Lead-Lag Live
Welcome to the Lead-Lag Live podcast, where we bring you live unscripted conversations with thought leaders in the world of finance, economics, and investing. Hosted through X Spaces by Michael A. Gayed, CFA, Publisher of The Lead-Lag Report (@leadlagreport), each episode dives deep into the minds of industry experts to discuss current market trends, investment strategies, and the global economic landscape.
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Lead-Lag Live
Tom Morgan on Wall Street Burnout, Right-Brain Shift, and Holistic Well-Being Strategies
What happens when a Wall Street professional undergoes a profound personal transformation? Step into the world of Tom Morgan, whose gripping recount of a psychotic break—better described as a spiritual awakening—changed his life forever. Tom's journey from the toxic grind of finance to a newfound understanding of wisdom, intuition, and holistic well-being is nothing short of fascinating. He shares how a rigorous elimination diet and deep self-reflection led him to write a 60-page document capturing his new worldview, resonating deeply with Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey.
Our exploration doesn't stop there. We unpack misconceptions about brain hemispheres, debunking the myth that one is purely artistic and the other purely logical. Leveraging Iain McGilchrist's thesis, we dive into the societal disconnection that arises from an overemphasis on left-brain thinking. From Chairman Mao's policies to George Soros' trading strategies, you'll see how an imbalance in brain function can lead to disastrous results. We also explore the shift towards right-brain skills in the age of AI and why wisdom—focusing on the right things at the right time—is crucial for well-being.
The discussion takes a nuanced look at the unique challenges faced by high-achieving finance professionals, especially during midlife crises or burnout. Sharing my own journey from making countless mistakes to becoming a transition coach, we highlight the importance of intrinsic motivation and the pitfalls of volatile reward mechanisms in the finance industry. We also emphasize the role of community in personal growth, balancing scientific accountability with genuine emotional fulfillment. Engage with us as we express our gratitude for your support and encourage you to follow Tom's insightful Substack content.
The content in this program is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any information or other material as investment, financial, tax, or other advice. The views expressed by the participants are solely their own. A participant may have taken or recommended any investment position discussed, but may close such position or alter its recommendation at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this program constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Please consult your own investment or financial advisor for advice related to all investment decisions.
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I've been studying wisdom for the last few years and wisdom is a deeply, achingly pretentious word, but the way I think of it is just you know exactly what to pay attention to at exactly the right time. The opposite of wisdom is anxiety, which means you just burn a bunch of energy on focusing on the wrong stuff and stressing about the wrong stuff and doing the wrong stuff right. Wisdom correlates with everything good your well-being, how much you're growing In later life. It actually beats out your material circumstances. Wisdom is basically everything, because it determines how effectively you navigate the world, and wisdom is fundamentally a right hemisphere impulse. It's like, okay, I'm in this really chaotic, no context environment and yet somehow I'm able to navigate it using both my broad attention and my narrow attention at the same time.
Speaker 2:My name is Michael Guyatt, publisher of the Lead Lag Report. Joining me for the rough hour is Mr Tom Morgan. Tom, you got an interesting background, you and I. When we first chatted, I was actually blown away by some of the stuff that you were talking to me about, and I always like talking to people who are smarter than me, so I'm glad that you're here. Introduce yourself to the audience. Who are you? What's your background? What have you done throughout your career? What are you doing?
Speaker 1:And, as you will have noticed by the end of this conversation, I've never years on Wall Street, of which I'd say the vast majority were on the South side, which just means common or garden stockbroker, I would guess. And then one day I had what you would describe as a psychotic break or a spiritual awakening, while sitting at a trading floor, which is not recommended. I went through a fairly catastrophic, I'd say two and a half year midlife crisis, nervous breakdown, and then, on the other side of it, the very long story short is that I discovered a model of the world that allowed me to understand everything I'd experienced, and also everything around me, in a completely new way, and then I felt that I should get that message out. And what's been interesting is that the world has been surprisingly receptive to that message, which makes me think that it's at least metaphorically true, if not literally true, and most days I come down on the literally true All right.
Speaker 2:So, to the extent of your comfort, I want to understand the psychotic breaks on the treating force. So was there some tree that went wrong that went right? Was it a culmination? Was there a trigger?
Speaker 1:There was no daily trigger, but what there was was it's almost like an embarrassing cliche, but essentially like I was a managing director. I was in my early thirties, I was on a two-year guarantee and I was in a room full of people that were basically phoning it in. They were being paid to stagnate. Maybe they were still jazzed by it, but I didn't get the sense that many of them were. I was getting increasingly bad physiological symptoms. I was gaining weight, I was getting anxiety attacks, I was getting non-specific pains around my body, I was getting brain fog, and I went through the whole US healthcare system and speed dated it and they couldn't diagnose anything wrong with me because essentially I believe it was a spiritual sickness.
Speaker 1:One of the dynamics that you notice from this neurological theory I think we're going to get into is that your brain's right hemisphere has a much, much better understanding of your entire situation, but it can only communicate emotionally and somatically and physically, and so when you're in the wrong place from like a toxicity perspective, it just blows up your life. One of my favorite quotes is from CS Lewis, which is God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience and shouts in our pains, and like if your world starts exploding in negative ways, it's usually a signal that you need to fix something. It just doesn't come verbally and it doesn't come logically, and that rebellion moment was what I experienced at my desk.
Speaker 2:Talk about sort of the buildup of that meaning. I assume that that physical response was not all of a sudden. Right, You've started maybe getting some feelings or some symptoms. You maybe thought maybe it's just a cold, maybe it's sick, I'll brush it off. How did that progress into sort of the extreme, sort of breakdown.
Speaker 1:I went to a functional medicine doctor. I know you're super interested into nutrition and unbelievably inspiring on that front, but basically they were like go on a three month elimination diet. I did spend a year afterwards getting a functional medicine coaching certificate and the only thing I took away from it was like if anything's ever going wrong with you from a dietary perspective, go on an elimination diet for three months. You just cut everything fun out of your diet. But the idea is then when you reintroduce things, you see what the stresses are. The effect it had on me was for a different reason, which was that essentially I was ignoring all these subtle psychological and physiological cues, which are very, very easy to do when you're drinking a lot of beer, coffee, very strong flavors. You're basically numbing all of those internal signals. That's like, dude, you're in the wrong place, you're in the wrong place, you're in the wrong place. So I quit anything fun for three months. And then I started getting more and more energy and that energy started being deployed towards writing and that writing started being deployed towards anything I found resonant. And then one of the first questions I'd ask people listening is when something resonates with you, what's it resonating? It's kind of like a strange question. It's not resonating with your spleen, it's not resonating with your liver.
Speaker 1:I realized towards the end of that exercise it was resonating with my unconscious, or my soul, or whatever woo-woo word you want to use for it. And then I wrote a 60-page PDF of everything that had ever appealed to me in any context markets, philosophy, movies and then the day I finished it, I realized that I was the thread running through it, and the Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey was something that had been very interesting to me at the time but was basically a manual for the transformation of my own consciousness. And I realized that I was at the very beginning of a journey that was going to completely upend my life. But it was this moment of sudden realization, which was contextualized by the psychiatrists, as you've just had a psychotic break and you're mentally ill, and was contextualized by all the spiritual people I spoke to as you were enlightened, congratulations. And the answer wasn't either of those things. It was just, I believe, like a hemisphere, hemispheric takeover. But it took me seven more years to understand what that actually meant.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's get into some of that biological aspect you mentioned before as far as the hemisphere. So I think this is where it gets to be interesting, sort of how we are kind of hardwired to perceive things a certain way and how we interpret things based on left side, right side hemisphere. First of all, for those who are not familiar or may have forgotten, let's talk about the left hemisphere, right hemisphere, what those parts of the brain typically do, what are the pros and cons of each? There's a guy called Dr Ian.
Speaker 1:McGilchrist, who spent God knows how long 40, 50 years on this topic, and there's a lot of experimental data as well. People get one side of their brain knocked out by strokes. They get the corpus callosum of their brain cut because they have severe epilepsy. There'll be an accident that'll decimate one side of your brain. So it's actually really easy to get solid experimental data on what each side of the brain does.
Speaker 1:Now, whenever you bring this up online, someone comes out in the comment section. That's like dude, all this stuff's been debunked. And no, no, no, no, it hasn't been debunked. All the stuff that we grew up with as kids. One side's artistic, one side's mathematical. That's not true. Both sides of the brain can do the same thing, which means if you get one knocked out, you can still function. But the way they do them is critically important and so oversimplify McGilchrist's thesis.
Speaker 1:The left-hand side of the brain is narrowly focused, linear, logical, highly, highly linguistic, uses very complicated syntax, loves abstract ideas, loves the fundamental nature of disconnection, but it also has an incredibly narrow understanding of the world and tends to make what's called naive interventions, which is like oh, I totally understand that I'm going to change one variable and then they blow up the system. My favorite example is Chairman Mao in China. He was like the sparrows are eating all the grain reserves. We're going to kill the sparrows. They actually succeeded in killing most of the sparrows. As a result, there was a locust infestation that killed 59 people. It was the worst man-made disaster in history. You see this in markets. All the time you optimize for one variable, whether it's the Fed or someone else. We're going to control one thing brute force and then there's a bajillion different knock-on effects which the left hemisphere can't anticipate because it only typically sees one thing directly in front of it.
Speaker 1:The right hemisphere has an incredibly broad, narrow and holistic understanding of things, but, as I said earlier, it's emotional, it is somatic, it is non-logical, it is non-verbal.
Speaker 1:So all that tends to come as some sort of intuitive sense which in today's world is very, very, very easy to ignore. And McGilchrist's diagnosis, which was a theory that changed my entire life, was that basically, for lots of different reasons, presumably because for the last 200 years we went way up into our heads and started talking about abstract ideas is that basically the whole world has become imbalanced towards the brain's left hemisphere, which means that we optimize for disconnection. And if you look at everything going on in the world, like everything going on in the world, then you just apply the word disconnection to it. Oh, we destroyed 70% of the species on earth in the last 50 years, right, we're on social media rather than having friends, porn rather than relationships, the food industrial complex poisoning our bodies Everything is a function of disconnection, and I think it's not a coincidence that the left hemisphere optimizes for this safety and disconnection, because that is fundamentally its affect to the world.
Speaker 2:I feel like we should define the word intuition for a bit. I don't think that's very clear. What exactly?
Speaker 1:intuition is oh man, this is such an interesting topic, particularly within a markets context. So like you ever heard of the George Soros back pain? Yeah, it's a big cliche. Everyone's heard of it, right, but those people that haven't? I think it was George Soros' son gave an interview to the Irish Times where he was like my dad gives all these like really smart reasons why he made a trade and it turns out that, like, his back went into spousal. Everyone repeats this as like. Well, it wasn't.
Speaker 1:George Soros had access to all this mystical bodily symptoms. It's not that at all. Intuition isn't good or bad. Intuition is good or bad depending on the strength of the database that's behind it. You wouldn't let a 21-year-old come in and trade a portfolio on their intuition because they have no information in their database. But one of the members of my community was given an emerging markets book at like 20, way too young and then was just allowed to blow it up, sort of by accident, for 10 years and, as a result, his pattern recognition and intuition is so good that he trades price. He can do it because he's been blowing up for 12 years. He has incredibly deep intuitive intuition that allows him to basically understand what's happening at an unconscious level.
Speaker 1:Now, the rub with intuition is that because it's coming from the right hemisphere, because it's coming from the unconscious, it manifests as a bodily symptom. First it's not mystical, it's just that if everything you ever knew was constantly in your conscious at the same time, you'd go completely insane. So it's all stored in this intuitive reservoir and then boom, it bubbles up. But it's neither good or bad. Just as an example, miguel Cris gives the example of a horse trainer called Frank Morier, who spent his life as a trainer and then he left to go help the bookmakers and he could give odds after watching a horse warm up for a couple of minutes, that were way more accurate than the bookies. And so the bookies were like great, let's turn this into a system. And not only did the system not work, it actually made him less accurate. It made Frank less accurate because he couldn't codify the system, because it was entirely intuitive. But he only had that intuition because he'd spent his entire career as a horse trainer.
Speaker 2:You, went in the direction I wanted to go. He said it's neither good nor bad, but is it more accurate? Is intuition more accurate? Because I think that's this is where this has to be, even in the context around AI. Right, ai is not going to have intuition right. So I mean, if you're going to try and see through left brain, right brain, it's probably going to be more left brain in the output because it's linear right In the way that it's trying to come up with inclusion on the LLMs. So let's talk about it.
Speaker 1:Is there's only so many moves. There's like a bajillion moves, but there's only so many moves Whereas a strictly unbounded domain where you have lots of reps, intuition is going to be radically more important. One of the examples I like to give from finance is corporate access. So like, corporate access means investors meeting management teams. Now there's some studies that show that investors who meet management teams outperform, at which point everyone goes oh, it's because they're getting non-public information. I was sat as a third party in thousands of those meetings. I never heard non-public information discussed.
Speaker 1:It's my belief that, basically, if you are a super tenured but fun manager that knows the stock backwards and then is sitting eyeball to eyeball with management team, you can ask them the relevant question and read the reaction. It's simple intuition. What's interesting about that is that autistic people, very left brain locked people, cannot look people in the eye when they speak to them because there's so much information being thrown off a human face that they don't know where to focus. Pixar the best animators in the world. If you watch the kids' movies, they don't animate human faces at all. They're all mega cartoony because if you've ever seen AI try and animate a human face, the complexity is so deep and so intuitive that we get thrown off by the uncanny valley immediately and we can't even work out why it doesn't look right. And so my idea is that if you're in these massive, unbounded domains like human interaction, getting reps is incredibly important and intuition is incredibly important, but if you're in a bounded domain, ai is going to destroy you every day, right?
Speaker 2:but also that that you alluded to it. Part of that, that pull for the intuition, is being face to face, right? I mean, you're not going to get it from, unfortunately, a video quite like this I'm looking at a camera, I'm not looking at you, even though it looks like I'm looking not just at you but also the audience, right. So it does seem like where, if, if that's true, if there's a link between 3d versus 2D, right in terms of the intuition aspect of it, that we're in for a world of hurt going forward, where intuition is just not going to be a thing as much as it used to be.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go the other way. I'm taking the other side of that professionally, which is that, yeah, like dealing with people on Zoom is a lower fidelity way of dealing with people in real life. But my view, having spoken to a bunch of investors behind closed doors and in private, is that AI's come in for everything left hemisphere and the quants have already come for it. Like every time I speak to a quant, like the level of physics, they've got more compute power up ahead than Google. Anything you think you can do analytically they could do better. So everyone's got to lean very hard into their right hemispheric abilities, these intuitive abilities. They all sound very woo-woo and a lot of the practices around them sound very woo-woo. But this is going to be your only sustainable human edge. And not only is it going to be your only sustainable human edge, but I've noticed from having worked on this for several years that if you can rebalance your hemispheres towards the right and be led by the right because it's more sophisticated even though it's quiet, your life is going to improve.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite studies I've been studying wisdom for the last few years and wisdom is a deeply, achingly pretentious word, but the way I think of.
Speaker 1:It is just you know exactly what to pay attention to at exactly the right time. The opposite of wisdom is anxiety, which means you just burn a bunch of energy on focusing on the wrong stuff and stressing about the wrong stuff and doing the wrong stuff right. Wisdom correlates with everything good your wellbeing, how much you're growing In later life. It actually beats out your material circumstances. Wisdom is basically everything, because it determines how effectively you navigate the world, and wisdom is fundamentally a right hemispheric impulse. It's like, okay, I'm in this really chaotic, no context environment and yet somehow I'm able to navigate it using both my broad attention and my narrow attention at the same time, like I am so crazily bullish right Hemispheric capabilities that I've based my entire business and life around it. But also it's really interesting to me that when you bring up the ways of getting more right hemispheric, people just like wig out because it all sounds woo, woo and I'm like great, more for me Right, like huge advantages to be had.
Speaker 2:How does the framework interact with some of Daniel Kahneman's work around? You know thinking fast as low system one, system two. I mean it sounds like the intuition is connected to the sort of longer thinking process, but it takes time not only for your brain to process what it's subconsciously thinking but then also to obviously verbalize it.
Speaker 1:In the way that only a really polite British guy can do. Mcgilchrist absolutely obliterates Kahneman in his book. The book is a matter of things. Yesterday you said recommend a book. This book's 1,500 pages long. It's a monster. The bibliography is 180 pages which, just to emphasize, means the list of the books cited in the books is longer than a book. So it's a monster, but it's certainly the best thing I've ever read.
Speaker 1:There's a section in the middle part of the book which is about how do you think well, in terms of balancing the hemispheres. And he talks about Kahneman and not only a lot of Kahneman studies, I think don't replicate. But that's not unique to Kahneman. It's more that it's a meaningless distinction. If you sit down for 15 seconds and think about system one and system two, it actually means nothing. So you're saying, if I think about stuff for longer I'll get better answers. That's it. Give me a Nobel Prize. I really don't understand what the fuss is. And the fact is it's not even a meaningful distinction Because, as McGilchrist says, if you're Frank Murray the horse trainer, you're jumping to conclusions.
Speaker 1:It's really good, but you don't even know why. And actually, when you say, frank, sit and give me a plan and really think this out, it gets worse. Plan and really think this out, it gets worse, right? So if he goes all thinky about his intuition, it degrades his intuition At the same time. If you jump to conclusion system, one on the basis of no intuition and no expertise, it is going to be terrible, but it just means the distinction is totally meaningless. It's expert intuition that's important and that is how you need to get reps and you need to be upgrading your right hemisphere, all right.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about that, because I'm still in my gym clothing, all right, and I can obviously do reps at a gym. Okay, yeah, I don't know how to do that for my brain, right? I mean, and I would take it a step further, I would argue that, in an environment where attention spans are increasingly getting shorter, even if people knew how to actually exercise their, let's talk about that sort of retreating of the rebalancing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean one is like so blindingly obvious I don't even want to repeat it, but it's just get reps right In order for you know what you want to get good at. Be very, very, very conscious about what you want to get good at. Work out if it's a bounded or unbounded domain and think about do I want to be a chess grandmaster in a world that competes against AI? Probably not right. So one think about choosing an unbothered domain and then find a way of getting reps as quickly as possible in trading a dummy trading account that you can bow up 50,000 times to get the reps. Otherwise you don't know if you're any good at it. You're not going to get the intuitive, embodied sense. That's blindingly obvious. The less obvious stuff you immediately go into woo-woo territory. So I'm doing an eight-part series at the moment on my website. It's free. I'm not selling anything About what are individual tools and practices that can make you more rebalanced towards right hemisphere Somatic meditation.
Speaker 1:One of the guys we had is a guy called River Kenner Legit, one of the most interesting dudes on the internet. His expertise is meditation that takes in your whole body. Why? So you're trying to get a more accurate sense of your own body. Why? Because George Soros' trading signals were sent to him through his back.
Speaker 1:Now, the thing that people miss about the Soros trading signals isn't that it was sent through his back. It's that when he felt his back, he knew what it meant. He didn't take an Advil, he wasn't like well shit, I had too many martinis last night. No, he knew his back meant his portfolio, which meant that he presumably had quite a granular sense of what his individual body sensations meant. And I've done this for serious and I've realized that everything from breathwork to meditation, to embodiment, to all of this stuff is all about giving you a very subtle sense of your own body, the same subtle sense of my own body I got during the elimination diet. So it's just like. That's one incredibly simple example of we tend to numb those signals because they're non-verbal and because they're emotional and they're somatic, but we just have to understand that they're coming with dramatically more information content than maybe our cultural understands.
Speaker 2:Is there a difference across males females when it comes to this, as far as the way the brain operates and the balance Controversial?
Speaker 1:topic. I can only speak anecdotally with the people that I've coached. I've been coaching people in transition for five or six years now. It seems to me that men, particularly men in finance, exemplify more left brain characteristics. I can't explain the causality where, basically, they get to my age I'm in my mid forties and they get stuck in a niche which they don't enjoy anymore. Either they never enjoyed it and they just got stuck there because that's what society told them to do, or it stops being interesting and then they get trapped right Because they don't know how to access the part of them that allows them to energetically reconfigure themselves in their life.
Speaker 1:Women, on the other hand, tend to be much broader, more characteristically right hemispheric, in that they have 50 different demands being made of them to be a mother, to be a wife, to be a girl boss, whatever it is and they have a lot of constraints on them from a societal perspective, narrowing that down to the one thing they want to focus on. So, in my experience, there is a genderization, but I don't know what. I don't know and no one's comfortable making gender generalizations into this culture. Yeah, which is a more interesting direction.
Speaker 2:I thought let's maybe take this out a little bit further. In a in a capitalist system, is it fair to say that most marketing, most businesses, they're trying to cater more towards that, that left side versus the right side. Because if you have to think a little bit deeper, if you have to have more intuition, you may not buy that junk food. You know where the word capitalism comes from?
Speaker 1:I didn't, I didn't know. It's like. Obviously it means headism, right, and it doesn't just mean headism in our culture. It means the left hemisphere. Look at who's being rewarded by capitalism. It's the guys in charge of abstractions who run hedge funds. It's the autistic Silicon Valley guys. They mastered abstractions and that our culture has basically aborted anything that masters abstractions. So engagement algorithms. You optimize for an abstract variable time on device oh look, catastrophe everywhere. Mouse smash barrows again. Oh look. You optimize for palatability of Doritos oh, it's going to give you all sorts of horrible stuff, probably. Oh look, you've optimized for profitability next quarter. Oh, your business has fallen apart.
Speaker 1:Capitalism, narrowly defined, is optimizing for the left hemisphere and is rewarding the left hemisphere. Now, the thing about that is you're like well great, shouldn't I just lean into the left hemisphere. One, I think it's going away but two people that play zero-sum games get zero prizes. In my experience, it lasts for a certain amount of time until it doesn't, and then you hit a wall hard. People that play infinite games win infinite prizes, which means they try and find places where their left hemispheric skills can be used in service of the whole. I believe that's the next iteration of capitalism. I believe those are the people that are going to win, and I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support it. It's just not, when you look outside the window, what you see.
Speaker 2:Again, part of this is it's the actual biology of the left and right sphere which then makes me wonder if there are certain cultures or parts of the world which maybe are more balanced or maybe are less balanced. Is there any evidence of that, or is there sort of a commonality across all of us?
Speaker 1:Man? This is such an interesting question. So there was a great study of Western and Eastern people taking photographs and they would give people a scene of a person sitting in a chair in the middle of the room and people in the West would take a photo of the dude or dudette sitting in the chair, whereas people in the East would frame the whole room and they'd just take the whole picture. And if you look at Asian paintings like the two I've got behind me in my bedroom, there's rarely a single subject. They take in the whole idea and that's something that's characteristic, again, very generally of Eastern and Western thought left hemisphere versus right hemisphere. Now you can go even further with this and I will, and this is going to make me sound like a crazy person, but I'm comfortable with it.
Speaker 1:A lot of other cultures, although sadly increasingly few, actually talk about other centers of the body as areas of cognition.
Speaker 1:Now we have the data for this the heart communicating more to the head than the head communicates to the heart, and the same with the gut.
Speaker 1:But the moment you mention the idea of the heart as an organ of perception and cognition, everyone loses their mind, because the left hemisphere is competitive and it lies when faced with things that it doesn't understand.
Speaker 1:But the fact is that there's enormous amounts of anecdotal and fascinating historical stories about people getting a much more holistic understanding of where to go in the world, based on their heart center, and the fact that gives me more confidence that it's true is actually all of our idioms. Think about the number of things we refer to open-hearted, full-hearted, follow your heart, heart as a guide. The sense is we're attracted to things within our environment, something I talked about in the Sohn speech, and that is something that comes through the energetic center of our body. If you ask people what your, because it gives off an electromagnetic pulse every time it beeps, why Start asking these questions? And the fact is that different cultures have a very non-left, hemispheric, centric perception of the world. The problem is, as I alluded to earlier, is that our culture right now is rewarding very short-term, left, hemispheric thinking and it's blowing everything up, which is why this thesis is so interesting.
Speaker 2:Right, which goes back to social media Vines attention spans Exactly right, it goes back to social media Vines attention spans exactly right, it goes back to that. But then, as I hear that, I think to myself okay, happiness comes more from the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere. I mean, is there a connection between one's emotional well-being and the balance? I would say yes.
Speaker 1:Miguel Crist would say yes, but it's not one or the other. The right hemisphere is not competitive with the left. The left is competitive with the right. Basically, the McGilchrist predecessor to the matter of things is called the master's emissary, which is basically the left hemisphere needs to be the emissary and the right hemisphere needs to be the master. We've just flipped it. The left hemisphere is amazingly good analytically and it keeps you alive. It is the seat of your ego. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, orients you in the world and shows you what's important.
Speaker 1:The most interesting study of the bajillion that McGilchrist cites is that if you experimentally suppress the brain's left hemisphere for 10 to 15 minutes, people feel animately connected to the world.
Speaker 1:They see the sun going across the sky and giving them energy.
Speaker 1:If you suppress the brain's right hemisphere for 10 to 15 minutes, people see other human beings as like zombies, machinery or furniture, that other people become dead, and that seems to me like emblematic of this psychopathic CEO fire everyone, destroy the culture mentality.
Speaker 1:But the reverse is also true. There's an amazing story by this woman, jill Balty-Taylor, who was amazingly a neuroanatomist, who had a golf ball-sized hemorrhage in her left hemisphere when she was in the shower and she said it was nirvana. It was literally nirvana, because she felt connected to everything, she felt a part of everything. But then when she goes to pick up the phone to call an ambulance because she knows she's having a stroke, she can't remember how to use a phone. So that kind of exemplifies this balance, where it's like if you are more right, hemispheric, you feel more connected, and I feel that that's pretty much the original sin that we feel deep in our souls is this shame of disconnection. And when you are more right, hemispheric, in relation to the world, you genuinely feel much better. That has been my experience since I've started these practices and there's been my experience and the experience of the whole community that I found pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:So I see some interesting work and documentaries around mushrooms. I think maybe tapping into that right hemisphere a bit more, let's talk about sort of that aspect of it, because I think there are ways it seems like perhaps illegal, okay, but there are things that apparently are out there scientific studies that you suggest, that there's some of these, these things that can be taken that maybe get us better connected in that way I don't have a lot of experience with mushrooms and it's a complicated issue pros and cons.
Speaker 1:What I will tell you is that I so I had like a dark night of the soul, treatment, resistant depression, but two and a half years, which was a waking hell of a magnitude that I wouldn't have imagined possible in any context before it happened to me. And then I went to psychiatry where they just sat in a room and asked me what was wrong with me and I couldn't tell them. I've got everything so much money in the bank, beautiful wife, kid on the way, and yet I feel nothing and total shame. And it was my left hemisphere interviewing my left hemisphere. It didn't have any access to the information that it needed. I went to urinalysis. I basically speed dated every single therapeutic modality I could lay my hands on for two years, because when you're in hell you'll try anything to get out. You will rip off your own arm to get out of that trap.
Speaker 1:What actually ended up happening was that I got ketamine infusions from Columbia University. The final ketamine session sent me on a trip to hell where I had all sorts of traumatic visions and didn't feel at all regenerative. But when I came out of it. Within a week I was engaged with the world again, and so the way I think about it is there was something so far below the waterline of my consciousness that I couldn't access it. So if those means whether it's psilocybin in mushrooms or ketamine or whatever it is allows you to access something below the line, carl Jung said all neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate suffering, and I do think sometimes our egos try and hide us from suffering that it's trying to protect us from, but sometimes drugs can get us past that defense mechanism and suffering is not a bad thing.
Speaker 2:I think it's missed, unfortunately, by a lot of people. I am curious to hear about this community that you've referenced a couple of times. I mean, we talked about a little bit of Kent Kotak, but OK, so you've got this, this life experience. You've gone through Hell, you came out of it, you've expanded your perception of the world, you got into the science of it. How do you sell that or how do you get people to be even interested in that? I mean, you said it before that this sounds a little woo-woo, right, I mean, but there's I know there's a lot of science behind a lot of what you're saying here. But question number one is how do you find people who are interested in what you have gone through, and then how do you impart your experience on them so that they can live a better way of perceiving the world?
Speaker 1:Yeah, firstly, I don't impart anything I'm. The only reason I had expertise is because I made every imaginable mistake. What happened is is that for three years I was a writer and sort of random curiosity sherpa for a large wealth manager, and the more public appearances I got booked, the more honest I decided to be about my own experiences. And then in that next week I would have 10 to 15 people DM me or come into my LinkedIn and be like, oh dude, I thought it was just me. But basically people often very, very, very successful people hit walls in midlife where that niche that they're in dries out. Or in our world, they just lose interest in finance and yet they're earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and they'll kill themselves quite regularly. I've experienced it several times or they'll just die at their desk, they'll just drink themselves unconscious and they don't feel there's a way out. And I spoke about this for a long time. And then people would come to me and being like so what do I do? And I'm like I took on people as one-on-one transition coaches to be like, well, don't do this. But then eventually at the start of this year, particularly after that speech went viral, I was like no, I'm just going to start a community and so I have.
Speaker 1:It's got 90 people in it so far. It's closed and age 45-ish, and they're interested in what's next. They're interested in very specific practices to rebalance the hemispheres, of which there are many, but they're very likely to be specific to you, which is something that makes it hard to explain. Exercise has become your thing. It's something different for someone else. It's about getting an ecology of accountability together, but also not to be overly critical. But sometimes at this point in life, conversation gets a bit superficial. That's why places like Kam Kotok are so great, because you can go straight to the meat.
Speaker 1:My community was set up so people could talk about these things in a safe environment, but without the woo-woo, a lot of these spiritual communities are just full of nonsense and no scientific backing and people with no agency. What's happening right now mark my words is one. You are seeing networks of these tribes spring up, but for the first time that I'm aware of, they are high agency people. There are 24 founders in my group. There are God knows how many CEOs. These are high agency people that are suddenly getting interested in a word that I hate to use, but spirituality. I mean, I hate it, but like personal evolution right. They're interested in personal evolution within a deeper context than just more and more performance, just cold showers, right. Just climbing that mountain of success. They're interested in looking around and seeing what's next, usually from a position of strength.
Speaker 2:I wonder how much of our industry, in the investment side of things, how much of that dynamic is just because our reward mechanisms get screwed up from the gains, losses, gains, losses, gains, losses. It's hard to sort of appreciate the positive when you're an active trader or portfolio manager, when in your profession, something you cannot control your value of your portfolio can make you bounce up and down in terms of the dopamine hits and then the sadness, depression, whatever you want to call it, that comes afterwards. Man, it's so hard.
Speaker 1:There's also the like yeah, be generalizing, but if someone wants your money in finance, you probably shouldn't give it to them, right? Like all the hedge funds I've ever dealt with that would take your money weren't always the best performing ones. It was the guys that were like, oh no, we're closed. Thanks very much. We manage our own capital now and we go up 60% a year and we don't need your money. In fact, your money would make our performance worse. Those people are doing just fine.
Speaker 1:I went to a good college, right, and a lot of my friends went into finance afterwards. I've never seen anything break more people's brains than the markets, because you take a good little boy and you put him in the markets and you were told that more work equals better results, more brainpower equals better results, and that just isn't true. I watched over the years all the hedge fund like the Ivy League hedge fund guys crowd into the same trades because they were complicated. They loved it, and then you saw the Reddit guys come out and just basically destroy them and squeeze them all out, and I know that was a unique moment in time, but the fact that there isn't a linear relationship between effort in and value out is one of the things that destroys people's mental health and finance.
Speaker 2:I talk often to Twitter X followers that engage positively. Sometimes they're anonymous and then I talk to them and it turns out it's literally some college kid that is looking for career advice. And I always make that point that if you're going into the field of finance and investing you better be real comfortable not having that clear link between effort and results. And it's unlike a lot of other domains, because also the domains already work the more you see the result. Not so in our business.
Speaker 1:And you have to love it. That's what people don't understand. I was like would you still do this job for minimum wage? I've got 20 years of experience in this now and the only guys that are making it the guys that are externally motivated by the money. It's just not a high hit rate because you've got to get that rep right. You've got to get so many reps in the field to get that embodied intuition that really differentiates you from everyone else. And people can point to outliers. But that's the whole chimp thing that there have to be outliers in the industry that have got successful just because people have to lose. It's the people that I look at, who I'm very explicitly not one of that. I'm like, yeah, that guy's successful. They're often in fact very rarely the smartest people I know. They do have the most intuition and they have the most intuition because they never think about anything else.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the substack, the leading edge, which I'm showing on the screen here. You've got some good engagement. You've got a nice audience there. What kind of content do you put out there and why should Thank you?
Speaker 1:So I'm doing this eight part series right now, which is for my wife, because my wife is always like, yeah, this sounds really. She doesn't even say it sounds interesting. She's like this sounds really boring and it's not going to make you a better dad and it's not going to make you a better father. Can you write about these abstract concepts in a way that gives me something practical to do and brings me into the world? And so I was like, well, I ruined my life and spent seven years in the abyss. Can I write a series for people that goes from really non-woo? So episode one is with a guy called Cedric Trinh and it's about how do you get good at trading, how do you get good at investing, how do you get good at business? And then in two weeks I'm going to have my friend Mona Sabani. I'm not going to tell you what it's about, but this weekend's episode is going to be about dream work and synchronicity Turns out.
Speaker 1:Dream work and synchronicity it turns out that dream work we dream for at least a third of our lives. How much effort do you put into analyzing your own dreams? There is a non-trivial amount of research that analyzing your dreams gives you access to your unconscious. So exactly the kind of intuition we're talking about. And people like, if you go into a hedge fund, as I did actually last week, and you guys should think about dream work as one tool in your tool belt, people just like laugh you out of the office. Well, they didn't laugh me out of the office, they were actually very nice, but people can laugh you out of the office for these ideas. And so this is a way of me building on the things that we've been talking about today, on one-off pieces and conversations, but also this structured series that will give people a lot of actual, real-world tools.
Speaker 2:Tom. For those who want to track more of your thoughts, more your work, aside from the sub-stack, which is the leading-edge stuff, I like leading as somebody who likes lead lag. But for those who don't know, drag, wear your thoughts more your work, which is what I do.
Speaker 1:I am, to my wife's chagrin, way too active on Twitter, as you have noticed. I think I looked this morning that I have like 18,000 tweets, which was like the most depressing thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 2:I get probably as auto-delete now, because I'm also tired of the nonsense of people taking screenshots from like a year or two ago. Oh, how off you've been. It's like all right, come on guys.
Speaker 1:So at Tomo and Mogan on Twitter, and I try and respond to every DM and every message I get.
Speaker 2:Everybody. I appreciate those that watch this live stream. Please make sure you give Tom a follow. Check out his sub stack as well. I have another interview coming up literally in about seven minutes. Stay tuned for that and appreciate those who continue to support Lead Black live. Thank you, tom, real pleasure. Thanks for having me. Cheers everybody.
