, we're on a mountain called Gashram 2 in the middle of winter in Pakistan. It's the 13th highest mountain in the world. And there were three of us, Simone Moro and a guy named Dennis Arruco. And we had just done the first winter ascent. And it was it was a big deal because it was you know A on the summit with windshield, it's probably minus 80. You know in the tent at night out of the wind, it's minus 51. And we're you know we're sleeping like these sardines stacked on top of each other. And well right after we submitted, we got hit by a storm. And then it snowed for two days. And on our way from base camp to or from camp one back down to base camp, we were hit by an avalanche. Now at the time, the avalanche felt enormous and it was and it nearly killed all of us. But in hindsight, I really think what happened, we were on flat ground and this this avalanche came down a very steep slope above us with all this new snow and ice in it. And I think really what hit us and what carried us was predominantly the wind blast. So as soon as the snow starts to hit flat ground, it slows down, but it also creates a huge wind blast out front. It picked us up and it carried us, I don't know, 500 feet over crevasses and there's all this ice in it. I mean it was it was horrifying. And the experience of being in an avalanche is very chaotic. It's loud, it's so you hear it before you see it. You hear it before you see it, then you see it, then it hits, then then everything goes sort of into chaos. And it's and it's, you know, just what is just for the person who hasn't and myself included, what is the time between hearing it, seeing it and being hit by it? Well, it depends on, you know, where you are exactly. But in our case, it's a matter of seconds between hearing it, seeing it and getting hit because it's moving very, very fast. And so we were picked up and we were thrown over this flat ground and then all of us were partially buried. And I immediately thought Simone and Dennis are dead and buried and I'm going to, I don't know how I'm going to get down, but I almost certainly am going to something is, you know, I'm probably going to die. And I thought I was going to die when the avalanche, when we were in it, when I was, when it stopped, I was like, you know, sort of now, now what? And then I heard Simone's voice and then I felt his hands on me and then he was digging me out and I don't know how much time elapsed, right? But it is, it's a matter of, the whole event was a matter of minutes, right? It's not long. I'm sure in some sense, like time collapsed, though, and it felt like an eternity. Time dilates, right? In hindsight, it felt very fast, but at the time, I remember it feeling just infinitely long. And as soon as I got out, I turned the camera on and I turned it on myself and I started to cry. And then several hours, well, about an hour later, after we had sort of survived this whole thing, this ordeal, and we were getting closer to base camp, I could feel the ice on my face and I could feel sort of this, this expression. And so I turned the camera on again and I took a selfie. And my relationship to that now is one of profound gratitude because it changed the trajectory of my life. I looked at it and there's a sense of, you know, awareness, but also like, I mean, the sense of my heart is baby boy, like you're good, you're good, like you're okay and this is going to hurt, man, this is going to hurt, but it's so worth it. And I see fear, I see confusion, I see hubris, I see self obsession, I see, you know, I see this sort of totality of my experience collapsed into a singular moment. And what I marvel at, and this is new language that I just figured out is being buried and being planted are oftentimes the same thing, right? And I wonder if I was just buried for a very long time, meaning I was buried under that avalanche and I allowed it to become an identity and I allowed it to become sort of a calling card of my life. And I leveraged it to the best of my ability and to the, and to the worst of my ability. And, and it, like I said, it changed the trajectory of everything in my life. And to a point where sometimes I'm so fucking sick of it that that it's like, and by the way, nothing wrong with talking about it, but sometimes I'm like, fuck, man, do I have to tell the story again? Because, you know, for example, like, Simone and Dennis didn't experience any of the after effects that I did. And it's created a sense of like wonder and almost guilt and curiosity about around like, well, did I make it all up? But to what, when you said the after effects, what, what in particular did they not experience? Like PTSD, they didn't have this whole unwinding and unraveling that I did. And, and they certainly didn't make it into their identity the way that I did. And granted, it wasn't their face in that photo. But, you know, I often am like, did I, have I overdone it? Have I, have I, you know, was it as bad as I thought? And, and I have to come back to like, yes, it was for me. And, um, but I look at it now. And again, I'm, I'm very grateful for it because no matter the circumstance itself, it created something in my life that allowed me to flourish. And it destroyed me at the same time, you know, and it took, it's 15 years ago now. And it took 12 real years, maybe, yeah, about 12 years before I wrote the chapter on it in my book. Why? I didn't know how to write about it. I didn't, I tried, you know, I tried to get a bottle whiskey and like, write it out. And it never, it never worked. Well, I didn't, you know, how to write about it. Because I, I hadn't made sense of it yet. I just hadn't, I hadn't really made sense of, of, of, of its, of its actual impact. And to be fair, I'm not sure that I'll ever make complete sense of it. Yeah. It's just, again, it's like we were talking, it just happened. And then things happened afterwards because of it. And then certainly having that photograph on the cover of National Geographic changed everything again. Right. But, but I, I see it. And I'm, I'm marvel at it. I'm confused by it. I, um, yeah, it's, it's not, is there any sense of guilt? I could further fact that they didn't experience this. And you maybe did and the ability to be able to share the story in unique ways and it's your photo that's on the, like, I'm just, no, no, there's, there's guilt because it's like, like I was saying is it's like, did I, did I, did I overdo it? Did I overplay it? I wonder about that all the time because they didn't have any of the same sort of reaction or response. So I'm going, wait a minute. Have I, have I, you know, have I made it up? And there's guilt around that. But it's not guilt because the answer is yes. There's guilt because almost like I didn't, I, I will, I still will not give myself permission to feel what I feel. So, there's almost a denial of self in it. Even talking about it, there's like a discomfort to it. Yeah, I feel that. It's almost like, there's a, I mean, it comes back to that word belonging and like, do I actually belong to that experience in the way that I have experienced it? Yeah, do I belong to the experience in the way that I experienced? Do I belong to the experience in the way I've characterized it? Have I, have I over characterized it or under in certain ways? And do I belong to them as a result of that? Yeah, exactly. So, it, it's still confusing, clearly, it's still very confusing. And I've often played with the idea of just not talking about it anymore. But I haven't, clearly I haven't gotten to that point. But I think at some point I will, where it'll just be like, yeah, we don't talk about the avalanche. Only because I, I wonder how much, you know, I still identify with those pieces by talking about it. Yeah, I'm also sure that like, I mean, the brain naturally, like distorts and generalizes and doesn't sit there, right? For sure. And I'm sure the number of times you tell a certain story almost grew. Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it can be. It can just be like, you tell it so many times it's like, it's almost gets, not further from what the actual experience was, but it's like, now you have to go back to all the times you've told the story to actually have the actual event. Yeah, yeah. And, and there are aspects of it that, you know, for a long time, the narrative has, has been for a long time. I, you know, I took the photo right after the avalanche. Well, and I didn't correct people for a long time. But the truth is I took it about an hour after the avalanche, you know, on my book, I say 47 minutes. I mean, who knows really what the time was. But I wish, I wish there's a piece of me that wishes so badly that I could go back to that moment and watch it, like, and watch what happened, or experience it as myself now, just because I think it'll be fascinating to see what distortions I have come up with. And, and how accurate am I being and how, how have I characterized it. But if you were to just like play the role of like the actor with me for a moment, I'm yourself in that scenario. Imagine you are reliving it. Yeah. Like, how would you reflect upon what you, what, what are you afraid you might see? What do you know? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think maybe I'm afraid that it wouldn't be as, as profound as, as I've made it out to be. And this is really interesting conversation. I've never spoken this candidly about those, those, those, yeah, yeah, I've never spoken this candidly about those internal experiences and, and the way I wrestle with it. You know, I'm afraid there, if it didn't happen the way I remember it, there would be shame, you know, there would be, oh, I, you know, I made too much out of this. But I will say this, it, it happened the way it happened. So those thoughts are really, they're in some form of mental masturbation because we can't replay it. Yeah. The narrative I have is the one I have and that's reality. Yeah. So, um, but it's a, it's a fascinating line of thought. It is fascinating. And also, like, a part of my philosophy on life is that we are all actors, like playing character, we're all playing roles. Absolutely. One of my favorite quotes is, um, at the end of this movie, the sound of freedom, you see the movie, the sound of freedom, it's a true story based on just the horrific events in the world surrounding child sex trafficking. Okay. And the movie didn't get funded or, um, sort of taken on board by any of the big Hollywood sort of agencies. And so the guy who created the movie had to go and raise money to put it out. Yeah. At the end of the movie, there's a quote that comes up from him, producer of the movie and he says that the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. Mm hmm. Yeah. And that quote was never left me because just the ability for us to create worlds with our stories and like, maybe the great human sort of divider and connector and the great human, like, at the centerpiece of everything that is human is story. That's all there is and like photography is just an extension of that words. Language is only 115,000 years old. Imagine what the world was before we were telling these stories with the language we have. And imagine how much it's trapped us and freed us, right? Communication is one of the most fascinating things. But anytime I meet sort of, you know, I come into contact with a lot of celebrity and the only thing I ever say to people that I really admire is thank you. And I let them interpret it however they want. But what I'm thanking them for is their contribution to the story telling. But I also believe that we are all consummate storytellers. We wake up in the morning, we tell a story about ourselves, the world we live in, everything that we do. Our families, all of it, we just tell a story and it becomes very entrenched. And the beauty of story is that it is malleable. That's not to say we should tell false stories, but it is to say that we should be mindful of the stories we're telling in the way that they can trap us, they can harm us. We can tell a story of victimhood over and over and over again and what happens while we live in victimhood. Yeah, I mean, it also begs the question for me, like I'm like, it's super, we can go super ethereal. Which I love. I love ethereal. It begs the question for me, like, what is a false story and what is a true story? If you and I can have the same, if we can experience the same moment, we were different with, like, we all live on one planet, but there's eight billion worlds, you know, so like, just because you and I see the same thing, doesn't mean we see the same thing, so to speak. So like, what is a false and what is a true story? Well, that's back to like everybody's right. Everybody's story is valid, but the reality of any experience is, is lives outside of the stories we tell, they happen as they happen and it's up to us to, to encapsulate them to the best of our ability and that's what I encourage people to do is try to do is, is, reduce a story to its basic facts and then from there, build the most net positive narrative around it. That is accessible to everybody, right? And so, um, story, you know, we are, we are wired for story, right? It's, uh, there's a Lisa, Lisa Cron, Lisa, anyway, she says, you know, um, story telling is, is as essential to human evolution as the opposable thumbs, opposable thumbs allowed us to hang on story told us what to hang on to. And, and it, we, we are, all we do is tell stories and the, the beauty and horror of that is those stories direct reality and yeah, the power of the story, the most powerful person in the world is a storyteller, absolutely and every single person is a storyteller. So by that measure, by that metric, we are all infinitely powerful in both horrible and marvelous ways. It seems to me that that is what would make photography such a beautiful art form in the sense that like one photo could be so open to the interpretation of, of a myriad of different faces, you know, well, I mean, it's, it's, it's open to our interpretation to every single person that used it and there's a fundamental flaw with story with photography too, which is like, you know, I can take a photo, say there's a photo on the ground and it's, there's a dead body in it, right? I can take a photo of just the dead body, um, that's one story. If I put on a wider angle lens and I see somebody devastated by that, uh, and praying over them and weeping over them, that's a different story. If I extract the dead body and it's just a person crying, you've got a different story. If I extend it further and there's a beautiful flower next to that, that's a different story and if I extract the weeping person, there's just the flower. All of those four different scenarios exist in the same scene and it depends on where we're pointing the camera and that is right. So and all of those things are true in that moment. That's what's so powerful about the stories we choose and it's not to deny the totality of the scene but rather to recognize the totality of the scene and make the best choices on the story we're trying to tell, right? That's so powerful. Trevor, is there a specific moment in which you can remember being behind the lens and having to either include or, like, keep out a certain, like, part of what the whole image depicted in order to tell the story you were trying to tell? Yeah, but then there's also this fundamental unease around that because you're like what's really happening here there's there's beautiful examples of this a lot of times it was sort of a trick of National Geographic photographers it still is is I always called it the zoom out effect where like you know the picture of like the bear on the waterfall like it's mouth open the fish jumping into it my friend Joel Sartori took a picture and it's that scene but he stepped back and what you see is 10 photographers pointing their lens at exactly the same moment right so it's that's a very different thing my friend Charlie Hamilton James you know there's a scene of the it's it's it's the teetons right behind and and what he's taking a picture of actually is a person taking a picture of the plaque not the mountains themselves but the plaque with the picture on it explaining what all the mountains are right so they're down here and and and then they're taking picture of a picture when the thing is right there or another great one is in and I don't know there's many photos like this but a picture of the Mona Lisa for example okay there's one picture in its of this beautiful painting the most iconic painting in the world well zoom out and you've got everybody standing there in front of the Mona Lisa but not one person is looking at it they're all with their backs to it taking a selfie totally different things happening and they're actually looking at themselves in the photo with them with the Mona Lisa so that's that that's the rub with photography is that it it relies on the photographer and the human interpretation of the scene and what is most important in the scene to depict that lends itself to a very different story every single time so there's a philosophical conundrum within the art itself that is I mean all the way back to Robert Cornelius who who who took the first selfie right so how do you then reconcile as a photographer this is much deeper than I could have ever imagined it would be to be in this craft yeah and like how do you reconcile the integrity conversation I mean integrity is ours to to to define what is most important to you is it the beauty of the painting or is the social commentary on how people want to be seen with the painting and can you even define which one is more important yeah they're they're both different stories but I think the power of photography is the most honest one and in my mind the most honest one is when you include the unexpected totality of a scene the the thing that people the bear opening its mouth is actually it's beautiful but it's expected yeah all of the people on the same deck shooting it that's unexpected yeah yeah it makes me think of just this question around creativity and that is like do we lose great art in the modern day because people are more focused on how it will be received than the actual art itself absolutely yeah we we it's it's about validation we want the art to be well received and so we so many people make they they pull the thread of mediocrity because they know that oftentimes mediocrity hits harder than then great art in fact a lot of great art just say that again and then break that down for me often mediocrity hits harder than great art yeah it means that that there are recipes there are there are sort of tropes that we know perform well on say platforms like Instagram yeah right so we keep creating the same picture over and over and by the way I've done that yeah you know like little person big landscape you know that's a cover my fucking book you know so so you know that's that's that's that's like I'm I'm guilty of this too I know that photo performs is it high art absolutely not the reality is art pushes itself through the world and this is like Kandinsky's triangle where the peak of the triangle is often incomprehensible and completely unrelatable for most people but it's always pushing upward so eventually that art that was at the peak becomes the base and and it it's a fascinating idea and concept but then it's in my mind the triangle is always moving in a circle so the arrow the tip of the arrow had always comes back around over and over and over again and we see idea that no story is original if you study something like somebody like Joseph Campbell I believe yeah like I believe one of the I think I think the power of myth should be required reading for the world I mean it's truly phenomenal because what it illuminates is how we did that we tell stories in a very specific way and it is ubiquitous throughout time with is not changed the structure of the story has not changed ever and it just keeps repeating itself and the same is true with photography the same is true with painting it just keeps repeating itself we we go to the literal and then we then we veer towards the abstraction and the abstraction makes us crave the literal and then we go back and forth and we just keep and in the context of storytelling writ large like if you look at the stories of human religions over over time there are something like twelve different stories that predate Jesus that all have you know some Christ like figure with twelve apostles who was born of a virgin and came right like the story of the of the garden is something like five thousand years of the first version of it is five thousand years older than the than the Torah and and and it just takes on a different cultural texture it's it's the same story wearing different clothes what a beautiful segue what's your relationship with God oh beautiful damn go from Kandinsky to God he'd probably be happy with that you know for a long time because my dad was raised Mormon and he left the church and he gravitated towards science he gravitated towards what is measurable and provable and so I was raised in a very analytic and and deeply cynical household when he came to God and so for a long time I paraded my my father's interpretation because that's what I that's the story I inherited about it and as I grew up I always had the sense that there is something bigger happening now is it mine to define probably not the stories we tell and the the confining of the of the limitless the confining of the infinite or the the the spiritual to use a word God to me represents both a beautiful struggle of humanity to try to understand our place in the universe but also the height of human arrogance to think that we could define the divine we can't define it and if you look at those stories and the way they're told and told over and over and over again it becomes clear that we are trying over and over again to to make sense of something that cannot be made sense of and it's not meant to be made sense of but what I'm certain of is that just because it's not measurable doesn't mean it's not true there have been many things throughout the course of history that at one time we're not measurable and seemed absurd but then became measurable and became true and that is so so when I think of God I think of back to our conversation about the sense of home inside of you there is a divine spirit within all of us and you can call a God you can call it love you can call it creativity whatever the fuck you want I don't care what I what I do believe is that there is an interconnectedness of things and the totality of that is what I would call God and so therefore I am an essential part of both the hard and fast reality but the much larger idea of something so much greater than us that we that we can't possibly comprehend and we're not supposed to and and what I struggle with is the idea of defining something so concretely that it then allows us to create enemies with people from people with different beliefs yeah it's quite arrogant of us to think we understand right It's the height of human arrogance. My God is right and yet the essence of most gods is some or religion is some expression of love. It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that the true experience of God is in the absence of the attempt to form your lives to define it. Right? Like in the same way Lao Tzu talks about the five colors makes a man blind, the five tones makes a man deaf, the definition of God and the defining of it, the reduction of it makes God inaccessible and it's not yet that is the second we stop looking for that we start seeing. That is a beautiful combination of almost everything we've talked about to be able to see this fireplace, we'll see the bridge, we'll really see the helicopter in order to magic. It also makes me think, I wonder if that's why people would often describe the closest they've felt to God being in their expression of art because like you just said about God not being just because it's not measurable, it doesn't mean it's not true or it's not measurable and just because it's not measurable, it doesn't mean it's not. It's not true. True. I saw a quote on a piece of art that said, science will save the world, but art is what makes it worth saving. You know, and it's, I have a piece on my wall that says life is an art, not a science. And I think that there's art in seeing the world with open eyes that aren't, that are no longer looking but just experiencing. Yeah, it's fucking fascinating. I've never heard that before that science will save the world. But art is what makes it worth saving. Yeah. I mean, this is all in art. Life is an art. It's an art form. It's a big, it's a big, beautiful game that we get to play and if we're mindful of it, we see the art and the artistry and all of it. It's very hard to do, especially when we're paying attention to all the negative things, but that is part of the canvas. You know, I really believe that, I was talking about this before, but I believe that the essence of all things is one sort of, the essence of all emotion, the essence of everything is love. And I write about it in my photo book that there's only one thing that does not have a duality to it and that is love. People would say, well, the opposite of love is hate. No, it's not. Love makes space for hate. Love makes space for a difference. Love makes space for war. And I'm not saying war is good and I'm not saying it's acceptable. I'm just saying love is zoomed out far enough makes space for it. And what happens in my mind, my philosophy is simply that the human experience is a prism. And this pure love shines through us and like a prism, it fragments out in this myriad of different expressions and and and all the actions both marvelous and terrible are simply expressions of love being impacted in one way or another. And if we can see that, I think the closer we can get to at least directing what comes out of the prism, you know. So hatred is when love has been impressed upon in a way that that is so painful. It's been rejected. It's been oppressed. It's been overlooked. It's been, you know, buried and that expresses his hate, you know, or fear. But when love is celebrated, when love is accepted, when love is granted, autonomy and agency, it expresses in a different way when when love is passed through the mirror of another person and ourselves, we feel romantic love. But it's all just love being expressed, sometimes horrifically and sometimes magically. Maybe just like a photograph, it's difficult for me to put into words what this conversation has meant to me and I'm sure to everybody listen and and your level of vulnerability, the man in which you can just dance in a variety of different areas and and maybe even bigger than that. And I continue to just feel the deep sort of resonance in you and in me and that's why this has been particularly beautiful for me is just the lens at which you view the world. Yeah, it's definitely through reading your book and just being here with you has put me in a deep, deep space of intimacy with it all and that's where I am to be. And so just I guess that it would be nowhere near a big enough gesture of my gratitude and I don't also at the same time have any more words than thank you. That's perfect. Thank you. That's that's that's the limitation of the story we tell with language. Thank you. I appreciate it. Just as we close this out, like for people who have listened to this and like myself been fascinated, like where can they learn more about you and and your book, of course, just where can they get your book and yeah, those you do. Yeah. The title of the book is the color of everything and then there's a companion photo book called bipolar and you know, Amazon is as much as the evil empire is not my friends. It's also a great place to get it. My encouragement for people is always if you if you like the book, buy it for somebody else. And that's how authors really survive is it's one thing to tell somebody about a great book. It's another thing to be like, hey, here it is, read it. And then of course, you know, social media, Instagram and I'm working on some big fun things in life that are an expression, a continued expression of of all of this and and you know, looking for those soon. I'm really excited about those. Yeah. And I will say to everybody listening, it is rare and I'm very cautious and careful to sort of sort of promote a book because I know that puts my reputation on the line and I will say that like reading Corey's book was an unbelievable gift for the ability that he has to bring someone into an experience. And as I said to you off air, like the manner in which you take what is a deeply unique experience and make it deeply personal, reminds me of the quote and I wrote this at the very beginning of my notes for you that that which is most personal is most universal. And what a beautiful quote. Yeah, and I could not speak more highly of the book. It was it was a really pleasant read and also despite its length, a really useful read because you write quite poetically in sentence as a sure and it's it's also very rhythmic. So yeah, I'll leave it at that, go get the book, yeah, thanks man, I appreciate it.