https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hjWMAx-GmpI
Imagine that you could be exactly where you wanted to be in five years. Like you’ve got these stellar opportunities in front of you. So then you’ve got to allow yourself to imagine like you’re a kid who’s pretending or daydreaming and thinking, okay, man, I can be wherever I want five years. I’m a musician. I’ve already got an audience. I’ve got an audience of people who want to hear me. I’ve got a lot of commercial options. And then I have a private life that I enjoy. Okay, how could I bring all of those together in the optimal way? What would that look like? And that’s got to be, that’s, you know, there’s a line in the Gospels that says that you should ask and you’ll receive. You should knock and the door will open and you should seek and you’ll find. And that’s actually an injunction to a kind of meditative prayer. And the idea fundamentally, and this works like a charm, is what the hell do you want? Just imagine that fortune could conceivably smile on you in the way that it has in the last couple of weeks. And you could set up your future so that it was literally your dream. What would that look like? Like you obviously like performing. I mean, if you, we could do that a little bit right now. If you imagine you could have a year where you had exactly the right balance between performing and having a private life. Like what size audiences do you like playing for? Yeah, that’s kind of the challenge. I love the intimacy of a smaller. I mean, we did the farm market. We had about 12,000 show up and like and even with that despite everyone telling me I was a fool for doing it. I stayed and did like a meet and greet after for about four and a half hours, but it gave me enough time that I was able to. I’d like it to stay at a level. I’d like to have opportunities to be able to meet people. So 10 or 12,000 people. I mean, we’ve got we’ve got a few coming up that size. You know, you go back to your point about trying to sort of paint a picture, a mental picture of five years ahead. I know you had talked about that at some point in the lecture and that’s actually I give you some credit for me sitting in the chair. I’m in now because I have done that from your recommendation. I did your self authoring program and all maybe two or three years ago. And you know, the thing that that the thing that really spoke to me the most though was your story about your friend Chris because I’m Chris. Oh, yeah. And I was really oh man. And I was you know, you talked about your friend Chris being an aspiring musician and getting high all the time. And like and I if I recall correctly, Chris had had was from what I could interpret like with my own experience, maybe he was even experiencing some like cannabis induced psychosis and all. I remember the story. I think it was that was that was in the other room and like yeah that. Yeah, I realized like maybe I’m maybe I’m Chris, you know. So yeah, well there’s part of the reason I wrote about my friend. He eventually committed suicide at about the age of 40 after he phoned me one night. He had got a bunch of his short stories published in a small book in an anthology from Northern Alberta, and he’s actually a pretty good short story writer. He was a good photographer too. He was quite a brilliant man. This friend of mine and he did smoke too much pot and it wasn’t good for him. And maybe there was something else going on there too, but he became very bitter and resentful and it and partly because you know, he regarded his own ambition as evil. He was one of these demoralized young men, an early version of it, very sensitive person and easily made guilty and the constant harping about, you know, the evil patriarchy and the terrible consequence of male ambition just absolutely did him in, you know, and it played into his own unwilling unwillingness to accept responsibility in a kind of pathological way. It was very sad. Like I knew him for years and he lived with me in Montreal when he was older in his 30s, my wife and I for a while. And we kind of we tried to get help and get his life back on track and did to some degree. But then he left and went back to Alberta. Anyways, he committed suicide the day after he had phoned me and told me about having this publication. He went out in a truck and hooked a tube to the exhaust and in his truck and smoked cigarettes up in the mountains and, you know, just let himself go. And it was quite the bloody catastrophe. But it was one of those situations where, yeah, his life was too aimless and he he didn’t take his own potential with enough seriousness. He regarded his ambition as evil. He kind of became a nihilistic Buddhist in the worst possible sense and, you know, and drifted was really a real waste of talent. And so it’s a hell of a thing to hear you say, you know, that you saw some him and you, but it’s very, very common, you know, and it is a lot better to develop a vision. You talked about this self-authoring program. It’s you need a vision, man. And so now you said you talked to 12 you sang to 12,000 people and that was good. But you like the personal contact with the meet and greet. So my team sets up meet and greets after my event at every event. And so that’s a premium ticket. And, you know, you can you can what would you say, satirize that as excess capitalist exploitation. But you have to parse people in some manner when a lot of people want to see you. And it’s also the case, you know, that people want to enter into a reciprocal agreement. So if they’re really happy with you and what you’re doing, they also want to contribute and that’s part of reasonable trade. Now, I love the meet and greets. You know, I only meet people for about 15 seconds probably. And I’ve but I’ve learned to put them at ease very quickly and to get a bit of a interaction. You know, one of the things I’ve learned, for example, is that when people approach you and put out their hand to shake your hand, that’s going to happen to you on the street all the time. Now, obviously, is that you can match your tempo to theirs like a dance. You move towards them about as quickly as they move towards you. And I always ask people what their name is, because even if they’re nervous, most people can remember their name. And once they tell you that, once they tell you that, that sort of puts them at ease. And I really like the meet and greets, you know, because it also helps you remember who you’re that it differentiates the audience back into individuals. You should always be communicating with individuals. You know, as soon as you start talking to the crowd, as something Kierkegaard pointed out, as soon as you start talking to the crowd, you’re immediately lying. You have to be talking to the individuals in the crowd. And so I think you can have your cake and eat it on the touring front. You know, you can you can sing to large audiences, but you can keep that intimacy if you structure it properly. And then you also don’t get on your high horse too badly because, you know, people are always coming up to you and telling you, well, like the story that you just told about the guy who came up to you, you know, with his with his brother who was in such trouble. And hearing those sorts of stories from people and seeing them open themselves up like that, it knocks the ego out of you. That’s a really important thing to have happen to you when you’re touring, too, because when you’re the center of that much attention, you know, you can get puffed up. That’s so dangerous, man. It’s so dangerous to have that happen. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t ever want to sit in a position to where I feel like I’m better than anyone that I’m singing to. Yeah, I don’t like that ego that you see come with people that are in celebrity status. Like, it’s it’s a tragedy because it ultimately it ends up the person changes into whatever into something completely different than what people fell in love with them for in the first place. Yeah, like I I don’t see myself any different than anyone else that I’m that I’m like, and that’s what’s been so weird about this whole thing anyway, is like when I am approached and of course, maybe like maybe I need to shave my beard and cut my hair and wear a hat and then I can go out in the public for a couple of days. But I kind of stand out in the crowd anyway, my height and red hair and all. And so. Yeah, but it’s it hasn’t been at least not yet. It hasn’t been a bother. It’s been. It’s been nice to know that. It’s been nice to know that it has made positive impact on people like. I don’t know. I just I just felt so hopeless for the future for such a long time that like seeing people just seeing people feel something that I haven’t seen in a long time means a lot. It means a lot more to me than. Than anything else than the money or whatever, you know. What made you you said that for a long time you had felt hopeless about future and you alluded to this song that you wrote to about sobriety. What and also about identifying to some degree, let’s say with my friend Chris, what do you think? What do you think it was that tempted you to feel hopeless about the future and how have you dealt with that to the degree that you have and how have you dealt with that successfully? The hopelessness I think comes from from seeing us all like. We’ve just we find fault in each other instead of finding common ground in each other anymore like to your point about Chris and like like with you know, and I and that’s one of the verses in the in the popular song is that. It references young men committing suicide at this ridiculous rate. They are today because. Yeah, we. And I don’t know why it is. I think it’s I think it’s almost been. Again through social media and sort of the parasitic way that it alters our thinking like by just we read everyday things that just change the change our perception of each other, but we’ve gotten to a point where we almost. It’s easier for us to try to find differences and faults in each other instead of similarities, which we all hold much more common ground than we do difference, you know, I mean we’re all. We’re all very biologically similar and we we all have to acquire some amount of money and we most of us have ambitions of raising a family or at least have developing friendships like. You know. I’d say 90% of the people that at least exists in North America are are very similar in almost every way, but it’s like we’ve somehow found. The nitpick arbitrary differences that we hold and we exploit those and blow those up and so yeah it feels hopeless because we are more divided today than we’ve ever been like everything’s politicized everything is about. One one one party or one person trying to hold some moral high ground over the other just for the sake of of being able to point your finger down at him you know. And it’s like what the hell are we doing like we’ve got a. We have just an incredible opportunity to live in the place that we do the fact that you and I can. Can use free speech and free thought because speech and thought are one in the same like if if people aren’t able to have open honest conversations with each other they aren’t able to conceptualize new ideas that takes us into a better place and whatever place it. We were in previously like that’s just that’s human existence 101 and so to see that being threatened and to see us all sort of being put into these categories in these political buckets you know. it’s like. Even even just our own even the personalities of people have been weaponized against each other you know you made a good point. And I never looked at people this way prior but you were talking about how just in people’s own persona and their personality and the way they think people can be more conservative or liberal like entrepreneurial imaginative people are typically more liberal and you know like in a business you’ve got the CEO is typically going to have a more conservative perspective and the the guy coming up with a new idea is the entrepreneurial guy he’s going to be the guy who’s going to be the one to get the most out of the business. And it’s like. It seems like they’ve whoever this day is the man behind the curtain if you will I don’t know if that’s just. I don’t know who I don’t know how to explain that side of it but it seems like things have become very much like. Taking the imaginative creative person and weaponizing him against the more traditionalist grounded person instead of them using their strengths together to sort of build a brighter future it’s about taking each other and. Seeing how far like how far we can take this thing but ultimately my hopelessness comes from from like what is this country or what is this world going to look like in 20 or 30 years like what world are my kids going to live in is it going to be. Are they going to be allowed to say what they feel or what is that world going to be like and what are the things that they’re going to be able to use to bring their voices out there. hopelessness comes from, from like, what is this country or what is this world going to look like in 20 or 30 years? Like what world are my kids going to live in? Is it going to be? Are they going to be allowed to say what they think? Are they going to even be able to walk down the sidewalk? I mean, like, you know better than most about just the atrocities that went on 100 years ago, 150 years ago, like we’re so close to falling back into that. That’s really where my hopelessness comes from. But I do believe things can be turned around for the better in a short period of time. It’s just people have to sort of retrain the way they think about each other and ultimately the way they think about themselves, you know.