Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Psychology of Architecture Interview · Acedra
Home
Explore
Psychology
Psychology of Architecture Interview
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
121 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:00
hi this is joel blackstock welcome to the taproot therapy collective podcast this is part two in our ongoing series the psychology of architecture in our psychology of series we focus on the psychology of different professions like fine arts and music we hope to feature in some upcoming series part two of the psychology of architecture is an interview with andre stewani mr duwani is a award-winning urban planner and architect
0:32
he designed among 300 other towns that his firm worked on seaside florida and kenton's maryland he is also the award-winning author of suburban nation the rise of sprawl and the decline of the american dream i hope you find the interview with him interesting as always not all of the views of our guests represent the views of taproot therapy collective but we very much appreciate mr dewani sitting down with us because he is a accomplished and ingenious individual
1:04
mr duwani is one of the founders of new urbanism a movement in urban planning that seeks to restore the design of cities to the way that people will actually live and interact to design walkable and community spaces and to design spaces that foster community and connection
1:24
please bear in mind i was connecting with mr dewani while both of us were traveling and this interview took place after five other methods of communication failed and i had to put a tape recorder next to a cell phone on speakerphone in order to conduct the interview at all so uh bear that in mind here's the interview and thank you so much for [Music] listening just to start like i you know you've written and talked a lot and i don't
1:59
want to make you recap anything that's already out there um that you've said but the purpose of this is for people who may not be coming from an urban design or architecture background and so maybe just a little bit of summary that helps them understand the kind of fusion of architecture and urban design and community planning that you do um because the thing that made me interested in when we were doing the psychology of series and wanted to talk to you is like i was
2:28
a kid in the 80s and i remember coming to seaside and it felt i just felt so powerful when i was here and it was because the community was laid out you know almost at child height you know for pedestrians and not for cars and there were little architectural follies and like little paths that i could go through in the woods and i just felt this magic you know and i think the psychology of
2:50
something like this is interesting and it's not something that you get in to a ton in your talks or you know usually the people you're talking to are pretty technical pretty professional um yeah so i don't know if that makes sense or if you um if you want to just take it from there that's a very good introduction um a couple of things about what you said we used to say at seaside that if uh if we designed a place in which dogs i wouldn't be would could go out safely all day
3:17
we would have succeeded that was the kind of uh that was kind of reality robert davis had uh
3:24
had a dog called budweiser who lit 20 without a leash you know and he at the run of the town he was very popular where to get tidbits he had friends everywhere and of course dogs are not you know they wouldn't survive half a day in an american suburbia you know
3:44
so that was a test but the other test the one you're referring to is um 50 of americans one way or another don't have a car they're too young to drive too old to drive or too poor to have a car we have a we have a situation in which um you know we're so incredibly concerned about accessibility you know the accessibility of the handicap and so forth and in fact when they can't even get to the ramp in the first place mcdonald's well how do you get there in the first place you know
4:19
so there's fast middle missing misunderstanding of what goes on and whenever there are people who cannot normally drive are dependent on their parents you know the famous soccer mom and they have one taste of seaside as young kids or one taste of paris as older people where they run around on their own it's absolutely exhilarating and it's stunning because they don't realize how constrained they are the public realm in america is designed by engineers they
4:56
think they're just designing roads for vehicles but they're in fact designing the public realm and they do not take into account the ability of people to get around because they think about buying your rent right i provide ramps at the corners and red lights and green lights that doesn't mean the kids can get anywhere so um this is something i've spoken about in a long time but it is in fact one of the great canary in the mine shaft tests
5:23
can you give your kid ten dollars and say see you at dinner you see and uh and it is and the word you use which is empowering is precisely precisely the word so um that yeah it's nice that you remember that now um there are kids that were born at seaside now that are they're 35 years old
5:47
and they have the same they're really really mentally agile yeah you know they're different from the other kids they've been from the beginning sure very very good to them to have had that experience yeah i do think that the way the way that the spaces we inhabit affect us does change society i mean urban planning is probably a discipline you don't think of when you think of politics but then when you get underneath
6:16
politics when you get underneath uh you know the economy like a lot it's it's driving the way that we live consume think and i think one go ahead it's readily observable like you just gotta see it i'm now in france you walk out and see it the kids are running free okay but with that and that's how we came up with all these ideas 35 years ago now these days people want you to do a study they say what statistics do you have what your metrics you know and it used to be
6:52
human observation which was better for 10 years i'm suspicious of that kind of academia i think that when you're saying well we need to do a study what you're really saying is we don't want to do that and we're going to get lost in the numbers so that we don't have to pay for it you know
7:07
which is it means that they they want to disempower you because you're a person in practice which is threatening to them and they want it to be reset so it's their you know it's their method that is used and i've fought it like a maniac for the last 10 years i mean just violently you know i can't you know i why should i do a study where something is readily observable yeah just stand next there and watch the sky is blue you know yeah yeah exactly well this
7:37
is one of the additional things that are making things more difficult rather than less and there's another thing by the way there are studies i could give you three books absolutely but nobody reads them yeah because there's another the studies are just deep six in the libraries so in the end no i i will not do a study because first of all it's perfectly obvious second of all i want to make
7:59
it operational not a study per se as an end yeah and third of all to read it anyway you know it's a very weak system to write it down sure i think east side is a propaganda machine in which people get to live it and experience it and remembering it is much much better than putting it in print
8:20
well a lot of um a lot of the psychology at taproot is is jungian i mean we carl jung's ideas kind of flared up really big in the 60s and 70s everything becomes more cognitive and ego driven and self-healthy insurance wants quicker fixes in the 80s now because of the trauma and brain based medicine movement a lot of that stuff's coming back i mean i think do you feel like there are certain designs certain ways of interacting with space that we're like
8:50
there are archetypal that you've we've evolved to need that we kind of forget about when we design sometimes i mean you see trent trends kind of pop up across society and it's shiny and it's new and then we forget about it and it's old and dated but the things that are timeless tend to look the same you know yeah no i i completely but there's one yes before i get to that i want to say one thing
9:14
um the studies have been done there are perfectly good books as some spectacularly good books that actually not only explain but teach you how to do it you know um and also spectacularly with books about crime you know not just that life gets better when you design space a certain way but but um but crime goes down bad things go down you isolation you know the isolation of older people yeah you know it just goes drastically down but there's
9:48
a there's a disconnect between the studies first of all there's the obvious you observe you know observable empirical evidence then there are the studies right and then there's the delivery system which is the studies do not get delivered to the people with the you know with the levers right to design cities let alone the politicians now there are politicians that on a one-to-one discussion can understand this and get very sophisticated about it because after all they're humans
10:20
you know and humans have experienced all of them have experienced walkable sociable spaces and unwalkable unsociable spaces so it's not like this is not something like like a scientific formula in somebody's drawer everybody has experienced good and bad urbanism they all have and so you can alert them very easily to what the issues are very easily and actually you can do it in their office
10:45
you don't even have to take a walk with them right the problem that they have a very low opinion of in the political discourse of the ability of people to grasp these things and so they over simplify it drastically and what happens for example we've had very good connections al gore knows exactly what we're talking about uh bill mckibben knows exactly what we're talking about
11:12
what we're talking about and then when they run for office and write a book
11:17
they think it is a trifle too difficult to explain they want up the bumper sticker yeah okay now urban planning is not is not it's not it's not difficult that's what's been done for thousands of years by quasi-illiterate people the profession is very young it's been done very well by people who were not particularly literate or intelligent so it's not but it's not nothing okay you can't reduce it to a bumper sticker and that's the problem
11:49
like for example well zoning is bad because it excludes people well that's a bumper sticker okay centrifugation talk about a buffer sticker now there's something about gentrification you say right away 95 percent of american cities could use nothing more than gentrification that's what they need they need a tax base they're five percent of american cities that are suffering from gentrification but there's ten cities in this country that need it right yeah
12:17
nevertheless you take it down to one thing and you get people coming up to me and to all of us who don't know anything and say well the single most important thing about urbanism centrifugation
12:29
and they they it's it's the it is i don't think the politicians are wrong i do think that their instinct that is beyond their ken that it's a little bit too complicated right to state it in a bumper sticker to make it a campaign slogan they are correct about that but on the other hand all of us who are newer but this time and again in public process
12:56
public participation by taking care right to make the case the pickup is extraordinary that you can't dumb it down the way the politics today demands
13:11
well and i think one of the things that you said that is a pretty brilliant conceptualization somewhere i don't remember why you said it um is that when you're designing the city you're you're having a trade-off between public and personal space and something like paris the apartments are tiny and dark but everything is public life you go out to the cafe and everything is public and then somewhere like where i'm from hoover alabama there's no public space at all
13:37
it's highways and strip malls and tidal loan stores but then you go home and you've got your huge plot of land you know and your mcmansion and the grass and that we've traded all of the public space for private space i mean there's a book pull that i would argue comes from trauma you know cultural trauma and and people that are living in more fear more of a fight or flight reaction becoming atomized becoming individual and pushing the public's sphere away distrusting any
14:10
kind of communal interaction any kind of um any kind of shared power there and that we've kind of been pushed into and so you see design trending you know one way uh you know through the 80s i don't i don't know if if that's the way that you see it or what you were meaning with that point but well uh the thing they do is to find a balance like for example i do think that when you visit these paris apartments or even when i am here in france who says it really is you know
14:42
extremely unpleasant mm-hmm okay various spaces and the mcmansions are awesome once you get inside but for example they're american cities such as my favorite i think the clearest example is charleston in to the balance of a very good public space and very good private space is almost perfect you know and that's what i see they say what's your favorite city i said charleston and that's the reason i give i give the technical reason it's not that it's prettier it's not that
15:12
this it's not that that it's you know it's not that the restaurants are getting better not that the you know whatever it's not bad because it had slavery no it's that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about the balance between public and private space is excellent it's one of the best
15:30
um going back to the idea of kind of adapt psychology or evolution i mean
15:36
do you feel like there are ways that we are designed to interact with space that maybe are not conscious you know you we know them when we do them but we don't always and we're not always aware of it one of the things that i got interested in psychology when i was looking at a social anthropology book and everyone assumed for a long time that humans built the first cities because it was easier the quality of life went up because we're
16:03
in a material in a you know kind of a specialized modern society where everybody has a role there's a surplus when it's industrial but that wasn't the case in the stone age in the first cities when they actually looked at the bones quality of life went down but people still came together to build these things that were hardwired to build even though there was no material benefit yeah that has been studied at a very high level you know with prospect you know living at the edge
16:30
of the woods and so forth there are archetypal studies okay that actually show that and then they move on to ever more precise studies like for example how do people sit in a cafe
16:46
that the shops on either side don't die as an example okay and then of course the ultimate in and it really is archetypal don't underestimate this is the way that shopping mall developers manipulate you
17:03
every possible uh whether it be the soundtrack which is uh in the some cases extremely exciting uh whether it be the lighting which is um you know humans are like moths whether it's the manipulation of the of the the springtime smell
17:27
whether it is the manipulation of the spring you know just the degree of dryness uh and temperature of the air whether you know how you circulate from left to right they're trying to create a spiritual experience i mean advertising is the new mythology consumption is the new spirituality almost yeah and you are manipulated there are rewards and then there are there are um you go through the darkness there's the boredom sets in and then and then you and then the dawn no
17:58
no i've been walked around with uh experts retail experts and it's been absolutely fascinating how uh what a science is yeah and uh it is a science yeah and it's archetypal it's um it's how it is it isn't that a place is it's not enough that a place be safe is that the destination be meaningful and useful okay it has to be also comfortable mm-hmm you're comfortable in a very deep way and comfort is now there's one thing i have to say about argentine okay the
18:35
first studies were that once certain patterns were established then they became culturally adjusted okay and this is the thing is underestimated like an italian does not behave like a frenchman mm-hmm and they're both publishers okay they just don't yeah and there's kind of a cultural and then a universal layer you know the coastal layer and then there is in america and this is this is of course the third rail everything is class
19:07
and competition to keep even if you are winning that day you don't know if you're going to win tomorrow so there's always the fear you know the best way you know there are very few places that you can't enter in america okay very very few lobbies i mean what hotel lobby doesn't let you in okay they all do what restaurant doesn't let you in okay what shop doesn't let you in everybody lets you in but you feel you're made to feel either very comfortable or very uncomfortable
19:37
you don't have to borrow a door to keep people out and that is so a science and it's called it's called um they don't call it class anything they call it price point it's a price point so i guess what i'm saying is that jung and people like that they were onto something and rather than being ignored as you might have implied they've actually it's actually been picked up on and it turned into a science and subsequently commercialized yeah so at all that has disappeared
20:11
at all it's actually central to the way that things are made and sold yeah in this country yeah but so i mean in i remember the there was a study recently that you know americans go to vacation on these places that are small walkable cities either in europe or disney world that's where they're going but then when you talk about living there there's this suspicion about like that you're gonna get tricked or power's gonna be taken away from me i'm gonna lose something it's like
20:42
they want to go there two weeks a year but not live there not inhabit them well i think that's it's been a long by the way a resort the reason that you're at seaside and the fact i mean we've designed 45-50 communities but the famous ones are the resorts and that's because the resorts have to be utopian like okay because what you do is you have two weeks vacation you have to go to a better place than your own house otherwise you would fence it so uh
21:10
resorts because they're people look for what they don't have in the resort they do and it allows us to run experimental platforms our resorts are experimental platforms we push the envelope you've seen rosemary and alice speech right mm-hmm okay those are you know that beautiful word fermentation can't be done in a full-time community so so what happens is that yes resources where people go and one of the things they really love is walking to things that life pull together
21:42
but they also walk for example they also want more restaurants in a tighter you know tighter radius they also want perhaps more pristine nature more nearby you know what i mean it isn't just urbanism but the fact that resorts are where people want to be is because they're better than normal places so you're right about that um they also have the advantage in the case of no urbanism that urbanism cannot just be looked at it isn't just about being pretty you know people go to
22:12
i said it's so pretty i love seaside but it's actually it only it always really impacts you when you live it from morning till night you know and that's why the program at seaside is so terrific because it actually allows you to propagandize the uh the experience of urbanism well and there's some resistance to making it a real town like robert davis wanted that people could live in and you know remember he said that he wanted a school he wanted a church he wanted a graveyard
22:41
and people were like well graveyard you're going to make it a retirement community we don't want you know there was a and it wasn't that he was trying to guide the nature of where the town went he just wanted it to be a functioning town you know not a resort
22:54
in his case it was autobiographical once he needed a place to get married a place to live a place to have good restaurants and a good market he needed a place for his child to uh
23:15
that is nothing unusual about that like people lay out places for themselves you know you have the power the duke makes the makes the um you know the castle and the town and it's a very amusing thing to do it's incredibly interesting to create a whole society when you have the chance but it was autobiographical it was not hypothetical you know when it's not about a real pound it's just i need it and i'm a real person yeah that's a good point therefore i need it
23:48
yeah and so and i have the power to do it and of course people fought him every step of the way but he goes in i mean well the the styles that you work in would you would you say that you tend towards post-modern classicism or is there kind of a name for the no i don't care what the style is for me style is camouflage it's just uh it just hides uh a lot of unpopular things like diversity mixed use okay you know like if you're going to do something that's denser than
24:20
usual or more diverse than usual um you know both economically and in terms of mixed use
24:28
is camouflage you can hide anything by having a harmonious style if this building looks like a glass box and the apartment buildings looks like a great balconies in the house uh you know hansel and gretel well they're incompatible and they work they're actually signaling that the thing is incredibly diverse and indeed radical so what have these uh
24:53
these styles that assuage the issue you know are really very powerful it's a very powerful propaganda tool to camouflage the very very radical program to urbanism
25:08
what's an interesting point you know we had talked to leon career earlier um you know his thing is classicism versus modernism you know and he feels very strongly about style um i was curious what attracted you to his work um because he had said that you had promoted him a lot early on well because what attracted me is that he actually clarified everything for us he taught us and you're very grateful you know everybody's confused about urbanism
25:37
everything is confusion and then a great professor a great teacher clarifies it for you and that is the most memorable and you're always grateful to the painting i think clarity what i provide in the public process to a bunch of people who are frightened and confused and everything else i just provide clarity and priority is the uh more than truth actually because you tell them you have to soften it usually but so it isn't like it's the brutal harsh truth that i'm
26:09
letting you know now that ain't it it's just let me explain why your tax base is going to [ __ ] let me explain while you're moving away let me explain why you are isolated let me explain why you don't have enough money or enough time and you clarify it for them and then they're hateful and they follow you they trust you because you've clarified something for them
26:34
beautiful way to put it i mean you're really doing group therapy a lot of the time when you're doing urban planning you know that's true that's true and uh considering how much therapy is worth is worth you should be picked like i always tell my my friend john lombard i say she says she has two meters she said great for designing and then a rate for therapy and that's great for therapy three times as much so when people get
27:02
all all worked up and need therapy she says well the therapy clock goes on
27:09
well my dad is an architect and i remember when i was a little kid i went to some uh like proposal meeting in this community and people were getting real emotional he's a very even killed guy and i was listening to what they were saying it was like they weren't even talking about the building i mean they're saying like we're sad and lonely and we want a forum to do this and you realize you know how much of that you encounter when you're you're not in a mental
27:34
health profession but a lot of what you're doing is mental health work to help clarify somebody's pain and give them a solution so that they know what to do that is helpful and then on the other end when you build a beautiful space that you know makes people have a better and richer life that does help heal society on a on a very you know meta level but remember one thing that and this is something that's shocking um there are people who really want ugly
28:05
dysfunctional [ __ ] yeah and they're [ __ ] them out of it it's not that they misunderstand it it's just that when you explain it to them they say i understand perfectly i just don't want it and i've seen that in in preference studies i've seen it all the time and one of the things that i'm always warning people about urban as i said you have to triage
28:27
you can only save one-third of america in with decent walkable diverse urbanism okay because the two different for another there's because that there are people there's another third of people who actually don't want to know their neighbor and they don't even know what you're talking about when you say well it's more social i want to know my neighbor you know yeah why i love driving i drop l i love driving my children i love uh i love drive-throughs yeah
28:55
i love walmart like you can't talk them out of it and then there's a last one third that is simply
29:06
that is because buildings are intrinsically anti-urban okay there's a lot in our life and not just sewer plants and factories okay there's a lot in our life
29:21
that is manifested in buildings that are not walkable and they're not diverse and it's built into them for example a bank is not going to be full of delightful windows it's going to have a lot of blank walls okay there are there is a place that is perhaps not noxious in terms of pollution but there are trucks by the hundreds and that's not something you want to bring into urbanism you see and if you go to cities the difference between cities like paris and american cities
29:54
as you drive into paris you will see that there's a huge belt of crap all the way around okay and a lot of that crap is the crap of the big boxes it's the crap of the trucks it's the crap of the things that have to be too large okay it's that crap what they do is they keep it outside so once you penetrate into that crap and you enter paris
30:18
it's no longer betrayed you're never unpleasantly surprised by an unwa hostile environment the united states sprinklers it everywhere like for example even the worst city in america let's say started before 1900 and you say this is devastating it's nothing but [ __ ] it can put every every city can put together 10 city blocks that are great okay they're just not adjacent you know first with this hostile stuff the problem with the united states is that we do not segregate
30:53
the anti-pedestrian environments and the planners what they try to do is they try to eliminate it and of course you eliminate it because it is intrinsically hostile and you can see them crashing you can see them saying well i really want to get rid of walmart and people come up and say what the guys what's this guy talking about that's where i shop
31:16
you see and so there is this this understanding very few of my buddies pick up on it that a third of what is entrance is built is intrinsically hostile to pedestrians and you have to allocate it you have to triage you can only save one third and if you try to save all of it you will make all of it mediocre so if we push the triage i was saying 130 is superb and two-thirds are goners
31:48
but we don't compromise the one-third which is superb listen our people who
31:54
just really love the life that we're against they love it even when they understand it they want it
32:07
so i don't know how built-in that is i think there's a lot of it is cultural rather than than archetypal you know they were just brought up with drive-throughs i can't stand i don't know how you eat well if you only see that then how do you how do you have the imagination for a better world you know you can and you know one of the things the reason things are ugly is that if you're brought up and every single window you've ever seen in your life is badly proportioned
32:36
if you ever see a good look a well-proportioned window you don't recognize it the european kids there's enough beautiful stuff in europe that they can tell the difference you see we have lost that we do not all these wealthy educated people that commission told you know buildings that's because they have no reference that it's like you've never eaten good food so why should you know about good food you've never seen and they're they probably go grew up in a high
33:06
school that looks like a prison you know we build these cinderblock windowless hells to put kids in yeah exactly exactly yeah exactly but it's even more subtle because it's not as horrible as a high school it's just like everything's badly proportioned and so you both proportion the window and they're suspicious
33:28
yeah it's great it's really something so yeah uh it's just one of these stones that's rolling
33:37
and uh frankly i think that you know we all know about the class distinctions in america um there is something that's going on now which is i think they're terrific cultural distinctions you know that are there are people who know about architecture and people who don't and that's the way it is and it's a fixed step well and that's uh an interesting take i i don't want to take up too much of your time i i really appreciate all of that um and i don't
34:08
want to run over i know initially it was for 15 minutes and then we got behind with the technology is this for some reason this has been an archetypal interview have you said this
34:20
feels like synchronicity for sure even though even the phone cutting out um the is there anything that you want to promote you have a book coming out or anything that people can can go to if they want to find out more about about your work
34:36
urban nation is the third best-selling book on the subject of all time
34:41
it's written at a very good level and explains everything it's been 20 years now suburban nation it sells a lot every year i would always send people to that then there are other books for designers that the very good very well illustrated one called the new civic art
35:00
but now i'm writing more specialized books like for example we did one called uh uh agrarian urbanism which is a societies that grow food it's not about growing foods but societies that grow food and the positive consequences of that you know
35:17
we're now working on what i think are the most single the most important things uh the first is really affordable housing there's nothing there's not even a second in terms of importance and then the other thing is what happens when we realize that we're going to lose the water climate change like what do we do then what happens to property values on coasts and things like that and then where do those people want to go yeah and it will not have happened it will not have happened
35:45
i would think in a radical way but suddenly you realize that that it is a self um you know it's a self-reinforcing system that once you've gone past the threshold it just keeps going right and so what you do when you realize that we've lost it what do you do and you identify five you want to use the term market segments five responses to it and i'd be happy to talk to you next time about what they are because they have a lot uh archetypal responses to
36:21
crises and they go from the ethical you know the ethical response you know thermopylae you know holding a stride the gates of fire you know and dying in defense of civilization to a very very rational response which is party on we're dying we're going to die anyways yeah it's these are not denialists there's a lot of people who are not denialists that are nevertheless
36:53
their party continues and they know that climate change is a lost cause and that is why they're partying yeah and you know you know it's like for example all around us the number one community in development successful in the united states is margaritaville you know look it up margaritaville is all about partying pretty interesting uh you know i think the thing to do whenever you bring up
37:20
a subject like you know archicad and so work the reason that i'm not as excited as i might be about it is that i do is that i think there are multiple archetypes you know for exactly the same thing
37:32
there are archetypes but it's not a single one it's not like you give your your back to the forest and you face out into the sunlight you know you meet your enemy that's not that's one archetype there are other ways well there's multiple and you know maybe an infinite number and within the same person you know which is what makes deaf psychology interesting but also people hard to wrangle and hard to understand yeah well i think that there's more there's more than one
38:02
but it's not an infinite number i i try very hard to open it up and i rarely find in fundamental things that they're more than five or six ways to do things you know so yes and i tell people yes it's more complicated than you think it's more than one but it's not an infinite number there's maybe five to do it uh politically what are the choices politically well we know it's not one or two but it's also not ten yeah you know and and
38:32
so i think that the limit i think when you say tell somebody there's an infinite number of ways that disempowers them and they say well i can't understand that [ __ ] i'm not going to study it yeah but hey look there's really five fundamental ways to look at this they can follow you yeah your the dumb people will never follow you you gotta just you have to write them off the problem is that if you're always pandering to the dumbest person that the dumbest question in the room
39:02
what you will do before the end of the day is lose all the intelligent people yeah and what i always respond to the most intelligent people as intelligently as i can and i lose the dumb people and they're pissed off they are pissed off and they're insulted and they say horrible things about you good riddance well and especially in the american south like we have such an avoidance of conflict people keep trying to make the truth in the middle of two points of view that are
39:26
bad and it isn't you know sometimes you have to say this is wrong and this is this one isn't if one third of the people haven't left the room you haven't made the point yeah you know like when we design a community and they say well six people didn't buy today they hated it and only three bought i said that's because we have a project a real character yeah you know if everybody liked it then go by you know give them catalog one of the other things you know that's for sale
39:58
so yeah you've got to you've got to be willing it will what you mentioned about the south is you have to be willing to lose sales you have to be willing to lose friends you have to be willing to lose a lot of things okay if you're going to stand for something and what i find is that um
40:17
it is that being popular is a weak platform it's very weak but being indispensable is a really strong platform it's almost never the same it's very hard to be really popular and tell people the truth they need to know so the people that i know that have smiley face attitudes they just eventually people just turn on them well you know a very difficult apparently a very difficult person to deal with um and i'm really not it's just that i tell the truth and but i'm always the
40:56
one that people want to interview you know i'm the one that people you know sure we don't work i i say to a lot of patients you avoiding conflict does not make you a nice person or a good person
41:10
actually it makes you an interchangeable person to have the integrity that you're talking about requires you to have done your own work you know you don't have to be in therapy or doesn't have to be in church but there is some kind of introspection where you're not afraid of yourself you're not afraid of judgment and most people most therapists won't do that work i mean when i go to a lecture and a lot of the therapists are cognitive only therapists
41:33
and i start talking about pushing somebody into the shadow and saying in the first session yeah you're talking about your wife and your mistress and your boss and whatever but that's not really what we're talking about you can't feel you you're afraid of feeling not as good as other people you're afraid of not feeling good so go ahead and do that i'm better than you the lamp's better than
41:49
you just feel that where is that in your body and i mean the therapists will leave i mean they'll walk out the door because they they don't want someone to do that to them they haven't been in that kind of therapy um but then you know there's a people want that kind of therapy those patients come back yeah so completely exactly what i'm talking about exactly and that goes not only for
42:12
therapy but for anything you're trying to sell if it's interchangeable with something else then oh you can just compete on price you know yeah it's a you know it's going to be a ford i can go to the gm i can look at this and look at the chrysler but it was going to be a tesla i'm not looking at anything else and i can charge whatever i want yeah absolutely but you have to be willing to lose
42:33
four fifths of the potential buyers that takes a lot of nerve and you have to be willing to do things that are scary for a lot of people to be misunderstood to be judged you know and the the worst fear for a lot of people than being misunderstood is having somebody think that they understand you but they're wrong you know especially a creative you know that that's
42:56
i hardly know hard honestly i i really do feel incredibly isolated is what we're talking about
43:06
i have very few colleagues that will actually say that they'll go as far as i will but i don't think i go any further than you have to go well but that's it's the thing that like when you're hiring therapists or you're training candidates you can't teach that you know people say like well i want to do brain spotting it's this technique that we do that is very experiential it puts people in touch with trauma really quickly you're kind
43:32
of in a fugue state and the therapist knows i'm teaching them the technique but the therapist is saying wait i can't put somebody in that much distress i can't do that and i'm saying no you you have to have faith that the plane is going to land you have to have faith that this when you have to be able to make room for this amount of pain and sit with it to help them heal and if you can't make room for it if you're afraid of it that means you need to go back to therapy i
43:57
can't teach you how to how to hold this and and that's the thing you can't teach you know people they they have that because they weren't they face something or they or they don't yeah well it must be getting worse because the fragility right of the younger people you know very well i'm talking about right there's kind of a generation of helicopter parents that were able to keep their kids from having any kind of obstacle and it's not a real life you know and they they
44:25
don't know how to do something robert pogaris gave a talk and he said i'm ready to quit teaching because kids today want nietzsche like they want a hamburger and what makes nietzsche worth understanding is that you don't get it you sit with it that it is hard and there's no room for that in american education anymore yeah yeah yeah well so i just think there have been institutions
44:55
that were created that were and there's a list and and the rural rulers of europe got together on this right he decided to subsidize religion subsidize public school have a universal draft for young men that remained they remained with their local regiment all their lives under their officers right you know to keep them going straight the savings bank or the uh for the workers you know and uh and did i say the subsidized search there were five institutions
45:28
and they took europe which was barbaric okay napoleonic were wars barbaric they took the west which was barbaric i mean they were indian massacres in 1890 yeah barbaric and they civilized them yeah and been doing the last 30 years is taking precisely those institutions apart one after the other because they're that kind of collectivism is a threat to consumerism you know consumer driven just hyper consumption um and you get people of a certain age in therapy they
46:03
don't understand they can't explain to you who they are without talking about what they can buy
46:10
you know i'm i'm an artist because i have an apple computer i'm an individual because i i get this tv at best buy i'm into that and i'm like okay stop talking about what you're buying who are you and there's certain cult part certain age certain culture they can't do that one of the things i saw was a debate between who was more right you might look this up whether it was brave new world
46:33
or 1984. and we often think and we fear 1984 right yeah uh dictatorship etc and there was a group of five i think there's five professors discussing huxley and orwell and hands down audience included uh brave new world uh one you know we it is the other thing that's happening yeah it's not the dictatorship and the repression and the black slab and the eye everywhere that we've been taught to fear it's actually the manipulation of our brains that it that is the winner and it's
47:13
so interesting it's not the enemy outside it's the enemy inside you know yeah yeah yeah yeah oh that's very well but very well put so that is in fact how this the fascinating debate came out
47:27
and i i really i must say i you know i've got certain i don't want i don't want to tie everything together to a single thing but there are several things that have clarified for me uh what's going on and therefore how i should behave including the potential that i have of making a difference yeah which is more reduced if you want to for example offer a better life a more a more reasonable life a more sensible life to a few people for a generation or two
47:59
that is possible okay and you say well you're so unambitious and i said excuse me excuse me you know what i'm offering here a better life okay you can't even offer a better weekend let alone a better life for a generation or two yeah you know you can't even keep somebody happy for a day like i think i'm a megalomaniac yeah i'm actually thinking of a generation or two and that's what they're all thinking well so i tell patients in therapy a lot that you we have
48:32
one choice under all the things that bring us into therapy biting our nails drinking alcohol whatever underneath that you have one choice in life do you look at the things that scare you and you and go into that and grow or do you run from it and most people will choose to run and culture works the same way societies work the same way we can be honest enough to make real change or we can kind of lie to ourselves about what the problem is and um and avoid
49:04
yep hey i gotta go now thank you so much for your time i really appreciate it
49:18
[Music] you
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat