The Exchanges

Q So why don't we start with, what do you assume that people are typically thinking about?

A Well, if you read the papers, what most people are thinking about are surviving this. That's the bottom line. Am I going to stay well If I'm going to get sick, will I get proper treatment? Will I survive that? And will I have enough to eat? And do I have enough to live on? That will occupy most of the energy of a significant portion of the population, particularly the gig economy people who live paycheck to paycheck. They will be in survival mode. And those are obviously the ones also who have to stay in the workplace that can't shelter in place. But I'm seeing all the people who are primarily sheltering in place, which I'd imagine be a significant portion of your audience.

AI assessment note: “what most people are thinking about are surviving this. That's the bottom line.”

Q more and sign up to join us at capitalallocators.com slash university. Thanks so much for spreading the word about our newest Capital Allocators University course for investor relations and business development professionals. Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Mirbosh. Michael, we are in the mountains of West Virginia, in the late innings of another Bureau's Journey. Why don't you describe what it is, this journey we're on here this week?

A Right now, we're on a mountaintop and remote setting in the middle of a national forest in West Virginia in the United States, and we are up here to take leave of our minds, really, and the fabric of our culture that's shaping us every day into who we are to be, and we're spending seven days or one lifetime or eternity, whatever comes first, up here to undo the things that are called Unquestioned assumptions about what is. Unquestioned and unexamined assumptions and expectations about how we believe life to be. What we do is we come up here and we go into a giant reflecting mirror called the natural world where we have wide open skies, vast, vast horizons up over that high plains area. Over there. We have deep green forest fields to get lost in over here. We have cave systems underground here where there's these underwater currents flowing underneath us right now that no one can see or touch or feel that are shaping us right now. And so we come up into this nature bowl and we soak in that to get out of the limitations of four walls and we bring the background forward. We're in a Mongolian yurt built by Bill Coppert's way in 1970 that people are still amazed by. And so you come up here and you enter into a living myth, because where can you actually live it? Because most people will read about it and can discuss it, but where do you say, I am going to leave everything I know beh…

AI assessment note: “we are up here to take leave of our minds, really, and the fabric”

Q What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?

A Hmm. What life lesson have I learned that I wish I had learned long before I did? Hmm. Probably would have told you someone about how to make it with a woman, you know, really make it with a woman that I have learned and know how to do. I think I would have hurt less people and been less hurt, you know, and that, that love isn't a feeling that you feel to feel good about, that love is, is your ability, um, to make an ordinary life go better, um, And love is the ability to withstand somebody at their ordinary worst. Their ordinary worst. Their ordinary worst, and to live with it, and rather than have them eliminated in them, you live with them with it better than they live with themselves in it. And I wish I would have known, in order to make it with a woman, you have to always look for what she teaches you next. And she has to be able to teach you, and if you can't find something to learn from her, you shouldn't be with her.

AI assessment note: “how to make it with a woman, you know, really make it with a woman”

Q Yeah. What formative experience led you to realize that you had the ability to steer the life in the direction you wanted?

A You're assuming I have that ability. One day, maybe. Well, you see, I, I used to think I was steering, you know, and I steered my life, uh, exactly how I was trained to steer. I learned how to drive well. I know how to take hold of the wheel. I know how to take charge of the gas pedal, and I knew how to drive it into the ditch. Or actually, you know, the car took itself there, you know, with the ways the culture shaped me and taught me, if you follow this way Of life, and you do exactly how we train you, and you follow the commandments, and you obey the rules, and you climb this ladder, you will enter the kingdom of something, and get your due. And I, I, like many, many people bought in fully, and I played that game. I looked to be good at it, and I, one day, in my Late twenties. And then again, in my early thirties, I realized the prescription does not work and it all fell down and the wheel came off.

AI assessment note: “You're assuming I have that ability. One day, maybe.”

Q What was the call for you that led to the creation of what we're experiencing here?

A Well, a call always comes when something's missing. You have to be deprived of something. Something has to be absent or undeveloped, and the part of you that's awake and aware knows it. That part of you knows something's missing. That was making me wanted to seek out of the absence of what was there. So I just always felt like I was seeking and longing for something I knew was missing. And that's the compass heading. What came through that was a vision quest with Joseph Jastraub in 1990 to whatever it was that I did it. And that seeded it, of course, because I did a journey to get away from everything enough to know not to be shaped by forces around me what to do, but to really feel what that ignited in me and to find what was really alive for me that it would be worth doing.

AI assessment note: “What came through that was a vision quest with Joseph Jastraub in 1990”

Q And if someone's yearning, really yearning to change in some sense and say, okay, they're aware that change is happening and they want to embrace it. What would you recommend that somebody do to move in that direction?

A You know, it's really simple and strangely hard. Which is anything else, but what you always do. Anything but that. That's how you start to undo a fixed pattern. And years ago, when we ran a program for, um, personal transformation with George Leonard, he was one of the founders of the human potential movement back in the seventies. He was an elderly guy and I was mentoring under him and he would say, start small, like, If you want to think differently, brush your teeth with your opposite hand. If you can't do that, and you're not willing to do it, what makes you think you'd be willing to think differently? Because you have to think differently for a second. But the awkwardness of something that where we feel incapable, or where we feel unwilling to go, like, that is definitely the areas where it has your greatest potential for development. Our strong suits don't need more work. And that's how we got out of balance because we're afraid to develop our deficits or things that we never did before. So really like in a time like this, many of us are surprised by the fact that we really enjoy an ordinary life. And how many people who do you know, maybe you're one of them who are doing things called, I think they call them jigsaw puzzles. Have you heard of those? But there's a shared participation, and that's one of the things that allow us to realize what we value sometimes more than…

AI assessment note: “Which is anything else, but what you always do. Anything but that.”

Q change, and maybe we don't know what that means. Is it parts of the economy? Is it the way we work? More comfort with video? Is it gonna eat at home more often? Do you have any sense of that notion of people being more comfortable in a different frame of mind than how you describe just go, go, go, How that might play out from a human capital perspective?

A What is clear to me is the people who have the resources to change and adapt will and do. And they're surprised at how quickly they are adapting. I mean, I'm learning a whole lot about how to work and go deeply with people online. That's very different than working in person. There's something about when you're willing to adapt and connect on screen, for example, that on the one hand, it's obvious that like you and I are now, we're not having a conversation like we did the last time in the same space. So it has a different quality to it, but because we know one another from the same space, it kind of transfers over. And then I've noticed it's kind of like a confessional From the Catholic perspective here in the Easter week, where when you're in a confessional and you don't go face to face, you feel freer to say what's really, you open up differently. The barrier is actually a support to opening. And so I'm watching people adapt to that and use the barrier almost as another way to connect differently, like not so head on and straight on. But again, the people who have the resources, the inner resources to adapt and change will recognize they're going to have to change. And then people who don't have them Or don't believe that they have the inner resources to change will only wish to go back, and their prayer will be to return to something that was before, which we know on some l…

AI assessment note: “the people who have the resources to change and adapt will and do.”

Q connect with people that you're working with online, that loneliness is an issue and people are realizing they need each other. Are there things that you figured out over these last couple of weeks about how to connect with people through the computer in a genuine way? Because there are so many of us that are conducting at least the work side of our lives online like we're doing now.

A What matters to people is what means something to people. And what typically means something to people is something that has shared value and shared meaning. And it's surprising how ordinary it really is. Even in these training programs are running with people from all over what people are calling hangouts or meetups, right? Where you're just hanging out, but especially When it's not a forced conversation. You know, when you're with somebody that you're not well acquainted with, you feel like you have to keep a banter going, and it's tiresome. The space is similar to like a jigsaw puzzle where you have the activity allowing everyone to relax and just be there. You know, it's kind of like the happy hours that people are having, but it, it's a shared gladness that we actually get to be together. And it's the shared gladness, Ted. It doesn't matter if it's over a happy hour thing, or being a part of a group that shares a song, or just tell me something good that happens. It's sitting there realizing, you know what, I'm really glad to be here with you. The way you would be out socially. And it goes across the screen. And people relax, and they kick back in their chairs. And After a while, I'm not thinking about this as a barrier right now when I talk to you. I just feel like I'm talking to you. And that's what happens. It's like the screen that feels like a window becomes like lite…

AI assessment note: “what people are calling hangouts or meetups, right? Where you're just hanging out”

Q So what lit the flame for you? In that experience at Gateway, and where'd you go from there?

A Well, it's just how it all unfolds, right? You know, so I started learning how to do family work. I'm just studying family systems, and bringing people together in psychodramas, where people step in and play roles, meeting very fascinating men who mentored me, like Abraham Tversky, who, um, was a founder of the rehab, and yeah, Ken Ramsey, people took me to their wing, and showed me things, and Gave me ways of doing this, and then it unfolds. They build this thing at the time that was brand new called Challenge by Choice Ropes Courses outside, and they're like, hey, what, what, what's that up there in the trees, you know, like, and they told me, like, who uses them, and all the patients, and why can't the family people use them? In fact, why can't I use them when we're not working? What's this, well, you know, and we started doing work up in the air, and so that created a deeper sense of, like, stuff being in your, you know, Living being in your body where life is in the body and not just in our heads. And that should be another world.

AI assessment note: “meeting very fascinating men who mentored me, like Abraham Tversky”

Q What's the type of change that you might expect if someone has experienced that ability to kind of stay within themselves and calm themselves down?

A Well, again, it all hinges, Ted, on our ability to tolerate disorientation. To have something undone that was once the way it was. Because we get fixed in our way. When we get fixed into a habit, or an economic class, or a certain job, or a certain way of thinking, or a certain time we eat, we believe that we're not capable of living outside that pattern of the routine. So when that's broken, our fear is to want to hold ourselves together the way we were before. But This ability to say I have a chance to change and be different and I can benefit from it is what it takes is that understanding that change could my ability to adapt is what allows me to survive. It's what allows the species to survive, to adapt to the circumstance. And if I could use the hero's journey Metaphor again, that when you cross a threshold and you enter into a territory in your life that is totally unfamiliar to you, it becomes like either a, an adventure, an uplifting and a fun adventure, or it becomes a nightmare, an ordeal. And it's safe to say that the pandemic that we're facing is a profound, profound ordeal. No one would want that or see that as in any way As an adventure. But from the standpoint of the hero's journey, where something is yielded for you, where, where there's a reward or a boon, to use Campbell's language, is sometimes it only will come through the ordeal, because the ordeal makes yo…

AI assessment note: “the ordeal makes you have to let go of what you're clinging to”

Q And what do you do when you run into that resistance day to day, right? The world that I come in, the financial community, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is different things that people don't relate to.

A You know, what do you do when you realize someone has a different light on and they're, they're humming to a different song than you? Let them sing. You know, let them sing. That I'm saying their song. I think the difference is, is to be less troubled by it, to be less troubled by it. And, you know, it takes a long time, I think, Ted, for anyone, certainly myself, to realize that everything happened in its own time, in its own way, that something's not really, really up to me, or you, or anyone else. And it's been really humbling to look around like here with men that are here. They're all ones I'd have never figured. They do not look the part.

AI assessment note: “I think the difference is, is to be less troubled by it”

Q What was the call for you that led to the creation of what we're experiencing here?

A Well, call always comes when something's missing. You know, you have to be deprived of something. Something has to be absent or, uh, undeveloped, and the part of you that's awake and aware knows it. That part of you knows something's missing. That was making me want it to seek out of the absence of what was there. So I just always felt like I was seeking and longing for something I knew was missing. And you know, that's the compass heading took me years, decades really to understand that love dogs poem by Rumi and where it's the longing itself. That's the call. And so I feel that, you know, and I get scared when I don't feel my longing. I used to try to cure it. I didn't know it was the cure.

AI assessment note: “I just always felt like I was seeking and longing for something I knew was missing.”

Q Does someone have to have that? I had a rough patch. Does it have to happen that way?

A It doesn't have to be like that, but trouble always comes. People, I think, come through one or two doorways. Everything fails or everything works. Both ways get you there. This term currency is an interesting term to me. What it means to have currency. What does it mean to be current? Any kind of valuable currency is the ability to exchange it, not to collect it. When we have a lively, a life-giving exchange, it holds value to the two of us, and when we turn it into a thing, when we objectify a currency, it becomes this static thing. You have a false idol, it rigidifies, and it's dulled, it has no life in it. In the end, it becomes the final danger. Now you've accumulated great wealth. Well, I guess now you better start protecting it. And separating yourself off from the rest of everybody else. They don't take it from you. And now begin the suffering. What's wrong with accumulation of anything? Wealth, status, success. It's great. Enjoy it. Now, when you cling to it, you're starved and you're on a survival mode. Here's this interesting comparison about where the Christian Bible has evolved. That's what Campbell said. These myths are alive in all cultures and all times. Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Oh man, that's a fairy tale for children.

AI assessment note: “This term currency is an interesting term to me. What it means to have currency.”

Q Uh, some people might have heard of this movie called Star Wars. What was it about Campbell that influenced that film?

A Well, George Lucas, uh, was a fan of Campbell and, you know, he, he, uh, absorbed the myth, you know, this whole sense that, you know, myth is something culturally very misunderstood. We, we tend to call myths lies. You know, if it's a myth, it's sort of a legend that's not true because you can't actually process it with a linear mind. So linear mind takes a myth and says, oh, that's a lie. It's just a myth. It's just a fairy tale. It's not really real. But what a myth is, is something that's truer than a historical fact. Something more true than whatever a linear historical fact would be. I was born into existence in August of 1959 where it all began with my mother. Historical fact. But I, we identify with our historical facts as our reality of who we are.

AI assessment note: “he absorbed the myth, you know, this whole sense that myth is culturally very misunderstood”

Q So what happened after you had this formative experience, the Cairn Foundation, what'd you do next?

A Oh, it's not what I did next. It was what was undone next. That lit the fuse. What happened was as I went into interior spaces, I didn't know were in me. I didn't know they were there. I had a glass ceiling in my life. I didn't know that that was a glass ceiling. I didn't know they were doorways. I just thought that was the four walls of the world. And it opened up a whole new world. What do you do when you're in a whole new world? And you experience oneness for real. Oneness for real. I cried so hard, you know, my insides turned inside. I laughed so hard. I thought my eyes would explode. You know, my cheeks hurt, you know, this feeling, you know, and then with strangers, and then it starts unfolding, you know, so that it opened me to magic and wonder. It was far beyond the world of reason. And then it went back into doing what I always do.

AI assessment note: “Oh, it's not what I did next. It was what was undone next.”