When you are there for a week with
people not talking about the
social hierarchy status of money or careers or
politics, and you're not on your devices connected
to an infinite supply of doom, scrolling,
you tap into what does it mean to
be human again? Like how to actually live
with other human beings in a pursuit of
love and self reflection and self fulfillment. And
if for no other reason, just for that,
just to be able to taste a glimpse
of what it means to be fully alive
as a human being.
Welcome everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and
this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute
and its stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process
and how it lives in the world radiating
love.
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Hoffman past.
Welcome to the Hoffman pasta TV show.
We're gonna cook some great dishes.
Jeff Orlowski
Yang. Great to have you. Thank you. Thanks,
Drew. So we're here at the beautiful eTown
studios in Boulder, Colorado. What a great place,
right? I love it here. Tell me a
little bit about
how
you got to Hoffman
and what happened
in that moment in time where you were
like, wait, what?
She's doing what?
So I,
I feel like I had
so many friends in my friend circle that
had done Hoffman and had raved about it.
And it was one of those things where
there was this mystery and allure to it,
and this
people weren't telling me what the experience was,
but just like, oh, you gotta do it.
And but, literally, it was probably eight, nine
people, 10 people that I had met that
had all mentioned it and spoke so highly
of it. And then a friend of mine
had gone through the process,
and he said he he had a friend
that was willing to pay for any but
if you were gonna have kids, she would
pay
for you to go attend the process
just if you were in that position of,
you know, partnership ready to have kids. And
it just seems
so out of the box to me. Like,
just that notion that somebody would do that
for somebody else took me by such surprise
that I really was like, I I need
to know what this thing is. Whether she
knew them or not.
Whether she knew them or not. I was
like, if you're gonna have kids, I want
you to experience this thing.
And
that became such a testament.
Interestingly, it's anchored itself in my own mind
around when I talk to other people. It's
like, oh, you're you're gonna have kids. You
should do this thing.
You should go consider this thing.
And my goodness, there's there's a gazillion directions
we can go with the conversation. But just,
like, seeing the
the patterns and the habits that we inherit,
that we are raised into, the stories that
we have, the stories that we tell ourselves,
and what are we holding on to, and
what's serving us or not. Right? I think
the ability,
the invitation to really examine that and to
examine what do you wanna hold on to
or not,
my experience was just truly a blessing, a
total, total blessing.
So you're stunned by this a little like,
how is this possible? And then
do you take her up on it even
though you haven't met her? Or I felt
like I didn't want to exhaust her resources
in that way. I was like, I can
cover this myself. I wanna do this, and
I wanna have this experience
just to know what this is about. I'm
now 41 years old as of today.
I had just gone through divorce before the
process.
Living what I've always felt was a very
aligned
life in many ways,
and
always kind of pursuing my hopes and goals
and passions
and figuring
what is my path. And self growth has
been a big part of my life. And,
whenever there's an opportunity or space
to
reflect and grow and examine,
that has only served me.
And this was a more expensive way to
explore that. And, you know, in retrospect, I
don't doubt the expense.
It was the time that was the biggest
challenge. How do you carve out that much
time? And the other thing that was advised
to me from friends who had done the
process already was you gotta make sure you
honor that integration time. And I took an
extra day off. I took Monday off and
made that my travel day and had this
three day weekend up in Petaluma.
And it was really just like a perfect
time and space to hold for myself for
that.
In hindsight, you're glad you did that? 100%.
I'd tell that to everybody.
Take two days extra if you can. Don't
rush that reentry.
And I think I'm also used
to altered spaces and used to integration as
a concept and honoring that how do you
come back into your normal day to day
life. And so I I think I had
a familiarity
with just that concept to be able to
know in advance that I really wanted to
honor that. When I hear you talk about
yourself and personal growth, one of the things
of the word that comes to my mind
is curiosity.
And you can't be a director
of film
and not be curious, can you? I would
say that's probably one of my top values
or personality traits or what have you is
is that deep curiosity in things. Yeah. To
a fault, maybe.
I have too many interests. I have to
constantly
be focusing on prioritization and what do I
wanna do because I have a gazillion things
that I wanna do professionally and personally. So
you take that curiosity. And for those listening,
you have directed Chasing Coral, Chasing Ice,
The Social Dilemma.
I mean, just these incredible films, please. If
you're listening,
please see some of these films.
Like how did you get there? Why
Chasing Ice?
I grew up wanting to be a photographer.
My dad was a photographer. He used to
photograph weddings back in the, you know, black
and white film days. And we had a
darkroom in in our house growing up. I
grew up on Staten Island, and in our
basement, we had a fully functioning black and
white darkroom. I thought this is how everybody
made photographs. Like, this was the only way
to make photographs.
And, grew up with this incredible blessing from
my dad. And, you know, we had National
Geographic come in every month, and that yellow
rectangle was just this
mesmerizing,
enchanting
lens to the rest of the world.
I remember there's a period where I would
get the magazines and I'd cut out the
photographs and I'd post them
up on one wall of my bedroom, and
I just I only had so much space
and they would kind of rotate through. And
then just National Geographic spreads
all across the wall, and it was just
this wonder
and joy and beauty and
travel and exposure to diversity and culture in
different worlds.
And that was my dream job. I just
wanted to go and travel the world and
take pictures. When I was in college, I
was doing photography. A friend of mine, one
of my closest friends, got me into film.
He told me that I needed to be
working on film,
And I was resistant at the time. I
didn't see myself as a filmmaker. I wasn't
interested in scripting or writing stuff. I considered
myself much more of a documentarian,
going out and capturing the real world. But
went ahead and took this film workshop in
college and fell in love with the medium
and fell in love with the process. After
graduating from college, those two worlds came together.
It was working with a National Geographic photographer,
James Balog, as he was trying to do
time lapses of glaciers all around the world.
So fresh out of college, we went to
Greenland and Iceland and Alaska,
and I was a videographer for him. And
I was filming everything going on these adventures,
just like truly epic adventures.
I spent a month in Greenland filming. We
we actually won two Guinness Book World Records
accidentally.
We filmed the largest calving event that had
ever been captured on film, and it's featured
in that movie Chasing Ice. And when the
film came out, we decided to post that
scene to YouTube. And I I don't know
what the count is. It's like 60,000,000 views
or more. You're kidding. And for those listening,
calving is when ice
sheds off of a glacier. It's basically
the biggest event that has been filmed of
a glacier falling apart and breaking apart. And
that was 02/2008,
I think. We'll post a link to the
show notes.
It was an experience of going out into
the world
and capturing a truth that we could record
and bring back to the public. James, the
photographer always referenced it as like Jason and
the Argonauts capturing the Golden Fleece.
There's always this notion of he wanted to
capture the golden fleece and bring it back
home.
And for me, that's what I was exposed
to fresh out of college that we could
go and we could do important work and
go on an an adventure at the same
time and reveal this truth to the public.
And when when Chasing Ice came out, it
premiered at Sundance, it picked up awards, it
played the festivals, it, you know, it got
nomination, a nomination for an Academy Award, won
an Emmy Award. And and the biggest thing
was that we were showing this movie to
climate skeptics
and seeing them be transformed
in seventy five minutes.
We were watching
skeptics come out of the theater
literally saying, I had been denying this. I
came here to heckle the movie,
and I have to go now and I
to apologize to my friends who have been
saying this is all nonsense.
We were getting that experience over and over
again from
making a piece of art and making a
piece of cinema. The power of film. The
power of stories and film being just one
of those mediums. I kinda got hooked on
it from Chasing Ice, and we just kind
of continued from there. We went on to
make Chasing Coral, but the same philosophy applied
to coral reefs. We were documenting how coral
bleaching was affecting and killing
coral reefs around the world.
And we filmed it was 2016. It was
one of the biggest bleaching events that had
ever hit Australia, and we captured that in
real time,
documenting that event and turning that into another
film. So calving is to ice as bleaching
is to coral. Pretty much. Yeah. The calving,
when that ice breaks off, it is a
visual manifestation
of climate change.
And coral bleaching is this phenomenon when the
corals turn white due to heat.
And sometimes they can actually recover and come
back from it, but oftentimes what happens is
that they get too hot and they actually
tip into into dying.
These two projects, I mean, they're heavy. They're
they're they're pretty heavy
subjects. My team and I, we've spent the
better part of a decade going and witnessing
and filming the
direct impacts of humans'
fingerprint on the planet. This is the visual
evidence of climate change happening today. Sometimes we
joke that we specialize in existential crises.
It was from there that,
we pivoted to social media and technology. One
of our main subjects, Tristan Harris, when we
were first starting our conversations, he called it
a climate change of culture,
that this technology was changing the background landscape
of the world that we live in, and
we don't even know it, and we don't
realize it because it's such a slow drip
of our day to day experience.
And that process of making the social dilemma
I've stopped using all social media since, I
don't know, 2019
or something. In the making of that movie,
I couldn't keep using it. I I just
saw it for what it was. I I
sort of I felt like I could see
The Matrix operating behind the scenes and why
I was getting a particular post and what
it was luring me into.
And I kind of weaned myself off of
it. I used all the techniques to get
off of addiction, to wean myself off of
social media
and create a new habit. And here we
are, whatever, six years later, and I haven't
touched it. Wow.
And then
through your own existential crisis and all this
incredible work you've done, you have a divorce,
and that feels like a good time to
do the process? Like, why then?
Yeah.
In large part, I think it was just
time and scheduling between a bunch of different
projects. And there's such a a waiting list
and such a lead time that I was
like, let me just sign up. And I
had done that, and then the dates didn't
work and it got pushed back. And then
so then I had to sign up again.
And then dates came up earlier that actually
worked really perfectly.
And, yeah, after going through a divorce, it
was just like a big life shift in
obvious ways
and wanting that time and space for self
reflection. And what are my patterns? What's showing
up and why and how. So take us
into your
process. You walk into the classroom that first
day you're,
you know, are you thinking to yourself, what
is this? I imagine you you weren't really
sure what was gonna happen.
No idea. And even though I had so
many friends, nobody told me anything about
what you actually do.
It's so funny. Like, the first day, I
I was there that evening, we're having dinner
before the program starts. And I just kept
thinking it's like it's like a scene in
a movie where you're meeting all the people
on the airplane that are gonna be stuck
on the airplane for the rest of the
film. And it lit I'm just thinking through,
like, who's this cast of characters?
And I love that nobody talks about what
they do. In a world where there's so
much around status in countless ways to show
up and have this
rule that you're not gonna talk about that,
that you're not going to project a story
onto anybody,
There's a beauty in that. I really enjoy
when I meet people through what have you.
I really enjoy not asking what they do
and almost never to the point where, like,
I have friends that I still don't know
what they do and they've been friends for
a long time. I just, like, milk that
as long as I can sometimes
to build the relationship and the connection completely
independently from this title and this label that
we carry on ourselves.
If you don't talk about what what you
do, what your profession is, what you do
for a living,
you know, that's a long week. If you're
not talking about work, what did you end
up talking about with your fellow classmates on
this stranded plane ride
of a trip?
I feel like we,
especially the people in my small group and
then, you know, a handful of the other
people that I connected with beyond, like there's
an invitation to go deeper at a personal
level,
eliminating this one thing off of the subject
matter list
that we all, for the most part, probably
spend most of our time thinking about or
talking about.
It forces
more nuanced and more in-depth conversations.
There's a film that we're working on right
now, Mental Health, that I'm advising on executive
producing on. And the director for this project
has put a line into the film that
he learned in his research and in his
studies on this. The line is around connection
versus
communication.
The idea is that we were sold a
story around social media, that it was all
about connection, that this is connecting people. And
it's not. It is a platform for communication.
It's a platform for a transference of ideas.
And communication is a transference of ideas, but
connection
is a transference of presence.
When he shared this with me, when I
heard it, it just, like, hit so deeply.
One is information
and getting information across between parties. The other
is, like, what is a real presence? What
are you and I feeling right now in
this room? What do we feel when we're
in a in a group of people having
a real deep conversation about life and what
you're wrestling with and the people that you
love the most in the world and how
you wanna show up for them?
The group
had such deep presence.
And I think those bonds that were created
there, they're those bonds will last.
We have a WhatsApp group for our cohort,
and then there are some subgroups within it.
And there's some real ongoing, deeply engaged conversation
around people who just want to stay close
to that feeling and to
know that with this group of humans, there
is a full invitation to be present
as a regular practice.
So what's the
given your film is about the one you're
consulting on is about mental health. What's the
cost? There's gotta be a cost of thinking
that this social media platform that you're engaging
in is all about connection,
when in fact it's only about communication.
You're thinking one thing, but it's not delivering
on that thing. There's gotta be a cost
to that.
The best analogy coming into my mind right
now is if you think you're eating something
that's healthy and you're just starving yourself of
all the vitamins and nutrients that you actually
need, you don't even realize that you're sick.
And we, as a society, are starved. We
are sick. We are
incomplete as human beings,
and we've been lied to. And the story
of what these tech companies have been trying
to sell us
has been falling a a fast one over
us, and
we get sucked into it more and more
and more. It litter they've literally designed it
to pull on your dopamine and to entice
you in and to figure out what's gonna
work on you and get you to spend
more time there for their business model. Don't
need to go down the whole tirade of
that, but I don't look at those platforms
as serving us. They are not designed to
serve us.
And that's been the biggest freedom for me
around not engaging.
Yeah. And we didn't used to think that
the process was digital detox, but more and
more
as social media and these phones, which are
so convenient
and people give up their phones, that's, we
can say that on air here,
That has actually been a huge piece of
the week. It's been part of the transformation.
It took me by shock a little bit
at the start realizing that I would be
without my phone or computer and had to
do a bunch of prep with my team
and my family around like, hey.
This is different. You're not gonna hear from
me for ten days. Like and I prepped
people that I'll get my phone back on
Friday, but you probably won't hear from me
until Tuesday.
So I gave myself the weekend buffer as
well, and really set up expectations. Like, you're
not gonna hear from me. Nowadays, when you
hear people say that, they go, but I'll
check my phone every once in a while.
It's like, you won't hear from me, but
you still will hear from me. This is
really, no, really, you won't hear from me.
And I think it is one of the
most beautiful and powerful
experiences that we could have nowadays.
It is a week where I was focused
on my own growth and my own
work, and the days are full. And you're
working long hours.
It's not like you're on vacation.
And this is also one of the best
gifts you can ever give yourself.
It's so funny. I use an Oura ring.
I've tracked, you know, these whatever stats for
forever, and there's a metric within it of,
like, your resilience.
I had never ever in my life hit
the exceptional
resilience until Hoffman. It was the weirdest thing.
I was going to bed early. I was
getting a lot of sleep and I needed
that just to endure
the emotional labor of every day. And I
was like, we we wrapped, we finished whatever
we did after dinner, and then I just
wanna go right to bed. I got some
of the best sleep of my life during
that time just because I was really focused
on, you know, how do I take care
of myself and how do I show up
with the most presence and the most energy.
Another side note, I'm a musician. I play
the piano, and I'm getting into composing.
And I normally
will pull out my phone and record a
voice memo of a song. And if an
idea comes into my head and one day,
a song comes into my head on day
three or four or something, and I'm like,
what do I do with this? I don't
I can't I don't have my phone. I
don't have a computer.
And I haven't ever done this. I took
out a piece of paper, and I wrote
staff bars
and I wrote the notes in my head
and I just wrote the notes down. And
I was like, I think this is the
song that's in my head right now. And
I'm so excited. I want to see what
that might turn into from day three of
Hoffman.
That's great. Was there any
moment during the week, you and I haven't
talked about this, so this is sort of
out of the blue. Was there any moment
where where you were like, oh, man, I
this is hard. Wow. This is painful.
I don't know if I can do this
or, or this feels so heavy.
I never felt a, I don't think I
can do this. And I think that's just
a testament to the program and the teachers
and the structure.
I think it's such an incredibly
structured week
where day one, you get introduced to things
a little outside of your comfort zone and
day two, it pushes that a little bit
more and day three, it pushes that a
little bit more. And if you hear what
you do on, you know, the last couple
days, if you hear that at the beginning,
it's like, what on earth? But but you're
prepared for it. I was in full surrender.
I went into it knowing
it has worked for so many of my
friends. I'm gonna trust this thing. I don't
want to say trust it blindly. I'm trusting
it with validation.
It doesn't benefit me to have any resistance.
And so I just went into it knowing
that
I'm down for whatever shows up,
and what am I gonna learn from this,
and what can I take away from this,
and how might this influence and affect my
life going forward?
But there were a lot of unexpected things
that showed up. I mean, different stories around
when the virtue is also the vice,
The narrative that I might've had on certain
things where like, wait, this has been of
great benefit to me. And wait, this is
also my limitation.
It was really mind bending. And the love
that I have for my parents and where
that also is like, wait a second, did
this always serve me?
And stuff that showed up that had no
sense was on the radar
gave me an opportunity to articulate that to
myself and to process that myself. I think
one of the most fascinating things is that
you're in this container where it's a group
container, but everybody's doing individual work, and you're
never doing one on one work with a
therapist in the way we think of
therapy today.
When I reflected on that with friends, it's
like there's something so magical. Like, you don't
actually need that. You can do it in
a group setting like this. Everybody's going through
their own emotional arc and their own journey.
And it wasn't like I was ever going
deep with my teacher on
the real weight and trying to sift through
that together. He was aware of my story
and the high level
and the places that had showed up, but
it was a group container.
Yeah. You share a couple key things there.
One is that you're in a group and
healing happens in community. So you can really
do powerful work in that group setting.
But the paradox that you're doing individual work
in that group setting. And then the other
thing you add is that it's not as
if we're the gurus dropping the mic and
you are getting the insights from your teacher.
You're getting the insights from the work inside
of you. And from the group and the
group's reflections as well. I think one of
the most impactful
things for me was
each of us is carrying our own biggest
story about the biggest scariest thing or what
have you. And then when it goes around
the group and you hear what everybody else
is worried about, there are some people that
say something and you're like, what? That's not
a big deal. Like, how is that a
big, you're worried about that? And then that
mirror gets held back on you. It's like,
wait a second. Somebody else is thinking your
biggest deal is not a big deal. And
there there is something about that. I don't
know if I'm hitting the point, but, like,
seeing
the diversity
of stories that people are carrying that are
holding them back and holding them down
with such weight.
It's like, wow. That story wouldn't is not
my story, but this is my story and
what I'm carrying.
And then just hearing all of those different
tones and reflections in the room was super
insightful to me. It helped me release my
own story
because it's just a story. We're all just
freaking carrying
this emotional baggage around
and we're attached to it and we're lugging
it cause we think it's the only thing
and it's what we need and we need
to protect it.
And yet
it's
baggage.
You speak to something I think is about
siloing
or isolation
in the sense that our story
doesn't really get the oxygen
that it needs to get. And so, because
it's not oxygenated,
it's not shared with other people. It gets
kind of calcified
in our mind. And if anybody tries to
confront it, it's like, well, you don't understand
my story.
And we tend to reinforce
it in this echo chamber that is our
psyche. And part of what you're talking to
is that,
wow, when you hear everyone's story, there's some
leveling,
some expansion,
something
softening that happens
in hearing people's story and having those stories
be shared in such a tight community.
It's almost like when you bring it out
into the light, the light can heal it
versus keeping it boxed up. Yeah.
It does speak to
the normalizing
of things that we have abnormalized
inside of our heads,
all that self judgment.
It's not rocket science sometimes. It's like, wait
a minute, what would it be like if
we just brought
more compassion to the experience
of being human?
And I think we've been starved of that
in this society.
I feel super
blessed in my friend circle here in Boulder.
There's a thorough quote from Walden that has
always stuck with me. And there's just a
phrase that he went to the woods to
live deliberately,
but he wanted to suck out the marrow
of life.
And that phrase to suck out the marrow
of life has always stuck with me, to
live deep and suck out the marrow of
life. And I feel like I have a
a friend circle that
that embodies that and practices that.
And through a couple of different groups, we
do monthly
meetups and check ins. I was last night,
I was on a friend's property who also
actually is a Hoffman alum
and or others in the group. I think
one of them is about to go. And
I don't know about the other two in
this in this group last night. We spent
hours in a sauna last night and just
went through these individual check ins. Each person
went for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes around where
they are in life and what they're wrestling
with and what's showing up and what's real.
And to be able to go through that
and five men just being able to hear
each other's stories and to reflect back
what wisdom we hear or what advice somebody
has or just to be a listening ear.
I feel so grateful that I have communities
like that. And I know that's not the
norm.
And I see friends that are starving for
human connection. It's painful when, when you see
that. Yeah. There's there is that isolation, isn't
it? Yeah. But is that addressed in your
next film coming up here? It's funny. It's
funny that you mentioned it. I don't wanna
overly spill the beans on it. The film
isn't announced publicly, and it doesn't have a
title.
We're prepping for a big festival submission soon,
but there is an insight that comes from
the film to this point
around
how technology now we've never been surrounded by
so much isolating technology.
And, yes, this means cell phones and social
media, but it's also
Uber Eats, and it's the self checkout at
the grocery store. And it's you've never been
able to live in a basement and never
talk to somebody for weeks on end before.
You can do that now. You can literally
keep yourself in a sealed room and survive
and function as a quasi human being
and never interact with other humans.
And we've never ever been in that place
in history before. And
it's funny. There's a phrase that we learned
when making the social dilemma,
Silicon Valley solves Silicon Valley's problems.
I'm putting a very broad generalization
out here and but I just picture
a lonely engineer
wanting to feel better and designing technology
that is the opposite of connection
and designing technology that has yielded what we
have today, this ecosystem of technology that we
have today that is isolating us more and
more and more. And it's not technology that's
actually helping us exchange presence
and be more informed about the world and
more interconnected and more understanding of each other's
empathy.
That's not the business model. Yeah. I imagine
the film offers some path forward.
A whole bunch. But, I'm actually super, super
excited about the film. We have a working
title right now, but not knowing
when or how the film's gonna come out
or how long it's gonna take for us
to finish it, it it doesn't even behoove
me to say the working title. But I
am very excited about it, and I hope
it is publicly available in the next year
or so. Are you excited to have
Sundance come to Boulder? Oh my goodness. Were
you a part of that happening? I helped
out here and there and helped with the
Sundance team and the local Colorado team. But,
yes, the biggest film festival in The United
States, the Sundance Film Festival, it's one of
the biggest the biggest independent film festival,
is moving from Park City, Utah, where it's
been for all of its decades, and it's
moving to Boulder, Colorado starting in 2027.
I feel like these have been my two
worlds. Boulder and Sundance have been my two
worlds for,
you know, my whole professional career, basically.
And to have it come here is really
special. This venue that we're in right now,
ETown, is going to be one of the
venues for the festival.
And people are gonna be sitting in that
room next to us hearing lectures and talk
backs and conversations about art and cinema and
and storytelling.
It's not just about the film. It's about
community coming together to what we're talking about.
And that's the thing that I love most
about film festivals is that the filmmakers and
artists are there and you watch the piece
of work and then you have a conversation
and a Q and A, and there's an
exchange of dialogue and ideas.
It's such a needed thing. I think we
need it more and more and more.
So take us
to you graduate
air quotes and you head into
your post process weekend
and then you head into your life.
What happens to your life, Jeff, post process?
The first thought that comes to mind is
there's a
an invitation towards the end of the week
to write letters, and I wrote a couple
of
meaningful
letters.
And in particular, I wrote some letters to
my parents during that following weekend. I was,
you know, staying in a little Airbnb at
this beautiful spot in Northern California
and for writing these letters and just pouring
my heart out, sent them to both of
my parents,
and getting those responses back from my parents.
My mom,
I don't think she's ever written a letter
to certainly not to me. I've never received
one. And to get this, like, multi page
handwritten letter back from her was one of
my most cherished special things to receive from
my mom. Wait. Your mom got your letter?
She got my letter. And then weeks later,
she sent me one back in return
and it was
spectacular.
It was so, so meaningful and so special.
I think for my relationship with my parents
and relationship with other close ones that were
kind of very much in my orbit and
my field
in particular during those weeks,
it just invited a deepening connection. I don't
know how else to summarize it.
The filter of all the day to day
stress and the day to day logistics and
the day to day, all the stuff that
we carry on a regular basis, it sort
of just felt like an invitation to put
that all aside and go to the marrow
of life, to go to that deeper
soul connection and a deeper place of of
a deeper reflection and gratitude.
There are a couple of practices that have
stuck with me in varying ways.
I find that the gratitude and appreciation practice
has been
super insightful and it doesn't take long. And
for a long time, I was journaling it
and writing it on a daily practice. And
then,
more recently, it's just like a nighttime before
I go to bed, like, brushing my teeth
and just a mental reflection
and, like, letting that wash over me and
using that as a transition
into bed and the morning quad checks. I
I don't stick to it all the time,
but when I, like, need to pull that
out, it's like, oh, I have this tool
in my belt. And it's either on my
morning routines
on either the light touch or a deeper
touch of a full meditation and and giving
myself that time, it feels to me like
I just have more and more tools at
my disposal for what level of presence can
I drop into?
You keep using this word presence. It means
so much and yet can be a little
confusing. Like what does it mean to be
present?
When your mind is
rattling off and going in a thousand different
directions,
it's not that. I start there because
that's almost the easiest filter for me around
when I'm present and engaged in a conversation,
I'm not thinking about
laundry or the errands or
a work thing, or what have you. And
it almost feels like a muscle that you
can build and practice.
It becomes more and more challenging. It's a
muscle that has atrophied in our digital society
when you see a bunch of people hanging
out together and they're all on their phone
and everybody's just endlessly scrolling
and
barely engaging with each other. And it can
be hard to be fully present sometimes with
people that you spend a lot of time
with. If you're day to day all the
time with somebody,
it can feel like work sometimes
to tap into that, that presence.
But I think in part two, that the
idea that connection
is an exchange of presence
has invited me all the more
to practice that more, to honor that recognition
and that gift
and to go deeper into what does it
mean to be fully present with somebody? Connection
is an exchange of presence.
Beautiful.
And how do you give that gift to
somebody else? And how do you receive that
gift or even demand that gift?
And there are times where it's like, Hey,
would you mind putting your phone away? Do
you do that at times? I find most
of my friends, we don't hang out on
our phone. Like, it's not the regular occurrence.
I do have a friend. She wants to
install a microwave at the entrance of her
house and have people come in and put
a microwave is a Faraday cage.
Right? It blocks radiation. So she wants people
to come in, put their phone in the
microwave, close the door, and leave the phone
in isolation.
And so, yeah, I for me too, I
I have charging stations around my house that
in an ideal world, my phone is there
kind of in its parking lot. Like, this
is where the phone can go live.
And it's charging, but it's away and off
my body,
and it just invites more and more presence.
It is removing
the slot machine of distraction and notification
and gives you more space for that.
The occasional
reward,
the unpredictable
reward is how you get people addicted, right?
Yeah. It's the slot machine technique.
It works. It works on this human brain
and they have optimized it really, really well.
Yeah. I love my phone and I love
the random reward. You see your, a great
text message come in and you see a
great email come in or, and it lights
you up and a friend you haven't spoken
to in a long time, there's so much
of that available there. There's an endless infinite
supply of that there. There is so much
there that you can never be fully satisfied
with it.
And so if you go down that slippery
slope, we just end up on these dopamine
addiction chains. And it is I have just
found for myself, it is
it's not where I wanna be spending most
of my time and it's hard for everybody.
That's not easy at all. I have a
question about
change and transformation.
You know, the tagline at Hoffman is when
you're serious about change.
And one of the things that I
am constantly
noodling about in my head is
what does it mean to change and how
do we change?
And I think part of the problem, I'm
curious about your take on this. Part of
the problem is people really don't understand
what change is and how to change. And
so oftentimes we hear the before and after,
but we don't hear the messy middle. You'll
hear people say, Oh, yeah, I used to,
I was depressed, but you know, I figured
it out and they'll give some maybe pithy
response, but you don't fully
see or experience
or understand
the journey
that people take. And so I I'm just
thinking about film and story
and how could we help people? If I
were pitching,
it'd be like,
let's do a film that gives people an
insight
into what change really looks
like. I'm wrestling with how to think about
it. I've been studying quite a bit on
psychedelics lately as well,
and
the application of how psychedelics affect the brain.
There are many ways to the top of
the mountain, and there are some ways that
are, you have to carve a trail and
other ways that are an elevator to the
top.
In some ways, I think like the Hoffman
process is a week long psychedelic experience.
It's a natural high. It is it's not
even a high maybe high is an appropriate
word to use, but it is a
process
that lets you rewrite your programming.
When we talk about change and does if
somebody want change or invite change,
there is some program
that is in there that somebody might not
be happy with.
You can choose to keep it, or you
can choose to change it if you want
to, but sometimes if you want to change
it, you don't know how to change it.
And so
digging it out and cleaning the wound and
addressing it from the root cause and getting
to the core of it
lets you heal it properly. Otherwise, you just
have this open wound forever.
There's an analogy in the psychedelic space where
it's as if you've been skiing on a
mountaintop
for years and years and years and years,
and this mountaintop just has, like, all the
ski tracks that you have put into it,
and you've built this rut into this mountain.
And you look down and you, yeah, I
can make a left turn here at this
tree,
but it's a big rut. It's really hard
to get out of that rut.
And the psychedelic experience, as I understand it,
and the
Hoffman experience as I've as I've experienced it,
is it's like shaking the snow globe.
And it's like a fresh snowfall has fallen,
and you're looking at that same mountain top
and you're looking down and you see that
same field of trees.
And now it's like, oh, I can make
this left turn. This is really easy. And
maybe I'll make a right turn here instead
of going behind that tree. I wanna go
in front of that tree. You can chart
a new course
with much greater ease
when you are put in a new mindset,
a new framework.
That's my take on what the Hoffman experience
is doing in some ways in this totally
sober, but intentionally crafted week long experience
where you are going in and going into
the patterns
that have formed
and inviting yourself to fill in the snow
in those tracks and to create new paths
if you want to. You think you could
do a good documentary on the process?
Oh, I think it'd be great. Was this
all just to get a film? No.
It's fascinating because
I was thinking, like, to film
the transformation
that happens. But part of the beauty of
the process is the unknown Yeah. And is
the reveal of what you're being exposed to
and the challenges and the just witnessing yourself
overcoming these things that you go through over
the course of the week.
So it's I think it'd be a phenomenal
movie to witness the before and after of
the humans that go through the process. And
at the same time, I don't know how
you could do it without showing the process
itself.
So it's like a big spoiler alert.
It's only for alums.
Only for alums.
You know, when I see people come, it's
not as if people have said to themselves,
you know, I've never tried change before. Let
me try change
more and more. And I think it's related
to part of what you're talking around social
media and the access to information.
People have tried change before
and it hasn't worked.
As a result, what you see
is some people coming in more disillusioned,
not believing in their own agency
to create the life they want. It's kind
of tragic.
And I didn't used to see that as
much. And now you see people
kind of not believing.
I've tried everything and Hoffman is
one of the last ones. And thank God
we can deliver,
but information is out there,
but that's not enough.
We're just living in an age of oversaturation
in general, and we're overwhelmed with so much
information.
And
I think this is a big shift from
what the internet and social media have done.
I remember growing up thinking
that I did not have expertise in almost
any subject.
Right? It's like, oh, you go to the
experts for a thing about fill in the
blank.
And that now everybody's sort of an armchair
expert on everything. Everybody is expected
to have a well thought out point of
view on every single issue
and
mental health being one of them and your
own mental health. And so it's challenging. It
puts us all in this position of sort
of like you can't admit to not knowing
something in today's day and age. When was
the last time somebody's
in a conversation said, I don't know.
Right. I cherish that. Right? Just to end
the frankness of, like,
yeah, this is beyond my let's go find
an expert.
So what's next for you? You're a grad
and alum of the process. You're
engaged in these great conversations in a sauna
or with friends. You're working a lot. You've
got lots of hobbies.
How is life for you and what do
you see going forward?
I think for me, it's always the question
of what is the balance that I'm looking
for?
And that's a question I ask very regularly,
and I feel like I'm always going to
my own North Star on that and the
balance between all of the creative projects and
the personal projects and family and partnership and
my puppy. You got a puppy.
Oh my gosh. That's good for mental health.
Yeah. He's awesome. He's, he's been the best
medicine for me in countless ways. My team
and I are in a very ambitious
stage of I'm directing four films right now
and advising on another three or four or
more, lose track sometimes.
This is like a big push for us
around these
stories and ideas that we wanna put out
to the world and hopefully can go and
affect change.
And this is our contribution
to shifting consciousness and to helping people see
a deeper truth in themselves and the world
that we are
we are
inhabiting.
If you think about the impact you've had,
the idea that climate change was hard for
people to accept
and film has changed the narrative on that
and storytelling that you've done. And then
all the what social dilemma
created around the cost of
social media.
Those are some pretty impactful
topics you hit. Yeah. Thank you. I think
these are the biggest issues of our time.
These are the biggest stories that we need
to shed a light on.
I feel blessed, and I feel the burden
at the same time of of the work
that we do. For our whole team, I
really just look at it as, like, this
is our contribution.
How do we shed light on these issues
and these subjects?
And there's no shortage of stories. We need
this over and over and over again. There's
no competition here. You know, many of the
greatest teachings, the the references practices. Like, there's
a yoga practice or meditation practice or
because there's never perfection. You're always working on
it
as a society and as a culture, we
need the we need to be surrounded by
the right influences and the right narratives.
And I think that's what we're stuck in
in a huge way right now, as capitalism
has taken over everything and and bought politics.
And
the entire information ecosystem that we're stuck in
is warped and distorted from kind of the
fundamental truths of nature.
And how do we get back to that?
And what are those stories that help connect
us with
that? It's a hard thing to shake people
out of because it's kind of a fog
that has clouded our view of things and
to wake people up from that
requires a lot. I think that's one of
the things that people, maybe for the first
time might tap into during Hoffman when you
don't have your phone and technology for a
week. And when you're not caught up in
the story of what I need to do
to make a living to survive in the
system. The system of capitalism isn't one of
freedom. It's the opposite.
We are all enslaved to the system, and
we have to run the rat race just
to survive to in order to eat food
and not be homeless.
Like, you have to
engage in the rules and the game of
the system
just to get by. And we're forced to
accept that. That's the world that we're in.
Despite the illusion or the messaging
that it's good for you and you do
have a say and free will choice, it
it's an illusion.
And when you are there for a week
with people
not talking about
the
social hierarchy status of money or
careers or politics,
and you're not on your devices connected to
an infinite supply of doom
scrolling,
you tap into what does it mean to
be human again? Like how to actually live
with other human beings
in a pursuit of love and self reflection
and
self fulfillment.
And
if for no other reason, just for that,
just to be able to taste a glimpse
of
what it means to be fully alive as
a human being. That's the thing that I
spend my time moving towards.
Well, maybe that's our new tagline, the Hoffman
process, what it means to be fully alive.
Yeah. When I sit back and think about,
you know, I've had many beautiful,
deep experiences in life in different formats and
styles across the board, but I think they
all have that thing in common. It is
wanting to seek out and be present as
a living being
that doesn't need to do anything to prove
anything to anybody.
You are
complete and whole as you are. You are
enough.
You are worthy of love and affection,
and you can share that with others, and
you can be present through that. Like, is
that not just, like, the most perfect that
just I just want that. I wanna put
that in a little box and just keep
it in my heart. And that's that is
the practice. I think that's ultimately
what Hoffman is
trying to give us a window towards.
And there are many, many ways that people
can find those things for themselves.
But
isn't that the point like isn't that the
whole point, Jeff? Thank you so much. I
love this conversation.
Thank you for your presence.
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Razi Ingrassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves, in each other and in the world.
To find out more, please go to hoffmaninstitute.org.