Today I'm joined by Dave Heim to explore the tension between success and meaning. Why do high achievers, people who've done everything right, still feel something unresolved? We talk about fulfillment, story, and what it means to live in alignment rather than just accumulate accomplishments. This is a conversation about the inner life behind outward success. Why do you think so many high achievers still feel unsatisfied or unfulfilled in life? Because I think that they secretly know that there's something else more meaningful, that they haven't devoted themselves to fully yet.
And I use that word, I use both of those words very intentionally, meaning meaningful.
We're all here for some reason, bigger than whatever it is our most recent achievement has been, or whatever our entire list of achievements have been. And when we're not connecting to a sense of meaning for ourselves, and when I talk about meaning I get it all from a book by a wonderful woman named Emily Esfahani Smith. She wrote a book called The Power of Meaning, and she studied meaning. And what she came up with is four different pillars, she calls them the four pillars of meaning. And they are belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence. And if in our day-to-day lives we're not connected to a sense of one or more of those four things, then there's that sense that something is missing that I think you're asking about.
You mentioned story. I talk a lot about story. I think so much of our happiness and suffering comes from the story we tell ourselves about who we are, the life we've lived, what it means. How does story factor into the way you teach and the way you interact with the world? As human beings we are meaning-making machines. So really we just walk through our lives being bombarded by the events that are happening to us, our circumstances in our lives.
Brooke Castillo came up with something called the self-coaching method. And the basis of that is that the first thing that happens to any of us, the first thing that we experience, in anything that we make meaning from is simply a condition. And that condition is neutral. And we bring meaning to it by how we are perceiving it, what our paths are telling us, what our beliefs are telling us. And the minute that we add meaning to a neutral circumstance, we are telling a story about that circumstance. So what's so powerful about story is that the only thing you have to do to change your experience of something is change the story you're telling yourself about that experience.
That's how I use it in my work. I struggle with applying meaning to events in my life and whether or not that's helpful. Do you essentially think that these events have meaning or are they just how we filter them as human beings? Is that just a human characteristic? And that's not how the universe works, are they just physical events? To get into sort of more of the esoterics around stuff, and I know you and I both love to talk about this, but the whole, there's got to be a bigger reason for being a human on planet earth these days.
And part of the way I look at that is that we are here to
have this human experience. And part of the way that we have this human experience is through creating meaning and the way we create meaning is through telling stories. And it's always been that way. And it's actually sort of how we all wound up where we are, right? I mean, it's,
we are all the products of the stories we were told and believed as we grew up, right? So that's what shapes our identities is what we chose to connect to, which stories we chose to listen to and believe, and which stories we chose to say, nah, no, not not for me or not true for me.
And it's through all of those little tiny moments that our identities are created. And that's also really where the power lives, because if you are living a life that doesn't match who you really fully believe you are, then it's because you're telling yourself the story that you have to live that life. And the minute you allow yourself to believe a possibility of a different story, which means a different identity, which is how you get to a different life, then then you really understand the power of story. And all of that, in my mind, to answer, I think the question you were initially asking is our sort of magnificent essence of who we are as sort of the true energetic beings inside the human machine. That's just part of the game we're playing here in order to have the quote unquote human experience, which is what we all came here to do. And the most freeing story, I believe that we could tell ourselves, is that we are in charge of how our realities unfold for ourselves.
And the minute that we begin to entertain that story and entertain that belief and play around with it is when we start to understand how powerful we truly are as beings, and that we're not here to be in reaction to what's happening to us. But we're here to learn how to take the experience of living this life and create whatever we want to out of it. Yeah, I think that's a really powerful thing to absorb. The story that we tell ourselves, and you see how much it affects a society. And so it only makes sense that it affects us as individuals. The stories that societies tell themselves shape the direction they had.
And I think that applies to our own lives, which actually brings me to something I've been wanting to ask you about, which you talk about in your videos, which is the great perturbation. Can you tell me about that? Can you explain what that is? I use that phrase, the great perturbation, to describe the state of the world today. And the reason why I use the word perturbation is it comes from a physics, I'm not going to use the right words, but a physics discovery. And that discovery is that any kind of organism, whether it is a cell in your body or a society, when it has more energy flowing into it, then it has the capability to release.
Then there's a buildup of energy inside that system. And that buildup of energy will cause one of two possible outcomes. The first outcome is that the organism itself, be it a society or a person or, let's say, your team at work, will either reorganize in such a way that it has bigger capacity to allow more energy to flow into it and through it, or it will destruct. There'll be so much energy flowing into this organism that the perturbation inside the organism will cause the organism to fail and destruct, fall apart, rather than reorganize and have greater capacity. And I believe what we're seeing in the world today in the systems that I grew up wholeheartedly believing in, and wholeheartedly believing we're going to take care of society in the world and me individually, have been failing now for quite some time. There are many, many people all over the planet, but we can just talk about the US because that's where I'm based, that's where you're based, who live in fear for their lives now from the very same systems that were promised to help us.
And we see that happening over and over again, we see governmental systems becoming corrupt, we see financial systems collapsing, we have been seeing the ecological systems. So it's not just manmade systems that are experiencing this, but we've been seeing ecological systems fail for decades. And we're seeing it come closer and closer and closer to our daily lives now. And so that's what this great perturbation when I speak about that, that's what I'm talking about. You mentioned systems becoming corrupt. I think a lot of them, even if they're well intentioned in the beginning, drift over time, do you think that we can, as human beings, build systems that are incorruptible, that we can maintain over time and not suffer that fate?
It's our only option. And here's where I see
that becoming possible. It's when we move out of creating systems that keep us separate from each other, so that are more tribal based. Tribal is just a generic word that I use to mean like think of the United States as a tribe and think of Canada as a tribe. So Canada has their systems, we have our systems. A lot of them look very much the same, but because we're very clearly
United States of America, Americans and not Canadians, then we're in these two separate tribes. And it's the tribal nature of the current systems is the reason why they are falling apart. Now,
the way that we as humans save ourselves and save the world and save each other is exactly through that, is through working together as individuals for the betterment of all of humanity, not for the betterment just of our tribe, because those tribal delineations are artificial. There's really no line between the US and Canada. It's all made up. And all of these things that have been made up over the last four or 500 years as governments have been created, as borders have been created, as more of these tribal things have been created. These are the things that are falling apart. And we now have the opportunity as individuals to say to each other, how are we going to make the world work for ourselves and each other as a part of humanity instead of as Americans versus Canadians.
Speed of information and the way it travels, the internet in particular, has made the world a lot smaller. I think it's the distance, isolation that creates boundaries, creates separation, creates variation in culture. And we're at this sort of tension point right now, where we've got this old world where there were borders, there were cultures that divided, those borders are being torn down. And I think we're a little cautious about losing something. I think people are scared of losing that identity. We go places now and travel.
And a lot of times it feels similar to the place we just came from, because they have the same stores, they have the clothes of the same style. Whereas 50 years ago, if you lived in New York and you flew to Italy, it was a different world. Now, there's a lot more they share in common than they did back then. And so I think people want to keep that culture, but they also don't want to be butting heads with people because I think the more distant you are from one another in terms of culture, the more likely that friction is to be there. So, where do we go? Do we become this homogenous unified world culture at some point where people are very much like the people halfway around the world in terms of how they dress and the way they talk and the information that they're exposed to?
And then we lose that culture? Or do we kind of find a way to hang on to that while still also being unified as you put it? I think that's the friction that we're facing right now. Yeah, I think it's really, really brilliantly put, Andrew. I think part of the tension is that
any given tribe and in our current situation in the United States, the tribe of the United States of America is putting pressure on its tribal members to homogenize, right? And part of the tension there is, no, we're not going to do that. We're all very distinct individuals
and we can all live together harmoniously as very distinct individual. You don't have to be wrong or right. You can just be you and that doesn't necessarily have to infringe with me being me. That again is the power of storytelling. So people have bought into particular stories that say X is right and Y is wrong. And that's when they build their identity on that, rather than on, I'm just who I am, you're just who you are.
And underneath all of the stories, underneath whatever the culture is, we are the same, but it's that style, it's that individual cultures, that individual, it's that individuality. Like I have two brothers and the three of us could not be more different. I mean, it's as if we came from different cultures, right? But we share the same, you know, genes, we share the same, we were all raised the same by the same parents. And they're a big age difference. No, there's we're a total of five years between the three of us.
The eldest one is five years older than I am. I'm the youngest one. It's just like if you've got multiple pets, like your two dogs are not going to have the same personality, right? But they're also not going to fight each other because they don't have the same personality. My brothers and I, we get along great on paper, you would think that we would have nothing to say to each other. But we have a shared commonality of humanity because we have some shared stories that draw us together.
And there are stories that draw every person together. And if we can focus on those stories instead of the ones that separate us, then that gives room for individuality. It gives room for culture. It gives room for like one of the places that I travel to for vacation time is on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. And it's right in the United States. But the city that I go to, there's no Starbucks, there's no chain fast food, there's no chain anything.
Everything is local. And that can be done. I don't want to use the word utopia because utopia just turns it into something that sounds doomed from the start. But this, this concept of we can all live together and not have to buy into a story of either disempowerment or us versus them. That strengthens the ability for you to be you, which you are your own cultural moment and me to be me. And I'm my own.
And while there's a Venn diagram that overlaps pretty strongly between us, there are parts that don't. And that's what makes it interesting. That's what makes me want to have conversations with you, Andrew, because you are built differently than I am built on the outside, you know, in all of the artifacts of humanness. Whereas I also see who you are on the inside and you're exactly the same as me. And so is everybody else. And that's the fascinating part when you can see that we are all one same entity.
But we all show up in these different packages. And we all show up with these different experiences and stories and what's meaningful to us. And, you know, where we've belonged and what we feel takes us out of our daily misery and puts us into something transcendent, right? So we all have these this inherent awesomeness, meaning awe and beauty that we bring into our lives that we experience in our lives. But what the world is asking us to focus on is all the crap, all the stuff that supposedly makes us different. Division, it's a powerful tool to organize people and to attain power by assigning a common enemy.
So I think that's why we still experience that today, that in politics, people can organize and they can get support quickly by pointing at somebody and saying they're other and we are the same. Even in these utopian or whatever you want to call them societies or that's a side of towns, there's still that shared belief. We cluster with people who we feel we relate to that share similar values. So you talk about the town you vacation, they don't have fast food, they don't have big box stores or chains. That sort of outcasts those groups, that makes those groups other, that makes them wrong and not right. I think it's such a slippery slope when you're trying to figure out how to get along with people who share different values on the planet.
I think that's why we kind of carve out this little space or when we're young, perhaps try to organize or cross those boundaries, I should say. And then as people get older, they're like, people aren't going to change. It's not worth it. I'm just going to find my little corner of the world and go away quietly and you stay on your side of the fence and I'll stay on mine. I don't want to sound pessimistic, but I do think that's a common pattern. It's like the acquiesce to inertia and the default human operating system.
So I think it's a difficult not to crack. I'm sitting around and thinking about these kind of things often. I haven't figured it out yet. Well, that's exactly who you are though, because the mechanics of who you are is the person who learns through interacting with others and then going back and thinking through all of the problems.
But you brought up a lot of interesting points. And the first one had to do with
us versus them coming from, say, political parties. That is playing on meaning, because what that is is saying, look, believe what we believe and you will have a place to belong. And somebody who doesn't hasn't grounded themselves in what's meaningful to themselves in their own life is more likely to say, yes, I'm going to sign up for that. Yes, I'm going to believe what you believe because I need to belong somewhere. That's not true belonging. That's again, manufactured belonging.
That's belonging with an agenda behind it. And as for where I vacation and their decision to have everything be local, that's also an agenda, as you're pointing out, right?
The question is, what are the stories and what are the beliefs that you're bringing to either of those situations that tell you how to feel about it? Because that's what we're doing, right? So you and I are both built to be able to see all sides of a situation. So it's easy for us to look at the town that I'm talking about and say, well, look, that's also sort of an us versus them. We don't want you if you're Starbucks, right? But there is a more, there's a more charitable way to look at that.
And I think the stories that we've been told is we have to be suspect. Whenever we see somebody being different and like not allowing Starbucks in, then we have to take a look at what might be wrong there. And that's part of the story of the false belongingness, right? Because there has to be an us versus them. What if it's an you do you and the next town over is going to want every Walmart, every, you know, Dairy Queen, every and that's great. And then people get the option to choose.
And as long as nobody is saying, you're wrong for not allowing this or you're wrong because you do allow this. Like where I live in Austin, there's a part of Austin where business signage cannot be higher than a certain height, right? Because they don't want billboards, they don't want, you know, it's just this is what this institutional part of Austin, Texas has decided to do. And if you don't like it, don't live there, right? That doesn't mean that you have to then thumb your nose at the people who do live there. And that's the difference between tribalism and humanism.
So once you start to say, just because you've chosen that doesn't mean you're wrong, it's not what I would choose. But that doesn't mean I'm right. We're just different. And it's okay. As long as we're not hurting each other, it's okay. How does this all fit into gene keys and human design?
I wanted to talk to you about that. I work with a variety of sort of ancient wisdom and modern psychology and, you know, some other modern technologies. I call them all technologies. And I've pulled them together into sort of a proprietary, what I think of as a diagnostic system. And two of the primary ones are human design and the gene keys. And the way I use them.
And the way I think that they would make sense for almost anyone who wanted to look into them is, I used to say it this way. If you want to understand yourself, look at your human design. If you want to appreciate yourself, look at your gene keys. And the reason why I use both of them is because I think of human design as being the mechanics that we're born with. So it's just who you are. It's just how you are.
I now think of the gene keys as the dynamics. So we're each made up of these mechanics, which pretty much are unchangeable. And then these dynamics, which are pretty much constantly changing. But my work, so where I have landed and the reason why my, the way I present myself has changed is
I use these systems that I use to help people who have come to the question in their lives of, isn't there more that I have to give to help humanity in these times? I use these systems to help them deconstruct all of what they've built up over their lives, all of the stories and beliefs, to get them back to the essence of who they are as a consciousness being, which is, want to talk about, I look into you and I see who you are, and I see that we are the same. It's that consciousness that we, when we touch that in ourselves, that's where our own individual power lies. And that doesn't mean that we have to deny any of our lives or change any of what we've done. But the systems that I use help us get back in touch with that part of ourselves who, before we started building up the layers of the stories and beliefs, we came to Earth as. And that's where the power lies for anybody who wants to make a change in the world today.
And human design and jinkies are two of the key or two of the primary methodologies I use. So when you strip down all of these layers, someone is returned back to more of their natural being, their natural self. Is that the goal? I would say the goal is to be more connected with that version of yourself, that version of yourself that isn't swayed by the us versus them, or that is more connected to everything. What I've spent the last five years or so doing is sort of reverse engineering. So I played the game, I went into the business world, I had a variety of ups and downs in business, both working for others and having my own businesses.
Very successful in some times, very much a failure in other times, worked with some really, really incredibly successful individuals. And I got to a point where I was like, wait a minute, I want my life to be more than just having played that game. And I remember being four years old and knowing that I was more than just this person who's been playing this game. That part of me hasn't gone away, it's been covered up. And I was having a conversation with a close friend who's about five years older than me. And he looked at me and he said, you know, you're telling me that you knew this at four.
And I believe you. But what I've been doing for the last five years is I've been trying to meditate my way to it. I've been trying to find that again. And you already have access to that. How do I get access to that? And that sort of started me down the trajectory of the work I'm doing now with the legacy activation work I'm doing.
So reverse, I spent time reverse engineering how you get to it. And these systems of human design and the genkeys is part of how you get to that version of yourself. And neuroscience, it's incredible that just late last year and early this year advances in neuroscience have shown that there are structures inside the human brain that are designed to connect to what scientists call the zero point field, which is the energy field that exists where everything still is a potential. Everything is a potential until it gets observed and then it becomes either a particle, which is matter, or a wave, which is a wave. And our brains have a direct connection to that zero point field. That's some of the new neuroscience discoveries that's going on.
When I read about that, I realized that that's what I was experiencing when I was four. At four, I was experiencing, oh, I have this direct connection to manifesting my own reality or creating my own reality from all of the potentials in the that are possible in the world into what it is I'm living. And we all still have that possibility. And so for people who
have the time and the desire and the motivation to make a difference in the world, I want to find those people, I want those people to find me so we can get them back to being in contact with that creative version of themselves so that they can create something better for the world. These layers that we put on ourselves, they're survival tools. That's how we get along. We figure out how to operate. Children are very observant. They want to understand social dynamics, hierarchies, how do you become someone valuable, respected, high-resourced.
You start to see people when they get older and they have enough resources as they believe to live out the rest of their lives without needing anything from anyone, especially once they've retired. And then you start to hear what they really think. Then they start to shed all of these layers that they needed to engage with society and mainly financial exchange. So is this something that only becomes available to people once they're highly resourced and they no longer need to get along in the world? How can someone who is 25, 35, 45 still of working age and maybe isn't a multimillionaire access this and still function? Anybody at any time can access this.
You do not have to be well-resourced. The trouble is, because of our systems and because of our society and because of, you know, you gotta put that roof over your head and you've gotta put that food in your mouth and pay your bills and all that stuff, it is typically only sustainable for people who have made it through those sort of survival levels, right? And sustainability is ultimately what matters now. I mean, what I want to do is I want to work with people who are finding ways for the 25-year-old who connects with that to have a place where they can then say, okay, here's how we're going to develop this, right? That you don't have to prove yourself by, you know, getting a job with Google and, you know, making six figures a year or whatever the current proof point is, right? It can be great.
You're moving towards the new humanity. Humanity is shifting into more of us being in that state all the time, but that means that there needs to be a support system for people who find themselves in that state and the people who can create that support system are the people who've already managed it for themselves and have more money than they need to leave behind so they can start building these kinds of things together. It's accessible to anyone. What I'm trying to do is make it put together new systems with people who have the resources to help me make that happen. Funnelling resources, finances to building environments or institutions that support that type of cultivation. Yeah, or even stories, even new stories, like one of my clients is a writer.
And, you know, what he wants to do with the rest of his life is create stories that support the concept in people's reality and people's minds of we need to be taking people who have these connections and take care of them and use them to help society go through all of the horrible changes that we're going through now and heal from that and move on to the next thing. Because that's what we need is we need individuals to step up no matter what your resource level is and say, I have a way to help. And if I can get somebody to sustain me, I can help others. You mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs often in your videos and your teachings. And I'm just going to list them out here for the viewer. But it's basically a pyramid and at the bottom, you've got survival above that safety, above that belonging, above that esteem, and above that self actualization.
Is this work you're doing trying to help people advance that hierarchy? Yeah. And so this is the question that I've been asking myself, right? Because this is the work that I started out doing. So when I started my work after doing the
sort of retrofitting how I got to age 64 from age four,
the work I was doing was on those lower levels. The work I was doing was trying to help people break free from beliefs that were keeping them stuck in survival. Move through those layers, understand what they are, get survival handled, get belonging handled, get esteem handled, I don't know if skipped one somewhere, but psychological, maybe is what it is. And that is incredibly valuable work. And there are a lot of people out there doing that work.
What I was what I did was I took the system that I use to help other people activate their own legacy. And I applied it to myself. I applied it to my own human design, gene keys, and the other systems that I work with. And what I saw is that my mechanics are I'm here to teach about consciousness. So when I talk about human design being your mechanics, like I'm just I'm here to talk, I'm here to guide, and I'm here to teach people about consciousness, period. And there's there's particular ways in which I do that, that I'm designed to do that.
And when I follow that, it just happens naturally. And very specifically around consciousness having to do with divine timing or natural timing, and understanding when it's time for you to take whatever the next step is that you're here to take as a conscious being. Right. And so that that can be anybody. And you know, I can teach that to people who are lower on the hierarchy of needs or people who are higher on the hierarchy of needs. But then you get into my gene keys, which is my dynamics.
And what my dynamics say is people who are drawn to what it is I do are people who see and feel the corruption in the world right now. And by corruption, I mean it in two different ways. There's how you think of corruption, like somebody doing something that they shouldn't be doing. Right. But then there's the other usage of the term corruption, which the easiest way to talk about that is somebody sends you an email with a PDF in it. And the PDF file gets mangled when it gets goes through email.
And so you can't load it because the data is corrupt. There's something going on inside human beings, the human beings who are drawn to me, where they recognize that they are here for something more that sort of the data inside them and coded inside them has been corrupted in their lives in some way. And they want to get re aligned, they want to get their data so that it can be useful again. Right. So there's that level of corruption. And there's also the level of corruption of look who's running governments around the world and things like that.
So they're very, very concerned about both of those things. And what they want to bring to the world is harmony. And they have the resources to bring harmony to the world. And those are the two key words that people who are drawn to my work really resonate with. Do you believe that where and when we're born decides who we become in the world? Well, the mechanics.
That's the mechanics part, more than anything else. I mean, yes, it has to also do with the dynamics piece, but the dynamics piece is malleable. The mechanics piece really isn't the mechanics pieces is
just how you're gonna be in the world. And it's neither good nor bad. And yes, it does have to do with your birth date, your birthplace in your birth time, because the planet earth is constantly bombarded by neutrinos from space. And those neutrinos pass through the planetary and other
energetics that are out there between us and the rest of the universe. And so
that has an effect on our DNA. And that has an effect on the nature part of who we are, as opposed to the nurture part of the nurture part is all the stories. Right. But when you when you peel back all the stories, like I can look at myself, here's the thing about human design, which is what we're talking about when we talk about
birth time and all of that. Yes, it plays into the gene keys. But with human design, the true test of whether or not you're going to believe this stuff is when you get your chart done, and you can get it done for free in a million places online. com is one of them. com is another one. They're all more or less the same, but all you need is your birth date, your birth time and your birthplace.
When you get that information and you look at the top layer of the information, which is energy type, strategy, authority, and profile lines. And that's not going to mean anything to anybody who hasn't looked at that. But when you look at those top things and what it's telling you about who you are, and then you look back over your life, and you look at each energy type has what they call a not self-theme and a self-theme. And there are five energy types. I can get way into this if you want to, but what I'm going to say is that the vast majority of people are an energy type that the not self version of that energy type is frustration. And the self version of that energy type is satisfaction.
So if you are that energy type, where you're either satisfied or you're frustrated, and you look back over your lifetime, and you look at where you felt so satisfied with your life, and where you felt so frustrated with your life, you will see that when you felt satisfied, you are living the mechanics of your human design. That's the mechanics of who you are. And when you were frustrated, you are moving against whatever the mechanics of your human design are. Going back to the corruption aspect that you mentioned earlier, I've always felt a resistance to how I naturally was and wanted to be in the world, and the way that the world was kind of forcing me to be, even from a young age and going to school, being rushed to school in the morning, having to adhere to the clock and the classrooms, and sit still. And I know I'm not alone in that. But I've always believed that I was meant to do something important.
How does one know that it's not just ego that's driving that motivation? How does one know that they truly are meant to lead, or they truly are one of these people that is meant to do something that not everyone is capable of. Yeah, I think it comes down to self and not self. I think that there are two fundamental ways in which people approach the world. We all approach the world in both of these ways, but everybody has one fundamental way of approaching it. And an old teacher of mine used to call it, you're either in what he called identity or attention.
And so to know whether it's ego driven or not is if it's about me, me, me, me, that's identity, that's all about the self, that's like, I am meant to do something great because I'm meant to be a great, you know, be thought of as a great person, right? Versus attention. Attention is when you're giving attention outside of yourself. So when the ego is saying, I'm meant to do something great because I'm here to help the world, right? So now let's look at the goat. Let's look at Muhammad Ali, right?
While his external, while while what we think we saw with him was, I'm the greatest, which sounds very ego, egoistic. What he was doing was demonstrating the possibility of greatness for anyone, which is one of the best things you can do to humanity, especially in the time and place in which he was doing it, right? So to stand up being who he was and say, I am the greatest and then become the greatest was hugely empowering for people all over the world. It was not ego driven at all, even though it sounded like it. So I don't know if that answers your question or not. It does.
It's funny when you said the goat and you said, I thought you were going to say, Muhammad, I'm a guy. Yeah, well, you know, different different.
You gave both doing the same thing just differently. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing. That's the thing. Like it's, it's pretty cut and dry.
Like I'm not, I see shades of gray all the time. Like my world is multicolored and like I'm here for all of it. But when it comes down to, are you serving yourself or are you serving the world? It's pretty easy to tell the difference. Even if it looks from the outside that what you are saying is that you're serving yourself. He knew what he was doing.
I don't think he would take so much heat the way he did politically and everything. If you were doing it solely for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I felt the difference.
I know what you mean when it's for self-aggrandizement versus service to others. I felt that shift in myself over the last few years in particular.
I had been aspiring professionally. And even before that, socially, academically, those types of ways of achieving social currency and finding your place in the world. I think that's how most of us try to navigate. That's the stuff. Try to figure out how can I survive. The old promise of get a degree, get a job and get taken care of.
Well, that's been out the window for a while. Please continue with what it is that you were saying. But I think that part of what you're saying is I did everything the way I was supposed to do. And now I'm questioning all of that. Yeah. I think I was always questioning it.
And finally just couldn't go long anymore. I just had to take a chance here and find my own way. And it's high risk. Yeah. It's high risk to step outside of the system. I mean, when you talked earlier about America, there's a national agenda.
There's a reason why government-funded schools teach a particular way, why they're structured a particular way, why they indoctrinate children with certain beliefs from an early age, Pledge of Allegiance. I mean, get up and put your hand over your heart and swear your allegiance to this nation, this identity, this story that we tell ourselves about our shared values. And ultimately, it comes down to GDP, national strength, wealth, influence, control over the global trade and the global economics. And I just think it's difficult to fight that current. It's hard to survive, I think, when you step outside of that system. Because so much of what's entrenched in our day-to-day life is money, is private ownership, things that we need for survival.
Food. I mean, you don't get access to food unless you find a way to contribute and make the country stronger, make the economy stronger. So there's a resistance, I think, for a lot of people, myself included, I struggle at times. It's like, wow, this is not easy to find a way to contribute in a way that feels authentic to me, that feels aligned with who I am, that is healing this corruption and misalignment with values. So I don't blame people for just wanting to stay comfortable or stay safe in a sense. But I do think we're getting forced to, we're sort of getting pushed off the diving board.
It's like, these institutions are breaking down. It's in our face that they're not working anymore. And we have to just come up with some alternative. People are being laid off. They thought they could find a safe career path if they just got the education and advanced the corporate ladder. And overnight, their income is gone.
And they still have a mortgage. And I think there's a disillusionment. But it's not a complete breakdown where people I think are quitting. I think people are talking to one another online. This sharing of information is happening so fast that people are quickly finding new identities and new ways to invent themselves. I'm one of them.
And so, I know you're one of them. It's an interesting time. I do think that there's,
I don't know where it's going to go. I mean, I don't know where to end this, but it's just, it's, people are not alone. And I think that's why I want to have these types of conversations. Yeah. There's an old curse, may you live in interesting times. And we are, we're very familiar with the, with the thought that control is an illusion.
And I think right now we're understanding that safety is an illusion. And the systems that are in place to keep us safe aren't keeping us safe anymore. So then what do we do? The only option we have is to get creative. With whatever it is that we're able to bring to the world to help make the world a better place. I know it sounds like a broken record, but you know, you said something very profound there, which is if you're not contributing to society in the way that the system has set up, you don't get food.
Well, you know, there are people out there who are in the process of creating ways for food to get to people in new ways, in ways that don't involve going to whole foods and, you know, participating in the material world. I can't speak to any of those kinds of things, but for every single thing that we need to live, there are humans putting their minds on. How are we going to do that when money doesn't exist anymore? Or money has no value anymore? Or, you know, there's no more trust in any of the systems. It's, you know, there's, there are two outcomes to all of this.
It's that perturbation thing. It's anarchy and death, or it's reorganization for greater capacity. And the greater capacity that we're learning is the capacity of love for humanity and caring for each other and doing things like finding ways to feed each other, as opposed to only finding ways to feed ourselves. Right. And so, you know, and things like changing what the stories are, like AI is forcing us to change what the story of being a human is. Because this is the story.
The story was, you get the degree, you get the job, you do the work, you go to the store, right? Well, you know, I'm not going to sit here because I don't have as much information about it, even as you do. And say AI is going to take over the world. That's kind of, you know, I don't have that kind of fatalism baked into me, nor do I have the data to support it. But what I'm seeing, like when I'm on LinkedIn, is I'm seeing my friends who, you know, 25 years ago, I started a web development and online digital firm. And I still have friends in that world.
And why in the world would you want to hire a firm or even a freelancer when you and Claude and, you know, whatever tool you choose to can build something. And it's going to look pretty damn good. If you even want a website or if you even wanted digital presence anymore, right? So is it only coaches now who have a digital presence? You know, it's everything is changing about the stories that we tell ourselves. And AI is accelerating that.
And the acceleration in AI, as you can see, is so fast that six months from now, things are going to look completely from how they do now. And it's forcing people to have different conversations. It's forcing people to say, I got laid off from my job as a designer after doing that for, you know, 20 years and going up through the ranks because I've been replaced now by machine. And so now what I want to do is I want to teach other people like me how to leverage AI to do XYZ, right? I don't know what necessarily it is, but these are the kinds of things I see in my feed. And there's just going to be more of that.
But what that's also forcing us to do is to tell the truth to each other about what's going on in the world and rely more heavily on each other for our needs. Because that's how we're going to break away from the systems that are failing us. I think skill and talent is being dispersed. I think a lot of these corporations, I don't know if we're going to be having five, 10, $50,000, or $50,000 person institutions anymore corporations. I think there's going to be a lot more independent, small online businesses and people offering their services to others. There's a bit of a pushback.
I think in the transition, people are starting to feel like everywhere they look online, somebody's trying to sell them something. It's part of that whole re-discovery or reconstruction of identity that people are now having to go on and figure out, okay, how can I take my knowledge, take my skills and experience and monetize them out of fear of survival? That's where I think a lot of people are out with it at this point. Well, and the other question at the same time is, do I want to continue to try to leverage this stuff that I was told I had to do and learn to survive? Or do I want to do the thing it is I really want to do? Yeah, that's the thing.
Most of the people who are starting there on the business, they don't want to take the thing they've been doing the last 20, 25 years because they never wanted to do it in the first place. They just did it because they thought it was a safe career. Or it's what their parent did or what they were told they were supposed to do, right? Yeah. Yeah. And we might be one of the first generations, if not the first generation, who outlive the birth and death of the people who are out with it.
And then they were out with the birth and death of a career and industry. I mean, I'm a software engineer. I mean, that job has only been around for 30, 35 years or maybe a little longer than that. But I mean, mainstream where kids were going to college and wanted to do that. I mean, that's only really been in the 21st century, I think. Yeah.
Obviously Silicon Valley existed before that. But I mean, where I really thought like, okay, like I can be a web developer, I can be a software engineer. And I was self taught, like I just jumped into it. And within 20 years, it's like, it's going away. I mean, that's a very short lifespan for human beings doing a certain job. I mean, the only other one I can think of is funny, but it's a cowboy actually.
Most people think American cowboy was like the whole 19th century, but apparently it was only like a 10 15 year span. But, yeah, I just, I don't know when else we've had this. This experience where we've outlived our, our career, like most people at least. Get to retire doing what they started doing. And I think there's a bit of a confusion as to how that happened for a lot of people or what went wrong. Well, and it's also, I mean, you tell your story of becoming a software engineer and going, wow, I can create stuff.
Right. And the thrill of that. So that's what you mean to. Yeah, absolutely. But then it turned into, oh, no, now it's about a career path. Right.
So it's not really about the creative thrill. It's about ticking off the boxes. Right. If I want to continue to pay my mortgage, I have to continue to do the things that I'm being told to do in this job that I've taken that is not necessarily using all of the parts of me that got me into this in the first place. Right. And so.
Yes, it's scary as hell to not have that. If that's what you've relied on. And if that's the identity you built, because that was certainly my situation. I built an identity where if I wasn't successful in an appropriate environment or in starting my own business, then I wasn't worth loving or being alive. Right. It's really, really, really frightening to go from that to.
I'm out here. Your cowboy illusion there or allegory. There's is kind of a little bit prompt. Because a little bit on the nose because it's a wild wild west again. You know, we don't know what's going to happen next. We can't know what's going to happen next.
And there's this frontier being opened that we 10 years ago didn't even know existed. And the world is changing at a really, really rapid pace.
And I just fully believe that what we what we're being challenged to do. What lives on the other side of that very scary place of I'm having to give up everything that I thought I knew was real or being challenged to do is. Go inside, find that spark to light a fire to help save the world. I had this imagery in my head when you were talking about the land rush in America. And that's kind of what we're dealing with now. It's an AI rush.
People are seeing millionaires, if not billionaires, be minted overnight. And you had people trying to grab land back then. If people trying to grab digital space now.
And you also back then had people starting churches trying to create safe havens for people. Refuges amidst all of this turmoil. And I think that's in a sense what maybe you, myself are trying to do in all of this is trying to find a place where we can slow down. Step away from the survival mechanics of all of it and figure out how to thrive in this new era. Yeah, by first acknowledging the. The human.
You know, starting there, starting by saying, you know, I see you and. And I want to help. So let's figure out how to help. I wanted to see what you think of this. The creator of human design. I believe his name is pronounced raw.
Roo who is that? That's the name he gave himself. His real name was Alan. Robert. I think Canadian guy.
Yeah. So he claims that human design came to him through a mystical transmission back in 1987.
You and I have talked about my experience. I had a spiritual experience that I woke up and I had this idea for my program five star creator and.
Underneath the mechanics of that program. There are a lot of things we're talking about is. Helping people live in a way that is more in alignment with how they see themselves in the world who they want to be who they. Feel drawn to create as. As this human experience that they're living and. I wanted to know do you.
How do you distinguish between something. Like that being divine or even being again ego driven because I've grappled with that I'm like. Some of the more the longer I step away from it I'm like I think to myself did that really happen. I mean I do believe it did but. I it's just.
How do you explain these things and what do they. Mean to you are these. Truly divine are these. Messages that are transmitted to us through this idea of a universal oneness and. I think you called it the zero point is that what you call the zero point field where all possible. Yeah.
Yeah I'm still trying to wrap my head around. What exactly that was for me and when I see when I was doing research for this conversation I read that and I thought oh that's interesting I wonder what. Dave's perspective is on that. What do you think about. Divine revelation. I think it's a message from ourselves.
I think it you know for some people I think for raw. The creator of the gene keys I. He he does talk about it as a I think a seven day long mystical experience. Richard Rudd the creator of the gene keys had a similar. Three day long sort of experience of voice. My take on it is it's our.
Self actualized self to use Maslow's term it's our consciousness it's our highest the highest version of ourselves. And. You know what I. Think about that is that there are people whose mechanics. Are. More apt.
To have that kind of experience you're one of those people because I know what your design is and. And I think that. Your mystical experience is real and I also think it's you giving yourself kind of a kick in the butt in a particular way to say let's go in this direction. You know your. Your design is one of embracing the unknown challenging everything. Never stop questioning but also.
You have the unique ability to translate the intangible into something completely relatable. And that's what you do with five star creator right you take. These. Questions that we have as creators about our abilities these these. Barriers that we have and you because of the way you're designed you are able to. See them see a solution for them.
Make them usable relatable tangible. And. You know if you if you got the message to start this business because and it's more than a business this this mission. This meaning that you were given if you got that through. A mystical experience. I don't question that.
And I you know again I think that some people are more designed than others to receive those and it's definitely in your design. Yeah you mentioned that maybe we would talk about that today my design. Do you. Want to go into that? Sure absolutely if you want to use it as an example for people to to kind of get a sense of. How their own design might be how it works.
Yeah we can talk about that. Just be it this would be sort of a very very light light version of it but you know what I do. Using human design in the gene keys is I do that sort of mechanics and dynamics piece and. In your mechanics. Your energy type is a projector it's the same energy type. That I am.
And what that all that means is that we're here to guide other people. That we have the ability to fully and truly see. Other people and what they're going through what they're struggling with and when invited to help help. Your way of doing it is very different from my way of doing it because of other aspects of our designs. Excuse me my way of doing it is diving deep into understanding things on my own. Doing a lot of discovery doing a lot of sort of sleuthing whenever something catches my interest.
And then a lot of trial and error so I try things out and I live the experience before I go and share it with anybody else. Your way of doing things is. Excuse me. You work with other people to understand the things that catch your attention. So you're not you're doing the same thing I'm doing in in in investigating but you're not doing it by yourself. You're doing it with others you're the person who's going to say oh I really want to talk to you more about that.
Whereas somebody's going to say something to me and I'm going to say oh I want to go find out more about that. Right. And then the other part of your design is that you take what you are. Discovering through interaction with others like for example our conversation today and you take it and you go. To you you go alone you get into solitude and you use it to help you unravel. Questions so that you can then come back and help other people so that's sort of the loop that you travel in terms of somebody who helps us kind of your mechanics.
How you help. And then the other major thing for you is in your mechanics is that you are that person who has this. Sort of in born need to explain. And it's this desire to you're you're not explaining to show anybody up you're explaining to show people how. So you're you're explaining to translate this intangible thing that they're trying to grasp. That's going to help them that you understand and can give it to them in a way that they can then use it.
So all of that is in the mechanics part that I would talk to you about. And there's a lot more if if we were working together in the work that I do. Then I would ask you so what what's the question that is sort of in. In your heart or on your mind all the time and we would talk through that but no matter what that question is and I'm not going to put you on the spot and ask you a question today. I would look at your gene keys and I would start to look at what are the dynamics at play there. And like I talked about I understand what's driving the people who are seeking me out is this sense of corruption and this desire for harmony.
The people that are seeking you out. They are really driven by a sense of dissatisfaction dissatisfaction with themselves. So they're trying to do something. And they're dissatisfied with the results and they're very close to blaming themselves about it. In fact they may already be blaming themselves about it. And then maybe they find your podcast or they get online and do the assessment the creator assessment that you have, which is what I did.
And they see that you can see them and that it's not about them. They don't need to be disappointed in themselves. There's a fix. There's a solution and you're the person who understands what that solution is. And what they're trying to get to is a sense of this is who's drawn to you. They come from dissatisfaction but the other side of that coin is that they know that they can make a difference.
The get used in the gene keys is vitality. So they're looking for vitality and vitality is the essence of life. So they want to be out there living their lives, their best lives and bringing what they've got to bring to the world. And they see you and the promise that you give is taking this thing that feels really complex to them and turning it into something that is super simple. Let's just walk you through here are the A, B's and C's of the things you need to do based on your, your creator assessment and your archetype to get you vital again. And that's the promise that you bring them.
And that's the service that you bring them and you bring that to them in a way that feels very creative that encourages their individuality and their creativity because that's the angle that you bring to this. There are a lot of people out there who can tell somebody how to be more visible online. But the way you do it is incredibly creative. And again, you have that ability to take something that feels intangible and make it relatable and doable and usable. And that's sort of the seed of where your legacy lives. So you can kind of take those components and you can say, what is the thing that I really feel like maybe I'm here to do in the world or to help with the world.
And you can start to look at those components and with guidance, you can get the answers to the questions that then come up because then it's a constant unfolding because what you're doing is you're looking at the future identity that you're creating for yourself so that you can have what it is that you want. And you're looking back at the past versions of yourself and letting go of some of those past versions of yourself. And that means looking at some of the things that are on the other side of what you bring to the world in your dynamics. Does that make sense. Yeah. I'm glad you use the word legacy.
I wanted to ask you about that. What does legacy mean to you? Well, I use the word legacy because I think most people can feel something when they hear that, right. And I think it's less important about what it means to me than what it means to them. My. Typical client base are going to be people like I've already talked about have already managed those lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy.
And there. It's like one of them said to me the other day. There's only so much golf you can play. Like when you're 50 60 70 or maybe even if you're 30 and you've sold a company for nine figures or whatever, there's only so much fill in the blank surfing world traveling, whatever it is that you can do in a day. And if you are feeling that inner pole to do something greater in the world, that's your legacy. That's your legacy calling to you.
Right. If you're not feeling that inner pole, no biggie. Go do whatever it is you want to do. That's not what you're here for. Not everybody is here to leave a legacy that's going to help humanity. But there are enough people who feel that pull and don't know where to go.
Like again, these are people who have built businesses sometimes built empires and they have. You know, they serve on boards or they have boards that they've served with. They've had executive coaching or they've had, you know, they have a wealth advisor or whatever but none of those people can answer this question of what is it that I'm really designed to leave behind here and how can I access that and that's what I do. Yeah, I think that's a powerful message. I think that's something that I imagine most people think about at least once in their life. I mean, yeah, maybe not everyone is thinking about what legacy am I leaving behind but I certainly do.
I would have said 10 years ago that you were in the minority but I think that things have shifted enough that. And again, this is a part of the direction the world is going that there are more and more people who are concerned with. You know, my clients all say, I'm leaving. A lot of money to my kids and my grandkids but I'm really concerned about the world I'm leaving behind. So help me fix the world. I think some of these high resource individuals are probably the ones who are socially and spiritually aware.
Probably questioning whether a certain one individual should have so much leverage or hold over a single resource. I was just reading about certain families in California that control water and the billions that they have and trying to figure out why does this bother me so much? Why does this bother me so much? And I was using chat GBT to kind of sharpen my thinking and that's what it landed on. It said you don't like the idea of a single individual holding so much leverage over what should be a shared resource. And I think the people that you're working with, I imagine understand that and are figuring out how to use all this pooled resources that they have this money and use it in a way that can serve humanity more than just themselves.
Yeah, while still traveling the world, while still playing golf, you know, it's like it's not an either or proposition. They are still enjoying their lives but they're, they want to make a difference. They don't like the inequities going on. The whole story you were telling about California and its water. If you've never seen the movie Chinatown, you should watch it today. Yeah.
Yeah, and it's those inequities. It's those systems that got set up four and five hundred years ago and over the last four and five hundred years and, you know, one by one, they they crumble. You know, there was a point at which the, what they called the railroad barons, you know, where the richest people in the world and, you know, that's no longer. That's not exactly what you're talking about because railroads are a natural resource, but you're exactly right. The, the. It becomes a reason.
It's true. Yeah. But control over something like water is kind of like trying to control air. You know, it's like nobody should have the right to do that yet because of our systems that has that came about because. So, yeah, that's a whole, the railroads became freedom of movement. The railroads, you know, that became a necessity for commerce and, you know, to be able to move your goods across the country and, you know, controlling that resource, having that leverage.
It's the same. It's the same as the land rush slash, you know, digital space rush that you're talking about right now. You know, who's going to control the ability to access AI or, you know, whatever it is that the next generation of digital tools are. Yeah. And then you look at open AI and there's the big controversy over the fact that it was originally a nonprofit and then became a for profit. Corporation.
So it's just interesting going back to what I said about how these things can start out idyllic and then drift. Yeah. Yeah. And at some point what we have to, you know, we have to hold. The people in power accountable. And, you know, I, I don't know how much in power Sam Altman still is over at open AI, but, you know, back in the day when it was a nonprofit, I was really.
Gung ho for for that guy. I mean, I use Claude myself. You know, here we are having this bizarre conversation that two years ago we would never you know, and I've had, but, you know, at some point. So power is going to have to shift to the people who are helping provide for the world as opposed to only providing for themselves. I agree. Yeah.
Dave, if someone wants to get started with the type of work you do. Where do they find you? What are the first step? Very easy. com is the place to find out about my work. I'm also on LinkedIn and I have a sub stack.
com. So those are my sort of three locales for finding me. Perfect. I have a couple more things before we got. Have you seen the movie green machine? We were talking about food earlier.
There was a documentary called the green machine. I don't think I have. There was a period. Maybe a couple of years before the pandemic started where I was watching a lot of food documentaries, but I don't remember necessarily watching that one. It's the green powerhouse. Okay.
That's it. Okay. Yeah. Watch the green powerhouse because they're filming this documentary. This guy creates this self sustaining powerhouse. It's like this internal ecological system that uses the water that it gathers from the air and grows food inside of this greenhouse.
And then with like the decay in there, it ends up creating more energy. It's totally self sustaining and it grows food. And before the documentary is over, the place burns down. And the guy is in shock because he says there's nothing combustible in my powerhouse. It's not flammable. How would it get set fire to?
And, you know, conspiracy theorists wouldn't have to reach too far to, you know, come up with theories. I think I'm hoping we start to see more things like that that that we do make food available to people. I mean, food really should be free. I don't understand why someone should have to prove their worth in the world in order to eat. We've really abstracted it to the point where that's become normalized. But if you whittle it down to basics, that's essentially what the situation, the system that we've developed has become.
The food is for sale. In order to get access to it, you need to contribute in order to get money. So you have to find a way to do that. Otherwise you start. Well, and I hear exactly right. And I think where we're going to is a system where the people who create the new version of the green powerhouses.
There are people who are passionate about making sure that those kinds of systems stay viable and safe that they provide safety for those systems. Then the ecology and the materialism around that system becomes, oh, you're keeping me safe. You're getting food. And it's not too different from how it used to be. It used to be, can I bring you a basket of eggs to get a basket of corn. While that sounds simplistic, it is from where we are today, a very big step and it requires people no longer immediately judging somebody else for their beliefs or their color or any of the things we have to get out of that us versus them mentality that we've talked about.
We've got to tell ourselves new stories. It can't even really be about we're either going to die or expand. That's a story that I tell. And there could be all other kinds of outcomes that we're not even aware of yet. We don't know what's going to happen. But what we do know is that everything is going to change.
And everything is going to be the same tomorrow as it was today. Yeah. And it's accelerating. We're seeing it happen. Yeah. Technology just continues to make change faster and faster.
Well, we'll have to have another conversation in another six months and see where we are at that point. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it might be a very different conversation. Dave Hyman, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I could talk to you for another two hours, but I'm going to let you go. I'm sure you've got plenty to do for the day.
Thank you so much, Andrew. It's always wonderful to have a conversation with you. And it's an honor to be on.
