Andrew Huberman: recommendation

Transcript context

…Bringing it back. You said that your conversation with James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst had a big impact on you. What do you mean? James Hollis is a 84-year-old Jungian psychoanalyst who’s written 17 books including Under Saturn’s Shadow, which is on the healing and trauma of men, the Eden Project, excuse me, which is about relationships and creating a life. I discovered James Hollis in an online lecture that was recorded I think in San Diego. It’s on YouTube. The audio is terrible, called Creating a Life. And this was somewhere in the 2011 to 2015 span, I can’t remember. And I was on my way to Europe and I called my girlfriend at the time. I was like, “I just found the most incredible lecture I’ve ever heard.” And he talks about the shadow. He talks about your developmental upbringing and how you either align with or go 180 degrees off your parents’ tendencies and values in certain areas. He talked about the specific questions to ask of oneself at different stages of life to live a full life. So it’s always been a dream of mine to meet him and to record a podcast. And he wasn’t able to travel. So our team went out to DC and sat down with him. We rarely do that nowadays. People come to our studio. And he came in, he had some surgeries recently, and he kind of came in with some assistance from a cane and then sat down and just blew my mind. From start to finish he didn’t miss a syllable. And every sentence that he spoke was like a quotable sentence of with real potency and actionable items. I think one of the things that was most striking to me was how he said, when we take ourselves out of stimulus and response and we just force ourselves to spend some time in the quiet of our thoughts while walking or while seated or while lying down, doesn’t have to be meditation, but it could be, that we access our unconscious mind in ways that reveals to us who we really are and what we really want. And that if we do that practice repeatedly 10 minutes a day here, 15 minutes a day there, that we start to really touch into our unique gifts and the things that make us each us and the directions we need to take. But that so often we just stay in stimulus response. We just do, do, do, which is great. We have to be productive, but we miss those important messages. And interestingly, he also put forward this idea of what is, it’s like, “Get up, shut up, suit up,” something like that. Get out of bed, suit up and shut up and get to work. He also has that in him, kind of a Goggins type mindset. So be able to turn off all this self reflection and self-analysis and just get shit done.…

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